Few people in New Paris, Ohio, know the Reverend Benjamin Russel Hanby or his music. Occasionally travelers will stop to inquire about his historical marker, but the villagers have let Hanby and his song-writing career rest in obscurity. After all, in this town Hanby was just another rejected sojourner on a walk through time, a man who never believed he had reached his goal. He stayed briefly, wrote the enduring Christmas folk song “Up on the Housetop,” and left. His is considered among the oldest American Christmas songs and the first folk piece written about Santa Claus.
Hanby’s life began the first time he heard melodies in his head, made by various musical instruments that he longed to play. He plucked the tunes from his mind, matching them with words that came to him in quiet moments. Songs flowed from his pen, and by the late 1850s he was one of Ohio’s most successful songwriters—but not the wealthiest. The only thing rich about him was his creative and happy spirit.
During the Civil War, Hanby’s songs entertained weary Union and Confederate soldiers. Afterward, his holiday tunes created Christmas traditions for millions of children and churchgoers. In his brief life, he wrote an estimated one hundred songs, of which seventy-nine were published—for any songwriter, in any time, a 79 percent publishing rate is impressive. Though most of his songs are now a forgotten part of Victorian history, three are still sung regularly: the sentimental prewar standard “Darling Nelly Gray,” the hymn “Who Is He in Yonder Stall,” and, of course, the Christmas carol “Up on the Housetop.”
Benjamin Russel Hanby, probably in the 1860s. (Courtesy Ohio Historical Society, Columbus)
But Hanby did more than just compose enduring songs. He used his positions as minister and, later, sheet music editor to campaign for musical accompaniment in churches. In a time when most congregations wanted to hear only human voices, he believed that instruments of many kinds could enrich Sunday services. He also supported the temperance movement and wrote anthems for its followers, including “Heroism,” in which he lauded moral strength. He also wrote for the prominent Dayton-based Ohio temperance newspaper, the Christian Repository, and supported the antislavery movement in the days before the Civil War.
Of all his works, the Christmas song is his legacy; it has long entertained children and adults, and it added a touch of modern Santa Claus to America’s brand of Christmas. Hanby borrowed from his early—and busy—childhood to craft the song’s lyrics. He was born in Rushville, Fairfield County, Ohio, on July 22, 1833, the oldest of eight children of the Reverend William Hanby and his wife, Ann. The elder Hanby, a saddler and a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, was an abolitionist who volunteered on the Underground Railroad, helping escaped slaves find their ways to Canada. (“We may be bound by a man-made law,” he said of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, “but we are more bound by a Lord-given conscience.”) His children lovingly referred to him as The Old Crusader, for his zeal to end slavery and other injustices.
In 1854, the elder Reverend Hanby moved his family to Westerville, where he became one of the first trustees of the new Otterbein College. School literature described his position as “Pioneer Advocate of Colleges for the United Brethren Church.” He and his family left behind their original log cabin and moved into the simple frame house that is now a state memorial managed by the Westerville Historical Society. He knew that by accepting the advocate position, he was making it possible for his children, if they worked hard, to receive a higher education.
Young Hanby toiled to pay for his schooling. He had started working at age six folding papers for his father, and at ten he became a paper carrier and collector in the family’s print shop. (The family also owned a harness shop.) At fourteen, Benjamin bought his first flute with money he’d saved working as a newspaper delivery boy. In those days, flutes were still made of wood; his was made of mahogany, with ivory mountings and German silver keys. He crafted his own wooden case for his new treasure, woodworking being a craft he learned from his father. The case was walnut, lined with brown flannel. His flute became his constant companion, and he stored it in his workbench or carried it in one of his saddlebags everywhere he went. He was always ready to play and compose music.
Enrolling at the college in Westerville at age sixteen, Benjamin followed his father’s path to the Church of the United Brethren, religious music, temperance, and the Underground Railroad. But the younger Hanby had a cause of his own—writing and performing songs. He had started playing music at nine years old when first he took up the flute, and later he added the organ and other instruments to his repertoire.
Hanby might have led an easier life if his calling had been strictly secular music. But he wanted to serve the church by combining music and the ministry. In fire-and-brimstone days, this was no easy task, for many denominations forbade musical instruments during worship.
In 1854, while still living in his parents’ overcrowded house on the corner of Grove and Main Streets with his siblings and grandmother, he wrote songs and studied. (In 1937, the house was moved to 160 West Main Street and dedicated as a historic site.) Patriarch William Hanby bought the children a Hazelton Square piano, and sweet melodies echoed from the parlor. Of course, the younger Hanby took up that instrument, too.
A lack of money prevented Benjamin from graduating from college in four years, so he alternated work and study over nine years. While he was a sophomore at Otterbein in 1856, he put his antislavery sentiments into words by writing “Darling Nelly Gray,” a song based on the true story of a runaway slave named Joseph Selby, who had died at the Hanby home in Rushville in 1842 while fleeing to Canada. During his final hours, Selby had explained that he once hoped to earn enough money to buy his sweetheart’s freedom someday. The day before they were to be married, however, Nelly Gray was sold at auction. Selby lost her, but he never forgot her.
As a child, Hanby heard the escaped slave’s story as his family retold it. It touched him deeply. The Hanby children performed “Darling Nelly Gray” for Hanby’s music teacher, Cornelia Walker, who convinced Benjamin to send the piece to the Oliver Ditson Company, a Boston music publisher with national distribution. Hanby received no reply. Without notifying him, company owners published it under his name, filed for a copyright under their names, and printed and distributed the sheet music. When Hanby heard his creation performed in a concert, he realized it must be a success. So he wrote to the company, seeking payment. “He couldn’t understand why he didn’t get paid,” said Larry Pryfolgle, a docent at the Hanby House museum. “The publisher wrote back and said, ‘You didn’t sign the papers.’ He sent along a dozen copies of the sheet music and added, ‘We have made the money, you the fame. That balances the account.’” With a lawyer’s help, Hanby eventually received $100 for the song. The lawyer took $50; Hanby kept the other half. The publisher did grant one favor: the sheet music was dedicated to Miss Walker.
The song was typical of the era’s sad love songs. A century later, ABC Radio broadcaster Ted Malone described it as “not just fictitious sentiment. It was real-life drama, a page torn out of Ohio and Kentucky history… . The song caught on like a flame and swept across the nation and the world. Translated into foreign tongues, it sold millions of copies.”
“Darling Nelly Gray” became popular two decades before the invention of the phonograph and seven decades before radio swept the nation. It was called the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of songs” for using a true story to acquaint the public with the evils of slavery. It also tugged at Americans’ collective heartstrings, regardless of region.
There’s a low green valley on the old Kentucky shore
Where I’ve whiled many happy hours away
A-sitting and a-singing by the little cottage door
Where lived my darling Nelly Gray.
Chorus:
O my poor Nelly Gray they have taken you away
And I’ll never see my darling anymore
I’m sitting by the river and I’m weeping all the day
For you’ve gone from the old Kentucky shore
When the moon had climbed the mountain,
And the stars were shining too
Then I’d take my darling Nelly Gray
And we’d float down the river in my little red canoe
While my banjo sweetly I would play.
In those days before the war, when many Americans wanted to learn more about slaves and their possible mistreatment, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she claimed to have based on stories she heard about slave trading in Kentucky while she lived in Cincinnati. Like the slaves in her book, Selby escaped across the Ohio River and pushed deep into the Buckeye State. Both Stowe’s book and Hanby’s song caught on quickly in the North.
Hanby entered the prewar music business just as it was leaving minstrel and torch songs for more patriotic music. With the success of Stephen Foster’s sheet music a few years earlier, the business was expanding to tap a growing market for families who wanted to sing and play piano in their parlors. Sheet music was fast becoming the main source of song distribution in America, and it would remain that way until the phonograph developed commercially in the late 1890s.
To Hanby’s surprise, “Nelly Gray”’s sheet music remained a major hit for several years. At the start of the Civil War, Union soldiers sang its melancholy melody around campfires. Confederate soldiers enjoyed the song so much that they changed the lyrics and sang it too. “The song had phenomenal sales,” historian Charles B. Galbreath wrote in 1925. “It was published in many forms and the tune was arranged for band music. The publisher must have made a small fortune out of it; Hanby had the obscure notice accorded to the songwriter and what to a man of his taste and sensibility must have been far greater—satisfaction of knowing that he had reached the popular heart and conscience in the support of a worthy cause.”
Hanby appreciated Ohio’s abolitionist congressman J. R. Giddings and various antislavery proponents, who sang the song as an anthem of their cause. Some claimed that it had more influence on the public than Uncle Tom’s Cabin because it was sung for free. But Hanby realized that popularity and worthy causes could not pay for food. He would have to work, and the ministry was a natural course.
In 1858, one month shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, Hanby graduated with honors from Otterbein College. He began working there to help the school obtain endowments, but the pay was low and he longed to preach. He also could have left for New York to try the songwriting business, but he had love on his mind—and the object of that love was Mary Katherine “Kate” Winter, one of two women who had graduated in Otterbein’s first class a year earlier.
Kate liked Ben because of his optimism, good humor, and talents. He talked three male friends into going with him to her house to sing her a love song he had based on “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She was embarrassed, but eventually she realized how much she enjoyed being with him. He shared with her his songs and articles, and he always kept her laughing, even when his subject was food:
By merciful Providence,” he once wrote, “man is so constituted that he may eat, think and talk, all at the same time. Here the table is often the scene of animated and interesting conversation, provided love is there. How beautiful is the arrangement by which members of a household are morning, noon and night (I pity the folks who eat only twice a day!) brought around the family board. Would it not be well for modern times to take a hint here? Had I been appointed architect of the Capitol at Washington, I would have constructed a couple of immense dining rooms with all the necessary appurtenances… . Imagine, if you can, a congressman helping himself to a batter cake, and at the same time calling his brother member a liar!
Kate Winter must have smiled when she married Ben Hanby on June 25, 1858, and thereafter every time she set the dinner table. They had love in the house. The following year, she gave birth to a son, Brainerd, in Westerville. Their own family was set.
But their plans for a growing family pressed Hanby to earn more money. In 1860, he accepted the job of principal at Seven Mile Academy, a private school in that small village, near Hamilton in Butler County, Ohio. He ran the school and also taught. With no pastor’s job available, he worked at the academy for two years. Finally, he received the call from the Brethren Church in Lewisburg, a small Preble County town where the main occupation was, and still is, farming. Although the rural congregation liked Benjamin and Kate for their kindness and good-natured ways, they had expected a preacher filled with hellfire. From the start, they saw Hanby was not going to offer that style of preaching. They could see by his appearance that he was a positive thinker, a man who would rather talk about music than hell. They could see kindness on his face—his curly dark hair fell across the tops of his ears, and his beard was moderately long, with no mustache. His eyes were penetrating.
When he suggested using musical instruments in the church, members didn’t exactly sing his praises. A few parishioners began to doubt his commitment to the sacred rites. Meanwhile, the Hanby family added a second child, a daughter named Minniehaha, born in Lewisburg in 1862.
Benjamin and Kate were an outgoing couple who enjoyed joking and talking with neighbors and congregation members. People liked the new preacher because he was down to earth and enthralled with life and its possibilities. Setbacks did not deter Hanby; neither did poverty.
As parishioners wished him well, he tried to explain to them the joys of using music in church services. They didn’t like his idea. To try to prove his point, he played his flute in the sanctuary. People frowned; some told him that such devices were “instruments of the devil.” Patiently, he said the instruments were not evil, but because good people refused to allow musical instruments to be played in churches, others took them into dance halls and barrooms, where anyone with a fiddle and flute could entertain. He said church services didn’t have to be bleak and repetitive, not when such music was available. Children responded to music, and he predicted that they would come to church willingly if instruments were played. Church members didn’t agree. They threatened action if musical instruments were introduced into services. They went so far as to say that music threatened the sanctity of church services. As one writer would explain later, “the Reverend Hanby was treading on dangerous ground … the austere element of the Puritan spirit was then still dominant,” and many people believed music “was one of the insinuating devices of Satan himself.”
Hanby backed off temporarily, trying to fulfill his songwriting needs through a new part-time job he had taken with the John Church Company, a music publisher with offices in Cincinnati, Chicago, and New York. When he no longer could resist sharing music with his congregation, he came up with an idea: Present a church play for the children showing the three wise men visiting Jesus. Unfortunately, that rankled important members of the church. They shunned the young minister and his play, and finally, they asked him to resign—he did. The Brethren Church transferred him to a small church in New Paris, a neighboring Preble County town, and to another small church in Darke County. The jobs offered hope for the heartbroken minister.
In New Paris today, the only reminder of Hanby is a marker erected by the state, declaring this is the town where he composed “Up on the Housetop” in 1864. “The children of New Paris were the first to sing the song,” said Barbara Brower, a local teacher who researched Hanby’s life. “A few years ago we tried to promote him and the song, but really there’s not much left here to remember him by. Everything has changed.”
His wooden house at the corner of Pearl and Washington streets burned long ago and was replaced by an insurance agency. In December, village workers hang big green wreaths and red bells all along the business district, but that’s as close as anybody comes to proclaiming New Paris as Ohio’s Christmas song capital. “This thing about Mr. Hanby,” postmaster Hugh Hart once said, “is not something we bring up in town that much.”
Despite the changes, New Paris is still much like the farming community of Hanby’s time. Small town. Honest people. No theaters, no shopping centers, no fancy buildings. Just a collection of old homes, stores, and churches. Barbara Hutchison, a librarian at the county seat in Eaton, recalled that New Paris used to have a Christmas celebration in honor of Hanby, “but that was years ago. Now, we don’t even have much information on him here at the library.”
When Hanby arrived in New Paris in 1863, the region’s economy was sinking and people were worried. As the Civil War continued, neighbors in southern Ohio towns argued about whether the fight was good for their state and the nation. Businesses found their vital southern markets cut off, and antiwar activists called Copperheads grew in strength in neighboring Butler County. Yet Benjamin Hanby still had music to make him happy; he continued to write secular and religious songs in his spare time. In a letter dated September 14, 1864, he told the owner of the Philip Phillips & Company, a song company in New Castle, Indiana, that he wanted to buy one of the firm’s songbooks. Apparently Hanby was personally acquainted with Phillips. In the letter, now on file at the Smithsonian Institution, Hanby revealed his aspirations and good humor by ending, “I hope I shall prove a formidable, but always honorable, competitor. Good luck to you (whenever it don’t cost me too much!).”
At the time, the Brethren Church in New Paris needed a minister. Hanby accepted the call. At first, things went well; shortly after moving his family to town, however, he brought an organ to the church services. Members immediately split over such an innovation. “The majority stood behind the young minister,” wrote historian Dacia C. Shoemaker of Westerville, “but his gentle and sensitive soul could not bear division of opinion in his little congregation. When his pleas for more beauty and brightness in the lives of young people failed, he made it known that if he could not take music into the church he would take the church into music and serve outside the pulpit. With anguish of heart, he quietly resigned.”
Hanby knew only two things—preaching and songwriting. He didn’t know how to combine them and create a full-time occupation. So he rented an empty store, moved in his organ and books, and opened a singing school for children. He taught them songs and how to sing together, and he preached to them. The country town reacted indifferently to his venture. Meanwhile, his health and income declined. He believed he was a failure. “The days ahead were dark and difficult,” Shoemaker wrote in 1941. “Hanby stood before the world a misunderstood and misjudged man, his income gone, in frail health and in debt. But he kept a song in his heart and went forward.”
In the gloomy days of December 1864, he tried to tell himself that he was useful, but his circumstances told him otherwise. His school was failing financially. He had no money to buy sheet music for his few students, so he wrote out their parts on a blackboard. His only commission was his promise to provide entertainment at a Quaker Christmas dinner for orphans in Richmond, Indiana, a larger town not far away. One day he remembered that he had no new song to sing. So he sat down and wrote these words:
Up on the house, no delay, no pause,
Clatter the steeds of Santa Claus;
Down thro’ the chimney with loads of toys,
Ho for the little ones, Christmas joys.
Chorus:
O! O! O! Who wouldn’t go,
O! O! O! Who wouldn’t go,
Up on the housetop, click! click! click!
Down thro’ the chimney with good Saint Nick.
Look in the stockings of Little Will,
Ha! Is it not a “glorious bill”?
Hammer and gimlet and lots of tacks,
Whistle and whirligig, whip and cracks.
Snow-white stocking of Little Nell,
Oh, pretty Santa crown it well;
Leave her a dolly that laughs and cries,
One that can open and shut its eyes.
The images were borrowed from Hanby’s memories of childhood Christmases—Little Will was his younger brother. But even with such a store of recollections to draw from Hanby didn’t have time to complete the song before Christmas 1864. The children of the singing school didn’t mind, though. They liked what they heard of it, and later the orphans in Richmond gleefully took up the refrain. Still, Hanby didn’t know what he had in the Christmas song. For years he didn’t even consider publishing it; he didn’t think it was important enough.
Before 1864 ended, the John Church Company rescued Hanby by offering a full-time songwriting position. Of course, he accepted. For once, Hanby worked for someone who nurtured his talent. He composed temperance songs; religious songs; pro-Union songs; and jubilees, which he wrote in Negro dialect (he was one of the earliest composers to do this). The job enabled him the freedom to write and publish more songs, including the temperance pieces “Revellers’ Chorus” and “Crowding Awfully.”
By the time the war was ending in 1865, Hanby’s songs had attracted interest from the music business, particularly from George F. Root, a famous Chicago composer. Root, the mid-Victorian equivalent of Irving Berlin, asked Hanby to be his children’s music editor. Hanby couldn’t believe his sudden turn of luck. Root was a partner in Root & Cady, the Midwest’s largest music publisher and an instrument distributor. The company, established by his brother, Ebenezer Root, and his business partner, Chauncey M. Cady, had more prestige than John Church. George Root had already composed some successful Civil War songs, including “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching” and “Just Before the Battle, Mother.” Impressed that the company’s founders had all started as music teachers, Hanby gathered his family and moved to Chicago to write and promote songs for children.
When George Root listened to Hanby’s material, he heard something original yet commercial. He wanted to teach the young minister how to further develop his composing style. Both men loved music, and, thirteen years Hanby’s senior, Root took on the role of older brother. By then, the highly respected Root had played organ at the Church of the Strangers in New York and taught music at the Abbott Institute for Young Ladies. In 1850, he had toured Europe, and when he returned he took a job as an assistant at Boston’s Academy of Music. Soon the lure of entertainment took him to New York, where he became a writer of minstrel songs and a collaborator with such successful songwriters as the Reverend David Nelson, composer of “The Shining Shore,” and Frances Jane Crosby, who wrote “There’s Music in the Air.” In 1859, Root moved to Chicago to join his brothers in their sheet music publishing company. In 1863, he wrote “The First Gun Is Fired” and other war songs, making the company even more successful.
At Root’s urging, Hanby collaborated on songs and edited songbooks for several months. Hanby wrote now-forgotten tunes such as “Little Tillie’s Grave,” “Ole Shady, the Song of the Contraband,” “Terrible Tough,” “The Nameless Heroine,” “Chick-A-Dee-Dee,” “In a Horn,” “Over the Silent Sea,” “Willie’s Temptation,” “The Robin,” and “Now Den! Now Den!”
Finally, Hanby had found his real calling. He responded with total commitment. During his stay in Chicago, he wrote more than sixty melodies and lyrics for about half of them. It seemed he knew he had to make the most of his short time. He also toured the Midwest, lecturing on music. In 1866, he wrote his last song, the Christmas hymn “Who Is He in Yonder Stall,” in Chicago. The five-verse piece is still sung today and is included in the United Methodist Hymnal. It includes these lines:
Who is he in yonder stall
At whose feet the shepherds fall?
Tis the Lord, O wondrous story!
Tis the Lord, the King of glory!
At his feet we humbly fall
Crown him, crown him, Lord of all!
Lo, at midnight who is he
Prays in dark Gethsemane?
Who is he in Calvary’s throes
Asks for blessings on his foes?
Tis the Lord, O wondrous story!
Tis the Lord, the King of Glory!
At his feet we humbly fall
Crown him, crown him Lord of all!
One day in 1866 while working in Chicago, Hanby remembered his old “Santa Claus.” He polished and finished the song with a little help from a friend known only as Pauline, who added two stanzas that included the characters Lazy Jim, pa, ma, uncle, and grandma. “These two verses Hanby liked and retained,” Shoemaker wrote a century later, “but he rearranged the poem so as to allow Rover, the dog, to create the story’s and wag his ‘Thankee’ in the last verse, as originally written.”
Although Pauline’s identity remains unknown, Shoemaker noted that the mysterious songwriter could have been a friend, the wife of P. P. Bliss, a musical evangelist who knew Hanby in Chicago. The Blisses died in an 1876 railroad accident in Ashtabula. Pauline, whoever she was, did not receive credit for her small but important contribution to the lyrics. But this was not unusual in the 1800s and early 1900s.
In the autumn of 1866, Hanby featured the newly revised song in Root & Cady’s quarterly Our Song Birds, edited by Hanby and Root. The song’s popularity spread quickly.
Sadly, Hanby had little time to enjoy his good fortune. While on the road, he caught a bad cold. After he climbed three flights of stairs at a hotel in Wisconsin, his lungs hemorrhaged. Kate came to nurse him. Three weeks later, she helped him get back home to Chicago, where physicians diagnosed him with tuberculosis. With his family and Root by his bedside, Hanby died, at just thirty-three. Adding more frustration to his early death, his traveling trunk—packed with new songs and other works—was lost.
Root was shaken. “He died,” he said of Hanby, “at the commencement of his career.” Kate Hanby said, “If to be a good storyteller is to be a king among children, he certainly deserved the title.” His body was taken to Westerville for burial in Otterbein Cemetery. Honoring one of Hanby’s song titles, his grave marker read, “Over the Silent Sea Passed Benjamin R. Hanby, March 16, 1867, aged 33 years.”
Fortunately, his most popular song did not die with him. Thanks to children across the nation, “Up on the Housetop” continued to be sung without benefit of songbook. After his death, the song began to take new form—its stanzas reversed, its text slightly altered, its title changed—depending on the memory and accuracy of the one who handed it down. The composer’s name, meanwhile, was forgotten, and the song marked “anonymous.” During its lost period, the tune was known under five titles: “Santa Claus May Be Recognized,” “Santa Claus,” “Good Saint Nick,” “Saint Nicholas,” and, in Hawaii, “Up on the Housetop.” Ultimately, sheet music publishers settled on the latter title.
Hanby’s death came eleven years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Ultimately, the so-called talking machine gave Hanby and all songwriters the most prominent distribution for their creativity in the history of entertainment. Thanks to Edison and the people who refined the phonograph, “Nelly Gray” and “Housetop” were heard by succeeding generations of listeners. If Hanby had lived forty more years, he could have been a big success writing secular and religious songs. The new phonograph performers could have recorded his latest songs, and his music might have revived. Death had ended the prolific Buckeye storyteller’s career just a little too soon.
In 1968, Merrill C. Gilfillan of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources researched “Housetop’s” long history and concluded in a state-published magazine story, “Hanby’s name was forgotten, but the jingling Christmas tune he gave to the world lived on in the hearts and minds of little children. For years the song was out of print. During those years it was handed down from generation to generation… . As a folk song it underwent some changes, most of which improved the original version.”
The modern opening stanza became
Up on the house-top reindeer pause
Out jumps good old Santa Claus
Down through the chimney with lots of toys
All for the little ones’ Christmas joys.
The rest of the song remained about the same, except for the second stanza, which reflected a change in toys available for children. Hammer, lots of tacks, a ball, and a whip that cracks replaced hammer and gimlet and lots of tacks, whistle and whirligig, and a whip that cracks. Over the next half century, Hanby’s Christmas song became jumbled—the title was changed at the whim of music editors, and some words were changed. The composer’s name continued to be forgotten.
But in 1940 Shoemaker discovered some old papers that proved Benjamin Hanby, not Stephen Foster, wrote “Nelly Gray” and also “Up on the Housetop.” Shoemaker had heard this claim fifteen years earlier from Hanby’s sister, Elizabeth and from Kate Hanby, who died in 1930 at age ninety-five. So Shoemaker started writing to publishers who sold the sheet music, asking them to credit the song to Hanby and offering to prove that he did write it. Most of them agreed to use his name. “Perhaps no other American song,” she once said, “has had a more varied record from its inception, has been more altered in text and title, and still holds an unassailable place in the hearts of little folks.”
Shoemaker’s own story is so firmly connected to the songwriter’s that they have become one; it was though she was destined to know and appreciate him. It all began on May 21, 1873, when Benjamin’s brother, Dr. William O. Hanby (the Little Will of Hanby’s Christmas song), delivered a baby—Dacia Custer. She would grow up in Westerville and graduate from Otterbein in 1895. Fittingly, she was the class historian. The following year, she married banker John Shoemaker. An old Hanby House brochure noted: “While writing a pageant for the seventy-fifth anniversary of Otterbein’s founding, Dacia reached a turning point in her life. In doing her research for the pageant she walked into the Hanby House and there found Ben. She fell in love with his sensitive spirit, and never again would she be able to forget him.” Shoemaker recalled: “In 1922, while doing research, as co-author of the historical pageant ‘Spirt of Otterbein’ … the story of Bishop William Hanby … and of his son, Benjamin, fell into my hands. So fascinating and so diverse were the circumstances that shaped their lives that, from the start, I could not let the story go. When further study disclosed the fact that many incidents of historical value had been neither published nor preserved in any form, the impulses came to me to collect and record them for future generations.”
In 1926, the Hanby House, now dilapidated, came up for sale. Dacia and her husband purchased it for $1,500 and announced her plans to restore it as a memorial to Ben. She convinced state fire officials to rescind their order to tear the house down, and she developed her own plans for it. Through her diligence, she helped make people aware of Hanby’s talents and importance. He became the focus of her life’s research, which she continued for years. Meanwhile, she sought and received help from the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society (as it was then called) and the Works Project Administration. She also helped organize the Benjamin Hanby Memorial Association, which raised money to move the house to West Main. She used proceeds from the sale of the property to help establish a museum. After the house was dedicated on June 13, 1937, she became its first curator. She served until 1950, while working on a history of the Hanby family. When she died in 1973, at age one hundred, the book remained unfinished. With assistance from two editors, however, Choose You This Day was finally published in 1983. It is still in print and offered for sale at the Hanby House.
In the 1980s, as the Ohio Historical Society could no longer afford to operate the old house, Emmeline Miller, curator from 1981 to 1988, developed a program that allowed the Westerville Historical Society to operate the place on its own. She also found volunteers to act as tour guides and helpers, and she trained them. Her work has enabled the Hanby House to continue.
In modern times, Hanby’s songs continue to be recorded and published. Jazzmen Emile Barnes and Louis Armstrong once collaborated on a version of “Darling Nelly Gray,” which was reissued on compact disc. Two songbooks written by Hanby are still in print: The Robin: A Collection of Music for Day and Sunday Schools, Juvenile Singing Classes, and the Social Circle, and Chapel Gems for Sunday Schools, which was a collaboration between George F. Root and Hanby. A few of the famous performers who’ve recorded “Housetop” over the last sixty years include Reba McEntire, the Jackson 5, George Strait, Eddy Arnold, the King Sisters, Gene Autry, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. Most surprisingly, 141 years after he wrote it, “Up on the House Top” became a national hit. Singer-actress Kimberly Locke, a former contestant on television’s popular American Idol, took the song to number one on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart during the weeks between December 17, 2005, and January 7, 2006.
But Benjamin Hanby didn’t need a hit record or a new songbook to assure his musical legacy’s survival: his songs do that by themselves. It is unfortunate, however, that he died so young, never knowing that his songs would be sung a century and a half later or that his brief ministry would outlast even the harshest critics of the flute and the organ.
