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.
This lovely winter view from atop Palmer Hill, Andes looking east towards the central Catskills was painted by the late John Hopkins and is this year’s prize in HSM’s annual raffle. Donated by Meg Hopkins, the acrylic on canvas in white frame measures 9″x12″.
Tickets are $1 each, 6 for $5.
To receive tickets to fill out and return, email history@catskill.net.
Drawing is Oct. 24.
Among HSM programs and events canceled by the COVID 19 pandemic was the Living History Tour of Margaretville Cemetery. Among the characters who had planned to greet visitors on June 20 was Arthur Leslie Dumond, stone carver, lamplighter and school janitor.
Leslie (he went by his middle name) was born in 1860 to Mary Jane Hewitt and Nathan Osborn. He was born in Westchester County, was educated at Delaware Literary Institute and Andes Academy and, like his father, was a schoolteacher as a young man. But he had a love of stone and of making something beautiful out of unforgiving granite, so he went to a ‘bas relief’ sculpture school in Tennessee and became a marble and monument dealer. Many local headstones bear his work.
To make ends meet, Leslie also served as the Village of Margaretville’s lamplighter. Local streets and buildings were first lit by kerosene in the early 1870s. Remembered Catskill Mountain News publisher Clarke Sanford in 1948, “Many an evening I have seen him go along the village street, can of kerosene and cleaning rag in one hand, short stepladder in the other. He visited each lamp post, cleaned the smoked chimneys, filled the lamps, lighted them and went his way. Neither rain nor mud or high wind kept him from his duty.”
Acetylene gas lamps replaced kerosene in 1905. In October that year the Margaretville Gas Light Company began piping the streets. Reported the News, “They have a gang of Italians borrowed from the D&E RR. There are 340 rods (more than one mile) of ditch to dig. Back streets will be ditched first. The work was begun in front of Herman Rottermund residence on Walnut Street. The tank and the generator will be located in front of Byron L. Searles’. The company expects to have the new gas in houses by Nov. 1.”
New iron street lamp posts were installed. The Margaretville High School, Presbyterian Church, hotels, homes and shops were all piped for gas.
Remembered Sanford, “Then (Leslie) needed only matches, the lamps were turned off at 11 p. m. by small alarm clocks, one attached to each lamp. The clocks had to be wound and set each night.” Leslie soon turned the job over to others, and took a job as the school janitor. He was a much beloved figure in town, and passed away in 1948.
Consider this a preview of the 2021 cemetery tour, when Leslie the Lamplighter will reveal more details about his life.
The battle against COVID-19 has prompted the return of an initiative that helped the US get through two previous wars of the shooting kind: The victory garden. Whether fearful of shopping amid crowds at grocery stores, wary of coming food shortages, or desirous of some degree of self-sufficiency, many folks are planning their own victory gardens this year.
Home gardens were a mainstay of family farms in the Catskills during World Wars I and II, and all the years before, after and in between. But many villagers heeded the Catskill Mountain News’ plea of April 26, 1918: “Every person that possibly can should plant a war garden. Boost this for all you’re worth!”
A year earlier, just weeks before the US entered the war, Charles Lathrop Pack had organized the National War Garden Commission to encourage Americans to contribute to the war effort by planting, harvesting and storing their own fruits and vegetables so that more food could be exported to our allies in Europe, where farmers had become soldiers and cropland battlefields.
Posters advocated that civilians “Sow the seeds of victory” by planting their own vegetables in “war gardens,” later known as Victory gardens.” Amateur gardeners were provided with instruction pamphlets on growing and preserving crops.
The federal Bureau of Education initiated a U.S. School Garden Army to mobilize children as “soldiers of the soil.” Gardens were planted in public spaces, too. More than eight million new plots were planted in 1917-18 and an estimated 1.45 million quarts of canned fruits and vegetables were put up by gardeners.
Victory gardens re-emerged in WWII when commercial crops were diverted to the military overseas and domestic transportation was redirected towards moving troops and munitions instead of food. With the introduction of food rationing in the spring of 1942, Americans turned to growing their own fruits and vegetables in a big way. Eleanor Roosevelt even planted a victory garden on the White House lawn.
By 1944, an estimated 20 million victory gardens produced roughly eight million tons of food, the equivalent of more than 40 percent of all the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in the US.
Wikipedia was consulted for this article
“’La Grippe,’ or the Russian Influenza, is heard from all parts of the world and creates the greatest public interest,” reported the Delaware Gazette January 1, 1890. “The fatal cases are very few, but the number of cases is very great and many of them very distressing. There seems to be none yet in this region.”
Just two weeks later the Delhi correspondent of the Hobart Independent claimed “nearly every family in this community has been suffering more or less with the prevailing epidemic. Several hundred cases have come under the doctors’ care.” At least one proved fatal – Norwood Bowne, the editor of the Delaware Express newspaper for 51 years, died of bronchitis which took over where the flu left off.
Bowne was among one million people who died in the 1889 pandemic, which began in Russia and spread rapidly throughout Europe aided by railroads and steam ships. It reached North America in December 1889 and spread to Latin America and Asia in February 1890.
Locally, the illness claimed bank presidents, teachers, laborers and physicians. In a time when people were accustomed to periodic epidemics – diptheria, meningitis, typhus, scarlet fever – there was a ho-hum, dismissive tone in some of the accounts. Said the Delaware Gazette January 8, 1890, “La Grippe has become such a fashionable disease that very many have already laid claim to the distinction of having been afflicted with it. Many have colds and suffer greatly, but weather is favorable for such cases, and if a new name had not been introduced we would all be suffering in the good old fashioned way and that would be about the end of the matter.”
Then as now, fear and misinformation spread as quickly as the virus. A report about a Sidney man being taken to the Utica Insane Asylum noted “It is said La Grippe is the cause of his mental derangement.” Another article declared “It is no longer good manners for a gentleman to raise his hat when he meets a lady on the street . . . uncovering the head in the open air (has) caused a number of cases of influenza.”
And in the absence of an effective cure or treatment, some people took to spirits. This appeared in the January 22, 1890, Hobart Independent
“Many of the Paris doctors believe a stimulating regimen to be the best prophylactic against the influenza. The official oracle of the Gaulois lately advised its readers to begin the day with a thimbleful of rum or other spirit, according to their tastes, and to take two or three “grogs” in the course of the afternoon. A lady reader of the paper writes to say that she has escaped the well-nigh universal affliction, thanks, as she believes, to acting on this advice, which she has induced several of her friends to take, with equally goad results. So firm is her own faith in it that she has decided to replace her 5 o’clock tea by a “5 o’clock grog” while the epidemic lasts.
Whether the locals took that advice is not known. In May the State Board of Health reported 7,262 deaths during the month of March 1890, exceeding the average of the previous five years by 844, the increase attributed to the pandemic.
In early 1937, the Catskill Mountain News gave us a glimpse of one man’s efforts to brighten up two local churches and a cemetery.
“The interior of the church of the Sacred Heart at Fleischmanns (now a private home) is being repainted and made ready for the summer. The work is proceeding under the direction of Rev. Edward Gaffney of Arkville. It gives his parishioners here a great thrill to see the learned priest at the work of directing the decoration. At the same time Rev. Gaffney is having the rectory at Arkville and the Catholic church at Arkville decorated. (At that time the church, also named Sacred Heart, was located within what is known as the Maple House, now apartments).”
In the same issue, an article on activities at the Margaretville Civilian Conservation Corps camp reported that Father Gaffney had started a choir among the young men there.
Earlier in the year, Rev. Gaffney had started “the work of remodeling the grounds at the Catholic cemetery at the edge of the village.” (Also known as the Catholic or Irish Cemetery, this burial ground is across the road from the larger Clovesville Cemetery.)
The report maintained that “The cemetery has been neglected for a number of years and was an eye sore to the community. The stone wall along the road will be removed and an ornamental fence will be erected. John Blish who has been the sexton of the Clovesville cemetery for a number of years, has been engaged. Rev. Gaffney hopes to have the village sign on the church property removed.”
For the record, the Irish Cemetery remains in sad shape 83 years later.
The Fleischmanns correspondent was an optimistic sort. “Father Gaffney’s parish extends from the county line at Highmount to Downsville. It will be the most prosperous parish in this county when the New York city dam is built.”
Father Gaffney would not see his parish through that era. He died suddenly of a ‘hemorrhage’ on April 2, 1938 at the age of 44. An honor guard from the local American Legion post stood guard at his wake in the Arkville rectory. Father Gaffney had been gassed while serving as a chaplain in France during World War I. This reportedly caused the poor health that led to his early death. He was laid to rest in Catskill.