"my heartfelt sympathy"

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October 7, 1903

Elmira, N. Y.

Dear Cousin Charles,

The sad news of your son’s death reached us a day or two ago and I immediately recalled his kindness to me on the only occasion I remember having seen him.

It was on the occasion of my visit to Long Island three years ago and he at once impressed me with his kindness, cordiality, and almost brotherly interest.

Please accept my heartfelt sympathy and especially extend this to his wife. I wish that we lived nearer each other so that we might be with you at this time.

Our love to all of you.

Affectionately,

S. Edward Roer

Fathers & Brothers

"In the fullness of time the old gentleman slept with his fathers and the little boy grew up, as little boys will."  --Reverend Jesse Halsey

from The Quick and the Dead c 1931

Then through the hills of the T.B. country, many couples, who are taking the cure, are out walking at the close of the day (I know something about the process, a brother and a sister having gone through it, one successfully).

from One Extra Curriculum or Adventures in Overalls c 1934

I am now, and have been for twenty years, the minister of a God fearing congregation that quite often wears dinner jackets. Needless to say, I don’t wear overalls in the pulpit. But they are, I rather think, thanks to my father, a symbol of my philosophy of life. My ancestors were sea-faring men, chasing whales from Kamchatka to Palmer Land. They sailed the seven seas. I have had to make my adventure nearer home, and these are a sample of some of the interesting things that have happened.

*** 

All but ready for college; hard work on the farm, day after day, through a long, hot summer. Father was often sick and my older brother an almost chronic invalid. I was working nights to get off a college entrance exam in German. Then came the uncertainty as to the possibility of going—one day going, the next, staying. Finally, a week before school was to open, everyone was better and college seemed assured. [1899?] Saturday, September 16, “going.” Sunday, the 17^th, “going tomorrow at 7:15 A. M.” “Monday, the 18^th.” Up at four in the morning and into overalls to milk for the last time and drive the cows to pasture. Then, a bath, a new suit, breakfast, the train, two ferries, another train, Princeton! All set to go! But came 6 A.M., there were no family prayers. “Father’s sick.” My older brother called me to his bed. “I don’t see how we can spare you. Go, if you think you ought (hard word to a New England conscience). We’ll find the money and get on somehow.

“If you ought?”= “If you can?” A long moment of terrific struggle, then up the stairs, back into overalls, down the lane behind the white horses (or their successors) and as the long, brown furrow turned ‘ere the train goes by, and I waved to the fellow who was supposed to be my roommate.

Then, for four years it was overalls all day and books at night; work, hard work, that made a boy into a man. Sickness at home, long painful days, tedious, painful nights, watching and crude nursing; learning, learning things not found in books, learning, so that, automatically, as one says 6 x 6, duty stands before pleasure and the days of work and nights of broken sleep, reading, study snatched here and there, with correspondence courses and a few weeks now and then in the winter, at the college, result in a body hard as nails, needing little sleep, splendid health and happy heart withal—work had become joy. The inoculation had become successful.

My brother died. I assumed the farm responsibility. Some crops failed, others succeeded (more of the former), and gradually I worked out my own schemes, sometimes with my father’s approbation and sometimes without. (But he always paid the bills.) I was handy with tools, so plumbing found its way into the old farmhouse, also steam heat and electric lights. Winter days laying hardwood floors. (Now I wish the old wide pine and oak floorboards worn by the feet of many grandmothers, were back.) New roofs, better stables, sheds, etc., were made possible by an overall ability inherited from my grandfather. My father, until the last years of his life, never had five hundred dollars in cash in any one year, but we lived well on what we raised, and traded produce for groceries and dry goods—of actual cash there was very little.

from Memoir: Section One, p. 14 c 1952

After mother died (when I was five) father took on the heavy responsibility of doing all that he could to take her place. He spent his evenings reading to me and telling me stories. I was with him constantly as he drove to the farm about half a mile removed from our barn and farm house. I followed him about his work and I imagined furnished him some small measure of companionship that he missed in mother's going. He was devoted to her memory and twenty years afterward I have come upon him at night kneeling at his bedside looking at her picture and pouring out his heart.

Harry T. Halsey | Obituary

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Sea-Side Times | Southampton, N. Y.

Thursday, October 1, 1903

 

A Man of Sterling Character and Christian Fortitude

Harry T. Halsey died at his home in this village at six o’clock yesterday morning after a long and wasting illness from which he has suffered for many years.

Harry Thomas Halsey was born in Southampton November 12, 1864. He was the eldest son of Charles Henry and Melvina Terry Halsey. He was named for his two grandfathers, Captain Harry Halsey, of Southampton, and Mr. Thomas Terry, of Terryville, near Port Jefferson.

Mr. Halsey was a young man of broad intelligence and sterling character. He was educated at the old Southampton Academy. At an early age he united with the Presbyterian Church and was later made a ruling elder being one of the youngest men ever chose to set in that capacity.

A dozen years ago he entered into a partnership with W. Seymour White under the firm name of Halsey and White to deal in farm produce, farmers’ supplies, and coal. The business is still in a flourishing condition.

Very soon after embarking in business Mr. Halsey was seized with an alarming affection of the lungs and went to Colorado in quest of health. He returned the following year but little benefited, but through the skill of physicians and extreme care on his part the progress of the disease was arrested.

He has spent several winters in the South, in Virginia, Georgia, or the Carolinas, daring to remain at home only during the summer. For more than ten years he has made a hard battle for life and for the last year or two has been in very terrible condition.

Last winter he lived near Thomasville, GA, and when he returned home his friends finally realized that it was his last winter S[?]. He was sick most of the time and confined to the house during the past summer and [?] past summers but was [?] when the expected end actually came.

The funeral service will be held his home tomorrow after at half past 1 o’clock.

On October 19, 1899, Mr. Halsey married Miss Ida D. Pettet, a favorite teacher at the new Southampton Union School. No children were born to them.

Besides a widow and his father, Mr. Halsey leaves [behind a brother, Jesse Halsey, and two sisters,] Miss Abigail Halsey [and Mrs. Edward P. White.]

Letter from Ida P. Halsey* | 1904

Dear Brother Jess,

When Harry and I were talking about the little gifts, he asked what I thought of them and I said that yours seemed rather small. You will remember that Harry left me the balance remaining after paying the little sums mentioned, and I told him that you ought to have it. He said, “Do you think so, I’m glad to hear you say that,” and he smiled so contentedly.

I have reserved $400 for expenses, the stone will probably cost from $225 to $250—the expenses, you know, were $184.60. The amount in bank including interest on September 30^th was $751.22. The legacies amount to $275, including your own $50, so that leaves you $126.22.

For your Christmas gift, I have wanted to give you Harry’s desk and desk chairs. I can hardly bring myself to part with them—so I give you the use of them until sometime when I might wish them—it is more than likely that they will always be yours.

With our best wishes for today and every day,

Lovingly,

Ida P.H.

*Ida Pettet Halsey was the widow of Jesse Halsey's older brother Harry. She later married Eli H. Fordham.  

(Quasi-Auto-Biographical. Written for one’s children.)

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from Old Sea Chest / In the East Riding of Yorkshire

By Jesse Halsey

Beside my fireplace sits an old sea chest, battered from long hard use by successive generations of whalers. Substantial tar dipped smelly rope handles at either end of it.

Beside my fireplace sits a sea chest used by successive generations of whalers. It has tossed on all the seven seas, is battered and bruised, has substantial tar dipped smelly rope handles on either end, but when opened gives forth a subtle fragrance of far Cathay and the Moluccas and other islands of spice. No wonder; it is lined with cedar and San Domingo mahogany and sandal wood. In it now repose for appropriate safe-keeping some treasures of sentiment garnered from the now distant days of my youth.

I turn its rusted iron lock with a sizable brass key and push back the oak battened cover, on its hand hammered strap hang hinges. Inside is a big Bible, most of one, a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress illustrated with a dozen steel engravings and numerous cuts, an old log book or two, some mariner’s charts, some pages from a diary of my father’s, some account books of grandfather’s dated early in the nineteenth century. The chest with its meager and miscellaneous contents and an old fouling piece that stands on guard in the corner by the stairs—these bring back my boyhood which might in many respects have been that of a son of the house one or two or even three generations earlier.

***

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It is as it were, a sprightly evening in early winter and a fire is burning on the hearth. It seldom snaps; it never smokes for grandfather was a skilled mason and knew his trade. Supper is over and the dishes cleared away, from the kitchen come the sounds of cleaning up and the stirring of buckwheat cakes being “set to rise” for breakfast. A Kerosene lamp burns on the erstwhile dining table now covered with a turkey-red damask cloth. In a Boston rocker by the fire sits an old man and on a foot-stool, toasting his shins, stretches a little boy. Whether he is six or eight or ten I cannot quite tell—no it is not the smoke, grandfather was a capable mason—it must be my eyes. Against the wall, so near that the boy can lean on it, is a seaman’s chest. The old man is reading, the boy listening, when he gets drowsy he leans his head on the chest and dozes off, waking with a start as Napoleon leaves Moscow, or Alexander reaches Babylon.

We must open that chest. Its stout rope handle smell of oakum, its battered exterior betrays its history knocking ‘round the seven seas in more than one forecastle. We should like to see what’s inside. The hand-hammered strap hinges gently protest but the boy turns back the lid. I’ve read in William James that smells quicken sure remembrance—well, they are here in urgent suggestions of far Cathay, the Moluccas, of the Celebes and other spice islands. The old people call it “cassia,” though we say cinnamon; this chest must have brought home cassia on occasion: at any rate its lined with strips of red cedar and San Domingo mahogany and sandal wood. It has fragrance when opened that to me is pleasant, though pungent and pervasive.

The boy explores the contents while his father holds the lamp. A broken backed leather bound Bible, with s’s that look like f’s, an old log book, some maps and charts, a volume of town records, a bunch of yellow letters tied with a faded blue linen rag, a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, a Bodwich’s Navigator and a box that used to hold a sextant. These and some sea shells from the south seas, (the boy holds one to his ear to hear the throbbing ocean), a few small nuggets of gold from California, more books—a lot of junk, so the boy thought—then. Now—with reverence he closes the lid realizing that the chest is empty—except for memories.

***

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Our ancestor, Thomas Sr. stayed on, as the old records show, was often fined for formulating “violent utterance,” and was elected to offices of trust in the town. A house that he built in 1660 still stands, older than any in Plymouth, humble but respectful. From that day to this his descendents have held such positions as were in the gift of their fellow citizens of the citizens of the township assembled in that pure democracy known as the “town meeting,” an institution which persisted until a couple of decades ago and was, next to Thanksgiving, the great high day of my young life. (The year I left the village for a somewhat belated college training, I was nominated for town clerk. Such things were in the family tradition.)

It’s time to get back to Pilgrim’s Progress. I was taught by precept and by example to love books. My first love was Pilgrim’s Progress. I remember it first as the book, the only one except the Bible, that was available for Sunday use. It had in it a few pictures—one of the Holy City that I often looked at after our mother died. (I was five then.) Another picture, a steel engraving, showed Christians passing through the Valley of the Shadow. The very word hobgoblin will chill my spine, to this hour. That valley was beset with them—hobgoblins. I was afraid to look yet could not forbear.

Father would read by the hour. After mother died his loneliness made him my companion. Night after night he would read me to sleep. Weeknights it was history, some poetry like Milton, stories from the Youth’s Companion, but chiefly history. That and stories that he had heard his grandfather tell, Indians, the ‘Red Coats,’ whaling—no end of that from Father and all his cronies (friends, I should say they were a dignified lot, mostly).

***

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The Sabbath was a long and weary day. Red socks that scratched like nettles, a Scotch kilt, a stiff collar, in these one went to Sunday school (after the one leisurely breakfast of the week, when we always had muffins—all I could eat—instead of the pancakes of week day, of which I tired—“nothin’ but buckwheat.”) After nine thirty Sunday school came eleven o’clock Church that lasted always an hour and a half. I sat, or squirmed through it, beside my father. Almost always when I got home there was a lickin’ for not sitting still. (One Sunday I happened to sit where I could see the minister’s daughter and thought that I could do what she did. I followed my exemplar; when we got home I was whipped with unusual severity. After that I made my own behavior patterns.)

***

--> I learned the Bible not only from Sunday reading and Sunday school and long passages read in Church but chiefly, I surmise, from morning prayers which came immediately after breakfast every day of the year, rain or shine, sickness or health, feast or famine. Breakfast over, father got the big Bible and read a short passage; the family, the hired man, the kitchen servant (an old Indian), all knelt down and father prayed; some of his phrases come back to me, often “using the Lord’s mercies and not abusing them.” I know something about the great liturgies of the saints; his phrases thrill me still. He knew the diction of the Bible; it dignified his speech. My older brother who was the support of father’s old age died one morning just before breakfast time, after the meal (such as it was) father called the family together and read the forty-sixth Psalm—“God is our refuge and strength . . . therefore we will not fear” clear to the end. . . “The God of hosts is with us,” knelt down and without a quaver in his voice commended us to “God’s gracious mercy and protection.” Since then, and more than once, I have heard that benediction on the lips of the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury in his vast cathedral. Lord Davidson, like the present Archbishop, was born in a Scottish manse and had “the liturgical gift” but the accents of that Puritan father whose unwavering faith found Holy Scripture its ready vehicle of expression are the ones that echo through the temple of my spirit.

Charles Henry Halsey | Obituary

The Southampton Press,

Wednesday, August 15, 1906

Charles Henry Halsey

Last Thursday, at five o’clock in the morning, another of our oldest inhabitants passed away at the ripe age of 73 years and 10 months, 72 of which were spent in this village. Mr. Halsey was born in New York city, where his father, Captain Harry Halsey, pursued his trade of mason.

Although not taking an active part in village and church affairs officially, Mr. Halsey maintained an interest in both and was always interested in the ways and means looking to success in all undertakings affecting each. A life-long member of the Presbyterian church, Mr. Halsey was consistent in his belief and led the life of a true christian. Genial and kindly in his associations with his fellow men, he was universally respected and leaves to his family and friend an honorable memory.

Mr. Halsey was descended from one of the Colonial families and was eight in line from Thomas Halsey, 1640: Daniel, Daniel, Henry, Jesse, Charles Fithian, Captain Harry, Charles Henry.

The deceased was the son of Captain Harry and Eliza Halsey, and was born October 10^th, 1830. He married Melvina D., daughter of Thomas Terry, December 24^th, 1863. She died June 2, 1887, of pneumonia, aged 43 years. Four children were born to them: Harry Thomas, deceased; Lizzie May, wife of Edward P. White; Abigail Fithian, and Jesse, who survive.

The funeral with was held at his late residence at two o’clock Saturday afternoon was largely attended. Rev. R. S. Campbell, D.D. conducting the services. Internment in new cemetery.

Hatchment

by Jesse Halsey

“They heard not the voice of Him that spake to me.”

{Jack Gardner [is a] soldier who joins church on return because of sunset experience; boy at the wood-pile.}

Hog—swine

Pig—Pork

Cow—beef

Hash—Popui; Webster in one of his definitions of hash, frankly says “A mess.”

Not to tarry over definition—a best this is, but popui—with sauce or without, a hash of experience. No horse meat, we trust—though we can testify it’s not so bad when you don’t know it. We had a sausage factory improvised in Siberia during the War, supposedly and actually we used reindeer meat, but I have a suspicion that ex cavalry equines go in at times, rabbits (arctic hares that is), and when one is skun a mongrel Eskimo dog looks just the same and if you don’t know it—tastes the same or similar. (I have eaten snakes in Japan, didn’t know the difference, thinking they were eels—which I catch thru the ice on Long Island, skin and fry—a delectable morsel.)

Why this dietetic metaphor—I can’t say; we started with hash. And this is just a sample here and there out of an oldster’s reminiscences of things grave and gay; res sacra and res secularia, unrelated likely to any logic, but tied into the stream of life for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, till death doth part soul and body and memory fades out of fructifies into heavenly harvest—or hellish (most hells of any gripping reality to men since Dante are constructed of memories).

But to get on; or rather to go back. Some one asked Duncan Spaeth, coach of the Princeton Crew why it was that rowing was his favorite sport—“Only thing I know where by looking back you can get ahead.” (Parenthesis, no two. The very time that Henry Ford called all history “bunk” he, nonetheless, was putting little concave mirrors on the front of the drivers [side] so he could see the road behind; that’s the only way to drive safely to at least glance on the road behind.)

With this recurring justification or alibi or reminiscence, we start again. A new England kitchen, big fireplace, brick oven, Saturday night and baked beans and brown bread. A red damask spic and span table cloth on a square walnut table; four persons seated. Kerosene lamp, flickers from the smoldering fireplace; the lazy hum of the tea kettle, now that the tea is brewed. A boy maybe twelve, and his older sister back to the wall, facing the fire; bewildered father at one end of the table, elderly aunt at the other.

Melvina Terry Halsey, 1842-1887

Father seemed old to the boy whose mother was dead, he himself as one born out of due time; father seemed old, he was old, looked old, felt old (rheumatism; its antidote a jug of hard cider with whittlings of barberry in it; the boy often went a mile down the lane to Uncle Harvey's barberry for twigs and bark for the decoction). Mother had died, quite young, when boy was five or less; father lived ever under its shadow; older sisters always thought that if father had been less stubborn (loyal) and had the new doctor who had come fresh from Ann Arbor and never lost a case of pneumonia, likely mother would have lived--who knows.

Aunt Gussie’s (her husband father's brother, she was mother's sister) husband, Uncle Will, our favorite out of a baker's dozen, at least, of uncles, had taken the boy, od six, his adult brother (and a neighbor's boy of five—Lewis Hildreth—on a clamming expedition. One horse box wagon, two wash tubs with ropes attached and down to Sebonac "gut" where the tide cuts in and out between the big bay and the cold spring, scallop bond—Ram Island and other ramifying creeks. (They say cricks down east, our way.) . . .

The men go out on the flats and beyond, the crop is plentiful and the tubs soon filled—a long hour or so—the boys play on the shore, shells and stones in many shapes and colors collected and arranged, and houses built and paddling in the lapping wash of the tiny waves; swimming lessons will come later when the men get back. Uncle Will is nearing the shore, crossing the channel, when he throws up his hands and flounders in the tide rip. The boys think he is playing a trick to amuse them. (He was always up to making them laugh—our favorite uncle.) He goes down “for the third time” as the saying goes and Lewis says (I can hear his lisp now), “I guess he’s gone down to look for his hat.” Alarmed, they begin to run up and down the beach wafting their coats like the old folks do when they sight a whale, shouting till finally Harry comes slowly thru the teeming water but fast he can, reaching the flat he kicks off the tub handle half of it, thus free from the rope and tub he plunges in the deep water of the gut and though the tide has carried tub and body far into the inlet he reaches the tub, now empty, tied to uncle Will and brings the body to the shore; the boys following the shoreline come to the place and stand helpless by while Harry rolls the body on the tub trying to extract the water from the lungs. (No Red Cross training in those days; only sailor’s methods.) Some furtive clam diggers from another township across the bay whose sloop is hidden behind Ram Island, hearing the boys’ shouts finally come and they and Harry work on half an hour without avail. The boy hears his brother now, across the intervening half century plus, as Harry lifts our uncle’s lifeless body into the one horse farm wagon, carefully bedded with dry seaweed from the shore—a fitting coach for an old whaler, but still (brothers sob) it seems inappropriate for a man just entering middle life. The long slow drive home, Harry and the boys on the seat, the body in the wagon shrouded in the horse blanket. The boys eat the lunch—wondering why Harry doesn’t. (They were six and five.) We stop at the first house from the shore and tell Cap’n ‘Lias (White), he saddles his horse and rides to the village to find Father, who like the elder brother of the parable only in this one regard was “in the field,” after going to tell his sister-in-law and her daughter, joins us at the foot of the lane as we come up to the house.

No professional morticians in those days—not there at least—and old Aunt Libbie who had ushered us all into the world and our parents before us—Aunt Libbie takes over. The boy at her direction goes across the street to Father’s barn to show the men where to find the rough pine plank 48’’ x 6’ on which his mother had been “laid out” some months before; stored up there in the hay mow (the east end where a great round shiny ships spar tied the hand hewn oak rafters together. What a job for a boy—or boys, for “Little Lewis” went along, too. (He died the next year.) But that’s another story; we wander too far; let’s get back to the kitchen table. There are shadows in the room you see; not of westerning sun’s making for the flicker of the fireplace logs—Father at one end of the table, Aunt Gussie at the other, going their best for the others’ sake to be cheerful.

. . . No levity; but much wisdom in the meagre conversation. Meagre is the gossip ("Gossip" says father, who studies the dictionary and knew his Latin from Academy days, "'Gossip' was once a good word akin to Gospel"--let's make it that and when some really unpleasant sure enough bit of unsavory morsel of truth filtered in, Father would say, "As Biney (his wife, my mother) used to say, 'Maye, for we all have a crook in the elbow.'" Then he would add as was his Scriptural custom, "Charity covereth a multitude of sins."