Sojourner Truth Lived in Ossining

c.1797 – 1893

Sojourner Truth, c. 1864
Photographer: Mathew Brady.
Credit: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

So, Sojourner Truth. Her name is ubiquitous with Black History month and abolitionism, but what do you know about her? In an informal, unscientific poll I took, I got answers that ranged from “I think she ran the Underground Railway,” to “Is she going to be on the $20 bill?” to “Didn’t she give some famous speech?”

Only that last part is true.

While Sojourner Truth was indeed an abolitionist, she was so, so much more. The more I dug down into the details of her life, the more amazed I became at her accomplishments, her fierce determination and her deep spirituality.

First, we’re able to know so much about her because in 1850 she dictated her memoirs to friend Olive Gilbert and they were published. This Book of Life would be added to and republished in 1878:

You can read it in its entirety here if you’re interested. (Isn’t the internet great??)

One of the most surprising things I learned about Sojourner Truth is that she was enslaved entirely in New York State. It’s stunning to me to that the buying and selling of Africans was a thriving business in the North, starting with the very first Dutch inhabitants. By the 1700s, 42% of all New York City households owned slaves, a figure that was second only to Charleston, South Carolina.^[1]

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree, in about 1797, to James and Elizabeth Baumfree. One of about ten children, the family was enslaved by a Col. Hardenburgh who owned a large farm in Ulster County, NY.

Her first language was Dutch, and she was said to speak with a Dutch accent when speaking English (which then brings into question the stylized “dees, dems and doze” accent she is often quoted as having in her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. But more on that anon.)

At the age of 9 (or so), Isabella was sold “for the sum of one hundred dollars, to one John Nealy, of Ulster County, New York; and she has an impression that in this sale she was connected with a lot of sheep.”^[2]

Because at this point (she was NINE!) Isabella could only speak Dutch and the Nealys could only speak English, she was frequently whipped for her misunderstanding and confusion. Within a few years, she was again sold, this time to a tavern owner named Martinus Schryver who lived nearby in Port Ewen. She would later describe this as “a wild, out-of-door kind of life. She was expected to carry fish, to hoe corn, to bring roots and herbs from the wood for beers, go to the Strand for a gallon of molasses or liquor as the case might require . . . morally, she retrograded, as their example taught her to curse; and it was here that she took her first oath.”^[3]

Within two years, Schryver sold her to a John Dumont in New Paltz, New York.

So, before she was 15, she had been taken from her family and sold as chattel to three other men.

Around the age of 18, she was “married to a fellow-slave, named Thomas, who had previously had two wives, one of whom, if not both, had been torn from him and sold far away.”^[4] She would have about five children with Thomas.

Now, beginning in 1799, New York State began slowly abolishing slavery – so slowly, that it would take until 1827 for it to be completely outlawed. As described in her Narrative:

“After emancipation had been decreed by the State, some years before the time fixed for its consummation, Isabella’s master told her if she would do well, and be faithful, he would give her ‘ free papers,’ one year before she was legally free by statute. In the year 1826, she had a badly diseased hand, which greatly diminished her usefulness; but on the arrival of July 4, 1827, the time specified for her receiving her free papers, she claimed the fulfilment of her master’s promise; but he refused granting it, on account (as he alleged) of the loss he had sustained by her hand.”^[5]

Furious, Isabella would sit down and spin about 100 pounds of wool before taking her infant daughter and walking away from the Dumonts early one morning (walked away, not run away. The distinction was important to Isabella.) She would eventually find herself in the home of the Van Wageners, an abolitionist, Quaker couple. When John Dumont tracked her to the Van Wageners, they offered $25 for Isabella and her infant. Dumont acquiesced, and Isabella lived with the Van Wageners (and took their name) until she was legally freed by the State of New York a year later.

Once free, Isabella Van Wagener wanted to find her young son, Peter, who had been sold away by John Dumont at the age of 5. Now, post-1799, slavery in New York State operated in a bit of a gray area. While the law abolishing slavery would free all minors once they reached the age of 21, and specifically outlawed selling slaves out of state, these laws were enforced only occasionally. However, Isabella Baumfree was not to be trifled with and she marched down to the courthouse. Long story short, she got her son back from Alabama where he’d been sold – a remarkable feat for a woman.

A page from court documents pertaining to Isabella (Baumfree) Van Wagener’s suit to regain her son, Peter.
Credit: NYS Archives

It’s at this point in her life that Isabella Baumfree Van Wagener’s Ossining connection arises. It’s a very complicated story and even the Narrative doesn’t get into the particulars, but let’s just say that in 1833 she was hired to be a housekeeper for what can really be only called a cult, led by one Prophet Matthias. They all ended up in a house in Sing Sing/Scarborough called Zion Hill (still standing today as part of the Beechwood condominium complex) living with Benjamin and Ann Folger.

We can be quite certain that she really did live here, because Benjamin Folger implicated her in the murder of one Elijah Pierson, a follower of Matthias and resident of Zion Hill, who mysteriously died after eating blackberries. But though accused of murder, Isabella went to court, sued Benjamin Folger for libel and, amazingly, won. See Miguel Hernandez’s article here for a deeper dive.

Isabella would continue working as a servant for about ten more years, before she heard the Lord call on her to preach. She changed her name to Sojourner Truth on Pentecost Sunday, 1843 and began preaching against slavery. By all accounts she was a very charismatic speaker and an inspiring singer. She would go on to dictate her memoirs, and with the proceeds, buy a house in Massachusetts.

In 1851, Sojourner Truth gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention.

Go and read it now. I’ll wait.

No really, it’s short, you should read it. Here’s the link again.

Now, the thing is, this is probably not at all an accurate representation of the speech Truth gave. A transcription was published at the time and is very unlike the version that has become associated with Truth. It wasn’t until 1863 (hmm, what was happening then?) that the version linked to above became the accepted version. (For more on this, check out Wikipedia here.) But let’s just say it sounds pretty stereotypical linguistically and not at all like someone who spoke with a Dutch accent.

Regardless, I think we can agree that Truth’s speech enlightened many who heard it, as did her life story.

Truth would move to Michigan, join a Seventh Day Adventist sect there, all the while preaching about equality.

She would die in Battle Creek, MI in 1883, in a home that she owned, bought with money she had earned from her writing and speeches, surrounded by her children.

A remarkable woman and a remarkable life.

^[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160331114300/http://www.thenation.com/article/hidden-history-slavery-new-york/

^[2] P. 36, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015071140167&view=1up&seq=36

^[3] P, 29, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015071140167&view=1up&seq=39

^[4] P. 46, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015071140167&view=1up&seq=46

^[5] P. 49, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015071140167&view=1up&seq=49

Jeanne Eagels — Star of stage and film.

*Jeanne Eagels, as a war orphan in the 1918 play “Daddies,” produced by David Belasco*

Okay, first, if you are under the age of 95, you might ask, who is Jeanne Eagels?

Well, she was a big Broadway and film star in the 1910s and ‘20s — in fact, one of the biggest.

And her Ossining connection is that she owned not one, but two estates here: a 30-acre estate called “Kringejan” at 1395 Kitchawan Road, and 22-acres of land and a house on Cedar Lane Road.

In fact, I’m convinced that these two photos below were taken in the front garden of Kringejan, 1395 Kitchawan Road (today’s Rt. 134):

And here’s a description of her 2nd home in Ossining, on Cedar Lane Road:

*Courtesy of the Ossining Historical Society*

In those days, Ossining was quite the place for the gentry to land – businessmen, bankers, writers and actors were snapping up farms and transforming them into elegant country estates. According to Eric Woodard and Tara Hanks in their biography Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, Eagels fell in love with the Ossining area when she was making silent films at Thanhouser Studios in New Rochelle.

Hers was the classic “lift yourself up by your bootstraps” story that America values. A small-town girl comes to the big city and makes good. She starts by nabbing bit parts in around 1908, and by dint of hard work, talent and luck, reaches the top of her profession before her untimely death at the age of 39.

1924 even found her on a list with Rockefellers, Roosevelts, Guggenheims and Harrimans when the income tax payments of Manhattan’s wealthiest were made public.

But somehow, that’s not at all how she’s remembered.

She lived most of her life on that tricky front line where she was applauded for her success while at the same time condemned for it. She was raised up and then torn down time and time again. The insatiable curiosity of the press and the public transformed almost every detail of her life into something salacious.

So, let’s try to separate the fact from fiction and give this accomplished woman her due.

Jeanne Eagels was born Amelia Eugenia Eagles in Kansas City, Missouri in 1890.

The story goes that Jean Eagles [sic] ran off with the Dubinsky Brothers Stock Company at the age of 15, though she was really 18. Starting off with a few small parts (and possibly by marrying one of the Dubinsky brothers) she clawed her way to the top there. At the time, stock companies were how most people living outside cities got their entertainment in the years before film and radio. And also how many actors got their starts.

These companies were constantly touring, often doing one night stands, after which the company would sleep sitting upright on chilly trains as they overnighted to the next stop. They played all sorts of venues, from legitimate theaters to church basements to tents in the nicer weather. On the rare occasion they played more than one night in a particular town, there were limitations about where they could stay because many hotels wouldn’t rent rooms to actors due to their supposedly loose morals. (And maybe because more than one had skipped out without paying.)

*Sometimes they played in theaters, sometimes in tents . . .*

She left the Dubinsky Brothers in 1910 (and changed her name to Jeanne Eagels) to join a tour of Jumpin’ Jupiter, landing on Broadway for three weeks in March of 1911. While the show was savaged by the critics, Eagels managed to land on her feet and score a job in the chorus of The Pink Lady, a Klaw & Erlanger production.

*Jeanne Eagels is third from the left in this c. 1910 photograph.*
*Courtesy of the New York Public Library – Billy Rose Theater Division*

From here on, she’d continue to work for the most influential producers on Broadway, such as Charles Frohman, David Belasco, and the Shubert brothers.

Arguably, her most famous role was as Sadie Thompson in the play Rain. Whether you know it or not, I can guarantee you’ve heard of it somehow, or at least of the character of Sadie. Based on what was at the time considered a wicked and immoral story by Somerset Maugham (written in 1921), it’s about a prostitute named Sadie Thompson and the married missionary who falls in love with her as he tries to save her soul. It was provocative, controversial and just downright shocking.

Audiences couldn’t get enough of it.

Rain first premiered on Broadway in 1923. Lee Strasberg, the father of Method Acting, called her Sadie “One of the great performances of my theater-going experience . . . An inner, almost mystic flame engulfed Eagels and it seemed as if she had been brought up to some new dimension of being.”

(Fun fact: Gloria Swanson sold her Croton-on-Hudson estate to finance the silent picture version of Rain called Sadie Thompson, which she produced and starred in. Other actors connected to Rain in later films include Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth. And, in 2016, the Old Globe Theater in San Diego premiered a musical version also called Rain. It’s a story that continues to fascinate.)

Anyway, Jeanne Eagels was as big a star as you could be back then. She appeared on Broadway and took her shows on the road, often selling out when she was the star. The Cleveland News ran a story about her which noted her “Lightning energy . . . Eyes snap. Voice trills. She seizes the attention.” It goes on to praise her realism and emotionalism – attributes it seems that most actresses of the time lacked.

In 1925, Eagels secretly married Ted Coy, a famed Yale football player and supposedly the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. He is still such an icon that in 2008 Sports Illustrated voted him most likely to have won the Heisman Trophy had they had it in 1908.

Ted Coy, legendary Yale football star.

But Eagels didn’t allow marriage to slow down her career. She stayed with Rain until 1926, when she left to take on the role of Roxie Hart in the original play of Chicago. But her private life – a failing marriage, health problems, mental instability – got the better of her, and she quit that show.

It’s at this point of her career that the legend of her temperamental nature becomes the story.

Here’s an excerpt from an article in the Milwaukee Sentinel from May 6, 1928, during the tour of Her Cardboard Lover, the show she did after Rain:

Miss Eagel’s eccentricities are of long standing. Before each performance, the company and management wait anxiously to see if she will appear at all. When she does, nobody knows what she will do on the stage, and the stage manager stands ready to ring down the curtain in case of trouble.

The article goes on to describe how she simply disappeared when the show moved from Chicago to Milwaukee:

Days passed, the theatre remained dark, the company idle, the management began to tear its hair, already made gray by the erratic star. Towards the end of the week, the lady of mystery turned up with the simple explanation that “She hadn’t been feeling well.” It was too late to do anything in Milwaukee, but there was a fine advance in St. Louis. So the manager bought flowers for the star and the company took turns petting and pitying her and asking no questions.

But the newly formed Actors’ Equity Association (of which Eagels, along with her New Castle neighbor Holbrook Blinn, had been unsupportive and refused to join) brought her up on charges for behaving unprofessionally, levied a $3,600 fine equal to two weeks’ salary (or $48,000 in 2016 dollars) and banned her from appearing on the Broadway stage for a year.

In response, Eagels just went off and made films because she could. She had made some silent movies before her stage career took off, and film producers had never stopped clamoring for her.

However, her personal demons were taking over, and after missing two weeks of shooting, she was fired from MGM’s Man, Woman and Sin, a silent film in which she was co-starring with John Gilbert. (Since she’s in the final cut, it seems like most of her scenes had been shot.) It’s also around this time the gossip columns start calling her “Gin Eagels” because she was known to drink hot gin “prescribed by her doctor to relieve persistent neuralgia.” (Let’s not forget, this is all during Prohibition.)

For the last year of her life, most of her press mentions concern her health (many hospitalizations), her divorce (in lurid detail), and her films. And, of course her tragic death.

Her last project was a 1928 film called The Letter. It’s her only talkie, and she was posthumously nominated for a Best Actress Oscar Award (it went to Mary Pickford instead.)

Here’s a link to a scene. She does not look like she is at her best here.

Sadly, the story that’s mostly remembered is the tragedy of her early death, and her erratic behavior. This was helped along by a titillating biography written in 1930 by a muckraking Chicago reporter. Called The Rain Girl: The Tragic Story of Jeanne Eagels, her death was attributed to heroin addiction and alcoholism.

Eagels’ story was still bankable in 1957 when Columbia Pictures produced a highly fabricated biopic based on the Doherty book, starring Kim Novak:

Even the New York Times was not immune to capitalizing on her death. Her 1929 obituary makes sure to remind everyone of her volatility and instability. It even took the time to follow up on her cause of death, publishing an article several days later that quoted the City Toxicologist’s finding that she “died from an overdose of chloral hydrate, a nerve sedative and soporific.”

The Times would go on to cover her funeral, burial and the settlement of her estate, noting that it totaled over $88,000 (that’s $1.1 million today) and consisted of her Ossining home, nearly $12,000 in jewelry and furs, and a rare Hispano-Suiza autocar.

A 1927 Hispano-Suiza motorcar. Imagine living in Ossining when cars like that were on the road! Today this car could sell for up to $450,000

Clearly she was troubled and likely an addict of some kind, but I’m not trying to be an apologist here for unprofessional behavior. The fact of the matter is that she was a remarkably successful actress, and producers kept hiring her because she sold tickets and made money for them. Looking at her films today, it might be hard to see the appeal, but back then, she was the cat’s meow.

A still from her last picture, *The Letter*

Vera Neumann — Legendary Designer

Do you know who Vera Neumann was? Perhaps your mother or grandmother owned a Vera scarf? Or maybe you bought some Vera dish towels from Crate & Barrel or a Vera scarf from Target not too long ago? She’s an absolute legend in the world of textile design and her Printex printing plant was located right here in Ossining, at 34 State Street.

So settle in, tie a brightly hued scarf around your neck, and read on . . .

Born in 1907 in Stamford, CT, Vera was creative from the time she could hold a pencil. The story goes that her father nurtured her talent by taking her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art every Sunday as well as hiring a sign painter to give her drawing lessons. Vera went on to study at the Cooper Union and started out as a fashion illustrator and freelance painter of murals for children’s rooms. (Wouldn’t THAT have been a thing to grow up with on your wall!)

She married her husband George Neumann in the 1940s and they became the power couple of textile design. With her limitless imagination and his business acumen, they built a wildly successful and long-lived company. Their first commission was placements for the B. Altman department store, with Vera screen printing the entire run on her dining room table. After that, it was a race to keep up with demand.

The post-WWII world complicated matters, and it became difficult to source fabrics. An oft-repeated story is that Vera came across a stash of silk parachutes in an army surplus store and began screen printing her whimsical, colorful, ever-changing designs on silk and so created her iconic line of scarves.

Outgrowing one studio after another, Vera and George settled in Ossining, buying the former Smith-Robinson House at 34 State Street and fitting it out for their Printex plant. (An 1810 Georgian mansion, it’s still standing today, barely, and is one of the few remaining buildings in Ossining built with prisoner-quarried Sing Sing marble.)

34 State Street, Smith-Robinson House/Printex
Courtesy of the Westchester County Historical Society

With their living space and office right next to the plant, Vera’s reputation and creativity thrived.

Vera and George Neumann in the design studio of Printex. Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. (1951), from the Library of Congress

The Living Room
Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. (1951), from the Library of Congress

Look at that shiny wood floor! And that fireplace!

The printing plant
Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. (1951), from the Library of Congress

The office suite of Printex
Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. (1951), from the Library of Congress

How fabulous was this? River views and no commute? Wood floors and fireplaces? And just look at the Georgian decoration around those doorways! I wonder if any of it survives today?

The Printex company employed many Ossiningtonians. Dr. George Hill, their neighbor at 30 State Street, provided medical services to Printex employees. He also helped connect young people with jobs there. Local artist Donna Chambers was one of them, and the training and inspiration she received no doubt helped inspire her to become a professional artist who creates remarkable quilts and jewelry today.

And here’s just a tiny selection of Vera designs, from a 2015 exhibit at the Alexander Gray Gallery in New York:

If we were going to play six degrees of Vera Neumann, we can connect to President Harry S Truman and First Lady Bess Truman, who chose Vera’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit design (below) for the upholstery in the White House solarium.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit design – note, the shadows are part of the design. It is one of Vera’s most popular, in active use from 1952 to the mid-1980s – a remarkable run!

We can also connect to Marilyn Monroe. who famously wore nothing but a Vera in her last photo shoot (with photographer Bert Stern.) I’d love to post a Marilyn photo here, but I can’t afford the rights, so here’s a link to a photo instead.

But one of the most admirable things, I think, about Vera Neumann is that she kept her price point low enough so anyone could own a Vera. While other designers charged upwards of $25 a scarf, Vera’s averaged from $2 – 10. (Remember inflation! $25 in the 1960s is about $250 today.) “I don’t believe only the wealthy deserve good design,” she said and meant it. And her inexhaustible creativity meant that the market was never saturated with the same thing, so even these “cheaper” scarves were unique and special.

In the 1950s, as their family grew, George and Vera decided to build their dream house, reaching out to the leading architect of the day, Marcel Breuer. On their plot of land at the top of Finney Farm Road in Croton, with magnificent views of the Hudson and beyond, Breuer’s modernist design is a triumph. Still standing, and recently restored, it was on the market in 2020 for $4.2 million. Take a look here and here.

Vera and George travelled widely and collected art – Alexander Calder (who briefly lived in Croton as a child) was a close friend, and the Neumann lawn was decorated with a large Calder sculpture, a gift from the artist.

In the 1960s, the company branched out into clothing and home textiles, and sales skyrocketed. Here are a few outfits I plucked off Ebay/Pinterest:

And here are some home goods items:

Ooh, I’ll take one of each please!

Sadly George died in 1960 and Vera sold Printex in 1967, though she remained active as a designer and board member for decades.

Vera Neumann in her Ossining studio, c. 1974

She lived in her beautiful home with her dachsunds and cats, swimming daily in her indoor pool until 1981, when she moved in with her daughter in Ossining.

Vera Neumann died in 1993, designing to the end. An artist, a trendsetter, a savvy businesswoman, hers was certainly a life well-lived who brought joy to everyone who saw her designs. Check out more of her work here.

Dr. Ruth Murray Underhill – Ossining Anthropologist

It’s Women’s History month and I’m going to try and blog about as many of Ossining’s inspiring women as I can. (I must editorialize a moment though and confess that I don’t much care for these theme months. It seems to me we’re perpetuating exactly what we’re hoping to fix, the idea that women’s history or Black history or any of the other myriad histories that are celebrated on a monthly basis are a separate thing from just plain history. But, until we teach a deeper, more inclusive history, I guess we need to keep doing this. Sigh.) Okay, off my soapbox.

For my inaugural Women’s History post, I want to share a bit about an Ossining woman I’m sure few have heard of – Dr. Ruth Murray Underhill.

Dr. Ruth Murray Underhill, c. 1960 (University of Denver)

She was one of several remarkable Underhill siblings who pushed the envelope of what was acceptable and expected at the time – her sister Elizabeth was a lawyer, a banker and a suffragist, and her brother Robert a mountaineer.

The daughter of Abram S. Underhill and Anna Murray Underhill, Ruth’s pedigree stretched back to one of the earliest European settlers of this country – Captain John Underhill who arrived on this shore in 1632. (More on him in a moment.) Further, according to a 1934 article in the Democratic Register, the Underhills were related to a William Underhill of Stratford-upon-Avon who reportedly sold William Shakespeare his home. How’s that for a fun fact?

Dr. Ruth Murray Underhill was a renowned anthropologist celebrated for her work with Native Americans. She was also a social worker, a writer, a lecturer, a professor, a Supervisor with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and a local television/radio host. Multi-lingual, Underhill spoke several Western languages, as well as Papago and Navajo.

Ruth was born in Ossining in 1883 and grew up in this rambling Victorian at 38 Linden Avenue that her father had built in about 1878. (I’ve always wondered about this grand house just off the corner lot. Now I know.)

She attended Clara Fuller’s Ossining School for Girls and went on to Vassar College, graduating in 1905.

Unsure of her true calling, she spent the next decade searching, briefly serving as a social worker for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, then traveling to Europe to study at the London School of Economics and Munich University. When World War I hit, she volunteered for the Red Cross.

In 1919 she married Charles Crawford, but they would be “divorced amicably” a decade later.

In 1920 she published a novel entitled White Moth about a successful woman in the business world, which was respectfully if not enthusiastically received. You can read it here if you like and form your own opinion.

After her divorce, at age 46 she went back to school, enrolling in Columbia University. Dr. Ruth Benedict, a professor in the Anthropology department (and a bit of a legend), encouraged her to pursue a PhD in the field. At the time, the Dr. Franz Boas, considered by many to be the “father of modern anthropology” was the Chairman of the Anthropology Department and seemed to be unusually encouraging towards female students – Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston also studied with him, though a bit before Ruth did.

For her doctoral thesis, Underhill lived with and studied the Papago (Tohono O’odham) in southern Arizona for over three years. Out of that came her Autobiography of a Papago Woman (1936) about Maria Chona, a Papago elder and leader of her tribe. This was the first published autobiography of a Native American woman. Now, I cannot tell a lie — some of the attitudes are a little cringy for today’s sensibilities. But for the time it was groundbreaking – Underhill documented the rites, ceremonies and history of Chona and her tribe. Underhill even wrote about the rituals surrounding menstruation, which must have been shocking for that time. Heck, it’s kind of shocking for THIS time.

Underhill received her doctorate in 1937 and began collaborating with Dr. Gladys Reichard at Barnard studying Navajo culture. From there, Underhill went on to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, becoming Supervisor of Indian Education and helping develop curricula for Native American reservation schools. (The irony of course is that one of her ancestors, Captain John Underhill, is infamous for his brutal tactics against the Native Americans in the 1600s. He led several bloody massacres and murdered hundreds (if not thousands) of Lenape during the Dutch era in New York State. Here’s an example of a nearby atrocity he spearheaded.)

Underhill spent her career traveling extensively, studying, writing and teaching. Here’s her 1952 visa to Brazil which I include just because I have this image:

Ruth ended her career as a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Denver and died just shy of her 101^st birthday.

Credit: Fremont Davis, 1941.
Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute Archives

Split Rock and Anne Hutchinson

This site has been on my bucket list ever since I first learned about it. It is neither in Ossining, nor something I’ve run by, but it is certainly history I’ve passed by . . .

In Pelham Bay Park there sits an enormous boulder split in two. It’s located on a tiny spit of land between the Hutchinson River Parkway and the exit to I-95N – you can see it from the Hutch briefly as you drive by if it’s winter, you’re in the passenger seat, and know exactly where to look.

The text below is apparently on an historical marker posted within Pelham Bay Park. I did not see it, but I would have read it if I had. Luckily, the NYC Parks Department has helpfully posted it on their website. So let’s start there:

Split Rock is a glacial boulder, divided in half with a large crevice between the two pieces, and is an important part of the history of Pelham Bay Park and the Bronx. It was in this gap that Anne Hutchinson and her daughter, Susannah, supposedly hid during the attack of the Siwanoy Native American tribe in 1643. Although the Siwanoy killed Hutchinson, it is believed that the Siwanoy protected and raised Susannah.

Split Rock Road was also the site of the Battle of Pell’s Point where, on October 18, 1776, Colonel John Glover (1732-1787) successfully safeguarded General George Washington’s (1732-1799) retreat to White Plains with a small band of Patriots against a large British and Hessian force. Glover placed his four regiments behind the stone walls along the side of the road to surprise the British and Hessian troops. Pieces of the walls can still be seen near the Split Rock.

Split Rock is located near the 375-acre Thomas Pell Wildlife Sanctuary, which was designated on October 11, 1967, to preserve the natural wetlands of Pelham Bay Park. The Sanctuary and marsh are situated along the western boundary of Pelham Bay Park at the Hutchinson River, and holds both salt marsh and forested lands. Salt marshes, characterized by saltmarsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora), are among New York’s least known and most valuable natural resources. Salt marshes flourish behind barriers of beach and sand, in the shelter of coves, lagoons, and bays, and along the banks of estuaries. They reduce erosion, and they provide for rich wildlife habitats.

The area is home to a variety of wildlife including raccoon, egrets, hawks, ibis, and, coyote. The border between salt marsh and forest is a good place to see yellow thistle (Cirsium horridulum) and holy grass (Hierchloë odorata), both rare in the City. The Sanctuary is named for Thomas Pell, the first European to control the land.

There is a Split Rock Trail that meanders 1.5 miles from the Bartow traffic circle through the Goose Creek Marsh, and the Thomas Pell Wildlife Sanctuary, to Split Rock. The trail runs near the former Split Rock Road, which now winds through the Split Rock Golf Course. The road was a former Siwanoy Trail between City Island and Pelham. In the summer of 1987 Parks and the Mayor’s City Volunteer Corps worked together to restore the Split Rock Trail for the public. The rock sits in the northwest corner of Pelham Bay Park at the junction of the Hutchinson River Parkway and the New England Thruway.[1]

A glacial boulder, massacre, a Native American trail, a Revolutionary War battle, rare thistle and salt grass? This site has thousands of years of history on it.

But let’s back up first, though, shall we? You must know of the Hutch, that narrow, windy Parkway that starts at the Bruckner and goes up about 20 miles to the Connecticut state line. If anyone still listens to traffic reports on the radio, the Hutch is almost always backed up with a disabled vehicle, a tractor trailer that has fallen from I-95 stopping traffic, etc. I hate driving it, although I love the name of it because it is one of the only (possibly THE only) New York State highways named after a woman.

The Parkway is named after the Hutchinson River it parallels, which in turn is named after Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan intellectual, activist and rebel. She was probably one of the most infamous women in her time, due not only to her unorthodox interpretation of the bible, but also her audacity of speaking and teaching these ideas in public. Throw in a hefty dose of patriarchal disapproval, fear and disdain for women, and you have the recipe for banishment.

Born Anne Marbury in 1591 in Lincolnshire, England, she was fairly well-educated for a young lady of her time. (Also, just parenthetically, she was born the year that Shakespeare wrote “The Taming of the Shrew”, “Henry VI” pts. 1,2 &3, and “Titus Andronicus.” This is in no way relevant, it is just some context that I find interesting.) Anne married William Hutchinson, a merchant, and they went on to have 14 or 15 children together. They also were extremely serious about their beliefs, and in 1634 followed the preacher John Cotton to Boston, Massachusetts on the HMS Griffin.

It was in Boston that Anne got into trouble for questioning the teachings of many Puritan ministers, accusing them, in effect, of not being pure enough, as they stressed the Covenant of Works over the Covenant of Grace. Without getting too deep into the weeds of Puritan theology, let’s just say this is called the Antinomian Controversy, and ended up with Anne being put on trial in 1637 for 80 or so counts of heresy of which, surprise, she was convicted and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Banishment was probably the kindest punishment for the time, considering that in England, heretics were often burned at the stake or hanged. Also, Anne might have been pregnant at the time, so perhaps the overlords were being merciful . . .

(It’s funny, isn’t it, how a group of people who emigrated from England on the grounds that they weren’t able to practice their religion freely, refused to allow others to practice THEIR religions freely in the New World. Ah, the base hypocrisy upon which our nation was founded!)

Anne, her husband and children left Massachusetts, along with Roger Williams and some other purists, to settle in Portsmouth, later Rhode Island. But just a couple of years later, again under threat from the long arm of Massachusetts, she and her husband took their six youngest children down to the wilds of New Netherlands, purchasing a tract of land in what is now the Bronx. In a tragic example of the cliché “out of the frying pan and into the fire,” the land they purchased from the Dutch belonged to the Siwanoy tribe, who did not recognize (or possibly even know about) the European transaction.

Tensions were high before the Hutchinson clan even arrived, due to the ongoing Kieft’s War, which was waged by the New Netherlanders against the Lenape, resulting in the massacre of many Native Americans. The other local tribes were united by these atrocities, and sent many warnings to Anne. Her husband William had died soon after they arrived, and Anne was left to build a house and set up a farm.

She had had convivial relationships with the Native Americans in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, so she apparently was not afraid or concerned when they visited her Pelham property on several occasions. For example, they would gather up the tools of her carpenter, James Sands, as he worked to build her house, and gesture to him to leave. (After a few days of this, he finally did, and she just engaged a different carpenter to finish the job.)

But the Siwanoy were not to be ignored.

Eve LaPlante, who wrote American Jezebel, the Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman who Defied the Puritans, described the fateful day as follows:

The Siwanoy warriors stampeded into the tiny settlement above Pelham Bay, prepared to burn down every house. The Siwanoy chief, Wampage, who had sent a warning, expected to find no settlers present. But at one house the men in animal skins encountered several children, young men and women, and a woman past middle age. One Siwanoy indicated that the Hutchinsons should restrain the family’s dogs. Without apparent fear, one of the family tied up the dogs. As quickly as possible, the Siwanoy seized and scalped Francis Hutchinson, William Collins, several servants, the two Annes (mother and daughter), and the younger children—William, Katherine, Mary, and Zuriel. As the story was later recounted in Boston, one of the Hutchinsons’ daughters, “seeking to escape,” was caught “as she was getting over a hedge, and they drew her back again by the hair of the head to the stump of a tree, and there cut off her head with a hatchet.

Depiction of the massacre of Anne Hutchinson and her family, found in William Cullen Bryant’s “A popular history of the United States,” 1878 (PUBLIC DOMAIN)

Afterwards, all was burned to the ground and this is partially why no one has ever been able to find the exact place where the Hutchinson farm stood.

It is here that the Split Rock takes centerstage. As the massacre was happening, nine-year-old Susanna was, so legend has it, picking blueberries some distance away. When she heard the screams, she hid in the split of the rock. But the Siwanoy found her and took her captive (some theorize they did this rather than kill her because she had red hair, which they had never seen before.) She apparently lived with them for several years before she was ransomed back to family in Massachusetts, where she went on to marry and have 11 children. Author Katherine Kirkpatrick wrote a necessarily fictionalized YA novel called Trouble’s Daughter: The Story of Susanna Hutchinson, Indian Captive, that imagines this part of Susanna’s life.

If you’ve made this this far, you definitely want to know how to get to the Split Rock. Now, I will tell you, but note that to get right up close to it, you have to run across the entrance ramp to I-95, something I absolutely and categorically do not recommend you ever do. But here are directions on how to get close enough to see it clearly – FYI this hike takes about 20 minutes each way:

Go to the very end of Beech Tree Lane, in Pelham. (GoogleMaps will get you right there.)
At the end of the street is a pathway that enters onto the Bridle Path in Pelham Bay Park – it’s fairly clearly marked. Pass through the low wooden gate and you will see the Pelham Bay Golf Course in front of you. Take a right, and start walking, keeping the golf course on your left.

You’ll note that the path seems more than just a path and is, in fact, part of an old roadway that, in the mid-19^th century, led from the estate of a man named John Hunter (located on Hunter’s Island) to today’s Boston Post Road (aka U.S. 1).

The path/road climbs briefly up to an old iron railway bridge built in 1908, that spans the New Haven Line. Then, after the bridge, you will soon start to parallel I-95. This is the least enjoyable part of the walk. This is also mildly historical, but it involves titles and farms and deeded right-of-ways of which I have no interest. (But if you’re a real estate lawyer, here’s a link that details all this https://historicpelham.blogspot.com/2005/03/split-rock-pelham-landmark-for.html)

Looking back along the trail

Keep walking until the trail starts to head down fairly steeply (you’ll see a “Steep Slope” warning sign.) Here’s where you can bushwack to the guard rail and see, across the entrance ramp to I-95, the Split Rock. I really wouldn’t get any closer.

But stop here and take a minute to think about Anne Hutchinson and her family, forced out of England, then Massachusetts, then Rhode Island for their beliefs. Think of the Native Americans who saw their land being bought and sold out from under them, and being settled by Europeans, often with bloodshed. And think about young Susanna cowering in the split of that rock, hearing not the rumble of traffic whizzing by, but the blood-curdling screams of her mother and siblings.

It’s just a big rock, but it holds many stories . . .

[1] https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/pelham-bay-park/highlights/11662

Featured

Carrie Chapman Catt — Leading Suffragist

So, here’s another of those mysterious driveway pillars that I pass by all the time. This one’s in Briarcliff Manor on North State Road, just about opposite the ASPCA.

“Juniper Ledge” has an intriguing, slightly dangerous ring to it, doesn’t it? Yet it’s took me years to get around to googling it and once I did, I fell down an Internet hole that led past Seneca Falls, the League of Women Voters, Prohibition and the Nineteenth Amendment. Juniper Ledge, you see, was the country home of one of our most dedicated suffragists, Carrie Chapman Catt. Even though it’s privately owned today, it’s on the National Register of Historic Places and is listed on the National Park Service website — see here for more information.)

Carrie Chapman Catt, c. 1913
Credit: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division

Hmm, wait, now who exactly was she? She’s up there with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, right? Ladies whose names get trotted out every Women’s History Month.

And now, thanks to this simple driveway pillar, I know all that there is to know about the early feminists and the early 20th century fight for women’s rights. Okay, no, not true, but I certainly know more than I did.

(As a side note, isn’t it hard to believe that American women have only been allowed to vote for just a little more than one hundred years? But it’s true – the Nineteenth Amendment wasn’t passed until 1920.)

Carrie Chapman Catt (nee Lane) was born in Wisconsin in 1859. Unusually for that time and place, she went to college (Iowa State) and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1880. She became a teacher, then a principal, then Superintendent of her Iowa school district. Pretty groundbreaking stuff for the Gilded Age, when women were just supposed to wear bustles and corsets, get married and have babies.

She did marry, though, twice. In 1880, she married husband #1, Leo Chapman, a reporter, who died of typhoid fever within a couple of years. In 1885, she married husband #2, George Catt, a wealthy engineer and fellow Iowa State alum. He apparently was quite supportive of her involvement in the fight for women’s rights. So she threw herself into the fray.

She took over the Iowa Women’s Suffrage Association and ran it with great skill. From there, Catt came to the attention of Susan B. Anthony, the Grande Dame of suffragists (so grande that she was awarded with her own US coin! Only minted for about three years though, due to its poor design and the opposition of Big Vending, but I am getting way off topic here.)

In 1900, Catt succeeded Susan B. Anthony as President of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and was still its President when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. Arguably, it was her stewardship and steady hand that helped unite all the different factions and win the vote for women.

Never one to rest on her laurels, Catt then started the League of Women Voters to give women information to help them make informed voting decisions.

Back to Briarcliff — while Juniper Ledge is listed on the National Historical Register, Carrie Chapman Catt really only lived there from 1919 – 1928. With her partner Mary Garret Hay (Mr. Catt having died in 1905.)

The story goes that the estate was named Juniper Ledge because of its abundance of juniper trees. And, as we all know, juniper berries are the main ingredient in gin. In a New York Times article from 1921, Catt asserted that she bought Juniper Ledge to keep the juniper berries from “wet” use. (She and Hay only served their guests coffee and orangeade. And maybe water.)

I suppose I should mention that many of the suffragists were also big on Prohibition. We won’t hold that against them, though. Things were different then. Did you know that Ossining had about 50 active saloons at the turn of the 20^th Century? So yeah, maybe there was a good reason for the anti-booze crusade.

According to another New York Times article, this one from 1927, Juniper Ledge was quite impressive: “The estate is one of the show places of Northern Westchester, and includes sixteen acres of extensively developed land fronting on two roads. The residence, on a knoll overlooking the countryside, is a modern house of English architecture containing fourteen rooms and three baths. A gardener’s cottage, stables, a garage and a greenhouse are also on the property.” Catt affixed brass plaques with the names of famous suffragettes to fourteen trees – and some of those plaques are now in the archives at Harvard.

Catt sold Juniper Ledge in 1927 to a “Manhattan banker” (according to the Times) and purchased a home at 120 Paine Avenue in New Rochelle. Sadly, her companion Mary Garret Hay died shortly after they moved.

Catt lived on, staying active right up until her death in 1947. She and Hay are buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The inscription on their joint tombstone reads, “Here lie two, united in friendship for thirty-eight years through constant service to a great cause.” (Here’s Catt’s obituary if you want to learn more about her life. It makes me tired just to read about all the things she accomplished.)

So, the next time you drive on North State Road, keep an eye out for that old driveway pillar and know that a very influential and historically important woman once lived up there.

Ossining History on the Run

Local History Seen from a Runner's Perspective

Category: Famous Women