USA > New York > Steuben County > History of the settlement of Steuben County, N.Y. including notices of the old pioneer settlers and their adventures, 1893 > Part 14
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tiou expressed in each, is one dollar, and all lands ;sold, or contracted to be sold out of the tracts conveyed, are reserved.
By the instrument executed on the 23d day of July, JS01, Sir William Pul- teney, in consideration of the execution of the said five escrows, and of the suni of twenty shillings, agreed-first, to accept and pay nine setts of bills of exchange drawn by Williamson on the 24th March, 1801, for the sum of £5,000 sterling, at two, three and four months after sight: 2d, to indemnify Williamson against the effects of bonds and mortgages, to the amount of about $70,000 : 3d, to pay Col. W. in three years after the Ist April, ISOI, £20,000 sterling, and the interest on that sumn at five per cent. at the end of each year, till all was paid, as a compensation for his services in managing the concerns of the Genesee Association, and also £15,000 to pay debts con- tracted by him by reason of his management of the said concerns : and finally, all claims and demands against Col. W. arising before the Ist April, 1801, are relinquished and discharged.
These facts appear from records in the office of Secretary of State, copies of which in the possession of Robert Campbell, Esq., of Bath, the Editor was permitted to examine.
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his clear, cheerful way, as he rode around the mob, " What, boys, have you begun the fun already ? Don't be in such haste," and wrathful Canisteo became pacified.
He had a gallant and impetuous way of doing what was to be done. Where he was, everything was kept stirring. The ordinary routine of a land agent's life had no charms for him. To sit in a drowsy office the live-long day, among quills, and maps, and ledgers, hearing complaints of failing crops, sickness, and hard times, pestered with petitions for the making of new roads and the mending of broken bridges, was unendurable. He must ride through the woods, talk with the settlers, awaken the aliens, show his lands to strangers, entertain gentlemen from abroad. By the pious and substantial settlers from the east, of whom there were many in the county, his tastes and practices were sternly condemned, but even these, while they were offended at his trans- gressions, and felt sure that no good would come of a state founded by such a Romulus, acknowledged the spirit and vigor of the man, and were willing to ascribe his failings partially to a military and European education.
He was dark of feature, tall, slender, and erect of figure. His habits were active, and he pleased the foresters by vaulting lightly to his saddle, and scouring the roads at full gallop.
Gen. McClure says, " Col. Williamson was an excellent, high- minded, honorable man, generous, humane, obliging and cour- teous to all, whether rich or poor. In truth and in fact he was a gentleman in every sense of the word. He was well qualified for the duties conferred upon him as agent of such an immense estate, and for the settlement and growth of a new country, so long as Sir William Pulteney would furnish the means to improve it."
Col. Williamson's objects and motives in conducting the affairs of the estate, were not merely those of a speculator. His pride and spirit were aroused. In invading the wilderness, in hewing, burning, bridging, turning and overturning, till the stubborn powers of the forest were conquered, broken on the wheel and hanged up in terorem, like the rebellious in ancient warfare-in these he found excitement. To stand in the midst of the moun- tains, and hear the crashing of trees, the ringing of axes, and the rattling of the saw-mills-to see wild streams made tame, to see the continuous line of emigrant barges moving up the lower river,
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and to feel himself the centre of the movement, would brighten the wits of a dull man, much more invigorate one so wakeful as Col. Williamson. In his fine, dashing way, he would carry the wilderness by storm. Down with the woods; down with the hills; build bridges ; build barns ; build saw-mills, and shiver the forest into slabs and shingles-these were his orders, and they express the spirit of his administration. In this swashing onslaught his enthusiasm was fired. Besides, the money which · he controlled, and the power which he wielded, made him a great man in the land. He was Baron of the Backwoods-Warden of the Wilderness-Hemlock Prince-King of Saw-mills. There was not a greater than he in all the land of the west. When, there- fore he found himself at the head of a little state which might sometime become great, the Napoleon of a war against the woods, it is not wonderful that in the excitement of building Babylons, or in the exultation of an Austerlitz among the pines, he should be animated with the thoughts and emotions which principles are not accustomed to expect in their agents.
All these dashing operations were fine sport to the men who rode on the whirlwind, but to the magician over the water, who was expected not only to raise the wind, but to keep it whirling, the fun was rather exhausting. To support a missionary of civ- ilization in the American backwoods, purely out of philanthropy, or to keep amateur city-builders in funds, merely that gentlemen might enjoy themselves, were acts of benevolence, not, of course, to be expected from the British Baronet. When, therefore, Sir William Pulteney became alarmed at the encroachments upon his fortune, and abruptly stopped the operations of his viceroy, it would be difficult to say what fault could be reasonably found with him for this determination. Considering the remoteness of his possessions, their tenure under the supposed uncertain laws of a republic, and the great uncertainty of the enterprise attempted, lie did no more than a man of ordinary prudence would have done, in his situation, in determining upon a change or a modifi- cation of policy, and the exercise of greater caution in his expenditures.
Time has proved that the reasons and expectations which induced Col. Williamson to undertake his great enterprise were il1-founded ; and upon the strength of these acknowledged errors,
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he is often sweepingly condemned as a visionary-a heedless, wasteful man, engaged in business of which he was ignorant, and for which he had little capacity. Against such broad and unqual- ified condemnation we must protest. He founded his schemes upon the expectation that the tract known as the Genesee coun- try would sometime become a region of vast wealth, and that through it the products of an indefinite Western country would pass to the Atlantic coast. Has time branded him a dreamer for these things? His error then, was, in mistaking the channel through which Genesce and the West would go to the sea-board. But, considering the modes of transit known to the world at that time, and the shape and position of the navigable waters which drained the Genesee, is any one prepared to say that there was a flagrant absurdity in pointing out the Valley of the Chemung as the destined outlet of the undefined Northern country ? Most men of sense and experience, at the close of the last century, entertained this opinion. A prophet, it is true, might have unveiled the future to the Scottish chief, and shown him canals and railroads ; but, except the wigwam of the Indian doctor, where the destinies were questioned by rattling porcupine-quills, and shaking the horns of a buffalo-bull, there was no oracle for the Western Cadmus to consult. To abuse Col. Williamson and his coadjutors, for want of common foresight, is as unreasonable as it will be for newspapers sixty years hence, to be astounded at the modern project of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific by railway to San Francisco, when, "anybody might have seen " that the natural port of the Pacific coast was Nootka Sound, and that the way to get there from New York would be to take the wires by way of Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchawan river.
CHAPTER IX.
STEUBEN COUNTY SINCE THE PERIOD OF SETTLEMENT-DISAS- TERS-PROGRESS-PROSPECTS-THE CITIZENS AND THE LAND PROPRIETORS.
The history of that province over which those blameless shep- herds of the people, the supervisors of Steuben County, wave their transitory sceptres, has now been traced with as much accu- racy as the sources of information permitted, from the earliest ages to the beginning of the nineteenth century. It has appeared how, in the most distant times of which record can be borne, that region was covered with the waters of the sea ; drifting icebergs then, perchance, scratched the tops of the hills, and our home was a pasture where marine herdsmen drove their ungainly cattle-whales, sea-lions, and mighty serpents of the ocean, and the shark and the sword-fish prowled along the trails afterwards trodden by the Indian and the Tory. It has further- more appeared how the land, being at length delivered from these monsters, rose above the waters, received sunlight and showers, was covered with forests, became a hiding-place of wild beasts and barbarians, and lay in silence through many centuries, being pleased with the murmur of its forests and the rushing sound of its rivers ; how at length the clamors of a strange warfare were heard at a distance, in the valleys of the lower streams, and waxed louder and nearer by degrees until barbarism, "clutching its curiously wrought tomahawk," and gathering its fantastic robe about its form, swept by in full retreat, followed by a horde of light-haired inen who assailed the wilderness with axes, scathed it with fire, and tore it with iron harrows. It has appeared how, afterwards, a republican baron, coming from the East, built him- self a castle out of the trunks of trees, in a broad, round valley, begirt with pine and hemlock hillsides, and dwelt there in the depths of the forest in true feudal style, exchanging defiant mis- sives with potentates who claimed fealty, and entertaining all manner of errant gentry, from French dukes to Newmarket
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jockeys, with much better grace, in faith, than the Front de Bœufs of the ancient English backwoods, while, to complete the similitude, Robin Hood and his lusty foresters reappeared on the Canisteo Flats, and there renewed the merriments of Sherwood Forest .*
With the close of this baronial period the present chronicle will conclude. Our heroic ages there abruptly ended, and modern time set in with a vengeance. The history of the county, after that epoch, would be but a record of the incidents which make up the daily life of an inland, obscure, almost inaccessible region, as the movements of emigrants, the establishment of stage routes, the sessions of supervisors, the burning of log-heaps, the building of saw-mills, the excitements of courts, trainings and elections- all passing by so quietly that, but for the clouds of smoke that overhung the hills on still, dry days of autumn', or the occasional gusts of martial music from rustic battalions, one standing with- out would hardly know that any living thing was stirring within the hemlock highlands. A few startling interruptions, as the war of 1812 and the Douglas affair, disturbed the routine of daily life, but the people kept steadily at work from year to year, had little intercourse with the world beyond their own boundaries except through the medium of newspapers, had their frolics without proclamation to all North America and the adjacent islands, opened great and unsightly gaps in the forest, steered thousands of rafts through the cataracts of the Susquehanna, and, devoting themselves mainly to the task of transforming the wilderness into meadows and plow-land, did few memorable things which are discoverable by the chronicler.
Let us barely glance at the general progress of the county, from the close of Col. Williamson's agency to the present time. At the time of the agent's departure the county had about two tholl- sand inhabitants. The work of subduing the forest had been but
* Curiously enough, we are able to perfect the similitude, by the addition of a Friar Tuck. The first Presbyterian clergyman who ministered to the spiritual wants of the Canisteo pioneers, is described as "a clever, humor- some man, who could drink grog and throw the maul with the best." He was a man of enormous muscular strength. Preaching once in early days in a warehouse in Angelica he became so much engaged in his subject that he dashed a store-desk in pieces with his fist.
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begun, but the beginning had been made vigorously and with good hope. A lumber-trade had been opened with the ports of the lower Susquehanna and the Chesapeake. Northern men had begun to bring grain in considerable quantities to Bath for trans- portation to the markets. The location on the Conhocton was yet considered highly advantageous.
The rupture between the proprietors and the agent, though sensibly felt at the scene of his prominent operations, was not regarded as hopelessly disastrous to the prospects of the county. The development of the agent's plan was far from complete, and the experiments which he had made were insufficient to determine whether his enterprises were wisely or unwisely conceived. The fate of "this great Babylon which I am going to build" was yet uncertain, and it was hoped that, although for the present the progress of the town towards an honorable position among the cities of the land might be retarded, yet that it would ultimately rise from embarrassment and fulfill its destiny. The air-castle, though rather dingy and dilapidated, was nevertheless a very fine affair, and was not without power to attract people from afar. After the year 1800, many men who might have bought lands near Geneva, Canandaigua and Rochester, for a trifling price, were induced, by the superior advantages for access to a market. then offered by the valleys of Steuben, to establish themselves among our own ungracious hills. Many a farmer now residing in this county has the satisfaction of complaining, that had it not been for Williamson's balloons, himself or his father might have had the site of a city for their cornfields, or perchance would have pastured their flocks on the ground now occupied by some stirring village of Genesee, Ontario, or Onondaga.
But the cold water suddenly showered on the delicate phantoms that overhung the forest-soon scattered them. The abrupt dry- ing up of the Pulteney Pactolus, that river of gold which had hitherto refreshed the thirsty wilderness, caused the plant which had been intrusted to the Pine Plains, to grow up scrubbily. A very ignominious metropolis, for many years, was the shire-town of the county. It was a quarter of a century or more before it began to free itself from its deformities, and to cast off its beg- garly apparel for comfortable garments, and to pick up Grecian,
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Gothic and Italian finery to bedeck itself withal. Indeed, imme- diately after the departure of Baron Williamson it was threatened with destruction in a very strange manner. The clearings in its vicinity were abandoned, and a growth of oak of amazing stout- ness and activity sprung up. The farmers were fairly over-pow- ered, as if by tribes of wild men, and driven from their fields. Whole farms were overrun by these invaders. They even pushed their conquests to the edge of the village, and stood insultingly at the heads of the little streets, like a horde of marauders, descending from the hills and pillaging the suburbs of some seedy old city, which has barely enough of its ancient vigor to keep the brigands outside of the gates. The wild beasts re-took possession of the land. Between St. Patrick's Square and Gallow's Hill was good hunting. The owl and the wolf clamored nightly for re-annexation. The bear thrusting his nose through the gar- den pickets, snuffed the odors of the kitchens. In 1811, the whole space between the village and the pine-forest, which encir- cled it at the distance of about half a mile, was overgrown with stout oak stalks, from ten to fifteen feet high. A few huts, occu- pied by negroes, were scattered among the bushes half smothered, and it was only by sleepless care on the part of the citizens that the sprouts were kept down in the streets and market-place, and that the whole metropolis, like a babe in the woods, was not buried in the leaves, so deep that the robins couldn't find it. It was told then, as a great thing, that a farmer on one of the Mar- engo farms had raised twenty acres of wheat. To such littleness had the standard of greatness shrunken in the abandoned Barony.
Not only the central village but the whole county felt the shock at the dethronement of Col. Williamson. He had been the life of the land, and " times were dead enough when he left," say the old settlers. No more the Hudson, the Potomac and the Delaware, were startled by proclamations of races in the wilderness : 110 more did rumors of bull-fights and the uproar of horns disturb the goodly: no more did gallant retinues of riders gallop through the forest, while servants followed with luncheons and baskets of wine. Newspaper paragraphs no longer told the citizens of the East of great thingsdone in Steuben, and pamphlets no longer enlightened London and Edinburg concerning the capabilities of the Conhocton river.
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The county was thenceforward expected to work its own way out of the woods ; to hew its own road to independence and pros- perity ; to scuffle unhelped with whatever enemies should seek to trample it to the earth. After years of hard, and often of discour- aging labour, we have gained the upper hand of the enemy. Our county, for so long a time proverbially a " hard county"-a kind of rough handed, two-fisted, ill-fed county, an offence in the eyes of Eastern elegance and Northern wealth, is rising fast not only to respectability but to consequence, like some great backwoods lout, who, from a youth of log-rolling and shingle-shaving, passes to a manhood of judicial or senatorial dignity.
The first forty years of our county's existence were years of iron labor. The settlers were poor men, and the discouragements and difficulties which they met with will with difficulty be appreciated by coming generations, who shall inherit vallies long tilled and hills subdued by years of thorough culture. One long familar with the farmers of the county says : "But few comparatively of the set- tlers ever succeeded in paying up their contracts and getting deeds for their land. The high price of the land and the constantly accumulating interest on their contracts, was more than they could bear. They were compelled to abandon to others their half-cleared farms, disheartened and weary. Most of the contracts given by the agents of the Pulteneys for the sale of land were assigned from one to another several times, before the whole amount of the principal and interest due on them was paid."
For the last twenty years we have occupied the vantage ground, and have been engaged in a work not only of subjugation but of cultivation. Hard and discouraging work was done during this period, and qnite enough of the same remains to be done among our stubborn hills ; but the increasing independence of the early- settled districts and the additional facilities for communication with the outer world, placed us upon the whole on the vantage ground, and the work of subjugation went on with greater rapidity and ardor than at any time before. Railroads began to encom- pass us ; a steamboat appeared on Crooked .Lake ; the old farming districts began to grow smooth and sightly ; new wildernesses were invaded ; cattle and sheep by myriads fed in the pastures ; viliages were built, and the old dingy towns brightened up and
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renewed their youth. Various schemes of progress were agitated. Canals and railroads were discussed. At length the rumbling of cars was heard on Shawangunk, then on the Susquehanna, then on the Chemung,-and the locomotive, ten hours from the Hud- son, rushed over our glad frontiers and discharged the Atlantic mails at the ancient monumental post of the Senecas. Saw mills arose in every pine forest, and in the spring, when the snow on the hills melted and the ice in the rivers went down to be piled in long battlements on the meadows below, hundreds of lumber- men came out of the woods, steered their rafts of boards, timber and enormous spars down the torrents to the Chesapeake ; riding over huge dams and rocky rapids, sometimes prosperously, and sometimes shattering their fleets and suffering shipwreck drown- ing, and all marine disasters which await mariners who sail in whaleships and frigates.
"Fifteen years ago," says the Citizen in his Descriptive and Historical Sketch, (speaking, in imagination, at the beginning of this century,) "standing on an exceedingly high mountain, we beheld unbroken forests lying west of the Chenango as far as the rainbows of Niagara, and covering the ridges and long slopes of the Alleganies. Standing now on that same promontory, behold a change. Broad swathes are opened in that meadow of timber. Smoke rises from the little chimnies of three thousand cabins, scattered among the choice valleys and by the pleasant river sides of the wilderness west of Seneca Lake. The noise of a myriad of axes is heard this side of the Mohawk, like the tapping of a host of woodpeckers in a grove : flotillas are riding upon the riv- ers, a long and scattered caravan is filing past old Fort Stanwix, while New Englanders are afloat in the canoes of Unadilla, and stout pioneers are urging upwards the barges of Susquehanna. At evening the great forest is dotted with lights. Torches glim- mer by the cabins. Trees are burning where fire runs wild tlirougli the woods, so that in the mid watch, when the torch- lights by the cabins are quenched, you may see afar off a zig-zag serpent of flame coiling around some mountain knob or wander- ing by the lake shore, or pursuing its shining trail through plains and marshes. Two sounds disturb the silence of the night-the dull plunging of Niagara in the West, and the distant uproar of
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Napoleon's cannon in the East. But what are all those thunders that rock the foundation of the other continent, and those tumults of kings and cannon, of horsemen and musketeers which the nations hear with alarm, compared with that unnoticed war which is waged in the forest below you !"
Being unfortunately ignorant of the position of this convenient mountain (which has been strangely overlooked by the State Geologist), it will be impossible to invite the republicans for whom these chronicles are written to look off from the same at the pres- ent day. A view from some such promontory or from a balloon would enable them to see to advantage the present condition of our county. One looking thus from above would behold the upland forests slashed this way and that with the most lawless violence, and the principal valleys freed from their ancient vegetation except where long and crooked lanes of elm, sycamore, and willow mark the channels of the streams, or where groves of oak stand in the midst of the fields, or here and there a cluster of maples or a soli- tary pine alone remain of many brethren.
Nevertheless immense tracts of land are yet covered with the forest. Stripes of timber as broad as the height of the hills, almost unbroken for miles, line the most cultivated valleys. Many broad districts are almost as wild as at the first. Within a mile of the villages and clean meadows of the river-valleys, one finds yet the rude "settlement," and on the further side of half the hills in the County are hollows, which in the provincial pro- nounciation of hollers are so suggestive of hemlocks, burnt stumps, log cabins, and of what is known in despair at the pov- erty of language as "the jumping-off place." There are com- paratively few commanding heights from which one does not seem to see more forest than farmned land, and there are many places where one looks across to districts dented with ravines and covered with treetops, where the axe has hardly begun its mission.
Forty years ago almost the entire strength of the county was in the valleys. Great now is the strength of the uplands, and rap- idly increasing. The subjugation of these obstinate regions has been a labor indeed, and to the eyes of the wanderer from softer lands they look as unsightly as the battle-field the day after the
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victory. The black stumps, the rough fences, the islands and broad girdles of timber, haggled of outline and bristling with long bare spikes, and the half-burnt trunks of trees, are indeed uncomely. Our hill-country, however, is calculated from its structure to attain generally a good, and often a high degree of beauty, when cultivation has removed its primitive roughness. A vision of rolling farms divided by wooded gulfs or ravines ; of smooth knobs dotted witli portly cattle ; of clean slopes covered with grain-fields and orchards-the whole forming a landscape unsurpassed in rural beauty by ancient and renowned counties of the east and north, is a dream of the future by no means too extravagant to be indulged in.
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