Lewis Mumford on the Value of Local History at Troutbeck

Dutchess County Historical Society Yearbook 2022 Encore Edition

Mumford at Troutbeck: The Value of Local History, 1927

Year Book

Dutchess County Historical Society Volume 12

1927

The Value of Local History Paper Read at Troutbeck September 15, 1926 hy Lewis Mumford

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All of us feel at bottom with Walt Whitman, that there is no sweeter meat than that which clings to our own bones. It is this conviction that gives value to ]oca� history: we feel that our own lives, the lives of our ancestors and neighbors, the events that have taken place in the particular local­ ity where we have settled, are every bit as important as the lives of people who are more remote from us, no matter how numerous these others may be; or how insig­ nificant we may seem alongside of them.

People who live in great cities are accustomed to identify them­ selves with the whole nation; for the Londoner, London is the Brit­ ish Empire; and for the New York­ er, New York is the United States.

A gTeat deal of our national his­ tory is written upon the assump­ tion that nothing interesting or im­ portant has taken place in the country which did not, as it were, pass through Washington, by com­ ing- under public debate, or by being enacted into a law. If wars, political elections, and laws were all that history consisted of there would be some truth, perhaps, in 22

these habits and beliefs; but ever since Green wrote his history of the English people we have come, slowly, to see that the main sub­ ject of history is the drama of a community's life-that is, in what manner and to what purpose peo­ ple have lived: what did they eat, how did they dress, at what did they ·work, what kind of houses had they to shelter their heads, what ideas and beliefs had they to fill their heads?

At present, it is almost impossi­ ble to write national history along these lines; for people's lives and habits differ from region to region; and we must know. a gTeat deal more than we do about each sep­ arate region, with all its intimate characteristics and peculiarities, before we can even begin to work this up into a single picture. In providing the materials for . this new kind of history the older parts of the country are in a more for­ tunate position than the newer ones: in New England, for exam­ ple, the local historian has been busy since the early part of the nineteenth century, and as a re­ sult of the great mass of material local historical societies and local

archaeologists have dug up, New England can boast such classic regional histories as Weeden's Eco­ nomic and Social History of New England or S. E. Morrison's Mari­ time History of Massachusetts, or Messrs. Cousins and Riley's com­ plete description of Salem archi­ tecture. The first two of these books are models for regional his­ tories in the grand style; and they have the great merit of showing the immense interest and signifi­ cance of local life in all its various details-details which the national historian is compelled to gloss over or neglect entirely when he is try­ ing to treat as a single unit all the regional communities between the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean.

Dutchess County has ·a past that is in some ways little poorer than New England's. In Dutchess Coun­ ty two different streams of civiliz­ ation, the landholding and trading civilization of the Dutch, and the more firmly knit and communal civilization of the Puritans camE> together and mingled. Dutchess County is historically what the geographer would call an area of transit:on: in a small way it has been in the position of the °?�p·i-: Basin, let us say, where two differ­ ent traditions, the North and the South, came together. The gain and the loss that took place in this mingling and exchange sh0w them­ selves very plainly in the architec­ ture of the surviving houses, and in the layout of the villages. The patient Dute hman, used to building in solid brick in the old country, took every opportunity to build with stone or brick in his new home: the old Church at Fis�kill

or the Winegar House on the road­ to Amenia Union from Leedsville, are examples of his sturdy archi­ tecture. When the New Englander came as a separate individual into these new parts of the country, in­ stead of coming as a member of a municipal corporation, he neglect­ ed to bring along the Common: and the absence of the common, or its reduction to a mere strip, as at Pawling, was a serious loss to the life of the Dutchess County villag­ es. One who knows the early his­ tory of this region does not need. the frontier marker to tell him that.

Sharon is in Connecticut and: Amenia is in New York: the layout of the villages tells the whole· i:;tory.

To come a little closer home, the· mingling of the Dutch, English, and Huguenot strains is witnessed' in almost every stone and every· bit of history connected with Troutbeck. The Delamater Cot-. tage reminds us of the numerous\ French Protestant names that wer-e scattered about the early colony: the Century Lodge is an excellent example of the Dutch tradition in American country ar­ chitecture, while down the Leeds­ ville Road are a pair of houses, one of them bearing the repainted date 1837, which shows the penetration of the English influence, with the formcJJity of a Palladian window, looking dowi1 upon the tight little Dutch stoop, built with the Dutch­ man's steady eye to comfort and convenience, let fashion be what. it may. Just as the naturalist can reconstruct a whole animal from the few bones he may find in an old gravel pit, so the historian 23

could reconstruct a large part of the history of the whole country, with no more to guide him than the -existing names, places, houses, legends, and histories that have to • do with so small a part of Dutchess County as the Amenia township.

Local history implies the history of larger communities to a much greater extent than national his­ tory implies the local community.

Every great event sweeps over th-e country like a wave; but it leaves its deposit behind in the life of the locality; and meanwhile that life goes on, with its own special his­ tory, its own special interests.

To follow even the life of a sin­ gle family, like the Bentons, who worked over the land and the land­ scape of Troutbeck, is to see in a fresh and more intimate light events which are merely names and dates, not_ living experiences, when they are focussed at a long distance in an ordinary history book. Local history shows us the Bentons tilling the land around Troutbeck for upward a century; it shows them helping to establish a woolen mill during the years when the Napoleonic Wars and the Embargo Act cut off the English supply of woolens; it shows them helping to project the Sharon to New York Canal, as men through­ out the state were projecting imag­ inary canals when the success of the Erie was demonstrated; the minutes of an Amenia Literary S0ciety show a young Benton sug­ gesting names for the streets of the future metropolis of Amenia; it shows Myron Benton listening to the distant voice of 'Whitman, and corresponding with Thoreau, 24

whose last letter was addressed to him; it shows another Benton going into the Civil War, and liv­ ing ·to write about it in a vivid and veracious book. I am merely using Troutbeck and the Benton family ·as examples of a hundred other equally interesting histories: to preserve these histories and to un­ derstand them is an important and indispensable step to understand­ ing what was going _on in the coun­ try at large.

Because local history is relative­ ly accessible and immediate; be-­ cause it deals with the concrete and the commonplace, it is what is nec-essary to vitalize the teaching of general history to the child at school, to say nothing of more ma­ ture $tudents. The things that we can see and touch are those-that awaken our imagination. Gibbon suddenly felt the Decline and Fall of Rome as he sat amid the ruined stones of the F'orum; and nothing has ever made me, for one, feel the might of t_he Roman empire more keenly than stumbling across the tiles and foundations of a Ro­ man villa in the midst of a quiet English field. Local history touch­ es off these things that have hap­ pened on the spot; and the facts of local history become parts of a person's own life to an extent which is rare with scenes and inci­ dents one has taken solely out of books and secondhand accounts.

To learn about the Indians who once lived in America, and not to pick out the Indian place-names on the map or to dig up the arrow­ heads that still remain he1·e; to learn about the Dutch and the Pur­ itan settlers and not to follow il.e

place names and the family names creeping up and down the Dutch­ ess County countryside; to learn about the Revolutionary War and not be able to recognize at sight the houses that survive from that period, or to be able to locate the mines and forges which supplied the soldiers with muskets and swords and ammunition; to learn about the commercial grO"wth of the United States after the Civil War and not to know that the fhst school of business was started up­ on in Poughkeepsie just before the conflict broke out, and was over­ run with pupils by the end of it­ in short, to learn the abstractions of history and never to observe the concrete reality is to throw away local bread under the impnssion that imported stones are more nourishing.

Every old part of the conr.try is filled with the memol'i3ls of .our past: tombstones and cottages and churches, names and ]egends, old roads and trails and abandoned mines, as well as the things we built and used yesterday.

All these memorials bring us closer �v the past; and, so doing, they bring us closer to our own present; for we are living history as well as recording it; and our memories are as necessary as our anticipatior, -·.

Communities seem to differ fl im individuals in this respect, that their expectation of life grows the older they become: the more his­ tory lies in back of them, the more confident we are that more will lie in front. A good past is a guar­ antee of a good future: and to pre­ serve the records of what came be­ fore us promotes that sense of

continuity which gives us the faith to continue our own work, with the expectation that our descend­ ants will find it equally interesting.

Local history is a sort of bench­ mark to which all more generalized and specialized kinds. of history must come back to, for verifica­ tion, as a point of reference. The value of local history for stimulat­ ing the imagination and giving the student something concrete and accessible to work upon has been recognized in the best English school; and it is beginning to take root in America, as well.

At King's Langley and at Saffron Walden in England one group of children after another has contri­ buted material to a little museum of local history. If nothing of this sort exists in Dutchess County, the local historical society members might well look into the possibili­ ties of using their local material� and it remains for enterprising teachers of history to turn it to their special advantage. The point. is that history begins at home, in­ evitably; but it does not end there.

With local history as a starting point the student is drawn into � whole host of relationships that lead him out into the world at large: the whaling ships that used to cast anchor at Poughkeepsie and other river towns will carry him to the South Seas; the discovery of the Hudson will take him back to the Crusades; once one begins to follow the threads of local history, local ·11anners, lo,�al industry, loca! peopks, one finds that they lead in every direction. And that is the proper method. Local history is not a means of exciting false pride 25

fa little things or exaggerated pre­ tensions to local virtues that do not exist: on. tiie' c��tr�r:v,. it' w-:o­ rnotes to· a dec-ent self-_respect i it is that form of self�knowledge which is �he : beginning of so�nd \knowledge itbout anyone else.. Just as the story of every on.e's.•life w'ould make 'at l�ast one novel, so

the story of any community's life would make at least· one history. ·To ·know that· history .and- -ta· take pleasure in· it· is the beginning; bf that ·sympathy with remote thnes and foreign peopfes 'which • tends to make one truly ..a man of the world.

Paper R�ad At Troutbeck, September 15,1926

by Charles E. Benton

• I hold in my hand a most inter­ -esting bit of Indian r€lic. You know that they divide the Stone Age into three periods; the Early Stone Age, in which they chipped the flint by blows; the Middle Stone Age, in which they had learned to flake off flint by pres­ sure with bone or other hard sub­ stance, and that was th€ age at which the Indians here had arriv­ -ed. Then came the later Stone Age, in which they had learned to ·grind the flaked edge to a fine sharpness. As far as I know this is the only stone implement which "Jias been found here having a :ground edge.

My grandfather came here from Guilford, Connecticut, in 1794 and ·the facilities for moving then were "!lot the same as they are at pres­ �mt. He loaded some of the things· "On a wagon, which, drawn by oxen, treked across the country for eigh­ ty • miles. The remaind€r of the things, with the women and children, were loaded on a large sloop, which sailed through the Sound, Hell-Gate, New York Harbor and Ql.P the Hudson to Poughkeepsie, 1

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then a village of 500 • inhabitants.

When the wagon was unloaded it we�t to Poughke€psie and brought them across the county to the new home. This was the year before the Vassars came to Poughkeepsie.

The road from Poughkeepsie here was not the same that it is now, for the Turnpike Company straightened it in many places, and at present it is probably fiv€ or ten miles less than it was then. There were no newspapers near here then, but I think my gTandfather must have been something of a newspaper fiend, for I have found clippings from newspapers publish­ ed at Hudson, Poughkeepsie and Hartford, though there was no mail service established, and the publishers had to send the papers by men on horseback.

The house which stood here th€n was built in 1765, and it formed a part of the house to which Mr. Spingarn came. The valley had then been settl€d about twenty­ five years, and there were several substantial houses here, but none of them now standing, so far as I know, have the date of their build-

ing fixed, even by tradition, except· the Delamater Hous-e, which has the date on the erid, in dai·k color­ ed brick.

The date of the settlem·ent here was not as exact as it was • in Sharon, just across the State line.

They came there in a body in 1739 and • settled down, and before the year closed they held a Town Meeting, elected Town Officers, and passed "Resolutions.:' One of these "Resolutions" was as fol­ lows: "Resolved: That pigs having a ring in their noses are a orderly ,creator."

It don't so much matter vrhat the resolutions were,.nor how they spelled. The main fact was that they organized a Town Govern­ ment, and established their civiliz­ ation. But from the west the Dutch-and many other kinds of people-just drifted in from tte Hudson River way, and there was no definite year in which we may say that the town was settled.

About the year 1800 there was a newspaper published at Sharon, though it perished so -early that all records seem to have been lost, and neither Mr. Sedgwick, in his history of Sharon, nor Mr. Reed, in his History of Amenia, give any account of it. But my brother

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Myron found some stray scraps of it at_ The Century Cottag� while making repairs, and they give an illuminating view of one of the Jefferson political campaign.s.

The old flax mill, which ., stood a short distance to the w�it _:of. us, has housed �any industries... First it was used to dress fl.ax, �' ·consid­ er"able industry then. ·'.Next, father concluded to run his threshing ma­ chine by the water power, a twelve foot overshot wheel, and he con­ nected with the barn by a long Tope band .. Then he concluded to saw his fire wood by the same pow­ er, and in succession there was a broom-making machine, a grist mill, and a marble gang-saw. Many industries were carried on at the farm.

We were a border community in many respects, and the gTound on which we are was once a part of Connecticut. But in 1731 a strip of land one and three-quarters miles in width was ceded to New York, and Troutbeck forms a part of that piece.

So, with the several races and civilizations settled in this valley we are a blend; both in race and culture. Let us hope that we have absorb-ed something of the best in each.