history

Last week, the Holland Land Office Museum announced the first "thing" to make the list of the "Twenty-Five Things That Made Genesee County Famous," a six-month countdown of the oddities, happenings, dudes, dames, places and episodes in history that put our lovely county on the map — and you thought a cartographer did that, ha ha ha.

Some of us were a little surprised to find that the New York State Thruway eked its way onto the list, even if it was onto the bottom rung of the ladder. I don't know about the rest of you, but whenever I hear "thruway," I tend to cringe. I remember that it costs about a buck and a quarter to get from Henrietta to Batavia on that gum-stained stretch of barren road that has about as much of a personality as a sleeping Parisian. But even the not-so-pretty things sometimes warrant a niche in our collective history. Take Louis XIV, for example.

So... what is Number 24, you ask? Or should we say who?

Why, it's none other than Mr. John Kennedy, that paragon of pedagogy, that eponymous father to Batavia's grade school, that Englishman turned Midwestern calvaryman who came to Batavia in 1890 to take over as superintendent of schools.

As HLOM Director Patrick Weissend writes of Kennedy: "Visitors to Genesee County often think the elementary school on Vine Street in the City of Batavia is named after the 35th President of the United States, but even the kindergarteners attending the school will correct you and tell you its “JK” not JFK."

Be sure to visit the Holland Land Office Museum Web site to keep up with the other 23 "things" forthcoming. And be sure to check back with The Batavian next Friday to hear about Number 23.

So it begins... The Holland Land Office Museum kicked off its countdown of "The Twenty-Five Things that Made Genesee County Famous."

And what, you ask, was the first to make the list?

None other than that 500 mile stretch of bleached tarmac and costly tolls otherwise known as the Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, "the longest toll road in America."

Visit the HLOM site for more info and to keep up with the countdown.

In Episode Two of our living history series at the Holland Land Office Museum, Pat Weissend tells us about a pair of Civil War medals on exhibit. Check it out:

We'll be back at the museum before long, so be sure to watch for the next episode!

For a short while in 1895, the newspaper that proudly proclaimed itself "a good organ" in service to farmer, merchant and tradesman alike shrunk its name from The Progressive Batavian to the simple yet stately: The Batavian. What a pleasure it was for us here at the contemporary Batavian — no less stately, no less of a service to farmer and citizen alike — to discover our progenitor in the drawers of microfiche at the Richmond Memorial Library.

As evidence of our continued service as a good and vital organ of the people, we have initiated this series of revisits to our shared past: that bizarre world of tonics, dames, davenports, milliners, philtres and... pugilists. So we turn back the clock 113 years to August 17, 1895, to peek in on the news of the times on that particular dog day of summer.

Before we delve into the tale of the wife of a pugilist, let us look at some of the other headlines from the day.

"This is Tough: Providence, a Lawyer and a Woman Make an Unhappy Combination for One Man" is a short tale of woe about a man who "had his eyes blown out ... in a lime-kiln explosion" and was then abandoned by his wife who subsequently hooked up with the man's attorney who had moved into his home and taken over his life.

"Grasshoppers Take Free Rides" is a quirky story about a "plague" of grasshoppers that rode a passenger train from Kansas to Denver and "made themselves disgracefully real" there, taking over the town.

"Girl Wife Sues Boy Husband" is mostly self-explanatory. While "Sheriff Sale on Execution" begs a bit more intepretation.

"Beats a Sea Serpent" tells of an 875-pound sea turtle that was believed to have already been an adult when Columbus discovered America. A state Senator purchased the creature for $25 and had plans to

"make the turtle a feature of the babies' parade on the board walk. He will place the monster on a float decorated in the national colors. Upon the back of the turtle will be a little girl dressed as a mermaid, holding ribbon reins extending from the turtle's mouth."

"Free Silver Charlatans Endeavoring to Humbug the People" artfully (and editorially) transposes the image of rainmakers sending dynamite-filled balloons into the sky and cheating Midwestern farmers with a group of citizens attempting to start a "coinage congress."

Near the end of the paper is a first-hand account of a boxer's wife titled: "Wife of a Pugilist: When She Met Him, Fame Knew Him Not. When Notoreity Came, Women Pursued Him — A Story With a Good Deal of Pathos Between the Lines." In it, the wife, a native of Amsterdam in New York, tells of why she decided to divorce her husband. She tells of how Jim went from a bookkeeper to a boxer and became adored by women, and how he was too "gallant" not to pay them attentions. She never wanted for anything, she says, though the couple barely spent a few months out of each year together. Still she kept with him. That is, until Jim began seeing another woman regularly and went as far pretending the other woman was his wife. She says: "To have such a creature as she be passed off for myself was outrageous. I felt no ill will toward her. He is a strange mixture, and few can understand him. I hope that he may be very happy with her, but I fear for him."

Previous "From the Vault" posts:

• Gold
• Sweet Girl Graduates

Look for the next installment in the coming weeks.

In today's Daily News, correspondent Kristina Greene Gabalski previewed the summer season for Genesee Country Village & Museum. It seems they've got more than ever going on at the Mumford living history museum this summer.

This year's annual Whirl — the museum's major annual fundraiser — will have a Kentucky Derby theme. The Sport of Kings Cotillion is planned June 14 and features a mock horse auction, jockeys moving wooden hobby horses around a giant  game board, a ladies' hat contest and live and silent auctions. The event is intended to capture the excitement of a Derby Day Ball at Churchill Downs.

Funny. Ladies' hats are the first thing that come to mind when I think of the Kentucky Derby — seriously. Have you seen these hats? They're about the size of a car hood, plumed with feathers or bows or nets or flowers. In an erotic swoosh, they curl and curve and dip around the head of a dame.

They're showy, posh — in a word, magnificent. My measly, paisley, Windsor-knotted tie is no match for their pretension.

But enough of ladies' hats.

What else can we find at the Genesee Country Village & Museum this summer? Well, just this month, for example, they've got:

• the Civil War by candlelight
• a birthday party for a pair of oxen
• a hike in search of bats, bugs and beavers
• and a birding expedition.

Visit the museum's Web site for dates and times of these and other events. Or call (585) 538-6822. The museum is located at 1410 Flint Hill Rd., Mumford.

Photo of the Derby hat borrowed from Hats by Nancee. Visit the site for more such hand-crafted splendors.

This morning, Pat Weissend was kind enough to show me some of what they've got over at the Holland Land Office Museum, where he serves as the director. I took a video camera and we stepped out onto the cold stone floor of the wood-walled museum addition that houses the 14-foot gibbet — a variation on the gallows. He tells me that the hangman's noose is the most popular artifact at the museum — no surprise, I guess, when you consider the morbid curiosity of children big and small.

This video will be the first in a (hopefully) long series of discovery-style episodes over at the museum, where they have thousands of other artifacts to scope and get the story on. So be sure to tune in regularly and keep an eye out for those. We'll try and get a new one up every couple weeks or so. In the meantime, and without further ado, The Batavian presents: The Hangman's Noose.

Visit the museum's Web site for more information, and to access links to Pat's podcasts on history. Or just head over to 131 W. Main St. and check out the collection.

Some years ago, a pug-eyed French aristocrat gave me a book to read. She was a trunk of a woman with a tongue more refined than any cut gem I've ever held. When she spoke the language, it was like a lesson in grace and custom. She was a whole other class of beast.

That book was L'Or by Blaise Cendrars. It was about a Swiss-born pioneer named Johann Augustus Sutter, quiet tycoon of the California gold rush. Sutter was a tragic character, as flawed as any other that had graced the stage of American history. His men found gold by accident. He amassed wealth by design. He died poor and broken by fate.

In an article from The Batavian, June 22, 1895, an old miner tells of the day the gold was discovered. It reads:

"There is alive but one of the men who worked for Sutter in the mill at Coloma, where on Jan. 24, 1848, James W. Marshall discovered gold. That survivor is James Brown. He is nearly 70 years of age and makes his home with a grandchild in Pomona valley. He is the only man living who was present when Marshall washed the yellow grains in the camp doughpan, and he is the man who first tested the flaky scales with fire, and going forth from the shanty to where the men were at work on the mill race cried, "Boys, here's gold!"

"I am the oldest miner alive in California today," said he the other day. "I don't mean the oldest in years, but I was the first miner. ... It was Marshall came to me and told me about the books about gold and mines he had been reading, and on the afternoon of Jan. 23, 1848, he determined to do a little prospecting. He asked me to bring him the pan. It was a common ordinary pan that we baked bread in and the like. He spent all the afternoon with that pan trying to find gold, but he hadn't got anything by supper."

The next day, everything changed when Marshall came back with the "little flake-like scales" of gold. Meanwhile, Sutter was working his men hard.

"But we made no kick," he went on. "We had agreed to accept cattle, horses and grub in part payment for our work. Moreover, we picked up enough gold before we left the place to square our account with the captain's Coloma enterprise. We had come with a bigger mission than that of seeking gold. We were Mormons. Many of us were soldiers. I had been serving with my battalion, and after our disbandment was marching with the rest of our people to Utah."

But the old miner stayed on with Sutter, at least until the captain's mill was finished. By then, news of the gold had spread.

"Did I stay long at Coloma after the completion of the mill, you ask? No, sir. Only a few of us did. Myself and most of our people only remained long enough to dig up enough gold to equip ourselves for marching back over the plains to meet those of our people who were coming out to join us."

James Brown made a fine cut — about $1,500 in gold dust, he reckoned.

"Marshall, who found it first, had none at all. Marshall was not lucky anyhow. He was one of the original bear flag men — one of the filibusters who thought he owned the country. They had selected the bear flag as their banner because bears were so abundant out here in those days. The first bear flag was nothing but an old strip of canvas, on which the men daubed a picture of a bear with tar, their paintbrush being their own fingers."

I came across this spectacle during my travels around the city yesterday. Do you know where it is? Do you know what it is? (This is, of course, just one small section of a much larger artifact — if we can call it that.) I'll put up a medium cup of java from Main Street Coffee to the first person who can guess both what and where this thing is.

It's June 22, 1895. The front page of The Batavian — a newspaper of the times — tells the simple story of a high school graduation, titled: "Sweet Girl Graduates."

"Radiant as the rosy morn was the graduating maiden of the Batavia Academy Thursday night. In ravishing costume and with brightened eye and blooming cheek she stepped on the rostrum of the opera house and with all the glamour that surrounds the pomp and panoply of war pulsing in her heart she gazed into the proud eyes of parents and friends and an immense concourse of people, and in the midst of showers of beautiful flowers was thrown into a dreamy ecstasy of delight."

It's no surprise the author has eyes only for such maidens. Batavia Academy's graduating class in 1895 consisted of 13 girls and a meager four boys. Where were all the young Batavian men at the turn of the century? Were they too good — or no good — for study? Ravaged by war? Bound by the ox to the farm?

No matter. This article's author had no need for them. Full of that very same poetic excess, he describes a few of the young ladies who especially caught his eye. Such as:

"Miss Flora Van de Venter is a piquant, fair-haired girl, with expressive eyes and a complexion that suggests peaches and cream. Her essay was captioned 'Fun and Philosophy of Mother Goose,' but there was nothing frivolous about it, though nicely spiced with humor."

And let us not forget "Miss Florence Quirk, a tangle-tressed maiden in white, (who) gave a learned essay, which evinced deep research."

Or in an article on the same front page (under "Town Topics: Seen and Heard in the Daily Current of Batavia Life").

"The summer girl is with us again. Arrayed in delicate tissue gown and jaunty straw hat, she rides through the streets in all her glory these pleasant evenings. With fan or parasol in hand she graces the piazza or the streets as she makes her periodical visits to the soda fountain. What would the druggist do without the summer girl? But it befits us all to be duly and honestly grateful for the blessing. For the summer girl is a blessing."

It must have been a long, lonely winter.