You can make a Difference...WRITE LADIES

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.

Most interesting to me is when a visitor to the old stone museum who  actually knows who Emily Chubbuck Judson was.  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!

Eaton's Annual Pie, Bake, & Gift Sale is coming!!

Michele Kelly and Barb Keough Have been workg on the apples for our sale.

The Annual Pie & Bake Good & Gift Sale is set for the Saturday before Thanksgiving…November 18^th from 10 until 2 pm or so and gives the museum an opportunity raise funds to keep it going.

The little museum has been striving for 19 years to preserve the history of this historic town. Eaton has its roots stepped in New England and the Mayflower and so I thought I would include a bit of history in our publicity to try and entice everyone to visit us or to support us on Facebook.

Few people realize The ties between the Stowe family, Harriet Beecher Stowe... and Eaton’s founders.  The museum helps preserve these links with displays and remembrances of the traditions from Natick … “Old Town” and Eaton.  From the book Old Town Folks by Harriet Beecher Stowe….

     On holiday food: “The pie is an English institution, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of species.  Not merely the old traditional mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from those main institutions to new uses.  Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, peach pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant pies, pear pies, plum and custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies, pies of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around and otherwise varied, assisted the boundless fertility of the mind, when once let loose in a given direction.”

     The piece goes on to describe hundreds of pies put into an open back room that allowed them to freeze an be bought out throughout the holiday season and sometimes up until April.”

Sure enough we have tons of pie recipes here in Eaton and the museum put out a cookbook with tons of pie recipes and pictures from Eaton’s past that will be on sale from our Thanksgiving Pie Sale... along with pies of every variety that you can bring home and freeze today… in a modern freezer.  To give you a sample of old fashioned pies I thought I would include a recipe here….

PORK APPLE PIE

 8 to 10 tart apples, peeled, cored and sliced

 20 pieces of fat salt pork, cut the size of pies

 3/4 cups sugar (maple sugar preferably)

 ½ teaspoon cinnamon

 ¼ teaspoon nutmeg

 ¼ teaspoon salt

     Fill a deep dish with apples.  Mix salt pork, sugar, spices and salt and sprinkle the mixture over the apples.  Cover with pie crust.  Cut slits for steam to escape.  Bake in a hot oven (450 degrees F.) for 10 minutes; then reduce heat to moderate (350 degrees F.) and bake 30 or 35 minutes longer.  If crust becomes brown, cover with foil so that it will remain a golden brown.     While pie is baking blend a package of cream cheese with 1 tablespoon thick cream and allow to become firm in refrigerator.  Serve pie warm with slice of cheese.

Seems Old-time New Englanders used salt pork from soup to dessert.  This recipe is said to have made first by an old fisherman who used dried apples, salt pork and molasses.  His wife improved upon it, using fresh apples and maple sugar.  It became a popular dish, often served in Vermont homes for the Sunday evening meal.  Calvin Coolidge, in the White House, extolled its goodness. Pork pie has a more succulent flavor than ordinary apple pie. So we may not have Pork Apple Pies but we do have local pies made with local apples calling them rightfully... “Heirloom Apple Pies”. So come down and buy one!!!

The Holidays in the Old Town of Eaton and a "Thank You".

Morse House

First I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who donated cans to our museum can drive…. thanks…it was a success. Another thank-you to the helpers – Michele Kelly, Barb Keough, Jen Caloia, Chris Klein and a special thank you to Steve Brown for hosting us.

The season is upon us… yes that time of year.  I often get questions on what the “Holidays” would have been like in the old days of Eaton when it was just a fledgling community with log or stone buildings and no access to a shopping center... except perhaps traveling to market in Albany one hundred miles away!.

So I thought on the information I had in my archives and came up with this…Old Town Eaton as we call it was not far removed in tradition from its home base of Sherburne & Natick, Massachusetts.   In her book Old Town Folks author Harriet Beecher Stowe talks about the family of Deacon Badger. Badger was really a Bigelow who was her husbands Grandfather and her own relation via the Stowe family ties. This couple in essence is the Grandfather and Great Aunt or relative of a number of the Eaton settlers at that time including Joseph Morse’s wife Eunice Bigelow, the Morse’s and the Stowe’s and others.  The book gives us insight into the family life and “Holiday” baking.

From Old Town Folks

On holiday food: “The pie is an English institution, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of species. Not merely the old traditional mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from those main institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, peach pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant pies, pear pies, plum and custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies, pies of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around and otherwise varied, assisted the boundless fertility of the mind, when once let loose in a given direction.”

Morse House Kitchen

The piece goes on to describe hundreds of pies put into an open back room that allowed them to freeze an be bought out throughout the holiday season and sometimes up until April.”

* I guess this inspired our traditional Thanksgiving Pie Sale.

One of Eaton’s great little stories is of a preacher who was so long winded that in the “Holiday Season”  the women at the service would be totally unnerved by his dragging the “Holiday” sermon on and on while their wood-fired ovens could be burning the food set for the holiday dinner.

If any of us can picture cooking the family feast over a wood fire or in a wood fired Brick oven?

 Since many of the residents were relations I am sure you can picture large family gatherings and a bill of fare that was gathered from the collective families larder. A long cry from today’s  shopping at Price Chopper or Wegman’s.

Emily Chubbuck AKA Fanny Forrester, Harriet Beecher Stowe and a Lecture

The Summer Lecture Series will come to an end this month ... thank you to all who have attended. I promised to try and do a lecture on Emily Chubbuck, as well as Eaton's famous missionaries with its links to Colgate University that included Nathaniel Kendrick, its incorporators, Jonathan Wade, and the many others. so it will be Aug. 29th at 7 pm at the Old Auction barn.

Most interesting to me was a visitor to the old stone museum who  actually knew who Emily Chubbuck Judson was.  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!

Here is a video clip of a famous part of the movie!

Eunice Bigelow Morse, Deidamia Chase MD, and all the pioneer ladies who settled our land!

Eunice and Joseph Morse

This week working on the book for the Eaton Village Cemetery as a “fund Raiser” I had the opportunity to think about a great number of women who survived the arduous journeys from other Northeastern areas to Eaton in the times of settlement.  Women, who bore children, took care of the family and worked side by side with their husbands clearing land and starting a new life.

Certainly among the most famous is Eunice Bigelow Morse of the famous Stowe-Bigelow -Morse families of Natick, Massachusetts.  Eunice came with her husband Joseph, and young children to a place that would become not only home to her but to generations of her family.

A relative Harriet Beecher Stowe in a book titled “Old Town Folks”, forever immortalized Eunice’s family.  Many believed the story was written by Harriet's husband Calvin Ellis Stowe for his family… the Stowe’s… However, when Harriet married Callvin she married into the same family as her grandmother. * It is interesting to note that the Eaton Museum has the first edition of Hearth & Home with the first installment of that book inside…a newspaper kept untouched by Eunice Morse. 

The museum also has Eunice’s rocker and the cradle she used for what became the famous Morse brood.  The Natick crowd (Old Town Folks) also included other Morses…crab (Hezekiah Morse”, Grandpa Stowe of Eaton’s Stow Tavern…. and many more.

From Luna Hammond’s History in part:   

 Joseph (Eunice)  removed to Eaton in 1796 from Natick… Joseph Morse was the founder of Eaton village, and his sons have been identified with nearly all of its business interests. These sons were named as follows: Ellis,  whose biographical sketch appears in the chapter relating to Eaton, Joseph, who moved to Pennsylvania served in the Legislature of that State, and also became judge of the County Courts; Calvin, who was an elected member of the Legislature from Madison County in 1842, and has held municipal offices in town and county; Alpheus, who has been a merchant and scientific farmer, and for many years past, manufacturer, being proprietor of the Alderbrook Woolen Mill; and Bigelow, who was a respected citizen of Fabius, Onondaga County. Eunice, the eldest daughter of Joseph More, married Dr. James Pratt the pioneer physician of Eaton.   After her husband's death, she with her family removed and began pioneer life again in Palmyra, Mo.  She was a woman of indomitable will and great energy of character.

     The descendants of Joseph (and Eunice) Morse have, many of them, distinguished themselves in various positions. Gen. Henry B. Morse entered the late war as Captain of the 114th Reg. N. Y. V., was promoted to the office of Colonel, and subsequently, for meritorious services, was breveted Brigadier-General in the army of the southwest. He is grandson of Joseph Morse; as also is the Rev. Andrew Morse, who as a young man was a missionary to Siam and then become the Chaplain of the U S Treasury and friends with Abraham Lincoln,. Gardner Morse, who was member of the Legislature in 1866, Walter, a member of the manufacturing firm of Wood, Tabor & Morse, George E., a prominent citizen interested in the schools and who founded the Eaton Village Cemetery Association, and Alfred, who bravely gave his life for the Union cause at the battle of Winchester,Va. ; all these being sons of Ellis Morse. Darwin and Frank B. Morse, merchants at Eaton village, Allie Morse Burchard whose husband formed the Chenango Breeder’s Association, Children of Bigelow, are grandsons of Joseph Morse. Two grand-daughters, Belinda and Eliza, daughters of Calvin, have been conspicuous as teachers, the latter being now assistant Principal of Vassar Female College.

     Hezekiah Morse, the third of the pioneer brothers, came to Eaton in 1806. His children are scattered and many of them dead.   One of his sons. Alpha was for many years a prominent manufacturer of Eaton.  Another son, Elijah, who is now dead, was a wealthy farmer of Eaton. A grand-daughter is wife of  Rev. John Raymond, President of Vassar Female College, Poughkeepsie, N. Y. Albert H. Morse, a prominent citizen of Eaton is also a grandson, being son of Elijah. H. B. Morse, youngest son of Hezekiah, is a scientific and successful farmer of Norwich, N. Y. (and this is just and excerpt)

What a family… and that isn’t all of them and their accomplishments.  The very road today’s Eaton Village Cemetery is located on (Landon Road) was once the Great Skaneateles Turnpike a road that it is claimed would not have been built except for Joseph and Ellis who controlled 51 percent of the stock investment… an investment they made of $30,000 in 1810… think about it.

Come out to Eaton Day on Memorial, Day Monday… tour the cemetery…by a book, make a donation to support the Eaton Village Cemetery Association and help Eaton celebrate History and  “Happy Mother’s Day” to all of those pioneer women whose husbands and children made our area a wonderful piece of rural Americana! 

*Interestingly Luna Hammond the historian and her famous mother Deidamia Button Chase (the first female physician of Madison County) and her famous brood are also buried in the cemetery. Almost all of the Morse family is buried in the Eaton Cemetery including the Morse – Motts. Did you know that Luna's brother Julius was the historian for the US Treasury in Washington DC.