“You Know Not How Much I Think Of You”

Detail of a letter written by Betsey Webster Manley DeWolf (1798-1879) in July, 1822. Author’s collection.

Two hundred years ago, probably no more than a mile from where I now sit, a young woman living in a log cabin penned a letter to family and friends in Massachusetts, to reassure them she was alive and well. In a strange way, this post serves a similar function. I have somehow managed to produce only one addition to this blog since the pandemic began nearly two years ago. But I recently acquired the extraordinary, double-sided note Betsey Manley wrote that day in July, 1822 and it was too wonderful not to share.

It has been so long since I wrote something like this that I had to go back and remind myself of all the things I knew and forgot about Betsey Manley. She was born in Otis, Massachusetts in the early summer of 1798, a deacon’s daughter. Regular readers of the blog may remember that most of the earliest settlers of Wellington came from the Berkshire region of Massachusetts. In 1816, Betsey married Josiah Manley, who went by his middle name, Butler. After five years of marriage and with three small boys in tow, they set out by oxen-team to settle in what is now northeast Ohio. They spent three years doing the back-breaking labor of clearing a “heavy timbered farm,” until disaster struck.

According to Betsey’s lengthy obituary in the Wellington Enterprise, “Sickness with its blighting hand, spread a veil of sadness over this once happy household. Mr. and Mrs. Manley were both stricken down. Dr. Johns was their attending physician. Mr. Manley died August 21st, 1823, at the early age of 32 years, his being the first death that occurred among the settlers in Wellington. At the time of his death, Mrs. Manley was so ill the fact of her husbands [sic] death was kept from her for a week” (5-15-1879, pg. 3). Josiah Manley’s headstone, and a biographical sketch later published about their son, Frederick, both indicate this first death took place in 1824.

Josiah Butler Manley’s 1824 headstone in the Pioneer Cemetery, supposedly Wellington’s first death. Manley is also listed on his wife’s later headstone in Greenwood Cemetery. Photo by author.

But all of that was yet to come when Betsey took up her pen on a July day in 1822. I have transcribed both densely-written pages, including notes in the margins, adding a few bracketed punctuation marks where I felt the text was otherwise confusing. It reads as follows:

                                                                        Wellington July ^th 22 1822

Dear Friends Although separated from you the distance of several hundred miles my mind often takes wing and in imagination I view you enjoying all the necessary blessings of this life at your pleasant dwellings but cannot realize that I am never more to enjoy your agreeable company[.] I think much more about going dear friends since I have lived here in the wilderness than ever before in my life. I will proceed to give you a short account of our circumstances here in the woods[.] We have a good log house much more comfortable than I expected a house of the kind could be made[.] had one hundred weight of shugar [sic] and two pails full of Molasses the first of April[.] Milked a cow through the winter have three cows this summer[.] have wheat flour in our Chamber to supply our family till late in the fall as good as I ever saw[.] have had seven hundred [pounds?] of good Pork & a plenty of Lard. A plenty of wild fruit Abounds in the woods[.] in short we have lived far more comfortable than I expected when I left Otis. I was pleased with the Idea of moving here & do not lament the pains we have taken to get here[.] We have a very good society Meetings regularly Attended every Sabbath[,] every other week within a quarter of a mile of us. We seldom have preaching but are hoping for better days have as flattering prospects as could be expected in [scratch out] so new a settlement[.] there has never been but a little sickness in the town before the present year some instances have occurred by reason of wounds[.] Capt Joseph [illeg] has had a leg taken off was brought very low [illeg] hours to human appearance beyond all hopes of recovery[.] he is now so far recovered as to begin to walk with Crutches. I take much satisfaction visiting with our Otis Neighbors do not feel myself among strangers but living with those with whom I have ever been intimately acquainted. Our Nearest Neighbor was formerly from Lee Mass. they are people of considerable property live in good style & as good kind obliging neighbors as I ever saw without exception a great blessing indeed[.]

[Upside down on upper right header margin] Please to send this letter to Bolton when an opportunity presents.

[Along left margin] Excuse my writing Oliver assists by holding my pen

Butler is making calculation for rolling up a Log barn this week his wheat is harvested & stands in stacks in the field[.] he has corn much taller now than any I ever saw in Mass. have had a good supply of green sauce since the fourth July have a very good Garden[.] have had twelve pounds flax this spring to make into Cloth A Crop of flax in the field but some injured by the worms and drouth [sic][.] Wool will be an article which we shall much need before we shall be able to keep sheep on account of the wolves which are very plenty[.] Butler has much the same health that he has enjoyed for some years past[,] not as good as I could wish to begin a new heavy timbered farm with but should his limbs or health be taken as in the Case of Capt. R. our flattering prospects would cease to shine our little property would not defray the expenses of such an instance but a few weeks [scratch out/blot] 150 dollars in one week to his physicians. Russel [Webster, Betsey’s brother] has not as good health as he had last summer but keeps to work calculates to go to making potash this fall his respects to you all & calculates to visit you a year from this time[.] I have enjoyed remarkable good health the most of the time since I have been in this wilderness[.] have staid [sic] a good many nights with my little Children (Butler & R[ussel] gone from home) not alarmed by being awoke with the howling wolves[.] My work is much harder than ever before have Considerable company & a large family[.] We board a little Girl to go to school with Frederick & Henry one mile & a quarter through the woods[.] they are as healthy as I ever saw Children little Oliver has lately had a very severe sore mouth the worst that I ever saw he is getting well fast. Uncle Jeremiah I should be very much pleased to see you with your family here should you think of moving into the woods[.] the Land which Uncle Elder & Cousin William own is good & very profitable you could [illeg] with them if you should think it best[.] I think of a great many things that I should be glad to write but have not time[.] I write to you all as one accept my best wishes for your prosperity [illeg] my sincerest thanks for numberless favors do not fail of writing to me you know not how much I think of you & My Dear Parents Brothers Sisters &c. When at Cazenovia [New York] last fall Uncle made me a present of one dollar[,] Aunt a flannel sheet[.] O that I could be sent thankful to my Earthly friends for blessings & to my God who grants them he moves hearts

Betsey Manley

[Along left margin] Butlers best Love to you all[.] I enjoy myself as well as ever I did in my life but no substantial happiness

A fabric sample identified as “spun and woven by Betsey Manly in 1822. Flax grown by her husband, Butler Manly, one of the first settlers of Wellington.” Read more about this object. Author’s collection.

There is so much to unpick in this fantastically evocative and maddeningly contradictory letter. Betsey feels nothing by half-measures. Her neighbors are as “obliging…as I ever saw”; her children “as healthy as I ever saw,” but also one is suffering from “a very severe sore mouth the worst that I ever saw.” Perhaps most intriguingly, she feels strongly enough to end the letter with a note in the margin that claims she is both enjoying herself “as well as ever I did in my life” but then adds the disclaimer “but no substantial happiness.” She takes great care to reassure her loved ones that her family is comfortably settled and well provided for, but doesn’t shy away from mentioning–more than once–the wolves that sometimes wake her in the night with their howling.

There are few mentions of other people in the settlement, all frustratingly vague. Betsey tells her readers she is boarding a girl who attends the nearby school with her oldest boys, Frederick and Henry, but we learn neither the girl’s given name nor with which family she emigrated. We hear that a Captain Joseph has had a leg amputated due to unspecified injury. That name does not appear in either the 1820 or 1830 census records for Wellington.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Betsey describes her nearest neighbors as people “of considerable property” from Lee, Massachusetts. She spends three lines praising them without once noting their family name. Her 1879 obituary indicates that when the Manleys first arrived in the settlement, they “shared the hospitalities of Mr. and Mrs. Bradley, whilest their new cabin was being finished.” I have written at some length about the Howk family of Lee–of which Fiche Howk Bradley was a daughter–and the possible financial decline that led to their emigration west. If they were the near neighbors Betsey so admired, that likely puts the Manley homestead somewhere in the northwestern quadrant of the town. Fiche and Josiah Bradley most likely lived along what is today Route 18W, on a bluff near the modern intersection with Pitts Road.

As I sit here this cold January day, typing on a laptop while exchanging texts via smartphone with my own sister back home in Massachusetts, Betsey’s 1822 wilderness existence seems very far away. Then again, my son is underfoot, home from school due to the severe cold and I find my eyes returning again and again to my favorite line of the letter, a small addendum in the margin that references Betsey’s infant son. “Excuse my writing Oliver assists by holding my pen.” Perhaps some human experiences–love, loneliness, the joys and frustrations of parenthood–transcend the centuries.

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Remembering 1858: The Wellington Indicted

This is the second in a series of posts that will feature the label text from a small exhibit currently on display in Wellington’s downtown, commemorating the capture and rescue of John Price on September 13, 1858. A photo of the display can be seen here.

Eli Boies
Eli Boies was born in Massachusetts in 1800, making him fifty-eight years old at the time of the Rescue. He emigrated to Ohio in 1842 and practiced medicine with Dr. Daniel Johns, the man credited with bringing the railroad to Wellington in 1850. Boies was also the proprietor of the short-lived Wellington Journal (1852) with his friend, merchant John Reed. Both men were dedicated members of the abolitionist Free Congregational Church.

Boies is mentioned in one only instance in the transcripts of the Rescue trials. Justice of the Peace William Howk testified that he “heard Doctor Boies advising [the crowd outside the hotel] to quiet.” Boies was one of four Wellington men who served time in the county jail, twenty-one days in total. He was released on $500 bail. His wife, Lydia, later wrote a letter about her life in Wellington, in which she noted, “[T]he Fugitive Slave Law was enacted, which awakened great indignation, and also sympathy for the fleeing slave, who found no rest or safty until safe in Canada, though destitute of every thing…”

Eli Boies served in multiple public offices, including being appointed village supervisor while he was completing his jail term. He died in 1863 and is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery. He is the only Wellington rescuer for whom a studio portrait is known to survive, and also appears in the famous 1859 jail yard portrait.

Robert L. Cummings
Little is known about Robert Cummings. He is mentioned in only one instance in the transcripts of the Rescue trials. James Bonney, an employee of Wadsworth’s hotel, testified that around 4PM, he was approached “in the hall up the first flight of stairs” by school teacher Charles Langston and “Cummins,” who offered him $5 to get the key to the locked front door of the hall. Bonney refused.

Cummings is notable mainly for his absences. He was the only Wellington rescuer not to enter a plea at the December 1858 arraignment hearings; he did not appear for the first time in the Cleveland courtroom until the following spring. He was also the only indicted man from Wellington/Pittsfield who did not attend the so-called “Felon’s Feast” in Oberlin, in January 1859. Cummings was one of four Wellington men who pleaded nolo contendere (no contest) on May 6, 1859. He was ordered to pay $20 plus court costs, and serve one day in jail. He spent the night in a Cleveland hotel.

Matthew DeWolf
Matthew DeWolf was born in Massachusetts in 1792. He and his family emigrated to Ohio in 1827. (DeWolf’s sister, Pamelia, was married to Abner Loveland, making the two rescuers brothers-in-law.) While his first occupation in Wellington was as a school teacher, DeWolf soon opened a temperance tavern at the center of the village, which also served as its first Congregational Church. An 1834 psalter with his inscription still survives.

On the day of John Price’s abduction, Matthew DeWolf was assisting with battling a large fire in Wellington. Abner Loveland and Loring Wadsworth were standing with him in the town square as events came to a head at Wadsworth’s hotel. The three men urged Constable Barnabas Meacham to enter the building and serve a warrant for kidnapping on the slave catchers holding Price. Meacham was concerned about his financial liability under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act; if he helped John Price to escape in what was later found to be an unlawful arrest, Meacham could be subject to severe financial penalties and even jail time. Matthew DeWolf’s only recorded action that afternoon was to help circulate an indemnity bond—essentially asking people in the crowd to make pledges against any financial loss Meacham might suffer—but few people were willing to sign.

DeWolf, Loveland and Loring Wadsworth pled nolo contendere (no contest) to the charges against them. All were fined $20 plus court costs and sentenced to one day in jail. The Cleveland Leader published a passionate condemnation of their convictions and noted, “No fugitive from slavery ever went unfed from their hospitable homes,” suggesting the involvement of all three men with the Underground Railroad. Matthew DeWolf died in 1865 and is buried in Pioneer Cemetery.

Matthew Gillett
“Father” Gillett, the most venerated of the Wellington indicted, was born in Connecticut in 1785, making him seventy-two years old at the time of the Rescue. Gillett was a farmer with more than sixty acres producing crops and supporting cattle and sheep herds. His role on the day of John Price’s abduction was relatively minor. Like all of the oldest Wellington rescuers, he never entered Wadsworth’s hotel on September 13^th. Instead, he approached keeper Oliver Wadsworth and encouraged him to allow other people to enter the building, to verify whether John Price was being held legally. When Wadsworth objected that a large group of people would likely damage his facilities, Gillett suggested a smaller delegation and the keeper eventually agreed.

What Gillett became justly famous for was his fortitude. Sent to the country jail with twenty other rescuers on April 15^th, Gillett of all the Wellington men refused to cut a deal with prosecutors to secure his own release. He remained in custody for nearly a month, so long that federal authorities became concerned for his health. It was not until officials threatened to turn him out in the street, and explicitly told him that their focus was on making an example of the men from Oberlin, that Gillett agreed to return home. He left jail on May 13^th and was driven to Wellington in a carriage by a federal marshal.

Gillett seems to have become a beloved figure in Oberlin. He led an Oberlin group that marched in a May 24^th Cleveland rally, holding an American flag inscribed “1776.” He also attended a celebration held in Oberlin for the final rescuers released from jail in July, and he was one of the evening’s featured speakers. He was quoted as saying, in part, “Never made a speech in my life; don’t know how to make a speech, and I ain’t going to make a speech; but I’ll just say that every thing under the heavens that I was taken down to jail for was just for being ketched down at Wellington; and that aint all. I havn’t confessed it all yet. I am ashamed that I didn’t do more than just be ketched down there; and if there is ever another such a time I am going to have more to be accused of, and if other folks are cowards, I’ll rescue the fugitive myself. I used to think Oberlin was a pretty bad kind of a place, but I’ve changed my mind about it now.” Matthew Gillett died in 1863 and is interred in Greenwood Cemetery. He is also immortalized in the famous 1859 jail yard portrait.

Lewis Hunt Hines
Lewis Hines was born in Ohio around 1831, making him twenty-seven years old at the time of the Rescue. A farmer by profession, he married Harriet Elizabeth Wells of Wellington in 1853. The couple had at least three children over the course of their marriage, the eldest of which, Hiram, was just six months old when John Price was captured. Lewis Hines later served as a private in the 23^rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Company C, during the Civil War.

There is a single oblique reference to his possible presence in Wellington in the Rescue testimony. Witness Jacob Wheeler, postmaster of Rochester, testified that he saw a group of men, including one otherwise unnamed “Hines,” enter the attic room where John Price was being held. Lewis Hines appeared in Cleveland for his preliminary arraignment in December 1857, but did not return to face judgement the following spring. He died in 1904 and is buried in Saranac, Michigan.

Abner Loveland
Abner Loveland was born in Massachusetts in 1796, making him sixty-one years old at the time of the Rescue. He had emigrated to Ohio in 1819, but did not settle permanently in Wellington until 1855. He was a farmer, and brother-in-law to fellow rescuer Mathew DeWolf. On September 13^th, Loveland was standing in the center of town with DeWolf and Loring Wadsworth. All three men had been assisting with the fire that raged on South Main Street that morning. Loveland’s only recorded action in connection with day’s other events was to urge Constable Meacham to go into Wadsworth’s hotel and serve a warrant on the slave catchers for kidnapping John Price unlawfully.

On May 12, 1859, a plea of nolo contendere (no contest) was entered for all three men. Their attorney made a lengthy statement about their venerable ages and high status in the community, and their absolute commitment to being law abiding citizens. Loveland later wrote a letter to the editor of a Cleveland newspaper in which he disavowed the entire statement: “I did not intend to authorize my counsel yesterday to give my views on government, to the Court; and disclaim holding to many of the doctrines expressed by him…I am not guilty of violating any law.” Nevertheless, Loveland was sentenced to pay a $20 fine plus court costs, and to serve one day in jail.

Abner Loveland died in 1879. He is buried in Wellington’s Greenwood Cemetery. In 1895, a family genealogy was published which read in part, “He was a firm friend of the bondsman…His house was a well known station on the underground railroad. All trains passing that way stopped there, and the passengers received the needed rest and refreshment and assistance to proceed towards freedom.”

John Mandeville
John Mandeville was a fifty-one-year-old brickmaker in 1858. He was born in New York and in 1843 married Hester Northrup, eventually fathering seven children. The History of Lorain County, Ohio (1879) named him as one of two men who went up a ladder to retrieve John Price from Wadsworth’s hotel, but this claim is not supported by hundreds of pages of testimony offered at the Rescue trials.

In fact, John Mandeville was standing in the crowd outside the hotel, when he was asked by Constable Barnabas Meacham to accompany him up to the garret where Price was imprisoned. William Sciples and Walter Soules were also asked to join the group. Mandeville was “in liquor,” and author Nat Brandt identified him as the man described in testimony as “purty reckless,” taunting the crowds outside by shouting through the garret window. When he pled nolo contendere (no contest) on May 6, 1859, his intoxication was possibly the reason Mandeville reiterated to the court that he was “not guilty in manner and form as he is charged.” He was ordered to pay $20 plus court costs and serve one day in jail. He passed the night in a Cleveland hotel.

John Mandeville moved his family to Penfield after the trials, before permanently settling in Camden Township in 1878. He died in 1900, at ninety-two years old, and is interred in the Camden Cemetery, Kipton.

Henry D. Niles
Henry Niles was thirty-one years old at the time of John Price’s abduction. A lawyer by profession, Niles had five children by his first wife, Lucena Barker, who died shortly after the conclusion of the Rescue trials. He married second wife Elizabeth Phelps in 1862. The couple added two more children to their family. Elizabeth would go on to survive Henry, when he passed away in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1895.

Niles was born in Wellington and was a resident of the village at the time of the 1860 census. His role in the events of September 13^th, 1858 go completely unrecorded in the trial transcripts. He is only mentioned in connection with his own court proceedings. Niles, Robert Cummings, John Mandeville, and Daniel Williams all pled nolo contendere (no contest) on May 6, 1859. They were ordered to pay a $20 fine plus court costs and serve one day in prison. They each spent the night in a Cleveland hotel.

At his death in 1895, the Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette published a lengthy obituary in which Niles’s connections to Wellington were detailed. The piece mentioned Niles’s distinguished military service in the Civil War (“Elder Niles was familiarly known in Ohio as Colonel Niles.”), his ordination to the clergy in 1874, and his memberships in the Odd Fellow Society, the G.A.R., and the Freemasons. No mention was made of his involvement in the famous events of 1858. 

William Sciples
Of all the men indicted in connection with the Rescue, perhaps the most enigmatic is William Sciples. Born in New York, he was living in Summit County, Ohio when he married Canadian émigré Laura Ann Elliot in 1843. The couple do not appear to have had any children. Legal documents and census records suggest a fifteen- to twenty-year age difference. They were living and farming in Penfield in the early 1850s.

Sciples was one of three men pulled from the crowd by Constable Barnabas Meacham to accompany him into the hotel on September 13^th, 1858. He spent much of the afternoon running errands on behalf of the slave catchers, and later guarding areas of the hotel against the crowd, at the request of keeper Oliver Wadsworth. At trial, Sciples turned state’s evidence and testified against mixed-race school teacher Charles Langston. Constable Meacham, Justice of the Peace Isaac Bennett, and fellow rescuers Matthew Gillett and Loring Wadsworth each took the stand to testify that they had known Sciples for seven to ten years, and that it was “generally believed he is not a man of truth.” After the proceedings, Sciples seems to have been released without bail, presumably in exchange for his damaging testimony. Langston was convicted.

By the time the 1860 federal census was compiled—just one year after the trial—William and Laura Sciples had relocated to Torrey, New York where he was employed as an innkeeper. Perhaps they wished to allow any public controversy surrounding his role in the Rescue to die down. By 1870, the couple returned to farming in Wellington. A decade later they were living in retirement on Mill Street. Laura Sciples is interred in Greenwood Cemetery in an unmarked grave, her husband presumably at her side.

Walter Soules
Walter Soules’s indictment is also somewhat puzzling. Born in Massachusetts around 1827, Soules was a young farmer with a wife, Phoebe Eliza Stanard, in 1858. The couple had seven children over the course of their marriage. Soules fought for the Union during the Civil War and was later a member of the GAR. The family lived in Wellington for at least a decade, then moved to Lagrange and finally settled in Kansas, where Phoebe died in 1885.

Like Sciples, Soules was asked to leave the crowd and accompany Constable Barnabas Meacham into Wadsworth’s hotel on September 13^th. When the slave catchers presented Meacham with legal documentation to support their imprisonment of John Price, Soules left the hotel. He never appeared again in court after the initial arraignment proceedings in December 1857. Walter Soules died in 1903 and is buried in Colony, Kansas.

Loring Wadsworth
Loring Wadsworth was born in Massachusetts in 1800, making him fifty-eight years old at the time of John Price’s abduction. Wadsworth had emigrated to Ohio at aged twenty-one, walking the entire distance. He and wife Statira Kingsbury built a Greek Revival house that still stands at 222 South Main Street today. A farmer by trade, Wadsworth and his family had hundreds of acres under cultivation south of the village.

On the day of the Rescue, Wadsworth was standing in the village square with brothers-in-law Matthew DeWolf and Abner Loveland, surveying fire damage and clean up. He does not seem to have played any major part in the day’s other events, beyond urging Constable Meacham to enter the hotel—owned and operated by his cousin, Oliver—and serve a warrant on the slave catchers for unlawful kidnapping. After his arraignment, however, Wadsworth found a larger role to fill. He and Matthew DeWolf were named as Wellington representatives to a self-appointed committee for the thirty-seven rescuers, to coordinate their legal and public relations strategies. Wadsworth then found himself in jail for twenty-one days, and was only released on $500 bail. He later pled nolo contendere (no contest) to the charges against him, and was fined an additional $20 plus court costs, and sentenced to an additional night of confinement.

Wadsworth held a number of political offices. He was elected mayor of Wellington on April 4^th, 1859, just days before he began his jail term. He was also a township trustee and village supervisor, often serving alongside other rescuers including Eli Boies, DeWolf, and Loveland. Loring Wadsworth died in 1862. Neither his multiple obituaries in the Lorain County News nor his later mention in Commemorative Biographical Record of the Counties of Huron and Lorain, Ohio (1894) note his participation in the events of 1858. He is preserved for posterity, however, in the famous 1859 jail yard photograph.

Daniel Williams
Daniel Williams was born in Vermont in 1815. After emigrating to Ohio at age fourteen, he eventually became a farmer with substantial land holdings in Pittsfield. The house he erected on Webster Road is still standing today. Later in life, the family relocated to a home on Courtland Avenue, where Daniel died in 1889.

Williams was one of four Wellington men who served time in the county jail, some twenty-one days total; as a consequence, he appears in the famous 1859 jail yard photograph. He was later released on $500 bail. But his actions on the day of the Rescue go unrecorded in hundreds of pages of trial transcripts. He later pled nolo contendere (no contest) to the charges against him, and was ordered to pay a $20 fine plus court costs and spend one additional day in jail. He passed the night in a Cleveland hotel.

When he died, Williams’s obituary in the Wellington Enterprise read in part, “He was public-spirited and encouraged all measures that promised good to the community. He was a man of strong convictions; a Republican, an abolitionist…always advocating principles which have forced their way through great opposition. He was conscientious. A frequent expression with him was, ‘My conscience wouldn’t let me do that.’” Williams is buried beneath an impressive granite obelisk in Greenwood Cemetery.

Bicentennial Lecture

If you would like to watch the presentation I made on January 9, 2018 to kick off Wellington’s Bicentennial Lecture Series, please click here.

Program Announcement IV

The Patricia Lindley Center for the Performing Arts, Wellington, Ohio.

Into the Wilderness: A Massachusetts Household Emigrates to Ohio
Inaugural Lecture of the 2018 Wellington Bicentennial Series
Patricia Lindley Center for the Performing Arts
January 9, 2018 | Doors open at 6PM; lecture begins at 7PM

In 1818, a Dutch farming family from the Berkshire region of Massachusetts left behind all they knew and traveled west on foot to begin a new life in the Ohio country. Many of us have heard stories of the founding of Wellington, but what you may not know is that one member of that settler household was a woman of color, a freed slave who had formerly belonged to the family she now accompanied “into the wilderness.”

This talk is free and open to the public. If you would like to indicate your interest in attending, you can do so on the Wellington Bicentennial Facebook page. And please take a look at the other monthly lectures and presentations scheduled for the remainder of the year!

A Journey to Lee

The Lee Congregational United Church of Christ, Lee, Massachusetts. Built in 1857. Photo by author.

For the past several years, as I made the journey home to Massachusetts from Ohio, I drove right by the town of Lee. Regular readers of the blog well know that many of Wellington’s earliest settlers came from Lee and surrounding communities in the Berkshires. I have long wanted to stop and take a closer look, and this year I was finally able to plan a visit.

I did a bit of preliminary research to try and identify eighteenth-century landmarks in the area. I was interested to see any buildings or structures that might have existed when the Howk family–1818 immigrants to Wellington–lived in Lee. There are not many left. The church at the center of the town was erected in 1857, though there is a marker on the adjacent green indicating where an earlier meeting house was built in 1780.

Marker indicating site of 1780 meeting house, Lee, Massachusetts. Photo by author.

Illustration of Lee’s first church, built in 1780. From “Lee: The Centennial Celebration and Centennial History of the Town of Lee, Mass,” opposite pg. 226.

The church and town green are at the base of Howk’s Hill, and I was able to drive around the golf course that today occupies the 125 acres which once comprised Isaac Howk’s homestead. There is a lovely parsonage on the same road (now West Park Street) that the Howks would have passed on their way to meeting each Sunday. Hyde House was erected in 1792 and is still a private residence today.

Hyde House, Lee, Massachusetts. Built in 1792. Image from Wikipedia Commons.

I then made my way to Fairmount Cemetery. What a strange experience it was, to wander around this Massachusetts resting place and and see so many familiar Wellington names: DeWolf, Foote, Bradley. I had no precise information on whether any stones stood for the people I have researched, but I was extraordinarily lucky. One of the very first markers I saw after parking belonged to Sarah Foote Sherrill (1808-1885).

Headstone of Sarah Foote Sherrill and her husband, Reverend Edwin J. Sherrill. Fairmount Cemetery, Lee, Massachusetts. Photo by author.

As I made my way on foot further back into the cemetery, I passed further back in time. By the time I reached the area farthest from the street and main gate, I was in the eighteenth century. I discovered an older back road, now grassed over, that led to the oldest stones on the grounds. At first, I could not find any stones belonging to members of the Howk family. But I did discover a large marker for an Ingersoll relative of my husband’s. When I brought him back to show him the stone, I found to my astonishment that it was just feet from the final resting places of Isaac Howk and his daughter Catherine.

Headstone of Isaac Howk (1757-1805), Fairmount Cemetery, Lee, Massachusetts. Photo by author.

Catherine, called Caty by the family, died of consumption at age seventeen and is interred next to her father. Her stone is not as legible as Isaac’s. I could not help but imagine the rest of the Howk family taking leave of these stones before departing Lee for the Ohio country, never to return.

Headstone of Catherine Howk (1788-1806), Fairmount Cemetery, Lee, Massachusetts. Photo by author.

It was a too-brief, but nonetheless thrilling, visit. I hope to return again and delve deeper into the historical connections between these two towns.

Disused rear gate that leads to the oldest part of Fairmount Cemetery, Lee, Massachusetts. Photo by author.

A Tale of Three Sarahs

Handwritten letter from Sarah Foote, Wellington, Ohio, to Captain Alvan Foote, Lee, Massachusetts, November 9, 1830 (R) and undated handwritten, bound transcription of that letter by her daughter, Sarah A. Sherrill (L). Private collection. Photo by author.

I was born and spent the first half of my life in Massachusetts. I still travel home a few times each year to visit my family, and every trip takes me along the same route, following the New York Thruway to the Mass Turnpike through the Berkshire Mountains. Since I began writing this blog, every time I make that trip I think about what the journey was like in the early nineteenth century, when so many people left western Massachusetts to start again in Ohio. I recently had the opportunity to look at the most extraordinary collection of objects, which beautifully illuminate the challenges and excitement of cross-country travel in the 1800s. They also happen to shed light on the lives of three women, all called Sarah.

Sarah Foote was born in Lee, Massachusetts in 1808. Three of her brothers–William, Alvan Jr., and Elisha Percival–all emigrated to Wellington (established in 1818) when she was a teenager. In the fall of 1830, Sarah set out on a journey to visit her siblings in their adopted village. She traveled without a chaperone, connecting periodically with groups of strangers for companionship as she moved farther from home. Though she was a twenty-two-year-old unmarried female, her voice in the letter she sent back to Lee describing her experiences is clear, strong, determined and witty.

The letter survives to this day. The stained and slightly tattered paper is closely packed with Sarah’s small but legible hand. A single sheet, measuring 12.5 by 15.75 inches, it was folded in half to form four pages of writing surface. Three of those contain the letter and the fourth was kept mostly blank to serve as the external “envelope” when the correspondence was folded and sealed. Though the wax seal has not survived, the hole in the paper where it was once adhered is still tinged red.

Handwritten letter from Sarah Foote, Wellington, Ohio, 1830. Unfolded view. Every available inch of paper was used, including the far left margin and the center fold; the bottom of the left “page” has an addendum that is inverted to distinguish it from the text above. Private collection. Photo by author.

Sarah’s travelogue begins with her departure from Albany on October 13, 1830. (There is no mention of how she made the trip from Lee to Albany.) She cruised for eight days along the Erie Canal on a boat called the Pilot Line Victory. The letter gives a day-by-day account of each settlement the boat passed–Schenectady, Canajoharie, Utica, and Rochester, to name just a few. I lived for two years in western New York and was delighted to read her description of a place I know well, Lockport. “I wish I could stop to tell you something about 5 double locks where the canal is cut through solid rock 2 miles[,] the greatest curiosity I have seen yet. A little shower and a fine rainbow added to the beauty and sublimity of the scene very much” (mss. pg. 1).

The day after her view of Lockport, October 21st, Sarah’s canal boat arrived in Buffalo. At this point in the voyage west, travelers had the option of either boarding a steamer to traverse Lake Erie, or going overland. Sarah was very much in favor of land transportation, but she had fallen in with a few of the canal boat passengers and they persuaded her to take the steam boat with them. It was a decision she immediately regretted. She purchased a “deck” passage, meaning that she had no cabin of her own. It was cheaper, but also less private and comfortable. “No place to sit down and nothing to do but stand there amongst the poor creatures [Swiss immigrants also taking the steam boat] and watch my trunk” (mss. pg. 2). Sarah became violently seasick and the boiler on the ship malfunctioned, causing some small injuries. The fall weather created stormy conditions on the lake; water was washing over the decks and Sarah was soon soaked, as well as sick. She eventually decided to pay nearly as much as her original ticket to upgrade to a cabin passage. “I pitched in at the cabin door[,] fell on the floor and there staid [sic] till morning[.] The boat rocked terribly and it seemed as if we should go to the bottom every moment” (mss. pg. 2).

But the nightmare did not end at the destination. When the steam ship arrived at Dunkirk, the crew tried for more than three hours to put in to the harbor, but because of the stormy weather and perhaps the lack of the boiler, they could not do it. Incredibly, they ultimately decided to turn the ship around and return to Buffalo. After two miserable days and a night aboard, Sarah found herself back where she had started. She was adamant that she would not take the water route a second time, even when the captain refused to refund her passage. Undeterred, Sarah simply found a man and sold him her ticket for $2.00, recouping some of her financial loss. She then parted company with her traveling companions–all of whom had decided to take the ship again, as soon as it was repaired–and bought a ticket for a stage coach bound for Erie, Pennsylvania.

“Map Showing Present and Proposed Canal System,” (1903). The modern New York Thruway follows the original Erie Canal route very closely. From the website www.eriecanal.org.

It took nearly a week of riding day and night, as well as waiting in several places for connecting coaches, for Sarah to reach Elyria, Ohio. She waited again nearly five days before she had the opportunity to hitch a ride in “a waggon [sic] drawn by 4 oxen driven by Lyman Howk for W[ellington]” (mss. pg. 3). Twenty-two days after departing Albany, Sarah finally arrived in the village at sunset on November 3, 1830. Three weeks is about half the time the same trip would have taken prior to the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. It is a journey that takes approximately nine hours in a motor vehicle today.

Sarah liked what she saw of Ohio. “I am now pleasantly situated in a good log house at [brother] William’s by a good fire and enjoy myself very well—-feel that I have great cause for gratitude to the Author of all good who has kindly spared my life and preserved me thus far on my long journey—I attended meeting Sunday in the log school house—-Mr Talcott attended but was not able to preach[,] health very poor—They are building a brick school house[,] the upper room for meetings[,] two rooms in the lower part for schools” (mss. pg. 4). The brick building that Foote described was, in fact, Wellington’s first town hall, and her writing is documentary evidence of its previously only conjectured construction date.

The letter she sent home on November 10th was addressed to Captain Alvan Foote, her father, so-called because of his service to the Massachusetts militia. The text was full of comments directed to Sarah’s younger sisters, Eliza and Huldah. Sarah concluded the letter with a list of all her expenses on the journey, with instructions that Huldah, aged nine, “must reckon it while I tell her.” Total cost of the cross-country expedition was $14.70, slightly less than the $18.50 one pays today in tolls on the New York Thruway.

Sarah Foote eventually concluded her visit to her brothers and returned to Lee, Massachusetts. Eight years later, she married Reverend Edwin Jenner Sherrill (1806-1877). They spent nearly four decades in “Canada East,” which is the southern portion of the modern-day province of Quebec. It may have been in Quebec that their eldest daughter, also called Sarah, was born in 1839. It was Sarah Sherrill who transcribed her mother’s long letter into a bound volume for posterity. The transcription is undated, but likely occurred before the younger Sarah’s marriage to William Bullock in 1887, since she signed the title page, “Copied by her daughter, Sarah A. Sherrill.”

Sarah Foote Sherrill returned home to Massachusetts from Canada East after the death of her pastor husband. She died in 1885 of cancer and cirrhosis of the liver, and is buried in Lee’s Fairmount Cemetery. Her daughter and transcriber, Sarah A. Sherrill Bullock, died in 1922 in New York City. The letter and its bound copy remained together and were recently purchased by a private collector. Though their authors lie elsewhere, they have both now come back to Wellington.

Headstone of Sarah Foote Sherrill (1808-1885) in Fairmount Cemetery, Lee, Massachusetts. Photo from website Findagrave.com.

While Sarah Foote was visiting her brothers in Wellington in 1830, she wrote home, “[Elisha] Percival has got the prettiest children that ever lived” (mss. pg. 3). One of those pretty children was his daughter, Sarah, born in Wellington just a year before the letter was drafted. When this third Sarah of our story was seventeen years old, her father sold his Ohio property and moved the family overland to Wisconsin. Like her paternal aunt, this Sarah Foote also kept a detailed journal of her expedition. It was carefully preserved by her children and later published. The full text can be found in several different places online.

While Sarah Foote (later Sherrill) arrived in Wellington in 1830, Sarah Foote (later Smith) departed from it in 1846. “Wednesday morning and pleasant. Many of our friends and neighbors gathered to see us off and after the usual exchanges of good wishes, goodbyes and sad farewells we were on our way at 10 o’clock. As we passed the old school house it was the saddest of all leave-takings though a silent one” (April 15, 1846 entry). Was this “old” school house that Sarah Foote Smith said good-bye to with such grief the same building that had been under construction when her Aunt Sarah visited the village sixteen years earlier? We know that Wellington’s first town hall was demolished in 1846, reportedly because of its age-weakened foundation.

Like her aunt, Sarah Foote wrote in a clear and direct style, carefully noting the costs of the trip via horse-drawn wagon and observing the conditions around her. The family arrived in Wisconsin in May of 1846 and by the next year, Sarah was married to William Champlin Smith (1824-1887). Genealogical sources vary on the exact number, but the couple seems to have had between ten and twelve children; the last was born in 1874, when its mother was forty-five years old. Sarah Foote Smith died in 1912, aged eighty-three, and is buried in Nepeuskun Cemetery in Rush Lake, Wisconsin.

All these women–both the two authors and the daughter who sought to preserve her mother’s words–clearly felt the value of written memories. I do not mean the abstract idea of creating an historical record for the benefit of future generations. Each Sarah Foote chose to set down her personal experiences because she knew they would be welcomed by her immediate family. Sarah Foote Sherrill sought to reassure her relatives in Massachusetts that she had survived the rigors of solitary travel and found her brothers flourishing. Sarah Foote Smith explicitly mentioned her intention to “show [her Wisconsin journal] twenty years from now when it may be interesting to those who shared the events.” But Aunt Sarah also begged her little sister, Eliza, to “just read this letter to our folks and then burn it[,] for no one else can read it I am sure but you” (mss. pg. 3). How fortunate for us today that Eliza did not comply.

Kith and Kin

Sign for DeWolf Street, Wellington, Ohio. Photo by author.

Just northeast of the center of Wellington, there runs a small road that currently dead-ends into the village’s main train line. There are fewer than ten homes situated on DeWolf Street, and I would venture to guess that not many of the residents suspect their road is named after one of the village’s earliest and most respected settlers. Other than his headstone, Matthew DeWolf has only this memorial. But his family’s story is deeply entwined with the founding and growth of Wellington, and contrasting Matthew with one of his younger relatives offers an interesting case study on societal changes here over the course of the nineteenth century.

Matthew DeWolf was born in Otis, Massachusetts in 1792. He and many members of his family eventually emigrated from Berkshire County to Wellington Township. Though sources offer a wide range of dates for the trip, the ones I find most persuasive suggest that Matthew, his wife Mary, young son Homer, brother Whitman, and sister-in-law Alice all journeyed west together in January 1827, shortly after the latters’ marriage. It is possible that Matthew’s younger sister–recorded as Pamelia, Parmelia and Parnela–also traveled with them, though some sources seem to indicate that she arrived in Wellington first.

In the unpublished manuscript records of the First Congregational Church of Wellington, the following passage appears on May 12, 1827: “Mr. Matthew D. Wolf & his Wife Mary & Mrs. Alice D Wolf Wife of Whitman D Wolf from the Church of Otis & Jonathan Niles from the Church of West Stockbridge, After their Letters were read the Individuals were examined in regard to their experimental knowledge of religion and their views of truth and duty—the Church votd to receive them as members of this Church” (mss. pg. 11). Two years later, Matthew’s father, James DeWolf, was also examined and admitted to what was then known simply as the Church of Wellington (mss. pg. 19).

Inscription by “M. DWolf – Wellington, Ohio” on the endpaper of an 1834 “Psalms of David.” Private collection. Photo by author.

Matthew DeWolf was known to his contemporaries as a religious person, deeply committed to societal reform. He is recorded in numerous written recollections as the keeper of a “temperance tavern” on what is today the corner of North Main Street and East Herrick Avenue. (DeWolf owned much of the land in the northeast quadrant of the town, which is why the street bearing his name is located there.) The name suggests a public house in which no alcoholic beverages were permitted. DeWolf’s building is also said to have served as a regular meeting spot for the church, as well as one of the village’s first schoolhouses. J. B. Lang, the Wellington correspondent to the Lorain County News, wrote in his obituary, “Mr. DeWolf during some of the first winters of his residence here, occupied his time in teaching school, and it was the fortune of the writer to attend one of his schools, which was an excellent one, he being one of the first teachers in the country who discarded corporeal punishments in the school room” (7-19-1865, pg. 3).

Homer DeWolf, Matthew and Mary’s only child, died unmarried around 1840, when he was no more than twenty-five years old. Mary DeWolf died circa 1855/6 and was interred in Wellington’s Pioneer Cemetery on what is now West Herrick Avenue. If Homer is buried near her, his marker has not survived. Matthew, by then in his mid-sixties, decided to remarry. He proposed to a local tailoress called Betsey Webster Manly, also born in Otis, Massachusetts. Betsey had been a widow for more than thirty years, but she accepted Matthew’s hand.

Betsey was the daughter of a deacon from Berkshire County. She had married first husband Josiah Manly on her nineteenth birthday. Her obituary is worth quoting at some length: “They remained [in Otis] till 1821, then with their little family of five members, bade adieu to the old home, and with an ox team set out upon a journey to the Westward, Wellington being their destination. Forty days and nights were passed before this long and toilsome journey came to an end…Russell Webster, a brother of Mrs. Manly, had a log cabin nearly completed, which was to be the future home of this family…The cabin had some extra furnishings which had been brought from the East. There was one chair, a small stand, some sheep skin mats spread upon the white puncheon [i.e. split log] floors, a candle stick, with snuffers and tray, and a tallow candle burning in the socket, an article the other settlers had not seen in use since leaving their homes in the East” (The Wellington Enterprise, 5-15-1879, pg. 3).

In the summer of 1824, sickness had passed through the village. Young Betsey and her husband both fell gravely ill. Dr. Daniel Johns was their attending physician. Josiah died August 21st, the first death recorded in Wellington. Betsey was so sick she was not told for a week that her husband had passed. Josiah Manly has two headstones: a simple, older stone in the Pioneer Cemetery, and a later joint stone with Betsey in Greenwood Cemetery. I presume that Josiah was not disinterred–why would the older stone have been left standing?–but rather Betsey wished to honor her connection to him on her own marker. It is curious that Betsey would choose burial in Greenwood given that her parents, siblings and presumably both of her husbands were all located in the older graveyard. Perhaps by the time of her passing in 1879, that small space was full.

(In later life, Betsey became mother-in-law to David Hoke who, in 1890, murdered his employer then committed suicide in a grocery store on North Main Street.)

Known for his commitment to temperance, Matthew DeWolf was also apparently an ardent abolitionist. He, his brother-in-law Abner Loveland (who married Pamelia/Parmelia/Parnela DeWolf in 1826), and Dr. Eli Boies were among the twelve Wellington men arrested and indicted for their role in the famous Oberlin-Wellington Slave Rescue of 1858. DeWolf and Loveland were considered men of means, so they were fined $20 each and only spent twenty-four hours in jail. Historian Nat Brandt asserted in his The Town that Started the Civil War (1990) that most of the Wellington men were indicted not because of direct action on the day of the rescue, but because they were known to be conductors on the Underground Railroad. He included DeWolf, Loveland and Boies in that group.

Headstones of Mary DeWolf and Matthew DeWolf, Pioneer Cemetery, Wellington, Ohio. Photo by author.

Matthew DeWolf died in the summer of 1865 and was buried next to his first wife, Mary. As I mentioned, the couple’s only child had died decades before. But one historical source claims that DeWolf raised a nephew. It is tempting to wonder if that nephew was James DeWolf, son of Whitman and Alice, who was born in Wellington in 1829. James was sometimes mistakenly referred to as Matthew’s son. Is that because he lived in Matthew’s household? Or is it because humans love to craft narrative around the events that they observe, and the more shocking and ironic that narrative, the better?

For James DeWolf was very unlike his well-respected uncle, one might say the polar opposite. He first appears in the public record in the late 1860s, charged with selling liquor. In 1868, his saloon on the south side of Liberty Street burned to the ground. The Lorain County News noted that most of the saloon’s contents were saved, excepting “two valuable billiard tables” (2-12-1868, pg. 3). Four years later, James was sued by a wife for selling intoxicating liquors to her husband; the case was to be heard by Mayor Noah Huckins but was settled out of court. A drunken brawl the same year left a customer with a nearly-severed ear and the bartender shot in the shoulder. In 1875, a suspicious death at DeWolf’s saloon resulted in a murder inquiry, but ultimately no one was charged with the crime.

Mrs. Lydia Boies met James DeWolf. In a letter now held in a private collection, she wrote: “Saloons were then not lawful, nor were they forbidden in Ohio. They were simply refused a license & were regarded as incompatible with the good of society. A young gentleman (De Wolf) opened a saloon for money making. We—that is, we that were accustomed to watch and pray for everyone were terribly aroused and began to ask ‘What can we do about it?’ We found also 2 or 3 others in town. One morning I received a message from Mrs. [Jerusha] Reed asking if I would join her in leading an attack with axe and hammer on De Wolfs and other saloons. Now I am physically & constitutionally a coward unless where I see duty or God leading, and my cowardice served me here. I replied that De Wolf kept a bull dog and and gun which he declared would be used on any one molesting him, and also I said violence was only to be used as a last resort. We then met and planned a series of visitations in person to every saloon keeper. Mrs. Reed & I visited a German who said ‘I will give up if oders will.’ De Wolf refused, and in after years it proved his ruin” (mss. pgs. 12-13).

Local amateur historian Robert Walden never met James DeWolf, but he did know James’ wife and daughter, Jessie DeWolf Seeley. Walden wrote: “James, universally called Jim…made a radical departure from the straight and narrow. He opened a saloon called ‘The Morning Star’ next door west from the Foote old frame livery stable on the south side of Herrick Avenue West. As its name suggested, he kept it open when occasion suggested until the wee hours of the morning. It was the scene of wild celebrations.” Walden noted that it was after the suspicious death in his establishment that James sold The Morning Star and left Wellington for nearby Clarksfield Hollow. “Many of the laborers were Irish and West Clarksfield had several saloons but there was an overflow crowd at Jim’s place in Clarksfield Hollow on Saturdays” (Notebook, #A159).

Damaged headstone of James DeWolf in Clarksfield Township Cemetery. Photo from website Findagrave.com.

James DeWolf’s wife eventually divorced him and he began living on the second floor of his new saloon. It was there, in December 1900, that he died in a fire that made headlines all over the state. The Stark County Democrat was one among many that reported, but did so in unusually gruesome detail. “Dewolf, a single man, was asleep in an upper room, was unable to make his escape, and prished [sic] in the flames. His head and limbs were burned from his body, and only a portion of his trunk was found in the ashes. He was smothered by the smoke and in attempting to get out of the building, fell headlong into the burning embers” (12-18-1900, pg. 2). Several of the newspaper accounts referred to DeWolf’s business as a tobacco and confectionery store, rather than as a bar.

Matthew DeWolf was seventy-three years old when he died. His nephew, James, was nearly seventy-two. The men shared a family name and hometown over the course of roughly equal life spans, but ultimately took quite different paths. It would be overstating matters to suggest some symbolism of a decline in Wellington’s civic life; that The Temperance Tavern, serving also as a church and school, gave way over the decades to the rowdy drunkenness and criminality of The Morning Star. Wellington grew and changed, to be sure, but it did not steadily decline from a wilderness paradise to an urban den of iniquity. Still, I find something deeply compelling in this family–and town–story.

Death of a Stranger

Cleveland Daily Leader, 2-27-1866, pg. 4.

There once was a girl called Lepha. She was born into a farming family in a small, rural settlement in western Massachusetts. Like every other human being, she must have had hopes, dreams, and wishes for her future. I can tell you nothing about these. Sadly, the event that I can tell you about in the most detail is Lepha’s tragic death. I could tell you a great deal, too, about the man whose actions ended her life, his family history, his accomplishments in the thirty years that he went on to enjoy, years she did not have. But I am not going to do that. This is Lepha’s story, and out of respect for her, that is where my focus will remain.

Lepha Irene Sherman entered the world in 1843. She was born to Kelley and Susan Sherman, farmers in the tiny northern Berkshire County community of Florida, Massachusetts. Lepha appears to have been the youngest of eight children. The details of her early life are lost to us. Like another woman I once wrote about, even her name has not come down to us clearly. She appeared in birth, marriage and census records as: Leafy, Liefa, Leapha and Lepha. After her life was cut short, she appeared in print as Sepha, Aletha and Alepha; one paper claimed that she was “familiarly called LENA” (Elyria Democrat, 1-10-1866, pg. 2).

Massachusetts conducted a state census every decade on the five-year mark, i. e. between federal census decades. We can therefore see that sometime between 1850 and 1855, Lepha’s uncle and paternal aunt, William Towner and Phebe L. Sherman Houghton, moved from Pownal, Vermont to Florida, Massachusetts. They took up residence very close, possibly next door, to the Sherman family. They brought two sons. The eldest, Isaac, was five years older than his cousin, Lepha. By the Fourth of July, 1861, Isaac and Lepha were married. She had just turned eighteen.

October 10, 1862 entry recording the birth of Carlton L. Houghton to Isaac R. and Lepha I. Houghton, nee Sherman. Massachusetts, Birth Records, 1840-1915; Town of Clarksburg, 1862, pg. 38.

Fifteen months later, Carlton L. Houghton was born. The baby survived only ten months. The Pittsfield Sun reported that the death of the “son of Isaac Houghton” occurred August 20th, 1863. In the documentation bookending his boy’s brief existence, Isaac was identified as both a farmer and carpenter. (In 1855, there were fourteen saw mills in Florida, a good option for employment during the off-season.) I can find no record of Isaac serving in the Civil War, though The History of Berkshire County, Volume One noted that forty-five local men served and of those, eleven did not come back (pg. 700).

By the 1865 Massachusetts census, both Lepha and Isaac disappear from the rolls. Their respective families continued to farm side-by-side in Florida, but I can find no mention of either of them in all of Berkshire County. According to testimony offered after Lepha’s death, she relocated to Ohio early that year “for the purpose of procuring a divorce from her husband” (Elyria Democrat, 1-10-1866, pg. 2). If this statement is accurate, it obviously suggests that Isaac remained alive. But I can locate no further trace of him in the historical record.

Why did Lepha leave her husband? It is impossible to say. We can conjecture about her youth–she was barely twenty-two–and whether she had ever wanted to be married to her first cousin. Perhaps she did not wish to be a farmer’s wife. Her choice of comparatively urban Wellington as a new home is an interesting one. I was very curious to learn how she came to settle so far from her birthplace. Regular readers of the blog will no doubt be thinking of the many other families who emigrated from Berkshire to Lorain County. Given that Lepha’s married name was Houghton, I initially suspected she was related to the Houghtons of Wellington. But research revealed what I believe to be the more likely scenario, namely familial networks on her mother’s side.

Two clues survive in the testimony offered after Lepha’s death. Elyria papers reported that her body was taken to New London “by a relative” for interment. The Cleveland Daily Leader wrote, “The evidence given by Charles Hannenway, cousin of deceased, revealed no new facts” (2-27-1866, pg. 4). I could find no evidence of such a person as Charles Hannenway. It then struck me that the name in the testimony was reminiscent of ‘Hemenway,’ a family I have written about before. The Hemenways came from New London, and one of brothers was, in fact, called Charles. Further digging revealed that they originally emigrated from Berkshire County and at least two of the Hemenway siblings were born in Florida. Lepha’s mother’s maiden name is recorded in her marriage documents as “Hemingway.” Susan Hemenway Sherman died in October 1863, just weeks after her infant grandson, Carlton. Perhaps the loss of both her mother and child drove Lepha to leave Massachusetts behind and start over in Ohio with help from her maternal cousins.

Advertisement for Levi Bowman’s clothing shop, still in operation nearly two decades after Lepha Sherman Houghton’s death. “The Wellington Enterprise,” 5-21-1884, pg. 4.

Lepha boarded in Wellington and “ran a sewing machine” in Levi Bowman’s clothing shop on the west side of South Main Street. She lived in the village for a year, as the Civil War drew to a close. Did she attend the memorial service when President Lincoln was assassinated in April? Did she get up in the middle of the night to watch his funeral train pass by the depot in a driving rain? Did she stroll through the fairgrounds with friends that September? We have no way of knowing. The obliquest of mentions appeared in the Lorain County News, in a description of her workplace: “A look through the clothing establishment of L. Bowman, of this place, will satisfy any one that some things can be done in Wellington, as well as others. Mr. B. is manufacturing all his own clothing, and at the present time giving employment to four men and eight or ten women. He has a very large stock of clothes and gentlemen’s furnishing goods, which will be sold as low as similar goods can be bought in the state. Give him a call, and satisfy yourselves” (8-30-1865, pg. 3).

Among those “four men and eight or ten women” employed at Bowman’s were both Lepha and A. J. Brown. He is referred to as “Asa” and “Andrew” Brown in later reports, while the Lorain County News dismissed him as “one ‘Jack’ Brown” (1-10-1866, pg. 3). Jack was allegedly separated from his own wife by 1865. In examining the 1860 federal census for Wellington, I found three J. Browns. Two were named John, a thirty-eight-year-old unmarried shoemaker and a forty-six-year-old laborer with a wife and five children. The third man, Jackson Brown of New York, was a twenty-four-year-old tailor with a young wife (Marion, 22) and small daughter (Emma, 3). His name, age and profession lead me to believe that he is the person at the center of the calamity that followed.

1860 federal census for Wellington, Ohio showing Jackson Brown, tailor, and his dependents. Pg. 102, #794.

The two co-workers began a relationship and by early winter, Lepha was pregnant. Was the affair secret? The woman with whom Lepha boarded, Mrs. Amelia R. Herrick, claimed that she knew Lepha was expecting as she “had had morning sickness and had symptoms of approaching maternity” (Cleveland Daily Leader, 2-27-1866, pg. 4). As a side-note, I have been unable to find Amelia R. Herrick in Wellington records. There was an unmarried educator in town named Armenia Herrick; she was sister to Charlotte Herrick Howk. In 1860, Armenia was sixty years old and fostering a nine-year-old niece. By 1870, she had moved in with another sister and nieces–five unmarried women in a single household. Widely respected in the community, Herrick was the subject of a lengthy 1879 obituary in The Wellington Enterprise by co-editor Mary Hayes Houghton; not surprisingly, it says nothing about Armenia keeping boarders, nor hints at any connection to the 1866 scandal.

Trial documents tell the rest of the story. Jack approached Mary Mason, who resided in Wellington more-or-less continuously from 1853 until her death in 1903, but had moved for a brief period to Elyria that September. She later testified that she had known Lepha for nearly a year prior to the latter’s death. Did the girl send her lover to Mrs. Mason to ask for help or did he know, and apparently trust, Mrs. Mason on his own? There is a vague reference in the court transcript which suggests that Mary Mason had visited the same doctor on several previous occasions; it may be that she was known as an individual who would discreetly assist women “in trouble.” Regardless, it was eventually arranged that Mrs. Mason would meet Lepha in Cleveland after Christmas and escort her to a clandestine, illegal abortion.

On December 30th, the two women went to the office of “Doctor” Hosea W. Libbey. I will spare you, dear reader, the gruesome details included in the subsequent indictment. Suffice to say that Libbey had no degree nor formal medical training of any kind, and was a charlatan even by the standards of his own century. The injuries he inflicted on Lepha in a locked office, away from Mary Mason’s eyes, led to the younger woman suffering severe internal hemorrhaging on the return train to Elyria. Mary brought Lepha to her house, where the girl was put to bed and never recovered. She died on January 4th, 1866. As mentioned, her body was taken to New London for interment. I have not been able to locate her grave, but I suspect she is resting among her Hemenway relations in the Grove Street Cemetery.

Ironically, the only person for whom this story’s ending is clear is the one who encountered Lepha Sherman Houghton for just ten minutes of her entire life. Jack Brown, father of the child, and Mary Mason, the woman who risked her own reputation to help, were both arrested for their complicity in the crime. I do not know anything further about Jack Brown’s fate; if I am correct in believing him to be “Jackson Brown” from the 1860 federal census, I also know nothing of what happened to the spurned Marion Brown or their daughter, Emma. Mary Mason continued on in Wellington until her death in 1903 and is buried with her husband in Greenwood Cemetery. What impact the scandal had on her interactions with her neighbors, we can only guess. (It is interesting to note that all mentions of the trial featured in the Lorain County News were submitted by the Elyria correspondent; not a single line was ever printed in the Wellington column, as if the village were trying to disavow any association with the shameful episode.) Hosea W. Libbey, just thirty-two years old at the time, was tried and convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years of hard labor; later documents show he served six weeks of that sentence before being released by the Pardon Board. He went right back to medicine. Though he periodically resurfaced in newspaper accounts of lawsuits, arrests for theft, and even the auction of his home and goods to settle debts, he continued with what seem to have been profitable practices in Cleveland and Boston. He secured patents and produced several publications. When he died in 1900, it was covered in both Ohio and Massachusetts newspapers; no allusion was made to his manslaughter conviction.

Hosea Wait Libbey (1834-1900). From “The Libby Family in America, 1602-1881,” B. Thurston & Co: Portland, ME (1882), opposite pg. 254.

How unjust that we should have a portrait of Libbey, but not of Lepha. She was “of attractive form and features, and…deported herself in a manner that indicated a good character and industrious habits,” we are told. Her landlady, even after Lepha’s public disgrace, characterized her as “steady, industrious, healthy, robust.” Whatever her sins, if sins they were, surely she did not deserve the excruciating, isolated death she received, surrounded only by acquaintances terrified that her end meant the beginning of their legal troubles. It is unclear whether even Jack was present when she passed. An editorial decried “the almost inhuman neglect of her body after life was extinct,” and indeed, we can only speculate as to where her body ended its journey.

That editorial, in the Elyria Democrat, delivered this scathing summation of the affair: “In all such cases, when woman yields to the more powerful influences of men, there is abundant cause for the exercise of two eminent virtues–pity, and contempt. Pity for the weaker and fallen one, and loathing and contempt for him who compassed her ruin by artful wiles, and then with cowardly instinct, seeks to hide his own shame by urging his victim to pursue a course that puts her life in peril” (1-10-1866, pg. 2). The assumption that Lepha was “weak” and seduced or coerced by Brown belittles her and negates her agency as a thinking, feeling person. In reality, we can have no idea of the true nature of the relationship between the two. Were they in love or lust, both or neither? Did they hope to marry or was the intimacy of a more casual nature? Did Lepha prefer to be independent, free of a father and husband’s control for the first time, or was she perchance hoping that sex would bind Brown more closely to her? It is possible she was entirely relieved to learn that an abortion was available in nearby Cleveland; but maybe, instead, she remembered little Carlton on the long train ride north and mourned the loss of a second, unmet baby. “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” the saying goes. Equally important to remember is that the simplified history we think we know rarely bears any resemblance to the complex and confused experience of actually living it.

 

“Into the Wilderness”: Part Three

[Stockbridge] “Berkshire Star,” June 6, 1816, pg. 3.

Heading West

At some point after the death of Isaac Howk in 1805, his entire family decided to leave Lee and Kinderhook far behind and make a new start in the western territories. There are tantalizing hints in the historical record as to why they might have made that choice. In 1816, an advertisement in the Berkshire Star announced the court-ordered sale of “all the real estate of Alanson Howk and Electa Howk, Minor heirs of Isaac Howk, late of Lee, deceased” (6-6-1816, pg. 3). Another son, Isaac Howk Jr., had a biography included in Sketches of Prominent Citizens of 1876 that mentioned he had attended Williams College, “but his means were limited, and did not admit of his completing the full course of college studies” (pg. 291).

Did the family fortunes deteriorate after Isaac’s death? Farming was already on the decline as a viable means of supporting a family in post-Revolutionary Massachusetts. To make matters worse, the years 1815 and 1816 were some of the most terrible weather years ever experienced in the Berkshires; a destructive hurricane in the fall of 1815 was followed by snowfall and killing frosts the next summer. “The weather proved too much for some and led to a large migration to the Midwest from western New England” (One Minute a Free Woman, pg. 20). Whatever their reasons, the six living Howk children, two of their spouses and possibly two small children, family matriarch Fiche Van Deusen Howk, and the former slave called Dean left behind all that they knew and set out in 1818.

Wellington

Who made that long and difficult journey to the nameless swath of forest then classified in official documents only as Township 3, Range 18? Of Isaac and Fiche’s seven children, four came to this area. The eldest son, Richard Howk, seems to have settled elsewhere in Ohio with his wife, Electa Ingersoll Howk, and their two young sons, Henry (b. 1812) and George (b. 1815). Third son, Isaac Jr., continued on to Indiana and became a respected lawyer and state representative, but died just shy of his fortieth birthday. Eldest daughter Catherine, called Caty by her relatives, died of consumption at Lee when she was seventeen, and was left behind with her father in the family plot there.

Fiche Van Deusen Howk, widow of Isaac, was by 1818 probably in her mid-fifties. Her son John was twenty-seven. Her daughter, also called Fiche, was already married and so is included in The History of Lorain County passage as “Josiah Bradley and wife.” She was just twenty-three. Next came son Alanson, nineteen. And at seventeen, daughter Electa was the youngest immigrant in the family. We have no way of knowing Dean’s precise age, though her classification in later federal censuses suggests that she was of a similar age to Fiche Van Deusen Howk, her former owner. Recall also from Memorial to the Pioneer Women that by the time she lived in Wellington, she was referred to as “Granny” Dean.

1820 Federal Census for Township 3, Range 18, later known as Wellington, Ohio. Seven families lived in the area. The mark on the far right of the form shows one free female person of color living in the household of John Howk. Though the marks that presumably record both Fiche Van Deusen Howk and Dean are in the age categories of 26-45, this is inconsistent with later census records. It also does not make sense in the case of Fiche Van Deusen Howk, given the ages of her children.

While no known letters or other primary source documents have come down to us to describe the Howks’ journey into Ohio, we can get a small sense of what the destination was like. At the beginning of this piece, I quoted the passage from The History of Lorain County that tells the story of the Howks’ arrival in the fall of 1818. John Howk, a cousin who emigrated with his own branch of the family in 1834, later recalled that his father “had moved into this quarter when it was so new that a trail had to be chopped through the woods for his wagon” (The Wellington Enterprise, 9-12-1894, pg. 8). Henry Bradley, a nephew by marriage to Fiche Howk Bradley, also relocated from Lee to Wellington as a child in 1835. In his 1907 memoir he reminisced, “In going from the settlement through the dense forest to our new home, we found the roads hardly passable because of the swamps and the clouds of mosquitoes which seemed to be waiting to greet us as new comers… The timber wolves, bears and deer were very numerous, often to our great discomfiture, and they were many nights troublesome” (A Brief Autobiography, quoted in Moving with the Frontier, pg. 37). Remember that these two narratives describe a period nearly two decades after the first Howks and Dean settled.

The 1820 federal census indicates that by that point in time, Josiah Bradley and his wife, Fiche, were living in one household with their new baby girl, while the rest of the Howks were living together in another place. Sometime in the early 1820s, according to local tradition, youngest Howk daughter Electa became the first bride in the new community when she married newcomer Amos Adams, Jr. Tax records from the 1820s and 1830s indicate that sisters Fiche and Electa lived close together on the west side of the township, while brothers Alanson and John lived on adjoining plots of land on the east side. By 1832, both men were paying taxes on a sawmill that they apparently co-owned with Amos Adams Sr. (their sister’s father-in-law) and Albert Adams. Since the Howk brothers were occupying two lots of land diagonally crossed by a river that is still there (albeit in diminished form) today, it seems likely that is where the sawmill stood.

1832 Wellington Tax Duplicate showing John and Alanson Howk each assessed as the partial owner of a sawmill.

Aerial view of Wellington today. The red circles indicate the approximate locations of the Howk homesteads. The circle at the far left of the image shows the site of Josiah Bradley and wife Fiche Howk Bradley’s house. Sister Electa lived somewhere just west of that location with her husband, Amos Adams Jr. The two circles to the right of the image are the sites of brothers Alanson and John Howk’s homes. Census data shows that Dean lived with John, probably until her death. A sawmill likely operated on the Wellington River, which ran between the two men’s farms. Approximately two miles separate the furthest points. The Pioneer Cemetery is noted (small red square) as a reference marker.

In some ways, we know even less about Dean’s life in this period than we could conjecture previously. Federal census records show one free female person of color living in John Howk’s household in both 1820 and 1830. Fiche Van Deusen Howk was also apparently living there. What sorts of work filled Dean’s days? Did she cook, clean, make candles, mend? Did she wash clothing in the river that ran next to the house? Did she play any role in agricultural functions? John Howk owned two horses and a steadily increasing herd of cattle during Dean’s lifetime (sixteen head in 1832, for example). Someone must have looked to their daily maintenance, particularly if John was operating a sawmill and cultivating crops. In both census enumerations, Dean was the only person of color residing in the township. In 1820, the white-to-black ratio was forty-three to one, but a decade later it had grown to two-hundred-twenty-three to one. Not unlike her time in Lee, Dean may have felt conspicuous in her “other”-ness.

We do not know when Fiche Van Deusen Howk or her slave-turned-servant Dean were born. Neither do we know when they died, nor where they are buried. Both women disappeared from John Howk’s household by the 1840 federal census. (John married in January 1838; he was nearing fifty years of age and his new wife, Mehitable Fox Couch, was a widow who was herself dead by 1843. Perhaps John felt the need to marry after the passing of the two other female members of his household.) All the Howk children who emigrated to Wellington in 1818 are interred in the so-called Pioneer Cemetery on West Herrick Avenue. John and Mehitable, Alanson and his wife, Theadocia Clifford Howk, and Amos and Electa Adams are lined up in a neat row. Fiche Howk Bradley is nearby, next to a damaged stone that was once likely that of her husband, Josiah. There is no surviving documentary evidence associated with the cemetery so we can only speculate as to the burial sites of Fiche and Dean, two women whose lives, while in obvious ways very different, were intimately entwined for perhaps half-a-century or more.

Three Howk siblings and their spouses; sister Fiche Howk Bradley (d. 1869) is laid to rest in the southwest corner of the burial ground. Pioneer Cemetery, West Herrick Avenue, Wellington, Ohio. Photo by author.

Did Dean and Fiche get along well? Did they like each other? They seem to have been of a similar age, and certainly shared a lifetime of common experiences, though not all of them positive. Did Dean travel with the Howks to Ohio because she had played a role in raising all of the children, and so was held with some esteem or affection within the family circle? It was certainly an arduous undertaking for a woman of her years, and one would like to believe that if she had preferred to stay in Berkshire County, she could have found a position as a servant within another household. Is Fiche buried near her children in a now-unmarked grave? Would Dean have been allowed burial in the same cemetery, even if the family had wished it? These are the unanswerable questions I continue to ponder.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the contributions of several individuals to the research that made this article possible. Their efforts have only strengthened the work, but any errors that have found their way into the text are entirely my own responsibility.

Dr. Emily Blanck, Associate Professor of History at Rowan University and author of Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts (2014), offered me insight into the piecemeal process of slave emancipation in Massachusetts in the 1780s.

Ruth Piwonka, Town Historian for the Village of Kinderhook, New York, alerted me to the existence of larger black communities in western Massachusetts in the eighteenth century. She was also helpful to me in understanding Dutch naming customs and pointed me toward resources on the Van Deusen family.

Mal Eckert of the Lee Historical Society and Will Garrison, Curator of the Berkshire Historical Society, were generous with their time and energies in assisting me to more precisely locate “Howk’s Hill” and Isaac Howk’s homestead in Lee, Massachusetts. Richard C. Leab, Senior Assistant in the Local History Department of the Berkshire Athenaeum, found some period maps that also illuminated the answers to this question. Mary Morrissey, Co-Chairperson of the Lee Historical Commission, provided me with documentation on the home of John Howk (brother of Isaac) still standing in Lee today, though much modified over the years; she also kindly connected me with the Davidson family of Lee, present-day owners of the house.

Jennifer Fauxsmith at the Massachusetts State Archives, and Elizabeth Bouvier at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives, fielded several legal reference queries and facilitated my access to Isaac Howk’s probate documents on an all-too-brief research visit to Boston in December 2014.

Mick Howk and Robert McFadden, two descendants of the Howk family, kindly fielded questions about their family’s genealogy and pointed me toward helpful sources. I sincerely hope they are pleased by the “results” of their efforts.

“Into the Wilderness”: Part Two

Runaway notice for slaves Fortune and Dean. “Berkshire Chronicle,” 7-31-1788, pg. 3.

Runaway

On a summer night in 1788, a man and woman made a desperate bid to be free. The man was a forty-year-old slave called Fortune by his master. The woman, called Dean, was “about 28 years old, of a yellow complexion.” These two human beings were the legal chattel of Abraham Van Allen, a Dutch farmer living in Kinderhook, New York. In running for their lives, Fortune and Dean stole two kinds of property that night: themselves, and the two mares on which they fled.

In 1788, slavery was still legal in New York. It had all but ended in neighboring Massachusetts, and Abraham Van Allen must have guessed that his fugitive slaves would head in that direction. In the runaway advertisement he placed for three consecutive weeks in the Berkshire Chronicle, published in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the farmer described his missing humans and horses at equal length, and concluded: “Whoever will take up the said man and woman slaves, and the mares, saddle and bridle, and bring them to me, or secure the slaves in some gaol [jail], so that the owner can have them, shall have THIRTY DOLLARS reward, and for the slaves only, TWENTY DOLLARS” (7-31-1788, pg. 3).

A brief word here about slavery in the northeast: Massachusetts is proud of its history as a so-called “birthplace of American freedom,” but is less vocal about its dubious distinction of being the first colony, in 1641, to formally codify the legality of owning another human being. Many of its earliest slaves were Native Americans taken as prisoners of war during multiple armed conflicts with English settlers. Over time, that demographic shifted so that more and more Africans were held in bondage. The total slave population of New England never exceeded three percent of its overall populace, but a slave census taken in 1765 still showed nearly 6,000 individuals held in Massachusetts in lifelong service against their wills (Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, pgs. 46, 75, 181).

Contrary to what was stated in The History of Lorain County, the adoption of a new constitution in 1780 did not legally end slavery in the commonwealth. Massachusetts could claim that it was almost unique among the colonies in that slaves there had the right to own property, write contracts, sue, petition, and bear witness in a court of law. The fact that they had these “important rights of legal personhood” enabled slaves to begin using the courts to chip away at the edges of slavery for decades prior to the 1780 constitution being ratified. Seventeen slaves sued for their emancipation in just the decade between 1764 and 1774 (Tyrannicide, pg. 18, 34). In the end, it was these “freedom suits” and a series of judicial decisions that gradually eroded slavery in Massachusetts. There is no single piece of legislation to point to, no definitive end date, though the year generally cited is 1783. New York did not free all the slaves still held within its territory until 1827.

Elizabeth Freeman, also known as Mum Bett, who brought one of the most famous of the Massachusetts “freedom suits” against her master, John Ashley. Born into slavery on a Dutch farm in New York, she was given by her Dutch owner to his daughter—John Ashley’s wife, Hannah—in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, and successfully sued for her freedom in 1781. Original 1811 watercolor on ivory belongs to the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.

Was the woman called Dean who fled bondage in New York in 1788 the same free woman of color who was counted as living in the Howk household in Lee, Massachusetts, two years later, the Dean who emigrated with the Howks to Ohio in 1818? It is impossible to know without discovering further documentary evidence. The female name spelled “Dean” in Dutch (pronounced “deh-AHN”) was not especially rare among those assigned by Dutch slave holders. A 1755 census of New York slaves included the names Dean, Deana, Deen, Diean, Dien, Dijeen, Dijean, and Dyaen. (Documentary History of the State of New York…, pgs. 845-868). Given differences between Dutch and English pronunciations, and the fluidity of all spelling in the eighteenth century, many of these variations could have sounded so similar when spoken that they were used interchangeably in writing. It is equally likely that the authors of the two late-nineteenth-century passages I quoted in Part One were transcribing things in written English that they were told orally, in which case the former slave’s name was probably something like “Dien” (pronounced “DEEN” in Dutch).

Whether the woman Dean who lived with the Howk family in Lee was the same woman who escaped on horseback from Kinderhook, New York, or whether she instead passed through the ownership of the Howk or Van Deusen families (also of Kinderhook, then of Berkshire County, Massachusetts) we can offer some limited speculation about her background. She was likely born into slavery in the United States. In his examination of African Americans living in the mid-Hudson River Valley in this period, historian Michael Groth noted that “the vast majority of slaves and children of slaves in the mid-Hudson Valley in 1800 were almost certainly native born” (“The African American Struggle Against Slavery in the Mid-Hudson Valley, 1785-1827,” pg. 68). It should be stated that Groth was specifically looking at Dutchess County, New York, but Kinderhook was located in the adjacent county of Columbia.

The counties of New York’s Hudson River Valley. From the website HudsonValleyTravels.com.

Groth further asserted that since most Hudson Valley slaves were raised and labored inside the homes of Dutch masters (as opposed to larger communities of field slaves, often housed separately from owner families in isolated slave quarters), many were “readily proficient in English or Dutch,” and he cited multiple examples of runaway notices that listed the number of languages spoken by missing slaves. It seems likely that Dean would have conformed to this pattern.

The 1790 federal census shows us that Kinderhook, New York, had 4,661 residents, of whom 638 were slaves. A History of Old Kinderhook helpfully informed its readers that this was “a total exceeding that of every other township in the county” that year (pg. 552). Lee, Massachusetts, was starkly different; in 1790, there were only 1,170 inhabitants in the village, of whom just three persons were classified as “other” than white. Despite the fact that slaves seem to have been permitted greater flexibility of movement and even work and living arrangements in Massachusetts than in the southern states, for example, Dean would still have found it difficult to connect to a larger black community living in Lee. We can only imagine how different her life would have been had she been in service in Great Barrington, just a few miles south but home to nearly fifty black inhabitants, almost half of whom were living in independent households. Stockbridge, too, due west of Lee, had nearly identical white population numbers as Great Barrington, but was also home to sixty-four black residents, of whom half were living in independent households. Ironically, Dean’s comparative isolation in Lee may have offered her some preparation for the next chapter in her life.

In Part Three, Dean emigrates to Ohio.