It Happened Here--The Saddest of Veterans' Stories

Among the saddest of veterans' stories are those which involve soldiers/veterans who have suffered  the grotesqueries of war--the fatigue, the horror, the shock, the blood,  the pain-- and somehow find themselves being delivered from it , only to have accidental  calamity strike.  The American Civil War had two notable examples of this. One involved the burning of the steamboat Sultana.  With the war ended,  veterans were being shipped home in great numbers.  A  Mississippi riverboat contractor rushed his aging  steamboat, the Sultana, used in the cotton trade  into service,  making emergency  boiler repairs, to take on  2127 veteran soldiers on a ship designed to carry  361 passengers and crew.   Three of the four ships boiler exploded and the ship burned.   Somewhere between 1,164   and 1,547died.

The second involved an horrific train crash barely a couple miles from the New York  Delaware river  border  near Shohola Pennsylvania.  

New York State saw none of the actual  Civil War conflict, except for the New York City draft riots, and a clandestine  plot or two .    But a very large number of New Yorkers served in the Union Army evidenced by Civil War monuments in almost every town of any size across the state.   Its mills, factories and foundries provided much of the materiel, weapons and ammunition  for the Union forces, from the Parrot guns and cannonballs produced at arsenals in Waterveliet  and Cold Spring to the iron plate produced in Troy, for the iron-clad monitors and gunboats that would dominate the rivers of the South.  The small town of Elmira would become a logistical hub for the collection and training of  recruits and draftees from upstate New York.  From 1861 to 1864 Camp Rathbun  received thousands of men, outfitted and trained them before sending them south by rail.   But by the second part of the war a new need arose.  

During the earlier stage of the  war,  a relatively effective  parole and exchange system  kept the numbers of prisoners of war down.  But as  the fighting intensified and pressures on the  the South's war effort and economy increased, the system broke down.  First, the increased intensity of fighting created a lot more POW's.  Secondly, the  agreements that allowed POW's to return to their homes,  as parolees, if they and their governments  agreed not to return them to the fight, until they could be formally exchanged, appeared to be often violated, and thirdly, the economic stranglehold the Union had over the Confederacy frequently resulted in, according to Union officials,  Union POWs  being returned in starved. sickened conditions, unable to return to the Army,  while  their Confederate counterparts  were returned relatively  healthy and could  resume active service much more quickly.   Finally, the  Emancipation Proclamation and the introduction of Black soldiers into the Union Army added another dimension.  It was widely believed in the North, (and to some extent true) that Black POWs were summarily killed or sold into slavery.  Consequently,  by 1864 the exchange system had  broken down.  Both sides began to create facilities for holding more prisoners for a longer period of time, even  for the duration of the war. 

 For soldiers on either side, surviving combat did not insure survival if it led to imprisonment as a POW. 

 In the south ,  Andersonville  Georgia became the major POW prison;  in the North . Camp Rathbun,  aka. Camp Chemung,  Elmira was one of the larger prisons.  The 300 acre Camp Rathbun had barracks for 5000 and tents for 1000, with  kitchens able to feed 5000 daily.  When the camp was reorganized, the new camp commander was ordered to prepare to receive  by train, 8-10 thousand prisoners  in 10 days.  Eventually some 12,100 prisoners would be housed  here in a facility that strained to accommodate half that number. 

 With no doctors and no hospital, a hospital tent and citizen volunteers would serve until a hospital barracks could be built.  Crowding.  restricted rations, rapidly deteriorating sanitation led to rampant outbreaks of diseases and deaths.  A small pond that  Union recruits had sometimes bathed in, in the camp's former life,  became a fetid swamp.  The camp quickly acquired  the name "Hellmira."  Inadequate clothing and shelter combined with a brutally cold and snowy winter of 1864-5 made conditions much worse, with prisoners literally freezing to death and  was followed by a wet spring that caused the  Chemung  river to rise, flooding parts of the camp with as much of two feet of water and washing away part of the surrounding stockade.

Starting on July 5, 1864 the first trainload of prisoners arrived.   On July 15 a trainload  carrying 833 prisoners and 128 Union guards collided with a southbound coal train near Shohola Pennsylvania.  Forty nine POWs and seventeen guards were killed.  Local residents gave the injured first aid and the dead were "temporarily" interred in a mass grave.  The track was cleared the next day, a replacement train found, and the survivors, including the most grievously injured were sent on to Elmira  the next day.  The "temporarily" interred dead were not exhumed until 1911 when, with identification no longer possible , they were buried , Union guards and Confederate POWs , together in Elmira's Woodlawn National Cemetery.

Historians debate the extent to which the privations suffered by POWs were solely the result of inadequate planning and provisioning  in the face of overwhelming numbers of prisoners, or were they exacerbated by retaliatory policies of U.S. officials, responding to stories of mistreatment of Union prisoners in Confederate prisons.  There is evidence that  Commissary General of Prisons, Colonel William Holman   ordered Elmira prisoners be placed on bread and water rations after he heard of the inadequate rations being given Yankee POWs in Andersonville and he ordered that clothing sent by Southern families to their imprisoned relatives not be given out, but burned, if they were not uniform-grey. After the war , the commander of the Andersonville prison , Captain Henry Wirz was charged with the mistreatment of Union POWs and hanged but similar charges were never brought against  Union prison officials.

At wars' end, the mortality rate for POWs  at Andersonville was over 1 in 4,  28.7%,  Elmira's was scarcely better, 24.5%.

One laudatory story that is always repeated in this otherwise tragic episode of NY history is the work of 

John W. Jones.  Jones was the sexton of Elmira's Woodlawn Cemetery, charged with maintenance of the cemetery and overseeing burial parties.  In the year of Elmira Prison's existence he was confronted with a huge number of Confederate soldier burials.  He did his work with respect, care and precision, such that only seven of the nearly 3000  graves are marked "unknown".  The rest, lying in precise ranks, have
 names, and most  have ranks, and units with whom the men served.  Jones had been a slave, escaping North before the Civil War.

 Marker of the Week  Fortnight --  

                                                                            A Milestone for "Markers"

Last summer when "NYSHMS: It Happened Here" was on hiatus while  I was engaged in other projects, I turned  to looking through old posts and happened  on  the  Blogger "stats" page.   I was astonished  to realize that people were continuing to read my old posts, and read them in fairly high numbers with this blog getting over 200,000 page views.   In  the middle of last month it surpassed the 250,000 mark -- a  1/4 million page views !

(It was something of a Sally Fields moment for me.)   But before I break my arm patting myself on the back , however,  I realize an unknown number of these  page views are probably the work of mindless  "bots" scurrying around the internet gathering up factoids for composing term papers for high school students  or college freshmen who could care less about their  paper's subjects.  To my faithful human readers, therefore, I want to express my gratitude.  To the unknown legion of "bots"---ta'hell'witcha!

A Milestone on the Albany Post Road,

Rte. 9  Kinderhook

--sources: The usual "suspects".     Since I was in Elmira,   The Friends of the Elmira Civil  War Prison Camp have been working to bring the history of camp to life,   restoring an original building once located at the prison, reconstructing a typical barracks, and a section of prison wall.  A museum and research center is  being planned.

 

          

          

                 It "Happened" Here--Historical Markers for  Fictional  Characters/Events: James Fenimore Cooper's Novels

One of the more curious subjects of some of New York's historical markers are found on those NYSHM's  that record an event or the actions of a person that exists only because they occurred in the imagination of a writer/novelist.

In recent  years the Pomeroy Foundation has developed their "Legends and Lore" Program .  This series marks the locations/scenes of folk tales and legendary ocurrences passed down in the communities in which they were said to have happened but which fail to meet historical verification.  But going back to the issuance of some of the first NYSHMs,  fictional characters and imagined  events were occasionally memorialized almost as if they were  historical.  And this pattern continues with real locations and events being given relevancy and importance by connecting them to literary characters and actions on signage.  In this post we will look at signs connected with the works of James Fenimore Cooper,  and to markers related to actual persons said to have been the models for some of Cooper's characters.

                Hutter's Point

     Where Hettie saved  her             

         Father, Tom Hutter                                    

          From the Huron

               "Deerslayer"

            --This sign , originally, 4 1/2 miles  N. of Cooperstown has been missing for decades   

    

Another marker, which is also missing,  was located  on the grounds of the Van Wyck Homestead in Fishkill, NY.  It asserts that the historic house was the model for the Wharton Home, the principal setting for The Spy,  Cooper's novel based on the exploits  of Enoch Crosby, a real-life informant on British/Tory activities who was tried and condemned in the Fishkill homestead, later to be aided in his escape by patriot authorities.

                                                                                     Wharton House

                                                                           Made Famous by Cooper's

                                                                      Novel  "The Spy", Headquarters

                                                                       Of Gen.Putnam in the Revolution

From Cooper's description of the Wharton house, the Van Wyck Homestead may have been the model for the Wharton house.

"The house was of stone, long, low, and with a small wing at each extremity. A piazza, extending along the front, with neatly turned pillars of wood, together with the good order and preservation of the fences and outbuildings, gave the place an air altogether superior to the common farmhouses of the country. "

Though not built of stone, and having only one wing, it is easy to imagine  this house inspired the house in Cooper's work.

In  4th work of Cooper's"Leatherstocking"series [1] The Pathfinder finds his most famous character, Natty Bumpo, aka. "the Pathfinder" and his companions, working there way, by canoe,   through a series of treacherous rapids and riffs down the Oswego river  on their way to Fort Oswego at its mouth where the river empties into Lake Ontario.  Intercepted by a Mingo, French aligned, war-party they narrowly escape in a running battle.  In the town of Fulton, originally known as Oswego Falls, near the Oswego Canal is this sign.

Lastly, there are the signs connected with Cooper's most famous book,   The  Last of the Mohicans.   A section of the falls of the Hudson at Glens Falls have long been identified as Cooper's Cave since Cooper visited it in 1824 and wrote about it, describing dramatically how Hawkeye, Chingachgook, Uncas and his English charges hid from the Hurons by seeking shelter in the rocks at the base of the falls and fighting them off from an island in the center of the river until their powder and shot were exhausted.    Later in the book, he would describe the British fort at the foot of Lake George, Ft. William Henry and its investment by the French,  its surrender, and the massacre that occurred when the Indians, that accompanied them attacked the surrendering English. 

          A recently erected sign at Cooper's Cave, one of several marking sites described in the "Leather Stocking" books. 

                                                                              Rt. 9, S. Glens Falls at the bridge

One of the caves below the Falls

 

The Hudson, below the Falls;  the island where the cave is located in the left foreground;  (Finch Paper Co. is on the opposite shore)

The reconstructed, popular attraction,  Ft. William Henry, Lake St., Lake George

          The recent sign in front of Ft. William Henry

                                                                         

 

 

Natty Bumppo is one of literature's more famous characters so it is not surprising that stories have developed about a real-life person who was supposed to have been the inspiration/model for that character, but Cooper's hero has two!  and Pomeroy documents them both.

Natty Bumppo

In this Burial Ground Lies

Nathaniel Shipman

the Inspiration for James

Fenimore Cooper's Famous

"Natty Bumppo" Character  

- New York Folklore, William C.  Pomeroy Foundation 2019

Main and Hall St., Hoosick Falls

Rte. 26, south of Fly Creek, NY

Marker of the Week  Fortnight -   Well, since NYSHMS : It Happened Here is resuming the final week of October I feel the need to make at least some  ghostly, witchy or Halloween-themed reference.  Fortunately,  Pomeroy is there to provide!  A short distance from my home is the settlement of New Salem, N.Y.,  a hamlet at the foot of the  Helderberg Escarpment too small for many years to support a corner grocery store, a gas station, a post office, or a coffee shop. If the settlers of this Salem had any connection to the Salem in Massachusetts of witchcraft infamy,  I do not know it.  But,  apparently,  they used to grow Pumpkins--Big Pumpkins!

                          

                                                                              

[1]  This is the third  work chronologically of Natty Bumpo's life  with the character appearing as a middle-aged man. [2] Text of the sign:

 

  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 -

The holidays are time for special, festive food and drink.  On that note NYSHMs: It Happened Here feature this Marker of the Fortnight, without additional comment.

                   Honey Joe Road, Fly Creek

 

                 It Happened Here-- "E tu Brute?! Naming the Towns

                                                                       of New York's  Military Tract  [1]  [2]

                                                                       Rte 31 1n3 West Brutus Rd., Weedsport
If someone were to look at the names of towns, villages and cities  of central New York State  they might reasonably expect to find a mix of names reflecting physical features, the names of early settlers and entrepreneurs, a few famous Americans, and of course, many Native American place names, the heritage the western Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca peoples who inhabited this area for centuries.  But instead we find a map dominated by towns  and cities  named after Greek and Roman Cities and Greek and Roman leaders and notables, plus a few classical scholars and a couple English enlightenment writers thrown in.  How did this come about?

Fairly early in the course of the American Revolution,  American generals, and George Washington in particular, realized Americans could not defeat  the British army and force Great Britain to recognize American independence with militias alone. While militias were formed for local defense and local volunteer armies were formed for to respond to some  regional threat,  regular professional armies that could operate overtime, anywhere in the United States were needed that could counter and defeat British Armies.  But  patriotism alone would  not be a sufficient motive to encourage large numbers of men to leave their homes and families for years,  for a life of privation and perhaps early death.  And New York, not to mention the other states, was in no position to offer cash bounties for enlistment, a situation that would only worsen as time went on and continental money became virtually worthless. But though cash poor, New York was, potentially, land rich.  Initially, New York was expected to provide four battalions, but recruitment lagged until Congress offered a 100 acre bounty of land in the Ohio Country and New York added a bounty of 500 acres of N.Y. land, per recruit, with higher bounties for commissioned officers.  Though generous,   these offers were not strictly warrantable, (ie. legal!) as the land being given was Indian land, occupied for centuries by Native Americans,  and certified as such by the Ft. Stanwix treaty of 1763.  But fortunately for the American Revolutionary cause events of the war would weaken Indigenous claims.   Though the Iroquois initial impulse was to stay neutral in this fight between their European neighbors, by the third year (1777) of the conflict most of the Iroquois had been drawn into the fight with the majority of the Iroquois  (except the Oneida) supporting the British.  By the fifth year, (1779) the Americans struck back against Iroquois, invading their home territories, leveling their towns, burning their crops and cutting down their orchards, driving them as refugees into the hands of the British who were ill prepared to support them. Disease, cold and famine killed large numbers.  In the peace talks at the end of the war the British ignored their native allies leaving them to diplomatically fend for themselves!   After the war only a fraction of them filtered back to their former homelands to try to rebuild their lives. 

                                                                              NYS Rte. 90, Union Springs (may be missing)

 In the summer of 1782, while the peace negotiations dragged on with the British, New York began to develop a plan for paying the promised bonty to its Continental veterans.   State Surveyor General Simeon  DeWitt was tasked by the New York Legislature of coming up with a plan to allocate "wilderness" land running from Lake Ontario and East of Seneca Lake in 600 acre blocks. (An arrangement was made with Congress to compensate New     York for the 100 acre parcels offered in the Ohio territory to soldiers). A rough rectangle of land in central New York was designated and divided into twenty-five numbered townships, each with  100 land parcels, as well as lands set aside for public use, schools and churches. 

                                                      U.S. 11, Main St. ,Homer
An unanticipated consequence of the Sullivan/Clinton and  Van Schaik  campaigns were that hundreds of New Yorkers and other would-be settlers got see the rich farmlands of the Finger Lakes region and Ontario plateau.  Between veterans and speculators interest was high. Two thousand, ninety veterans were eligible.

                                                                                NYS Rte 34 Scipio Center

Grapes growing along one of the 

Finger Lakes (Keuka)

Three more  townships would be added to accommodate all of the eligible veterans.  When the plan to allot the land became known, not surprisingly, the Cayuga and Onondaga Iroquois tribes, whose land it had been, objected .  It was seven long years before their cases were settled by treaties, which specified the payment of cash awards, annuities and the establishment of much smaller reservations on which returned Cayugas and Onondagas could live.  [3].  Subsequent treaties would reduce Indian lands further with the land adjacent to Lake Onondaga becoming the city of Syracuse and the Cayuga Reservation disappearing altogether.                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                      NYS Rte 89 near  Canoga                

But the fact that New York State negotiated the latter treaties without the authority of the United States would open challenges to them that continued  into the twenty-first century.

On July 3, 1790 a lottery was held with two barrels, one containing the names of  eligible veterans, the other containing  the numbers of land parcels with the names of the township in which they were located.  Names for the townships had been assigned by Robert Harpur, a clerk in DeWitt's office.  Harpur was versed in the classics and a teacher at King's College  (the only instructor  of fifteen professors at the college to support the Revolution).  He had been a New York Assemblyman and served in a number of administrative posts. He became a land speculator in the upper Susquehanna Valley, moving there and founding the village of Harpursville.

                         NYS Rte 79, Harpursville

Harpur's list was made up of famous real and mythical figures from antiquity plus five English and Scottish enlightenment  figures:

Homer, Ulysses, Lysander, Salon, Hector, Aurelius, Brutus, Camillus, Cato, Cicero, Cincinnatus. Fabius, Galen, Hannibal, Manlius, Marcellus, Ovid, Pompey, Romulus, Scipio, Sempronius, Tully, Virgil, Dryden, Junius, Locke, Milton, and Stirling (Sterling)

            5617 Highland Ave., NYS Rte. 14, Millport

                   Cayuga St., NYS Rte 38, Monrovia

      

NYS 90  Aurora

                                                                                                   Rte 414, south of Hazlitt Rd. Hector

NYS. 89 and Swick Rd., Romulus

NYS Rte 5, Elbridge

Many of the early townships would be broken up with new townships added in response to differing interests and burgeoning populations. There would be problems with land frauds, bogus titles, squatters, and Indian claims but before the end of 1790 settlement would be well under way.

Cor. NYS Rte 31 and Main St., Jordan

[1] "You too Brutus?!"  Is a famous line in Shakespeare's Tragedy of Julius Caesar  when the Roman emperor realizes his friend Brutus has joined the Senators come to assassinate him.

[2]  The word "Town" has several different meanings, which can be confusing. Commonly it refers to an area where there are a bunch of houses in close proximity, as opposed to a rural area where any dwellings are spread apart.  In the New England and New York traditions  it can also be  an administrative or governing unit which usually (but not necessarily)  has one or more groups of houses in it, and the lands surrounding it. It differs from an incorporated village which is a self-governing unit with relatively restricted land around it. New Englanders often call these towns-with-surrounding-lands. "townships" which distinguish them from mere clusters of dwellings.  New Yorkers, unfortunately, don't. For clarity, I prefer to use  the word "township, " even though New Yorkers typically use the word "town".

[3] I am struck by  the legal language of the disposition of the Native  Americans' cases and the historical  pieces  written about them.  Legal claims of Native Americans were not "settled", "negotiated", "satisfied", or even "adjudicated".  They were "extinguished".

--All the usual suspects.  For this post I found the articles by the county historians of the  different counties that were part of the Military tract interesting to compare.   "Names of Townships Used in the Military Tract Compiled by D.G. Rossiter"   (www.swampstomper.nl/history/military.html )        provides short bios of all twenty eight ancient  and  enlightenment people whose names were used in naming the townships, if you are curious.

 Marker of the Week  Fortnight -- Degory Prowtt

Yes, again!  Degory's  story is at the same time exceptional in the variety and number of both adventures and misfortunes that befell him and emblematic of the kinds of disasters and misfortune that could confront a young man in colonial/revolutionary times. The National Park Service has an excellent bio of his life, that I can't improve on--Take a look!

nps.gov/people/degory-prowtt.htm