The growth of a century: as illustrated in the history of Jefferson county, New York, from 1793-1894, Part 1

Author: Haddock, John A., b. 1823-
Publication date: 1895
Publisher: Albany, N. Y., Weed-Parsons printing company
Number of Pages: 1098

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HADDOCK'S

CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY, N.Y.

SITY 998L

A.D

Cornell University Library

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3 1924 075 483 184

THE GROWTH OF A CENTURY :

AS ILLUSTRATED IN THE

History of Jefferson County,

NEW YORK,

FROM 1793 TO 1894.

" The war-worn lived content upon his unmenaced pension, with no anxious thought as to penury or the poor-house. And when his work was done it was left to the historian to write that in material prosperity, in moral force, in the power which comes from the respect of other nations, the United States held a position never before attained."-[1880-92.]

DANIEL WEBSTER once wrote: "There may be, indeed, a respect for ancestry which nourishes only a weak pride. But there is also a moral and philosophical respect for ancestors which elevates the character and improves the heart - a respect which is laudably manifested by perpetuating their lineaments and de- scribing their virtues."

COMPILED FROM STATE, COUNTY AND TOWN RECORDS, WITH MANY ORIGINAL ARTICLES UPON INTERESTING SUBJECTS,

JOHN A. HADDOCK.

ALBANY, N. Y. WEED-PARSONS PRINTING COMPANY, PRINTERS AND BINDERS. 1895.

LIBRARY

DEDICATION.

UPON the Peristyle at the Chicago World's Fair, of 1893, were inscribed the words printed below - the author being President CHARLES W. ELIOT of Harvard University. They are inserted here as strikingly appropriate for our purpose :

TO THE BOLD MEN, THEIR NAMES REMEMBERED OR FORGOTTEN, WHO FIRST EXPLORED, THROUGH PERILS MANIFOLD, THE SHORES, LAKES, RIYERS, MOUNTAINS, VALLEYS AND PLAINS OF THIS NEW LAND.

TO THE BRAVE SETTLERS WHO LEVELLED FORESTS, CLEARED FIELDS, MADE PATHS BY LAND AND WATER, AND PLANTED COMMONWEALTHS.

TO THE BRAVE WOMEN WHO IN SOLITUDE, AMID STRANGE DANGERS AND HEAVY TOIL, REARED FAMILIES, AND MADE HOMES.

A FEW DARED, TOILED AND SUFFERED, MYRIADS ENJOY THE FRUITS.

OF MANY RACES, TONGUES, CREEDS AND AIMS, BUT ALL HEROES OF DISCOVERY.

THE WILDERNESS AND THE SOLITARY PLACE SHALL BE GLAD OF THEM.

BUT BOLDER THEY WHO FIRST OFFCAST THEIR MOORINGS FROM THE HABITABLE PAST. AND VENTURED, CHARTLESS, ON THE SEA OF STORM-ENGENDERING LIBERTY.

I, FREEDOM, DWELL WITH KNOWLEDGE; I ABIDE WITH MEN BY CULTURE TRAINED AND FORTIFIED. CONSCIENCE MY SCEPTRE IS, AND LAW MY SWORD.

WE HERE HIGHLY RESOLVE THAT GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE BY THE PEOPLE SHALL NOT PERISH FROM THE EARTH.

A FEW EXPLANATIONS.

THE desire to write a History of my native county first formulated itself in my mind in 1892, largely developed through the advice of Dr. A. R. THOMAS, now Dean of the great Hahneman College and Hospital in the city of Philadelphia, who was once a Watertown boy, born upon Beebe's Island about the same year as my- self (in 1823). His advice was gratefully received, for he has had much to do with books, as student, reader, teacher and publisher. I hesitated long before under- taking such a task. but gradually the thought became one of simple "duty," and I was led to my final decision in a way which a judicious friend advises me it would not be proper to speak of in public, for fear that some hypercritical person might say I was " poseing for effect." Suffice it to say that when my decision was reached my desire to take up the work became altogether predominant. It was like a con- suming fire. I knew that the times were hard. Nevertheless I persevered, and have worked for about fourteen months continuously and conscientiously, early and late, with the result which is before the reader.

I am painfully conscious that the work has many imperfections. There are some errors that ought to have been avoided, and a few articles that might have been omitted. I have at the last been much puzzled as to what to leave out, for not half the material I have prepared has obtained a place. My promise was to make a book of 480 pages. This volume contains over 950.

My labors have been materially aided (and at a trying crisis) by Gov. Flower and his two noble brothers, John D. and Anson R., and by his nephew, Fred., son of Col. G. W. Flower; by Mrs. C. H. McCormick, and by Dr. A. R. Thomas, of Philadelphia city. To Mr. J. W. Brockway, of Watertown, a gentleman who knows full well the trials of publishing, I have been indebted for material aid, as well as for sound counsel, and for kindest words of encouragement. No man's friendship has pleased me more than his. Indeed the press of the country has given my work ample and hearty endorsement, while the great mass of the people have treated me fully as well as I deserved.

For assistance in editing and preparing matter for the History, I am under obligation to Hon. L. Ingalls, Col. A. D. Shaw, Gen. Bradley Winslow, Col. D. M. Evans, now of Minneapolis, Minn .; to Mr. Geo. Allen, of Pierrepont Manor; to Mrs. E. J. Clark; to Mr. Joseph Fayel and his talented brother William, now of St. Louis; to Mr. L. G. Peck, of Carthage; to General Bradley Winslow ; to Mr. Theodore Butterfield, of Syracuse; to Lieut. Don M. Watson, of Redwood, and to my early friend, Mr. Andrew J. Fairbanks, one of the oldest Watertown-born citizens now upon the stage; and last, not least, to Miss Florence Ida Bickford, my indefatigable assistant.

We beg indulgence from the reader if he perceives trivial errors. The page of " Errata " is referred to for a settlement of some crooked lapses, and the reader will perhaps be more charitable when he considers how many names and dates are herein recorded.

We are aware that in each town some deserving people have not been men- tioned, and possibly that some are noticed who might well have been omitted. The public should remember that the history of a county is not a census report, nor yet would it be a history if none were named especially. Men and families are what make history, so far as personalities are concerned, and these, after all, make up the greater part of what we call "life," and the delineation of "life " is history ; add to this the indifference manifested by the average American citizen as to his own or parents' genealogy, and the reader will appreciate why some people are omitted who think they ought to have been mentioned.

Now that the work is done, we become more and more conscious of its de- merits. Another may come who will be glad to read what we have written and compiled, and if he be chastened by experience, to him the author willingly leaves his fate, and we shall perhaps rest easier if by chance he may say a word in praise.

JNO. A. HADDOCK.

A PLEA FOR PERSONALITY.

COLONEL SHAW, in his excellent "Founder's Day Oration," delivered at Cornell University in 1892, quoted HORATIO SEYMOUR as declaring that "History was robbed of its most useful details through the omission of little things, which are the real basis of character, and enable us to become acquainted with the associa- tions and conditions which have much to do with moulding the lives of past generations." HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, in her admirable "Old Town Folks," says there is so much that is human in every man that the life of a single individual, if really and vividly portrayed, in all its aspirations, struggles, failures, and suc- cesses, would command the interest of all.

Beyond this, however, it should be considered that every individual is part and parcel of a great picture of that society in which he lives and acts, and his life cannot be depicted without reproducing the picture of the world he lives in. It has appeared to me that by introducing many biographies and vivid descriptions of transactions which may be strictly classed as "personal," I shall be able to present to the reader the image of a period in Jefferson county's growth most peculiar and interesting, the impress of which has almost faded away. I mean those ante-railroad and telegraph times, the period when our isolated position made us a self-contained, ultra-democratic collection of farmers and denizens of small villages, shut out from the older portions of the State-and separated by a pathless ocean from the Old World, whose refinement and civilizing influences were almost forgotten-and yet, under all these depressing conditions, there burned, like a live coal, individual characteristics and personal yearnings which could only be satisfied by experiences (sometimes fruitless for good) with the great world which was beyond our limited horizon.

Before MACAULEY began his History of England, none but educated Englishmen were familiar with the early history of their native land-for the men who had up to that time written English history were learned pedants, with minds full of dates and naked facts, but lacking in a single spark of imaginative power, and their books were not read by the common people because uninteresting. When MACAULEY's book began to be known, however, the printing presses had to be forced to extra speed to supply the enormous demand ; for he introduced his own inimitable powers of description into every chapter, and the reader saw real men and women parade before him upon the stage of what seemed to be real life. He neglected no fact or date or person, but he wove them all together in such a way that his His- tory read like an attractive essay. When this distinguished author passed away with only a part of his great work completed, even the common people mourned his loss, and it was felt by all that a great light had gone out in England. No one has yet taken up the work he left unfinished.

If, then, in these pages the reader shall find considerable personality - in biographies, in political delineations and in the chronicling of leading incidents in certain prominent men's lives - let him not pass them over as unbecoming a "history ; " but regard such efforts, rather, as really the best way of impressing history upon the human mind. Nor will these pages fail in trustworthy data, in

INTRODUCTION.

statistics, or facts, with such other details (often dry as dust) as are demanded in a faithful portraiture of that condition to which we apply the generic term "life."

It should not be forgotten that the need for publishing personal biographies is much greater in this democratic government than in one where royalty rules, and by its titled court gives tone to society, to literature, even to morals. Royalty beholds its own greatness reflected in its nobles, and their individual history is well looked after, published at public expense, and religiously preserved among the archives of that nation; and in America there are many ancient families who can any day appeal to these records, printed and written, and trace their lineage back for a thousand years. But in our own Republic there is no public method of preserving a record of those (perhaps more truly noble), who, from generation to generation, perpetuate patriotism and love of goodness and respect for learning. For a record of such lives we must depend upon private publication and upon such histories as local pride or the hope of gain may bring forth from one era to another.

EMERSON, in his admirable lectures upon "Representative Men," strikes the true note as regards greatness and our present duty to perpetuate its memory ; not as slavish idol-worshippers, but as men who, by their common humanity, are in some sense allied to a higher life, and may perhaps in their own breasts feel the latent yearnings of a sentiment which those we call "great " can deliver to our listening ears or to our ready understanding with such facility. Nature, he says, seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the veracity of good men (and he might have said of good women, too, for he doubtless meant it); they make the earth wholesome, and those who live with them find life glad and nutri- tious. They grow to be good in an atmosphere of goodness, and such noble ones we immortalize by calling our children and our towns after them. Their very names are wrought into the verbs of languages ; their effigies are in our homes, and each day we recall them by some apt remembrance. The knowledge that from Watertown emanated the cunning device (long sought and needed in every household) by which any oil can be burned without a chimney; and that in that town was born the inventive mind that produced a railway car in which the sick, the wounded, the aged or the weary may be borne in a decent bed from ocean to ocean; or that, soaring above pure mechanism into the realms of deductive phi- losophy, a Jefferson county man discovered, by analytical chemistry, that God- sent anæsthetic which gives painless forgetfulness under the surgeon's cruel knife - we say that such a knowledge raises the credit of all that county's citizens, and loosens a thousand streams of ambitious emulation, and may quicken the womb of all futurity.

The great moral of biography is that it brings us in touch with the good who have preceded us, or (better still) are yet spared to our daily observation. Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus ; every novel-writer (not excepting our beloved WM. DEAN HOWELLS, the printing-office graduate), is a debtor to Homer and to Shakespeare. Every carpenter who shaves with a fore- plane is in debt to some former inventor. We may justly be said to be as great gainers by finding a new property in the old earth as if we had discovered a new planet.

INTRODUCTION.

Men are helpful to one another, too, through the affections and the finer sensi- bilities. One cannot read Plutarch in his delineations of the characters of great warriors or rulers without a tingling of the blood. One obscure sage may be the instructor of an hundred ages. Plato, through the mechanism of the printed page, speaks to a thousand millions, while in his own day he ranked as only the teacher of a village. How long ago Confucius lived no archaeologist can tell, but his influence is the one grand gift of the oldest people to all later mankind.

Human society has been compared to a Pestalozzian school, where all are teach- ers and pupils in turn. We are equally served while receiving or imparting. Men who know the same things are not the best company for each other. But bring to each an intelligent person of an another experience, and it is as if you let off water from a lake by cutting another basin. It seems a great mechanical advantage, and becomes a decided benefit to each speaker, because each supplements the other; and so when we read of genius or exceptional moral worth or proud achievements, we desire that our inward aspirations may conform to what we read. Who will deny that we are in some indefinable way linked for good to those we admire? For we know that every possibility must have for its germ a resolution to achieve.

The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The endearing and desirable qualities abide - the men who exhibit them serve their purpose and pass away, but their qualities are preserved, and adorn some other life. The ves- sels upon which the beholder reads sacred emblems, turn out to be common pot- tery, but the sense of the picture is sacred, and may (by the printed page) be transferred to the whole world. At last we shall doubtless cease to look to even the best men for completeness, and content ourselves with their social or delegated qualities. In all things there are some imperfections. Even the finest marble reveals some coarser specks. And it is well that such should be the fact; else man, conscious in his inner soul of many imperfections, would cease to press upward and onward, discouraged by the perfection around him. But he struggles forward, approaching completeness as closely as his limitations will permit; and, with such thoughts in his mind, the writer begins the work upon this History.

JNO. A. HADDOCK.

1793-1893

AS THIS is an "alleged " History, and is expected to be read 50, 60, perhaps 100 years hence, it may be appropriate, in its first pages, to concentrate a few thoughts connecting the year 1893 - which has just closed as we begin the preparation of this work - with that '93 of a century ago.

These '93's seem to be phenomenally un- propitious years. In 1793 terror reigned in France. then just past its zenith as the first political power in Europe. The infuriated people took their poor fat king, who did not know enough to act as conductor upon a city trolley car, and with no more harm in him than there is in a watermelon, and barbarously guillotined him. And his wife, the beloved Marie Antoinette, a peerless, charitable, eminently religious Catholic lady, they took her from her miserable prison one morning and chopped off her head, in the name of " liberty, equality and fraternity " - and this, after the mob had led before her grated window her poor, de- Inded little son, the legitimate heir to the throne of France, and made him shout, for her to hear, " Vive la Commune !" After that inhuman cruelty, death must have been a glad release.

The '93 of the last century was a dreadful year - none darker in all the centuries. France was literally crazy, and the insanity spread even to surrounding countries. Would you believe it? - in the grand old Quaker city of Philadelphia, American patriots in various conditions from grog, danced the can-can and sang disreputable communist songs. Then try to realize the contagious panic which swept over sedate England, when Burke, one of the greatest statesmen that or any other country ever produced, even with his sovereign reason and capacity for thought, dashed a dagger down upon the floor of the House of Com- mons, to emphasize his liatred of the French, an animosity which seems to have taken possession of every Englishman. And then the Germans- who have about as much business in France as we would have in Brazil - must needs invade France and be shrivelled up at Valuny and Jemappez. And Napoleon, that Corsican scourge, just beginning his fateful career, that was to end with the allies in his capital, and he a caged prisoner in St. Helena.

Passing to our own '93-the rounded cen- tury in the development of that once wilder- ness Black River country, now " blossoming as the rose," and literally "abounding with fatness," and again concentrating our thoughts upon France, we see, not heads chopped off-but what a chopping of credit, of public reputations, of national self- respect ! - the culmination of the Panama business developing a state of morals that

found but poor vindication in sending the principal promoters to prison ; the mnost dis- tinguished engineer of his time dragged down to the level of a common swindler. The head-chopping of 1793 could hardly have been worse, and may possibly be ex- cused on the plea of "general insanity " - but the France of 1893 made public that dry-rot which had eaten away the vital honesty of so many of her high officials.

And has the '93 of our day been much kinder to Germany ? Take her young, am- bitious, restless, meddling, fussy emperor- can you imagine any thing more trying to the nerves than to live under such a ruler, when any midnight whistle of the wind may suggest a summons to mobilize that vast human machine, his army, and start it any day on the familiar road to Paris, via Sedan and Strasburg.

And Italy, that land of the she-wolf's suckled infants - the home of modern art and artists - so rich in storied memories, sun-kissed, and environed with purpling vineyards-she is bankrupt, almost beyond any fate short of repudiation. And then Austria, with her antagonistic nationalities, threatened by destruction between the Sonth and that ponderous Russia, halting between barbarism, anarchy, or war.

And then England - the country from which we so largely sprung ; which has amiably sought, by two wars, to bring us back to her motherly protection and her peculiar love, but failing in her benevolent and unselfish designs, becoming our clamor- ous competitor in the markets of the world; and then, in our hour of sorest need, turn- ing loose upon us armed cruisers, to burn our unarmed merchant-ships, and drive our flag from the ocean. And then, when the gallant Winslow had brought one of these English-built-and-manned pirate ships to bay, and had left her decks level with the sea, just then a watchful British ship inter- feres, and rescues from capture the pirate's captain, bearing him away to a reception in England's capital. This is that friendly England which is even now attempting, in many ways, to shape to her own selfish ends the tariff laws of the country her great Gladstone sought to dismember. Think of the losses brought upon her by her over- reaching greed; the fall of her greatest banking-house, and the later disclosures of mal-administration in the Bank of England itself. Staggering under these and kindred disadvantages, her heavily taxed people are asked to add new war-ships, to cost $125,- 000,000, to her already enormous navy, be- cause her supremacy in the Mediterranean is threatened by Russia and France.

And the United States - possessing the bravest, freest, most enlightened people

THE GROWTH OF A CENTURY.

under the sun (if we are not greatly mis- taken) - even we are finding this fateful '93 the worst year of the century: surpassing even '57 or '73 - all springing from a sense- less newspaper and monometallist crusade against silver, thus weakening public con- fidence, and resulting in a far-reaching panic that has stopped mills and foundries all over the land, and thrown nearly half of the railroad mileage of the country into the bands of an unprecedented body of men known as "receivers," responsible to no body on earth save the judges who appoint them. All this has come about by a wicked and senseless attempt to destroy silver as a circulating medium, when the whole land is filled with plenty; with storehouses burst- ing with every earthly product that contri- butes to man's comfort or happiness ; with good flour at $3.50 a barrel, wheat 70 cents a bushel, and other grains in proportion. The strongest moneyed institutions have trembled to their foundations, and feebler ones have fallen in every direction. It has indeed been a year of gloom and of pro- found sorrow to men as well as nations. But it has passed, and the worst has been endured. We are already emerging from the dark cloud that so suddenly darkened the whole mercantile world, and we shall go forward with loftier ideas of human brotherhood, and will press on to new achievements and a more advanced civiliza- tion.

We add the two following articles, as they throw some additional light upon the year 1893:

From the Philadelphia Times (Democratic), Dec. 31, '93.

THE END OF 1893. - The year will be re- membered all over the world as the year of "hard times." It has not been every where or in the same degree a panic year, but it has been everywhere, from Hindostan to Oregon, one of commercial and industrial depression. We have not vet got quite free from the habit of our forefathers of regard- ing every nation as separate from and an- tagonistic to all other nations. This media- val conception still maintains on the continent of Europe, to the great cost of the people - but every year demonstrates more plainly that the real relations between nations are those of trade, commerce and finance, and that the railway, the steamship and the telegraph have knit them together so closely that the conditions which affect one affect all. While the universality of the depression of 1893 shows this, it also shows how closely the extent and effect of such periods of depression are connected in every country with either particular mis- fortunes or with particular mistakes. In Germany we see this very plainly. That great empire is oppressed by the diversion of the best energies of a large part of its population to the unproductive pursuit of war. The cost of the imperial army is not

only in direct taxation, but in its bad effect upon the industrial development of the country. The effort to overcome this result of militarism by an unreasonably high pro- tective tariff, enhancing prices without thereby establishing sound industrial con- ditions, has simply aggravated the disease, and has brought Germany to a condition of " hard times " which even the general re- covery expected during the new year will not do much to relieve without a decided change of imperial policy.

Italy affords an even more conspicuous example of the results of excessive taxation. The existing poverty in that country is probably greater than in any other part of Europe, both because the military burden of Italy is relatively the greatest, and he- cause the administrative machinery of the country is very inefficient, and the taxes imposed upon the people are out of all pro- portion to any benefits received from them. France feels the military burden less because the French people are more industrious and thrifty, and because the political adminis- tration of the country, under whatever form of government, is well organized, efficient and economical. But France also has been dabbling in economic quack remedies. pro- tective tariffs and the like, that have dis- turbed her commercial system more than it has been disturbed for many years past, while the wild speculations in canals, in cop- per, in all sorts of securities and insecurities indulged in during the past decade, have brought about the inevitable reaction, and France has been suffering with the rest of us, the complaint of " hard times."

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The growth of a century: as illustrated in the history of Jefferson county, New York, from 1793-1894, Part 1

Author: Haddock, John A., b. 1823- Publication date: 1895 Publisher: Albany, N. Y., Weed-Parsons printing company Number of Pages: 1098

Author: Haddock, John A., b. 1823-
Publication date: 1895
Publisher: Albany, N. Y., Weed-Parsons printing company
Number of Pages: 1098