The tax records compiled here consist of 604 digital images of the grand lists, assessment books, and quadrennial valuations in Castleton Town, 1832-1901, from the basement vault of the town offices.  These records offer some intriguing clues about key aspects of the lives of the people we're focusing on here, and a fascinating portrait of the community in which they lived.  They show not only annual accountings of personal and real property for every property-holder in the town, but where people lived -- or at least what school district they lived in, which is pretty much the same thing.  They thus serve as a kind of proxy for censuses -- especially for the 20-year gap between 1880 and 1900 -- at least for property holders. 

     Instead of transcribing these unwieldy documents, which would consume a prodigious amount of time and in the end not take us very far, here I do what a historian customarily does when confronted with a mass of primary data:  pose a series of questions, and try to answer those questions with the evidence at hand. 

 Above: Castleton Town Offices auxiliary basement vault in May 2007, before the big cleanup.  Below: in August, afterward.

Property Ownership and Financial Relations among the Brothers Delehanty and Patrick H. Downs, 1860s-1900s

 

•    While all three brothers and P. H. Downs started out poor and working class, James, John, and Patrick H. Downs ended up near the top of the socioeconomic ladder, and Mathias near the bottom.

•    After the Civil War, as James & Mathias came of age and started raising families, there was a period of consecutive five years -- from 1870 through 1874 -- in which they owned property together:  5 acres and a $540 house & lot in Hydeville.  After 1874 this property became James's, and Mathias disappeared from the lists.  He did not appear again until 1886.

•    This corresponds precisely with what we know from other sources:  that Mathias and his family lived in Granville NY in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and that after the death of his first wife Margaret McGrath in 1878, he, his children, and his second wife Bridget Waters moved to West Castleton and opened the Delehanty Boarding House.  This was in 1885.  It was there that John Delehanty was born a year later.

•    This strongly suggests a financial falling-out of some kind between James and Mathias, dating to around 1875.  It seems revealing and important that these two brothers owned property together for five straight years in the first half of the 1870s, and never again thereafter.  Mathias never became part of Downs & Delehanty Slate Works (established in Poultney in 1873) or the Lake Bomoseen Slate Company (established in Castleton in 1885).  A full decade separated the dissolution of the Mathias-James financial partnership (1875) and the re-establishment of some kind of financial relationship between them (1885, in Mathias's presumed rental of the boarding house, though no documentary record of this rental arrangement has been found).  We'll probably never know exactly what happened, but the big picture seem clear:  Mathias began as James's financial equal, then dropped out of the picture for 10 years, then returned in an vastly inferior financial position, where he remained until his death.

•    The growth of the Lake Bomoseen Slate Company, from its founding in 1885, paralleled the growth in the fortunes of its three co-owners James, John, and Patrick H. Downs.  The data show a big expansion of the company in the year 1890, with the acquisition of some 47 acres of quarry and mountain land.  (It was also in 1890 that the company purchased a big safe from a Chicago outfit to store all their cash, and soon after started buying steam barges to haul slate on the lake; see Photo Pages 30 & 31, photos 1096-97 and 1107-08).  Overall the 1890s were very good years for James, John, and Patrick H. Downs.

•    John Delehanty (Uncle) owned no real estate in Castleton Town, except for his co-ownership of the Lake Bomoseen Slate Company.  He first appeared on these lists in 1883, when he lived in Hydeville (School District 5).  Two years later, in 1885, he moved to West Castleton (District 9), where he lived for the next 13 years.  The value of his personal estate rose dramatically -- from $100 in 1885 to over $6,000 a decade later.  In 1898 he moved to Fair Haven, married a woman 17 years his junior, and starting raising a family.  During his 13 years in West Castleton, he probably lived in the Delehanty Boarding House with his brother Mathias, his wife, and their children -- including his young nephew John.

•    The data for John Delehanty (Uncle) and Patrick Wallace (husband of Anastasia Delehanty, the sister of James, John & Mathias) provide corroborating evidence for their journey to the Dakota Territory gold mines in the late 1870s and early 1880s.  John seems to have returned to Vermont from Dakota Territory in 1883, and Patrick Wallace in 1884 (see Census page for their listing in Leadville, Dakota Territory, in 1880).  Evidently neither struck it rich, but both did make it back in one piece.

•    The following chart summarizes these data for the years 1886-1900, using the variable of personal estates (cash money that each possessed):

•   Where did Mathias get his $1,000 from 1895?  It almost seems to have fallen into his lap.  Whatever the case, we see here rapidly rising fortunes for everyone except Mathias (these data for the Lake Bomoseen Slate Company are probably somewhat deceptive, as all signs are that the company's assets grew rapidly during this period; that increase probably wasn't measured in the value of liquid assets, which is what this chart shows). 

•   John and Patrick H. Downs saw the most rapid increases.  The data for John stop after 1898, when he moved to Fair Haven and started raising a family of his own, nearly three decades later than his brothers.  James probably ploughed much of his profits into stocks, bonds, and other non-taxable commodities, as well as into raising and educating his 11 children.  We know in 1903 John sold off his portion of the company for upwards of $20,000.  This was about the same amount inherited by Patrick H. Downs's widow Bridget after his death in 1902.  So altogether the company was worth around $60,000 in the first years of the 20th century.  Mathias owned none of it. 

•    Another way to look at the data is to compare the total tax of each individual and entity over time:

xxx

Abstracts of Individual Lists, Castleton, 1902, Letter "D"

Column Codes

A.  Poll?

B.  ?

C.  L---  S----

D.  Dollars

E.  Money, including debts due ---.  Dollars.

F.  Stocks in Banks, Corporations, &c.  Dollars.

G.  Total Personal Dollars

H.  School District

I.  Remarks

photo no. 338, photo page 7

WCJ-Docs   Census  •  News  •  Land  •  Vitals  •  Probate  •  Taxes  •  Other  •  Pubs

WCJ    Photos  •  Maps  •  Docs  •  Journal  •  Home