It Happened Here -- Two Tory Families

It is widely held that the American Revolution was America's first civil war.  Somewhere between 30-40% of the population expressed active support for the British at one time or another.
For American loyalists the consequences of rebel victory ranged from extremely difficult to disastrous.
 

In what would become Columbia County, the closely intertwined families of Van Buren, Van Schaak, Van Alen, Hoes (or Goes*) and Van Ness took sides. Martin Van Buren's uncle, for whom the future President was named, was condemned as a Tory. The elder Martin Van Buren was banished to the British lines in 1778.  The future President's grandfather's brother, on his mother's side of the family,  John Dirk Hoes became aligned with a group of important men from Kinderhook who supported the British ministerial government. He too was condemned but avoided banishment by first being named as a witness in a murder trial that dragged on for many months, and then by going into hiding, among sympathetic family members. His daughter, Hannah Hoes, would be born in 1783 while he was still in hiding.  Eventually, with the war over, he could come out from hiding and be accepted back into the community. His daughter's marriage to Martin Van Buren, the future president would go along way toward completing his re-acceptance back into the community. Van Buren would marry his first cousin, once removed, in 1807.

Hoes House, Mill St., Vlatie

Site of the Van Burens' wedding, West Main St., Catskill

Simon Fraser was born two years after his parents,  Simon Fraser (Sr.) and Isabella (Grant) Fraser settled in Mapletown in the town of Hoosick on the border between New York and the Hampshire Grants (Vermont).  The Fraser family had arrived on the Pearl, a boat loaded with Catholic Highland Scots, like themselves, and after a year in Albany, they purchased a 160 acre farm. But the title to that land was not secure and within a few years, 60 acres was lost to claimants from Vermont. Simon Fraser (Sr.) came from a military family with long years of service to the Crown. He had two brothers that served in the 78th Highland (Fraser) Regiment throughout Wolfe's campaign to capture Quebec in the French and Indian War. As soon as the opportunity arose in 1777 he and his eldest son William headed north to enlist in Loyalist forces, marching south with Burgoyne.

On Rensselaer County Rte 102

Bennington Battlefield marker, NYS Rte 67, Waloomsac

Following the Battle of Bennington the elder Fraser was captured, while his son escaped with the surviving members of Lt.Colonel Francis Van Phisters Loyal Volunteers.  Captain Fraser was jailed in Albany under what one biographer euphemistically called "rigorous" conditions. The treatment of prisoners was often appalling on both sides in the American War for Independence. For "dangerous" prisoners or incorrigible Tories their treatment could be every bit as inhumane as the treatment meted out to Rebel prisoners on British prison ships or in the infamous "sugar house", a densely packed windowless warehouse in New York. Without adequate food or clothing prisoners often faced endless days in damp subterranean cells or cold, drafty windowless attics.

 Isabella's friends petitioned the "Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies in the State of New York", the Committee that oversaw the Tory threat in New York. They begged for his release 'due to the suffering of his wife and her numerous young family.'  But on July 30, 1778 a John Patan wrote the committee that he and others 'were uneasy about this effort' and asked that the family be 'driven off'!  A grand jury was summoned on July 31, 1778. Isabella's petition has been lost and any transcript/summary of the proceedings has never come to light. (Probably both were destroyed in the New York Capitol and Library fire of 1911.) But the Committee failed to act on the petition and in January 1779 Simon Fraser (Sr.) died in prison.

 Isabella and her family continued to be ostracized and harassed, even as the war in the North wound down and the peace treaty was signed in  September 1783.  As the older boys came of age (Simon, Jr. had two older brothers in America) the family was repeatedly fined, and their cattle confiscated, for the boys non-participation in militia musters.  Finally in 1784  John Fraser, Simon's brother arranged for the family to emigrate to Quebec, where they were finally reunited with Isabella's son William who had bought a farm at Coteau-du-Lac, west of Montreal.

Eight year old Simon Fraser (Jr.) grew up and eventually became a partner in the Northwest Company,  a fur trading company organized in 1792.  Employed in developing the fur trade in the far Canadian west, he explored much of what became the Province of British Columbia, about the same time Lewis and Clark made their journey of discovery in the American West. Searching out better trade routes to bring furs to the Pacific he made a harrowing journey down a river he thought was the Columbia River. Before he reached the Pacific he realized he was too far north for that river to be the Columbia. His companions named it the Fraser River. 

                                                                   

*In the archaic Dutch of colonial New York the G and H sounds were intermingled and the Hoes surname was often written as Goes.

It Happened Here -- The Albany Regency

If you ask most residents of New York's Capital District what the Albany Regency was,  most would respond it was a hotel/motel on the south end of Albany, now defunct. They would be right, of course, but long before this property that began its life as a Howard Johnson Motor Inn, the term "Albany Regency" referred to a group of politicians organized in the 1820's to dominate state politics.
It's creator was Martin Van Buren, life-long resident of Kinderhook,  who made his way from local politics, to state  politics, to national politics via his election to the U.S. Senate and then the Vice Presidency through his work in crafting a successful campaign for Andrew Jackson.  Following Jackson, he would become the eight President.

Martin, whose father was a farmer/tavern keeper learned
politics at an early age in his father's tavern

Through his climb to power in state politics, Van Buren came to realize most of politics was driven by the convergence of supporters around charismatic men.  Groups of supporters of men like Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Burr dominated the politics of the first decades of the United States. But a politics based on personalities was inherently unstable.

 

Gradually Van Buren came to believe that politics driven by positions and principals hammered out in caucuses and in conventions; and candidates whose views and support were revealed through conventions and nominated by groups of party members provided a more stable and democratic base for selecting candidates for election. Candidates thus democratically nominated whose ideas had been examined and approved in party caucuses could claim/demand greater loyalty from party followers. The greater degree of organization necessary to enable this degree of consensus required a new type of politician, "the Professional." And "professionals" could maximize the gains from elections by steering government contracts and appointed jobs to party loyalists.

Van Buren headed a splinter group of the New York Democratic Republicans known as the "Bucktails" who were opposed to the Dewitt Clinton wing of the party.  Eventually they would become Jacksonian Democrats.
                                                         

After a failed  Presidential re-election bid Van Buren retired to Kinderhook to his home, Lindenwald, on the Albany Post Road where he could continue to keep in touch with political developments in New York and the nation.

                                                                                       

On Rte 9J, Kinderhook Landing

Benjamin Franklin Butler, from Kinderhook Landing was an early supporter of Van Buren, (not to be confused with the Benjamin F. Butler, a union general and infamous military governor of New Orleans.) He became one of a group of Van Buren's political insiders that became known as the "Albany Rengency"

This group was given the name "Albany Regency" by Thurlow Weed, the editor of the Albany Evening Journal when Van Buren was elected Senator and  left for Washington. Weed, a Whig opponent of Van Buren compared his power to that of a monarch's and when Van Buren left he  decried the takeover of his powers by a "Regency" of his supporters.

The Knower house, Main Street, Altamont

Another insider was  Benjamin Knower, a successful
hat manufacturer in West Guilderland, (Altamont), whose daughter married  William L. Marcy, a member of the "Regency" who became governor 1833 to 1838.  Commenting on the patronage jobs that became available to the winning candidates in an election Marcy uttered the memorable quote, "[Politicians] see nothing wrong in the rule, that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.." (The highest mountain in New York State was also named in his honor.)

 

Silas Wright was another member of the "Regency" that became governor.  Wright's role in attempting to suppress the Anti-rent Movement has been mentioned in a previous post.

Wright's law office, Rte 4, Hudson Falls

Finally, not all members of the "Regency" were full time politicians. Phillip Hooker was a part-time politician and a very successful architect. His buildings included the first New York State Capital, the second Albany City Hall, Hyde Hall in Cooperstown, the original Albany Academy, in Academy Park, numerous houses of wealthy Albanians, and the First Reformed Church in Albany.

1st Reformed Church. from Clinton Sq..N.Pearl St. Albany

It Happened Here -- Marker for a Mastodon!

North Mohawk St., Cohoes

In 1866 workers were digging down to bedrock, some 60 feet down, to build footings for the Harmony Company's new Mill #3 along the Mohawk River. The mill would soon be turning raw cotton into cloth, now that the Civil War was over and cotton would again be flowing north. The mill would be one of the largest of its kind in the world with 130,000 spindles on 2,700 looms. The building would contain 7 miles of gas and water pipes. But it would not be its size that would make Mill #3, soon to be known as the “Mastodon Mill”, famous. As the laborers approached the  bedrock of the ancient riverbed they discovered several large and deep potholes. Scientists would  speculate these were created, not by the existing river but by glacial streams dropping hundreds of feet from the top of melting glaciers to the bedrock, during one of several ice ages. In one of the pot holes buried beneath peat and sodden oak trees the workers were astonished to find a huge jaw bone with several large molars. In another pot hole some 60 feet away, a skull, leg bones, ribs and fragments of tusks were found. 

The massive Mill #3 built in 1866 was greatly enlarged in 1873

Cohoes Mastodon at the NYS Museum

From this point different scenarios could have developed. The bones might have been ignored and removed with the other trash in the potholes. The bigger bones might have been collected by the curious and ended up neglected souvenirs cast aside in someone's barn; the better preserved molars might have ended up as doorstops in one of the mill owner's houses. But developments in American society led to them receiving a better treatment.

Several developments in the middle of the 19^th Century contributed to the attention these

bones received. After two centuries of colleges and universities in America following the European tradition of devotion to the classics, the teaching of Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and the training of clergy,  by 1850 most American colleges and universities had begun to establish departments in the natural sciences, chemistry and geology. These departments were filled with bright young men eager to establish the legitimacy of their disciplines and increase the status of their departments at their respective schools.

Several states, New York among them, had started to hire state geologists to survey the geology of earth within their borders, in part for the sake of pure scientific inquiry, in part to better exploit the mineral wealth that might lie therein.

The exhibition of “natural science wonders” became extremely popular from the late 1820's onward. P.T. Barnum would become the most famous of these exhibitors. But there would be many other exhibitors and exhibitions.   Many larger cities had private exhibit halls, and even a large canal boat was outfitted as a traveling museum to tour the interior of New York on the Erie and other connecting canals. Numerous public museums came into being as well.

The American interest in what would become paleontology began with the European discovery of a trove of fossilized bones in an ancient salt spring near the Ohio River in Kentucky.  Known as “Big Bone Lick” by the native Shawnee Indians, it was “discovered” by French soldiers in 1739 who sent a sample of bones to their king to be displayed in his “cabinet du Roi” of natural curiosities. President Thomas Jefferson heard of the site and dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at different times, both before and after their famous cross-continent expedition to collect specimens for him. In 1832, after a decade of collecting fossils, the property owner, Benjamin Finnell exhibited a collection of 300 bones and tusks from the “Lick” in New York City.  Professor Benjamin Silliman professor of geology at Yale College would report excitedly “ I cannot refrain from attempting to convey to others something of the impression made upon my own mind on entering the [exhibit] room containing this astounding assemblage of bones, many of which are gigantic in size.” Nathaniel Southgate Shorter, who worked for many years as the director of the Kentucky Geological Survey, studied the “Lick” and when he became a professor of Paleontology at Harvard had over a ton of fossils shipped from the “Lick” to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.

In Cohoes, the mill owners, to their credit, instructed the workers to collect any pieces of bone they encountered, and part of the floor of the mill office was set aside for that purpose. As the floor filled with bones, cleaned and oiled by the workers, the scene was “overrun” with curious townspeople and within days scientists from Union College and Yale were at the site. Professor O. C. Marsh of Yale College¹ spent most of the week inspecting the bones. He pronounced they were all from one animal and identified them as bones of a young, adult female American Mastodon. According to the Albany Argus of Nov. 12, 1866,  Marsh was “quite anxious to be allowed to take the bones with him.” The paper fretted that it would be a shame allow such an important piece of New York “geological history” to leave the state, “Let them at least go no farther off then to be deposited in State Geological rooms [in Albany.]” But the paper need not have worried. While the mill received offers from several public institutions to buy the bones and a plan was proposed to donate the proceeds to the Union Sunday School, James Hall, paleontologist and curator of the New York State Cabinet of Natural History came on the scene.  T.G. Younglove, of the Harmony Company had first written Hall, inviting him to come and see the “curious things” being taken out of the excavation site. Hall ignored the letter and did not respond until Younglove wrote him again about a large jawbone being found, and probably Hall began reading newspaper reports of the finds.

James Hall has been described as “headstrong, single-minded and a tenacious advocate of science and accuracy”. In his 63 years as first, a geologist for the State Geological Survey, then curator of the State Cabinet, then director of the New York State Museum of Natural History, Hall was a ferocious defender of his scientific theories, his projects and the programs he headed.

Several incidents illustrate the remarkable lengths to which Hall was willing to go to accomplish his ends. In 1849 a schoolteacher, James T. Foster, from Greenbush, a town across the river from Albany, promoted a geological chart for use in the public schools that Hall felt was vague and filled with errors. After trying various channels to block the adoption of this chart, including lawsuits, Hall heard an entire production run of these charts was being printed for use in the New York City schools. Hearing they were being shipped on a certain night from Albany via the Hudson River Night Line Hall booked passage for that trip. Dr. Hall arrived safely the next morning in New York City, but “mysteriously”, the charts did not. Someone had dumped the whole edition of the charts overboard, during the night!

About the same time, James Hall became involved in a bitter dispute with his former teacher Ebenezer Emmons. Both he and Emmons studied the geological formation of the Taconic mountains. Emmons produced a series of papers and maps that traced the origins of the mountains back to the early Pre-Cambrian era, contradicting Hall's research conclusion that they dated from the later Ordovician era. Hall took Emmons works as a personal attack against him and brought a suit against his former mentor. In a court of Law the two scientists squared off against one another, each presenting their hypothesis and conclusions. The charismatic Hall backed by an entourage of supporters, not only received a favorable judgment but the court banned the unfortunate Dr. Emmons from ever practicing geology in the State of New York! -- undoubtedly the first, and probably only judgment of geological malpractice! (Ironically, less than a dozen years later fossils were discovered that proved Dr. Emmons was correct.)

When James Hall, geologist became James Hall, curator, and then James Hall, museum director, he carried the same traits of zealous tenacity and flair with him. His annual presentations before the state legislature became legendary, with the good doctor making impassioned pleas for funds, stomping about, slamming his cane on senator's or assemblymen's desks and even waving it in their faces.

Not surprisingly, Hall would go to tremendous lengths to acquire rock and fossil collections he wanted. If a collection could not be bought outright, Hall would sometimes make irresistibly generous offers to the collection's owners to come to Albany to study their collections under him, paying them handsomely as assistants or apprentices. Eventually these assistants/apprentices would move on – but the collections would stay in Albany !

The discovery of the Cohoes mastodon could not have come at a more fortuitous time for James Hall. By 1857, as the state geologist, Hall had increased the state's collection of geological samples and fossils so greatly that a new laboratory had to be built to house them.

Hall's Laboratory (now the Sunshine School), Lincoln Park

 In January 1865 he was appointed curator of the state's collection of geological and “natural history” specimens known as the State Cabinet. At this time he made a compelling argument for the establishment of a public museum for the display of geological and natural science exhibits and was charged with developing a plan to create the State Museum. Preparations for the new museum were well underway when the mastodon was discovered. Hall was well aware of the value of public support for his museum. He doubtlessly realized that any collection New York State invertebrate fossils, of no matter how complete and well displayed they were. would not generate a tenth the interest that a fossilized skeleton of a mastodon, fully reassembled and articulated would generate.

When Dr. Hall realized what was being dug up, virtually in his backyard, he rushed to the scene. Within days, Professor Marsh was on his way back to Yale, without the bones he so much desired. Offers to purchase the mastodon and the plans to donate the proceeds to the Union Sunday School were swept aside, and a plan for Harmony Mills to donate it to the State Cabinet was in place. In return for this gift, Alfred Wild, president of Harmony Company would receive from the legislature a “joint resolution of thanks.” And Hall would secure $2000 (roughly the equivalent of $22,000 today) to complete the final excavation and the preservation and mounting of the skeleton.

Within a month plans were being made to reassemble the bones, making plaster-of-paris substitutes for missing bones copied from other mastodon skeletons in collections around the country. At a National Academy of Science conference at Hartford, James Hall read a major paper detailing the investigations of the mastodon and the river bottom in which it was found.

 The next year the restored skeleton was placed in the State Cabinet of Natural History in Albany, which eventually became the nucleus of the State Education Department Museum in 1913.

State Ed Building, Washington Ave. Albany

A NYSHM stood here advertising the state Museum and Library

So while the Cohoes Mastodon marker marks the location of a prehistoric fossil find, it also, in a sense, marks an event  in the beginnings of the scientific field of paleontology.

Marker of the Week -- Perhaps half a dozen NYSHMs have primarily a geological instead of an historical subject matter.  One of these is the "Helderbergs" marker in Thatcher Park.

On Rte NYS 85A in Thatcher Park

 

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That very year, Othniel Charles Marsh, born in Lockport New York, had become a professor of vertebrate paleontology at Yale University. Marsh would persuade a wealthy uncle, Charles Peabody into funding Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History and the Yale Paleontologist would become a towering figure in 19^th century paleontology. Over the next two decades, Marsh would scour the American west, discover and name eighty species of Jurassic and Cretaceous period animals. The Brontosaurus (later named Apatosaurus), Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops were but a few of the giant dinosaur genera discovered and named by him.

It Happened Here -- "King of the (Indian) Traders"

They called him "King of the (Indian) Traders." George Croghan was born in Dublin, Ireland about 1718 and came to America in 1741. In a short time he became a major player in the fur trade in the Ohio Valley, developing trading posts in Indian settlements, as the French did,  instead of locating his operations in white settlements and waiting for Indians to bring their furs to him, as most English traders did. Taking advantage of war with the French (King George's War 1744-1748) which closed off French access to trade goods via the St. Lawrence and put English traders at a tremendous competitive advantage, Croghan rapidly expanded. He had several trading posts deep into the Ohio  country, and scores of employees manning his storehouses, and leading packhorse trains along the trails that led through Indian country and back through Pennsylvania. His expansion in the Ohio Valley and trading activities right up to the French fort at Detroit would become a major source of concern for the French and create tensions that would contribute to the outbreak of hostilities between the French and English in 1754 at the start of the French and Indian War.

Semi-literate, Croghan wrote letters and documents filled with idiosyncratic spellings and syntax, a challenge for modern historians (and probably his contemporaries) to read, but few European-Americans had a better knowledge American Indians in contact with the colonies of New York and Pennsylvania. Croghan became fluent in Seneca and Delaware dialects, so could communicate to some degree with most Iroquoian and Algonquin peoples. Beyond simple understanding, he became a skilled orator adept at the highly figurative oratory his Indian audiences respected. Because of his skills he became Sir William Johnson's Deputy Commissioner of Indian Affairs for fifteen years. 

Like Johnson, Croghan mixed public business with private speculative schemes. Like Johnson, in time, Croghan's involvement in buying and selling land surpassed his fur trading interests. Croghan became a major land speculator, buying large tracts of land from Indians, working to gain title on them and retailing small parcels out to settlers. Frequently cash poor, Croghan made a career of enlisting partners, buying tracts of land, mortgaging those properties to get cash to buy other properties and pay off his most ardent creditors, and managing to stay clear of debtor's prison.

Like most land speculators, Croghan preferred to obtain new grants of Indian land, (far cheaper) rather than those already "patented". To do this he had to work his way around several laws/regulations designed to protect the Indians from wholesale exploitation. Individuals were allowed to buy only 1000 acres of Indian land; they had to be granted a patent--a certificate giving them the right to own the land; and only the government could directly buy land from the Native Americans. Croghan, and other land speculators, would typically form a company. A 100,000 acre tract of land would require Croghan to enlist 99 other petitioners who would sign their names, collect a fee from Croghan and withdraw after the deal was consummated. Next, Croghan would apply to the governor for permission  to negotiate with the Indians to buy the tract. (Usually, before this, a deal had already been  informally agreed upon with the Indians.) Croghan would then get together his finances--usually a collection of loans, investments from partners, monies from mortgaged properties, etc.-- and the Governor, (for a sizable fee) would make the purchase. Then the land would be surveyed and Croghan would be issued his patent. The process was time consuming and fraught with the potential of collapse at any number of points and Croghan usually had several schemes going at the same time.

At the end of the French and Indian War the British government attempted to prevent interminable conflicts between western Indians and settlers by establishing a line setting off Indian territory, beyond which white settlers would not be allowed to settle. Unfortunately for George Croghan, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 officially shut him out of several tracts of land he was negotiating or had already bought and was waiting for the confirmation of his patent. After a few years it became obvious that the British government could not prevent a flood of squatters from crossing that line and their presence in Indian territory made for tensions that resulted in bloodshed.  Croghan used his extensive contacts to begin a letter writing and lobbying campaign to the British government to get the line moved west, to forestall another Indian war.  A treaty meetings convened at Fort Stanwix in 1768 with Sir William Johnson presiding and Croghan presenting the assembled chiefs of the Six Nations and other vassal tribes with gifts and cash amounting to nearly £ 10,500, underwritten by the crown.          

Rte 26, Augusta

With the line moved west, and (temporarily) fewer squatters on Indian land, and the chiefs mollified by presents and bribes, the incidences of bloodshed declined.  A full scale Indian war would not break out until 1774. The big winners were Johnson and Croghan.  Johnson secured lands promised to him earlier by Iroquois sachems, and Croghan was able to proceed with several large land deals previously negotiated, lands in the fertile Cherry Valley, and "Croghan's Forest",  a  250,000 acre tract around Lake Otsego, south of Johnson's holdings. 

On the southern shore of Lake Otsego, Croghan would build his "hutt", a massive six chimney-ed log cabin he furnished with imported figured wallpapers on the interior walls, a dinner table covered with the finest damasks cloths and ivory handled knives and forks. Eight indentured servants, a mason, five
laborers and a gardener would staff his "hutt".  Five or six outbuildings were erected; a sawmill, a gristmill and a bridge over the Susquehanna were planned, as well as a road to the riverport town of "Kaatskill on the Hudson."

Main Street, Cooperstown

Grogan left Groghan's Forest in 1770.  During the American Revolution most of Groghan's properties became unsaleable with widepread Tory and Indian raids on the frontier. He was forced to sell off most of his Otsego land holding but deeded the "hutt" to his daughter Susannah Prevost when he died in 1782.  Three years later she sold the property to Judge William Cooper in 1785 who laid out the town of Otsego the following year, that became Cooperstown in 1812.

Marker of the Week -- Gone Missing?

For me, one of the most distressing things about writing this blog has been to realize how many NYSHMS have disappeared over the years. (The gratifying side of this is to realize how many of these signs that have been damaged, have been restored, put back together or replaced.)  This week I passed the site of the Bender Melons sign, in New Scotland, which I featured as a Marker of the Week on  June 9, 2013 and realized it was gone and only its post remains. I hope it wasn't stolen. I hope, when the weather warms up it will be restored if it was damaged, and returned to its original site! --Tom