Monthly Archives: April 2014

The Trials of Canandaigua, Part 2 — Jemima Wilkinson

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A couple of weeks ago in this space we looked at the drumhead court-martial of 19 year-old Philip Spencer, a Canandaigua lad whose hanging on board a naval vessel led in part to creation of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis.
But the “Chosen Spot” was the venue for several other key legal cases from the early days of our republic. The first, in 1799-1800, concerned Jemima Wilkinson. A highly important founder of the white occupation, she was also easily one of the most bizarre figures of regional history. And considering the competition, that’s saying something.
Jemima, like me, started out in Rhode Island. After a severe illness in 1776, she announced that she had actually died and been resurrected. This royally annoyed the doctor and the neighbors, all of whom made it clear that no such thing had happened. The doctor, in fact, had insisted from the start that the whole thing was psychosomatic.
But now, according to Jemima Wilkinson, she was the incarnation of God on earth – neither male nor female. Though only 24 at the time of her illness she actually gathered a substantial following, and moved her flock to Pennsylvania before sending a team to prepare the way for her as she proceeded to the New Jerusalem – what we now call Yates County. Eventually she had a falling-out with two of her earliest followers, James Potter and William Parker.
The wonder is that this didn’t happen sooner, or more often. Wilkinson by all accounts was imperious, and demanding, frequently getting revelations that you should give something you had to the Publick Universal Friend, as she styled herself. Along with it she must have been tremendously charismatic, persuasive, and appealing, even as she ruled with an iron hand.
Parker had been a magistrate in Rhode Island, and Potter state treasurer… not men to underestimate. Besides making financial claims that had to be adjudicated, they swore out charges of blasphemy against her. Spotting a constable coming to arrest her, she outgallopped him (she was an excellent horsewoman) and barricaded herself in a follower’s house. The next constable to try surprised her in the community’s weaving shop, but the women there manhandled him back out the door and barred it. According to an old history, “A renewal of the onslaught was impossible without a repair of his breeches.”
Finally a 30-man posse broke down the door of her house with an axe, but their own doctor quickly ruled her too ill to travel. A negotiated settlement left her at large, but committed to present herself for trial in Canandaigua.
Which happened in June of 1800. Courts and judges were on a circuit in those days, so perhaps Potter and Parker had schemed to keep her out of circulation, and cut off her preaching. But court finally sat, and the grand jury quickly and unanimously ruled that there was nothing on which to base an indictment. Indeed Jemima Wilkinson was invited on the spot to preach to the court, which she did to great approbation. The Friend returned in triumph to her adoring flock, which melted away once she “left time” for good in 1819.
To give her due credit, she had opposed both war and slavery (two positions that easily qualified her as un-American), as well as promoting good conduct and celibacy (recommended but not required). Even so, while a conviction would have impeded our area’s growth, this court case didn’t prove much of anything, except how grumpy Parker and Potter were. Possibly it also sent a message to anyone else silly enough to get up a criminal trial for blasphemy.

Shallow Water Attracts Many Varied Water Birds

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Remember that Sunday a couple of weeks ago when it was 83 degrees – two days before it snowed?
Well, I had had family members at three different hospitals that week, and one was still in, so although I NEEDED to get outside for a while, I was too frazzled and worn for hiking or anything very demanding. So instead I went bird watching in Hammondsport.
There are two places in Hammondsport to see water birds… Champlin Beach, and the village waterfront. I started out at the Beach, right on Route 54. First off, I was disappointed that the pair of trumpeter swans were nowhere to be seen. But I consoled myself.
There didn’t seem to be much around that was very interesting, which illustrated what’s probably the best rule of nature watching – keep on looking. So I watched the Canada geese for a spell, and the mallard ducks – lovely birds both, bur pretty commonplace around here. I listened to the starlings singing. Yes, they sing, and their song is beautiful. They just throw in a grawk now and then to remind you that they’re starlings. I also spent some time watching and listening to a robin sing. His “cheeriup” heralds ever-returning spring, and he hopped from ground to rock to stump like he was stage-managing the season himself. Beautiful bird, and the first one many children learn.
By then I had worked my way over by the old boat dock, and here I was rewarded by a close look at a raft of American coots. A coot is cute. It’s a fat little black bird with a white front on its bill and between the eyes. They usually travel in small flocks, and they’re diving birds. They submerge completely to grub up food, and they’re in no hurry to come back up.
I’d seen the coots hanging around as I worked along the shore, but in passing the dock I got a good surprise – several pairs of common mergansers. In coots and geese the sexes look alike, but mallards and mergansers can be identified male or female from a distance… the male merganser has a striking whitish body and dark head, while the female has a small crest. Mergansers are diving birds like coots, but they’ve got serrated bills, almost like proto-teeth.
Feeling that I was doing pretty well for the afternoon, I left the park and drove over to the waterfront. While there had been twenty or thirty coots and six or eight mergansers, I now found more coots (off to the right, away from the waterfront itself), five or six pied-billed grebes, and, down off the mouth of the flume, a common loon.
Now, loons and grebes are – guess what? – diving birds. So is the bufflehead, of which I saw a single immature paddling around by the boardwalk.
This got me to thinking. Why were five types of divers hanging around the shore in Hammondsport? Obviously they’d prefer shallow water, but what were they up to down there out of sight? Were they all after the same thing? Or did they all fill different ecological niches in the same space?
So, just for starters… coots, with their lobed feet (rather than full webs) will eat almost anything, but they really go for underwater plants, such as algae, duckweed, milfoil, cattails – you name it, really. Mergansers, on the other hand, mostly take small fish, putting those serrated bills to work. So coots and mergansers can hang out side by side (just as I’d seen) without actually competing.
Grebes, like coots, have lobed feet, but unlike coots, they go for fish. This helps explain why you often see a grebe simply disappear, then come up again a minute or two later a good distance away.
The loon too is a fish-eater, with projections or barbs on the tongue and the roof of the mouth to help along, while the bufflehead dives down to find invertebrates.
So… I’d seen coots AWAY from the swimming areas at both locations. That made sense. They want plants, and that’s where the plants are still allowed to grow. The nearby mergansers could peacefully hunt the same space for fish.
The grebes, the loon, and the bufflehead were all in the plant-barren swimming area, but in shallow water where it would be relatively easy to spot small fish or invertebrates. And they were present IN SMALL NUMBERS, which probably reflected the amount of prey available in the swimming area.
As loons drift along, they ride so low in the water that they look as though they’re sinking. Suddenly a loon will put its head into the water and go down after it. Some people have suggested that loons are an ancient evolutionary development, as their feet are set so far back that they’re scarcely any use on land. Nesting is just about the only reason loons go ashore, spending the rest of their life on (or under) the water.
Grebes, as we’ve mentioned, just sort of disappear. I never really see one go – they just seem there and gone, as though a shark has snatched them from underneath. The cute coot pulls a neat little stunt, jumping upward out of the water, pulling a 180, and diving down nose first. Both the upward and the forward movement are just about the length of the coot’s body. It’s a hard maneuver to catch, as you never know which one’s about to dive, but lots of fun to watch when you see it.
So, five different diving birds in an hour along those shallow waters, not to mention gulls, geese, duck, swallows, starlings, robins, and crows. A nice way to spend some time, and the occasion for an interesting little research project.

A Canandaigua Tragedy

Canandaigua, for some reason, became the focal point of several major court cases in the early years of our republic. Handsome young man-about-town Philip Spencer was a Canandigua boy who became the unhappy star of one such proceeding, even though it happened far from home.
By all reports Philip was a charming and persuasive teenager, one whose wealthy and influential parents and grandparents were always getting out of scrapes. I think of him as a country club boy, deferential to the adults in their presence but instigator of pranks and even of little crimes behind their backs. He didn’t last long at what’s now Hobart, or at Union College, before the authorities bounced him out.
Dad secured him a midshipman’s commission in the navy… an “almost-an-officer” rank in which you’d get training and experience to become commissioned. Successive dissatisfied captains bounced him from ship to ship in a “shunt the crud” maneuver until he wound up in the South Atlantic on USS Somers as part of a midshipman’s cruise, designed to break these young gentlemen in with practical experience.
It shouldn’t be any surprise to hear that Philip wasn’t enthusiastic for responsible life aboard a ship of war, far from the pleasures of Rio or even Canandaigua. Before long he was regaling shipmates with visions of what HE would do if HE were in charge of the ship, rather than their stodgy old captain (not that he had any qualifications at all to do so). With several enlisted men he began to sketch out a scheme to seize the ship and begin a life as pirates.
Can they possibly have been serious? Or was this just youthful high-jinks games playing? In the end it didn’t matter. The captain got wind of it, seized Philip and several enlisted men, and even found a paper Philip had written in Greek listing crewmen likely to be sympathetic, and assignments for the takeover. There was no trial – only a conference of officers on December 1, 1842 – and with no further ado nineteen year-old Philip Spencer, along with two of his co-conspirators, was hanged from the yardarm, after which their bodies were pitched into the sea.
This seems excessive to us, and perhaps it was – BUT consider that in those days there was no communication at all back to home. Mutiny was always a possibility, and the captain had no backup at all, except for his own officers (IF he could trust them) and whatever men remained loyal. It’s possible… maybe not likely… that had Philip’s plans matured, a blood bath would have followed. It’s also possible, given his track record, that he’d have fouled things up, or even just lost interest.
Even so, once Somers returned to New York City news raced across a shocked nation, and the reaction from Washington, D.C. was volcanic. Philip’s father was secretary of war in the President’s cabinet, and this affair was not going to go away.
After extensive testimony a naval board of inquiry backed the captain, but public furor remained so hot that Captain Mackenzie demanded a full court-martial to clear his name. He won on a technicality (a split decision meant that the charges against him were rejected), but the public never forgave him. James Fenimore Cooper, who had been a midshipman himself, was furious, and Herman Melville, who had a cousin on board, probably drew from the case in writing Billy Budd.
Whether or not he deserved hanging, and whether or not that drumhead not-quite-court-martial was justified, Midshipman Philip Spencer had definitely tried to suborn mutiny. Both the midshipman’s cruise and the method of appointing midshipmen were in thorough disrepute, and in 1845 the U.S. Naval Academy opened at Annapolis. Four years of rigorous training and instruction were now the route to a naval commission. The navy, and the nation, were far the better for it. In a back-handed way, it may have been thanks in part to Philip Spencer.

“The Steuben County Horror”

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On April 7, 1878, the supervisor of Steuben County’s poorhouse did what he usually did at the end of the day. He locked the “inmates” into their various buildings and went home, taking the keys with him.
L.C. Ford, a “violent and dangerous” epileptic from Hornellsville, was confined to a cell under the care of inmate Thomas Pendergrass, who was infirm and visually impaired. The facility for the handicapped and insane was a two-story brick building with 14 cells, each having a wooden door with an 8 X 10 opening for food. Eighteen men were confined on the first floor, 25 women on the second.
Ford set fire to his cell, and the fire soon spread to the entire building of trapped people, most unable to care for themselves in the first place. One-legged Daniel Casey, who lived in the “old tollgate,” broke a window with his crutch, rescuing a woman and child.
Some reports say that Eli Carrington (keeper) was not present, and that his family took the lead in fighting the fire. Others report that Carrington and C.T. Blancett (supervisor of the laboring paupers) broke open the east door, allowing ten or twelve “nearly suffocated” people to escape. “Mr. Carrington made a desperate attempt to go up stairs and unfasten the doors of those whose dispositions were of such a character that they could not be trusted, but from the dense smoke and increasing heat of the fire he was unable to go; but it was not until he was forced by the main strength of Mr. Blancett, that he gave up the idea.”
“Occasionally an affrighted face could be seem at a grated window, and then the fierce flames would seep down and it would be seen no more. It was no wonder that women fainted and men turned pale…. After burning for about three hours nothing was left standing save the bare fire-eaten walls enclosing a smoking, undefined mass of ashes, bones, iron bedsteads and cell gratings.” This was our version of the 1911 Triangle Fire.
Carrington and Blancett, aided by some neighbors and “a few of the paupers who could be controlled,” protected neighboring buildings.
Alerted by the watchman (“after some hesitation”) people in Bath saw the glow against the night sky, and the fire “companies went out some distance but turned back knowing there was no water source available.” Would they have done that had the wealthy John Davenport’s house been on fire? (Again, some reports place fire companies on the scene.)
The victims were black and white, male and female. They came from aty least eight towns in Steuben County and one in Schuyler. Fifteen people under county care were killed outright (including a year-old child and a child of 4), and one, Edward Hudson, succumbed the following day. Hudson, who could not “move in an upright position without the aid of two crutches,” crawled out with his clothes aflame. Blancett “tore his clothes from him and applied a pail of water.” The eldest victim was 84 years old.
The coroner’s jury exonerated the keeper, but censured the citizens of the county and the Board of Supervisors “for not having provided safe and suitable accommodations.” The jury censured the Superintendents of the Poor “for not having provided a better mode of egress and fire apparatus, and for not removing the insane incendiary Ford to the asylum.”
According to a New York City newspaper on April 18 (“The Steuben Horror”) [Carrington] must have foreseen that in the event of a fire there was needed within the building some person of competent mind and muscle to open a way of escape and intelligently aid it. To quietly lock up fifty or more aged, idiotic, crippled or insane persons in a building night after night, pocket the key, and go off to bed in another building, providing no earthy means of aid in the event of an emergency, would seem to involve the faintest shade of responsibility, before knocking at the door of the Supervisors and Superintendents of the Poor.”
On May 7 the Board of Supervisors (following a defeated proposal to abolish the poorhouse) appointed a committee to review the county home; this committee reported on May 8.
Accused superintendent of making claims for the support of long-dead inmates, and of spending county home funds for personal use. Among the questioned goods were mustache cups, applejack, liquor, bonnets, napkins, umbrellas, veils, cashmere dresses, button ties, ribbons, garters, and “satin goods for the farmer.”
Ordered the superintendent to charge visiting officials for meals. On audit day the county home fed up to fifteen horses and thirty people (including wives), and provided enough liquor to cause comment, though one employee said that “they were not so unfitted they could not do business.”
Led to installation of a cistern and force pump for firefighting.
Built new buildings, leading to a total cost for the year of $21,872.47, including about $3200 for care of the inmates.
Following establishment of the state Board of Charities in 1873 the mentally ill and children under 16 were required to be housed separately from poorhouses… obviously that had not been the case in Steuben. American attitudes at the time regarded the poor as criminals… indeed, at one stage the Board of Supervisors in Steuben ordered that anyone applying for aid was to be arrested.
Though this was the worst, it was not the FIRST fatal fire at the poorhouse. An 1838 fire killed one inmate, while seven died in an 1859 blaze. At least the Steuben County Horror was the last.