USA > New York > Monroe County > Rochester > History of Rochester and Monroe county, New York, from the earliest historic times to the beginning of 1907 > Part 8
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An act was passed by the legislature in April of that year, authorizing the construction of a canul from the Mohawk to the Seneca river, and on the 4th of July, 181;, the work was begun, run- ning west from Utien. By succeeding legislatures the limits were extended as the work progressed, and in October, 1819. the commissioners-whe were Stephen Van Rensselaer, De Witt Clinton, .Joseph Ellicott, Samuel Young and Myron Hol- ley-gave out the contracts from Rochester to Palmyra. As each section was finished the water was let into it from streams that it traversed, and Rochester was one of the first places to use the channel for transportation. so that from April 26th to May 6th, 1823, 10,000 barrels of flour were shipped from here to Albany. The hardest part of the labor was in eufting through the moun- tain ridge at Lockport and constructing the splen- did locks at that place, which used up all of 1824 and much of the next year; finally, on October 24th. 1825, the guardgates there were raised, the last section was filled with water and the canal was finished in all its length, the greatest work on the continent up to that time. The celebration lasted more than a week, for it involved the pas- sage of the official party-headed by De Witt Clin- ton, who before that time had been elected gover- nor of the state-from Buffalo to New York, the Intter place being reached on the 4th of November, after stops of several hours had been made at dif-
ferent places for speeches and banquets. As the telegraph was still unknown, the news of the act- nal departure of the flotilla of boats was conveyed from the western terminus to the metropolis in a novel manner. Cannons were stationed at frequent intervals along the route, as fast as one gun was fired the next gave the signal, so that New York heard the last report in one hour and twenty min- ntes after the first explosion.
Contrary to expectations the canal was soon found to be inadequate to the demands upon it, and its original dimensions of forty feet in width by four feet in depth were quite insufficient. In 1838 the legislature appropriated $4,000,000 an- nually for its enlargement, whereby its width was increased to seventy feet, its depth to seven, ser- eral locks were added, making seventy-two in all : by straightening the line twelve and a half miles were taken off from the original three hundred and sixty-three, while the cost was increased from $7,143,789 to $51,609,203. Of the nine engineers engaged in building it three lived here, then or afterward; of the tolls taken about one-eighth were received here; the income derived from it by the state increased steadily for twenty-five years, declining as steadily afterward, so that tolls were abolished in 1883, to the great satisfaction of all. This work, which has been of incalculable benefit to our community, has, in its present form at least, outlived its usefulness and is to be superseded by a barge canal, of greater dimensions and of far greater cost; whether the new will accomplish more than the old. time will show.
While we are on this subject, mention may as well be made of the Genesee Valley canal, de- signed to furnish transportation through this fer- tile portion of the state from north to south. Though begun in 1837 it was not finished. from Rochester to Olean, till 1856, and even then its volume of business did not come up to expecta- tions, so it was abandoned in 1878 and three years later was sold to a company which laid through its bed what was at first the Genesee Val- ley Canal railroad, afterward the Western New York and Pennsylvania, and is now a branch of the Pennsylvania railroad. The Delaware, Lacka- wanna & Western also runs ils trains in on those tracks. In 1837 a short canal was constructed from Scottsville to the Genesce, and for several years it was of great service in getting grain and
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PRESENT MONROE COUNTY COURT HOUSE.
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HISTORY OF ROCHESTER AND MONROE COUNTY.
flour to market from the sonthwestern part of the county.
THE MORGAN AFFAIR.
A mysterious affair, with which Rochester was only incidentally connected, but which stirred the whole community to its lowest depths for a long time afterward, took place at this period. The Masonic order had acquired great popularity here, Wells lodge having been instituted in 1817, Ham- ilton Royal Arch Chapter in 1819 and Monroe en- campment of Knights Templars in 1826. One of the members of the order, in which he never rose to any eminence, was William Morgan, who fol- lowed the trade of a printer. He seems to have been a most nndesirable person, somewhat intem- perate, with the persistent habit of not paying his debts and of forgetting to return anything that he had borrowed, which last defect contributed to his undoing. After he had removed from here to Batavia it became known that he was writing a book to reveal the secrets of Freemasonry, prob- ably to avenge some fancied slight at the hands of the fraternity. There was intense excitement over this and every effort was made to defeat his intention, even an unsuccessful effort to burn down the printing office in which the hook was being put in type. Every other expedient failing. Mor- gan was finally arrested, in September, 1826, and taken to Canandaigua on a charge of petty larceny committed there; the acensation was soon shown to be ill-grounded and he was discharged but was immediately re-arrested and imprisoned for a debt of two dollars, which he acknowledged; four men came to the jail the next night, paid the debt, with the costs, and, as Morgan was abont to leave the building, seized him and threw him into a carriage which drove off rapidly ; he was never seen again as a free man.
The grand jury of Ontario county found indiet- ments for abduction against four persons, and, al- though they appeared in court with a formidable array of eminent counsel, three of them pleaded guilty and all four were sentenced to ierins of confinement. It was not difficult to trace the car- riage to Rochester, where it was driven down to the old Steamboat Hotel at Hanford's Landing, whence it took the Ridge road for Lewiston. Ac- cording to the evidence brought out at subsequent judicial trials, Morgan was carried from Lewiston
into Canada, but all the efforts of Governor Clin- ton, himself a Mason of the highest degree, to get on the track of him through the earl of Dal- housie, the governor of Lower Canada, were un. availing. What eventfully became of Morgan was never known, except to those who disposed of him, bnt the most prevalent, and probably the best- founded, belief always was that he was brought back from Canada, concealed for some time in an old fort, then taken out and drowned in the Niagara river. No one now has the slightest doubt that the Masonie body, as a whole, was innocent of the erime, and even ignorant of the existence of the plot, but at that time the responsibility of the fraternity was generally eredited, the anti- Masonic fury raged around Rochester as its center and Timothy Childs was twice elected to Congress from this district as an anti-Mason ; finally, to al- lay the excitement, all the lodges in Western New York took the commendable step of surrendering their charters to the grand lodge; not till 1845 was the order revived here, after which it became stronger than ever.
MORE FOREIGN VISITORS.
Rochester was still so small that it delighted to receive distinguished visitors, partienlarly if they were foreigners. Lafayette came here in June, 1825, arriving on a canal boat from Lockport, though the waterway was not completed till four months later. Of course, there were receptions and speeches and a grand banquet at the Mansion House, then kept by John G. Christopher, after which the guest departed for Canandaigua. Cap- tain Basil Hall, an eminent officer in the British navy, came here in 1827, and the following ex- tract from his charming book descriptive of his travels in North America will show how he was impressed with the village :*
"Everything in this bustling place appeared to be in motion. The very streets seemed to be start- ing up of their own accord, ready made and look- ing as fresh and new as if they had been turned out of the workmen's hands but an hour before, or that a great boxful of new houses had been
*After Captain Hall had returned ta England he published, in a volume separate from his narrative. as many as forty etchings from views which he had taken in this country by means of an ingenious mechanism called the camera furida, the ancestor of the photographic camera. As the edition was very limited, the work is extremely rare. The picture representing our village. with the first court-house and the Presbyterian church in the rear, in reproduced in this volume.
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HISTORY OF ROCHESTER AND MONROE COUNTY.
sent by steam from New York and tumbled out ou the half-cleared land. The canal banks were at some places still onturfed; the lime seemed hardly dry in the masonry of the aqueduct, in the bridges and in the numberless great saw-mille and manufactories. In many of these buildings the people were at work below stairs, while at the top the carpenters were busy nailing on the pranks of the roof. Some dwellings were half painted, while the foundations of others, within five yards' distance, were only beginning. I cannot say how many churches, court-houses, jails and hotels 1 counted, creeping upward. Several streets were nearly finished, but had not as yet received their names, and many others were in the reverse pre- dicament, being named but not commenced, their local habitation being merely signified by lines of stakes .. Here and there we saw great ware- houses without window sashes but half filled with goods, and furnished with hoisting cranes, ready to fish up the Iruge pyramids of flour barrels, bales and boxes lying in the streets. In the center of the town the spire of a Presbyterian church rose to a great height, and on each side of the sup- porting tower was to be seen the dial-plate of a clock, of which the machinery. in the hurry-seurry, had been left in New York. I need not say that these half-finished whole-finished and embryo streets were crowded with people, carts, stages, cattle, pigs, far beyond the reach of numbers, and as all these were lifting up their voices together, in keeping with the clatter of hammers, the ring- ing of axes and the creaking of machinery, there was a fine concert."
TWO SENSATIONS.
In 1829 two events occurred that were much talked of. one exciting temporary interest, the other having far-reaching consequences. A wan- dering fellow named Sam Patch, who had acquired some celebrity by jumping from lofty places. not- ably into the Niagara river from a rock projecting from the bank more than half the height of the cataract, leaped the precipice here and then an- nouneed that he would do it again on the 13th of November. Handbills liberally distributed at- tracted an immense crowd on that day and Sam, true to his promise, sprang from a scaffolding which had been built twenty feet above the brink of the falls. If he had been sober he might have been successful: as it was, his limbs were broken by the awful phinge when he struck the water : his mangled body was found in the following spring at the mouth of the river and was buried in the cemetery at Charlotte.
The other incident was not immediately fatal, but it produced greater misery in the end. A young man named Joseph Smith professed to have found in the woods in Wayne county a number of golden tablets, the miraculous writing on which he had copied. Offering the manuscript for publication to Thurlow Weed, who was then issuing the Tele- graph, and meeting with a positive refusal by him. he carried it to Palmyra, where it was printed hy E. B. Grandin as the Book of Mormon, in 1830. It is interesting to note that the old press on which this Mormon Bible was struck off was sold in June, 1906, for five hundred dollars, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints at Salt Lake City. A copy of the first edition of the work is in the possession of the Historical society of this city.
SABBAT ARIANISM.
The fundamental American principle of the separation of church and state was not so well un- derstond in those days as it is now, and the board of trustees, while it woukl probably not have un- dertaken to interfere with the theological vieu, of anyone, considered that it had charge of the morals of the people. So the blowing of the bugle on canal boats as they passed through the village on Sundays was absolutely prohibited, and this official action seemed to stir a certain class of the inhabitants almost to frenzy over the wick- edness of traveling on that day, whether by boat or by stage coach. Large and excited meetings were held, in which that form of vice was de- nouneed in unmeasured terms, a kind of religious boycott was established and three strict construc- tionists, Aristarchus Champion, Josiah Bissell and Ashbel W. Riley, put their convictions into prac- tice by setting up the Pioneer line of stages, to ran on secular days only, an experiment which was abandoned after the projectors had lost sixty thousand dollars in it. The feeling was not all on olle side, for the "friends of liberal principles and equal rights" held a large meeting on January 14th, 1831, to protest vigorously against some Sab- batarian laws that had been proposed and against the religious test then used in courts of justice.
THE CHOLERA.
Asintie cholera. to give it the full title universal- ly bestowed upon it until recently, appeared here for the first time in 1832; long in advance its ap-
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THE KEMPSHALL MILL IN 1838.
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HISTORY OF ROCHESTER AND MONROE COUNTY.
proach was known and a board of health was ap- pointed, consisting of Dr. Coleman, Dr. Ward, Dr. Reid, Everard Peck and Ashbel W. Riley, the first named being sent to Montreal, where the disease was then raging, to study its symptoms and find out the most efficacious mode of treatment. All possible precautions were taken to prevent its appearance, but in vain, and after it had come all the efforts to arrest its progress were equally futile, in spite of the efforts of the local physicians, including Dr. McPherson, who came in from Scottsville to give himself wholly to the work. Nothing did any good; those who were
smitten died, one hundred and eighteen were car- ried off by the scourge during the summer, and General Riley, who had devoted himself to the cause, put eighty of them into their coffins with his own hands; the contagion did not touch him and he lived for more than fifty years after that. 'The destroyer came again in 1834, and had fifty- four victims; once more in 1849, with one hun- dred and sixty deaths, and for the last time in 1852, which was worse than all the other years combined, for, though the exact number cannot be ascertained, it is known that more than four hundred were swept away by the pestilence.
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CHAPTER VI
IT BECOMES A CITY.
The Boundaries-The .Municipal . Government- High-Minded Mayors-Mt. Hope and Other Cemeteries -- Center Market-Old Military Com- panics -- The New York Central and Other Rail- roads --- The Old Carthage Road-Street Ravi- ways-The Telegraph-Disastrous Speculations -The Rochester Knockings -- Anti-Slavery Sen- timent-The Underground Railroad-The War Time.
THE CHARTER.
On the 28th of April, 1834, the legislature passed the act incorporating the city of Roches ter, and containing its charter. It way full time, for the place then contained over twelve thousand inhabitants; there were thirteen hundred houses, fourteen churches or meeting- houses, nine hotels-the Engle, the Rochester, the THE GOVERNMENT. Clinton, the Mansion, the Monroe, the Arcade, the City, the Franklin and the Rensselaer-ten news- The municipal government, as created by the first election, consisted of Jonathan Child, mayor; Vincent Mathews, attorney and counsel; Samuel papers (counting all grades) and two banks; the amount of business done was then very great, and in the previous year one-sixth of all the canal tolls . Works, superintendent ; E. F. Marshall, treasurer; in the state had been taken here. The city limits John C. Nash, clerk : William H. Ward, chief en- gineer ; aldermen -- first ward, Lewis Brooks and John Jones ; second ward, Thomas Kempshall and Elijah F. Smith; third ward, Frederick F. Backus and Jacob Thorn; fourth ward, Ashbel W. Riley and Lansing B. Swan; fifth ward, Jacob Graves and Henry Kennedy. The names of the successors of all these officials will appear in another part of the volume. The number of wards was increased to nine in 1845, to ten in 1853. to eleven in 1858. embraced about four thousand acres but they were slightly enlarged two years later, partly for the purpose of straightening to some extent the east- ern boundary, which at first was very crooked. The section of the act making that addition gives, singularly enough, no metes and bounds or dis- tances from one point to another, but simply says: "The boundaries of the city of Rochester are here- by extended so as to include within the limita
thereof the farm of William Pitkin, situate in the town of Brighton, and also all the land lying be- tween said Pitkin's farm and the eastern boundary of said city." So distant was the prospect that that farm would be built up that Mr. Pitkin exchanged its hundred acres for an ordinary lot on South Washington street. About a quarter of it is now comprised in the university grounds. In 1874 the city limits were so extended as to more than double its size; the lines were somewhat irregular but that furthest west was the Thurston road, that furthest east was the Culver road, these large additions of area constituting the fifteenth and sixteenth wards, respectively. In 1894 the western line was run out to Lincoln avenue. The latest extension was made in 1904, when the whole village of Brighton (with a small strip from Irondequoit) was an- nexed, becoming the twenty-first ward.
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HISTORY . OF ROCHESTER AND MONROE COUNTY.
to twelve in 1859, to thirteen in 1864, to fourteen in 1866, to sixteen in 1874, to twenty in 1892 (80 as to overcome the preponderance of the nineteen towns in the board of supervisors), to twenty-one in 1904 and to twenty-two in 1906, the last being without any addition of territory. There were two aldermen from each ward till 1877, when the nuin- ber was reduced to one, which has been found to be quite sufficient.
MAGNANIMITY IN OFFICE.
Mayor Child did not hold his office for the full term of a year and a half, which had been made a provision of the charter in order that the exer- utive and the common council should not enter upon office at the same time. Even throughout the first year there had been much difference of opin. ion on the subject of licenses between the council and the mayor, who was a consistent temperance man of strong convictions, but the board was on the whole discriminating and Mr. Child waived his objections. In June of the following year a new council was elected, and soon after their taking office it became evident that there was to be # good deal more laxity than before. The mayor was not long in making up his mind, and he soon sent in a message saying that the former board, al- though opposed to licensing in general, had given four licenses to grocers to sell ardent spirits bo- cause they supposed that a gradual reform on their part would meet the general sentiment better than a plenary refusal; that on that occasion he had sacrificed his judgment to the desires of the ma- jority, but that as an individual, both then and since, he had constantly objected to that measure and to every approach to it in the issuing of gros- ers' licenses. Mentioning the fact that the new board had issued numerous licenses he concluded by saying : "It becomes incumbent on me in my official character to sanction and sign these papers. Under these circumstances it seems to me equally the claim of moral duty and self-respect, of a consistent regard for my former associates, of just deference to the present board and of submission to the supposed will of the people, that I should no longer retain the responsible situation with which I have been honored. I therefore now most re- speetfully resign into your hands the office of mayor of the city of Rochester." The resignation
was accepted at once and General Jacob Gould, who was elected mayor a week later, was more complaisant than Jonathan Child.
A corresponding instance of magnanimity was shown in 1845, when Mayor Jolm Allen was the camhidate for re-election on the Whig ticket and Rufus Keeler was his opponent on the Locofoco platform. They came within two votes of each other, und the common council, acting as a board of canvassers, was tied on the question of allowing three imperfect votes to John Allen. which would have elected him ; Mr. Allen, having as mayor the casting vote in the council, decided against himself ; Mr. Keeler was then declared elected, but he declined to serve; Mr. Allen would then have held over, but he immediately sent in his resignation and William Pitkin was appointed mayor by the council.
THE CEMETERIES.
One of the first duties of the new common coun- eil was to provide a suitable resting-place for the dead. The early settlers had used for that purpose a half-acre lot on the corner of Plymouth avenue und Spring streets, by permission of its owners, Rochester. Fitzhugh and Carroll, who finally deeded it, as a free gift, to the village corporation in 1821. Three months later it was exchanged fer a lot of three and a half acres on West Main street, where the City hospital now stands, and all the bodies were removed thither. This was always known as the Buffalo street burying- ground, while a smaller one on the east side of the river was called the Monroe street burying-ground. But both together were too circumscribed and too near to a growing population, so in 1836 the com- mon council. approving a selection unofficially made by a committee of citizens, purchased o! Silas Andrus a piece of ground comprising the first fifty-three acres of what is now Mt. Hope. Fortunately for posterity Silas Cornell was the surveyor of the city at that time, to whose rare skill as a landscape architect, and equally perhaps to his wise forbearance in altering as little as pos. sible the undulations of the ground, it was owing that Mt. Hope has always been one of the most beautiful resting-places for the departed in all the land. The spirit of the original design has horn adhered to by successive superintendents,
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HISTORY OF ROCHESTER AND MONROE COUNTY.
notably by George D. Stillson, who held the posi- tion for sixteen years. Additions were made to the necropolis from time to time, the largest being in 1865, when seventy-eight acres were purchased, so that it now contains about one hundred and cighty-eight acres. The first interment, that of William Carter, was made on August 18th, 1838; on the 1st of June, 1894, the fifty thousandth burial took place and up to this time some sixty thousand have been laid away there, a veritable city of the dead, a silent city.
While there were some few Catholics interred at Mt. Hope in early days, the great majority of that communion, practically all of them, preferred to bury their dead in ground consecrated by their church, and so the trustees of St. Patrick's bought an extensive tract on the Pinnacle hills, southeast of the city, in 1838, and for the next thirty-three years the interment of English-speaking Catholics was made in the Pinnacle burying-ground, as it was always ealled, since which time much of the light, sandy soil of that eminence has been re- moved for building purposes. The German Cath- olics have had three cemeteries-that of St. Jos- eph, on Lyell avenue; of Sts. Peter and Paul, on Maple street, and of St. Boniface, on South Clin- ton street-but almost all the bodies have been re- moved from these and deposited in the Holy Sepulcher cemetery. This comprises about one hundred and forty acres, situated on Lake avenue. north of the city line, in the town of Greece, and extending to the bank of the river. The location is a most desirable one, and since it was opened, in 1871, it has been increasingly beautified, so that it has become very attractive to all visitors.
Perceiving the advantage that the Holy Sepul- cher had over Mt. Hope in being located so far . from the dwellings of the living, several persons formed themselves into a corporation in 1892 and bought one hundred acres of land just north of the former, where the grounds were at once laid out in a suitable manner and were tastefully decorated, the result being that lots were speedily purchase-l and interments are very frequent in the lovely Riverside cemetery. One other place of the dead might have been mentioned before, on account of its antiquity. Although within the city limits, near the southern end of Genesee street, it was doubtless intended for the use of the dwellers ir Scottsville and Chili, for it is said to have been
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