Heat and Light, Circa 1840

“Churches are not warmed as they were. In my early days, St. James’ church had a stove passing through the partition between the vestibule and the body of the church. This was found dangerous, and it was then removed to the great stove seat within, where hemlock leaves often crackled on the stove, causing the older people to look around and see what the boys were doing… Footstoves were then largely used, and carried to special seats before the service commenced.

“For a long time churches had no lights, the second service being held in the afternoon… In that church (St. James’), however, on Christmas eve the windows were often filled with candles in rows–a simple yet fine illumination. It was the only place that Christmas was observed.

“This church also had six square pews, with seats all around and a table in the middle. Paterfamilias thus had an eye on the whole family, and this was pretty well brought up. Underneath was a schoolroom, part of the basement being partitioned off for this, and there I first went to school. The dark unfinished part on the east side we called the dungeon, where the girls never ventured, though the boys had no fears. Of course, it was a primary school. In it was a dunce-block, obsolete now. It was a great block with three solid pegs for legs, on which scholars were sometimes placed as a punishment or an example for the rest.

“When the dunce-block was not at hand, in summer the stove answered just as well, until one day one poor fellow was set on it while it was tolerably warm. The teacher had forgotten that there had been a fire in it, and we were almost convulsed as one bare foot was drawn up and then the other, trying to keep cool.”

– From “Notes of Other Days in Skaneateles” by the Rev. W. M. Beauchamp, published in the Annual Volume of the Onondaga Historical Association, 1914

On Hosting Music

“Many years ago on a Friday night at St. James, a severe thunderstorm struck the village. Along the lake lightning flashed, thunder crashed, suddenly the lights went out. Like a stroboscopic creation, Andrés Cárdenes passionately played on. Fully engrossed when the lights came back, he never missed a beat, concluding his virtuosic solo through a standing, stomping ovation as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

“And it hadn’t. But it had. Nothing and everything. All at once. Magic. That’s how it is here, at the Skaneateles Festival. We know it will happen again. We just never know when.”

– Judy Bryant, quoted on the website for the Skaneateles Festival.

The Rev. Henry Scott Miller

At the Village dump, in the Swap Shop where people drop off things that still have some utility left in them, a copy of Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl sat on a shelf. It was a first edition, the binding somewhat faded by sunlight, and inside was the bookplate of Henry Scott Miller. The name was familiar to me because I see it every Sunday, on the floor at St. James’ Episcopal Church, on a brass plaque surrounded by tiles. The Rev. Henry Scott Miller was the thirteenth rector of St. James’, serving from 1931 to 1956.

Henry Scott Miller was born in Richmond, Indiana, in 1886, and graduated from that city’s Earlham College in 1915. While at Earlham, he was active in the Classical Club, in school plays and the Y.M.C.A., was on the staff of the yearbook and served as editor of the Earlhamite, the college literary magazine. One of his poems was chosen as the Prize Poem of 1913-1914 and included in an anthology entitled Earlham Verse, published in a limited edition of 250 copies in 1914. Miller was proud of his work; he inscribed and sent a copy of Earlham Verse to Indiana’s famed poet James Whitcomb Riley.

In the Earlham yearbook, Henry Scott Miller was described in these words:

“Poor Harry! He has such a hard time remaining popular, ’specially with the Dean, because he insists on telling folks about themselves — and it’s generally true. Then, too, many people think that he is married and that his wife’s name is Bertha and that she keeps him at the library, which is enough to make any man tear his hair, even though he is a poet and a philosopher.”

After graduation, Miller left Indiana and studied at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, graduating in 1918. He returned to Indiana to serve in his first parish, and afterward served in New York City and Washington D.C. In late 1930, he received a call to serve at St. James’ Episcopal in Skaneateles, succeeding the Rev. Arthur B. Merriman.

In the next 26 years, he baptized, married and buried many parishioners. He was never married himself, but was “surrounded by spinsters” as Virginia Thorne of our congregation recalls. Spinsters and books. Henry Scott Miller never lost his love of poetry and literature, and he has an appropriate legacy today, as books from his personal library, bearing his bookplate, are in collections all over the world. His eight-volume set of The Works of George Fox (1859) was auctioned off in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2007. The books bore the marks of the Skaneateles Library Association; one can easily see the Rev. Miller returning home with his arms full from the library’s annual book sale. The Rev. Miller’s copy of The Country of Pointed Firs (1896) by Sarah Orne Jewett is today in the University of California’s library at Berkeley, and his copy of Unbeaten Tracks of Japan (1881) by Isabella L. Bird has made its way to a library in Japan.

The Rev. Miller retired from St. James’ and his profession in 1956, and was given a parting gift of $5,000 by grateful friends in the congregation. In 1966, he died in Elmira, New York, where he had resided since leaving St. James. He was buried in Fort Hill Cemetery, Auburn.

In his portrait, published in a history of St. James’, the Rev. Miller seems to be looking around the corner into the frame, not quite committed to having his picture taken, perhaps wishing he was home with a good book.

Vegetables in the Pews

“CHURCH DIVERSION — About the years 1843-44, when the old square pews were in St. James’ Church, a few of the gentlemen attendants indulged in a little diversion among themselves. At that period, when there were no garden vegetables or garden fruit sold at retail in the village, each householder cultivated a garden for household purposes, and, when one of the St. James’ attendants happened to raise unusually early in the season a cucumber, an ear of sweet corn, a melon, radishes, or other novelty, he would take his best specimen and carry it to church before service, and deposit it in the pew, on the cushion, of some one of his friends.

“When the regular services were about to commence, and the congregation became seated, the recipient of Nature’s earliest product immediately became aware that some of his friends had had the sagacity to overreach him in early vegetation.

“His curiosity, of course, was excited to ascertain the source of the Sunday present. Then, waiting until the clergyman began to read the morning lesson from the Bible, he would take the opportunity carelessly to scan the audience without attracting attention, to identify, if possible, his friend. The result always was that every one whom he suspected seemed to be paying strict attention to the words of the lesson, and to be very much interested in it.

“What general conversation ensued, when he afterward met his church friends, has been kept secret. The practice of placing Sunday surprises in the pews continued generally throughout the season.”

– Edmund N. Leslie, History of Skaneateles (1902)

St. James’ circa 1880

Photo by O.H Wildey, who was in business in Skaneateles from 1867 to 1881, courtesy of the Skaneateles Historical Society.

St. James’ by Spencer Adams, 1944

A photograph of St. James’ from Spencer L. Adams’ book The Long House of the Iroquois, published by Adams in 1944. The Austin Park he refers to is F.C. Austin Park, between Thayer Park and St. James’ Episcopal Church. Adams’ mother was an Austin, and he was related to both F.C. Austin and to Clarence Austin, for whom the other, larger Austin Park is named.

Blue Sky

Henry Thurlow

Born in Haddenham, Cambridgeshire, England, in 1844, Henry Thurlow came to Skaneateles as a young man with his parents. In 1866, Henry married Sarah Tucker. They worshipped at St. James’ and raised a family, living in homes on Jordan Street and on West Elizabeth.

Henry’s father was a teasel grower and Henry become a teasel merchant, buying teasels from the farmers who raised them and selling them to woolen mills both in the U.S. and abroad. Such was the fame of the Skaneateles teasel that Henry once shipped his goods to a customer in Moscow.

As the president of the American Teasel Works of Skaneateles, Henry was the last independent teasel merchant in the eastern U.S. not in “the combination” or “teasel trust,” a group who sought to fix prices, paying less to farmers and extracting more from woolen mills. Henry refused all of their offers, and they in turn attempted to drive him out of business.

In 1903, Henry gave an extensive interview on teasels and the declining state of the industry:

“Whatever may be said of Skaneateles,” remarked Mr. H. Thurlow of that New York town of strange name, according to the Sun, “it raises teasels, which for many years could not be successfully produced in any other section of this broad land of all sorts of products.”

“It is a plant,” continued Mr. Thurlow, “whose burr is used to produce a pile on cloth, and for certain kinds of fabrics nothing has yet been found to take its place. Forty years or more ago the teasel was in great demand, and as they could not be raised anywhere except in a small area about Skaneateles, the industry was very considerable with a radius of ten miles of my town. Teasel raising began as long ago as eighty years and at one time it represented a business of half a million dollars a year and over 500 people were engaged in it. Today not more than a hundred are in it, and the amount has similarly decreased.

“This is owing rather to the production of smoother cloth than the adoption of a substitute for the teasel, because, as I said, they cannot get a substitute for it. Steel has been tried but the finest points they can make are rough and jagged compared with the fine-hooked points which nature puts on the teasel burr, and which are necessary in producing the proper nap on the cloth.

“The teasel is sown in the spring as the ground is ready, and the plant is left to grow until the frost kills it down. The root remains, and the following season the plant grows from this and bears the burrs, which are cut in August, basketed and wagoned to sheds, where they are housed and trimmed ready for the market.

“An acre of ground will produce from 150,000 to 200,000 teasels, running ten pounds to the thousand and worth now from 75 cents to $1 a thousand, although I have seen them worth as much as $5 a thousand. I remember buying 3,000,000 teasels at 50 cents a thousand from a man who had held them for 21 years, and had at one time refused $2.50 a thousand for them.

Workers with clippers prepare teasels for shipping (while holding very still for the camera)

“They require three or four weeks to dry; then they are trimmed, the stems cut to about six inches, and then are packed in boxes, 40,000 to the box. The burrs vary in length from an inch to six inches, and they are designated by sizes as ‘Buttons,’ ‘Mediums’ and ‘Kings,’ those of from an inch to an inch and a half being choice.

“Some people say the ‘bull thistle’ and the teasel are the same, but if they will examine the two they will find that the prongs of the wild teasel are straight, while those of the real thing are hooked, which is all the difference in the world for the work they have to do. In the woolen mills, a teasel will last about 24 hours, and some of the big mills in New England have used as high as 1,200,000 a day, but they don’t use them that way now. Very comfortable fortunes were once made in teasel raising, too, but that time is past also. Most of the product is used now in the making of blankets, and coarse clothes.

“Skaneateles is out of it, to a large extent, as Oregon has come into the field with an even better teasel than we can produce, and we are turning our ploughshares to other uses. Any visitor to our town may see teasel farms and the teasel clippers at their benches snipping away with their scissors, but the business is no longer what it once was, and it isn’t improving.”

Not one to stake his livelihood solely to an industry in decline, Henry was also a cigar manufacturer and a grocer.

For a time, Henry made cigars “over Irish’s flour and feed store.” He promoted his products enthusiastically, as on a July evening in 1883, when a brass band traveled up the lake on the Glen Haven steamboat to play in the village. The Skaneateles Press reported:

“H. Thurlow passed out his ‘Buds of Promise’ cigars to members of the Scott Cornet Band last Thursday, while they were serenading on Jordan street, and they smoked them with a keen appreciation of their flavor.”

I think I would have liked Henry Thurlow. As a grocer, he also made a name for himself with another crop, as this piece from the August 28, 1896 Skaneateles Press notes:

“Henry Thurlow, at his fruit and tobacco store near the bridge, has some of the largest bananas ever seen in this village, four weighing two pounds two ounces, and many weighing half a pound.”

In the community, Henry volunteered as a Skaneateles fireman, and was active in the Elks, Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias. He died in 1928, at the age of 85, survived by his wife and six children. The funeral service was at St. James’. There was a requiem celebration of Holy Communion for the family at 7:30 a.m., and “the burial office was read at 11 o’clock.”

The Thurlow family, with white-haired Henry in the center

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My thanks go to the Skaneateles Historical Society, and to these sources:

“An Example” in The New York Times, September 19, 1890

“The Teasel: Peculiar Industry Once a Specialty in Skaneateles, N.Y.” in The Mt. Sterling (Kentucky) Advocate, November 25, 1903

“Obituaries: Henry Thurlow” in The Skaneateles Press, August 9, 1928

Henry Thurlow’s trade card from eBay

Mary Elizabeth Beauchamp

Mary Elizabeth Beauchamp was one of St. James’ more fascinating parishioners. Born in England in 1825, the daughter of William Millet Beauchamp (1799-1867) and Mary (Jay) Beauchamp, she came to America with her family in 1829, and to Skaneateles in 1832. Her father was a printer and a publisher, and as a young girl she had the run of his thousand-volume lending library.

With her younger brother, William Martin Beauchamp (1830-1925), she developed a lifelong interest in the Onondaga tribe (whose members she first saw in her father’s store), botany, religion and literature.

She wrote rhyming verse for her friends, and wrote down favorite poems in her scrapbook in a very clear and precise hand. And friends added their favorite verses to her scrapbook, also in a very clear and precise hand, such as was taught in the nineteenth century. Her scrapbook was also a place for pictures, etchings that had come her way, showing her interest in architecture, botany, Indian maidens and women of fashion.

She became a regular contributor to children’s magazines; at the age of 14, she wrote a serial that ran for six months. Still in her teens, she placed an illustrated tale in Peterson’s Magazine. In her twenties, living at home, she was challenged by ill health, and her writing shifted to religious verse, published often under the pen name “Filia Ecclesiae.”

At the age of 28, accompanied by a younger brother, she returned to England, where she stayed for nearly two years. An uncle, a vicar in Wells, asked her to write a guidebook for Wells Cathedral; it was published in 1856, after she had returned to Skaneateles.

Having worshipped in England for two years, she found herself holding up the American version of the Anglican church for comparison. She wrote a series of papers entitled The Emigrant’s Quest, or Is It Our Own Church? which were collected and published “in a small, neatly bound volume of only ninety-two pages, which one could put into his vest pocket.” Edward Isidore Sears, in The National Quarterly Review, commented:

“This is an unpretending tiny volume; but the author, of whom we have no personal knowledge, could have rendered a much larger work interesting and attractive. The story purports to be that of an English emigrant belonging to the Anglican Church, whom the injustice of an avaricious landlord had forced to abandon the home of his ancestors and emigrate to this country. The unfeeling conduct of the landlord; the grief of the family at having been dispossessed merely because the lease happened to expire; their parting with their friends, &c., are each portrayed by Mr. Beauchamp with considerable pathos.

“Having arrived in this country, the emigrant, his wife, and young daughter attend different Episcopal churches in New York; and they naturally compare what they see and hear to what they had been used to in attending church at home. Some of the criticisms thus made are quite piquant; but it must be admitted that in general they are true.”

Mary Elizabeth’s mother died in 1859, and her father in 1867, loosening her ties to Skaneateles. In 1868, she moved to Buffalo and became a teacher in the orphan ward of the Church Charity Foundation, where she had 55 students; she taught there for 12 years, eventually becoming the principal.

In 1880, she went to Europe for a year with a friend from church work, and then returned to Skaneateles. She joined the Protestant Episcopal Church to the Onondaga Indians as a teacher, and bought a home in the village, where she conducted a school for the children of summer residents, organized a literary society for young ladies, and took adult pupils in French and drawing. And she wrote for publications such as The Gospel Messenger and The Churchman.

In March, 1890, she suffered a stroke, and moved in with her married sister, Maria Humphryes. But she was by no means finished with writing. In 1891, three of the religious poems she had written as a young woman were collected and published in Lyrics of the Living Church. In 1896, she prepared and delivered a speech, “Early Quakers of Skaneateles,” for the Onondaga Historical Society. And at some point along the way, she wrote “Recollections of St. James’ Church,” a history that has since gone missing.

In 1903, at the age of 79, she died at the home of her niece, Miss Margaret Humphryes. Her funeral was held on a Friday afternoon at St. James’, and she was buried in Lake View Cemetery. Her obituary noted:

“Of a devout temperament, much of her writings had a religious tone, and nothing but weakness or ill health ever kept her from church. In later days she found much pleasure in the Leisure Hour Club, but no less in the charms of nature, which an observant eye fitted her fully to enjoy.”

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My thanks to the Skaneateles Historical Society, where Mary Elizabeth Beauchamp’s scrapbook resides today. And my thanks to Google Books for her rediscovered verse below.

* * *

TWO BIRTHDAYS

A fair-haired little maiden
Looks up with beaming eyes;
She tells me ‘t is her birthday,
With a kind of mild surprise;
So odd it seems to her small brain,
She cannot well divine
Why she was eight but yesterday,
And now, to-day, is nine.

Her mind is full of projects
About her sports and toys;
No fear of coming evil
Her present good alloys;
She only wants the tender care
Her parents freely give,
And in the shelter of their love,
Without a care can live.

A sad-eyed, gray-haired woman
Sits in her room alone:
It is her birthday morning,
And memory makes a moan,
That three score years have passed away,
And taken in their train
All hopes and joys, and left to her
But weariness and pain.

Ah! lonely one, bethink thee
Of that far birthday morn,
When life seemed full of brightness,
Thy path without a thorn.
If thou again could’st freely trust
Thy Father to provide,
Still might’st thou like little child,
Without a care abide.

IN MEMORIUM
HANNAH GARDNER PORTER
Oct. 31, 1881

Tis Hallowe’en and the trees are gay
With the gorgeous beauty of decay;
And the air is full of misty light
That soothes and charms the languid sight.

Beneath our feet and above our heads
The golden drapery waves and spreads
And full and ripe, like the Autumn day
Is the life that is passing from earth away.

With grace and beauty and culture blessed
The richest gift of each state possessed
As Christian, as wife, as mother, as friend
How brilliant the tints and how soft they blend!

Blest are the dead who die in the Lord,
They rest in peace, saith the mighty Word;
But even there, in their places of rest
Their works do follow the peaceful blest;

And the good she has been and the good she has done
Shall add to the bliss of the home she has won.

MY PORTION FOREVER

I CANNOT live without Thee,
O Jesus, Friend Divine;
I long to feel Thy Presence
Within this heart of mine.
Thou nearest and Thou dearest Friend,
Without Thee earth were gloom,
And life were but the dreary way
To an unlighted tomb.

I cannot live without Thee;
No earthly joy or love
Can fill the heart that yearneth
For Thee, all things above.
In Thee alone my heart exults,
My Love, my Joy, my All;
While Thou art mine no bliss can blind,
No terrors can appall.

I cannot live without Thee,
O Shepherd of my soul,
To guide me and to guard me
And all my ways control;
Poor, homeless wanderer I should be
Without the unseen Guide
By whom my path in life is marked,
My every want supplied.

I cannot live without Thee;
Thou art my breath of life,
My strength in every hardship,
My aid in every strife.
Uncheered by Thee, life’s loneliness
Would be too hard to bear;
And heaven would be no heaven to me
If Thou should’st not be there.

SURSUM CORDA!

O SOUL that hast a right to higher life,
Why be content with this poor mundane sphere?
Forgetful of thy lofty heritage,
Why should thy fears and wishes centre here?

Rise up, O heart, above this dark, cold sod,
Rise into warmer air and purer light,
And see the petty joys and cares of earth
Dwindle and vanish from thy soaring sight!

In thy brief absence from our Father’s courts,
Wilt thou forget thy lineage divine?
And more esteem the exile’s mean array
Than all the treasures that are truly thine?

Why should we love, and strive to make like home,
This one-night lodging in a basement cell?
When the whole palace overhead is ours,
And in its stately chambers we shall dwell.

Lift up your hearts! Too long have we bestowed
On this poor earth our being’s noblest powers.
Lift up your hearts! lift them to His abode,
His who alone can fill these hearts of ours!

Come As You Are

What seems like a short while ago, a new Rector came to St. James’ and, among other changes, introduced a “come as you are” service. I can see my readers nodding knowingly. I of course refer to the Rev. Robert M. Duff, who arrived here in May of 1867. The Rev. Duff saw that many of our parishioners were farmers, plain men and women who had recently come to Skaneateles from England, good Anglicans all, but people who felt out of place at St. James’, with its pew cushions and carpeted floors — not at all the country church where they had worshiped in their homeland. These good people would faithfully come to St. James’ to have their children baptized, and then would not be seen again.

The Rev. Duff, a man who was said to be “welcome in every company and every household,” arranged for a Sunday afternoon service, once a month, for farmers alone. Local historian F.J. Humphryes wrote, “They had their own choir, and the church was filled with a congregation where the thick boots and the coarse clothes of the men, and the antiquated bonnets and dyed ribbons of the women, would not be put to shame by the rich attire of the usual church goer; and where a man could sing heartily without drawing all eyes upon himself.”

The Rev. Duff resigned in 1872, leaving behind “a united and prosperous parish, with the prospect of a new and beautiful church.”

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With thanks to “Notes from My Scrapbook” by F.J. Humphryes, Skaneateles Press, September 2, 1938, and the continued kindness of the Skaneateles Historical Society.