USA > New York > Franklin County > The north country; a history, embracing Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Oswego, Lewis and Franklin counties, New York, Volume 1 > Part 11
USA > New York > Jefferson County > The north country; a history, embracing Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Oswego, Lewis and Franklin counties, New York, Volume 1 > Part 11
USA > New York > Lewis County > The north country; a history, embracing Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Oswego, Lewis and Franklin counties, New York, Volume 1 > Part 11
USA > New York > Oswego County > The north country; a history, embracing Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Oswego, Lewis and Franklin counties, New York, Volume 1 > Part 11
USA > New York > St Lawrence County > The north country; a history, embracing Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Oswego, Lewis and Franklin counties, New York, Volume 1 > Part 11
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But if good roads were needed to encourage extensive immigra- tion, the almost complete absence of roads of any kind had not served to deter the hardy and the adventurous, goaded on by stories of land to be bought for a song, from blindly treking through the forests. Daniel W. Church, one of the St. Lawrence county pioneers, arrived on the site of Canton, according to his diary, with seventeen blisters on his hand, occasioned by rowing and pulling the batteau along. Nicholas Salisbury, the pioneer of Adams, arrived at the site of his future home, his household goods drawn by oxen on a sled, after a journey through the forests of twenty-six days. The settlers coming into Rodman had to cross over a deep gulf on a pole bridge and one pioneer wife, writing of the experience many years after, said that once having passed safely over this bridge she said goodbye to every- thing as she was sure she would never go back over that place. But the women were usually as venturesome as the men and seventeen- year- old Lucy Fox, carrying her babe of a few weeks in her arms, and accompanied only by her sister, rode all the way from Rome to Adams through the woods guided only by marked trees.
The present county of Lewis, because it was the nearest to the settlements at Rome, Utica and Boone's, was at first the most popu- lous of all the Northern New York sections. Shaler's in the town of Leyden had early become an important settlement with rutted forest roads radiating from it to a half-dozen nearby hamlets. At Turin was Jonathan Collins, the first supervisor and a man of consequence, Major John Ives, Elder Stephen Parsons and others, many of whom had their titles clear at the turn of the century. Not far from High Falls lived Richard Coxe, the brother-in-law of James D. LeRay de Chaumont, who was soon to build his high, curb-roofed house on a hill west of Collinsville. By 1803 lands in particularly choice loca- tions in this vicinity were selling for the unprecedented price of $17 an acre. And at Martinsburg, or Martin's, as it was first called, in the higher country to the north, lands at the very beginning of settle- ment brought $5 an acre and they were well worth it because Col .. Walter Martin proved himself a proprietor of the first order. He and his aged father, Capt. Adam Martin, an officer in the Revolu-
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tionary war, at first lived side by side in log cabins like the lowliest of settlers, but by 1804 James Constable rode into the hamlet and found Martin erecting a great stone house modeled carefully after the baronial mansion of Sir William Johnson at Johnstown, and so well did he build it that it stands to this day, an example of architectural grace and majesty.
Martin speedily interested settlers of a high type in his lands. Levi Adams was one of the first to come. He was later to go to the state senate and become one of the powerful council of appointment. To Martin's also came Chillus Doty, brother-in-law of the colonel, to build an inn and later to become Lewis county's first sheriff and eventually member of assembly, surrogate and county judge. Squire Martin early built a grist mill and a saw mill, a school in 1804 and a paper mill in 1807, the same year in which he started the first newspaper in all Northern New York. But more important than all in 1806 he built the first church edifice north of the Mohawk and soon after was paying a clergyman $250 a year so that he might be "free from wordly cares and avocations."
At Lowville, a few miles from Martin's, Seth Stow, the agent of Nicholas Low, had created quite a little hamlet about the spot where Daniel Kelley, his brother-in-law, had built a log house against a great boulder in 1798, but the village was not equal in influence to Denmark in the Deer River country where Abel French, a power in state politics, was the land agent and had attracted to the section many sturdy Federalists from New England.
After one proceeded up the old Black river road to the Long Falls and crossed the river at Jean Boussout's ferry he was but four miles from Noadiah Hubbard's settlement at Champion, but "four good miles" as a traveler of that day fervently remarked. At Champion one might find, as did the Rev. William Taylor, the missionary, "old acquaintances and old-fashioned cookery and things comfortable and convenient." Even James Constable, the landowner, who owned no property there, was willing to admit it was "a pretty good town, tolerably well settled."
Here Captain Noadiah Hubbard, who owned the only clock in the Black River Country, was already supervisor of the town, represent- ing it on the board of supervisors of Oneida county. It seemed that
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HISTORY OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
surely if a new county were formed Champion must be the county seat and attracted by this prospect quite a group of notable men took up their residences in the little hamlet nestling among the Champion hills. To Champion, fresh from Williams College, came Egbert Ten Eyck, destined before many years to become a power in North Country politics and to represent his section in congress. And to Champion, too, came Moss Kent, brother of the chancellor, labori- ously bringing up through the woods his fine library of calf-covered books. Among them were Shakespeare, Milton and Addison's Spec- tator, Humes' "History of England" and old-style novels like those of Sir Charles Granison's. Kent had already served in the senate from the western district and had campaigned for John Jay with the best of them. Engaged to a sister of J. Fenimore Cooper, when she was killed by a fall from a horse, he turned his steps northward, became later land agent for James D. LeRay and filled one public office after another to the satisfaction of his neighbors.
Adjoining was the town of Watertown, then much larger in area than the present town, where the Coffeens reigned supreme. In the hills, now known as Rutland, David Coffeen had early established himself and by 1800 had built a grist mill which drew patronage from the settlers for miles around. A distillery was erected and for a time whisky was considered legal tender in this part of the town. David Coffeen was a man of consequence, so much so that he was elected to the assembly from Oneida county in 1802 and 1803 when the present Jefferson county was still a part of that county. Levi Butterfield, veteran of the Revolution, early established a tavern there, which the frank Constable refers to as "a poor tavern in an old log house."
In the hamlet of Watertown Henry Coffeen, probably the most able of the brothers who came into the Black River Country about 1800, had settled and was already dreaming of a new county with his little village as the county seat. Then but a group of log huts with the little log inn of Dr. Isaiah Massey standing in their midst, there seemed little justification for his hope. But down by the great falls of turbulent Black river which the Castorland explorers had viewed with such wonder a few years before, Jonathan Cowan was acquiring water power rights which today would be worth millions,
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HISTORY OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
and was taking the first steps to utilize the power that was within the next century to make Watertown the metropolis of the entire North Country.
Further down, towards the mouth of Black river, Jacob Brown, youthful surveyor and one day to be the commander-in-chief of the armies of the United States, had established himself at a settlement already known as Brownville, where he had opened up a brisk trade with Kingston, Canada. It was as prosperous a settlement as there was in the North and there Constable, early in the century, found a hotel "too large for the present state of the place and not finished, as well as good houses and other buildings."
Further south settlers were establishing themselves on both branches of Sandy Creek. At Adams, sometimes called Louis and sometimes No. 7, a group from Massachusetts early settled. They were rigid Congregationalists whose Sabbath started with sunset Saturday. Not for nothing did the old bard speak of "Adams with its deacon's face" and even the narrow Rev. William Taylor admitted that here was a "decent, respectable, industrious people." Here lived Nicholas Salisbury, Peter Doxtater, who had been kept a prisoner by the Indians for three years during the Revolution, and Samuel Fox. Here also lived Eliphalet Edmunds, later to be named a presidential elector at a time when to be a presidential elector meant something.
At Ellisburg, still further south, Lyman Ellis, a man of extraor- dinary energy, had settled as early as 1797 and was certainly the first man within the limits of the present Jefferson county to raise a crop. James Constable, who has left an interesting account of his travels in the town in the early days of its existence says that eighty bushels of grain had been produced on an acre but that fifty was the general run. He found no liquor in the town and they only drink water "with which they seem to be content." The Rev. Mr. Taylor found the inhabitants "very rough in general," and incensed at an encounter with a Rhode Island Baptist, wrote a scathing indictment of the inhabitants, in which he charged them with "ignorance, self- will, self-sufficiency, ill manners, pride, boasting, fanaticism and witchcraft." This can be dismissed, of course, as the intemperate statement of a narrow man. As a matter of fact the settlement was strikingly progressive and as early as 1798 Ellis had been able to write Constable that "we have a good dam across the creek, which
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HISTORY OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
has been expensive, a good saw mill, well finished and running, and have considerable towards a grist mill."
These were the principal settlements in the territory which was later to become Jefferson county. Sackets Harbor had begun to settle but did not have that "pretty appearance" which Constable noted a few years later when the village had become the principal port of the North Country. Settlers were building cabins on the site of the present Chaumont and using ciscoes which they caught in plenty in the lake in place of money. The rest of the county was unbroken wilderness. There were a few log cabins along the Oswe- gatchie road in the present town of Antwerp. Three miles north of the present Antwerp village was Capt. William Lee's tavern where all travelers to and from Ford's settlement at Ogdensburg stopped. We have Constable's testimony that here the fare was hard and the lodging poor, a description which after all would apply to any of the backwoods inns of that day.
If one followed the old Oswegatchie roads northward he would find nothing but wilderness with now and then a mean, log hut, until he reached Nathan Ford's settlement at Ogdensburg. The first settle- ments in the present St. Lawrence county were all along the St. Lawrence. Later settlements were to spring up in the back country, on the Racquette, the Grass and the St. Regis, but the lots along the St. Lawrence were the most valuable.
The little village at Oswegatchie, called by the people "The Garrison" and by Ford Ogdensburg after the proprietor, was laid out with the expectation that it would become the principal town of the new county as indeed it did. Streets were surveyed and named and a tavern built. Major David Ford, a jealous Federalist who had helped suppress the Whisky Insurrection, soon joined his brother and a year or so later we find him building the first house in the present Morristown and becoming one of the pioneers in the new country. Louis Hasbrouck, fresh from Princeton, early came northward through the wilderness with his family and his female slave, a large part of the trip being made on foot, the party subsisting on dried beef, crackers and lemonade. Through the influence of Judge Ford he became the first clerk of the new county of St. Lawrence. But the settlement was still a frontier village with all the term implies. Drunken Oswegatchie Indians broke into the old stone garrison,
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HISTORY OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
seized Dick, Judge Ford's slave, and were about to put him to the fire when the wiry judge appeared in flapping nightshirt and put. the invaders to rout with his sword.
Not far from Oswegatchie was Madrid, one of the original Ten Towns, where there were a few "openings" in the forest where iso- lated cabins stood. But the little village of Hamilton, named from the first secretary of the treasury, was early a place of importance. Long since this village has been known as Waddington but it was Hamilton when the Ogdens came there to build their great house with walls three feet thick, and then, like the landed gentry they were, their stout, little church, St. Pauls, probably the first church building outside the missions at Oswegatchie and St. Regis, north of Champion.
Lisbon, also one of the original Ten Towns, early drew settlers. A mill was built on the river bank, seventy by fifty, three stories high, which from its color early gave the little hamlet the name of Red Mills. Alexander J. Turner, the land agent, became the first super- visor of the town, and he and John Tibbets, the proprietor, who became the first town clerk, were citizens of consequence in the new country as the letters of Ford attest.
In the meantime settlers had pushed through on the old Chateau- gay road, penetrated the wilderness and were building homes along the St. Regis river. Most important of them was Judge Roswell Hopkins, who had served as secretary of state in Vermont and had abandoned his home there to become a pioneer in this new country. Also he had served in the Revolution and had been a presidential elector so naturally he at once became a person of note in the new county which he later served as a judge in the court of common pleas and a member of assembly. His name is perpetuated in the name of the town which he founded, Hopkinton.
Stillman Foote pushed even further through the wilderness to the Grass river, where he found a lone settler who sold him such title as he had and his crop of wheat for a horse, saddle and bridle with which to leave the country. The common route then was to follow the Lake Champlain road from Vermont and then up the St. Law- rence to Lisbon, or Red Mills, there entering the forest again. Foote built a shanty on the site of the present fair grounds in Canton and when Daniel Church, whom Foote had engaged as a millwright,
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HISTORY OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
arrived, he found Foote and twelve others all living in the same shanty. A series of misfortunes followed the pioneers. Mr. Foote's father succumbed to smallpox a day after the son had fallen and broken his rib. A young man set out for Johnstown, Canada, for a doctor, but the swollen streams forced him to return. Nearly every- one was sick and Mr. Church, writing of those first dreary days, says ; "Sleep none at all. Have free scope for my thoughts, not having anything to interrupt me, but the snoring of the rest of the company, soaking in water." It was 15 miles from Canton to Lisbon through the unbroken forests following a forest trail which ran through swamps and mireholes but gradually the place settled.
It was later before Benjamin Raymond arrived on the Racquette to plant his settlement. He came by the long water route from the Mohawk to Wood creek, the Oswego river, Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, until he finally landed at Mr. Ogden's snug little settle- ment at Hamilton, now Waddington, from which point he struck through the woods. It was Benjamin Raymond who founded Pots- dam. Old Judge Cooper of Cooperstown came on to his Northern New York lands in 1802, bringing north a company of thirty-four. Over the Oswegatchie road they came with their spans of oxen, opening a makeshift road from Bristol's Tavern in the present town of DePeyster to DeKalb, where they located just above Cooper's Falls. Here a little later Judge Cooper erected a fine, large tavern on the top of a hill. The settlement of DeKalb opened up the interior country and the first pioneers of Gouverneur passed through there to their new homes from Washington county.
Many of the settlers coming into what is now St. Lawrence county came from Vermont whose newspapers had been filled with glowing accounts of the new country to the westward. They came by the Chateaugay road and found Chateaugay a thriving, fairly well popu- lated town as early as 1800. Here, too, they found old friends because most of the residents of Chateaugay had formerly lived in Vermont. Judge William Bailey, whose house on Depot street still stands, was a slave owner and prominent resident and politician of the town. So was Gates Hoit, later to become a member of assembly and the right hand man of Governor Tompkins. Fort Covington was then French Mills, described by Constable when he visited it as "an old saw mill not at work." Malone was called Harison. It was long before the
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HISTORY OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
Chateaugay road went any further westward than Harison and a number of the pioneers who had intended to go further west settled in Harison involuntarily when they found the forest trails leading into the St. Regis and the Grass country impassible. In 1802 it took six days to make the trip from Plattsburgh to Malone and from there on the going was much harder.
Some idea of how thinly settled the North Country was in that day may be gained from the Oneida county assessment roll of 1803. The following are the Northern New York towns with the name of the supervisors, the number of taxpayers and the total property valuation :
Town
Supervisor
No. of Taxpayers
Property Value
Lowville
Daniel Kelley
161
$ 41,300
Redfield
Nathan Sage
55
52,537
Watertown
Henry Coffeen
163
46,412
Martinsburg
Asa Brayton
53
45,418
Leyden
Silas Southwell
183
287,885
Rutland
David Coffeen
129
29,734
Turin
Eleazor House
145
279,824
Champion
Noadiah Hubbard
93
27,263
Brownville.
Jacob Brown
124
484,856
Harrisburg
Lewis Graves
110
54,00€
Adams
Nicholas Salisbury
120
83,455
Mexico
Reuben Hamilton
121
628,071
Perhaps even more indicative are the election returns for 1801 and 1804 in the northern towns of Oneida county. In 1801 the can- didates were George Clinton, Republican (the name then applied to the party of Thomas Jefferson and not to be confused with the mod- ern Republican party), and Stephen Van Rensselaer, Federalist. In 1804 the candidates were Morgan Lewis and Aaron Burr, who that year was voted for quite generally by the Federalists :
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HISTORY OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
1801
1804
Van
Town
Clinton Rensselaer
Lewis
Burr
Adams
89
41
Brownville
26
65
Champion
17
29
30
61
Harrisburgh
33
100
Leyden
14
59
140
29
Lowville
28
7
140
29
Mexico
17
8
27
10
Martinsburg
64
1
Rutland
85
49
Redfield
24
0
50
0
Turin
1
48
60
47
Watertown
29
27
105
58
1
1
1
1
1
1
-
1
1
1
t
HOW THE PIONEERS LIVED
What of the people who during the first decade of the 19th cen- tury had flocked into the North Country to settle along the Black, the Oswegatchie, the St. Lawrence, the St. Regis and the Grass rivers? Who were they and what kind of a life did they lead? Almost without exception they were from New England-from Con- necticut and Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but mostly from Vermont. They were the sons and daughters of the men who had fought at Bennington under Stark and at Saratoga under Schuyler and Arnold. Hardy and almost without exception poor, they were accustomed to hard work and few luxuries. With the exception of the Congregational clergy, there were few men of education and learning among those early settlers of the north. Of all the leaders of the towns who met at Denmark to start the movement which ended in the creation of the two counties of Jefferson and Lewis but one, Egbert Ten Eyck, was a college graduate. Most of them were young and in vigorous health. An old mother and father might be brought on later, but it was the sons and daughters who came on first to make the first clearing and build the first house.
To the North Country they brought the traditions of old New England, the uncompromising Congregationalism of their Puritan
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HISTORY OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
ancestors, a distrust of the Jacobin Republicanism of Thomas Jef- ferson, their great calf-covered Bibles, a few pewter dishes and some homespun clothing. Sometimes, too, they brought to their new homes the half-forgotten superstitions of another age, of witches and evil eyes, of charms and curses. Stubbornly they clung to the old cus- toms. One of the first official acts of the board of the town of Lor- raine in Jefferson county was to erect a pair of stocks "at the crotch of the road near John Alger's Inn." The church meeting ruled the early village of Malone as effectively as it ever did a New England town while the Federalists were still electing congressmen and mem- bers of the state legislature in the north when most people thought the Federalists had passed out of existence.
The first pioneers came by foot through the forests, single file, their packs strapped to their backs, laboriously following a trail of blazed trees. Later the trail was such that oxen could be driven drawing crude wood sleds but even as late as 1802 when Louis Has- brouck, fresh from Princeton, came up through the Black River Country on his way to Ogdensburg to become the first clerk of St. Lawrence county, he and his were forced to travel a considerable distance on foot. While James Constable and other hardy travelers were able to travel the length and breadth of the North Country on horseback at a very early date it was not until the state road con- necting Brownville, Ogdensburg and the High Falls was built that wagons could be used with any degree of safety and certainty. From the narratives of the old pioneers, from yellowed journals and from diaries religiously kept we learn something about conditions under which the first North Country settlers lived. If there was beauty in the age-old forests with their towering trees and mirror-like lakes, it was lost on the practical settlers who saw in the trees enemies to be lowered and in the flaming fire-weed a pest to be conquered. An early settler of Champion whose tastes took a poetic turn might sing of Pleasant Lake as
"Sweet lake of the valley ; sequestered, serene, And still as the night of the grave."
But to most of the settlers life was a stern, real battle against nature and chances for an easy old age depended upon getting as many trees as possible cleared from the farm.
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HISTORY OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
Riding up through the Sandy Creek country early in the century James Constable writes that "after traveling some miles I had at last the gratification of seeing a settler here. Three men were cutting and burning large piles of enormous trees. Ellis (Lyman Ellis, pro- prietor of Ellisburg), being acquainted with them, we went and staid in their hut, which was about twelve feet square, built of logs, no chimney and but very little furniture. There were two beds, in one of which a man and his wife slept and in the other the other two men. . We dined on salt pork, with good bread, butter and chocolate, much to my satisfaction."
The first dwelling might be of bark after the Indian fashion, but soon it was succeeded by a log cabin which seldom had more than one room. The floor would be made of loose puncheons, a thick plank made by splitting straight-grained basswood logs and hewing them a little. At first there was no hearth or fireplace but simply a place for them. A backing of rough stones against the logs at one end provided a place where the fire could be built and the smoke found its way out through a hole in the roof. The roof was covered with rough boards, the joints battened with wide, heavy slabs. Usually an iron crane was fashioned over the place where the fire was built and on this the kettle was hung. Later a door was constructed and hung upon wooden hinges with a wooden latch. Then a window was cut out and a glass sash inserted and finally the stone fireplace built. About this time a new floor would be laid of white ash planks, sawed at one of the new sawmills, and the mistress of the house would have a job of years before her to scrub this floor smooth with a splint broom and the suds left from the weekly wash. The logs of which the cabin were built were rough, hewn only on the inside and the cracks plugged with cedar wedges and moss over which clay mortar was plastered. The blazing fireplace would hold an eighth of a cord of wood without crowding and it was customary to burn fifty or more cords of wood a year. Such was the home that William Read, an early settler of the town of Bombay, Franklin county, recalled and it may be considered as typical of the North Country as a whole.
Some excellent cooking was done in those great, stone fireplaces over blazing fires of wood. There were roasted pigs and goslings and turkeys done to perfection before the fire in great tin ovens. In bake kettles, heated by coals from the fireplace underneath and by
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