Dec 17

Historian bags Boston Tea Party link

1774 letter discovered in Montgomery County refers to tax protest

By Paul Nelson Published Tuesday, December 15, 2015, Times Union

A 1774 letter from a file of Patriot leader Jelles Fonda’s personal writings discovered in the Montgomery County relates to the Boston Tea Party rebellion. The correlation was found by Montgomery County Historian Kelly Yacobucci Farquhar. The missives, which had never been uncovered before, described the political rift that developed between he and Walter Butler and the heirs of Sir William Johnson, chronicles Johnson’s attempts to curtail free speech and the rebellion of citizens in Tryon County in August 1774. Additionally, Fonda mentions the allegations leveled at him and the repercussions Bostonians would feel for destroying the tea in the city. (Courtesy Montgomery County)

A 1774 letter from a file of Patriot leader Jelles Fonda’s personal writings discovered in the Montgomery County relates to the Boston Tea Party rebellion. The correlation was found by Montgomery County Historian Kelly Yacobucci Farquhar. The missives, which had never been uncovered before, described the political rift that developed between he and Walter Butler and the heirs of Sir William Johnson, chronicles Johnson’s attempts to curtail free speech and the rebellion of citizens in Tryon County in August 1774. Additionally, Fonda mentions the allegations leveled at him and the repercussions Bostonians would feel for destroying the tea in the city. (Courtesy Montgomery County)

Fort Plain, NY – In the spring Montgomery County Historian Kelly Yacobucci Farquhar went with her daughter on a class trip to Boston, where they visited the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.

On Monday, Farquhar made history herself when she found personal writings about the subject while taking inventory of the archival collections of patriot leader Jelles Fonda.

On Tuesday, the historian recounted how the words ‘Boston’ and ‘tea’ on those documents caught her eye. They describe the political rift between Fonda and Walter Butler and the heirs of Sir William Johnson, and chronicles Johnson’s attempts to curtail free speech and the rebellion of residents in August 1774 in Tryon County, from which Montgomery and several other counties were later created.

Fonda also mentions allegations leveled at him and the repercussions Bostonians would feel for destroying the tea in the city.  “Everybody that I’ve shown it to is pretty certain it was written by Jelles Fonda,” said Farquhar, who has worked with the county department of history and archives for nearly two decades. She made the find while inventory in advance of making the historical papers digital.

The Boston Tea Party (initially referred to by John Adams as “the Destruction of the Tea in Boston”) was a political protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, on December 16, 1773. The demonstrators, some disguised as Native Americans, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company, in defiance of the Tea Act of May 10, 1773. They boarded the ships and threw the chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The British government responded harshly and the episode escalated into the American Revolution.

The discovery occurred days before Wednesday’s 242nd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, when the city residents dressed as Native Americans dumped tea into the harbor to protest taxes. The Fondas were early settlers in the region, the county seat bears their name and their descendants including the Fonda acting family of Henry, Peter and Jane.

Fort Plain Museum researcher Norm Bollen transcribed the letter, and said in a statement that “reading and understanding 18th-century handwriting can be challenging.”

The letter will be featured as part of a new exhibit he and Farquhar are working on for the department that showcases the history of Tryon County at the beginning of the American Revolution. It is expected to debut sometime next summer.

Farquhar said Tuesday that she remains excited about the find.  “I’ve come across a lot of neat things but this is pretty close to the top of the list, if not the top because of the reference to national history,” she said.

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Nov 12

Ami McKay’s The Virgin Cure

Ami McKay’s debut novel The Birth House was inspired by the former midwife’s home she and her husband bought in Nova ‘Scotia near the Bay of Fundy. Her 2011 novel The Virgin Cure also has a real-life inspiration — McKay’s great-great grandmother was a woman doctor who ministered to the poor in the 1870s in New York’s Lower East Side. Dr. Sarah Fonda MacKintosh was in the first graduating class of the medical school founded by Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first women ever to practise medicine in the U.S.

Nova Scotia writer Amy McKay says she is always looking for women’s stories from the past. (Ian McKay)

Her graduating thesis was on syphilis in young girls and she moved directly into residency at the Blackwell sisters’ infirmary for the poor in Manhattan. The Blackwells’ infirmary was the only hospital that would accept a woman doctor at the time — the medical field considered too crude for ladies. At the time, that part of Manhattan was home to waves of immigrants and destitute people of all backgrounds, and the hospital would have dealt with waves of diphtheria and cholera that killed the very young as well as venereal diseases that blighted the lives of those not much older.

McKay models her character Dr. Sadie on the women doctors of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, but the crusading doctor doesn’t make an appearance until half-way through her new novel. The Virgin Cure is essentially a young girl’s story — of what it was like to grow up poor in a Manhattan teeming with homeless children. McKay told CBC she tried writing about this time, just after the Civil War, from the point of view of her great-great-grandmother. But the voice that emerged was not of an educated woman with a mission among the poor, but an almost illiterate girl who has grown up without love or care.

Portrait of Dr. Sarah Fonda MacKintosh

“I tried writing from a first- or third-person perspective and even from her point of view primarily, and it just … wasn’t hanging together the way I really wanted,” McKay said in an interview in Toronto. “I thought about her role in all of this and how selfless she must have been and then, when I started to think about what role would she want to take in telling this story, I realized the stories she was chasing after in her own life were of these children.”

‘We hear that and it’s in sub-Saharan Africa and it’s around AIDS and we think it’s far from ourselves — it’s easy to dismiss it. But I found it’s part of our history as well.’ —Ami McKay, author of The Virgin Cure

The protagonist is Moth, who is sold into domestic service by her mother the year she turns 12. Cruelly treated by her mistress, she is warned by the kindly butler Nestor to leave the house before the return of the master, who has a taste for young girls. Nestor helps her steal and fence some jewelry, but once the money from that has run out, she is wholly desperate. McKay gives a vivid picture of life on the Lower East Side — the packed tenements, the filth on the streets, the gangs of toughs hanging out together and the complete lack of options for abandoned children.

Moth — her name is from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost — is used to being hungry, to fending for herself and to innovating in the face of want. But she’s also a child, prone to daydreaming of a better life, charmed by pretty things or fascinated by a dime museum of freaks and oddities. She knows she will eventually have to barter her body, though she’s far from sexual maturity, but is content to live in the present, postponing that day as long as she can. Her bleak predicament is offset with short selections from ladies’ magazines and etiquette guides, highlighting the fashions of the day and expected demeanour of young ladies. The picture of the all-American girl created by these excerpts contrasts with the paucity of Moth’s life.

Selling young bodies big business

She falls into the hands of an “infant school,” a brothel specializing in selling off the virginity of young girls. The madam invests both time and money in feeding her, dressing her and teaching her comportment and it is a reputable house, where the gentlemen are checked for disease before they are allowed access to the girls. Moth meets other young girls in training, though she doesn’t seem to make close friends as one would expect with a child so starved for affection. As loathsome as the business seems to modern readers, it was in fact spelled out in great detail in travel guidebooks of the period, which McKay found in New York archives. “It was a big machine in the city at the time. Everyone worked to keep it going — the age of consent was 10, that is astounding to me — that doesn’t change for another decade,” she said.

New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children and Women’s Medical College

The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay is the story of a girl raised in poverty in 1870s Manhattan. The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay is the story of a girl raised in poverty in 1870s Manhattan. Which brings us to the virgin cure — the title of the book refers to the belief, prevalent at the time, that intercourse with a virgin could cure syphilis or gonorrhea. Moth is aware of the bodies of young girls found in poorer parts of the city, raped and killed. Belief in the virgin cure leads to one of the climactic scenes of the book, and helps set the course of Moth’s life. It’s a sordid and wrenching subject, and not even Moth’s matter-of-fact point of view makes the scene easy to read. McKay is forcing readers to face an unpalatable fact of 19th-century life that she herself discovered by combing through archives of the period.

The parallel with the myth, circulating in the developing world today, that sex with a virgin can cure AIDS, is one of the touchstones of McKay’s story. “We hear that and it’s in sub-Saharan Africa and it’s around AIDS and we think it’s far from ourselves — it’s easy to dismiss it,” McKay said. “But I found it’s part of our history as well.” McKay said she herself refused to believe the practice was so prevalent in the 1870s, until a doctor at the downtown hospital that replaced the Blackwells’ infirmary pointed out the significance of the title of her own great-great-grandmother’s thesis. McKay has no diaries or letters from Dr. Sarah Fonda MacKintosh, nor does she have the thesis itself, only the title. If the crusading doctor had been writing about congenital syphilis, she would have studied both boys and girls, and if she had been talking about prostitutes, her title would have been syphilis in young women. But Dr. MacKintosh wrote about syphilis in young girls — girls used and discarded and faced with a bleak, unhealthy future because there was no cure.

Pot-boiler of a read

As in The Birth House, McKay uses spritely storytelling to draw readers into this world. Her dialogue is true to the period and her description enough to quickly paint scenes without an excess word. The Birth House became a best-seller by word of mouth — passed from mothers to daughters to grandmothers and snapped up by book clubs. The author says that success bought her time to write this book. Despite its gruesome subject, The Virgin Cure is a quick pot-boiler of a read and will appeal to the same audience — people interested in the real world of women 140 years ago.

McKay said she is fascinated with women’s stories from history. “There are so many accounts of men’s lives, men’s work. There are accounts or diaries and you can find them easily. Whereas with women’s lives, I felt a real sense of having to track them down and then I found there are a lot of missing pieces. That’s where fiction came in, filling in those gaps,” she said.

Links: Find-A-Grave

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May 30

A moment in history…

Fonda, NY Train Wreck

“The wreck occurred on July 18, 1947 at Fonda, NY.  My grandfather was the engineer operating engine number 2775, an L2a Mohawk I believe. He was the only one injured.  It tied up all four tracks of the mainline for quite some time. He said the tower man switched his train into the back end of a work train sitting on a siding.  He also said they never saw the tower man again after the wreck.”  Don Relyea, May 2010

Train Wreck 1

Also shown at Railroads of Madison County

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May 30

A moment in history…

Hotel Roy Burned

Fonda Landmark Destroyed – Night Porter Injured While Escaping

Hotel Roy Fire - Fonda, NY - 1909

Syracuse Herald, Syracuse, NY, 26 Jan 1909

Fonda, NY – Jan 26 — The most disastrous fire that has visited this village since 1899 was discovered about 2 p.m. yesterday in Hotel Roy. The fire was first discovered by Miss Agnes Miller, an employee of the hotel, and before she could give the alarm, the entire building was filled with smoke. The fire is thought to have originated in the laundry, which was located in the cellar of the hotel. The Fire department was called out and shortly afterwards word was sent to Fultonville for assistance, and the firemen from that village – were soon on hand to give their help. The firemen worked faithfully, but all their work only seemed to help the blaze, and at 1 o’clock the entire structure was a roaring furnace.

When it was seen that the hotel could not be saved, streams of water were turned on the buildings on the opposite side of the street and they prevented the fire from spreading.

Shortly after the fire was discovered, John McMaster, who was the night porter in the hotel, and who was asleep in his room on the third story, on the west side of the hotel, was awakened and being unable to enter the all, opened the window and hung by his hands on the window ledge for several minutes, when the bricks became so warm that he lost his hold and fell to a roof below. He received a bad gash across his forehead, a badly burned arm and a broken hip. He was taken to Amsterdam hospital on the 4:52 train. Hotel Roy was erected by John V. Borst in 1836, and was one of the old land marks of the village. In 1892 Wells and Ward Streeter of Gloversville purchased the hotel of the late Jacob Snell and have since conducted the same. The building was destroyed and the loss is estimated at about $40,000 with an insurance of $25,000.

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Mar 01

AC Fonda – Charleston Stop

Anthony Cornelius Fonda (1818-1893) was the 6th of 10 children born to Cornelius Isaac and Alida VanVranken Fonda of Albany, New York.  He was baptized at the Boght Becker Reformed Dutch Church in Colonie, NY.  AC came from a family of farmers, but he took an interest in education.  In 1839 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Latin Salutatory from Union College in Schenectady.  He may have completed graduate work as well, as he practiced law in the area for a few years.  For unknown reasons,  AC headed south to teach in Natchez, stopping in Charleston, MS overnight… and he never left.  He married Mary Kernes Worley in 1842, in Charleston and had two children; after her death, he married Delilah Catherine Howard in 1854, in Charleston and had nine children. He taught school in the Rocky Branch community; in 1853 he was appointed surveyor for Tallahatchie County. He enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1862, joining Company I (Ballentine’s Regiment) of the 2nd Partisan Rangers of MS serving as SGT. In 1882 he became the first Superintendent of Education in the county. He had an active role in organizing three Presbyterian churches in Charleston, Pine Hill and New Hope.  He died May 20 1893, near Charleston, MS and is buried in Rowland Cemetery, Tallahatchie, MS.  AC Fonda had 11 children, 31 grandchildren and 123 great grandchildren.  There is a family reunion each year in Charleston, MS.

Photos courtesy Greg Stewart.

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