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Delehanty - Sullivan - Kinsman - Schroeder Family History Workspace |
DRAFT ESSAY:
Genealogical Puzzles and the Historian's Craft:Tracking John Delehanty (1886-1929) in theSlate Quarries of Rutland County, Vermont,1851-1903
© Michael J. Schroeder, January 2006
I always wondered about John Delehanty. What kind of a man was he? Why did he die so young, when my mother was just a baby? As a small boy, nestled comfortably on my grandmother's lap, I used to ask her about the man whose surname she bore. "Tell me about grandpa Delehanty, grandma." A gentle old woman who exuded nothing but love and kindness, she was also fiercely protective, determined to keep her grandchildren from feeling any sadness or hurt. The most I ever remember her saying was "he was such a handsome devil, such a handsome devil, he looked just like Clark Gable." I had no idea who Clark Gable was, but it sounded grand, and she seemed happy when she said it, so that was good enough for me. Still, deep down, I wondered: who was this mysterious man, my mother's father, whom my grandmother loved so much, the grandfather I never knew? This essay applies my training as a historian to the life my maternal grandfather John Delehanty, who died 29 years before I was born. That it focuses on Vermont is the accident of John Delehanty's birth. For many years I thought he was born in New York, because that's what his death certificate said. I imagined him walking the streets of Brooklyn, pitching pennies on the sidewalk, playing ball in a vacant lot, working in a smoky factory. Research has revealed a very different picture. Learning about his background has meant turning not to Brooklyn but to the history of Rutland County, Vermont, and the community of slate-quarrying Irish immigrants of which he was a part. This essay is my effort, however small and inadequate, to honor the memory of John Delehanty, by telling his story as best as I'm able with the evidence at hand. Since all people are, to a large extent, the products of the environments in which they were reared, we begin by sketching the history of his boyhood home.
THE HISTORY OF JOHN DELEHANTY'S STOMPING GROUNDS John Delehanty grew up in Rutland County, Vermont in the 1880s and 1890s. At that time the mountainous region east of the upper Hudson Valley was dominated by the slate and marble quarrying industries, which boomed from the 1850s and 1860s until their gradual decline half a century later. The westernmost range of the Green Mountains, with its huge deposits of slate and marble, runs north-to-south on the eastern side of the upper Hudson, separating the watersheds of Otter Creek and the Hudson River south of Lake Champlain (see maps).[1] [ Today, if you drive north from New York City and take Highway 4 east into Rutland County, you'll easily miss the string of small towns to the south along the old Delaware & Hudson Railroad – Fair Haven, Hydeville, Castleton – most founded in the late 1700s. If you get off the turnpike at State Road 30 near Castleton Corners and head north, you'll drive past huge lakeshore condos and million-dollar homes lining the eastern shore of giant Lake Bomoseen, which runs about eight miles north-to-south. If after a mile or two you get out of the car and gaze northwest across the lake, you'll see Cedar Point, and just past it to the south, Bomoseen State Park, a wooded stretch of land separating Lake Bomoseen from smaller Glen Lake a bit further west. It was there, some six score years ago, in a rustic boarding house built next to a small slate-quarrying settlement called West Castleton, that John Delehanty was born. ] [ NOTE: Parts of this description are doubtless inaccurate and will be revised after visiting the area this coming summer 2006 - MJS. ][2] French explorer Samuel Champlain gets credit for "discovering" the area in 1609, though Abenaki Indians had lived throughout the region for thousands of years. What today is Rutland County was first settled by white people from around the 1730s, initiating centuries of complex interactions between Europeans and Indians. The entire region saw intense fighting during the Seven Years War between France and Great Britain (1755-1763). The war spurred the formation of municipal governments and local militias among its Anglophone residents, as people organized politically to protect their rights and property. The first town incorporated was Pawlet (1761), followed soon after by Clarendon and Rutland (1768), Castleton and Pittsford (1769), Poultney and Wells (1771), and Brandon (1772).[3] By the time of the Revolutionary War (1776-1783), several hundred English-speaking families populated Rutland County and the surrounding valleys. Coming mainly from Massachusetts and New York, their mores were Puritan and their ethos one of hard work, obligations to kin and community, and defense of political and religious freedoms. The stories of fighting in these thickly forested hills during the seven year-long struggle for independence are legion, with Ethan Allen and the "Green Mountain Boys" skirmishing relentlessly against the British redcoats. One oft-told local tale has Ethan Allen and his boys rendezvousing at Castleton just before their capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775. The period of the Revolutionary War, and later, of the War of 1812, accelerated the formation of political, religious, economic, and cultural institutions throughout the region.[4] Transportation into Rutland County remained rudimentary until the early 1800s, when several turnpikes were built linking the county with the more populated zones west and south. The railroads came around 1850, mainly to get the slate and marble out. Within a few years those same railroads also would be used to bring thousands of people in.[5] The European population of Rutland County remained low until the mid-1840s. Then, within a few short years, tens of thousands of Welsh and Irish slate miners poured into the area. Census data provide snapshots of this enormous increase. In the four decades from 1800 to 1840, the county's total population remained below 6,000. By 1850 it had shot up to more than 33,000 – a more than five-fold increase in a single decade.[6] Population levels stabilized in the years following this phenomenal rise. In 1870, the county's population reached 40,000. Over the next 20 to 30 years, people stopped moving into Rutland and surrounding counties and started migrating out. By 1900, the county contained fewer than 45,000 people, a net decline from what would have been the natural increase.[7]
POPULATION OF RUTLAND COUNTY, VERMONT, 1790-2000
Most notable in these figures is the phenomenal increase of 1840-1850 and the stagnation after 1870. The bulk of the massive wave of immigrants consisted of Welsh and Irish slate miners and their families. Most Irish immigrants hailed from County Tipperary, a landlocked, upland county known especially for its mines and slate quarries. Fleeing the Potato Famine, as many as 100,000 Irish men, women, and children of the slate regions of Tipperary migrated to the United States. Tens of thousands headed to the slate quarrying districts along the New York-Vermont border in the 1840s and 1850s, joining the tens of thousands of Welsh who had already arrived.[8] Two of the thousands of Irish immigrants who came to this hardscrabble region in the early 1850s as small children were John Delehanty's parents – Bridget Waters and Mathias Delehanty. What do we know about their ancestry? We begin with John's mother, Bridget Waters.
BRIDGET WATERS AND THE IRISH WATERS FAMILIES OF RUTLAND AND WASHINGTON COUNTIES Samuel Waters was among the first European immigrants to settle in Rutland County, his name appearing in the first US census of 1790. Though his nationality is not identified, he was doubtless English, not Irish. The name Waters disappears from Rutland County for the next two censuses (1800 and 1810), reappears in 1820 and 1830, and vanishes again in 1840 – though the same 1840 census, which does not specify place of origin, shows 10 Waters families living in adjacent Washington County, New York, including two in Granville.[9]
The 1850 Census and After From 1850, Waters of Irish birth and ancestry remained rooted in Rutland and Washington counties. The 1850 census counted six Waters' in the Town of Rutland, three born in Ireland: Anna (age 19), Julia (age 24), and Matthias (age 25). All three were boarding with other families, and near enough in age to be siblings. It also counted 55 Waters in Washington County, three born in Ireland. The three Irish-born Waters lived in Whitehall, less than ten miles from Fair Haven along the railroad: husband James (age 38), laborer, his wife Margaret (age 22), daughter Ellen (age 5), and daughter Margaret (1), born in New York.[10] A few months after the 1850 census – around September – a girl named Bridget Waters was born in Galway, Ireland. Ten months later she arrived in New York, carried in the arms of Barbara Waters, age 24. Barbara and Bridget were but two the hundreds of Irish immigrants named Waters who came to New York in the 1850s. The two arrived together on May 15, 1851 aboard the Barque Celeste from Galway, Ireland, the only Water's aboard the ship. The name, age, and time of arrival all match: this is very probably our Bridget Waters.[11] It is important to recall the squalid conditions under which Famine-ravaged Irish immigrants arrived in U.S. and Canadian ports in the 1840s and 1850s. The following account of the arrival of a ship from County Cork to Grosse Isle, Canada, in May 1847 could likely be applied to the Barque Celeste upon which Barbara and Bridget Waters chugged to New York four years later:
Under such circumstances, with small children and the elderly the most vulnerable groups, it is no small thing that 10-month old Bridget Waters survived the voyage. Thousands of other Irish-born infants did not. The late 1840s were devastating years for Ireland as a whole, and for the Waters clans of County Galway and other counties. Immigration data show 232 Irish surnamed Waters came to the United States in 1851-1852 – the highest influx of any two years, and about one-third of the 731 documented Irish surnamed Waters arriving on the Eastern seaboard in the eight decades from 1850 to 1930 (1,088 Waters came from Britain, including 819 from England, 106 from Scotland, and 15 from Wales). Probably all of the 232 Irish Waters who came in 1851-52 were fleeing the Famine.[13]
The 1860 Census and After What happened to Barbara and Bridget after their arrival in America is not known. Neither appear in the 1860 census. Barbara would have been around 33, Bridget around 10. Three explanations seem possible. (1) Barbara married and gave away Bridget; (2) both were missed by the census-taker; or (3) Barbara died before 1860 and the census-taker missed Bridget. Only the last two seem plausible. Given the larger social context of poverty and illness, the last seems likeliest: Barbara probably died, and the census-taker probably missed Bridget.[14] We know that Bridget ended up in the Rutland slate and marble quarrying districts, so the likelihood is high that Barbara brought her there before she died. If she did, she would have been following a very common migratory pattern, especially by 1851 in these districts, by linking up with "pioneer" family members already settled in the area.[15] If Barbara did come to Rutland County and then died, where did she leave Bridget? Two things seem possible: (1) that Bridget went to live with one of her aunts or uncles – such as Julia or Anna Waters in the Rutland Town, or one of their married sisters, or with James and Margaret Waters in Whitehall, NY – and was missed by the census-taker; or (2) that she was orphaned (left without kin), became a domestic servant, and recorded under a different surname. Census data from 1860 show four Irish-born Bridget's ages 8-12 in Rutland and Washington counties with surnames different from others in their household. The domestic arrangements make clear that these girls were working as domestic servants; one is specifically identified as such. All were probably orphans, not integrated into a kin network. Their names were Bridget Clark (age 12, White Creek, Washington Co.), Bridget Carter (age 12, Fair Haven, Rutland Co.), Bridget Bolen (age 11, White Creek), and Bridget Bale (age 11, Cambridge, Washington Co.). Any might be our Bridget.[16] It is worth recalling here that the head of the household, not the servants, provided information to the census-taker. A 12 year-old servant girl named Bridget could have any surname the head of the household chose to give her – or any given name, for that matter.[17] So let us take a different tack. Were there any Irish-born "Water's" in Rutland or Washington counties in 1860? In fact there were four in the Town of Rutland, in three different households. One was headed by Patrick Waters, a 28 year-old railroad hand, born in Ireland, and included his 35 year-old Vermont-born wife Bridget (not our Bridget); their baby girl; and Irish-born Margaret, age 56 – probably Patrick's mother. Two other Irish-born Water's lived in Rutland Town, both named Hugh – one an 18 year-old blacksmith living in a boarding house, and the second a 17 year-old quarry worker boarding with a family of teamsters.[18] These two Hugh's were probably Patrick-the-railroad-hand's brothers or cousins. Perhaps Patrick had a married sister who took in his orphaned niece Bridget, and the census-taker failed to record her correct surname. Two other Irish-born Waters families lived in Washington County. In both counties together lived at least 14 Irish-born Waters. Our Bridget is not among them.[19] Despite Bridget's absence from the 1860 census, it is clear that by the early 1860s Waters from Ireland were fairly thick on the ground in the slate quarrying districts of Vermont and New York, as were the Irish-born. In 1860 the two counties of Rutland and Washington contained some 8,200 Irish-born inhabitants – up ten percent from the 7,400 in 1850, and several thousand percent from their tiny numbers in 1840. It is very likely that our Bridget was in there, somewhere – living with one of the Water's families and missed in the census, or with extended kin and listed under a different name, or working as a domestic servant under a different name.[20]
The 1870 Census and After Ten years pass. It has been 19 years since her arrival in America, and we still have no evidence of Bridget Waters' whereabouts. By the time of the 1870 census, nine Waters of Irish background lived in the Town of Rutland:
1. House No. 262, Family No. 338 WATERS, BRIDGET, age 30, washerwoman, born in Ireland WATERS, MARY, age 11, born in Vermont (Living in the same house with another family, the Clarks, also from Ireland.) 2. House No. 406, Family No. 507 WATERS, GEORGE, age 34, employee at the saw mill, born in Ireland, and boarding with a carpenter named R. P. Snow, his wife, and his son Daniel, 17, a clerk, and a Vermont-born female domestic servant, age 20. 3. House No. 1154, Family No. 1244 WATERS, PATRICK, age 26, quarryman, born in Ireland WATERS, MARGARET, age 24, keeping house, born in Ireland WATERS, MARY, age 3, born in Vermont 4. House No. 1483, Family No. 1808 WATERS, MICHL, age 20, laborer, born in Ireland WATERS, BRIDGET, age 22, keeping house, born in Vermont WATERS, MARY, age 3, born in Vermont
In other words, the 1870 census lists four Irish-born Waters living in the Town of Rutland – Bridget (age 30), Michael (age 20), Patrick (age 26), and George (age 34). They were probably siblings, cousins, or otherwise closely related in the same first generation of immigrants.[21] Careful readers will have noted that two Bridget Waters' lived in the Rutland Town in 1870 – one a 30 year-old unmarried washerwoman born in Ireland, the other a 22 year-old housewife born in Vermont. The first is very probably our Bridget. The census-taker just got her age wrong.
Thick Description of the 1870 Census There are several peculiarities about her listing. For one, 30 year-old Bridget was listed as the head of a household. Female-headed households were rare in this male-dominated social world, around seven percent of the total. This made her distinctive, by definition. A second oddity is that 11 year-old Mary Waters was listed as part of the Clark family, instead of with Bridget, even though all lived in the same dwelling house. (The exact relation between Mary and Bridget is not known.) The jumbled listing likely resulted from the census-taker's confusion and haste, which in turn hints at a confusing and not altogether cooperative household.[22] Nosing through every part of town with a clipboard in hand and the authority to record for the federal government every individual's name, age, household status, occupation, net worth, country of origin, parents' countries of origin – census-taking was neither a simple nor a non-political act. Hired on short-term contracts and receiving only nominal pay, census-takers had the authority to pry into fairly intimate aspects of people's lives. They also had only so long to cover their allotted territory, and little time to sort out the specifics of each dwelling place. In the end what mattered was the total tally, not who belonged to which family, especially among the poor. The data make clear that Bridget and Mary Waters lived in the same house, were probably related, and that we are looking at a common situation: two families sharing one dwelling place – the Waters and the Clarks.[23] Looking more closely at this process of census-taking, we see that Assistant Marshall C. H. Forbes began his enumerations of Rutland Town on June 1, 1870 at the town center, on page no. 1, with dwelling house no. 1, family no. 1. He finished on 13 September – 105 days, 247 pages, 1,613 dwelling houses, 1,987 families, and 10,395 people later. Among the first ten families were three machinery manufacturers, two merchants, an insurance agent and railroad agent, and two teachers, with a total net worth of $86,500. Among the last ten, after circling throughout the town (including its expansive rural districts) and ending up back at its center, were a bank president, two bank employees, three marble dealers, and a governess, with a total net worth of nearly $300,000.[24] Bridget Waters lived among working people, and in close proximity to some of Rutland Town's wealthier residents – probably right around the corner from them. Enumerated on June 23, 1870, on pages 38-40, her neighborhood was populated by both working-class and upper-class households. In the house next door lived a 67 year-old black laborer and his family of six, with $0 net worth. In her own dwelling place, five people in two families claimed $0 net worth. On the other side lived two carpenters, a dressmaker, and two other adults, who claimed a combined net worth of $2,300. Next to them lived the superintendent of the Rutland Railroad, worth $18,500. A few doors down from him lived a grocer worth $16,000 and hotel owner worth $20,000. Other near neighbors included three carpenters, a mason, a laborer, a teamster, and a cabinet maker. Evidently it was a very mixed neighborhood, perhaps with working-class blocks running perpendicular to upper-class blocks.[25] Bridget Waters lived next door to one of the town's few black families: Joseph Taylor (age 67), his wife Charity (age 68), and four other Taylor's, ages 39, 29, 15, and 4. Altogether only 96 persons identified as "black" lived in all of Rutland County in 1870, 44 in Rutland Town – less than one-half of one percent of the town's total population of 10,395.[26] Of those more than 10,000 people, exactly two were white female heads of household living next door to a family of black people. One lived in a rural district. The other was Bridget Waters.[27] If we make that immigrant white female heads of household living next door to a family of black people, there was just one – one among Rutland Town's 10,395 people. Bridget Waters. That is not all. Her next-door neighbor, Charity Taylor, age 68 in 1870, was the daughter of one of the county's most prominent African-American men, Pearson Freeman, who had lived in the county since the 1770s. A landowner who served with distinction in the Revolutionary War, Pearson Freeman was also a talented musician, soap manufacturer, and author of many memorable advertisements in the Rutland Herald. His obituary was very lengthy and laudatory. His daughter Charity Freeman was baptized on July 4, 1802, at the East Parish Congregational Church in Rutland, married Joseph Taylor on January 1837 in Rutland, and lived in Rutland until her death in 1884 at the ripe old age of 82.[28] In other words, Bridget Waters lived next door to one of Rutland Town's most prominent black individuals, one with deep roots in the local community. If anyone knew the county intimately, and its people of color, it was Charity Freeman Taylor. Consider for a moment the extent and depth of the social connections to which Bridget might have been introduced by her black neighbors. The possibilities are breathtaking. In light of her personal and family history, and her advanced years, Charity Freeman Taylor probably knew most everyone in town worth knowing. How did these two neighbors – young Irishwoman Bridget and elderly black woman Charity – get along? A range of possibilities exist, from mutual indifference, to outright hostility, to abiding friendship. The slender reeds of evidence available on this question suggest they got along swimmingly. I imagine them chatting over the fence, sharing the occasional coffee or tea, and that Bridget absorbed a universe of knowledge from Charity and her family about the history and people of Rutland County. I imagine that being neighbors with Charity Freeman Taylor changed Bridget's life in some important ways – that it provided her with social connections and local knowledge that she simply could not have gotten any other way. That it made her a force to be reckoned with.[29] One small whiff of a hint in this direction is the 1870 census itself. Why the jumbled household sequence? And why the 10 year discrepancy in Bridget's age? Both things were rare in census records, each occurring in less than one percent of all listings. The odds against both things happening in the same listing are on the magnitude of 10,000 to 1. Why in Bridget Waters' listing? Given the larger patriarchal culture and the rarity of female-headed households, unmarried women heads of household had to be especially independent and assertive. The jumbled listing, Bridget's head-of-the-household status, and the discrepant age together suggest that Bridget somehow rankled Assistant Marshall Forbes, who recorded her age as 30 years instead of 20. Or, that she refused to tell him how old she was and made him guess. Or, that she had worked so hard in her 20-plus years that she looked like she could be 30. One can imagine many plausible scenarios explaining why Mr. Forbes listed her as 10 years older than her actual age.[30]
Getting Her Liquor from a Cucumber One significant piece of evidence that tends to support these interpretations, and that offers some fascinating insights into Bridget's personality and character, consists of two brief but remarkable newspaper snippets from the Rutland Herald from the late summer of 1874, when Bridget would have been about 24. These were tiny articles appearing in the "local news" section. It appears that Bridget Waters had been arrested for drinking in public, thrown in jail, and refused to tell the judge where she had gotten her liquor. The newspaper summarized the court proceedings:[31]
Rutland Herald, August 20, 1874, Police Court:
Rutland Herald, August 22, 1874, Police Court (two days later): Bridget Waters, who was put away up stairs to await a time when she could remember where she procured her liquor, manifests no desire to get out: on the contrary, she declares that she is quite comfortable and is willing to stay inside a while.
"Clearly showed the Justice that she got her liquor out of a cucumber" – what does that mean? Got pickled from something that was no pickle? Whatever the phrase's meaning – and it might well have carried a sexual connotation – the gist of these two tidbits of local news seems clear: Bridget Waters was openly defying the judge's authority, and in a way that the newspaper portrayed as funny and amusing. "Bridget Waters . . . clearly showed the Justice . . ." What, exactly, did she so clearly show him? I would dearly love to know. Perhaps a piece of her mind. Whatever it was, the young woman in these snippets was portrayed as scrappy, defiant, saucy, sassy – a real local character.[32]
Street Culture, the Politics of Liquor, and the Temperance Movement in Rutland To understand the social context lurking behind these curious news items, we need to widen our inquiry to ask about street culture and the temperance movement in Rutland Town in the early 1870s. Fortunately, the pages of the Rutland Herald offer a robust, fine-grained portrait of both. The Herald's general editor, Henry Clark, appears to have been a typical Yankee-Yorker: prosperous, Protestant, and a strong backer of the temperance or anti-drinking movement, a man who found many elements of Rutland Town's street culture appallingly boorish and ill-mannered. His paper fairly brims with strong moral condemnations of both.[33] The temperance movement here was part of a much broader trend in late nineteenth-century America, as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and like-minded organizations battled to make alcohol illegal. In Rutland County, local chapters of an organization called the Good Templars were the most active in promoting an anti-drinking agenda – staging plays, delivering lectures, hosting fund-raisers, writing letters and verse, pressuring their legislators and the local police, and in general doing everything in their power to staunch the evils of "the rum power."[34] A news item of January 12, 1870 reporting on the Annual Meeting of the Good Templars at the Rutland Town Opera House was typical. "Prohibitory laws are the heavy artillery of temperance," thundered the keynote speaker from the podium, "and the strongholds of the rum power cannot be broken up without them!" The organization's creed was simple: "[We are] eternal in our hatred to alcohol and its minions, servants, and sympathizers." Almost daily, the Herald published small news items that made unambiguous connections between anti-social, immoral behavior and the consumption of alcohol.[35] An item from Castleton published March 9, 1870 illustrated these moral connections. During the previous week, according to the Herald's Castleton correspondent, four men "in the employ of the Pencil Manufacturing Company" had gotten drunk in a neighboring town, and "in the morning they returned home pretty drunk and ready for a first-rate fight." The sheriff was alerted, they were arrested and fined, and "the next morning they went to work sober and wiser men, with the remark that they were served just right." The previous weekend, on March 4-5, the Good Templars staged a play in Fair Haven called "Ten Nights in a Bar Room." The Herald's resident critic lauded the play for its fine depiction of the evils of the "liquid damnation" and for illustrating the "very lowest of degradation by the use of 'Hell fire'." A few months before, in early January, the local constable arrested one William Manney for public drunkenness. Required to disclose where he obtained his "fire water," he, like Bridget Waters four years later, refused, "and for such refusal was recommended to jail until he would divulge," an action the Herald applauded.[36] Alongside these strong moral condemnations of alcohol was the Herald's editorial disgust at Rutland Town's vibrant street culture. Typical was an editorial complaint of January 6, 1870 about young men hanging out on the street corners at night. The "ribald talk" and "gross insult" of these young men was simply too much for the Herald to stomach. "Great complaint has been made to the authorities of this nuisance impropriety. . . . These young men who determine to resist all appeals at their honor and good sense may expect an exercise of the authority of the law." With typical Yankee-Yorker emphasis on the ethics of hard work and the evils of idleness, on March 7, 1870 the Herald derided street "loafers" in the following doggerel:
Standing on the sidewalk Smoking my cigar Nothing under heaven My happiness can mar
Staring at the ladies Surely what a treat Bless me! This is pleasant Loafing in the street.
But the newspaper's more typical rhetoric was neither light-hearted nor amusing but strongly condemnatory, as seen a week later, on March 15, in a column titled "Loafing as a Fine Art.":
Such editorial complaints continued for years. They make it plain that Rutland Town's poor and working class had created a vibrant street culture that the town's "better class" of citizens found highly disconcerting. The reason "why something cannot be done" about this "filth," of course, was the U.S. Constitution and its guarantees of freedom of assembly and speech. Rutland Town's wealthier residents may have owned the newspaper and the machinery of town government, but on many occasions the poor owned the streets.[37]
Bridget Waters, Public Nuisance With these the contexts in mind, we can more fully appreciate Bridget Waters' arrest in August 1874 for public drunkenness. One can readily imagine the scene: an unmarried Irish washerwoman in her mid-20s, an active participant in the vibrant street culture the Herald incessantly denounced, howling at the moon on a warm summer's night, with a lively tongue and streak of independence to match – virtues when practiced by men, vices (or sources of amusement and derision) when practiced by women. Hauled into jail by the local constable, and then, at her arraignment, refusing to cooperate with the judicial system, she opted to sit in jail rather than squeal on her friends who supplied her the liquor. There is another possibility, given the larger contexts. It is possible that her irreverent demeanor, bawdy wit, and lack of deference, day after day on the streets of Rutland Town prompted one of her wealthy and politically connected neighbors to arrange her arrest on trumped-up charges – like swatting at a neighborhood pest, on the presumption that a few days in the hoosegow might teach her to have more respect for her social betters. That might explain her open defiance in jail – because she knew the whole thing was a sham, a frame-up, and mainly a bid to squelch her spirit. Indeed, this episode has all the hallmarks of a small act of civil disobedience: a non-violent, open, and intentional violation of a law on moral or political grounds, followed by full acceptance the judicial consequences. The entire episode has a strong political feel to it – political in the sense of an unseen power struggle.[38] In this light, it is probably not inconsequential, or coincidental, that her immediate neighborhood was inhabited by two of Rutland Town's most politically powerful men and their families. Two doors down lived Alanson Dyer, age 70, and his wife or sister Emily A. Dyer, age 57 – either the siblings or father and sister of Horace H. Dyer, a 50 year-old farmer with a net worth of $42,500 elected as "Lister" on the Rutland Town Council in March 1870. ("Listers," along with "Selectmen," were the most influential members of the town council.) Six doors down in the other direction lived Evelyn Pierpoint, age 54, a real-estate speculator with a net worth of $90,000, also a "Lister" on the town council, and a member of the Rutland School Board. Bridget Waters, a poor Irish washerwoman, lived in very close proximity to the town's premier power-brokers and their families. For these reasons, speculation that her politically powerful neighbors had something to do with her arrest does not seem unwarranted.[39] We have no proof of her neighbors' involvement in her arrest. What we do know is that Bridget Waters openly and unabashedly defied the authority of the town judge in Vermont's most populous town. Her colorful defiance of that authority piqued the interest of Vermont's largest municipal newspaper, whose news items was clearly meant to amuse. It would be interesting to know how many stories circulated, in this time and place, that cast a woman's open defiance of authority and the law as funny and harmless, as depicted here. I have found no others. In this male-dominated world, this was not a common trope. The woman in these snippets was implicitly portrayed as using humor, wit, and her own stubborn resolve to deflect attention away from her open defiance of the law. It is true that the anti-liquor laws were widely despised and ignored by those at whom they were principally aimed: poor immigrant communities. It is also true that open defiance of a judge's authority can be a very serious offense. She did it anyway, and with panache, painting jail time as easy, "comfortable," and much preferred to the alternative, which implicitly included betraying a friend and admitting defeat.[40] How would her neighbors, especially Charity Taylor, interpret her behavior? Given the broader context of white supremacy and traditions of black resistance to many kinds of legally institutionalized oppression – not so much in Rutland County per se, or even in Vermont, but in American history and culture generally – it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that Charity Taylor found Bridget Waters' scrappiness and sauciness endearing, which in turn facilitated their mutual friendship. Memoir literature abounds with instances of women of different ages and ethnic and racial groups forging intimate friendships based on a shared sense of patriarchal oppression and ethnic and racial subordination. Rutland Town's urban environment in the 1870s would tend foster such a bond between neighbors like Bridget Waters and Charity Freeman Taylor. Assuming that they were friends, their 40-year age difference might have been an important part of it: the elderly tend to venerate spunk and spirit among the young, while intelligent youth tend to appreciate practical wisdom and experience among the old.[41] Three or four years after her brief incarceration for getting her "liquor from a cucumber," Bridget Waters, in her late 20s, married Mathias Delehanty. In the next dozen years she bore six of his children (at least officially), including son John. What do we know about Mathias Delehanty and his ancestry?
MATHIAS DELEHANTY AND THE DELEHANTY FAMILY OF RUTLAND AND WASHINGTON COUNTIES Mathias Delehanty did not come to America as an infant, as did his future wife Bridget Waters. He arrived two years later, in 1853, and as an 11 year old. "After a rough voyage of four weeks," his family of eight touched the nation's shores on November 5 at old Castle Garden in New York City. His father, Patrick Delehanty, was 42. So was his mother, Mary Harney Delehanty. Seventeen years before, in 1836, Patrick and Mary had married in Carrick on Suir, County Tipperary. Both were 27 – a fairly late marriage in that time and place. Four years into their marriage they had their first child, Mary C. Thirteen years later, in 1853 when they emigrated to America after surviving the worst years of the Famine, the nuclear family consisted of parents Patrick and Mary (age 42) and children Mary C. (13), Mathias (11), James (9), Anastasia (6), John (4), and Patrick Henry (six months) – two girls and four boys.[42] The day after landing in New York the family journeyed directly up the Hudson Valley to Hydeville in Rutland County – a clear sign that they knew exactly their destination in America, and planned to link up with relatives or friends already settled in the slate-quarrying districts. Exactly where they lived during their first years in America is not known. They probably settled near Hydeville or Granville in Washington County, with family patriarch Patrick working as a quarryman, and the boys, from ages 14 or 15, working in the quarries and mills. Thus passed the 1850s.[43]
The 1860 Census and After Curiously, the family does not appear in the 1860 census. They are nowhere to be found, anywhere in the country. This seems very odd. It was one thing for the census-taker to miss a parentless 10 year-old girl, another thing entirely for him to miss a family of eight. Perhaps he was simply inept. Or, perhaps the Delehanty's intentionally avoided him in order to elude federal government's eye, with the larger aim of keeping Mathias (age 18) and James (age 16) from being drafted into the war that, by summer 1860, seemed likely to erupt from the brewing sectional conflict between North and South. War was declared the following spring. In summer 1861 thousands of men from Rutland and adjacent counties volunteered for service in the Union Army. None of the Delehanty's were among them. The family's only military service came fairly late in the war, in fall 1863, with the leaves splashing the hillsides in their annual riot of color and three months after the Battle of Gettysburg and the New York City Draft Riots. In October of that year, father Patrick, age 53, volunteered for nine months' service in the 14th Regiment of Company F of the Vermont Volunteers. Why were none of the boys drafted? Why did none of them volunteer? Perhaps, by fall 1863 their evasion of government authority had been discovered, and father Patrick volunteered to prevent his boys from being drafted. We don't know.[44] The winter after Patrick marched off to war, his wife Mary (Harney) Delehanty died. The date was January 24, 1864. She was 54.[45] By summer 1865, with the war over and widower Patrick back at home, his 22 year-old son James was poised to marry Mary Hatch of Hydeville, born in Massachusetts. She was 18. The young couple, married on October 5, lived in either Hydeville or Poultney. By 1866 they had their first child, Mary. Two years later, in 1868, James built "a large and comfortable residence on his 21-acre lot in Hydeville," along with some "tenement houses." He lived in this "large and comfortable residence" for at least the next 30 years.[46] The four brothers Matthias, James, John, and Patrick Henry all lived near each other. Mathias's house in Granville lay only a few miles south and west of James's house in Hydeville, less than half an hour's ride on the Delaware & Hudson Railroad.[47] Around the same time that James was marrying Mary Hatch and building his house in Hydeville, his brother Mathias, in his mid-20s, married a young Irish immigrant named Margaret McGrath.
The 1870 Census and After By summer 1870 Mathias, his wife Mary, and their two small children, along with Mathias's younger brothers John and Patrick Henry, were all living together in Granville:
FAMILY OF MATHIAS AND MARGARET DELEHANTY, GRANVILLE, WASHINGTON COUNTY, NEW YORK, 1870
Two years after this census, Mathias and Margaret had a third child, Philip (in brackets).[48] A few years later, the Delehanty brothers John, James, and Patrick went into the slate-quarrying business. Exactly how they achieved this feat is not entirely clear. What is clear, according to the Rutland County Book of Biographies (1899), is that in April 1873 James Delehanty, age 29, founded a small slate-quarrying operation with business partner P. H. Downs. Patrick H. Downs was a 29 year-old married Irish immigrant and stone cutter living in Castleton. They called their company Downs & Delehanty Slate Works.[49] The Delehanty portion of the capital required for the venture, according to the Book of Biographies, came from James's frugality and hard work: "When fourteen years of age [in 1858], he began to work in the slate mills . . . [he] began life bare-handed and in a small way, saving money from day labor, until he acquired sufficient capital to purchase an interest." In other words, he worked for 15 years in the slate mills before saving enough money to start a slate-quarrying business of his own. This, at least, is what James told the biography compiler around 1899.[50] Another plausible story has James's brother John going West to make his fortune mining gold around this same time. Their sister Anastasia, who had married one Patrick Wallace, supposedly went West with John, but turned back when they ran into "Indian trouble." If the story is true, they probably trekked to the Black Hills in Dakota Territory, where after 1874 a gold rush lured thousands of Euro-American men with the prospect of striking it rich. Recall that "Custer's Last Stand" of 1876 was against a coalition of thousands of Sioux and other Indians, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, enraged by white people's recent desecration of their sacred Black Hills in their insatiable lust for the yellow metal.[51] The problem is, the timing of the two stories does not jibe. On the one hand, it seems extraordinary that James was able to save enough money, after 15 years on quarryman's wages, to start a slate-quarrying company in 1873. On the other hand, if the start-up capital came from John's gold-mining venture, the money wouldn't appear until after 1874, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills. If the gold-mining story is true, and John did hit pay-dirt, he must have done so between 1875 and 1880. Perhaps gold had nothing to do with the company's founding. Or, perhaps the 1873 date is wrong.[52] In either case, it is clear that by the mid-1870s the brothers John and James Delehanty had accumulated enough capital to form a partnership with Patrick H. Downs and start a slate mining company in Hydeville, at the southern tip of Lake Bomoseen. Downs & Delehanty was but one of dozens of small slate quarrying companies founded in Rutland County in the 1870s and 1880s. According to H. Smith & W. Rann's History of Rutland County, Vermont (1886), Rutland County's first commercial slate mining company began operations in 1839. The industry exploded in the coming years, as tens of thousands of Welsh and Irish immigrants poured into the region, providing a ready supply of cheap labor.[53] By the mid-1880s there were a total of 67 individually owned companies producing slate in Rutland County, according to Smith & Rann's authoritative tally. Downs & Delehanty Slate Works was among them – not a huge operation, but not tiny either, with around half a dozen employees in the late 1870s.[54] In May 1877, soon after they started their operations in Hydeville, Downs & Delehanty bought stock in another company nearby, the Lake Bomoseen Slate Works, on the lake's eastern shore at the settlement of Bomoseen. Thus, by 1877 the brothers Delehanty were involved in at least two separate slate quarrying operations. Meanwhile, their youngest brother Patrick Henry chose the life of the priesthood. He entered the Catholic seminary in Montreal, Canada, and later went on to become parish priest of Cambridge, New York, south of Granville (while evidently still owning part of Downs & Delehanty, as seen below).[55] In that same May of 1877, back in Granville, Mathias Delehanty's wife Margaret died. She was 29. Her death, which must have been a devastating blow, left Mathias a widower with three small children – Patrick, 9, Mary, 8, and Philip, 5.[56] Widower Mathias Delehanty married Bridget Waters soon after, probably in 1878 or 1879. Exactly how they met will likely remain a mystery. Both moved in a relatively small world. Their shared networks of families and friends probably made fairly high the chance that they would become acquainted.[57]
The 1880 Census and AfterAfter her marriage, Bridget moved from Rutland Town to Granville to live with her new husband and his three small children, who became her step-children, as shown in the 1880 census:
THE FAMILY OF MATHIAS AND BRIDGET DELEHANTY
Eight months before this census, in Granville in October 1879, Bridget became pregnant. By the following June of 1880, when the census-taker came around, her belly was swollen with child. She bore her first child, son Daniel, a month later. In the next four years, still living in Granville, she had two more children: Margaret A. (July 1882), and Elizabeth (Nov 1884).[58] Meanwhile, over in Hydeville, James and Mary were raising their family:
THE FAMILY OF JAMES AND MARY DELEHANTY [HYDEVILLE], CASTLETON, RUTLAND CO., VT, 1880 CENSUS
Eight people under the same roof: the two parents, five children ages 4 to 14, and the family patriarch Patrick, still a quarryman at age 70.[59] The other Delehanty brother, John, is missing from the 1880 census – nowhere to be found in either Rutland or Washington counties. There is, however, a listing for one "John Delehante," a miner boarding in a hotel filled with other miners in Lead City, Lawrence County, Dakota Territory – right in the heart of the Black Hills. He is of the right age (32) and birthplace (Ireland). This may well be him.[60] Whatever the case regarding the gold, by the early 1880s the Delehanty brothers' slate-quarrying business was prospering. An 1881-1882 Gazetteer and Business Directory of Rutland County, Vermont, compiled and published by one Hamilton Childs, described Downs & Delehanty's slate mining operation:
In late summer 1882, Downs & Delehanty Slate Works opened another quarry near West Castleton on the western shore of Lake Bomoseen. Three years later, in 1885, they built a slate finishing mill there. This was probably when the company purchased the "40 acres of slate-quarry land, together with 680 acres of woodland in close proximity to their mills" described in the 1899 biography of James. The brothers Patrick Henry and James co-owned the mill, their brother John its superintendent and treasurer. This is according to Smith & Rann (1886), which carried two separate descriptions of the brother Delehanty's operations: From Chapter 13, "Development of Machinery":
And from Chapter 22, "Towns and Townships":
According to local historian Peter Patten, "the quarry, now abandoned, was a major operation, with accompanying mill, and the slate was shipped down the lake by barge." By the time of our John Delehanty's birth in October 1886, then, the Delehanty brothers James, Patrick, and John were running a thriving slate quarrying business. Or, in the words of the 1899 biography, "They carry on an extensive business, and furnish employment to many men."[63]
LABOR UNREST AND MUNICIPAL POLITICS IN RUTLAND TOWN, 1880s-1900s Let us look at the Delehanty brother's operations, and Rutland County, from a wider lens. In the late 1870s, the United States entered a period of widespread labor unrest marked by massive strikes, protest movements, and trade union formation in all the country's major industries. This era of upheaval began with the failed Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and continued through the 1880s in the rapid growth of the Socialist Labor party, the American Federation of Labor, the Knights of Labor, and thousands of lesser trade unions and workers' clubs and associations. "The year 1886 became known to contemporaries as 'the year of the great uprising of labor,'" in the words of historian Howard Zinn. "From 1881 to 1885, strikes had averaged about 500 a year, involving perhaps 150,000 workers each. In 1886 there were over 1,400 strikes, involving 500,000 workers."[64] The slate and marble quarries of Rutland County were not immune from this massive upsurge in labor unrest. Indeed, in the mid-1880s the town of Rutland itself became a hotbed of radical labor organizing. As historian Leon Fink has detailed, "here, in the largest settlement of the most rural and most Republican state in the Union, a tenacious workingmen's movement seized political power in 1886 and did not fully relinquish it for ten years."[65] An all-out organizing effort by the Knights of Labor among the working class of Rutland Town began in late 1885. After several months of secretive, behind-the-scenes organizing, the Knights of Labor burst onto the Rutland political scene in late January 1886, when a reporter from the Rutland Herald was taken blindfolded into a union meeting and returned "amazed at what has been going on in our very midst." Local Assembly 5160 was the tangible result of those months of preparation. The Herald reporter noted that the association included men "from almost every department of work in town."[66] Over the next two decades, a complex political and cultural battle unfolded in Rutland municipal and county politics among shifting factions of Republicans, Democrats, business owners, and working people. As Prof Fink's compelling narrative makes clear, one high point of labor agitation and political activism took place in August and September 1886. On September 7, in what the Rutland Herald headlined as "RUTLAND'S QUAKE," independent, working-class, Knights of Labor-affiliated candidates won a slate of seats on the town council.[67] The political struggle in Rutland between business owners, workingmen's associations, and various factions of the Republican and Democratic parties continued well into the 20th century. In many instances, working people dominated the machinery of local town government – ruling school boards, determining tax assessments, and in myriad other ways – including winning the mayor's seat in 1904.[68] These dramatic political changes in the town of Rutland surely echoed throughout Rutland County, including in Castleton and West Castleton. What role the Delehanty brothers played in these events is not known. As owners of small slate quarrying operations in West Castleton and Hydeville, they were both geographically insulated from these events and inexorably caught up in them. Quarry workers throughout Rutland County would tend to ally with the Knights of Labor and their affiliated workingmen's associations, in opposition to owners and operators, including the Delehanty's. Thus, in the early and mid-1880s, relations between employers and workers in West Castleton and elsewhere were likely colored by a degree of class-based tension.[69] On the other hand, the main struggle in the mid-1880s was between Rutland Town's monopolistic marble-quarry owners, most notably one Redfield Proctor, and the marble-quarry workers – not between Castleton-area slate-quarry owners and their workers. Castleton and Hydeville, like the main slate districts, lay a considerable distance west of Rutland Town. Ownership of slate quarries was evidently more decentralized, with dozens of small, independent firms competing for business – firms like Downs & Delehanty. Relations between quarry owners and workers in the slate districts were probably less conflict-laden than in the marble districts around Rutland Town, though lack of evidence makes this interpretation mostly conjectural.[70]
THE DELEHANTY BOARDING HOUSE OF WEST CASTLETON In any event, Mathias and Bridget Delehanty and their six children (three by Margaret, three by Bridget) picked up stakes and moved from Granville to West Castleton between November 1884 and October 1886. There they opened a boarding house for unmarried slate workers. Evidently Mathias and Bridget saw an opportunity to make easier money, and for Mathias to get out of the quarries, and they seized it.[71] Spring 1885 seems the likeliest time for the family's move. Considering the magnitude of the project, they probably started building the boarding house in spring 1885 – the same year that Downs & Delehanty built the slate-finishing mill. Two crews probably built both at the same time, and were close enough to share hammers and saws. By the end of the year, the Knights of Labor were secretly organizing workers throughout the district. Did Knights organizers pass through West Castleton? What effects were Rutland Town's labor agitation having on the quarry workers around Lake Bomoseen? We don't know.[72] What we do know is that the Knights of Labor organizing drive among the marble and slate workers of Rutland Town and its districts was taking place just as Mathias and Bridget Delehanty and their children were moving from Granville to West Castleton. A century later, in the 1970s and 1980s, old-timers still remembered the old Delehanty boarding house in West Castleton, long after it had been shuttered. According to Peter Patten, "West Castleton was quite insular in the 1800s. They even had their own accent due to their isolation." Another historian, Prof. Paul Hancock of Green Mountain College, says the Irish in West Castleton were sometimes called the "screwdriver Irish," because nearby Glen Lake was locally called "Screwdriver Pond."[73] Yet no place in Rutland County was totally isolated from larger trends. Also, the public presence of Bridget Waters Delehanty – boss of the boarding house, formerly one of Rutland Town's colorful characters, with many social connections – perhaps tended to make Screwdriver Pond a mite less insular. With the boarding house as their main source of income, from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s Mathias and Bridget had three more children: John (October 1886), Ellen Teresa (June 1888), and Mathias (April 1892).[74]
Possible Solutions to a Genetic Puzzle Or did they? I pose this question because a genetic test shows that I have nine percent Native American Indian ancestry. Since all other ancestral lines are very well documented, the only explanations are that (a) the test is wrong, or (b) John Delehanty's biological father was around three-quarters Native American Indian.[75] Here is where it becomes very interesting playing with various scenarios. Much of it is nothing more than play -- given the paucity of evidence, one can do nothing else except ignore the question -- though I do try to avoid pure speculation. The main question is: did circumstances make it at all possible for Bridget Waters to have become pregnant by an Indian man? Let us pause to imagine the situation in late January or early February 1886 in West Castleton, the time and place that John Delehanty was conceived. The boarding house has been running for less than a year. Bridget is 36 years old and the mother of three children under five. After living her first ten years of adulthood unmarried in the hustle and bustle of Rutland Town's working class neighborhoods, she now finds herself married in an insular company town, surrounded by children and unmarried quarry workers. Her life consists of tending to the sundry needs of her children and running a boarding house, sharing the work with her husband and her three stepchildren, all nearly grown. It must be a crazy, crazily busy place. At any given time Mathias and Bridget are probably housing from 10-20 workers: feeding them, cleaning up after them, washing their grimy work clothes and bedclothes. Bridget spends the vast bulk of her time doing some kind of domestic labor. All of these recently imposed labors and responsibilities suggest an environment tending to foster feelings of frustration and thwarted desire on the part of Bridget Waters.[76] Now, in these contexts, imagine the likelihood of Bridget having a brief sexual encounter with one of the unmarried boarders. What numbers might a Los Vegas odds-maker put on the chances of such an event? A thousand to one? Certainly less. Indeed, such a thing does not seem at all unlikely. Knowing what we know about Bridget Waters Delehanty – her streak of independence, her defiance of authority, her saucy tongue, her penchant for drink and for doing what pleased her – such a thing would almost seem probable. Three-to-one odds would likely draw many bets. Recall, she headed her own household at age 20, and perhaps before, and was not married until her 27th year. That gives her a decade or more of exercising her sexual autonomy. There is no evidence that she was under any patriarchal control before this time -- no father, no husband. The first months of 1886, with the boarding house open for only a few months, was likely a period of great change and confusion in the Delehanty family, of much movement back and forth, and, perhaps, of ample (and previously non-existent) opportunities for brief sexual escapades. Consider, too, that an accidental pregnancy would carry few costs – she was going to have more kids anyway, and who would question who the father really was? Further, how much time would such an encounter take? Fifteen minutes? Ten? Five? That Mathias Delehanty was officially listed as the father is not definitive.[77] Now, what are the odds that she would have a one-time sexual relationship with a local Abenaki Indian? We have already noted that the Abenaki had lived in this area for thousands of years. Other sources note that substantial numbers of Abenaki lived in Rutland and Addison counties in the 1870s and 1880s. In particular, Addison County is well known locally for its several clans of Abenaki. The likelihood is high that local Abenaki worked as casual laborers in the region's many quarries and mills. The likelihood is also high that during its period of operation, Bridget and Mathias Delehanty's boarding house counted among its guests more than one Abenaki man.[78] Consider, too, that a casual sexual relationship with a transient Abenaki laborer would carry no social stigma, because no one but Mathias would claim parentage. There would be no one around to raise suspicions or cause trouble, since the biological father would dwell outside the local Castleton-area white community. Finally, on the very reasonable assumption that she was friendly with her African-American next-door neighbors, the Taylor's, in 1870, Bridget Waters Delehanty was accustomed to interacting with non-white people. In this light it seems reasonable to conjecture that the act of transgressing racial boundaries by having sexual relations with a non-white man would have played into her tendency to defy established authority, and expressed her antipathy to white racism. Putting all these facts, probabilities, and possibilities together, it seems entirely possible that John Delehanty's biological father was a local Abenaki man.[79] It is uncanny that the Knights of Labor organizing drive, and working people's infusion into Rutland municipal and county politics, began at the precise moment that Bridget Delehanty conceived John Delehanty. The Knights burst onto the scene on January 29, 1886 – the day after the Rutland Herald reporter was taken blindfolded to the big workers' meeting in Rutland Town. The night of the big meeting – January 28, 1886 – is exactly nine months, almost to the day, before the birth of John Delehanty in West Castleton.[80] Are these dates purely coincidental? Perhaps. Yet there might be some hidden connection, rendered invisible by the lack of documentary evidence. Consider, for example, the following scenario, whose many speculations are consistent with the available evidence: Bridget, who we know lived in Rutland Town in June 1870 (the census) and August 1874 (the "cucumber" incident) had actually lived there for many years and grown intimately familiar with the town and its working-class neighborhoods and denizens. After marrying Mathias, moving to Granville, and then to West Castleton, she retained many of her personal connections to the town. Then comes the big secretive Knights of Labor organizing drive in Rutland Town from October to December 1885. Physically removed from these efforts, Bridget is kept abreast of developments by word-of-mouth, by friends passing through West Castleton who give her all the latest news. As a first-generation working-class Irish washerwoman, she feels deep sympathies with Rutland's marble quarry workers, many of whom she knows personally – feelings that run counter to the more conservative views of her husband and brothers-in-law, who have business interests to protect and don't know the town like she does. Then, in the dead of winter comes the big public meeting of January 28, 1886, which nine months later will culminate in "RUTLAND'S QUAKE" as the Rutland Herald called it. The months of secret organizing have paid off – on January 29, 1886 Rutland's quarry workers are a political force to be reckoned with, and all the town knows it. It is a time for celebrating the smashing success of all the hard work of the preceding months. A day or two after the big meeting, one of Bridget's quarry-worker friends from her old days in Rutland Town, perhaps an Abenaki man, heads to West Castleton to tell her the good news. They meet in secret, share a bottle, one thing leads to another, and John Delehanty is conceived.[81] Impossible? No. Unlikely? Perhaps. It is true that many pieces of these various scenarios fit, making it not only possible but plausible that a man other than Mathias Delehanty was the biological father of John Delehanty. Here I must confess to the delightful mental image created by this latter scenario: John Delehanty, conceived on a cold winter's night between two longtime friends and lovers, in joyful celebration of a hard-fought triumph of the working class, in direct violation of racial boundaries and white racism, and in defiance of patriarchal hypocrisy regarding extra-marital affairs. It makes a spine-tingling, belly-jolting story, if it is true. Perhaps that is why I imagine that it might well be true. But what is ultimately true, donning once again the hat of the hard-nosed historian, is that the identity of John's biological father will likely forever remain a mystery.
Life in West Castleton, 1885-1899 By the late 1890s, Bridget and Mathias were raising their three boys and three girls, with a span of 12 years between the eldest and youngest sons. They were running a successful boarding house, and Mathias's brothers running a successful slate quarrying operation.[82] Their home, the settlement of West Castleton, home of the "Screwdriver Irish," was described in 1882 as "a postal village . . . contains one store, one church, one slate manufactory and about fifty dwellings." An 1897 USGS topographical map (surveyed in 1888) locates with considerable precision the location of the various dwellings of West Castleton. Rather than clustered together, the "fifty dwellings" were dispersed north along the road to Half Moon Pond, east toward the Cedar Point along Lake Bomoseen, and south along the road to Hydeville (see map). The Delehanty quarry-works, mill, boarding house, and living houses for James & Mary, Bridget & Mathias, and other nuclear families appear clearly represented in the 1897 map. Among the buildings was St. Joseph's Catholic Church, with a membership of about 150, which could seat some 200 persons, and was built in 1879 at a cost of around $2,500.[83] In 1888, the same year as Ellen Teresa's birth, both family patriarch Patrick and his grandson Patrick Henry died. Patrick Henry, parish priest of Cambridge, New York, died on May 6. He was only 36. His grandfather Patrick, a quarryman all his life, died a few weeks later, on July 30. He was nearly 80.[84] The 1890s appear to have been good years for Bridget, Mathias, and their six children in West Castleton. In June 1900, all the children except Daniel had attended school for 8½ months of the previous twelve. Daniel, at 19, would have already graduated from high school. John's signature (of which we have one example, from 1917) is easy and flowing, suggesting a man accustomed to putting pen to paper. All this suggests that John and his siblings received good educations.[85] Since they lived in West Castleton, the six Delehanty children probably walked to Castleton Village each day to school – down the dirt road from the village at Glen Lake along the western shore of the big lake, past the Point of Pines to Hydeville, then left down the main road to either the Rutland County Grammar School or St. John's the Baptist Church. The daily walks probably began around 1886, when Daniel started school, and continued for the next dozen and more years. It was, and is, about an hour's brisk walk each way. [86] That daily walk to and from school with his brothers and sisters, through those particular woods and along that particular path – knowing this feels like no small thing in the ef |