It Happened Here -- "The Tavern Lamps are Burning"

The Tavern Lamps are Burning was the title of a book by Carl Carmer, a popular folklorist and spinner of historic New York non-fiction stories from the 1940's through the mid 1970's. Though he doesn't specifically refer to them in his anthology, Carmer appreciated the importance of taverns,  for public discourse and debate so necessary in a new democracy, and their role as public/ governmental spaces for conducting the business of

(N.Y. Rte. 9 Valatie)

government. Unlike New England which had long traditions of town meetings, held in the local Congregational Church Meeting houses, or the South which early-on established County Courthouses, New York had few such institutions.  Albany's Staat Huis was a notable exception of a public building that existed from the earliest Dutch settlement, throughout much of the colonial period.     Where the Great Leaseholds held sway, government business was often transacted along with business of the Manor, at the Manor house. But as New York moved to restrict the power of the “Lords of the Manor” the tendency was to move governmental functions from the manors themselves.

 

(NY 209, Marbletown)

 

                                                                          One of the first concerns of the rebel governments was to determine who were their supporters and who were not.  In many counties people were asked (required) to  pledge their acceptance of the new governments by signing onto documents like the "Articles of Association".  Taverns were often used.

(Co. Rte 32, N. Chatham)

                                          (NY Rte 32, Saugerties)

                                                                                               
                                                            














The early years of the revolution were a disaster for the rebel forces in New York necessitating that  the State government, as well as the national government become a government on the run.

 

(Corner of Maiden Lane & Fair St,
Kingston)

The growth of roads, turnpikes and canals at the end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th century encouraged the growth of many more taverns with accommodations for  travelers.                


The Susquehanna Turnpike ran past the once solid and handsome Richtmyer Tavern (NY 990V, Conesville)

Site of one of the first taverns built to accommodate Turnpike travelers, NY 20, Guilderland

                                                            

The Depuy House in High Falls was a tavern on the D&H Canal

 






 

   
 By the mid-nineteen hundreds  the term "tavern"was falling out of fashion with its standard offerings of food, drink and usually common dormitory accommodations  in favor of hotels, with private rooms and separate dining and bar facilities.  Soon after, saloons would make their appearance with facilities
for alcohol consumption, and perhaps light meals but no sleeping facilities.

   The Marker of the Week -- Imagine

the stories told and political intrigues that could have happened here!

 

(Co. Rte. 31, Saugerties)

It Happened Here -- Winifred Goldring, Paleontologist

New York City had been growing rapidly throughout the nineteenth century and with its growth came a growing thirst for safe fresh drinking water. The City and the State Legislature looked north to the streams and valleys of the Catskill mountains. In 1905 the legislature enacted a proposal for the damming of the Esopus and Schoharie Creeks to create reservoirs and a system of aqueducts to conduct water to the City. On the Schoharie, the gorge at Gilboa was selected for a reservoir site with the dam running right through the village of Gilboa, requiring that the whole town be razed. Three churches, two boarding houses, many stores, business and homes – some 430 structures were torn down or burned. Seven cemeteries and family burial plots were relocated. In 1917 land acquisitions began and by 1920 excavations for the dam commenced.

           GILBOA SETTLEMENT
       COTTON MILL 1840-1869, TANNERY             
       CHURCH & CEMETERY STOOD ON              NYSHM at Schoharie Dam (now obscured by dam reconstruction)
   GROUND NOW COVERED BY RESERVOIR
     OF NEW YORK CITY WATER SUPPLY
                  STATE EDUCATION
                     DEPT. 1949

As the steam shovels began their work to dig footings, and as crews began blasting out rock from creek-side quarries for the dam, workers began to discover fossil tree stumps.

Some seventy years before, Samuel Lockwood, a local pastor and amateur naturalist had first discovered pieces of fossilized tree trunks, and foliage as well as some distinctive bulbous tree stumps in a quarry along the Schoharie Creek. They had been identified as a species of fern-trees from the Devonian age. They had been located at the edge of a shallow inland sea and buried in a slurry of storm-borne sand.

The New York State Museum was called and a team was rapidly assembled to rescue any significant fossils that emerged before they were covered by the construction of the dam or the waters of the reservoir. Beyond the team's important discoveries, the State Museum's project was significant for other reasons as well. First, it was one of the earliest “salvage paleontology projects” and secondly it was one of the first major paleontology projects headed by a woman.

Winifred Goldring was an extremely bright young woman, graduating from Albany's Milne School as class valedictorian in 1905 and graduating with honors from Wellesley College four years later. She began her college years focusing on classical languages but two required “science” courses (geology and “geography”) set her on a totally different path. As a girl she had collected fossils in the Helderberg Mountains; and her father must have sparked in her an early interest in botany. Frederick Goldering was trained as a master gardener at Kew gardens in Great Britain, and had come to America to manage the exotic orchid collection of Erastus Corning¹ a wealthy businessman and politician in Albany. Later Goldring ran a successful florist/greenhouse business from his home in Slingerlands, N.Y. In 1912 Winifred earned her AM degree at Wellesley and took additional courses in geography, paleontology and paleobotany at Harvard, Colombia and John Hopkins University.

In 1914 she was hired by John Mason Clarke, the New York State Museum's third director as a “Special Temporary Expert in Paleontology” to create fossil invertebrate exhibits for the State Museum. Hired to “fill the cases” she worked, instead on creating interpretive exhibits that would educate the public, beginning with exhibits entitled “What is a Fossil?” and “What is a Formation?”

She would go on to create full-sized dioramas that would depict a Devonian Forest and the pot hole deposition site of the Cohoes mastodon bones. Eventually her museum work would lead her into science publications for the general public. The Handbook of Paleontology for Beginners and Amateurs, first published in 1933 went through several publications and was widely used as a college introductory text. The Guide to the Geology of John Boyd Thatcher Park was also published in 1933, and was republished in 1997!

In 1915 she was hired as an assistant paleontologist. Clarke had begun an ambitious review of the literature and of the State's extensive collections of both catalogued and as yet un-studied fossil crinoids (sea lilies), but the project had languished as Clarke was occupied with other museum business. In 1916 he asked Winifred to take over the study. Early on he had been impressed by her scholarship and work ethic, praising her as a “particularly hardy seeker after the truth.” After seven years of comprehensive study she published a 670 page monograph that systematized the ancient crinoids into twenty five families, sixty genera and one hundred and fifty five species, firmly establishing her reputation as a first rank paleontologist.

When fossils began emerging from the excavations and quarry sites at Gilboa in 1920, Clarke and his team began collecting. But again, the press of business at the museum prevented him from devoting adequate attention to overseeing the project. In 1921 he turned over the Gilboa fossil project to Winifred Goldring and her colleague Rudolf Reudemann.

 They would work the site until 1926 when rising reservoir waters would prevent further work. In 1924 Goldring published a synopsis of their work to date at Gilboa in the New York State Museum Bulletin #251. Over forty tree stumps had been found from three successive forests, each having been buried by storm driven sands. In the same layers, but not attached to the stumps were found considerable amounts of fossilized vegetative matter – (apparently) seeds, spore cases,branches and palm-like fronds. 



Based on this evidence Goldring concluded the stumps were a new genus of “seed ferns” she named Eospermatoperis (ie. “dawn of the seed fern”). This designation would stand for eight decades. The publication of this report and subsequent journal articles would make Gilboa and Winifred Goldring world famous.²

Though Goldring had the support and respect of most of her colleagues at the State Museum, many people, including some of her co-workers were uncomfortable with a young single woman doing geological field work, and wished she would confine her work to the laboratory and the museum. Though she participated regularly in professional meetings and conferences, she was rarely invited on collecting expeditions out of state and colleagues mentioned in letters the “limitations of taking women into the field.” To many it simply didn't seem proper for a woman to be seen clambering around rocky outcroppings or picking through shattered bedrock at a quarry or examining the latest discovery at the bottom of a hole at a construction site while construction workers stood around watching. Certainly the fashions of the first decades of the twentieth century were not conducive to such activities, as the voluminous ankle length skirts of the first decade gave way to the pencil thin dresses of the second decade. It would be another twenty or twenty-five years before women commonly wore pants, but Miss Goldring was not to be thwarted. She created her own outfit with bloomers for fieldwork. When other critics and concerned friends raised the issue of her personal safety when working alone un-escorted in the field, around quarries and construction sites, she answered them by learning to shoot a revolver, implying she would work armed, if she was ever working alone and felt threatened.

Perhaps more troubling for Winifred were issues of fair compensation and opportunities for advancement, as a woman. In 1918 she resigned briefly over issues of inadequate salary combined with the pressures of completing her exhibit work and working on the crinoid project. In 1928 she considered applying for a position with the U.S. Geological Survey but was dissuaded by colleagues who alerted her that the survey directors were looking for a “he-man” paleobotanist. The following year in a letter she discussed the issue of whether a woman should go into the fields of geology and paleontology. She pointed out that her salary of $2,300 was half that of the (male) clerks and stenographers at the museum. Generally she encouraged girls to go into other fields – botany and zoology instead of paleontology. Her promotions came slowly but steadily as her dedication to her profession and the quality of her work could not be denied. From 1920 to 1938 she worked as an Associate Paleontologist, during which for three years she held the title of Paleo-botanist. From 1938 to 1939 she was the provisional State Paleontologist until she became State Paleontologist in 1939, the first woman to hold such a position in the United States, and the highest ranked woman in her profession in the world. In 1949 she became the first women elected president of the Paleontological Society and the following year, vice president of the Geological Society of America.

In the 1930's Miss Goldring turned her attention to an unusual rock formation a few miles west of Saratoga Springs. Discover in 1825, by J. H. Steele, he described the site as having “great quantities calcareous concretions...mostly hemispherical. But many are globular and vary in size from half an inch to two feet in diameter; they are obviously composed of a series of successive layers nearly parallel and perfectly concentric; these layers have a compact texture, and are dark blue or near black in colour, and are united by layers of lighter coloured calcareous substance....they are very thin and I have counted more than a hundred [layers] in one series.” The advancing glaciers had sheared off their upper portions leaving them looking something like cabbages, halved and ready to be grated.

Lester Park Rd, south of Co. Rte 21, Saratoga

But what were these things? Both Steele and William Mather, a geologist reporting for the Geographic survey of 1843 he felt they were inorganic concretions. In 1883 James Hall examined the area and discovered within the fossils minute branching “canaliculi”. He named them Cryptozoon proliferium (ie. Prolific hidden life). In 1906 H.M. Seeley confirmed they were organisms but classified them with the sponges. In 1916 G. R. Wieland first advanced arguments that they belonged to a group of algae.

Robert Ritchie, an amateur geologist bought the property that contained much of the outcroppings. Uncovering much more of the area, he opened it to the public as a park, Petrified Sea Gardens, in 1924.  New York State acquired the rest, which became Lester State Park.

In the 1930's Winifred Goldring joined the fray, and with characteristic thoroughness studied the area, for several years. In a 70 page report she concluded they were actually three reefs of ancient algae, each dominated by a different species: Cryptozoon proliferium, C. ruedemanni, or C. undulatum. She described the environmental conditions that favored one or another species. Goldrings conclusions would be supported by studies in recent times by the discovery of living stromatolites found in reefs in Australia and other places.
 

Miss Goldring died in 1971. Her career spanned over 40 years and was marked by significant professional achievements as she rose to the top of her profession, in the face of sustained gender discrimination. While her accomplishments are highlighted in a kiosk type display near the Gilboa Museum which features several of Gilboa tree fossils of the type she discovered and described, she is not mentioned at the Lester Park site. In 1998 Governor George Pataki's administration promoted a series of New York State Historical Markers spotlighting the achievements of Women in New York State.3 Unfortunately she was not among those chosen. Hopefully in the future she will be considered for a Marker, perhaps at the site of her home in Slingerlands.

Marker of the Week -- You have to Wonder,


given the (ah) shall we say, spontaneous habits of cattle if you spend any time marching them back and forth over clay won't they tend to make their own  "contributions" to the clay? Well, of course the bricks were fired....and maybe a little additional organic matter made them stronger.

At any rate, the good Doctor ended up with a handsome house.

                    Buckwheat Bridge Rd., North of Clermont

1Erastus Corning was the grandfather of Erastus Corning III who held office as Albany's mayor for 43 years.

2In 1935 German scientists would call into question the classification of these trees as “seed fern” but it would not be until 2004 that paleontologists would find at Gilboa two complete Eospermatoperii with their trunks and foliage intact. Their announcement of their discovery in 2007 would begin a process of reclassification that continues to this day.

3 Recent posts on this blog have featured Alida Livingston and Amelia Bloomer

It Happened Here -- The Mexican War: So Long Ago, so Far Away

It is hard to imagine an event in American History less likely to produce New York State Historical Marker references than the Mexican War. Fought wholly in California, Texas and Mexico; hotly debated in Washington; the subject of so much concern in the South and southern frontier areas, with an increasing subtext for the future of slavery in the United States, the war seems pretty remote from New York State's history--at least this is what I presumed, until I stumbled upon this marker in rural

Near Co. Rte's 29 & 39 & NY 32, "Bacon Hill" North of Schuylerville

Saratoga County.  But of course, New York has been the home to soldiers in all of America's wars, and has produced men and women who have participated in virtually all of American history.
Since then I have encountered two other markers of New Yorkers who went on to play significant roles in the Mexican War and the years that followed.  Since I had heard of neither of them I could not help but do some research...

William Jenkins Worth was born to parents Thomas Worth and Abigail Jenkins who lived on Union St. in the City of Hudson in a house as solid and unadorned as their Quaker faith. William rejected the pacifism of that faith when he enlisted in the 23d Infantry early in the War of 1812. He came to the attention of Brigadier General Winfield Scott becoming his aide-de-camp and distinguishing himself in the battles of Chippewa and Lundy's Lane. At the end of the second battle Worth received a wound from grape shot that nearly killed him and would leave him lame for the rest of his life. After the war, Worth remained in the Army securing a position as Commandant of Cadets at West Point.  

With Superintendent  Sylvanus Thayer he would usher in a new era of integrity and professionalism  in the military. In 1842 Worth was given the task of ending the 2^nd Florida Seminole War which had dragged on for five years. Winning the battle of Palakta and destroying the Seminole's crops and settlements he forced 3000 to surrender and established a de-facto border with the remaining 300 to bring the war to an end.

Ordered to Texas, Worth became General Zachary Taylor's second in command and fought in the first battles of the Mexican War. In 1847, he along with most of Taylor's army were transferred to a new army being formed to capture the capital of Mexico, led by his old protege Winfield Scott. 

The Mexican War was the first American conflict where events were witnessed and reported by newspaper reporters rather than retold or summarized from official after-action reports and letters and interviews with travelers or other witnesses to the events. The advent of telegraph communications and reliable steam ship transportation made news reporting from the field possible. Colorful figures and dramatic events sold newspapers and the athletic, dynamic General Worth with his ramrod posture made good press. Worth, eager to enhance his reputation, had a flair for the dramatic. At the amphibious landing at Vera Cruz, General Worth was the first American ashore, leaping into chest deep water to lead his men into battle. At the final battle of Chapultepec castle, again at the head of his division, Worth personally tore down the Mexican flag over the castle to replace it with the American colors. By war's end General William Worth was the most famous living American General.¹

Like many famous military men General Worth was more than a little vain and jealous of his good reputation. (Subordinates nicknamed him “Haughty Bill”) He was also supremely confident in his opinions. In the Battle of Molino del Rey, leading up to the conquest of Mexico City, Worth concluded Scott's orders to him would lead to costly tactical errors. His disagreement with Scott escalated until Scott had him briefly arrested for insubordination. Worth never forgave his mentor. The general from Hudson had named his son Winfield Scott Worth. Following the incident he had his 7 year old son's name changed to William.

At the conclusion of the Mexican War, Worth was approached by Cuban revolutionaries. Building on their common bond as Freemasons they induced him to aid them in liberating their county from Spain. Worth accepted money from them but he was abruptly transferred to Texas, and the plot came to nothing.

In Texas, Worth began establishing his military administration and preparing for protracted defensive operations against Apache and Comanche raiders, when suddenly he was cut down in a cholera epidemic. At age 55 the vigorous, athletic General was dead. Fort Worth Texas was named in his honor. Seven years after his death the celebrated war hero was re-interred in New York City beneath an ornate obelisk at 5^th Avenue and Broadway. Some researchers have suggested that a vindictive Winfield Scott worked to obscure his reputation, even going so far as to see some of his records were destroyed. A more likely explanation is that within a dozen years the United States would be engulfed in a far greater war and soon a whole panoply of new generals and war heroes would occupy the attention of Americans.

                                                                      ***********

John Anthony Quitman was born in Rhinebeck, New York in 1799. His father, Frederick Quitman, a Lutheran pastor, had emigrated from the Rhine-lands coming first to Schoharie. In 1789 he resettled in Rhinebeck with his wife and several black slaves² His new congregation built him a parsonage, a compact “Adams style” house along the Kings Highway that ran to Albany. John Quitman would receive an education in the classics at Hartwick Seminary before moving to Chillicothe Ohio where he pursued a law career. 

In 1826 John Quitman bought a plantation in Mississippi, near Natchez³. Quitman practiced law and politics, building a career first in the Mississippi House of Representatives, then the Senate, then as head of the Senate as acting Governor, before becoming a judge on the Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals. By 1834 his plantation had over fifty slaves and Quitman had become as fully a member of the southern plantation aristocracy as any of his southern-born peers. His views on nullification (the doctrine that states had the right to nullify any federal laws detrimental to their interests) were more extreme than many Mississippians, at that time.

When the Texas revolution began Quitman wrote Sam Houston encouraging him to action and recruiting a force of volunteers to support him. The “Natchez Fencibles” marched and counter-marched in East Texas before learning Huston had defeated the Mexicans.

When the Mexican War began Quitman was commissioned a brigadier general of volunteers, and like Worth, served in Texas under Zachary Taylor, then transferred to Scott's expedition, and fought in many of the same battles. Worth and Quitman stormed different entrances to Chapultepec and Quitman's force was the first to enter Mexico City.  Scott appointed Quitman military governor of the City.

Returning to the United States, Quitman ran successfully for governor of Mississippi.  While governor he became associated with the "fire-eater" faction of southern politicians who openly advocated succession to protect slavery in their states.  During this time, he, like Worth before him, was enlisted by Cuban revolutionaries,  who suggested Cuba might become a U. S. slave holding territory or state.  At the time the Franklin Pierce administration gave tacit approval for such plans. Only when the Pierce government realized they were poisoning their support among their Northern Democratic base did they reverse themselves, and indicted leading conspirators including John Quitman for violation of Federal Neutrality laws. Quitman resigned the governorship in 1851 to focus on defending himself.  The prosecution was dropped after several juries failed to reach a decision.

Also, like General Worth, John Quitman died unexpectedly, "before his time".  Quitman came to Washington in the spring of 1857 to attend the inauguration of President James Buchanan, and stayed at the National Hotel, where the President-elect was staying.  Both became sick, along with many others from what has been described as a virulent form of dysentery and the "National Hotel Disease". Some believed it was part of a mass poisoning plot, a theory given some credence by the fact that cases lessened when Buchanan left the hotel for a visit home but continued when he returned. More likely it was caused by poor sanitation. Water and sewer pipes had burst in the hotel during a cold snap the winter before. In all some 400 people were sickened and perhaps a dozen died. Buchanan suffered for six weeks making his weak presidency even more irresolute. Three Congressmen succumbed, including Quitman who lingered at his plantation until dying the following summer.  One can't help but wonder what roles this transplanted New Yorker might have played in the Confederate government or perhaps on civil war battlefields, had he survived.

1One is tempted to draw comparisons between Worth and some of the most famous generals of the twentieth century. Images of George S. Patton riding a tank, or standing in a squad car in his cavalryman's jodhpurs with his pearl handle Colt 45's certainly come to mind as do those of Douglas (“I shall return”) Mac Arthur striding ashore through the surf in the Philippines, (then doing it several more times to make sure the cameramen got it all on film.)

2New York had begun the gradual emancipation of its slaves, back to 1799, freeing in 1827 all male slaves when they reached their 28^th birthday.

3Monmouth Plantation would eventually house 300 slaves and encompass 1500 acres. The plantation house would survived the Civil War and exists today as a five star inn.

Marker of the Week  -- Place Names spellings persist

NY Rte. 9 at Dutchess/Columbia line

While our language often changes relatively quickly (see the Marker of the Week post for
April 14, 2013, "Schuyler's Intrenchments") our spelling of place names  remains pretty conservative, retaining older spellings. Consider the number of "tons", centuries after "to'n" ceased to be a contraction for "town".  Of course, often a city is named after an older city.  Kingston, New York for example, may have been named for any one of numerous Kingstons in Britain. More likely it was named for James the Duke of York, proprietor of New York with an eye for flattering him, following his ascendency to the English throne in 1685.          .
A more remarkable fact was that there seems to have been no discussion of changing the name of Kingston, after the King's army burned it down in 1777!

It Happened Here -- Those Remarkable Schoolcrafts

It Happened Here -- Those Remarkable Schoolcrafts

If you haven't had a course in Anthropology or you aren't from the northern Mid-west you might draw a blank if you hear the name Schoolcraft.  Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was a New Yorker, born and educated and introduced to the world of business via his father's Hamilton glass foundry. But it was in the Ozarks and the northern Midwest as an early explorer, discovering the source of the Mississippi River and as a student and recorder of the folkways and legends of the Chippewa and other Great Lakes Indians where he became famous. (In Missouri a freeway, in Michigan three townships and a college with 36,000 students, on Michigan's northern peninsula a county, and in Minnesota a state park are all named for H. R. Schoolcraft.) 

Henry Schoolcraft was a serious, studious boy whose middle class father sought to introduce him early into the family business in Guilderland. At age 13 Henry was responsible for the family's company store at the glassworks. The next year he became an overseer, and at age 15, entered Union college to study chemistry, geology and mineralogy. 


 




Willow Street, Guilderland

"...Hamilton Glass wks made bottles, window glass, closed 1815"--Foundry Rd. Guilderland

By age 17 he was superintendent of a new glassworks his father had organized in Geneva, New York but within two years the directors of the plant had decided not to renew his contract. It is not difficult to imagine how the bookish, some said priggish, young man who owed his job to his father's influence, might have run afoul of traditional foundrymen and gaffers. In 1813, Lawrence Schoolcraft found another position for his son as a superintendent at a struggling glassworks in Salisbury township in Vermont.  In Vermont he studied further under the tutelage of a professor from Middlebury College. When, the failing business was unable to continue paying his salary, Lawrence and his son bought a glassworks in Keene, N.H. and Henry became its proprietor and superintendent  The end of the War of 1812 brought a recession, exacerbated by the British dumping large quantities of consumer goods (including glassware) on the American market. Henry made some bad business decisions and the Keene enterprise went bankrupt.  Henry returned to his father's home, now in Geneva,  in disgrace. His return was made more difficult by the knowledge that his brother-in-law       Willet Shearman who succeeded him at the Geneva glassworks had created a thriving business making window glass. 

"GLASS FACTORY
  BAY
  1810 - 1850
  ONTARIO GLASS MANUFACTORY
  BLOWERS OF WINDOW GLASS
  VILLAGE OF 500 INHABITANTS "                    On Rte. 14  1 1/2 Miles S. of Geneva
 

Within a year Henry left his father's home to explore opportunities in the West. He found his way to Missouri where he joined up with another New Yorker, Levi Pettibone . The two amateur explorers set off into the Ozark Mountains to look for lead deposits. Henry had some success with a paper he had written about manganese mining and hoped he capitalize on it with a commercially successful book that would examine the prospects for mining the lead deposits in this little-known region.¹ The inexperienced explorers, after losing most of their supplies when their pack horse floundered crossing a stream, and becoming lost for several days, was befriended by a hunter-mountain man and Schoolcraft was able to fill several notebooks full of useful information and write his book. 
 

Henry journeyed to Washington to promote his book and look for employment. Though a meeting with President Monroe came to nothing, a meeting with Secretary of War, John Calhoun was more fruitful. Calhoun was organizing an expedition with Michigan territorial Governor Lewis Cass into the headwaters of the Mississippi to impress the Northern Indians who continued to be aligned with the British and to survey and explore the area. Calhoun recommended Schoolcraft as the expedition's geologist. For four months Schoolcraft travelled with the expedition exploring central Minnesota and coming within a few miles of the source of the Mississippi before being thwarted by low waters, then heading east to trace the shores of Lake Superior and Huron back to Chicago. ( A few years later Schoolcraft would return to discover the Mississippi's headwater which he would name Lake Itasca.)

In 1822 the glassmaker, turned explorer secured a position as Indian Agent at Sault Ste. Marie. The same year he married Jane Johnston daughter of a Scots-Irish fur trader and his Ojibwa wife. She was largely responsible for setting him on a path of studying Native American culture, its legends and myths that would occupy his attention the rest of his life. Articulate and cultured, she taught him the Ojibwa language and explained to him many Ojibwa legends and stories. Together they wrote The Literary Voyager, the first magazine produced in Michigan. She, herself, wrote poetry in both English and Ojibwa. Together they had four children.

Though Schoolcraft became a devoted recorder of Native American culture, he came to believe the only way to save Native Americans was through assimilation, giving them the tools to become “Americanized” As an agent of the U.S. Government he helped negotiate the 1836 Treaty of Washington through which the Ojibwa ceded 13 million acres of land in exchange for an annuity, training in agriculture and related crafts to transition them to an agricultural life.

In 1839 Schoolcraft began to publish his Native American studies under the title Algic Researches. After the Democrats lost power in 1841, Schoolcraft lost his position as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department and he returned with his family to New York, where he took up the study of the Iroquois League. In 1842  Jane Johnston Schoolcraft died.

Four years later Congress commissioned Schoolcraft to write an encyclopedic reference work on American Indians. While in Washington, the next year he met and married Mary Howard from Beauford, South Carolina, a widow from a wealthy slave-owning plantation family. Her strength, aristocratic bearing and Cultured manner must have appealed to him for in other respects she was an unlikely partner. The future Mrs. Schoolcraft was a staunch defender of slavery who condemned miscegenation! Such beliefs quickly alienated Henry's two surviving children and it is difficult to see how the marriage would have survived if fate had not intervened. The following year Henry Schoolcraft suffered a debilitating stroke. Mary Howard Schoolcraft became his devoted nurse and caregiver, and despite her views of the racial inferiority of non-white races she worked closely with him as his secretary and transcriber, allowing him to eventually finish his massive work.²

1To this day, southern Missouri remains the center of lead mining in the United States.

2In 1860 she gave full vent to her racist opinons, joining the ranks of a dozen or more “Anti-Tom” authors from the south who sought to “correct” the picture of slavery presented in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The book was a “best seller,” though no where nearly as popular as Beecher Stowe's book. Mary claimed her husband fully supported and encouraged her, though it is difficult to imagine how the severely disabled and dependent Henry Schoolcraft would or could have objected.

 

 Marker  of  the Week -- A Man's Home is his Castle

Andrew Jackson Downing was one of America's first self-appointed arbiters of good taste. In the 1840's he railed against Americans building Gothic palaces or castles out of anything but stone. "If a man is ambitious of attracting attention by his house and can only afford wood let him...build a gigantic wigwam of logs and bark...but not attempt mock battlements of pine boards and strong towers of thin plank." (quoted in The Hudson, by Carl Carmer, p.177)  John L. Schoolcraft (Henry's Uncle) was unimpressed.

                       Western Ave (Rte. 20)  Guilderland