Saturday the Museum will be OPEN for Fall History Day!

                                 Chubbuck Key and Sounder

The Old Town Museum on River Road in Eaton, will be open on Saturday from 12 - 3 pm. This is our usual Fall History Day and refreshments will be served.  Backstreet Mary will be there to answer History Questions and invite you to join our special history group! Come Down and learn some History!....

You know history does march to a different drummer in Eaton.  I live here and marvel at the fact that on every corner of the Hamlet... once called “Eaton Village”… history lived.

The very spot where we usually host our event on Memorial Day Monday - Eaton Day…and our lectures…is one of the town’s historic places…a place  of national importance actually…for it is the site of the birth of the Camelback Key and Sounder for Morse’s telegraph!  Yup.. in old Eaton, New York.

Early Sounder

If you go behind the old auction barn building you will find the spot where Samuel W. Chubbuck did all his experiments … a place that was his father’s Mechanic Shop.  Samuel Chubbuck and his family moved to Eaton, then called Log City, very early and his son Samuel it was said could fix anything.

Samuel eventually became noted for his many ideas, which include not only telegraph equipment but also the modern battery post used in our cars, lift bridges, and so much more.  If an idea came to him in a dream he took no patent on it as he believed in came from God.

His camelback key is actually patented to his cousin Charles Chubbuck?  I have always wondered if he gave it to Emily Chubbuck’s father to give him some income… (His family was very poor.) Oh yes did I mention Emily Chubbuck Judson…the missionary known also as the famous writer “Fanny Forrester”… was his cousin. And yes, the brook that wanders behind Samuel’s work spot is the brook that she made famous in her “Alderbrook Tales!”

Anyway Samuel went on to become a very famous and rich man who gave lectures all over the USA as Professor Chubbuck.  It is interesting to note that one of the men he influenced with his theories on “electricity” who gave him credit was Thomas Alvah Edison.  Chubbuck’s company made all of the early equipment for Morse’s Telegraph…something that modernized news and communication.

A humorous piece on his family is noted in Luna Hammond’s history of Madison County:

“After the Skaneateles turnpike went through, there was need of better tavern accommodations; Mr. Samuel Stow, therefore, built and kept a tavern on the corner opposite the lower hotel. Samuel Chubbuck, living opposite to him, carried on a blacksmith shop. These two men had by some disagreement become violently opposed to each other. In a spirit of competition, Mr. Chubbuck was a staunch Democrat, and this was a time soon after the war of 1812; so upon one side of his attractive sign board was displayed the dying words of Commodore Lawrence, as a motto, --- "Don't give up the Ship!" --- and on the other side, "Free Trade and Sailor's Rights!" Mr. Stow immediately erected another blacksmith shop to match Chubbuck's, which stood very near where Coman's store is, and swung out his sign directly opposite to Chubbuck bearing these words: "Don't give up the Shop!" and on the reverse side, "Free Trade and Mechanic's Rights!" --- alluding to his neighbor's giving up blacksmithing for tavern keeping. Those unique signs hung out for many a year. “

PS   If you didn’t ever hear of this piece…it was because S F B Morse was and ego-maniac and took credit for everything he could!

Fall History Day is Coming...Saturday, October 17th!

 Saturday, October 17... will mark our 29th Fall History Day! The museum which celebrated its 30th year on May 3rd.  will host a special Fall Day to kick off the end of the history season and the start of the next!  

The museum building and its little "AG" Museum next door will be open from 12 until 3 pm and will have refreshments and a hope to get some new members to join.   This would also be a good time for the community to make monetary donations to keep this important  piece of local history alive.  Until you get older you never realize how important a role the small town you were born in has played and how it shaped your life.  In actuality it is part of your family because in many cases your parent or grandparents may have come from the town as well.

This month we will be working in the  cemetery on our quest to have a Cemetery Tour by the end of the month...Date to be announced. (Weather has made it a tough year to plan anything!)

In Eaton many of the founding families are still here, names that still fill classrooms, societies and eventually come home to rest in our local cemeteries.  History and our American root system are what hold us together as a people, and hold our tree of Democracy upright.

Community Spirit has made us what we are so... we here at the museum call ourselves the “Keepers of the Fire” for the community… known as the Friends of the Eaton Museum… we invite you and your family to come to Eaton on Fall History Day.

This will also give you the opportunity to visit over refreshments with neighbors and relatives… some not seen over the Summer.  You will also be helping keep open an 1806 stone building that houses the “Past for the Future”. It is nice to remember that memories are still a part of our “Reveries” whether we are young or old!

Put the sound on and visit with the past in the video!

History of the Baptist Missions, Bibles & William Dean

The missionary movement of the early 1800’s was very much a part of our local history, and doing the research on it has been interesting and informative. While on my search for information on the different missionaries from the Eaton area, I came across an interesting bit of information on the Reverend Dr. William Dean.

 I knew of his fame but was never able to put words to it.  After much searching and reading I came across a site on the Anniversary of the Hong Kong Baptist Mission which marked in 2002 their 160^th year.  There smack dab in the middle, was the honored story of the Reverend William Dean and his wife.  

I did some more digging and have come up with a wealth of information that links him to many things in the missionary movement.  In the biography of Emily Chubbuck I found out that it is Dr. Dean who baptized her when as a young women she was finally formally entered into the Baptist Faith.  Dr. Dean was also the corresponding secretary as a young man for the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution.

 In an interesting letter that was sent to Dean as recording secretary was a reply by Andoniram Judson, American missionary to Burma.  In the letter Judson says:

     “I feel called upon to answer, for you ask my advice on several important points.  There is, also, in the sentiments you express, something so congenial to my own, that I feel my heart knit to the members of your association, and instead of commonplace reply, am desirous of setting down a few items which may be profitable to you in your future course.  Brief items they must be, for want of time forbids my expatiating.”

The rules basically covered rules for those contemplating the missionary life.  Among them are remarks that include his telling them to come out to the missionary field for “life” not just for a limited term.  He also gives them information which I still laugh over and my women readers will enjoy-please read:

     “In choosing a companion for life, have particular regard to a good constitution, and not wantonly, or without good cause, bring a burden on yourselves and the mission.”

We can only assume he had what he considered “good cause” when Judson married for the third time a very unhealthy young lady by the name of Emily Chubbuck!

 William Dean was born in Eaton, N.Y. on June 21 of 1807.  Eaton had just become a town and early settlements were started in 1793, so his family was one of the early residents.  Dean being a brilliant student went on to attend the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution, which became Madison University then Colgate University.  In 1833 he was ordained a Baptist minister and sailed for Siam to become a missionary for the Baptist Missionary Union to the Chinese in Bangkok, arriving in Thailand in 1835.  

Of note* He received his confirmation just before he “Baptized Emily,” we learn this from her biography!  Dr. Dean was the first pastor of the Baptist church organized there in 1837.

 In the year 1842 he moved his labors to Hong Kong where he founded a Swatow-speaking Baptist church in 1843.  Dean remained in Hong Kong until 1845, when he returned for a year to America.  Dean returned to Hong Kong and continued working in the missionary field there until 1865.

His worked included publication of mainly translations and tracts on the Bible to the Chinese language.  Many of them were translations of the New Testament in part and unbelievably some early texts were printed by local printers (in Chinese) using wooden blocks.  

Rum, Romanism & Rebellion....and Eaton!

                                                            Old Town of Eaton Museum

The Old Town of Eaton Museum will be open this Sunday from 1 to 3!  Come down and enjoy the Day and learn some history you never knew about Eaton!

Well... is anyone tired of the election yet?????  

I am!  This whole thing has gotten out of hand..and this back and forth, back and forth, without any real information or with information that changes depending on the day.... has really got me. Can we Mail in ballots or noT?

I remember an interesting story that I was spouting at dinner about Grover Cleveland and the R & R thing..I remembered a Republican minister with local ties who went to fill a speaking engagement for another person who had to cancel.  His name was Dr. Samuel Dickenson Burchard  and he got up and gave the usual preacher long winded speech.. in - part off the cuff ..when he interjected the words...an alliteration actually...Rum, Romanism & Rebellion!

A reporter who was half asleep pick up on it..and the rest is history!!!!  I quote here from the website Rum, Romanism and Rebellion...

"Days before the election, James Blaine visited the crucial swing state of New York, attending a morning meeting in a New York City hotel. During a speech made by Presbyterian minister Samuel Burchard, the Democratic Party was assailed as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” In many ways, this phrase singled out Irish Catholics, many of whom lived in the large urban centers like New York and Boston. The phrase catered to the stereotype of the drunken Irishman and demeaned the Catholic faith. Most all Irish were Roman Catholic."

"The term “Rebellion” was a typical post Civil War Republican ploy of “waving the bloody shirt,” reminding voters that it had been the Democrats who were responsible for the great bloodshed and connecting them to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. "

"Catholic priests took to the pulpit the weekend before the election and urged church members to vote against the Republicans. When it was all over, Cleveland carried the state."

Well Dr. Samuel Dickenson Burchard was from the famous Burchard family of Pecksport in Eaton.   His brother was the famous Sylvester Burchard who brought the first breeding herd of Holsteins to the USA and who was also a  famous judge of the breed.  Sylvester was married to Ali Morse of the famous Morse family of Eaton. 

What is interesting is that I have some things of Dr. Burchard's in the Old Town of Eaton Museum.  One is the story told by his niece that after the election Grover Cleveland (who also had ties to Eaton - his brother was the minister of the Eaton Congregational Church)- invited Burchard to the White House to thank him for his remarks and laugh..Burchard said he didn't want to be seen doing it for obvious reasons, so the President sent a coach with curtains drawn for him and brought him to the White House in secret!

In fact though..Blaine also lost that election because of Republicans who jumped sides and became known as "Mug Wumps"!

A humorous side note!!!!

When asked about the loss, James Blaine was reported to have said: “I should have carried New York by 10,000 votes if the weather had been clear and Dr. Burchard had been doing missionary work in Asia Minor or China.” Blaine’s great mistake had been not distancing himself from Burchard’s comments."

Harry Hart and Stories of Old Eaton!

If you need a dose of local history please come and visit the Old town of Eaton Museum...we have been open an most Sundays this past month but much work has been going on and I am busy...if you would like to come call 315-684-8032 and leave a message and I will call you back...I am busy but we always try to accommodate  people...! WE also need volunteers to help us by volunteering to help sit the museum on a Sunday... with someone!

 Stories of "Old Eaton" are numerous and some of the best were written by Harry Hart who acted as the local historian for many years.  Harry had lived through a good number of years and he had the confidence of Mrs. Mott the last owner of the Stone House who loaned him Morse family papers to write from.  One of Harry's stories gave me more information on the Lower Hotel, Samuel Chubbucks property that became Fred Close's Gas Station.  This was the site of the Famous Tower Gas Station and today is Eaton's Lighthouse Post Office. The Hotel was owned by one of Eaton's well known characters, Sadie Hunt. But I thought I would let Harry tell the story for me.

From Harry Hart....

There are many stories about Sarah and as a friend told me recently, “The stories about Sarah are legend but I could vouch for none of them.”  There is one thing for sure she liked the hotel business and could tend bar as well as anyone.  It was

unusual for a woman to run a hotel in those days, but it was her business and the way she made her living.  She clung to her property through good times and bad times.  The coming of the prohibition era gave her a difficult time and she was hard pressed to make a living.  She went out picking peas to earn enough to live on, as indeed many others did.

The following is a little story about her in the pea-lot of neighbor Eli Tupper.  There was a hired man working for Eli by the name of Frank Cook, or as he was more commonly known as “the Battler” by all the neighborhood kids because of Frank’s prize fighting ambition.  A great row erupted when he accused Sarah of not filling her baskets full and there were some choice words passing between them.  All the rest of the pea pickers looked and listened much to their great amusement.  Pea picking came to a halt for a few minutes!

Sarah had an unusual way of talking, such as, “Says I to him…., says he to me…., Says I to him it looks like a bad storm.  Says he to me, it appears so.”  When she had a full stock of liquor on the shelves she would remark, “Says I, that looks good to me.”

Now, Norm often took to sampling the stock and if it were early in the day, Sarah would object.  “Sarah,” Norm would say, “I want my tea I tell you!”

 The following announcement was found in the Oneida Dispatch February 23, 1867, “Married in Georgetown by Reverend N. Mumford – Mr. Norman Hunt of DeRuyter to Miss Sarah Wood of Georgetown, New York.”

 Sarah and Norman kept the hotel for about twenty-five years together while the Exchange Hotel changed proprietors many times during this period.

 Sarah was already sixty years old when she married Will Stringer.  From all accounts Will was a very well liked man and the best trombone player in these parts.  The old porch on the old colonial style hotel made an excellent place for the Eaton band to play.  Here they were sure to gather and play on the Eaton Field Days, amid the sweat, the beer, and the cigar smoke, pausing only long enough to pour the spit from their horns.  The figures of the musicians were somewhat dwarfed by the enormous size of the hotel, but the music came forth loud and clear.  The Eaton folks were out for fun and fun they had on this special day.

Sarah in her younger days dressed very fashionably and she especially liked to drive her matched pair of road horses.  She had the carriage painted and shined up to a glass finish. There were many fancy plumes that were fastened up to the headstalls and above the horses back.  It was a sight to behold to see her driving up through West Eaton on her way to her parents home in Georgetown.

 Mr. Clifford Smith Sr., or better known to all his many friends as “Kip” remembers seeing her as a youngster.  Kip can recall all these incidents and the local people so vividly way back then.  In fact he is the only person who recognized Norman Hunt in the Eaton Hotel photograph.  Norm is the man with the bell and hat in hand standing out in front of the hotel.

In Sarah’s latter years it was her practice to dress all up in her best clothes, usually all black, and walk around the square in Eaton for exercise.  The clothes she wore were ten or fifteen years out of date.  Nobody thought anything about this except to say perhaps, “There goes Sate this morning.”  She was a town character of many, many years.

 The following story was relate d to me by Mrs. Matilda (Saunders) Pratt.  She and her family were residents of the village of Eaton at the turn of the century.  Her father, Leonard Saunders, often told this story about Sarah.

Sarah had one of the first automobiles around and she and her husband enjoyed riding about in their horseless carriage.  Sarah made the remark one day, “You know says I, my husband and I “driv” over to Hamilton to put some wind in the wheels.”

History of the Alderbrook (Eatonbrook) Mills....

The heat continues....Humorously I ran into one of the cashiers in the local grocery store who saw how hot and tired I was and commented that I was just as miserable when it was freezing cold...TRUE!  I did get to sit near the Alderbrook again and so this weeks blog came to mind...How many know the history of the West Eaton Mill area? Then this history blog is for you!

(Eatonbrook) -Alderbrook Mill History

 This mill is one of the old landmarks which our citizens will regret to see pass away.  Some 35 years ago, an old saw mill stood upon the site, which was purchased by Alpheus Morse and John Brown.  They also obtained land of Simeon Chubbuck , …land upon which to erect and build bogs and to flow water into the pond.  In 1849, they built and put into operation the well-known Alderbrook Woolen Mills.  

It was a wooden structure four stories high.  They built a fine boarding house, a cottage or two and the Long Block, a long building.  The factory was in the shadow of the northern mill, a very pretty location.  The Mill employed some 75 employees and manufactured some of the best quality cashmere and doeskin.  

In 1856, the firm failed, after which Alpheus Morse effected an arrangement and continued the business.  During the war, he made the army and navy blues, his goods being in such demand in the early years of the war that much of the time the works were run night and day.  Mr. Morse ran the mill with the cooperation of different individuals with varied success until 1874 or ‘75, during which time he built three cottages on the terrace overlooking the sheet of water.  

In 1876, the premises were purchased at a mortgage sale by Messrs. Lakey & Co., who sold to D.E. Darrow and Philo Walden in 1879.  Darrow and Walden soon after removed two stories of the upright part of the mill, putting in a new roof and otherwise repaired it.  The Long Block had become a ruin nearly ready to fall when they removed it. 

 

In 1883, they leased the mill to John Klock from St. Johnsville, N.Y., for paperboard manufacture.  Later, James Healey from the same place became associated with him.  Last year, Klock and Healey sold their interest to Messrs. Howe and Son.  

The cottages on the terrace have all been sold to different individuals, and now all of the buildings belonging to the mill property, all that is left, are the wool house and the boarding house.  

Fifty years ago, before there was ever sound of factory bell, hum of wheels or clash of looms in Alderbrook dell, it was the delightful home of Emily Chubbuck, the gifted “Fanny Forester.”  Here with her father and mother, her brothers and sisters, she lived her free joyous childhood – amid the wild picturesque beauty of nature, inhaled the breath of poetry…and wrote some of her most charming stories.  

The stories of busy enterprises silenced the Muse and for more than a third of a century held away.  The actors in the drama and their works are low in the dust; and should the pristine romantic beauty and poetic atmosphere of Alderbrook return to it, then this third of a century is simply bridged over by the force that evolves destiny; a period, a scene, fallen into oblivion…dead and buried.

**And so it is today...back to the wild pristine slumber of the ages…

Famous Woman Writers...Write and Share...It can make a difference!

I was thinking about this year in history and I ran across this old blog I wrote in 2014 about women writers and the impact they made on our history. With all that is happening now and knowing history always repeats itself...I thought I would post this and ask those who can to write about things today...to write..you can change things for the better and might become famous as well.

Certainly the woman who made the most historic rendition of our Eaton and Madison County History is Luna Chase Hammond Whitney whose mother was the first female physician in Madison County. Luna wrote a book on her mother that is still available today on Amazon.

Luna Chase Hammond refers to the 1859 biography " Trials and Triumphs of an Orphan Girl: Or, the Biography of Mrs. Deiadamia Chase, Physician and Phrenologist" written by her Daughter Luna M. Hammond (sometimes listed as Luna M. Hammond Whitney). 

Another history writer was Fanny Forester whose articles on the area were published as Alderbook Tales.  This book is available as a reprint at Walmart on line!

Most interesting to me is when a visitor to the old stone museum who  actually knew who Fanny Forester was....Emily Chubbuck Judson.  Of course the woman was a writer and journalist... but still…Emily dates back to 1817.

Born in Eaton Emily became a writer of children’s stories under the pen name Fanny Forrester.   She started writing articles for the newspapers and put them together as a book of famous short tales about the Eatonbrook .  The Eatonbrook is a little stream still runs today through Eaton and behind the Old Town Museum today.  Then it was call the Alderbrook and her stories of  “Alderbrook Tales” put together as book sold very well.  Emily of course became famous in the mid-1840s when she married Adoniram Judson the American Missionary to Burma.  Her life and her writings about Judson’s earlier wife made quite an impact on the Baptist world in her time.

Certainly the most famous woman writer of her time and a woman credited with moving America toward abolition was Harriet Beecher Stowe.  The Old Town Museum contains information on her family and her husband’s family as they are directly related to the Stowes and Morse-Bigelows who settled Eaton.

Harriet’s book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, like Chubbuck’s “Alderbrook Tales”, was also a serial book first carried in the periodical "National Era".  Later as an actual book it was translated into different languages and became a best seller in many countries.  In the United States the only book that sold more copies in its day was the Bible.  In its first year it sold 300,000 copies here in the USA and 200,000 copies in England.  It effected a change that some feel led to the Civil War.  It certainly stirred the sentiment of a great swath of the country toward abolition.

Another woman later did the same thing with her only actual full-length novel, a book in part based on an actual experience that happened in her early life called “To Kill A Mocking Bird”.

With the release of this book… Harper Lee became an overnight sensation.  The 1960 book won her the Pulitzer Prize and was rated in England by librarians as “a book every adult should read”.  The story in a way contributed to social change since it addressed race relations, equality and life in the “Deep South”... among other things.  A book used in classrooms and made into a movie…it has never been out of print.

So women…get out your pens…start writing…there are a whole lot of social issues that need to be addressed today.  Remember it only takes one book to make a difference.  Wish I could make a difference with my blog…but if I got someone else to write the big book…. I will have.  SO WRITE!