USA > New York > Essex County > Westport > Bessboro: A history of Westport, Essex Co., N.Y. > Part 30
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This and the next occurred the Mexican War, but it seems.not to have stirred a ripple on the calm waters of Westport society. I have heard that Mr. Walter Root served in that war, but do not know whether he was a citizen of Westport at that time.
There was a new school house built at Wadhams. which is still in use, and it was of future importance to as that this year the first sewing machine was perfected, Athongh it was ten or fifteen years before the first one
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
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was brought into this town. This was also the time when three-cont postage was adopted, a change imme- diately affecting every individual.
1847.
Town Meeting at HI. J. Person. John Hatch Low, Supervisor.
Wilham D. Holcomb. Clerk.
. Samuel Root and David S. MeLeod, Justices.
Ira Downey, Collector.
Abram M. Olds, Town Superintendent of Schools. Andrew Frisbie, Assessor.
Archibald Patterson, Highway Commissioner.
Daniel W. Braman. Joseph R. Delano, David R. Wood ruff. Inspectors of Election.
Albert P. Cole and Joel F. Whitney, Poor Masters.
Ira Downey, Loval A. Baxter, Charles fl. Eddy, Hosea. Howard and Anson C. Rogers, Constables.
Samuel H. Farnsworth, Sealer of Weights and Measures.
Pathmasters. --- Thomas Walton. Alexander Stevenson, James W. Coll. Archibald Patterson. Albert P. Cole. Wil- lard Frisbie, William H. Melntyre, James Marsball. Henry Rovce. George W. Sturtevant, Daniel French, Joel R. Whitney. A. Finney, George Skinner, Samuel Storrs, Jus- tin Harris. Marcus J. Hoisington, Albert Stringham. Luthe: B. Hammond. Dennis B. Stacy. Dorr W. Howard. Orlain Stockwell, Julius W. Ferris, Moses Felt. Abram Greeley. Leonard Taylor. Sewall Cutting, Julius Vaughan. Orrin Skinner, Johu Stone, Levi Atwood, Ziba Howard.
. In April there was a special election, held at the same house, to decide again upon the liquor question. This time there were 316 votes, of which 191 were for "License" and 125 for "No License." This reversal of the decision of the preceding year shows intense agi- tation of the question.
Mr. S. Wheaton Cole writes me thus about this year : "I was teaching fifty-two years ago the past winter on
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the north side of the bridge. The brick school house stood near the residence of Mr. William Olds, the black- smith. Rev. Thomas Brandt was pastor of the Baptist church, Rev. Pomeroy of the M. E. church. The mer- chants were B. P. Donglass on the north side, John H. Low, C. B. Hatch and Son, Walker Eddy, William Richards and Harvey Pierce on the south side. Lake Champlain was covered with sailing vessels and steam- er's then; there is scarcely one seen to-day. The entire country is cleared of its forests. The lake had good docks aud warehouses in every town, to-day there are but few. Change is written on everything in the east, yet I love to visit it."
Miss Augusta Kent was also teaching at this time, a primary school in one room of the Academy.
The Rev. Benjamin Pomeroy was not stationed here as preacher until the years 1849 and 1850. In 1847 Rev. William W. Pierce was pastor of the M. E. church, and in ISIS Rev. D. P. Hulburd. At this time the pas- tor of the Congregational church was the Rev. Charles Spooner, who remained thirteen years, from 1841 to 1854.
1848.
Town Meeting at H. J. Person's.
William J. Cutting. Supervisor.
Samuel H. Farnsworth. Clerk.
John H. Low and William D. Holcomb. Justices.
Daniel W. Braman, Town Superintendent of Schools. Ira Downey. Collector.
Geo. Skinner, Assessor.
John Greely, Highway Commissioner.
Joel F. Whitney and Albert P. Cole, Poor Masters.
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William P. Merriam and Edmund J. Smith. Inspectors of Election.
Ira Downey. Nathan Slaughter, Harry N. Cole, Dorr W. Howard. Anson C. Rogers, Constables.
Freeborn H. Page, Sealer of Weights and Measures.
Diodorus Holcomb appointed luspector of Election by the Town Board.
Pathmasters .-- Thomas Walton, Hinkley Coll, James W. Coll, Noel Merrill, Samuel W. Cole, Willard Frisbie. John Greely, William P. Merriam, James Marshall, Elijah An- gier, George W. Sturtevant, Jason Braman. Joseph R. Delano, Joel K. Freneb, R. Woodruff. Alvin Burt. Jobusou Hill, J. Nichols, Jr., David Smith, Dorr M. Howard, Hiram Stacy, Robert Doty. Horace Goodspeed, Julius W. Ferris. Orrin Cronk, Lorenzo Gibbs, George Bennett, D. L. Allen. J. B. Finney, Orrin Skinner, James Fortune, W. Tuos- dall, H. Howard.
.George Skinner appointed assessor.
Miles M'F. Sawyer appointed Inspector of Election in place of Diodorus Holcomb, who refused to accept.
At this town meeting the voters all protested against a reported petition which was to be presented to the Legis- lature by the town of Essex, praving that "one mile wide of Westport" should be set off into Essex. This protest- ing vote seems to have been sufficient for the purpose in- tended, as the Supervisor was instructed to send a copy of the protest to our Representative at Albany.
A bigbway was laid out. upon application of Franklin H. Cutting and others, "through lands of the late Barna- bas Myrick and of Franklin H. Cutting, beginning eighty three links north of the building formerly occupied for a Hat Shop by Dan H. Kent, (who died two years before.) running thence east nearly to the old stone mill, thence south until it intersects the highway leading from Frank- lin H. Cutting's store easterly to the lake.'
A road was applied for by Jonathan Nichols. to be laid out "through lands of the late Jobu Chandler. Calvin Hammond, Charles Hammond, and Dennis and Joseph Stacy. Mention is made of " the late Gideon Hammond. and of a "house being built by Deunis Stacy. "
Town' Meeting adjourned "to the Hotel of Ira Hender. son, " which was kept by nis son-in-law, William Richards
This year came Mr. and Mrs. Francis L. Twee, from
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Boston and built the house which they called "Stony Sides" on a hill north of the village, overlooking the Jake. Mr. Lee was accustomed to give as his reason for building here that he had traveled through all parts of the habitable globe, and had never found a spot with a finer prospect nor with more natural advantages for a home. His taste for landscape gardening was fully indulged in the care which he bestowed upon the -sur- roundings of his house, and many a garden and door- yard in the village was also improved by his advice, and by the gift of bulbs and flowering shrubs which still blossom every year to his memory. Henceforth the family spent their summers here, and the winters in Boston, or in travel. There were three sons and three daughters, Francis W., Thomas, Robert, who died when a child, Mary, afterward Mrs. Matthew Hale of Albany, Alice and Anne. There are now ten grandchildren : Mrs. Hale's children are Ellen, Matthew, Mary, Robert and Dorothy, and Mr. Francis W. Lee's are Mary, Guy Hunter, Isabella, Alice and Susan.
A year or so before this time Mr. Francis H. Jackson of Boston, already connected with the Port Henry Iron Company, had bought the Sisco farm, on the shore of the bay, about a mile north of Hatch's wharf. This was a beautiful spot, with a wooded point enclosing a tiny bay, and commanding a wide view of the lake to the southward. Here on the point he built his house, and in 1848 completed one of the finest iron furnaces ever seen upon the lake. It is said to have cost one hundred thousand dollars, and with the well-known ingratitude
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so often found in costly buildings, never returned to its builders one-tenth of the price. Mr. Jackson called it the Sisco furnace, after the name of the people who had lived so long on the place, and the little bay has always been called the Sisco bay. A dozen workmen's houses, a large house for the book-keeper, offices, a store and a long row of giant coal kilns, with a wharf for the boats of the company, made up a village of per- haps a hundred souls, and it was soon given the popu- lar name of "Jacksonville." There was never a post- office there, but the place had a mail-bag of its own. The writer came upon a bit of humor in a recent Bos- ton story called "A Family Affair" which will be quite as well appreciated in Westport as it could be in Bos- ton : "There are Jacksons and Jacksons. As every- body knows, many, possibly most of those who bear that title might as well have been called Jones or Rob- inson; on the other hand I am toll that certain Massa- chusetts families of that name will, on solicitation, ad- mit it to be their belief that Eve was a Cabot and Adam a Jackson." We may pride ourselves that it was not an ordinary Jackson, but one of the last named Gar- den-of-Eden Jacksons, of the first families of Boston, who gave the name to Jacksonville-in-Northwest-Bay.
Watson says : "The motive power of the Sisco fur- hace was steam, and its products pig iron. The ore used was chiefly from the Cheever bed, and in part from a bed two or three miles west of the village of Westport, and owned by the proprietors of the fur- nace." This means the Ledge Hill mine, in the mount-
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ain just west of the Mountain Spring road, back of the McMahon place. This ore bed was opened soon after that at Nichols Pond called the Campbell bed. The ore was soon found to be titaniferous, and therefore not available for use in the furnace, but large quantities of the Moriah ore were manufactured. Says Watson : "In 1817 Lee & Sherman effected a sale of twenty thousand tons to F. H. Jackson of the Sisco furnace at Westport. This was the first sale made of ore to be used in furnaces." Charles Hatch, writing at about this time, says proudly, "We now find ourselves situ- ated in a pleasant Village of about one thousand in- habitants, plentifully supplied with all the necessaries of life and many luxuries, having now a variety of fac- tories, among others a furnace which makes from six to nine tons of iron per day." This must have been its maximum production, and one not steadily main- tained for the eight or nine years in which the furnace remained in the possession of Mr. Jackson. In 1857 the property passed out of his hands, but I believe that the family had returned to Boston before that time, the house being occupied for several years by Mr. Ralph A. Loveland, who had charge of the business. Before this, Mr. Silas H. Witherbee of Port Henry was manager aud Mr. Victor C. Spencer book-keeper. Af- terward the property was owned by George W. Goff, who resided in the village.
It was at this period, not long after the opening of the Sisco furnace, that the old forge site on the upper Black river was again built upon. This had been the
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scene of the first operations of Jonas Morgan, between the time of his receiving the larger patent from the state in 1799, and the year 1807. He built his forge on the Elizabethtown side of the river, "nearly opposite the Ira Daniels farm house," as I am told by an old resi- dent of the Black river country. Later he sold the forge to Jacob Southwell, and not long after the con- clusion of the war of 1812 the property was owned by Captain John Lobdell. Barnabas Myrick had also an interest here, probably in partnership with Captain Lobdell, and I think ran a saw mill at this place. The freshet of 1830 wrought great damage, and it is not certain that there was any business done bere at all from that time until Guy Meigs# came not long pre- vious to 1850. He rebuilt the forge on the old site, with a saw mill and his own dwelling house on the op- posite or Westport side of the river, and here for a time he gave employment to a number of men, but in one of the frequent depressions in the iron business he suf- fered considerable loss, and coucluded to try his for- tunes once more in the west. He left town in 1855, and since then there has been no iron made at the place
*Guy Meigs came of that old and honorable Meigs family which has supplied officers to every war of the United States. Major Return Jonathan Meigs went with, Arnold to Quebec in 1775, and there joining Montgomery, participated in the attack upon Quebec, and was taken prisoner in the failure of the assault. Guy Meigs (born 1817, died 1585) was the oldest son of Captain Luther Meigs, a soldier of the war of 1812, and grandson of Benjamin Stone Meigs, one of the pion- eers of northern Vermont. Eight towns and one county, besides at least two forts, have been named after members of this Meigs family, and the mountain hamlet on the lonely course of the Black river may well keep its title for the sake of these associations.
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
that has been called for fifty years "Meigsville." The saw mill has been in operation of late years, owned by James E. Patten.
1849.
Town Meeting at the Inn of William Riebards.
William H. Cutting, Supervisor.
Freeborn H. Page, Clerk.
Jason Braman, Justice.
Barton B. Hammond, Collector.
Aaron B. Mack, Assessor.
D. H. Sayre, Highway Commissioner.
Aaron Clark aud D. Mansfield Howard, Poor Masters.
Miles M'F. Sawyer, Benjamin F. Holcomb. H. E. Smith, Inspectors of Election.
Ira Downey, Nathan Slaughter, Harry N. Cole, Barton B. Hammond, A. C. Rogers, Constables.
Alvin Davis, Sealer of Weights aud Measures.
Pathmasters .- Thomas Walton, Hinkley Coll, Samuel Root, Noel Merrill. William Joiner. Asa Loveland, William Richards. Darius Merriam, James Marsball. Montgomery Pike Whallon, Henry Betts. Titus M. Mitebell Benjamin Hardy, Asa Finney, David R. Woodruff. William Lawrence. Harvey Smith, Marcus J. Hoisington. Alouzo Slaughter. Platt Sheldon, Jonathan Nichols. John Ormiston. Horace Goodspeed. Francis Mason, Orrin B. Crook. Abram Gree- ly, William C. West, Reuben Brown, Leonard Wares, D. M. Nichols. John Stone. Edwin Truesdall. Myron Chappell.
For the first time we find it recorded that voters were challenged and obliged to swear that they were legal vo- ters in Westport. Six men were challenged and took the required oath: Electo Dupree, John Miller. William Wil- son, James Branard. Chandler Dutton. H. N. Tabor.
Town Meeting adjourned to H. J. Person's.
Noel Merrill was afterward appointed Collector in place of B. B. Hammond. who had moved away.
This reminds us that this year and the next saw the departure of all the family of the Hammonds. Deacon Gideon Hammond had died in 1846, and his widow and
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children soon decided to emigrate to the west. Neigh- bors of theirs in the western part of the town, the Nichi- ols, Sloughters and Stacy's, with some others, took part in the general exodus, and they all settled in or near Camanche, Iowa, on the Mississippi river. This made a little Baptist colony, and there a new church was formed, containing between twenty and thirty original members from the Westport Baptist church.
Notwithstanding the attraction of the new lands of the west, which drew away a large number of our best citizens, young men were coming in from all directions to take up business enterprises. John C. Osborne, a young Englishman, opened a harness shop, J. Nelson Barton,# coming from Crown Point, was a carriage ma- ker, Peter P. Bacon, from St. Pierre, P.Q., soon opened a shoe shop, and William Douglass a blacksmith shop. Mr. Osborne afterward built the large house just north of the Armory. His children were George, who has continued his father's business after the death of the latter, Maria, who married John Gregory, and John, afterward Governor of Wyoming, and owner of
*One interesting fact about the Essex County Bartons is that they are descended from one of the Salem witches-that is, from one of the unfortunate women who were accused, of witchcraft at Salein in 1798. Sarah Cloyse was accused, tried and sentenced to be hung, but escaped from prison and was hidden by her friends. She had two sisters who were hung for the crime of witch - craft. Her daughter by her first hushand, Hannah Bridges, married Samuel Bar - ton, and the line comes down through Joshua, Timothy and Timothy Stow to Simon, who came to Moriah in 1$12. Simon Barton's wife was Olive Cary, daugh- ter of John, and sixth in direct descent from the original immigrant John Cary, who came of the line of Sir Robert Cary, Brave stories are told of Sir Robert, but we do not love him as we love gentle Goodwife Cloyse, who suffered such bitter persecutions at the hands of the Salem witch hunters.
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
large cattle ranches in that state. Mr. Edward Os- borne, brother of John Osborne, Senior, came to West- port later, after the war.
Mr. Bacon married Louise Joubert, and their chil- dren were : 1. Eliza, married Cornelius Remington. 2. Ida, married John McCormick of Ticonderoga. 3. Emma, married Dr. Charles Holt, son of Augustus P. Holt. 4. Marie, married Harry P. Smith, now mala- ger of the Westport Inn. 5. Osite, married John H. Low, son of Edwin B. Low.
Mr. Douglass, (not, I think, related to the family of Ebenezer Douglass,) married Marion Havens, daughter of Asahel Havens. Their family record is a mournful one of early deaths. Clarence died as a child, James and Walter in their teens. Alice married Orcelius Olds, Clara married Will Cross, and Lottie married Will Carey, and all died young. Three sous, Carlos, Will and Ben, are still living in the west, with their families.
This year and the next Mr. George W. Goff was Member of Assembly. To Mr. Goff is given the credit of effecting the new division between Westport and Moriah, by which the southern boundary of Gilliland's Bessbero was made the southern boundary of the town. This change gave the Cheever ore bed, then just derel- oping in importance, to Moriah. Aaron B. Mack was sheriff of the county for this and the two following years.
In 1849 were built the first Vermont railroads, run- ning north and south through the state, on each side
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of the Green mountains. Thus the Champlain valley first echoed to the shriek of the iron horse, and the dwellers on the western shore first saw the white puff of steam against the mountains as they looked across the lake. Not for twenty-seven years did we have a rail- road on this side of the lake which went through from Albany to Montreal.
In 1849 was organized the first Essex County Agri- cultural Society, in Keeseville, where the first fair was - held. From 1850 to 1865 the annual fair was held in Elizabethtown, and since then it has been held in West- port. This is also the year in which a most remarka- ble figure appeared in Essex county, and was frequently seen at the county fair for the next five or six years, driving all the way from the high mountain plateau of North Elba fine blooded cattle for exhibition. The re- port of the Society for 1850 refers to "a number of very choice and beautiful Devons from the herds of Mr. John Brown, residing in one of our most remote and secluded towns." This was none other than "John Brown of Ossawatomie," who died ten years afterward at Har- per's Ferry. He was often seen in Westport, going and coming ou his many journeys, and was looked upon as an eccentric person with an absurd idea of establish- ing a colony of free negroes in the freezing climate of North Elba.
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1850.
Town Meeting held at the Jun of H. J. Person's.
Ralph A Loveland, Supervisor.
Barton B. Richards. Clerk.
David S. MeLeod. Justice.
Andrew Frisbie. John H. Low and John L. Merriam, Assessors.
Noel Merrill, Collector.
S. W. Cole, Superintendent of Common Schools.
Samuel Root, Highway Commissioner.
D. M. Howard. L. W. Pollard. Poor Masters.
Aaron Clark. D. Il. Sayre. David R. Woodruff. Inspec- tors of Election.
Noel Merrill. J. F. Whitney. Ira Downey, D. M. Howard. D. B. Stacy, Constables.
Alvin Davis. Sealer of Weights and Measures.
Road district No. 1 dropped. since its territory now be- Jongs to Moriah.
Pathmasters. - Hinkley Coll. Benjamin Warren. Andrew Frisbie, Lorrin Cole, Asa Loveland. William Viall. Darius Merriam. James Marsball. Cyrus Royce. Henry Betts A. E. Wadhams. Benjamin Warren, Sylvester Young. Jared Goodall, William Laurence, Johnson Hill, Marcus J. Hois- ington. Alouzo Slaughter, Dennis Person, Edward Harper. John Ormisten. Orson Stockwell. Lee Prouty. Abram Sber- man. William Bennett, Joel B. Finney. Dependance Nich - ois. John Stone. Edwin Trusdall, John Miller.
Aaron B. Mack having been elected Sheriff of the County. resigned bis office as Assessor.
In 1850 the township numbered 2,332 in population, a number never since equaled. The furnace at Jaek- sonville employed many men in every capacity, and all through the back country wood cutters had come in to eut and draw the wood for its use. All kinds of busi- less prospered. D. L. Allen extended his wharf a hundred feet farther into the lake to accommodate the increased shipping, and the chances are that if the place had been to name again at this time it would have been Sousething-or-other-opolis.
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Now Jenny Lind was singing in New York, and her fame drew a number of Westport people to the city to hear her. I know the name of but one who went through lake, canal and river, on a packet boat, to the metrop- olis, and that one was Mrs. Miles M'F. Sawyer, who visited at Dr. Ranney's and came back with many a traveler's tale and notes upon the latest fashions. Then women wore great hoops, overspread with voluminous gathered skirts, tight bodices with belts, large flowing sleeves, often with lace or embroidery under-sleeves, and wide flat collars of lace or needle-work which lay flat upon their shoulders, encircling the base of the neck. The shoulder seams of the bodices were uucon- scionably long, and the hair was worn combed smoothly down over the ears and coiled in a knot at the back, the ideal of perfection being a satin-smooth sur- face, withoat a stray hair floating. The bonnets were not so large as those worn in the thirties, but were still often "poke" in shape, of the kind called "cottage bon- net." And very nice our grandmothers looked in hoops and mantilla, with black mitts covering all but the fin- gers of their hands, as they sailed up the church aisle of a Sunday. It took both grace and genius to manage a hoop well, and get it gracefully through uarrow doors, but surely nothing displayed a rich dress fabric to bet- ter advantage. At this time changeable silks were much in favor, and the shimmering breadths, billowing out from a slender waist, were very pretty. When Mar- garet Angier married Harvey Pierce she had a red and green changeable silk for a wedding dress, and it was
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carefully laid away to be shown to the generations following. My grandmother used to wear a wide-flow- ing dress made of what they called "Mexican grena- dine," a soft gray ground with green and purple flowers, and over this she spread a mantilla of changeable blue and green silk, trimmed with "milliner's folds" of the same, laid on with the most exquisite stitches. The earliest daguerreotypes show many of these costumes.
1851.
Town Meeting at the Inn of H. J. Person's.
Benjamin Warren, Supervisor.
Barton B. Richards, Clerk.
William D. Holcomb, Justice.
John L. Merriam. Assessor.
Aaron Clark, Collector.
Jared Goodale, Highway Commissioner.
D. M. Howard and L. W. Pollard, Overseers of the Poor.
Benjamin F. Holcomb. David S. MeLeod, Cyrus W. Richards, Inspectors of Election.
Tra Downey, Perrin J. Ainger, Richard Brown, Aaron Clark, Dennis B. Stacy. Constables.
Alvin Davis, Sealer of Weights and Measures.
Pathmasters .- Hinkley Coll, B. I. Warren. Henry Fris- bie. A. P. Cole. Asa Loveland. William McIntyre, Joseph James, Samuel Anderson, Henry Royce, Fleury Betts, Elijah Wright, Benjamin Hardy, Sylvester Young, Rus- sell Woodruff, Royal Stores. Johnson Hill, Jonathan Nich- ols, Leonard Averv. Eli Wood. Warren Pooler, Alvin Burt. Orson Stockwell, Luman Hubbard. Titus Sherman, Steven Jackworth. Leonard Taylor, Charles Vaughan, Orrin Skinner, James Fortune. Edward Trusdare, John Miller.
Two men challenged, Lorenzo B. Nichols and Erastus Huntley.
Voted to raise $150.00 for support of the poor.
It is hard to tell from the meagre accounts left of the existence of the Essex County Academy, how long it
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remained the leading school in the county, but we are inclined to think that its first days were perhaps its best, at least so far as the education of the older class of academic students is concerned. About 1850 or 1851 there were young people sent away to private boarding schools in Vermont, as Phebe and Platt Sawyer were sent to Bakersfield, and a little later their brother Irv- ing was sent to the school in Fairfax, Vt. Miss Wil- Hard's famous school for girls in Troy was no longer open, Miss Willard, I think, being engaged in visiting other female seminaries, both north and south, and lec- turing upon education. Some of the Westport youth were sent to the Academy at Keeseville, and there Alonzo Alden studied from 1851 to 1853. It was not nneommon for thegirls to be sent to the convent schools in Montreal, in spite of the rigid Protestantism which prevailed, for a certain dainty finish and demureness of manner which was acquired there, together with the incomparable needle-work which was taught.
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