Such a sweet name, but a place that came to signify hell on earth for hundreds of men who clashed there on November 30, 1864 just inland from the coast of South Carolina. The 144th Regiment from Delaware County was there. In the thick of it was Co. G, largely made up of Middletown volunteers. At the end of the day, Co. G casualties included James Craft, Daniel Myers and James Elliott who were killed, and Silas Blish, Anthony Brown, Sidney Dury, Joseph Fuller, D. W. Gavett, William Hubbell, Albert Hulstead, James Myers, Dewitt Philips and James Weighly among the wounded. 

A tamer version of this battle was reenacted at the Delaware County Historical Association in Delhi July 26, when the newly established 144th NY Regiment of living history portrayers, along with several other units, ‘fought’ a line of Confederate reenactors in an attempt to take control of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad in support of Gen. William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea. Fog, bad maps and stubborn southern fighters spelled defeat for the Union forces back in 1864. The outcome was the same in 2014.

Cheers to Capt. Brian Cornell, who has organized this band of 144th reenactors to pay tribute to Delaware County’s role in the Civil War. The group will travel to South Carolina in November to participate in another reenactment of Honey Hill at its 150th anniversary. To learn more info@144thnewyork.com, or visit www.144thnewyork.com.

Among the reenactors who came to Delhi were four members of the Skinner family who live at Ridgeland, SC, near what used to be known as Honey Hill. Two of them camped on the Union side for the reenactment; two on the Confederate side, reflecting the split among their ancestors who fought on opposite sides during the war.

Also participating were several men representing the 54th Masasachusetts, a regiment of black men who fought beside the 144th at Honey Hill and were later massacred at Fort Wagner, the battle brought to life in the movie “Glory.”

The 144th was raised in September of 1862. Its casualties at Honey Hill two years later were 108, including Lieut. James W. Mack, the only commissioned officer of the 144th killed in action. Total Union casualties that day were 89 men killed, 629 wounded, and 28 missing. The Confederates, under Col. Charles Colcock, sustained much lighter losses: eight killed and 39 wounded.

By Trish Adams
First published in the Catskill Mountain News

If your ancestors include Boutons, Faulkners, Scudders, Hewitts, Hinkleys, Hubbells, Blishes, Kellys, Dimmicks, Millers, Davises, or Greens, it’s likely that you are part of the founding stock of one of the hardiest, hard-core sects of Baptists in this country, dating back to the days before the Civil War.

Ben Bath, an ethno-musicologist, gave us an insider’s view of the founding of the Old School “Primitive” Baptists, as well as the music that got them (and us) on our feet, in a fascinating presentation at the Middletown Historical Society this past Sunday (June 8). Elder Hubbell could not make it, but perhaps he was toe-tapping from above.

What’s an ethno-musicologist? It’s someone who loves to study the intersection of a group or culture and its music, to see how the music reveals their values, beliefs and experiences. A musicologist believes that what people sang or played helps us understand how they lived.

The Protestant faith now has numberless denominations, but the roots of Protestantism in the 1500s is truly “Protest” — back then it was against Rome and the Pope, against heirarchies and church corruption, against any barrier between the worshipper and God. All across Europe, but especially in England, wars were fought, blood was shed and clandestine sects were formed as people sought a way to worship outside the Catholic and state-established churches.

Many of the Scots-Irish settlers in our area were such “pilgrims,” seeking a place to worship their own way: strict, yes, but also egalitarian, without arcane structures, or paid ministers — a faith that did not “solicit” or “convert” but wanted only true believers. Like many early Protestant faiths, our original Baptists frowned on “music,” which to them meant instruments. Singing psalms from the Bible, or other “hymns” in unison together, was still part of worship.

Have you ever been to a service — or a concert — where a leader wanted you to sing with them, so they shout out the words first, and then you sing them? This is a long standing church tradition called “Lines Out” or “Lining.” This began in earlier days because some church members could not read. So the song leaders or ministers would call out the words, so everyone could sing to the tune chosen for that hymn.

In Old School Baptist and some other older Protestant sects, this tradition still stands firm. It also remains part of the ritual of folk and other indigineous music concerts. Some early Protestant faiths believed only actual words from the Bible (the Psalms) should be sung; hymns were the religious words, regardless of tunes, and “tune books” were ones that included notes to sing.

There are not many OSB churches left: mostly here, Maine and spots in the South; that tells us that isolation from larger cultural forces helps maintain this “primitive” Baptist tradition. Also that cultures that are naturally “stoic,” and fatalistic might be a more likely home to such a breed of Baptist. Especially a century or so ago, if you sang a hymn, saying you might not see your neighbor next week, you truly knew that could come to pass. A random horse kick, pneumonia, a fire… just look at the front page of this paper any given week from 1902 onwards. Old School Baptists knew whereof of they sang.

The restored Vega OSB Church, now a performance hall owned by the Roxbury Arts Group

The Coffin Man’s calling card

There once was an itinerant stone carver who traveled the dusty roads of upstate New York in a horse-drawn wagon loaded with quarried pieces of sandstone. He was looking for families who had recently buried loved ones, to sell them a headstone for the grave. His “signature” was the coffin shape he would chisel at the base of each headstone. The size, and the number of these coffin shapes would indicate whether the occupant was an adult or a child, and how many rested beneath this headstone.

The headstone in the Sanford Cemetery for George Sands, who died August 8, 1816 at age 83, was so inscribed. There are two coffins at the base; it is not known who the second person might have been.

For decades, the carver remained anonymous, known only as “The Coffin Man.” Researcher Mary Dexter of Cortland became obsessed with locating as many of his stones as she could (she found more than 200 of them over 30 years) and of trying to determine the carver’s name. At last, she discovered, in estate papers of one of his “customers,” a record of payment of $5 for a headstone and footstone to one Jonas W. Stewart.

Stewart, it turns out, came from a family of stone carvers. Father Jonas was a well known carver in the Clermont, NH area. Jonas W. Stewart II was born in Clermont in 1778. J. W. and his brother James followed in their father’s footsteps, but each developed a unique, recognizable carving style, and each staked out stone peddling territories of their own.

The Protestant faith now has numberless denominations, but the roots of Protestantism in the 1500s is truly “Protest” — back then it was against Rome and the Pope, against heirarchies and church corruption, against any barrier between the worshipper and God. All across Europe, but especially in England, wars were fought, blood was shed and clandestine sects were formed as people sought a way to worship outside the Catholic and state-established churches.

Many of the Scots-Irish settlers in our area were such “pilgrims,” seeking a place to worship their own way: strict, yes, but also egalitarian, without arcane structures, or paid ministers — a faith that did not “solicit” or “convert” but wanted only true believers. Like many early Protestant faiths, our original Baptists frowned on “music,” which to them meant instruments. Singing psalms from the Bible, or other “hymns” in unison together, was still part of worship.

Have you ever been to a service — or a concert — where a leader wanted you to sing with them, so they shout out the words first, and then you sing them? This is a long standing church tradition called “Lines Out” or “Lining.” This began in earlier days because some church members could not read. So the song leaders or ministers would call out the words, so everyone could sing to the tune chosen for that hymn.

In Old School Baptist and some other older Protestant sects, this tradition still stands firm. It also remains part of the ritual of folk and other indigineous music concerts. Some early Protestant faiths believed only actual words from the Bible (the Psalms) should be sung; hymns were the religious words, regardless of tunes, and “tune books” were ones that included notes to sing.

There are not many OSB churches left: mostly here, Maine and spots in the South; that tells us that isolation from larger cultural forces helps maintain this “primitive” Baptist tradition. Also that cultures that are naturally “stoic,” and fatalistic might be a more likely home to such a breed of Baptist. Especially a century or so ago, if you sang a hymn, saying you might not see your neighbor next week, you truly knew that could come to pass. A random horse kick, pneumonia, a fire… just look at the front page of this paper any given week from 1902 onwards. Old School Baptists knew whereof of they sang.

The restored Vega OSB Church, now a performance hall owned by the Roxbury Arts Group

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.