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Reflections
Pioneer's letters described this 'most beautiful country' : Reflections : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisPioneer's letters described this 'most beautiful country'
| by Roger Matile
| 3/31/2011
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In the late fall of 1843, a small party of pioneers set off from the village of Smyrna, N.Y. for what they hoped would be a better life in Illinois.
The party was comprised of the family of Nathaniel Hawley, including his wife, two daughters, and four sons, plus James Sheldon Barber, the single 20 year-old son of Benjamin and Agnes Barber.
Benjamin Barber was a Rhode Islander who married Agnes Finn of Sherburne, N.Y. The couple moved to Smyrna where their children were born and Benjamin engaged in business as owner of a large linseed mill. His son, James, had been trained as a wood-turner with the skills to turn out useful products ranging from wagon wheel hubs to bedsteads and chairs.
But New York and the east in general in 1843 was not a conducive place for a young man wishing to earn a comfortable living. The disastrous effects of the financial Panic of 1837 were only gradually subsiding, making for hard and uncertain times. Farmland was expensive, and the quality relatively poor.
So the accounts of what life was like on the Illinois frontier sent back by families from in and around Smyrna who had already emigrated-Stephen G. Waters, Samuel and Thomas Hopkins, and Levi F. Arnold among others-made many New Yorkers eager to try their luck in the west.
Today, the details of trips the Hawleys and Barber took have largely been lost along with the travelers' impressions of what it was like to venture into unknown territory with only a hope of better times ahead. Fortunately, however, Barber's family were savers, and among the things they saved was a collection of letters James wrote home, from the time he left Smyrna through several years of residence in northern Illinois. In a fortunate string of circumstances, his letters were handed down for well over a century before they were sold at a garage sale. A few more decades passed before they were donated to Oswego's Little White School Museum, where they've been preserved and transcribed. And the story they tell offers a rare glimpse into the lives of our region's pioneers.
Barber's first letter to his parents was posted Nov. 2, 1843 from Lewiston, N.Y. just upstream from Niagara Falls, where, he wrote, the party was waiting to cross the Niagara River into Canada. From there, they proposed to continue overland to Detroit, on to Chicago, and finally try to find Oswego on the Fox River of Illinois, where so many of their former neighbors had settled. In his letter, Barber detailed the party's nine-day journey.
Last fall, my wife and I traveled to New York State and followed the trip from Smyrna to Lewiston that Barber described so graphically to gain a little perspective on the era of settlement in northern Illinois.
According to Barber's letter, the party left Smyrna at 8 a.m. Oct. 24, setting out northwest to Pompey Hollow where they planned to stay overnight with Barber's Aunt Sally Finn. Their route probably followed modern N.Y. Route 80, which winds towards the Finger Lakes Region along valley floors cut by brooks and creeks. Pompey Hollow, it turned out, was a broad, flat valley cut over the eons by Limestone Creek. The hollow offered the pioneer travelers a relatively flat, easy route due north to what was in the 1840s, the superhighway of Upper State New York-the Cherry Valley Turnpike. The turnpike carried them to their next stop at an inn five miles west of Syracuse. That night, however, six to eight inches of snow fell, delaying their Friday start until noon. So they only made a few more miles to a point five miles east of Auburn. Today, that region of New York is covered with thousands of acres of apple and other fruit orchards. And much like in 1843, it is intensely rural and surprisingly unpopulated.
They found traveling a little easier on Saturday and pressed onward to Geneva-namesake of our own Fox Valley Geneva-at the head of Seneca Lake. Unlike Barber's party, we paused in Seneca Falls to visit some of its famed women's rights sites before stopping to snap some pictures in Geneva looking south down the lake. The route west of Geneva the Barber party took in 1843 took them through rolling farmland (that is today covered with cabbage and cauliflower fields) to their next stop at East Bloomfield. It turned out the crossroads village was the home of the Northern Spy Apple, first raised in the early 1800s by Roswell Humphrey in one of the township's many orchards. It was a small taste of home for us, since we've a fine Northern Spy tree in our back yard that produces what seem to be the world's best cooking apples.
But, unlike the Barber party, we didn't stop, but instead headed once more west. On Monday, Oct. 30, 1843, Barber's party rolled into LeRoy, N.Y.-namesake of yet another of our region's towns-the going made easier by leaving the hilly Finger Lakes region behind, but nevertheless hampered by another two to three inches of snow.
From there, it was on west to Pembroke Center. The morning of Nov. 1, after a couple miles travel, they turned off the Cherry Valley Turnpike and headed due north to Royalton. Despite some rain and another snowstorm, they finally stopped for a few days at a house three and a half miles from Lewiston where Barber wrote his letter home.
We recreated Barber's nine-day trip in two, with time to spare, before heading back east through Canada, to Detroit, and finally back to Oswego. Today, we take our Fox Valley landscape largely for granted, but in December 1843, Barber wrote his parents "it is the most beautifull country I ever saw." Even so, after a few years Barber drifted back east, eventually retiring from the lumber and grain business in Philadelphia before moving back to New York to live with his sisters until his death in 1908, one of our region's unsung pioneer settlers.
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