Puritan Leveretts

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A story from the Revolution

I've been telling my kids and friends this story because it's very revolution, very 1776, very Leverett. The hero of this story was not my ancestor; he died before he could create descendants. He was a Leverett during the Revolutionary War.

Thomas and his cousin John Leverett graduated from Harvard in 1776, the year they moved Harvard over to Concord, Mass. so that the soldiers could use the old buildings as a barracks. Concord was unacceptable as a replacement and many suspected that they cut some corners to make it possible for the class of 1776 to graduate, but they did. Thomas was to become a surgeon while his cousin John was a lawyer and would therefore be known as John Esquire, though he never practiced much as a lawyer.

Thomas would have become a surgeon but the war broke out and, as a doctor, he was placed on a boat heading to Maine to fight the British. But the boat was captured, and all the prisnoners were deposited in the Jersey, an old boat that was sitting and rotting in Brooklyn harbor, a boat that the British were using as a prison.

The British were very aggravated at the rebel soldiers and took it out on them. They figured that if they mistreated these prisoners badly enough it would teach everyone a lesson. The boat was rotting and wet and unsafe below, and they brought only scraps of unhealthy food to them. Soon the prisoners started dying, but they didn't care. The orders were treat them like hell and everyone followed the orders.

Thomas, being a doctor and all, was appalled by the conditions, and protested to the Captain of his own boat, who was also a prisoner. Status however didn't seem to matter. Everyone was suffering appalling conditions.

Finally the captain got Thomas and one other guy to join him, and plead to offer a deal to the Americans. You free some British prisoners, and the British will free these and save their lives. It was their only hope. The British agreed to let them talk to the appropriate authorities, who would be generals under Washington, along with British authorities, and see if some kind of humane trade could be arranged.

They did it at a bad time in the war, though. The Americans weren't interested. They weren't making deals with anyone for anything. They felt like they were about to win the war and any deal would look like accepting the permanent status of prisoners and those who would soon be free anyway. No deals were happening, and Thomas went back to being on the prison ship.

Many died on the Jersey and its documentation rebuilt a very horrific scene. A recent book has been written about it called Ghost Ship of Brooklyn, which documents the horrible conditions and the number of people who died, in some cases seven or eight a day.

Others, like Thomas, were simply so damaged they could never live a normal life again. After the war the prisoners were released and Thomas did have a chance to practice as a surgeon, but he died after only six or seven years, unable to recover his full health. Of course he received lots of recognition as a surviving prisoner of war.

Some said that the harsh treatment of prisoners actually backfired on the British and made Americans more likely to defend the rebels, more likely to join the war efforts, less likely to have any sympathy for the British at all. For years bones would wash up onto Brooklyn Harbor's beaches and people would tell stories about the prisoners. So many of those prisoners didn't survive, or if they did, couldn't have descendents, so we don't know what to make of the stories when we encounter them.

Thomas's cousin John had an interesting tale. During the war his parents were very sick and he moved them to Connecticut, where they could be cared for more properly. His mother would inherit a farm up in Windsor, Vermont, whereas his father, Colonel John, who had given up printing to run an imported goods store, only to find that the 1760's was a terrible time to run an imported goods business, had simply left Boston after years of being an Overseer of the Poor. They had seen enough of the "Times of Hardship" and the "Times of Suffering" where Bostonians had starved and been unable to import food legally due to a chokehold tariff by Britain...anyway, from Connecticut, when he finally did join the war it didn't amount to much. And when his mother inherited that farm in Windsor Vermont, he would move up there and occupy it.

An odd thing happened, though. His second wife was a cousin, Thomas the surgeon's sister Hannah. Thomas the surgeon would have inherited his father's printing fortune, but he, being dead, could not, so Hannah had inherited it, and now all the wealth was combined in John Esquire's household, soon to move to Vermont, and John Esquire would never have to work again. He became a gentleman farmer and a kind of vocal intellectual.

I'm not sure if he was haunted by knowing what happened to his close cousin, Thomas, on that boat in Brooklyn. It was like the people on those boats were the martyrs of the revolution, having died for the cause, and not only died, but suffered quite a bit in the process. Making the book probably helped memorialize them. It's an unpleasant topic, though, because their treatment was so horrific.

I think of the story sometimes when people remind us that 250 years is a long time, and we often forget what happened and why.

old letters

It was during the Depression I think that Frank Leverett, famous geologist, got interested in family genealogy, and actually went to Boston to see what he could dig up. My great grandfather Will was in his generation, and also interested, and saved many of the letters from Frank, among which this is one. You can see that it comes from Ann Arbor, and its date is 1940. It's a classic.

In it he claims that Will's father James W. had made a mistake. James W. had come through Boston when he was four; had received some children's things from one of his aunts who was taken with how cute a child he was, and had named that aunt as one of the two that were living there with his grandmother, who he met only that once. They had a stagecoach at the time (1834), had it all decked out, and were on their way from Maine to Illinois.

So this aunt, Frank said, was a relict, or surviving widow, of a Leverett, brother of James W.'s father. But the one who had lost two children was different from the one James W. had named. Frank figured this out.

But my question is this: Is it possible that James W. was right, even though he was only four, and the two lost children should have been attributed to the aunt he named, not the other aunt? These trees are sometimes reconstructed on very flimsy evidence, and are often reconstructed wrong. A child who died, well who knows who its actual parents were? I guess it's just a question. We are using one tree to call James W. wrong, while maybe we should be using James W.'s personal witness to question that tree.

Not sure if anything will come of this. I'll show you the letter if you're interested.

Catherine Mauer

My father, James R. Leverett Jr., once said that most people have pleasant memories of their maternal grandmothers, but he had no pleasant memories of his. His grandmother, Catherine Mauer, moved in with his mother and father and, according to him, made their lives absolutely miserable. As an example he said that his mother was sick and needed medical advice, but couldn't talk to her brother, my dad's Uncle Roy, because grandmother had a feud with him and wouldn't allow him into the house. I was curious about how somebody could become that angry, that difficult, that unpleasant, so I did research into her life.

Born into a family of Ostfrisians, originally from that northern land between Netherlands and Germany, she was born in Ogle County, Illinois, which had a kind of Ostfrisian community. It's not clear to me whether her father, John Singelmann, served in the Civil War or not, but she was born right after that, the third of four daughters all born in Illinois. Her mother, Katharine, may have used the German spelling but named her Elizabeth Catherine with her middle name clearly being the same as her mother's. The family moved to Hancock, Iowa, on the Nishnibotna River, in Pottawattomie County, not too far from Council Bluffs.

As far as I can tell life was difficult out there; it was isolated. I am not sure whether the girls were able to help John with the farming, or whether they were able to hire anyone, but the best I can figure, no, no. The second daughter married a prominent local farmer in the Minden area; Charles and the Mauer clan were from York township, near Minden.

Minden was a German town with lots of Ostfrisians and even a Dutch Reformed Church, which is no doubt where Catherine met Charles. They married in 1893. But John, her father, died that same year. I may have to get the exact dates nailed down here but this is my understanding.

She went with Charles to live at his family's farmhouse in York Township. The house was large but his older brother was already married (to another Kate or Catherine Mauer) and also had several children. She soon had her three children, Leona, Roy, and Verna, while still in that farmhouse. It would be crowded.

If Charles wanted to farm, he'd have several choices. His parents Henry and Anna would surely split their farm into two and let him build on the empty half, given that his older brother wanted the farm and, as oldest, was in line to get it. They could also save money and buy a nearby farm, though cash was hard to come by and this appears that it would be more difficult.

But the last option would be for him to take that Hancock farm once the father died. She may have even hoped or expected him to, since they were family. With her father dead, her mother and two sisters were in trouble. The first sister married and moved out, now leaving her mom with a young teenage girl, her young sister.

Charles would take his share of the farm (I presume) and buy into a hardware store in Council Bluffs, and work there through the early years of the 1900s. He would take Catherine and the three children and move to Council Bluffs where they would live on Harrison St. I am still trying to work out whether this is what he wanted, or whether it was his only choice, given that his brother would inherit the main farm that he grew up on.

Not all people are made for farming; in that era it was mostly running horses, and attaching plows to them, or figuring out how to bring in crops somehow and get them to market. Hancock being isolated, it would take more work, with less reward, than the Mauers were used to, but the Mauers had a fairly successful farm in Minden, and Charles could see what farming would be like in the area. It's a little competitive, brothers on farms isolated day after day, and maybe he couldn't handle that. But also it requires a lot of skills and hard work. Maybe he thought it was too much work.

But here's the tragedy: a couple years later, in early January, the teenage girl, the youngest sister, died. There is no record of what she died of. She is buried at the Dutch Reformed Church near Minden, next to her father. The mother moved out soon after, to move in with the second sister, and died in her sixties soon after (the father died in his fifties). The family was gone.

Charles, after many years running the Swaine-Mauer Hardware store with his partner, Mr. Swaine, decided to open a store where customers checked themselves out, like an Aldi's setup. It was quite revolutionary at the time and I believe he did it with groceries, not hardware. We are talking Council Bluffs here, early twenties, the Roaring Twenties. It failed. He gave up, got a traveling salesman job, and died in Watertown South Dakota (on the road) in the late twenties. My dad's grandmother Julia said she always suspected that Catherine had driven him into the grave.

When he died, she had no place to go except in with her youngest daughter Verna, my grandmother. She wasn't talking to her son. Her older daughter was out in California in a small apartment. Verna took her in because she could. She made Verna's life miserable and Verna died early; my dad said he suspected dying was the only way she could get out of it. By this time there was nothing pleasant or loving of her at all.

How could she be this way? I finally concluded that the answer lies out in that Hancock farm, or in the story of what happened to it. By the way I'm not exactly sure what happened to it, so I could be wrong here, but the lack of records or clear testimony suggests that they just sold it out and left it; if nobody could or would farm it, it would go to someone who could. Could she be mad at him for not doing that? Could she have deep down expected him to take and run a farm and take care of her mother and little sister? The bitterness of her sister's death must have eaten away at her, I figure.

There may be more to the story that I haven't uncovered, given that records are scarce and not enough to go by anyway. I keep wondering what I'm missing, or if what I've found is really enough to justify the turn in her life. My father didn't know her until the thirties when it was the Depression and everybody was miserable. Apparently the fight with her son was over handling of Union Pacific stock, the family fortune, and would have been right around then. I have yet to really look into that. Maybe being hungry during the Depression was enough whether her son-in-law, my grandfather, provided for her or not.

Frank Leverett Day

A word should be said about Frank Leverett Day, March 10, which oddly enough I celebrated this year in my own kind of way. I like to tell my family stories about Frank Leverett, though I didn't really have much chance to do it, so I'll do it here.

Frank Leverett was probably the most famous of the Leveretts, a geologist who was in the first Who's Who in around 1900, and then set the record for being in more consecutive Who's Whos than anyone else; he was in that Who's Who until well into the 1920's. That's because a geologist rock star doesn't turn up every year, but he wss solid, deserving, and as famous as he always was every time they went looking for a geologist. He had walked 100,000 miles of the midwest looking for evidence of where the glaciers had receded because he had figured out, based on surface features, what could predictably be found beneath. His methods were particularly useful to the oil boys but that story I will save for later. He at one point went to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition and showed off through his exhibit "Soils of Illinois" everything he had found up and down the lake, and out this way, toward the Mississippi Valley. Though he had grown up in the Iowa Territory, born during the Civil War, his work convinced him that during the Ice Age the Mississippi actually flowed down to the west, down through Columbus Junction Iowa, so his little cabin in Denmark down by Burlington would have actually been to the east of it. Today I live in that territory, more or less, east of the river.

He's a family hero because toward the end of his life he started collecting "data" about the family, and investigating the tenuous connection between the western Leveretts and the original Puritan ones from Massachusetts colony fame. He even went back there, found an old lady living in a house full of antiques in Boston, and inquired about the line, carefully writing down everything he found. When he got to Harvard a friend gave him his edited chapter on The Great Leverett, about John Leverett the President of Harvard in the early 1700s. With this came a general overview of how the Leveretts could have been related and who we really had going back as far as we could. But in this process he became interested in longevity. How long had everyone lived? Was it a genetic trait or what? What kind of averages were out there? Where would he fit in, i.e. how long would he live?

His birthday was on March 10, and so was his second wife's, and together they made a habit of celebrating, every year, having made it to another one.

This year I made it to Chicago, picked up one son near Lakeshore Drive, and went to see two others, also on Lakeshore Drive, to celebrate their grandpa's turning 100 on Mar. 10. A longevity party. This was my ex-wife's father, not mine; in fact longevity is not really a trait of our line. We, like Frank, can expect to make it to about 90 if we're lucky. But what's luck? To me it was to be able to drive on Lakeshore Drive, see the big city at its best, be in a room with three sons, and make it home all in one piece. Here's to Frank Leverett, great map-maker of the midwest. Picture is Frank and Charles, his brother, in Iowa, around the Civil War.

Harvardinates

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True story of the beginning of secular education in the colonies.
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