Myron F.'s Forgotten Life, Part I
This is Part I of Family, Fort Wayne and Forgotten Stories: The Life of Myron Barbour.
Martha Phelps Barber faced grim prospects by the summer of 1779. Widowed at 43 with eight children sixteen years old and under, she’d been left with a modest estate of a little over 100 pounds. That was bad enough. But the estate was incompetently managed by the executors and quickly exhausted.[1] Martha could no longer care for all the children. Those eight years old and up were placed in apprenticeships. Her oldest daughter was already married. The littlest ones, a four-year old and a baby, remained with Martha.
Her son Roswell Barber was nine when his father Daniel died, so he could not be spared. Childhood was over.
At the time of Daniel’s death, the Barber family had lived in Simsbury, Connecticut for nearly 150 years. It is a town settled by Puritans, including Daniel’s ancestor, Thomas Barber, who arrived in the 1630s as an indentured servant.[2] Maybe Martha and Daniel Barber’s children would’ve left Simsbury even if Daniel lived a long life. Throughout New England, young couples were leaving the rocky, worn-out soil and moving west.
After his father’s death and the break-up of the family, it’s not known who Roswell was placed with.[3] Eventually, he and his siblings all grew up – a feat not to be taken for granted in their time -- and Roswell married Elizabeth, “Betsy” Barber, a distant cousin. They were 19 and 23 when their first child, Laura was born.
Roswell wanted to try his prospects somewhere besides Simsbury. First, he moved his young family to Massachusetts, where daughter Sylvia and son Milo Roswell were born. They moved back to Connecticut where another daughter, Nancy, was born; then in 1807, they finally joined the crowds moving west.
It was where everyone was going. Land! So much of it! They were going to Genesee County in western New York. And why wouldn't they want to? Handbills circulated up and down the Atlantic advertising this marvelous land. They promised it was "more eligible, desirous and advantageous for settlers than any other unsettled tract of inland country of equal magnitude in the United States, "filled with black and white oak, hickory, poplar, chestnut, wild cherry, butternut and dogwood." It was "finely watered...with never-failing springs and streams, affording sufficiency of water for grist-mills and other waterworks."
It was an area known as the Holland Purchase. Thirteen Dutch bankers and businessmen bought the land from American land speculators for development and speculation. It had once been the lands of the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois. The Holland Purchase was a huge tract, bounded by the Great Lakes the Erie and the Ontario on the north and west, and Pennsylvania and the Genesee River on the south and east. It is estimated that three New England states alone lost 800,000 residents to upstate New York in the period between 1790 and 1820. So common was the Barbers' move that Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, called New York "a colony from New England."
An account in a book of Barber history about a different Barber gives a glimpse of what was likely similar to their experience:
…they sold their little, barren Connecticut farm and with $700 in cash set out with their ox team and sled for New York arriving at the end of February….Here they bought 100 acres…they moved into a log house while the husband worked to clear and improve the farm. The wife was busy with her loom, weaving not only the linen and wool for her own household, but the neighbors’ as well. In 1810, a frame house “of the pattern so common in dear old Connecticut” was built and furnished, the busy loom having paid for the brick in the chimney, the sawing of the lumber, and the labor for shingling the house.
To clear, grub and plant three or four acres in one year was as much as could be expected. Ten acres was considered quite an accomplishment. It took seven to ten days just to clear one acre of land, even if the farmer was a skilled woodsman. Then there was the cabin and outbuildings to construct, crops to put in, fences to build. Neighbors helped neighbor, and Roswell certainly could have had help, and helped others.
As was very typical, he and Betsy didn’t make this journey alone. Roswell’s brothers Jared and Russell and their families moved with them. Betsy’s siblings John Barber III, Rhoda, Cynthia and their families also moved to Sheldon.[4] But Daniel was one of the first people to walk through the doors of the Holland Purchase Land Office to buy lots 13 and 21 in the embryonic town.[5]
Sheldon consisted of little more than a blacksmith’s shop and a log cabin that served as both store and inn owned by a man named Roswell Turner. Each winter, Turner bought twenty loads of provisions for his customers to get through the winter. Otherwise, settlers had to rely upon themselves. Formidable woods closed in on the little settlement. In 1849, a county history described the area as “a wild and rough region even now.”
Genesee County in 1807 was frontier. Bears, wolves, foxes and wildcats preyed upon the sheep, hogs and chickens of settlers. Sheep had to be kept indoors at night, no exceptions. There was a large bounty for wolves, and some settlers made a nice profit hunting them.
“In cold winters when the snow was deep, the wolves would get hungry and ravenous,” a local historian wrote. “There were several instances of them obliging men to climb trees to avoid them. Bears would come and take hogs a few rods from the dwellings.”
There was a poignant story the Barbers surely heard that took place a year before their arrival. It became known as the “Story of the Lost Boy” and was told to children around the fireside for decades to come. A farmer named David Tolles told his son, Hiram, a boy of about nine, to go keep watch over a planted field to be sure the cows did not stray into the young crop. There were no fences yet.
The boy obeyed his father. Later his footprints were found following the tracks of the cattle into the woods….the woods that engulfed all.
He never came out of the woods. The boy was never found, though search parties were launched, and his parents paid Indian trackers to hunt for him. His father gave himself up to the search; even years afterwards, if there was any rumor of a lost boy – even when he could no longer have been a boy – whether it was in Pennsylvania or Ohio --- the poor father took off for that locale. It was a cautionary tale, not about obedience, for the boy demonstrated that. But about the dangers of endless forest, and perhaps about watching one’s children closely in strange new places.
The first years, understandably, were especially hard. The first year, settlers girded trees and planted corn around stumps. In April the year the Barbers arrived, there was a freakish snowstorm, the worst known. Snow was four feet deep, and there was a shortage of hay and grain for the cattle.
Years later a man named Lyman Tuttle related his family’s experience in their first year in Sheldon, around the same time as the Barbers. Lyman’s father was a cooper who arrived in Sheldon with ten shillings to his name. He deposited his family at a cabin with no floor, windows, or even a chimney, then went to Rochester where he could earn needed cash. Transportation costs were so high that the provisions he bought to send home to them doubled in price. Neighbors took pity on the family and felled trees for them so they could plant corn, beans and potatoes around the stumps. As the family became more destitute, neighbors brought small potatoes for them to eat, what little they could spare. In the family’s desperation, they took to digging for roots and eating slippery elm bark.[6]
These pioneer tales of hardship were not unheard of in communities all over the country as families moved west. The Barbers were more fortunate. Perhaps they were more planned than the poor Tuttles, and they had the support of family around them. Roswell did well enough to go back to the Holland Land Office to buy another parcel of land four years after his first.
Three years after their arrival, probably born in a log cabin, there was another fresh beginning for the Barbers– a new baby.
He was named Myron Fitch Barber, and he was the last child Roswell and Betsy would have. His parents may have spelled his first name “Miron;” it was spelled that way in his father’s will. His middle name may have come from the town postmaster, Fitch Chipman. [7] Chipman was a Middlebury College graduate, the son of a prominent doctor, legislator and judge. In the 1820s, he also served in the New York State Legislature.
Myron was quite the family baby; his sister Laura was 17 and had been married for two months when he was born. Myron would become an uncle when he was eight months old, when Laura had a namesake daughter. His sister Nancy was two and would be a playmate though; their next-closest living sibling was Milo, who was eight years older than Myron.
As the town of Sheldon grew and Roswell’s farm began to prosper, the settlers ensured the success of two institutions important to Connecticut Yankees: school and church. Church, of course, meant the Congregational Church, the church of the pilgrims. Both church and school would be very important to Myron all of his life.
Religion wasn’t something taken lightly by the Barbers. Roswell’s parents, Daniel and Martha, used to argue with each other about the finer points of religion, each quoting chapter and verse “shot for shot” to support their opinions. Roswell’s oldest brother, Daniel, Jr., became a Congregational minister, although at age 27 he converted to the Episcopal Church. [8] Betsy’s brother, known as Deacon John, was a leader in the Sheldon congregation.
There were funny stories about the town’s first ministers. The first was a man named Rolph, who announced at his first sermon that he didn’t allow himself to preach for less than five dollars a day. So the good people of Sheldon didn’t either.
The second minister was a Mr. Spencer, noted for preaching “many different sermons all alike, and from the same text.”
School was something also considered essential to these New Englanders. Even when the Barbers first arrived in Sheldon, there was school. The blacksmith shop served as a meeting place for lessons; by the time Myron was born, a separate building dedicated just to the business of educating the children was constructed. This was the village school where Myron got his lessons.
In his childhood, lead pencils were not yet invented. The teacher’s pen-knife would be used to sharpen quills students brought from poultry in the home barnyard. Friction matches would not be invented until Myron was a teenager. When the fire in the school fireplace went out at night, a burning brand from the nearest neighbor was needed the next morning. Webster’s spelling book and an old reader were likely to be the only texts, just as the Bible and Fox’s Book of Martyrs were likely to be the extent of the home libraries of most Sheldon residents.[9] A large chunk of school time was devoted to spelling and penmanship. Myron must have learned well. Decades later, his obituary mentioned the pride he took in his penmanship.
There were the usual hardships of life on the frontier, and there were one-of-a-kind historic events. Myron was just a toddler when the War of 1812 affected his family. Great concern and dread swept the county. All able-bodied men were summoned to join a militia and fight, leaving only a few behind to manage crops. Roswell, at age 42, did not join the war effort. A Roswell Barber, probably our Roswell, paid a man named Peter Delaney to go in his place. Roswell’s son-in-law, Maxon Godfrey (Laura’s husband), and his nephew, Jared Barber, Jr., also went off to war.
On December 30, 1813, in retaliation for the American burning of Canadian villages and farms, the British torched the fledgling village of Buffalo, 35 miles from Sheldon. They also burned other nearby villages. Residents of these areas were left homeless in the middle of winter, “reduced to poverty.” Soon, streams of wounded veterans and desperate refuges, including Indians from the reservations, were traveling through Sheldon, passing by Roswell Turner’s establishment.
The local people watched as ox sleds bearing wounded soldiers passed by, and ox sleds bearing settler families with what few household goods they’d been able to gather. Men carried litters, resting upon their shoulders, of wounded colleagues or the sick and elderly. Women and children walked; remnants of dispersed militia groups walked, guns in hand. Then came the Indians, on foot and on ponies, babies strapped to their mothers’ backs.
“It was a crisis of suffering and privation; a winter of gloom and despondency,” wrote a historian. “Language, at this distant day, is inadequate to enable the reader to fully realize the condition of the Holland Purchase. Through all the back settlements, there were half-deserted neighborhoods; the solitary log house, no smoke rising from its stick chimney, cattle, sheep and swine, hovering around and looking in vain for someone to deal out their accustomed food.”
The taverns the refuges and militiamen passed were soon depleted of bread, meat and drink. The people fortunate enough to be the “un-displaced” shared what food and drink they had, but of course, it was not enough for so many. The people of Genesee County sent a petition to the legislature on behalf of the refugees, describing a 40-mile wide section of county now “completely depopulated.”
The people were soon burdened with heavy taxes imposed to pay war debts. And the end of the war also meant a return to competing with British trade that had been suspended during fighting.
More hard times were ahead. A meteorological “perfect storm” would drive even more people out of western New York. It was the Year Without a Summer, also known as Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-To-Death, or simply, the Poverty Year. Today, it’s believed the severe climate abnormalities were caused in part by the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia.
The effect was that in May 1816, buds were frozen on the trees in Genesee County. Four days of blizzard conditions hit in the middle of June. This was worse, far worse, than the year the Barbers arrived, when there was the four-foot April snow. Anything that had managed to turn green was killed. In July, there was still frost and ice, and it was impossible for farmers to plant. August found conditions still icy and cold. Crop yields were a quarter of normal production. The Barbers, like everyone around them, would have to survive on greatly reduced crops and what was left from the previous year.
The first six months of 1817 were called the Starving Season. Whereas flour had sold for $8.50 a barrel in New York in 1813, prices soared to $18 a barrel – if a person could find some to purchase.
Thousands of western New Yorkers gave up and packed up, pushing farther west into Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. Many had purchased their property from the Holland Land Company on credit, and now they were unable to make payments. The company accepted cattle in lieu of cash, but losing livestock left the farmers worse off. Crop prices remained high while livestock prices remained low until 1820. Somehow, the Barbers rode out this crisis.
But there would be more to endure. In these hard times, Betsy died at age 42. Little Myron was only six.
She was buried in Humphrey Hollow Cemetery behind the Congregational Church, one of the first to be buried there.
Most people remarried quickly; it was a matter of survival. Someone was needed at home to literally keep the home fires burning. Roswell found a valuable partner in Sophronia Case, another very distant cousin. [10] She was a spinster at 31, who supported herself as weaver and teacher. Like Roswell, she had come from Simsbury. Her sister Elsie was married to Roswell’s nephew Harlow Barber, Jared’s son. It’s likely that they had known each other all of their lives.
Two years after his stepmother arrived, Myron was no longer the family baby. A sister, with the fascinating name Pleaides, joined the family, followed a year later by little Elcy[11]. The year Pleaides was born, Milo was apprenticed to a tanner back home in Connecticut, probably an old Simsbury friend or relative. Sylvia married during the Year Without a Summer; of course Laura had been on her own since Myron was a baby. Sophronia was mother to two baby girls, stepmother to nine-year old Myron and 11-year old Nancy.
Some years passed, and Roswell prospered. The Erie Canal opened in 1825, a major historic event with profound effects on New York and the western expansion of the country. Before, farmers in places like Sheldon were in a struggle for bare existence, while the Erie Canal brought what one historian called a “speedy and permanent relief.”
The ability to ship one’s goods affordably to market, and of course to obtain goods at a fraction of the previous price was a wonder. A jolting two-week trip from Albany to Buffalo was shortened by half. Freight rates fell to only ten percent of previous cost, markedly increasing the profit margin.
Then Roswell died. It was 1829, and at 59, he too was laid to rest in Humphrey’s Hollow Cemetery.
Roswell had written a will four years earlier. He left his wife and children in much better shape than he, his siblings and mother were left when his own father died prematurely. Roswell had done well in life.
He left money or goods to all of his children, specifying how he wanted the money to be spent in two cases. He was very clear about what he wanted for Myron: an education.
But first, a look at what he left to each of his other children: To Laura, noting that, “in addition to what she has already received,” he bequeathed fifty dollars, with another hundred dollars to be paid later. To Sylvia, in addition to what she too had already received, he left five dollars. Milo was given three hundred dollars – equivalent to roughly $6,000 today, although precise conversion to today’s dollars is difficult. Nancy was granted five hundred dollars, a hundred and fifty of which was to be used for “comfortable furniture for keeping house.” Pleaides and Elcy, who were only five and six when the will was written, were given, along with Sophronia, the farm and everything on it – fifteen acres, the house, a horse, saddle and bridle, a cow for each of the little girls, two cows and ten sheep for Sophronia.[12]
To Myron, he left an astonishing amount - a thousand dollars “for the completion of his edducation.” Roswell detailed how this was to be spent: five hundred dollars for this educational completion, and “if that is not sufficient to give him a liberal edducation, to add to the aforementioned some [sic] five hundred more, making one thousand in the whole, but to be paid for his edducation as above mentioned, as necessity shall require…”
This was an amount equivalent to roughly $25,000, for a boy who was turning 14 when the will was written. It seems clear that a college education was what Roswell wanted for this son, and that Myron had the academic ability to dream of this.
[1] Daniel Barber, Jr., Martha’s oldest child, discusses his mother’s difficulties briefly in a pamphlet he wrote, “History of My Own Times,” (Washington 1827). He also wrote another pamphlet, “Catholic Worship and Piety Explained and Recommended in Sundry Letters to a Very Dear Friend and Others,” (Washington, 1821). Daniel became part of a famous family conversion to Catholicism at a time and place where the Church was reviled.
[2] Thomas was indentured to Francis Stiles for nine years as an apprentice carpenter. Stiles was under contract to Sir Richard Saltonstall to build homes for wealthy immigrating Puritans. Thomas and other carpenter apprentices ended up taking Stiles to court for not fulfilling his obligations to them. The court found in their favor and released them from indenture. Thomas eventually was granted 600 acres after his services in the Pequot Indian War.
[3] Since Roswell’s younger brother, Calvin, was placed in an apprenticeship at age eight, it is reasonable to assume that nine-year-old Roswell would have been, also. Calvin was placed against his will with his brother-in-law, Jacob Pettibone, Jr. He was trained as a stonecutter and mason, and became a prominent Simsbury citizen. He was a lieutenant colonel in the local militia and a justice of the peace, as well as a quarry owner and noted gravestone carver.
[4] Other relatives who moved to Sheldon included: two of Betsy’s first cousins, brothers Fithian Case Jr. and Jasper Case; Jared’s son Harlow and his wife Elsie Case Barber; Gurdon Hurlburt, Rhoda’s husband and Gurdon Hurlburt, Jr., and Chauncy Sadd, Cynthia’s husband.
[5] The Holland Purchase was an enormous tract of land owned by a group of Dutch investors.
[6] The Tuttle family evidently overcome their gruesome early struggles. Lyman, at least, remained in Sheldon all his life. By the 1875 New York Census, he was listed as a retired farmer. In 1880, he and his wife had taken in his 66-year old brother Ransom, who was a cooper like their father. Lyman lived to be 82.
[7] Then as now, last names as middle names were usually family names, such as the mother’s maiden name. However, there aren’t any Fitches in Myron’s family tree on either his mother’s or father’s side. Fitch Chipman’s father, Lemuel, bought a large parcel of land from the Holland Company to found Sheldon.
[8] As noted in a previous footnote, Daniel made what was seen as a radical conversion to the Catholic Church, as did his son Virgil. Their conversions led to a mass Barber conversion that became famous and was widely covered admiringly in the 19th century Catholic press. Roswell and Daniel Jr.’s youngest sister Abigail, known as Nabby, her husband and children, were part of this group conversion.
[9] What school was like: “The Old Schools and the New,” by Aaron Groves, Journal of Education, Vol. 5, Feb. 4, 1897. Groves gave an interesting account of Connecticut schoolmaster Ariel Parish’s school in 1825. Fox’s Book of Martyrs included an account of the suffering of Protestants under the Catholic Church, and influenced or confirmed popular anti-Catholic views.
[10] Betsy Barber’s mother was also a Case. Her mother was Elizabeth Case, the daughter of Capt. Josiah Case.
[11] Her name was spelled this way in Roswell’s will. Sophronia’s sister, who also lived in Sheldon, was named Elsie.
[12] While Sylvia received only five dollars in Roswell’s will, the notation that it was in addition to what she’d already received lets the reader know that she was not slighted. The will implies that Roswell sold or gave land to her husband, Anson Driggs. He had some sort of arrangement with Anson, too, in that half the fruit in Anson’s orchard was bequeathed to Sophronia, Pleaides and Elcy. Roswell may have extensively helped Sylvia and Anson get off the ground as a newly-married couple.
Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023
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