It was the opening of the land office at Clarence Hollow in 1803 near present day Rochester that brought about thirty people from the Baptist settlement of Whitehall and Hampton, New York. This wasbwhere the Truesdells broke the soil around 1790 for farming, but after years of growing the same thing the soil was depleted of vital nutrients. His yield would have dropped from 120 bushels per acre to less than thirty. Before he died, Gideon made arrangements to buy land from the Holland Land Company, a syndicate of Dutch bankers who owned 3.2 million acres of wilderness at the western edge of New York.
Pictures courtesy of Monmouth County Park System
His widow, forty-eight year old Dorcas Truesdell (1758-1824) made a grueling trip with her eight children. Before leaving their Whitehall farm, they loaded several wagons with possessions needed to survive: cast iron skillets, pots, utensils, clay bowls, a spinning wheel, rifles, traps, carpentry tools, and farm implements with breeding stock tethered behind slow-moving wagons. It wouldn’t have been an easy trip for Mrs. Truesdell with children ranging in age from six to twenty-four. A 15-year-old daughter, Dorcas, was deaf, although she learned how to read, write, speak, and eventually married. Her son, John, had recently married Betsey Webster, the brother of Elizur Webster. He took an option of 3,000 acres, and sold all of it within a few months to his friends and neighbors. Throughout the summer of 1803 sixteen year old William Webster and his brother spent months chopping trees, clearing a trail into the 3,000 acres lying between the two ridges of the valley bordering the creek. We know from a biographical sketch that Webster returned to Hampton in the fall of 1803 with his brother, and the following spring he returned to the Holland Land Purchase with his wife and five children. He brought with him two teams, one driven by himself and the other by twenty-five year old Amos Keeney and Shubael Morris, who were going to buy land from him. Keeney struck a deal for fifty acres in exchange for clearing ten acres of his land. When finished, Keeney walked three hundred miles back to Hampton with Lyman Morris so he could spend the winter with his wife and children. Keeney returned the following spring to build a log cabin, chop some more trees for Webster, and return to Hampton to spend another winter with his family. He carried his provisions in a knapsack but almost drowned as he crossed the Genesee River. There was an enterprising man operating a makeshift barge across the river who charged a shilling, but Keeney couldn’t afford the toll so he crossed the stream with a big stick. Being a slightly-built man he found it difficult to make it across, jumping from stone to stone with heavy currents swirling around him.
In October of 1804, Keeney and Lyman Morris arrived from Hampton with their families, sharing a wagon packed with essential household goods, with their wives and children riding and walking. Dairy accounts from those years reveal that people packed little more than hand-made mattresses, cooking utensils, cast-iron frying pan or Dutch oven, wooden buckets, a shotgun and ammunition. People walked when they grew tired of bouncing along, and when they got tired of walking they rode for a while. Either way, it was an exceedingly dull and monotonous journey, covering 10 to 20 miles a day. The wagon and two yoke of oxen belonged to Morris, with three cows and another belonging to Keeney trailing behind the wagon. When they were within ten miles of the settlement the king-bolt on a wagon wheel broke, leaving them stranded in the woods for the night. After making repairs the makeshift wooden bolt broke again so they walked the rest of the way to Warsaw. Morris carried his two year old son while driving an ox, and Stephan Perkins, who was traveling with them, carried five year old George Morris while driving the cattle. Keeney put on his overcoat, and by turning up the bottom hewas able to carry his two children with Mrs. Keeney carrying their six-month old baby. Morris was the first to arrive at the settlement and when he explained their situation to Elizur Webster he immediately hitched-up his wagon and road out to pick-up the others.
Pioneer cabin pictures courtesy of Museum of Appalachia.
By the time Keeney arrived in the Holland Land Purchase his provisions had been depleted to a few pounds of flour, and what remained of a salted fish. His cabin didn’t have a chimney although it did have an opening for one; the stones for the fireplace had yet to be gathered so his family’s sleep was disturbed by howling wolves in the forest. They were so impoverished that Keeney had to sell a flannel shirt and chintz dress belonging to his wife so he could buy flour and twelve bushels of corn to feed his family. To store his corn he chopped down a hollow tree into sections, removed the bark, and smoothed the inside. He then put the corn meal into the hollowed tree two inches deep, separated by layers of clean flat field stones, and was able to preserve his flour and corn-meal for nearly a year. Life was far more hazardous than anything we can imagine when settlements were small and distances between farms was great. When Artemas Shattuck was trapped by a falling tree in a freak accident, he was spun upside down with his foot stuck, and he was left suspended high in the air where he couldn’t touch the ground, or pull himself into a sitting position on a branch. He yelled for help until he began suffering extreme pain from hanging upside down by a foot for hours. He continued yelling but was three-fourths of a mile away from the nearest cabin, and the weather was starting to turn cold. He knew that he would soon lose consciousness from hanging upside down, which meant that he would be dead by morning unless he did something extreme. He ran through a list of options, and the only one that made sense was severing his foot. He realized that even then there was a good chance that he might bleed to death, but if he did nothing he was as good as dead. He pulled out of his hip pocket an old Barlow knife, and cut off the leg of his boot and sock, and with a piece of line that he had in his pocket, he tied-off his ankle as tightly as possible to stop the flow of blood. After mentally preparing himself for the pain and gore he took a deep breath, carefully severed his ankle, and left his foot in the cleft of the tree. Shattuck slide down the tree trunk, and crawled to his dinner basket where he bound-up the stump with a napkin. He cut a stick, and hobbled or crawled on his hands and knees through the snow towards his cabin. When he arrived within a few rods of his place he was discovered by his family. Exhausted and almost ready to pass out from the pain and loss of blood, he was brought indoors and resuscitated.
resuscitated.