The Glen Haven Daily Mail

Note: Revised from an earlier post of 2010.

Between 1854 and 1859, guests at the Glen Haven Water Cure & Summer Resort had no nearby U.S. post office to convey their letters to the outside world. The closest was four miles south in the hamlet of Scott, with a larger post office seven miles farther on, in the town of Homer.

As a service to its guests, Glen Haven opened its own “supplementary” post office where letters were collected and carried to Homer (when the weather was pleasant) or to the closer post office in Scott (if the weather was bad). The cost for the service was one penny per letter. Any incoming mail was picked up free of charge, and brought back to the hotel guests.

To the delight of present-day collectors, in addition to the required U.S. postage stamp, each outgoing envelope carried a Glen Haven Daily Mail stamp, signifying that the penny had been paid.

In 1859, the U.S. opened a post office at Glen Haven, and the supplementary service came to an end.

— The Private Local Posts of the United States: Volume 1, New York State by Donald Scott Patton, published by Robson Lowe Ltd.; London, 1967, pp. 320-325

You might ask what the one-penny Glen Haven stamp brings today. Here are four examples from recent auctions:

$1,000

$1,400

$3,250

$3,250

Not a bad return on an investment of one cent.

The Parrott Guns

They rest on either side of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument like decorative bookends, and you would hardly know in passing what remarkable instruments of war they were. They arrived in the Village on August 13, 1897, two years after the completion of the monument. They were a gift of the federal government, with the freight ($39.40) paid by the local Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) post.

They were first placed on limestone stands to match the monument; in 1995 they were mounted on authentic wheeled carriages built by Tom Dean and Charlie Rounds of our village.

Specifically, our resident cannons are 30-pound Parrott Guns. The barrel of each gun is 11 feet long and weighs 4,200 pounds. Too heavy to be moved during a battle (each requires a team of eight horses), these were siege guns, wheeled into emplacements and brought to bear on fortifications. The 30-pound Parrott Gun was used by Union armies to besiege Confederate forts and fortified cities across the south, most famously at Vicksburg, Mississippi; Port Hudson, Louisiana; and Fort Macon, North Carolina.

They take their name from their inventor and manufacturer, Robert Parker Parrott, the superintendent of the West Point Foundry from 1836 to 1867. Our two cannons were made there, just across the Hudson River from West Point, in a cluster of brick buildings whose fires glowed red through every day and night of the Civil War. You can see the identifying initials RPP and WPF engraved on the muzzle face of each gun.

Even without the initials, the Parrott gun is easily recognized by the thick band of iron wrapped around its breech. This reinforcing band, at the point of greatest force, enabled the gun to be made of iron, rather than bronze. The Parrott Gun could thus be manufactured quickly and cheaply. It was a boon to the Union.

Parrott Guns were also known as Parrott Rifles because of their rifled bore, five grooves running the length of the barrel with a right-hand twist. The grooves spun the projectile so it flew with a spiral motion, traveling farther and hitting the target with more power and accuracy.

The “30-pound” designation refers to the weight of the projectile the gun fired. The West Point Foundry made 10-, 20- and 30-pound Parrotts. The 30-pound Parrott fired two kinds of shells, each about 4 inches in diameter and 10-12 inches in length. One type was 30 pounds of solid iron and was known as a “bolt.” The second type was hollow and packed with a matrix of black powder and lead balls, called case-shot. A fuse exploded the case-shot in the air or on impact. The solid bolt was used to destroy walls and other artillery pieces. Case-shot was intended for gun crews and troops.

Fully elevated, the 30-pound Parrott Gun could send a projectile almost four miles. Upon its return to earth, the 30-pound shell could pass through masonry walls, even solid stone. And the gun was accurate. At a range of a mile and a half, gunners could place three out of four shells within ten feet of their intended target. As the Confederacy learned in North Carolina.

The siege of Fort Macon, a coastal fort on the Outer Banks, had been dragging on for more than a month when the Union artillery arrived for the final assault. Most notably, three 30-pound Parrott Guns were emplaced a mile from the fort’s outer walls. On April 26th, 1862, the Union guns opened fire and the Confederate guns returned the barrage. Early in the day, the rounds from the Parrotts were carrying over the fort, but by noon they had found their range. A single round hit three of the fort’s largest guns in succession, knocking two out of action, killing three men and wounding five more. The parapets were soon swept clear. Shot passed through solid stone stairways and masonry walls, wounding men inside.

Because the fort had been built by the Union, the Parrott gunners knew the exact location of the powder magazine. They began concentrating fire on the wall that shielded 10,000 pounds of gunpowder. When it began to crumble, the fort’s commander, Col. Moses White, realized he was one round away from leading a band of angels. The white flag went up and the age of masonry fortifications came to a end.

Today you can buy Parrott shells dug up from the mud of Vicksburg, Port Hudson and the Carolina coast. You can see Parrott guns in parks and battlefields. Of the 30-pound Parrotts, 198 are known to survive. Two sit quietly in Lake View Cemetery. I don’t know where they’ve been, or what they’ve done. But I know what they were capable of, and I look on them with respect.

* * *

“Parrott Guns,” Chelsea Telegraph and Pioneer, October 3, 1863; “The Confederate Defense of Fort Macon,” Paul Branch, Ramparts, Spring 2001; Union Drummer Boy Civil War Artifacts; “The Patriot and The Parrott Rifle,” Eric Ortner; The Encyclopedia of Civil War Artillery. My thanks as always to the Skaneateles Historical Society, and to Tristan Whitehouse for holding the other end of the tape measure.

First posted in 2009, this piece has been updated with new information to accompany the revised version of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument posting.

The Soldiers and Sailors Monument

Built in fits and starts, of limestone and marble, and crowned with bronze, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument stands today in Lake View Cemetery to remind us of hundreds of young men who marched south to do battle so that the United States might remain united. But as the war was a struggle, so too was finding a proper way to remember it.

Twenty years after the end of the War of Rebellion, the Town of Skaneateles still had no monument to its heroes. Such memorials were being raised all over the north, the effort usually led by the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), an organization of Civil War veterans established in 1866. Each town’s G.A.R. post was named after a Civil War hero, and given a number. The Skaneateles chapter was chartered in 1880, Ben H. Porter Post 164, and led the local efforts to honor those who served, first raising funds in February of 1886.

But just as the honorees of the monument had endured shot and shell, so its promoters would have to endure politics, poverty and letters to the editor.

The first wrinkle came in June 1886 when a rival association, “The Soldiers’ Monument Association of Skaneateles,” began collecting for a monument to honor veterans of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Civil War, plus, in a sweeping catch-all, any soldier in the town or adjoining towns who made a contribution to the fund. By October, that association had collected $394. In December of 1887, however, under-financed and under-appreciated, they bowed out. The following month, the G.A.R. noted that $936.10 had been raised and work would begin.

In December of 1888, a site was staked out in Lake View Cemetery. Stone arrived in January of 1889. In the spring, local stone mason William Cottle began laying the foundation.

As befits a war memorial, sniping began at once. One critic pointed out that the monument was being built on quicksand. Cottle replied that six feet of foundation stone would be laid on four thicknesses of plank, and would hold up quite well. And to his reply he added this verse:

“Rock, sand and timberland
Are what I like to see.
But from big guns and fools’ tongues
Good Lord, deliver me.”

Cottle finished the foundation in August of 1889 and began work on the first level. At summer’s end, the monument stood 16 feet high but alas the treasury had dwindled to nothing. No work was done in 1890. In 1891, the coffers held one dollar and eleven cents. In early 1893, the unfinished monument was scorned as an “unsightly pile of stone.”

But in September of that year, Cottle returned to work on the second story. The expenses were “to be borne by a liberal citizen of the Village” who guaranteed the monument’s completion. Cottle finished the work using 240 tons of limestone in all, and the monument stood 60 feet high. On its front, an inscription read, “In Memory of the Soldiers and Sailors of Skaneateles.” 

The “liberal citizen” was artist, banker and civic leader John D. Barrow, the designer of the monument, of whom it was said, “he did not have a warlike spirit, but he was a friend of the soldier himself.”

To crown the spire, a statue was suggested, and more money was sought. By January of 1894, $1048.20 had been raised and a $950 bronze was ordered, also to be designed by Barrow. His finished design was cast by Melzar Hunt Mosman (1846-1926). In addition to our statue, Mosman also cast the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Bridgeport, Connecticut; an 8-ton equestrian statue of General Ulysses S. Grant for Lincoln Park, Chicago; the bronze doors of the U.S. House of Representatives; and the Tenth Massachusetts Regiment monument at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

By October of 1894, Barrow’s statue of a Union soldier had been delivered and installed, raised to the top by William Cottle, and unnamed horse, and a block & tackle. But on windy days, the statue rocked. Word was sent to its makers “to come and remedy the difficulty.” In the summer of 1895, the statue was steadied with two bolts securing a strap over one of the figure’s shoes. Wind was not the only culprit, as gusts of irate letters buffeted the monument as well. Wrote one curmudgeon, “I think the statue is too far away. We haven’t all got spy glasses.”

In June of 1895, the names of 204 of the Town’s enlistees were carved on slabs of marble and mounted inside the monument, on the east wall. On the west wall, three more panels carry the names of 147 more soldiers. There is a story in every name: Navy Lt. Benjamin Porter, 20, killed leading a charge across the beach at the storming of Fort Fisher, North Carolina. His brother, Private Stanley Porter, 20, mortally wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Virginia, his body never found. Private Albert De Cost Burnett, 16, the Village’s youngest recruit, dying of disease at Harrison’s Landing, Virginia. Private Wadsworth B. Francis, 51, killed at the storming of the fortress at Port Hudson, Louisiana. Sgt. James Dunn and Private Michael Dunn, dying at Andersonville Prison, Georgia. In all, 60 men belonging to the Town of Skaneateles gave their lives in the conflict.

The completed Soldiers and Sailors Monument was dedicated on September 4, 1895. The effort had taken almost 10 years and $10,000, but a throng of 8,000 crowded the Village for the dedication, and was well pleased.

Today, atop the monument, the silent soldier still speaks about his designer, the “unwarlike” John Barrow. Take a look and see what the soldier is not doing. He is not aiming or firing his weapon, not charging into eternity, or standing guard, or dying, unlike so many memorial figures of the era. This is not a statue about war. The soldier’s rifle stands at his side, steadied casually by his right hand, as if it were a walking stick. The rifle’s bayonet is tucked in his belt. The soldier’s left hand is empty and hangs relaxed at his side. His forward foot is almost off the pediment, as if he is preparing to move on. His jaw is firm, his eyes are steady, and he looks straight ahead, calmly, resolutely. The battle is over. The war is done. Peace beckons on the horizon.

***

Notes

First posted in 2009, this piece has been updated with new information and photos.

The last surviving member of Ben H. Porter Post, No. 164, G.A.R., was John Thompson. Enlisting as a private in February of 1865 at Auburn, he was present when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Thompson died at the age of 92 on March 9, 1939.

The photo of the monument is most likely William Cottle’s own, found in a Cottle family attic in Maine.

The photo of young William Cottle was donated to the Skaneateles Historical Society by members of the Cottle family.

The photo of Barrow’s statue was taken by Matt Champlin, via drone, and we are very grateful to him.

Mott Cottage

I confess to some personal confusion regarding what came to be known as the Mott Cottage, because there were two Lydia Motts and our own Lydia lived in three different cottages.

First let us respectfully dispense with the other, and perhaps more famous, Lydia Mott (1806-1875), a Quaker teacher who was active in the movements to gain the vote for women and end slavery. Our Lydia Mott (1775-1862) was a Quaker teacher who founded a boarding school for young women, and was a strong advocate of education for women. Fortunately, she was known more often as Lydia P. Mott, her middle name being Philadelphia, in honor of the new home her parents, Joseph and Sarah Stansbury, had established in America. (Some accounts place her birth in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, while her parents were enroute to Philadelphia.)

In 1795, Lydia married Robert Mott; ten years later, she was widowed and left with four children. Between 1812 and 1816, three of the children died, leaving her with just her son Arthur.

In 1818, Lydia and Arthur came to Skaneateles. By the next year she had established the Friends Female Boarding-School, more familiarly known as “The Hive.” Mott and her assistants taught needlework, arithmetic, grammar, geography, history, rhetoric, logic, bookkeeping, philosophy and mathematics, as well as French and Latin.

Mott sold the Friends Female Boarding-School in 1823. But she remained in Skaneateles and continued her involvement with the school’s students. A friend wrote, “The little cottage where she lived, nearly opposite the Friends’ meeting-house, was then a lovely place, with its porches covered with fragrant honeysuckles, and two sides of the house surrounded by a flower garden.”

This was Lydia Mott’s first cottage, but not the Mott Cottage. This cottage was located at what is today the corner of West Lake and Benson Roads. After selling the school, she moved closer to the Village. In “The Early Quakers of Skaneateles,” published in the Skaneateles Free Press of January 29, 1897, Mary Elizabeth Beauchamp noted, “Mrs. Mott, after leaving her pleasant, rose-embowered little abode opposite the ‘Hive,’ built the cottage which was afterwards owned by Frances and Edward Potter on the site of the present ‘Mingo Lodge.’ This was her second cottage, but not the Mott Cottage.

(At the time of Miss Beauchamp’s writing, Mingo Lodge was the former Daniel Robbins estate, renamed by its new owners in 1895. The main house eventually became known as Westgate, and “The Annex,” built for the family’s children, took the name Mingo Lodge. This latter-day Mingo Lodge, designed by architect Charles Follen McKim in 1878, was demolished in 2016.)

In later years, Lydia P. Mott left Skaneateles briefly, moving to Cincinnati, Ohio. But she returned to Skaneateles, living in what was long known as Mott Cottage, where she spent her last years.

Mott Cottage

Seen on the 1856 map below, the Mott Cottage was at the top of Leitch Avenue (then known as John Street) at the corner of Academy Street.

In the Skaneateles Press of January 23, 1936, historian Fred Humphryes described the cottage and his childhood under its roof:

“After Mrs. Mott’s death, my father [John Humphryes] rented the place, and we lived there for six years. In this house my youngest sister [Alice] and two brothers [Harold and Willie] were born and where one of my brothers [Willie] died.

“The Mott cottage was a long, rambling story-and-a-half house. It stood where the dwelling of Mrs. Lillian Palmer stands. On the first floor to the west was the parlor, with a bedroom to the south, both rooms opening into a hall which extended north and south clear thru the dwelling, and opening onto a porch in the rear, this porch overlooking the lake. On the east of the hall was a large living room facing Academy street and to the rear of this was a bedroom, and next east of the living room was the kitchen, and from this extended a long storeroom and woodshed, on the upper story of the house were two bedrooms on each side of the stairway.

“Between the house and Academy street was a ravine with a brook running through it, on either side of this ravine were a row of stately maple trees. This ravine has now been filled in, the cottage demolished, and nothing remains of the dear old place but the barn, and that has been transformed into a garage. Extending south from the back porch was a pair of old-fashioned cellar doors where we children used to slide down, and what great times we had there. From this back porch I remember watching a torch-light procession as it passed along Genesee street. This was during the Grant and Colefax campaign. It was a pretty sight, watching the flicker of the lights through the trees.”

“My memory takes me back, at times, to the old cottage, and the trundle bed in which I used to sleep in what we called the hall bedroom. In the summer the brook had a great attraction for me. I would go down and lift the stones to see the crabs scuttle from under them.”

In her last years, Mrs. Mott was confined to her cottage. Susan Kellogg Lee, the wife of Benoni Lee, lived just around the corner on Academy Street. She, like many of Mrs. Mott’s friends, would visit her almost every day and read aloud to her, to help pass the time.

Lydia P. Mott died on April 15, 1862, at the age of 87. An obituary in the Friends’ Intelligencer noted:

“She was an example of plainness and simplicity; and the subject of the best education of woman occupied much of her time and thoughts. The wrongs and injuries of the poor Indian claimed her sympathy and care. For the imbruted slave she was an earnest advocate, the latest effort of her pen, only a few months since, being an encouragement to those who were laboring to affect his emancipation. She bore the vicissitudes of her changeful life with an uncomplaining spirit, in the fulness of faith that goodness and mercy would continue to follow her all her days, and her end was signally marked with peace.”

Three years after Mrs. Mott’s death, Susan Kellogg Lee anonymously submitted a poem, “The Maples of Mott Cottage,” to the Skaneateles Democrat:

“They grew in the forest tall and fair,
Until man the destroyer came,
Felling their brothers for light and air,
And to nourish the household flame.

Musing a while on the hill, he stood,
Watching the day’s decline;
Why do I fell these lords of the wood,
Planted by Hand divine?

Sickly exotics from sunnier climes,
These natives can never replace;
Leaves softly murmuring like evening chimes,
It seems like a hallowed place.

A group of trees by this purling brook,
A cottage would shade and adorn,
Peace for a pilgrim in yon quiet nook,
Repose for the weary and worn.

Bared to the sun, cheered by the breeze,
Half a century of seasons have sped.
The maples now are grand old trees,
And the woodman who spared them is dead.

They catch the first gleam of morn’s early light,
See the shadows steal over the lake,
The sun’s parting rays linger at night,
Tinge with gold the wood and the brake.

Here may life close in quiet and ease.
Weary the path I have trod,
I can list to the murmur of the trees
And silently worship God.

Hushed the lone heart, its pilgrimage done,
The breezes sigh mournfully by;
To the bourn that’s returnless the mother has gone,
The son among strangers to die.”

Writing in 1897, Mary Elizabeth Beauchamp noted that Mott Cottage “has been pulled down within a few years.”

Writing in 1936, Beauchamp’s nephew, Fred Humphryes said, “The dear old place is gone, and I often wonder if the home we build today are any more comfortable, or look any better than the well-kept, rambling old cottages of our childhood. What a beautiful place the old Mott Cottage would be today, with the ravine and brook, a rustic bridge across it with a well-kept lawn and flower beds. Certainly it would be the delight of all beholders.”

***

Notes:

For more on Lydia P. Mott: “A Powerful Influence in Disseminating Knowledge: Lydia Philadelphia Mott and the Friends Female Boarding-School in Skaneateles, New York” by Jana A. Bouma

Regarding the torchlight parade, in 1868, Ulysses S. Grant and Schuyler Colfax successfully ran for the offices of U.S. President and Vice-President.

For more on Mingo Lodge: https://kihm6.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/the-robbins-estate/

For more on Benoni Lee: https://kihm6.wordpress.com/2023/01/16/benoni-lee-our-sphinx/

Susan Lee’s poem was originally published in the Skaneateles Democrat, December 7, 1865. The poem’s final line is a reference to the death of Lydia’s son, Arthur Mott. He was a bright lad and successful in business; he established a woolen mill in Mottville, which was named for him, but later in life suffered grave financial reverses and succumbed to alcoholism. He moved to Toledo, Ohio, and died there in 1869, “among strangers.”

Sailing in 1911

This postcard, printed in Germany for H.A. Livingston’s store in Skaneateles, bears the message, “Dear Kitty, Will you please tell me the numbers of the pages we have to skip in Arithmetic.”

Skaneateles, 1849 & 1922

“The village of Skaneateles is one of the most lovely and picturesque in western New-York. From this village the eye measures about half the distance of the lake to the south, a mile and a half in width. On the shores are no bogs or marshes to disfigure the prospect; the rich velvet like green of the gradually sloping banks of the lake, seem to be resting on the water’s brink. Villas and lawns give a charm which distance lends to the view. The woodlands, clothed in the richest green, rock and rustle their foliage in the wind, and the golden grain of the cultivated fields waves in the breeze. The herds and flocks graze in slothful competency over the luxuriant pastures, and the light bark glides gracefully over the sweet bosom of the water.

“The hum of prosperous business is heard amid the rattling of the rail road cars, the clinking of hammers, the rumbling of machinery and the rushing of water falls, and the happy faces and the happy homes of the citizens, invite the settlement of many more among them. The society, the schools, the scenery and the prospects of business, are all wholesome and flourishing, and it may be said, without fear of contradiction, that few if any villages present so many great and desirable advantages.”

— Onondaga; or Reminiscences of Earlier and Later Times (1849) by Joshua V. H. Clark, A.M.

In 1922, the mythical Rosberry Holmes (pen name of C.H. Williams, editor of the Jordan Home Paper) updated the text in an article entitled “Looking Out from the Kan-ya-to Inn,” as follows:

“The village of Skaneateles is one of the most lovely and picturesque in Central New York. True, there is Cazenovia down in Madison County, and Cooperstown in Otsego. But Skaneateles is in Onondaga, and we are for Onondaga because it’s home.

“From the comfortable rocking chair on the porch the eye measures about half the distance of the lake to the south, where it turns to the left and points its finger toward Cortland.

“A mile and a half wide, and deep as the sea in places. There are no bogs nor marshes on the shore to disfigure the prospect. The rich velvet-like green of the gradually sloping banks of the lake seem to be resting on the water’s brink, as you sit at the breakfast table and scan the picture. Villas and lawns give a charm which distance lends to the view. The Woodlands, clothed in the richest green, rock and rustle their foliage in the wind, and the golden grain of the cultivated fields waves in the breeze. The herds and flocks graze in slothful competency, both here in the Inn and over in the luxuriant pastures. While the navy of light barks glide gracefully over the sweet bosom of the water.

“The hum of prosperity is heard from the high class cars of the high class people who come from over the hills and far away, drawn here by what people say of Skaneateles qualities. This is the great rural feeding time of the year, and here is the place where the prodigal sons and daughters come to dine.

“Holworthy Hall came to Skaneateles last season. I am here now–and I in my obscure modesty have a long way the best of it for the Inn was boarded up then slumbering under a mantle of incompleteness. Now it is open in all its brilliant brightness, and there is a good cook in the kitchen and I am at the little table in direct line with the time of my life, as I look out across the waters into the Skaneateles hills.

“There is an abundance of excellent trout under the surface down in the cellar bottom of the lake. The same species lies before me on a platter, tender, sweet and rich brown. There’s many a farmhouse along the roads that lead to Skaneateles where tender fowls are milk fed on certain mashes that give to them a certain sweetness that is appealing. A broiler from one of those countryside paradise places is at my right hand. And with big red strawberries and the cream that comen down from the Lime Ledge farms, it makes you feel like royalty.

“There’s dew on the grasses and the smell of new mown hay is in the air; the birds are singing the old songs, and all nature is warm-hearted and full of smiling gladness. And–Oh! it’s great to live when you can live like this.

“This tribute to our fair neighbor is written by Joshua Clarke in 1849, and I have only added a few little things that he did not know about when he said with flowers what he was inclined to say of a beautiful picture that is open to the view of the satisfied guest whom good fortune becks to Skaneateles and to Kan-Ya-To Inn.”

– “Looking Out from the Kan-ya-to Inn: Rosberry Holmes Goes a Dining” in the Marcellus Observer, July 12, 1922

***

Note: The Kan-Ya-To Inn is, of course, today’s Sherwood Inn.

The visit of author Holworthy Hall is described in detail here.

No Mosquitos

From The Automobile Green Book, circa 1925

A Tale of Two Parks

Between St. James’ Episcopal Church and Legg Hall are two parks, both gifts to the Village of Skaneateles.

In the 1860s, both plots of land were in a wild state, sloping from an unpaved Genesee Street down to the water. The St. James’ seawall ended at the church’s western boundary. In 1873, the people of St. James’ built a new church, but the land between the church and Legg Hall remained in its natural state.

Joel Thayer owned the parcel of land next to Legg Hall, across Genesee Street from his home (today The Thayer House condominiums). In 1874, he built a seawall, filled in the slope and created a park. When his park was complete, he opened it to the public. In 1922, his granddaughters, May and Eva Webb, formally deeded Joel Thayer’s park to the Village.

That same year, Frederick Carleton Austin, a native of Skaneateles and a graduate of the Skaneateles Academy who had gone on to business success in Chicago, visited Skaneateles and saw the overgrown land between St. James’ and Thayer Park. He promised that if the land came up for sale, he would buy and donate the land to the Village. When he did make the purchase, he offered an endowment of $25,000 to maintain the land, provided the Village would build a seawall to link the walls already raised by St. James’ and Joel Thayer.

Frederick C. Austin knew construction. He was the founder and president of Municipal Engineering and Contracting Company of Chicago, and of the F.C. Austin Drainage Excavator Company. When the United States was building the Panama Canal (1904-1914), Austin’s firms provided excavation equipment and concrete mixing machinery. His companies also made earth movers, road graders and paving machines. (In the Village, an F.C. Austin sprinkler helped to keep down the street dust in the summer.)

Austin was as generous as he was successful. In Chicago, he planned a major gift to Northwestern University. In January of 1929, he donated the F.C. Austin Building, an 11-story “skyscraper” valued at $3,000,000, and also promised to leave the remainder of his estate to fund scholarships to the business school. In return, Northwestern agreed to assume responsibility for any bequests made by Austin in his will.

One of those obligations was the $25,000 gift to the Village of Skaneateles, which was so far unclaimed. In the six years since Austin’s offer, the Village had made no progress on the seawall. In 1929, Austin stipulated that the Village had just five years to build, or there would be no $25,000.

In 1931, when F.C. Austin died, the Village still had not begun construction. Work finally started in December of 1933; thirty men on the relief roles were employed by street commissioner William Hennessey and paid by the Civilian Works Administration. The lake was low, so it was an ideal time to work on the wall. But it was not until 1935 that the trustees of Northwestern University were informed of the wall’s completion, a full 14 months after Austin’s five-year deadline had passed.

Fortunately for Skaneateles, the Northwestern University trustees were good sports, and in 1936 they wrote the check to honor F.C. Austin’s wishes. In 1939, after another three years had passed, the Village placed a small marker in F.C. Austin Park to honor its creator.

Today, the land between Legg Hall and St. James’ is one expanse of green, thanks to the generosity of the Thayer-Webb family and F.C. Austin. Austin’s contribution, however, has been overshadowed by that of his distant cousin, Clarence Mason Austin, who in 1927 died and left his land for Austin Park, thought by many to be the only Austin Park in the Village. But at Northwestern University, more than 770 students have benefited from F.C. Austin Scholarships and the benefactor’s name lives on.

* * *

The Book of Chicagoans: a biographical dictionary of leading living men of the city of Chicago (1911) by Albert Nelson Marquis; History of the Panama Canal, Its Construction and Builders (1915) by Ira Elbert Bennett; Letter to the editor of the Skaneateles Press, June 5, 1943, by Spencer L. Adams; hand-written notes of Helen Ionta, Village Historian, from the files of the Skaneateles Historical Society; website of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Rob Howard Rarities

In 1982, photographer Rob Howard received a call from Dick Schemeck, owner of the Hitching Post gift shop at the corner of Jordan & Genesee. Dick was placing an order for Skaneateles postcards in a day or two, but had no photos. This was not Rob’s usual subject matter, but Dick was a friend, and had a list of about a dozen subjects in the village that were postcard-worthy. The next day, Rob shot half of the sites on the list in the morning light, and then the other half in the late afternoon light.

He recalls the oddest request was for a picture of the Parish Center at St. Mary’s of the Lake; Dick explained that visiting Catholics liked to send postcards to show where they’d gone to Mass while on the road.

Little did Rob imagine that one day his cards would show up on eBay, and be sought after by collectors. Printing by Plastichrome, Boston; love the deckle-edge.

Terrapin Veal

Browsing in The Skaneateles Cook Book of 1915, I came across a recipe for “Terrapin Veal.” I was set to wondering what turtles and veal calves could possibly have in common, aside from their vulnerability, and by what path this recipe made its way to Skaneateles.

First, the terrapin, especially the diamondback terrapin that thrived in the marshlands along the Chesapeake Bay of Maryland. Native Americans and early settlers found them to be easy to catch and quite edible. They were so abundant that landowners often sustained their indentured servants and slaves on a diet made up largely of terrapin meat. Then, in the 19th century, the turtle became a delicacy, “sought with enthusiasm by the privileged,” especially in stews or soups seasoned with sherry and cream. Terrapin bowls and terrapin forks became part of the tableware of the affluent.

But as the terrapin population dwindled and prices for the meat rose, people began casting about for equally elegant but more available alternatives, such as “mock turtle soup” and “terrapin veal.” Skaneateles, being far from the coastal habitat of the terrapin, was an apt spot for such a substitution.

The contributor of the recipe was Cornelia Longstreet Poor, the daughter of Cornelius and Caroline Longstreet. Her father donated the land on which Syracuse University was built, including his mansion, Yates Castle, where Cornelia spent her girlhood. When Cornelia married Charles Henry Poor II of the U.S. Navy, Cornelius gave the couple Willowbank, a home in the village where they could spend their summers. The Poor family’s main residence was in Washington D.C., where they were very much a part of military high society. And hence Cornelia was surely familiar with the finer things, including terrapin. And so this recipe in the Skaneateles Cook Book:

If you prepare this before I do, please tell me how it is.

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Notes:

For more about the Poor family and Willowbank, visit “A Grand Wedding.”

Terrapin photo by Will Parson of the Chesapeake Bay Program

“The Vanished Banquet: Terrapin Soup” by David Shields

“The Diamondback Terrapin: The Biology, Ecology, Cultural History, and Conservation Status of an Obligate Estuarine Turtle” (2006) by Kristen M. Hart and David S. Lee