It Happened Here--Zadock Pratt and

the Town He Built (Part 1)

He must have looked like a young Rip Van Winkle, before his long sleep, hiking up the heavily forested mountains and down into the deep cloves of the Catskills with his dog at his side. But the young Zadock Pratt was no henpecked husband escaping a shrewish wife by going hunting for small game in the mountains. Zadock Pratt was hunting for trees, specifically Eastern Hemlocks – lots of them. And quite unlike the laid-back and lazy Rip, Zadock reflected much more the image presented in another book, published fifteen years after Washington Irving’s 1819 tale.

  

In 1830 Alexis de Toqueville visited America. In 1834,1835 he would publish Democracy in America, vol. 1 and 2. Among the things that impressed the young French aristocrat was the spirit he saw in many Americans. Unlike his countrymen, divided into the wealthy nobility who disdained the pursuit of wealth as vulgar and crass, and the masses who largely despaired of ever becoming wealthy, many Americans, Toqueville observed, actively – even fervently pursued their dreams of fortune, through their own efforts. A second trait Toqueville observed and admired was the tendency for many Americans to embrace public service. Both of these traits Zadock Pratt would exhibit in abundance.

 

Zadock Pratt was born in 1790, in Stephentown in Rensselaer County New York. He learned from his father the craft of tanning hides to produce leather.  After an apprenticeship, Zaddock worked for his father and brothers as a journeyman saddler at their tannery before going into business on his own operating a general store, and selling his saddles and leather goods. Zadock worked sixteen hours a day and slept under the store counter to save money. Often bartering his goods for produce from his neighbors he, in turn, sold their produce in New York City. 

Zadock returned to the tannery business forming a partnership with two of his older brothers. For several years the business grew. In 1819, Pratt, after buying out one of his brothers, embarked on a trading venture to sell leather goods and harnesses in rural Canada, however, when he returned to the United States a major setback greeted him. In his absence, his tannery had burned.  Over the next four years Zadock and his older brother Ezra rebuilt their business. In the course of this time Zadock's ambitions out grew those of his brother. The younger Pratt dreamed of building a tanning factory.  In 1824 Zadock ended the partnership, and began a search for hemlock forests that would span four counties.  Zadock selected a site in the little hamlet of Schohariekill.

 Encountering skepticism and hostility from some of the inhabitants, Pratt declared his intention to “live with (the residents) not on them.” The tanning business had a rather checkered reputation in the Catskills. Tanning was hard on the environment. Large tanneries stank for miles around; the acid effluent from their vats killed fish and degraded streams and tanners clear cut hemlock forests for their bark, leaving stacks of downed timber--an ecological catastrophe and a dangerous fire hazard. (see NYSHMS:It Happened Here on11/19/13.)
 

Tannery-based communities in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the Northeast had some similarities to mining communities in the West in the second half of the nineteenth century. Entrepreneurs would come into an area and set up their operations. Workers with little other resources than strong backs and a desire to make a living wage would be attracted to the area. Shanty towns would spring up, and when the ore/hemlocks were all extracted, or if the bottom fell out of the market for the commodity produced, the operators would shut down their operations and leave with their profits (or losses). Left behind would be the wreckage of a community, destined to struggle on for decades or become a ghost town.

  

Pratt Museum, Rte 23 Prattsville

Having declared his intention to make this community his home, Zadock launched into his tannery project.  Zadock’s tremendous enthusiasm, boundless energy and willingness to work along side of his workers gradually won over all but his most skeptical critics. He developed a reputation of being a boss who would never ask a worker to do anything he would not or could not do himself – this, in an industry which routinely required workers to handle 100 pound skins, clean fetid vats and scrape hides with scraps of putrefying hair and fat attached.  Pratt bought a large parcel of meadow straddling the Schoharie creek. He  immediately started damming the creek to build a large millpond, declaring his intention to be able to swim the length of it before the year was out. On November 1, 1824, breaking a skim of ice before him, he made his swim.  The next spring he began his mill. At 550 feet by 43 feet with 350 vats it was the largest tanning operation in the world.

Kiosk at Pratt Rocks, Rte 23, Prattsville

Soon after beginning his tannery, Pratt began building a large boarding house for his workers. He would follow this, over time, with the construction of 100 homes, built for workers and sold to them on reasonable terms. Unlike most other tannery operations, many debarked hemlock logs would find their way to the Pratt sawmill and into the homes built for Pratt workers and buildings of other Pratt enterprises.  The Tanner partnered with other businessmen and entrepreneurs to open a variety of businesses. An indefatigable businessman, Pratt seemed virtually unable to turn his back on any enterprise that seemed likely to be able to turn a profit. A grist mill, a cabinet shop, a machine shop, a hat factory, an oil cloth factory, 3 cotton mills, a match factory, an iron foundry, a chair factory, an India rubber factory, several general stores and a printing plant which produced the town’s newspaper all came into existence, the result of Pratt’s partnerships and money. 

Pratt Home/Museum, Rte 23, Prattsville

 Though not particularly religious, Zadock Pratt appreciated the salutatory influence that religion could have on a community and the steadying influence it might have on its workforce.To both the Dutch Reformed and the Methodists he supplied 1/3 the costs of their new buildings and to a Baptist printing company that produced bible tracts he gave a $4000 no interest loan and provided them with an office and two houses, rent free.
 

The Prattsville Tanner’s education was limited¹ to what his mother was able to teach him when he was a child, and whatever business training he would learn from the saddle-maker with whom he apprenticed and his father and brothers. Pratt developed a respect, even a veneration of the written word and for education that some people denied an education come to hold. Over the course of his life with the help of editors and ghostwriters, he would write an autobiography, and numerous articles about his tannery, his dairy farm and tanning and agriculture in general. In an age when tanning methods were closely guarded secrets, he shared his tanning methods with all. He reveled in his son’s academic achievements and in 1842 promoted the Prattsville Academy, a secondary school for the sciences and classics, offering to pay for half of its construction. 

Prattsville Cemetery, Rte 23A, Prattsville

From Zadock’s early days in the Catskills, Pratt held various town offices. From Prattsville he was twice elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The Prattsville tanner took these responsibilities very seriously participating in every role call vote during his first term and refusing to leave Washington, to return to his business even when spring floods washed out his mill dam and caused major damage to his tannery one year. During his tenure he promoted the first survey for a continental railroad, the creation of the Bureau of Statistics and the construction of the Washington monument. He was most proud of his sponsorship of a successful bill to roll back the price of U.S. postage, and the bill to finance a survey of the continental railroad--accomplishments he had inscribed on his cemetery monument!

 

1 This would become an issue in one of his political campaigns when an opponent, a member of the Greene County Bar Association would accuse him of being “practically illiterate”.

Marker of the Week--Jacacks' Landing! Well, maybe.

Rte 89, East Varick

Let us hope I misread this sign at first, and it was not a misreading of the map/documents of the committee who ordered the sign or the foundryman who produced it.


 Next Week--Veterans Laid to Rest

In Two Weeks--Z. Pratt (Part 2) Farmer, Banker, Monument Maker

It Happened Here--The Fish House

Throughout history rich and/or famous people have had their retreats, their summer houses, their dachas or their camps where they could escape the pressures of their jobs that inevitably followed them home. These were often places where, away from the everyday exigencies, their owners could reflect or think creatively. They often became extensions of their personal, as opposed to their official, selves and as such, these places could, sometimes, be used as high status venues where their most important colleagues, clients, allies and enemies could be invited for the famous persons to work their charismatic magic on them. Versailles, Hampton Court, Berchtesgaden, Camp David and the Kennedy Compound are a few such places that come to mind. For others their retreats were much more modest.

Statue of Johnson at the Lake George Battleground

In 1762 William Johnson was near the height of his personal, political and economic power. In 1755 the force he had raised turned back a major French invasion, at Lake George, capturing their major general (Dieskau), and providing the first good news from the battlefield the Crown  had received to date. He was knighted, a baronet, for his efforts--one of only two colonists ever to be so honored. The next year he was appointed sole Superintendent for Indian Affairs for the Northern Colonies and in 1760 the Mohawks gave him 80,000 acres in what would become northern Fulton county. In his life he would own 170,000 acres, becoming the third largest landowner in colonial America. In 1762 he began Johnson Hall, an imposing colonial mansion flanked by two stone blockhouses, designed to impress/intimidate Indian delegates come to make treaties or do other business with His Majesty's Superintendent of Indian Affairs. The same year he began the Fish House.

Johnson Hall, Johnstown

Much smaller and simpler, Fish House was a hunting and fishing camp on the shore of the Sacandaga River where it broadened out into a great marsh filled with ducks and shorebirds, flooding in the spring, and filled with trout and bass and pike.

Co.Rte. 110 at Co. Rte. 109, Broadalbin

It became a retreat where he could go by himself or with a few close friends (and perhaps rendezvous with the two accommodating daughters of the old caretaker of the place.)

Johnson loved to tell stories and like many sociable men in all periods of history seemed to have an extensive repertoire to draw upon whenever he was so inclined.  One of them involved the naming of a creek that emptied into the Sacadaga near Fish House.

Co. Rte. 110, north of Broadalbin

It must have been during the spring when the

water was high and Johnson, a Dutch friend, John (Hans) Conye, and some others were fishing from a boat off of the entrance to the creek. John (Hans) apparently became so excited, he fell in and being unable to swim he nearly drowned. Eventually Johnson and the others fished him out, no doubt inquiring if he had scouted out any fish in his underwater sojourn.

Co.Rte 30 at Lathrop and Griffis Roads, Mayfield

In 1772 Johnson built a nicer place, a few miles northeast of Fish House,   on Summerhouse Point and maintained by two of Johnson's slaves. By then, the old wound from a musket ball buried deep in his hip, received at the Battle of Lake George was bothering him a great deal* for he decided to have a  fourteen mile carriage road built for him from Johnson Hall to his new retreat. At every mile he had a large tree marked with the mile number.  The nine mile tree was a huge pine that survived for twenty five years after Johnson marked the tree, and its stump survived another seventy years. It is possible the pines seen in back of this sign are "grand children" or "great grand children" of that tree.

*Johnson ought relief from the pain of his injury by traveling to several springs to bathe in their waters. He went by carriage to Saratoga and even to Lebanon Springs, on the Massachusetts border.

Marker of the Week --with Halloween approaching I usually try to present a marker with some "spooky" or "haunted" associations

Paradise Point Road., N. of Mayfield, off Rte. 30

attached to it, and this marker has long been associated with unsettled spirits wandering in the vicinity near it. But I hesitate to relate its background story, because of its gruesomeness, even some 135 years after the event.

The area now comprising northern Fulton county stood squarely astride the warpath down the Sacandaga creek valley leading down from the Adirondacks, Lake Champlain and Canada.  From 1778 to the end of the war this area was raided every year by Iroquois war parties. There were fewer raids in 1779 due to the Clinton-Sullivan invasion of Iroquoia, that summer, which threw the Iroquois on the defensive, but what they lacked in number they maintained in ferocity.  When the Dunham homestead was attacked in April, Jacob Dunham and his son put up a resistance, giving time for the rest of the family to escape. Both were killed and subsequently scalped and then the elder Dunham was decapitated.  One of the family's horned cows was rounded up and instead of it being slaughtered,     (captured cattle's usual fate) the frightened beast was held while the severed head was impaled on one of its horns. In that condition it was left for the family to find. --No wonder there are stories of unsettled spirits wandering the fields nearby!

It Happened Here -- Days of Decision: 

Schoharie, summer 1777

Rte 30, South of the 30A Intersection, Scoharie

 In 1711 Governor Robert Hunter bought land from the Schoharie  Indians on which to settle Palatine immigrants who had been brought to the Hudson valley in a failed experiment to produce tar for the Royal Navy. Some soon left for the Mohawk valley, and others to Pennsylvania, but the majority stayed on, clustered in little villages (german-- "Dorf"s) up and down the valley.









 The first Dutch
settlers came to the Schoharie Valley from Schenectady in 1714 when Adam Vroman obtained a patent from the English authorities.

Rte 30, south of Middleburgh

For nearly two generations they farmed and lived 
in a state of semi-isolation,  several days journey from Albany and its politics. One of their main contacts with the outside world was with Sir William Johnson and his family and associates who bought their agricultural surpluses and traded with them, and the Schoharie Indians.

As war approached, in 1775. a Schoharie Commitee of Safety was created, mainly to keep an eye on the local Indians and insure their neutrality, and to prevent Tory recruiters from operating in the valley.

Main village of the Schoharies Rte. 30, south of Middleburgh

  A militia regiment was organized in 1776. It had trouble attracting recruits and remained undersized with only three companies. Several prominent valley leaders felt obliged to accept officer positions in the newly formed regiment but felt deeply ambivalent.  Perhaps most valley residents would have preferred to believe the rising tide of troubles was mainly a dispute between the Yankees along the coast and the Crown, but events in 1776--the British invasion of New York City, the Continental Congress' Declaration of Independence, and the Johnson Family's abrupt departure for Canada--left valley residents feeling events were spinning out of control.

By the following summer the situation had worsened.  A British army was making its way down the Lake Champlain corridor.  It had already taken Fort Ticonderoga and appeared unstoppable. A second army was approaching from the west.  In the valley, at the southern end of Vrooman's Land, a prominent farmer, Adam Chrysler, had announced his support for the Crown and was actively recruiting men for Tory regiments. He was joined by John MacDonald (also spelled McDonnell), a former associate of the Johnsons, who had built a farm along the Charlotte river, south of the Schoharie Valley.  Mac Donald had fled with Johnson when he escaped in the spring of '76 but he appealed to the rebel authorities to be allowed to return home in March 1777.  However, once home, he appeared to be more interested in recruiting Loyalists than in farming. (He was, in fact, a Captain in a Loyalist regiment attached to Burgoyne's army.) Between them they recruited some seventy Tories and Indians.

Finally, beginning on August 4th  matters began to come to a head. General Phillip Schuyler directed Albany County Militia General Ten Broek to mobilize the  county militias to send them north to Stillwater to oppose the Burgoyne invasion. Over the next few days Col. Peter Vroman assembled his men and their equipment at Captain George Mann's Tavern in Fox Dorf,  at the head of the road to Albany, at the northern end of the valley.

Rte 443, Schoharie

Vroman wanted a personal commitment from his men that they were willing to fight, so he arranged for his three company captains to each give an inspirational talk. Afterwards the vast majority of them were expected to confirm their support. But then the unthinkable happened.  Captain Mann, of the first company, who had led previously led expeditions to round up Tory organizers, made an impassioned speech supporting King George and his government and concluding with the challenge, "whoever is in favor of King George, follow me!"

Several militiamen left with Mann while the rest milled around in uncertainty and stunned confusion. Colonel Vroman, hoping to prevent a total disaster sent two runners to Albany to summon reinforcements but they were apprehended by other groups of Loyalists on the road from Beaverkill (Berne) coming to support Captain Mann.

Col. John Harper of Harpersfield, commander of the 5th Regiment, Tryon County Militia was in the Valley either to witness the send-off of the Schoharie Militia or to oversee his company of rangers shadowing the activities of Tories at the southern end of the valley or providing support for militiamen garrisoned in Weysertown (Middleburg). Observing the confusion and the growing Tory strength at Fox Dorf  Harper seized on the same plan that Vroman had attempted. Spurring his horse he surged past Tory pickets and galloped up the road toward Duanesburg and Schenectady.  Two Indians were dispatched to bring him down but he fended them off with his sword and pistols.

The following day both newly minted Tories, and confused and disheartened militiamen at Fox Dorf were startled by the staccato call of a cavalry bugle as Harper and twenty eight troopers from the
 2nd Continental Light Horse came thundering into the tiny hamlet.  On charging muscular mounts, with crisp uniforms, polished plumed helmets and gleaming sabres the cavalrymen stunned both Tories and militiamen alike.  Confirmed Tories were quickly rounded up*; many recent converts had a change of heart; and the more steadfast Patriots found new resolve to drive their enemies from the valley.  En masse they marched south through the valley to Weysertown where the Becker stone house served as the Valley's  new southern defensive post. (Within a few weeks it would have a palisade around it and sprout swivel guns.) With darkness falling, and nowhere to contain their Tory prisoners, some creative mind conceived of the idea of forcing them up onto the rooftop, of the large stone structure, then removing the ladder for the night!


The following day, Col. Harper and the 2nd Continental Light Horse, with members of the 15th (Schoharie) Albany County Militia trotting behind, went looking for the enemy. They found them near Adam Chrysler's place on "die Flache" (German--"the Flats") when the Tories fired from ambush. Though three troopers fell; including their lieutenant, the cavalry charged, scattering the Tories.  The number of Tory dead and wounded was unrecorded but about half a dozen were transported to prison back in Albany. The Battle of "Flockey," as it came to be known, was the United States Army's first cavalry charge.

Adam Chrysler, John Mac Donald and many Tories fled the Schoharie Valley but they would return time and time again. (Adam Chrysler would stage one of the last attacks of the war
on July 26, 1782.) But now, at last, the battle lines had been drawn.

*George Mann escaped in the confusion and went into hiding. Friends encouraged him to give himself up and he was imprisoned in Albany for the duration of the war. They also got his trial postponed until the war was over and because he appeared sorry for his actions he was released without further penalty. The tavern was judged to be the property of his father, so it was not confiscated.


Marker of the Week-- ...and another one bites the dust!

 

This weekend I returned to Schoharie to get a clearer picture
of the Gerlach Dorf sign only to find it was the apparent victim of another automobile accident. Hopefully money will be found for a replacement!

It Happened Here --Before the Erie, Champlain and other Canals

Halfway Creek, Ft.Anne

Before the Erie, Champlain and other canals the indigenous peoples, and explorers, traders, settlers and military invaders of early New York history relied heavily on the natural lakes and rivers of New York for most of their transportation with smaller streams and portage trails connecting them, and providing routes around unnavigable rifts and rapids. The Indians of the upper Great Lakes region introduced the French to the relatively light, durable birch bark covered canoes they had developed, while the Iroquois and the (Hudson) River Peoples, not having access to massive birch trees had to rely on slower, heavier dugout and elm bark covered canoes.

NY Rte. 4, Ft. Anne

A Reconstructed Batteau at the Herkimer House, Little Falls

Explorers and colonists were soon building boats for exploring and trading on inland waterways. It was probably the French who first created the simple, double ended, flat bottomed craft propelled by oars, or polls or occasionally a square sail they called simply batteaux* (boats). Made out of sawn lumber, they were less seaworthy than most ship's boats or whale boats of the day but they were often lighter and drew less water and could stand being dragged through the shallows. Straight sided, with ship-lapped joints they could be quickly constructed by men who had carpenter and joiner skills but who were not necessarily master ship-carpenters. Very quickly English colonists adopted the "battoe" for inland water travel as well. Batteaux were usually designated as three handed, four handed or five handed, depending on their size and the number of crewmen needed to operate them. Three handed batteaux were usually 24 to 30 feet in length and had two oarsman or polers and a stern man handling a long oar or sweep used for steering. A five handed batteau might be up to 58 feet in length and would have two sets of polers or oarsmen, while a four handed batteau might have the fourth crewman working as a second oarsmen rowing on one side to counteract the drift of the keel-less boat in windy conditions or up front, as a bow-man, to help navigate through rocky or twisting narrow channels.

War provided the impetus for the construction of fleets of batteaux as armies could be moved easiest over waterways. The small wooden forts that were constructed throughout English and French colonial America could usually stand up to infantry assaults but were no match for artillery and siege operations that could be brought to bear using weapons and sizable amounts of materiel that could only be carried through the road-less wilderness by watercraft. At various times Montreal, Albany and Schenectady became boat-building centers, mass producing batteaux for military expeditions. With standard whaleboats these became the major form of military transport along inland waterways.

CANADA 1760
AMHERST WITH 6000 AMERI-
CANS 4000 BRITISH & 200
BOATS MARCHED VIA MOHAWK
&OSWEGO TO CAPTURE OF
MONTREAL SEPT. 8, 1760
Location: AT INTERSECTION OF STATE ST. 

& WASHINGTON AVE., SCHENECTADY
(sign missing)


A Radeau, a heavy floating
raft-like battery with gun
ports cut into it and several
batteaux can be viewed by
scuba divers at the bottom
of Lake George harbor








Undoubtedly, the boats for Burgoyne's bridge in 1777 were batteaux. Their flat bottoms made them excellent, stable pontoons for bridges.
        
 "Albany" batteaux tended to be smaller, for most were built for carrying troops and materiel up the Hudson/Lake George/Champlain corridor which involved portages from Fort Edward to Lake George and Lake George to Lake Champlain or from the Hudson to the South Bay of Lake Champlain via Halfway Creek. In 1755 William Johnson ordered ordered boats about 24' in length with a 3' beam for his intended expedition against Crown Point. "Schenectady" Batteaux, on the other hand. could be much larger (up to 45 feet with a 6 foot beam) since they were portaged over the well trodden Oneida carry and would see service on Lake Ontario.

Ft. Bradstreet protected a carry on the Oswego River

In 1755 (then) Captain John Bradstreet was assigned the task of improving the fortifications at Fort Oswego and improving the logistics between Albany and the fort to ready it as a supply base for an assault on Fort Niagara. He worked to establish a corp of soldier/ "battoemen", 2000 strong, organized in forty companies. This became a tradition that saw its reincarnation in the American Revolution in John Glover's regiment of Marblehead (Mass.) soldier/boatmen and in the British/Canadian forces in the war of 1812.

While a couple locations on the Mohawk contained falls or rapids that required portages, like the falls at Little Falls, there were more locations that were navigable by the flat bottomed batteaux, if they were pulled over them with ropes, or during seasons when the water was higher. Rifts were fast water, flowing over shallow rocky sections, and they could be dangerous.  

Rte 5, Palatine Bridge

NY 10, Canajoharie

    


                                                   
  There is at least one occasion when an expedition made its own high water, anticipating a practice that would be extensively used during the boom period of Adirondack logging in the mid-nineteenth century. While a large force of regular Continental Army troops assembled in Pennsylvania under General John Sullivan that might menace the British forts along the Ohio or strike into southern Iroquoia, a second army mobilized in Schenectady under General James Clinton. Equipped with 200 batteaux it gave every appearance of a force prepared to move up the Mohawk to strike at Fort Oswego and threaten northern Iroquoia--the homes of the Onondaga and northern Cayugas and Senecas. The British were faced with the necessity of dividing their forces to face two armies. Suddenly at Canajoharie Clinton's army left the

South end of Otsego Lake,  Cooperstown

Mohawk and began to march southward. Meanwhile a sizable contingent of axemen had begun building a dam on Lake Otsego and clearing away brush and obstructions from the headwaters of the Susquehanna River that drained the forested lake. When Clinton arrived at Otsego he assembled his men and supplies in their batteaux above the dam. The dam was knocked out and a large "bubble" of water surged down the Susquehanna. On the back of this flood rode Clinton's little army on its way to join up with Sullivan to create an army the British and their Indian allies were unprepared to resist.

Mohawk River, Little Falls. from the Rte. 167 bridge

After the Revolution commercial travel on New York's inland waterways began to flourish. General Phillip Schuyler and Albany businessman, traveler, and former courier for George Washington, Elkanah Watson pushed the state legislature into enacting its first "canal law" in 1791. It authorized and funded the exploration and land survey for improving the Mohawk, Woods Creek, Oneida Lake, Oswego River route to Lake Ontario. The following year the legislature authorized the creation of two companies, the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company and the Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company, both headed by
Schuyler and Watson. Though the Northern Company failed to materialize, the WILNC pushed ahead building a 5 lock wooden canal nearly a mile long around the falls and rapids at Little Falls and plowed out channels along the Mohawk to Schenectady**. Where rocky bottomed rifts occurred,  V-shaped dams were built funneling the

West Mill Street, Little Falls

water through the apex of the "V" to create a channel for boats to navigate through. Woods Creek was widened, cleared of debris, and thirteen short canals were cut through the stream's meanders, shortening the route by six miles. In 1796 a 1.7 mile canal between the Mohawk and Woods Creek was built at Rome. With these improvements, larger Durham boats could operate on the Mohawk.  The Durham boat, 60 feet long and 8 feet wide, and decked over at the bow and stern had been developed in the Delaware Valley in Pennsylvania in the 1700's. (It is likely Washington's army crossed the Delaware in 1776 in Durham boats.) Able to carry up to seven times the cargo of large batteaux, they were usually poled by crews of five or six men who walked along cleated walkways at either side of the boat.  Once again, Schenectady became a boat building center, constructing what became locally known as "Schenectady boats."

Port Watson St, US 11, NY 41,  Cortland

By the early 1800's rivers throughout New York were carrying their share of commercial traffic. Even Cortland, far removed from the Hudson, the Mohawk, Lake Champlain and the Finger Lakes was moving its lumber and farm produce by water, via the tiny East Branch of the Tioughnioga river which connected to the Susquehanna River and then to markets in Pennsylvania. The town on its banks, (founded by the ubiquitous Elkanah Watson), even aspired to call itself a Port, producing watercraft and rope. The "arks" they produced were little more than floating shipping containers with walkways on all sides enabling polers to guide the craft downstream on a leisurely one-way trip to market, where they would be broken up for the sawn lumber they contained. They could, however, be fairly elaborate with bunks and stoves and cooking facilities for crews shepparding rafts of logs to Pennsylvania sawmills. To the east, in the foothills of the western Catskills, Arkville got its name for the "arks" built there.

In another post we will look at the myriad of sailing vessels built along, and operating on New York's rivers and lakes.






*The modern French spelling is bateau (bateaux, plural) but in the 17th and 18th centuries it was generally spelled with two t's. The English either used the French spelling or anglicized it to "battoe".
**Remember, the Mohawk as it is seen today is the product of the dredging and dams of the NYS Barge Canal. In the 18th and early 19th centuries most of its length had shallows and sand bars.

It Happened Here--The Little Pilot House on the Hill

 

Mark Twain. The name brings to mind the image of a man dressed in a white linen suit, bushy mustache, bushy eyebrows ensconced in a little pilothouse-of-a-study, on a hill overlooking the River, writing – writing about life on the Mississippi, writing about growing up in a little river town along its banks, writing about a boy's great adventure running away from home with a fugitive slave on a raft on that great river, while the smoke curls up from the omnipresent cigar of the writer, and beneath his perch life hurries on in one of the fabled river town (Is it Cairo or Vicksburg, St. Louis or Memphis?)

All of these images ring true, except the last one. The little “pilot house-of-a-study” does not look down on the storied river towns of Cairo or St. Louis, Vicksburg or Memphis. Instead it was located near Elmira, NewYork, overlooking Elmira and the not-so-mighty Chemung river. How did this come to be?

In the summer of 1867, Samuel Clemens, the man behind the emerging persona fell in love – smitten in a classic romantic, Victorian fashion. Clemens was a moderately successful young writer bound for Europe and the Holy Land looking for material for his next book. A fellow passenger, Charles Langdon, showed him a picture of his sister, Olivia Langdon. He could not tear himself away from the image of the slender, doe eyed, child–woman of the photograph, and begged Charley for an introduction when they returned. Eventually, Charles brought his sister Livy to meet the “wild humorist of the Pacific slope” who had shown so much interest in her. Visits and dinners with the family, and carefully chaperoned outings followed. Clemens determined almost immediately she was “the One” and embarked on a formal courtship. 

 

A lengthy engagement followed as Clemens used his money from a successful career as a lecturer, or “platform speaker”, and a loan from Livy's family to buy into a Buffalo newspaper, and embark on a career as a newspaper editor.

 Platform lecturers were a natural outgrowth of the religious revivals of the first half of the nineteenth century, where traveling speakers would preach to audiences in local churches, halls, opera houses, theaters, and even open fields. On their heels came a variety of moral crusaders – abolitionists, temperance advocates, and women's rights advocates, to be followed by spiritualists, scientists, history and travel lecturers feeding an ever-growing appetite for entertainment. Clemens followed his natural ability to entertain people by telling stories.   By the late 1860's his alter ego “Mark Twain” was well along in his development and “Twain” could command a healthy fee of $100 an evening. “Doors open at 7:30, trouble begins at 8:00”, his advertising posters read, and there were plenty of people looking for his kind of “trouble”.

 

While the irreverent, wise-cracking Mark Twain was holding forth on the lecture circuit and had penned numerous newspaper articles and had his first successful books , The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, and The Innocents Abroad, Sam Clemens in his private life longed for the Victorian Era's version of the American Dream.  In Livy he found the perfect Victorian wife who he could idealize and idolize; someone who would make for him a proper home, help him maintain a social life, care for him and bear and raise his children. Clemens would also look to her to reform him; to keep him from drifting into bad habits and curb the wildness in him that ostensibly, every Victorian man, and, especially, the creator of Mark Twain was heir to.  In time Livy would also become Mark Twain's personal editor, censoring any jokes or stories she thought would be too offensive to any segment of his audience. (This would be important because if Mark Twain developed a reputation for being too vulgar, his middle and upper middle class followers – men, and especially women, might abandon him in droves!)  But, at the time of his marriage, a large society wedding, Sam Clemens looked forward to sending Mark Twain into, at least, semi-retirement, while he took up the respectable position of newspaper editor and Livy's family bought them a luxurious three story brownstone mansion in Buffalo.

 But after several years, marred by personal tragedies, Clemens was feeling bored and unfulfilled. Together, Sam and Livy reached a decision.  They would sell the newspaper and the sell large house in Buffalo. They would go to live near several close personal and literary friends in Hartford and Sam would return to writing and platform speaking.
 

Over the next few years they built a whimsical three story house with gables and porches and a tower in East Hartford, and became immersed in the literary and social life of their little community. It became clear, however, that between lecture tours, and social obligations Sam was finding little uninterrupted time to write. Summers provided the only respite when the family left the summer heat of Hartford to stay with Livy's sister, who had inherited from their father a small farm, on the edge of an abandoned limestone quarry in the hills above Elmira. 

Sam marveled at the quiet and the ease with which he could write there. The third summer the family returned to “Quarry Farm,” his sister-in-law had a surprise for him. She had built him a little study, overlooking the old quarry, a hundred yards or so from the main house, away from the hubbub and crying of children, the bustling of servants and the constant stream of visitors. Eight sided, the little study had large windows on every side, and resembled the pilot houses of the old river steamboats where Sam Clemens practiced the profession he loved, so many years before. It was just big enough for a sofa, table and a few chairs; it even had a small fireplace for chilly summer mornings. Sam Clemens loved it, (and so did Mark Twain.) 

The slower pace of life at Quarry Farm, gave Clemens time to sift through the his life's memories for materials he would  use in his two greatest novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Adventure of Huckleberry Finn. The summers at Quarry Farm would lead him to conversations that would profoundly influence his work.

 

In the summer of 1872 he met John T. Lewis a freeborn black man from Maryland who became Twain's model for Jim, the fugitive slave in Huckleberry Finn. The leisurely hours spent with him trading stories of boyhood adventures awakened in Twain the germ of the idea for these books.

Sam Clemens had grown up with slavery and had lived among slaves in his Missouri boyhood home. To some extent he had become inured to the mistreatment whites inflicted on blacks, and his experiences little resembled the catalogue of melodramatic horrors and egregious behaviors that his neighbor in Hartford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, portrayed in her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. But like most whites, he was largely unaware of the more nuanced and subtly evil and destructive injuries that  slavery, and the racism that continued after slavery, inflicted upon blacks .

Front Porch at Quarry Farm. Elmira

The summer following Clemens conversations with John Lewis, Sam had a chance encounter with Mary Ann “Auntie” Cord, the black cook for the Cranes. What followed was a long conversation with her on the front porch of the main house at Quarry Farm. Clemens had made an off handed comment that she always seemed bright and cheery and from that they fell into a long conversation of the “old times,” before the war. Sam and Livy listened spellbound as “Auntie” Cord described the tender relationships she had had with her husband, and the life-long anguish she felt when she was permanently separated from her husband and seven children by her owners. Clemens was deeply affected and suspended work on his current project to write, in southern black dialect “ A True Story” which he published in the Atlantic Monthly. His friend and editor William Dean Howells would comment, this piece 'leaves all other stories of slave life infinitely far behind.' 
 

Clemens reflections and experiences at Quarry Farm would give a depth and subtlety to his writing and help turn an adolescent adventure story (Huckleberry Finn) into a literary work that  Earnest Heminway would call “the best book we've had...All American writing comes from that.” 

Over the years, a steady stream of writings poured forth from the little study. Twain worked on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (pub.1876), A Tramp Abroad (pub.1880), The Prince and the Pauper (pub.1881), Life On the Mississippi (pub.1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (pub.1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (pub.1889) and numerous short pieces and lectures, from his little refuge looking down on Elmira.

In 1952 the little “pilot house on the hill” was moved from Quarry Farm to the center of the Elmira College Campus, to protect it from vandalism, where it continues to inspire young writers and students in the Mark Twain studies program there.

It Happened Here -- Salt City

State Rte. 90, Montezuma

It was while father Simon LeMoyne was visiting the Onondaga in 1654 that his Iroquois hosts showed him a spring they said was "defiled by a demon." LeMoyne recognized it for what it was, a salt-brine spring that he mentioned in his report to the governor of New France. Two years later he returned to establish a mission to the Onondagas, Ste. Marie de Ganentaa. During their time there the Jesuit missionaries made salt, boiling the brine in kettles and sending samples back to Quebec. By 1658 relations between the Iroquois and the French had soured and the missionaries fearing they would be massacred if they stayed, made a precipitous nighttime escape, never to return. The Iroquois had little taste for salt* and after the flight of the French the salt springs lay largely neglected until after the Revolution when the first settlers began filtering into the area. Two escaped Negro slaves were first reported producing salt in kettles and selling it to local settlers. In 1788 Asa Danforth and Comfort Tyler established the first permanent salt works there. By 1790 over 600 bushels of salt were produced in and around the community that became known as Salt Point. (Tyler lived an interesting life. He served in both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. He participated in Aaron Burr's aborted expedition to New Orleans, for which Burr was tried for treason, and Tyler was indicted but never tried. He survived a rabid dog bite by immediately packing the the wound in salt--which may have dessicated and drew out the infected saliva. In 1811 he moved to Montezuma, NY where he set up salt production operations for the Cayuga Manufacturing Company. There he died in 1827.)

Very early on the state government recognized the importance of the salt springs and took over the Salt Point area springs to prevent them from falling into the hands of a small monopoly of owners. In 1788, as part of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the Salt Springs Reservation was established and nine years later, the State assumed formal ownership of the springs. A Salt Springs Superintendent was appointed with a staff in charge of distributing brine to salt manufacturers, collecting fees and maintaining the equipment to erect wells and distribute brine through pumping stations, pipelines, and reservoirs.

A Reconstructed Salt Block on Onondaga Lake on

Early brine boiling operations which arranged a half dozen or fewer kettles in an arch, open to the weather were soon replaced by enclosed furnaces with their kettles arrayed in two rows on a second floor over a flue that led to a high chimney. 

Interior of the Salt Museum's Reconstruction

By the 1850's these "boiling blocks" or "salt blocks" would have contained fifty to sixty 120 gallon copper cauldrons which were supplied with brine from wooden pipes that carried the salt saturated water from state reservoirs to company cisterns to the individual kettles. (Wooden pipes were not subject to corrosion.) In the cisterns, impurities, including iron oxide and calcium chloride would settle out. Further settling out would occur in the boiling kettles which were supplied with a "bittern pan" which would be periodically removed and cleaned out.  Salt crystals formed at the top of the boiling brine and would be scooped out by workers and deposited in baskets made of ash splints, where the excess water was allowed to drain off. The baskets would be emptied into storage bins along the sides of the boiling block and the salt allowed to dry for 14 days before being packed in five bushel barrels.





 In an era before refrigeration, salt was crucial to food preservation. During the Civil War, Union Armies were usually well supplied with beef and pork, while southern armies, their salt works under the control of Union forces, often had to subsist on dried corn and peas and what they could forage. Salt was among the first commodities regulated by State government. The fourteen day drying period was mandated by law.  The Salt Superintendent or his staff inspected every barrel of salt produced.

State regulation, however, didn't extend to the well-being of the workers.  Most salt blocks ran day and night with two shifts of workers, working 12 hour shifts, splitting their days between feeding the fires in the furnace rooms and skimming salt crystals from the cauldrons. In summer the work was hellishly hot, but in the coldest winters, conditions might be even more unhealthful with workers alternating between the hot furnace rooms and the often drafty, freezing boiling lofts.  Then there were the dangers of working around floor level boiling cauldrons and in the constant steamy atmosphere of boiling brine. All too often horrific scalds and burns occurred and frequently pneumonia and other respiratory diseases incapacitated workers. It was not uncommon for workers wives and children to take the place of an injured worker to save his job while he recovered from a work related injury or illness.

A Mobile Drilling Rig at the Salt Museum

To get a good supply of high quality brine, early on, the State and private entrepreneurs began sinking brine wells.**

A Well site east of   
Fulton on Gilbert
Mills Rd, Oswego Co.

The Well Head --150 Years after the
well was drilled, grass refuses to grow on
the brine soaked ground
 

By 1848 the supply of firewood around Salt Point was running out. The rapid development of woodlands into farms throughout the region forced saltmakers to turn to coal, but after the Civil War coal became too expensive, as well.
From 1800 sea salt had been produced on Cape Cod by solar evaporation.  By 1822 the salt region around what became Syracuse had its first solar salt field. By 1888 solar evaporation operations dominated the salt industry around Syracuse. eventually covering the area with some 50,000 "salt rooms," evaporation troughs.
 




 A Model of Salt Producing Facilities, next to the Erie Canal.  White Evaporation Troughs or "Rooms" are flanked by grey Rain Covers.  Nearby are the older, Chimneyed Salt Block Buildings
   
Because salt was such a bulky commodity, transportation costs were a major expense in the production of salt. Prominent community leaders became vocal advocates of improved transportation. Comfort Tyler built some of the first sections of the Seneca Turnpike. A network of roads, followed by rails, began to radiate from Syracuse. Syracuse politicians were early supporters of the Erie Canal and the Seneca and Oswego Canals that would soon connect with the Erie Canal. James Geddes. an early advocate of the Canal, from Syracuse became the canal's four chief engineers. Salt became the major revenue generating commodity shipped on the canal. Cheaper transportation lowered the cost of salt, encouraging New York farmers to diversify from wheat production to pork and dairy production, which in turn, increased the demand for salt. In 1825 Salt Point after being known by several different names was incorporated as the village of Syracuse. In 1847 it merged with the nearby salt producing village of Salina to become the City of Syracuse.

At "Salt Road" and NY 90*** at Summerhill

*A decade before, during Father Jogues captivity the Mohawks teased him saying they had eaten the flesh of captives of other tribes, but had never tasted French flesh before and knowing that the French liked salted meat wondered, if when they boiled him, his flesh would taste salty.

**New Yorker, Edwin L. Drake adopted this technology when he first drilled for oil. See my post "It Happened Here--The Oil Driller" 6/9/13.

***Not to be confused with U.S. 90, the NY Thruway