Walking the Berkshires

Keeping Track of Olmsteds: Items from the Archives

Family history has been a passion for genealogists in our family for nearly two centuries.  My Gr-grandmother Margaret Stearns Olmsted's people were particularly interested in their origins and began making inquiries about their early roots back in the 1830s.  She, along with the brother Ned Olmsted and sister Kate Olmsted Price, were early members of the Olmsted Family Association, which was active for many decades and then after a lapse in the 1950s and 1960s was revived - with strong support from its Canadian branch - in the 1970s as the Olmste(a)d Family Association.  I became a member last year, and because it communicates largely by newsletter rather than by website, I have not been able to share all the information I have pertaining to the original OFA with my newly discovered distant relatives.  I shall not attempt to do so here, either, as it would  be of little interest to most  of the readers of this blog to know whatever happened to certain collateral branches of my family tree.  However, some of the Olmsted items in my archive are worthy of a wider viewing, and I shall reproduce a few of them here.

The oldest document in my files associated with the Olmsted family is a deed  from 1788 for the sale of property in Ridgefield, Connecticut that was witnessed by Ebenezer Olmsted (1748-1801), my Gr-gr-gr-gr-great grandfather.  He was a Lieutenant in the Revolution, and actually fought with the 5th Connecticut defending his hometown at the Battle of Ridgefield.  He married Esther Ingersoll, a truly remarkable woman who deserves her own post and one of these days I shall write it for her.  Esther outlived him by nearly 1/2 a century, as discussed in the comments here.  Her children were scattered to the four  winds -none of the 12 who lived to adulthood remained in Ridgefield.  My direct ancestor was the eldest son in this family, Moss Olmsted, a merchant mariner and captain who moved to Philadelphia and according to our family papers witnessed the epic naval duel of the USS Wasp and the British brig Frolic during the War of 1812.  His 1807 marriage certificate survives in our family papers.

In the late 1830s, two of the children of Moss Olmsted and Sarah Gilmore started trying to find out more about their family history.  There are pages of correspondence between brothers Anthony Isaacs Olmsted and Henry Morse Olmsted and other Olmsted family researchers, most notably with Henry King Olmsted whose Olmsted Family Genealogy (1912) is still the main source for those tracing their Olmsted roots.  Both of these men passed their extensive archival collections to their great-nephew, Edward "Ned" Olmsted, and these in turn went to his sister Margaret Olmsted Ogden and next her daughter, my Great Aunt Margie, and now to me.

The Olmsted Family Association was formed in 1910 and held regular reunions, usually    biennially except when WWI intervened.  Gr-great Uncle Ned was the most active member in our family, serving the OFA in various capacities including as its Vice President and President.  Copies of the reunion proceedings from 1914, 1924, 1926, 1928, 1930, 1932, 1934 and 1936 were retained by him and exist in our files, while the 4th reunion badge from 1916, at left, belonged to my gr-grandmother Margaret Olmsted Ogden.

What astonishes me as a genealogist who enjoys unprecedented access to resources through the electronic media is the remarkable correspondences and archival detective work that my ancestors undertook to determine their family origins.  They have left their descendants a tangible and fascinating legacy of primary source material and we are all the richer for it.

       

A Brace of Carnivals

Creative Gene's Carnival of Genealogy 10th edition features posts about graveyards this month.  A venerable one of mine from last November entitled Hallowed Ground is included, along with a great post by The Genealogue about the story behinds a suitcase-shaped tombstone!

Also this week is the one year anniversary edition of Philobiblon's Carnival of Feminists, which particularly highlights "women’s contributions throughout history (including recent history). So often, it seems, women who were prominent in their own times are lost to societal memory within a generation or two. Yet they can be an inspiration, a source of ideas, hope." I am pleased to have my recent post about Gr-great Aunt Het the Suffragist featured among these women.

No Nukes or Netcong? A Liberal Family's Dilemma

Looking back on it, I believe the hardest thing for my supportive, progressive parents to come to terms with regarding my teenage interest in Civil War reenacting was the need to buy me a pistol.  Back in 1975 my father had been an active proponent of the campaign to ban private ownership of handguns in Massachusetts.  And now here was their 8th grade son, mad about history and passionately interested in the period of the American Civil War, desperate to join a troop of cavalry reenactors that was then organizing in my hometown.

The challenge was to somehow reconcile their desire to encourage my interest in history, love of costume and theater, and otherwise gentle nature and non-violent proclivities, while coming to terms with the fact that I had graduated from cap guns to percussion caps and from toys to reproduction firearms capable of firing live ammunition.  They ultimately resolved this moral quandary by purchasing a reproduction Colt Navy model 1851 revolver and accoutrement's "for the unit" that was never to come home with me and was never to be loaded with anything but blanks.

My own dilemma had nothing to do with weapons - except that my continued participation in this hobby required my parents to work out a principled compromise to provide me with one.  My problem was that the cavalry unit forming in Millbrook NY wore the wrong uniform.  Although numerous ancestors served in New York infantry regiments during the war, and I even had a Gr-gr-great Grandfather in the 1st NY "Lincoln" Cavalry, the opportunity now before me was to join a troop of 10th Virginia confederate horsemen. 

I was a dyed in the wool Yankee sympathizer - as the above photograph taken of me in the Spring of 1982 will attest.  My childhood games of "civil war" with the neighborhood gang, previously discussed here, were Union fantasies.  True, there was the confederate brigadier in the family closet, but my affinities lay elsewhere.  And now, for the sake of history I had to choose whether to participate as a southern soldier - and whether I could do justice to the historical interpretation that would require - or to pass up the opportunity for the sake of my personal beliefs.

Reenacting ultimately won out over progressive ideology, and the day my shell jacket arrived from C & D Jarnagin in Corinth, Mississippi was a thrill I still recall vividly these many years later.  I ordered the kepi from a store in Spotsylvania where during a family vacation to southern battlefields I had previously acquired the Union 'bummer-style" forage cap depicted above.  You will note the combination of "modern mufti" and authentic reproduction uniform in the image at right, which happens to be the only photograph of me in even partial confederate attire that was taken during this period.  Observe as you enlarge the image that the State of New York belt buckle is worn reversed to indicate its captured status: a refinement insisted upon by members of our sister regiment, the 10th NY from over in Ulster County, when we trained with them one afternoon.  That was the same day I live fired a .44 cal Walker Colt revolver that belonged to one of the other reenactors, who used it for hunting deer and needed to clear the charges, and appalled my family by happily discussing it over dinner that evening.

The branch of the 10th VA in Millbrook was a very small unit.  Its founder and Sergeant was an 18-year-old public high school student named Troy Sorbello who had moved up here with his mother from Virginia where he had been a confederate reenactor.  Troy had a large personal collection of uniforms, weapons and soldier's sundries, which he freely shared with me while I was acquiring my own equipment.  It was his saber I wore in my school musical as the captain of the "Pinafore", and his spare pair of mounted sky blue trousers and brogans.  He was a gentle and generous young man and extraordinarily good with animals.  Troy used to tell stories about riding his horse to New York from Virginia along back roads and byways, and to hear him tell it it was the only way to really see the country.

The others were Steven Greer, the son of a local auto dealer, and Jason Nolan, who decided to reenact as a civilian rather than a trooper - probably because he did not ride a horse.  I was the youngest at 14 years old and the only private school kid among us, and that was it.  We were four boys playing at being our gr-great grandparents.

Going to different schools and not yet of driving age, I relied on my mother to get me to Troy's and to unit events.  This was the first of my teen-aged friendships to test my parent's comfort with me riding with young drivers.  Because Troy was 18, he made the cut, but this became an issue later, when we had our first big reenactment to attend and once again our family found itself with divided loyalties.

It was June, 1982 in Reagan's America.  We were a household of progressive, liberal Democrats - even the one masquerading as a confederate in his spare time.  June 12th that year was a singularly important date for us. The nuclear freeze movement was planning a huge disarmament rally in New York City that would become the largest peaceful protest march in American history.  Ordinarily the whole family would have gone, but there was a conflict.  This also was the date of my first Civil War reenactment: an encampment, mock battle and cavalryman's ball to he held at the Wild West City in Netcong New Jersey.  A tough choice for liberal minded folks trying to do right by all concerned, you will agree.

In the end, after earnest debate around the kitchen table, it was determined with the wisdom of Solomon to divide the family in two equal parts.  My father and sister would march to Central Park with nearly 1,000,000 fellow opponents of the nuclear arms race, and my mother and I would drive to western New Jersey so that I could "see the elephant" with my comrades in gray.  Only Troy and Steve owned horses and the borrowed trailer could only carry two mounts, so Jason and I were to fight dismounted.  Along the way, Mom and I learned a valuable lesson about the proper following distance to maintain between one's Honda Accord and the rear of a horse trailer with the hindquarters of its occupants exposed to view.

The Wild West City was one of those Mom & Pop tourist traps that emerged to entertain a mobile population traveling the nation's Interstates after WWII.  It had a wide palisade of suburban spite fence around its perimeter, a dusty main street with false-fronted stores and penny arcades, and a 1/4 scale kiddie railroad encircling the whole affair.  There were loudspeakers in the trees announcing the day's events, which notably featured the capture of Black Bart at 3, followed by a confederate raid on the town at 3:30.  It was, in a word, hokey, and not at all what I had imagined reenacting to be.  Not at first, anyway.

What was, I think, true to life about the experience was the total confusion of green troops, the lack of understanding of the tactical situation before us or of a unified command structure.  Jason and I were soon separated as he wandered off and blended in with the regular "townsfolk."  Troy and Steve, meanwhile, were told that as the only cavalrymen there who had actually brought their horses, they were to play a key role in the battle, galloping into town after we had first captured it to announce that Yankee reinforcements were on the way.  This left me alone, without my unit or comrades, and uncertain of where to go or what to do.

The battle began without my fully being aware of it.  Just when an actor in a long handlebar mustache was asking his little deputy sheriffs what to do with Black Bart now that he had been captured - to which they replied with gusto "Hang him!" -  I heard the sound of gunfire.  I headed off through the side streets of the town and suddenly found myself joining a ragged skirmish line of dismounted confederate cavalry advancing down the main street.  At the far end of town the Yankees were drawn up in line of battle, with a few zouaves in baggy red pants and fez's on the right flank, waiting to receive our fire.  Suddenly caught up in the moment, and pointing my pistol in the general direction of the enemy, I squeezed the trigger.

The most disappointing blob of waxy smoke poured limply from the barrel.  The paraffin wax we had used to hold our powder in the cylinder of the revolvers interfered with their discharge in a most unsatisfying way.  After two more misfires I decided that my best course of action was to become a casualty and when the Union troops leveled and fired, I dropped dramatically to the ground.

Playing dead is not all it is cracked up to be, especially when there are 6th graders kicking you and exposing you as a fraud for breathing.  After enduring this for a while I decided it was time to revive, and crawled to my knees, only to find that my comrades were retreating around me and the Yanks were advancing with fixed bayonets.  One of the troopers helped drag me to the rear and offered me a drink from his canteen, but soon I was alone between the lines again and it was all I could do to drag myself down the street ahead of the relentless Yankee horde.  I pulled myself up over a low wall and as the only target left to receive the next and final volley, slumped once more to the ground, and the battle was over.

As the audience cheered and I dusted myself off, a confederate soldier came up to me and handed me my pistol, which I had left in the sand where I had first become a casualty.  Reunited with Troy and the rest of my unit, it was the general consensus that the event had not met our expectations.  The overall sentiment of the 10th VA confederate cavalry (Millbrook branch) was that the best thing to do was to hold up the kiddie train when next it made its circuit, but my Mom gently suggested that maybe there had been enough fun for one afternoon and we had best head for home.

My dad and sister were featured in Time Magazine's coverage of the great peace rally, photographed and interviewed as they strode alongside survivors of Hiroshima near the head of the march.  I went off to boarding school that Fall and lost touch with my confederate friends back home in New York. Troy Sorbello moved back to Virginia where he was a talented and humane animal trainer and founding Lieutenant of Company B, 9th Virginia Cavalry.  Tragically, he died in 1998 of Hodgkin's Disease.  At Troy's funeral, there was an honor guard from his unit and a riderless horse with his boots reversed in the stirrups.  He was 35 years old.

Too young, like so many young men whose short lives we reenactors depict.  Godspeed, Troy.

"Are you alright?": What not to say to a sleeping elephant.

Mongabay had a story a few months back about what to do when elephants attack.   

"...in a true charge, there are a few options. Climbing a sizable tree—one the elephant cannot knock over—is a possibility for the nimble. So is throwing a decoy, like a hat or shirt, which the elephant can "kill" while you run to safety. Local Gabonese hunters have their own technique for escaping elephants—hiding between the stilt roots of swamp trees. Used to support trees in sandy, nutrient poor soils, these roots act as a protective barrier against elephants. Standing still can also help but is tough to recommend in the face of several tons of mammal bearing down on you."

I have had some experience with African elephants on their native turf, and reading this story brought to mind my closest encounter with an elephant and what I learned from the experience.  I share it now in hopes that it may prevent some reader from falling into tragic error whilst walking blissfully across the Savannah, as I did one hot day in Namibia nearly a decade ago.

We lived at a discontinued Ministry of Agriculture breeding station where persistent elephants routinely smashed through 10 foot high fences and torn up water pipes.  This may have been because the station was located along an elephant highway, the dry riverbed of the Kakatswa (charmingly translated as the "anus droppings river").   It was actually a starkly beautiful spot, there below the flat mesa of the Grootberg amid the mopani trees and bottelboom.  I often walked up this dry watercourse, watching birds and exploring the landscape, and never went armed because I never expected to get into a situation where I might need to be.

You may think that foolish, given that there were leopards and hyena in the area, as well as scores of venomous snakes, but I knew enough about these to know that a leopard has never killed a human being in southern Africa since recorded history began, that the few strand wolves were furtive and avoided human contact, and that the best thing to do with snakes was avoid stepping on them.

So on this particular day I decided to walk several miles upriver and out to a grassy abandoned airstrip where I had seen a breeding herd of elephant - 40 strong - two days previously.  I wanted to experience what the ground looked like after being worked over by so many huge creatures, and thought myself quite safe because the herd had moved on and was reported to be over 60 km away.

As you might expect a foraging herd of pachyderms tears the hell out of the vegetation, particularly in semi-desert conditions. They had left great red smears of dust against the tree trunks where they had scratched, and twisted and broken limbs hung from the acacias.  After satisfying my curiosity, I decided to take a different path home, following a smaller dry stream back to the main stem of the Kakatswa. 

As I walked, I noticed the fresh footprints of an adult elephant.  I considered that the matriarch of a breeding herd will drive off the adolescent bulls when they reach about 15 years, and they remain apart from the herd in small bachelor groups or as solitary males until they enter musth, a sexually aggressive period when they can be quite dangerous.  It could have been that these tracks belonged to one such male, but in that case I figured it had followed the herd, looking to mate, and was by now long gone.

So when I rounded a corner of this narrow riverbed, hemmed in by acacia thorn and mopani veld, my eyes jerked upward when I heard a great, ponderous exhalation of breath nearby.  Discerning nothing, I caught a motion on the ground, perhaps 20 feet away, and something long and snakelike rustling in the leaves.  Slowing it dawned on me that it was an elephant's trunk, and that lying before me was an adult elephant that I would have walked right passed had it not snored.

At least, I thought it was a snore.  But I could neither recall reading about nor hearing anyone talk about elephants lying down to sleep, and I wondered whether this animal was ill or had been injured.  Perhaps it had been wounded by a poacher and had run until collapsing.  In any event, I was far too close to it and it to me, and the last thing I wanted to do was startle it.  So I asked it if it were okay.

I'm not sure what response my unconscious mind was expecting, but that elephant was on its feet and fully upright in a terrifying instant.  I turned and started moving very swiftly away from the elephant, looking over my shoulder and expecting pursuit.  Much to my relief, it was of the same fearful mind and started moving very quickly in the opposite direction, looking back at me in alarm as it vanished into the trees.  Within a few seconds I could no longer hear the elephant and I was once again alone in the bush.

I believe I sang the first song that popped into my head - "Waltzing Matilda" - as loudly as possible for the remainder of my swift return to camp.  Viv looked at me as if I had lost my senses and decided that I certainly had gotten too cocky about my command of bush lore to let myself get surprised in that way.  In my defense, that elephant's behavior was quite unusual. Friends at the Ministry of Environment and Tourism later said that elephants only rest lying down when they feel very, very secure in their surroundings, and that this one would likely never do so again.

Morale: Best let a sleeping elephant lie.

Saving the Capitol (While Stealing the Stationery)

The service of my Great-great grandfather, William Nisbet Olmsted, during  the American Civil War was brief.  Together with his comrades in the elite 7th New York militia regiment, he marched to the defense of the nation's capitol in the first month on the war, served his 30 days, and returned to his business interests in New York.  Although many of the Seventh's members subsequently became officers and leaders in other regiments during the war, Pvt. William N. Olmsted was not among these but was soon off to the China trade and adventures of a different sort in Canton.

Margaret Leech wryly describes the arrival of the Seventh Regiment in the capitol in her book Reveille in Washington:

"The deliverance of Washington was effected in style.  It was relieved by the Seventh New York, the kid-glove militia corps of the North.  In spick-and-span gray uniforms with pipe-clayed crossbelts on their breasts, the young gentlemen had had several day's experience of the inconveniences of war - dirty, crowded ships and coarse rations, long marches and hard labor.  The sandwiches, prepared for them under the supervision of Delmonico, had long ago been eaten; and they had had to leave at Annapolis a thousand velvet camp stools.  All night long they had trudges the miles from Annapolis to the Junction, helping the Eighth Massachusetts to repair the track, sharing their rations with hungry, resolute sailors and mechanics.  The New Yorkers had suffered their hardships without complaint - even fellows who would send back a turban de volaille aux truffes at Delmonico's, if the truffles happened to be tough.  The had come to save the capital, and were proudly aware of their own pluck and perseverance.  As they marched in perfect step to the White House, with flags flying and bands playing, and rifles and little brass howitzers shining in the sun, they accepted the welcome of the Washington population as their rightful due."  - Leech pg. 66.

Despite their pretensions, this precious regiment of blue bloods in gray was most welcome in the scantily defended capitol during those fearful weeks in April, when Virginia was almost certain to secede and the 6th Massachusetts had just been stoned in the streets of Baltimore by a hostile populous.    Washington was ill-prepared to garrison the volunteers who arrived to provide for its relief, and government buildings were pressed into service to quarter them.  The Eighth Massachusetts were housed under the unfinished rotunda of the capitol building, while The 1st Rhode Island bivouacked in the US Patent Office.  It was the Seventh's lot to be assigned the ornate Chamber of the House of Representatives.  The soldiers thought it a great lark to hold mock sessions of Congress, complete with overblown oratory, while others slept on gallery benches or made use of the Congressmen's lavatories.  They helped themselves freely to Congressional stationery, and many sent letters in official envelopes that had already been franked with 3 cents postage.  My great-great Grandfather also indulged in this practice, and one of the letters he sent - with his own stamp, at least - survives in our family archives.

Olmsted's letter was written after the regiment had moved to a new camp on Meridian Hill - clearly he kept a stash of stationary for future use - and describes camp life, the locations of other regiments, and the sentiments of the volunteers whose 30 days service was drawing to a close. 

"The thirty days for which the Regiment was sworn in will expire next Sunday, and I am very much afraid that we will return home, as I want to see and do some service.  Some of the Officers and men want to remain but I think the majority of them are in favor of returning; they argue that they only came here to protect the Capital until the arrival of other Regiments, and that object having been accomplished, there is nothing to prevent them returning honorably.  We hear that there is a strong feeling in New York against the return of the Regiment at the expiration of their time, and though I am in favor of remaining, I think that some injustice is done them, as many of the men came away without any expectation of remaining as long as they have done, and their businesses is suffering in consequence."

It was a simpler time, when a well-regulated militia and a small professional army were all that stood between the country and those who sought it harm.  The idea that militia units would serve not only during a short-term crisis but for 2 or 3 years, or even the duration of the war, was unprecedented since American Independence.  We should not judge too harshly these bandbox soldiers of the Seventh.  Their modern day counterparts in the National Guard have seen their terms of service extended far beyond what many of them anticipated when they enlisted.

The Seventh was called out during the draft riots in New York in 1863, and passed in review during Lincoln's funeral procession through the city two years later.  Lincoln himself had reviewed the regiment during its first week in Washington, when many thought the war would be over in a matter of months instead of four terrible years.

"In a carnival, of sights to see..."

Economics and Social Policy Carnival XVI had a post of mine last week, along with some insider dirt on the Hewlett-Packard boardroom spying scandal from Donald Luskin.

I and the Bird #34 is at  Tortoise Trail, where my friend and fellow Whorled Leaves contributor Pam Shack serves up a great carnival about all things avian.

The History Carnival XLI is at ClioWeb and has a plethora of good stuff, including a delicious post entitled: Back from yet another globetrotting adventure, Indiana Jones checks his mail and finds that his bid for tenure has been denied.  True to life.

With the "Free Love" of a Suffragist: Esther Gracie Ogden and Votes for Women

Aunt Het was a suffragette.  This is how our family remembers her, although suffragist  was the term preferred in America by those working to enfranchise women.  Esther Gracie Ogden was my great-great aunt and died long before I was born, but her story has always fascinated me.  Women's history is usually not self-evident and is harder to tease out from ancestral files - even those as extensive as those in my care - but there have been many formidable women in our clan and Aunt Het is an exemplary example. 

She was the daughter of Dayton Ogden and Esther Gracie: two old families of New York and Elizabeth New Jersey.  She was an active worker in the suffrage movement between 1912 and 1920 and prominent in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, "the most mainstream and nationally visible pro-suffrage group."  She was also a director and President of the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co., Inc., which was a powerful tool in getting the message out.  My grandmother recalled getting "Votes For Women" pencils in her Christmas stockings from Aunt Het and produced by her suffragist press.  I have searched in vain for extant examples of these items, but do have several treasured pieces of suffrage memorabilia, including a gavel inscribed "Votes for Women" dated May 2 1914 when neighboring Delaware held its largest rally for woman suffrage, and this small leather folder, embossed with Aunt Het's initials.  If f you click to enlarge the image you will see in the yellow patch that it reads: "Votes For Women New Jersey Women Voted 1776-1807 Why Not Now?"

Aunt Het was modest about the part she played to help gain American women the vote, but she was very proud of women's achievement.  In 1940, she sent my grandmother and each of her sisters a copy of  Victory: How Women Won It 1840 - 1940 published that year by NAWSA.  In a letter to my grandmother that accompanied the book, she writes:

"As you know my tiny part in the struggle for woman suffrage covered only the last eight years 1912 - 1920, but they are the years of my long life which to me were the most worthwhile.  I often think of how you as a very little girl used to ride in my Model T Ford adorned with Votes for Women pennants.  It added much to the satisfaction I felt in being a cog in the campaign machinery that we were working for you when you should come of age.  Now (thanks be!) the struggle is an old story and woman suffrage is a matter of course in this country but I want you girls to have this record."

Women of the upper class and of society were not always in the suffragist vanguard.  There are hints in the  family record that some members, at least, were decidedly anti-suffrage.  One of these was "Uncle" Johnny Owen Stearns, standing at right and also holding the horse at left with my great aunt Margie in the carriage.  He was the great-uncle and of my grandmother, a confirmed bachelor, and renowned for his racing trotters.  Along with Het and other family members he was an annual guest at Christmas dinner, where it was then a family tradition to have one small gift at each place and a suitable poem composed by my great grandmother Margaret Olmsted Ogden to accompany it.  Madge Ogden had an impish wit, and she kept copies of her doggerel for posterity.  Here in the entries for 1913 I find the following marvelous verse:

To Uncle Johnny - "Votes for Women" is the cry which often now we here / And yet the Antis tell us that the home is woman's sphere/  No wonder that poor Johnny's head is often in a whirl / How can he share the sentiments of of each and every girl? / But when it comes to fooling the public and the fair / Not Cook nor P. T. Barnum can with Our John compare. / He doesn't like society, Oh no, indeed not he / And yet "among those present" his name we often see. / But when it comes to suffrage a paradox we view / Although her is an Uncle, he is an Anti too! / Now if he is no suffragist there need not be much strife / for John you know has given votes to Women all his life."

He must have been mortified, though perhaps he relished such teasing attention.  The photograph at the top of this post is inscribed "To Johnny, with the 'free love' of a suffragist."  As for Het, her 1914 Christmas poem reads as follows:

" To Aunt Het - I do declare, it's hardly fair to get a joke on Het / For on every hand she has to stand being called at suffragette. / The Anti's scoff, but then hats they'll doff as she motors about the town / And her flaming car will be seen afar to add to her renown. /  When the vote is won and the talk is done the jokes she will not resent, / For you can bet we'll all vote for Het, when she runs for President!"

When Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment giving the 2/3 majority needed to make woman suffrage the law of the land, Esther G. Ogden turned her energy and organizing skill to promoting democracy and opposing totalitarianism.  Het served in a variety of official capacities with numerous political and social justice organizations.  She was Vice chairman of the Women's bureau for the Democratic National Convention in 1920 and assistant secretary of the following convention in 1924.  In 1935 she was a delegate to the Women's International Congress in Istanbul.  She was a member of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and of the executive committee of the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War. 

In 1921 she became membership secretary and the secretary of the Foreign Policy Association and served as an honorary member of its Board of Directors until ill health forced her to resign in 1937.  In noting its deep regret at her departure, the board recognized her importance to the organization;

"Not only because of her length of service but also because of her rare wisdom, warmth of friendship and unflagging faith in the continuing possibilities of the Organization, Miss Ogden was a pillar of strength for the F.P.A.  Whatever success the Foreign Policy Association has achieved during that period has been enhanced incalculably by the insight, the poise and the rare capacities which Miss Ogden contributed to every task of the organization."

I remember those slim, information-packed issues of Foreign Policy that my grandmother continued to receive and read with great interest as late as the 1970s, and clearly her support for the F.P.A. was due to its connection with Aunt Het.

Esther Gracie Ogden lived to be 89.  She was a spirited and tireless worker for progressive causes, none greater than the cause of woman suffrage.  She was a close friend of Carrie Chapman Catt and Eleanor Roosevelt (a very distant relative).  She was particularly fond of the younger generations and had great hopes for them in a more democratic society.  I can imagine her driving her Model T through the streets of Elizabeth, New Jersey, suffrage banners waving, and smiling at the laughing little girl beside her as they drove together toward a brighter future.

Morale and Materiél: Scrap Metal and Victory Gardens in WWII

Radio announcer Gabriel Heatter, whose famously upbeat sign-on to his wartime broadcasts was "There's good news tonight!", exhorted Americans to take part in a 1942 nationwide scrap drive to help the war effort:

"A good many people are planning to make every minute count tomorrow hunting scrap...It is imperative every ounce of scrap be recovered to keep plants going at capacity...We have junked two million old cars.  We are getting 400,000 tons a month in our automobile graveyards.  What you see on any scrap dealer's lot isn't stagnating.  Far and beyond all that, however, we face a critical shortage.  Half of every tank, destroyer or merchant ship is made of scrap iron.  Every pound you hunt up and turn in may be as good as ten pounds next spring."  - Sunday, September 6th, 1942 broadcast on WOR

There is no question that scrap drives and their agricultural component, the planting of Victory Gardens, created a sense of collective purpose and shared endeavor and had significant morale boosting value for those on the American home front.  Our family participated in both.  My great great aunts in Petersham, Massachusetts documented a scrap drive that was held in their town on August 23, 1942 with photographs and a copy of Heatter's broadcast, excepted above, that included the following mention of their town's efforts:

"The rising sun of Japan was born of American Junk.  American junk will make it a setting sun never to rise again.  Can it be done?  Let me read you a telegram. Petersham, Massachusetts - population 960 - just held a scrap harvest festival - yield - 52 tons of scrap metal.  Population 960."

According to a fascinating article on the practical value of these drives in The Straight Dope, it was particularly difficult to recycle rubber and what was produced was inferior to virgin rubber.  Nor could recycled aluminum be used to make aircraft.  Iron and steel were different, and drives like the one held in Petersham were valuable in this regard.

Wartime shortages were real - rubber was in critically short supply after the Japanese conquest of Malaysia and the Dutch East Indies where most of the world's natural rubber was harvested.  In fact, gasoline rationing was most essential to maintain sufficient oil reserves for the production of synthetic rubber.  Although millions of tons of scrap material  were amassed in drives throughout the war - not just metal but paper, rags kitchen fat and rubber - not all of it was particularly useful in boosting wartime production or providing quality supplies of needed material.  According to a very informative article in

As a patriotic act, however, these scrap drives helped pull the nation together.  Wrought iron fences were pulled from cemeteries.  Monuments to older wars were stripped of their cannon and pyramids of shot, although later some communities regretted their over-zealous plundering of irreplaceable relics. My grandfather carried one of these scrap drive pictures in his wallet when he was overseas, next to his family photographs.

Victory Gardens had a similar impact on morale, and also contributed  to the war effort.  The USDA estimates that nearly 20 million Victory Gardens were planted during the war by non-farm families:  urbanites and those with a patch of yard converted them to vegetables and invested in pressure cookers and canning supplies.  The amount produced 9-10 million tons, was equal to the output of commercial farms during this same period. 

My paternal grandfather taught at a boarding school during the war and supervised the construction of a root cellar for the vegetables produced by the students.  My Great Aunt Margie put in vegetables in the sandy yard of her summer home at Point Pleasant, NJ beginning in the summer of 1942, and sent pictures of what was produced to her brother Dayton, a naval officer serving in the South Atlantic. 

Even when Victory Gardens were no longer required, our family has kept up the practice of vegetable gardening and putting food by -a practice that has come down through the generations.  In our disposable consumer society, it connects us to the land and the seasons of the places where we live, and perhaps subconsciously to a tradition of doing one's part in a greater effort.

"He had a very big rack."

"He walked right out in front of my car," she said. "He walked very deliberately, across the road and onto a lawn. He kept heading in the same direction and disappeared between the houses there. He was much taller and his legs were skinnier than I would have thought. He had a very big rack."  - Betty Mitchell, Salisbury, CT

It is Fall, after all, and a wandering moose's thoughts turn to love.

The Lakeville Journal has the October 5th story. 

No Farmers, No Future

According to the Connecticut Department of Agriculture, the Nutmeg State has 169 active dairy farms, or one for every town in the State. Another source reports that "in 1975 there were 817 dairy farms in Connecticut; 10 years ago there were 289; there are now 158."  That breaks down to an average loss of 25 farms a year from 1975 to 1996, and 13 farms a year since then.  Add to that that agricultural lands are converting faster to development than any other land cover type - at a statewide rate of close to 30 acres a day by some estimates - and the future of farming as a significant part of our rural economy starts to look very bleak. These are sobering numbers, but they don't tell the full story.

For one thing, as has happened elsewhere there has been substantial consolidation of dairy lands into larger farms with fewer owners in Connecticut.  The size of farms measured in agricultural land controlled by the dairy farmers has actually increased, and a great deal of agricultural land is leased for silage production and hay.  This leased land should be a concern for both farmers and community members, since there is no guarantee that it will be available in the future for farmers to use unless it is specifically conserved for that purpose.  Nor is there a guarantee that there will be farmers in the future willing to lease it.  The former case has significant consequences for the dairy farmers, as lands they have leased pass into other hands and have higher value as developable property than in agricultural use.  The latter case jeopardizes the property tax abatements that landowners currently enjoy if they have 25 acres or more enrolled under Public Act 490 to maintain existing agricultural use. In many Litchfield Hills Towns, more than half the total land base is listed under P.A. 490 for forest, farm and open space but none of it is permanently protected.

Herd sizes and milk production have increased, although just $1 per gallon of milk goes directly to local producers.  A 1999 survey of dairy farms in Connecticut, when the state had 245 dairy farms, found that the average farmer age was 53 and over 86% said it was very hard to find an adequate labor force.  22.4% were enrolled in the Connecticut Farmland Preservation program that makes payments in exchange for permanently restricting development rights.  90% were enrolled under 490 current use abatements.  The poll had a 51% response rate. The percentage of respondents who thought they would cease total farm operations within 5 years was 12.3% back then, with 20% indicating they would not be farming themselves in 5 years.  Even using the state's figure of 169 active dairy operations today, there was a loss of 76 farms between 1999 and 2006 or about 1/3 of the total.   A follow up survey would be quite illuminating, particularly to see whether farmland preservation has helped to slow the rate of farm loss.