AMERICANA IN DRUMLIN SQUARE, Part 3

The older men had taken all available riding horses, so the young man took what was left, namely, an old plow horse. The shooting was all over when he finally reached the lake, but he did find a cannon ball that had been discharged from one of the British ships. This souvenir was treasured by him, and has been passed along to his descendants in the Palmyra area.

The General Swift referred to in Brackenridge's report of the Pultneyville invasion was General John Swift who founded Swift's Landing, the original name for the present village of Palmyra. Brackenridge's history also details the war events on the Niagara Frontier, the bravery of General Swift, and how he was killed at Fort George a few weeks after the Pultneyville engagement.

A state historical marker in the east end of Palmyra marks the site of General Swift's home, the first log cabin in Swift's Landing. The local library, too, has dutifully gathered much history of Swift's activities, and of his brother, General Philetus Swift of nearby Phelps, a part of whose regiment it was that coincidentally encountered the British at Sodus Point as did General John Swift at Pultneyville.

Main Street in Palmyra is a block south of what formerly was its principal street, appropriately named Canal Street, for it still parallels the old Erie Canal.

Palmyra was an important canal town full of a lot of Americana history, much written and some unwritten. Driving along the old Canal Street, one wondeers if things were so quiet and genteel there in the early 1800's as they appear today.

The old homes, sheds and former inns were undoubtedly the hub of many and varied activities when the old Erie canal was the main "highway" between Albany and Buffalo. And, at least one novel has been written combining facts and fiction of the old canal town's pre-Victorian heyday.

And of a more sedate topic we must at the same time remember that on these streets walked Joseph Smith and the other members of his father's large family, and it was in Palmyra too that the first Mormon Bible was published.

And here was born the maternal grandmother of Winston Churchill, Clarissa Hall, whose daughter Jennie was Winston's mother.

Clarissa really had her roots in Palmyra, as her mother, Clarissa Wilcox, was also born there. Clarissa Halls's father, Ambrose Hall, came to Palmyra in 1818 from Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Clarissa Hall married Captain Leonard Jerome, who was born in the village of Pompey, New York. Captain Jerome lived at various times in Palmyra, Rochester and Brooklyn. It was in Brooklyn that Jennie Jerome, Churchill's mother, was born January 9, 1854.

Jennie Jerome never did live in Palmyra, although she did visit an aunt in the village on a few occasions. But at the youthful age of thirteen, Jennie's parents took her to Paris, and she never returned to the country of her birth.

Jennie was later married at the British Embassy in Paris, April 15, 1874, to Lord Randolph Henry Churchill, third son of the 7th. Duke of Marlborough.

A small cottage, moved from its original location and now on Canal Street, is claimed to be the house visited by Churchill's mother.

The old Jerome frame homestead is still preserved and can be seen at the old Jerome Farm north of Palmyra, west of Marion, on the Eddy Ridge-Hall Center Road.

And Palmyrans generally believe a small frame home located near the site of General Swift's log cabin is where Churchill's grandparents lived for a time before leaving for Rochester and a prominent niche in history.

One thing is sure, that when the Palmyra militia and General Swift rode to Pultneyville in 1814, the last thought in their minds would have been that their own neighbors would be ancestors of one of Britain's greatest statesmen.

A large drumlin sticks its earthy neck right into the Palmyra village within two blocks of its downtown section. At the foot of this hill a state historical marker call attention to the pioneer home of a Palmyra youth who became a shipmate of Admiral Dewey.

Admiral William T. Sampson was born in Palmyra in 1840, where his first exposure "sea water" was probably on the old Erie Canal which ran through the village two blocks north of his home.

Although Sampson taught in the U. S. Naval Academy, and was its superintendent for four years, his most prominent bid for fame or publicity was as President of the Board of Inquiry on the Maine Disaster. This office of necessity involved him in considerable controversy because of the public indignation that exploded along with the Maine.

His country thought enough of him to name the huge World War II Sampson Naval Base for him. This upstate base, now abandoned, was located on the east side of Seneca Lake south of Geneva, and was appropriately named for an Admiral born in nearby Palmyra, a neighbor to Churchill's ancestors, and who now rests in Arlington Cemetery.

On a county road just north of Palmyra, there is a beautiful cobblestone house, built about 1850, which figures in the historical as well as the architectural history of the area.

This house is on the Martin Harris farm, a farm mortgaged by Harris for $3,000 in 1829 to finance the publication of the first Mormon bible. Until Harris stepped in to provide financial backing, Joseph Smith's hand-written revelations could not be broadcast to the world.

Through his support, Harris actually became one of the prime founders of the Mormon Church. As one of the "Three Witnesses" who testified they had seen the famous golden plates, and that Joseph Smith's revelations were true, Harris' name is inscribed on the bronze tablet of the angel Moroni monument, barely a ten minute drive south of his old homestead.

Architecturally, Harris' home is representative of the cobblestone structures built from the middle 1820's until about 1868, most of which still endure in well-preserved condition.

Cobblestone homes and buildings were built in the area lying between Utica and Buffalo, in the Lake Ontario region. The lake beaches provided most of the cobbles for this unique and often strikingly beautiful type of construction.

Cobbles are small rounded or ovoid stones formed by the glaciers and smoothed by water action. Most of them came from the lake area, but there are some structures built of rough cobbles gathered from area fields.

Area old-timers recall their parents' and grandparents' stories of trips to the beaches, picking up the stones, and hauling them to the building site in oxen-drawn wagon.

The cobbles, when delivered to the construction site, were sorted by size and sometimes by color, in sorting bees. They were usually dropped by hand through various openings in planks, enabling the mason to choose from a uniform supply the stones to be used in each area of construction.

There are around 150 of these edifices, mostly homes, in Drumlin Square. It would require a large book to write the history of each, with their herringbone and other patterns of stone arangement, including occasionally the alternation of different colored stones to further accent the horizontal and vertical lines of stone arrangement.

At one time there were many lime quarries in the area, and the local masons used this lime for their mortar. Each mason had his own jealously guarded formula for making mortar, and the surpising thing is that even today there are few cobblestone structures that show signs of shoddy workmanship.

There was a time in the area when 8-sided, or octagon homes were built, although practically all of them have disappeared. At least one octagon structure was built of cobblestones in the village of Alloway, south of Lyons.

This building was a blacksmith shop built about 1827, and is still standing. It was painted red, white and blue in the late 1800's as a result of a lost election bet.

Churches and schools were also built with cobbles, and a few of them are to be seen in the area. Many of the houses had hiding places for runaway slaves, as many people in the "Square" were links in the underground railway system that relayed slaves from the southern states up through "Yankee" land and on to Canada. The Pultneyville-Sodus Bay harbor regions were embarking points for these runaways.

Old diaries reveal the obvious fact that people lived in log cabins while their stone houses were being built. The early Americana stone architecture was so enduring and attractive that people sometimes today wonder why it has not been revived, or did not continue, as it was such a contrast to the early log structures that certainly did not endure.

Labor costs apparently are the only reason why cobble homes ceased to be built. And when you ponder that just the front of a house, after allowing for window and door spaces, could require from 3,000 to 8,000 stones, the reason seems sufficient.

While cobblestone buildings are scattered through the area, the interested traveler will find the greatest concentration in and around the villages of Phelps, Newark, Palmyra and Marion.

There were and are other bits of Americana in the region of course: old homes still standing which were inns or stage stops of another century; float bridges; roads plowed in winter with giant kettles drawn by horses; old settlements surrounding flax mills, on very active, now disappeared; tanneries; iron mines; hop fields and mint farms (Lyons was once the peppermint oil center of the world); plank roads; country schoolhouses, and more.

Many of these have their own interesting history, but not necessarily peculiar or unique to Drumlin Square. But we have mentioned at least some of history's famous children who were born here, or at least dallied here. And some of them, we believe, may have dreamed their great dreams inspired with the scenery framed by Mother Nature's icy workmen when they, too, tarried here.

Mindful that the present must be for the living, it would seem though that only the drumlins can afford to sit here and watch succeeding generations as they too create successive chapters of Americana for those who may follow.

But it can do no harm for our present busy generation, and those that follow us, to pause once in awhile to reflect on our Americana legacy as they view and ponder -

THE SLEEPING DRUMLINS

The last great glacier's frozen arms
Stretched to these temperate lands;
Grasping earth and rock, then moulding them
Twixt fingers of its icy hands.

Ages passed - then slow retreat,
Sun-driven to its polar home -
With dying tears, its waters' ebb
Revealed these hills of clay and loam.

Oh drumlins Of the eons, born,
To sleep on Mother Nature's breast!
What sloping beauties man doth view,
In your sprawling, silent rest!

Pat Smith
End.

(Note: the formatting of the bibliography is exactly as in Mr. Smith's original.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grouped principally by subject matter; where the same publication covers other subject matter as well, a reference code is used for the sake of brevity. Page numbers are shown only where the general index of the publication might not suffice for reference.

DRUMLINS and related geology.....

DRUMLINS OF CENTRAL WESTERN NEW YORK - by H. L. Fairchild - N.Y.S. Museum Bulletin # 111 (1907)

GEOLOGY OF THE CLYDE & SODUS BAY QUADRANGLES, NEW YORK - by Tracy Gillette - N.Y.S. Museum Bulletin #320 (1940)

THE STRUCTURE OF THE DRUMLINS EXPOSED ON THE SOUTH SHORE OF LAKE ONTARIO - by George Slater - N.Y.S. Museum Bulletin #281, Section 1 (1929)

ICE JAMS AND WHAT THEY ACCOMPLISH - Paper read by M. A. Veeder, M.D. (Lyons, N.Y.) before the American Associaton for the Advancement of Science, August 12, 1897

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK - by Arthur C. Parker - N.Y.S. Museum Bulletin #237-238, Part 2 (1920)

COWLES HISTORY OF WAYNE COUNTY, NEW YORK (1895)(a) (Pt. Hill and Jesuits, Savannah, N. Y. under Savannah Township - transit area, Page 13)

MORMONS

HISTORY OF ONTARIO COUNTY, 1788-1876 (Page 42)(b)
(a) Pages 76-82

HISTORY OF WAYNE COUNTY, N.Y., 1789-1877 - by Prof. W. H. McIntosh (c) (Page 150 indicates the present Joseph Smith historic home was only partially completed in 1831 when Smith left the Palmyra region; the Smith family lived in a log cabin next to the present site, laboring on the house from 1818-31)

HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK - N.Y.S. Historical Association, Volume 5 (1937). (Mormons state the sect was formerly organized in Fayette, N.Y., Seneca County - above works state the sect was first formed in Manchester, 1830, then a few weeks later formally organized in Fayette)

WHAT IS A MORMON? - Brochure of Historic Mormon Country issued by the Mormon Church

STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS

(b) Page 81 (Page 181, re: Granger, spells his first name Gehazi)

HISTORY OF ONTARIO COUNTY, 1911 - Pages 135-141

DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY, VOL. V (1930) (e)

Note - Granger reportedly married Sally Douglas in 1819 but a search of the ONTARIO REPOSITORY (Published in nearby Canandaigua, N.Y.) carries no mention of his marriage in the issues for that year, or the years 1820 and 1821

PHELPS, N.Y. (Israel Nims)

(b)
WHEN PHELPS WAS YOUNG - by Helen Post Ridley (1939)

SPIRITUALISM

ROCHESTER HISTORICAL SOCIETY publications - Vols. I,III,IV,V,XI,XII
(a) Pages 82-83

A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE - Published by Cornell University, 1959 (d)

(HORACE GREELEY - see (d), and ROCHESTER HISTORICAL SOCIETY Vol. V, Page 16) Also (h) reference below. THE GROWING WORLD, published 1885, Page 104, states that in 1830 Greeley worked for a time on the DEMOCRATIC paper at Sodus, N.Y., then continued on to Erie, Pennsylvania at a $4 a month increase in wages.

SHAKERS

THESE PEOPLE CALLED SHAKERS, by Edward D. Andrews. The Oxford University Press, 1953
(a) Page 220
(c) Page 173

FOURIERISM

THE UNIVERSAL STANDARD ENCYCLOPEDIA, Vol. IX - Funk & Wagnalls' (UNICORN PRESS)
(a) Pages 198 & 221
(c) See Sodus History

CLYDE, N.Y.

GRIP'S HISTORICAL SOUVENIR OF CLYDE, N.Y. (1905)
(a) Page 272
(c) Page 84

ERIE CANAL (early locations)

WAYNE COUNTY ATLAS - 1874

PORT BYRON, N.Y.

(e) Vol. XVII, Isaac Singer; Vol. XIX, Henry Wells

N.Y.S. VACATIONLANDS, Published by N.Y.S. Dept. of Commerce
(According to (e) above, Wells was apprenticed in Palmyra, N.Y. at the age of 16)

PALMYRA, N.Y.

Admiral Sampson - (e) Vol. XVI
General Swift - (c) Page 134
Also collection of clippings, writings and other errata owned by the Palmyra Public Library

PALMYRA AND VICINITY, by Thomas L. Cook - Published by the PALMYRA COURIER JOURNAL, 1930 (f)

Particular appreciation is given Emma Swift, Head, Local History Division, Rochester, N.Y. Public Library for assisting the writer in untangling conflicting information previously published regarding Jennie Jerome's birthplace, etc.

NELUMBO LUTEA (Yellow Lotus)

N.Y.S. Conservation Dept. letter, September 13, 1960, from Ralph H. Smith, Conservation Biloogist (earlier writings had stated the Sodus Bay lotus colony is one of only four such colonies in the world)

COL. PEREGRINE FITZHUGH

GREAT SODUS BAY, by Walter Green (1945) (h)
(a) Page 204
(c) Page 166

PULTNEYVILLE

(c)
This history (c) gives the date of the invasion as "early morning, June, 1814", and Cowles (a) repeats this statement as well.

MARY ASHLEY TOWNSEND
(e) Vol. XVIII (Published 1936) - this also gives source material as well as a list of her principal works.

The writer is also grateful to Dorothy S. Facer, Wayne County Historian, for furnishing source material and reviewing this completed work; to the Palmyra Public Library for source material; to the Newark Public Library and the Hoffman Foundation of this library, whose extensive works on local history furnished references on many of these subjects, and the principal events of the Oliver Perry train robbery incident.

Prepared by Volunteer Nancy Allen Valvano

This material, copyright © 1962 to Francis "Pat" Smith, may be freely used by non-commercial entities, as long as this full paragraph remains on all copied material. These electronic pages, with commentary and underlying source code, cannot be reproduced in any format for profit or other presentation, nor may this copyrighted original electronic text be used on any other site or CD-ROM or other digital storage medium.

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