Dear Citizens:
September is here again, time to throw open our doors and welcome back our beloved students, the women of Equinox College. “Every parting,” as Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection”—and so let us rejoice, even in this impending season of decay, the arrival of friends old and new.
For their edification of the new, allow me to devote this month’s newsletter to a retelling of our town’s most cherished historical event, its creation myth, the Apple Blossom Massacre. Not only is it vital to our moral strength that we understand the history of the ground upon which we daily tread; this story may serve as a cautionary tale for newcomers and longtime residents alike.
Most Equinoxians are aware that our town was founded in 1784 by a Revolutionary War soldier named Thomas Crim. To express their gratitude for his military service to the newly independent United States, our government had granted him a great deal of the land our town now sits upon. Crim rode here from New Jersey on his horse, with nothing but the clothes on his back, a hatchet, and the musket he fought with during the war. Within a few years he had cleared our shoreline, built himself a log cabin, and planted a small apple orchard. With the help of other former soldiers, he built a tavern and a church, and was said to attend both regularly. He brought a girl back from one of his trips and married her, and she became Emily Crim. Soon there were more than a dozen people living here, and a vote resulted in the name Equinox, which is said to refer to the town’s springlike blossoming.
But all was not well in Equinox. Emily Crim soon discovered that her husband was impulsive, paranoid, and violent; some historians have suggested that he suffered from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Shell shock, in other words. This violent paranoia was soon brought to bear upon a relatively innocent group of residents, the small Onteo Indian tribe, who lived in a tiny village on the shores of what is now Unionville. (If you have found arrowheads while planting your tomatoes, you can thank the Onteos!) Crim had become convinced that the Onteos intended to wage war on the citizens of Equinox, and managed to steer several other townspeople (the tavern-keeper and minister, to be precise) around to his point of view.
Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. Even in an era rife with settler-Indian conflicts, the Onteos were as unlikely a threat as could have been imagined. What little we know about them suggests that they had not waged war in fifty years. Indeed, early explorers of the area reported that the tribe had formed their village on the lake after being decimated by a band of Senecas sometime around 1725, and had devoted themselves to a quiet life of fishing and hunting far from other human habitation. But this fact had escaped Thomas Crim, and his friends the minister and barkeep didn’t know that Crim was mad, and so the stage was set for what would become known as the Apple Blossom Massacre.
It was May, and Crim’s apple trees, which in the years since his settlement here had grown as high as a man on a horse, were heavy with white blossoms. They would have littered the ground and drifted in the air like snow. He decided to send an emissary—a teenage boy named Jacob who knew a little Seneca and could make himself understood—in a rowboat along the shore to invite the Onteos to a festival, an apple blossom festival, to celebrate the coming harvest of fruit. We can presume that the Onteos knew about the white settlement to the south, and must have been relieved to discover that the settlers were friendly. Of course they accepted.
It comes down to us from Georgia McCullum, the minister’s wife and an obsessive journal-keeper, that the Onteos were to arrive in late morning, on foot, for they had no horses. Mrs. McCullum, who owned the only clock in town, reports that at a quarter past eleven, “a great clamor was heard, and the shouts of the red men and women, and the cries of their children, and smoke was seen rising over the trees.” A couple hours later her husband returned, filthy with dirt and Indian blood. He, Crim, and the barkeep, Samuel Fitters, had murdered many dozens of Indians with their guns, he said, and then had ridden to their village to kill the survivors, which they accomplished quickly, setting the village on fire on their way out. The resulting fire consumed many acres of forest, and, ironically, threatened even Equinox itself, though the town was ultimately saved by the relatively damp weather and a change in the wind.
The following day the bodies of trusting Onteo men, women, and children were thrown into the lake, where they rotted for weeks, drawing huge clouds of insects and carnivorous birds. Though some of the Onteos’ bones have been recovered and given a proper burial, most still lie at the bottom of Onteo Lake, near our beloved beach.
As for Crim, he would soon descend completely into lunacy, threatening to murder his wife (she would flee their home and vanish into legend) and eventually drowning himself in the very spot where the Indians’ bodies lie. Jonathan McCullum would also commit suicide, shooting himself to death in the woods behind the church (our present Episcopal church, constructed in 1884, stands on the site of the original church). Samuel Fitters would leave Equinox and eventually help found a free-love colony in the Hudson Valley. Nothing is known of the boy Jacob, the messenger of death.
The apple orchard, however, lives on today, its fruit nourished by blood (and orchard-keeper Archie Olds tells me this year’s crop will be a bumper!). So when you welcome our newest residents, bring them an apple, and a smile.
Your faithful servant,
Ruth