Early Days in Cambridge NY
Gunfight at Pumpkin Hook (In the Good Ol' Days)
I like to write about "the Good ol' Days," when Florens Hoxie and Dodds and McCrea Hedges were building the beautiful homes of the Cambridge Valley; when streets were sandy and lined with great elms, and the constables patrolled on foot;when groceries came in hogsheads and sold by the measure; when boys wore knickers, little boys gowns and black was for Sunday because it was the most expensive dye; When People could actually READ James Fenimore Cooper.
Those were the Good Old Days, when the writing was so
practiced that a letter from the period is today a lovely
wall decoration.
EVERYONE COULD SING
Everyone could sing and read music because everyone went to church and learned four part harmony and shaped notes.
Youths were more responsible in the Good Old Days, because adults gave them more responsibility. Experience, under proper supervision, remains the great teacher.
Some things never change. That is the Cambridge Valley I love to chronicle.
It was a society that feared alcohol and drugs far more than we do, because that world had no social drag-net in place. An individual suffered the consequences of his actions, and so did those of his association; so, one watched the company one kept.
THE OTHER WORLD
But just as there is today, there was on the other side of the white picket fence another world; a dark, marginal
society, where the people didn't wear sachet or bathe,
unless in summer.
They were an ambitious lot, bound to get ahead, so long as work wasn't required.
They didn't graduate the Cambridge or Salem Washington Academies and they didn't go to church.
They couldn't write or read a grocery list, much less Fenimore Cooper; although they would have recognized themselves in some of his characters.
By day, it belonged to the constables, ministers and
judges. But at night, The Cambridge Valley belonged to the
Subterraneans.
To them, we are indebted for the electric flood-light above every street corner, lane and chicken house; for locks,
burglar alarms, Dobermans, insurance, mace and 24 hour
police surveilance.
They are the subjects of these next few paragraphs.
If I have a point, it is only this, that some things never change. Some are born to heal the sick, others to steal your chickens.
And although the best chicken thieves preferred to live in proximity to the saloons and butcher shops, most of the miscreants of the Valley chose the out-lying hamlets,
away from the sheriff's warrant and the policeman's cudgel.
Everyone has read of the notorious hang-out for hoodlums of the Wild West, "Hole in the Wall." But where among us is the heart that races in fear and dread at the whispered mention of, "Pumpkin Hook” or “Cobbtown"?
We have read of Butch, Sundance and the tubercular Doc
Holiday, but who is terrorized by the dread surnames,
Lebarron, Surdam, and Mattison?
On April 19, 1875, the anniversary of the Battle
at Concord Bridge, a somewhat more infamous skirmish played out among these Taghonic foothills and took its rightful place in the annals of local history.
The disputants were Eugene Surdam and Clark Mattison.
The episode occurred in Pumpkin Hook, although it could
have as well occurred at Cobbtown. Pumpkin Hook is now deserted, the only signs of previous habitation are a few scraggly apple trees and the sluiceways carved into the stones over which the brook still falls. In the 18th century, it was a thriving, though tiny, industrial complex nestled in a high pass in the foothills of the Green Mountains in a region that would eventually become part of a future state named Vermont. At the time of this yarn, the the chair manufactory and the flaz mill had vanished, leaving behind the pattern of poverty and degradation seen generations later when they great mills pulled out of Massachussetts.
ON THE BORDER
Specifically, Pumpkin Hook was located in the saddle of a ridge of the Greens running north and south, conveniently on the Vermont-New York line between Cambridge NY and Arlington Vt. Now the only inhabitants are an independent order of Greek Orthodox monks who have built a monastary near there.
But that was now and this is then. Of Pumpkin Hook the local newspaper observed:
"This sequestered locality is infested with a class of
citizens whose character is bad, equalling, if not rivaling,
the denizens of that rural city Cobbtown in deeds of evil."
For new-comers to this Blog, let me say that Cobbtown was a hamlet near the local "aerodrome" on Plains Road between Cambridge and Shushan NY. Its residential base has improved a great deal with the passage of time.
Pumpkin Hook, aside from the above-mentioned, has ceased to exist. It once straddled the
divide between the Cambridge and White Creek valleys high in the hills above Ashgrove, itself an early Methodist mecca.
Pumpkin Hook was a major industrial community during the heyday of cottage industry and water power.
That Sunday Surdam rode his horse to a cabin the Mattisons occupied near the woods below Pumpkin Hook. Surdam hitched his horse in front and started toward the house.
Through a hole in the side of cabin, Mattison spotted him. Followed by his teen-aged son, he stepped out upon the lean-to porch, blocking Surdam's way.
With a plodding use of the vernacular that would have nonetheless stunned Professor Newman of the Cambridge Washington Academy, Mattison ordered Surdam from his yard.
FISTIC PUNCTUATION
Surdam, being not so dexterous with the language; in fact, being given to mono-syllabic disputations, punctuated with his fists, pulled his revolver from his pocket and shot
twice at Mattison, with no visible effect.
This terrible markmanship is better understood when one considers the time of day, and the fact that Surdam habitually spent the bigger part of Sunday sitting under an apple tree imbibing freely of a low-grade, semi-petrified
resin known as “pop-skull”, for the manufactory of which Pumpkin Hook was well known.
Mattison Sr. was so surprised at this line of discourse from the naturally taciturn Surdam that for several seconds he stood frozen to the rude planking of the porch. This while his brain ploughed through the events to try and make head or tail of them. For while he was a talker, in a disputatious sense, he was none too logical.
Mattison Jr., being the more nimble-witted, bolted for the woodshed, where he recalled there being a recently sharpened, double-bitted axe, and where the walls, being of Chesnut log, were thicker than those of the cabin, being of pine plank.
Surdam was aiming poorly, but thinking well that afternoon. He surmised what junior might be up to and fired twice at him; but again, he missed.
In the meantime, the brain of Mattison sr. got things lined out. Mattison was a laboring man, not given to fast moves, but known for miles around as someone into whose hands you ought never to let yourself get.
He sagged at the knee until a foot moved forward to support his tilting bulk. Thus begun, Mattison lurched off the stoop, his huge hands stretching for the turkey buzzard neck of the ill-fated Surdam.
Surdam fired one last shot. The low velocity bullet struck Mattison on the left hand, following the bone and sticking in the hard, fore-arm muscle.
As Mattison had very little to say about this and didn't appear to have been brought by the fortuitous shot to a point in the dispute where he might negotiate a settlement, Surdam stuffed the empty five-shooter in his pants and bolted for his horse.
When last seen, he was riding away from the sunset, high-tailing it over the ridge toward Vermont, that refuge of horse-thieves and cut-throats, for so it was regarded by the border people of White Creek in those days, and by some in these.
Of course, this is the way Mattison's friends told the story. In Pumpkin Hook, as in Cambridge, you could be sure that, never mind the facts, if certain folks came down on one side in a dispute, certain others would be found on t’other.
So it was in this 'shoot-out' at Pumpkin Hook. Surdam's crowd told it that the Mattisons, father and son, had stoned him until he was compelled to shoot in self-defense, never mind that the incident took place on the Mattison's front porch.
For the boys on the east side of White Creek in 1870, resorting to the law was just another move in the game. Therefore, the friends of Surdam wasted no time in swearing a warrant for Mattison, who was taken before Judge Tabor of White Creek.
Once they had him out in the open, they took the advantage. On Tuesday, as Mattison walked home alone from the hearing, the Surdam crowd way-laid him and administered the sort of thorough beating a crowd of crows can inflict upon a red-tail hawk that is twice their size, but half their speed.
That it was thorough may be deduced from the punishment meted out among his tormentors, for now it was Mattison's turn to appeal to the court. His complaint led to the arrest of one Lyman Gibbons, who was forced to post a peace bond. His brother, Aaron Gibbons, was sent to Salem Jail for six months.
In Vermont, the instigator, Surdam, finding agreeable lodging and boon companionship, showed a healthy disinclination to return.
The final resolution of the case is, of course, lost in the mists of time. So long as it involved one Subterranean doing in another and was not an immediate threat to the gentrified chicken coops of the Valley, the local weekly (from which these facts were gleaned)was in it strictly for its entertainment value.
There were Good Old Days in the lovely Cambridge Valley, but those days were a lot better, it seems, if your lot was tempered by money, family, education, and faith in God.
Some things never change.
YANKEE HILL BILLIES
The Cambridge Valley is not really the "Cambridge" Valley at all. It is the valley of The Owl's Kill --- The Owlkill Valley, so designated in pre-christian times when Mohicansacs and Abinakis vied with the Mohawks for control of the mountain passes, the farmable valleys and the waterways.
The valley stream that drains the mountain regions to the east ---Ashgrove, Black Hole Hollow and Pumpkin Hook --- meanders through what in ancient times was a vast bog and pine barren, until after its 15 mile wander it flows into the larger Hoosic River and thence into the Hudson.
At the junction of the two streams is Tiashoke, the seat of power of The Owl, the wise chief of the Mohicansacs. That tiny hamlet, with its bounteous cornfields still producing today, is better known to us as "Eagle Bridge", the final home of primitive artist "Grandma Moses".
The people of the hills east of the Cambridge valley were different. Since pre-revolutionary days, when terrorism and guerilla warfare raged over the settlement of the land, the region worked and played to different rules.
Family relations were uncommonly direct. In 1873 Dave Browner of Murray Hollow dispaired of living alone. Murray Hollow is set in this same ridge of the Green Mountains, except that its stream flows north into yet another basin, which is drained by the Battenkill River. That stream is today revered not for its numerous water-powered manufactories, but as a popular stream for the fishing of trout.
Anyway, in 1873, Dave Browner had one of the most coveted of possessions among the Subterraneans, a good horse, but his wife had left him the year before.
George Fraser, a fellow denizon of Murray Hollow, had a wife and two kids. But Fraser loved a good horse best, and he didn't have one. That October, facing another bleak winter isolated in the hills without the companionship of a wife, Browner approached Fraser with a proposition.
The parties were reported to be happy with the trade.
Prostitutes posed such a challenge to female-centered society that they were never tolerated, not even at Cobbtown. And Cobbtown, in 1867, tolerated about everything. It is said to this day that in "the good ol' days" one dared not ride through Cobbtown after dark on a good horse.
In 1867 one Sora Anton operated from her residence. Neighbors ganged up and broke out her windows and smashed in her doors. They told her that if she didn't move her operation they would come back and tear the house completely to the ground. She fled.
Vigilance, so-called "frontier justice" prevailed at various times in the history of the Valley. When Pumpkin Hook became too rough in 1869, a group of irate citizens hired one Benjamin Whitaker to break up and prosecute the gang of thieves that was operating from there. He was so successful that they gave him a bonus of a new suit of clothes.
But of course, it didn't last. The Subterraneans quickly reclaimed their community. The years following the Civil War were especially turbulent. Many immigrants had been brought in by the government to fight the war. Afterwards, they had to be assimilated into the body politic.
Westward expansion was at its height. Soldiers suffering after-shocks from combat roamed the countryside, unable to settle down. Civil War "Bummers" continued to roam and pillage, simply because they had acquired a taste for the life.
Many communities formed vigilante committees, including those in the Owl's Kill and Hoosic valleys.
It was during this turbulent time that one Dennis Welch was roasted alive at the saloon of J.H. Eccleshymer of Johnsonville, a tiny hamlet by a dam on the Hoosic. Welch, a laborer in that village, was accused of having body lice. The clientele stripped him for public inspection, then poured "camphene" over him to kill the graybacks.
Some other thoughtful soul set him afire.
That March, things got so bad at Hitchcock's Hotel in White Creek, one of the towns in which The so-called Revolutionary War Battle of "Bennington" was fought, that Constable Butts hid out until a "party of Vermont toughs" finished smashing up the place and went home.
Times were so hard in the Valley in 1869 that in Cambridge Village the kerosene street lamps were not lit. There was no money in in the treasury. The Washington County Post (from whence these yarns were researched) reviewed the trouble along the eastern border:
"Shaftsbury, especially that portion bordering White Creek, has a class of inhabitants who, if not openly immoral, at least lead lives different from that Caesar wished for his wife... not above suspicion."
Ranked among the suspect was the Hill family, who lived on the border in a house belonging to Samuel C. Wheeler . Wheeler boarded with the family. Neighbors assumed that he was Mrs. Hill's paramour.
For a considerable time, all went well. Then on July 4 (a Sunday), Wheeler took sick. On Wednesday he died. Neighbors wanted a post-mortem, but Wheeler's mother would not allow it. He was buried.
Then a few days later, a child of Mrs. Hill sickened. A Dr. Turner called. He told the mother that the child had been taking laudunam (opium). He believed the child deliberately poisoned.
The parents denied any knowledge of opium on the premises, but the Dr. found evidence. This he carried to White Creek Village. There he learned that the druggists Barker and Fassett had sold the opium a short time before. The Doctor concluded that both Wheeler and the child had died from it.
Dr. Turner sought to exhume the body of Wheeler, but there was a problem. He had been buried across the time in Vermont.
The Hills maintained that the poisoning was accidental, the result of rat poison, which had been sprinkled on the pantry shelves.
They thought that it must have gotten on some pork, which had been cooked for breakfast. All had sickened, but only Wheeler had died.
DOPE AND BOOZE
In an unrelated incident that occurred in that vicinity about the same time, Brownell Niles tried to murder his wife.; They lived near Shaftsbury center. He came home drunk and tried to force his wife to get drunk. She refused.
Niles seized a child of 3 or 4 months and poured a quantity of the spirits down its throat, strangling it terribly. Then he went at his wife with a butcher knife, trying to cut her throat.
He made one pass, succeeding in slicing into her hand, before she rushed out of doors. She headed toward a passing team. Niles took to his heels and remained away for several days. Then the family “reconciled”. No legal action was taken.
Leroy Elwell lived about five miles east of Bennington, Vt. He had been married a few years, but his wife had refused to live with him. His marriage was not widely known.
Finally Elwell became smitten by the charms of an unmarried young woman. He counterfeited a divorce decree and married her, she thinking it was genuine.
Lately Elwell, “possessed of the horror of his crimes," imagined the law was after him. That Friday night he went to the garret of his house and hanged himself. It was the third suicide in Shaftsbury Township in seven months.
THE VILLAGE SMITHY
Fusil oil was an ingredient in some of the local "pop skull”, the imbibing of which could drive a man wild. One Saturday night in Hoosick Falls, John Faley, stimulated by "this delectable nectar", got into a row with a saloon-keeper and bit off his great toe.
Remarked the WCP, "there is no accounting for the tastes of Hoosick Falls pugilists."
A blacksmith of Old Cambridge, Malachi Shaughnessy, suffered the effects of alcohol abuse when his workman, Patrick O'Brien, pushed him onto a pile of iron and pounded him 3-4 times. By-standers called for Officer Chappell, the constable in those days. Chappell couldn't subdue O'Brien, even with handcuffs. He called for volunteers.
James Finn stepped forward and was kicked in the forehead for his trouble. Clark Weir split his best pair of pants. Finally, they got the cuffs on O'Brien and put him in a carriage to haul him to the lockup, but he kicked out of the driver's seat and Chappell and Weir had to subdue him again.
Justice Crocker fined in $15 and gave him 30 days in the County Jail. On the way to Salem, Officer Baker stopped at his home for supper. O'Brien was left on the step in the charge of a little girl.
"Good bye, he says, and down the road he ran, with Baker in pursuit," taking what in those good ol' days was known as "leg bail"!
It was not only the poor and the Irish who had a fondness for alcohol. It was that the proper people disguised and controled their appetites, consuming quantities of "patent"remedies, the principal ingredient of which was usually alcohol or opium.
The blackberry was a popular crop because it was generally believed that it gave color to the blood. Taken as a
brandy, it was considered medicinal, a remedy for diarrhea.
The local editor observed that the only part of the
blackberry that was an astringent was the root. "There is no
more medicinal value in blackberry brandy than in cherry
bounce and other tipples."
Such was life in The Cambridge Valley in "the good ol' days"!
dt
(All of Dave Thornton's tales and stories are protected by Copyright Law.)
I like to write about "the Good ol' Days," when Florens Hoxie and Dodds and McCrea Hedges were building the beautiful homes of the Cambridge Valley; when streets were sandy and lined with great elms, and the constables patrolled on foot;when groceries came in hogsheads and sold by the measure; when boys wore knickers, little boys gowns and black was for Sunday because it was the most expensive dye; When People could actually READ James Fenimore Cooper.
Those were the Good Old Days, when the writing was so
practiced that a letter from the period is today a lovely
wall decoration.
EVERYONE COULD SING
Everyone could sing and read music because everyone went to church and learned four part harmony and shaped notes.
Youths were more responsible in the Good Old Days, because adults gave them more responsibility. Experience, under proper supervision, remains the great teacher.
Some things never change. That is the Cambridge Valley I love to chronicle.
It was a society that feared alcohol and drugs far more than we do, because that world had no social drag-net in place. An individual suffered the consequences of his actions, and so did those of his association; so, one watched the company one kept.
THE OTHER WORLD
But just as there is today, there was on the other side of the white picket fence another world; a dark, marginal
society, where the people didn't wear sachet or bathe,
unless in summer.
They were an ambitious lot, bound to get ahead, so long as work wasn't required.
They didn't graduate the Cambridge or Salem Washington Academies and they didn't go to church.
They couldn't write or read a grocery list, much less Fenimore Cooper; although they would have recognized themselves in some of his characters.
By day, it belonged to the constables, ministers and
judges. But at night, The Cambridge Valley belonged to the
Subterraneans.
To them, we are indebted for the electric flood-light above every street corner, lane and chicken house; for locks,
burglar alarms, Dobermans, insurance, mace and 24 hour
police surveilance.
They are the subjects of these next few paragraphs.
If I have a point, it is only this, that some things never change. Some are born to heal the sick, others to steal your chickens.
And although the best chicken thieves preferred to live in proximity to the saloons and butcher shops, most of the miscreants of the Valley chose the out-lying hamlets,
away from the sheriff's warrant and the policeman's cudgel.
Everyone has read of the notorious hang-out for hoodlums of the Wild West, "Hole in the Wall." But where among us is the heart that races in fear and dread at the whispered mention of, "Pumpkin Hook” or “Cobbtown"?
We have read of Butch, Sundance and the tubercular Doc
Holiday, but who is terrorized by the dread surnames,
Lebarron, Surdam, and Mattison?
On April 19, 1875, the anniversary of the Battle
at Concord Bridge, a somewhat more infamous skirmish played out among these Taghonic foothills and took its rightful place in the annals of local history.
The disputants were Eugene Surdam and Clark Mattison.
The episode occurred in Pumpkin Hook, although it could
have as well occurred at Cobbtown. Pumpkin Hook is now deserted, the only signs of previous habitation are a few scraggly apple trees and the sluiceways carved into the stones over which the brook still falls. In the 18th century, it was a thriving, though tiny, industrial complex nestled in a high pass in the foothills of the Green Mountains in a region that would eventually become part of a future state named Vermont. At the time of this yarn, the the chair manufactory and the flaz mill had vanished, leaving behind the pattern of poverty and degradation seen generations later when they great mills pulled out of Massachussetts.
ON THE BORDER
Specifically, Pumpkin Hook was located in the saddle of a ridge of the Greens running north and south, conveniently on the Vermont-New York line between Cambridge NY and Arlington Vt. Now the only inhabitants are an independent order of Greek Orthodox monks who have built a monastary near there.
But that was now and this is then. Of Pumpkin Hook the local newspaper observed:
"This sequestered locality is infested with a class of
citizens whose character is bad, equalling, if not rivaling,
the denizens of that rural city Cobbtown in deeds of evil."
For new-comers to this Blog, let me say that Cobbtown was a hamlet near the local "aerodrome" on Plains Road between Cambridge and Shushan NY. Its residential base has improved a great deal with the passage of time.
Pumpkin Hook, aside from the above-mentioned, has ceased to exist. It once straddled the
divide between the Cambridge and White Creek valleys high in the hills above Ashgrove, itself an early Methodist mecca.
Pumpkin Hook was a major industrial community during the heyday of cottage industry and water power.
That Sunday Surdam rode his horse to a cabin the Mattisons occupied near the woods below Pumpkin Hook. Surdam hitched his horse in front and started toward the house.
Through a hole in the side of cabin, Mattison spotted him. Followed by his teen-aged son, he stepped out upon the lean-to porch, blocking Surdam's way.
With a plodding use of the vernacular that would have nonetheless stunned Professor Newman of the Cambridge Washington Academy, Mattison ordered Surdam from his yard.
FISTIC PUNCTUATION
Surdam, being not so dexterous with the language; in fact, being given to mono-syllabic disputations, punctuated with his fists, pulled his revolver from his pocket and shot
twice at Mattison, with no visible effect.
This terrible markmanship is better understood when one considers the time of day, and the fact that Surdam habitually spent the bigger part of Sunday sitting under an apple tree imbibing freely of a low-grade, semi-petrified
resin known as “pop-skull”, for the manufactory of which Pumpkin Hook was well known.
Mattison Sr. was so surprised at this line of discourse from the naturally taciturn Surdam that for several seconds he stood frozen to the rude planking of the porch. This while his brain ploughed through the events to try and make head or tail of them. For while he was a talker, in a disputatious sense, he was none too logical.
Mattison Jr., being the more nimble-witted, bolted for the woodshed, where he recalled there being a recently sharpened, double-bitted axe, and where the walls, being of Chesnut log, were thicker than those of the cabin, being of pine plank.
Surdam was aiming poorly, but thinking well that afternoon. He surmised what junior might be up to and fired twice at him; but again, he missed.
In the meantime, the brain of Mattison sr. got things lined out. Mattison was a laboring man, not given to fast moves, but known for miles around as someone into whose hands you ought never to let yourself get.
He sagged at the knee until a foot moved forward to support his tilting bulk. Thus begun, Mattison lurched off the stoop, his huge hands stretching for the turkey buzzard neck of the ill-fated Surdam.
Surdam fired one last shot. The low velocity bullet struck Mattison on the left hand, following the bone and sticking in the hard, fore-arm muscle.
As Mattison had very little to say about this and didn't appear to have been brought by the fortuitous shot to a point in the dispute where he might negotiate a settlement, Surdam stuffed the empty five-shooter in his pants and bolted for his horse.
When last seen, he was riding away from the sunset, high-tailing it over the ridge toward Vermont, that refuge of horse-thieves and cut-throats, for so it was regarded by the border people of White Creek in those days, and by some in these.
Of course, this is the way Mattison's friends told the story. In Pumpkin Hook, as in Cambridge, you could be sure that, never mind the facts, if certain folks came down on one side in a dispute, certain others would be found on t’other.
So it was in this 'shoot-out' at Pumpkin Hook. Surdam's crowd told it that the Mattisons, father and son, had stoned him until he was compelled to shoot in self-defense, never mind that the incident took place on the Mattison's front porch.
For the boys on the east side of White Creek in 1870, resorting to the law was just another move in the game. Therefore, the friends of Surdam wasted no time in swearing a warrant for Mattison, who was taken before Judge Tabor of White Creek.
Once they had him out in the open, they took the advantage. On Tuesday, as Mattison walked home alone from the hearing, the Surdam crowd way-laid him and administered the sort of thorough beating a crowd of crows can inflict upon a red-tail hawk that is twice their size, but half their speed.
That it was thorough may be deduced from the punishment meted out among his tormentors, for now it was Mattison's turn to appeal to the court. His complaint led to the arrest of one Lyman Gibbons, who was forced to post a peace bond. His brother, Aaron Gibbons, was sent to Salem Jail for six months.
In Vermont, the instigator, Surdam, finding agreeable lodging and boon companionship, showed a healthy disinclination to return.
The final resolution of the case is, of course, lost in the mists of time. So long as it involved one Subterranean doing in another and was not an immediate threat to the gentrified chicken coops of the Valley, the local weekly (from which these facts were gleaned)was in it strictly for its entertainment value.
There were Good Old Days in the lovely Cambridge Valley, but those days were a lot better, it seems, if your lot was tempered by money, family, education, and faith in God.
Some things never change.
YANKEE HILL BILLIES
The Cambridge Valley is not really the "Cambridge" Valley at all. It is the valley of The Owl's Kill --- The Owlkill Valley, so designated in pre-christian times when Mohicansacs and Abinakis vied with the Mohawks for control of the mountain passes, the farmable valleys and the waterways.
The valley stream that drains the mountain regions to the east ---Ashgrove, Black Hole Hollow and Pumpkin Hook --- meanders through what in ancient times was a vast bog and pine barren, until after its 15 mile wander it flows into the larger Hoosic River and thence into the Hudson.
At the junction of the two streams is Tiashoke, the seat of power of The Owl, the wise chief of the Mohicansacs. That tiny hamlet, with its bounteous cornfields still producing today, is better known to us as "Eagle Bridge", the final home of primitive artist "Grandma Moses".
The people of the hills east of the Cambridge valley were different. Since pre-revolutionary days, when terrorism and guerilla warfare raged over the settlement of the land, the region worked and played to different rules.
Family relations were uncommonly direct. In 1873 Dave Browner of Murray Hollow dispaired of living alone. Murray Hollow is set in this same ridge of the Green Mountains, except that its stream flows north into yet another basin, which is drained by the Battenkill River. That stream is today revered not for its numerous water-powered manufactories, but as a popular stream for the fishing of trout.
Anyway, in 1873, Dave Browner had one of the most coveted of possessions among the Subterraneans, a good horse, but his wife had left him the year before.
George Fraser, a fellow denizon of Murray Hollow, had a wife and two kids. But Fraser loved a good horse best, and he didn't have one. That October, facing another bleak winter isolated in the hills without the companionship of a wife, Browner approached Fraser with a proposition.
The parties were reported to be happy with the trade.
Prostitutes posed such a challenge to female-centered society that they were never tolerated, not even at Cobbtown. And Cobbtown, in 1867, tolerated about everything. It is said to this day that in "the good ol' days" one dared not ride through Cobbtown after dark on a good horse.
In 1867 one Sora Anton operated from her residence. Neighbors ganged up and broke out her windows and smashed in her doors. They told her that if she didn't move her operation they would come back and tear the house completely to the ground. She fled.
Vigilance, so-called "frontier justice" prevailed at various times in the history of the Valley. When Pumpkin Hook became too rough in 1869, a group of irate citizens hired one Benjamin Whitaker to break up and prosecute the gang of thieves that was operating from there. He was so successful that they gave him a bonus of a new suit of clothes.
But of course, it didn't last. The Subterraneans quickly reclaimed their community. The years following the Civil War were especially turbulent. Many immigrants had been brought in by the government to fight the war. Afterwards, they had to be assimilated into the body politic.
Westward expansion was at its height. Soldiers suffering after-shocks from combat roamed the countryside, unable to settle down. Civil War "Bummers" continued to roam and pillage, simply because they had acquired a taste for the life.
Many communities formed vigilante committees, including those in the Owl's Kill and Hoosic valleys.
It was during this turbulent time that one Dennis Welch was roasted alive at the saloon of J.H. Eccleshymer of Johnsonville, a tiny hamlet by a dam on the Hoosic. Welch, a laborer in that village, was accused of having body lice. The clientele stripped him for public inspection, then poured "camphene" over him to kill the graybacks.
Some other thoughtful soul set him afire.
That March, things got so bad at Hitchcock's Hotel in White Creek, one of the towns in which The so-called Revolutionary War Battle of "Bennington" was fought, that Constable Butts hid out until a "party of Vermont toughs" finished smashing up the place and went home.
Times were so hard in the Valley in 1869 that in Cambridge Village the kerosene street lamps were not lit. There was no money in in the treasury. The Washington County Post (from whence these yarns were researched) reviewed the trouble along the eastern border:
"Shaftsbury, especially that portion bordering White Creek, has a class of inhabitants who, if not openly immoral, at least lead lives different from that Caesar wished for his wife... not above suspicion."
Ranked among the suspect was the Hill family, who lived on the border in a house belonging to Samuel C. Wheeler . Wheeler boarded with the family. Neighbors assumed that he was Mrs. Hill's paramour.
For a considerable time, all went well. Then on July 4 (a Sunday), Wheeler took sick. On Wednesday he died. Neighbors wanted a post-mortem, but Wheeler's mother would not allow it. He was buried.
Then a few days later, a child of Mrs. Hill sickened. A Dr. Turner called. He told the mother that the child had been taking laudunam (opium). He believed the child deliberately poisoned.
The parents denied any knowledge of opium on the premises, but the Dr. found evidence. This he carried to White Creek Village. There he learned that the druggists Barker and Fassett had sold the opium a short time before. The Doctor concluded that both Wheeler and the child had died from it.
Dr. Turner sought to exhume the body of Wheeler, but there was a problem. He had been buried across the time in Vermont.
The Hills maintained that the poisoning was accidental, the result of rat poison, which had been sprinkled on the pantry shelves.
They thought that it must have gotten on some pork, which had been cooked for breakfast. All had sickened, but only Wheeler had died.
DOPE AND BOOZE
In an unrelated incident that occurred in that vicinity about the same time, Brownell Niles tried to murder his wife.; They lived near Shaftsbury center. He came home drunk and tried to force his wife to get drunk. She refused.
Niles seized a child of 3 or 4 months and poured a quantity of the spirits down its throat, strangling it terribly. Then he went at his wife with a butcher knife, trying to cut her throat.
He made one pass, succeeding in slicing into her hand, before she rushed out of doors. She headed toward a passing team. Niles took to his heels and remained away for several days. Then the family “reconciled”. No legal action was taken.
Leroy Elwell lived about five miles east of Bennington, Vt. He had been married a few years, but his wife had refused to live with him. His marriage was not widely known.
Finally Elwell became smitten by the charms of an unmarried young woman. He counterfeited a divorce decree and married her, she thinking it was genuine.
Lately Elwell, “possessed of the horror of his crimes," imagined the law was after him. That Friday night he went to the garret of his house and hanged himself. It was the third suicide in Shaftsbury Township in seven months.
THE VILLAGE SMITHY
Fusil oil was an ingredient in some of the local "pop skull”, the imbibing of which could drive a man wild. One Saturday night in Hoosick Falls, John Faley, stimulated by "this delectable nectar", got into a row with a saloon-keeper and bit off his great toe.
Remarked the WCP, "there is no accounting for the tastes of Hoosick Falls pugilists."
A blacksmith of Old Cambridge, Malachi Shaughnessy, suffered the effects of alcohol abuse when his workman, Patrick O'Brien, pushed him onto a pile of iron and pounded him 3-4 times. By-standers called for Officer Chappell, the constable in those days. Chappell couldn't subdue O'Brien, even with handcuffs. He called for volunteers.
James Finn stepped forward and was kicked in the forehead for his trouble. Clark Weir split his best pair of pants. Finally, they got the cuffs on O'Brien and put him in a carriage to haul him to the lockup, but he kicked out of the driver's seat and Chappell and Weir had to subdue him again.
Justice Crocker fined in $15 and gave him 30 days in the County Jail. On the way to Salem, Officer Baker stopped at his home for supper. O'Brien was left on the step in the charge of a little girl.
"Good bye, he says, and down the road he ran, with Baker in pursuit," taking what in those good ol' days was known as "leg bail"!
It was not only the poor and the Irish who had a fondness for alcohol. It was that the proper people disguised and controled their appetites, consuming quantities of "patent"remedies, the principal ingredient of which was usually alcohol or opium.
The blackberry was a popular crop because it was generally believed that it gave color to the blood. Taken as a
brandy, it was considered medicinal, a remedy for diarrhea.
The local editor observed that the only part of the
blackberry that was an astringent was the root. "There is no
more medicinal value in blackberry brandy than in cherry
bounce and other tipples."
Such was life in The Cambridge Valley in "the good ol' days"!
dt
(All of Dave Thornton's tales and stories are protected by Copyright Law.)
posted by Unknown | 4:48 AM
2 Comments:
Man, I didn't realize they had such lowlives there in Yankee country. Extremely interesting piece. Ought to be in Yankee Magazine, if they still publish it.
You might consider allowing anonymous comments so those poor, lost, "blogless" souls can illumine you with their wise thoughts.
Mike
Can you tell me more about Tiashoke, the history of the word and area, any related symbols, and perhaps point me to places where I might get more information? Thanks so much!
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