Stamford: Ned Buntline

By Steven Huff

Stamford, New York, is a village in the lower elevations of the Catskill Mountains, near the Delaware River. One gets the sense that it hasn’t changed very much over many years, despite the presence of a few chain stores and ATMs. Small, comely, it would be a comfortable place to get snowed in. Part of the village is in the Town of Stamford, part in Harpersfield. I drove south on Route 10 from the New York State Thruway Exit 29. You can approach it from Route 23, but I found that scenic Route 10 is rewarding. A little north of Cobleskill is a stone marker, “Near this spot, Catherine Merckley, on October 18, 1780, fleeing on horseback from the Indians was shot and scalped by Seths Henry.” This followed by two and a half years the Battle of Cobleskill, May 30, 1778, in which Loyalists and Iroquois led by Mohawk leader Joseph Brandt attacked and destroyed much of Cobleskill.

The Town of Stamford, of which the village is part, was founded in 1792, the first settlers having arrived ten years before. In the War of 1812, little Stamford contributed more than twenty officers and around a hundred and twenty foot soldiers, which must have left farms and businesses short of strong-backed youth. But the war on the home front that year was with wolves encroaching on farmers’ stock, and a five dollar bounty was paid for each wolf shot.

The oldest Stamford house on the west side of the Delaware River was the birth place in 1823 of Edward Zane Carroll Judson, a.k.a. E. Z. C. Judson, a.k.a. Col. Judson, later famous for his dime novels written under his pen name, Ned Buntline. His great grandfather Samuel Judson was one of the town’s first settlers. Broad traveler, adventurer, luxury seeker, bloviator and con-artist though Ned was, the quiet bucolic Stamford would remain his hometown where he would shelter from his life’s storms.

Ned Buntline (1823-1886 )

Ned Buntline was about as complicated and flamboyant as any author who ever lived. He campaigned for temperance, but alcohol was probably the only thing he was ever temperate about— and that only sometimes. In fact he was occasionally drunk when lecturing to temperance gatherings, so he knew whereof he preached. In addition to the above mentioned virtues, he was also a bigamist, bail jumper, and a natural-born showman. In his best years he was estimated to be the wealthiest author in America, money he earned from the sale of the dime novels that he cranked out, one after another, at least four-hundred of them, mostly adventure yarns.

Before he gained fame as a novelist he wrote stories for magazines, most notably the Knickerbocker, a respected literary journal, which is curious considering the hack quality of his later work. But Buntline also started and published several magazines. One of them, Ned Buntline’s Own, carried a regular feature about himself, from which many of the fables of his life gained currency, and thus are hard to corroborate.

Many biographers have tried to nail down his personality and found themselves in a thicket of contradictions. But all have agreed on his noted bonhomie. As T. M. Bradshaw has written, “Actual crimes, schemes, and lying manipulations aside, he was known as pleasant company, a genial, good-natured, friendly man,” also, “intelligent and creative but completely heedless of real consequences.”

Biographers have debated the old story that Buntline special-ordered the Colt company’s long-barreled .45 revolver, and gave it its name, the Buntline Special, as gifts to some of his western friends such as Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and others. However, the Colt company’s records do not support that any such order or purchase came from Buntline himself. It may be true. Or it may be just another Ned legend.

Off to Sea

When he was still a boy, his father moved the family from Stamford to Philadelphia so that he could study law. Ned, hating the cramped city, snuck aboard a fruit ship from the West Indies. He may have lied about his age to the captain who put him to work as a cabin boy, since he was only 11 years old. It was the beginning of a short career working on merchant ships. He may have lied about his age again when he joined the Navy in 1837, aged 14.

Most of his accounts of his heroic Navy years are probably yarns, but one bona fide adventure occurred aboard a small boat on route to the Brooklyn Navy Yard with a load of sand when it capsized after colliding with a ferry, and seventeen men went overboard into the icy water of the East River. Ned’s actions helping the men stay above water until rescue led to his appointment by President Van Buren to midshipman aboard the warship Boston.

His name on his grave stone in Stamford Cemetery is Col. E. Z. C. Judson, a rank that he never held. As a midshipman in the Navy during the Seminoles Wars he saw little action. He claimed that in the Civil War he fought on with Gen. Sherman after Appomattox; in fact he was once jailed for desertion, often cited for drunkenness and insubordination, and dishonorably discharged in August 1864. While on furlough in Washington, he went to Mathew Brady’s studio, and sitting himself in the famous chair that Lincoln had been photographed in, he posed in a colonel’s coat—an act of impersonating an officer that could have landed him in the brig again.

He married at least six times, and by some accounts as many as nine. According to biographer Julia Bricklin, he did not bother to divorce several of the women before remarrying.

The Porterfield Incident

One incident in which he was shot and wounded and lynched—and survived—made news far beyond his own magazine. Not long after the death in childbirth of his first wife Severina in 1846, he was in Nashville writing for one of his magazines and became involved with Mary Porterfield, the teenage wife of Robert Porterfield, fireman and auctioneer’s assistant. Both Buntline and Mrs. Porterfield protested their innocence, but various people had seen them together. Robert Porterfield, deranged with jealousy, went looking for Buntline with a gun, and fired several shots at him; Ned returned fired and mortally wounded Porterfield with a bullet to his head, and then turned himself over to the law.

To be fair, it was the second time Porterfield had gone after Ned with a gun, who apparently had no interest in fighting with Mary’s husband. But the citizenry was outraged. At his arraignment, Porterfield’s brother, along with a mob, burst into the courtroom and fired a gun at Buntline, who ran from the court with a bullet wound to his chest and hid in a hotel across the street; but with the mob still in pursuit, he jumped from a third floor window and was dragged to jail, stunned and injured, by law officers. Later that night, in a case of old-time western justice, the mob broke into the jail, captured and hung Buntline from an awning post in the village square.

From there, accounts of the incident are murky. But apparently he had friends at the scene—or at least persons with cooler heads—who cut him down in time, or by other accounts the rope simply broke, and his pals whisked him away. The court cleared him of any blame in the death of Porterfield, and he recovered from the bullet wound. But he suffered a limp for the rest of his life from his leap from the hotel window.

Following the incident, Buntline wrote in the Knickerbocker, “Mr. Porterfield was a brave, good, but rash and hasty man; and deeply, deeply do I regret the necessity of his death. His wife is as innocent as an angel.”

The Dime Novels

His novels require from the reader more than the usual suspension of disbelief. But in the years following the Civil War, the United States had a fairly large standing army in the west engaged in the Indian Wars. Buntline knew that most of them were garrisoned for long periods of time with little to do; and so he gave them what he knew they’d love: sensational yarns mythologizing white American heroism in the west, such as Buckskin Sam the Scalp-Taker, and Norwood, Or, Life on the Prairie. To many of his eastern readers the west was a mystery, and so they had little cause to doubt him.

He is most identified with his western novels, although they counted only a few of his oeuvre. Far more are sea adventures, The King of the Sea: A Tale of the Fearless and Free , The Queen of the Sea, Or, Our Lady of the Ocean: A Tale of Love and Chivalry; hardscrabble and adventure, The Virgin of the Sun: A Historical Romance of the Last Revolution in Peru, The White Wizard: Or, the Great Prophet of the Seminoles. Ned was especially fond of hunting and fishing, and his characters were also lovers of the open wilds, on land or sea.

The Creation of Buffalo Bill

In 1868, on a trip to Nebraska, he met a young man named William F. Cody who had been working as a civilian scout for the US Army under Gen. Philip Sheridan. Buntline liked his flamboyant personality. He wrote a purportedly non-fiction book about him, and his supposed exploits among Indians, and gave him a name—Buffalo Bill. He didn’t invent the name, however—it was a common moniker in the west at that time—but he made it stick to Cody. Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men was serialized in the New York Weekly in December, 1869. When Cody read the book, most of the heroics was news to him. Buntline also made him out to be a temperance advocate like himself—which was another stretch of imagination, since Cody liked his tipple.

But Bill too had a flair for show business, and Buntline made him famous, organizing and promoting a traveling show for him, Scouts of the Prairie, beginning in Chicago in 1872. The entertainment consisted of western scouts on horseback, Indians—sometimes real, sometimes actors—and a rough, hurriedly written script for good old-fashioned western shootouts.

The show was a success, repeated many times over, moving around the eastern half of the country from one big top to another. It hit one snag in St. Louis when Buntline was arrested in his hotel for jumping bale on a charge of incitement to riot in the city twenty years before. But con artist that he was, he jumped bail again, this time with the treasurer of the Kansas Pacific Railway having to make good on the thousand dollar bond.

Buntline wasn’t one to let adversity spoil his day. When Buffalo Bill decided to split with Buntline and run his own show, eventually to be called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, casting none other than Wild Bill Hickock to play Buntline’s part (after all, unlike Buntline, Hickock and Cody where handsome fellows), Buntline started a rival show, bringing real Comanches instead of actors, and two white scouts, Arizona Frank and Dashing Charlie. And, anyway, he made easier money on Bill with the western novels, Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot, Buffalo Bill’s Last Trail, Buffalo Bill’s Last Victory.

Certainly he helped to create the romantic and largely mythical images of the American west, so perpetuated by authors like Zane Grey, and traded on by Hollywood actors and directors such as Tom Mix, William S. Hart, John Wayne, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and multiple TV shows of the 1950s. He sure made his mark.

Gravity caught up with Edward Zane Carroll Judson, a.k.a. Ned Buntline, on July 16, 1886 when he died of congestive heart failure in his Stamford home. In the last months of his life he was confined to an “invalid chair,” tended to by his last wife Anna Fulton. But the mayhem was not over. At least two former wives went after his Civil War pension. And Anna was forced to sell their house to make good on his debts.

Finding the Grave of Ned Buntline

Follow Route 23 (Main Street) east out of the village. Turn right is on Tower Mountain Road where you will find two cemeteries directly across from each other. Stamford Cemetery is on the right. From the small parking lot inside the gate, follow the car path straight back for a couple hundred feet. When you see a stone for Grant, turn right; the tall brown spire is visible from there.

His name of the stone is Col. E Z.C. Judson 1823-1886, also here are Irene A. Judson, “d. 1881 in her 4^th year”; E. Z. C. Judson, Jr. 1881-1894; and Mrs. Anna Judson [no date].

Sources

Bradshaw, T. M. Ned Buntline: So Much Larger Than Life. Np. 2019 (ebook).

Bricklin, Julia. “The Many Wives of Ned Buntline.” HistoryNet.com (web) 2021. (accessed 4/19/21).

Duerden, Tim, and Ray LaFever, Images of America: Delaware County. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2016 (print).

Monaghan, Jay. The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1952 (print).

Munsell, W. W. “The History of Delaware County: Town of Stamford,” Genealogy and Historical Site.

https://www.dcnyhistory.org/books/munstam.html n.d. (accessed 3/27/2021).

Woodstock: Howard Koch

By Steven Huff

As a young musician enamored with the folk music movement in the 1960s, Woodstock was a kind of Mecca, an off-the-path place in the forested Catskill Mountains with a mysterious psychic magnetism that had drawn some of the song-makers I admired most, lured them from the harried stink of New York City to settle down. Here were Tim Hardin, John Herald, Peter Yarrow, Maria Muldaur, and of course Bob Dylan, as well as some electrified acts that drew from folk tradition, Paul Butterfield and his Blues Band, and Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel and the others that made up The Band. Not that you’d expect to run into any of them hanging around in front of the drug store. But they were there in this little town, part of its artsy milieu. Others came just to perform: Dave Van Ronk, Patrick Sky, Mississippi John Hurt, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly.

But they were really just a new wave. Woodstock had been an art haven for longer than any living memory. Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole was here more than a hundred years before the folks with the banjos showed up. The Byrdcliffe Arts Colony was started in 1902, and still operates as the Byrdcliffe Arts Guild. The Art Students League of New York came here in 1906, now called The Woodstock School of Art.

My girlfriend was studying at SUNY New Paltz in ‘69, and one spring weekend day she impulsively rode her bicycle 27 miles north to Woodstock. There, cycling around, she heard a band playing in a church. It sounded pretty good, so she peeked inside and found the Butterfield Blues Band working out. Friendly fellows. Easy to hang out with. In fact, Butterfield and his wife invited her home for dinner and to sleep over. The next morning, Butterfield put her bike in the trunk of his car and drove her back to college. She recalled that all the way, he kept saying, “I can’t believe you rode your bike this far!”

It was the kind of thing that could only happen there. But later that year the atmosphere changed somewhat, because of the Woodstock music festival, although it was actually held in Bethel, some sixty miles away. Long after the revelers went home, and the trip tent came down and all the garbage picked up, hordes of curious travelers and star gazers followed the signs to Woodstock and the nearby hamlet of Bearsville. If not for the publicity-storm from the festival, most of them would never have heard of the little town where living legends were now keeping out of sight, pulling their curtains tight, and sending errand boys for their groceries.

I first came to Woodstock on a long weekend in 1969 with a friend to camp in the Catskills. The traffic was amazing. A policeman told me that at mid-day it was averaging forty-five minutes for a car to get through town. That night we went to a free concert nearby, probably at Byrdcliffe, featuring the band Fear Itself with the amazing Ellen McIlwaine singing. Traffic notwithstanding, the town was a beautiful place, with a current of psychic energy and mystique.

Writers rarely have such star-power as music stars. But one writer buried in Woodstock had his hands deep in the star-making machinery.

Howard Koch ( 1901- 1995 ).

Howard Koch, best known as a screenwriter for the classic film Casablanca, settled in Woodstock with his family in the late 1950s. They had moved to Europe in 1951 because he was blacklisted for his work on the movie Mission to Moscow. when he was cleared to work in the US again, Woodstock offered the quiet and easy surroundings that had eluded them in New York City and Hollywood

He was born in New York, went to Bard College, and gave up a legal career to write plays,, three of which were produced on Broadway, before he was hired by John Houseman in 1938 to write radio scripts for Mercury Theater, the New York theater company run by Houseman and Orson Welles that was producing radio dramas adapted from literature.

War of the Worlds

The best known of these, of course, was The War of the Worlds, which Koch wrote as Invasion from Mars, and which was broadcast on the evening of October 30, 1938. Welles and Houseman were demanding bosses, and Koch worked like the devil on the script, so much that after the broadcast he went to bed and slept like a moon rock, unaware that the world outside was dissolving in panic over what they had heard. Many believed that extraterrestrials were really on the attack, while others thought that the war they had been worrying about was finally happening and that Germany was striking New Jersey, and that New York and Washington would be next.

Not until he saw a newspaper in a barbershop the next morning did Koch realize what he had helped to cause. According to him, “the submerged anxieties of tens of thousands of Americans surfaced and coalesced in a flood of terror that swept the country.” The New York Times reported that the same Orson Welles who as the voice of the mystery Shadow character had given “’the creeps’ to countless child listeners” had now made a broadcast that caused panic and “at least a score of adults [to seek] medical treatment for shock and hysteria.”

Fortunately, no one died of shock or committed suicide. And the country slowly came to its senses before Welles and company could be pilloried. But Koch credited popular columnist Dorothy Thompson for putting it all in perspective. “[F]ar from blaming Mr. Orson Welles,” she wrote, “he ought to be given a Congressional medal and a national prize for having made the most amazing and important contribution to the social sciences.”

She continued, “If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men from Mars, they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fear of Reds, or convinced that America is in the hands of sixty families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorized into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.”

On to Hollywood

After the infamous broadcast, he took another shot at play writing, and then moved on to Hollywood like Welles himself, and began working on screenplays. One of his first was Sea Hawk (1940), an Errol Flynn feature directed by Michael Curtiz, which he wrote with veteran screenwriter Seton I. Miller– screenplays are rarely the work of a single individual. Then two more films before working on Sergeant York (1941)—the Cary Cooper classic about an American pacifist who becomes a World War I hero after deciding to “render unto Caesar.” On this venture he worked with three other writers, one of which was John Huston, whom he had worked with on the New York stage, and who would become famous later that year for directing The Maltese Falcon.

Koch’s most famous effort was Casablanca, again working with Michael Curtiz. He was one of three screenwriters—twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein and Koch—working from a never-produced play by Murray Burnett and Joan Allison. But part way into the project, the Epsteins were taken off and put on a different script. It was crisis time—little progress had been made, and shooting was about to begin. Koch had to take what he had, some one-liners and virtually no storyline or structure, and forge ahead full steam, making up scenes as he went along, hoping it wouldn’t all fall apart, barely keeping up with the filming schedule.

At some point, Ingrid Bergman asked Koch, “Who will I end up with?” He couldn’t tell her, because he hadn’t gotten that far. He finished the script on the last day of shooting. So, in that famous last scene when Bergman’s Ilsa doesn’t know if she is going to get on the plane or not?—it’s possible that she really didn’t know. Casablanca, which many call the best movie ever made, was a helter-skelter rush job. Humphrey Bogart himself thought it was going to be a stinker. But of course it is a beloved classic.

I used to teach a class at Rochester Institute of Technology, called Writing about American Film, where I showed a classic film each week. I always began with Casablanca, partly for the local connection: Bergman was living in Rochester with her first husband when the call came that she’d gotten the part of Ilsa. Also, because many of my students had never seen a black and white film; I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like the film, and after I showed Casablanca to my students, I knew I could show them other black and white movies.

His favorite screenplay project was Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), directed by Max Ophuls, which Koch adapted from a novel by Stefan Zweig.

The Dreaded Blacklist

Howard Koch’s backlisting was a classic example of hysteria and political stupidity. President Franklin Roosevelt asked Warner Brothers to make a movie adapted from the novel Mission to Moscow, a story sympathetic to the Soviet Union and Stalin, to soften America’s heart toward Russia and help generate support for the USSR in the war against Germany. Koch wavered. Harry and Jack Warner insisted.

Years later, the House Committee on Un-American Activities turned its focus on the entertainment industry, and studios developed the Hollywood Blacklist to keep themselves out of trouble. Entertainment careers were ruined because of alleged Communist associations. The so-called Hollywood Ten went to jail for refusing to cooperate and name names. Koch in the early 50s was himself barred from employment, largely, he understood, because of his work on Mission to Moscow. Never mind that Roosevelt had wanted it, had all but ordered it.

But Koch was resilient. He and his family moved to England, where he continued working under an assumed name. When they returned in the late ‘50s and settled in Woodstock, and he went back to work in both TV and films, and acting under the name Peter Howard.

Finding the Grave of Howard Koch

He is buried in the Woodstock Artists Cemetery. It is the resting place of sports commentator Heywood Hale Broun; and several artists, including Milton Avery, Petra Cabot, Bolton Coit Brown, Frank Swift Chase, Philip Guston, and painter and silent film actress Wilna “Willie” Hervey.

Route 212 runs through the middle of town, where it turns a corner just a few blocks north of Route 375. Turn north at that corner onto Rock City Road. To the right, shortly after you turn, is the large and prominent Woodstock Cemetery. Artists Cemetery is to the left behind a parking lot. Turn left on Mountain View Road which runs along the perimeter of the parking lot and takes you directly to the cemetery. Artists Cemetery is one large hill. Walk directly over the hill. The graves on the other side are mostly flat stones and plates, and so it is difficult to note landmarks; but Howard Koch’s grave, where he is buried with his wife and family members, is one of those flats, to the right side of the hill as you face the woods.

Chandler, Adam “The Brothers who co-wrote Casablanca.” Tablet Magazine, August 22, 2013. Web Accessed 4/11/2021.

Gossow, Mel. “Howard Koch, a Screenwriter For ‘Casablanca,’ Dies at 95.” New York Times, (web) 8/18/1995. (Accessed 4/14/2021).

Koch, Howard. The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of an Event. With an Introductory Interview with Arthur C. Clark. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970 (print)

n.a. “Howard Koch.” Bard College Archives & Special Collections. May (Web) May 28, 201 (accessed 4/14/21).

“Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact.” New York Times, 10/31/1938.

Kingston: Walter B. Gibson

By Steven Huff

In 1777, during the Revolutionary War, the new State of New York set up its government Kingston, judging it to be a relatively safe distance from the advancing British Army under Gen. William Howe. Here, in June, it organized into a governing body, with George Clinton sworn in as first governor (later to be the third US Vice President), and John Jay its first Chief Justice (later to be the first US Supreme Court Chief Justice and a signatory of the Treaty of Paris in 1783). Thus Kingston rightly claims status as the first New York State Capital. It was an extraordinary moment in history.

Earlier that spring, Howe sent a force of 7000 soldiers by sea to the St Lawrence under Gen. Burgoyne, with orders to attack the colony from the north and secure the vitally strategic Hudson River, cutting New England off from the rest of the colonies. The age-old divide and conquer tactic. But the colonial forces scored a major victory over the British at Saratoga and Burgoyne surrendered his army to Gen. Horatio Gates on October 17.

However, while the battle was raging in the north, British forces under General Vaughan sailed north on the Hudson from Manhattan, taking aim at Kingston. On October 16, they burned about 300 homes and buildings, and left the city a smoldering ruin. Those buildings that were from the Dutch era were built of stone, but their wood interiors were burnt to ash. With winter coming, residents rigged up leant-tos against the stone walls.

To the surprise of many, the Brits under Vaughan did not continue north to join Burgoyne’s army in the north, but called their work in Kingston a job well done, and turned tail back to the warmth of New York. They would have been too late to help Burgoyne anyway. And the British never did gain control of the Hudson.

When the revolution ended in 1783, a crew of white men and numerous slaves began cutting west through the mountains and backwoods to establish the Schoharie Road, hoping to rebuild Kingston as a trade center. In 1828, the Delaware and Hudson Canal connected the Delaware River with the Hudson at Rondout, now part of Kingston, and became a critical passage for coal from northeastern Pennsylvania. More roads and railroads followed. Kingston regained some of its prominence in the Hudson River Valley, becoming the main river port between Albany and New York City.

In 1861, the Mary Powell, the largest, fastest, and most elegant steamboat on the Hudson River, began carrying passengers between Kingston and New York City. A 300-foot sidewheeler, it ran for fifty-five years until it was sold for scrap.

Over the years, Kingston has had its ups and downs. The IBM plant, which opened in 1956 and employed more than 7,000 people at its peak, closed in 1995 and transferred its 1500 remaining jobs to Poughkeepsie. And unlike other Eastern New York communities, such as Woodstock and Saratoga Springs, it has never been a holiday destination. But in recent times it has seen a rebirth, mostly owing to the gravitation of artists to its old lofts. Journalist Sara B. Franklin wrote, “Kingston is unique in its deliberate zoning and programming meant to attract, house, and retain working artists and craftspeople, particularly through the Midtown Arts District initiative.” That means metalworkers, painters, jewelers, ceramic and fabric artists, people who tend to put down roots where they can do their art without being pushed out by runaway gentrification.

Naturally, a city that has been such a focal point of history has bragging rights on a long list of distinguished people, more than just Clinton and Jay. For example, Charles Dewitt, delegate to the Continental Congress; Alton Parker, Democratic nominee for president in 1904; Peter Bogdanovich, movie director and film scholar —the list is too long to grant it justice here. But there is one person buried here, Walter B. Gibson, an author, quite unlike the rest.

Walter B. Gibson (1897-1985)

Walter Gibson may have been the most prolific writer of his or any other generation. He authored 282 novels for his series The Shadow (yes, that Shadow), and he wrote well over 175 other books—many on psychic phenomena, manuals of magic tricks, martial arts, spiritualism, card games, hypnotism, true crime, and his theory of dreams. He wrote puzzles for newspapers. He once said that he couldn’t remember all the books he’d written. And he was a professional magician.

He was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1897. Like most magicians, his fascination with the slight- of-hand happened early. But his love for writing—and writing fast—would dominate most of his life. Fortunately, his two obsessions often worked together. While attending Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, he wrote more than 200 articles for a variety of publications on magic. An enormous output for a student carrying a full load of classes.

Still in his youth, he joined a carnival as a magician, touring New Jersey and Long Island. His magic performances and mastery of a variety of tricks drew the attention of some of the most famous magicians of his day—which also led to his first book contracts.

He joined the Society of American Magicians in 1919. This led to his association with famed magician Howard Thurston, who was too busy wowing audiences to write his own books on magic, and contracted with Gibson to play ghost writer. Harry Houdini himself was impressed with Gibson’s feats of magic, but also with his skill at cranking out Thurston’s books, and wanted him to do the same for him. Unfortunately, before Gibson could show him the two books he’d written, still in manuscript, Houdini died of a ruptured appendix after famously collapsing on stage, October 31, 1926. Gibson then showed them to Houdini’s widow Bessie, who, however, was consumed with managing the estate of her late husband and didn’t want the added headache of seeking a publisher. She suggested he publish them under his own name, and one of the two did publish, Popular Card Tricks.

Gibson would write several books on Houdini, his tricks, and his art of escape. In 1927 he published First Principles of Astrology, under the pen name Wilber Gaston. Over the years he used enough pen names to make a hefty invitation list to a soiree.

Maxwell Grant Meets the Shadow

Gibson was already writing fiction for such magazines as Tales of Magic and Mystery and True Strange Stories, when pulp magazine publishers Street & Smith contracted with him to write novel-length stories on a character called The Shadow, which had already been created for radio. He was to produce one for each issue of The Shadow Magazine, using the pen name Maxwell Grant. The first one appeared in their April-June issue, 1931. They became so popular that the magazine went to a monthly format, and eventually to twice each month, demanding twenty-four novel-length stories each year, a pace that would kill most writers. But he did it.

Gibson liked chain-smoking and pounding typewriter ribbons to shreds, hour after hour. He was reputed to turn out as many as 10,000 to 15,000 words on a good day. Or, well over a million words per year, for more than fifteen years.

To put that number in perspective, most fiction writers call 1,200 words a good day’s work for a rough draft. Later drafts and revisions can be glacially slow, whole chapters might be thrown away, or the writer might become dispirited and stop for a while. Sinclair Lewis claimed to write 3,000 words per day. Hemingway said that anyone is lying who claims to write more than 500 per diem. To be fair, Gibson didn’t bother to revise, rewrite, or throw away chapters. But he did find time to research, even traveling to other cities to get a feel for whatever locale he planned to caste his Shadow.

He moved to Maine with his second wife Julia in 1936, yet even in that pastoral setting he kept up the hammering pace. Gibson did not write the famous radio plays. In fact he felt that the radio Shadow lacked the complexity of his character. But those shows, with Orson Welles as The Shadow and Agnes Moorehead as his companion Margot Lane, helped sales of the pulp version.

With 282 of his Shadow novels in print he left the series to other writers (they eventually numbered 325). Now he concentrated on writing books on whatever subject tickled his inventive wit: Houdini’s Escapes and Magic, The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Magic, Hypnotism, and many more, including The Complete Book of Divination and Prophecy—although, as he grew older, he did not write at the pace that he kept when he was a young man.

After time in New York City, he moved with his third wife Litzka (who coauthored Complete Book of Divination) to Putnam Valley, New York, and finally settled in 1963 in Eddyville, near Kingston. Now he and Litzka were local celebrities, performing magic shows, even making appearances on national TV. He died in a Kingston hospital on December 6, 1985 after a debilitating stroke suffered a month before.

Finding Walter B. Gibson’s Grave

He is buried with Litzka in Montrepose Cemetery, Kingston, Block D, Section 2. From Broadway, which runs through the center of town, take West Chester Street south, all the way to the end. On your left will be Montrepose Avenue, which is the cemetery’s official address, and to your right you will see the cemetery gates. Once in the gates, take the paved car path more or less straight ahead. In a few hundred feet you will see an unpaved car path to the right. On the corner is a double-bowed tree. About a hundred feet down the unpaved path, you will see his stone near the path under a small evergreen tree.

Sources

Boyle, Robert H. The Hudson River: A Natural and Unnatural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969 (Print).

Evers, Alf. The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1972 (Print).

Knowles, George. “Walter B. Gibson (A Wizard of Words).” Controversial.Com (Web) 2008 (Accessed 3/30/2021).

Mabie, Roger. “The ‘Mary Powell’, in Pilot’s Log 2000. Hudson River Maritime Museum. Nd. [Web] https://www.hrmm.org/uploads/2/6/3/3/26336013/the_mary_powell_2000.pdf

Shimeld, Thomas J. Walter B. Gibson and The Shadow. Foreword by Robert W. Gibson. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2003 (Print).

Olean /Allegany–Robert Lax

Lax Olean

[Note: Much of the material in this post has been in a page on my blog for most of a year. But, I have added new information, and so I decided to make a post.–SH]

By Steven Huff

Major Adam Hoops, the Revolutionary War officer who originally purchased the property on the Alleghany River from the Holland Land Company in 1804, called the settlement Olean, a name that he had twisted from the Latin word oleum, meaning oil. It must have seemed an odd association at the time, but it was prescient, since the area would become, in the age before Texas oil tycoons, petroleum states and OPEC, the largest producer of oil in the world. The Southerntier oil boom subsided in the mid-twentieth century when bigger oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma began producing.

Olean was the southern terminus of the Genesee Valley Canal, begun in 1836, the waterway that connected the Erie Canal to the Allegheny River, hence to the Ohio. Unfortunately, the canal was obsolete almost from the start. Its dimensions were 40 feet wide by 4 feet deep, the same as the Erie when it was first built, but the Erie had already begun construction projects to widen and deepen it to accommodate larger barges. Moreover, railroads were already crisscrossing the area. Olean remained an industrial hub, but the canal went bust and closed in 1878.

Saint Bonaventure is usually associated with Olean, although it is actually in the neighboring town of Allegany. Thomas Merton taught there briefly. In the summer before the United States entered World War II, before he became a monk, he lived in a cabin in the hills above town with his friend Robert Lax, an Olean native who would become a poet and exile.

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Robert Lax (1915-2000) The Contemplative in the World

Robert Lax, who may be the most idiosyncratic American poet of the twentieth century, lived much of his life on a remote Greek island. He was also an engine of invention. His poems range from highly experimental concrete poems where a noun or an adjective is repeated with little variations, to imagistic narrative, to circus fabulism. His journals, many detailing only his solitude, his diurnal doings and interactions with people in the Greek islands, are nevertheless deeply fascinating and transporting—a reader can slip very easily into a sense of his solitude.

Yet, although he produced about fifty books in his life, he was little known in his native country—perhaps better known in Europe—and even that small reputation owes much to his well-known friendship with Merton who has much to say about their friendship in his now classic spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain.

Lax was born in Olean in 1915, the son of a Jewish tailor and a community-minded mother. He went to Columbia University where he met Merton (as well as John Berryman and studied under Mark Van Doren), and they became life-long friends and voluminous correspondents. After college, Merton began graduate studies, and both men converted to Roman Catholicism, Merton took monastic vows while Lax tried his hand at journalism. He joined the staff of The New Yorker for a time before leaving the United States for the Mediterranean in 1962, making a home on Patmos (according to church tradition, the island that Saint John was exiled to and where he had his apocalyptic visions) and Kalymnos, returning only four times in the next three decades. He made a final journey home to Olean in 2000 when he realized that he was going to die. It has been suggested that he lived as a hermit in the islands, but it is not quite true. According to his biographical information in the Hermitary, whatever solitude he found in his simple quarters on Patmos, he still liked people, and he mixed easily with the islanders during his daily walks.

Merton wrote, “he was a kind of combination of Hamlet and Elias. A potential prophet but without rage….the secret of his constant solidity I think has always been a kind of natural, instinctive spirituality, a kind of inborn direction to the living God.” Jack Kerouac called him “one of the great original voices of our times.”

Paul Spaeth, head of libraries at St. Bonaventure College near Olean (Where Merton once taught), and curator of Lax’s papers, affirms that he was better known in Europe, where many of his books were published. Some of his books published in the US include 33 Poems (New Directions 1988), Love Had a Compass (Grove 1996), A Thing That Is (Overlook 1997) and Circus Days & Nights (Overlook 2000), and The Hermit’s Guide to Home Economics (New Directions 2015).

I was lucky in my search for Robert Lax. A friend, the writer Bill Kauffman, gave me contact information for two Lax enthusiasts, Sally and Lou Ventura, high school English teachers in Olean who agreed to show me the grave site. They also introduced me to Spaeth. We visited the site, and spent a wonderful afternoon in the archive amid the banker boxes of Lax’s manuscripts, correspondence, photos, etc. The man was a tireless, probably compulsive, writer.

“To sum it up,” Merton wrote, “even the people who have always thought he was ‘too impractical’ have always tended to venerate him—in the way people who value material security unconsciously venerate people who do not fear insecurity.”

lax grave — The grave of Robert Lax in Saint Bonaventure Cemetery

The best way to get there is via Route NY 17 / US 86. Take Exit 24 for Allegany and St Bonaventure. Turn south from the exit and a left turn onto Route 417. You will pass the college in two miles. The entrance to the cemetery is on the left, immediately before the sign for the St. Bonaventure Clubhouse, and a short distance before the bridge over the railroad.

Once in the gate, drive all the way to the top, and turn left. You will see a sign for Section a (lower case) ahead. Turn left there and stop. Between two prominent stones, one for McGuinn and one for Boyle, you will find a small angel and a flat stone for Robert Lax. His poem inscribed on the stone reads:

slow

boat

calm

riv

qui

land

ing

Sources:

I have drawn information on Robert Lax from, among others, the following sources:Merton, Thomas, The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1948. Print. NA, House of Hermits: “Robert Lax: Enigmatic Hermit.” Hermitary: Resources and Reflections on Hermits and Solitude. http://hermitary.com/articles/lax.html. ND. Web. Spaeth, Paul, “Robert Lax Archives St. Bonaventure University.” http://web.sbu.edu/friedsam/laxweb/ ND, web; n.a.”Brief History of Olean,” and n.a. “More on the History of Olean,” City of Olean Bartless House Olean Point Museum, web (accessed 6/12/19)

Clinton: Alexander Woollcott

By Steven Huff

Nestled in the hills of Oneida County is the Village of Clinton, not to be confused with the Town of Clinton in Dutchess County, or the Town of Clinton in Clinton County up near the Canadian border. It is named for George Clinton, first governor of New York, and is home to Hamilton College, named for Alexander Hamilton who was on the college’s board of Trustees. Its first settlers were Revolutionary War veterans and their families who started arriving in 1787, though it didn’t actually incorporate as a village (in the Town of Kirkland) until 1846.

Grover Cleveland lived briefly in Clinton; Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, attended the Clinton Liberal Institute, 1850-1852; and Elihu Root, who was born in 1845 in a house on the Hamilton campus, went on to serve as Secretary of War and Secretary of State under presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. His daughter Edith married Major General Ulysses S. Grant III, and both are buried in the Root family plot in Hamilton College Cemetery. Iron ore was mined here and two blast furnaces produced countless tons of cast iron until 1900, when competing iron production in the Mesabi Range in Minnesota put them out of business, much as it did in Furnaceville, closer to Rochester.

The college started in 1793 as the Hamilton-Oneida Academy, founded to enroll both white and Indian students, and received its formal charter 1812 as a liberal arts college. Ezra Pound enrolled as a student at Hamilton in 1903, and graduated in 1905. It was at Hamilton that he studied Dante, probably developing his early ideas for his Cantos. Another student, Alexander Woollcott, who graduated in 1909, became known and feared as one of the great theater critics of his time.

Alexander_Woollcott_(1939)

Alexander Woollcott (1887-1943) The Brilliant (and Beloved) Smart Aleck

Long regarded as one of New York’s (and hence the nation’s) most influential drama critics, as well as a journalist, writer, playwright, actor, and radio commentator, Alexander Woollcott was a grandly notorious figure, widely known for his brilliant and caustic wit (he could have driven Don Rickles to tears); but also, with his wide girth, he was one of the most physically recognizable literary figures of his time. You loved him (if he praised your play), or hated him (if he panned it). He never wrote puff pieces: his integrity as a critic was unquestioned.

He was one of the original members of the legendary Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan where, if an innocent soul happened to sit down with such wits as Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, and Woollcott, he might be chewed up and spat out. Yet it was more than a phalanx of wits. According to David Wallace, “Seeing each other on a more or less regular basis created a kind of creative synergism between regular members of the Round Table,” where ideas, as well as gossip and jokes, were tossed back and forth.

He was in love with Harpo, so some stories go, but apparently it was just a close friendship. In fact, they vacationed together, and after Harpo married movie star Susan Fleming, they named their son William Woollcott Marx. The likely reason that he remained single was that, while in college, a brutal bout with mumps left him partially impotent. He was nothing if not a restless and lonely man.

Once when he was theater critic for The New York Times he was banned from all theaters owned by the Shubert company, owing to his acerbic reviews. So, he and the Times publisher Adolph Ochs sued for discrimination. Following a court injunction, he was allowed tickets again, but he ultimately lost in the New York State Supreme Court which ruled for the Shuberts, stating that only race, creed or color constituted unlawful discrimination.

Alexander_Woollcott — Alexander Woollcott, on the air

He had another side: a man kind and generous to friends, his purse always open to struggling actors and writers, although few of his public were privileged to see it. At the height of his career, it was said that he could eat dinner at a different home in New York every night of the year, so much were people entertained by him, so avidly was he in demand by hosts. In 1933 he began a new career as a radio commentator for CBS, and his renown grew exponentially.

Moss Hart and George S. Kauffman tried to capture his personality in their comedy play, The Man Who Came to Dinner. It became an hilarious movie, with Monty Woolley playing the part of the Woollcottian character Sheridan Whiteside. He was also an obvious inspiration for the fastidious, wisecracking, syndicated columnist/ radio commentator Waldo Lydeker, played by Clifton Webb in the classic detective film Laura (1944), except that Woollcott never had that character’s malice. But few writers have held such celebrity. James Thurber called him “Old Vitriol and Violets.”

He was considered one of the most quotable persons of his time. Here are a few of his quips:

“At 83 Shaw’s mind was perhaps not quite as good as it used to be, but it was still better than anyone else’s.”

“Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening.”

“I’m tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. We are supposed to work it.”

“Nothing risqué, nothing gained.”

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with Oscar Levant that a miracle can’t fix.”

And my own favorite: “His huff arrived and he departed in it.”

His biographer Edwin P. Hoyt makes clear that the brilliant vinegar that made him famous, was toward the end, a front. By his forties he was playing a caricature of Alexander Woollcott, and there seemed no way to publicly take a bow and step out of that role. He became more restless, traveling back and forth over the ocean, changing addresses, overeating, drinking too much and smoking. His health began to suffer, and in 1943, at the age of 56, he had a heart attack while on the air, and died later in the hospital.

He was born in New Jersey to parents who were adherents to Fourierism, a radical back-to-the-land communal society that lived in agrarian homesteads called phalanges. Woollcott grew up in one near Red Bank, which was, for its time, a radical mix of agnostics and free thinkers who recognized only civil marriages, outrightly abolishing religious unions. They were not, however, free-love colonies as many people assumed. His father was a restless, itinerant worker who moved his family around the country; but somehow they always returned to the phalange. If the commune was limiting, there was a local library, and he pulled wagon loads of books home with him, the literary light already burning in his brain. And there was Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, a place he loved dearly, and where he graduated with the Class of 1909.

Some claim that Woollcott was a Fortean, an adherent to the occult of anomalous- phenomena ideas of Charles Hoy Fort (See Chapter 1: Albany), which also included Ben Hecht, John Cowper Powys, Sherwood Anderson, Clarence Darrow, and Booth Tarkington. After all, like Fort, he was a compulsive contrarian.

He liked Hamilton and Upstate so much that when he was a student, rather than returning to the phalange, he spent his summers working Upstate, first at the Roycroft Colony—the cultural center and spa in East Aurora—and thereafter at The Chautauqua Institute. In 1924, Hamilton College awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. Whenever possible, he attended Hamilton’s commencement ceremonies, one of the few of the alumnae who did.

His writing output was voluminous. The earliest books are collected theater reviews, which now, I suppose, would only interest someone studying the history of American theater. But he also wrote the first biography of Irving Berlin. His later works, such as While Rome Burns and Long, Long Ago, are collections of much broader commentary, places, events, personalities. And they are brilliant. In addition, he edited The Woollcott Reader, and Woollcott’s Second Reader, anthologies of works by writers that he thought deserved a wider audience. While it is unlikely that you will ever see a stage production of the play that he wrote with George S. Kauffman, The Dark Tower, the DVD of the 1934 film version, The Man with Two Faces, starring Edward G. Robinson and Mary Astor, is available.

Hoyt’s biography, Alexander Woollcott: The Man Who Came to Dinner, is lively and sympathetic to Woollcott, whom he defends against harsher critics, but he also notes Woollcott’s responsibility for his own problems and his lifestyle that led to his eventual demise. When he died, according to his wishes, his ashes were sent to Hamilton for interment in its cemetery. However, they were misdirected to nearby Colgate College, and his urn finally arrived at Hamilton with 67¢ postage due. Maybe Hamilton was the closest thing he had ever had to a real home.

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Finding the Grave

To reach Clinton, get off the Thruway at Exit 32 for Westmorland, and drive south on Route 233 for about seven miles to the intersection with Route 412. A left turn puts you on College Street into the village. To the right is College Hill Road, which takes you into the Hamilton College Campus. Turn right again when you see a small sign for Skenandoa, Wertimer and Wallace Johnson Houses. That road ends at the Sydney and Eleanor Wertimer House, a dormitory for first-year students. I am told that if you arrive on a weekend or during the summer, parking is open. When classes are in session you need a permit (call Campus Safety at 315-859-4141).

But let’s assume that it’s a Saturday, sunny and mild, and there are only a few cars in the student lot at Wertimer House. Directly up the slope from that lot is the Hamilton College Cemetery, and you can see it through the trees. A path will take you to the left around the trees and in the side of the cemetery, or you can take the paved walk around. It is a small cemetery, and Alexander Woollcott’s grave is easy to find. He is four rows down from the high end of the slope, a modest block stone. Look for two prominent stones in the third row for Fitch and Shepard. Woollcott is just a few paces in front of Shepard.

While you are there, visit Elihu Root and family, with Ulysses S. Grant III under flat stones and the bottom of the slope. In this small cemetery you will also find Oneida Chief Skenandoa, and the missionary to (and advocate for) the Oneidas, Samuel Kirkland, for whom the town is named, and who was the college’s principal founder.

Sources:

Edwin P. Hoyt, Alexander Woollcott: The Man Who Came to Dinner, New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1968; David Wallace, Capitol of the World: A Portrait of New York City in the Roaring Twenties. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2011; n.a. “Just the Facts,” web, n.d. www.hamilton.edu/about/just-the-facts (accessed 5/19/19); n.a. “Village of Clinton,” Wayback Machine, web, 2012, web.archive.org/web/20120722195122/http:// village.clinton.ny.us/ content/History (accessed 5/19/19).

Fayetteville: Matilda Joslyn Gage

By Steven Huff

Fayetteville is on Route 5, a few miles southeast of Syracuse in Onondaga County. The traffic on its main drag is heavy enough to give the traveler the impression that many more people live in the village limits than the actual population of just over four thousand. Its quiet side streets give a much more small-town feel. Like many Upstate communities, it made a grab at history by name-association, Fayetteville being a twist on the name of the Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette. A neighboring town already had dibs on the name Lafayette.

Unlike many municipalities, it did not let developers tear down its best old architecture: grand Victorian, Greek Revival and Italianate houses are plentiful here. The Stickley Museum is worth seeing, located on Orchard Street, next door to the Fayetteville Free Library, in the furniture company’s original building. President Grover Cleveland’s boyhood home is on Academy Street.

And there is the home of Matilda Joslyn Gage, the famed abolitionist, suffragist and author, now the Gage Home, which houses The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, its stated mission being its dedication to “educating current and future generations about Gage’s work and its power to drive contemporary social change,” with a variety of tours and programs, and scholarly presentations. Its director, Sally Roesch Wagner, is one of the first women in the US to receive a PhD in Women’s Studies.

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Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898) Stalwart Reformer and Author

She was born in Cicero, New York, a few miles north of Fayetteville where she would later settle with her husband Henry Hill Gage and where she would live most of her adult life. Her family were staunch abolitionists, free-thinkers whose home was a haven for other free-thinking radicals, and supporters of the Underground Railroad. Matilda Joslyn Gage championed the abolitionist cause, as well as advocating for Native American rights, for which she became an honorary member of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk tribe.

But it is for her work in the Woman Suffrage movement that she is most remembered, becoming a founding member of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and publishing their newspaper, the National Citizen and Ballot Box. She authored with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton the first three of the six-volume The History of Woman Suffrage.

Her tour de force, however, was her book Woman, Church and State, in which she takes Judeo-Christian religion to task for promoting and codifying women’s subservience to men, beginning with the concept of God as male, and the Genesis story that woman brought sin into the human family. She asserted that society and religion needed fundamental reforms for women to gain control over their own lives. For these viewpoints, she was viewed as more radical than many of her companions in the suffrage movement.

She was, however, religious, in fact a Theosophist and member of the Rochester Theosophical Society. Among their beliefs, according to Mary Crane Derr, are “the presence of life and consciousness in all matter; the evolution of spirit and intelligence as well as matter; the possibility of conscious participation in evolution; the power of thought to affect one’s self and surroundings; the duty of altruism, a concern for the welfare of others.” This is a system very much consistent with her own tenets.

Partly through her influence, her daughter Maud and her husband L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, also became Theosophists and joined the Ramayana Theosophical Society in Chicago. Much has been written about the possible influence of Theosophy on the Oz books. Baum was born in nearby Chittenango, and grew up in Syracuse. According to John Alegro, Gage was “a passionately devoted Theosophist,” who had found “a kindred spirit” in Madam Blavatsky, the Russian occultist and founder of the Theosophical Society.

Matilda Joslyn Gage died in Chicago in 1898 at the Baums’ home. She was cremated there, and Maud brought her ashes back to Fayetteville Cemetery for burial with her husband who had died in 1884.

Finding the Grave

To get to Fayetteville from the east, take the Thruway take Exit 34A and Interstate 481 South to Route 5, where you will turn east. From the West, get off the Thruway on 690, and follow it through the City of Syracuse to 481, and down to 5. From the north or south, 81 will get you to 481 or 690.

Route 5 East will take you through Manlius’s plaza district (Fayetteville is in the Town of Manlius). Shortly after you pass the sign welcoming you to Fayetteville, the Gage House will be on the right side. In the center of the village, turn south on South Manlius Street. Fayetteville Cemetery is a short distance on the left.

There are three entrances to Fayetteville Cemetery. Take the second entrance. You will be on a paved car path. There are some unpaved paths; take the first such path you see on the left, which is an almost immediate turn. The first large, rough-hewn, grave stone on the right is Matilda Joslyn Gage. Her husband’s name and dates are on the other side. In most cemeteries, the rough style of her stone would be distinctive, but there are dozens of similar stones in this cemetery.

Soures:

n.a. “Who Was Matilda Joslyn Gage?” The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation n.d. web; Mary Crane Derr, “’Our Struggle Is for All Life’: The Theosophist/Unitarian Feminist Pioneer Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898 CE)”; Coral Anika Theill, “A Tribute to Matilda Joslyn Gage: Women, Church & State—Addressing Our Patriarchal Violence-Accepting Society,” web, www.coralanikatheill.com; John Alegro, “L. Frank Baum and Theosophy, Part 4,” Theosophy Forward, 12/4/2014, web, www.theosophyforeward.com (accessed 4/25/19); Sally Roesch Wagner, “Oz—Dorothy Gage and Dorothy Gale,” The Theosophical Society in America, web, posted from the Baum Bugle, Autumn, 1984 (accessed 4/25/19); John Alegro, The Theosophical Wizard of Oz,” Theosophy Forward, web, www.theosophyforeward.com, 8/15/09, (accessed 4/25/19); Sally Roesch Wagner, email.

Canandaigua: Austin Steward

Canandaigua: Austin Steward

By Steven Huff

Note: The information in this blog post will be added to the already-existing Canandaigua post for authors Stanton Davis Kirkham and John Mosher Chapin at inourhomeground.wordpress.com.

The City of Canandaigua has a small-town, lakeside atmosphere, very attractive to tourists, although the lake’s shoreline itself is distressingly overdeveloped and has been for generations. Once a Seneca village, it was burned by Gen. John Sullivan during the Revolutionary War to punish the Iroquois Five Nations for aiding the British. It was resettled by European whites, and by the 1790s had a public school. Here, in 1873, at the Ontario County Courthouse, Susan B. Anthony was tried and convicted for the crime of voting in the 1872 presidential election in Rochester. As happens so often, the judge and jury were on the wrong side of history. It is also home to the New York Wine & Culinary Center, and Sonnenberg Gardens–both very much worth a trip.

Of other literary note, Canandaigua is the birthplace in 1823 of Philip Spencer, a mid-shipman who in 1842 was hung with two other sailors aboard the U.S.S. Somers and buried at sea for the crime of conspiracy to mutiny, but without a legal court marshal, which led to scandal. He was probably the model for Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. Spencer, son of John C. Spencer, President Tyler’s Secretary of War, was a noted rake and rogue. A Navy court exonerated the ship’s captain, reasoning that had the men been merely confined aboard ship, they could have been released by other disgruntled shipmen and then mutiny would have ensued. Public opinion in the US was outraged, but as everyone knows, outrage sputters out eventually. Melville had a relative aboard the ship, a cousin named Lieutenant Guert Gansevoort, and so the author was certainly familiar with the story.

Canandaigua was the birthplace in 1880 of Arthur Garfield Dove, known as America’s first abstract painter.

Austin Steward (1794-1869): From Slave to Freeman

He was born into slavery in Prince William County, Virginia, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and migrated with his master to Central New York before the War of 1812. While there, Austin Steward escaped bondage. His memoir, Twenty-two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman, belongs among the great narratives of African-American experience in the ante-bellum years, such as The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, American Slave; and Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northrop. It gives us a horrifying picture of slave life, but also a view of Upstate’s early settlements from the perspective of a man in bondage, and later of a free man who took his destiny into his own hands. He became a businessman in Rochester and an active abolitionist, helping slaves flee to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

Steward was put to work as a slave in the fields at age 7, and later made a household slave. His accounts of the lives of field slaves, of the thirty-nine lashes that one would receive with a heavy, lead-tipped whip allude to something even worse than senseless cruelty, but to an insane savagery, almost incomprehensible, in men who would have treated their horses and cattle gently. This brutality was more the norm than the exception, according to Steward, since lenient masters were despised by their neighbors. He relates details of an insurrection (years before Nat Turner) on the plantation of one such master that occurred when a patrol came to break up the slaves’ Easter festivities, in which the four members of the patrol and two of the slaves were killed.

The Journey North

His master, Capt. Helm, loved his leisure: poker, booze and race horses, and eventually gambled himself into penury. He sold his plantation and moved his household and slaves north to the recently settled Genesee Valley in New York State. Steward recalls that this was not good news to the slaves, who thought the Genesee to be beyond the pale of civilization, “where we should in all probability be destroyed by wild beasts, devoured by cannibals, or scalped by the Indians.”

He writes: “We traveled northward, through Maryland, Pennsylvania, and a portion of New York, to Sodus Bay, where we halted for some time. We made about twenty miles per day, camping out every night, and reached that place after a march of twenty days. Every morning the overseer called the roll, when every slave must answer to his or her name, felling to the ground with his cowhide any delinquent who failed to speak out in quick time.” Steward does not say how many slaves made the journey, but it must have been a considerable crowd since he does not mention any slaves left behind.

A New Country

There wasn’t much of a welcoming party at Sodus—only a single tavern. Capt. Helm bought a large tract of land on both sides of the bay and ordered his slaves to clear the woods. But hunger set in. The Virginians had no idea how to feed their multitude in the unfamiliar place. Slaves found wild animal bones in the woods and boiled them to make broth.

But things were different there in another significant way. The slaves sensed that they possessed a modicum of liberty in this new land. One day the overseer went into a cabin and found a slave named Williams whom he was determined to whip. But the slave was having none of it. “Instantly Williams sprang and caught him by the throat and held him writhing in his vise-like grasp, until he succeeded in getting possession of the cowhide, with which he gave the overseer such a flogging as slaves seldom get.” Shortly after, the monster quit his job and went back to Virginia.

Restless, Capt. Helm moved them all back down the valley to Bath, where he used the proceeds from the sale of his plantation–$40,000, or around $800,000 in today’s dollars–to found saw- and gristmills, which later proved unprofitable, and Helm began hiring out his slaves, including Steward.

The nation was readying for war with Great Britain. While hired out to a man in Lyons, Steward witnessed troops training for war with the British, a scene that became a carnival of drunken bedlam.

The Cost of Education

Steward found a spelling book, and began teaching himself to read. “But here Slavery showed its cloven foot in all its hideous deformity….I had been set to work in the sugar bush, and I took my spelling book with me. When a spare moment occurred, I sat down to study, and so absorbed was I in the attempt to blunder through my lesson, that I did not hear the Captain’s son-in-law coming until he was fairly upon me. He sprang forward, caught my poor old spelling book, and threw it into the fire, where it was burned to ashes; and then came my turn. He gave me first a severe flogging, and then swore if he ever caught me with another book, he would ‘whip every inch of skin off my back,’ &c.”

Steward said, “I found it just as hard to be beaten over the head with a piece of iron in New York as it was in Virginia.”

When Helm fell into financial trouble again he began selling his slaves, while others simply walked away. Steward bolted for freedom with the help of members of the New York Manumission Society, who told him that by virtue of hiring Steward out, Helm had forfeited legal ownership of him in New York—a technicality in the state’s 1799 Gradual Emancipation Statute. Dennis Comstock, of the Society, gave him money to help him get settled. Steward wrote, “the first thing I did after receiving it I went to Canandaigua where I found a book-store kept by a man named J.D. Bemis, and of him I purchased some school books.” Bemis was a noted supporter of progressive causes. There is a Bemis Street in Canandaigua.

Helm made one last grand effort to restore his wealth by attempting to kidnap his former slaves en mass and transport them back to Virginia to be sold. He threw a big party in Palmyra and invited them all; then, late at night, he closed in with a group of men to capture them. But it ended in a bloody battle, with many injured, including Steward’s father who succumbed later to his wounds, and Helm and his confederates went away empty handed. Steward himself had sensed trouble and had stayed away.

A Man of Stature and Eloquence

In 1816, Steward started a business in Rochester, on what is now West Main Street, selling produce and meat. He prospered, despite some local resistance from whites, and soon became a property owner in Brighton and Canandaigua.

The State of New York ended slavery in 1827, one of the last northern states to do so (although not until 1840 did a census find no slaves in New York). Steward, now married, and active in the Underground Railroad, celebrated the occasion with a speech in Rochester’s Johnson Square, exhorting former slaves to look forward to the hard work ahead of free people: “Let not the rising sun behold you sleeping or indolently lying upon your beds. Rise ever with the morning light; and, till sun-set, give not an hour to idleness. Say not human nature cannot endure it. It can—it almost requires it….Be watchful and diligent and let your mind be fruitful in devises for the honest advancement of your worldly interest. So shall you continually rise in respectability, in rank and standing in this so late and so long the land of your captivity.” It was an eloquent, memorable speech, a forerunner in some respects of the great orations that followed in Rochester by Frederick Douglass and William H. Seward, and the “First of August” celebrations, beginning in 1834, marking the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies.

Later he was elected vice president of the first meeting of the National Negro Convention Movement, held in Philadelphia in 1831.

That same year, he moved to Canada to join the Wilberforce Colony in London, Ontario, which had been founded for African Americans escaping slavery and agents who crossed into northern states looking for runaways. But he found the leadership of that colony corrupt, and in 1837 he moved back to Rochester. But he had spent all his wealth on the colony, and upon his return had to borrow funds to rebuild his business and reestablish a home. His autobiography, Twenty-two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman was published by William Alling in Rochester in 1857. He died in the winter of 1869 from typhoid fever.

Finding the Grave

Take Exit 44 from the New York State Thruway, and head directly south on Route 332. As you come into Canandaigua, it becomes South Main Street. A bit less than 9 miles from the toll booths you will find West Avenue, where you will turn right. If you come to Canandaigua on Routes 5 and 20, turn north on South Main Street, and in a few blocks you will find West Avenue. Turn left. Shortly after your turn, you will see the West Avenue Cemetery on the right, and you will find the front entrance where the hedge breaks.

Walk or drive in about 50 feet to an intersecting path, and turn to the right. The white granite spire for the Steward family, with footstones for him, his wife Patience, and several of their children are a about 25 feet ahead on the left.

Sources:

Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman (1856), The Project Gutenberg EBook, 2004; dann j. Broyld, “Rochester’s Black Pioneers: Austin Steward,” Rochester History, a Publication of Rochester and Monroe County Library, Christine L.Ridarsky, editor, Vol 72, No. 2, Fall, 2010; Preston E. Pierce, “Liberian Dreams: West African Nightmare: The Life of Henry W. Johnson,” Part 1, Rochester History, Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck, editor, Vol. LXVI, No. 4, Fall 2004; David Lewis, “Steward, Austin,” web, BlackPast.org., (accessed 1/9/19); Shirley Yee, “The National Negro Convention Movement,” BlackPast.org (accessed 1/28/19).

Newark: Charles R. Jackson

By Steven Huff

Newark, New York

Newark New York is a village in the Town of Arcadia on the Erie Canal, about half-way between Rochester and Syracuse. An area on its east side was once known as Lockville, where a cluster of three canal locks raised westbound boats entering Newark. The locks have been preserved for an historical park. Like most villages on the canal, it owes its early prosperity to Erie traffic. The presence of even one lock was good for local business, general stores and taverns particularly, simply because boats were delayed there and canallers availed themselves of whatever was at hand.

Famous dancer and choreographer Sybil Shearer (1912-2005), born in Toronto, grew up here. Journalist Harriet Van Horne (1920-1998) graduated from Newark High School. Songwriter, singer and animator Peter Hannan is from Newark. And, although few in Newark remember him personally now, there was author Charles Reginald Jackson.

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Charles R. Jackson (1903-1968) and His Lost Weekends

He was born in New Jersey in 1903, but grew up in Newark, New York, where his family lived in a small house on Prospect Street. Charles Jackson was kid addicted to books, who spent his weekend afternoons in the village library instead of on the ball field. In fact, that is where he was on November 12, 1916, when a call came for him to come directly home. His older sister Thelma, 16, and four-year-old brother Richard had been riding in a car that was hit by a passenger train at a nearby railroad crossing. Both were killed. Besides paralyzing the family, the tragedy traumatized the entire community.

At the funeral, the two siblings were laid out together in one casket, Thelma on her side as if napping, with Richard’s head on her arm and holding her hand. Not long after, the father, Fred, who had been working in Manhattan, wrote to say that he wouldn’t be coming home again. And thereafter, Charles grew very close to his mother, although their relationship was contentious.

The youths of many writers seem grounded in tragedy. Among Upstate authors, John Gardner was involved in a farming accident that killed his younger brother Gilbert; Adelaide Crapsey was devasted by her father being defrocked from the priesthood by the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester; Mark Twain’s brother died in a river boat fire. How much those traumas fired their creative drive is a matter for speculation, more things than can be dreamt of in my philosophy.

Charles Jackson—short and slight of build— was a closeted bisexual, which in those times was a scandalous complication, and may have been a driving force behind his later alcoholism. But who knows?—a boozer is a boozer, and whatever happens, he will find the bottle. He enrolled in Syracuse University in 1921, but left after a minor dustup over a brief relationship with another fraternity member. Four years later in 1925, he left Newark on a train for Chicago, and for years worked in bookstores and as a newspaper editor there and in New York City.

But in 1928 he began coughing up blood, and by 1929, living in Newark again, he went to Rochester General Hospital where collapse of his right lung was induced as a treatment for tuberculosis. Since antibiotics for the disease did not arrive until 1946, this was the only practical medical intervention, allowing tuberculous damage to heal. Finally, he and his brother Fred, who also suffered from the disease, went to a renowned sanitorium in Switzerland for treatment, which included rest and clean air, and sleeping in frigid temperatures. The bill was paid by Bronson Winthrop, a wealthy lawyer that Charles had befriended a few years before.

Unlike Rochester poet Adelaide Crapsey (See Rochester at Mount Hope Part 1), Jackson regained his health after his bout with tuberculosis.

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The Lost Weekend

Jackson was a hard-working writer. While still in his teens he was local editor of the Newark Courier-Gazette, writing much of what passed for news in the small town. His first novel, The Lost Weekend— the story of five days and nights in the life of an alcoholic writer on a binge, which years later he admitted was largely autobiographical—made him famous, and while none of his other novels quite came up to it in critical acclaim or in sales, he remained a highly respected writer and a well-paid lecturer. It was translated into fourteen languages and, according to Jackson biographer Blake Bailey, aroused the jealousy of British poet and novelist Malcom Lowry who was hard at work on his own “alcoholic masterpiece,” Under the Volcano.

Focusing on a writer’s dipsomania—the romantic “tortured soul” notion that many readers have—is often a diversion from what truly matters about the works. But, as with Frederick Exley (Watertown), it is inescapable with Jackson. Lost Weekend was one of the big publishing events of 1944. Philip Wylie, in a review in The New York Times, said, “Charles Jackson has made the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey….[He] makes plain the psychic states which give rise to the morbid eloquence of Poe, on one hand, and to such phenomena, on the other, as the late F. Scott Fitzgerald’s identification of glamor with literal intoxication.” The book was destined for classic status.

jackson 3

Hollywood, Wilder and Brackett

Billy Wilder made it into a 1945 movie, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Actor for Ray Milland, and a Best Adapted Screenplay for Wilder and Charles Brackett. But novelists are rarely happy with their film treatments. (Hemingway didn’t like any of his movies.) And Jackson, while initially thrilled with the script, wrangled with the Wilder-Brackett team when they tacked on an upbeat ending that they knew would be more palatable to the public and less apt to rile the Hays motion picture censors. He felt cheated, and became a nagging thorn in Brackett’s side, who wrote in his diary, January 2, 1945, “Charles Jackson’s letter arrived (a five-page agony of hatred of the final sequence). It sounded so repetitious it was like a loop….” The strife went on for months, Brackett calling Jackson “Birdbrain” in a telegram.

A few days later, a phone call from Jackson got Brackett out of the bathtub. Peevishly, he wrapped a towel around himself and went to answer it. “I said, ‘I don’t want to hear your voice. I don’t want to hear your name. I am just Goddamned bored!’ With that I hung up.”

Jackson was a devoted husband to his wife Rhoda and a doting father to his daughters. For long stretches of time he remained sober, even traveling as a national spokesman for Alcoholics Anonymous. It is worth listening to one of his talks, “Charles R. Jackson—Alcoholics Anonymous Speech (1959),” which is available on YouTube. He mentions there that he did not actually begin drinking to excess until age 26, unlike most big drinkers he had known who were more precocious boozers. Although, even while traveling for AA, he had trouble staying out of the sauce. Near the end of his life, he deserted his family as had his father before him. He died in 1968 from an overdose of barbiturates at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan (where Dylan Thomas had died from inebriation fifteen years before). Jackson was 65.

And yet, all considered, his life was a triumph, not only over tragedy, tuberculosis, and stretches of time lost to alcohol, but over the self-doubt that plagues every writer. Inside of this small man was a core of strength and genius.

His Books

His books that followed Lost Weekend were, The Fall of Valor (1946); The Outer Edges (1948); The Sunnier Side: Twelve Arcadian Tales (1950), Earthly Creatures (1953), and A Second-Hand Life (1967).

Finding the Grave

No freeway goes to Newark, but trusty Route 31 runs through it, the road that more than any other runs parallel to the Erie Canal in Central and Western New York. Coming from the east on the Thruway, get off at Exit 42 for Geneva and Lyons; take 14 north several miles to Lyons and turn west on Route 31. From the west, take Exit 41 for Palmyra and travel east on 31. Or set your GPS for Vienna Street, Newark, NY, 14513.

In the center of the village, turn south on Main Street, then left (east) on East Maple Avenue, which, in about a mile, will intersect with Vienna Street, where you will turn right. You will find the main gate of East Newark Cemetery a short distance on the left. The main road into the cemetery is called Pine Street. Take this road, passing a wooden shed on the right. You will see Aspen Street on the left. But Aspen is actually a loop. Go to the second intersection with Aspen. The Jackson family plot is on the neast corner. Charles Jackson is nearest to the corner. Next to him is the grave of Thelma and Richard. Their mother Sarah and brother Fred are nearby.

Sources:

Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend, Introduction by Blake Bailey, New York: Vintage Reprint Edition, 2013; The Lost Weekend, Dir. Billy Wilder, Principle performers, Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Paramount 1945; Charles Brackett, “It’s the Pictures that Got Small”: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden Age, Edited by Anthony Slide, Foreword by Jim Moore, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015; Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013; Philip Wylie, “Wingding,” New York Times Book Review, January 30, 1944; Charles R. Jackson—Alcoholics Anonymous Speech (1959) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoiP5xsJzvs (accessed 12/27/18); John R. Groves, “Where is Lockville?” Wayne County Life, 31 Oct., 2008, web., (accessed 1/5/19).

Canandaigua: Stanton Davis Kirkham and John Chapin Mosher (revised).

By Steven Huff

Note: This chapter has not been a blog post before. I have revised it from from an earlier blog page after I found a bit more information on John Chapin Mosher.

The City of Canandaigua has a small-town, lakeside atmosphere, although the lake’s shoreline itself is distressingly overdeveloped, and has been for generations. Once a Seneca village, it was burned by Gen. John Sullivan during the Revolutionary War to punish the Iroquois Five Nations for aiding the British. It was resettled by European whites, and by the 1790s had a public school. Here, in 1873, at the Ontario County Courthouse, Susan B. Anthony was tried and convicted for the crime of voting in the 1872 presidential election in Rochester. As happens so often, the judge and jury were on the wrong side of history. It is also home to the New York Wine & Culinary Center, and Sonnenberg Gardens–all very much worth a trip.

Canandaigua was the birthplace in 1880 of Arthur Garfield Dove, known as America’s first abstract painter.

Stanton Davis Kirkham (1868-1944) Philosopher and Traveler

Stanton Davis Kirkham was a philosopher, naturalist, and travel-writer. He was born in Nice, France to an American Military family, Major Murray S. Davis and Julia Edith Kirkham Davis. His grandfather, Gen. Ralph Wilson Kirkham brought him to the United States, adopted him while he was at it, and sent him to college at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Edwin Stanton, President Lincoln’s secretary of war, for whom his father had been an aid, was the influence for the philosopher’s first name. Auspicious beginning, perhaps.

He was to write in the genres of his three disciplines: as a philosopher, Where Dwells the Soul Serene (1907), a rambling but absorbing text, and he probably coined the term “self-help” for his book on self-reliance, The Philosophy of Self-Help: An Application of Practical Psychology to Daily Life (1909); as a naturalist, Outdoor Philosophy: The Meditations of a Naturalist (1912); and as a travel writer, Cruising Around the World and the Seven Seas (1927)— my own favorite. A busy man. But he also found time to write a book for children, Half-True Stories: For Little Folks of Just the Right Age (1916). Sixteen books in all, finishing with Shut-In (1936), his account of becoming bedridden in his later years owing to a disease contracted in 1914 while traveling horseback in South America.

kirkham

In a review of Where Dwells the Soul Serene in the journal The Light of Reason, James Allen wrote, “This is a work of transcendentalism after the fashion of Emerson’s Essays. The diction is a model of chastity and elegance, and the loftiest spirituality characterizes the work. The author starts with no central idea and adheres to none. The thirteen sections of the book are entirely separate from each other, the thoughts are discursive, the sentences short, pithy and axiomatic; all of which breathe forth a spirit of sweetness and serenity.”

Another writer, reviewing his Mexican Trails, noted, “He has an excellent knowledge of plants and animals, is more than versed in legend and archaeological story and the phases of the country described are varied and pertinent. His description of the sequence of activities of a day from dawn to night makes you feel the moods of the passing hours as if they were a personal experience.”

He married late, at 39, to Mary Clark Williams, 38, the granddaughter of New York Governor Myron H. Clark. They had two children before her death four years later in 1911.

Finding the Grave

Stanton Kirkham Davis is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Canandaigua, New York. Take Exit 44 from the New York State Thruway, and head directly south on Route 332. As you come into Canandaigua, it becomes South Main Street. A little less than nine miles from the toll booths you will find West Gibson Street, where you will turn right. If you come to Canandaigua on Routes 5 and 20, turn north on South Main Street, and in a few blocks you will find West Gibson Street. Turn left.

Gibson will intersect in about four tenths of a mile with North Pearl Street. Turn right. You will see the stone and wrought iron gates of Woodlawn Cemetery a very short distance on your left. To miss it, you would have to be deep in a daydream.

Or, simply key the address into your GPS: 130 North Pearl Street, Canandaigua, NY.

Woodlawn is a vast, hilly, and as the name suggests, wooded expanse. The roads curl and twists, apparently just for the pleasure of it, and it is easy to get lost. Fortunately, you do not need to go far to find Kirkham’s grave, but without some guiding information, you would never find it, since only his initials, SDK, are engraved on a footstone. If you need help, you will find the cemetery managers to be very helpful. Their office is in the small, well-kept house just inside the gate to your right.

Inside the gate, keep right at the fork that will come up almost immediately, and stop at the first section on the left where you will see a spire for Winslow. In the next family plot is a Celtic-cross-style monument for George Norton Williams (1937-1907) and his wife Abigail Stanley Clark (1843-1902), Kirkham’s wife’s family. In the foreground is a series of small, uniform footstones. Kirkham’s stone is at the extreme left.

Mary Clark Williams’s Kirkham’s grandfather, Gov. Myron H. Clark, is also buried in Woodlawn.

Sources:

Information online for Kirkham is scant, but my sources include Film: Life Lessons: How to De Hypnotize Yourself | The Philosophy of Self Help by Stanton Davis Kirkham https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=THLYRVof5rA; “ Stanton Davis Kirkham.” N.a. Revolvy. http://www.revolvy.com/topic/Stanton Davis Kirkham. N.d. “Genealogy Trail. New York State Data: Governors and Lieutenant Governors of New York, 1777 to present. http://www.genealogytrails.com/ny/nygovernors.html. All the above from Web. Review of Mexican Trails, by R.E.D., in Bulletin of the National Geographic Society, Vol. 41, No. 12 (1909), pp. 769-770. Web. (Accessed 6/27/18)

Some of the information on Philip Spencer and the U.S.S. Somers is from: Thomas White, “Cases of Mutiny at Sea,” from Southern Literary Messenger, Richmond VA , 1843 Web. “Herman Melville’s Billy Budd”: Bibliography. xroads.virginia.edu/ ~HYPER/bb/bb_ resources.html. nd. An interactive site for readers of Melville’s text. Web.

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John Chapin Mosher (1892-1942) At Twilight

Born in 1892 in Ogdensburg, New York, that distant town up on the St. Lawrence River, John Chapin Mosher was on the staff of The New Yorker, joining in 1926 after serving in the medical corps in World War I in a shell-shock ward, teaching English at Northwestern University, and working as a freelance writer. Noted for his articles on writers such as Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was also the New Yorker’s regular film critic and the first reader of unsolicited manuscripts, known for his enthusiasm for writing rejections. Well, someone has to do it.

About Fitzgerald, he wrote: “Scott feels that he is getting on in years, that he is no longer young. It weighs upon him, troubles him. He is almost thirty. Seldom has he allowed a person of such advanced age to enter his books.” Unsurprisingly this earned Fitzgerald’s undying enmity.

Two of his plays, Sauce for the Emperor and Bored, were staged by the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village, significant even if his plays are not well remembered for the company kept with such other bright lights in that collective as Eugene O’Neill, Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Wallace Stevens.

He was a summer resident of Cherry Grove on Fire Island, where he was an early property owner for an emerging gay community there. He wrote stories for The New Yorker about life on the island, collected in 1940 in a volume Celibate at Twilight and Other Stories, many of which focus on a very fastidious, middle-aged bachelor named Mr. Opal. It is not easy to lay hands on this book, as it is decades out of print, but the stories are gems.

celibate at twilight

He died of heart failure, September 3, 1942. His funeral service was held the following Saturday, September 5, in Memorial Chapel, Canandaigua, in the town where his maternal grandparents lived. And he is buried there in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Chapin family plot, but far from Fire Island. He was 50, although his obituary in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle listed his age as 49.

His sudden death shocked his many literary friends. Screenwriter Charles Brackett wrote in his diary on Sept. 3, that he had received an urgent telegram from the editor of The New Yorker: “‘JOHN MOSHER DIED UNEXPECTEDLY THIS MORNING. HAROLD ROSS.’ Despite the profound inner conviction I have had ever since the first news of his heart trouble, it was a crushing blow. I’m afraid I bawled in the office, and as I drove home for luncheon cried all the way down Melrose and Wilshire. For myself again, because I’d begun to miss the wittiest, wisest friend I’ve ever had or will have.”

Finding the Grave

John Chapin Mosher is in the far end of Section 5. Starting at the cemetery gate, take the left road at the fork, and cross Sucker Brook. You will pass the Woodlawn Chapel on the right, where Mosher’s funeral services were held. Now Section 5 is on the right, but it is a very long one.

Turn right at the next intersection. You will pass a work shed on the right. Continue on the same path through the next intersection. The section to your right is still 5. Now make the next right turn. You will see a tall spire on the corner for McKechnie., and an ancient oak tree. When you turn the corner you will see a large mossy boulder on the right. The Chapin family plot, which includes several Moshers, is to the right of the boulder. John Chapin Mosher has a small stone adjacent to his grandparents, John Bassett Chapin, M.D., and Harriett Preston Chapin. Dr. Chapin was on the medical staff of the Brighton Hall Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases in Canandaigua, now closed.

Sources: Kennedy, Jeff. “’Bored’, by John Chapin Mosher.” Provincetown Playhouse. Web. 2007. (accessed 6/27/18); John Chapin Mosher, “That Sad Young Man,” The New Yorker, 1926. Web. (Accessed 7/18/18); Melissa Homestead, Every Week Essays, n.d., University of Wisconsin Libraries. Web. (Accessed 7/18/18); “John Chapin Mosher,” Revolvy. N.d. Web. www.revolvy.com. (Accessed 7/18/18); “Services Set For Writer, 49,” Democrat & Chronicle, Rochester, NY 9/5/42, Web, (Accessed 7/18/18); Thomas Vinciguerra, Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of the New Yorker, New York: W. W. Norton, 2015, Print; the Canandaigua Historical Society; Jim Moore, editor, “It’s the Pictures That Got Small”: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden Age, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Saratoga Springs: Mansfield Tracy Walworth

By Steven Huff

I love to find any excuse to travel to Saratoga Springs. Great restaurants and bars and a good used book store or two. The historic Revolutionary War battle ground sites where the American rebel forces defeated General John Burgoyne in 1777. Caffe Lena on Phila Street, is the oldest continuously operating folk music spot in the US., where Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Utah Phillips, and dozens of other folkies played in the early days of their careers. It is hallowed ground. Saratoga is also home to Yaddo, the most famous artists and writers retreat in the country. Of course, most people come for the horse races and the resorts, and the spas. Something has to pay the bills.

And once it was home to a notorious novelist.

mansfield t Walworth

Mansfield Tracy Walworth (1830-1873): Mad Leads to Madness

He was not the sort of fellow you would invite to a soiree. Writers can often be complicated people, but Mansfield Tracy Walworth was beyond the pale even in literary circles. The son of New York State Chancellor Reuben Hyde Walworth, he was born into privilege in Saratoga Springs where the Walworths occupied a position of local royalty. An old family with a lot of money. And a dark side that carried Mansfield to his early death.

What was a state chancellor, you might ask? The job was a carryover from British rule when colonies had a court of chancery like they have in Mama England. Until the post was eliminated in 1846, Chancellor Walworth held great power as head of the state judiciary, and acted as a kind of judge at large. He traveled the state judging cases from small claims to capital crimes, and in 1825 he left three murdering brothers dangling from ropes in Niagara Square in Buffalo. He sent a young New York City woman to the gallows for the murder of her infant child, although there remained strong evidence that her lover was the guilty party. But the chancellor also sat on the Court for the Trial of Impeachments and Correction of Errors, which could act as a court of appeals, so it was tough to challenge his decisions. Like many prominent people of his time, he was a member of the Temperance Societies, as well as The Great Bible Tract.

But his own family was heading for sensational trouble, although the good chancellor, who died in 1867, was gone before the worst of it hit the paddle wheel.

His son Mansfield was a bright fellow who graduated from Union College in 1849 and became a lawyer, and then a writer of sensationalist novels, low-brow stuff that would have disappeared long ago if they had not written by such a notorious character. But in fact, Warwick, or the Lost Nationalities of America; Hotspur, a Tale of the Old Dutch Manor; and Lulu: A Tale of the National Hotel Poisoning, among others, are still available on line in both print and e-book format. The last was a fictionalization of a mysterious miasma which in January 1857 struck some four hundred guests of the National Hotel in Washington, DC, resulting in more than thirty deaths, including several congressmen and the nephew of the new president-elect James Buchanan, who also was taken ill. Arsenic was suspected as well as water-born bacteria, but the offending bug was never identified. The New York Times commented that his novels were “intended for and only bought by the numerous class of persons who admire glittering and gaudy descriptions and sentimental storytelling.”

Like his father, he was also a Confederate sympathizer, and during the Civil War he was caught in Washington in the company of a woman who was a suspected spy for the south. But wealth and privilege saved him from prison, and possibly even the gallows. He was released into the company of his father and ordered not to leave the house in Saratoga for the remainder of the war. Or else.

But allow me to back up a few years. In 1852, Mansfield married Ellen Hardin Walworth, the daughter of the chancellor’s second wife–in other words, he married his step-sister. That is actually legal everywhere in the US except Virginia. To everyone’s dismay, he turned out to be an abusive husband, both physically and verbally. After having five children, three daughters and two sons, and after several attempts at reconciliation, the couple divorced.

200px-Mrs._Ellen_Hardin_Walworth

Mansfield moved to a boarding house in Manhattan, cut off from his family and his considerable inheritance. From there he wrote letters back to Ellen, threatening to beat and even kill her and the rest of his family. These were not mere angry letters, nor even the foments of an unrepentant brute; they were vile rants of a mentally ill and obviously dangerous man.

Eventually their nineteen-year-old son Frank, who suffered from epilepsy and was very close to his mother, began intercepting the letters and keeping them from her. He decided to take matters into his own hands, and on the morning of June 2, 1873, he boarded a train in Saratoga bound for Manhattan, and he left word at the boarding house for his father, asking him to come to his hotel room in the Sturtevant House.

The following morning, June 3, Mansfield knocked on his son’s door. What exactly was said between them no one knows, but Frank fired four shots into his father with his Colt revolver, and then promptly turned himself in to the police at the precinct station on Thirtieth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenue. He walked calmly to the desk and said to the officer in command, “My name is Frank H. Walworth; I have just shot and killed my father, Mansfield T. Walworth in the Sturtevant House, and here is my pistol,” according to the The New York Times which called it “a case of unusual repulsiveness.”

Frank was remanded to the Tombs awaiting trial. And at the age of twenty, he received a life sentence for second degree murder. But this is where the story takes another extraordinary turn.

His mother, Ellen, was determined to win a pardon for her son on grounds of insanity. She decided, therefore, to study law, and graduated from New York University to practice in New York and Washington, DC. It paid off. Frank was pardoned in 1877 by Governor Lucius Robinson, bolstered by the opinion of doctors that he was indeed insane and that extended time in prison would lead to complete mental dissolution. He was freed, but his life was short: he died in 1886 from a lung disease contracted while in prison.

Yet, for all that, the murder of her husband liberated Ellen. She lived a long life as a lawyer and public servant, she wrote numerous articles on science and historic preservation, became an authority on the Saratoga battlefields, raised funds for the restoration of George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon, and was one of the four principal founders of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).

Finding the Grave of Mansfield Tracy Walworth

You can’t, not really. Several members of his family are buried in Greenridge Cemetery in Saratoga, and in fact he is too. But according to cemetery staff, they are not entirely sure where. They know he is buried in the Old Section A, near his older brother Clarence, who was a priest. But there is either no marker remaining, or the grave is marked by one of a couple stones nearby that are now illegible. Apparently, no one felt inspired to tend it. And he was such a nice guy!

But Ellen’s grave is worth a visit. From South Broadway (Route 9), just a little south of the business district, turn east on Lincoln Avenue, and then very shortly turn right on Greenridge Place, a short cul de sac. At the very end of the street you will see the portals of Greenridge Cemetery. Greenridge is part New Section, and Part Old, which can be confusing, but these directions will get you to the spot.

Once through the portals, turn left onto an unpaved path and stay on it as it takes a sharp turn to the left along the perimeter fence. Make a right turn passing behind the Civil War Memorial. Old Section B will be straight ahead. Stay on the path and stop next to the sign for Old Section A. A few strides away, and to your left, is the modest spire for Ellen Hardin Walworth. From the sign, follow the lane back directly to the area near the fence. There you will see Fr. Clarence’s crypt, and the area of grass under which lies the infamous Mansfield.

Sources

“A Terrible Parricide. Mansfield Tracy Walworth Killed by His Own Son—Surrender of the Murderer.” New York Times, June 4, 1873, p.8, web, accessed 12/8.18).; “The Four Founders,” DAR Daughters of the American Revolution, web, (accessed 12/8/18); “F. H. Walworth Pardoned. Governor Robinson Orders His Release,” New York Times, Aug. 2, 1877, web, (accessed 12/8/18); “The Walworth Patricide,” Murder by Gaslight, web, May 25, 2013 (accessed 12/8/18);