It Happened Here-- "Tis the Season "
where NYSHMS: It Happened Here relaxes its criteria for what is a New York State Historical Marker to present stories with holiday/ winter themes. In Decembers past we have featured pieces on church bell foundries in Waterveliet and sleigh bell foundries in Cairo marked by bonafide Historical Markers but we have also featured a story of Seneca Falls, a little town that believes it was the model for Bedford Falls, the town featured in Frank Cappa's Christmas movie classic, It's a Wonderfull Life. In that case the event was memorialized by a couple street signs and a plaque on the iron bridge spanning the Seneca river that flows through the town.
In that spirit we turn to a modest little three story building on River Street in downtown Troy and the small bronze plaque on the left hand corner of the front of it. The building was home to a modest, short lived newspaper, one of perhaps two dozen that came and went in the nineteenth century in the area of Albany, Troy and surrounding little towns, known collectively today as the "Capital District". The newspaper was the Troy Sentinel , a semi-weekly newspaper published between 1823 and 1832. It featured a collection of news stories, opinion pieces and literary submissions. Though perhaps more than an early nineteenth century version of a local twentieth/twenty-first century "Pennysaver," it was no New Yorker Magazine .
Nevertheless in December 23, 1823 it published a short anonymous poem it had received. The fifty six line poem would be copied and published and re-published, memorized and read to generations of children. Its memes and iconic images would form the heart of the second most important Christmas Story. A tiny magical sleigh is pulled by eight flying reindeer; a little rotund elf of a man, with a snowy white beard surreptitiously delivers a bag full of toys to sleeping children in the middle of the night; he magically descends down the chimney of their home and deposits the gifts in their stocking left hanging by the chimney, by the children who hope that he might fill them with presents; then, laying a finger to the side of his nose (a nineteen century sign of a shared secret) and giving a nod to the observing parent, he magically rises up the chimney and departs--all of it is here, cobbled together from bits of Dutch folklore of Sinterklaas without the dark moralistic undertones of some of the original tales--for the first time!
The popularity of the poem was such that in 1837 a famous academic and biblical scholar, Dr. Clement C. Moore announced that he had written the poem and had read it for years to his children on Christmas eve. It had been submitted to the paper anonymously by a friend or relative who didn't want to embarrass the distinguished Doctor. Later in 1844 he included it in a book he published of his own poetry.
In 1999, however, the descendants of Henry Livingston Jr. (a scion of the Hudson River Dutch Livingston family) claimed he had written it . The following year Donald Foster, a literary scholar wrote a book supporting the Livingston claim. Since then the debate has gone back and forth with academics on both sides presenting evidence for one or the other author, with recent studies using computerized textual analysis.
Regardless of its authorship, the original publication of this little poem set a new tone for the holiday, redirecting its secular aspects away from adult celebration and "wassailing" and toward children and gift giving. --And It Happened Here. Happy Holidays.
Marker of the Week Fortnight -
Honey Joe Road, Fly Creek
