A Bit of Local History Written by the Late W.S. Pelletreau

Record of the Ownership of the Triangle between Main Street and North Sea Road Southampton Press

The recent burning of the Dawson dwelling and barns recalls an article written by our esteemed historian, the late William S. Pelletreau

--> [1840-1918], and published in the PRESS in May, 1917. The article has much value and interest to all living in that section of the village and is reprinted by request.

In old times, long before the Revolution, the entire triangle between the Main street and the North Sea road was owned by Abner Howell. He was the son of Col. Josiah Howell, and was a man of importance in his day and time. A small, brown tombstone tells us that Mr. Abner Howell died Sept. 16, 1775 in the 76^th year of his age. About 1750 he gave his son, Phineas Howell, the lot where John Cavanagh now lives, and he built a house upon it which was standing in our boyhood days. At the same time there was another house exactly like it and this was owned by Mr. Peter Fournier and was where the Commercial House now stands. They were not only exactly alike in other respects but there was a peculiar style to the chimneys which attracted our attention. Both of these houses were torn down about 1849. Abner Howell seems to have divided the entire triangle between his two sons, Phineas and David, and Phineas had the north part and David Howell had the south portion. In 1788 Phineas Howell sold east part to Annanias Halsey and went to what was the “Western Country” and settled in the town of Tully, in what is now Onondaga County, New York, and he died there at a very advanced age. Annanias Halsey was the father of a family that had been prominent in Southampton. His son, Uriah Halsey, lived on the place now owned by Mrs. Wilmun Halsey and had two daughters. One married John Sherry of Sag Harbor and the other married Capt. Crowell of the same place.

Another son of Annanias was Eli P. Halsey, who was the father Edwin P. Halsey, who lived in the old house, next north of Herrick’s store.

Another daughter married Col. Samuel hunting, whose wealth has been of benefit to many families. Another daughter, Mary (or Polly, as she was generally called) married Mr. Daniel Fordham, whose descendants are numerous and well known. Another daughter, Susan (commonly known in our boyhood days as Aunt Susan Halsey) lived and died unmarried in a little old house that stood just north of Capt. Daniel Jagger’s house, now Mr. Donnelly’s. After her death the house was sold by Capt. Jagger to David Terry, who moved it to Tuckahoe where it still remains.

The part of the lot sold to Annanias Halsey was in later years sold to Capt. Harry Halsey, who is well remembered. The part where the little house stood is now owned by Miss Abigail Halsey, and the homestead by the Rev. Jesse Halsey. The old house and lot of Phineas Howell was sold by him to Ebenezr Jagger in 1772. He had a tan yard on the premises, and was the great-grandfather of Mr. Hubert Jagger. In later years the house and lot belonged to Mr. Aja Halsey, who tore down the old house and built a new one and which, after passing through several hands now belongs to John Cavanagh.

We may add that Abner Howell did not live on that tract. His home lot, which was that of his father’s before him, was where Mr. Livingston Bowden now lives. He was the village blacksmith and the relics of his shop were plainly visible some years ago, when the road was ploughed up on Bowden Square.

The south part of the triangle was given by Abner Howell to his son, David Howell, who built a house upon it about 1750. In 1770, the main street of Southampton was surveyed from the beach to the road at Long Springs and David Howell’s house is there mentioned. Like most houses of that time it was built on the line of the street. The present door yard has been taken in from the highway but no one is any the worse for it. David Howell was a silversmith and learned his trade from Capt. Elias Pelletreau. We have seen spoons made by him and stamped with his name. On May 10^th, 1782, David Howell sold his house and lot to Col. Josiah Smith of Moriches for £400, or $2,00. As the lot included what is now Mr. Donnelly’s property, it is worth as much today. What became of David Howell we do not know but he may have gone West like his brother. Colonel Josiah Smith bought this place for his daughter Hannah, who married Elias Pelletreau, and they lived there many years keeping a store, which did a large business for those days. Flax was a staple article and was raised in large quantities and taken in trade but times have changed and there has not been an ounce of flax raised in Southampton for nearly 100 years. We may as well mention that another article of extensive sales was West India rum. In the latter part of his life Elias Pelletreau purchased a large farm at the south end of the village, with a house still standing and well known as the Hollyhocks.

After the death of Elias Pelletreau, the David Howell, house and lot was sold to Benjamin Howell and after passing through one or two hands it came into possession of Capt. Austin Herrick and is now owned by his descendents who are well known to us all. The house which still remains, was built originally after the standard style of those times, with a long sloping roof on one side, but at some later period it was changed, and by making gambrel roof with dormer windows, it was made practically a two-story house. In old times, when land was cheap, houses were built large on the ground, the upper part was a necessary evil, and it was not necessary to put one house on another. It has stood the storms of more than 160 years and will outlast many of the flashy houses of the present time.

The person who sees Mr. Dawson’s place would hardly believe that it is a hundred years old. So much has been added that it looks like a new house, but the original house has passed its 100^th mark long years ago, and hereby hangs a tale.

In the early part of the last century, the farm at the north end, now owned by Mr. James E. Foster, was the homestead of John Bishop and his wife Jerusha, both models of short-sighted penuriousness. The story goes, and we have heard it repeated by those who evidently believed it, that they were left this farm and much other land, with the condition that they were to support two maiden sisters until their death or marriage. They seem to have been well convinced that the former would happen first and they might have to wait a long time for that, and they worried about certain sharp individuals, and there were sharp people even in those virtuous days, and they were Squire William Herrick, Rufus Sayre, and Joel Jacobs, made them the offer to take the girls off their hands and support them until they were dead or married, in exchange for their farm and some other lands, among which we believe was a lot at Halsey’s neck, now owned by Edward. H. Foster, Esq. They accepted the offer and congratulated themselves on their grand stroke of luck. One of the characters in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” says, “Gals is mighty on certain things. If you think they have gone one way they are sure to be gone the other.” With that perversity, so peculiar to the female sex, these girls, who were expected never to marry, were both married within a year. The Bishops then repented in sackcloth and ashes, that they had parted with their land so easily. The house on the farm was sold to Paul Sayre, the grandfather of our well-known townsman, Mr. Rufus Sayre, and he moved it to its present site where he purchased a small piece of land of the proprietors. This is the 100^th anniversary of its moving and it is certain that it was of some age at the time. Here Paul Sayre lived and died, and his daughter, Miss Nancy Sayre, with a sister lived there within our recollection.

As for the Bishops’ story we hardly know what to say. There are some things which make us doubt it, but as the Italian saying is, “If it is not true, it is well made up.”

The Jesse Halsey Manuscript Collection. Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library. 

Clamming in Labrador

"The Boss & the Gang (College Students from U.S. College)"

Repeatedly, I asked Joe Souley, John Patey, and the other fishermen who worked at the time “on the Room” (mission) if there were no clams in the harbor. The bottom at low tide looked just right for long clams, but they always said, “No.” One day I took a bucket and spade and went up to the “top” of the harbor (a mile) and came back with some good-sized one. The mud was full of them. When I showed them to Joe, he blurted, “Skipper, them are no clams, they be Cocks and Hens.” “Don’t you ever eat them?” I asked. “Not if we can help it, all durin’ the Starvation Winter we had nothin’ else, and never ate ‘em since.” Our reasonably meager diet was often increased by clam bisque, clam-pie, and fried clams; soon other Mission folk followed and after a meal at our house, Joe and some other of the harbor folk followed suit—but gingerly. They had had enough.

They didn’t know that many other groups, Indians and settlers, have survived starvation winters by the same means as is attested by the great shell heaps long the coast from Maine to Florida.

Joe Souley was a great person. He could neither read nor write but he knew a lot about life and human nature. He has sailed the seven seas and could describe ports, like Liverpool, that I had seen so accurately that I trusted his description of those I had not seen. And year after when I saw Yokohama, and Fuji, it looked just as Joe said it ought to.

Joe had worked in a copper mine up the coast at Tilt Cove and knew how to use dynamite. He taught me how to blast, but he couldn’t temper drills. They would be too soft and not hold an edge, or too brittle and break. I had watched Andy Jagger in the blacksmith’s shop on the way home from school, blown the bellow fro him, broken his twist drills, and learned many things from him. I remembered that he heated things he wanted to temper to a “cherry-red” and then dipped them in oil. Just what color cherry-red was while in a forge fire memory didn’t say, but trail and error demonstrated that it could be done.

Great boulders stood in the way of our pipe lines and cellars and much blasting was indicated.

(After his first Cottage Hospital was under roof, the Doctor, so he told me, had thought of a cellar and got a miner to blast—the roof was damaged! So we did our blasting first.)

Joe would have me hold the drill, then with a giant sledge he would begin to strike while I turned the drill in the hole. Then brave man, he took his turn holding while I . . . swung the sledge, fortunately for him I never missed—my old grandfather coming to the rescue. (I am a great believer in atavism—or whatever it may be called. Cap’n Harry, my grandfather, was a skilled mason (he built most of Greenwich Village in New York, over a hundred years ago.) He once was known to have cut the center out of a millstone to convert it into a well curb, cut it—on a bet—in thirty minutes. He knew how to swing a maul; I’m sure he was there fifty years later, for my help. (What’s fifty years among Yankees?)

--Jesse Halsey
1912

"We'll Float Tonight or We'll Go to Hell!"

The Circassian Story

LOST FROM THE SHIP'S ORIGINAL CREW
RICHARD WILLIAMS, Captain of the Circassian, a Welshman from Liverpool, about forty years old, married, Ieaving two children
EVAN JOHNSON, Third Mate, from Liverpool, twenty. unmarried; just completed apprenticeship
THOMAS ORR, Carpenter's Mate, from Liverpool. twenty-five years old, married with no children
WILLIAM KEEFE, Boatswain, native of Finland. unmarried
HENRY FREEMAN, Sailmaker, from Philadelphia, thirty years old, married, leaving two children
JOHN GRANT, Cook, about forty-five years old, a Negro
FRANK WRIGHT, Apprentice, from Liverpool, eighteen years old
ANDREW NODDER, Apprentice, from Wavertree, England (near Liverpool), seventeen years old
WALTER COLBURN, Apprentice, from Liverpool, eighteen years old
JAMES SCOTT. Seaman, native of England, twenty-three years old; belonged to the Royal Navy Reserve
HORATIO JOHNSON, Steward, born in Liverpool, about forty-five years old, married with several children, a Negro
ANDREW LADAGO, Seaman, native of Italy, thirty years old
JOHN McDERMOTT, the stowaway, from Liverpool, nineteen years old
 
LOCAL MEN LOST
LEWIS WALKER, a Shinnecock, twenty-six, married, leaving three children
JOHN WALKER, a Shinnecock, fifty-one, married, leaving nine children, a former whaler
DAVID W. BUNN, a Shinnecock, forty-seven, married, leaving five children, a former whaler
J. FRANKLIN BUNN, a Shinnecock, thirty-nine, married with no children, a former whaler
RUSSELL BUNN, a Shinnecock, forty-nine, married, leaving four children, a former whaler
WILLIAM CUFFEE a Shinnecock, twenty-three, unmarried
WARREN N. COFFEE, a Shinnecock, thirty-three. married leaving three children, a Civil War veteran
GEORGE W. COFFEE, a Shinnecock, twenty-five, married, leaving one child
JAMES R. LEE, a Shinnecock, thirty-three, married with no children, a former whaler
OLIVER J. KELLIS, a Shinnecock, thirty-nine, married with no children, a former whaler
JAMES THURSTON, from Southampton, twenty-four, unmarried
 
COAST WRECKING COMPANY EMPLOYEES LOST
JOHN LEWIS, foreman of the wreckers, about forty-five years old, married, with no living children
LUKE STILLMAN, engineer, in his thirties, married, leaving eight children. from Brooklyn
PHILIP KEARNS, engineer, in his thirties, from Staten Island
PATRICK DONOHUE, engineer, in his thirties, married with several children, from Stapleton, Staten Island

from "Down North" | c1941

One day in the late spring of 1907, I was riding to the University on one of those (then) novel double-decker trams that ran in Glasgow. (The paper, this very day as I write, shows a picture of two bombed and gutted standing inert on the car-track) when I noticed a meager item on an inside page of an evening paper of how a mission doctor in Labrador had been carried off shore on an ice flow and had lived to tell the story. That was the first I ever heard of Grenfell. Two years later, I was on his staff—not as preacher but as plumber.

It happened like this. He came to Princeton Seminary to speak for a week at Chapel. Chapel was a dreary performance held at the end of the afternoon with a handful present and a cut and dried professorial performance in exegesis as diet. I seldom went. But hearing that Grenfell was coming that day, I went and took several other fellows along. The place was filled the second day; and before the week was out the crowd jammed the largest hall on the University campus.

In one of his talks he told the story of that ice pan experience (of which I had read on the Glasgow bus), in another he intimated that students sometimes would “down” with him in the summer to do odd jobs. I made an appointment at the house of the professor where he was staying. “Yes,” he took students along to help; “What was I going to be?” “A preacher!” “No, he didn’t need a preacher, they had too many on the shore already. “Well,” I ventured, “What do you need?” “A plumber,” he snapped back, “a plumber for our new hospital.” I signed up, then and there, knowing that water runs down hill and inheriting from my practical builder-mason-grandfather, a manual knack for doing things, and knowing how to solder and wipe a joint, and a few other things, from a Yankee blacksmith who had a shop on the back street where I used to stop in to blow the bellows and fuss around on the way home from school.

In May (Divinity Schools have a short term), I started out for Labrador. It took nearly a month to get there, for it was a late season and the ice hugged the land so that schooners and mail boats couldn’t get “down along” shore. When we reached St. Anthony all set “to plumb” the hospital, I found that the hospital wasn’t even built. The Chief was like that: ambition always running ahead of any possible performance on the part of his helpers.

Not only was the hospital unbuilt, not even a foundation was in, no excavating done either. So after putting a new window in the log bunk house for light and air (terribly dull tools they had and my new plumber’s kit didn’t fit the wood working job, all their tools were dull except the axes; a Newfoundlander can build a ship with his ax and after I had fussed for half a day with brace and bit (dull in spite of my file) and key hold saw pecking at the logs, Old Skipper Joe Souley came along and in ten minutes with his ax cut the hole in the side of the bunk house where I installed my window.

There being no one more capable available, I set about excavating for the new hospital cellar. We struck solid rock. I knew nothing about blasting—except that one did it before building. (The Doctor having finished his first hospital realizing that it needed a cellar, undertook to blast one and blew off his roof.) Skipper Joe (my friend of the ax) had worked in a mine; he knew how to blast! But he didn’t know how to sharpen drills. Here my Yankee blacksmith came to my aid; (by quasi proxy). I had watched him and had a dim notion of how it was done and after considerable experimenting—just the right heat “cherry red” dipped at the right moment in oil, the drill was just the right temper, not too hard to be brittle and break under the sledge as it bit its way into the rock and not too soft—not cutting at all but just further blunting itself.

I would hold the drill; Joe would strike it with the big sledge, strike with an unerring accuracy; when my turn came to strike and he to hold, like the brave man he was, he held the drill while I swung the sledge, fortunately for him I never missed—my old grandfather coming to the rescue. (I am a great believer in ativism—or whatever it may be called. Cap’n Harry, my grandfather, was a skilled mason (he built most of Greenwich Village in New York, over a hundred years ago.) He once was known to have cut the center out of a millstone to convert it into a well curb, cut it—on a bet—in thirty minutes. He knew how to swing a maul; I’m sure he was there fifty years later, for my help. (What’s fifty years among Yankees?)

When the holes were drilled we began to blast. It was cold; dynamite will not explode when it is “frozen.” Joe would build a fire in the forge and put me to blowing the bellows, with a pail of water on the coals. When it began to boil he would pile sticks of dynamite cob-house fashion on the pail there to “thaw.” “Let out a reef, Skipper,” Joe would say. I would accelerate and the sparks would fly all round the pail and all over the dynamite. “No harm, Skipper, she can’t bust abroad without the cap.” When the sticks were sufficiently softened, Joe would cut a length of fuse and fasten on a cap (detonator) to the end of the fuse. The cap is a hollow tube an inch long made of soft, malleable copper. Joe would take the thing between his teeth (he had two that met) and craunch the cap on to the fuse. (When it became my turn (under his tutelage) I used the pliers (as Dupont suggested). Not so Skipper Joe Souley—“Teeth’s quicker.” Then we would insert the cap and fuse in a stick of dynamite, put it down in the drilled hole in the rock on top of one, two, or three other sticks of dynamite and then with a stick, tamp dirt into top of the hold. Then we’d pile a lot of logs on top with a few lengths of old anchor chain to (hold her down), light the fuse and run. At least I would run, Joe was too old, or too fat, or to lazy, or too proud to run. He would amble along and maybe get behind the forge house before the blast brought down its concomitant shower of small rocks and gravel.

It took all summer to build the hospital cellar and frame up the hospital. In the fall, I came back to Seminary in New York, bringing an esquimoux boy to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to learn lathe work and other things that I didn’t know much about. Theology played second fiddle, I fear, that winter. I got hold of an old friend who was a master plumber and heating engineer and learned to figure radiation, etc., etc., ad infinitum (to use theological language). By the next spring I had collected in Boston a schooner load of radiators, boilers, pipe fittings, tools, tile, linoleum, and what-not enough to plumb and heat the new hospital and the old hospital and several other hospitals and mission buildings at various stations along the shore.

In May (this is 1910), I graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity, was married, and in June set out for Labrador on a honeymoon.

There we stayed three summers, two winters. There our two older boys were born. There I would still be if I had been a doctor instead of a preacher. When the plumbing work was done, I became business manager for the mission. When the expert accountant, Price, Waterhouse recommended that the business office be put in St. John’s Newfoundland, rather than on the field, I lost interest in the business job, even though they had been interested in me. I had been buying thousands of dollars worth of supplies of all kinds, running a big schooner on several voyages back and forth as her skipper and how I ever kept out of jail with my accounts, I don’t quite know (or off the rocks with the schooner). It always puzzled me to make up a set of books that would balance and no wonder Price, Waterhouse wanted an accountant and not a preacher.

--Reverend Jesse Halsey

from Down North

Reverend Jesse Halsey c1941

 

One day in the late spring of 1907, I was riding to the University on one of those (then) novel double-decker trams that ran in Glasgow. (The paper, this very day as I write, shows a picture of two bombed and gutted standing inert on the car-track) when I noticed a meager item on an inside page of an evening paper of how a mission doctor in Labrador had been carried off shore on an ice flow and had lived to tell the story. That was the first I ever heard of Grenfell. Two years later, I was on his staff—not as preacher but as plumber.

It happened like this. He came to Princeton Seminary to speak for a week at Chapel. Chapel was a dreary performance held at the end of the afternoon with a handful present and a cut and dried professorial performance in exegesis as diet. I seldom went. But hearing that Grenfell was coming that day, I went and took several other fellows along. The place was filled the second day; and before the week was out the crowd jammed the largest hall on the University campus.

In one of his talks he told the story of that ice pan experience (of which I had read on the Glasgow bus), in another he intimated that students sometimes would “down” with him in the summer to do odd jobs. I made an appointment at the house of the professor where he was staying. “Yes,” he took students along to help; “What was I going to be?” “A preacher!” “No, he didn’t need a preacher, they had too many on the shore already. “Well,” I ventured, “What do you need?” “A plumber,” he snapped back, “a plumber for our new hospital.” I signed up, then and there, knowing that water runs down hill and inheriting from my practical builder-mason-grandfather, a manual knack for doing things, and knowing how to solder and wipe a joint, and a few other things, from a Yankee blacksmith who had a shop on the back street where I used to stop in to blow the bellows and fuss around on the way home from school.

In May (Divinity Schools have a short term), I started out for Labrador. It took nearly a month to get there, for it was a late season and the ice hugged the land so that schooners and mail boats couldn’t get “down along” shore. When we reached St. Anthony all set “to plumb” the hospital, I found that the hospital wasn’t even built. The Chief was like that: ambition always running ahead of any possible performance on the part of his helpers.

Not only was the hospital unbuilt, not even a foundation was in, no excavating done either. So after putting a new window in the log bunk house for light and air (terribly dull tools they had and my new plumber’s kit didn’t fit the wood working job, all their tools were dull except the axes; a Newfoundlander can build a ship with his ax and after I had fussed for half a day with brace and bit (dull in spite of my file) and key hold saw pecking at the logs, Old Skipper Joe Souley came along and in ten minutes with his ax cut the hole in the side of the bunk house where I installed my window.

There being no one more capable available, I set about excavating for the new hospital cellar. We struck solid rock. I knew nothing about blasting—except that one did itbefore building. (The Doctor having finished his first hospital realizing that it needed a cellar, undertook to blast one and blew off his roof.) Skipper Joe (my friend of the ax) had worked in a mine; he knew how to blast! But he didn’t know how to sharpen drills. Here my Yankee blacksmith came to my aid; (by quasi proxy). I had watched him and had a dim notion of how it was done and after considerable experimenting—just the right heat “cherry red” dipped at the right moment in oil, the drill was just the right temper, not too hard to be brittle and break under the sledge as it bit its way into the rock and not too soft—not cutting at all but just further blunting itself.

I would hold the drill; Joe would strike it with the big sledge, strike with an unerring accuracy; when my turn came to strike and he to hold, like the brave man he was, he held the drill while I swung the sledge, fortunately for him I never missed—my old grandfather coming to the rescue. (I am a great believer in ativism—or whatever it may be called. Cap’n Harry, my grandfather, was a skilled mason (he built most of Greenwich Village in New York, over a hundred years ago.) He once was known to have cut the center out of a millstone to convert it into a well curb, cut it—on a bet—in thirty minutes. He knew how to swing a maul; I’m sure he was there fifty years later, for my help. (What’s fifty years among Yankees?)

When the holes were drilled we began to blast. It was cold; dynamite will not explode when it is “frozen.” Joe would build a fire in the forge and put me to blowing the bellows, with a pail of water on the coals. When it began to boil he would pile sticks of dynamite cob-house fashion on the pail there to “thaw.” “Let out a reef, Skipper,” Joe would say. I would accelerate and the sparks would fly all round the pail and all over the dynamite. “No harm, Skipper, she can’t bust abroad without the cap.” When the sticks were sufficiently softened, Joe would cut a length of fuse and fasten on a cap (detonator) to the end of the fuse. The cap is a hollow tube an inch long made of soft, malleable copper. Joe would take the thing between his teeth (he had two that met) and craunch the cap on to the fuse. (When it became my turn (under his tutelage) I used the pliers (as Dupont suggested). Not so Skipper Joe Souley—“Teeth’s quicker.” Then we would insert the cap and fuse in a stick of dynamite, put it down in the drilled hole in the rock on top of one, two, or three other sticks of dynamite and then with a stick, tamp dirt into top of the hold. Then we’d pile a lot of logs on top with a few lengths of old anchor chain to (hold her down), light the fuse and run. At least I would run, Joe was too old, or too fat, or to lazy, or too proud to run. He would amble along and maybe get behind the forge house before the blast brought down its concomitant shower of small rocks and gravel.

It took all summer to build the hospital cellar and frame up the hospital. In the fall, I came back to Seminary in New York, bringing an esquimoux boy to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to learn lathe work and other things that I didn’t know much about. Theology played second fiddle, I fear, that winter. I got hold of an old friend who was a master plumber and heating engineer and learned to figure radiation, etc., etc., ad infinitum (to use theological language). By the next spring I had collected in Boston a schooner load of radiators, boilers, pipe fittings, tools, tile, linoleum, and what-not enough to plumb and heat the new hospital and the old hospital and several other hospitals and mission buildings at various stations along the shore.

Southampton Library

Rev. Samuel Herrick D.D. in his paper made before the 250^th anniversary celebration, when in making a shaming plea for a library for Southampton he turned to his contemporaries from the platform and said “Mr. Howell and Mr. Pelletreau, How much do you and I owe to that old Historical Library which used to be kept in Capt. Harry Halsey’s [c 1835?] back kitchen? It did not do as much perhaps to fit us for college examinations perhaps but that back kitchen was the portal through which we entered into a knowledge of good literature.” This was in 1890 and years later the Rogers Memorial Library was dedicated.

Mr. Edward Huelling writes us that as a boy he distinctly remembers being sent by his father to Capt Harry Halsey’s to retrieve a library book for his father.

--Lizbeth Halsey White, author, suffrage leader, town historian