USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Mount Carmel > The old Mount Carmel parish, origins & outgrowths > Part 15
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* Vol. II, p. 515.
+ Barber and Howe, Historical Collections, p. 80.
XVII. Up the Mohawk and Beyond.
T HE sturdy men and brave women who strike out together into distant lands to transform a tangled waste into productive fields do not usually have to wait long for companions in their enterprise. At any rate, they did not at Bradleys' Corner.
Mary Alling came very soon with her husband, Adonijah Tillotson, from New Hartford; and they were soon joined by his two brothers, John and Matthew; all three originally from Massachusetts and known respectively by the titles, Captain, General, and Colonel. They arrived in 1794. A little later, Chloe Alling, having come on from New Hart- ford with the Reverend Dan Bradley at the time of his re- moval to Marcellus, joined her sister, Mrs. Tillotson; then went to live with her uncle Jabez; and, in 1796, became the wife of Miles Bradley. Then came the brother, Rodolph Alling, uniting the three children of Captain Jonathan and Hannah (Bradley) Alling, for the first time, probably, since their separation in Connecticut. Captain Alling, having mar- ried a second time, and then a third, eventually found a home in Smithboro, Tioga County, where he died. A daugh- ter of the second marriage, Hannah, married John Light and had a large family of twelve children at Smithboro.
A younger sister of Dan and Jabez Bradley was Lois, who had married Tully Crosby at Mount Carmel and, by his early death, in 1794, had been left a widow with one little child. She, too, found her way to Genoa and in course of time became the wife of Deacon John Stoyell of Moravia, in the immediate neighborhood of her old friends. Deacon Stoyell had come from New London County, Connecticut, in 1790, and bought of a Dutchman a large tract of land through which flows the Owasco, furnishing good water-power for a saw mill and grist mill that he built .*
* C. C. C. Bradley's MSS.
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Again, Deacon William Bradley, as he was called after the organization of the church in 1798 and his election to that office in 1800, was not very long without other mem- bers of his father's family near him. His brother Lemi, who had married Ruth Newell of Lenox in 1795, joined him in Genoa very early; and after a time Daniel Bradley, the youngest of Captain Jesse's family, with his wife, Patience Cooper, followed on to make their home at Groton, in Tompkins County, a few miles south of Genoa, but near enough for neighborly intercourse.
Before leaving Mount Carmel, Eli Bradley and his family lived in a neighborhood largely made up of people who bore the names of Goodyear and Atwater. Mrs. Eli Bradley was herself a Goodyear. It is not strange, therefore, that families with these names were among the early settlers in this New York community.
In Mount Carmel Parish affairs, Captain Samuel Atwater was a leading man, having a prominence among the people below the Steps very much like that of Captain Daniel Brad- ley among those living to the north. He had a family of thirteen children, ten of whom grew to manhood and wo- manhood; most of them married and had large families of their own. Among the children were John Atwater, who married Susannah Goodyear; Caleb Atwater, who married Thankful Cotter; Susannah Atwater, who married Joseph Goodyear, and Sarah Atwater, who never married. All of these removed to Genoa and "settled on the Ridge road south" of Northville, apparently about 1794. An older sis- ter, Abigail Atwater, married Titus Goodyear and continued to live in the vicinity of the old home at Mount Carmel; but their son, John Goodyear, afterward came to Genoa, and after a time married Julia Bradley, a daughter of Jabez; and another son, Dr. Miles Goodyear, after his medical course at Yale, began practice as a physician at Genoa, but soon re- moved to the village of Cortland, where he passed his pro- fessional life and attained to wide distinction. One of the sisters of Jabez Bradley who remained in Connecticut mar- ried Asa Goodyear, Jr., who was in Genoa for a time; and a
Up the Mohawk and Beyond. 169
son of theirs, Charles Goodyear, came to Genoa after his uncle's death in 1817, and lived for a short time with his aunt. These Atwater and Goodyear families contained a con- siderable number of children when they came from Con- necticut, and the number became larger in the years that fol- lowed their arrival .*
In going from New England to western New York, peo- ple went by different ways. The Bradleys went through Albany and up the Mohawk River. A daughter of Mrs. Chloe Alling Bradley has left this account of her mother's journey with the Reverend Dan Bradley from New Hart- ford: "Mother assisted in the care of the children, coming up the Mohawk river in an open boat to the head of the river and camping out at night, crossing over to Fish Creek by land, then going to Oneida Lake and through there into Seneca River, camping one night at Jack's Rifts, then into Cayuga Lake and landing near where Northville now is, go- ing there to her sister's home, Mrs. Tillotson's, where she stayed until she went to her uncle's, Squire Bradley's."+
An account of the journey of some people from Green- wich, Connecticut, to King's Ferry, near Northville, tells of a wholly different route: "In the spring of 1793 Jonathan Mead and his brother-in-law, John Moe, came from Green- wich. Mead had been a soldier in the Revolution and settled on lot No. 5, which he had received for military service. He and Moe with their families came by schooner as far as Cats- kill, bringing with them wagons and oxen; thence on a track of blazed trees and lopped underbrush they came to Owego, from which point theirs were the first wagons coming in this direction. It was a four weeks' journey. Benjamin Close came with Mead and Moe; put up a house, and returned for his family in the fall. On coming back, Mrs. Close brought her youngest child, an infant in arms, all the way from Con- necticut on horseback. Mrs. Weeks, a daughter of Mead, and her husband were of the party; and in her old age she told
* Atwater Genealogy, pp. 139-140, 188-189; Goodyear Genealogy, PP. 154, 215.
+ C. C. C. Bradley's MSS.
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of the tiresome journey of four weeks by way of Catskill, Oxford, and Owego."*
The colony at Homer in Cortland County was about twenty miles directly east of Genoa and was no doubt in close relations with Genoa. Groton, the place where Daniel Bradley lived, was about equally distant from the two vil- lages. Sempronius, to which Eli Atwater removed from Ho- mer, lies further north, but is also about as near to Genoa as it is to Homer. Another settlement in this region that had an intimate connection with Mount Carmel was Lake Ridge in Tompkins County, a few miles south of Genoa.
About 1804, Abner Todd with his wife and the younger children of his large family removed to Lake Ridge. He was a son of Ithamar Todd, another of the leading men who started the Mount Carmel Parish. His farm was on the southern slope of the Blue Hills, east of the river, and in a neighborhood quite distinct from the others that have been named. Abner Todd's wife was Mary Tuttle, the twin of Nathaniel Tuttle, 3d, and sister of Uri, Charles, Jonathan, and Jesse; also of Mrs. Joel Bradley. Several of Abner Todd's older children remained in Mount Carmel: one was the wife of Deacon Aaron Bradley, another of Elias Hotch- kiss, a third of Isaac Chatterton, who went to Rutland, Ver- mont. A son, Medad, also remained, while another son, Jo- siah, went with his father and mother to their new home. They were near kinsfolk of the Amos Todd and Mrs. Beebe who were the first pioneers on the ground at Homer in 1791. This may have influenced their removal to Lake Ridge; not to speak of the presence of many other old neighbors who had gone before that time into this new country.f
So large a number of families who were from the same parish and had been well acquainted in their old Connecticut homes must have made the new country, wild as it was, not so very uncongenial or different from the New England they had always known. And besides these former neighbors, the other settlers whom they found were most of them from
* Centennial, Presbyterian Church of Genoa.
t The Tuttle Family, pp. 272-273.
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Up the Mohawk and Beyond.
somewhere in Connecticut or the other New England States; having the same habits and ways of thinking; industrious, intelligent, religious, maintaining their church and school; even their town meeting, and the whole order of their social life, transplanted with slight change from an old soil to an- other where it could grow on with renewed vigor.
Some of the Mount Carmel pioneers, however, made their way to other parts of the great state of New York. About 1790, Jared Goodyear, having recently married Beda Ives, joined a company which was going to found a settle- ment in Schoharie County. This was earlier than the migra- tions to the region of Genoa and was near the time of the first start at Homer. For this reason, Schoharie County, which is only a little way beyond Albany, was looked upon as much farther away than it seemed a few years later. It was called "Western New York" and was talked about as "The Far West." The account of the journey dwells upon the fact that the whole distance was made by ox teams. The settlement was prosperous, as were almost all those planted by New England people in the period following the Revolu- tion. The Goodyears were especially influential. They had a large family and their sons and daughters filled a large place in the community. As they were not very distant from the old homes in Connecticut, intimate relations were kept up with their many family friends, among the Ives as well as the Goodyears, by frequent visits back and forth. So, in the course of time, it came about that one of the sons, Willis Goodyear, married the daughter of his cousin Horace and went back to make his home in the old Goodyear mansion; to raise a new family there; and to become an honored dea- con in the Mount Carmel Congregational Church .*
The village of Unadilla will be remembered as being close to Oghwaga, where the Connecticut missionaries for many years maintained their Indian school; and as a famous landing on the Susquehanna River for the pioneers on the way to their settlements in the Wyoming valley. With the
* Goodyear Genealogy, pp. 98, 99.
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changed order of things after the Revolution, this point be- came a field for new settlers. One who came here about 1800 was John Dickerman, a son of that earlier pioneer who had gone from New Haven to Vermont some thirty or more years before and had made his home in Lyndon. This son was a soldier in the Revolutionary War, and after the War, like so many other soldiers, looked to the state of New York as especially attractive for a new home. He had married, in 1789, Thankful Smith of Granby, Massachusetts, and al- ready had five children, to whom six more were added after his coming to Unadilla. He worked at the trade of a black- smith, but also had a small pension to aid in the support of his family. His four sons and seven daughters all grew up, married, and had families; so that the number of his grand- children was seventy-two. Several members of this family have risen to distinction. One son, Dr. Clark Dickerman, was a physician at Harford, Pennsylvania, and was highly hon- ored for his professional ability and his estimable character; and his son, Charles Heber Dickerman, was a representative of Pennsylvania in the United States Congress. Another grandson, Albert Dickerman, after three years of service as an army officer in the Civil War, studied law in Cleveland, Ohio, practiced his profession in Hillsdale, Michigan, and held the responsible positions of circuit court commissioner, probate judge, and state senator; later, at Muskegon, he served for six years as circuit judge; after which he removed to Watsonville, California, where the last years of his life were passed. In 1869, he published a carefully prepared his- tory of that branch of the Dickerman family to which he be- longed, which is embodied in the larger Dickerman Gene- alogy .*
In the West Woods part of Mount Carmel there lived a family of the name of Sperry, which removed, not far from 1 805, to Russia in Herkimer County, New York. The father was John Sperry, son of Asa and Hester (Hull) Sperry, and the mother was Amy, the eldest daughter of Enos and Lois (Alling) Dickerman. There were eight children in the
* Pp. 240-272.
Up the Mohawk and Beyond. I73
family before the removal, and four more were born after- ward. Russia is hardly more than ten miles from New Hart- ford; but there is no way of knowing what influences brought about this removal; or the stern experiences of this family in breaking the ground and getting a roof over their heads. There are, however, very full records of the family which show that, from this spot in the wilderness, children and grandchildren went forth to establish a multitude of other homes in different New York communities, in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and other states, so that the descendants of this one couple number sev- eral hundred .*
A little earlier, Jared Pitkin Sperry, with his wife Esther Lucy Sanford, had gone out from the same neighborhood to the settlement at Russia. Esther Sanford was the daughter of Stephen and Sybil (White) Sanford, who lived to the west of Centerville, about two miles south of the Enos Dickerman homestead. Jared Sperry and Esther were mar- ried February 2, 1794, and, immediately after, started on their journey to make a new home in the wilderness. There were eight children in their family, and many later descend- ants. We cannot but associate them with John Sperry and his wife in their pioneer enterprise.t
Mention has been made of the Reverend Benjamin Doo- little who went to Northfield, Massachusetts, and of another Benjamin Doolittle who was among the early settlers in Pennsylvania. There was a third of the same name, the son of Titus Doolittle, a near neighbor to Ithamar Todd, who went to Catskill, New York, before 1812, and, after living there awhile, removed with his family to Enfield in Tomp- kins County. He had eight sons and three daughters to bear their part in that new community. Titus Doolittle had an- other son, Titus, Jr., who remained at Mount Carmel. He also had seven daughters, all of whom went away to make their homes. At least two of these seem to have gone with their brother Benjamin to Enfield, for one of them, Sally,
* Dickerman Genealogy, pp. 407-422.
+ Sanford Genealogy, chap. XX, p. 6.
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The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
became the wife of Jonathan Rumsey, who lived at Tru- mansburg, near Enfield, and, after her early death, married her sister Polly.
The Doolittle families in and about Mount Carmel were numerous and went abroad in many directions, often leaving no clews by which their after history could be traced. There was a Philemon Doolittle, who went from Wallingford to Blandford, Massachusetts, in 1777, and removed thence to western New York, where he was a minister and left a large family of children in the neighborhood of New Haven, near Oswego. There is also some evidence that two brothers of the elder Titus Doolittle, whose names were Benjamin and Samuel, went from Mount Carmel to Edgefield, South Carolina; whence a host of descendants have been dis- tributed to other parts of that state, and to Alabama, Missis- sippi, and Texas .*
Colonel Samuel Bellamy was a prominent figure in Mount Carmel life, as has been already shown. He kept the village tavern, which stood on ground just north of the church. After accumulating considerable property, he de- cided to give up his rather laborious business; and, as he had no family but his wife, it was comparatively easy for him to move. His wife was a sister of Jabez and Dan Bradley and we may be sure that he was well informed of the things go- ing on in Onondaga County; how enterprising people were flocking there from all over New England and opportunities never known before were being offered for every sort of undertaking and investment. Colonel Bellamy, with his so- cial habits and fondness for mingling with men of affairs, was not likely to be impervious to these strong attractions. The thought of being near so many old friends and neigh- bors in the new country, where they were bringing about good results and enjoying no little prosperity, must have had a good deal of weight. On June 7, 1804, he sold to Noah Barber for $ 5,000 forty-six acres of land with the buildings in Mount Carmel; and a year later, June 15, 1805, he sold fifty acres more for $2,000 to Samuel Chapman. After that,
* Doolittle Genealogy, pp. 222, 346.
175
Up the Mohawk and Beyond.
about 1806, he was in Marcellus, where now is the village of Skaneateles, near Dan Bradley. A Congregational church was started at this place in 1801, which is believed to have been the first church of any order in the old town of Mar- cellus. It afterward became a Presbyterian church .*
Colonel Bellamy was probably in active business here, at least to the extent of finding a remunerative use for his money, for he became a rich man, according to the estimates of those times. His position was unlike that of the other pio- neers all about him, for he had no children of his own to whom to leave his property; and so he made up his mind to put it into a school that should be of permanent value to this region. In the year 1816, the Reverend Dirk C. Lansing, a graduate of Yale in the class of 1804, became pastor of the Presbyterian church of Auburn and, being a man of zeal and eloquence, soon won the hearts of the people for many miles around by conducting revival services and leading large numbers into the churches. Then, a movement being started to found a theological school, he was chosen financial agent to collect funds for the enterprise. Some $ 16,000 was raised, mostly in small sums in Auburn. When application was made to the generous people in other communities, Colonel Bellamy responded with a large contribution, which was fol- lowed by other gifts till his entire estate, with the exception of an annuity of some $600, which he left to his widow, and some other specific bequests, passed into the funds of the Auburn Theological Seminary. A memorial sermon by the Reverend Henry Fowler, entitled the "History of the Church of Christ in Auburn," preached on November 28, 1867, has this passage:
The corner stone was laid May 11, 1820, by Colonel Bellamy of Skaneateles, a liberal benefactor, whose name, and that of Colo- nel Linklaen of Cazenovia, inscribed on a silver medal, were de- posited in the stone. On the same medal was also inscribed: "Behold I lay in Zion for a foundation a chief corner-stone, elect, precious" "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and forever."¡
* Barber and Howe, Historical Collections, p. 403.
+ Op. cit., p. 23.
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The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
The pastor of the Mount Carmel church received a letter, under date of October 15, 1914, from the librarian of the Auburn Theological Seminary, inquiring about this bene- factor, as follows:
I am in search of information regarding one of the founders of our Seminary who died in 1829. It is Col. Samuel Bellamy who re- moved from New Haven to Skaneateles about 1806. I have learned that he came to New Haven from Mt. Carmel where he was a member of the Congregational Church and a Free Mason, and "his house still standing" when Blake's History of Hamden was written. Can you give me any information about him or place this letter in the hands of some one who can? I would especially like to know whence came his title of "Col." which was uniformly given him here; also any other personal items which would help to make him more than a name to us. His was one of the two names inscribed on the corner stone of our first building, laid in 1820.
The catalogue of the seminary for 1913-14 states that the original seminary building was taken down in 1892; that the original endowment consisted of ten acres of land for the campus and $35,000; that the present endowment is $ 550,000 with a campus of about fifteen acres; that the fac- ulty numbered in that year fourteen members, and the stu- dents sixty-five. The letter of a niece of Mrs. Bellamy, of July 6, 1896, says that Col. Bellamy's will gave to the semi- nary $60,000 and made it the residuary legatee .* What used to be called the "Bellamy and Edwards Professorship" was named for him. He was a trustee of the seminary from 1821 to the end of his life. He became a member of the First Presbyterian Church in Auburn January 27, 1823; died March 20, 1829, and was buried in Auburn.
Canandaigua is a point of particular interest in the history of western New York. Its beginnings remind one of the first settlement of the Whites at Whitestown. The lands of this region lying west of a line near Geneva, some 6,000,000 acres, were ceded to Massachusetts by New York at the Hartford Convention of 1786, and in the following year a tract in the eastern half amounting to 2,200,000 acres was
* C. C. C. Bradley's MSS.
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Up the Mohawk and Beyond.
sold for $1,000,000 to Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gor- ham, who went out in 1788 with a company of men to ex- plore and survey the territory. They had to make terms with the Indians and met them in council where Canandaigua now stands, and after a famous conference obtained their confir- mation of the title. Proceeding with their surveys, they opened a land office there and put the lots on the market .*
Moses Atwater of Cheshire came to Canandaigua in 1791 and set up as a physician. It is said that he was there in 1789; this may have been on some transient errand. He was a Yale graduate of 1787, two years earlier than Dan and Joel Brad- ley, who were his neighbors, and whom he must have known before going to college, as well as after. He studied medicine after graduation and removed to Canandaigua the same year that Dan Bradley made his first visit to Whitestown; so that we can imagine that the two were together during the early part of their westward journey. Things must have been quite rough in the new settlement; for in the following year it was reported as having only two frame houses and a few log cabins. The young doctor was very heartily welcomed under such circumstances and soon came into a position of high es- teem; he was made associate justice of the county court in 1795 and enjoyed increasing honors to the close of a long life. He was joined at Canandaigua by his younger brother, Jeremiah, who also lived to a great age, knowing the place in its day of prosperity as well as when it was only a land office with a few cabins about it.t
The work of putting these Massachusetts lands on public sale was hardly begun, when the Connecticut lands of north- ern Ohio began to draw the interest of the pioneering New Englanders. The Connecticut Land Company, consisting of forty-eight subscribers, took over these lands to the amount of 1,200,000 acres, in the year 1795. Oliver Phelps of Canandaigua subscribed $ 168,180, which was more than any- one else; and Pierpont Edwards of New Haven, $60,000.
* Barber and Howe, Historical Collections, pp. 405-408.
1 Yale Biographies, Fourth Series, pp. 524-525; Atwater Genealogy, p. 186.
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The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
Caleb Atwater of Wallingford was another of the larger subscribers and, having paid down his money for the stock, he went out, located, and surveyed his lands, one township of which received the name of Atwater; but he came back to live in Wallingford .*
There was an Atwater in Mount Carmel who went to Ohio to stay, a young man of the name of Amzi. He was a son of Enos and a grandson of Jacob and Miriam (Ives) Atwater, whose home was one of that little group of home- steads known as "New State." Enos Atwater lived on a farm about a mile west of his father's, the ground of which was rugged, even for Connecticut. At about the age of nineteen, Amzi paid a visit to his uncle, the Reverend Noah Atwater of Westfield, Massachusetts, who was in the habit of teach- ing mathematics to a few young men. He was invited to re- main and study, and thus learned the art of surveying. He also came into companionship with Warham Shepherd, who was afterward associated with him in explorations. In the spring of 1796, with a knapsack on his back, he started on foot and alone to join Shepherd at Canandaigua and help the Connecticut Land Company with their survey. He was at this work for more than a year, during which Shepherd fell ill and died. In 1798-99, he was in the employ of the Holland Land Company, in the western part of New York, and assisted in running nearly all the township lines. In the fall of 1799, he returned to New England and spent the winter with his uncle in further study. Then, in 1800, he took his brother Jotham, who had been with him before in some of his surveys, and together they went to Ohio to make their permanent home. They bought land at Mantua, a place between Cleveland and Youngstown, and settled down to farming. Their father died not long after; their mother came out to live with them, and Mantua became the home of the family, their four sisters coming eventually to Ohio and dying in that state. The Portage County History speaks of Amzi Atwater as "the man who, more than any other, left his impress on the township and county. On the or-
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