USA > New York > Wyoming County > Warsaw > History of the centennial celebration : Warsaw, Wyoming County, New York, June 28-July 2, 1903 : 1803-1903 > Part 12
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Deacon Seth Gates came to Warsaw in this early stage of its prosperity and here he spent the remainder of his life, about fourteen years, living in the house on Genesee street. He was always active in sustaining the preaching of the gospel, schools and all benevolent and charitable enterprises, and he remained always a member of the Baptist church. He died November 9th, 1847. His wife survived him about four years. Doubt- less he had been led to come to this village by the de- sire to spend his remaining years with his children, as business interests were leading them to this village. His eldest danghter, Calista, had married Isaac C. Bron- son of Sheldon, and they were living in Warsaw at this time, Mr. Bronson having associated himself in the mer- cantile business with Dr. Angustus Frank in 1832. Mr. Bronson was for over twenty years closely identified with the business enterprises of this village, in the boot, shoe and leather trade and then as one of the owners of a woolen factory where an extensive manufacturing busi- ness was carried on. That factory building was after-
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ward sold and turned into a grist-mill, at the extreme south end of the village where we all remember it. He was for several years postmaster and later took an act- ive part in securing the construction of the Attica and Hornellsville Railroad and was one of its directors.
Mr. and Mrs. Bronson removed in 1854 to Rockford, Ill. They had a family of eleven children, eight of whom were born in Warsaw. Fonr are living now but none of them remained in Warsaw after their parents removed. Deacon Gates' second daughter, Delia, lived here with her parents entil her marriage to the Rev. A. HI. Stowell. They had four children but none of them ever resided in Warsaw.
The second son of Deacon Gates, Chauncey C. Gates, was born in Sheldon, June 16, 1810. He came to Warsaw about the same time his father did and engaged in the mercantile business with his brother-in-law, Isaac C. Bronson. In 1837 he became a partner in the business and continued in it until 1843 when he sold out his share to A. G. Hammond. From that time he carried on the hardware and stove business under the firms of Gates & Garretsee, and C. C. Gates & Co., and others, for many years. HIe married in 1848, Mary Elizabeth Butler who was born in Henniker, N. HI., April 10th, 1825, and brought her to the old homestead at the head of Gene- see street, where his mother was still living, his father having died the previous year. Here they made their home the whole of their married life their house being always a place where their friends, young and old, found a cordial welcome and where they loved to gather.
Mr. Gates died in 1897 and his wife in 1903. They had five children all now living: William Chauncey Gates of Auburn, Walter Harrison Gates of Scotts Bluff, Neb., Willard Merrill Gates of Geneva, Mrs. L. II. Humphrey and Mrs. F. J. Humphrey or Warsaw.
Seth M. Gates, the eldest son of Deacon Gates, did not live in Warsaw during its early history, but in the neighboring town of Sheldon and, later, LeRoy. In 1820 he left his father's farm in Sheldon, where he had worked until then and went to Middlebury Academy for three years, teaching school winters, his first school being
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taught in Sonth Warsaw, in 1821. In 1823 he began the study of law in the office of the Hon. leman J. Red- field of LeRoy, and was admitted to the bar in 1827, when he formed a law-partnership with Augustus P. laseall of LeRoy. le resided in that village until 1848, and there became known as a bold, fearless and snecessful champion of all measures for the public wel- fare. The LeRoy Gazette, in an editorial published at the time of my father's death, said in part: "It is now thirty-four years since his residence in Le Roy termi- nated, and yet fresh in the memory of all of our older classes of citizens are the distinguishing characteristics of the young lawyer in his opening career, which have marked his whole life. His inflexible love of justice and hatred of oppression, his clear intellect to discover the right, his umbending will in the pursuit of duty, his stern integrity and high sense of honor while yet a young man among us, led him early to take a conspicuous position and to be onr chosen representative in places of honor and trust. First as Supervisor, then as Member of Assembly, and afterwards for two successive terms, Rep- resentative in Congress-the town, County and Congres- sional districts respectively called for his services, which in every position were ably and faithfully bestowed. In this brief notice we can merely advert to Mr. Gates' public career. With moral and intellectual qualities such as those with which he was endowed, it could not have been otherwise than that he should have been in full sympathy with the anti-slavery movement with which the country was agitated, npon his first entrance into public life. With the most prominent of the leaders he became at once a trusted counselor and an active coad- jutor. The necessity, or policy, of a third party organi- zation, to check the aggressions of the slave power, which the extreme leaders had resolved upon, found in Mr. Gates a steady opponent and his trenchant contro- versy with Gerrit Smith and Horace Greeley upon this subject made for him a state reputation which brought him into close political relations with Governor Seward and the anti-slavery members of Congress. It was there that he joined that noble band whose struggles for the Right of Petition and to restrict the area of slavery
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aroused the nation to the enormity of the evil with which they were contending. It is enough to say of Mr. Gates that he was the active and trusted friend of such men as John Quincy Adams, Slade and Giddings during this eventful period. He was their peer, and ' there were giants in those days.'"
It was in 1832 while my father was in the State Legisla- ture, that he helped secure the passage of an Act authorizing the building of the Tonawanda railroad from Rochester to Attica. There he also joined with others in an effort to secure the construction of a railroad from Warsaw to Le Roy, along the valley of the Oatka, but although the right was seeured from the Legislature and over $100,000 worth of the stock was subscribed for, the project was after- wards abandoned. "Ilad that road been built at that time the population of Warsaw would probably have in- ereased several thousand," said Andrew Young, in his Ilistory, "and long before this time (1869) have been
extended South-intersecting other railroads-to the coal mines of Pennsylvania and thence to Pittsburgh." This
was actually done by the building of the Buffalo, Roch- ester and Pittsburgh road, a few years after that was written. But what a grand project it was to build this railroad for the development of Warsaw and LeRoy away back as early as 1834! In 1838 he was elected to Congress as an Anti-slavery Whig and, being re-elected in 1840 he served two terms there. At the close of the XXVIIth Congress, at the request of John Quincy Adams, he drew up a protest against the annexation of Texas, proving that it was a project to extend the area of slavery. This protest was signed by all the anti-slavery members of Congress, and this action is alhided to in later histories as the first organized effort in Congress to check the spread of slavery.
By transmitting the address of the World's Convention held in London in 1840, under his own frank to the gov- ernors of the states, he so exasperated the slave-holders that no less than five governors mentioned the fact in their next messages, and a rich planter in Savannah, Ga., offered a reward of $500 for the delivery of the offending Member of Congress, dead or alive, in that city! Nor
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was the accomplishment of that purpose so unlikely then as one might, in these more peaceful times, believe.
In the midst of this brilliant and promising political career my father was attacked by a second severe stroke of paralysis, warning him of a constitutional weakness, and his physicians told him that he must give up polit- ical life and even leave his profession, the law. It has long seemed to me that the spirit in which he "embraced the inevitable," and with no false parade of disappoint- ment, with no complaint either public or private, of a broken life or a thwarted career, resigned all hope of further political preferment and retired to a comparatively uneventful life, showed the real metal of the man. He moved to Warsaw in 1844, to be near his parents and brother and sisters, all of whom were then living here, and occupied himself with varions business interests, after a year giving up even the practice of his pro- fession.
In Le Roy he had united with the Presbyterian Church upon his conversion at the age of thirty-three, but upon coming to Warsaw he chose the Congregational Church, partly, no doubt, on account of its advanced position in regard to slavery. This church he supported by his active interest, by his rare gifts of voice and pen, and by earnest personal work as long as he lived. He was for a long time the church clerk and for thirteen succes- sive years the superintendent of its Sabbath School. But his work was not confined to the church to which he belonged and which he loved so well. Ile was an earnest and outspoken temperance man, practicing and teaching total abstinence from the use of all intoxicating liquors as a beverage and from any traffic in them. Yet his judgment led him on this question, as it had in regard to slavery, to oppose the formation of a third political party, and here, as before, his forcible pen was used to defend what he felt was right and to oppose what he thought would be a great mistake.
Edneational matters had his interested and intelligent support, always. He had been one of the original founders of Ingham University in LeRoy, one of the first institutions in the country established for the higher ed- ucation of women. He was also one of the early sup _
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porters of Oberlin College, paying for several scholar ships there for many years. He took an active part ian the organization of the Free-Soil party in 1848, a move- ment which resulted later in the formation of the Re- publiean party, and his well known record in anti-slav- ery matters led to his nomination again at this time to publie office, when as their candidate for Lieutenant Governor he ran several thousand votes ahead of his ticket. ITis record as an Anti-Mason is not less honorable and consistent than as an anti-slavery man and a tem- perance reformer, and up to the very end of his long life he was unchanged in his belief in the undesirabil- ity of a Christian's belonging to the Masonic order or kindred ones.
He married in LeRoy in 1827, Miss Eliza Keyes of that place and they had seven children, six of whom survived their mother whose death occurred in Le Roy in 1840. He married for his second wife, in 1841, Miss Fanny Jeannette Parsons of Lisle, Broome Co., N. Y., and they had five children, four of whom are now living, their mother having died in Warsaw, in 1866. In 1867 he mar- ried Mrs. Ann Cornelia Bishop, widow of the late W. S. Bishop of Rochester and daughter of the late Colonel Nathaniel Rochester.
In closing I venture to quote from an editorial in The Western New- Yorker, written shortly after his death : "The character of a man like Seth M. Gates cannot be estimated in its completeness by the aspect which it pre- sented to the public. He needed to be known in the private companionship and more intimate ways of his life to be fully appreciated. Men knew him mainly as a bold controversialist and fearless champion of what he deemed to be just. To them he seemed an armed warrior, always on guard and always with battle-axe in hand, alike ready to repel an attack or to make one.
"Those who knew him best found this man of steel to be one of the most genial and warm-hearted of friends. ITis large culture and his knowledge of men and of the world, that had been amplified by the years of three-quar- ters of a century, made him the most interesting of asso- ciates. His mind was observant, his apprehension alert and accurate, and his judgment almost unerring. These
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qualities of his, together with the power of arranging his thoughts in well-chosen and foreeful language, gave a value to his conversation that few possessed.
"In a small literary association of which he was a member for the last few years of his life the charm of his peculiar qualities shone at its best. The intimacy of the eirele revealed him in new lights to those who thought they knew him well before. Ilis years largely exceeded those of the oldest of them all, but the spright- liness of his mind and his readiness to meet cvery call for a literary contribution was a marvel to them all. Be it a poem, a historie essay, a reminiseenee of the politieal confliets he had passed through, a story, or a song of the olden time, it was all the same to him-he was ready for each and all of them, and he entered into the in- terest of each with a zest that was of itself an inspiration to all around him. His burden of seventy-five years was not a burden to him. His remarkable temperament secmed to transfigure the years as they came and went and change them to a glory. He was never an old man, for he kept his heart always young. Only a year before his death he said to a friend who had spoken of his advancing age, that in all his life he had never enjoyed the days the Lord was giving him better than he did then.
"What a faithful and friendly counselor he was those ean tell best whose footsteps his judgment has guided. The man who could be as stern as Fate when the oeca- sion demanded it-was as tender and pitying as a woman at a speetaele of suffering or wrong.
" While he will be remembered longest among men for those great qualities and heroic virtues that became him so well, others, and these among the most intimate of the friends of his latter years, will praise him for those gentler elements of his character that did not so much attract the publie eye, but were a perpetual surprise and a per- petual joy to all who were within reach of their influence."
William Lloyd Garrison, in a letter written at this same time to the bereaved family said : "Indeed he was made np of such grand elements that to think of him is to be at onee reminded of the portraiture of Abdiel, by Milton in Paradise Lost. For such was Seth M. Gates, bold for the
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truth, uncompromising for the right, faithful to a sensitive and an enlightened conscience, devoid of all fear of the Ad versary and his machinations, strong in the conflict of freedom with oppression, serene and confident in the midst of fiery trials and deadly perils, untainted by selfish considera- tions, choosing to be popularly misunderstood and ma- ligned rather than to be false to his conviction of duty to God, his fellow-men and his country; patriotic in the purest sense of the term and noble in his aims and am- bitions."
Of my father's family of twelve children it remains only to be said that six of them are now living, five sons, and one daughter whose greatest claim to fame here and now is that she was the first one of the children of Setlı M. Gates born in Warsaw and that the many happy years of childhood and youth spent in this village until her marriage took her away, made it to her always, as it still seems, the loveliest village of the whole world; and to have been present at the exercises of this Centen- nial celebration one of the pleasantest experiences of her whole life.
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JAMES WEBSTER and SYLVANUS HAWLEY BY ELLA HAWLEY CROSSETT
James Webster, the grandfather of John B. Crossett, was one of the pioneers of Warsaw who filled quite a place in its history. Ile was a carpenter and cabinet- maker, and built the first frame house in Buffalo, in 1800. Ile was with the Wadsworths in Geneseo for a time, then went back cast but returned to the then western country, Wyoming (or Genesee) county in 1810. He often employed thirty carpenters and his wife always had sev- eral apprentices in the family. He was the contractor for the old Presbyterian church, afterwards used as the plan- ing mill. Ile also built the house now occupied by Charles L. Morris, for Judge Webster; the residence of Albert P. Gage for Dr. Sheldon; one for Captain Fargo, and others. IIe lived to be 83 years old, so that many now living here remember him well.
Sylvanus Holly, or Hawley, my grandfather, came to Warsaw from White Hall in 1816, with his brother David.
They had married sisters by the hame of Waldo, and decided to spell their name Ilawley instead of Holly. In 1822 other brothers came here and held to the original name. Alanson Holly, John and Milton Holly were identified with the growth of the town for many years. Alanson published the Wyoming County Mirror and was one of the members of the first school board for higher education which was established in 1853.
John Waldo Hawley, my father, lived in Gainesville for a few years, but the most of his life was identified with the business interests of Warsaw. Ile built the store now ocenpied by M. W. Campbell. After salt was discovered he and members of his family built the Hawley Salt Works, naming it for him. Since the works were sold to the National Salt Company, his son, Warren W. lawley, has had the management of the salt works here.
The traits of character of the family have been fidel-
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ity to the truth, temperance, liberality in religious thought and interest in the growth of freedom of the citizens of our Republic to have their opinions expressed at the ballot box, or in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "by no means excluding women." Two of the four college presidents spoken of by one of our speakers, namely, David Starr Jordan and Devello Sheffield, came from the Ilawley family.
On my mother's side, among the pioneers, was Elder Pattison, pastor of the Baptist Church here in 1818. Two of his sons were ministers; one a doctor; one danghter married Dr. Binney and they went as mission- aries to India. Incy Pattison married Warren Thorpe. They lived for many years on the farm south of the cemetery. Grandfather Thorpe had charge of the ceme- tery and set out the fine maple trees that surround the grounds. There are still a few people in town who can say that they have known five generations on both my fathers's and mother's side, and it behooves the present generations to endeavor to keep up the good record of their ancestors.
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MIDDLEBURY FAMILIES BY IRVING B. SMITH
Ladies and Gentlemen :
I am asked to speak as a representative of an old fam- ily, or of old families of Middlebury. You may ask what that has to do with a Warsaw centennial. I re- ply that for the first few years of Warsaw's history- until 1812-Middlebury was a part of Warsaw. It is only just to credit much of our present glory to the glorious beginnings made in Middlebury one year before the wilder- ness of the present Warsaw was discovered. The time al- lowed forbids even the mention of the illustrious names of pioneers who began Warsaw on Middlebury soil; Jabez Warren, Amzi Wright, Silas Newell and many others. Mr. Newell was the real founder and early builder of that little village down the valley known as Wyoming. He seems to have been to Wyoming in those days what Mrs. Coonley Ward has been in these more recent times -"The whole thing." Then there is the long line of Ewells introduced by the seven brothers from Massa- chusetts who seemed to have belonged to the aristocracy as they brought into the wilderness a barrel of pork and a half bushel of potatoes.
But I must not radiate from the whole town of Mid- dlebury as a starter. Take one feature of the town, the old Middlebury Academy. How could I even hint at the glory of that institution of learning and ever finish my talk? How much the present renown of our War- saw is due to the output of this famous old school ! Many of Warsaw's most noted men brought from thence knowledge and inspiration. One name, that of Seth M. Gates, has been several times mentioned here. Seth M. Gates was one of the graduates of Middlebury Academy. In passing we might notice the fact that the great War- saw salt interest was born in Middlebury.
If I should start from my own family center, how many
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of yon would listen to the long family story of the Smiths? John and Sammel were in Attica in 1805; then came isaac Smith, my grandfather, who was then a Revolutionary veteran and who lived to the advanced age of 93 years. There can be no question of the Smith superiority as they seem almost without beginning or end. Again I might notice my maternal grandfather, Aaron Bailey, who came into Attica in ISOS, a shoemaker who " whipped the cat," that is, went about from house to house making up cowhide shoes for the family just before winter set in. If I had time I wonid introduce you to the pioneer honors of my "better half" and confuse you in the wilderness of the great Miller family. I will not expand along any of these lines but simply say that both my wife and myself are wonderfully descended.
We hold this Centennial to remind ourselves of the good that has been done in the progress of a hundred years, to remember some of those who did it, and to note how we are historically connected with the benefits. The pictures of our beginning and of the struggles of progress cannot help but make us more appreciative, more sensible of obligations, and more patriotic. In this way we keep firm hold upon our institutions, our Amer- icanism, and in this way we become inspired with the spirit of our fathers. In these days of our prosperity and comparative case it takes just such reminiscences to energize our loyalty and refresh our patriotism. Thus breathing in something of the spirit of our pioneer fathers and mothers, we are kept from a spirit of it- difference. Some one has said that there are three great enemies to our national life: violence, corruption, indifference, but the greatest of these is indifference.
We have here among us a great flood of people from across the sea who cannot trace their ancestry to these early settlers. When these foreigners look back through the line of progenitorship they are not one with us, but when we all look back through the declaration of inde- pendence made by those first people here apon American soil, where they declare: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, &c," we find that these are one with us. What really constitutes an American? This question was once disputed between a
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man born in America and a man born in England but naturalized an American citizen. The American born said: "You are an Englishman since yon were born in England." "No," said the man born in England, "I am no longer an Englishman, I am a naturalized American citizen; I have renounced my allegiance to the crown of of England. I have adopted America and America has adopted me. I believe in America. I am filled with American ideas and therefore I am an American." " No you are not, as you were born in England; I am an American, born here in America." "Well," replied the man born in England, "our old eat found a brood of kittens in an old stove oven; I suppose you would say they are therefore biscuits."
With the broad and true brotherly old declaration be- fore us, all truly loyal Americans are brothers as though they were of one flesh and of one blood. Such is the mys- tie cord of true fellowship among our American citizens. There will be unity of patriotic hearts as long as there is love of freedom in the world.
We need to enttivate a knowledge of our beginning and our progress as a people and to consecrate such knowledge in love and true fellowship. Knowledge of our institu- tions is sanctified by love of our institutions and our peo- ple. In our efforts to emphasize home, there springs up a home patriotism which is the beginning of all true patri- otism. Principal Wicks, of the Syracuse High School, is accustomed to train his pupils along lines of practical citizenship. At the time of a heated political campaign, involving the question of the tariff, his pupil congress was discussing the issue. One boy arose and said : "Mr. President, we don't want any free, foreign salt here in Syraense; what we want to do is to fill ourselves up on American Salt so that we shall be ready to die for our country." Is it not a good thing to become thoroughly salted with American ideas so that we may live or die for our country upon occasion? Warsaw will be hence- forth dearer to ourselves and dearer to our children for this Centennial's intellectual and spiritual salting.
I have particularly noticed the gladness of those who have come back to Warsaw for this occasion, and I think I can discover some manifestations of regret for ever
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