Phelpstown Footprints -by Mabel Oaks
Ontario County, New York


 
Also by Mabel Oaks
  The Presbyterian Church of Oaks Corners
                                                             



 
Seven Settlements of Phelpstown
 
PINE PLAINS
 
"THIS IS THE FOREST primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks - -- - stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic." This was Pine Plains when the first folk came there from the land of the Druids, England, to make clearings in the wilderness, to build cabins and raise their families. Boundaries of this area are now much the same as then. It extends in a rough rectangle from Lyons Road far into Seneca County to the east. On the north the area begins near Route 96 and ends at Packwood Road on the south. The pioneer pine plains contained well over a thousand acres of level, low-lying country, some of it swampy, all of it darkened by the virgin forest of its pines.
As everywhere, the people of the Pines were good and bad, intelligent and ignorant, industrious and inert. Isolated as they were, some intermarried closely, too closely. Their good native stock deteriorated; their standards suffered. European royalty pursued the same poor practice for centuries, but for different reasons. It was said some Pine Plains settlers still had the pallor of debtors' prisons on their faces. It was no disgrace if they did. Canandaigua's old jail had its debtors' cell in which luckless local folk were from time to time confined. Imprisonment for debt seems to have been senseless. How could men ever pay when they were not allowed to work? Imagine how full debtors' jails would be now in these days of installment buying!

In time, three small centers of activity formed among the pines-one near the church on Lyons Road, another on New Pre-Emption Road to the east, the third on Packwood Road. The little Lyons Road church still stands, still gives good service although no longer Episcopalian. Once called the Mission Church of South Phelps, it had no pastor of its own but was under the care of a larger neighboring church by whom a preacher was supplied. In the 1870s it was under protection of St. John's Church, Phelps village. At times it was the protégé' of St. Peter's, Geneva, whose records include a register of its baptisms. However, when Frank Mack (formerly of Phelps) wrote of it in 1904, the church was again under Phelps instruction.

The November 1904 issue of "The Four-Track News, a Magazine of Travel and Education," nationally circulated, carried Mack's article "In the Shadow of the Pines." I quote in part: "The little hermit colony has its church with distinctive wooden cross at the gable. It has known vicissitudes, and its hearth has sometimes been cold. Its property was at one time innocently debased when its loft was made storage place for stolen goods by a band of thieves whose chief lived near the church." (I could name names, but the articles stolen are of interest too. Fur coats, fur robes, blankets, harnesses and saddles were hidden there even young pigs during a short but lively interval.) "The people cling to their church life, the only thing besides their old English dishes which came over the ocean with their ancestors." (Mack)
More than eighty years ago a child's murderer struck and was speedily lynched in the woods just north of the church. The daughter of a member of the lynching party told me that, as a child, she was shown the rope still swing­ing from a tree limb. So lynch law was exercised at Pine Plains while Episcopalian law was being taught nearby. This is not to speak ill of the community. Lynch law received its title in aristocratic, Episcopalian Virginia, which state once had a peace officer of that name too ready to issue sentences for hanging.

When the little congregation had no pastor, the church was closed. Yet always it reopened, prayed and worked into longer life by members like Mary Ann (Smith) Dawkins of Welch Road. Widowed early and poorly supported by her photographer son, Mrs. Dawkins' chief interest was the Lyons Road Church. Before coming to the Pines she must have known better days. Oaks Corners museum has her tiny, hand-tooled leather baby shoes and framed sampler stitched in 1830 at Mamaroneck, L. I., when she was thirteen. On it the alphabet is lettered in five scripts. Its motto advises:
                 "A sampler resembles a well governed mind
                 Whose passions by virtue subdu'd and confin'd,
                 Move only in lines of affection and duty,                 
                 Reflecting a picture of order and beauty."
Treasured by her over the years, these lines may have set a behavior pattern for Mary Dawkins' life. The museum also has a letter of sympathy she sent to a friend in 1879; the note is well-written, deeply religious in tone.

All Pines Episcopalians were not cast in Mrs. Dawkins' mold. One Sunday when there were to be baptisms, the young rector learned to his dismay that some babies were children of unmarried couples. He proceeded to lecture his congregation severely and refused to perform the service. Finally agreeing to continue, he later wrote a widely-circulated article on the loose morals of Western New York. As a result he became disliked, resigned his position and left the area, I am told.

The Pine Plains tollgate house on the Lyons-Geneva plank road was the first place south of the church, known for years as the Manktlow house. Toll was taken from a porch-like enclosure attached to the east end of the house, close by the road. When no longer needed, this enclosure was made part of the house interior, a bed alcove. Near it rose the quaint chimney place, its cupboards and oven. Edna Oldacre Fisher, of the Manktlow family, tells me she saw the old house burn--a few flickers, one great puff of smoke and flame, and the ancient timbers were gone. Today the new home of William Paul Tracey stands on the toll house site. The Charles Fishers, whose Oldacre home is opposite the church, are an example of contrast between modern Pine Plainers and the early people. Both have positions in Geneva, have made a half dozen trips by jet to California and plan to spend their retirement years there. Mr. Fisher grows lovely orchids as a hobby.

 The only other Phelpstown tollgate house known to me is the home of Dr. Donald Pulver, Clifton Springs Road. In the very center of the house was a small double-walled room, the toll office (later used as a pantry) with a wall opening like a cashier's window into the front hall. Here toll was received. Gates were usually operated from the house. They say stagecoach drivers would crack their whips to warn gate keepers to start turning the crank that raised the long bar from the road. When the Pulvers remodeled, tearing out this room, quantities of old newspapers were found between its walls--among them a full-length picture of Abraham Lincoln.

The terms toll road and turnpike were synonymous, and soon tolls made a popular practice of "shunpiking," driving on back roads. Undoubtedly thrifty Phelpstown travelers often preferred Carter or New Pre-Emption Road to the Lyons plank highway, even though the latter was more improved. There were other ways too of avoiding toll payment. Two women drivers, stopped at a gate one day, inquired how much the charge was. The gatekeeper answered, "Fifty cents for a man and a horse." "Well then, get out of our way; we're two girls and a mare. Giddap, Jenny!" And away they went. Modern folk sometimes shunpike to avoid traffic, not toll. The Asheville, N. C., Chamber of Commerce--probably others as well--even offers a free shunpikimg map of its scenic byways.

Improved though it was, the Lyons plank road must have left much to be desired. (By 1870 most plank roads had been abandoned because of cost of upkeep; stringers and cross pieces decayed so quickly.) Low sections were logs laid closely crosswise--called corduroy, their roughness revealed by the name. Many years later when Clarence Fynaut was a Lyons Rd. boy, he sometimes earned a quarter for digging one of these ancient logs out of the roadbed and refilling the hole with dirt. Sand teamsters driving from Geneva to the Oaks Corners pit made these payments.

The small settlement on New Pre-emption, two roac[s east of Lyons Road, was really the heart of the Pines. At one time it included two churches, two stores, postoffice and school as well as houses. The 1874 Seneca Co. Atlas shows families named Steele, Butts, Morris, Thayer and Ridley--among others--living there. Later Cook, Baker and Patrick were prominent names. A few others were Arnold, Avery, Boyce, Bryant, Fairman, Gittens, Parish and Taylor.

 A two-story schoolhouse stood just north of Lynch's store, corner of New Pre-emption and Steele Rds. The Jim Steeles bought the building (then not in use) for their home, tore down the Lynch store and built, attached to south side of the house, their own store, later run by Will Patrick and still standing. This business proved unprofitable. Mr. and Mrs. Steele had their own separate prices for goods, all unmarked, so that a customer's expenditure depended on which one was tending store. People were dissatisfied. Soon Jim Ridley erected a second store north of the White Church. All this was on New Pre-emption Road, the west side of which is in Ontario County, the east side Seneca County, Oaks Corners and Pine Plains have in common the unusual fact that each is bisected by a Pre-emption road, the old one false, the new one true.

Again on the subject of storekeepers--I have learned of one Phelpstown Shylock whose custom it was to break a bulk cracker in two to measure one exact pound, not a crumb over. There was also the local merchant who pressed the scales with his thumb to give less than one just pound.

The Pines' Presbyterian Church--once called the White Church, then Union--was later used as a community club center. A 4-H group met there regularly. Now the building shelters only an occasional private party or wedding reception. The neighborhood's second church was Methodist, an unpainted wood structure on the east side of the road opposite and north of the White Church. This was later sold, torn down and its timbers used in other near-by buildings.

As a little girl, Belle Edington (Spears) regularly at­tended both of these churches. From her home on Lyons Rd., now that of Henry D. Eddington, she walked to Presbyterian Sunday School with her grandfather along a foot­path through the woods to Welch Rd. From here a wagon trail wound through the big pine woods to reach the New Pre-emption. In fact, three woods roads converged on the settlement near the stores. There was no highway east from Lyons Rd., as now at Mr. Baroody's gas station.

The trip through the trees to Sunday School was some­times eventful. One morning the alert grandfather heard a rustle of leaves beside the path and caught glimpses of a large snake. Breaking a stout stick for a cudgel, he killed a rattlesnake just as it raised its head to strike. At Sunday School Belle Edington's teacher was a Mr. Moses of Geneva. Since there were no printed lessons, Mr. Moses would cut a large sheet of brown wrapping paper for each child, dip his hand in a bottle of blue dye and finger-paint Bible verses for their memorizing, eighty years ago. The Pines' Presbyterian Church--although under care of Geneva's North Church--did not always have a minister, so members used to exhort just as they did at Oaks Corners and else­where in pioneer times. Belle's grandfather, John Edington, often preached there, his congregation straining to catch the words delivered in his strong Scotch brogue.

On Sunday evenings the little girl drove with an aunt in democrat wagon the long way around on the north road to Methodist meeting. John and Hannah (Stewart) Edington were a thrifty, self-sufficient couple; he was a shoe­maker, his wife a skilled tailoress. Today there are many local Eddington families, spelled with both one and two ds, but nearly all descended from these pioneers and their four children. Original spelling of the name had one d.

For entertainment the folk of South Phelps held church sociables and home gatherings. The scissors-grinder with his performing monkey made regular calls. Every few months a peddler with small tin trunk or full pack on his back would be a welcome visitor. His pack had straps that passed over his shoulders and hooked to the bundle; there was a black oilcloth cover too for stormy weather. A magician the man seemed to children when he brought out his "Yankee notions," as the stock was called--gum, horehound, mouthorgans, jew's-harps and trinkets along with the needed almanacs, combs, shoelaces, elastic, yardgoods, needles and thread, not to mention the latest news. As early as 1810 DeWitt Clinton, traveling through western New York, wrote: "Pedlars from Connecticutt sell wooden clocks all over this country for $20, and they answer very well. We met tin pedlars in all directions, dickering for feathers" --- for featherbeds and pillows.

Later the tin caravan wagon covered all country roads, its shiny utensils rattling and its big bags of rags and bones swinging at the rear of the wagon. Between the tin-man's visits children gathered bones (for fertilizer) and rags (for paper-making) to earn pennies for sweets; the man weighed their bones and cloth with steelyards. There was one week each summer from 1816 to '40 when tinmen must have beelined from all directions to Phelpstown to set up booths on the Oaks Corners common and hawk their wares for the immense crowds at the trotting races and fair--called in Turner's 1851 History "to Western New York what the State Fair now is to the whole state."

In all probability one of our peddlers was the man who won posthumous fame as "Mr. Split Foot" some years after his murder in a house north of Newark; the Fox sisters supposedly received communications from him, you remember, and modern spiritualism came into being, which birth led to tabletipping and Ouija board sessions in many local homes.

Unwelcome visitors were the tramps who would boldly bum breakfast after a night's rest in the woods or a cozy corner of some split-rail fence--barn haylofts in winter. Most housewives today have never fed a hobo; their meals were once routine. Even in the City of Geneva, 1910 house-wives were complaining of the unusually large number of tramps asking for handouts at their back doors. (Days of Yore, Geneva Times)

In spite of their three churches, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Methodist, some considered the Pine Plainers heathen--as indeed they were in the original meaning of the word. In England all learning was once centered in the cities, in the ecclesiastics there. Out on the heath (open country) the peasants were ignorant of both city ways and religion. So the word "heathen," at first meaning one who lives in the country, came to carry its present connotation.

It has been written concerning the "Pineys" of Central Pines, the cranberry country of Southern New Jersey: "The more intelligent journeyed to town for marriage or important business. The rest bothered with laws and conventions only when convenient." This observation might have been applied to some people in the Phelpstown Pines. Frank Mack wrote of one man's matrimonial maneuvers: "A lawyer over the hill [on Cross Rd.], beyond the pines, was once asked to pass on the validity of a bill of sale by which one man of the colony transferred his wife to another man for and in consideration of one dollar in hand paid." Some husbands may read with an envious twinge of such inexpensive proceedings. A few such trades were achieved without legal pieces of paper, I have been told. Yet these practices should not be considered a folkway--as in Hollywood.

For years celery was the colony's strongest link with the "outerworld," as Mack phrased it. The ditched sand-fields raised and bleached excellent celery plants. Several families made and sold ash splint baskets too. This was their living until big business came. On the 1874 Ontario County Atlas. John Dilman's home on New Pr-emption Road was marked just north of Cross Road. The house has now disappeared, but bushes of deutzia, syringa and roses were bravely blossoming in a tangle south of the large cellarhole when I visited it last summer. Nature seldom admits defeat. John was then (1874) farming twenty-one acres, but his sons (Jack in the old home and Fred on Lyons Road) later cultivated over four hundred, mostly in fruit peaches, apples and cherries. Peaches were their specialty. The Dilman Brothers business was a huge produce enterprise with its main office in Geneva in Castle Street's Dilman Block. They owned more than a dozen farms in the northern part of the area and for a number of years employed Pine Plainsmen almost en masse. Henry Burtis of Oaks Corners was their superintendent, driving from farm to farm in his one-cylinder Brush automobile.

A pleasant autumn memory of my childhood is our annual drive in the surrey down to Dilmans' orchards to buy several bushels of peaches for canning and pickling. I remember the fragrant, heavily laden trees, the softness of the clean, deep sand beneath them. Harvest time was hectic --no isolation then. The Dilmans also raised large acreages of muck celery on the Blue Sky Road, named by them; today it is prosaic Dunham Road. They grew asparagus too in large quantity on the home farm. As the fruit trees became old, replants of the orchards were tried but many did not thrive. There were ruinous freezes--especially one winter when not only buds but the trees themselves were killed. Then there was Georgia competition too. So fortunes were made and at last lost on the Pine Plains sands. Mrs. Jack Dilman was of the Harry Day family. So Oaks Corners knew the Dilmans well.

We have told of the Lyons Road settlement and of Steele's or Patrick's Corner. The Plains' third focal point was at Dobbin's Corners where the New Pre-emption crosses Packwood Road. The two very early, brick Dobbin houses are in Seneca County, as is the Dobbin cemetery. The corner house is the home of Mr. and Mrs. John Estes. Gen. Hugh Dobbin, a Revolutionary officer, was a prominent early land owner, some of whose descendants live in Geneva today. Dobbin's Corners has three other family burial grounds, nearly forgotten--Wooden, Nicholson (farther south on New Pre-emption) and Scott (on high ground in a grove west of Herbert Fox's).

On the northwest corner , in Phelpstown, stood the old square Wetherley house, facing Packwood Rd. West of this the traveler saw the still older Wetherley drovers' inn of which I wrote in "The Corners." This is now the home ot Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Fox. Close by the road once stood a log store which served both whites and redskins. A few small homes were clustered nearby. Still farther west, corner of Welch and Packwood Rds., the Swift inn (later home of Martin Welch) sheltered stagecoach passengers; a bungalow stands on its site.

When the tavern was sold only the sons, Will and John Swift, remained of the family. Will was a telegraph operator. John, an Ichabod Crane of a man, lived in a tiny house north of the inn--alone with his eccentricities. He still owned some land and managed to live with little work. Handy with horses, he doctored neighbors' animals. One winter in the early 1900s when a band of gypsies camped in the Wetherley woods, John had a lively time talking and trading horses with the men until their spring departure. John would talk but never smile. His black cat often sat on his shoulder as he walked along the roads, felt boot on one foot, shoe on the other.

In spite of its two inns on Packwood Rd., as well as the Van DeMark Tavern (corner of Old State Road and New Pre-emption beyond the Pines' north boundary), no tales of regional carousing are told. Certainly peach brandy, cider and perhaps perry (from pears) were made in the homes.
Of course the old-time tavern was never meant primarily for drinking, as today. It was actually a community center. To prove this I cite an 1877 essay given me by Mrs. Frank Buisch of Junius and written by Oliver Phillips, Junius, for a Phelps School English assignment; its subject is Van Demark Tavern built 1826 by Henry Van Demark. The composition tells of the large, white inn itself, the barroom cupboard which once served as West Junius post-office, the carriage house, three horse sheds and two barns, the platform scales for public use in weighing wagon loads. Opposite the inn, across the Old State Road, was a little park in a small oak grove; one venerable tree still stands. Plank seats were fastened between the young trees and became embedded in their wood as the trees grew. There was a swing for children, a space for games. Often there were horse trades, races and card games, turkey shoots and quoit contests. General adjournment to the inn followed for refreshment which always ended with a generous wedge of the famous whortleberry pie. Mrs. Buisch's grandmother made many of these pies during the time her father John Dyson ran the inn. It is difficult to imagine such noisy bustle of activity on the now quiet corner.

One of two Phelpstown inns not yet mentioned was the L. J. Wooden place, west side of Lyons Road, now the second house south of Cross Road. A very old inn on Cross Rd. itself, corner of Hayes Rd., was that of William Howell, at present the property of Mr. and Mrs. Harold Edington. This interesting house has a huge built-in sideboard; its front door faces the east since the road used to fork behind the house and pass it both east and west.

To return to Dobbin's Corners--Pine Plains' first post office with its lettered pigeonholes still hangs on a wall of the east Dobbin house, though no longer official. The Dobbin family is not entirely agreed on this postoffice location, but the tradition persists. Present owners of this handsome home are Mr. and Mrs. George Cryst. Later the office was moved north to Steele's store and called "Steele." For years Phelps village newspapers employed a regular reporter who contributed news from Steele and then from "The Pines and Vicinity."

Today Geneva businessmen like George Cryst, Carl Cole and Leslie Hilton make their homes in the Pine Plains area. Carl Cole owns the old Baker place north of Patrick's Corner on the New Pre-emption. The 1904 Atlas told of Will Baker's "Reliance Truck Farm specializing in asparagus and celery. Three large greenhouses stand near the spacious attractive modern home." The Cooks had greenhouses too on New Pre-emption and Lyons Rd.; they and Will Baker sold to Geneva stores as smaller truck farmers did from house to house. Leslie Hilton, owner of two hundred acres of the Plains' wild woodland, enjoys his new home at Dobbin's Corner, built on the site of the old house where Newt Wetherley and his son DeForest used to live. DeForest bicycled to work in Geneva each day. At night the two made music on their harp, organ or square piano.

The Pines have housed other musicians too. The Baker (not of the Will Baker family) all-girl orchestra used to play for weddings, Grange and Odd Fellow dances in most towns within a twenty-mile radius of Geneva. The four sisters once had a week's engagement at the old Temple Theatre where they were a special attraction. Here they played not only on stage but on the covered outdoor balcony (now gone), performing for a packed Exchange Street. When quite young, the chaperoned girls traveled through Ohio and Michigan, playing in motion picture houses. One sister--now Mrs. Grover Cleveland, Phelps village--played a piano accompaniment for the silent movies, quite a trick as senior citizens recall. The pianist had to keep an eye always on the screen and be quick to match her music with the mood of the picture plot; she could not be playing "Down by the Old Mill Stream," for instance, as the villain was throwing the bound heroine across railroad tracks in front of an oncoming train. Between pictures the other three sisters played violin, trumpet and trap drums on stage with the fourth sister still at the piano.

The Baker girls were Geneva residents during their orchestra days; the family came there from Ohio around 1900. After the pianist married Grover Cleveland (name­sake of his cousin the President, by the way), her husband's health broke and they then moved out to Pine Plains. Mrs. Cleveland was Oaks Corners' substitute church organist during the early 1920s. Today another of the girls, Mrs. Clinton Edington, lives on Welch Road. A resident of Steele Road, the late Herman Tusch was a talented organist and pianist. George Wood, Welch Rd., was a self-educated intelllectual whose interests were politics and chess.

The Pines' railroad should have been mentioned earlier. It was shortly after 1877--nearly forty years later than the Auburn Road's coming-that the Fallbrook line between Williamsport, Penna., and Lyons, N. Y., was opened. This was the Pennsylvania division of the New York Central which had earlier (1876) come as far north as Geneva. The Fallbrook road became widely used by people in the east part of Phelps.

Pine Plains had a station behind the John Edington house (now Henry Eddington's). Prospective passengers hitched their rigs in his yard and walked down his lane to board the train. This station had night and day telegraph operators, but fares were paid on the train. A little to the south, on Packwood Road, was the East Crossing, commonly called the East; this was later a flag stop with Will Patrick as operator. Will Parish used to carry mail from the Fallbrook to Steele's store. The West X, also with telegrapher and station, was on Henry J. Cook's farm southwest of his house. The track crossed Lyons Rd. just south of the Cook home at Skuse's Corners. The purpose of this spur was "to connect the Auburn and Fallbrook Roads to allow through coal and freight trains to avoid the long, sharp curve at Geneva, and get a nearly straight cut across from Nicholson's Corners to the junction below Geneva, thus saving about two miles' run for every such train." (Geneva newspaper) For years the Auburn Branch had a highway crossing on Skuse Rd., a little east of Carter Rd.; this was abolished after young Jack Mclvor was killed there.

With the coming of the railroad, of the highway from Lyons Rd. to New Pre-emption and finally of the automobile, the Pines' isolation was at an end. Earlier the two large woods on either side of Welch Road had kept people apart. Many acres were cut over for timber; these are now mostly second and third scrub growth--comparatively few pines as pines seldom seed themselves. In 1888 Nathan Oaks 1st sold his Pines property, originally two hundred acres of virgin pine forest, to Seymour Fridley. Mrs. Benjamin Lane, sister of Newt Wetherley and mother of Phelps garage man Charlie Lane, sold her timber to Joel Caves. It was across the road from her house that the Cameron tragedy took place; this is detailed in another chapter.

Now the center of the Plains has shifted from New Pre­emption to Lyons Road where the Church of the Open Bible, a store, a radio service shop, three gas stations and a large new commercial building stand ready to serve the public. The footpaths, deep-rutted sand roads, shacks and cabins have disappeared. Present Pine Plains roads and houses are as well-kept as in most rural sections. The area is still sparsely settled as some soil is too light and sandy; there is much more open land, of course, than formerly. In spring the snowy puffs of blossoming shad trees and then the pink of a few azaleas lighten the dark green of the woods. A woman, writing of her travels in 1834, exclaimed over the masses of beautiful azaleas which grew wild in the neighborhood of Geneva.
The newspaper man Mack described the improper, not the proper Pine Plainer. I stress again the point that the Plains have always sheltered both kinds. Mack knew that only the unconventional makes news; hardworking, honest, church-going folk receive no headlines. Solid citizens of Phelps have had their roots among the Pines.

 
SKUSE'S (NICHOLSON'S) CORNERS
 
At the extreme southern edge of Phelpstown on Lyons Road we find Skuse's Corners with Packwood Road running east, the Skuse Road west. Once called Nicholson's Corners, it was settled very early by two pioneer friends, Daniel Nicholson and James Wooden.
Name of the little settlement has been determined by ownership of the southwest corner farmstead with its big brick house. We know little of the Nicholsons who built the house in the 1820s. Three families of that name lived at Nicholson's Corners according to the 1852 County map. John Chase of Carter Road has Nicholson ancestors through the early Denniston family. By 1874 the handsome home was the property of Charles S. Skuse whose son Orville and grand-daughter Mae (Abrams) were the last of the name to live there. The Skuses moved to our town about 1806. Charles was born 1814 near Oaks Corners and married in 1841. Later he bought the Nicholson farm. Charles' sons were John, Orville and Frank; descendants of John and Frank Skuse live in this area.
Now, and for nearly twenty years, the corner farm has belonged to Merlyn C. Phillips whose name may sometime be given to "Phillips' Corners." His stately house is really three buildings erected at different periods--now three rn one. The oldest section is at the east; this part has twin chimneys, each serving three fireplaces--in basement, first and second floors. The basement kitchen's door faces Lyons Road. Its fires have warmed fugitive slaves on their way to safety in Canada; school classes too were once held there. The west part of the house, with one fireplace, was built next. For some years between the two sections there was only a shed into which wagonloads of wood could be drawn to feed the seven hungry fireplaces. Finally this middle shed was made part of the house.
Skuse Road was then Harris Road as far west as the Old Pre-emption. The Harris farm is now the handsome property of Dr. and Mrs. Wilber T. Schroeder. A large lime pit at Carter Rd. corner once burned lime for its land from its own stones.

It was one spring in the early 1790s that the Wooden and Nicholson families, traveling together, left Goshen, Orange Co., N. Y., to make new homes in the wilderness of western New York. As the little procession of people, horses, wagons and oxen passed through Albany--so the story goes-one of the children picked up from the street a pretty pocket handkerchief, not knowing that smallpox was epidemic there. Nearly everyone in the party contracted the disease; they dieted on mush and maple sap, all recovered and reached Phelpstown safely.

James Wooden built his home on west side of New Pre-emption, first house south of Dobbin's Corners, directly east of the Nicholsons' land. Wooden acres extended west to Lyons Road; their deed was issued by Sir Wm. Pulteney--as were others locally--because Phelps and Gorham had then sold to Robert Morris who resold to the English Asso­ciation headed by Pulteney and managed by Charles Wil­liamson.
We believe all of Abigail and James Wooden's ten children were born in Orange Co. On an 1874 map of Town of Waterloo I counted seven Wooden homes on or just east of New Pre-emption. One son, John, had an inn on Lyons Rd; another son, Benjamin, remained on the homestead. Two of James' daughters married Burnettes of the early and prominent Phelps family; one lived on first farm north of the Canandaigua Outlet on east side of Old Preemption Rd., the other on New Pre-emption just north of Bostwick Road. Eleanor Wooden married Archibald Black, a Scotchman, father of John Black and his seven sisters, Lyons Road.

The pioneer James Wooden had fought in the French and Indian War and all through the Revolution. As an older man he was badly crippled with rheumatism caused by exposure during the winter he spent at Valley Forge as one of George Washington's men. There he slept on the frozen ground, wrapped in his blanket often snow covered by morning. His final sleep is in the old family burial ground a little north of his home. Tbe graveyard is really two, separated only by a fence. The lifelong friends, James and Dan Nicholson, were walking through the fields one day when they decided then and there to choose a common burial plot, to remain near neighbors in death as in life. Names of other early families are carved there too; Clise and Pardee men married Wooden daughters. Matilda became the bride of Nathaniel Pardee; Elizabeth Nicholson chose Austin Oaks. The late Dr. Aubrey Wooden, Packwood Rd., was a great grandson of the pioneer James.

The Wooden daughter named for her mother Abigail married Asa Palmer who came to Nicholson's Corners in 1808. It was an unusual route that Asa traveled from Providence to western New York. With heart as stout as that of his ancestor Roger Williams, famous founder of Rhode Island, he made his way by canoe and portages to the head of the Genesee River, then on that stream to Rochester. Here he traded his canoe to Indians, bought a horse and rode on to Geneva. His first log house (at what is now Skuse's Crs.) was used as a shop after a better home was built for his bride. The house of William H. Cook now stands on its site, very near the southern boundary of Phelpstown.

All travelers were made welcome at this Palmer home. There was, for instance, the Scotchman who stopped to rest but stayed a year; one of his many stories was of the dancing school he had attended in Scotland with his friend Robert Burns who became a poet; Once a homeless basket-maker came to the Palmer door asking to work for board and room. So that the man might earn a little cash, Asa allowed him to weave cornhusks into door mats which he sold. Indian squaws sometimes asked shelter and slept on the floor with their papooses. It may have been partly because of all this hospitality that Asa Palmer's spouse, Abigail, became such a thrifty, versatile housewife. She made candles and pickles to sell, passing her special recipes on to her daughter Rhoda along with the big brass kettle that made her pickles brightly green. Abigail skillfully cared for sick neighbors too and could concoct herb remedies.

In middle life Asa became a devout member of the Junius Quaker Church. On the back of his 1851 will--now in Geneva's Museum--Asa recorded thoughts on the Quaker religion with its unusual attitude toward peace and war. Through the kindness of Col. Elias Cost, Oaks Corners, Asa was exempted from town militia duty which, as a Quaker, he could not fulfill. He was a close friend of Jonathan Melvin of Melvin Hill.

Later the Palmer house (then his son Gideon's) was a station on the "underground railway" before the Civil War. The purpose of this railway, you remember, was to aid escaping slaves. The many northern abolitionists conducting the underground were brave men, willing to pay for their pnnciples. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made anyone helping a runaway slave escape liable to a fine of as much as $1000 or six months' imprisonment; also he might have to pay the slaveowner $1000 for each slave so lost. In spite of this law our area had its stations.

A slave stop south of the Palmers was the old Giffing home on Geneva's North Water St. (now Exchange) across from the Catholic Church. The two families were fast friends. The Giffings' great-granddaughters, Mrs. Frank Gilmore and Miss Josephine Johnson of Washington St., have told me the following story. One dark night a tall young negro knocked at the Giffing door and was quickly admitted. Slung over one shoulder he carried a large lumpy bag emitting faint sounds. As everyone stared, he gently lowered the bag and untied its knots. From it he lifted a tiny, brown woman--his mother. Weak and ill, she had been unable to walk and he had no wagon; carrying her in his arms. would have called attention to the two fugitives, so he had improvised. Tbe Giffings cared for the sick woman until she could travel, meanwhile keeping the son hidden. Months after the two had left for Sodus Point, via the Palmer home, the Giffings received a letter from the young man telling of their safe arrival in Canada, of his mother's recovery and their thanks. It was most unusual then for a negro to be literate.

By the time the Civil War began, their children had laid to rest both Asa and Abigail Palmer in the old Quaker cemetery, Nine Foot Rd., Junius. One son and daughter--Gideon and Rhoda--continued to live on the homestead at Nicholson's Corners.

Rhoda J. Palmer was born in June of 1816, the famous year without a summer." That year there were snow flurries in June and frost every month of the twelve. Even grass would not grow to make hay, which had to be brought from south of us. Rhoda and her little next-door neighbor, Eliza Nicholson, became intimate friends--as their pioneer grandfathers had been. Eliza died as a young woman.

Rhoda, an excellent student, attended school in Geneva. She was an artist too having taken art lessons in both Geneva and Albany; some of her paintings are still owned by members of the family. She became deeply interested in the cause of woman suffrage and attended the Women's Rights convention held at Seneca Falls on July 19, 1848--first in world history. Miss Palmer was one of that brave band of original signers of the Declaration of Sentiments at that convention. In the course of her seventy years' work for the cause she often wrote both poetry and prose articles for women's magazines. She was a life member of Geneva's Political Equality Club.

Rhoda Palmer was a friend of Anne Fitzhugh Miller, daughter of Elizabeth Smith Miller, Geneva. Associated with her earlier life were such names as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone and Horace Greeley. She was a suffragist of the first rank, but never a "suffragette." The latter term, in ill repute in this country, was used freely in Great Britain where women reformers were more militant but less ladylike.

Miss Palmer's one hundredth birthday celebration in 1916 received Geneva Times headlines. Interviewed by a reporter, she proved herself still a strong, vital personality. She clearly remembered driving into town as a child to see General LaFayette in June of 1825. She remembered too when the section between Castle and North Streets, North Main and Genesee Streets, was one great meadow. Rhoda lived to see women vote and to cast her own first ballot in 1918 when she was 102. It was not until 1920 that woman suffrage became effective nationally, but New York State had granted it three years earlier.

Miss Palmer died August, 1919, aged 103 years, at the Lyons Rd. home of her nephew Edward Palmer. A large group of suffragists attended the funeral in a body; her bearers were Daniel Bennett, E. G. Bullard, Henry J. Cook, Calvin Dye, Frank Skuse and Edgar Smith. She was buried in the Quaker cemetery beside her parents.

Much has been written of Rhoda Palmer as a Geneva town resident. However, she lived in South Phelpstown for ninety-four years, and Phelps correctly claims her as a bright star in its crown of history. Most of the Wooden-Palmer story was sent me by Helen Palmer Hay Fodera of California at my request. I regret my inability to publish the material before her death.

Helen, daughter of Edward Palmer in whose home her great aunt Rhoda spent the last nine years of life, had interests and a keenness of mind like those of her remarkable aunt. Helen's first school teaching experience was in 1912 at Townsendville, a then flourishing hamlet south of Lodi. On her adventures there Helen wrote an article now in the Paul Townsends' Museum, Trumansburg. 1912 was the winter, she recalled, when Seneca Lake froze completely, and John Townsend on one February day daringly drove his E.M.F. automobile across the ice. Luckily the car was not then living up to its nationwide nickname, "Everett's Mechanical Failure," and John reached the opposite shore safely. Even more extraordinary was the successful crossing of a second local man with his heavy threshing machine. They say that not only skaters but horses and cutters too moved about on the ice that unusual February.

The lake has not since frozen. Capt. Charles Williamson, founding father of Geneva, wrote in 1792: "Seneca Lake does not freeze over." Only a half dozen times in recorded history has Nature contradicted him. The "Watkins Express" told of a hard freeze at its end of the lake in 1885 when "a grand skating carnival" was held there with a thousand skaters on the ice.

On the southeast corner of Skuse's Corners, opposite the big brick house, lives William B. Switzer with his family, as did his father before him. His property was once owned by Alexander Mclntire who came to our town in 1850 and lived just east of Nicholson's Corners for some years. Of his large family, one son became a Congregational minister. Another, John M., enlisted at Phelps in Co. D, 8th Cavalry under Capt. Wm. Frisbie. Captured twice by the Confederates, he did not long survive the hardships of prison life and became one of the ninety Phelps men to whom the Civil War brought death. One daughter, Miss Abby, a Holyoke Seminary graduate, pioneered in mission and temperance work. She moved to Exeter, New Hampshire, where she organized W. C. T. Unions after the war. The old McIntire home was recently bought by Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Millis. When they began to remodel the back part, they discovered to their surprise that the present partitions enclose a complete log cabin-28 feet long, east and west, and 18 feet wide--now revealed after many years.

Nicholson's Corners has always had a school. The log structure where Rhoda Palmer studied was north of the brick house, across the road. That was many years before the brick school on Skuse Rd. was erected. In 1945 this second school closed although District No.6 still exists, and its officers meet annually. The district owns its own bus, garaged in the former school; children are chauffeured to and from Geneva schools by Oscar Patrick.

In the 1890s school officers' names were Booth, Bullard, Condit, Hay, Palmer, Parker, Patrick, Scott, Skuse, Smith and Wooden. Around 1915 officers' names that recurred year after year were Baroody, Cook, Dennington, Dewey, Lutes, Mowers, Phillips and Simpson. W. Deane Cook is the present school clerk.

Today Skuse's Corners has its old houses and new ones too--as well as two garages and two stores. Present and past intermingle; for example, Bill Cook's garage business is housed in the old Palmer blacksmith shop and wagonshed whose hand-hewn, wood pegged timbers are still sound. These pegs, used to fasten framework together when handmade iron nails still expensive, were early called "tree-nails," a word later slurred to "trunnels."


MELVIN HILL

Melvin Hill was once a busy settlement, its Baptist church the center of activity. Historian Turner wrote:
"Here Jonathan Melvin, better off than most pioneers, purchased eight hundred acres in 1795 and soon had large improvements, grain, pork and pasturage for new settlers." His farm is now owned by Chester Gridley. Melvin built too both school and church, the latter costing him $1000. Today a hill and a road keep his name living.

The Religious Society was organized 1798 as reported in a Baptist Council record of that year. Re-established Aug. 31, 1808, it was called "The First Baptist Church of Phelpstown," the old society "having in a measure lost its visibility." I like the old phrasing, don't you? First pastor was Jehiel Wisner. In the 1840s Rev. Calvin G. Carpenter served. Family names of later deacons were Crittenden, Jones, Melvin, Ottley, Peck, Salisbury, Storms, Warner and Webster. In 1876 the building was still being used--probably not regularly--for Church and Sunday school, although its last record is in 1860. The Church's influence declined sharply after half its members formed the Vienna village Baptist Society in 1843. Today its site is marked by a large houlder across the road from the cemetery.

An early Phelps Citizen carried the following article on the Church and the Hill by Curren Calamo, pen name of Laura Carpenter: "The religious country folk came from a radius of six miles to worship in the small, unpretentious Melvin Hill Church. It originally faced south with two entrance doors--one for men and boys, the other for women, girls and small children. Deacons and elderly men sat in the center of the house directly in front of the pulpit, the choir behind them on a low platform. Men and women sat separately after the Quaker fashion, young people in back seats, middle-aged men on the east side, and strangers occupied seats behind the doors." This position given to strangers seems an inhospitable arrangement. The complicated seating copied earlier customs of New England where even bachelors and "ancient maids" had separate sections. Seating them together might have been wiser, to encourage nature a bit. This seating system was called "dignifying the meeting."

Tbe writer continued: "Two box stoves on either side had their pipes running the whole length of the house after the old fasbion of saving all heat. Good hard maple wood was used, cut by the farmers' sons who made a 'bee' to get the meeting house wood." Earliest churches were unheated, you know. Even the introduction of stoves did not spell comfort for a congregation. As late as the 1900s Oaks Corners Church was known to some boy members as "The Holy Refrigerator."

"Entrance to the pulpit was from the west side; the pulpit itself was box-shaped with narrow uncushioned seats on two sides. The Bible rested on a plain, bare desk. Tin candleholders hung at intervals around the room; the small-paned windows had no blinds or curtains. Seats were solid and hard like the builders, made for wear and service. Queer-shaped, home-made boxes, filled with sawdust or ashes, served as spitoons; yet the bare floor was always clean." We need not be startled or shocked at the above statement. Such accessories were quite the order of a day when most men chewed their tobacco. Laura Carpenter remembered one feminine caller at her family home who was a confirmed snuffer; as soon as she seated herself the lady would draw her little box from a pocket and snuff repeatedly as she talked.

"Long rows of sheds stretched to the south and north of the church for comfort of the church-going horses. Among families who worshiped here were the Crittendens, Flints, Gates, Marshes, Ottleys, Pardees, Pecks, Storms and Warners. Deacon Jesse Warner was a founder of both Orleans and Melvin Hill churches. Dr. John Melvin and Dr. 'Melvin Jameson, grandsons of Jonathan Melvin, often visited their grandfather and attended his church. Dr. Jameson graduated in Rochester, preached ten years in Illinois and then became a missionary in Burma. [The Jameson home was that of the late George Long.]

"Martin Holmes became an Ohio Baptist minister, Pat Storms a New Jersey lawyer. As to the Carpenter boys-the older one graduated from medical college at Ann Arbor, Mich., and became a successful doctor, first in Geneva and then in New York City on the medical staff of the city asylum on Ward's Island. The younger Carpenter graduated from Rochester University and went out to Wisconsin to serve on its State University faculty." (by Curren Calamo) The old brick tavern on N. Newark St. was once conducted by Dr. Elon G. Carpenter (diploma 1840), father of Dr. Elon N. Carpenter (diploma 1884)
Out on Melvin Hill his brother Elder Calvin Carpenter, a retired Baptist minister, and his six children were important people. His house is the present home of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Parker. Laura, the writer, became a teacher--preceptress of Elbridge Collegiate Institute, a college of that day. Dr. Calvin H. Carpenter, W. Main St., Phelps, served as surgeon with the 148th regiment in the Civil War. After the war he lived on Lester Road in the house once the home of Dr. Joel Prescott 1st. Later he practiced in Geneva where both he and his eleven year old son died from diptheria during the dreadful epidemic of 1878.

Elder Carpenter himself was something of an individualist. His picture shows him a stern-lipped, bearded patriarch. Born in 1800, he lived to see nine decades of the past century. Like a diplomat he would seldom say "Yes," was cautious about committing himself--a man of few words. The saying was that a man should think twice before trying to trade horses with him; for most he was too clever.

Marsh Comford has a delightful story of him. One afternoon a group of men were gathered at the Hill's blacksmith shop, their rainy day club. They were discussing the meaning of the Biblical word "apocryphal" but disagreed. One man exclaimed, "Here comes Elder Carpenter home from the village--I'll ask him!" Out he ran to stop the wagon and ask his question. "Doubtful. Giddap !!" was the laconic reply. The man reentered the shop to tell the others, "Elder don't know either"--not realizing the elder had given him the correct meaning.

There is another story about a neighbor who came to the Carpenter place to buy a load of straw. After price for a load was agreed on, the man began to pitch the straw, then tread it down, pitch another layer, retread and so on until he had a load so heavy his team was unable to move it. Elder Carpenter was obliged to harness one of his own teams and together the four horses pulled the overloaded wagon to the road. When the man returned later to pay for his straw, the Elder told him, "It will be twice the original amount, for two loads. It took two teams to pull it, didn't it." No one could outsmart the elder.

The Carpenters were a fine family whose name has disappeared from the local scene. Carleton De Vall and his brother are the Elder's greatgrandsons. Carleton has in his possession very old Carpenter birth records and the family coat of arms. First of the name to come over from England arrived in Massachusetts before 1650. The Carpenters were related to Gov. Bradford of Plymouth Colony fame, to Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, and to Sir Walter Scott.

One early Hill family was divided in its church allegiance. Dr. Conway Wing (once student at Oaks Corners Academy, then preacher and college president at Carlisle, Penna.) wrote to the Phelps editor in 1887: "In my boyhood my father (Elder) Enoch Wing attended church at Oaks Corners. Each Sunday morning one carriage went with father and his children three miles to the old meeting house there; the other carriage set out with my stepmother and her children to the Baptist Church at Melvin Hill." Dr. Wing's stepmother was the widow of John Newhall, a wealthy 1796 Phelps pioneer and large landholder.

The late Miller W. Sweet, whose home was the old Storms farm a mile south of the Hill, was a grandson of Deacon John and his wife Mary Storms. The pioneer Storms--as other settlers--knew the hardships of log cabin living--forestlands to be cleared by day, door and window barred by night against wild animals and roving Indians. You remember there was general uneasiness here in regard to Indians before Anthony Wayne's 1795 Ohio victory and again during the War of 1812 when local Senecas became restive. Of the same family was David B. Sweet whose farm on the Hill Road, north toward the village, is marked on the 1852 county map. Elder Enoch Wing was this farm's first owner.

Just north of the Storms place were the farms of Seth and Austin Swan (later Niles'). John Storms and Austin, neighbors of about the same age, died in 1871 a week apart after very short illness. The Geneva Gazette carried an editorial on the deaths of "these two upright citizens, regarded with universal respect. . . . "Mr. and Mrs. Willis A. Buck have owned the Seth Swan farm for forty years. The Swans were of Puritan New England stock. Seth Swan, father of the Phelpstown brothers, was a Revolutionary minute-man who died in the battle of Bunker Hill; his father and grandfather were both Boston chirurgeons (old spelling of surgeon) and attended Harvard.

The Pardees were an early Phelps family. Israel Pardee's sons, Alexander and Harrison, had large farms here one hundred years ago. Elizabeth, a daughter of Israel, married a son of Luther Root in 1844; Harriet, another daughter, married a Gerow and lived at the top of Melvin Hill. Later, two Pardee brothers owned farms near the foot of the Hill; Charles Pardee lived in the east cobblestone house, Howard in the old Melvin home across the road. Mrs. Charles Pardee and Mrs. Edwin S. Kregloh were daughters of Enoch Dimock whose farm joined the Wm. Ottley place on the west. In their retirement years the Edwin Kreglohs lived on the Dimock farm. An Ottley daughter, Lydia, had married a Dimock son, so the Kreglohs and Pardees were related by marriage to Ottleys through the Dimocks.

Three generations of Gerows have lived on the hill road. Oliver Gerow came to Phelpstown from Westchester Co. as a youth; his only son Thomas was born 1832 on their Clifton Springs Road farm. After his marriage to Harriet Pardee, whose mother was a Crosby, Thomas bought the farm now owned by John De Boover. At least four of Oliver's five daughters married local men. There is a tradition of beauty in the family. Mary became the wife of Russell B. Cobb, Louisa married Thomas Crittenden, Jane was the bride of Levi Lord and Hannah married Wm. P. Ottley of the cobblestone house at the foot of the hill. Most families of early Phelpstown had a complexity of local kinship in those days of little travel when neighbor often married neighbor. The Halls, Websters and Marshes were related; so were Marshes and Pardees. Ottleys were kin to the Marshes and Halls. Hosea Marsh came here from Vermont in 1804, built a log house and began to put his acres in order; his son Samuel married Milanthe, a daughter of John Hall.

Next in importance to the Hill's church was its school. A log school was in session there before 1805, soon replaced by a framed building, then the present brick one (now a private home). South of Elder Carpenter's home stood a barrel stave and shingle factory. The John J. Salisbury blacksmith shop was a little north of the crossroads on the east side between the two houses now standing. (There were three Salisbury families on the hill on the 1852 map.) One roof covered both Salisbury shop and cider mill. This mill ran with a sweep operated by circling horses, usually four at a time .Customers furnished their own horsepower by unhitching their teams to turn the sweep. The Hill had a wagon shop too. For some years Sydney Severance was blacksmith. Unusually fond of children, he was regularly visited at his shop by the boys and girls during noon hours and recesses at the nearby school. His home on the top of the hill is now that of Charles Sheldon. On this same 1852 map were three Crittenden places west of the Hill. Earl Crittenden, whose home is the old E. G. Salisbury farm, at one time had occasion to rip up flooring of a large room with no cellar beneath. He was astonished to find tree trunks lying there in the ground, side by side, as they had fallen when the first settler cleared his land.

Winter weekend activities of the community included thrilling bobsled rides down the long hill and square dances in the homes. In late winter the settlement's sugar bushes began boiling down their maple sap. According to Laura Carpenter, the Salisburys, Melvins, Halls, Storms, Marshes and Websters all had sugar camps. Laura wrote of Wm. P. Ottley's place in particular. When a lumber wagon load of visitors arrived from town--as often during the season-they would be escorted from the main road back to "Long Bill" Ottley's camp in sleigh, bobs or stone boat, depending on the weather. Just before Easter dozens of eggs were collected and boiled by the bushel at some sugar camp. Visitors were always welcome; syrup making was a lonesome task for the men who gathered sap and kept the fires roaring.

Much farther north on the Hill Road was the Ichabod Lord farm, today owned by Robert Crough and earlier by his father, William Crough Sr. Since Ichabod Sr.'s son Levi had married Jane Gerow the family became part of the Hill's life. The farm was in the Lord family nearly one hundred years, from 1830. On a high, hand-hewn main beam of the Crough barn are carefully chiseled these printed words: "Built in the Year of Our Lord 1798." On a front windowpane of the house is scratched the date 1867, cut with her mother's diamond by a little Lord daughter who died as a child. The old home, its walls plank-partitioned, was unusually well-built; its wide hardwood floor boards are two inches thick and doublelipped. Mrs. William Howe, Rochester--a daughter of Thomas Gerow's only son, Milton P.--has inherited some of Jane Lord's beautiful antique furnishings.

Laura Carpenter surely revealed in her articles the caliber of the Melvin Hill folk. People there today are fewer but of no less worth.

Orleans

In early times Orleans was a prosperous, thriving community with Clifton Springs--then Brimstone Springs--left far behind it in activity. Mrs. Sidney L Wheat Sr., whose late husband was a great great grandson of the 1795 Orleans pioneer Benjamin Wheat Sr., has compiled many scrapbooks which reveal in picture and in print both the old and new Orleans (before and after the fire). Practically all the following facts on Orleans were given me by Mrs. Wheat and are printed here with her permission.

Her November 15, 1961 Geneva Times article told of the Baggerly family's 1805 arrival from Maryland. The well-to-do Baggerlys, Fergusons and Shekells all brought

slaves as did other settlers from the south. These must have been freed at least by 1826 when New York State outlawed slavery. It was Benjamin Shekell who founded Clifton Springs and built a mansion there in 1800. Conover's History says that the Shekell slaves were well provided with homes when freed--equally true of other Phelpstown slaves, we assume.

Henry Baggerly, a strong Methodist, soon had built a meeting house on the northwest corner of Case and Wheat Roads; its burying ground across the road is now hidden in a little grove of trees. The gravestones of Henry and his wife have been moved close to the road and carefully embedded in cement inside a railed enclosure. After Mr. Baggerly's death a new Methodist church was erected in the village itself about 1835. This fine large steepled building was later sold for use as a Presbyterian Church. In the 1890s services were discontinued, and the ufortunIate edifice was sold to become a fruit evaporator; it burned to the ground in 1902. The settlement's other church, the third Baptist Society of Phelpstown, was established 1819; the very next year a $2000 building arose on the site of the present church. Burned in 1845, it was rebuilt but burned again in the disastrous 1910 fire. So today's Church is the third on the same spot.

One of Mrs. Wheat's scrapbooks contains this authentic and remarkable record of Orleans public buildings and businesses in the year 1845; the list was gathered by an oldtime resident from those still older.

Two Churches--one school--five general stores, two hotels, three shoe shops, three blacksmith shops, potash factory, distillery, tin, tailor and harness shops, wood turning and boot manufactories, a tannery and slaughter house. As for mills--there were one saw and two grist mills. In addition a carding mill near the upper bridge specialized in making monk's cloth.

They say the stores did many thousands of dollars worth of business. One grist mill and the saw mill stood opposite each other on the creek banks; at its end of the dam each had a wooden flume whose deep stream raced toward a wheel. Often in springtime the dam would go out with the ice and have to be rebuilt. Flint Creek at such times never knew its own strength. Phelpstown mill owners frequently lost heavfiy in spring when trees and timbers came floating down to destroy dams and bridges. The old three-and-a-half story, frame grist mill stood until 1930 when fire destroyed it. Around 1900 the village had a wagon, sleigh and harness shop for both manufacture and repair, a corn planter factory, four evaporators and a large vineyard industry.

Orleans had for years its resident doctors--Dr. Lewis, Dr. William Turck and Dr. G. Y. Armington. Its early school had fine teachers--for instance, Richard P. Marvin who became a New York State Supreme Court Justice just as did, many years later, Chief Justice Earle S. Warner, distinguished descendant of Orleans pioneer Jesse Warner of Warner Hill. Richard Marvin, his brothers Erastus and William (afterward a Judge) taught in our town schools in the 1820s and 1830s while they studied law with Thomas Smith Esq., Phelpstown's very first attorney. Dolphin Stephenson, son of Harvey S., an 1800 Orleans settler, practiced law for years at Phelps village in the Eacker block, east corner of Main and Church Streets. Phelps has had many outstanding lawyers, and this tradition continues.

Orleans had a postoffice for 100 years, most of that time with daily mail. This closed in 1934. Its newspaper, "The Asteroid," was being printed by the Geneva Courier office in 1879. Just after the Civil War large slate quarries were opened along the Creek. Some of the slate was ground to make a plastic roofing material.

The prizewinning Orleans Cornet Band, once famous, drove to all sorts of area events as far away as Rochester and Sodus Point. The painted bandwagon smartly drawn by four horses, its uniformed occupants and their paraphernalia must have been a colorful sight. The wagon had seats on each side for about ten men (twenty in all) with room for their instruments in the middle. John Runyan, Eben Potter the whistler, the Rulisons and Blythe boys, the four Lambs (one a drum major), Sumner and Ed Ferguson. drummers, were a few of the band members, Mr. Briglin tells me. Sumner's big bass drum is now in Oaks Corners Museum, the gift of Glenn Sheldon. After the railroad went through, the station waiting room was often used by the band for practice sessions; they played home town concerts on the hotel balcony. Orleans men--musicians or not--used to pile into the big wagon to ride down to Phelps village on town meeting days.

"Henpeck," northeast of Orleans, was really School District 22, established 1829. The old brick schoolhouse stands empty where Schroo Rd joins Route 88. Folk living near the school were said to be from Henpeck. Thereby may hang a long forgotten tale of some unhappy husband. There is another version of the nickname's origin; some say one Hen (ry) Peck was trustee so long that the district took his name.

The fearful fire of April 10, 1910 was discovered by Mr. Jesse Briglin whose family were barely able to escape their house in night clothing. Twenty one buildings were destroyed, including seven homes, the Baptist Church, town hall, warehouses, barns and school. This school was a two-story brick building erected 1882; its upper floor was a hall for both school and public purposes. Joseph Blythe's coal shed with 120 tons of coal caught fire; over half the coal burned and continued burning for days. The hamlet never recovered from this blow.

One of Rev. Anson Titus' historical articles tells the origin of the community's name. First nicknamed Hardscrabble, it received its permanent title at the close of the War of 1812-15 after Gen. Andrew Jackson had won the Battle of New Orleans and so saved a large area from the British. Local admirers of the soldier hero suggested his victory be commemorated by naming their hamlet Orleans. Jackson was then the idol of a large part of the American people. In 1818 he led the Seminole War to its successful end, became Governor of Florida in 1821 and seven years later was in the White House as seventh President of the United States.

An old obituary I recently read was on the death of a daughter of Elijah Goodale and relates to Orleans. I quote: "Her father, Elijah Goodale, a Phelps pioneer, was killed Sept.21, 1816, at the setting of the sun just as he was completing the bridge across Flint Creek at Orleans." Elijah's bridge may have been the first one there. If the creek had to be forded and the steep banks climbed until 1816, little wonder the place was called "Hardscrabble." Elijah was undoubtedly of the same family as Solomon Goodale, Orleans Baptist preacher and 1796 first town clerk of Phelps. The Elijah Goodale listed in the 1867 Directory as owner of an Orleans hotel and carriage shop was probably a son.

Today Orlean's chief claim to fame is its widely known restaurant, The Town Pump, owned by John Fabrizi whose home is the old G. W. Brockway place (later Little) on Waddell Road--a dignified brick house high on its hill. The Brockways were an early Baptist family that owned large acreages on either side of the road.


GYPSUM 
 

Gypsum developed along the Canandaigua Outlet on the townline between Manchester and Phelps. Conover's History relates that Abram Spoor and John Robison were first to settle there in 1797, soon followed by Jacob and John, sons of Garret Vanderhoof to whom one thousand acres from the Phelps and Gorham Purchase were deeded June 5, 1800. Other Dutch families came so that the first name given the hamlet was "The Dutch Settlement;" second name was Plainsville and then Gypsum when it was discovered this state already had a post office named Plainsville.

John Robison, who died in 1807, was a cousin of John Decker Robison, our town's first settler; James, oldest son of John D. Robison, settled early at Plainsville too. In the 1867 Directory eight Robison families were listed as living there. Simon P. Robison was then postmaster and innkeeper.
Simon's brother Jonas was a great grandfather of Mrs. Grayce Lannon who has given me family information. Jonas' wife Maria was a skilled rug weaver sought out by customers from miles around. In early times Vanderhoof acres were on west side of the road to Port Gibson; Robisons owned a square mile on the east side. In 1867 Vanderhoof and Robison men were still farming nearly three hundred acres each. Van Deusens held over three hundred; Clifford J. Van Deusen of today's Plainsville is of the same family.

A little earlier than Vanderhoofs in his pioneering was Adam Van Deusen of Columbia County. His 640 acres were deeded him by Phelps and Gorham Purchase agents in 1798. When he built his home on the present Outlet Road there was no public highway; for some years a mere lane led west to Plainsville. However, the builder wanted to enjoy the sunshine of southern exposure and, true to his name, to have a home near water. The family spelling was originally Van Deursen, meaning the lord of the place by the water (dur). During the Spanish troubles their ancestral castle and other Netherlands possessions were lost.

One hundred years ago the old building was moved back from the road by William J. Van Deusen, grandfather of present owner, and made the rear part of a stately new house. Ambrose L. Van Deusen's property was a little to the west. He was a member of the State Assembly after the Civil War; his will included handsome bequests to both Gypsum Church and Cemetery Association. His nephew Ambrose married Millicent Van Auken of Fort Hill Road and gave his name to Van Deusens Corner (west of Oaks Corners) where he lived and died. The present Mr. Van Deusen is a nephew of the Oaks Corners Ambrose.
 
Gypsum's old stone and plaster tavern house on the west corner was long known as the Vanderhoof Tavern, built by them and now owned by Mr. and Mrs. Walter J. Cummings Sr. Its long porch is paved with great slabs of quarried stone over a foot thick; these stones extend around the corner of the house to its south door, once an entrance to the barroom. The inn has two identical, sidelighted front doors one above the other; the porch roof must have been a second floor balcony. As you stand in the lower hall--which used to double as a dining room for coach passengers--imagination reconstructs the busy life that once moved through its rooms. At your right is the old kitchen, its fire­place and Dutch oven (now closed) filling nearly the whole north wall of the room. The bar beckons at your left. Behind it is the seclusion of the sitting room, logs burning in its elaborately-framed fireplace. All other rooms have fireplaces with plain mantels, most of them closed at present. In the upper hall five folding doors on each side open up the bedrooms to make a ballroom the full width of the house; there is an enclosed bench where the musicians sat as they played. Stagecoaches used to ford the Outlet, lumber up the hill to the inn and on toward Port Gibson and Palmyra. The regular route from Vienna to Palmyra was on McBurney Roard to Gypsum and north.

As soon as the inn was finished in 1831 Jacob Vanderhoof, then married, moved into it; born there were his sons Abram, William and Peter. Peter had four sons of whom one was Macomb, father of Mrs. Albert Greenwood, Phelps. Another of Peter's sons was Dr. Fred D. Vanderhoof. Mr. Fred C. Vanderhoof, Gifford Road, is of the same family. Descendants of Peter and Margaret Vanderhoof have in their interesting ancestry several prominent Palatine families of the early Mohawk Valley. McIntosh, in his 1876 County History, tells us the Vanderhoofs had come to Phelpstown in wagons from Morris Co., New Jersey, by way of Oneida, a journey of five weeks. Their first log home had only blankets in its doorways; there were no boards for doors. A loaded gun was kept handy for use against intruding wild animals; no fresh meat was ever kept over­night in the house as its smell would attract beasts. All the family's table articles, even plates, were of wood and home­made--called treenware. Their corn was pounded in a hollowed stump to make meal; their groceries were bought at Geneva until John R. Green opened his Oaks Corners store in 1803. This description of daily living would have applied equally to other Phelps pioneers.

Just across the road from Gypsum's old tavern to the east is a house (also Cummings-owned) that was used as an annex when the big house was full. It was the postoffice too, where mail was received three times weekly; During the Civil War a large flag--nine by eleven feet--used to fly between these two corner houses; it was hung by ropes from the chimneys and floated above the north road. Designed and made in 1861 by the women of Gypsum, its thirty four stars were arranged in points on their blue field. The flagmakers had these family names: Bryant, Cobb, Follitt, Fries, Harmon, Mosher, Robison, Van Deusen and Vanderhoof. Mrs. Homer Dymond is in possession of this historic flag on which her grandmother, Sarah Robison Fries, sewed. Sarah's home was the Maple Tree Farm (Outlet Rd.) which gave its name to the highway (now Smith Road) which runs through its fields. The long line of maple trees, planted by young Sarah and a brother, stands a living monument to them. John Decker Robison was Mrs. Dymond's great great grandfather.

Gypsum has its guota of cobblestone structures--a church, (former) school and three houses. The largest, of medium-sized lake-washed stones, is the old Baptist meeting house on west side of the north road; this was erected about 1834 on land given by the Vanderhoofs. Jacob and Peter Vanderhoof, the Robisons and others hauled its stones from Lake Ontario. The church's gallery above the auditorium was later made into a second floor. This historic building is now the home of Mr. and Mrs. Crawford Kline. It was 1812 when the "Second Baptist Society of Town of Phelps" was formed there and met in homes--usually at Jonas Robison's next to the mill--until the church could be built. James Robison, over forty years a devout member of this church, was the first person baptized there by Elder William Roe, first pastor, and the last person for whom the aged man preached a funeral sermon (1858).

A stone blacksmith shop stood south of the church for years. Across the road is a most attractive home, once the schoolhouse, erected 1838 according to an early article; its walls are beautifully faced with unusually tiny and uniform cobbles. Not only stone buildings but miles of dry stone walls were built by our pioneers, as we know. I have read somewhere that the standard for a good day's work was a rod of stone wall laid by two men with stoneboat and ox team.

Plaster was first found in Phelpstown about 1812; large beds at Gypsum were soon opened in the Outlet banks and the rock carted from quarries to a mill (presumably Robison's) long since disappeared. Across the west road from the tavern was a second mill built of stone about 1820, once a knitting mill, then saw and cider. It ended its working days grinding grists and was torn down in the 1930s. The ruins of its wooden flume which carried water from the now empty mill pond to the waterwheel were long visible.

The hamlet and surrounding area must have had a pleasant social life. Of Abram Spoor's five children four became singing teachers. Gypsum's singing school was a popular activity. Military training days were social events as well as gay parties at the inn and private homes. Mrs. Greenwood's grandmother, Mrs. Georgianna Plass, born 1845, once wrote in the Newark newspaper of country fun near Fairville in the sixties--of spelling and quilting bees, church socials and home dancing. She included a delightful detail on lighting. Oil lamps were not yet much used, candles still the custom. Whenever there was a dancing party each girl was asked to bring a pair of candlesticks, for no family, unless rich, had enough sticks to brightly light an entire house. The girls would vie to see who could bring the prettiest set. Wouldn't you like to have seen those silver, brass and colored glass candlesticks standing in a row ready to be lighted with rolled paper spills? Did you know that guests were once expected to bring along their own table silver?

On the Outlet Road east of Gypsum lies its large and well kept River View Cemetery on land originally given by the Robisons--the last resting place of many Millers, Robisons, Rockefellers, Scutts, Vanderhoofs, Van Deusens and others.
 


UNIONVILLE

"Unionville, once a busy locality, has lost its primitive importance," the 1893 County History informed us. During the 1830s and '40s the mills, two inns, two stores, a blacksmith and wagon repair shop, tailor shop and shoe store were all in successful operation there--earlier a paper mill and a carding mill as well. These mills under the hill were well supplied and run by water from a dam about twenty five rods up the Outlet, conducted by a raceway down to the mills.

Business men of the community in its heyday were Moses H. Swift, Benoni P. Beardsley, Edwin Beardsley, George W. Swift, Isaac Pinckney, Wm. Whiting and Eben D. Langdon (of the shoe store). Mr. Scribner kept the brick inn in early years. There were a dozen or more frame houses and a schoolhouse too. The latter stood on the site of the home of Mr. and Mrs. LaVerne H. Peake whose deeds describe it as District No. 4.

Unionville was then a trading center for all country folk east, south and north of it. West of the hamlet people went to Vienna village. The settlement was named "Unionville" by the Swifts as a slightly humorous way of trying to harmonize its people. The ambitious business men of Unionville and the Viennas (East and West) were often at odds as their interests clashed. (Rev. Titus)

Moses Swift, from Waterloo, was Unionville's real promoter. He built both brick houses, the storehouse and mills; the east house was early occupied by Curtis Rogers. Moses ran the mills, built 1839, and lived in the present Russell Hicks house built 1825. The east brick house was erected 1824, or a little earlier, but did not please Moses' wife, a former Geneva girl. So Mr. Swift--obviously a moneyed man as well as an obliging husband--built for her a second home beside the first, larger and more elaborate. The young wife died soon after moving into it. Moses also conducted a general merchandise store in the brick building at the top of the hill overlooking his mill. Here a large sign promised: "Swift's--Cash for Wheat." An early picture of the store shows a two-story building with a one-story thirty-foot ell on the east. Later Benoni Beardsley kept both store and inn until he moved to Elmira; then Isaac Pinckney took over the store and ran it along with his mills.


Fred VanDermark once lived in the big brick house and then Isaac Pinckney who sold it in 1868 to Nahum Cobb, great grandfather of Russell Hicks, present owner of the Swift houses and old brick store. Nahum's father, George Cobb, had come early to Phelps from Conway, Mass., and settled on the present Adsitt farm, Maryland Street Road. Nahum's grandfather, George Sr., had served in the Revolution. In 1849 Nahum bought the Gates place, Lester Road, (now owned by Leon Adams) and farmed there until his purchase of the Unionville home where he spent the rest of his life. At Nahum's 1880 death his son Russell B. Cobb--with his Wife, Mary Gerow Cobb--moved from Lester Rd. to Unionville. Russell Hicks is Russell Cobb's grandson, so the family has already lived nearly a century in the beautiful home Moses Swift built for a bride destined only to die in it.


Bricks of the Unionville structures were all handmade from nearby clay and sand mixed with water to the right consistency by the treading of oxen and horses in places scooped in the ground. Lime for the mortar was burned in a kiln just south of the Hicks house. Nearly every Phelps farm had its own small kiln; a few were commercial enterprises.

Unionville no longer has a Four Corners; its north and south road is gone. There were once bridges across Outlet and tail race, and the road north from the mills across the flats was well traveled except in spring flood time. The south public highway beside York Inn (later called Hicks Rd.) connected the two Cobb farms, passing on the way the property of Ishmael Lane, now that of Leonard Hol
brook. Here lived the beautiful Lane girls remembered as party belles; both married Pittsburgh men.

About Unionville's inns--History has a way of repeating itself. Yorkshire Inn (I remember the old lettering on its front), a very early stage coach stop, was for some years a private home but is now again serving the public under the successful ownership of Mr. and Mrs. James Malone. Its large ballroom extended across the front of the inn's second floor with bedrooms back of it; later Baptist church socials were held there. On the third floor were four smaller bedrooms--the a, b, c, and d rooms, so lettered at their doors. The other inn was a displaced dwelling. The Squire Granger place had as its second owner Jacob Farr who moved the original large wood farmhouse to Unionville and himself built the unique plaster house and barns today owned by Miss Louie Ross. The Granger house became the village's west tavern, now the home of Edward Schleimer. It used to be much larger before a back section was removed; its front porch had a balcony.

Both taverns must have been full on race days. "Prior to the days of the railroad and for several years afterward this race course [on Route 96] enjoyed national popularity, and southern runners were brought to the spot where racing cards would be enjoyed daily for weeks at a time during the summer. The finish line was down in front of the old York Inn, and onlookers at the store would have an unobstructed view of the horses coming down the main stretch." (From 1934 Geneva Times) Nahum Cobb, as a youth, was one of the jockeys.

And then came the railroad in 1841. Since mills and store were on the north side of the road, the first line of track from the east crossed the main road just before it reached the four corners. The mills had a sidetrack too. The brick store building became both freight and passenger depot. Trains stopped regularly. A heavy safe inside the store was used as the local bank.

In spite of all this activity there were times when the host of the brick inn was not busy enough to please him. So one dull day he candy-bribed the haif-witted switchman to throw the switch at a wrong moment. Engine and cars left their track and piled up in the middle of the highway. It took all day and extra men to restore order, and the workers seemed hungrier and thirstier by the hour. The innkeeper was surprised that evening as he counted the day's record receipts. The moron won the bag of candy but lost his job.

The railroad was not especially welcome because its noise and tracks across the public road near each end of the race course disturbed the running horses. Soon railroad officials were pressured into moving the tracks to their present place. They say that Commodore Vanderbilt himself came to Unionville to investigate the sportsmen's complaints. After that the races began to decline although winter races were run on the Outlet ice west of Fridley's mill and probably at other spots. A "Days of Yore" column in the Geneva Times contained this item of fifty years ago (1910): "An ice carnival on the Canandaigua Outlet at Phelps is scheduled for tomorrow. Horse racing will be the principal attraction."

The three interesting stone houses on Route 96 east of Unionville were once closely associated with the hamlet. The west one, the Frederick L. King residence, was built in 1848 by Benjamin F. Hawks and later known as the Miller Adams place. This gabled house with its Gothic-type windows has unusual charm, outside and in. Its very small uniform cobblestones were brought from Lake Ontario shore and sorted for size by dropping them through a hole in a board.

The builder of this house was born 1799 in Vienna's first inn then owned by his father, Major Eleazer Hawks. Eight years afterward the family moved to the William Gainey farm where they burned lime commercially. B. F. Hawks continued this business on his Unionville farm. The rows of cobbles in his house walls were set in mortar made from stone gathered and burned on his own farm and all of it paid for by the product of his kiln. Truly it was the house that lime built, as his granddaughter of Boston, Mass., wrote me recently. B. F. Hawks later erected the Marsh Comford dwelling on W. Main Street. Adam Hawks, founder of this family, opened our country's first permanent iron mine in 1643; his mine furnished the ore for John Winthrop's 1645 ironworks at North Saugus, Mass.--today a tourist attraction. Hawks were killed in the Deerfield Indian massacre. Eleazer and Cephas pioneered in our town; they were brothers of Martha, wife of Jonathan Oaks.

The distinctive, older house next to the Kings' is the property of Mr. and Mrs. Edgar K. Hicks. Its walls are more than sixteen inches thick, its original door latches and hinges still intact. On the wide pine plank flooring stand many pieces of heirloom furniture. Its stone barns are most unusual; the group of buildings is a combination of field and cobblestones. The third stone house is the large and stately mansion built of native cutstone by Gen. Philetus Swift in 1816; a tablet set in the eighteen-inch thick front wall confirms this date. It is now the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lansing S. Hoskins. Were the General to return and once more enter his beautiful front door, he would be prouder than ever of the interior of the house he habited so long ago.

The row of stone houses, the dignified brick buildings of the hamlet itself, Miss Ross's unique plaster structures all make a stretch of road which tourists admire and recall. My main source of information on the old Unionville was an article by Lysander Redfield published in an 1895 Phelps Citizen. Russell Hicks too has given details.

COXSACKIE

An 1895 Citizen issue printed reminiscences of Buren Sherman, ex-Governor of Iowa and once a Phelps boy. Among other matters he wrote of Coxsackie. "Northeast of Vienna on the Outlet stood a mill, blacksmith shop, school and quite a cluster of dwellings built up principally by the Cook family and so called in compliment to them." Governor Sherman implied here that the early spelling of the little settlement's name was "Cooksackie;" it seems more probable that whoever named it was thinking of Coxsackie on the Hudson. The name comes from an Indian word meaning the hooting of owls and was pronounced "Cook-sock-y" by the early French. "In the forties the Ira Cooks emigrated west to Iowa near the present Davenport. There were four brothers in the family. William became a county judge, John P a noted lawyer. Young Ira moved to DesMoines where he built up successful real estate and insurance businesses. The fourth brother, Ebenezer, made banking his career; he became the most prominent banker in the state and a leading financier in the whole Mississippi valley."

In the 1880s Buren Sherman revisited Phelps; Ira Cook accompanied him. There were receptions and speeches. On one such occasion Buren was presented an axe made by his father and bearing the stamp of P. L. Sherman; the father had been a Phelps axe maker fifty years before. This axe was given by John 0. Phillips Esq., of Junius.

The land of Elisha Granger once extended north to White Road, Coxsackie. His sons, Pierce and Elihu, arrived here five days after first settler John Decker Robison, the records tell us. Pierce Granger was preacher at the first Phelps Methodist meetings held at Granger schoolhouse, White Rd. He was the man responsible for early organization of our town's preaching station on the Seneca Lake Circuit about 1793. So Phelps Methodism began at Coxsackie. The present brick building-no longer a school-has a tablet above its door: "Coxsackie Dist. No.21-1874."

It was just south of the school in a little cove (now disappeared as time has changed the Outlet's banks) that John D. Robison is said to have first landed. However, it is generally believed that he built his log cabin on the south bank. Mr. Charles White used to fish in this cove, finding there so many flint chips and points of unusual hardness that the spot must have been an Indian campsite and workshop for making tools. Mr. White found on his farm over a bushel of arrowheads and a fine stone mortar and pestle, among other artifacts. The White farm--recently sold by Mr. and Mrs. Francis Eighmey--was earlier Granger land; Mr. White's maternal grandmother was a Granger before her marriage.

Coxsackie once had two mills .The mill site still noticeable was that of Oliver Granger's plaster mill; Oliver lived at the top of the hill on the east line of the Elkanah Young farm, White Rd. F. Root's carding mill (on an 1859 map) stood a little east of the Granger building, both on the Outlet's north bank.

This same Francis Root wrote of an interesting Indian encampment in a different part of the town. About 1840 Francis and a cousin fresh from Yale explored what Francis' father Luther had always called "the old fort lot." This was a bluff on the south side of the outlet, just west of Eacker's Bridge (now Rockefeller's), Newark Rd. Here the two found one large space of dark soil and, in a circle around it, five smaller dark spots--indicating a large wigwam with five smaller ones. They also discovered pottery, arrowheads and a well-carved pipe whose bowl was an eagle's head. In 1882, historians Titus and Conover (of Geneva) confirmed their findings. These early people on Phelps soil were puny parts of a long procession, as we are. Someday machines not yet invented may unearth the ruins of Phelps village, and men from other worlds may puzzle over our civilization--or lack of it.

The history of Oaks Corners I have already told in the book, "The Corners." All our country communities have declined; their past had more color than their present. But it is good to remember that this is the way it once was in our town.
 

MILLS
 

AS TOWN HISTORIAN, I have been asked to make a fresh review of the mills of Pheips. In pioneer days the wonderful waterpower of both Flint Creek (called Flint River on century-old county maps) and the Canandaigua Outlet was realized and utilized. Mills lined their banks. An old definition of a river is "any stream that can grind the grain that grows along its banks." Flint River could and did for many years.

Four very early grist mills within Vienna itself (Phelps village) were the William Hildreth establishment in the west end, the Leman Hotchkiss Eagle Mill (which gave Eagle St. its name), the Seth Deane Mill (Margrove Dairy Bar site) and Thomas Edmonston's 1819 building at north end of Exchange St. At this same location stood the later Peter Garlock cider mill and brandy distillery, started 1819. E. j. Ross ran his mill on Mill St.

The Seth Deane building was sold for a land plaster business. Deane's son built a larger mill, the "Farmers' and Mechanics'," then sold to Frederick Vandermark who razed it and erected in 1834 the fine stone structure known in later years as Howe's Mill, southwest of Maslyn Super Shoppe.

In 1804, as a boy of nineteen, Frederick--son of Lodewick Vandermark, millwnght--had built and operated one of the best sawmills in Phelpstown. This was on the Outlet's west bank on the Dewey West farm, Fisher Road--then Vandermark land. You could still see the race bed before the Thruway. The saw did its last work there in 1860 when it cut planks for the bridge nearby to the north. Another sawmill is marked on the 1852 map on the old Dillingham place, Route 96, where the outlet turns north, A little farther north, on Charles Van Auken's land, a saw mill, mint distillery and flour mill stood close together.

Just outside the village limits on the Outlet to the north, Wm. Dickinson--with Cephas Hawks and Theodore Bannister--erected in 1799 the large flour mill known for years as the Exchange Mills. Those were the days when Genesee flour made from wheat of the rich Genesee Country, was the finest brand in world markets; opening of the west ended milling supremacy here. The Exchange Mills were sold to Bartle, Norton and McNeil who did an enormous business there for over twenty years--the largest produce and milling business in Ontario County. Their brick store (Bartle, Hotchkiss and McNeil, begun 1811) was really a department store; their mills bought and ground immense quantities of wheat and corn, then sent the grain by teams to Albany, the nearest market. They were also making potash and whiskey.

All three men were active in advocating construction of the Erie Canal. About 1824 James Bartle moved to Lockville (East Newark) where he built store and warehouse and represented his firm at the canal on its 1825 completion. This warehouse became the market and shipping place for miles around. Mr. Bartle was a born leader, important in business, military, Masonic and religious affairs. He is said to have given the village of Newark its name; passing through Newark, N. Jersey, on a stagecoach journey, he had been impressed by its beauty and the plan of its streets. Newark, N. Y., had little existence until after the canal.

The hard times of 1837 caused the mill firm to fail three years later, a great blow to people of our area. James Bartle remained at Newark; Isaac Norton moved to Wisconsin. David McNeil, oldest member of the firm, was heartbroken by the failure, rapidly went into a decline and died at Vienna (Phelps) in 1841 not long after his marriage to Sarah Young, sister of an earlier Elkanah Young. An old article on the McNeils mentions Sarah as "unusually accomplished"--perhaps in music. After the Judge's death she became the wife of Capt. Albert Banta, honored in the naming of Banta Street.

Later the McNeil mill was bought by a Mr. Affleck who sold about 1888 to Seymour and Philip Fridley. The Fridleys' Ontario Mill made sixty barrels of flour daily. By 1907 Seymour Fridley, successor to Fridley Bros., was "Dealer in Lumber, Flour and Feed." Many remember the building as the Fridley Saw Mill whose foundations are yet visible; it burned in 1919. The Fridleys' first large purchases of timber were tracts in Pine Plains. Joel Caves too bought logs in Pine Plains for his mill and lumber yard. Today this Pearl Street business is owned by his son J. Walter Caves who, with his son, has a second large yard at Newark. Their work is done by electricity. Stone ruins in the Creek south of Dr. Pulver's home were once a saw mill too--William Hildreth's. A man told the doctor recently that his grandfather used to wash his sheep in the raceway there each summer.

Discovery of plaster in Phelps was made about 1812. Luther Root's plaster mill used to stand south of the Fridley site across the Outlet. This mill was widely known; teams would come from as far away as Cattaraugus Co. loaded with lumber, shingles or wheat and would return home loaded with plaster. The building finally fell into decay. Farther west, on the Outlet Road, were the Empire Mills of Philander Mott and the one at Gypsum. In 1893 Albert D. Miller owned the Empire plaster mill by the bridge at north end of Stryker Road. Just east of this stood Ford Burgett's grist mill, originally Miller-owned. Also on the Outlet, a little west of Vienna Rd., Charles L. Bigelow (later Clark Eros.) had a planing mill and woodworking shop; this burned around 1900.

The beds of gypsum by the Outlet banks from Vienna to Gypsum were once of considerable importance. This rock was ground to powder for use in making plaster; today's plaster-board is made of gypsum and felt. The best old-time mortar was made from burnt lime, sand and cowhair--so hard it would never crumble. This was used on outside walls of cobblestone houses; the softer gypsum rock made interior wall plaster. Plaster of Paris is calcined gypsum, so called because the finest quality was found near Paris, France.

Gypsum was used to some extent in improving quality of soils, but lime was preferred. A Scottish farmer visiting this State in 1833 recorded in his journal that lime cost nine cents a bushel and gypsum fifteen, the latter being used agriculturally only for clover and corn. Later farmers preferred gypsum for general agricultural use as lime sometimes tended to burn crops. A handful of gypsum to a hill of corn was their rule. Many a ton was sent out to world markets. As early as 1820 trade in plaster was brisk, between the Genesee Country and Susquehanna River towns in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Phelps loads were hauled to Geneva, shipped on Seneca Lake through the Chemung Canal and feeder to Elmira, the Chemung River and on south down the Susquehanna.

Limestone (a harder rock than gypsum and of slightly different chemical content) was calcined in wood-fueled kilns to reduce it to quicklime, then ready to sweeten land as soon as applied. Raw crushed gypsum or lime needed repeated frost action to soften and crumble it still finer before it could actually become part of the soil. The pioneers were eager; they could not afford to wait. Besides, both fuel and labor were plentiful and cheap. Many local farmers had their own small limekilns. Some engaged in the business commercially. For instance, the kiln of Major Eleazer Hawks--whose family owned the William Gainey farm, Lester Rd., from 1807 to 1848--is still visible back in the woods. Ambrose Horning had a large kiln too, probably commercial-- now filled with stones.

The Gainey farm kiln is an impressive, rounded structure roughly twelve feet high, fifteen feet wide, built of large, oblong stones to make a huge chimney. Plainly marked is the roadway where wagonloads of stone were drawn up a rise of ground to the top of the kiln. (Near it an interesting, stone-walled, square enclosure outlines the water rights of the adjacent Springbrook Farm to the spring.) Kilns were usually erected against a side hill so they could be filled from the top with alternate layers of stone and wood for fuel. The height gave good draft.

Over in Wayne .County, close by the side of Lime Kiln Road where it ends on South Geneva Rd. near Wallington, stands by far the tallest kiln in the area, twenty feet wide, thirty-five feet high. In it stone from nearby Quarry Rd. was burned and shipped by the Erie Canal. The hamlet of Thornton Corners--now vanished--grew up around it. Today on Quarry Rd. stands the General Crushed Stone Company's Sodus plant. At one edge of the modern quarry rise the ruins of an ancient kiln--a story in stone of the old and the new, a visible reminder of changing times. The Gen, Crushed Stone Co. has ten industrial plants, three of which become agricultural during winter months, making pulverized lime as a sideline. The Sodus plant is one of these three.

The 1860 New York State Gazetteer informed us: "Gypsum crops out along the banks and is extensively quarried along the Canandaigna Outlet in Phelps. The water limestone, next above, is quarried for waterlime and building stone."--as it was by the Bloomers and MeBurneys locally. By 1860 limeburning seems to have become an extinet state industry, although I have read that in Wisconsin, for example, it was still being done on a large scale during the early decades of this century. Today Phelps limestone is quarried and crushed by electrically-powered machinery, as at the Oaks Corners plant, for use in making concrete.

To return to early mills-- William Hildreth's Red Mills (flour and feed) were later those of Josiah P. Champion, great-uncle of Miss Arlene Champion and her brother Leslie. They were located where the Phelps Cement Products plant now stands; part of the old structure is still in use. Another section of the mill building was a slaughter house where sheep were killed for hide and tallow, not for meat. A nickel could buy a fine leg of lamb there one hundred years ago. One Phelps man remembers seeing a half-mile of old stone wall completely covered with sheep pelts drying in the summer sun.

Mrs. Ridley has written of Phelpstown's business connections with the early Erie Canal. This connection proved disastrous one year to Isaac Pinckney of the Unionville Mill. Isaac had bought heavfly of western wheat to grind and deliver to Albany by the canal. However, an unusually early and severe frost closed the waterway and left him with tons of flour far from market, He tried hauling it with teams, but this already out-of-date method proved so slow and roads so poor that its transportation cost the miller more money than he received in Albany for the flour. The Pinckney Mill was forced to close. In 1862 Isaac Pinckney and Son were dealing in dry goods and groceries on West Main Street. James B. McLean was running the Unionville Mill in 1874.

Again in Pheips vfllage--the plaster rock mill of Oliver Granger, end of North Wayne St., was afterward used as a paper mill; this burned one night in 1874. Two years later Richard A. Willing erected his Star flour and feed Mill on the same spot, tvhere creek and outlet meet.

Only twenty nine years old at that time, this enterprising young man had an interesting eariier history. His ancestors had been millers in Old England; Mrs. Daniel D. Decker, his grand daughter, has a picture of the ancient family mill. Orphaned little Richard traveled from Devonshire, England, to Canada when he was only four, to live with step-relatives. In 1865 a boy of eighteen, he came south to New York State with exactly one dollar in his pocket. His first job was driving a mule team on the Erie towpath, but each Sunday morning when church bells rang their invitation and he had to continue work, the earnest young Presbyterian was so ashamed that he soon quit the canal. To his Canandian relatives Richard wrote: "I've found God's country, and here's where I'm going to stay." God was a living presence to this man who, in over forty years, missed night and morning Sunday service less than half a dozen times.

At Camillus Richard ran a mill for two years, then moved with his wife to Phelps where he rented the old Howe Mill. Unable to afford a horse and wagon, he delivered small orders with a wheelbarrow while his young wife minded the mill. In two years he had saved enough money for first payments on the start of his own venture, the Star. When opportunity came later to buy the Unionville concern, he was criticized for his boldness in so doing. Business was precarious then as well as now; Pinckney's failure at the same mill was still remembered. However, Richard firmly declared, "If I can make a living on one mill, I can make two livings on two mills." And he did. His son, Robert J. Willing, ran the Unionville business (75 barrel capacity) for years, the father owning both. At Richard Willing's death in 1910, Robert took over the Star Mill. This building was razed in March, 1952.

The Unionville property was sold 1912 to Alonzo S. Rathbun who operated it until it burned to the ground during a lightning storm in 1922. There is a tradition of milling in the Rathbun family too. Alonzo's father, Lewis. U. Rathbun, was a miller and millwright who sold and helped install most rolls in the smail mills throughout New York State when they changed from the old stone to the new roller type. Mr. Alonzo Rathbun retired in 1958 after seventy years of milling. Today Phelpstown has only one miller, Richard  L. Rathbun, a son of Alonzo whose grist mill is in Seneca Falls. The Rathbun house was once the home of the second Leman Hotchkiss, peppermint king, son of Leman the pioneer miller. I am told that only five flour mills now operate in the state outside the city of Buffalo; they are at Penn Yan, Auburn, Baldwinsville, Churchville and Blossom Rd., Rochester.

East of Unionville once stood Philetus Swift's flouring and saw mills operated by the General and his successor Henry Swift until 1858 when Obed and Jesse Barlow bought a half-interest. In 1870 they purchased the other half. Barlows and Swifts were related by marriage. Barlow Roller Mills (flour, saw, lath and cider), behind Harold Fisher's home, had a capacity of fifty barrels df flour per day. Its saw mill was attached. Great piles of logs usually covered the ground from mill to public road; the sawed lumber was piled behind the mill.

I well remember childhood trips there with my Grandfather Shear and litfle cousins to buy middlings for his several pigs, always named after us children. On each visit we would drink deeply from the spring that flowed out of the hillside by the mill; even on hot summer days the water was icy cold. This spring was fitted with a ram which noisily forced the water uphill to a horsetrough and to the three nearest houses--the Barlows', their tenant house (now gone) and the Swift home. Most farm rams have now gone the way of the once common windmills.

The Swift-Barlow raceway, still visible, was an unusually long one because of the mill's distance from the Outlet across the fields. The race was a canal, hand-dug from mill to millpond, made by damming the outlet waters some distance above the mill. The raceway's current once drove the deep-set turbine water wheels that turned the stones that ground the farmers' grain.

South of Phelps village Wm. Van Vrankin's grist mill (Seager farm, Griffith Rd.) was marked on the 1874 County Atlas. It must have been only in springtime that he had sufficient waterpower. Today a shallow brook, bordered by willows, winds its picturesque way past foundation ruins. The Jabez and Joseph Blythe Mills (grist, flour and saw) on the Creek at Orleans were flourishing when Conover wrote of them in 1893.

On the Mills of Phelps this is only a partial review of other historians' recordings. There were so many, of all kinds; they changed hands, burned or were torn down so often that even the complete picture seems a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing. For instance, young Mr. Root sold his father's mill to a group of four men who soon separated and brought other mills into being. In 1867

Stoutenburg, Root & Co.'s plaster mill was owned by Isaac Stoutenburg, Francis and Austin Root and James Snow, local dentist. Confusing, isn't it?

The two earliest mills in this area were outside our town. Oliver Pheips himself had a gristmill built In 1791 on the Outlet half a mile above Shortsville; this was run by Samuel Day, Early in the year 1794 Bear's Mill was erected at South Waterloo; its frame was raised on a Sunday by churchmen from Geneva at the request of the minister who officiated that day at a Geneva service. (Conover)

Early Phelps milling and malting were truly big business. The 1867 Directory listed for Phelps five flouring, one paper and two plaster mills besides seven stone malthouses. Some names well known in malting over the years were Crothers, Duckinfield, Gibson, Howe, McIntyre, Nester and White.

Phelps village boasted much more business too. The afore-mentioned directory reported a tannery, an iron foundry, manufactories of agricultural implements and steam engines. Other factories turned out rakes, axes, barrels, trunks, sheepskins, cheese, windmills, log pumps, tin and sheet iron, cigars, boots, mittens, soap and yeast cakes. There were coopers and blacksmiths, of course harness and carriage makers. It was not unusual for one business to have a number of owners and vice versa. Charles Vandermark had seven partners in his yeast cake company. Dr. John Q. Howe, on the other hand, helped manage his grist and plaster mills, malthouse and brickyard in addition to practicing medicine.

Only fifty years ago Phelps had a distillery, cider mill, boiler works, stove foundry, tin, crate and agricultural implement manufactories, a creamery, one saw mill, four flour mills and three sauerkraut factories. Today Phelps businesses are fewer but larger. One is the largest sauerkraut factory in the world.

Peppermint

THE PHELPS PEPPERMINT story has never been told in detail; although everyone knows the industry began in Phelpstown, it continued here much longer than most folk realize. Arch Merrill of Rochester, Lois O'Connor of Ithaca and the late Glenn Rogers, Geneva, have printed articles on the history of Lyons peppermint with scarcely a mention of Phelps.. This is not strange, for the Hotchkisses of Pheips have been gone so long from the local scene that they are all but forgotten. May I refresh our memories?

Leman Hotchkiss 1st, with his family, moved from Oneida Castle to Vienna (Phelps village name till 1855) in 1811. On Flint Creek, near today's Empire State Pickling Co., he established the Eagle Mill; a section of the mill wall still stands close by the road. Leman chose the name for his mill after an eagle had been seen several times alighting on its roof. Mrs. Ridley, in her fine 1939 history, wrote that for some time between West Vienna (Wm. Hildreth's settlement) and East Vienna there were only two houses in the woods. One of these, pictured in her book, was Leman's. It is now the Eagle St. property of Mr. and Mrs. Alec A. Cheney. An original part of the old home, at the northwest corner, was torn down long ago, The basement kitchen and its fireplace sheltered and warmed escaping slaves when the house was a station on the "underground railroad."

Leman Hotchkiss 1st was not only miller but merchant, too. "With David McNeil as partner [later Bartle, also] he opened a general store which became one of the best known in Western New York doing a business of over $100,000 a year." This quote is from a Wayne Co. history; Phelpstown was part of that county until 1823. "In 1816 Leman started a store at Lyons on Water St. under the name of

 

Scanning this historic treasure is an ongoing project and will take some time.





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