It Happened Here -- Big Bells, Little Bells 

Part II

About the same time Andrew Meneely was starting up  his foundry to cast large bronze bells in what would become Watervliet,  William Barton III had moved from East Hampton Connecticut to the little town of Cairo, New York,  on the Susquehanna Turnpike and set up shop, to cast

Rte 23B, Cairo

bronze sleigh bells.  (1826 v, 1828).  The Bartons had been making bells in the East Hampton area for several generations, with Captain William Barton making his first castings of horse bells in Wintonbury (Bloomfield)  as early as 1778.

The Connecticut Bartons rediscovered the process of making one piece sleigh bell castings. The "jinglet" or "pea" in the spherical bell (crotal) was packed in a ball of molding sand. A second round, two piece sand-mold was placed around this ball of sand. The ball of sand was supported on a small column that was later drilled out when the throat slots and holes were cut into the bell.  After liquid bronze or brass had been poured in the mold and cooled, the sand surrounding the jinglet was shaken out, allowing the jinglet to rattle freely around the inside of the bell. The completed bell was polished by tumbling it in a barrel of sand, a process developed by one of Barton's sons, Jason, who accompanied him to Cairo.  The whole process though seemingly complex, was less time consuming than producing a crotal in two separate halves, turning each half on a lathe to remove imperfections, then soldering the halves together.  It also made a stronger, better sounding bell.

 William Barton's  Connecticut foundry had burned in 1816. but after he rebuilt it, around 1823,  Barton bought 160 acres south of Cairo, New York.  There he built a sawmill and a new foundry on what became known as Bell Creek, a tributary of the Shinglekill, which emptied into the Catskill Creek. There were several possible advantages to this move.  First, his new New York foundry, located on the Susquehanna Turnpike, only a few miles from the Port of Catskill on the Hudson, offered ready access to raw materials -- copper and tin or zinc. His 160 acres, no doubt heavily forested,  provided an ample source of wood both for his sawmill and for charcoal for his foundry. (Soon after he began operations,  coal, too,  would become available via the D& H canal that would connect the coal fields of Pennsylvania with Kingston.) The streams flowing out of the Catskills were a natural source of fine alluevial sands/clays for the casting processes, and even the Susquehanna turnpike, itself, with its steady stream of wagons pulled by horses carrying settlers to new farmlands in western New York and the Ohio valley would be a market for Barton's horse bells.

Along with his sons, William and Jason, Barton hired apprentices, including Abner and William Bevins. After they had fulfilled their apprenticeship contracts in Cairo the Bevins brothers returned to East Hampton to establish their own foundry there, which continues in East Hampton to this day.  Over the years, William Barton taught the secrets and special skills of his trade to many apprentices, both family members and outsiders.  By the close of the 19th century 35 bell makers had set up shop in East Hampton.

From 1828 to around 1845 William Barton produced sleigh or horse bells in Cairo. Sleigh/horse bells, besides being a cheery ornament,  were an important safety device, warning pedestrians when a horse drawn vehicle was approaching. This became especially important when a light snow muffled the sounds of horses' hoofs and a sleighs could skim over the snow virtually silently.  Some locales even required horses pulling sleighs or carriages to wear sleigh bells.

Besides sleigh bells,  the bell works at Cairo were also known to produce other bronze or brass pieces.  Saddle chimes, trivets and even a few church bells, such as the one hung in the Presbyterian Church in Cairo were thought to have been produced by William Barton's company. In 1845 Barton sold the property on which his foundry had been built.  He retired back to East Hampton and died in his Connecticut hometown, four years later. ¹

1Many thanks to Robert Uzzilia, Cairo Town Historian who has written about the Cairo Bell Foundry and generously shared the information he had.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead
 New Year's week is as good a time as any to glance back and look ahead a little.  This week's post is the 48th weekly installment of  New York State Historical Markers:  It Happened Here, first posted on February 3d, this year. Over these eleven months we have looked at some 125 New York State (type) Historical Markers -- not a bad start until you realize there are probably between 3500 and 4000 of them out there and more are being created every day. Of course, not every blue and yellow cast iron/aluminum marker is of historical significance, except in the most narrow sense of the word, and then only to the local town board, church consistory, or chamber of commerce, etc. that chose to create them. Fortunately, I don't have to judge what is historically significant, but only pick those that strike my fancy, or seem to illustrate the story I am presenting,  and I am certainly grateful for all the material that is out there.

You may have noticed that most of the markers I have featured come from an area of some half a dozen counties around Albany.   I am looking forward to the prospect of going farther afield in the coming year.  I am excited about writing about the War of 1812 that sputtered and flared along New York's northern borders from the Niagara frontier, to Sackett's Harbor, to Plattsburgh, with repercussions far inland;  I am excited about learning more about the Underground Railroad, that I barely touched upon this year, and the whole constellation of reform movements that sprang from the religious reform movements that took root in central New York in the early 19th century-- abolition,  temperance, women's rights and labor reform.  And I am looking forward to renewing and deepening  casual acquaintances I have had with so many New Yorkers, including Teddy Roosevelt, George Eastman, Samuel Clemens,  George (and DeWitt) Clinton,  Frederick Douglass, George          Westinghouse,  Sojourner Truth,  James Garfield,  Abner Doubleday and many others.

So I am looking forward to a Happy New Year, and I hope you have one too.  And please watch out for the little blue car, parked (probably illegally) in front of a New York State Historic Marker,  near you. -- Tom

It Happened Here -- Big Bells, Little Bells
Part I

One of the enduring icons of the holiday season is the tolling of bells--large bells from church steeples, and the jingling of sleigh bells. For the origin of many of these bells we need to look no farther than eastern New York State.

Broadway, Watervliet

In 1808 Benjamin Hanks and his son Julius, came to Gibbonsville, on the west bank of the Hudson, across from Troy. (The hamlet, combined with other small hamlets, would become known as West Troy in 1831, then Watervliet in 1896)  Hanks, an instrument maker from Mansfield Connecticut had built a forge in Litchfield CT., and produced bronze cannon and church bells as early as 1795. In 1816 he patented a method for molding and casting bells. Hanks took on an apprentice, Andrew Meneely.

In 1825 Julius left the Gibbonsville works for a new factory at 5th and Fulton St. in Troy where he continued to manufacture church bells, large town clocks and brass surveying instruments. (This location would eventually house W.E. Gurley Co., surveying instrument makers who would continue at this location to the present.) The Hanks' apprentice took over the Gibbonsville works in 1826 and established the Meneely Bell Foundry. Meneely's two sons, George and Edwin, continued in the family business when he died in 1851, but their tenure was a troubled one.  The following year, their foreman and Andrew's brother-in-law James H. Hitchcock, backed by Eber Jones set up a competing foundry, Jones and Hitchcock (aka. The Troy Bell Foundry.) Andrew's youngest son, Clinton H. Meneely, dissatisfied with his share of the family business,  struck out on his own in1870, forming Meneely and Kimberly, with his brother-in-law, George Kimberly. The older brothers sued the younger brother over the use of the Meneely name in a case that dragged on for five years before being decided by New York's highest court in 1875. By this time there were three bell factories in Troy and one in West Troy, all run by several intermarried families.

Over their history the bell foundries of Troy and Watervliet produced some 65,000 bells--mostly large church bells, but also smaller ship and school bells. In 1868 George Meneely designed a rotary yoke for large bells.  One of major sources of a bell's failure, over time, was from it being struck every time in one place by its clapper. (The crack in the Liberty Bell was attributed, in part, to this problem.)  Meneely devised a mechanism that would turn the bell slightly in its yoke every time it was struck, thus evening out the wear on the bell, and prolonging its life.

The Troy/Watervliet bell makers developed techniques to tune their bells. The Troy Bell Foundry claimed to have produced the first complete set of carillon chimes which it supplied to St. Stephen's Church in Philadelphia in 1853 but Andrew Meneely claimed to have produced a prize winning set of chimes for a New York City exposition in 1850, but they were never hung and have disappeared.

One of the area's largest bells was produced by Meneely and Kimberly for the United States Centennial in 1876. Weighing 13,000 lbs -- a half ton for each of the original thirteen states, it was to be an exact replica of the Liberty Bell.  Three cannon from the revolution, and two from the civil war (one union, one confederate) were donated for its bronze.

A second replica 13,000 lb. bell was created for the Columbian Exposition in1893 . Donations were received from across the country of historic metallic artifacts to be incorporated into the bell. After the exposition concluded, it was sent on a world tour, as its promoters proclaimed "...conceived in the idea of peace and liberty... its purpose is to help perpetuate peace the world over." Unfortunately, like Andrew Meneely's prize winning chimes it disappeared, having been last seen in Russian customs in 1905. Its likely, and highly ironic fate was that it was melted down to be used in shell casings in the decades of revolution and counter-revolution that followed in Russia.

But if the Columbian bell had a dubious and uncertain fate, the fates of thousands of other Troy/Watervliet bells are well known.  They hung and continue to hang in church steeples and bell towers across America and across the world, reminding people of the time, calling them to work, calling them to school, calling them to worship.

(Next week)

It Happened Here -- The Captivity Narratives, Part II

In life --and it seems-- especially in wartime, chance often plays a tremendous role.  Young Frederick Schermerhorn would never have guessed that a simple errand of going to fetch his brother to help him drive some of his family's sheep to market would result in an Indian captivity and his forced induction into a Tory regiment that would last four years.

Cemetery Rd., Round Top

Frederick's brother, Jacob, lived with his wife and children on his wife's parents' farm. For five summers the storm of war threatened off in the distance, around the cabin of Johannes Strope (aka Johann Heinrich Straub/Straup). It had rumbled around like a Catskill Mountain thunderstorm above his farm, and flashed like heat lighting on the horizon. Some of his neighbors had joined the rebel militia and fought at Saratoga three summers before; some joined the Sullivan expedition that destroyed Indian settlements through out Iroquois territory last summer and many continued in local militia units like the Esopus Rangers who patrolled the area to counter Indian/Tory raiders. Some of his other neighbors had fled with Tories from the Mohawk valley to link up with the British at Fort Niagara. Rumors persisted that some local Tories had even fled into the heights of the Catskills and were acting as guides to raiding parties when they descended upon outlying farms. But because locally, Johannes Strope was known as a "King’s Man", or a Tory, himself, he wasn’t particularly concerned for his own and his family’s safety, and at age 69 he mainly wanted to be left alone to work his little farm. 

When the war finally came to Strope’s homestead it didn’t come with drums beating and fifes shrilling; it didn’t come with proclamations of Independence or pleas to support the colonists’ King and Sovereign Lord; there were no long files of scarlet-coated British regulars. Instead it came in the form of three or four solitary Indians looking for “Bastayon”, Strope’s adult son. Bastian, (short for Sebastian) had moved with his wife around 1773 to Northumberland, Bradford Co. Pennsylvania where many Palatine Germans, (eventually to be known as the Pennsylvania “Dutch”) had settled. On the Susquehanna River he, his wife and three children had been picked up (captured?) by the Indians and he had somehow tricked the Indians.  Perhaps he talked his way to freedom and Frederick Schermerhorn speculated he had made off with a valuable musket, shot and powder of theirs, though Bastian’s wife and children remained with the Indians and were taken to Canada. At any rate, the Indians were furious at him and were quite literally looking to take his scalp! 

Frederick Schermerhorn, age 17, had come to the Strope’s cabin the day before to get his brother Jacob’s help to drive some of his family’s sheep from their farm to Shinglekill (now Cairo).  His brother was married to Anna “Annatje” Strope and they lived with the Stropes. The boy had arrived late in the day only to discover his  brother was off visiting the miller on Kishkatom creek, so he stayed the night. The next morning, the family was up before dawn and Johannes was already out in his field before Frederick arose. Suddenly, Frederick heard his sister-in-law scream. She had spotted the Indians in their war paint approaching the cabin. 

The Mohawk Indians invited themselves in and made a show of being friendly, at first, by shaking hands with the cabin’s occupants, while they explained they were looking for Bastian. At the same time they began to look around for items to pilfer. This alarmed, then infuriated Mrs. Strope. She  began attempting to take things back that the Indians had picked up and demanded they leave. One of the Indians spied a linen chest and broke into it with his tomahawk. Admiring a piece of linen, he declared it would make a fine shirt for himself. The enraged Frau/Vrouw Strope threw herself at him shouting that the linen was Bastian’s. The Indian declared he hated Bastian and the two wrestled over the piece of fabric as a terrified Frederick shouted to her to give it to him before he killed her. During the commotion, Frederick’s sister grabbed up her children and ran outside where she sought refuge in the high stalks of the Strope’s rye field. The scuffle ended abruptly when the Indian struck Mrs. Strope down with his tomahawk. At the same instant Johannes rushed in from his field, and was felled by a second blow of the enraged warrior’s weapon. As the terrified boy watched, the Indians expertly encircled the dying couples heads with their knives and with their teeth ripped off their scalps as blood poured out over the cabin floor. The Indians quickly gathered up anything they thought would be of use or value to them and then turned to the stunned boy who readily agreed to go with them, rather than suffer the apparent alternative. Out in the rye field Annatje looked up when she smelled smoke and heard the crackling of the burning house, in time to see the Indians laden with their loot, leaving with her brother-in-law in tow.

 The Indians made their escape with the young Schermerhorn through some of the roughest terrain in the Catskills, done to frustrate pursuit, into the Susquehanna valley, up through western New York, eventually arriving at Fort Niagara. There the Indians sold the scalps they had taken to the British for 8 Spanish dollars apiece. Schermerhorn given the choice of being adopted by the Indians or enlisting in Sir Guy Johnson’s regiment of Tory Foresters, chose enlistment. His Indian captors were paid $40 for bringing in a “volunteer”. In the course of the war, Schermerhorn participated once in a raid on the Mohawk Valley. He refused to fire on his countrymen or assist in burning their property. Afterwards he was sent to Michigan as part of a detail guarding a captive American officer. In 1785 he was finally released. Making his way back to his home, wearing the Tory Forrester uniform he had been given, he suffered scorn and abuse as a returning Tory until he was reunited with his parents who had moved to Hudson. A few years later he married and eventually bought 100 acres for a farm not far from the site of the Strope’s farm, where he had been captured. He and his wife Sara were buried in the Round Top Cemetery. 

The story of the Stopes' murders and Frederick Schermerhorn's captivity was written down by Josiah Priest, an Albany coach upholster and leather-worker, turned professional author, published in 1839. Priest began writing pamphlets that sold for 12 1/2¢ to 18 1/2¢ each. His first book was   Wonders of Nature and Providence, Displayed ...., a rambling  collection of essays about strange animals, natural phenomena and exotic cultures, published in 1826.  In it he included   "A Prisoner among the Indians", a first-person narrative of John Strover's captivity by the Miami Indians at the start of "Lord Dunsmore's War"--a punitive campaign by the colonial governor of Virgina before the out break of the French and Indian War. The unfortunate Strover survived a 12 year captivity only to be recruited as a scout in 1782 and captured again where he witnessed the torture and burning of other captives, and was nearly burned at the stake himself.

 After his first book, many of Priest's books focused on popular, controversial subjects, that he knew would sell. A View of the Expected Christian Millennium in 1827 and The Anti-Universalist, in 1837 took up current religious issues. His American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West, (1833)  was a book about the mound builders of the Mississippi basin that re-hashed many of the theories about their supposed European or biblical origins and asserted that American Indians were not advanced enough to build them. Priest tried his hand at Gothic fiction with Museum Of Diversion and Tales of Horror (1840) and even jumped on the Washington mythology bandwagon that Parson Weems rode so successfully in A History of the Early Adventures of Washington Among the Indians of the West, conjuring up a romance between Washington and a frontier girl.  Priest entered into the growing public debate on slavery, coming down on the side of slaveholders with Slavery as it relates to the Negro or African Race, examined in the light of current history and the Holy Scripture (1843) and even attempted to exploit the anti-rent controversies with A Copy of the Grants to the Van Rensselaer and Livingston families, together with a history of the settlement of Albany, (1844) for which he got an endorsement from Smith Broughton.

However, time and time again Priest returned  to the genre of the captivity narrative. In 1832 he produced A True Story of Matthew Calkins, also the Captivity of General Patchins by Brant and his Indians and Five Other Rare Pamphlets (1832) (Patchins who became a brigadier general in the New York State militia in 1806 was captured in a 1780 Indian raid near Stamford, NY.)  Stories of the Revolution (1836) included five or six captivity narratives, including "The Captive Boys of

 Rensselaerville," an account of the Dietz family massacre and the capture of John and Robert Brice.
"The Low Dutch Prisoner" came next in 1839, followed by A True Narrative of David Ogden, (and three other captivity stories), in 1840, and The Fort Stanwix Captive in 1841. 

Today, Josiah Priest is largely forgotten, or dismissed as a hack writer and a racist. In his time his captivity narratives fed the need of white Americans to perceive Native Americans as savages and peoples who needed to be removed to beyond the frontiers of white settlement. His principal motive appears to be to produce sensationalist writings that would appeal to his audience and would sell.  But unlike the nickel and dime novelists of the 1860's through the 1880's his captivity narratives were not works of pure fiction, but rather, based on interviews with Revolutionary war veterans and the captives themselves, and though colored by time, Priest's abundant prejudices, and his literary pretensions they have historic merit.

It Happened Here -- Drawn to Sea

It was a fairly large house.  Plain. Utilitarian. The latest in a series of moves. The Melvills had always moved, choosing houses that reflected their circumstances, or, more often, their aspirations. The first house at 6 North Pearl Street in New York City was a few steps from the waterfront. The second house. a larger house on Cortlandt Street, was followed by a grand house on Bleeker Street, then a fashionable house on Broadway. Two years later, in 1830 Allan Melvill, a dealer in imported fine fashion accessories and his family  was on the move again.  But this time it was to a house less grand, less fashionable, and in Albany--less convenient for his creditors and closer to his wife's relatives to whom he would appeal for help to cover his daily expenses. Allan Melvill's business was bankrupt. He had lost out to competitors who worried less about refining their own good taste, than in knowing what their customers wanted. In two years he would be dead after having made a start in an Albany branch of a cap and fur business, and not much of a start in diminishing the mountain of debt that had followed him.

Gansevoort Melville, the family's oldest son had followed his father into the cap and fur business. (Maria Melville had added a final "e" to the family name, perhaps to signify a break with the past.) And a position had been found in the firm for the second oldest son, Herman, now that college was out of the question for him. The Melville family's fortunes had begun to rise when a fire in 1835 destroyed the family store and most of its stock, then the Panic of 1837 collapsed their remaining hopes. In 1838 seeking to reduce expenses, they moved to the house in Lansingburgh, adjacent to the north end of Troy.

Herman began studying for job as a surveyor on the Erie Canal but after completing his studies no job was forthcoming.  Perhaps it was while he waited on his front porch or strolled on the grassy shore opposite his home and watched Hudson's waters rolling ceaselessly to the great port of New York that he thought of his walks with his father to the waterfront.  In Moby Dick he would recall that scene:

        Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean

        reveries. Some leaning against spiels; some seated upon pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships

        from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better peep. But these are all landsmen; of      

        week days pent up in lath and plaster-- tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this?              

       Are the green fields gone? What do they here?  

Inevitably like some of the thousands of watching landsman he would be drawn to sea. In June 1839 he shipped out on the packet St.Lawrence as a cabin boy, to Liverpool from the port of New York. 

By the end of October he was back, back into the family drama of bill paying and survival and doing a short and unhappy stint as a teacher in Greenbush, some thirteen miles distant. June 1840 brought another scheme to find work out west. With a friend, Eli Fly, Herman Melville crossed the Hudson to the mouth of the Erie Canal. From there it was a succession of canal boats and steamers until he was at the farm of his uncle, Thomas Gansevoort, in Galena Illinois, on the Mississippi.  But his mother's brother was struggling, himself and Herman returned, unsuccessful, to his mother's house on the banks of the Hudson. There, he no doubt watched the succession of freezes and thaws when the ice chunks, large and small marched in perfect unison to the sea. After months of frustrated idleness he could wait no longer and prevailed on his brother to take him to the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts in the depths of winter. In January 1841 Herman Melville signed onto the crew of the whaler Acushnet. He would be gone until the summer of 1844.  In those four years he would experience a lifetime of adventures--whaling, jumping ship, finding another ship, participating in a "mutiny", imprisonment, and living among Polynesian "cannibals" before joining the crew of an American frigate and returning home again.  

Locked away in an upstairs bedroom he wrote down his adventures. His brother Gansevoort asked a friend going to England to take his manuscript with him and show it to a publisher there.  Intrigued, the publisher published it but insisted Typee: a Peep at Polynesian Life be published as fiction because some of it seemed too exotic to be believed by Westerners. Herman Melville's work became an overnight success and was soon published in America.  The Brooklyn Eagle. where Walt Whitman  

NYSHM at Melville's Home. Across 1st Avenue, the Hudson rolls to the sea.

worked, and often reviewed books described it as 'a strange, graceful, readable book...as a book to hold in one's hand and pore dreamily over of a summer's day, it is unsurpassed'  (in contemporary parlance--a great summer read.)  Trading on his initial success, from the same upstairs room, Melville produced Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. 

 In 1847 he would marry and leave his family-home in Lansingburgh,  for New York City, then Pittsfield, then New York, again.  Five books would follow in the next four years, the last one larger, more complex and more multi-layered than all the rest. Ultimately its poor showing would frustrate and discourage Melville and he would forsake literature for the security of a job as a New York Customs inspector. It would not be until the second decade of the twentieth century that Moby Dick would be appreciated as great literature.

It Happened Here -- The Daredevil from Hammondsport

Three days had passed since he announced he would begin his flight from Van Rensselaer's Island, just south of the Albany city line. On the first day the plane was not ready. The emergency flotation device, five inflated airbags of "balloon cloth" mounted above a "planing board" had yet to be installed and every nut and turnbuckle on the plane needed to be checked and varnished to prevent them from vibrating loose.  The wind Friday morning was gusty and though it settled down later in the day, unpredictable gusts that nearly upset the "Hudson Flier" convincing the pilot to cancel the takeoff. On Saturday at 8AM everything was in readiness.  The New York Central locomotive that was to shadow the flight with its four carloads of reporters and dignitaries and the inventor's wife had built up a head of steam (for the third time) and was easing down the tracks when a last check of the weather from New York revealed a storm was working it way up the Hudson. The pilot and inventor. Glenn H. Curtiss threw himself on the ground in utter frustration. 

 Events seemed all too much like a sequel to events of late September, half a year before, during the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration.  At that time both Curtiss and the Wright Brothers had been contracted to make demonstration flights with their machines and invited to participate in a challenge to be the first to fly between New York and Albany (with no more than two refueling stops along the way). An intense rivalry had developed between the Wright Brothers and Glen Curtiss. The Wrights jealously guarded their innovations and at the time were suing Curtiss for patent infringement. 1

Wilbur Wright revealed he had no intention of hazarding his plane on such a long flight, at this time, but arriving at Governor's Island before Curtiss he had been able make a flight across New York Harbor, circle the Statue of Liberty and return to adoring crowds, before five days of bad weather set in. During the bad weather two airships set out to win the $10,000 prize put forward by editor Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World .  One airship was forced down into the Hudson, a few miles north of the City, while the other gas bag limped back to Governor's Island, with wind damaged gear. Pulitizer extended the challenge for another year, and Curtiss, pressed by other commitments, had been obliged to leave.

Port Administration Bld., Port of Albany

Finally, on the fourth day on Van Rensselaer Island the weather turned calm and mild. At 7:02 Curtiss lifted off and the trip proceeded without incident to his scheduled refueling stop south of Poughkeepsie.  Landing there he discovered no gas or oil had been delivered. (Apparently his fuel supplier refused to "break the Sabbath".)  But an enthusiastic crowd of motorist-onlookers were thrilled at the opportunity to give him gas and oil from their vehicles' reserve tanks to send him on his way. The Hudson Highlands were Curtiss' biggest obstacle.  Climbing to 2000 feet to get over Storm King Mountain a gust of air drove the little plane downward while thrusting it on its side. Curtiss on the open seat was nearly tossed from the plane as Lena, his wife  and the other passengers watched in horror from the train below. Seeking calmer air,  Curtiss descended to 40 feet above the water until another gust of wind nearly plunged one wing into the water. Somehow Curtiss survived this second near-crash and emerged into the broad expanse above the Tappan Zee.  As he flew over Yonkers Curtiss noticed his oil gauge showed he was getting low on oil. The eight cylinder engine, of his own design, was oiled manually by operating a hand pump every ten minutes.  Had he used too much oil?  He waited until the engineer on the escorting train below layed a steady blast on his horn, announcing Curtiss' arrival into New York City, then he began to search for a place to make an emergency landing.  Fortunately, at that time there were a few large estates in the upper Bronx. Curtiss settled his plane down on the grassy slope of the Isham estate. The estate's owner came running from his veranda, having just read about Curtiss' flight in his Sunday paper. Curtiss accepted his congratulations then once again had to beg for oil and gasoline. The take off was tricky: down the grassy slope, over the cliff edge, steering between the sides of the Spuyten Duyvil gorge, but once he accomplished this he was on his way, down the length of Riverside drive accompanied by a cacophony of car horns, and whistles, bells and sirens of boats and ships of every size and description celebrating his arrival.  Passing the end of Manhattan, he crossed New York harbor to circle around the Statute of Liberty before setting down in triumph on Governor's Island. 

The Glenn Curtiss Museum, Hammondsport

Glenn Hammond Curtiss was born in the little town of Hammondsport at the southern end of Keuka Lake in the Finger Lakes wine country. Curtiss began his adult life working at George Eastman's photographic plant.  Bored with the confining factory production work he got a job as a Western Union Bicycle messenger, and homesick, began regularly making the 70 mile trek home on his bicycle, on weekends.  In Hammondsport he came to the attention of a local bicycle racing club. He started racing with them and soon was able to return home, supporting himself on prize moneys and by repairing bicycles. Realizing the mark-up on bicycles, he began to manufacture his own bicycles under the trade name Hercules, and soon had a second shop repairing bikes and selling his own brand. Fascinated by speed, the Hammondsport bike manufacturer ordered a mail order gasoline engine. What he got was a crude engine block with no carburetor and no instructions, but instead of returning it, he taught himself how to build an engine and was soon ordering from them the biggest engine they made. Convinced he could make better, lighter engines himself, he began manufacturing his own engines and mounting them on bigger, stronger frames. The Curtiss motorcycle was born and Glenn Curtiss began competing against the best motorcycle racers and the best motorcycles of their day, Harley Davidsons and Indians. His desire for greater and greater speed eventually led him to the construction of an 8 cylinder monster motorcycle that he raced at Ormond Beach, Florida, making him "the fastest man in the world"at 136.3 mph--a record that would stand for five years.  

8 cylinder Curtiss Motorcycle at the Curtiss Museum

His successes brought him in contact with Thomas Baldwin who was looking for a better, lighter engines for the dirigibles he was developing. At first Curtiss was not impressed by "these aviation cranks" but he realized he could get twice as much for an aviation engine as for a complete motorcycle and eventually he became intrigued. Baldwin introduced him to a group of aviation enthusiasts, led by the famous (and wealthy) Alexander Graham Bell. who were pooling their talents to build a machine that could achieve practical sustained flight. Curtis became the engine man for the Aerial Experiment Association.  While Bell and others in the group focused on developing a tetrahedral kite design created by Bell,  Curtiss, inspired by the Wright's early successes, employed the biplane glider configuration first used by German air pioneers. A series of early planes were developed culminating in the "June Bug" produced at his shop, which won a Scientific American prize for first aeroplane to fly one kilometer.  The airplane's development, and confidence in what airplanes could do leaped ahead for in only a year's time a Frenchman, Louis Bleriot had flown the English channel and Curtiss was contemplating the New York to Albany flight.

The June Bug at the Glenn Curtis Museum

In years to come, following Curtiss' Hudson 
river flight he would build the first successful seaplane and make many developments in that field. In 1917 his company would produce the JN4 "Jenny" widely used as a WWI trainer and the mainstay of the U.S. Mails for many years. And in WWII the Curtiss Company would produce transports and the rugged P40 fighter, used in every war theater.

 

 Early Curtiss hydroplanes

                                                               A "Jenny"

A   P-40 "Flying Tiger"
 

1The Wrights asserted in their patent suit that they had patented a solution for the problem of aeroplanes tending to roll as a bi-product engine torque by modifying the shape of the wing. Their technique was to modify the flow of air over the wing by flexing or “warping” the rear of the wing-tips up or down. Curtiss (and others) modified the flow of air over the wings by using a hinged flap (aileron) but the Wrights asserted the principle was the same. The suits dragged on until, eventually, with the demands of WWI pressing, the government set up a "patent pool" open to all U.S aircraft manufactures in which the manufacturers would pay a small royalty to the government for any patented ideas they used and the government would pay the manufacturer who had patented the idea.