The Lewis County Historical Society and the Publications Committee mourn the death of Leslie Safford, our cherished colleague. We dedicate this year’s annual LCHS Journal to her, in honor and remembrance of her many invaluable gifts to us.
The Publications Committee relished her expert and generous baking; delighted in her love of contra dancing; was impressed by her polished discourse- she spoke in well-rounded paragraphs, not mere sentences; and mostly enjoyed being in the company of her cheerful and enthusiastic warmth. Her keen, learned intellect was astonishing and her offered input and advice, gentle good humor and laughter, along with her sweet treats, graced our committee meetings. She also happened to be a wonderful, gifted writer. We have lost a quietly remarkable person in our midst.
Leslie revisited her Lewis County roots in a vivid memoir beginning with her great-grandfather Seymour van Santvoord. She writes that in 1903, “Seymour bought land on Beaver Lake and built a house he called Shingle Shanty.” Readers can enjoy the lively reminiscences of four generations of Shingle Shanty, the haven for so many families and friends, in “Summers and Seasons at Number Four,” printed in the LCHS annual journal, November 2023, Volume XLIV.
For almost 20 years, the Lewis County Historical Society has sponsored and put on the Black River Valley Concert Series – a set of Saturday-evening musical performances that take place through the winter months at the Historical Society’s beautiful “Temple” on State Street in downtown Lowville.
Each year, we invite a variety of performers from across the State and beyond to share their talents in the Temple’s lovely Blue Room, with its special and impeccable acoustics. Vocalists, small ensembles, dance ensembles, bluegrass, gospel, a cappella, folk, rock and jazz are just some of the genres that have graced the stage in the Blue Room. A warm, comfortable, lounge atmosphere makes for a lovely evening out with family and friends, and the Lewis County Historical Society provides delicious refreshments and beverages to accompany these delightful evenings.
The Lanphere collection represents one man’s passion – that of noted biblical instrument archeologist and professor of music, Lewis County’s own Charles Nathan Lanphere.
This exhibit, on display at the Lewis County Historical Society during the summer of 2023, included musical instruments made by Charles N. Lanphere around 1900 to illustrate two of his widely-acclaimed lectures and concerts – “The First Ten Thousand Years of Music” and “Music of the Bible.”
Born June 15, 1869 in the town of Harrisburg just outside Copenhagen, Prof. Lanphere’s formative years were spent on the family farm on the Alexander Rd., within a stone’s throw of Deer River. He came from a devout Methodist New England family. By the age of four, he had heard many of the beautiful stories of the Bible from his mother and he could recite them from memory. Along with his early interest in the Bible, he also developed a keen interest in music, building his first violin at age 10 (against the wishes of his father initially, who feared he would use it to play dance tunes). Strongly devote, however, the young Lanphere quickly turned his interests to the ancient music of biblical times.
Schooled initially at a small common school on the Wood Battle Rd. outside of Copenhagen, he was soon accepted for study at Lowville Academy, where he would hone his interest in music and ultimately graduate. He then took secondary music courses at the Potsdam Normal School (where he met his future wife, Harriet Ellis, a Potsdam native). But quite quickly he returned to Lowville, where he was awarded his first professorship, serving as Professor of Music at Lowville Academy – and to earn a little extra money, he taught music lessons on the side.
Known throughout his life as a dapper dresser, with a pronounced handlebar mustache, Prof. Lanphere could be seen on the streets of Lowville wearing a long black cape and silk top hat – often stopping to spread his cape, tip his hat and curtsey in the European style when meeting someone along his way. He and his wife, who also taught music in Lowville, would stay in the village until the mid-1890s, when they chose to leave the area so Prof. Lanphere could pursue and obtain additional music degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music and the Virgil Piano School of Chicago.
Fascinated by the development of music from its very beginnings, Prof. Lanphere would later travel to Europe and study in London, Paris and Dresden. During that time, he wrote and delivered two widely acclaimed lectures, “The First Ten Thousand Years of Music” and “Music of the Bible.” The instruments in this exhibit were made by Prof. Lanphere around 1900 to illustrate these lectures.
Among his instruments, the exhibit contained: the actual violin he made at age 10; a Nabel (an Assyrian harp of ten strings); a Psaltery (a Middle Ages forerunner of the modern piano); a Toph (an Egypto-Israeli hand drum); a Crotalum (an Egyptian percussion clapper); a Tambourine (from the Egyptian-Hebraic period); a Nebel (a Harp of the Hebrews); a Lefre (an Egyptian Horsehead Lyre); a Psanterin (from the book of David); a Nofre (Egyptian Lute); a Kinnor (the first stringed instrument mentioned in the Old Testament); and a Sebaca (a Harp described in the Bible).
After years of world travel, Prof. Lanphere returned to the North Country, settling in his wife’s hometown of Potsdam, where he began teaching piano at the Crane department of music at the Potsdam Normal School (later to become Potsdam Teachers College and eventually the State University of New York at Potsdam). By all accounts, he was beloved locally as a teacher and a person. He died in 1940, and he and his wife are buried in Potsdam’s Bayside Cemetery.
The instruments in this collection were donated to the Potsdam Public Museum, which generously made some of them available to the Lewis County Historical Society for this exhibit. Special thanks are due the Potsdam Public Museum, Mimi VanDeusen and Mary Gilbert for having made this exhibit possible.
A big thank you to the Cloudsplitter Foundation for supporting our Collections Care & Share Project! This multifaceted project aims to help the Historical Society in modernizing our computer-based collections management system to better document and organize our extensive collections, and to position us to share Lewis County history with our communities, neighbors and friends through both in-person research and online history-telling. Due to the generosity of the Cloudsplitter Foundation, we have been able to take steps to achieve these objectives.
If you are interested in volunteering to help us work on our Care & Share project, our collections organization or our online history-telling, or even if you would like to donate to those efforts, please reach out to us to volunteer or donate. But make no mistake, we simply would not have be able to move forward with this project without the steadfast support of organizations like the Cloudsplitter Foundation. So once again, we say Thank You.
Caleb Lyon, Jr., youngest son to Lyon family patriarch, Caleb Sr. – whose progeny have long been tied to the Lyons Falls community – was born up the Moose River in Lyonsdale in 1822.
Widely known over his lifetime as a poet, lecturer, traveler, and politician, he might fairly be looked on historically as the black sheep of the family. Notorious for feuding with his older brother Lyman, who it fell upon to run the family’s extensive businesses throughout the North Country, Caleb instead followed his fancies as an immensely talented, albeit somewhat disreputable, tumbleweed. And some would certainly call him much worse than that. But his poetry, written from his earliest days to his last, is first-rate.
The Lyon of Lyonsdale
By the time he was 25 he had secured an appointment as US Consul to Shanghai, although he never actually made it to China, choosing instead to use his official credentials to travel to South America and then California. And once in California, he quickly championed statehood, was appointed a member of the 1849 California Constitutional Convention, and even managed to be credited (somewhat questionably as it turns out) with designing California’s Great Seal.
Lyon’s restless feet soon brought him back to Lewis County, where he was quickly elected to the NYS Assembly and US Congress. But wanderlust again prevailed, and so he wrangled an appointment from Abraham Lincoln to be Governor of the Idaho Territory. The poetry-writing “Lyon of Lyonsdale,” as he often chose to call himself, was rather conspicuous in the roughshod wild west and not a popular Governor. His critics called him “Cale of the Dale” and while his negotiations with the indigenous Shoshone people are viewed as rather progressive in hindsight, they certainly did not go down well with Idaho miners and land prospectors at the time, who were pressing to attack and wipe out indigenous settlements. His unilateral decision to move the territory’s capital to Boise and his promotion of speculative diamond mining ventures that “ruined many a better man,” led the Idaho Stateman to once write that only a “military escort could prevent him from violence or death.”
So at risk was his life from the good folks of Idaho, Lyon ultimately chose to flee for the East Coast, pursued by allegations that he had stolen $42,000 that he was to deliver to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (for his part, he claimed some unknown thief had stolen the money as he slept on a train departing Idaho).
His last years were mostly spent at Lyon Castle, a large home he acquired and renamed, which had been built to replicate Windsor Castle in the Rossville section of Staten Island. He lived there with his sister while amassing a considerable art collection and awaiting possible indictment. He did manage to return to the North County briefly (to secretly exhume the bodies of his parents from their island burial crypt in Lyonsdale and have them reburied in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn), but that’s story for another day. No charges were ever brought against the Lyon of Lyonsdale, as he managed to drag the criminal investigation out for years until his death finally mooted it.
Lyon Castle, Staten Island
Regardless of what one might otherwise think of the Lyon, his poems are still to be admired and always worth reading, although they often are hard to find today. Around these parts, he is perhaps best known for three of his early poems, “The Thousand Islands,” “Stanzas,” and “Lewis County in the Olden Time” (click image to expand).
The Trial of Horatio Hough (pronounce “huff”) is a short, but enlightening documentary film that follows a group of cavers in 2014 as they search for Hough’s Cave, a stop on the Underground Railroad on Route 26 just south of the hamlet of Martinsburg in rural Lewis County in upstate New York. Intercut with their search for the cave is the story of Horatio Hough, a farmer and resolute abolitionist who defied the status quo of his church, his community, and a nation under slavery in 1840’s America.
The film was done by Clarkson University Professor Stephen Farina, who originally screened it at the Annual Underground Railroad Public History Conference at Russell Sage College in April 2016 and has since been shown in various settings, but is currently available online at this link: vimeo.com/125483102.
This project was undertaken at the behest the Lewis County Historical Society and the Martinsburg Historical Society in an effort to preserve this story before all physical evidence of the cave and its significance was lost. Without such actions, local legends (like that of Hough’s Cave) all too quickly are forgotten or relegated to the dustbins of history.
Hough’s Cave Historic Roadside Marker
In 1926, the State of New York began an historic roadside marker program. The first of those markers placed in Lewis County was to memorial the location of Hough’s Cave. And it still stands there today.
Recently, the Lewis County Historical Society was fortunate to receive a donation from the Christian “Earl” Yousey family of a Civil War-era Pattern 1853 Enfield Rifle, which had been owned and used during the Civil War by prominent Lowville and Lewis County man Van Rensselaer Lansing Waters.
Lansing Waters’ Pattern 1853 Enfield Rifle
Every year, new artifacts are added to our collections through the generosity of individuals, families, businesses and other organizations. Donations of artifacts are the main way in which our collections grow; they are one of the few ways you can help preserve and leave a legacy to the history of Lewis County; and they truly help the Historical Society in fulfilling its mission as interpreters and promoters of Lewis County’s history. So let us say right up front, thank you to the Yousey family.
And now to Lansing Waters, who was quite a well-known and accomplished figure around Lowville for many years. He was born in 1843 in Trenton Falls, NY to the Rev. Van Rensselaer Lansing Waters and his wife, Belinda Burr, but the family soon moved to Constableville, NY, where young Lansing’s boyhood days were spent. He attended the common schools around Constableville, but subsequently would move north to board at and attend Lowville Academy.
For those who might not know, Waters would later go into business with prominent Lowville merchants Dewitt Clinton West and Frank Easton, ultimately taking over their businesses and becoming renowned as one of the largest and best known dry goods merchants in the North Country. His business occupied three floors in downtown Lowville; his merchandize was varied, with different lines grouped separately; and essentially he ran what was Lowville’s first department store. A prominent member of the Lowville community, known for his intelligence, honesty and fine judgement, he was active in most every movement for the upbuilding of Lowville and the extension of its influence in the business world.
Van Rensselaer Lansing Waters
Beyond his own dry goods store, he was also a director of the Asbestos Burial Casket Factory, one of Lowville’s most valuable industries at the time; he was instrumental in organizing and the first president of the Fulton Machine and Vice Company, another major Lowville business; he was one of the principal organizers of the Lowville and Beaver River Railroad; and he played a prominent role in securing the splendid water system that Lowville continues to use to this day, serving as Lowville’s water commissioner for years. He was a high priest in the Lowville chapter of the Masonic Order, a vestryman at Trinity Church, and a long-time trustee of Lowville Academy.
Waters Terrace in Lowville take its name Lansing Waters, not only because of his stature in the community, but because he lived for much of his life in the house on the corner of that street, known today as the 1812 House. Indeed, he built much of the back half of the 1812 House while he lived there. And if you have the good fortune to visit or stay at the lovely house, you will find that Chris and Shelia Buckingham, who operate the 1812 House, have named one of their rooms after him.
Lowville’s 1812 House
But as much as Lansing Waters is known as one of Lowville’s foremost citizens, he was also known as a soldier. At the time of the Civil War, Waters was fresh out of Lowville Academy, barely 17 and working as a clerk in the store of Col. Seth Miller in Constableville. But when Fort Sumter’s guns resounded through the land in 1861, Lansing Waters was one of those who stepped forward to answer Lincoln’s call and stake his life on the issue then involved.
He enlisted out of Turin in Co. K, 5th New York Heavy Artillery (at the time called Co. B, 3rd Battalion, Black River Artillery). Notwithstanding his youth, he was elected sergeant of his Company, and though he was mustered into service at Sackets Harbor, he and his Company were soon sent south. He proved an exceptional soldier, and was quickly promoted to second and then first lieutenant before he was twenty. He served within the defenses of Washington, and commanded a mortar battery on Maryland Heights when it was besieged by General Jubell Early during his raid on Washington. He was subsequently appointed assistant provost marshal on the staff of General Stevenson, where he would go on to distinguish himself in the lengthy engagements at Harper’s Ferry and Shenandoah Valley.
Upon enlistment, Lansing Waters had been given this Enfield rifle, which he carried with him throughout the war, and he was allowed to retain it upon his discharge. The gun is a Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle. And put simply, it is one of the most important firearms of the 19th century. It is a rifled musket (replacing the older smoothbore muskets of the time); it was produced in England and issued to British regulars and colonial troops around the globe.
These guns were chambered to fire a Minie ball, which was a relatively new type of ammunition that replaced musket balls with lead .58 caliber bullet-shaped projectiles. The Enfield was also among the first military rifles to be fitted with sights as standard (previously muskets had been inaccurate, due to their smoothbore barrel and round musket ball, could only shoot an effective range of 200 yards, and sights were unnecessary) and was considered a “sharpshooters rifle.” The Pattern 1853 Enfield used an adjustable ladder sight, with a second, flip up sight for distances up to 1,250 yards. Both the North and the South purchased Enfield’s from the British in great numbers during the War; it was the most popular firearm used by the South and the second most used by the North (which also used the Union .58 Springfield).
Lansing Waters kept this rifle throughout his life, often taking it to events long after the Civil War. He took a deep interest in Grand Army affairs; he was one of the oldest members of the Guilford D. Bailey Post, G.A.R, and held the office of commander at the time of his death. He was active in organizing annual reunions of veterans of the Third Battalion, Fifth New York Heavy Artillery, and served as president of that organization. In 1913, a year before his death, Waters even visited Gettysburg on the 50th Anniversary of that battle to make peace and shake hands with former Confederate officers. And, of course, where he went, so too often did his Enfield rifle.
After his death in 1914, his Enfield rifle became available at an estate sale and was purchased for $2 by Earl Yousey, who also received a bayonet, the original ammo pouch, and a belt buckle and brass uniform buttons with his purchase. Kept by that family all these years, it was recently donated to our collection.
