* * *
Dear Bill,
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years, three years and four months old, respectively, they have no more interest in the
origins of the Baldwin family than you or I did when we were youngsters. But the day may
come twenty, thirty or forty years hence when Christopher, William III, Nicholas or Miss
Victoria may wonder about the path which led successive generations of Baldwins down
to you and to them.
box which every family seems to have. Maybe it will turn up when the boys become of age
and be at least of some passing interest.
N. Y. We have hazy knowledge of the fact that two or three preceding generations of
Baldwins lived in northern New York State, or, more specifically, in Oswego and
Jefferson counties which lie north of Syracuse along the shores of Lake Ontario as it bends
northward to enter the St. Lawrence River. But where did they come from? How did they
happen to settle there? When did their forefathers come to America?
blooded Baldwins were among our antecedents, which no one today can prove, the strain
long ago vanished in the veins of thousands of descendants. Besides, for every Sir Roger
Baldwin, if ever there were such a person, you'll probably find plenty of scalawags in the
lineage. And there's always the possibility that St. Roger himself should have been in jail.
Buffalo, I asked him why. "One of the Wilkes," he said half-jestingly, "was Lord Mayor of
London and I can't let him get the best of me." Kneeland's brother Stewart promptly
deflated him by adding, "Yes, but what will people say when they learn that our Lord
Mayor's father was the bastard son of Sir Hubert Wilkes and one of King George's scullery
maids!"
here are some men and women of the family who walked, even though anonymously,
through pages of history full of color and adventure. They watched, probably with hearts
in throats, the British cannonade the American vessels off the shores of Lake Ontario in
1812; they felt the terror of Indian attacks on the palisades of colonial Milford.
Davids, Jabezes and their womenfolk of equally quaint name -- Amanda, Hannah, Abagail,
Delia, Lovinia and even a Miss Silence Baldwin! They are only names until, in your mind's
eye, you start walking in an ancestor's shoes along the Mohawk trail of post-
Revolutionary days. Then you begin to see the stagecoach and the mud road cutting
through the forested hills of Oriskany, Fort Stanwix and the shores of Oneida Lake to the
new outpost of civilization in the Oswego valley where you will make your home.
that body of forty or fifty men with their wives and children moving along an Indian trail in
the Connecticut wilderness, driving their cattle and other domestic animals before them?
They are making their way to the mouth of the Wepawaug River, to a site they have
purchased from the Pauguaset Indians. One of these men is Joseph Baldwin. He's your
great-grandfather twelve generations back!
your lineage right on down from the days of King Henry VIII. Most of it, to tell the truth,
is news to me. It was only a few days ago that I discovered that one of the Baldwins a
generation or two back (and no kin of ours) apparently made a life work of tracing the
lines of descent of various American branches of the Baldwin family from their medieval
beginnings. It's in two fat books over at the library -- of interest, as your Aunt Lucille
crushingly puts it, only to another rhinocerous.
New York State which I never before knew existed, provided part of the bibliography for
this report of mine. Another contribution is an old, old family record originally in
possession of my grandfather which I saw for the first time two or three weeks ago when
my cousin Lucille Granger showed it to me in Hartford. It was this latter document, in
fact, which touched off this exploration.
immediate predecessors -- is sister Lucille, your aunt. I was too young -- 13 years old --
when my father, mother and sister Laura and I left Syracuse to live in Buffalo to remember
much about the older Baldwins of northern New York. (Lucille at that time already had
married George Martin Van Slyke and was living in Brooklyn.) I looked upon the great
aunts and uncles of my grandfather's generation as rather awe-inspiring old strangers. The
outermost horizon of the Baldwin family, as far as I was concerned, was my own father,
for my grandfather William Baldwin had died four years before I was born in 1892.
knew my grandfather but his brothers. She had seen their homes and their fathers' homes
in northern New York ... one of them, as she says, a superb example of classic Greek
architecture with tall pillars, wide cornices, beautiful mantelpieces and curving stairways.
Their personalities, their ways of life, are real and vivid in her memory and are a link with
an age that reaches almost back to the American Revolution.
that: "In 1849 William Baldwin (your great-grandfather) purchased a tannery which
afterward burned. Mr. Baldwin rebuilt it, making it one of the largest in the county; this
also burned about 1870. He was a citizen of much public spirit and usefulness."
"Our grandfather was very handsome and had beautiful hands,
very skillful ones. He made that mahogany box that I have on the
piano. I have been told that the reason he became a tanner was because
he could not buy leather that suited him to cover trunks. His own bridal
trunk stood in our Purman street (Syracuse) attic for years. It was a
beautiful thing, he had tanned the leather himself and built it himself.
For a long time he bound his own books. Don't I wish I had just one of
those! I saw just one -- the song book he used to conduct the choirs --
he directed two each Sunday, one in the Baptist church and one in the
Methodist church. His clothes had a special pocket for his tuning
fork.
"His clothes were elegant. He and his brothers all were dandies. The
last time I saw Uncle Harry (great-uncle, of course) he was then past eighty,
but he had just had a manicure and was wearing a pale gray Prince Albert,
striped trousers and an Ascot tie. And Uncle John's haberdashery, even
after he had retired to semi-practice in his old age in Sandy Creek, was
some he had bought in Paris and London.
"Our grandfather was an invalid in my very youthful day and I was
always fascinated by his blue velvet dressing gown and another paisley one
-- both with silk neckerchiefs. And his nightshirts were embroidered with
his monograms.
"He would sing old ballads to me until they dragged me out. He was the
pride and joy of my childhood. I simply adored him! I thought of him as old
as God -- I suppose because of his white beard. Indeed I thought God
looked like him!"
you one of these days. Lucille showed it to me only last month when we were down to her
new home in Westport (not too far, by the way, from Joseph of Milford's haunts) and told
me she wanted you to have it. It is full of daguerrotypes which attest to the elegance of
your great-grandfather's attire.
Jesse, Albert, John Jabez, and his sister, Delia -- all born in Sandy Creek from 1822 to
1838, but your Aunt Lucille can tell you this:
"Three of his brothers were dentists, swanky ones who charged
large fees. Uncle Harrison operated in Kentucky and Cuba. The last time I
saw him in New Hampshire (past eighty) he showed me his elegant kit of
tools with mother-of-pearl handles and told me he once was ship-wrecked
coming from Cuba and tied them around his waist.
"Uncle Jesse was the only Baldwin farmer I heard about. He
migrated to Illinois, took a section of land. I saw that farm when I was
fifteen -- grand big house and wonderful buildings. It was his son Arthur
who migrated to California. They seemed to love to wander; many of them
arrived in Honolulu and their descendants still have huge pineapple and
sugar plantations.
"Almost all of them had a flair for music. Our grandfather had a
splendid tenor voice and before you were born our father was the leading
tenor in St. Paul's Cathedral. His sister Abbie was a fine soprano."
recollections of the few trips I made with my father and mother to the homes of my
grandfather's contemporaries in Sandy Creek and Mannsville are pretty dim. It's a pity,
too, because I now realize they were an adventure into a setting that probably had
changed little from pre-Civil War times; they were horse-and-buggy villages with lamp-
lighted homes .. with the town pump and its tin drinking cup. I remember the horsehair
sofas, the plush photograph albums in the parlors' the china pitchers and wash basins on
the marble-topped bedroom stands ... and the "chamber pot" under the bed ... not to
mention the fragrant outhouse ... which brings to mind another olfactory recollection, the
pungent Pintach gas burners which lighted the creaking Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburg
train on the trips north.
one-cylinder "horseless carriages" were a novelty, when few homes had telephones, when
kerosene-lighted horsecars were beginning to be replaced by trolleys with open drivers'
platforms and hand brakes, when only the knobbier homes (like ours!) were gas-lighted
and had zinc bathtubs. Even our kitchen relied upon a hand pump which drew water from
a cistern in the cellar.
not quite the architectural atrocity which many houses of that day were -- but almost. A
porch ran around from the front to one side whose roof was supported by grillwork.
Another second-story verandah was recessed above the front porch, framed with an oval
grill of spindles. "Gingerbread" jigsaw work encrusted the facades of the twin front gables,
one of which rose above the bay-windows of the first and second floors. Wooden
sidewalks led back from the granite stepping stone and hitching post at the curb.
halls. Inside shutters folded hack behind the starched lace curtains in the parlor, living
room and "music" room (where, I remember, my sister Laura, who became a most skillful
pianist, practiced endless hours). Bas-relief ornamentation gave the ceilings a fancy touch.
A "stoop" led off the dining room while father back was still another porch, leading off the
laundry room behind the kitchen. Upstairs was a labyrinth of bedrooms with the lone
bathroom halfway down the hall with its zinc tub, wash bowl and toilet (you pulled the
chain). The open plumbing system, which included an attic cistern as well as a cellar one,
was the bane of father's life. Zero spells invariably would find him in the cellar thawing the
pipes with kerosene lamp.
like, from a monster furnace up to the hot air "registers" in the rooms above. A few
minutes after father would descend to this jungle with his kerosene barn lantern, clouds of
ash dust would pour from these registers, followed by belches of coal gas.
grapevines, apple, pear and peach trees, berry bushes, squash vines, lettuce, carrots and
asparagus beds. At the rear was the barn with its stalls for our horses, its feed bins, its
hayloft and harness closet. A lean-to housed the hen houses which let out onto a screened
chicken yard. A pigeon coop and a rabbit hutch completed provision for our "livestock" --
all this, mind you, in a well-built-up section. the crowing, the cooing, the cackling, the
whinnying and even the lowing of a neighbor's cow pastured in a large vacant stretch
beyond our house seemed not at all incongruous to the city dwellers in our neighborhood.
dressing, horse linament, hay and manure. We burrowed far into the hay to make secret
caves; we leaped from rafters. we slid down the feed chutes into the stalls. (No wonder
father sometimes found the horses inexplicably skittish!) We climbed into the buggy, or
the fringed-top surrey, and drove imaginary prancers at breakneck clip with Laddie, the
dog, adding to the pandemonium. Later, when my father replaced the horses with a
Locomobile steamer, whose stablemate , incidentally, was a neighbor's curved dash, one-
lung Oldsmobile, the upper story was rid of its hay and became a combination gymnasium
and theater, where the cast always outnumbered the audience. Some of my mother's gray
hairs probably trace back to one afternoon when fusilade of blank cartridges punctuated by
unearthly tells and screams brought her out of the house on the double. It was merely an
impromptu Wild West Show (admission, five pins.)
go without setting down in the record a brief picture of the "stable of those days ... for it is
a curiosity now and in another twenty years surely will be completely forgotten. There
were "rigs" of all kinds from the tallyhoes rented by the livery stables to the hacks,
broughams, victories, traps, buggies, surreys and wicker pony carts. And for winter, of
course, there were the cutters with offset thills or shafts so that in deep snow Bobbin
could track in one of the ruts made by the runner of the sleigh. Coarse haired buffalo robes
and a deep bed of straw on the floor kept you warm. And, oh! the music of the sleigh
bells!
blinder, hackamore and other odd terms which were part of the everyday language of
those days.
button-life glass ornaments. Leather fly nets were added in summer as well as little
tasseled "socks" for the horse's ears. Some horses even wore outlandish strew hats with
their ears poking up through two holes.
trotted under the axle only a few inches from the flying hoofs. One ritzy family had a show
rig to which the horses were hitched in tandem driven by a coachman with a cockaded
silk hat, silver-buttoned green coat, white cravat and white breeches. His gloved hands,
poised at the correct angle, held a beribboned whip, tipped with a gaily colored tassle.
with his leather apron, his forge and bellow, would send sparks flying as he hammered the
white-hot shoe on his anvil. Pungent fumes would steam off the horses hoof when he
pressed the still hot shoe against it I would watch this with a feeling of anguish, but the
horse never seemed to mind it. On one occasion, the smith circled a horse shoe nail around
the point of his nail, fashioning a finger ring for me that I treasured for a long, long time.
years. Our grandfather had given him a small job printing press in his youth -- a foot
treadle affair. He set up shop in Mannsville and turned out handbills, cards and business
stationary. He soon started to print a "newspaper," The Ellisburgh Advertiser, a four-
page, 7 1/2" x 11" monthly; subscription price, 25 cents a year.
"The bandwagon being built for our band By William Baldwin is now
progressing finely and will be out soon."
lists law blanks, note paper, envelops and stationary -- all to be had "at lowest rates" at W.
E. Baldwin's.
substantial printing business. I remember its distinctive smell of paper and printer's ink, its
clanking flat bed presses, the "kerchunk, kerchunk" of the smaller job presses with the
pressmen nimbly taking out a sheet with one hand and inserting a blank one with the other
in the split second when the press jaws parted. I remember Jo Lepham, the head pressman,
with his gold-rimmed glasses and bushy mustache, trying to teach me to handset type in a
printer's "stick" even though I was only 10 years old or so. I remember the metallic sound
of the quoins as the key turned them to wedge the bed of type tightly into the chase or
iron frame, later to be locked into the press.
of the impressive, full-color automobile catalogs of later years which I, as an advertising
man, labored to produce. And, at one time, he was printing many of the theater programs
of upstate New York. One of them, he told me, contained a classic typographical error
whereby the letter "F" appeared in place of the "P" in "Part I" of Madame Melba's recital
at the Weiting Opera House.
the Syracuse Herald for afternoon supremacy. Here my sister Lucille during her college
years served as a society reporter and here she met George Martin Van Slyke, also a
northern New Yorker, spending his college summers as a cub reporter. Later, of course,
his by line was a familiar one on the front page political articles of the New York Herald
and then the New York Sun. Indirectly this brought another newspaperman into the
family, for my sister Laura married George's best man, John N. Harmon, editor and
publisher of the Brooklyn Times. It was George who turned my own steps into the
newspaper field, for he persuaded a friend on the Buffalo Courier to apprentice me to the
"profession".
Journal plant to get out an "extra" announcing the assassination of President William
McKinley at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. He took me along in the buggy. I
remember filching an armful of papers from the roaring pressroom (I was only nine years
old) and stealing out to the thronged downtown streets to reap a harvest of pennies while
father probably was frantically searching high and low fro his lost boy.
United States. Only a year or two later my father had me on the platform in downtown
Syracuse when President Teddy Roosevelt delivered an oration. Afterward, he included
me in the handshaking and I still can see his leathery skin, his moustache, his thick glasses
and the famous TR array of teeth. Of course in after years as a reporter I had close-ups of
the jovial William Howard Taft, a mountain of a man, and of the scholarly Woodrow
Wilson, on whose presidential campaign train I spent two fascinating days.
directions, these ramblings somehow have drifted to all points of the compass.
from the earliest records down to you.
clear -- at least two hundred years, in fact, before Egbert of Wessex united the kingdom
under his overlordship to become the first King of England in 827 A. D. It's not surprising
that early records were sketchy, for true surnames as hereditary designations did not
become common in England until the tenth or eleventh century. But you'll find mentions of
Baldwins in various spellings -- Bawdewyn, Baldwyn, Baldwen, Bawdwin and Baldwin --
back as far as 672 A. D.
who overcame the Danes in 878 A. D. and other Baldwins crop up during the reigns of the
Plantagenets and the Lancasters.
VIII. At that time there was a Sir John Baldwin of Bucks County who was chief justice of
the Common Pleas of England from 1536 to 1545 when he died. His will mentions a
number of Baldwins whose relationship to him is uncertain. But one of these sons,
nephews or brothers or what-have-you, is your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-
great-great-great-grandfather, Richard Baldwin.
bequeathed him part of the parish of Dundridge or "Donrigge."
the elder Richard gave him lands in Cholesbury. To the younger Richard was born Joseph
Baldwin -- later to become known as Joseph of Milford -- who fathered the direct line of
American Baldwins leading down to you.
increasing numbers of people, including a number of Baldwins from County Bucks and
other adjoining counties, were emigrating from England to the American colonies. Many
of these pioneers were rebelling against the persecution of the prelates of the Church of
England whose tenets they were unwilling to accept.
when the "Hector" sailed from London to Boston with a group under the leadership of
John Davenport and Theophilus Katon. Five weeks later another ship carried a group
headed by the Rev. Peter Prudden.
the Rev. Prudden and John Davenport desired to found their own colony. They decided to
lead their followers to the Connecticut wilderness after listening to accounts of this region
brought back to them by Theophilus Eaton who had made an exploratory journey. In April
1638 the group took passage on a ship, sailing through Long Island Sound to the mouth
of the river on which a small colony had established the settlement of New Haven.
Joseph Baldwin. They cleared land, built rude dwellings and planted crops as part of the
New Haven colony but looked forward to founding a settlement of their own.
the Long Island shore to the mouth of the Wepammug River to negotiate for land with the
Paugusett Indians who had a village on its banks. On February 12, 1639, the five entered
into a ceremonial with Ansantawae, sachem of the tribe, and purchased what became the
site of Milford. The price was "six coats, ten blankets, one kettle, twelve hatchets, twelve
hoes, two dozen knives and one dozen small mirrors." The Paugussets sold the land in the
hope they would enlist English protection against the Mohawks who were continually
raiding their territory.
which they used as a meeting place, the forty or more who intended moving to Wepawaug
(or Milford as it later was named) laid their plans and formed the First Church of Milford.
Joseph Baldwin undoubtedly attended these meetings as one of the founders for his name
appears on the original land plots of the new town.
Prudden's followers migrated from New Haven in the late summer of that year, 1639. One
account states "they followed the devious Indian footpath, driving their cattle and other
domestic animals before them, while their household and farming utensils and the materials
for the 'common house' were taken around by water. "Arriving safely, they built a few
rude huts for temporary residence and immediately began clearing the land.
church members wee granted the franchise as "free planters." The following summer of
1640 roads were laid along the banks of the river and 41 plots of about three acres each
were staked out.
thus became known as Joseph of Milford. Life was one of arduous toil. Each of the
settlers had to be a jack-of-all-trades, felling timber, milling it, building his home, planting
his crops, tilling and harvesting them.
There also were other Baldwins in Connecticut, undoubtedly related more or less distantly
to Joseph, for they, too, had emigrated from neighboring counties around Bucks in
England, but the descendants of Joseph of Milford and Hannah Whitlock alone were so
prolific that more than 3,000 of them are listed in C. C. Baldwin's History of the Baldwin
family.
given the name of Joseph. This second Joseph married Sarah Coley of Milford. Before his
death at the age of 41, she bore him nine children. One of the daughters, incidentally, so
the records relate, was admonished by the court in 1677 for "wearing silk in a flaunting
manner to the offense of sober people, contrary to law."
was given the name of Joseph. This third-generation Joseph settled eventually in Malden,
Mass., and married Elizabeth Grover, who before his death on November 22, 1714, bore
him twelve children.
grandfathers. He moved to Spencer, Mass., with his wife, Abigail Barr, when he was 39
years old. It is recorded that David was the architect of the Congregational Church of
Spencer. David and his wife had a family of eight children. One of the daughters, it is
interesting to note, bore the odd name of Silence.
generation nearer to ours. He settled eventually in Vershire, Vermont, where he married
Hannah Lyon. In 1763 a son, Jabez, was born.
from Massachusetts to the wilds of Oswego County, N.Y. The earliest settlers had built
cabins in the Sandy Creek area only six years before. Sandy Creek records report his
arrival with this simple statement: "Jabez Baldwin settled three miles west of the village in
1809." Much of the region south of the Thousand Islands was a trackless forest. Wild
beasts reamed the woods.
they were living in a route used for invasion by the British during the American
Revolution. From the lake shore they could see enemy vessels as they engaged American
ships. More than once, rumors that the British had landed spread confusion. Fears of
Indian warfare swept the settlements.
grandfather Zebulon (whose big leather covered Bible I have). Four of the brothers alone
in Sandy creek fathered no less than twenty-seven children -- so you can see the woods
literally were full of Baldwins around the Sandy Creek region of those days.
five sons and one daughter, all born in Sandy Creek. One of them, of course, was your
great-grandfather William Baldwin, born October 21, 1825.
without break through my father, through me, through you to your son) married Harriet
Ann Hughson October 18, 1851. He died February 5, 1888. Their two children were my
father, William Edward Baldwin, born February 19, 1857, in Mannsville, and his sister, my
aunt Abbie Adelia Baldwin, born November 6, 1862.
Minnie Fish because she was the littlest) October 15, 1878. Father died in Buffalo
September 28, 1934, and mother, as you know, only a few months after you and Lucy
were married in 1941.
Laura Jeannette Baldwin, born January 1, 1885 in Syracuse, and me, William Marsh
Baldwin, born March 26, 1892.
her heart) and on December 11, 1915, along come, guess who ---- William Marsh Baldwin
junior.
Lucy Ann Webb of Cleveland, Ohio, on July 12, 1941. Their children:
Christopher Webb Baldwin, born April 16, 1943
William Marsh Baldwin III, born January 29, 1945
Nicholas Johns Baldwin, born August 11, 1947
Victoria Baldwin, born June 2, 1950.
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