It Happened Here -- The "Lily"

Amelia Jenks, like a surprising number of her sisters and brothers in the social reform movements that swept through America in the first 60 years of the 19th century had been born and raised in central New York.  This area had been host to so many pentecostal type religious reform movements and fiery  traveling religious speakers that it became known as the "burned over" district. While these preachers' central message had been that individuals could save their souls by accepting Jesus Christ, implicit in that message was the notion that individuals through their personal actions and choices could improve their lives, reform their society, and create in a small measure, a heaven on earth. It was this notion that inspired the girl from Homer, New York, and so many of her contemporary central New Yorkers.

In 1830 Amelia married Dexter Bloomer, a lawyer, and they moved to Seneca Falls,  New York where he edited a newspaper the Seneca Falls County Courier. Though Amelia had only two years of formal education she was soon regularly contributing to his paper. Active in her church, she became involved in the Seneca Falls Ladies Temperance Society in 1848. Americans had been heavy drinkers since the earliest colonial times, with homemade low alcohol beers providing a safe alternative to often fetid and disease laden water available to early settlers, but the post-revolutionary war era saw the rise in popularity of much higher alcohol content—distilled beverages, bourbons and rye whiskeys. Widespread inebriation had become a social problem, having the greatest impact on women and their families. She would write,

“Intemperance is the great foe of her (women's) peace and happiness. It is that above

all that has made her House desolate and beggared her offspring....Surely she has the

right to wield her pen for its suppression.”

The Lily, a newspaper for 'home distribution' was started by members of the Ladies Temperance Society in1849 but by 1850 Amelia Jenks Bloomer would be its sole editor. One of its early contributors would be Elizabeth Cady Stanton, writing under the pen name “Sunflower”. Before long the Lily would be addressing not only temperance issues but issues about child bearing and education, women's rights and fashion, becoming a forerunner of modern publications for women—Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Oprah and many more. Beginning with a circulation of 500, by its final year of publication in 1853 it was being distributed to 6000 people.

The same year Amelia joined the temperance society, she attended, as an observer, the First Women's Rights Convention, in Seneca Falls. Women's Rights became an increasing focus of the Lily. In 1851 she introduced Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton facilitating a partnership that would span decades and be the driving force in the Women's Movement in the 19^th century.

Also in 1851 Elizabeth Smith Miller visited her cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton. There she met Amelia Bloomer. Mrs Miller was a women's rights activist and the daughter of Gerritt Smith, a leading abolitionist from Peterborough New York, near Rochester. She was also an advocate of women's clothing reform. The fashions and mores of women's dress in the mid-19th century dictated that women wear floor length, billowing dresses with up to fifteen pounds of petticoats underneath and tightly corseted waists, often strengthened with stays of whalebone.  Hot and fatiguing, such costumes, the women agreed, were  a considerable health and safety hazard.  Trips and falls were a constant threat especially for women attempting to negotiate stairways with children or arm loads of laundry. Such dresses dragged in the street, bringing all sorts of filth home with them and around hot stoves and open hearths they could be a menace.  The women believed the tight corsets. besides being extremely uncomfortable might be leading to a variety of health problem.

At their meeting, Elizabeth Smith Miller wore a costume inspired by middle eastern women's costumes, with a loose blouse, a short skirt and underneath, a pair of light loose pants,

fastened at the ankles.  Both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia made their own versions of this outfit and Amelia began to enthusiastically promote dress reform in the Lily,  even supplying patterns to interested readers.  The New York Tribune picked up her articles and soon her clothes were the center of a storm of controversy with clergymen and male social commentators weighing in against “the Bloomer Costume” and the most controversial part of the outfit, the baggy pantaloons or “Bloomers.” Ridiculed by male opinion leaders, and condemned for undercutting the patriarchy of the family, or even being sinful the fashion was abandoned by most member of the women's rights movement who saw it as a distraction from their main cause of Women's Rights. Amelia persisted until 1859 when she too abandoned the fashion announcing the advent of crinoline petticoats and other changes made current fashions less objectionable. 

In 1853 Amelia moved with her husband to Mount Vernon Ohio, where she continued to publish her paper. The following year she sold the Lily when the couple moved again to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where there were no facilities to have the paper printed, but she remained a contributing editor .
Amelia Bloomer continued to be involved in Women's and other social causes throughout the rest of her life.

Marker of the Week -- Winners and Losers

Rte. 32,  Greenville

It is easy to forget that the American Revolution was actually America's first Civil War  with an estimated 1/3 of all Americans supporting the Crown; or that this nation that earned a reputation for accepting all sorts of political refugees was extremely reluctant to accept back the loyalists who had supported the mother country against the revolutionaries.
The displacement of people was extensive and widespread with every town seeing properties "abandoned" and realizing the necessity of having courts set up to dispose of "abandoned" properties.  Prejudices persisted. Thus on this sign, Benjamin Spees is held up as something of a pioneer, for occupying the home of a (nameless) Tory.

It Happened Here -- The "Naples Tree"

Grimes Glen a County Park  off of NY 21, Naples, N,Y.

It has always seemed a little odd that New York State Historical Markers sometimes have as their subjects geological features or paleontological discoveries, but of course, any discovery has a story (a history) behind it, and as it turns out there are some interesting stories behind several of the early discoveries associated with the New York State Museum.

Millions of years before land animals (much less man) walked the face of the earth a great shallow inland sea covered much of what became New York State. Great storms slammed into the eastern shores of this Devonian Sea, flooding the streams that made up the Catskill delta and undercutting the tiny fibrous roots of a tree of a species of large fern-trees.  Over the years probably countless trees were undercut and floated out far into this sea.  This tree drifted perhaps 150 miles west before it became waterlogged and sank to the mud at the bottom of the sea.  Eventually sediments covered and encased the tree and fossilization began, preserving the features of the tree to a remarkable extent.  Over the eons, uplift continued and the sea bottom became a plateau. During the ice ages the glaciers carved great furrows into this plateau which became New York's Finger Lakes, and small streams of runoff water drained into these lakes. One of these streams at the head of Lake Canandaigua flowed nearly over the fossilized tree and eventually eroded a gully that left exposed part of a limb of the long buried tree.

In the 1870's and 1880's two men were regular companions in the search for fossils around the Naples area and throughout western New York. The younger man, John M. Clarke was a college trained student of Geology who had earned his degree from Amherst five years before, and just recently secured a professorship in Geology and Mineralogy at Smith College.  The older man, his uncle, had been, like the tree battered by life's storms and cast adrift.  D. Dana Luther was a miller, by trade, like his father before him, but he developed "miller's asthma," an allergy to the flour he ground at his mill and he could no longer pursue his trade.  Then his wife of many years, Augusta (Wiley) Luther, suddenly died.  Luther bought a small men's clothing shop in the nearby village of Naples, New York, but his heart wasn't really in the business and he frequently closed his shop early to seek solace in the woods and pursue his passion for hunting fossils, often with his nephew. Over a period of thirteen years they spent much of their summers together collecting fossils.

In 1882 while exploring Grimes Creek, Luther spotted a small line of coal-like material on the edge of a rock ledge, along the creek.  Chipping into the ledge he discovered it was part of a branch-like structure that led to a flattened scaly trunk.  His excitement grew as his excavation revealed a fossilized trunk that went on and on, running out of the gully, up into the farmland above it, right under a pigsty and beyond, before terminating with the tops of broken roots. Luther had discovered a nearly whole tree, over 18 feet in length!  More importantly, it was unlike anything that had been discovered before.  Eventually, scientists would attach a scientific name,  Lepidosigillaria to it, but it would be known popularly as the "Naples Tree".  Luther, excited, contacted his nephew.  The State Museum was wired and James Hall, its Director, visited the site. Painstakingly, over the next months, Luther freed the fossil from its matrix and mounted it for shipment.  In 1887 it was placed in the State Museum.

John Clarke was named assistant State Paleontologist in 1886.  In 1891 he hired Dana Luther to the museum staff as a field assistant.  At age 51 the miller, turned haberdasher, with a passion for paleontology would begin what became a twenty five year career in paleontology/geology.  He would go on to map much of the geology of western and central New York State.  He would co-author dozens of monographs and papers, retiring in 1916 at age 76!


Next Week-- The Lily and the Marker of the Week Returns!

E-Mail Me: If you have comments about this blog or any other thing having to do with NYSHM's I would be delighted to hear from you. I would be especially interested if you know of any new or interesting markers or can report on any efforts to restore old markers. My email is tba998@gmail.com I look forward to hearing and sharing your thoughts on this blog. 

It Happened Here -- The Oil Driller

(Corner of NY 32 and NY81, Greenville)

We expect large towns and cities to be the homes of, and stages for, important and famous people, but for small hamlets and little rural villages their connections with the famous can often be short lived and tenuous. Often even a brief association can be a sufficient reason for an historic sign.

Edwin Laurentine Drake's encounter with history occurred when he he drilled the first oil well in the United States in 1859. His connection with Greenville, New York, in northern Greene County was that he was born there in 1819 and lived there the first six years of his life until his family moved to Castleton. Vermont. (A Vermont State historic marker at Castleton Corners commemoratives his youth and boyhood growing up in that state, as well.)

Drake left home at age 19, after a basic one room school education, apparently without any clear intentions of what he wanted to do with his life. He traveled west to Buffalo and landed a job as a night clerk on a lake steamer shuttling between Buffalo and Detroit. After a short while he joined his uncle on his farm outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. But farm life didn't suite him any better in Michigan, than it did in Vermont. He soon left the farm for the nearby town of Tecumseh, Michigan where he clerked in a hotel for two years. Eventually, he tired of clerking. He missed his friends and family, and a scant three years after leaving he was back in Vermont. But Drake did not stay long. Sensing his restlessness, his family and friends suggested he pursue his fortune in New Haven, Connecticut.

In New Haven, the tall, relatively handsome, personable young man soon landed a job in a dry goods store. After three years Drake was ready to try his considerable people skills in the larger marketplace of New York City. In short order he had a job in a large dry goods emporium on Broadway. About this time he met a woman who would become his wife. He married Philena Adams of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1845. But Philena was in frail health and they moved back to Springfield where Philena's family could be with her. Edwin went to work as an express agent on the Boston and Albany Railroad.  They had two children, in 1847 and 1849 but both died before they were two years old. The Drakes moved back to New Haven, and Edwin took a job as a conductor on the New York and New Haven Railroad. A third son was born in 1850 but in 1854 while they lived in Port Chester, New York, Philena died in childbirth, with an infant daughter. Edwin and his young son, George returned to New Haven where he could be with friends. Father and son, took up residence in the Tontine Hotel and Drake continued his job as a railroad conductor. Within two years little Georgie would also die. While illness and early death were common in the 19th century, such a string of misfortunes must have been devastating for Drake, but his ability to keep going in the face of such tragedy suggests a degree of inner strength that would soon serve him well.

In 1857 he married Laura Clarisssa Dowd and the couple moved in together in the Tontine Hotel. Just when it looked like Edwin was beginning to get his life back on track, however, Drake came down with a “malarial fever” followed by “muscular neuralgia” that resulted in varying degrees of numbness in his limbs. Drake, unable to work on moving trains, was forced to take a leave of absence from his conductor job.

With little else to do, the former railroad man began to hang out in the lobby of the Tontine Hotel. There he met James Townsend, a New Haven banker who also lived at the Tontine and other local businessmen who frequented the lobby, to exchange news, talk about business prospects and entertain each other with stories. Drake fit right in, and with his varied background, easy manner and ability to tell stories he made an interesting and affable companion. Townsend had a friend, from New York, James Bissel, who was trying to get together a group of investors to form a company to collect, refine and market a strange smelly substance that oozed from the ground in northwestern Pennsylvania known as “rock oil” or “Seneca oil,” named for the Indian tribe that once gathered it for medicinal purposes.

For some time Eastern Europeans had been digging wells for “rock oil” (petroleum) in Galicia and Rumania and using fractional distillation to produce an oil suitable for lighting purposes. But this lighting fluid remained a smokey and smelly light source until almost the mid-1800's when a pharmacist from Lvov and a local plumber created a lamp with a chimney that largely eliminated the problems. For many years North Americans and the British ignored these developments relying on whale oil, as their primary source of illumination. With the decimation of the world 's whale population, however, top quality whale oil began approaching $25.00/ gallon, (over $200 in today's money), and demand for a cheaper lamp oil grew. An ex-British Admiral, Thomas Cochrane and a Canadian geologist, Dr. Abraham Gesner, refined an oil from asphalt, naming the product Kero-elaion (Greek--'wax-oil'), and then changed the name to Kero-sene, so it would resemble another recognized lighting fuel, camphene, which was refined from turpentine. Camphene, though a good lighting fuel was highly flammable and often caused fires in people's homes. In England, Scottish chemist James Young set up an industry refining Kerosene (called Coal-oil in Britain) using cannel coal as a base, while in some U.S. cities coal was converted to a gas and piped to city street lights and the homes of well-to-do subscribers.
 
 

 (Corner of Jefferson St. and Fifth Ave., Troy) The telescoping iron tank enclosed in this brick shell kept the
 gas at a constant pressure. Other buildings, now gone, included coal sheds, a retort house that converted the coal to a gas, a condenser building, an exhauster building (pump house) and a purifying house where sulphur was removed from the gas.

Another early experimenter with petroleum was Samuel Kier. Kier operated two salt water wells in Tarentum, a town about twenty miles northwest of Pittsburgh. In an age before refrigeration, salt and brine solution were important products in food preservation. In central NewYork and western Pennsylvania wells were drilled to reach underground pools of highly saline water which could be pumped up and evaporated to form fine crystalline salt, highly desired for preserving meat and fish. But Keir's wells became contaminated with “rock oil” – a common misfortune in Pennsylvania salt wells. Rather than skimming off and discarding the oil, as most salt well drillers did, or shutting down the well, in disgust if the flow of oil became too troublesome, as some producers did, Keir experimented to see if he could find any use for the substance. First he collected a large number of folk remedies that extolled the virtues of “rock oil” and he took his well skimmings and bottled the stuff as a patent medicine, selling it for $0.50 a half pint bottle. Next, he hired a chemist and with him developed a method of distilling the oil into several products, including petroleum jelly and kerosene.

In New Haven, Edwin Drake bought $200 worth of shares in the new “Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company” and for a time was elected its president. Eventually Drake would have to relinquish the shares and the office. But Townsend and the other investors thought enough of Drake and his enthusiasm for the project to hire him as their company agent in Titusville, Pennsylvania.   In fact, enthusiasm, an engaging personality, and the fact he was out of work and had nothing better to do may have been Drake's most outstanding qualifications for the job.  Drake also held a pass from his former employment as a conductor that allowed him to travel on any railroad for free – an additional plus for a cash strapped start-up company, that had to watch every penny.

In December 1857 Drake visited Titusville Taking the railroad to Erie, Pennsylvania, he stopped first at Syracuse and observed the salt works there. In Titusville Drake explored the “seeps” along Oil Creek and observed how oil was traditionally gathered. Wool blankets were used to soak up oil and water that collected in shallow collection trenches. The water was allowed to evaporate from the blankets, then the oil was wrung out into barrels. It was obvious to Drake that this method could never produce a sufficient quantity of crude oil, so Drake turned to drilling. Accounts differ about who first thought of drilling for oil. Two stories, set in different locations have George Bissel coming upon a display of bottles or an advertising poster in a pharmacy for Kier's rock oil patent medicine. Both featured a picture of a salt well derrick, the source of Bissel's panacea. Other historians point to early documents authored by Drake which described his intentions to “bore” for oil.

The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, originally chartered in New York, was reorganized as the Seneca Oil Company of Connecticut¹. The new company bolstered by a report from a noted Yale chemist, Benjamin Silliman, who they had hired to research the feasibility of distilling Kerosene from petroleum, announced itself ready to begin the business of extracting oil. The former New Haven railroad conductor was dispatched back to Titusville. But before he departed, James Townsend began to mail him instructions and important looking packets addressed to “Colonel Edwin Drake – Titusville, PA. “ By the time Drake arrived, thanks to the efforts of the local postmaster, trying find him, the whole town was buzzing about the mysterious “Colonel Drake” and his new enterprise. Though Drake had never served a day in the military, Townsend figured the title and the publicity would help him command respect, make contacts and attract employees for this unusual and highly speculative venture.

When Drake arrived he leased an island in Oil Creek, hired laborers and began digging his well. He did not get far before it became obvious that a hand dug well was impractical, as it quickly filled with groundwater from the Oil Creek valley. Drake went to Tarentum to recruit salt well drillers. Salt well drillers, however, had a reputation for being rowdy and heavy drinkers. The first drillers Drake hired failed to show up for work. A second crew showed up drunk and showed little enthusiasm for the crazy idea of drilling for a “worthless commodity” like rock oil. Finally Drake approached a blacksmith familiar with making equipment for the salt well industry, William A.“Uncle Billy” Smith, and his son. The pair could do the work, knew the technology and could make any modifications Drake might need for oil well drilling. Drake's crew brought in a steam engine, built a drilling tower and set up for drilling. Drake began drilling, but again he was beset by the problem of ground water contamination and debris clogging the well, as he drilled toward bedrock. After being forced to suspend drilling, Drake came up with a solution. As he drilled, he would drive down an iron pipe which would encase the well and the top of the drill bit.²

Drilling proceeded slowly. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months. The Seneca Oil Company ran out of money. For several weeks James Townsend kept the operation going by advancing Drake monies from his own account. Finally, Thompson sent Drake a last bank draft with instructions to shut down the operation, pay off his creditors and come home. Luckily, Townsend's letter took several days to arrive. On August 27, 1859, at 69.5 feet, the drill bit at the well suddenly dropped into a subterranean crevasse. “Uncle Billy” decided to shut down for the day while he went home and pondered what this meant, and what he should do next. The following morning the blacksmith returned to find the well flooded with a rich mixture of oil and water. When Townsend's letter arrived later that day Drake could telegraph Townsend back with the news he had struck oil! and with the money he sent him, he would begin buying up whiskey barrels all over the county to store it in. With a well producing twenty barrels a day, he would soon exhaust his existing supply of barrels.

What had seemed like a crazy idea and had been called by the local residents “Drake's Folly” began to attract competition after only a few short months of successful operation. Up and down the flood plain of Oil Creek competitors derricks began springing up, copying innovations Drake and Smith had adapted from salt well drilling operations or pioneered themselves. Then disaster struck. On October 6, 1859 “Uncle Billy” was checking on a storage tank, while carrying a lantern. Volatile fumes from the open tank ignited, setting the tank on fire. Smith escaped with his life but the derrick, the pump house with its expensive steam engine, several vats of oil and Smith's cabin were destroyed in the fierce oil fed fire. It took several more months to get back in production, but by then the world's first oil boom was in full swing³and over-production was starting to collapse the price for oil. Soon competitors' wells were out-producing Drake's well and with falling oil prices the Seneca Oil Company was in trouble. Drake was let go and a year later became Justice of the Peace in Titusville, while supplementing his salary by buying and selling oil leases.  

In 1863,  Drake returned to New York City intending to continue the business of buying and selling oil leases. Within a year a combination of bad luck, bad business decisions, and failing health left Drake destitute. He returned to his kinfolk in Vermont, but the cold and dampness of the northeast aggravated his condition. In 1869, while looking for work in New York City, he happened to run into an old associate from Titusville who was shocked and saddened by his condition. His friend returned home and helped raise $4000 from towns people who had benefited and even made fortunes from Drake's discovery in their home town. With the money he was able to resettle in Bethlehem, PA, near a famous “hydropathic institute” where Drake was able to find some relief from his illness. In 1873 the State of Pennsylvania awarded him a $1500 a year annuity for himself and his wife, for his perseverance in discovering a resource in their state that had created large amounts of tax dollars for the state and made wealth for many of their citizens.

1New York laws at that time made investors liable for all debts their companies incurred while in Connecticut, investors were liable only for the amount of their investment, and no one knew if this enterprise would be a fantastic success or an expensive boondoggle.

2Drake's innovation became standard in the industry. If he had patented and protected his patent, this idea alone might have made him a wealthy man but unfortunately he did not and wealth would elude him.

3The oil boom greatly changed northwestern Pennsylvania. Titusville had been a small community that owed its existence to the lumber industry. Many believed after the big trees had been lumbered off Titusville would disappear. But oil changed that

Marker of the Week -- Marker for Melon

Charles Bender must have been something of a perfectionist. In 1900, after seventeen years of "persistent experimentation" he traveled to New York city to market his "Golden Queen" muskmelons.  Starting with a melon variety introduced in 1876 by a local Albany seed company,  year after year Bender saved and planted the the seeds of his "best" melons, gradually improving their sweetness, aroma, flavor and size.  The melons he sold to the Waldorf Astoria's Restaurant, the Savoy, the Lambs and other top restaurants averaged over 7 lbs., with thin rinds whose flesh could be eaten right down to the rind.  For the restauranteurs an important feature was their durability. "Benders," as they came to be known, didn't reach peak sweetness until three days after they had been picked, and if picked before fully ripe could last a week or more. In one month the Belmont Hotel would buy $2,200 of melons.  Before the Saratoga Hand Melon farm became a traditional favorite with the Saratoga summer racing crowd, Bender was selling his melons to them to be shipped all over the country.  In 1917 the Joseph Harris Seed Company began selling "Bender Supreme" melon seeds but Bender's seeds were only part of his success. William Taylor who learned the business from Bender, eventually buying him out, explained his secret. He "babied them in every way possible."  In dry weather he hauled to the fields a 300 gallon skid tank of rainwater collected from the eaves of his barns and other buildings, ladling water over each and every plant.  In damp weather the thousands of maturing fruit were raised upon wooden plates or trios of cobblestone that littered the stony fields.  "Bender had no kids. The melons were like his kids."

E-Mail Me: If you have comments about this blog or any other thing having to do with NYSHM's I would be delighted to hear from you. I would be especially interested if you know of any new or interesting markers or can report on any efforts to restore old markers. My email is tba998@gmail.com I look forward to hearing and sharing your thoughts on this blog. 

It Happened Here -- Knox: the Pillbox Capital

Co. Rte. 156, Knox

Marker of the Week*

The Town of Knox, one of the "Helderberg Hilltowns" was populated after the Revolution with  tenants leasing lands held by Patroon Stephen Van Rensselaer. (See last week's post.) It appears to have been named for either for John Knox (1514-1572) a Scots Protestant Reformer or Henry Knox   (1750-1806),  Washington's General of artillery (see post of 4/21/13). 
 

Nathan Crary, a resident of Knox, or Knoxville, as it was known then, began first producing wooden pillboxes in 1806 out of basswood, an abundant fine grained wood that was resistant to splitting.

The boxes, resembling miniature Shaker boxes were usually oval in shape with the sides made from a single shaving or "winding" with the ends glued together to form a hoop.  The bottoms and were made from a slightly thicker  basswood shaving, cut or stamped  out in an oval shape. Occasionally, customers might request a round profile. The pillbox covers were made in a similar fashion but slightly larger--designed to slip over the tops of the boxes. 

Before the American Revolution, most commercially produced medicines were imported from Great Britain.  The term "Patent Medicine" does not refer to these medicines being patented but rather to the practice that doctors  who treated members of the nobility or other famous personages with them, would attempt to get for their compounds an endorsement or "patent" from their famous patients to help market their "cures" to the general public.

It was after the Civil War that large numbers of returning veterans, many injured,  created a large market for patent medicines. The increase in demand was spurred on by extensive marketing.  Patent medicine manufactures spent as much as a third of their revenues on advertising.  Newspapers, which had become commonplace in the lives of both urban and rural Americans were filled with patent medicine advertising. ¹Colorful advertising cards (the forerunners of today's sports cards) were given away by medicine manufacturers, and  by the 1880's the Ayer's Company even published its own almanac as an advertising media.  Crary's family business was joined by others in Knox, becoming a major local cottage industry with six shops in Knox manufacturing pill boxes.  Such medicines as Sherman's Cathartic Lozenges, Doctor Ingoldsby's Vegetable Extract, James Compound Vegetable Pills, Doctor Newton's Jaundice Bitters, and Ayer's Cathartic Pills were sold in Knox pill boxes.  J.C. Ayers and Co.  of Lowell Massachusetts bought 1,000,000 pill boxes in a single year from Knox!

Though Crary's son John F. Crary, in 1870 had a long term contract to supply Benjamin Brandreith's company that produced the Vegetable Universal Pill, one of the most successful patent medicines, most of the pill boxes were sold through jobbers. Packed in 10-12,000 count "tierces" they were transported by wagon to the port of Rensselaer to be shipped to down the Hudson.  A full "tierce" might wholesale for $3.50.

Despite the increased demand,  the manufacture of pill boxes remained a cottage, family based, industry. Typically, the men of the family would harvest the basswood trees, hand sawing them into short logs, and splitting them into blocks, to be stored away and dried. When seasoned, the blocks would be cut by the men into the proper thickness "shavings" with a draw knife, on a shaving horse. A boy might be in charge of stamping out the tops and bottoms.  He might produce 30,000 a day. The only significant mechanization came with the use of a horse-powered rotary plane that made uniform shavings. The assembly of boxes was done mostly by women and girls. The precut “windings” were tightly wound around a roller and the ends glued together with a hot glue made from horse hoof trimmings, obtained from one of the two local blacksmiths in town. Heated in a double-boiler pot on the shop's stove the glue set quickly after it was applied. The ends were held in place by “gripes” – wooden blocks, with channels cut in them. After the glue set, the rollers were removed and bottoms or tops were glued on. In this way a worker might make 1,600 to 1,800 boxes per day for which they might receive $.03--.07 per 100 boxes.  While the patent medicine makers made millions, the farmers and their families of Knox worked incredibly long and tedious hours to make a pittance.  At the patent medicine factories a dozen or so pills were placed in the boxes and the boxes were sealed with labels.

For a century the tiny town of Knox produced most of the pill boxes made in America. Only after the stocks of local basswood trees were depleted , and new methods of mass producing glass pill vials and tin pill boxes were developed did production end.

 

1Newspapers became so dependent on patent medicine advertising dollars that when reformers in the 1890's began pushing for disclosure of patent medicine ingredients and restrictions on unsubstantiated claims, the advertisers negotiated so-called “red clauses” that voided advertising contracts if the newspapers' states passed any law restricting them. Subsequently, many newspapers avoided editorials supporting reform.

 

*This week's marker of the week deserves some explanation, so we will forgo a longer article that normally precedes it.

It Happened Here -- The "Battle" of Clarksville 

Corner of NYS 443 and Cass Hill Rd

 

From the flats at the edge of the tiny hamlet of Clarksville Sheriff Michael Artcher gazed up the hill toward Reidsville. With him was a little army of 500 hundred citizens of Albany, a “posse” of men from all walks of life, he had summoned to assist him in serving papers to the farmers of the Hilltowns, delinquent on their rents to their land lord, Stephen Van Rensselaer III, the last Patroon. 

Delaware Ave, Delmar

Most were mechanics and workingmen from Albany, but they also included bank presidents, John Van Buren, son of the President, himself a prominent lawyer, and William Marcy, former Governor. (The 53 year old Marcy had marched with the “army” the first six miles until he reached the Adams' Tavern, where a friend gave him a ride in his carriage, the rest of the way.) With these numbers, Artcher hoped he could overawe the farmers and serve his warrants without bloodshed, avoiding another humiliating confrontation like he had suffered two months before when a gang of farmers had barred his way and sent him packing down the mountain.
 

For the origins of this conflict one would need to go back over two hundred years to the Dutch settlement of the area that would become New York. Henry Hudson established the claim for the Dutch from the Hudson Valley down to the Delaware. The Dutch government granted the rights to commercially exploit this territory for whatever riches it might contain to one of their large trading companies, the Dutch West India Company, and soon the Company was profiting from a lucrative trade in beaver pelts with the Native Americans. But to maintain their claims to the area they needed permanent settlements of their countrymen living there. Finding such people in a country like the Netherlands was not easy where peace and prosperity made its citizens reluctant to leave. To accomplish this task of people-ing their colony, the company turned to private entrepreneurs who would be given huge tracts of land if they would buy them from the Native Americans who inhabited them, and settle them with at least fifty farmers and tradesmen. From these settlers the Patroons could collect rents and fees and govern them as they saw fit. While most of these first patroonships failed and reverted back to the Company, one established by Kilean Van Rensselaer, in what became Albany, Rensselaer and northern Columba counties succeeded. When the English took over the Colony in 1644, they modified the judicial system to conform to English law, but left the economic aspects of the patroon system largely untouched, and in fact extended the manorial system to reward political supporters of the Duke of York and his government in the Colony. The manors of Livingston, Van Cortland, Hardenburg and others joined the Van Rensselaer's to place virtually all farmlands in the Hudson valley and surrounding hills in the hands of a few wealthy families who through inter-marriage became an economic oligarchy. Most of these families sided with the revolutionary cause during the American revolution, snapping up vacated Tory lands to become even stronger than before the revolution. Although Democratic forces pushed through a law outlawing feudalism in 1782,  Stephen Van Rensselaer III, the current patroon neatly side-stepped the new law by issuing new “durable leases” to his tenants. Devised by his new brother-in-law, Alexander Hamilton, the financial wizard of the Revolutionary generation, the leases were termed “incomplete sales” in which the “owners” (ie. tenants) gave a down payment of ¼ of the value of the land and forever after paid annual “quitrents” of a specified number of bushels of wheat, “fat fowl” and days labor with their teams of horses or oxen and wagons. The land could only be used for agriculture by the tenants, and all water, timber and mineral rights remained with the Patroon. As “owners” the farmers were responsible for any taxes levied on the land and on any improvements (houses, barns,etc) they made to it. As “owners” their property, any improvements, and their tenant obligations to the Patroon automatically passed to their heirs. It was a lousy deal for the farmers. But it was one which Stephen Van Rensselaer III was able to successfully market to a generation of post-revolutionary war farmers desperate for land, especially when he offered them seven years rent free to clear their land, build their homes and barns and begin farming. Under these terms the hinterlands of Albany and Rensselaer counties, which had been mostly uninhabited, quickly filled with farms. Similar arrangements had similar results in heretofore undeveloped areas of Delaware and Columbia counties, on the Hardenburg (Catskill) Patent and on two smaller Schoharie patents.

For many years Van Rensselaer collected his rents, becoming rich, and managing discontent among his tenants by not pressing them for their rent and allowing rents to go unpaid during years of poor harvests, or times of personal hardship. His laxity in rent collection, and some significant acts of philanthropy, resulted in Stephen III becoming known as “the Good Patroon”. But in January of 1839 the “Good Patroon” died and it turned out he never forgave or forgot. The records of unpaid rents had all been carefully recorded and passed on to his two heirs, Stephen IV and William Patterson Van Rensselaer as part of his assets to be collected by them. In addition, he owed $400,000 in debts which would come out of his estate, unless these rents could be collected in short order. Stephen IV's first official act as heir to his father's West Manor estate was to order Daniel Barnard, one the executors of the will to collect his delinquent rents in Albany County.

At the Intersection of NYS 85 and NYS 143/443, Westerlo

 

Among the inhabitants of the Albany County hilltowns resentments grew especially strong. How could the Van Rensselaers allow the overdue rents to accumulate to such high levels if they were going to demand payment all at once, and especially in the spring, after a long winter when the farmers' resources were stretched to their thinnest, as they struggled to put in a new crop?   Stephen Van Rensselear had worked (and connived) to gain the respect and deference of his tenants, that he felt was an essential attribute of men of the landed gentry, but his sons, especially Stephen IV considered the deference of his tenants their birthright. When they asked to meet with him and assembled at his manor in North Albany, the new proprietor of the West Manor refused to even acknowledge them, much less meet with them, instructing his underlings to communicate to the tenants that they should write down their grievances, which he subsequently rejected. News of such treatment spread like wildfire among the Hilltowns, galvanizing not only those who could not pay the overdue rents, but those who could and those not behind in their payments.

From his posse of 500, Sheriff Artcher selected an advance guard of 100 horsemen to accompany him up to confront the farmers. Perhaps he did not want to involve the rag-tag group of mechanics and shopkeepers that that had answered his summonses and straggled along on foot, unwilling to take seriously the Van Rensselaers' dire characterizations of a county-side up in revolt, or perhaps he did not trust these people if real trouble should break out. Whatever his motives Artcher began his advance up the hill, to the blasts of farmer's tin dinner horns from various locations on the hill announcing his approach. A short way up he encountered a party of mounted farmers of about equal in size to his party.  Without speaking, the group parted, allowing his men to pass.  Farther up the road a larger group of horsemen armed with clubs,  pitch forks and various other improvised weapons blocked his way. As the sheriff consulted with his deputies and other  leaders of his party, about forcing their way through, this second group opened a path for the sheriff's men.  The sheriff's men continued to the top of Cass Hill where they were stopped in their tracks by a mass of perhaps 1800 armed and mounted farmers.  The sheriff and a few of his men tried to force their way through and were handily rebuffed by the farmers.  A second attempt was beaten back more forcefully.  Artcher ordered a retreat. The column of Sheriff's men turned and made a hasty exit off the mountain to the accompaniment of farmer's  curses and howls of derision, and the bleat of tin dinner horns.

 Back in Clarksville, the beaten and humiliated members of the Sheriff's posse sought to salve their occasional bruises and hurt feelings with ample libations at the Clark's Hotel while Governor Marcy was forced to spend the night, where the only serious injury, his ripped pair of trousers, was mended!

Rte 443, Clarksville

Thus ended the first skirmish of the "Anti-Rent Wars", which would span decades. In future posts we will return to this chapter of New York history.



Marker of the Week

 Preston Hollow may have had only
a Justice of the Peace in the early 1800's, but I betchya didn't want to pull any nonsense in his court!












E-Mail Me: If you have comments about this blog or any other thing having to do with NYSHM's I would be delighted to hear from you. I would be especially interested if you know of any new or interesting markers or can report on any efforts to restore old markers. My email is tba998@gmail.com I look forward to hearing and sharing your thoughts on this blog.  

It Happened Here -- Yankee Doodle came to Grenen Bos

  

The substantial brick house on the shore of the Hudson River, across from Albany in the little Dutch town of Grenen Bos (Greenbush) was packed with “guests,” the officers of his majesty's regiments 

preparing for an expedition against the French forts in northern New York during what was the last of the colonial wars with the French¹ .  Nearby were hundreds of tents of the King's soldiers and a motley assortment of tents and improvised bark shelters of New England militiamen, growing in number every day as colonial militia companies straggled in from Connecticut and other parts of New England.

The house was the home of the Van Rensselaer family and stood on the foundation of an earlier house built in 1642. The current house was built about 1704 with defensive features designed to thwart Indian attacks. Stone loopholes were incorporated into the brickwork that allowed muskets to be fired from it. The entrances had heavy reinforced wooden doors and the downstairs windows had heavy wooden shutters, that could be drawn shut.  The house, named Crailo, (Crow's Wood) after the Van Rensselaer estate in Holland, became known as Fort Crailo.

Fort Crailo, today serves as a museum of Colonial Dutch life, instead of simply, a furnished historic house. The role
of Crailo in the creation of Yankee Doodle is somewhat down-played today because, in fact, the story is based on a family legend, with virtually no historical documentation to corroborate it.

Among the billeted “guests” was likely the regimental surgeon Richard Shuckburgh. Shuckburgh, originally from a Warwickshire English gentry family had bought his commission and come to America around 1737. Though officially the surgeon to the four independent companies in New York, he appears to have spent much of his time speculating in land, drinking, carousing and building friendships in the Albany area and the Mohawk valley. He counted William Johnson among his friends and sometime-business associates, and he often attended negotiations between Johnson and the Iroquois. In 1744 while a dinner guest of the Van Rensselaer's, he met Dr. Alexander Hamilton, a Scots physicians traveling in the northern colonies. Hamilton wrote of him, “by his conversation he seems to have as little of the quack of him as any half-hewn doctors ever I had met with”, unlike most of the “empirics” of Albany—a recommendation—of sorts! But if “doctoring” was his vocation, partying, seems to have been his passion. Reflecting on a failed venture, he wrote “I endeavour to forget that and every Disappointment, being as merry as I can make myself and those about me, and I am apt to say...that I have made more people laugh in my Lifetime in the World of America than will cry at my departure out of it.”²

The Well-reconstructed to enhance the legend

t

So, when an idle afternoon found Shuckburgh with nothing better to do, sitting on the edge of the well, out in back of Fort Crailo, he decided to compose a few lines of verse to amuse his fellow officers and the Van Rensselaers that evening after dinner.³ He probably didn't have long to think about a fitting subject for his few lines of doggrel. Though in the coming years the Dutch inhabitants of Crailo and the officers of His majesties' regiments would find fewer and fewer things they could agree upon, an obvious subject now was the pretensions, clumsy amateurism and anticipated cowardliness of the citizen-soldiers flooding in from the small towns of New England. The professional English soldiers found it easy to find fault with the efforts of these New Englanders and the burghers of Greenbush, who had a long simmering dislike of the English colonists who seemed forever trying to encroach on Dutch held lands, were more than ready to join in the fun.

“Yankee Doodle” most likely derived from the Dutch “Janke” or little Johnnie, referring to the common nickname for New Englanders, “Brother Jonathan” and Doodle was a common synonym for a fool. Mispronounced “Janker” it could also mean a “howling cur “or complainer. Jan doedel was also slang for a glass of gin or a town drunk.  (Throughout the 19^th century and into the 20^th musicologists and folklorist developed numerous other theories for the origins of Yankee Doodle and its music but these are the most likely.) The tune seems to have come from a children's rhyme “Lucy Locket” that had been around for centuries. It had gained more recent popularity when it was featured in the immensely popular Beggar's Opera that satirized British society and government corruption, first staged in 1728.   While performed by professional and amateur companies in both Great Britain and America, New Englanders were less likely to know it, theater being forbidden in Puritan New England.

Shuckburgh had delighted his dinner companions with his song. Now he compounded the hilarity, by convincing New England fifers that it's melody was the newest military aire and teaching it to them.

Soon New England Companies were clomping about, in formation, on the grounds of Van Rensellaer's estate to the tune of Yankee Doodle, re-living for anyone who had heard its words the satire.

                                                                    

One of several signs, all with the same message located at various distances from Ft. Crailo

 

A decade later relations between Great Britain and its colonies had deteriorated and Yankee Doodle continued as a vehicle for making fun of, and, now, heaping insult on the New England militias who now seemed a potent threat to British rule and order. The occupation of Boston by thousands of British redcoats led to scores of new verses being created by dozens of wags in the British army, and among the Loyalist population.

On April 19, 1775 units of the British army marched out of Boston to snap up stores of gunpowder held by the miltias in Concord and hopefully capture rebel leaders Adams and Hancock rumored to be in Lexington. Once out of Boston their musicians struck up the “Yankee Song” and the troops joined in with some of the many verses that had been created. At Concord Bridge the unimaginable happened.  The British vanguard was thrown back precipitating a long bloody retreat back to Boston as they were ambushed form all sides by groups of militiamen. Adding to their misery they heard strains of “Yankee Doodle” coming from the rebel fifers who were turning the song against them. They would hear it again months later from rebel lines when they marched up Breed's Hill into the onslaught of rebel fire at the battle of Bunker Hill, and again two years later when they stacked arms to surrender at the battle of Saratoga. By the end of the war this doggrel-parody of New England militiamen had become something of an unofficial national anthem for the new United States.

Marker of the Week

 The road to Saratoga was paved with good intentions!

(Rte 443, Dormansville/Westerlo)

1There is some dispute whether the events to unfold here occurred in encampments in 1755 or 1758, before the Johnson-Lyman expedition that resulted in the Battle of Lake George victory, or the later Abercromby expedition against 
Ft. Carillon (Ticonderoga) that was a major English/American defeat.

2Quoted from Stuart Murray. America's Song, The Story of ' Yankee Doodle' p, 78, 60-61.

3Recollections of this incident were kept alive and handed down through generations of the Van Rensselaer and Schuyler families.

It Happened Here -- New York's Wooden Roads

Yes, I said wooden, not wooded.

In retrospect, the idea of roads made of wood does not seem like a good idea.  Wood, of course, rots quickly when it is in contact with the earth. For centuries, corduroy roads had been constructed. Logs cut and laid down side by side were used to run roads across swampy areas and through muddy stretches, preventing wagons from becoming mired in the mud.  But they quickly rotted out,  and besides, the ride over them was extremely bumpy and miserable.

In the 1840's stories began to circulate  about a new type of road that had originated in Russia and was being successfully employed in Canada.  The Town of Salina, near Syracuse sent civil engineer George Geddes to Toronto to study them. Geddes returned full of enthusiasm for the new plank roads, extolling their virtues in Scientific American, April 27, 1850 and publishing his own pamphlet promoting them.   Geddes learned that the Canadians were building roads of two to four inch planks laid crossways over wooden "sills", "sleepers". or "stringers",  sometimes laid over logs set corduroy fashion over wet areas¹.

The roads were constructed with drainage ditches along both sides to carry rain water away from them. By keeping the roads from becoming waterlogged, it was predicted plank roads would last 8 to 12 years.  Geddes built the first plank road in America,  the Salina—Central Square Plank Road, north of Syracuse in 1846.

In the first decade of the 19th century New York had experienced an explosion of turnpike road building.  Investors pooled their capital to pay for construction of private roads that charged tolls for their use. But over the next several decades turnpike companies struggled to meet expenses, and rarely turned a profit. Local governments forced them to keep their tolls low and exempted much local traffic from having to pay tolls. Maintenance became a major expense. Mostly dirt roads, the turnpikes became deeply rutted, and in the spring became nearly impassible seas of mud.²

During the second decade, regional turnpikes began to feel the pressure of competition from New York's growing canal system, and in the decades that followed, from the railroads as well. While the great turnpikes struggled and failed and were abandoned into the public domain in the first half of the 19th century, the demand for local feeder roads grew. Farms and towns needed roads to connect them to the State's railroads and canal system, and the regional  and statewide markets that were developing. Into this environment burst the new plank road technology with its promise of smooth reliable transportation at a cost to developers of about $1,500 per mile. By the early 1850's, timber-rich New York was home to some 335 plank road companies, laying some  3,500 miles of plank road,  more than any other state³.  They became especially popular in rural areas where for the first time a growing dairy industry could rush butter, cheese, and even fresh milk to nearby cities.

Main Street, Altamont

 





                    Rte 146 and Rte 9, Clifton Park
                         

County Rte. 110, Broadalbin

But then, just as suddenly as they came into existence, the popularity of plank roads plummeted. Instead of lasting eight to twelve years, as promoted, they began to rot away in a mere four to five years! (The warmer climate of the United States, over Canada or Russia may have hastened their demise.)  Soon the courts were filled with cases of plank road customers seeking compensation for damages to their wagons and horses caused by falls through rotted out planks.  By 1853-54, no new plank roads were being built and repairs to existing plank roads were made with earthen fill and gravel. By 1865 most plank roads had been resurfaced with stone or fill, or they had been abandoned. In the second half of the 19th century, reporting on his trip over a plank road in Michigan,  Mark Twain quipped,  " "It would have been good if some unconscionable scoundrel had not now and then dropped a plank across it."⁴

 

Across New York vestiges of long gone plank
roads can be seen in local streets named "Plank
Road" This one, near the intersection of Rte 9W and Rte 32, was near the end of the South Bethlehem Plank Road, incorporated in 1851.






















 

                        Plank Road, Clarksville
















1The availability of timber and the advent of saw mills made plank roads feasible.  New York was the largest lumber producer in the United States in the first half of the 19^th Century and innovations in saw mill technology, development of circular saws and gang saws (multiple saws that cut a log into several planks at once) made the cheap production of large numbers of planks possible.

2Around 1820 a superior road which resisted ruts and potholes had been developed by a Scots engineer John Macadam. Macadam roads were built on a base of large crushed rock, covered by smaller crushed rock followed by a top layer of small crushed stones and stone dust. The jagged edged stone locked together when packed down forming a stable base. The roads were built with a “crown”--raised in the center, to allow water to run off, and not pool and cause potholes. But at an estimated cost of $3500 a mile they were prohibitively expensive. It was not until the twentieth century that asphalt was used as a binder for Macadam roads.
 

3 See "Turnpikes and Toll Roads in Nineteenth Century America" eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Klein, Majewski,Turnpikes.

4 Quoted in “The Plank Road Craze” /www.michigan.gov/.../0,4570,7-153-54463_18670_18793-5286...


 Marker of the Week --  Repurposed Ver. 4.0    (This is the last one, for now--I promise.)

 Saugerties, New York
From a church, to a school... and a blacksmith shop!
(and now it is home to a church, again.)

 ‎