USA > New York > Wayne County > Rose > Rose neightborhood sketches, Wayne County, New York; with glimpses of the adjacent towns: Butler, Wolcott, Huron, Sodus, Lyons and Savannah > Part 39
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Josephine, Fred For this inter- +1 advantages, 1. To the Du chtful to xxxpor tidren. Returning to Eron N. Thomas, it should be stated politics, he always stood high in the opinions of his f elected him to about all the offices in their gift t including a year in the Assembly, the winter of 186 _. Albany he was highly esteemed, as is evident from letters sent t ul the stre of isti,ns. They woOuld accept, , m by Governor Horatio Seymour. It is told of him that, during an exceedingly cold and dreary winter, when many men in the Valley were ont of work, he deliber- ately sat down and considered what he could do to give them employment, and he entered upon a scheme of getting out stave bolts, saying: "I shall not make one cent, but I shall have the satisfaction of keeping the wolf from many a poor man's door. I don't like to think of hungry children." How would that do for an epitaph ? Mr. Thomas' figure is very familiar in memory, though it was in 18:4 that friends bore his remains to the Rose cemetery. He was below the average stature, rather heavy in build. His face betokened generosity, while his heavy lower jaw told of giant firmness. His countenance lighted up easily, and no one enjoyed a joke or a song better. There were few gatherings of the people wherein he was not found, if time and health would permit. Many of the Rose citizens lived longer lives in point of years, but few crowded more into their periods of existence ; and when we consider the physical difficulties under which he labored, the record seems little less than wonderful.
Here, then, the record ends. With me, the readers have gone over every highway and through some of the byways of our good town of Rose, so redolent in names. Since we began our journeyings, many who started with us have fallen out to repose in the various burial grounds en ountered in our progress. May they rest in peace, and may we, too, fig it a good fight and keep the faith, and may we never lose any of the interest due to the town in which we were born.
"Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land ! "
1 0
ai
ue na Down in AN Fion
ROSE AND WAYNE.
.LODELIVERED IN ROSE, N. Y., JULY 4TH, 1889, .10
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1
BY ALFRED S. ROE.
"Ma", through all ages of revolving time, Unchanging man, in every varying clime,
Deems his own land of every land the pride,
Beloved by heaven o'er all the world beside ; His home, the spot of earth supremely blest, A dearer sweeter spot than all the rest."
-James Montgomery.
1789-1889.
A hundred years ! In that interval generations of men have come, have played their brief part and have gone. Then France, awakening from the lethargy of centuries, was girding herself for the destruction of the Bastile ; for the liberation of the masses, and for the guillotining of crowned heads. The Napoleonic battles, called by Hugo the readjustment of the universe, were yet to be fought ; for the being who prompted them was still scarcely more than a boy, a subaltern at Valence. England, just recovered from the struggle with her colonies, was breathing more rapidly over the eloquence of Edmund Burke, as he impeached Warren Hastings in the name of heaven and humanity. America, adjusting herself to her new condition of freedom, had accepted a Constitution for the United States of America, and, under the presidency of George Washington, was pushing out into the unexplored territory of the west.
Now France celebrates the centennial of the destruction of the Bastile and, escaped from kings and emperors of whatever line, smiles, a republic. England, under her Victorian Queen, forgets the animosities of Bunker Hill and Yorktown, and, in the van of nations, disputes with America only the leadership in thought and liberty. America, a universal refuge, has repeatedly accomplished the nominal impossible-for a teeming popu- lace fills the Great American Desert, making it bud and blossom as the rose; an iron road-bed crosses the Rocky mountains, over which loaded trains ascend and descend as easily as did angels in the patriarch's vision the ladder reaching heavenward; away above the East river shipping,
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apparently as stable as earth herself, a mighty arch binds the twin cities of New York and Brooklyn-a bow rivaling in promise that which spanned the firmament when the receding waters released the prisoners of the Ark; for one gave assurance of no more deluge and desolation, while the other forecasts the infinite possibilities of science and art ; five hundred and fifty feet above the base, at times among the clouds, shines the aluminum tip, whose refulgence tells of the gratitude of the republic to him whom all call the Father of his Country ; the Washington monument eclipses all similar structures, and, standing in the national capital-itself a growth of the century-it may look back over the contests of the hundred years; over the liberation and enfranchisement of a race ; over the waxing and waning of reputations ; over high officials slain in office ; over the develop- ment of the country and the almost utter annihilation of the impossible.
Till March, 1789, what is now Wayne county was virgin soil. South- ward a line of settlements had led to the west, and, even in Revolutionary days, the Indian whoop and scalping knife had proclaimed the presence of adventurous whites, along what we call the southern tier. Water-ways had borne the exploring French over vast areas to the Mississippi. On the north, the waters of Ontario had for ages laved the beach, as yet untrodden by the feet of white men. Oswego, a strategic point, had long been held, and hostile arrays had moved up and down the Oswego river ; but what this country possessed in the way of civilization was still in the far east. As when the English rulers gave a charter to a colony, they made the western limit the setting sun, or the very nearest, the Pacific ocean, so the earliest formed county, west of the Hudson, was named Albany and included everything in the state to the westward. This was in 1683, and while Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga or Seneca roamed at will over this vast domain, the name remained unchanged till 1772, when Tryon county was organized, embracing all that territory west of a line running north and south, through the middle point of Schoharie county, and was thus called from William Tryon, then governor of the province. The Revolution speedily followed, and at its end, the patriotic inhabitants could not endure the name of a loyalist governor and so changed it to Montgomery, thus recalling the thrilling scene before the gates of Quebec. But the star of empire was steadily moving westward, and in 1791 the setting off of Herkimer county permitted the application of the name of the hero of Oriskany. The area included all between the present eastern boundary of Herkimer county and the eastern line of Ontario, erected in 1789, this running along the eastern side of Lyons and Sodus. Of that part of Wayne county we will speak later. Now we will trace the further changes in that part of the county where we meet to-day. In 1794 there was another slicing off, and one portion became a part of Onondaga ; again a division in 1799, and we became a part of Cayuga.
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In 1804 another tribal name came to us, through the creation of Seneca county, whose extreme northern town, Junius, included the present town- ship of Huron, Wolcott, Butler, Rose, Galen and Savannah.
Thus we continued until April 11th, 1823, when the above part of Junius from Seneca and Sodus, Lyons, Williamson, Palmyra and Ontario from Ontario county were united to bear the cognomen of that glorious veteran of the Revolution, "Mad " Anthony Wayne. The leader at Stony Point had been sleeping more than a quarter of a century on the shores of Erie when he was thus remembered in this shire of ours, and the creation of Marion township, in 1826, from Williamson, gave the hero Revolutionary company. There is a whimsical jumble of names in our county that will bear a moment's contemplation. The word Wayne is melodious, terse and suggestive; Marion, too, arouses a host of memories, and Williamson, on the north, is quite in place as the name of the first agent of the Pulteney estate, but on the south we step into the past and Palmyra. One naturally looks for Thebes hard by, for the names are so commonly joined in story, but instead, if we go west, we are in the domain of Philip and Alexander, or Macedon, while, should we journey east, our way will lead into Arcadia, the land so often praised by poets as the abode of peace and innocence. The name of the bordering lake fitly appears in one division, while just below it is the town named from Chancellor Reuben Hyde Walworth. From Arcadia we make only a step and Grecian reminders cease and we are in France, " sunny France ;"' at any rate, the town is Lyons, and all school children will tell you that Lyons is the second city in France. Just one, and one only, reminder of Indian occupation is had in Sodus, but that must go back to Assorodus, before we find the aboriginal for " silvery water." Possibly Huron may be of American origin, in its recalling of the great northern tribe of savages; but east of it is Wolcott, a loyal tribute to the memory of Gov. Oliver Wolcott, of Connecticut. The origin of Butler is probably in that Richard Butler, who, with Oliver Wolcott and Arthur Lee, was appointed by the government of the United States to negotiate with the Six Nations in 1784. Rose comes from a purchaser of a large tract of land, including that on which we now are gathered. Galen owes its title to so queer a notion as the ascribing that part of the military tract, covered by the township, to the medical department, and in its annals, who so prominent as him of Pergamus ? The jumping-off place is reached when we get to Savannah, along the Seneca river, and the name of the town explains itself. So then, in these fifteen towns, we have ancient history and geography drawn upon along with those of modern times, beside an occasional reference to individuals and to the aborigines.
The first settlements were made within the bounds of the present towns of Palmyra and Lyons, and through these settlements the exercises of to-day partake of a centennial character. The venturesome pioneer from
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Connecticut or New York sailed up the Hudson to the Mohawk ; then by means of a pole he pushed his craft up that stream till he reached the site of the present city of Rome, when his boat and effects were carried across the country, a mile and a half, to Wood creek, down which he floated to Oneida lake. The wind might propel him the length of that body of water, and down its outlet, Oneida river, to its junction with the Seneca to form the Oswego. Then he turned his prow southward, travelling the sluggish stream till he entered the Clyde river, up which he went till he dropped anchor at Lyons or Palmyra. This journey, under favorable circumstances, covered twenty-eight days. Among the many changes of the one hundred years, no one is more marked than the improvement in locomotive facilities. Yesterday your speaker breakfasted within forty-four miles of the city of Boston. It was not till nearly ten A. M. that he took the cars for the Empire State, yet at nine P. M. he was landed at the station on the very banks of that river along which, a century since, our ancestors pushed their clumsy bateaux, at scarcely more than a snail's pace.
Of the events incident to the towns of Palmyra and the old area of Lyons, it would be interesting to speak, for in Palmyra, Mormonism had its origin, and in Arcadia, set off from Lyons, the famous Fox sisters set the world to thinking about the phenomena of Spiritualism ; but it will be better for us to confine ourselves to a " pent-up Utica," and to tell of those narrower bounds that inclose what to the majority present is our native town.
" With what a pride I used to walk these hills." They first beheld the tottering steps of my childhood, and now look solemnly down upon the graves of my grandsires, and, though more than half of my life has been passed out of my native state and only a small fraction in this, the town where I first saw the light, there has never been a moment when I could not reproduce at will " many a path beloved of yore and well remembered walk." In our company there is no one with soul so dead that he hath not o'er and o'er said, " This is my own, my native land." No boy nor girl, however mischievous, has ever climbed these steep hills, to roll down stones in summer and snow-balls in winter, without pausing to drink in great draughts of inspiration from the grandeur of the scene. From several points in this town may be seen the waters of the lake, while in other directions we may gaze beyond the borders of our own township. When nature gives an extra turn to her kaleidoscope, and, in a mirage, throws upon the sky the lake shore, can anything be more glorious ? These hills, left by the melting glaciers of an early age, are a peculiar feature of our landscape, and nowhere in our country is there better evidence of water and ice action in the formation of the earth's surface, and iu no town in the county are the results better marked, than here in Rose. It was Auerbach who said that on every height there lies repose. Though we may be
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tempted to spend hours in visual feasting as we scan the scene from their summits, certain it is that nothing tends more to thrill the soul of man than the sight of lofty eminences. Though these of ours do not approach the mountains in height, yet I believe they have so impressed themselves on the youth of this town that from whatever station, looking back to their old home, no fancy would be complete without the familiar contour of the north and south ranges of hills.
"Ye hills of Wayne ! ye hills of Wayne ! In dreams I see your slopes again- In dreams my childish feet explore Your daisied dells, beloved of yore. In dreams, with eager feet, I press Far up your heights of loveliness, And stand, a glad-eyed boy again, Upon the happy hills of Wayne."
The earliest settlements in our county were sixteen years old when, in 1805, the pioneers turned northward from the Clyde river and pushed out into the wilderness, following, possibly, pretty nearly the direction and location of the present Clyde and Wolcott road. Before that date our section had been the hunting ground of the savage. This part of the state seemed to be held in a sort of joint ownership by the Cayugas, Onondagas and Mohawks, of the Six Nations, and they were the tribes that signed away their rights, when a grateful nation determined to pay in land a part of the debt owed to those who had fought during the Revolutionary war. Of this Indian occupation we have very little trace. Occasionally the farmer turns up an arrow head in his plowing, and Mrs. George Aldrich, of North Rose, has an excellent gouge or scoop ; but to my knowledge there is no other utensil of the kind among us. There are no traces of burial places nor villages, but that game was abundant, thus affording the savage a reason for roam- ing over this part of the country, all early settlers agree. Even after the coming of the white man, his red brother was a frequent guest as he flitted phantom-like over the region which he once called his own. I some- times wonder if the Chief [Logan, to whose memory those patriotic words, engraved upon the pyramidal structure in Fort Hill, Auburn, " Who is left to weep for Logan ?" may not have followed the chase hither, or whether, in the remoter past, hostile Hurons may not have skirted the lake and Assorodus bay to the point of debarking in our own town as they preyed upon the more peaceful Iroquois. But all this is fancy, for long since the Indians " slowly and sadly climbed the western hills and read their doom in the setting sun." The sword of the white man has swept them away. The land they left was devoted to the soldiers of the Revolu- tion ; but very few of them ever occupied the lots assigned to them. They sold their claims to speculators who may or may not have realized upon
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them. In the vicissitudes incident to the Phelps and Gorham purchase, whose new eastern line ran along the western part of this town, the state gave to the successors of the original purchasers of the Pulteney estate, certain parts of the military tract, and in this way our location came into the care of Captain Williamson as agent, and from him, finally, the Geneva land office passed under the direction of Messrs. Fellows & McNab, whose names may be found 'upon the deeds of all the original farms in our vicinity. Osgood Church, one of the first settlers of Wolcott, father of that worthy veteran, Hiram Church, was a sub-agent for the estate, and his old sale book, still in existence, is a precious relic of the early part of the century.
It was in 1805, then, that, armed with their deeds of sale from the patentees, Caleb Melvin, Alpheus Harmon and others made the beginnings in our town. Melvin's location was on or near the Thomas place, south of the Valley. He was a relative of the first Thaddeus Collins, who was another early comer, the father of probably the latest survivor of those who moved into Rose. I refer to Stephen Collins, our aged and revered fellow citizen. But 4,000 acres in this very centre of the present town had been bought by Major Robert S. Rose and Judge Nicholas, both Virginians, but then of Geneva ; so the giving of titles was still further mooted. Alpheus Harmon located his log hut near a spring, still flowing, a little east of Stewart's school-house, and there remained till the moving spirit carried him further west. A granddaughter, Mrs. Ambrose Lockwood, of Butler, only recently died. A near neighbor on the west was Lot Stewart, who came to the then Wolcott from Saratoga county. We of to-day can have little conception of the nerve necessary to carry our ancestors over their long and tedious march hither. In this gathering, to-day, are descendants of those who first walked, with knapsacks upon their backs, to this wilderness to inspect and locate their purchases. Coming from Massachu- setts, Connecticut or the Hudson river counties of our own state, we can properly rate the distance traveled. Then, returning, they fitted up a vehicle, to serve as wagon and house, and often, with slow moving ox team, started, in some cases with a numerous family of small children, on their journey of hundreds of miles. Roads as we know them had no exist- ence. Streams must be forded, ferried, or " gone around," and then after weeks of shaking and jolting, following blazed trees, camping by the side of some spring or creek, the home is reached. And what a home ! Let the cultivated fields and comfortable houses of to-day disappear. In their places stands the primeval forest, and close by the perennial fountain, furnished by nature, is the early settler's home. In his first visit he had cut down and piled up certain trees, covering the enclosure as best he could, and into this abode the weary mother and fretful children are ushered. Food has been brought with them till the first crop can supply
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them. When this is grown, there is no mill near by to grind it, so the inventive pioneer hollows out the top of a stump, and for this he will not have to go far, and in this primitive mortar brays his first fruits. Fancy, if you can, the agony of friends when disease came among them and singled out its victims. The old and the young, the weak and the strong were alike liable. The facilities of the old home were not to be had, and only patience, and faithfulness in the use of such medicines as the forest afforded, were of any avail. And should death, always terrible, take from the circle the aged matron, who had joined the migration, or the tiny baby, whose coming had speedily followed the settlement, where was the minister who should speak the usual words of consolation ? When the grave was dug, in the newly cleared vicinity, and the body of the loved one was laid away for time and eternity, who can portray the desolation that must have been felt in the scantily furnished home !
In spite, however, of all hindrances, population poured in till, in 1810, the original town of Wolcott possessed 480 inhabitants. Immigration was rapid, and the difficulties of assembling for town meetings, alternately at Wolcott Village and Stewart's corners, resulted in the dismemberment of the old town and the creation of three new ones, viz., Rose, Huron and Butler. We may be pardoned a morsel of pride as we reflect that the year of our separation was the semi-centennial of the Declaration of Independ- ence, though we made our start in February rather than July. Had it occurred to the good people of this town to celebrate, in 1876, the nation's centennial and their own half century, what a goodly array of those who came to the wilderness as boys and girls might have been brought together !
This town of ours has been and still is eminently agricultural. The arts and manufactures so prominent in some sections have never been located here ; while this fact may account for the lack of large fortunes in the possession of any one individual, it is not without its agreeable features. As a rule, vast holdings presuppose the proximity of the very poor. Many doubtless have said : "If the Sodus canal or General Adams' ditch had only been put through, this town would have been much more flourishing." Location upon water-ways or trunk lines is not without its drawbacks. The man who grumbles thus may reflect that the crime and pauper average is correspondingly lower. The saw-mills which cut up the timber once standing here did not give place to the hum of the loom nor the rattle of the shoe factory, but the population has remained honest and homogeneous. Go to the churches in this village next Sunday and you will find the descendants of those who first broke into this primeval forest ; not so in the east, where ten years will nearly transform the personnel of a manu- facturing village. There are many worse surroundings than a farming community ; but what would the fathers say could they return and see the
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methods of to-day ? Those good old men who cleared away the trees, turned over the soil and sowed wheat which grew so heavy that it would scarcely bend as the farmer threw his heavy wool hat upon it ; what would they say were they to walk forth some fine day and see acres given to the growing of onions, where they devoted a few feet only ! Wouldn't they think that the habits of the people in the way of food had wonderfully changed ? And when they saw an adjoining field covered with a rank growth of peppermint, what would be their reflections on the popular stomach-ache ? As they passed large enclosures given to the growth of raspberries, may we not fancy some patriarch saying : " Well, I do declare, if these folks don't beat all ! In my day these things grew wild all over the back lots, and the boys and women folks had no trouble in finding all they wanted, but here are whole acres just covered with bushes, and it does look as if they had run cultivators through them, too. I wonder if folks have given up eating bread and have taken to berries ? Strange times ! "' Should he continue these investigations, he would find, on some farms, as much land given up to potatoes as to corn, and I can fancy him wondering if there is a greater percentage of Hibernians in the country now than there was in his day. Should his visit come in the autumn, he would be filled with wonder as he saw great loads of fine apples, not the crab apple kind, which grew on the trees that came from seeds of his planting, but large, smooth Greenings and Baldwins, carried-to the cider-mill ? not at all, but to this queer building, one of whose most prominent features is a big chimney and which seems to be a great devourer of fuel. Here, should he look in, he will see the fruit speedily transformed into the whitest of dried apples, not in the least like the results of patient paring, quartering, coring and stringing of his time. Do you not think he would draw strange conclusions as to the likings of the present generation for dried apple pie ? In harvest what would be his wonderment at following one of those machines which cuts the grain and, binding it, drops it ready to be put into the shock. A few weeks earlier, would not his bones ache with very envy as he saw horses drawing a cutting bar, which did what it took many a sweep of his brawny arm with snath and blade to accomplish, and then when down, a machine, which, kicking like an exaggerated grass- hopper, stirred out the grass. Soon afterward, a man, boy, or perhaps a woman, comes riding along on a skeleton-like contrivance, which speedily gathers the hay into windrows. If away up in conveniences, the wagon and rack which follow will have a loader attached, and what cost him many a weary tug will now be done by horse power. He goes with the load to the barn, and just, look at his eyes as he sees a large fraction of that mass, at the will of the party on the mow, put just where he wishes, with no more effort on his part than merely to direct it. The horse down below is doing the lifting, and the boy who, in his grandfather's day,
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