Halfway Brook

Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann is now available directly from BookBaby (the printer).

“See Inside” and/or order Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann by clicking on “BUY NOW” under the cover in the right column. (You don’t have to purchase the book to see the covers and a 9-page preview.)

Now through March 31, 2022, save $20 off the regular price of $70 (plus shipping and tax) with Coupon Code: ALMA22

Once you are on the Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann page, when you click on the link to purchase the book, the new screen will have a box to put the coupon code in. After typing in ALMA22 the cost of the book will show $50 (plus 4.99 shipping and tax). You can use PayPal or a credit card.

A different preview “Look Inside” is also under the cover of Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann in the right column.

Signed Bookplate
If you purchase Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann and would like a signed bookplate, send me an email with your name and address at: halfwaybrook at protonmail dot com or go to “Comments” above and send the information that way (I view every comment and won’t post that information).

Dear Halfway Brook Friends,

I am excited to inform you that I have found a new printer and that Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann will be available for purchase soon.

Included in its 356 full-color pages printed on 80# glossy paper are:

150 sidebars
2 family trees
a 330-year timeline
35 poems
320 images (including 14 letters, 14 old and new maps, and 7 journal pages)
14 pages of endnotes
1,500 people, places, and events listed in the index

With a coupon code Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann will be available to Halfway Brook readers for $50 plus shipping and tax.

I will post the link to purchase Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann (along with a coupon code) as soon as the book is available.

This is an excerpt from Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann, Chapter Nineteen, “College and Financial Difficulties Emma and the Austins, 1872–1878,” pp. 237–243.

It continued to be difficult to make money in Eldred. Henry needed his sons’ help with farming, his only source of income. But sons Ell and Lon (ages twenty-three and twenty-one) didn’t like working for their father.

Around 1878 Ell and Lon headed 1,343 miles west to Kansas, which offered work on railroads, ranches, stores, and farms.

Lon and Ell worked some in Solomon City (now Solomon), Kansas. When the townsfolk objected to the whole street being taken up by cattle during the cattle drive, Abilene, Kansas, ten miles to the east, became the major shipping center for cattle and produce.

(In 1871 James Butler Hickok, the Austins’ fifth cousin had been marshal in Abilene. James B., “Wild Bill” as he was known, had died in the Dakota Territory, in 1876. It is doubtful the Austin brothers even knew they were related.)

Hannah Hickok Eldred, her husband James, daughter Mary Ann, age three, and stepdaughter Phebe Maria, age fifteen, lived in a new two-story home.

Built in 1830, the house sat next to the old sawmill, a few hundred feet east of the main road.

Halfway Brook (further east) flowed four miles south to the Delaware River. The northwest corner of their property will eventually become part of Halfway Brook Village, and much later the village of Eldred.

In October 1831 James Eldred became the Postmaster for Lumberland. For the next twenty years one room in the Eldred home was set aside for the Lumberland Post Office. James also held positions as Lumberland’s Inspector of Schools and Town Clerk.

Lumberland Occupations
Lumberland was slowly entering the nineteenth century. The community’s economy continued to be connected with lumbering. But now jobs were available with the Delaware and Hudson (D&H) Canal, which had been designed by Benjamin Wright, the chief engineer of the Erie Canal.

Starting in 1828 the D&H Canal transported anthracite coal on mule-pulled barges, from the mountains of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, to Rondout (near Kingston), New York, on the Hudson River. Passengers could travel the 108-mile, man-made waterway.

Seventeen miles of the D&H Canal followed the Delaware River at Lumberland’s southwest border. The D&H Canal operated stores, an office, and a dry dock, in Barryville. The developing hamlet soon boasted a blacksmith shop, a gristmill, a broom handle factory, and a business which would grind feed or saw lumber for customers.

Travel in and to Lumberland
Traveling in Lumberland was difficult whether walking, riding a horse, or traveling by coach. A ferry was still the only way to cross the Delaware River from Barryville to Shohola, Pennsylvania.

There were two ways to reach Lumberland from New York City. Both involved sailing north on the Hudson River. Continue reading →

In August 1839 a group of freeborn Africans, victims in double illegal circumstances, made headlines in the United States.

Earlier in the year the West Africans had been taken captive by fellow Africans and forced to make the trek to the infamous Slave citadel Lomboko, on the West African coast. They were compelled to board the Slave ship Tecora to take the nightmarish Middle Passage to Cuba, a Spanish Colony.

In Cuba, knowing it was illegal, slave traders Ruiz and Montez purchased the fifty-four surviving captive Africans. (Illegal since 1820, selling Africans continued because Spanish authorities received ten dollars for each person sold into slavery.) Ruiz and Montez forced the group to board la Amistad, at the Havana Port. From there they were to be transported to another Cuban port to become Slaves on a plantation.

But on July 2, 1839 the Captives, led by Joseph Cinque* (a kidnapped rice farmer of the Mende people), escaped their shackles, killed the Captain and the cook, and seized control of la Amistad. The freed Africans pressured Ruiz and Montez to sail the schooner to Africa, which the slave traders did during the day. But at night they guided the two-masted vessel towards the American coast.

In late August 1839 the Amistad arrived on the east side of Long Island, New York. The ship was captured. Those on board were taken captive to Connecticut because that state had not yet freed Slaves.

The Amistad Case
On board la Amistad were forty-five Africans (including three girls and one boy) and the two Spanish slave traders. Ruiz and Montez claimed the Africans were their Slaves, and accused them of piracy and murder.

Abolitionists (including Arthur Tappan and his brother Lewis) became involved and made major efforts to raise funds. Roger Sherman Baldwin (grandson of Roger Sherman, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence) helped to defend the group in court against the American President Martin Van Buren, the Spanish government, and Ruiz and Montez.

The Africans were imprisoned in New Haven for eighteen months—the time it took for three court cases.

It is possible that at least Julia Smith attended the first two court cases. Julia wrote that she and her sisters visited the Amistad Africans in New Haven, and later in Farmington. Continue reading →

This is one of several poems regarding slavery written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807–1882. The woodcut of Longfellow was part of a news article in Mary Ann Eldred Austin’s Scrapbook.—Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann, p. 135.

Loud he sang the psalm of David!
He, a Negro and enslaved,
Sang of Israel’s victory,
Sang of Zion, bright and free.

In that hour, when night is calmest,
Sang he from the Hebrew Psalmist,
In a voice so sweet and clear
That I could not choose but hear,

Songs of triumph, and ascriptions,
Such as reached the swart Egyptians,
When upon the Red Sea coast
Perished Pharaoh and his host.

And the voice of his devotion
Filled my soul with strange emotion;
For its tones by turns were glad,
Sweetly solemn, wildly sad.

Paul and Silas, in their prison,
Sang of Christ, the Lord arisen.
And an earthquake’s arm of might
Broke their dungeon-gates at night.

But, alas! what holy angel
Brings the Slave this glad evangel?
And what earthquake’s arm of might
Breaks his dungeon-gates at night?
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Hannah Smith and her daughters were very much involved in the Abolition movement which fought to free slaves. It was a very challenging chapter to write because of the horrors and many injustices involved with people who had been enslaved.

This is the first of several sidebar posts from “Chapter Ten: The Heinous Sin, the Smiths and the Abolitionists, 1830s.”

I have been a Slave myself…The man that says Slaves be quite happy in slavery—that they don’t want to be free—that man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a Slave say so.

I never heard a Buckra (White) man say so, till I heard tell of it in England…The great God above alone knows the thoughts of the poor Slave’s heart, and the bitter pains which follow such separations…—Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince.

There was a very concerted effort in Great Britain to free Slaves. The story is well told in Simon Schama’s, Rough Crossings. British heroes include the incredible John Clarkson.

On May 15, 1830 English members of the Anti-Slavery Society (including Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, brother of John) held a convention requesting slavery be abolished in the British Empire as early as possible.

Using pamphlets, handbills, and posters, English Anti-Slavery societies increased from 200 to 1,300. Petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures flooded Westminster. Three hundred fifty thousand women signed one of the more than five thousand petitions to end slavery, which were then sent to Parliament.

In 1831 The History of Mary Prince was published. Mary Prince’s first person account told of the many trials she endured as a Slave growing up in Bermuda and is thought to have encouraged the freeing of Slaves in the British West Indies.

In August 1833 King William IV signed the West India Emancipation Act. The act was to take effect in 1840, to give the economies of the West Indies time to adjust to the change. The law used a two-step approach to free 800,000 Africans from their British slave owners. Great Britain was to pay slave owners £20 million to free the West India Slaves. Continue reading →

In 1824, more than half a century ago, the marquis Gilbert Motier de Lafayette, for the Fourth Time, visited the United States. His arrival was hailed with universal joy throughout the land; and he passed through the twenty-four States of the Union in a round of civic and martial triumphs, unequaled in magnificence and splendor. During that visit, it was my good fortune to become acquainted with him, and to witness some of the most splendid displays on that occasion…—Amos Parker, Recollections of Lafayette, p. 9.

In August 1824 the very popular Revolutionary War Hero of two continents, Marquis de Lafayette, age sixty-six, began his fourth and last tour of the United States.

At eleven o’clock the morning of September fourth, General Lafayette arrived at Hartford, Connecticut. A street full of militia and many others, including the Smiths, welcomed him.

Julia Smith had never seen so many people. She and her family waited while Lafayette ate lunch in the house on the opposite side of the street. Around one o’clock the Smiths went to the courthouse where they “were presented to the Marquis who took us by the hand.”

As Lafayette took her hand, Julia said in French, “We are pleased to see you Monsieur le Marquis. Lafayette replied in French, thanking her. “Monsieur le Marquis left Hartford for New York in a steamboat,” Julia wrote in French in her journal.

In New York Lafayette visited Mrs. Willard’s Troy Female Seminary. “The General was much moved” and requested three copies (one for each of his daughters) of the welcome song the young ladies of the Troy Female Seminary had sung.

Continue reading →

Halfway Brook Friends,

I hope everyone is staying well and warm with all the snow, ice, and cold this winter. It was 30 degrees here in Cave Creek, AZ when I got up this morning. A bit cold for this time of year here, but nothing like what other parts of the country are facing.

I am disappointed to report that the latest proof copy of Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann did not come close to being approved. We are currently looking into a new printer, in hopes that will work. I’ll update you when I have news of the imminent availability of Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann.

Meanwhile, I hope to post some more excerpts or images from Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann, though not in chronological order.

I collected a number of sleighing images for Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann. I thought Halfway Brook readers might enjoy this one which was not used. (Click on it twice to get the full size.)

Until next time,

Louise