Historical sketches of Franklin county and its several towns, Part 4

Author: Seaver, Frederick Josel, 1850- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1918
Publisher: Albany, J. B. Lyon company, printers
Number of Pages: 848

USA > New York > Franklin County > Historical sketches of Franklin county and its several towns > Part 4

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The percentage of increase in the county's population from 1800 to 1810 was 518; then to 1820, 73 per cent. ; then to 1830, 42 per cent .; then to 1840, 32 per cent .; and from 1860 to 1910, about 44 per cent. During the half century from 1860 to 1910 the population of most of the other distinctively rural counties of the State remained either stationary or actually decreased. It should be remarked, however, that Franklin's growth in this time was but little, if any, along agricultural lines, and was due principally to the development in Malone, to the very marked progress of Harrietstown (attributable to special and in some respects peculiar causes), and to lumbering operations in the south- western towns.

While the contemplated scope of this sketch is to make it almost entirely narrative, with little statistical cumbering, it yet seems essen- tial (inasmuch as not all even of our own people know our boundaries and dimensions accurately, and because an "outlander " may possibly

FRANKLIN COUNTY

chance occasionally to scan these pages) that they carry just a touch geographical and climatic.

Franklin county lies in the extreme northern part of the State, bounded on the north by Canada, with the St. Lawrence river sweeping its northwestern corner for a distance of two or three miles where the St. Regis Indian reservation juts westward beyond the line marking our seemingly natural boundary there; on the west by St. Lawrence county; on the south by Hamilton and Essex; and on the east by Essex and Clinton. It has an area of 1,618 square miles, of which about 270 square miles are under State ownership. The extreme length of the county from north to south is along its western border, and, according to Tupper's survey made about 1798, is 63 1/8 miles, but Colvin questions Tupper's accuracy in this respect, and thinks that the distance is slightly less. A measurement on the east, from the south- east corner of Harrietstown, to the Canada line makes 60 1/8 miles. The county's greatest width is about thirty-three miles. At the date of its settlement it was densely wooded throughout; in the northern part with giant pine, and elsewhere with hard and soft timber generally intermingled. Clearings for farms and homes, the manufacture of potash and charcoal, vast lumbering operations, the cutting of pine for rafting to Montreal for conversion into ship masts, and the sweep of fire have denuded great tracts, though there still remain large areas that are well timbered, and which the best interests of the county demand shall be protected and forever preserved, because it can not now be thought that larger possibilities of prosperity, wealth and growth lie in destructive operations in the Adirondacks than in con- servation, to the end that the region may be kept a pleasure resort and a sanatorium.

No considerable part of the county is without its surface broken by hills, though Constable, Westville, Fort Covington, Bombay, Bangor and Moira contain broader reaches of level country than are to be found elsewhere. The southern townships are thickly studded with mountains, and large parts of them must always remain uncultivated and waste lands, though even here valleys also abound which may be successfully farmed except when frosts blast and blight, as they are apt to do even in the summer months at the altitude of 1,400 to 1,700 feet, which is that of the settled parts of most of our Adirondack towns. Some of these altitudes as shown by United States surveys are: Loon Lake 1,712 feet, Mountain View 1,498 feet, Lower Saranac Lake 1,534

HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY

feet, Upper Saranac Lake 1,571 feet, Saranac Lake village about 1,600 feet, Malone at the county clerk's office 730 feet, Paul Smith's 1,640 feet, Raquette Pond 1,542 feet, Rainbow Lake 1,668 feet, and St. Regis Falls 1,235 feet.

In portions of some of the northern towns clay predominates; in too many localities the plains of considerable area on which pine once flourished are sandy and all but hopelessly barren, though generally the soil is a good loam, and when intelligently and faithfully worked pro- duces abundantly. Only of late has intelligent and practical considera- tion been given to the question of the kinds of crops to which the soil and climate are best adapted, and, therefore, farmers have not always realized the best possible results. In earlier years flax was a staple because the product was required in the domestic economy of that period, when all of the cloth used in a family was manufactured in the home. But farming generally was a hit or miss business, and accurate knowledge of how to prosecute it scientifically was neither possessed nor sought. Within the past few years, however, a Farm Bureau, with a competent and expert instructor, has been maintained., and advice has been given to individual applicants when requested, experiments con- dueted with results accurately registered, and also in a general way information has been imparted by lectures and through the medium of circulars and newspapers. The one particular aim of the bureau instructor, besides teaching the most advantageous methods, is to establish unmistakably the lines along which farmers should especially concentrate their attention and energies with a view to economical management and the largest recompense. The single product in which Franklin outranks all other counties in New York, both as regards quantity of yield per acre and quality, is potatoes ; and it is sought now to persuade farmers to make a specialty of raising these for sale as seed to other localities. The county has been found to be exceptionally adapted to oats also, and lands in proximity to villages or to summer resorts are profitably worked for the production of small fruits and early vegetables.

The principal streams are the Salmon, the Saranac, the Chateaugay, the two branches of the St. Regis for some distance from their sources, and again after they join for a few miles before uniting with the St. Lawrence. The Raquette also, near its head, has its course for a time in our county, and barely cuts a corner of the St. Regis reservation near its mouth. None of these is navigable except for light-draft launches

FRANKLIN COUNTY

in their still reaches and expansions, with the exception of the St. Regis and the Salmon for a few miles above the points where they join the St. Lawrence. All are characterized by rapids throughout the greater part of their courses, with occasional falls of considerable height, and are capable of a development to afford many fine water powers.

Lakes and ponds are innumerable. Among those of first importance, because of extent of area, scenic beauty and fame as sporting and summer resorts, are Lower Chateaugay Lake, Meacham Lake, Loon Lake, the several St. Regis waters, the Saranacs, Raquette Pond and Tupper Lake. Meacham was named for a hunter and trapper of Hop- kinton and Waverly, who frequented it, and whose record of deer, wolves and catamounts killed almost challenges belief, and Tupper for a sur- veyor whose work in the vicinity dates back more than a century.

Deposits of iron have been located at many points, and some of them partially developed, though not one, so far as I have been able to learn, ever proved profitable. A great difficulty in prosecuting such an enter- prise in pioneer times was the enormous expense of transportation to market, and, as regards the one mining prospect (at Owl's Head) which was deemed for a generation to afford the best promise of any in the county, exploration with a diamond drill has demonstrated that while the ore near the surface ran sixty to eighty per cent. pure iron of a superior quality, at a greater depth the percentage decreased to less than thirty.

Hundreds of claims of discovery of gold and silver in Franklin county have been filed by prospectors with the Secretary of State at Albany, and in at least one instance, near the village of St. Regis Falls, considerable development work was done only a few years ago in a search for gold. An advertisement published in the Palladium about 1835 invited investment in a copperas mine known to the advertiser, but so far as I have heard the existence of such a mine was never other- wise manifested. Belief that there is lead in the vicinity has been insistent for half a century or more. The late Albon Man, a gentleman of the highest character and of scientific attainments, used to hunt before the civil war at Indian Lake and Mountain View (then known as Round Pond and State Dam), a dozen miles south of Malone, with " Old Aleck," a St. Regis Indian, for guide and camp worker, and the writer remembers distinctly having been told by him that upon more than one occasion " Old Aleck" had sneaked off from camp, and after a few hours' absence brought back quantities of pure galena, which they reduced and cast into bullets. Of course Major Man did not pretend

HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY

to know whether the galena was from a cache or from a mine in the neighborhood, but " Old Aleck " insisted that it was procured from the latter, that the members of his tribe had always obtained their supply of lead from it, and that they would kill him if he were to reveal the place of deposit to a white. Old settlers in the vicinity used to tell of the same Indian appearing at their homes from time to time with native lead which he claimed to have brought from a mine in the mountains ; and it is certain that men who have had unquestioning faith in the existence of such a mine have spent an aggregate of months, and perhaps of years, in unavailing search for it.

Climatic conditions a hundred years ago must have corresponded closely to those of the present, for these, though varying widely from year to year, hold practically the same average over long periods. Our fathers, therefore, suffered or enjoyed virtually the same extremes of heat and cold, and the same recurrences of excess and deficiency in precipitation of rain and snow that are the portion of the present generation, which are those of the temperate zone at the forty-fourth and forty-fifth degrees of latitude. If these carry discomfort in their extremes, particularly in the low temperatures, though even then our drier atmosphere mitigates the severity, there is the compensation that but rarely does drouth or rainfall interfere with seed time and harvest, that devastating floods are almost unknown, and that the whirlwind, tornado or cyclone strikes hardly once in a generation, and then invariably over only a limited tract in length and breadth. Tested by a yearly average, or certainly with the omission of three or four winter months, it is the conviction of most of our people that nowhere in the world are there preferable climatic conditions.

PIONEER CONDITIONS AND PRACTICES

These the conditions and the environment of the pioneers, what were their general and individual circumstances and activities? For fifteen years immediately succeeding the first settlement no event of par- ticular moment or of real public consequence is known to have occurred save the prompt establishment of schools and churches - which was a procedure as of course by men from New England - and save also the erection of the county and of new towns. Nor did the formation of the county count for much until later, because all county officers were appointive, and in the choice of representatives to the Legislature and to Congress we were still in effect a part of Clinton. Practically all

FRANKLIN COUNTY

else was individual and domestic, and also commonplace for that time, extraordinary and even impossible as it would be in the present. Apart from an occasional saw-mill, tannery and grist-mill, industries there were none, nor were there fraternal bodies save for two Masonic lodges, or organizations of any sort other than governmental and religious to afford diversion or to promote acquaintanceship and social association. Dwellings were of logs, often little better than huts. There wasn't a stove in the county, and the conveniences in the household, the shop and on the farm that are to-day deemed indispensable had not even been shaped in the minds of inventors. Matches were unknown until 1827 or later, and fire was made by use of the flint and tinder when it had not been preserved by covering coals in the ashes on the hearth. For lights the tallow dip, or possibly a lamp fed with animal oil, was the best that any one had, and many may have had to depend upon a mere wick in a saucer of grease, or upon the pine knot or pitch-pine torch. For the most part, flour was from rye instead of from wheat, and had to be brought from Plattsburgh over execrable roads until crude mills were built, one of which is said to have been only a mortar and pestle arrangement, the mortar a bowl hollowed in a stump, and the pestle depending from the limb of a tree. Cloth was exclusively of home production, the wool or flax being spun and woven by wife, mother or daughter, and all of the family clothing was also of home manufacture; often so clumsy and ill-fitting that it used to be said that it could not be told by looking at a boy plodding along the road or path "whether he was going to or returning from school." Shoe- making and repairing, where each head of a house did not himself serve the family needs in such respect, was an itinerant occupation, the cobbler traveling from house to house, and doing his work wherever he found a customer. Building was generally accomplished by " bees," the men of an entire neighborhood, or, if the structure were very large, of practically the entire county, assembling for a "raising," and "making a day of it." Upon these occasions rum or whiskey was freely supplied, the local distilleries making it easy and inexpensive to procure. The price was perhaps twenty cents per gallon. Moreover, it was customary in general stores to have a pail of whiskey on the counter, and customers were free to partake of it at a cent or two per glass. There was then no internal revenue tax on liquors, and it is this that makes present higher prices. Malone has had five distilleries, and Fort Covington and Moira at least one each. The late Sidney P.

HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY

Bates, M. D., was working as a boy for the late Deacon Leonard Conant at the time when the latter was to have a barn raising, and was sent to " whiskey hollow," north of the village of Malone, for a supply of liquor for the occasion. He bought three gallons, which was a rather unusual quantity, and in telling of the incident in a letter to the Pal- ladium in 1883 the doctor explained that the neighbors had been boast- ing that they were going " to drink the deacon dry," which would have disgraced him, and therefore it was thought necessary to have the quantity equal or exceed the drinking capacity of the workers. In this period of changed sentiment on the temperance question it is hardly comprehensible that only two or three generations ago it could have been regarded as not a cause of reproach to a company of staid and respectable citizens if they drank to the limit of their capacity, while a church deacon would be in actual disgrace were he to fail to provide an ample supply of whiskey to satisfy their wants. About 1835, however, temperance societies began to be formed in the county, lecturers were engaged from abroad, and a remarkable agitation for abstinence con- tinued rather actively for a number of years. It is amusing now to read some of the reports of such meetings and the discussions had therein. At first the form of pledge proposed carried a number of conditions and times when it was not to be binding, but as sentiment became aroused and crystallized it was made stronger and called for teetotalism.

Upon the occasion of such "raisings " the stronger and more agile men, desisting for a time from their labor or when the work was finished, would engage in rough contests to determine which possessed the greatest lifting power or the greatest skill in wrestling, or there were " tugs of war " and other tests of physical prowess.

MONEY SCARCITY

Otherwise pioneer life was all grim earnest, almost unintermittent toil, privation, and poverty without much pauperism. In 1800 there were but nine hundred post-offices in all the United States (less than twenty times the number now to be found in Franklin county alone), postage stamps did not come into general use until after 1847, and postal rates for considerable distances were so high as to be practically prohibitive for poor people, so that even if our ancestors had had the time to spare and the facilities for engaging in correspondence they would scarcely have acquired the habit. There were no magazines or local newspapers, and but few books. Of actual money there was next

FRANKLIN COUNTY

to none in circulation except during the period of the war of 1812 and for a time immediately subsequent, when the pay of the soldiers stationed at Fort Covington and Malone found its way into local dis- tribution ; and the little that the inhabitants found it possible to serape together in the course of a year had all to be applied in the payment of taxes or for the purchase of such supplies as could be procured only from outside of the county. A striking illustration of this condition is found in the fact that in 1821 Northern Constellation Lodge, F. and A. M., of Malone, which had been chartered in 1806 with about thirty members, addressed a memorial to the grand lodge, reciting that though the quarterly dues exacted by the latter had been paid to 1824. but only by applying in part the initiation fees and the charity fund to that purpose in order to meet the obligations of members who lacked the means to pay for themselves, such dues had then become three years in arrears, and even the better circumstanced brethren would be dis- tressed to meet the demand, while the poorer were utterly unable to respond. It was further represented in the memorial that the cir- culating medium here had nearly vanished, and in 1833, partly because of the anti-Masonic agitation and in part because money could not be had, the charter was forfeited for non-payment of dues. The late Michael S. Mallon confirmed this condition of money scarcity by his recollection that even as late as 1845 about all the real money that he ever saw was silver pieces which Obadiah T. Hosford, then an inn- keeper on the site of the present Howard Block, used continually to clink together. Though in some cases distilleries paid cash for grain, the manufacture and sale of potash was about the sole means whereby it could be had, other commodities being disposable only in exchange for such merchandise as comprised the primitive and seanty stocks of the few local tradesmen.

THE MAKING OF POTASII

The story of potash, interesting in itself. will bear recital and ampli- fication because the product meant so much to this section in pioneer days. Its manufacture was our first industry. The name is derived from ashes, from which alone it was formerly prodneed, and from pot. in which the lye was boiled to dryness. Black salts is a synonym. In earliest operations each settler was himself the manufacturer through all of the stages - felling the timber so that it would lie in heaps, burning it, gathering the ashes and leaching them, boiling down the lye, and hauling the product to market. The labor must have been

HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY

prodigious, as thirty cords of wood are required for the making of a ton of ashes, which yields only about a sixth of a ton of potash. Ash- ories sprang up later and came to handle the business generally, though individuals continued in many cases to do the primary work them- solves - usually leasing a pot from an ashery at the rental price of one dollar per month. The asheries received ashes through individual delivery at their doors, or gathered their supply with their own teams. Ashe's produced in the home commanded a considerably better price (usually twelve cents per bushel) than the field product, with which a good deal of dirt was commonly mixed, and which sold at from five to eight cents per bushel. In not exceptional cases the asheries bought the potash from individual makers, and converted it into pearlash. An ashory which continued to operate long after the industry had ceased to be general, and which many of us readily remember, was that of the late B. F. Jewett, north of North Bangor village. It kept a number of teams scouring the county continuously for house ashes.

Ehm and ash give the largest yield of ashes, and an operator who cleared a heavily elm timbered tract in Bangor used to say that he found a five dollar bill at the roots of every free.

The business of producing vegetable potash as a commercial propo- sition has practically disappeared, owing to the facts that the labor cost would be prohibitive even if timber had not become too valuable to burn, and also to mineral potash having come into general use through the discovery in 180; of a practicable process for separating it from salt deposits in Germany. (Ninety or a hundred years ago the price for chopping was three shillings a cord, and an item in the Pal- ladium in 1835 noted that a young man in Malone had chopped and piled six cords in one day.) The vegetable potash is. I believe. still produced in some of the wilder paris of Canada and in Russia, and in Michigan and Wisconsin from the refuse of sugar cane and beet sugar refineries, but only in small quantities. The extreme price for it when its production in this county was extensive was one hundred dollars per Ion, except that during the embargo preceding the war of 1819 it reached three times that figure. As the usual price was sixty to eighty dollars per ton, and one hundred dollars gave a good profit. it is easily understood how great an incentive to activity the ante-war values must have been to the makers and smugglers, some account of which appears in a subsequent chapter.

The German mineral product comes exclusively from salt mines. and has become enormous. Until the outbreak in 1914 of the awful

the vegetable potash.

Pearlash ie only potasa purified by heating, salerate, fox street dieplaced by bicarbonate of moda (which i deritel fon common valt) bøed to be made from pearlanh, milf a carbonate of porin, sy pany carbonie add gas through a solution of it undll it became & hcarbonate, and then Shering and craposating it to catallmatin. The lab: William Hogle, of for Change, ve at one time a manufacturer of commonly in cookery in my father's Household.

Potash je beed principally in chemical preparationi and ze a fer- tilszer. It entere farzely into the manufacture of soap and explosives, and to some extent into certain kind of matones. Diligent and cher gette exploration as at present being protected in the allah wave of Utah, Nevada and California for dinner of deporte which would make ue independent of Germany, and jem recently blant formance and manufacturers of cement hale held oot & hope that they man, or able to supply potash in commercial quantities as a by-product of ther. business.

As in these days a farmer, in arranging for a lean or a more realist. promise settlement when ne drage hie " butter money" or markets he- hay, hope of potatoes, to our ancestors ved to base their credite on the promise of " halte in June." I was the one production upon which they felt that they might count with certainty, and which tradesmen mere always eager to accept. The latter strained their resources to al- mulate stocks of it, and generally they converted it into pearlash. The late Sidney W. Gillett told the writer that one year when He was in trade at Trout River he had a -tock of it when ready to go to market amounting to ten thousand dollars. Caually, however, the marketing was done at short intervale, and in quantities amounting to only a few hundred dollars, Fort Covington or Dundes having been the point of shipment, with Montreal the destination for export thence to Europe.

Bit enough of wandering for the present.

HOW THE PIONERRE LIVED

The conditions which prevailed in the long ago and the manner in which the people then lived have been already outlined, ble more general- izing can not possibly convey as distinct and graphic a picture as definite

HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY

description by those who were actually in and of the life, and into whose minds experience had burned unforgettable memories. While no pen picture of the county's earliest days is discoverable, the county and its conditions then could not have been materially different from those that obtained a quarter of a century later, except that originally the reaches of unbroken forests were wider, clearings for homes fewer, and the travesties of roads more horrible. Certain letters written for the Palladium by early settlers. all of whom have passed away, are for- tunately available, and carry one back to 1815 or earlier, and two pamphlets dealing with conditions during a few years following 1823 and 1824 are invaluable for this purpose. They seem to awaken in the reader the genuine spirit of the time of which they treat, and quicken in him a sympathy with it. as they almost photograph the scenes to which they refer. Following are extracts from some of the letters in question :

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Historical sketches of Franklin county and its several towns, Part 4

Author: Seaver, Frederick Josel, 1850- [from old catalog] Publication date: 1918 Publisher: Albany, J. B. Lyon company, printers Number of Pages: 848

Author: Seaver, Frederick Josel, 1850- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1918
Publisher: Albany, J. B. Lyon company, printers
Number of Pages: 848