Who were the Waterburys?

Who were the Waterburys?

Mar 15, 2014 | Tin Horn

The headstone in the Sanford Cemetery, Dunraven is impressive, a bronze plaque on a granite monument: Robert L. Waterbury, MD, 1823-1881 “He lived so others may live”; Christiana Dowie, 1823-1878 “His faithful wife”; and two children, a five-year-old son, and a 22-year-old daughter who, we have learned, died in 1883 of typhoid fever while a student at Vassar College. She is actually buried at Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery.

If you come to the 3rd Annual Living History Cemetery Tour June 21, you will learn much more about this family of cultured, educated men and women who hailed from Middletown pioneer stock. Fred Margulies (you’ll remember him from last year’s tour as John Blish who sold the Fleischmanns the land they would develop as a family compound) will portray Dr. Robert Waterbury. He was renowned as a teacher as much as a physician, teaching at several academies and colleges, and also serving as a surgeon to a NYS National Guard unit in the Civil War. He and wife Christina had 4 children, two of them, Lucy and Mary, becoming teachers themselves, as well as accomplished musicians who in the 1870s started a private school that was the precursor to Margaretville Central School.

Dr. Robert’s brothers were also teachers – seems like everyone in the family took a turn at teaching at the Old Stone School. Their parents, Rev. Daniel Waterbury and Mary Lewis Grant, raised the family on the homestead near the school established by Mary’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Asa Grant (he was the first postmaster in Middletown). Robert’s siblings included Daniel, a lawyer, State Assemblyman and gentleman farmer; and Edward, a teacher, insurance agent (improbably enough) and, in the 1880s, president of the Albany Normal School (predecessor of SUNY Albany).

There is a curious connection to Sandersville, KY near Lexington, where Robert, and his three 20-something daughters lived in 1880. Lucy either went there to teach music at a local college, or to care for the children of a wealthy northerner who had acquired a plantation there. Robert Waterbury is said to have died there, his body brought back to New York to be buried in an Arena cemetery later removed for the Pepacton Reservoir.

We’re still researching that one. Come to the tour to see what we discover!

Calling all bakers!

Jan 28, 2014 | Tin Horn

As you know we need a new roof and will be doing a lot of fundraising this year to pay for it. Our first event will be a bake sale at Freshtown (between Freshtown and CVS) on Saturday, Feb. 15 from 10AM to 2PM. Since it is Valentine’s Day weekend we think homemade chocolates and baked goods would be a great way to make some money for our roof fund. This is where all of you come in.

We need all of you great bakers to make the homemade goodies to offer for sale. And we need help to staff the table for one hour shifts. Anne Sanford will be coordinating the bake sale so could you please let her know by email, natty55@verizon.net, or phone, 607-326-4817 if you can make a goody and/or staff the table by Feb. 5 (or sooner if possible)?

Please package baked goods for sale so we can minimize handling. We’d appreciate it if you could price each item, too. It would be helpful if you can drop off your goody at Freshtown between 9 and 10 that morning. If you can’t, please email, or call Anne to make other arrangements.

Thanks for your help!

Does the man on the left look familiar?

Does the man on the left look familiar?

Jan 24, 2014 | Tin Horn

Backstage at the Capitol Theater, NYC

 

Paula Eisenstein Baker, Houston, TX cellist and musicologist, is trying to verify whether he is Bernard Nadelle, a prominent cellist with the house orchestra at the Capitol Theater in NYC in the 1920s and 30s. Eisenstein Baker, adjunct instructor of violincello at University of St. Thomas in Houston, is writing a book about an overture on Jewish themes composed for the Capitol Theatre by the man in the center, violist Leo Zeitlin (1884-1930). The man on the right is Alexander Savitsky (188?-1965). These three, and violinist David Mendoza, played together in a string quartet on the radio program “Major Bowes’ Capitol Theatre Family,” broadcast Sunday nights on WEAF in the 1920s. The photo is labeled (on the back) “Capitol Rest Room” (i.e., musicians’ lounge).

So here’s the local connection: Bernard Nadelle and his wife, Feliska Lezeynska Nadelle, were frequent visitors to the Denver Valley, spending time in an apartment at the farmhouse of Lena and Howard Greene. In 1951, they purchased land from the Greenes and built a small home on the Denver-Vega Road where they vacationed for many years. “He was always practicing,” remembered Shirley Greene, who married the farm couple’s son Gerald. “You had to be quiet.”

But the music died in May of 1964 when Nadelle, suffering from cancer, took his own life in the little country house. His widow stayed on, receiving help with rides and shopping from Mrs. Greene and another neighbor, Ethel Roberts. Shirley recalls that Mrs. Nadelle, like her husband a Polish immigrant, had a playful side. “She was a foxy lady, a lot of fun.” She painted the house pink, and once, after a visit to the undertaker to make her own funeral arrangements, cheerfully took Shirley out for a strawberry soda.

Feliska Nadelle died just before Christmas in 1967. She is buried in Roxbury. Her husband rests in Bnai Israel Cemetery, Clovesville.

If you recognize the man in the photo as Bernard Nadelle, or by some miracle, have a confirmed photo of him, contact Eisenstein Baker, at eisenbak@stthom.edu; 713-522-9488.

The groaning board

The groaning board

Dec 2, 2013 | Tin Horn

At this the season of feasting, we offer this 1944 photograph of Max Kass, proprietor of the former Kass Inn in Kelly Corners, which was known for its marvelous buffets. The Inn was started in 1919 when Max Kass and two others (Nachman Groubarth and Harry Taub) bought a six-room farmhouse and 284 acres from Leander McEwan. In 1921, Max married Sadie Ginder and over the years they expanded the inn to accommodate 150 guests in 75 rooms, adding the 300-acre Hess farm across the road. The Catskill Mountain News, announcing Kass’s plans to add a golf course to the property on May 7, 1948, reported that “the Inn . . . enjoys an excellent reputation throughout the mountains and this part of the state. On big days at the Inn, it is not uncommon to serve 500 dinners. The Inn will probably average 1,000 to 1,500 meals weekly.” Kass Inn was sold in the early 1990s to a Japanese firm and renamed Hanah Country Inn. This photograph, taken by Bob Wyer, was the November image of the 2013 calendar produced by the Delaware County Historical Assoc.

The “last word” in campaigning, 1940 style

The “last word” in campaigning, 1940 style

Nov 3, 2013 | Tin Horn

The GOP campaign trailer stopped at the Esso station on Margaretville’s Main St., Oct. 14, 1940

 

He was nowhere near Margaretville but his presence loomed large on October 14, 1940 when the “GOP Motion Picture Caravan” streamed in to town to campaign for Republican Presidential hopeful Wendell Wilkie, who was fighting an uphill battle against Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The sleek trailer, one of several criss-crossing the country stumping for Wilkie and his running mate, Charles McNary, was described as “the last word in the modern technique of political campaigning,” according to the Catskill Mountain News, whose publisher, Roswell Sanford, was Middletown GOP Chairman.

The trailer was equipped with “a projector for showing sound movies on a 5 by 7 screen, an amplifying system, radio and two phonograph tables for reproducing speeches. . . As many as 12,000 have gathered around one of the trailers and have stood for hours listening to the music and watching the movies which show Wendell L. Wilkie. It is a thrilling departure from the traditional cut-and-dried form of street corner meetings. It gives the audience an opportunity to see the candidate on the screen and to hear his voice.”

And boy, could they hear it, whether they wanted to or not: “On the open road when the sound equipment is operated at maximum intensity, the voice can be heard over a distance of four miles,” the paper reported. (Note the giant sperakers on the trailer’s roof in photo, which was posted to the Delaware County History and Genealogy website by Jim Kelly.)

A “union crew of technicians” traveled with the trailer, which was accompanied by local candidates. Hitting as many towns and villages in the state as they could reach, the entourage stopped to provide ‘shows’ at Hancock, Walton and Sidney October 12, and , after passing through Andes, Margaretville, Fleischmanns, and Roxbury, gave an evening presentation at Stamford October 14.

Whether it was the impressive use of media, or Wilkie’s anti-Roosevelt and New Deal platform, Delaware County voted Republican in a big way that November: 15,837 to 5,946. In Middletown, Wilkie won 62% of the votes, 1,223-723.

The Democrats carried the country though, and Roosevelt , with Vice President John Nance Garner, was swept into his third term of office.

Wilkie, born to German immigrants, was a World War I veteran, and Indiana lawyer. After the election, the Democrat-turned Republican joined ranks with the man who defeated him, becoming FDR’s unofficial ambassador advocating internationalism over isolationism as World War II began.

Had he and Senate Minority Leader McNary been elected, the country would have been in the position of replacing both of them during their term of office, as they each died suddenly in 1944.

An interesting sidebar to the local 1940 election: The Roxbury correspondent to the News reported that a Civil War veteran and a Civil War widow — 101-year-old Charles Dugan, and 90-year-old Martha Whitney — voted within moments of each other at the Masonic Hall in Roxbury. Dugan had voted in every presidential election since casting his first ballot, for Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. Mrs. Whitney was the widow of Jonathan Whitney, who served with the 80th NYS Regiment from Halcott.