The Slate History Museum in Granville NY features a series of displays on the history of various immigrant groups in the Vermont-New York slate districts:  Welsh, Italians, Irish, and others.  So imagine my surprise and delight to discover that, highlighted on the display on Irish-American immigrants were none other than James Delehanty and Patrick H. Downs -- the very two men I'd been chasing down for the past year-and-a-half, and for the previous week-and-a-half in the records of the Castleton Town Offices!   (Photo at right:  exterior of the Slate History Museum, Granville NY, from their website, www.slatevalleymuseum.org)

     Recall that in 1902, our grandfather John Delehanty (age 15) selected his Uncle James to be his legal guardian after the deaths of his parents.  Who knew he had such prominent relatives?  We didn't.  While there's still a lot to learn, one thing is clear:  James Delehanty and other people figuring in these land & property records also figured very prominently in the boyhood of John Delehanty, and in complex ways.  For instance, these records helps to explain the nature of John's migration West:  his father had basically failed in business, and his wealthy uncles would not support him.  By 1902, his was a failed and mostly destroyed branch of the family.  No wonder he left West Castleton and never looked back.   

Slate History Museum display on Irish immigrants in the slate districts, featuring James Delehanty and Patrick H. Downs (detail of photo 297)

 

     Thanks to Peter Patten, we already have copies of the Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens of Rutland County shown on the museum display board, above.  From these sketches (with information provided by the subjects) we learn that James Delehanty began accumulating property soon after reaching adulthood, mainly as a result of his frugality and hard work, in partnership with his brother John Delehanty and Patrick H. Downs.  But the paltry information available left a lot of questions unanswered.

     So Mike visited the Castleton & Fair Haven town offices to look at the original land & property records, to see what else he could find out.  As they say, the devil is in the details.

     So, this is the homepage for summary and analysis of around 110 land & property transactions undertaken by the Delehantys and their extended family (including Patrick H. Downs) from the 1850s to the early 1900s, as recorded in the Castleton & Fair Haven town offices.

     This page is linked to the the six pages shown in the following bar, a bar that appears throughout these land records pages:

     These inventories, lists, tables, charts & transcriptions comprise the necessary starting point for any kind of substantive interpretation of this evidence.  Such interpretations will come later, after the evidence is analyzed more fully, though at this point we can suggest some of what it shows.

Signature of John Delehanty, 30 Dec 1889

Castleton Town Records, Book 22, p. 422

      The most basic conclusion to be drawn from this evidence is that James Delehanty, John Delehanty, and Patrick H. Downs played the game of property accumulation extremely well from the 1870s until their deaths.  Working as business partners, following intersecting but distinctive paths, each ended up owning tens of thousands of dollars worth of real estate. 

     Mathias Delehanty, in contrast (James & John's elder brother and our g-grandfather), was largely a failure in the race to accumulate land & property.  As his probate records show, he ended up owning three cows, a buggy, and a total estate valued at $429.93 -- a paltry sum compared to his brothers and the circles in which they moved.  His name is noticeably absent in the towns' land records.

     Overall from these masses of data we can pretty much conclude the following:

James was an exceptionally disciplined, frugal, and prudent businessman and the most successful of the three brothers

John was very successful and also probably very lucky

Mathias was on the whole dismally unsuccessful (and maybe very unlucky besides).  This is especially striking since he appeared, along with his younger brother James, as a property owner in the "Grand Lists" (for tax assessment purposes) in the 1870s, while John didn't appear at all.  Maybe John really did strike it rich in the Black Hills Gold Rush . . . in either case, Mathias Delehanty was largely a failure in business, despite what appear to have been ample opportunities for at least modest success.

Patrick H. Downs  (brother-in-law and lifelong friend and business partner of James Delehanty) was smashingly successful as a businessman.

Other notable characters  appearing in these land records include:

•   Anastasia Delehanty Wallace, sister to the three brothers, and her husband Patrick Wallace, who also seemed to fare pretty well

•   Helen, Ambrose, and Nicholas J. Delehanty, among other & various of James' children and grandchildren

•   The Hatch family -- including Mary E. Hatch, wife of James Delehanty for most of 23 years (from their marriage in Oct 1865 until her death in Aug 1888) and Kate Hatch, who married Patrick H. Downs around the same time as her sister Mary Hatch married James.  In 1870 Kate and her unborn child died in childbirth.  The tragedy seems to have forged unbreakable bonds between James Delehanty & Patrick H. Downs.  The patriarch of the Hatch family (Mary & Kate's father) was Nicholas Hatch.  James Delehanty's house came to be known locally as the "Hatch House" (and was identified as such in the Town's Grand Lists, for instance, and in his probate records).

•   Michael McDonough, a neighbor of the Delehanty's, was distantly related to the parents of grandpa John Delehanty's first wife, Bridget McDonough (b. 1885, d. 1922, m. ~ 1906, all in St Paul MN)

•   Richard, Edward, and Michael Delehanty, and Edward's wife and later widow Bridget Delehanty -- members of another branch of the family entirely, about whom we've learned little, except that they were distantly related to our branch.  (This also means that there were two Bridget Delehantys in the Fair Haven-Castleton area during this period:  our g-grandmother Bridget Waters Delehanty [who does not appear in any of these land records], and the other one, wife of Edward, who does appear several times).

     These tables, charts, maps & transcriptions offer different views of the data relating to the Delehanty' property transactions from the 1850s to the 1950s  (bearing in mind that I didn't go much past 1905 with these records, except for a few sample items; if I had, there'd be a whole lot more of them . . .)

     More specifically: 

Land Table 1   Presents Delehanty Land & Property Records in Chronological Sequence (without remarks; basically an index to land & property transactions); also accessible as an Excel file.

Land Table 2   Presents Delehanty Land & Property Records in Photo Sequence (with some remarks; kept mainly as reference); also accessible as an Excel file.

More Land Tables   Analyze different aspects of these transactions, including individual time series and comparisons over time (based on the Excel files, above)

Land Charts  Offer a fuller analysis of property transactions over time (also based on the above Excel files)

Land Maps   Show where all this stuff was taking place

Transcriptions  Offer transcriptions of the operative passages in these documents, including land descriptions and references to land descriptions as they appear in earlier records

This page is called the Land Home  or  Land Records Homepage  (or WCJ-Docs-LandHome more formally).

     Taken together, these data shed a fascinating light on the culture of property accumulation among slate quarry & mill owners & operators like Downs & Delehanty in the late 19th century.  They are also very suggestive of the larger forces shaping the boyhood & adulthood of our grandpa John Delehanty.  But as we said, first we'll present the evidence, then offer a more extensive interpretation of it.  That interpretation will probably appear on another page altogether, to be called something like Interpretation of Evidence Relating to Property Transactions among the Delehantys & Downs, ca. 1860s-1900s.  But that page awaits.  (Photo of Samuel L. Hazard & Wife, West Castleton, Sept 1905 -- a quarry-and-store-owning family that lived less than a mile down the road from where John Delehanty grew up; from the Martha B. Warren Collection)