So my cemetery project continues.  Just before the weather turned cold, I cleaned two more graves.  Deacon Abraham Beecher's and his wife, Lydia's.  I used a mild cleaner, Simple Green,but it has it's limits. Thankfully, the town of Northampton has backed me financially in purchasing the D2, Biologic Solution, that is used specifically for cleaning gravestones. Hopefully I will get another warm day in this crazy fall, so I can clean more of  this beautiful gravestone.
   If you go to the Cemetery Bios page in this website, you will see that I am researching every "resident' of this graveyard, as I clean each stone. 
   I started concentrating on Deacon Beecher's life and as always, it is fascinating to me.  Abraham was born in Connecticut, but for some reason, he and three of his brothers (Ely, Isaac and Amos) ended up in this region of New York.  Ely started in Fish House but then moved up into Edinburg where he started many businesses.  Beecher's Creek and Beecher Hollow are named after this brother.  Isaac farmed up in Edinburg, as did Amos.  Abraham had a farm just over the town border from Fish House.  He referred to it as the Sheffield Farm. His farmhouse, that he built in 1803, no longer stands.  But it was located on Sinclair Point, near the Roslyn House, which was built in 1919 by the Sinclair's. The chimney of the Roslyn House, has two bricks from the original fireplace of Abraham Beecher's house.  One has A.B. on it and the other has 1803.
    Abraham, along with Isaac Noyes, were responsible for the construction of a wooden Presbyterian Church in 1814. Abraham was Deacon of this church. The present brick church was built on the same site, in 1860, 15 years after the death of Abraham.  
   There is a house across the street from the Presbyterian Church, that I refer to as the Beecher House.  It was not built by Beechers, but in 1880 it was purchased by the Beecher line.  James Fuller Beecher, grandson of Abraham and Lydia Beecher, lived there with his wife Elizabeth and their three daughters.  Sadly, just  this past summer, a tree fell on the house and I fear it is beyond repair.
   The Beecher family has many connections to American history, one main one is Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852..  Abraham Beecher's grandfather, Isaac (1716-1801) was Harriet Beecher Stowe's great grandfather.  
    
   

    Truman B. Shew was the son of Elizabeth Beecher and Godfrey I. Shew, a cousin of Godfrey Shew Jr., the first settler of Fish House.  Truman was one of six brothers.  Two became doctors.  Truman and his other three brothers (William, Myron, and Jacob) became photographers. They were trained in 1841 by Samuel T, B. Morse (the telegraph inventor) in the art of daguerrotype. Samuel Morse had been in Paris in 1839 , when Louis Daguerre had demonstrated this process of photography for the first time. It was the first form of photography and it was the primary form from 1839  to 1859.  
   The four brothers, after being trained,  first traveled in upstate New York doing their own daguerrotype photography.  Eventually they settled in different east coast cities and ran photography studios for John Plumbe Jr.  Truman ran a studio on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia.
    “[Daguerreotype] creates a silver image on a silver surface using some of the more dangerous chemicals like mercury and iodide, and that’s why a lot of early photographers, especially daguerreotypists, didn’t lead the longest lives.” – Arthur Kaplan of the Getty Conservation Institute.
 Truman Shew became very ill.  His brother, Joel, was a doctor in New York  City and tried to cure him, but to no avail. Truman died in 1848  at the age of 31. He was buried next to his maternal grandparents in the Fish House cemetery next to the Presbyterian church where his grandfather had been a deacon.  Myron and Jacob bought Truman’s Philadelphia studio, but a year after Truman’s death,  Jacob joined the gold rush of 1849 and went to California.  William and Myron headed to California a short time later.  All three brothers continued in the photography business but it was William who became well known.  William died in 1903 and unfortunately most of his work was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.  Some of his works can still be found in history books and also in the Smithsonian.    
     The above information on Truman Shew is also found in the bios of the cemetery residents on a different page on this website.  I have just started this project of learning everything that I can about the people who are buried in the cemetery by the Presbyterian Church here in the hamlet of Fish House.  Fish House was first settled in 1762 and it slowly grew into a beautiful little town that included humble people making a living here as well as wealthy people who were summer residents.  What has surprised me in my research are the connections to the "big" names in history.  Truman Shew, was trained by Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph.  Truman then worked for John Plumbe Jr. who is the photographer that took the very first photo of the White House.  Truman's brother, William, became a noted photographer and some of his photos are in the Smithsonian.  Truman's mother, Elizabeth Beecher, was related to Harriet Beecher Stowe.  So how is it that residents in such a little town, such as Fish House,
​ intersected with famous people in our American history?  

​

This is the earliest known photograph of the White House.  It was taken in January of 1846 by John Plumbe Jr.  It is a daguerreotype.  
Plumb took several photographs of government buildings that year.  But the photographs were lost until 1972 when they were discovered  in a flea market in Alameda, California , The  six daguerreotypes were cleaned up and are now at the Library of Congress.

     My goal, this past spring, was to research as many of the gravestones as I could that are in the old Presbyterian Church graveyard.  One of my research tools is the extensive website that Pete Shew has constructed.  It was with dismay that I discovered that that website was unavailable.  It had been "down" for several months.    Just recently it is now up and running.  Even with Pete Shew's website and with my access to ancestry.com. I have only found out information about a small number of the graveyard "residents".  I learned all about George Osborn and that information was made public on my Facebook page in June of this year.  But I wondered why that was the only Osborn gravestone in that cemetery.  Where were the other family members buried?  So I did research on George's wife, Mary Anne Paul Osborne.  Please note: the Osborn spelling sometimes has an e on the end, and sometimes not.  Many times it is due to a hastily scrawled name on a census form.
     George was listed as a farmer on an 1850 census.  His farm was near the vicinity of Osborn's Bridge (now underwater).  I have not been able to connect George to the original Osborn's Bridge settlers,,,perhaps cousins, perhaps not.  George died at the young age of 38, Mary was left to raise four children, all under the age of ten.  She continued to stay on the farm until after 1860.  The 1865 census has her living in Johnstown with her three daughters.  The son, Robert, would have been around 14 at the time, if he was still alive.  But he was not on the census.
       Doing more research on Mary Paul Osborne I discovered that she ended up in Nebraska!  What would have motivated her to move all the way out there?  My guess is that it was due to the Homestead Act of 1862.  Nebraska allowed women to own land for free. Much of the Nebraska Territory was populated due to that Homestead Act.
    As far as I can tell, Mary brought her children with her to Nebraska.  Her oldest daughter, Lucy, died in 1929 Missouri.  I have not found any information  of the other three.  Did Mary continue to farm?  I do not know.   She never remarried.  She died at the age of 62 and is buried in Cairo, Nebraska.
​      It is so easy to just look at birth dates and death dates when doing ancestry research.  But when I start to delve into people's lives, I start to realize the challenges that people faced.  What an amazingly strong and brave woman Mary Paul Osborne had to have been.  The inscription on her gravestone is from a hymn.  There Are No Partings in Heaven.

    In the center of what is left of Fish House stands an abandoned brick church.  It once was the Presbyterian Church. It has not been used in decades.  It is now the property of a resident of Fish House.  
     Next to the church is a very old cemetery.  It is referred to as the Presbyterian Cemetery.  It has grave stones from people born dating back to the 1770's.  There is even a Revolutionary War solder, David Marvin, buried there.  Neighbors, from time to time, mow and weed the cemetery, but it is still in sad shape.  A few years back, some neighbors and I, went to document the gravestones there.   Photos were taken, names were written down.  There is a list of "occupants" for this cemetery that was written in 1930 and later put on the internet, but we discovered that several people were not listed. 
     The cemetery continues to degrade, the names continue to erode to the point of oblivion.  In an effort to save history, I have put together a spread sheet of all the names on the gravestones with the photos.  Sadly it is too late for some gravestones. 
     There is already a page on this website with photos of the gravestones. It is there that you will find a link to the cemetery spread sheet.    I hope to expand on that with as much information as I can find about each person buried there.

   In the fall, when the water level goes down, one can walk into what was the center of Fish House before the lake was made.  There is a foundation that is there that belongs to what I have always referred to as the Brick Store, since the store was made of brick.

I never knew much about this store,,,some literature has it listed as the Noyes store in 1919.  A resident of Fish House is making a quilt of all the historical buildings of Fish House and I thought she should include this store, but that presented a problem.  I didn't know when it was built.  So I started doing some research and studying the old maps.  There was another store, a wooden structure, just down the road from the brick store, that was referred to as the Smith Store.  I had just assumed that the book I was reading was accurate, but the more I studied the maps, the more I became convinced that there were errors in the literature.  
     If you were to walk down Old Fish House Road today, you would come to the end of the road, literally,,and the lake would be there.  If you were there in 1900, you would have continued to walk right to the center of the village.  On the right of the road you would have passed the Henry Smith house (a beautiful Victorian), the brick store pictured above, then a small wooden structure (on an old map it was referred to as a barber shop), then a wooden store, and then finally the Fish House Hotel. Pictured below, from Left to Right: Wooden Store, Barber Shop, Brick Store. 

     So after so many years of referring to the wooden store as the Smith Store, it was hard to wrap my brain around the fact that I was probably wrong.  I studied lots of maps and looked at census records to determine who owned which building.  What I found out was this:
     The Wooden Store was owned by:
       1865 - 1894 Robert Humphrey Sr & Jr
       1894-1910 - John T. Moore
       1910-1912- Charles Henry Mosher
       1912 - 1927 - Delbert Noyes
       1928 (circa) - it was moved up to South Shore Road and run by the Stead family
                         (Harry Noyes (Delbert's brother) was married to Sarah Stead 
    No where did I find that it was owned by Smith.

     The little building still remains a mystery.
       On one map, it is implied that it was owned by the Noyes brothers.  
      There is also reference that at one time, Robert Humphrey owned a barber shop.

    The Brick Store was owned by:
      1860-Charles Fay Smith
      1880 - James Henry Smith
     1890-1908- James Henry Smith (son of Charles Fay Smith)
     1908 - Harry Noyes
     1912- 1924 - Delbert Hoyes
     After Delbert's death in 1924, I have not determined who ran the store until
    it was torn down before the lake was made in 1930.  I read somewhere that the
    Stead's ran the store,,,I have yet to verify that.

I have tried to be as accurate as possible, using newspaper articles, federal  and New York census records, and family trees.  I am not presuming that these facts are rock solid.  There are still gray areas...for instance, in the New York 1910 census, it lists John Moore, Charles Mosher, and Harry Noyes all as store proprietors.  Was there a third store or was there an overlap of ownership during that year?  I might never find out.
 
   As an historian, I have come to the realization, that when I am trying to learn something as simple as the date a building was built, I find out so much more than I had anticipated.  Yet, I still don't know when the Brick Store was built.  I can hazard a guess, but please remember, it is only a guess. On the 1860 map, it is listed as belonging to Charles Fay Smith. he was James Henry Smith's father.  Charles Fay Smith was listed as a merchant on the census and James, at 21, was probably a clerk at the store. Charles Fay Smith died in 1864 and that is when James Henry Smith took over the store.  As for when Charles Fay Smith built the store, it is difficult to say.  In the 1840 census, he is listed as living in Northampton, but nothing specific. So at this point in time, my guess would be that the store was built between 1850-1860.  I will continue to look.  
   If the above information has not confused you,,here is a little more confusion.  The very first store in Fish House was built by John Fay in 1809.  It was a brick building that was located across the street from the Fish House Hotel.  It was later run by John Fay's son, Charles and then later by Harvey Smith (cousin to Charles Fay Smith).  That brick building was torn down in 1887 by Hiram Osborn who built the Osborn Hotel.
    In 1895, there was an attempt to burn down three buildings, the Wooden store, the Brick store and the Osborn Hotel.  The first two fires were put out, but the Osborn Hotel burned to the ground.

    

     One of the most popular photos of Fish House depicts the old Fish House Hotel.  It was located at the village square.  (the square wasn't really square, but it was the center of Fish House where five roads converged).  The hotel was built somewhere between 1803 and 1817 by John Fay.  Fay came from Galway and first built a brick structure which served as part residence and part commercial.  His first wife bore him ten children before she died at the age of 45.  To accommodate all the children, Fay built a wooden structure across the "square" .  After the last of the Fay children moved out, the structure was converted into a hotel. It was a very popular place for hunters and summer visitors.
    Earlier this summer, I received a phone call from a woman who was the great granddaughter of the last proprietor of the Fish House Hotel.  She was doing research and was hoping I could help her locate a photo of her great grandfather, Martin Kelly and to learn more about the history of the hotel.  
     So I set out doing research, using old newspapers, to find out the chain of proprietors. Searching old newspapers can be frustrating.  Many times, back 100 years ago, they would report who what having tea with whom, who went to visit relatives.  One of my tools that I use is Old Fulton NY Postcards,,,I have learned so much from that website!
    I was able to put together a timeline of proprietors, as well as some other information on the hotel, but I still have not found a photo of Martin Kelly. As for why the hotel burned, the reference books I used stated that the hotel burned down in 1920, no other specific information.  I turned to looking through old newspapers but my big problem was that I was referring to the hotel at the Fish House Hotel. Apparently when Martin Kelly took it over, it started being referred as Kelly's Hotel.  Using that title, the great granddaughter was able to find an article about why the hotel burned down and she sent me a copy.  
       Below is a photograph of the hotel circa 1906, the year Martin Kelly bought it.  He ran the hotel successfully until it burned down in November, 1920.  The article,below, is from the Amsterdam NY Evening Recorder, November 19, 1920. 
     I am delighted to know why and exactly when the hotel burned down.  Now if I can only find a photograph of Martin Kelly.  Maybe that is the man standing on the porch of the Fish House Hotel in the photograph below.  I might never know, but I will keep searching.

     When I first became the Deputy Historian, I read any books available that dealt with the history of Fish House.  I wrote down what I learned and accepted the information as factual.  But many of these "facts" had been passed down from one person to the next, and as anyone knows, who has played the Gossip game, the information gets mangled.
So when I first started researching the old house up on Shew Hill, that I refer to as the Grinnell house, the information I read said that Alexander St. John built it for his daughter Parnell.  What I didn't catch, at first, was that his daughter, Parnell, died at the age of four.  Alexander St. John did have a granddaughter, Parnell, so I made an erroneous assumption that he built the house for THAT Parnell.  But the more I studied the dates and the family trees and the research,,,the more I realized that this was probably also wrong.  It would be wonderful if the tax records went back that far. It would be great if the state census of the 1800's included actual addresses, but they don't.
    So I will never know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, but this is what I believe probably happened in the early history of this beautiful old house.  First, what I know...the right section of the house was built in the early 1800's...that is the most exact "year" I could find. The left, larger section of the house was built in 1841.  Second, Alexander St. John did build part of the house, but he couldn't have built the larger section, as he died in 1825.  Now for some assumptions mixed with facts:
     * Fo whom did Alexander St. John built the first section of the house? Well, his daughter, Elizabeth, married Nathanial Wescot in 1810, so it makes sense that it was for her. It couldn't have been for his granddaughter, Parnell, as she was born in 1811 and didn't marry until after Alexander St. John died.
     * So I assume that Elizabeth St. John Wescot and her husband, Nathanial Wescot, lived in the original part of the house (the right side).  They had 7 children! The original part of the house is not that big...so they were probably the ones responsible for building the bigger addition in 1841.  
     * Parnell Wescot( Alexander St. John's granddaughter) married Clark Grinnell around 1828.  Perhaps they continued to live in this house or perhaps they moved away, only to return once Parnell's father, Nathanial Wescot died in 1844. It is a fact that they lived in this house, I am just not sure when they started to live there as a married couple.  By 1841, Parnell would have been married for about 13 years.  I can't imagine this married couple living at this house before the big addition was built in 1841.  The year they were married, 1828, there were 5 other children living in the house under the age of 15.
    * Side note: In 1840, Parnell's brother, David died at the age of 24. Then in 1841, Parnell's daughter, Elizabeth, died at the age of 12 and Parnell's sister, Josepha died at the age of 28.  I can't imagine how awful this had to have been.  These deaths might have been the reason that Parnell and her husband, Clark Grinnell moved back to this house.  In 1844, Parnell's father, Nathanial Wescot died, at the age of 54.
     * So another assumption, Parnell and her husband Clark Grinnell lived in the house to help out Parnell's mother, Elizabeth, after all these tragedies.  This is where the facts that I read in the deeds and the census records don't help.  I can only assume.

    With the internet, comes great responsibility.  In the past, I have put information out there that later I recalled,,as erroneous.  But once a "fact" is in the internet, it is very difficult to reign it in.  So please note,,,that much of this blog entry is based on assumptions.
     In researching this house and who lived in it and when, the many deaths around the 1840's peaked my interests.  I tried to find out the reason for their deaths, but was unable to find death certificates.  In the 1840's, there were outbreaks of influenza, typhoid, and cholera.  Did one of those diseases cause so much heartbreak in this family?
     If anyone can enlighten me about this family, and where they lived  and their deaths, please contact me.