Tag Archives: Austin Steward

A Day With the Dinosaurs, at Rochester Museum and Science Center

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How far would YOU go to see robotic dinosaurs?
We had to go from Bath to Geneseo for an appointment last week, so we just kept on goin’ afterward, up to Rochester Museum and Science Center.
I love dinosaurs, and I was just about to write that I think MOST kids do, when I remembered that I’m 70 years old, and arguably not a kid any longer.
Except when it comes to dinosaurs. I think we’re all kids with dinosaurs.
I got a glimpse of this right in the lobby, where you meet your first dino, AND you can control it by using a panel of buttons. Raise and lower neck; swing neck side to side; turn head; open mouth; swing tail; roar. It was loads of fun, and by working several buttons simultaneously I could make it raise its neck, open its mouth, and roar all at once. A little girl, probably not quite two, was enthralled, showing no signs of fear at all. Dinosaurs are scary, but not frightening. (Even if we’ve seen Jurassic Park.)
The main exhibit is on the third floor, and we had scarcely gotten off the elevator when my wife laughed, and called my attention to the first informational panel. There was my childhood hero, Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews – the man who discovered the first dinosaur eggs, and many previously-unknown species, on the Central Asiatic Expeditions for the American Museum of Natural History. With his high boots, broad-brimmed hat, high-powered rifle, gun belt with pistol and cartridges, and expeditions to exotic and dangerous places, he was obviously an inspiration for Indiana Jones.
This third-floor space had multiple dinos, interspersed with artifacts, photos, diagrams, films, and explanatory panels – not only on dinosaurs and their lives, but also on the finding and interpretation of the beasts. You can operate the spike-tailed stegosaurus and the horned triceratops. But the albertosaurus – a smaller (only three or four tons) cousin of tyrannosaurus rex – operates on its own, either set to a timer or activated by motion sensors when someone approaches. The velociraptors, on the other hand, operate and squawk constantly. They could get on your nerves.
(There’s some artistic liberty – nobody knows how dinosaurs actually sounded, or what colors they were.)
The dinosaurs are great, but RMSC also dedicates much of its space to the story of Rochester and its people. There’s a huge diorama of the city as it was two centuries ago, and a mocked-up country store with historic post office boxes – from Ingleside, in the Town of Prattsburgh!
We walked our way through extensive exhibits on Native American life in the Rochester area, and in the United States at large. I made a stop, as I always do when we visit, at a large panel dedicated to Austin Stewart, who walked away from slavery in Bath when he was 22 years old, got legal help to assert his freedom, learned to read, and became an entrepreneur in Rochester. He was honored in the first class of inductees to the Rochester Business Hall of Fame.)
Austin Steward was also an activist fighting for abolition, a comrade of John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Local people asked him to give an address celebrating the end of New York slavery in 1827, and he lived long enough to see it ended throughout America. The exhibit incudes a late-life picture, from the frontispiece of his memoir… perhaps the only picture we have of a person who had been enslaved in Steuben County.
There are also hands-on science and technology exhibits, but our schedule precluded them on this particular day. The dino show goes through May 1. RMSC goes back to 1912, and it has over a million artifacts. You might like it. We sure do.

Slavery Days in Steuben

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By the time white people started moving into our area in large numbers, slavery was still legal in 12 of the 13 states. So tiny numbers of enslaved people trickled in, usually in ones and twos. Frederick Barthles, who founded what we call Bradford, reportedly had “his slave Jim” buried at his feet, though if that’s true, the stone has disappeared.

Eleazar Lindsley brought in seven enslaved people, but Captain William Helm brought up many more… maybe over a hundred… from Virginia. While his arrival was hailed as the coming of gentility and sophistication, it also debuted a spectacle of cruelty and profligacy. To be a slave, and be sold or traded, was bad enough. To be yanked from your family and sent to a new master because Captain Helm lost you in a game of cards was even worse. And he lost a lot.

With very few people owning slaves, and attitudes slowly changing, slaves occasionally got away with facing down their masters. But as Austin Steward walked across Bath’s Pulteney Square on his way to church, he once heard his sister screaming as her master beat her, and couldn’t do a thing. “Imagine my feelings when I saw the smooth-faced hypocrite, the inhuman slave-whipper, enter the church, pass quietly on to his accustomed seat, and then meekly bow his hypocritical face.”

Helm repeatedly hired Steward out, and one night Steward encountered lawyer Daniel Cruger on the Cameron Street bridge. “I asked him to tell me if I was not free, by the laws of New York. He started, and looked around him as if afraid to answer my question, but after a while told me I was NOT free.”

But at a private meeting in Cruger’s office, the lawyer assured Stewart that he WAS legally free, and gave him contact information for abolitionists in Canandaigua. He escaped in company with a young woman known only as Milly, a slave to George Hornell (for whom the city was named). He had legally acknowledged paternity of her child Milo, but now she left Hornell “to take care of himself… resolved on death, or freedom from the power of the slaveholder.”

Pretty much broke, Helm gathered a few confederates for a gigantic kidnaping scheme. A front man arranged a large reunion in Palmyra, particularly for former Helm slaves. The Captain and his gang burst in to capture the whole crowd, race them southward, and sell them off. But the slaves and former slaves fought back with “fists, clubs, chairs, and any thing they could get.” Returning with only a few captives to Bath they grabbed a few more, most of whom later gave them the slip, so they arrived in Virginia with only two young boys.

Daniel Cruger, by then in Congress, got wind of the upcoming sale and investigated. Not only were both youngsters from his district (Elmira and Painted Post), but he actually knew one of them! He also knew darned well that they were both free people, and after extricating them he paid for their journey home.

Thanks to Robert Troup and others, New York slavery ended on the Fourth of July in 1827. Since southern whites only agreed to join the United States if they got bonus Congressional and Electoral votes as a reward for having slaves, each census up to 1820 counted New York slaves. Steuben County’s highest number was 87 (in 1810)… Ontario had 212 the same year, and Allegany 21. The highest total statewide was 21,193 in 1790. Every one of those lives was lived with terror and tragedy looming.

We Finally Get Back to Rochester Museum and Science Center

We toured the Rochester Museum and Science Center last week. Apart from taking part in a Kwanzaa celebration there, we hadn’t visited in maybe twenty years. For a long time now, it’s been on our list of “places to get back to.”

As the name suggests, RMSC covers both science and the history of the Rochester area. But the science presentations are actually slanted toward the area, so each emphasis supports the other.

Just for instance, in the “Exhibition Earth” area a cast-bone mastodon skeleton faces a full-sized mastodon diorama. These large relatives of the elephant rumbled around our area something like 10,000 years ago. The presentation focuses on what “Rochester” was like at that time – how the climate, wildlife, vegetation, and human inhabitants differed from what we’d find today.

There’s also exhibitry showing significant mastodon finds locally, tying the whole thing together very nicely – AND an “archeology” pit where kids can dig for “fossils.” You can also wend your way through a “glacier,” suggesting those that covered our region during the last ice age.

If your museum hopes to be a really cool place, it needs a dinosaur skeleton. Apparently only one dinosaur type has been verified in New York state, thanks to tracks found down around Nyack – there’s been too much erosion of the appropriate strata to preserve many fossils. But by looking at the dinosaurs found in New England and Pennsylvania we can draw sensible conclusions, so when you visit look for the skeleton of probable resident Albertosaurus – small for a member of the tyrannosaur clan, but big enough to scare the dickens out of us.

In some ways even more exciting is a hall of life-size dioramas showing the flora and fauna of various habitats in our area today… in each case, the diorama is set at a particular location in the region, elevating it from the academic to the experiential. There’s also a set of small dioramas showing habitat and wildlife change over thousands of years, leading from the last ice age.

Another gallery focuses on weather and hydrology, including a slanted sand table where you (or your kids) can get hands dirty. Water flows continuously down, and you can restructure the lay of the land to see what changes it makes in the flow and direction of the water.

I loved maneuvering the underwater ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) with its television camera, and watching the screen as I went along. There’s also a large canal-and-lock layout that you (or your kids) can operate, with information tying in the Erie Canal’s significance for our area.

Up on the second floor is a good-sized gallery on Underground Railroad days in Rochester, focusing on several key escaped slaves, including Frederick Douglass. This held a special interest for us since one of the focus people is Austin Steward, who walked away from slavery in Bath and escaped first to Ontario County and then to Rochester. There he became a comrade of John Brown and Frederick Douglass, a key figure in the anti-slavery movement and the Underground Railroad, and a businessman of considerable wealth.

There’s also a gallery on Native American life, organized around such large geo-cultural groupings as Pacific Northwest, Southeastern Desert, Northeastern Woodlands, and so forth. I was about to step into a room dedicated to Seneca life when the P.A. system announced a third-floor presentation about Tesla coils on the third floor, so off we went, and were having a fine time indeed (who’s cooler than Tesla?) until the fire alarm went off.

The museum was evacuated safety and quickly, and actually it was a nice enough day that we could have just relaxed beneath the wide-spreading shade trees and considered it a fine afternoon… not to mention the fun of watching all the fire trucks. Word went around that they’d been working on the alarm system, and it had probably gone off by accident. Figuring that it would take a bit of time to properly check everything before reopening the museum, we decided to call it a day. Which means, of course, that we owe ourselves another trip to see the other half of the place. Which we don’t mind a bit.

One more thing I must mention. In Rochester Museum I had an experience I will probably never have anywhere else… encountering a flock of passenger pigeons. These many mounted birds suggest the time, almost within memory, when they covered our landscape in thousands… before we killed them off, in the joint names of sport and business… wiping out species far more quickly than the ice age did.

Slavery Days in the Southern Tier

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When our region was opened to white settlement in the 1780s, it was opened to black settlement as well, because the early white settlers brought along their slaves.
Slavery was forbidden in the Northwest Territory, bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi, and Massachusetts abolished slavery by court order in 17??. But apart from that, slavery was legal everywhere in U.S. Territory, including New York.
Since our area had direct connections with Chesapeake Bay and the Maryland-Virginia Tidewater (via the Conhocton-Chemung-Susquehanna River route), this became a “natural” area for slavery to extend. Indeed, land agent Charles Williamson, who had 1.2 million acres to dispose of, marketed this region to southerners as a place to buy huge estates, bring your slaves, and live like a king. This never came to pass, but Steuben County and its neighbors did become home to a noticeable slave population.
A hundred years ago you could still see buildings in Canisteo and in Bath that were reported to have been slave dwellings, and you could also find slave cemeteries that have since disappeared.
By and large, white men didn’t record much about the lives of slaves, just as they didn’t record much about the lives of women and poor people (of any race). We do have record of Colonel L. A. Jones in Addison, who won a woman and two sons in a game of cards (!) around 1820. According to a town history he passed the woman on to his brother, but recognizing the impending end of slavery enrolled the sons in school. “They were refused admission on account of color. He called a meeting of the citizens at the school house…. He said, ‘Gentlemen, the law will soon free these boys, they will have no master to look after them. They must earn their living as white men do, they must have a chance, they must have some education. They are going to attend this school and by the great Jehovah I will mop the ground with the man who refuses them admission and throw this building in the river stick by stick.’”
While this is stirring, the story also suggests the horror of casual, offhand transfers and the breakup of families as slaves (even children!) were routinely sold for payment of debts or taxes, or in liquidation of assets to settle estates.
Austin Steward left a remarkable slave narrative in which he described being brought to Bath from Virginia and hired out along with other slaves, including his sister. “One pleasant Sabbath morning, as I was passing the house where she lived, on my way to the Presbyterian church, where I was sent to ring the bell as usual, I heard the most piteous cries and earnest pleadings issuing from the dwelling. To my horror and the astonishment of those with me, my poor sister made her appearance, weeping bitterly, and followed by her inhuman master… flourishing a large raw-hide. Very soon his bottled wrath burst forth, and the blows, aimed with all his strength, descended upon the unprotected head, shoulders and back of the helpless woman, until she was literally cut to pieces. She writhed in his powerful grasp, while shriek after shriek died away in heart-rending moanings; and yet the inhuman demon continued to beat her, though her pleading cries had ceased, until obliged to desist from the exhaustion of his own strength…. The kind reader may imagine my feelings when I saw the smooth-faced hypocrite, the inhuman slave-whipper, enter the church, pass quietly on to his accustomed seat, and then meekly bow his hypocritical face….”
Steward describes being hired out to a man who clubbed and beat him frequently, not on any grounds, but simply because he could. Encountering attorney Daniel Cruger as both men crossed a bridge, Steward asked whether he shouldn’t in fact be free under New York law. Cruger loudly stated that of course Steward was NOT free, but the two men later held a private consultation (“you didn’t hear this from me”) in Cruger’s office.
A New York law for gradual emancipation had gone into effect in 1799, and court rulings since then had held that importing a slave, then hiring that slave out, was an evasion of the law’s provision against slave sales, and that the act ipso facto emancipated the slave. Cruger helped Steward get in touch with anti-slavery activists; at the age of 22 he walked away from Bath to settle in Manchester, where the activists helped him maintain his legal freedom when his owner later found him and tried to reclaim him. Facing the legal reality, the owner tried to lure Steward back “with honeyed words.” Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work.