It Happened Here-- Author of the Weird 

                                  & Signs of Spooks and Witches

Well, once again America's holiday that celebrates horror, the weird, the creepy and the spooky is fast upon us.  (No, I'm not referring to election day.) In Octobers past I have occasionally tried to showcase, or mention markers and stories associated with memes or things that "go bump in the night", etc., etc.[1]   In recent years the Pomeroy foundation has made this easier for me by producing a series of   "Legends and Lore" markers that celebrate New York folk lore. But first, let's begin at the summer home of a writer who made his mark by writing in genres of horror and "weird" stories.

On a quiet street in the quiet village of Broadalbin  NY is the former summer residence of Robert W. Chambers a literary beneficiary of Edgar Allen Poe and a literary contemporary of Mark Twain, Stephen Crane,  and Ambrose Bierce.  Chambers was scion of a wealthy family living in Brooklyn who was educated first at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, then, when he showed artistic promise enrolled in several of the most famous art schools in Paris but after he graduated  abruptly left art for writing, returning to it occasionally to  produce  some illustrations for magazines or to illustrate some of his own works.

North Main St., Broadalbin

( picture  taken in 2014 )

 Chambers was most successful in the genres of gothic horror, science and supernatural fiction and just plain "weird" stories, inspiring the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. His most popular work, The King in  Yellow is a collection of stories centered around the effects of a play ("The King in Yellow")  reputedly, so profound, so psychologically  engaging that readers cannot put it down with the effect that it ultimately drives them insane!  And it is this thread that links four of the collection's short stories.  Later in his career he would write romances and historical fictions that were less successful.

  Chambers, himself, was an avid sportsman who loved the Adirondacks and his home on the doorstep of New York's great wilderness.  Like some baronial hunting lodge, his home in Broadalbin was filled with hunting and fishing trophies, and  his extensive collections of exotic insects.  His stories are sometimes set in wild, outdoor-atmospheric landscapes, like the Scottish and  English moors that inspired his Victorian predecessors and contemporaries. The Sacandaga Vley out his back door was a large area of sunken meadows,  cattail swamps, vernal ponds, interspersed with tangles of thickets and patches of woods, before it was dammed  up creating the Sacandaga Reservoir in the 1930's. 

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, his work habits were a bit odd.  For most of the year he lived in New York City.   Six days a week he would arise, breakfast, and groom and dress himself immaculately before leaving for his office to write, precisely at 10am.  He returned precisely at 6pm.  No one, not his family, not his business associates, not his publishers  ever knew where this office was!  [2]

 I won't spoil any of his stories by summarizing any of his plot lines, but let me give you a little of flavor of his work by describing some of the characters he creates:

--A little, fussy tradesman, with wax ears held on by wires and no fingers on one hand, who repairs things  for people as a clock repairmen or shoe maker might, but the things he repairs  are reputations  and the tools he uses are an army of  henchmen who wheedle and bribe and threaten and intimidate.

--mysterious spectral maidens                                                                                                        -grey bipedal mur-men with with soft fleshy rubbery skin, red pulsating gills, slack open mouths, and lidless staring eyes

--foul smelling spidery, reptilian things

--a scientists that turns living matter into marble

--a church attendee who discovers he is being observed by the organist during the mass,  and from that person's expressions and supposed feigned indifference to him, he conjures up all sorts of malignant intentions the musician  must harbor towards  him.

-- a pale bloated driver of a two horse hearse.

                                               ***********

Within the last few years the Pomeroy Foundation has created a number roadside markers that are part of their "Legends and Lore" series--stories that lack verifiable documentation, but have persisted over time  in an area long enough to be considered part of the local folklore

                  Rt. 20, Esperance at Schoharie Creek

After the Napoleonic Wars a French Grenadier and his wife and two young sons came to live across the Schoharie Creek from the village of Esperance. The ex-soldier died and the women lived apart from the community, never learning english.  Rumors began to spread about her among the New England settlers of the town after several crop failures and unexplained deaths of livestock and children. One villager reported she had seen the women polling her way across the Schoharie  riding upon her apron and when she reached the other side she put on the apron, undampened by the crossing and continued on her way.  This revelation was enough to galvanize the New Englanders who assembled at the local meeting house and decided she must be put down/killed.  One of their number was chosen to cast a silver bullet from a table spoon and shoot her through an  open window of her home. She was buried with a stake driven through her head, buried  under a  tree so its roots would keep her from leaving her grave.  In later years one of her sons vividly told the story of her demise.

*******

Like many legends, the legend at Spook rock, a large angular boulder on the edge of the Claverack Creek has several versions. The features they have in common are that a star-- crossed pair of lovers escaping from their people who don't approve of their union, come together at the rock where they meet their demise but when the church bell  from the Claverack church can be heard echoing through the valley the pair reappear in spirit form at the rock or  in the surrounding woods.                                 Spook Rock Rd., Co.Rte 29, Claverack

The most "accepted" version, to which the Pomeroy marker alludes , is the version  reported by the Greenport Historical Society.  In this story a Mohican chief in his fortified  village on Becraft Mountain has a beautiful daughter.  A young handsome brave, from a rival tribe, scouting out the village, runs into her and they fall in love.  The pair plan a tryst in the woods  but then a huge violent storm develops.  They seek shelter under a rocky outcropping near the top of the mountain .  In the midst of the downpour and lightning the cliff side  collapses and they are carried down the mountainside ending up buried together under a huge boulder at the edge of the creek.  When the church bell tolls the boulder temporarily turns over releasing them briefly from their rocky tomb and they can be seen together in ghostly form.

A second version have the couple deciding to elope and coming to the rock with the creek at flood stage, deciding to cross, and both being swept away to their deaths. Ever after, the Princess is said to be heard moaning in the wind as she searches for her lost beau.

A third version has a young Mohegan princess and a young Dutchman meeting at the rock to carry on a romance but when the affair was discovered the local Dutch settlers  surprised the pair at the rock killing them both.  Their shadows can be seen in the moonlight and their screams faintly heard in the woods.

                                                            *********

A final story doesn't belong in this blog because it isn't located in New York State but it brings up a point I wish to make.  On vacation this summer, I was in York, Maine.  York is an old town first settled in 1624 and incorporated in 1652.  In its heart is a colonial cemetery and in the cemetery is a "witches grave".  In their signage the Old York Historical Society is quick to reassure us that this isn't  really the grave of a witch,  covered over with a very large stone to prevent said witch from reemerging and causing mischief.  Instead, it is a grave  covered by a thoughtful husband who wanted to make sure his wife's remains are undisturbed by wandering livestock.  Fair enough--but why is this grave the ONLY grave to receive such treatment?

                                                                    Old Parish Cemetery, Rte 1A, York , Maine

And then there is the "portrait". In a cemetery filled with cherubim and angels of death images conveying the standard dour warning "repent--for I am now what you soon will be", there is this singular lady, elaborately coiffed, in a flowing gown, sensual, bare-breasted!  Eyes staring forward, mouth pursed,  she seems ready to burst out with something --but What?

And she lies there seemingly alone, away from the other well marked graves. Actually there are probably plenty of graves nearby but they are unmarked or were once marked with wooden markers, long since rotted away. She's up in the cheap seats!  And where is her family?   

A final observation--she hasn't been totally forgotten by members of the  twenty-first century. Her grave is covered with mementos, tokens, gifts, coins, flowers, talismans, etc. What are the meanings of these "gifts" for the people who gave them?  Though I don't take seriously witches and ghosts and  the "things that go bump in the night" etc, etc.,  it  is well to remember, there are many that do.

Happy Halloween!

[1] see "New York State Historical Markers: It Happened Here.  October 26 , 2014, "With Halloween Approaching"--Indian Raid.

see also NYSHMS:It Happened Here.  October. 23,  2013. "The Ghost of Duncan Campbell"and Marker of the Week "The Mysterious Throne in Kingsbury"

[2]  Broadalbin Town Historian,  William Clizbe. (many thanks, Mr. Clizbe)  related an incident in which a local resident was hired to drive Chambers to New York and Chambers  asked him  to be let him off at a busy street corner  instead of his office or some address, giving some credence to secretiveness.  (Other stories  suggest the existence of a mistress.)

 

                                   It Happened Here--"The White Woman                                                                                    of the Genesee"

"Tne Genesee"--the heart of the homeland of the Seneca, the largest, most  powerful people of the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois confederacy), the "keepers of the western door," and in their midst lived Mary Jemison.

Mary Jemison statue 

 Her grave site was relocated near here in 1874 from Buffalo Creelk to the Letchworth State Park, Council Grounds. The statue was erected here in 1910.

Mary Jemison was born in 1743  on board

 ship when her parents were immigrating from Ireland to America.  Her family settled and prospered on the Pennsylvania frontier for over a decade. However, with French and Indian War raging, a raiding party of Shawnee warriors and four French soldiers captured the, then, twelve year old Mary and her family.  Two of Mary's older brothers  escaped capture.  The raiders, fearing they would be overtaken by militia pursuers killed and scalped Mary's mother, father and other siblings but took Mary to the Ohio country where she was sold to a Seneca family living there who were mourning the loss of a son/brother killed in the  the war. Gradually their care for her, sympathy and kindness  won her over  as she was formally adopted into the family. [1]  Formally adopted, Mary was re named "Dickewamis," (pleasant girl, handsome girl or a pleasant, good thing .) [2] After a few years she was married to a Delaware man,  Sheninjee  with whom she had a son, Thomas, who she named after her father. The couple moved in with her clan mother , her clan sisters and brothers in a Seneca  town on the Ohio River.

The extended family probably lived in a traditional bark longhouse similar to this one

(longhouse reconstruction in Ganondagan, Seneca village near Victor, New York)

On a visit to the British Fort Pitt during an apparent truce, Mary was observed by British colonists there.  Fears that  they might attempt to  take her from them contributed to the family deciding to return to their Genesee homeland, moving into "Little Beard''s Town.  With peace at hand,  in 1768  a bounty was offered for the return of white captives.  A dutch trader and a local chief the "Old King" conspired to capture Mary to collect the bounty.  She successfully hid from them .   Away on a hunting trip, Mary's husband  became sick and died.  She remarried a Seneca man, Hiokatoo with whom she had two sons and four daughters.  She settled into the quiet life  of a native-American squaw, raising corn,beans and squashes and ,  dressing skins,  preparing and preserving venison, occasionally accompanying hunting parties to help carry back game, but more often working in close society with her clan sisters.  "Our labor was not severe, [and our] cares certainly not nearly half as numerous nor as great [as white women's]." [3]  The Seneca's material culture, however, was changing fast with native -Americans becoming increasingly dependent  on goods available only from Europeans and European Americans. The Little Beard's Town Mary moved to was in many ways indistinguishable from "white" frontier towns on the edge of the wilderness with log cabins, plowed fields [4]  and orchards.

Mary reported greed for these things led their chiefs to support the British over the rebels.

Mary's daughter's house from the Gaudeau Tract, at Letchworth State Park.  Mary's house in Little Beard's Town would have been similar.

At first, the Revolutionary War little impacted Mary and her sister's lives, as their warrior husbands and brothers occasionally left and returned from distant raids.  A major exception to this was the Oriskany Battle to which the Seneca were invited to "watch." and "smoke their pipes" while "Regulars" and "Loyalists" punished the upstart rebels.  Instead,  the Senecas became fully involved, fighting for their lives.   Dozens of warriors from Little Beard's Town were killed and wounded.  [5]  Mary also frequently hosted visits by Colonels Butler and Bryant in their travels to Little Beard's Town. Her peace, however, was shattered in 1779 when Washington,  fed up with constant Indian raids  directed armies led by Generals Sullivan and Clinton to crush the Haudenosaunee.  Meeting at Tioga Point on the Susquehanna the combined armies swept up through the finger lakes burning every Cayuga, Tuscarora and Seneca village before them, destroying crops and food stocks, and cutting down orchards. At the head of Conesus Lake  the Senecas and Butler's Rangers set up an ambush to try to stop Sullivan's forces before they could enter Little Beard's Town.  But before they could effect the ambush, a scouting party sent out earlier by the Americans blundered into the ambush and in a running skirmish the party's commander, a Lieutenant Parker, and a Sargent Boyd were taken prisoner.  The enraged and disappointed warriors took their prisoners to the village where they were tortured and beheaded, before a council of chiefs decided that, with the element of surprise gone, their only option was to withdraw before this much larger army.  Little Beard's Town, it crops and orchards was utterly destroyed. 

                        Letchworth Park Rd., Castile

While most of Mary's people crowded into towns untouched by the Sullivan invasion,  even seeking shelter in the shadow of the British headquarters at Fort Niagara, Mary took her family south, along the Genesee to an old abandoned village that would become known as the Gardeau Tract.  There she met a pair of escaped slaves who had raised a large field of corn.  They  took her and her family in, feeding and sheltering them, in exchange for help in shucking and shelling the corn, through a severe winter that devastated  the Haudenosuanee people through cold and famine.  Mary stayed with her family, after the former slaves moved on. Reunited with her husband, she built cabins, farmed and raised livestock.  Peace came and she became surrounded by a scattering of white squatter-settlers. 

                                                                                                                     cor. U.S. 20 A and Mary Jemison Dr., Geneseo

 In 1797 Robert Morris  an extremely wealthy investor,  and a major financier of the Revolution bought the rights to be the sole negotiator to buy land owned/occupied by the Senecas and other tribes in western New York, (the right of Preemption).  Morris arranged for a meeting with the Senecas at the town of Big Tree (near present day Geneseo).  Mary attended the meeting, as respected clan matriarchs often did, advising their tribes' chiefs. The meeting was contentious, and unsavory, dragging on for over a month, with American negotiators using alcohol and bribes to win over individual Indian delegates and with Native Americans realizing  the flood of white settlers would continue unabated unless they made concessions,  surrendered land for payments and got (some-hoped-for) legal protections for their established towns and "developed" lands. Mary was an outspoken advocate for her people.  Morris' company bought the entire Seneca lands west of the Genesee to the New York western border with the exception of twelve "reservations"--mostly settled Indian towns and farmlands for $100,000 (roughly $5 billion, today). The money was  invested stocks in the Bank of the United States with the stipulation that $6000 or  up 6% of the earnings of the stocks be returned to the tribe as an annuity.  Mary's Gardeeau Tract was one of the reservations.

For the next thirty four years Mary and her family lived on the Gardeau Tract but it was not without stress and tragedy.  The Gardeau Tract, whose boundaries  set out by treaty were thought to encompass about two square miles but when surveyed were discovered they encompassed 16,927 acres! This gave her ample land to lease acreage to neighboring farmers so she could live comfortably but it was also large enough to attract the attention of land speculators and land hungry neighbors who developed repeated schemes  to take land from her.  The stresses of living on the edge of the white society also effected her family.  Her oldest son Thomas and middle son John  frequently clashed in violent alcohol-fueled altercations.  In July  1811 John killed Thomas.  Hiokatoo died later that year from advanced age and consumption and her youngest son Jesse died in a fight with John in 1812.    Five years later, John was killed in a brawl with two other Senecas in a neighboring reservation.

Despite her losses and struggles Mary bore her personal disasters with grace and good humor, never turning away persons who came to her in need. Her neighbors encouraged her to meet with James Seaver who interviewed her in 1823 to tell her remarkable story.  The following year he published A  Narrative  of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.   

In 1831 she moved to the Buffalo Creek Reservation with her remaining daughters and their children, selling the remainder of her lands. She died there in 1833 at the age of 91.

[1]  It is important to remember that Iroquois (Seneca) families are matrilineal so their extended families center around the clan mother.  Husbands essentially marry into their mother-in-law's family, thus throughout most of her life, Mary Jemison's life would center around her clan mother's life and her adoptive sisters.

[2] Later english renditions of her name represent it as "Dehgewanus" and translate it as "two falling voices".  One can imagine her as a young scared girl speaking English and learning the Seneca dialect-- starting to speak, but having her voice trail off in fear and uncertainty.

[3]  A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.  Chapter VI.  James E. Seaver.  1824.

[4]  Living along the Ohio, Mary reported they used a short sharpened stick as a hoe-like instrument to plant their corn, but moving into her own piece of land, the Gardeau Tract, she brought a pair of horses and plowed her fields to grow her corn. 

[5] see also "NYSHMs: It Happened Here.  Apr. 11., 2025."

--A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison   is available  on line in text at "Project Gutenberg" and as an audiobook at "Librivox"

--The online "Exploring Letchworth State Park History " by Tom Breslin and Tom Cook is a wealth of articles and time lines about the park, the Gardeau Tract and Mary Jemison

--all the usual internet suspects.

Marker of the Week  Fortnight (!)  -- Diners

  7550 N. Broadway, Redhook

The descendants of "lunch wagons" and modeled after railroad dining cars, these prefabricated light-meal restaurants were popular in the 1920's, and after WWII.   Completely pre-wired with appliances, plumbing, booths, counters, and "bar stools" these original fast-food restaurants were virtually ready for business as soon as they were  delivered and connected up to public utilities. Known as the Village Diner or Halfway Diner  (because it was said to be halfway between New York and Albany ) , this Redhook restaurant was fabricated in Paterson, NJ and brought to Redhook  by flatbed rail car and truck in 1927. 

After the Taconic Parkway was built it was moved to the intersection of Rte.199 and the Parkway,  then moved back to Redhook after the building of the  mid-- Hudson Bridge redirected a greater flow of traffic through Redhook.  Like many other diners an extended kitchen was added in the rear.

 One of about ten diner manufacturers, Silk City Diners was a division of the Paterson Wagon Company that produced about 1500 diners from 1926 to 1966.  

Another Silk City Diner exists in Albany.  Built in 1941 it had a number of owners and operated under several names, Lill's Diner, The Miss Albany Diner and currently, Tanpopo Ramen and Sake Bar.

In 1987 it was featured prominently in the film Ironweed.