It Happened Here -- Welcome to a "Tech Valley" --1830's style!

You well might wonder what would provide the employment of "so many mechanics" in West Berne in 1830-1834, some seventy-five years before automobiles came into existence. and no railroads  within many miles of the Helderberg mountains. But "mechanic" is a term that became increasingly narrow in it definition.  In pre-industial times anyone, who was not a merchant or a farmer, who used tools and worked with his hands to produce a product might be called a mechanic. Thus carpenter/joiners, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, glassmakers and gunsmiths might all be called mechanics. But by the first decades of the 1800's a mechanic was coming to mean, predominately, someone who built or maintained the machines that produced products. In effect, most mechanics were becoming "millwrights." And mills were sprouting up all over the northeast in towns with fast moving streams  that could provide waterpower for powering mills. Hamlets like East Berne, Berne, and West Berne coalesced around streams like the Switzkill and the Foxenkill. 

The Berne falls--In the 1800's multiple millponds and sluiceways were here

As early as 1751 Jacob Weidman built a gristmill at the Berne falls. In 1832 Malachi Whipple rebuilt the gristmill, which was operated until the end of WWII.

Saw mills were built in several locations, first with reciprocating vertical saws then, later in the century with circular saws, that might be "ganged" together to saw multiple planks with a single pass.

In 1858 East Berne saw the construction of a large five story grist mill which by 1886 had four sets of mill stones powered by a 22 foot diameter mill wheel which also powered a mechanical lift used to raise bags of flour to its upper floors.

In colonial times mill construction might be shared by the miller and a local carpenter/millwright who had had some apprenticeship training/experience in mill construction, but as mills became more complicated the trade of millwright/mechanic became a profession all its own.

In 1785  Oliver Evans, a young inventor and wheelwright by trade, developed the first automated flour mill using a variety of devices to move bulk materials--bucket elevators, conveyor belts and archimedean screws.  Despite taking out patents, his ideas were widely copied and finally in 1834 he published them in a book, The Young Millwright and Miller's Guide.  Mill construction and maintenance was becoming a vocation for a specialist.  He also developed a machine for drawing and bending wire and inserting it leather straps' to be used in the wool carding process.

Carding was a process of straightening or combing out wool fibers so they could be twisted into strands to be woven, and fulling was a process of stripping the excess oils from raw wool, to plump it up, to ready it for spinning.  Both of these had been done, by farm families, laboriously, by hand before machines had been created at the end of the 18th century. Malachi Whipple with William Ball and Lyman Dwight also built a Carding and Fulling Mill at the Berne falls.

The largest employer in Berne was Daniel Simmons Axe Factory built in 1825, which was said to have employed 200 workers and turned out 600 axes and other edged implements a day!  Using the abundant Helderberg timber for charcoal and for ash tool handles, it refined pig iron, produced elsewhere, into steel axe heads. Water power, from sluiceways on the Foxenkill no doubt both operated the factory's bellows and powered its trip hammers and other machinery.





Marker of the Week--Revisiting 11/12/13
Last year I posted a set of Markers of the Week which featured some "Remnants of the Horse Powered Society" which included the Unionville Reformed Church with its set of horse and carriage stalls. Recently I came upon another old church, a Quaker meeting house dating back to 1790 (the existing building 1807).  Located in the hamlet of Quaker Street on NYS Rte 7 near its intersection with NYS Rte 20.  It too, has a set of stables, and like the Unionville church, appears to be still going strong.

It Happened Here -- The Radical Doctor who Named a State!

Born in a log cabin in New Winsor, New York,  a precocious Thomas Young attended Yale college and apprenticed with a local physician to become a doctor in 1751 at age twenty.  On a small country crossroads which he named. Amoenia (derived from Latin, meaning "pleasant to the eye"), the youthful doctor set up his first practice. Rural Dutchess county close to the Connecticut hills was not the most advantageous region for a young doctor to begin practice but it was certainly a fortuitous choice.  For from there, after two years, he moved to nearby Salisbury Connecticut where he met another precocious youth of sixteen years, Ethan Allen.  It was there, Young, bursting with ideas from the Enlightenment became a mentor to Allen.  Young came armed  with a set of notebooks into which he had copied the writings or summaries of the ideas of writers, the likes of  Thomas Acquinas, Niccolo Machiavelli, Alexander Pope,  John Locke, and deist Charles Blount. Many of these ideas he had acquired from his time at Yale; others he acquired elsewhere, being a young man eager to be on the cutting edge of radical contemporary thought.


Allen moved away but returned to Salisbury seven years later to renew their friendship and ignite a storm of controversy by conspiring with the doctor to publicly receive a small pox inoculation. Most orthodox Calvinists were opposed to inoculations as actions that   challenged the will of god.  Furthermore, early inoculation experimentation had often gone disastrously wrong as patients inoculated with live virus actually contracted a weakened version of the disease and if they came in contact with others, while contagious, they could transmit the disease which could become full blown smallpox in others.  Together with their medical experiment, their shared deist philosophies and other enlightenment ideas they constantly flirted with wholesale community rejection.
In 1760 Young invested heavily with John Henry Lydius, a New York land speculator.  Four years later he moved abruptly to Albany. The doctor's practiced had suffered when a more orthodox and less controversial doctor had moved into town, and the move to Albany enabled Young to keep a closer watch on his investment.

In the next few years the conflict between Britain and her colonies began to heat up as Parliament devised new laws to regulate her colonies and help pay for the recent expensive colonial war. Not surprisingly Young thrust himself into the politics of the day, becoming the first to sign the constitution of the Albany Sons of Liberty in 1766. By the end of the year, inflamed by the Stamp Act controversy, Young moved his family to Boston to be at the center of the controversy!  Present at the Boston Massacre the radical doctor brandished a sword and was credited with preventing more rioters from being shot. Young became a close friend of Sam Adams, despite their differences in religious philosophy. At the Boston Tea Party he refused to wear a disguise when boarding the tea ships and was later identified and severely beaten by British soldiers.  Fearing for his life, Young moved to Newport R.I. Then, when he discovered he was still being pursued, he moved to Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia, Young soon became friends with Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, working with the two of them to draft a radical new Pennsylvania constitution, while volunteering as a surgeon to a Pennsylvania rifle company, in the opening years of the American Revolution. While in Philadelphia he met an old friend from his Amenia-Salisbury days.  Herman Allen, Ethan Allen's brother was with a delegation of farmers and tradesmen from the Hampshire Grants petitioning Congress to allow their area to become a separate state. Several of the Allen brothers had moved to "the Grants," an area between New York and New Hampshire, claimed by both former colonies. (see my post of  3/3/14.)  While his brother Ethan remained a prisoner of war, captured in the failed invasion of Canada in 1776,  Herman led the delegation seeking to create a new state they were calling "New Connecticut".  Young gave the group a copy of the constitution he had been working on. It would eventually become a model for the delegates' new political entity.  He also pointed out that "New Connecticut" was a name used by Connecticut settlers in the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania. Doctor Young suggested "Vermont," from the latin vert (green) and mont (mountain). The name would recall the area's most significant feature, the Green Mountains and also honor the "Green Mountain Boys," Ethan Allen's milita force that had captured Ticonderoga and for years had defended settlers of the "Grants" from New York officials.

Once again, Thomas Young was at the center of a storm of controversy.  James Duane, the New York representative angrily denounced Young for his meddling; the delegates were rebuffed and would return to their homes. But they would take Young's ideas to write a new Vermont constitution and form a new independent state, the Republic of Vermont.  It would not be until 1791 that Vermont would join the United States as a new state. But Doctor Young would know none of this.  Ministering to Continental troops he would contract typhus, and die suddenly in June 1777.

Few of the leaders of the Revolutionary generation are less known than Dr. Thomas Young. Perhaps his early death contributed to his obscurity, although men like Dr. Joseph Warren and Gen. Richard Montgomery died early in the war.  Perhaps it was because his early death prevented him from participating to a greater extent in the formation of the new nation, but men like Sam Adams were deeply suspicious of national governments and declined to participate in affairs outside their own states. Perhaps it was because he was an outsider, coming into an area, participating in the troubles and then leaving again. But there were many "outsiders," men like Englishman Thomas Paine and a raft of foreign generals.  Perhaps it was all these factors; but in any event Dr, Thomas Young deserves a greater degree of recognition.

It Happened Here --Cold Temps. and Snowbanks

I had hoped to have a whole new stock of  signs and stories when the winter weather broke but since in many areas where signs are found, the snowbanks are 3 and 4 feet deep and the roads are barely more than 10 feet wide it has been difficult and hazardous to get out to photograph them. So there is no post for this week.

But since you are already here--Perhaps you might want to catch up on some posts you might have missed. The easiest way to find them is by clicking on the year and the month in the menu on the right.

   Date                          Title                                                                Topics

2/3/ 13   A Blog about NY State Historical markers      

2/10/13  A Quiz for Presidents' Week
2/17/13  Answers to the Presidents' Week Quiz
2/24/13  Citizen Genet                                                    "Citizen"  Jean  Genet
3/3/ 13   Caution Fragile Signs                                        Trials and Tribulations of NYSHMs
3/10/13  A Tale of Two Railroads  Part I                        Albany Schenectady RR
3/17/13  A Tale of Two Railroads  Part II                       Catskill and Canojoharie RR
3/24/13  Adam Helmer's Run                                          A. Helmer, militia scout, Rev. War
3/31/13  In Precarious Positions Part I                            Charles Nalle, Harriet Tubman, slavery
4/7/13    In Precarious Positions Part II                           Solomon Northrup, slavery
4/14/13  Grandma Moses                                                 Grandma Moses
4/21/13  A Noble Train of Artillery                                 Rev War, Guns for Boston, Henry Knox
4/28/13  The Man who Measured (+Saved) the Mts.      Verplanck Colvin
5/ 5/ 13  The Man who Measured.... Part II                     Verplanck Colvin
5/12/13  New York's Wooden Roads                                Plank Roads
5/19/13  Yankee Doodle Came to Grenen Bos                 Yankee Doodle, Fort Crailo
5/26/13  The "Battle" of Clarksville                                 Anti-Rent Wars  part I
6/ 2/13   Knox: The Pillbox Capital                                  wooden pillboxes, patent medicine
6/ 9/13   The Oil Driller                                                     Edwin Drake, first oil well
6/16/13  The Naples Tree                                                   Paleontology,  D. Dana Luther
6/23/13  The "Lily"                                                           Amelia Bloomer, women's rights
6/30/13  The Tough,Wiley Scotsman+his Diligent Vrouw   Robt. + Alida Livingston,  patroons
7/  8/13   Those Remarkable Schoolcrafts                         Henry Rowe Schoolcraft + family
7/15/13   The Mex.War: So Long Ago, So Far Away        John A. Quitman, Wm. J. Worth
7/22/13   Winifred Goldring, paleontologist                      paleontology, Gilboa Forests, W.G.
7/29/13   "TheTavern Lamps are Burning"                        taverns and democratic government
8/  5/13   New York's Revolutionary Militias                    Rev War, militias, anti-Tory activities
8/12/13   The Christian Sisters in Canaan and the
                 Greenwich Vill. Poet of Austerlitz                    Warner Sisters, Edna St.Vincent Milay
8/19/13   The Town that Made a Name for Itself               Red Rock, Columbia County
8/26/13   Pioneers and Potash                                            Potash in frontier economies
9/  3/13   The Grand Old Man of Nature                            John Burroughs
9/  9/13   Pay as you Go                                                     Turnpikes
9/17/13   John Brown's Body Lies a-mouldering...            abolition, John Brown in New York
9/22/13   "Incorrigible"                                                       Thoreau, Emerson
10/1/13   The Physician who Practiced Sedition                Anti Rent Wars part II, Smith Broughton
10/8/13   The Electric State (Part I)                                    Jos. Henry, Allen Penfield, electromag.
10/14/13   From Alps to Berne to Andes                           Anti-Rent War part III, Osman Steele
10/21/13   A Bug in the Works (no post)
10/23/13   The Ghost of Duncan Campbell                       D.Campbell, Fr +IndianWar, Ft. Ti.
11/  3/13   The Lingering Death of the Leaseholds            Anti Rent Wars part IV
11/12/13   The Captivity Narratives (Part I )                      Fr. + Indian Wars, Rogers' Rangers
11/19/13   The "Tanlords" of the Catskills                         Leather tanning industry
11/26/13   The Battles on Snowshoes                                 Fr. + Indian Wars, Rogers' Rangers
12/  3/13   The Daredevil from Hammondsport                 Glenn Curtiss, aviation history
12/10/13   Drawn to Sea                                                     Herman Melville
12/17/13   The Captivity Narratives (Part II)                     Josiah Priest
12/24/13   Big Bells, Little Bells (Part I)                           Meneeley Bell Foundry, Troy foundries
12/31/13   Big Bells, Little Bells (Part II)                          Sleigh bells, S. Cairo
   1/ 7/14   Uncle Dan's Town                                             Alb. Dem. Machine, Dan O'Connell
  1/16/14   New World Dutch Barns                                   Dutch Barns, Jan Wemp
  1/21/14   The Forgotten Advocate: Jesse Torrey              public libraries, slavery, Jesse Torrey
  1/30/14    First Contacts                                                    Henry Hudson
  2/  5/14    King of the (Indian) Traders                             G. Croghan, Traders, Land Speculators
  2/11/14    Marker for a Mastodon                                       Cohoes Mast., James Hall, paleontology
  2/18/14    The Albany Regency                                         Albany Regency, Martin Van Buren
  2/25/14    Two Tory Families                                             Rev. War, Tories
  3/  3/14    The Van Ness Murder + Further Thoughts         Rev. War, Tories
  3/11/13     Cold Temps. and Snowbanks                            An Index to Date

  Coming Next Week: The Radical Doctor Who Named a State!

It Happened Here -- The Van Ness Murder and 

Some Further Thoughts on the Treatment of Tories

Last week we looked at the fate of two Tory families. 

 John Dirck Hoes, in what became Columbia County was silenced for his views and forced to go into hiding for the duration of the conflict, (or at least stay out of sight), under threat of banishment to the British lines in New York. After the war it was several decades before he was fully accepted back in his community. 

Simon Fraser (Sr.)  residing in adjacent Rensselaer County was arrested, following his participation at the Battle of Bennington, imprisoned under harsh conditions, until he died a little more than a year later in prison. When his family appealed to have him released, on the grounds that his family was suffering extreme hardship as the result of his incarceration, their appeal was ignored or denied and provoked a letter from someone opposed to the appeal who suggested the family should be driven away. His family was ostracized and harassed, even after the end of the war, with the apparent complicity of the local authorities who fined the older sons for non-participation in regular militia exercises. 

Why were they treated so differently?  It was not because Columbia County patriots felt less threatened by Tories within their midst, or were less willing to take decisive action.  A group of Tories heading north to join Burgoyne in 1777 broke into the house of Abraham Van Ness, looking for arms.  They captured Van Ness who was home on leave from the Continental army, then killed him on a bridge a short distance from his home.  The Tories were overtaken by the militia on the shore of the Hudson river as they were looking to cross.  The whole group were summarily hanged on the spot!

Obviously, the authorities in Albany felt Simon Fraser had demonstrated he was more of a threat than John Dirck Hoes. But there may have been other factors operating as well.  Hoes was part of an established community of interconnected families, an inter-connected enclave of dutch freeholders going back to the original dutch settlement.  As long as he took no overt actions against patriot forces and the threat of banishment to the British kept him quiet, his presence could be tolerated.

Fraser was a newcomer, and a dangerous one at that,  settled on his land only three years before he marched off to support the British invasion of his new homeland. His Highland gaelic culture and catholic religion were no doubt seen as a challenge to his Yankee and Yankee-Dutch neighbors.

Furthermore, Fraser had become an unwitting pawn in the boundary dispute between the Provinces of New York and New Hampshire.

Beginning in 1749 New Hampshire governor Benning Wentworth began issuing land grants in the western part of what he claimed was New Hampshire, for hefty fees to New Englanders, mostly from Connecticut. On the south west corner of the first of his grants a town sprang up, named for him--Bennington. After the end of the French and Indian Wars a succession of New York provincial governors got into the lucrative land granting game by issuing grants as far east as the Connecticut River to New York land speculators,  who looked to Highland Scots as potential settlers. Early in the 18th century the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had settled its boundary with colonial New York but New York officials maintained the boundary with New Hampshire was the Connecticut River, going back to James I claim in 1664 when he took New Netherlands from the Dutch. The Highlanders were recruited because many of them had served during the French and Indian Wars along the Lake George-Lake Champlain corridor and had seen the fertile lands in that area, and also in Scotland many Highlanders were being forced out of their farms as powerful lords began to enclose their lands for wool production. Fraser appears part of four hundred Highland Scots settled 'in the Albany area'  in 1773. Other Highlanders were granted lands around New Perth (Salem, New York); what became Argyle, New York; and east as far as Middlebury (Vermont).  To make matters worse, New York speculators sent the Albany county sheriff's men into the disputed lands to try to collect title payments from Yankee settlers who had already bought titles  from New Hampshire's governor.  Ethan Allen organized a Yankee militia, the "Green Mountain Boys" to defend their homes against New York authorities and to intimidate settlers (mostly Highlanders) from New York. So when Fraser took up arms against the rebels his actions became an excuse for insistence on his family's removal.

In another post we will look at the New York-Vermont border in more detail.

 Marker of the Week -- The Marker remains, but....

It is an unfortunate thing when a NYSHM goes missing, demolished by an automobile, removed and never replaced when a road is widened or a new structure built, or stolen or destroyed by vandals. But it is infinitely sadder when a marker survives but the historic building or site it describes is destroyed.  The Blenheim Bridge was the longest single span wooden covered bridge in the world. One hundred and eighty three years it spanned the often turbulent Schoharie Creek until Hurricane Irene in August 2011 carried it away.  Authorities offered to restore the bridge if only 40% of its original timbers could be recovered. But even that was impossible from a flood that devastated whole towns and swept away a whole herds of horses, without a trace. Other NYSHM sites suffered as well. Guy Park was severely damaged by the raging Mohawk River.