The Battle of Shacksville, March 14, 1845

The Battle of Shacksville, March 14, 1845

Feb 22, 2024 | Tin Horn

This is the general area where the Battle of Shacksville is presumed to have happened. That’s the East Branch of the Delaware River at center left crossing under the bridge on what is now Briggs Road. Town of Roxbury collection

The Battle of Shacksville,

March 14, 1845

A little-known chapter of the Anti-Rent War which convulsed the Catskills in the mid-1840s took place near the community known as Shacksville just south of Roxbury off what is now NYS Route 30. Central to the dramatic episode was Daniel W. Squire, a farmer who, as a leader of the rebellious “Calico Indians,” had provoked the ire of the Delaware County Sheriff and his deputies.

Squire’s mother Nabby in 1830 had paid $750 for a 76-acre farm just north of the present Darling farm on Route 30. The deed, which in 1837 was conveyed by Nabby to son Daniel, carried from owner to owner the requirement that an annual rent of one shilling per acre be paid (though to whom is not clear).

Many local farmers had withheld their rent in protest of the system that allowed wealthy, distant patent holders to require annual payments of crops, labor or cash for land which they were prevented from owning, or which they had purchased but was still subject to rent. They disguised themselves in sheepskin masks and calico dresses (“Calico Indians”) and vowed to defend fellow farmers who were visited by deputies and Up-Rent posses demanding payment.

Daniel W. Squire, a farmer and sawmill operator, was a respected leader known as “Big Thunder.” His wife Phebe allegedly sewed costumes for other “Indians,” who came to his defense in September 1844 when his neighbor, landlord agent Timothy Corbin, and Sheriff Green Moore attempted to serve a warrant on Squire for nonpayment of rent. Tin horns alerted the calico tribe and they descended en masse, seizing and burning the papers, mounting Corbin on a soap box and applying hot tar and feathers as punishment.

In February of 1845, still itching to arrest Squire, Undersheriff Osman Steele led a surprise raid on his home. With little time to escape, Squire reportedly hid between feather ticks on a bed on which his wife Phebe, and Nabby, the widowed mother who lived with them, were lying. Discovered, he was carted off to jail in Delhi, charged with riot and assault and battery. He was later released on bail.

A series of nasty confrontations between Up and Down Renters throughout the area over the next few months elevated tensions leading to the conflict near Shacksville, a cluster of buildings at the intersection of Green Road and Stratton Falls Road. On March 11, 1845, Undersheriff Steele led a posse of 80 men, who captured another rebel farmer, Zera Preston, and placed him under guard at the store of Edward Burhans in Beaverdam (the hamlet of Roxbury). Daniel Squire called together his compatriots who spent the night at his house before heading out to rescue Preston. They encountered Steele and company and a violent clash followed.

Although the exact location of the skirmish is uncertain, at least some of the fighting is believed to have taken place in the area of today’s Briggs Road which connects Route 30 to Statton Falls Road in the vicinity of Shacksville. Participants described in later court testimony close combat with musket balls fired by rebels crouched behind a stone wall. Several of the “Indians” were unmasked by their opponents. One of them was Silas Tompkins, constable and collector from Middletown. Eleven men and a teenage boy were arrested, shackled and placed in the back of a wagon for transport through the cold dark night to the Delhi jail.

The “Battle of Shacksville” was over, but the war continued towards the culminating event, the killing of Osman Steele in Andes that spring. Though he was nowhere near the scene, Squire was among 94 people indicted for various charges related to the murder on the Moses Earl farm. He was sentenced to life in prison for being an accessory to the fact, and, with three comrades, spent two years in Clinton prison before they were pardoned in 1847. Daniel’s mother, Abigail Squire, made the difficult 300-mile trip to the Adirondacks to visit the prisoners in the summer of 1846 when she was 60 years old. She reported to the worried families of the men that they were in good health and good spirits.

The 1869 Beers Atlas map of the Town of Roxbury shows the location of the “Shacksville Battle Ground 1845” nearly a quarter century after the Anti-Rent War clash between disgruntled farmers and the county sheriff and his posse. A dotted line extends to lands of Jacob C. Keator (JKC) where today’s Briggs Road connects the north-south Route 30 with Stratton Falls Road.

In 1846 and ’47, the feudal system of land ownership in the Catskills was ended through political action and legislation. Many farmers found the means to then purchase their hard-won land. But Daniel W. Squire, who had been away for two years, lost his 76-acre farm when the mortgage was foreclosed. His wife Phebe died in 1852 and was buried in the Old School Baptist Church Cemetery next to two daughters who had died in 1841 and 1842.

Daniel found another wife, Mary Rogers, and moved with her, four surviving children and his mother to Windsor, Broome County. They had two more children, and in 1857 he was named postmaster of New Ohio in the neighboring town of Colesville.

The reverberations of the Anti-Rent War having been long quieted, “Big Thunder” passed away in 1881 and is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Windsor.

For the colorful details of this compelling era in State and local history, consult Tin Horns and Calico by Henry Christman (1978, Hope Farm Press); and A Free Soil, A Free People: The Anti-Rent War in Delaware County. New York by Dorothy Kubik (1997, Purple Mountain Press). Other sources consulted for this article were FamilySearch.org; FindAGrave.com; Ancestry.com; and nyshistoricnewspapers.com.

In The Prime of Their Lives

In The Prime of Their Lives

Mar 31, 2023 | Tin Horn

Young people in the prime of their lives are reflected in these undated portraits, c. 1870, from an album scanned by Steven Morse. The cigar-smoking men are cousins Eugene Crosby and William M. Bellows and the women are Will’s sisters, Sarah Idell Bellows and Orrie Bellows.

The Bellows siblings were children of Merrick and Amelia Morrison Bellows of Bedell. Eugene was a son of Thomas and Jemima Morrison Crosby. Their lives would diverge and come back together over the next 60 years. The Crosby family migrated to Illinois, Missouri (where Jemima died in 1877) and finally Nebraska, where Thomas died in 1906. Eugene, who never married, returned to Halcott in the 1870s and evidently had his portrait taken with his cousin Will.

Will Bellows married Lizzie Mead in the 1880s. She died tragically in 1908 when a kerosene lamp ignited her dress and, despite Will’s attempt to smother the flames, she succumbed to burns the next day. The young widower retreated in grief, leaving their seven-year-old daughter Ellen in the care of his sister, Orrie and husband Dewitt Avery. They lived in Armstrong Park, Fleischmanns, which Dewitt had subdivided and where he had several homes constructed.

Eugene and Will, both carpenters by trade, would later find themselves under the loving care of Idell, who had lost her husband Justus Fellows in 1915. She provided a home for several siblings and other relatives as they aged, including Will who was paralyzed for his last three years.

Eugene died in Oneonta in 1923, Will in 1930, Orrie in 1936 and Idell in 1938.

WARK: Home-grown TV

WARK: Home-grown TV

Feb 4, 2023 | Tin Horn

WARK: Home-grown TV

Back in the Dark Ages, before you could whip out your cell phone, shoot some video and in an instant post it on the internet for all the world to see, there was ‘local access’ cable television. In the Margaretville-Arkville area, it was known as WARK, Channel 3 on the Margaretville Tel-Vis cable network.

This was back in 1984, when Mike Finberg, Larry Smith and Geoff Samuels teamed up with Tel-Vis owner Roy George to produce and share with cable subscribers all manner of locally-generated news and entertainment. For six months the trio, and Larry’s wife Christine Cordone, dashed about the area, videotaping interviews, community events, performances, kids’ workshops, how-to shows and more. Geoff, musician and soundman, was behind the camera. Larry, a seasoned performer, and Mike, a born talker later known as party MC Buck Steel, were the interviewers. Christine, a singer and elementary school teacher, hosted special events and activities.

Larry and Christine composed and sang the WARK jingle, recorded at Geoff’s home studio. The partners sold ads and recorded commercials. And they solicited suggestions for on-air demonstrations from the public (examples offered in a sign-up form included car repair, fly fishing and belly dancing.) “Anybody who had any idea for a show, we pretty much did it,” explained Mike. (Nobody offered to belly dance, though.)

Roy George was more than willing to help, literally handing them the key to his cable kingdom. “We would take the tapes to the little building at the head of Dry Brook where the signal emanated from, unplug WSKG (public TV from Binghamton), put in our tape, and when our show was over, reconnect WSKG.”

He described it as a “handshake arrangement. No money was exchanged.” Which was a good thing, since very little money was made. “The advertising revenue didn’t offset the needs of the three partners, but it was fun, so we continued to do it for six months.”

In those six months they created an archive of now priceless videos: The Arkville Parade and Fair (WARK borrowed the fair’s specially built ark-on-wheels as its logo). Music shows hosted by Larry at the Binnekill Square Restaurant’s piano with guests like Galen Blum, Tom Pacheco, Rob Rosenblatt, Kim Wrobel and Izzy Goldstein.  Cooking shows with Eric Rosen, Howard Raab and Vinnie Ammirato. (Vinnie’s paying gig was on a tugboat in New York Harbor and he also arranged for a WARK tour of the vessel.)

Christine interviewed performers in a traveling circus that came to Arkville and showed children how to make all sorts of crafts. Larry interviewed Eric Wedemeyer at the grand opening of the renovated Granary building and Mike once asked questions of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Bands and dancers at the Pine Hill Tavern, Ricci’s and the Meadowbrook brought these now fabled night spots into area living rooms.

And, presaging ‘Jeopardy,’ there was the Dictionary Game, with teams of local brainiacs trying to out-wit each other on definitions of obscure terms.

Larry estimates that 10 to 20 hours of ‘background labor” went into every hour of finished video. “It was quite an operation,” he said. “Everything was hands on, home grown.”

Subscribers to MTC Cable can watch vintage WARK video on the newest community-centered public cable channel, CatskillsAir, MTC Cable Channel 1. Advises Mike Finberg, “Prepare to see local residents without gray hair.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Home from The War

Home from The War

Nov 1, 2022 | Tin Horn, Uncategorized

Orville Baker led an ordinary life.

One of six kids in an ordinary family who grew up in an ordinary town, his death was ordinary, too, for the times. Orville succumbed in 1918 to pneumonia in the murderous worldwide influenza pandemic while serving with thousands of US soldiers in France.

The inscription on his headstone in the Taylor Farm Cemetery in New Kingston might have been all we remembered about Orville Charles Baker – that he was born August 3, 1894, died Oct. 2, 1918 and served in Co. E of the 104th Ammunition Train – were it not for an email received by the Historical Society of Middletown from a teacher in France.

Anthony Le Brazidec wrote to say he is compiling information on 300 American soldiers who were buried in a temporary cemetery in his town, Morbihan, in Brittany on the northwest coast of France. He had already found the online 1918 Catskill Mountain News article reporting Orville’s death, but he wanted to know the exact date of his burial in New Kingston in 1920.

Anthony shared documents showing when and where Orville was buried in Morbihan, and the details of the repatriation of his remains to his parents, George and Hattie Baker, two years after his death. This came as news to us: We knew about the memorial service for Orville held at the New Kingston Presbyterian Church on Sunday, Nov. 10, 1918, one day before the Armistice was signed ending WWI. And we knew the pastor who had officiated at the service, Rev. Jesse Jamieson, had, like pastors everywhere in Middletown and across the country, rung the church bells with joy that momentous Monday, before the good reverend himself died of a stroke two days later.

But because the Catskill Mountain News is missing for 1920, we did not know that the body of Orville C. Baker was not present for that service, or for the observance of the end of the war that claimed him.

A letter sent to the Baker family by Capt. James B. Puller, commander of Baker’s company, explained that Orville (he was inducted at Delhi May 13 and arrived in France June 29, 1918) had become ill in September and died after a month in the hospital. “He was visited frequently by both the officers and men of his company as all seemed to think a great deal of him,” wrote Capt. Puller in the letter reprinted in the News January 31, 1919. “He was buried in his military uniform with military honors and his company marched to his funeral.”

Records provided by Anthony LeBrazidec more than a century later show that long after his burial and the cessation of hostilities, Orville’s body was one of thousands collected from cemeteries across France to be returned to the US. It was removed from Morbihan July 20, 1920 and was shipped to Brest, France where it was held for a month and prepared for the two-week Atlantic crossing aboard the Princess Matoika, a luxury liner-turned-troop transport that carried 1,284 repatriated remains on this its last voyage for the US Army.

Orville Baker’s casket was then put on a train in Hoboken and taken to Arkville, where his 72-year-old mother claimed her son’s remains October 9, no doubt breaking her heart all over again.

Despite historian Shirley Davis’ search through church records, we were unable to find the exact date of his reinterment at the hillside cemetery not far from the Baker home, as Monsieur LeBrazidec asked. But we are happy to know that this French researcher plans to erect a plaque to the American soldiers who once rested in Morbihan, and we are grateful for this additional information on one Middletown soldier and his long road home.

 

 

 

 

Hard luck brings out the neighbors

Apr 13, 2022 | Tin Horn

If you live in the Catskills chances are you’ve attended a benefit supper, concert or ball game to help a sick neighbor or a family fallen on hard times. It’s what we do. Sometimes it’s all we can do. ‘Twas ever thus, it appears.

In 1909, Margaretville came together to assist Michael Laughman, 61, who the Catskill Mountain News reported had had “a run of hard luck like the stories you read in books.” First, in April, he fell 18 feet from a scaffolding while building a house for Olney Smith in Dunraven. He broke multiple bones, pierced a lung and his recovery was in doubt. But recover he did.

In July, his 94-year-old mother died (she had raised Michael and his siblings alone after her husband died in the Civil War).

Then in September Michael, back at work, cut off two fingers in a buzz saw at Frank Mead’s shop in Dunraven. Hobbled by injuries and unable to work, Michael must have felt pretty low.

In October, his friends, seeking to help him, put together a day of play and giving in Margaretville. Goldie and Eva Myers and Clara McCumber snagged everybody on Main Street to collect donations. Horse races and a clambake were held. Mead’s Orchestra played at the Opera House for a dance. And a baseball game between Pine Hill’s town team and a local squad made up of “Hasbeens, Wantos and Neverwas” played until stormy weather called a halt to the game.

The News hailed “the excellent showing of the locals in not allowing the visiting pitcher to hit their bats with the ball.” Pine Hill won by a score of “three to minus 3.” Proceeds on the day came to $150.75.

Michael Laughman, we must assume, was grateful. But a year and a half later, his luck indeed ran out, when he died of pneumonia.

Cemetery Drive Tour Offers Escape

Cemetery Drive Tour Offers Escape

Jul 24, 2020 | Tin Horn

Looking for a reason to get out of the house without worrying about catching or spreading COVID 19? Our self driving tour of 9 cemeteries in and around Middletown is just the ticket. Scenery, history and freedom on four wheels! This poignant memorial to a child can be found at the Bedell Cemetery.