Sam Patch, the famous jumper

The date of the Patch family’s arrival in Pawtucket is uncertain. They had lived previously in Marblehead, where their last entry in civil records was in February 1805. Sam’s mother and sister joined a church in Pawtucket in April 1807. Family memory and subsequent folklore say they came to Pawtucket in 1807.

See in particular Alexander Hamilton, “Report on Manufactures, December 5, 1791,” in Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Reports of Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1964), esp. 130-31 (quote, 130); Tenche Coxe, A View of the United States of America, in a Series of Papers, Written at Various Times, Between the Years 1787 and 1794 (New York, 1965; orig. 1794), 14, 55. No Manchesters: George S. White, Memoir of Samuel Slater, the Father of American Manufactures, Connected with a History of the Rise and Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in England and America (New York, 1967; orig. 1836), 135. Such reassurances appear frequently in tracts reprinted in Michael Brewster Folsom and Steven D. Lubar, eds., The Philosophy of Manufactures: Early Debates over Industrialization in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).

Gary B. Kulik, “Factory Discipline in the New Nation: Almy, Brown & Slater and the First Cotton Mill Workers, 1790-1808,” Massachusetts Review 28 (Spring 1987), 165-84 (quotes, pp. 172, 173); “poor children”: “Account of a Journal of Josiah Quincy,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd Series, 4 (1888), 124. Baptist: David Benedict, Fifty Years Among the Baptists (Boston, 1860), 312, and Elizabeth J. Johnson and James Lucas Wheaton IV, comps., History of Pawtucket, Rhode Island: Reminiscences & New Series of Reverend David Benedict (Pawtueket, 1986), 121-22. (This is a compilation of the Reverend Benedict’s newspaper articles published in 1853-64; cited hereafter as Benedict Reminiscences.) Travel guide: [Theodore Dwight], The Northern Traveller, and Northern Tour (New York, 1830), 314. On the degradation of mill labor and the increasing roughness of Pawtucket, see Gary B. Kulik, “The Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in America: Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 1672-1829” (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1980), 188-251, 284-85; and Brendan F. Gilbane, “A Social History of Samuel Slater’s Pawtucket, 1790-1830,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1969), 271-83.

Patch gave the name Greenleaf to the census taker in 1790, and his great-granddaughter knew him by that name. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in 1790: Massachusetts (Washington, D.C., 1908), 152.

The declining rural communities of the North Shore and Middlesex County, from which the Patches came, have been well studied by social historians. See especially Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970); Christopher M. Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland: Family and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England (New York, 1979); and Daniel Vickers, Farmers & Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994). Also very useful is Toby L. Ditz, Property and Kinship: Inheritance in Early Connecticut, 1750-1820 (Princeton, N.J., 1986).

William Richard Cutter, comp., Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts (New York, 1908), 1:219; Wenham Town Records, 1730-1775 (Wenham, 1940), 1:141, 184; 2:3, 5-6, 8, 20; 3:23, 115, 177; Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War (Boston, 1903), 11:1000.

Will of Timothy Patch, Administration No. 20744, Essex County Court of Probate, Salem, Mass. Adult brothers shared houses and/or outbuildings with increasing frequency in the late eighteenth century. See Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland, 73-74, and John J. Waters, “Patrimony, Succession, and Social Stability: Guilford, Connecticut, in the Eighteenth Century,” Perspectives in American History 10 (1976), 150. A more general discussion of the overlapping obligations attached to inherited property is provided in Ditz, Property and Kinship, esp. 82-102.

Landholdings computed from the Essex County deeds listed in note 9. Vital Records of Wenham, Mass. To the End of the Year 1849 (Salem, 1904), 65-66, 152, 214.

Court cases: Records of the Essex County Court of Common Pleas (Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.), July 1764 (Dodge v. Patch), September 1766 (Cabot v. Patch, Jones v. Patch, Dodge v. Patch, Brown v. patch), March 1767 (Brimblecom v. Patch). Land transfers: Essex County Registry of Deeds (Essex County Courthouse, Salem, Mass.), Book 123:103; 120:35; 124:64; 116:96; 123:105; 123:44; 121:132; 120:278. Timothy’s land transfers to his sons are recorded in Books 120:273 and 115:210. Family persistence traced in Vital Records of Wenham.

Essex Court of Common Pleas, July 1770 (Andrews v. Patch), July 1779 (Gerilds v. Patch), July 1782 (Prince v. Patch, Putnam v. Patch, Wilkins v. Patch, Patch v. Sawyer, Endicott v. Patch), September 1782 (Prince v. Patch), December 1783 (Upton v. Patch).

Reading Town Rate Books, 1773-93, Assessor’s Office, Reading Town Hall. Available at the Family History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, microfilm reel #0968004. In 1787 Patch paid a poll tax and the tax on a very small amount of personal property.

Marriage: Vital Records of the Town of Reading, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850 (Boston, 1912), 413, 178. Abigail gave birth seven and one-half months after the wedding.

A good recent account of the Battle of Dunbar and its aftermath is Roger Hainsworth, The Swordsmen in Power: War and Politics under the English Republic, 1649-1660 (Phoenix Mill, England, 1997), 80-106.

Cutter, Genealogical and Personal Memoirs, 3:1155; Lilley Eaton, comp., Genealogical History of the Town of Reading, Mass. (Boston, 1874), 96; Will of Joseph McIntire, Middlesex County Court of Probate (Middlesex County Courthouse, Cambridge, Mass.), Administration No. 14496; Inventory of the Estate of Archelaus McIntire, Middlesex Probate 14481; Reading Town Rate Books, 1792.

Daniel Scott Smith and Michael Hindus, “Premarital Pregnancy in America, 1640-1971: An Overview and Interpretation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5 (Spring 1975), 537-70. McIntire marriages and births are recorded in Vital Records of Reading.

The house and shoemaker’s shop seem to have been substantial. The record of debt (dated September 1789, and carried on into 1790) includes the boarding of workmen (masons as well as carpenters) for nine weeks. Middlesex Probate 14481.

On outwork in New England, see Mary H. Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1810 (Urbana, Ill., 1990), 3-96; Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 29-75; Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Albany, N.Y., 1981); Vickers, Farmers & Fishermen, 309-24; John Philip Hall, “The Gentle Craft: A Narrative of Yankee Shoe Makers” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1953).

John Philip Hall, comp., “The Journal of James Weston, Cordwainer, of Reading, Massachusetts, 1788-1793,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 92 (April 1956), 188-202.

Reading Town Rate Books: Town and County Tax, December 1790 and November 1792.

Bureau of the Census, Heads of Families … Massachusetts, 152; Reading Town Rate Books, 1792.

Middlesex Probate 14481; Middlesex Court of Common Pleas, November 1791, March 1792, and September 1792 (Patch v. Parker); Middlesex County Registry of Deeds (Middlesex County Courthouse, Cambridge, Mass.), Book 165:60; Eaton, Genealogical History of Reading, 246; Town of Reading: Orders and Receipts, 1773-93 (Assessor’s Office, Reading Town Hall), entries for 15 September 1794 and 25 August 1795.

Middlesex Probate 14481.

References to Deborah McIntire in the Will of Archelaus McIntire (Middlesex Probate 14481) and the Will of Archelaus McIntire, Jr. (Middlesex Probate 14483). Patch’s appointment as executor, Archelaus Jr.’s assignment to a guardian, and the widow Abigail McIntire’s letter of complaint (in which the sixty-four-year-old Abigail identifies herself as an invalid) are in Middlesex Probate 14481. Patch assets recorded in Reading Town Rate Books, 1791, 1792.

Nancy Barker is identified as the half sister of M. G. Patch in the Will of Job Davis, Essex Probate 7278. She had lived in Wenham and had married into some branch of the Patch family; at her marriage to Jonathan Barker of Haverhill (in Wenham) in 1786 she was “Mrs. Nancy Patch.” Jonathan and Nancy Barker moved to Haverhill and appear there as the parents of children with the names of those later brought to North Reading by Nancy. A shoemaker named Jonathan Barker died intestate and nearly propertyless in Haverhill in 1791. The “it seems” in the text is due to the fact that the probate file identifies that man’s widow as “Anna.” Vital records do not list a marriage or children for a Jonathan and Anna Barker; nor do they list the death of another Jonathan Barker. My guess is that a probate clerk simply misrecorded the name of Jonathan Barker’s widow. Marriage of Mrs. Nancy Barker and Jonathan Barker of Haverhill: Vital Records of Wenham., 152. Their children and his death: Vital Records of Haverhill, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (Topsfield, Mass., 1910), 2:29, 287. Will and estate inventory of Jonathan Barker: Essex Probate 1682. Marriage of Archelaus McIntire, Jr., and Nancy Barker: Vital Records of Reading, 387.

Boundary dispute: Records of the Town of Reading, Massachusetts, 1639-1812. Land Grants and Boundaries (typescript, Lucius Beebe Memorial Library, Wakefield, Mass.), 3:148. Tax dispute: Reading Orders and Receipts, 14 November 1797. Patch does not appear in this record as landlord to schoolmistresses after 1795; the teacher stayed with John Swain in 1796. Court cases: Middlesex Court of Common Pleas, December 1798 (Patch v. Tuttle); Essex Court of Common Pleas, October 1798 (Herrick v. Patch) and March 1804 (Reid v. Patch). The last lists the lawyer’s bill as outstanding.

Records of the Town of Reading, 3:148; Federal Direct Tax of 1798: Massachusetts (New England Historic Genealogical Society, Bostcn), returns for the town of Reading list Archelaus McIntire, Jr., as the owner of two houses, neither of which was occupied by M. G. Patch.

Guardianship papers dated 7 September 1791, Middlesex Probate 14482.

The McIntire-Felton transactions are recorded in Essex Deeds, 153:95, 165:60. Suicide of Debbie McIntire: Vital Records of Danvers, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849. Volume II: Marriages and Deaths (Salem, Mass., 1910), 405. No one named Deborah or Debbie McIntire was born or married in Danvers.

Population Schedules of the Second Census of the United States, 1800: Essex County, Massachusetts, listed a “Mahue” G. Patch in Danvers. The sexes and ages of members of his household match the Patch family exactly. In 1803 the recorder of a deed involving Greenleaf Patch spelled his name “Mayhew.” (Essex Deeds, Book 172:252.) Indexes to Danvers Town Records, Family History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, microfilm reels 0876107 and 0876184. North Parish Valuation, 1799. The valuations for 1800, 1801, and 1804 do not list Mayo Greenleaf Patch.

Will of Job Davis, Essex Probate 7278.

List of Inhabitants, 1804, 1805, 1806, Marblehead Town Hall (Family History Library, reel 0864082). Patch did not appear in the 1805 or 1806 assessments. The other heirs received small payments when the house reverted to the Reids in 1805. (Essex Deeds, 175:32, 172:32, 177:302, 179:15.) The dealings with the children of Nancy Barker, who each inherited one twentieth of the two houses, can be traced in Essex Deeds, 373:240-41; 379:283; 383:154.

The debts, court cases, and land transfers can be followed in Essex Court of Common Pleas, March 1803 (Sawyer v. Patch), June 1803 (Burnham v. Patch), December 1803 (Dolebar v. Patch), March 1804 (Goodale v. Patch, King v. Patch, Sawyer v. Patch, Reids v. Patch), June 1804 (Totman v. Patch, Shelden v. Patch, Holt v. Patch); Essex Deeds, Books 172:252, 175:35, 175:186. The last—the purchase of Patch’s right of redemption—is dated 2 February 1805.

“Petition of Abigail Patch for Divorce,” Records of the Supreme Court of Providence County, September 1818-March 1819, Box 39, Providence College Archives. Convict Registers for the Charlestown State Prison, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston. A check of probate and vital records in all of the counties in which Patch or members of his family had lived, and a check of heads of household in the United States in the census of 1820, turned up no trace of Patch’s later life.

Obediah Brown quoted in Kulik, “Factory Discipline in the New Nation,” 172. Slater’s trips to the North Shore: Samuel Slater Day Book, vol. 3, entries for 8 December 1804, 30 April 1808, 10 October 1809, Almy, Brown, and Slater Papers, Baker Library, Harvard University. See also Kulik, “The Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in America,” 205.

The estate inventory of Archelaus McIntire and a letter that his widow signed with a mark are in Middlesex Probate 14481. Accounts of women’s work in postrevolutionary New England begin and end with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990). Studies of home life deduced from estate inventories are deftly presented in Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790-1840 (New York, 1988), 105-48.

Quote: “Petition of Abigail Patch for Divorce.” For indications that this language was indeed Abigail’s, see Nancy F. Cott, “Eighteenth-Century Family and Social Life Revealed in Massachusetts Divorce Records,” Journal of Social History 10 (Fall 1976), 32-33, which demonstrates widely varying marital expectations among divorcing persons.

See the accounts of the division of labor in shoemaking households in Blewett, ‘Men, Women, and Work, 3-19; Dawley, Class and Community, 16-20; Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers, 48-51; Elizabeth Abbott, Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic History (New York, 1910), 148-52. There is an interesting discussion of the “adaptive traditionalism” of rural shoemakers in John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (New York, 1989), 294-303.

Names traced in Vital Records of Reading and Vital Records of Wenham. New England child-naming patterns are described in Daniel Scott Smith, “Population, Family and Society in Hingham, Massachusetts, 1635-1880” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1973), 340-48; idem, “Child-Naming Practices, Kinship Ties, and Change in Family Attitudes in Hingham, Massachusetts, 1641 to 1880,” Journal of Social History 18 (Summer 1985), 541-66; John J. Waters, “Naming and Kinship in New England: Guilford Patterns and Usage, 1693-1759,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 138 (July 1984); Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland, 78-79, 84-85.

Information on Archelaus, his wife, and his daughter Mehitable is from the records of the United Church of Christ, North Reading (Mrs. Arthur Diaz, Church Clerk, letter to the author dated 27 June 1979). Abigail’s sister Mary lived in Salem but baptized a child in Reading, suggesting that she belonged to a Salem church. Archelaus Jr. died at the age of twenty-nine without having joined a church, but his will is drenched in religious language.

Here and in the following paragraphs, information is from the records of the First Church in Wenham, Congregational (Carol T. Rawston, Church Clerk, letter to the author dated 22 September 1979). Baptisms from Vital Records of Wenham.

The question of church membership reveals some of the problems with research in local and genealogical records. The manuscript records of the Second (North) Parish of Reading (now the Union Congregational Church of North Reading) were carried off by Universalists during a schism in 1802, through they allowed the Congregationalists to make a list of persons who were admitted to the church between 1720 and 1802. In 1979 the clerk of the church searched that list and found no Patches. Twenty years later, while searching the Stunts and Stunters File at the Niagara Falls, New York, Public Library, I found a scrap of yellow paper on which David Coapman of Alhambra, California, claimed that Abigail Patch joined the North Parish Church at the age of twenty in 1790. (Mr. Coapman, as a schoolboy in Rochester, New York, led a campaign to give Sam Patch’s grave a proper headstone; he referred to himself in 1969 as “Patch’s ‘Boswell.’”) An exhaustive search failed to locate either Mr. Coapman or the original record book. As of autumn 2002 the new clerk and historian of Union Congregational Church stand by their predecessor’s 1979 finding.

Vital Records of Marblehead, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (Salem, 1903), 1:380. The infant Isaac was baptized at Marblehead Second Congregational Church. A search of the records of that church between 1790 and 1810 turned up no Patches as members. (Record books held by the Unitarian-Universalist Society in Marblehead.) The baptisms of Abigail and her oldest daughter were recorded in “Baptist Church of Christ, August 1805 to November 1837” (First Baptist Church, Pawtucket), entries for 4 April 1807 and 12 April 1807.

Molly, Polly, Mary: “Baptist Church of Christ,” 4 April 1807: “Mrs. Patch and her daughter Polly came forward …” A Mary Patch married Goodman (Edward) Jones in Pawtucket in 1809 (James N. Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island: North Providence [Providence, 1892], 32), and the Manual of the First Baptist Church, Pawtucket, R.I., Organized August, 1805 (Providence, 1884), 28, identified Mary Patch Jones as having joined the church in April 1807. The Molly Patch born in 1789, the Polly Patch of 1807, and the Mary Patch of 1809 were definitely the same woman. Nabby, Abby, Abigail: “Baptist Church of Christ,” 12 November 1810, 31 January 1811, 1 January 1829. There is another—though unlikely—way of interpreting these changing names. Nabby and Abby can be diminutives of Abigail, Molly is sometimes a diminutive of Mary, and it is possible that these women simply stepped into adult names as a part of growing up. But in all the generations of Reading McIntires, while there were many Marys and Abigails, there was not a single Nabby or Molly in the records of births, marriages, and deaths. The Wenham McIntires named girls Mary and Abigail as well. Only Greenleaf’s brother Isaac named daughters Nabby and Molly. Isaac also had a son named Samuel. Greenleaf and Abigail Patch had children named Greenleaf, Molly, Nabby, Samuel, and Isaac—per—fectly duplicating the names (assuming that young Greenleaf lived there) of the Isaac Patch household in Wenham.

Population Schedules of the Fourth and Fifth Censuses of the United States, 1820 and 1830: North Providence, Rhode Island (Family History Library). Robert Grieve, An Illustrated History of Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Vicinity (Pawtucket, 1897), 66, states that Abigail moved into the Main Street house “about 1830.” She did not appear as a household head in the census taken in 1830, but the “widow Mary Patch” did. Mary’s adultery: “Baptist Church of Christ,” 2 June 1825. Other information in this paragraph is from a letter to the author from Elizabeth J. Johnson and James L. Wheaton IV of the Spaulding House Research Library, Pawtucket, dated 16 March 1989.

Manual of the First Baptist Church, 29. Articles of the Church in the opening of “First Church of Christ.” On mill owner control and the slow pace of growth, see Gary Kulik, “Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island,” Radical History Review 17 (Spring 1978), 15-17. The founding members of the church in 1805 included fourteen men and thirty women; the few who joined in 1806 and 1807 (including Abigail and her daughter) numbered twenty-four women and only seven men. Constituent members: First Baptist Church in Pawtucket, Constituted Aug. 27, 1805. Covenant, Articles of Faith, Rules of Discipline (Pawtucket, n.d.), 7. Dated admissions: Manual of the First Baptist Church, 20-37.

Schoolhouse and Abigail’s death: Grieve, Illustrated History of Pawtucket, 29, 101. House purchase: North Providence Deeds and Mortgages, Book 8:523 (Pawtucket City Hall). Sarah Anne’s troubles: “Church Meetings, January 1838 to January 1874,” entries for 29 August 1853, 30 August 1853, 23 September 1853 (First Baptist Church, Pawtucket). The inventory of Abigail Patch’s estate is in Probate Records, Pawtucket City Hall, Book 8:343. When she died, Abigail was broke: she had run up a debt of $931 for board, nursing, and doctors, which suggests an unusually long and hard death, and her administrator sold the furniture and petitioned to sell the real estate—the house and a vacant lot in another part of Pawtucket. The lot was sold, but it is not clear whether Mary retained ownership of the house. (Pawtucket Probate, 8:327; 8:348; 9:2-3; 9:13; 9:36.)

Benedict quote: Benedict Reminiscences, 65.

Emily Jones reminiscences, from an undated typescript of an article in the Providence Journal, which forms the first six pages of the Sam Patch Scrapbook, Local History Division, Rochester Public Library, Rochester, N.Y. Unless otherwise cited, information in the following two paragraphs is from this article.

Greenleaf the lawyer: phone conversation with John Powers, Office of the Clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 2 October 1979. Sam’s cotton mill: Emily remembered the partner’s name as Kennedy. A search of deeds and tax lists in Smithfield (Central Falls), site of the supposed partnership, along with a search of bankruptcy petitions in the years 1820-25, turned up nothing on Patch. A John Kennedy, however, was taxed as the owner of one-fourth of the Chocolate Mill (so called because it actually had been a chocolate factory) in 1824 and 1826. Patch’s partnership with Kennedy remains an undocumentable possibility. (“Estimate for 1824” and “Town Tax for 1826,” in Smithfield Tax Records, stored in the attic at Central Falls City Hall.) Bankruptcy petitions searched in the Records of the Supreme Court of Providence County, Providence College Archives. On the Chocolate Mill: William R. Bagnall, Textile Industries of the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1893), 1:390-94. Isaac the farmer: a search of the indexes to the manuscript census of 1850 (the first to list age and state of birth) turned up an Isaac Patch—native of Massachusetts—in Illinois, but this man had been born eleven years before Abigail’s son. There were also Isaac Patches in Michigan and Pennsylvania, neither of whom fit the son’s date and place of birth.

Emily’s reminiscences and Abigail’s divorce petition, cited above. The census listed Mayo G. Patch as head of the household in 1810: Population Schedules of the Third Census of the United States (1810): Providence County, Town of North Providence, 1:434.

A sailor: Joseph Cochran reminiscences in Jenny Marsh Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical (Rochester, N.Y., 1884), 185; a sailor and an orphan: A. J. Langworthy reminiscences, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 31 March 1898, in the Ashley Samson Scrapbook, 64:50, Local History Division, Rochester Public Library; a foreigner: Reminiscences of Mrs. Mary Ann Davis, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 31 January 1923, Sam Patch Scrapbook. In 1828 the Providence Cadet commented on the New Jersey leaps of Sam Patch by comparing them with the leaps of boys at Pawtucket—apparently ignorant of Sam’s origins in that town. Cadet article reprinted in many places, including New-York Statesman, 21 July 1828, and Niles Weekly Register, 26 July 1828.

Quote: Benedict Reminiscences, 65. On Sunday schools and attitudes toward children among early national New Englanders, see Ann M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880 (New Haven, Conn., 1988), esp. 6-21; and Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York, 1977), 21-148. The Pawtucket Sunday school is thought (with some competition from Philadelphia) to have been the first established in the United States.

Sam in White Mill: Emily Jones reminiscences. On the White Mill: Bagnall, Textile Industries of the United States, 1:253; Gilbane, “A Social History of Samuel Slater’s Pawtucket,” 139-40. On Pawtucket mill architecture, see Gary Kulik, “A Factory System of Wood: Cultural and Technological Change in the Building of the First American Cotton Mills,” in Brooke Hindle, ed., The Material Culture of the Wooden Age (Tarrytown, N.Y., 1981), 312-18.

Unless otherwise cited, information on early child labor in textile mills presented in this and the following two paragraphs is from Kulik, “The Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in America,” 189-222; Kulik, “Factory Discipline in the New Nation”; and especially Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York, 1978), 136-39, 182-83, 327-29.

Carding accidents: Benedict Reminiscences, 78; Slater’s discipline: White, Memoir of Samuel Slater, 108; Patch cuffs children: Charles Pitman Longwell, A Little Story of Old Paterson, as Told by an Old Man (n.p., 1901), 37.

Quote: “Account of a Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 124.

There is a full and clear description of the spinning mule and its operations in Wallace, Rockdale, 189-92, which quotes Andrew Ure on pp. 191-92. See also Harold Catling, The Spinning Mule (Newton Abbot, England, 1970).

Kulik, “The Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in America,” 351-53. On the mule spinners, see Catling, The Spinning Mule; Isaac Cohen, “Worker’s Control in the Cotton Industry: A Comparative Study of British and American Mule Spinning,” Labor History 26 (Winter 1985), 53-85; Teresa Ann Murphy, Ten Hours’ Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 33-46; Cynthia J. Shelton, The Mills of Manayunk: Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 1787-1837 (Baltimore, 1986), 63-64; Wallace, Rockdale, 134-44; and Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 186. For an overview of the questions involved here, see David Montgomery, “Worker’s Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century,” in Worker’s Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York, 1979), esp. 11-15.

Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York (Cambridge, Mass., 1969; orig. 1821), 2:14; [Margaret Hunter Hall], The Aristocratic Journey: Being the Outspoken Letters of Mrs. Basil Hall, Written during a Fourteen Months’ Sojourn in America, 1827-1828, ed. Una Pope-Hennessy (New York, 1931), 106; P. Stansbury, A Pedestrian Tour of Two Thousand Three Hundred Miles, in North America … Performed in the Autumn of 1821 (New York, 1822), 265.

Gary Kulik, “Dams, Fish, and Farmers: The Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” in Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 25-50; J. Milbert, Picturesque Itinerary of the Hudson River and Peripheral Parts of North America (Ridgewood, N.J., 1968; orig. 1828), 240; author’s on-site observations.

Henry Bradshaw Fearon, Sketches of America: A Narrative of a journey of Five Thousand Miles through the Eastern and Western States (New York, 1969; orig. 1818), 99; “Account of a Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 124.

Milbert, Picturesque Itinerary, 240.

Benedict Reminiscences, 66.

Benedict Reminiscences, 66, 103.

Benedict Reminiscences, 65; Grieve, Illustrated History of Pawtucket, 101; Providence Cadet, reprinted in the New-York Statesman, 21 July 1828; news clipping entitled “One of Sam Patch’s Scholars, Pawtucket, Rhode Island, October 2” (no year), Sam Patch Scrapbook; 1829 jumpers: Thomas D. Clark, ed., Footloose in Jacksonian America: Robert W Scott and His Agrarian World (Lexington, Ky., 1989), 34.

Jumpers at Yellow Mill: reminiscences of David Benedict and Edward Wilkinson, Pawtucket Gazette & Chronicle, 26 December 1862 and 7 February 1873. Bucklin genealogy: Benedict Reminiscences, 185-86, 307-16. Jumping style: Pawtucket Gazette and Chronicle, 27 May 1853, 26 December 1862, 7 February 1873; Sam’s later technique: Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 22 October 1829.

II. Paterson

Quotations, in order: Edward C. Carter II, John C. Van Home, and Charles E. Brownell, eds., Latrobe’s View of America, 1795-1820: Selections from the Watercolors and Sketches (New Haven, Conn., 1985), 167-68; Manufacturer’s and Farmer’s Journal (Providence, R.I.,), 27 September 1824; Eliza Southgate Bowne, A Girl’s Life Eighty Years Ago: Selections from the Letters of Eliza Southgate Bowne (Williamstown, Mass, 1980; orig. 1887), 180; C. D. Arfwedson, Esq., The United States and Canada in 1832, 1833, and 1834 (London, 1834), 1:235; P. Stansbury, A Pedestrian Tour of Two Thousand Three Hundred Miles, in North America … Performed in the Autumn of 1821 (New York, 1822), 16; New-York Spectator, 7 September 1827. On the view of Paterson from the falls ground, see Arfwedson, The United States and Canada, 1:136; J. Milbert, Picturesque Itinerary of the Hudson River and Peripheral Parts of North America (Ridgewood, N.J., 1968; orig. 1828), 260; Captain Frederick Marryat, Diary in America, ed. Jules Zanger (Bloomington, Ind., 1960), 80. See also Leo A. Bressler, “Passaic Falls: Eighteenth-Century Natural Wonder,” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 74 (April 1956), 99-106.

The only modern history of early Paterson is Howard Harris, “The Transformation of Ideology in the Early Industrial Revolution: Paterson, New Jersey, 1820-1840 (Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1985), esp. 1-37. On Hamilton’s role, see John R. Nelson, Jr., Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789-1812 (Baltimore, 1987), 37-51. Newspaper quoted: Sentinel of Freedom (Newark, N.J.), 26 June 1827.

Paterson Intelligencer, 12 December 1827 (quotation); 28 July 1830 (war dances); 12 August 1829, 8 August 1832 (circus); 18 June 1828, 30 September 1829, 11 August 1830, 9 July 1828, 15 September 1830, 29 June 1831, 10 August 1831, 27 June 1832, 1 August 1832, 26 June 1833, 24 July 1833, 5 August 1835, 18 May 1836, 31 May 1836, 28 June 1837, 6 June 1838 (fireworks).

Paterson Intelligencer, 30 June 1830, 30 September 1829, 21 July 1830, 9 July 1828.

Paterson Intelligencer, 10 October 1827; E. M. Graf,”Passaic Falls Bridges,” Bulletin of the Passaic County Historical Society 3 (October 1944), 14; Frank L. Byrne, Prophet of Prohibition: Neal Dow and His Crusade (Madison, Wis., 1961), 7, 10, 18.

On Patch and child workers, Charles Pitman Longwell, A Little Story of Old Paterson, as Told by an Old Man (n.p., 1901), 37; on Sam’s candlewick mill, Paterson Intelligencer, 19 July 1826. Branigan stays in business: Rev. Samuel Fisher’s census of Paterson for 1827, copied in a letter to the author from James G. Ward, 16 January 1984.

The lockup story told in Longwell, A Little Story, 37-38, and idem, Historic Totowa Falls (Paterson, n.d.), 37. It is corroborated in the Journal of Commerce (New York), reprinted in the New-York Evening Post, 7 July 1828.

New-York Evening Post, 1 October 1827; Paterson Intelligencer, 10 October 1827. Longwell, A Little Story, 37-41, and Historic Totowa Falls, 36-39, reminiscing at a distance of seventy years, differs in some details from the contemporary story in the New-York Evening Post. In Longwell’s version the bridge sways dangerously after the fall of the log roller, and this near-disaster provides the backdrop for Sam’s leap. Longwell has Patch’s pre-jump speech as”Now old Tim Crane thinks he has done something great; but I can beat him.” Given the many decades that intervened between the two accounts, they are remarkably similar. When they differ, I follow the account in the Post.

Local memories of Sam’s leap: Longwell, A Little Story, 37-41; Longwell, Historic Totowa Falls, 36-39; William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York, 1963), 15-17. The Intelligencer published a cryptic account of the leap which received this response from the writer”No Quiz”: “What a pity it is, that too much modesty should ever repress the brilliant coruscations of wit and genius. O that Quiz had done justice to the launch of Timothy Crane’s bridge o‘er the deep and yawning chasm at Passaic Falls, and the adventurous leap of Sam Patch, Esq. from the giddy height which overlooks the aforesaid gulf! But, alas, we must now despair of ever having these memorable events, ‘at which the little boys and girls did gape and stare,’ given to us and embodied in the true quizzical style.” He went on to what appears to be a defense of Timothy Crane against unspecified rumors: “Quiz is informed that Wormwood’s ear has never been lent to such ‘oft repeated tales,’ but that the facts have come from other sources, and are incontrovertible. Quiz is of course at liberty to laugh when he pleases; but with all due deference, would it not be well to select a subject at which he could laugh with a better grace?—this is so confoundedly like a forced laugh, that it sounds as if ‘he mocked himself.’ But there is another circumstance, which I suppose will also be laughed at by the whole attacked corps, who seem to have concentrated and marshalled all their forces, bringing up all the resources, ‘little Trim’ and all, which have been so sagaciously kept back, for the fatal moment when a last and desperate effort is to be made to prostrate a single individual, who, notwithstanding many sneers, does not appear to be beneath their notice: and it is this—that the individual did serve in the armies of these U. States, during the whole of the late war, with credit to himself and advantage to his country—and a part of the time under the immediate command of the lamented and gallant Pike, with whom, as I can prove from circumstances, he must have been a favorite and confidential officer. He shall stand, Mr. Editor, like a redoubt of granite, uninjured, amidst all this slanderous fire.” (Paterson Intelligencer, 10 October 1827.) Another tantalizing and unresearchable note—possibly referring to Sam Patch—was printed in the Intelligencer on 10 January 1827: “The lines of ’S.P.’ evince a very creditable feeling, but are not sufficiently finished for publication.”

Longwell, Historic Totowa Falls, 40 (quote). Adlard Welby, A Visit to North America and the English Settlements in Illinois, with a Winter Residence in Philadelphia (London, 1821), 23-24; Stansbury, A Pedestrian Tour, 15-16; [Margaret Hunter Hall], The Aristocratic Journey: Being the Outspoken Letters of Mrs. Basil Hall, Written during a Fourteen Months’ Sojourn in America, 1827-1828, ed. Una Pope-Hennessy (New York, 1931), 30; Marryat, Diary in America, 80-81; Norman F. Brydon, The Passaic River (New Brunswick, N.J., 1974), 109. Sam’s early jump: New-York Evening Post, 7 July 1828. Sam advertised his second and third publicized jumps as his third arid fourth.

Paterson Intelligeneer, 11 May 1831, 7 July 1831, 14 July 1830, 12 August 1829; Rev. Isaac Fidler, Observations on Professions, Literature, Manners, and Emigration in the United States and Canada, Made during a Residence There in 1832 (New York, 1833), 98.

Fidler, Observations, 96-97; Paterson Intelligencer, 20 June 1838, 27 June 1838, 11 May 1831 (Crane’s explanation).

Paterson Intelligencer, 19 March 1828, 31 December 1828, 11 May 1831. On Christmas Night: Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle over Christmas (New York, 1996); Susan G. Davis, “‘Making Night Hideous’: Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 34 (Summer 1982), 185-99.

Fidler, Observations, 97 (quote); Paterson Intelligencer, 11 May 1831.

On Timothy Crane: Longwell, Historic Totowa Falls, 38; Fidler, Observations, 96-97; Ellery Bicknell Crane, Genealogy of the Crane Family. Volume I. Descendants of Henry Crane, of Wethersfield and Guilford, Conn., with Sketch of the Family in England (Worcester, Mass, 1895), 1:102; William Nelson, ed., The Van Houten Manuscripts: A Century of Historical Documents (Paterson, 1894), 69-70; D. Stanton Hammond, comp., “Rev. Samuel Fisher’s Census: Paterson, N.J., 1824-1832,” Bulletin of the Passaic County Historical Society 4 (August 1958), 104; William Nelson and Charles A. Shriner, History of Paterson and Its Environs (New York, 1920), 2:406.

Albert Winslow Ryerson, The Ryerson Genealogy: Genealogy of the Knickerbocker Families of Ryerson, Ryerse, Ryerss; also Adriance and Martense Families; all Descendants of Martin and Adriaen Reyersz (Ryerzen) of Amsterdam, Holland (Chicago, 1916), 128; Crane, Genealogy of the Crane Family, 1:102.

Paterson bank seizes the property: Paterson Intelligencer, 26 March 1828 and 9 April 1828. Further legal troubles with the land: Paterson Intelligencer, 16 June 1830, 18 November 1835, 15 June 1836, 20 July 1836. The north bank remained contested territory for many years. In the 1850s a silk manufacturer bought the grounds and closed them off with the intention of building a house for himself. He reconsidered and turned the property into a privately owned “public” park, with the advertised intention of improving Patersonians. He too was harassed and vandalized until he quit the grounds. See Longwell, Historic Totowa Falls, 40, and Levi R. Trumbull, A History of Industrial Paterson (Paterson, 1882), 332-33. The land is now a public park, operated by the City of Paterson.

Fidler, Observations, 99-100, told the jumped-for-love story just after a conversation with Timothy Crane. Patch told his own story in the Paterson Intelligencer, 16 July and 2 July 1828.

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1750-1950 (New York, 1958), and Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1976). Williams’s principal concern is with the dissociation of “art” from occupational skills (Sam Patch’s definition) and its attachment to anti-occupations practiced by special people who operate apart from and above the workaday world, a redefinition that was not accomplished in the United States until at least the 1850s. A third use of the word (Timothy Crane’s) stemmed from the old vocabulary used by Sam Patch, but reshaped in ways that gave “art” new entrepreneurial and developmental meanings. Crane’s “art” is fully illustrated in the historical and critical studies cited in note 25. Those studies and the works in labor history cited in note 20 establish the centrality of Patch’s and Crane’s definitions of art in working-class and middle-class perceptions of economic development during the crucial years 1825-50.

The vocabulary and ethos to which Patch’s “art” was attached had been in existence for a long time, but had been codified by the experience of the Revolution and the succeeding debate on economic development. Labor historians have established their importance to working-class thinking and actions throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. That ethos among handworkers is most thoroughly discussed in Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984). Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York, 1978), 211-95, discusses a very similar cluster of attitudes. Popular ideas of the value of work and workers in the shoe and textile towns in which Sam Patch grew up are discussed in Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Albany, N.Y., 1981), 28-57; Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 42-73; and Gary Kulik, “The Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution: Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 1672-1829” (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1980). David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York, 1987), places that ethos at the center of working-class life between the Civil War and World War I. The term “system of rules” is from the definition of “art” in Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York, 1828).

Pawtucket jumpers: Pawtucket Gazette and Chronicle, 26 December 1862; Elizabeth J. Johnson and James Lucas Wheaton IV, comps., History of Pawtucket, Rhode Island: Reminiscences & New Series of Reverend David Benedict (Pawtucket, 1986), 65. Later technique: Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 22 October 1829; New-York Evening Post, 21 October 1829 (from the Buffalo Republican); Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Advertiser (St. Catherine’s, Upper Canada), 19 December 1829 (from the Buffalo Republican). Sheriff McKee: Paterson Daily Press, 20 May 1885. (Thanks to James Ward.)

Sam’s jumping suit: “Colonel William L. Stone’s Visit to Niagara in 1829,” Buffalo Historical Society Publications 14 (1910), 270; Rochester Daily Advertiser, 7 November 1829. Spinner’s uniform: Paterson Intelligencer, 12 July 1826.

New-York Evening Post, 7 July 1828 (reprint from the New York Journal of Commerce). This article included the first publication of what became Sam’s motto: “Some things can be done as well as others.”

Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York, 1983), 25. William W. Campbell, ed., The Life and Writings of DeWitt Clinton (New York, 1849), 23. (Thanks to Steven Bullock.)

These conceptions of nature and art were central to writings in American Studies in the 1960s through the 1980s, beginning with Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964). See Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington, Ky., 1975), 73-93; Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860 (New York, 1966), esp. 188-216; John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (New York, 1976), 55-106. The grandest of civilized nature parks is the subject of Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (New York, 1985). For the philosophical groundings of all this, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, England, 1990).

The juxtaposition is analyzed beautifully in McKinsey, Niagara Falls, 127-77.

New-York Evening Post, 24 July 1828.

Paterson Intelligencer, 9 July 1828. See the discussions of “mechanic” in Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York, 1989), 31-34, and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1999), 50-52.

E. T. Coke, A Subaltern’s Furlough: Descriptive of Scenes in Various Parts of the United States, Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, during the Summer and Autumn of 1832 (London, 1833), 1:142.

On celebrations of the Fourth of July, see Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, Mass., 1997); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997); Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 1997), 83-119; Scott C. Martin, Killing Time: Leisure and Culture in Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1800-1850 (Pittsburgh, 1995), 71-101. More general studies of American festivities that have shaped the following paragraphs include Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); Ryan, “The American Parade: Representation of the Nineteenth-Century Social Order,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), 131-53; Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1986); Sean Wilentz, “Artisan Republican Festivals and the Rise of Class Conflict in New York City, 1788-1837,” in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Working Class America: Labor, Community, and American Society (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 37-77; Laura Rigal, “‘Raising the Roof’: Authors, Spectators, and Artisans in the Grand Federal Procession of 1788,” Theatre Journal 48 (October 1996), 253-78.

Information in this and the following three paragraphs is from the Paterson Intelligencer, 21 June 1826, 6 July 1826, 12 July 1826.

Paterson Intelligencer, 11 July 1827. Canal explosions at Paterson: Montreal Gazette, 19 July 1827. On the emerging connections between technological progress and the Fourth of July in the 1820s, see David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 41-43.

Paterson Intelligencer, 4 June 1828, 18 June 1828, 25 June 1828, 2 July 1828, 9 July 1828.

Quotation from Paterson Intelligencer, 9 July 1828 and 8 July 1829. In subsequent years the mechanics’ associations were not listed among the planners, and none of the official toasts mentioned them. There were now toasts to an abstracted “People.” In 1830 the fire companies, apparently controlled by Jacksonian Democrats, held their own banquet. There were twelve cheers for “The People,” and toasts not only to De Witt Clinton but to Thomas Paine, and to the Jacksonian Democrats’ libertarian position on church and state. In 1831 the official banquet included the visiting Directors of the Paterson and Hudson Railroad, which had ritually begun construction on that day. In another hotel the Mechanics Institute (which, if it was like those in other towns, was an elite organization that provided rational education for ambitious and well-behaved mechanics) held a banquet of its own. Its vice-president toasted “The Mechanics of Paterson—May their reputation for intelligence and patriotism be equal to their reputation for mechanical excellence; they will then assume that rank in Society to which their industry so justly entitled them”—a rank that they had occupied unchallenged in previous years. At the end of the day, the elite could choose between Crane’s fireworks and a fancy-dress ball.

There was a related transformation in the official celebration of women. Women marched in the parades of 1826 and 1827—the schoolteachers with their children, the others apparently marching as a group, dressed as they pleased. Women were not mentioned in 1828, and the parade was rained out in 1829. They reappeared in the parade of 1830 as “Ladies, dressed in white”—an abstract, feminized purity. The thirteenth official toast was always made to women, transformed from “Our Fair Country Women” in 1826 to “The American Fair” in the following three years (followed in 1827 and 1828 by the playing of “Come Haste to the Wedding) to “Woman” in 1830. Judging by what the elite chose to celebrate, one would have to say that Paterson was transformed in the late 1820s from a town of useful mechanics and pretty women to a pantheon of Industry, Progress, and Woman. See the Paterson Intelligencer, late June through mid-July, 1826-31.

Paterson Intelligencer, 9 July 1828. The longer piece appeared in the New York Journal of Commerce, and was reprinted in the New-York Evening Post, 7 July 1828, and other papers.

Sam’s motto: New-York Evening Post, 7 July 1828. Though the exact time for the official dinner was unannounced, its seems very safe to assume that the exclusive festivities were still in progress when Sam leaped at 4:30 p.m. The parade formed at 11 a.m. on that day, and marched through all the principal streets. Services at the church included a prayer, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, numerous songs by the choir, and the performance by the Orator of the Day, a speech that generally occupied more than an hour. There was then the parade to St. John’s Hall, more festivities, a formal banquet, the thirteen regular toasts (each followed by a band performance), and even more volunteer toasts. In subsequent years the parade began at 10 a.m., with the banquet scheduled for 3 p.m. For times, see Paterson Intelligencer, 9 July 1828 (Sam’s leap, parade starting time); 1 July 1829 and 4 July 1830 (parade and banquet starting times).

Paterson Intelligencer, 16 July 1828; New-York Commercial Advertiser, 31 July 1828, 6 August 1828.

This is the conclusion of Howard Harris, “The Transformation of Ideology in the Early Industrial Revolution,” 296-308, and of Clay Gish, “The Children’s Strikes: Socialization and Class Formation in Paterson, 1824-1836,” New Jersey History 110 (Fall/Winter 1992), 21-38.

Quotes: New-York Commercial Advertiser, 6 August 1828; New-York Evening Post, 26 July 1828. On the Pawtucket strike, see Gary Kulik, “Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island,” Radical History Review 17 (Spring 1978), 6-35.

New-York Commercial Advertiser, 24 July 1828; New York Statesman, 21 July 1828. New York Enquirer, 4 August 1828 (crowd estimate). Money: New-Jersey Joumal (Elizabeth Town), 22 July 1828.

James Epstein, “Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 122 (February 1989), 101, 110-11.

New-York Evening Post, 26 July 1828 (quote); New-York Commercial Advertiser, 26 July 1828, 31 July 1828 (quote); Paterson Intelligencer, 6 August 1828.

New-York Spectator, 1 August 1828; New-York Enquirer for the Country, 29 July 1828; New-York Commercial Advertiser, 31 July 1828; New-York Evening Post, 30 July 1828; Paterson Intelligencer, 30 July 1828.

New-York Commercial Advertiser, 6 August 1828, 8 August 1828.

New-York Commercial Advertiser, 31 July 1828.

Archibald Douglas Turnbull, John Stevens: An American Record (New York, 1928), is a detailed account of the Colonel’s activities. See also Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1935), 614-16.

See Bryan J. Danforth, “Hoboken and the Affluent New Yorker’s Search for Recreation,” New Jersey History 95 (Autumn 1977), 133-44. “Best” people at hotel (including John Jacob Astor, who stayed there while supervising completion of his Hoboken villa in 1828): W. Jay Mills, Historic Houses of New Jersey (Philadelphia, 1902), 46-47. “Known world”: New-York Commercial Advertiser, 8 August 1829. Quotations: James Stuart, Esq., Three Years in North America (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1828), 2:23; Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Young Actress, ed. Monica Gough (New York, 1990), 153; Robert C. Sands, The Writings of Robert C. Sands, in Prose and Verse. With a Memoir of the Author. In Two Volumes. (New York, 1834), 2:286.

Harry F. Smith, Jr., Romance of the Hoboken Ferry (New York, 1931), 45-59; Charles H. Winfield, Hopoghan Hackingh. Hoboken, a Pleasure Resort for Old New York (New York, 1895), 63-69, 72-76. [A Scot], Travels in the United States of America in the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 to 1824, Vol. 3:1335, manuscript travel account, New-York Historical Society. Kemble, Journal of a Young Actress, 83-84; Stuart, Three Years in North America, 1:444; 2:306-7; New-York Spectator, 4 August 1829. Obelisk: John W. Barber, Historical Collections of New Jersey: Past and Present (New Haven, Conn., 1868), 234; the obelisk was carried off “a few years” before 1830. See [Theodore Dwight], The Northern Traveller, and Northern Tour; with the Routes to the Springs, Niagara, and Quebec, and the Coal Mines of Pennsylvania; also, the Tour of New-England (New York, 1830), 21. In the 1830s the writer N. P. Willis lamented that “the fashion of visiting Haboken [sic] and Weehawken has yielded to an impression among the ‘fashionable’ that it is a vulgar resort. This willingness to relinquish an agreeable promenade because it is enjoyed as well by the poorer classes of society, is one of those superfine ideas which we imitate from our English ancestors, and in which the more philosophic continentals are so superior to us.” Nathaniel P. Willis, American Scenery; or Land, Lake, and River. Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (London, 1840), 2:31.

Circus: New-York Evening Post, 5 August 1823. Running races: New-York Evening Post, 1 July 1824. July 4: New-Jersey Journal (Elizabeth Town), 12 July 1825; New-York Commercial Advertiser, 2 July 1825, 7 July 1829. New York American, 2 July 1828. Pigeon shoot: New-York Commercial Advertiser, 2 October 1829. Eclipse at Hoboken: Albany Argus and Daily City Gazette, 25 February 1826. Shooting range and railroad: New-York Commercial Advertiser, 8 August 1829 and 10 September 1829. See also Smith, Romance of the Hoboken Ferry, 45-59; Winfield, Hopoghan Hackingh, 63-69, 72-76. In later decades, John Cox Stevens turned his sporting interests from horse racing to yachting. He was the first president of the New York Yachting Club, and his boat America defeated British boats in a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851; the trophy awarded him became the object of the America’s Cup race. On John Cox Stevens and the New York sporting scene, see Melvin L. Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-1870 (Urbana, Ill., 1986), 35-38, 41-42, 197-200, 212-13. There is a fine essay on Stevens in John Dizikes, Sportsmen and Gamesmen (Boston, 1981), 91-120.

New York Enquirer, 4 August 1828 and 6 August 1828; New York Statesman, 6 August 1828; New York Gazette and General Advertiser, 8 August 1828.

Walter M. Oddie Diary, Vol. 2, entry for 6 August 1828, Library Division, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. New York Statesman, 6 August 1828; New York Enquirer, 4 August 1828; New-York Evening Post, 7 August 1828. Pawtucket jumpers: New York Statesman, 21 July 1828.

Works near Philadelphia: Charles V. Hagner, Early History of the Falls of Schuylkill, Manayunk, Schuylkill and Lehigh Navigation Company, Fairmount Waterworks, etc. (Philadelphia, 1869), 76. Leap at Little Falls: Philadelphia Gazette, 29 June 1829. Further evidence that Sam was in Philadelphia is that the owner of a summer garden in that city challenged Patch to jump against his great “antedelluvian frog” in July 1829. Democratic Press (Philadelphia), 9 July 1829. (Thanks to Shane White.)

III- Niagara

Biographical information on William Leete Stone is from Stone, The Life and Times of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha, or Red Jacket … with a Memoir of the Author, by His Son (Albany, N.Y., 1866), 9-101, and Julian P. Boyd, “William Leete Stone,” Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (New York, 1935), 15:89-91. Stone became a “colonel” as a member of Governor De Witt Clinton’s wartime staff, and used the title for the rest of his life. On gentility and genteel taste: John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997); Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992); John F. Kasson, Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York, 1990); and the early chapters of Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, England, 1990).

On scenic tourism in America see Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C., 1995), esp. 15-40; Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790-1914 (Toronto, 1995), 3-54; Kenneth Myers, The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820-1895 (Hanover, N.H., 1987); Bruce Robertson, “The Picturesque Tourist in America,” in Edward J. Nygren, ed., Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830 (Washington, D.C., 1986), 189-211; and John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1989). Also valuable is Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800 (Stanford, Calif., 1989).

Col. William Leete Stone, “From New York to Niagara: Journal of a Tour, in Part by the Erie Canal, in the Year 1829,” Buffalo Historical Society Publications 14 (1910), 243-44, 245. His (unfavorable) review of Hall appeared in the New-York Commercial Advertiser, 15, 16, 18, 23, 25, 27, and 29 August 1829. William Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara: Travellers in America (New York, 1830), played a long season at the Bowery Theater in 1828-29. See George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1927-49), 3:407-8. In the Commercial Advertiser of 2 September 1829, in a review of Herr Cline, the tightrope walker at Niblo’s Garden, Stone quoted Burke, strongly suggesting a recent reading of Burke’s treatise on the sublime: “‘Night,’ says Burke, ‘increases our terror, more perhaps than anything else; it is our nature, when we do not know what may happen, to fear the worst that can happen.’” Niagara at Niblo’s: Commercial Advertiser, 19 July 1825; at Castle Garden (quote): New-York Daily Advertiser, 22 August 1827.

Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” passim.

Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 211-12, 229-30. Burke’s most concentrated discussion of the sublime is in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (New York 1990; orig. 1757), 36-37, 53-79. “Delightful horror:” p. 67.

See Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (New York, 1985); Jasen, Wild Things, 29-54; Brown, Inventing New England, 15-74; Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, passim.

Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 241-42.

Forsyth advertisement: Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada, 9 August 1827; Black Rock Gazette, 5 October 1826 and 6 October 1827; Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 220, 250. On the relation between conquest/development and the American view from above, see Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830-1865 (Washington, D.C., 1991). Niagara Falls, on the other hand, was maintained as an “undeveloped” sacred shrine. Tourists generally avoided broad panoramas seen from great distances and heights.

John Howison, Sketches of Upper Canada, Domestic, Local, and Characteristic: to which are added, Practical Details for the Information of Emigrants of Every Class; and some Recollections of the United States of America (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1821), 107; E. T. Coke, A Subaltern’s Furlough: Descriptive of Scenes in Various Parts of the United States, Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, during the Summer and Autumn of 1832 (London, 1833), 2:31; C. D. Arfwedson, Esq., The United States and Canada in 1832, 1833, and 1834 (London, 1834), 2:312-13; James Stuart, Esq., Three Years in North America (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1828), 1:140; Travel Diary of John Fanning Watson, 1827, entry for 24 July 1827, Library Division, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum; Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 242-43.

Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 246.

Edward Allen Talbot, Esq., Five Years’ Residence in the Canadas: including a Tour through Part of the United States of America, in the Year 1823 (London, 1824), 1:129; Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London, 1984; orig. 1839), 337; Frederick Fitzgerald De Roos, Personal Narrative of Travels in the United States and Canada in 1826, with Remarks on the Present State of the American Navy (London, 1827), 160; Basil Hall, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828 (Edinburgh and London, 1829), 1:184. “We are most delighted, when some grand scene … rising before the eye, strikes us beyond the power of thought … . In this pause of intellect; this deliquium of the soul, an enthusastic sensation of pleasure overspreads it, previous to any examination by the rules of art. The general ideal of the scene makes an impression, before any appeal is made to the judgement. We rather feel, than survey it.” (William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to which is added a poem, on Landscape Painting (London, 2d. ed., 1794), 49-50.

Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 244-45.

Anon., American Sketches, by a Native of the United States (London, 1827), 237; Emanuel Howitt, Selections from Letters Written during a Tour through the United States, in the Summer and Autumn of 1819 (Nottingham, England, 1820), 130; John Fowler, Journal of a Tour in the State of New York, in the Year 1830; with Remarks on Agriculture in those Parts Most Eligible for Settlers, and Return to England by the Western Islands, in Consequence of Shipwreck in the Robert Fulton (London, 1831), 141; Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 246.

[Theodore Dwight], The Northern Traveller, and Northern Tour; with the Routes to the Springs, Niagara, and Quebec, and the Coal Mines of Pennsylvania; also, the Tour of New-England (New York, 1830), 87; [Thomas Hamilton], Men and Manners in America (Philadelphia, 1833), 2:162; Talbot, Five Years’ Residence in the Canadas, 1:134; Howison, Sketches of Upper Canada, 98; Henry R. Schoolcraft, Narrative Journal of Travels from Detroit Northwest through the Great Chain of American Lakes to the Sources of the Mississippi River in 1820 (Albany, N.Y., 1821), 36-37.

Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 246.

Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 246-47.

Albany Daily Advertiser, 9 July 1828; New-York Evening Post, 7 July 1828 (reprint from the Journal of Commerce). On the Journal of Commerce: Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, 1969), 54; Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 5 August 1829 (reprint from the New England Palladium); Stone: New-York Spectator, 11 July 1828 and 18 July 1828. (The Spectator was the for-the-country edition of the Commercial Advertiser.)

Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 227, 238, 240.

Jackson riot: New-York Commercial Advertiser, 31 July 1828 (quote) and 2 August 1828.

Corrupt bargain parody: New-York Commercial Advertiser, 8 August 1828. Historians continue to argue about the validity of these charges. See Robert V Remini, Andrew Jackson: Volume Two: The Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832 (New York, 1981), 74-99; Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York, 1991), 251-72; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991), 185-201; Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York, 1990), 80-83.

New-York Commercial Advertiser, 6 October 1829.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna; A Descriptive Tale (New York, 1823). On Hiram Doolittle, see Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York, 1995), 290-91, 421-22.

Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825-1850 (Austin, Tex., 1964), 106-9, 162-63; Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago, 1943), 262-65. On the stage Yankee generally, see Hodge, Yankee Theatre; Alexander P. Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London, 1990), 116-23; Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 39-42.

On Cooper: Taylor, William Cooper’s Town. On Dunlap: Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York, 1979), 113-58. On Hackett: Hodge, Yankee Theatre, 84-86, and Coke, A Subaltern’s Furlough, 1:35.

William Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre (New York, 1832), 384-92, 400-1, and idem, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (New York, 1834; reprint 1965), 1:345; Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 411.

On Jedediah Peck: Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 237-38, 241-49, 275-76, 284-87. Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 216.

Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 228-33.

New-York Commercial Advertiser, 6 October 1829 and 21 October 1829.

New-York Commercial Advertiser, 13 October 1829. All further quotes from Hiram Doolittle, Jun., are from this article. It is reprinted in full in Buffalo Historical Society Publications 14 (1910), 265-71.

Forsyth: Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 9 August 1827; Black Rock Gazette, 15 June 1826. Guest lists: Colonial Advocate (Queenston, Upper Canada), 16 September 1824; Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Intelligencer (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 1 August 1827. Quote: Syracuse Advertiser, 15 August 1827. The Pavilion, the largest of four hotels at Niagara, could accommodate 150 guests in 1828, according to Stuart, Three Years in North America, 1:110. A guidebook estimated the capacity of the Pavilion at 100-150 guests. [Gideon Davison], The Traveller’s Guide through the Middle and Northern States, and the Provinces of Canada, 6th ed. (Saratoga Springs, N.Y., 1834), 272.

Rochester Album, 14 August 1829 (from the Black Rock Gazette); Black Rock Gazette, 23 December 1826.

Names: Christian Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage through the States of New-York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, and through the Territories of Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi and New Orleans; Performed in the Years 1807 and 1808; Including a Tour of Nearly Six Thousand Miles (1810; reprint Ridgewood, N.J., 1968), 65; Hibemicus [De Witt Clinton], Letters on the Natural History and Internal Resources of the State of New York (New York, 1822), 202; Robert Gourley, Statistical Account of Upper Canada, Compiled with a View to a Grand System of Emigration (London, 1822; reprint 1966), 1:66; Anon., A Northern Tour: Being a Guide to Lake George, Niagara, Canada, Boston, &c., &c. (Philadelphia, 1825), 149; David W. Prall, “Journal of a Jaunt from New York to Niagara, July 1821,” entry for 21 July 1821, manuscript journal, New-York Historical Society; Samuel Rezneck, “A Traveling School of Science on the Erie Canal in 1826,” New York History 40 (July 1959), 265 (quote); John Fanning Watson Travel Diary, 24 July 1827 (quote); Rochester Gem, 25 September 1830. Only a few early tourists (Schultz in 1807, Prall in 1821) admitted that they “conformed to the custom of the place, by engraving our names on a rock.”

Quote: [Dwight], The Northern Traveller, 86. M. Smith, A Geographical View of the Province of Upper Canada, and Promiscuous Remarks on the Government in Two Parts, with an Appendix: Containing a Complete Description of Niagara Falls, and Remarks Relative to the Situation of the Inhabitants Respecting the War, and a Concise History of Its Progress, to the Present Day (New York, 1813), 13; Timothy Bigelow, Journal of a Tour to Niagara Falls in the Year 1805 (Boston, 1876), 64; Howison, Sketches of Upper Canada, 101-2; P. Stansbury, A Pedestrian Tour of Two Thousand Three Hundred Miles, in North America … Performed in the Autumn of 1821 (New York, 1822), 112-13; [———Mathews], A Summer Month; or, Recollections of a Visit to the Falls of Niagara, and the Lakes (Philadelphia, 1823), 78. Trees and boats: Peter Kalm, Travels in North America (1770; reprint, New York, 1964), 2:702-3; Elizabeth Cometti, ed., The American Journals of Lt. John Enys (Syracuse, 1976), 132; Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 338; Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 2:166-67.

The Columbian (New York), 22 November 1810. Canoe: Clinton, Letters on … Natural History, 208. Furniture: Ontario Repository (Canandaigua, N.Y.), 13 November 1821; Connecticut Courant (Hartford), 20 November 1821; the story is retold in Talbot, Five Years’ Residence in the Canadas, 1:136-37. Canoe and small boat: Montreal Gazette, 21 November 1821. Apples: Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 25 November 1824; Wayne Sentinel (Palmyra, N.Y.), 1 December 1824. Three men: Black Rock Gazette, 28 March 1826; Livingston Register (Geneseo, N.Y.), 4 April 1826; Ontario Repository (Canandaigua, N.Y.), 29 March 1826. Ice: Syracuse Gazette & General Advertiser, 4 March 1828. Smugglers: Erie Gazette (Pa.), 26 February 1829. Eagle: Seneca Farmer & Waterloo Advocate (Waterloo, N.Y.), 27 February 1828. Deer: Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Advertiser (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 1 April 1829. See [Theodore Dwight, Jr.], The Northern Traveller; Containing the Routes to Niagara, Quebec, and the Springs; with Descriptions of the Principal Scenes, and Useful Hints to Strangers (New York, 1825), 50-51.

See the dates to newspaper citations in note 34. Construction: Coke, A Subaltern’s Furlough, 2:38; Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 344; [Davison], The Traveller’s Guide, 271-72n.

Annie Fields, ed., The Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston, 1897), 90. On romantic death at Niagara, see Patrick Mc-Greevy, Imagining Niagara: The Meaning and Making of Niagara Falls (Amherst, Mass., 1994), 41-70, and McKinsey, Niagara Falls, esp. 167-69. Both the nineteenth-century elite and most historians have construed the relations between common people and nature in these years as unthinking, unfeeling rape of the land. For an account which sees a more nuanced plebeian aesthetic—one with powerful echoes of the terrific sublime—see Lewis O. Saum, The Popular Mood of Pre—Civil War America (Westport, Conn., 1980), 174-99. On the relation of nature, physical labor, and elite leisure, see Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1995), 171-85.

Paul E. Johnson, “Strange Cargo: The Michigan Descent at Niagara, 1827,” presented at the Conference on Festive Culture and Public Ritual, American Philosophical Society, 13 April 1996. Quotes: Black Rock Gazette, 8 September 1827 (reprinted in many places); Leroy Gazette, 16 August 1827.

Buffalo Patriot, 8 September 1829; Buffalo Journal, 8 September 1829; Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 1 October 1829; Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Intelligencer (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 30 September 1829. Many, many reprints.

Buffalo Journal, 8 September 1829; Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 1 October 1829 (citing Buffalo Republican); Seneca Farmer & Waterloo Advocate (Waterloo, N.Y.), 23 September 1829 (citing Niagara Courier); Painesville Telegraph (Painesville, Ohio), 15 September 1829.

William Forsyth spent his fortune on the court cases, lost, and left Niagara in 1832. On Forsyth and his troubles with the government, see Robert L. Fraser, “William Forsyth,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto, 1988), 7:311-16; John Charles Dent, The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion (Toronto, 1885), 1:151-60; Patrick Bode, Sir John Beverley Robinson: Bone and Sinew of the Compact (Toronto, 1984); Paul Romney, Mr Attorney: The Attorney General for Ontario in Court, Cabinet, and Legislature, 1791-1899 (Toronto, 1986). Willis story: Nathaniel P. Willis, “Niagara—Lake Ontario—the St. Lawrence,” in Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil, Part 2: “Inklings of Adventure” (1845), reprinted in the American Short Story Series (New York, 1968), 30:11. Because the governor sent soldiers instead of civil authorities to tear down the fence, Canadian reformers branded the incident the “Niagara Falls Outrage,” and covered the controversy in scores of newspaper stories. See especially McKenzie’s Colonial Advocate for the years following 1827. Papers on the United States side also kept track of Forsyth’s travails.

Buffalo Journal, 6 October 1829 and 13 October 1829; Fanner’s Journal and Welland Canal Intelligencer (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 7 October 1829; Connecticut Courant (Hartford), 27 October 1829; Livingston Register (Geneseo, N.Y.), 21 October 1829; New-York Commercial Advertiser, 13 October 1829. Pigs and fireworks: The Atlas (New York), 10 October 1829. Circus: Barnard and Page headed the only circus troupe playing in the area. They had played in Erie, Pennsylvania, a few days earlier, and opened in Buffalo a few days after the Niagara exhibition. On this troupe, see Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 21-27 November 1828; Erie Gazette (Pa.), 1 October 1829; Buffalo Journal, 13 and 20 October 1829; Anti-Masonic Enquirer (Rochester, N.Y.), 24 November 1829 (fullest description); Onondaga Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.), 21 October 1829 and 30 December 1829; Stuart Thayer, Annals of the American Circus, 1793-1829 (Manchester, Mich., 1976), 224-25.

Livingston Register (Geneseo, N.Y.), 21 October 1829.

New-York Commercial Advertiser, 13 October 1829.

Hiram Doolittle locates the downriver explosion at the Indian Ladder in the New-York Commercial Advertiser, 13 October 1829. Accounts of the Indian Ladder: Commetti, ed., American Journals of Lt. John Enys, 136-39; Isaac Weld, Jr., Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (London, 1800), 2:122-23; J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, in Frank H. Severance, “Studies of the Niagara Frontier,” Buffalo Historical Society Publications 15 (1911), 356-59. There in 1823: Talbot, Five Years, 131-35. Fishing: Capt. William Newnham Blane, An Excursion through the United States and Canada during the Years 1822 and 1823 (London, 1824), 405; Mary F. Dewey, Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (New York, 1871), 132.

Terrapin Rocks quote: Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 2:166. Other accounts: Fowler, Journal of a Tour, 140; Stuart, Three Years in North America, 1:141. Terrapin Bridge and Michigan Descent: Saratoga Sentinel, 18 September 1827.

Providence Patriot, 21 October 1829 (citing a Buffalo paper); Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Intelligencer (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 7 October 1829; Livingston Register (Geneseo, N.Y.), 21 October 1829; Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 13 October 1829.

Quotes: New-York Commercial Advertiser, 13 October 1829; Livingston Register (Geneseo, N.Y.), 21 October 1829; Providence Patriot, 21 October 1829; Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Intelligencer (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 7 October 1829. The ship stayed on the rock until a storm dislodged it in late November, Buffalo Republican, reprinted in New-York Evening Post, 3 December 1829.

Painesville Telegraph (Painesville, Ohio), 13 October 1829; Freeman’s Journal (Cooperstown, N.Y.), 26 October 1829; Livingston Register (Geneseo, N.Y.), 21 October 1829; Providence Daily Advertiser, 20 October 1829.

Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 15 October 1829.

People’s Press (Batavia, N.Y.), 23 October 1829 (citing Buffalo Republican ); Livingston Register (Geneseo, N.Y.), 21 October 1829; Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 22 October 1829. Other mentions of drunkenness: Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Intelligencer (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 19 December 1829; Painesville Telegraph (Painesville, Ohio), 27 October 1829.

Sam at museum: Livingston Register (Geneseo, N.Y.), 21 October 1829; Painesville Telegraph (Painesville, Ohio), 27 October 1829. Buffalo Patriot, 10 November 1829 (portrait) and 27 October 1829 (recitation).

Buffalo Journal, 14 July 1829, 11 August 1829, 25 August 1829; Buffalo Republican, 25 August 1829; Buffalo Patriot, 25 August 1829. During the previous year, McCleary operated a similar establishment in Detroit. The Detroit Gazette, 6 November 1828 and 13 November 1828, printed McCleary’s advertisement for a “Select Cabinet of Nature and Art” in that town. He published notices of dramatic recitations in the issues of 25 December 1828 and 8 January 1829, then apparently left Detroit.

Buffalo Journal, 4 August 1829, 18 August 1829, 22 September 1829; Buffalo Patriot, 25 August 1829, 29 September 1829, 27 October 1829 (Patch recitation). Neither Hewitt nor Anderson appears in the detailed indexes to George C. O. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1927-47). Within a few years McCleary had left Buffalo to perform his Irish songs and comic sketches with the York (Toronto) Circus. See Edith G. Firth, ed., The Town of York, 1815-1837 (Toronto, 1962), 344n.

Clothes: accounts of Sam’s second Niagara leap. Bear: Painesville Telegraph (Ohio), 27 October 1829. W. P. Moore: Buffalo Journal, 13 October 1829. Frog: Democratic Press (Philadelphia), 9 July 1829. (Thanks to Shane White.)

Buffalo Journal, 13 October 1829; Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 15 October 1829; New-York Commercial Advertiser, 20 October 1829; many others.

Goat Island tolls: Onondaga Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.), 21 October 1829; The Atlas (New York), 17 October 1829. Steamboat: Buffalo Gazette, 13 October 1829.

People’s Press (Batavia, N.Y.), 23 October 1829 (citing Buffalo Republican ); Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 22 October 1829. Steamboat departure: Buffalo Gazette, 13 October 1829.

Biddle Stairs: Buffalo Journal, 29 September 1829; Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (New York, 1969; orig. 1838), 1:108. Crowd, weather, and ladder: People’s Press (Batavia, N.Y.), 23 October 1829; Buffalo Journal, 20 October 1829; Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 22 October 1829; The Gem (Rochester, N.Y.), 31 October 1829.

Flag: Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Intelligencer (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 19 December 1829 (from the Buffalo Republican ); Buffalo Patriot, 27 October 1829. For a particularly startling mix of patriotism, Anglophobia, and populist racism, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984), 264-65. See also Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), 246-53.

New-York Commercial Advertiser, 22 October 1829 (from the Buffalo Republican); Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 22 October 1829; The Gem (Rochester, N.Y.), 31 October 1829.

Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 22 October 1829. The article is bylined “Andrew Todd,” but Mackenzie reprints it and identifies himself as its author in William Lyon Mackenzie, Sketches of Canada and the United States (London, 1833), 97-100. At the Descent: Colonial Advocate, 15 September 1827.

Only fragmentary files of the Buffalo Republican have survived. The long article datelined 17 October 1829, however, was reprinted throughout the Northeast: see New-York Commercial Advertiser, 22 October 1829; New-York Evening Post, 21 October 1829; Rochester Republican, 27 October 1829; Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 21 October 1829; Anti-Masonic Enquirer (Rochester, N.Y.), 3 November 1829; Onondaga Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.), 28 October 1829; People’s Press (Batavia, N.Y.), 23 October 1829; Manufacturer’s and Farmer’s Journal (Providence), 26 October 1829; Providence Patriot, 24 October 1829. Most of the article is reprinted in the Buffalo Historical Society Publications 14 (1910), 247-49n. A reminiscence published in the Republican two months later (it contains Sam’s admission that he nearly fell) was reprinted only in the Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Advertiser (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 19 December 1829.

IV. Rochester

[Margaret Hunter Hall], The Aristocratic Journey: Being the Outspoken Letters of Mrs. Basil Hall, Written during a Fourteen Months’ Sojourn in America, 1827-1828, ed. Una Pope-Hennessy (New York, 1931), 53; Thomas L. McKenney, Sketches of a Tour to the Lakes, of the Character and Customs of the Chippeway Indians, and of Incidents Connected with the Treaty of Fond Du Lac (Baltimore, 1827), 85.

For tourists’ descriptions of Rochester in the 1820s, see Dorothy S. Truesdale, ed., “American Travel Accounts of Early Rochester,” Rochester History 16 (April 1954), 1-24; and Pat M. Ryan, ed., “Rochester Recollected: A Miscellany of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Descriptions,” Rochester History 41 (January and April 1979), 1-48. Paving at Four Corners: Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 7 January 1829. (The name State Street is used throughout the text for purposes of clarity, although the street’s Carroll section had yet to be renamed in Sam Patch’s day.) See also Blake McKelvey, “The Physical Growth of Rochester,” Rochester History 13 (October 1951), 1-24; McKelvey, “Rochester and the Erie Canal,” Rochester History 11 (July 1949), 1-24; and Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York, 1978), 15-21.

Mills obscure both ends: The Gem (Rochester, N.Y.), 13 November 1830. Aqueduct quotes: [Theodore Dwight], The Northern Traveller, and Northern Tour; with the Routes to the Springs, Niagara, and Quebec, and the Coal Mines of Pennsylvania; also, the Tour of New-England (New York, 1830), 74; Isabella Hope Wilson (1833), cited in Ryan, “Rochester Recollected,” 36; Anne Royall, The Black Book; or, a Continuation of Travels in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1828), 1:59; A. Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States (Philadelphia, 1829), 2:193. Lafayette quote: Rochester Telegraph, 14 June 1825.

William Leete Stone, “From New York to Niagara: Journal of a Tour, in Part by the Erie Canal, in the Year 1829,” Buffalo Historical Society Publications 14 (1910), 254-55; Basil Hall, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828 (Edinburgh and London, 1829), 1:153, 160; E. T. Coke, A Subaltern’s Furlough: Descriptive of Scenes in Various Parts of the United States, Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, during the Summer and Autumn of 1832 (London, 1833), 2:18.

The literature on respectability, entrepreneurialism, and middle-class self-fashioning in these years is immense. Substantial recent contributions include Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992); Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

On Rochester’s culture wars in the 1820s, see Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium.

Recess: Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 17 July 1829; Anti-Masonic Enquirer, 20 October 1829; Jenny Marsh Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical (Rochester, N.Y., 1884), 184-85.

See Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 29-31 October and 2 November 1829.

Partnerships: Rochester Telegraph, 12 July 1825, 28 June 1828; Edwin Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters,” newspaper scrapbook, Rochester Public Library, Letters Nos. 4 and 8; Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 184-85; Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr., “J. L. D. Mathies: Western New York State Artist,” New York History 39 (1958), 133-50; Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America (New York, 1994), 84-87. Practice at Recess: Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 30 January 1829.

Band roster and stories: Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters,” Letters Nos. 2-10. They are identified (once) as the Clinton Band in Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 30 January 1829. Celebrations: Ontario Repository (Canandaigua, N.Y.), 11 October 1823; Rochester Telegraph, 14 June 1825. Concerts: Rochester Album, 14 March 1826; “Diary of E. Maria Ward,” 3 January 1819, in Rochester Historical Society Publications 11 (1932), 49; Rochester Daily Advertiser, 24 March 1832.

Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters,” Letters Nos. 2-10. Monroe Garden: Rochester Telegraph, 21 June 1825; Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 15 July 1828. Utica trip: Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 28 September 1829. Band occupations and anecdotes: Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters”; Sylvester J. H. Clark, Early Rochesterians Index (Syracuse, N.Y., 1969).

Drinking episode: Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters,” Letter No. 4. Monroe Garden: Rochester Telegraph, 21 June 1825; People’s Press (Batavia, N.Y.), 9 July 1825. Saturday practice: Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 30 January 1830. Buffalo and Niagara trips: Rochester Telegraph, 11 September 1827; Rochester Gem, 25 September 1830.

Utica trip: Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 28 September 1829. Band occupations and stories: Clark, Early Rochesterians Index ; Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters,” Letters Nos. 1-10.

Joe Cochrane and O’Donohue: Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 184-88.

Drake is identified as having been personally acquainted with Sam Patch in Rochester Evening Times, 13 November 1909 (Sam Patch Scrapbook, Local History Division, Rochester Public Library, cited hereafter as SPSB). Bible: Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters,” Letters Nos. 129-30; relation to Peck, Letter No. 51. On Peck, see Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 43-44, 45, 98.

Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters,” Letter No. 52.

See Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1988), 77-96. Pluck’s tour: Albany Argus and Daily City Advertiser, 19 March 1827 (elephant); Wayne Sentinel (Palmyra, N.Y.), 10 August 1826; Manufacturer’s and Farmer’s Journal (Providence), 28 August 1826; Livingston Register (Geneseo, N.Y.), 12 September 1826.

Parker, Rochester, 133-34; Mrs. Elizabeth J. Varney, “Panorama of Rochester in Its Early Days,” Rochester Historical Society Publications 8 (1929), 222; [Lyman B. Langworthy], Desultory Notes and Reminiscences of the City of Rochester: Its Early History, Remarkable Men and Events, Strange Revelations of the Murders, Mysteries, and Miseries, Casualties, Curiosities and Progress of the Young and Growing City for the Last 50 Years (Rochester, N.Y., 1868), 33-35. Langworthy and Parker both claim that the Fantastical farces in New York State began in Rochester, though exact dates are provided in none of the sources. Leaders’ occupations: Clark, Early Rochesterians Index. Robinson’s barbershop: Rochester Telegraph, 2 April 1822, 12 August 1823, 3 September 1828; Rochester Republican, 29 December 1829; Landlord’s Appendix to Clark, Early Rochesterians Index.

Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters”; Parker and Varney, note 18; Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 220. The literature on working-class and sporting male social life, amusements, and organizations in antebellum America places Sam Patch’s Rochester friends somewhere between the rough and respectable extremes. On the rough, see Richard B. Stott, ed., History of My Own Times: or, the Life and Adventures of William Otter, Sen., Comprising a Series of Events, and Musical Incidents Altogether Original (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), especially the editor’s “Commentary,” 181-223; and Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986). On the respectable: Warren Goldstein, Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), 17-63; Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, N.J., 1998), esp. 41-79.

Of the nine men identified as ringleaders of the militia Fantasticals, only the master saddler C. G. Lathrop was a church member (St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, admitted in 1827). The fifteen who formed the traveling squad of the band in 1829 included the housepainter Jerry Selkrig (First Presbyterian Church, 1824, transferred to St. Paul’s Episcopal, which became a haven for anti-evangelical churchgoers during Charles Finney’s revival). The newsman Edwin Scrantom joined the Second Presbyterian Church during that revival in December 1830, and thereafter sold his newspaper to become a merchant and miller. The printer’s apprentice E. O. Hall converted under Finney and became a missionary to Hawaii. Sources for church membership: Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 152-58. Drake’s toast: Rochester Republican, 12 July 1831. Free-thought advertisers: The World as It Is (Rochester, N.Y.), 2 April 1836; Liberal Advocate (Rochester, N.Y.), 13 October 1832.

This section has been shaped by Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York, 1978), 3-60, and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), 91-110.

Stuart Thayer, Annals of the American Circus, 1793-1829 (Manchester, Mich., 1976), 135-36, 144-45, 224-25. George M. Elwood, “Some Earlier Public Amusements in Rochester,” Rochester Historical Society Publications 1 (1922), 19-20. Bernard and Page advertisements: Rochester Daily Advertiser, 21-24 November 1828; 27-28 November 1828; 19-23 December 1828; Rochester Telegraph, 26 November 1828; Anti-Masonic Enquirer, 24 November 1829 (fullest description). Village restrictions: Records of the Doings of the Trustees of the Village of Rochesterville (typescript, Rochester Public Library), entries for 15 April 1828, 2 December 1828, 14 April 1829, 24 November 1829. Anti-circus editorials: Rochester Observer, 8 May 1829, 20 June 1829, 26 June 1829.

Riots and murders: Spirit of the Times (Batavia, N.Y.), 3 January 1823; Ontario Repository (Canandaigua, N.Y.), 7 January 1823, 14 January 1823; Sandusky Clarion (Ohio), 26 February 1823, 28 August 1824; Lyons Advertiser (Lyons, N.Y.), 24 August 1825; Rochester Telegraph, 17 May 1825. Bearcup: Rochester Album, 19 September 1826. Peddlers, etc.: Rochester Gem, 18 July 1830. Celtic airs: William Lyon Mackenzie, Sketches of Canada and the United States (London, 1833), 6. On Erie Canal disorder, see Blake McKelvey, “Rochester and the Erie Canal,” Rochester History 11 (July 1949), 10-11; Roger E. Carp, “The Limits of Reform: Labor and Discipline on the Erie Canal,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (Summer 1990), 191-219; Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (New York, 1996), 138-71, and Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers & the Digging of North American Canals, 1780-1860 (New York, 1993), esp. 163-99.

Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 23 September 1829. Reprinted in Rochester Observer, 25 September 1829; Onondaga Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.), 7 October 1829; Western Intelligencer (Hudson, Ohio), 20 October 1829; Cherry-Valley Gazette (Cherry Valley, N.Y.), 29 September 1829; Paterson Intelligencer, 7 October 1829; New-Jersey Journal (Elizabeth Town), 6 October 1829; United States Gazette (Philadelphia), 29 September 1829; Manufacturer’s and Farmer’s Journal (Providence), 4 October 1829; Boston Patriot & Mercantile Advertiser, 1 October 1829; Albany Daily Advertiser, 28 September 1829.

Quotes: Rochester Observer, 15 November 1829; Rochester Album, 8 January 1828 and 6 June 1826; Records of the Doings of the Trustees, 16 September 1828. Trustees’ attack on first company: ibid., May—July 1826. On early Rochester theater, see Elwood, “Some Earlier Public Amusements in Rochester,” 23-25; McKelvey, Rochester: The Water-Power City, 144-45.

Hill: Rochester Telegraph, 24 October 1828. Vilallave: Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 1-11 September 1829. Theater companies seldom advertised in newspapers after 1826, but they were licensed regularly in 1826 and 1827: Records of the Doings of the Trustees, 1826-29. Restrictions: entries for 12 December 1826, 26 December 1826, 4 January 1827, 9 January 1827, 27 March 1827, 15 May 1827, 29 May 1827. Peace officers and closing time: 18 September 1827. The trustees granted no theater licenses from late 1827 through the end of 1829, but theater companies clearly played in Rochester. Hooting and howling: Rochester Album, 8 January 1828. Batavia: Rochester Observer, 29 January 1828.

Fights: Rochester Post-Express, 20 August 1892, in Ashley Samson Scrapbook, 52:14-15 (Rochester Public Library); Harriet A. Weed, comp., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed (Boston, 1884), 30-31; Anti-Masonic Enquirer, 14 April 1829; The Craftsman (Rochester, N.Y.), 8 September 1829, 13 October 1829, 20 October 1829. On Whittlesey, see Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 24, 74, 76, 78, 91, 128. His wife and Female Charitable Society: [Elisha Ely], A Directory of the Village of Rochester … to which is added a Sketch of the History of the Village from 1822 to 1827 (Rochester, N.Y., 1827), 105. His theater poem was published in the Rochester Album, 23 May 1826. Whittlesey’s Antimasonic colleagues Thurlow Weed and Henry B. Stanton (who soon dropped such frivolities to become a Presbyterian, an abolitionist, and the husband of Elizabeth Cady) also supported the theater. See Weed, Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 206-7; Henry B. Stanton, Random Recollections (New York, 1887), 26-27.

On Frankfort: Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 63-64; Howard L. Osgood, “The Struggle for Monroe County,” Rochester Historical Society Publications 3 (1924), 127-36; Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck, “Frankfort: Birthplace of Rochester’s Industry,” Rochester History 50 (July 1988), 1-23. Militia quote: Langworthy, Desultory Notes and Reminiscences, 34. McCracken’s Tavern: references in Rochester Historical Society Publications 6 (1927), 343-44; 4 (1925), 237; Charles Hastings Wiltsie, “Reminiscences of McCrackenville as Related by Mrs. Hiram Lavira Blanchard,” Rochester Historical Society Publications 6 (1927), 129-34. Horse races: Liberal Advocate (Rochester, N.Y.), 22 March 1834.

A. J. Langworthy reminiscences, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 31 March 1898 (SPSB).

Henry O‘Reilly, Settlement of the West: Sketches of Rochester (Rochester, N.Y., 1838), 381; Catherine Josephine Dowling, “Dublin,” Rochester Historical Society Publications 2 (1923), 233-49.

Journal of Mary O’Brien (1828), in Ryan, “Rochester Recollected,” 21; Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” 254-55.

Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Young Actress, ed. Monica Gough (New York, 1990), 192; Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rochester,” in Tales, Sketches and Other Papers (Cambridge, Mass., 1883), 17; Nathaniel P. Willis, American Scenery; or Land, Lake, and River. Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (London, 1840), 1:89.

Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Intelligencer (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 7 February 1827 (original story in the Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph); Rochester Album, 13 May 1828 and 17 June 1828; Republican Advocate (Batavia, N.Y.), 17 March 1826 (original in the Rochester Telegraph) and 13 January 1826 (from the Monroe Republican); boys and raceway: Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters,” Letter No. 108.

Bunnell: Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters,” Letters Nos. 129-30 (rattlesnake); Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 134 (Fantastical).

“Tinselled theatricals”: Rochester Republican, 4 January 1830. Clinton portrait: Rochester Album, 8 July 1828; Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 31 July 1829. Julius Catlin: Rochester Observer, 26 September 1828; Henry O‘Reilly, Settlement of the West, 384; Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 115-16. On the Franklin Institute in Rochester (which failed for lack of membership soon after 1830), see McKelvey, Rochester: The Water-Power City, 124-25; notice in Rochester Historical Society Publications 16 (1937), 26-29; Directory of the Village of Rochester, 110-11; Rochester Republican, 1 June 1830.

Quote: Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 333.

Crowd: Albany Evening Advertiser, 10 November 1829; Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 7 November 1829; Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Advertiser (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 18 November 1829 (reprint from the Auburn Free Press).

Albany Daily Advertiser, 10 November 1829.

Albany Daily Advertiser, 10 November 1829. Langworthy reminiscence: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 31 March 1898; Rochester Post Express, 11 April 1903; unidentified clipping dated 14 November 1909 (all in SPSB); Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 186-87, recounts this as a dubious but enduring part of the local Patch legend.

Albany Daily Advertiser, 10 November 1829; Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 7 November 1829 (“Large as was the concourse”); Farmer’s Journal and Welland Canal Advertiser (St. Catharine’s, Upper Canada), 18 November 1829 (“No Mistake”).

Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 12-13 November 1829. The advertisement appeared in far fewer papers than did the notice of Sam’s first Rochester leap, but the handbills circulated widely. Sam and his friends were learning that handbills were the cheapest and most effective way to advertise shows.

Schooners: Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 187. Bets: Rochester Daily Advertiser, 2 March 1833 (SPSB).

Crowd estimate: Colonial Advocate (York, Upper Canada), 19 November 1829. Five-year-old: John Haywood reminiscences, Rochester Evening Times, 13 November 1909 (SPSB), identified as the son of village trustee John Haywood in Anah B. Yates, “Early Records of St. Luke’s Church: Marriages, Baptisms and Deaths, 1821-1847,” Rochester Historical Society Publications 5 (1926), 167. Other crowd descriptions: The Gem (Rochester, N.Y.) 14 November 1829; Weed, Autobiography, 357; Rochester Gem and Ladies’ Amulet, 23 January 1841 (SPSB); Manufacturer’s and Farmer’s Journal (Providence), 10 December 1829 (quote “romantic station,” from the Boston Evening Gazette).

Pebbles: The Gem (Rochester, N.Y.), 7 January 1837 (SPSB). Collections in the crowd: A. J. Langworthy reminiscences in Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 31 March 1898, in Ashley Samson Scrapbook 64:50 (SPSB), and an account written in pencil, dated 1879, in Samson Scrapbook 2:94-95 (SPSB).

Sam’s jumping suit: Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 188.

Procession: Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 188; Rochester Daily Advertiser, 2 March 1833 (SPSB). Cheers: Rochester Gem, 14 November 1829 and 7 January 1837; Rochester Gem and Ladies’ Amulet, 23 January 1841 (all in SPSB). Journalists: Stanton, Random Recollections, 27; Manufacturer’s and Farmer’s Journal (Providence), 10 December 1829.

Woman in window: John Haywood reminiscences, Rochester Evening Times, 13 November 1913 (SPSB). Baby: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 3 January 1923 (SPSB). Citizen and old woman: Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 188.

Joe’s story: Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 188. Gin: John Haywood reminiscences in Rochester Evening Times, 13 November 1913 (SPSB), which follows Cochrane’s story closely in all other respects. Quotes: Ashley Samson reminiscences, Rochester Daily Union, 13 April 1855 (SPSB); Stanton, Random Recollections, 27; A. J. Langworthy reminiscences in Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, 31 March 1898; handwritten account dated 1879, in Samson Scrapbooks, 2:94-95 (all in SPSB).

Langworthy, Desultory Notes, 18; Weed, Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 357; Stanton, Random Recollections, 27; Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 188.

Albany Daily Advertiser, 17 November 1829. Most eyewitnesses agree that Sam was clearly out of control in the air. But the correspondent of the Boston Evening Gazette watched Sam’s descent from the island and insisted that “he appeared to rush thro’ the air with the straightness of an arrow, and his white costume contrasted finely with the dark precipice behind.” (Reprinted in the Providence Manufacturer’s and Farmer’s Journal, 10 December 1829.) The Englishman James Boardman, who unwittingly disembarked from a canal boat on the day of the last leap, also recorded that Patch “kept himself perfectly upright” in the descent. [James Boardman], America, and the Americans (New York, 1974; orig. 1833), 166.

Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical, 189. Once again, there is disagreement on how long the crowd stayed. Most agreed that they left after “several minutes,” after “some time,” or “in less than five minutes.” But the eyewitness Henry Stanton remembered that the crowd waited “for hours,” while a later reminiscence insisted that they “waited until dark.” In order: Rochester Daily Union, 13 April 1855 (SPSB); Rochester Daily Advertiser, 14 November 1829; Langworthy, Desultory Notes, 18; Stanton, Random Recollections, 27; Rochester Post Express, 11 April 1903 (SPSB).

V. Celebrity

Patch alive: Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 28 November 1829. Sightings: Albany Daily Advertiser, 1 December 1829; Jenny Marsh Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical (Rochester, N.Y., 1884), 189. Jacob Graves: [Lyman B. Langworthy], Desultory Notes and Reminiscences of the City of Rochester: Its Early History, Remarkable Men and Events, Strange Revelations of the Murders, Mysteries, and Miseries, Casualties, Curiosities and Progress of the Young and Growing City for the Last 50 Years (Rochester, N.Y., 1868), 18; Edwin Scrantom, “Old Citizen Letters,” Scrapbook, Local History Division, Rochester Public Library, Letter No. 8. Boston: American Traveler, 24 November 1829. (All of these stories were widely reprinted in northeastern newspapers.) Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rochester,” in Tales, Sketches, and Other Papers (Boston, 1883), 17-18. Hawthorne’s tour of western New York is dated 1832 in Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (New York, 1983), 308n.

Geneva Chronicle, cited in New-York Commercial Advertiser, 27 November 1829; New-York Evening Post, 28 November 1829; Connecticut Courant, 1 December 1829; Providence Daily Advertiser, 1 December 1829; Manufacturer’s and Farmer’s Journal (Providence), 26 November 1829; Albany Daily Advertiser, 30 November 1829; Boston Patriot & Mercantile Advertiser, 1 December 1829. Second rumor: Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 16 February 1830.

Details in this and the following paragraph are from Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph, 18 March and 19 March 1830; The Gem (Rochester, N.Y.), 20 March 1830; Rochester Republican, 22 March 1830. Alcohol: Painesville Telegraph (Painesville, Ohio), 30 March 1830. Charlotte reminiscences: Rochester Post-Express, 11 April 1903 (Sam Patch Scrapbook, Local History Division, Rochester Public Library, cited hereafter as SPSB).

Much of this material is presented and cited in Richard M. Dorson, “Sam Patch, Jumping Hero,” New York Folklore Quarterly 1 (August 1945), 133-51, and in the pages below. Sentoro: F. Calvin Parker, The Japanese Sam Patch: Saga of a Servant (Notre Dame, Ind., 2001). Dream book: The Dreamer’s Sure Guide, or the Interpretation of Dreams, Faithfully Revealed (Baltimore, 1831) 27-30, which tells us that Patch dreamed that he was a huge frog before his last leap. (Thanks to Karen Halttunen.) Minstrel song: “Jim Crow Complete in 150 Verses” (n.p., n.d.), Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets, Library of Congress, Making of America Web site: memory.loc.gov. (The Patch verse went like this: “Dar was one Sam Patch / Who took de ugly leap / He’d better stay in New-York/And be a chimney sweep.”) Cigar box (label copyrighted 1886) in author’s collection.

See Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York, 1986). On the Founders, the seminal treatment is the title essay in Douglass Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers (New York, 1974). Well-wrought examples are strewn throughout Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2000), and Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, Conn., 2001).

John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York, 1953), is the classic rendering of Jackson’s mythical-celebrity status.

On the origins and preconditions of modern celebrity, see P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis, 1997), 3-50; Richard Dyer, Stars (London, 1979), 7-32; Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, 315-598; Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London, 2001), esp. 101-41. On the folklore/fakelore controversy as it applies to Sam Patch, see Gerald Parsons, “Second Thoughts on a ‘Folk Hero’: or, Sam Patch Falls Again,” New York Folklore Quarterly 25 (June 1969), 83-92; Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr., “Reply to Gerald Parsons’ ‘Sam Patch,’” New York Folklore Quarterly 26 (March 1970), 78-80; Kathleen M. Kavanagh, “The Limited Fame of Sam Patch,” New York Folklore Quarterly 28 (June 1972), 118-34. There is a useful discussion of such matters in Robin D. G. Kelley, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Folk,’” American Historical Review 97 (December 1992), 1400-8.

Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), 14 November 1829; The Constellation (New York), 21 November 1829. Some patricians, in their bemused way, shared the popular interest in Sam Patch. The genial New Yorker Philip Hone, for instance, recorded Sam’s death and copied the Albany Daily Advertiser’s account of the last leap (with commentary that was neither positive nor negative) in his diary. See Allan Nevins, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851 (New York, 1927), 1:17-18 (entry for 18 November 1829).

“A Monody” appeared in the New-York Commercial Advertiser, 2 December 1829. It reappeared in Robert C. Sands, The Writings of Robert C. Sands, in Prose and Verse. With a Memoir of the Author. In Two Volumes (New York, 1834), 2:347-52. Review: American Traveler (Boston), 8 December 1829. “Columbia man”: Van Wyck Brooks, The World of Washington Irving (New York, 1944), 192.

Flaccus, “The Great Descender,” Knickerbocker Magazine, January-February 1840, reprinted in [Thomas Ward], Passaic, A Group of Poems Touching that River: with other Musings: by Flaccus (New York, 1842), 17-41. Reviews: The North American Review 51 (July 1840), 231-32; Edgar Allan Poe, “Thomas Ward” and “William Ellery Channing,” in Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 994, 459. On the Knickerbocker Circle, see Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York, 1956), 9-68.

Review of Mr. Green, The Work of Aerostation, in the International Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science, and Art 2 (December-March, 1850-51), 17; Senex, “The Corinne, or Italy, of Madame De Staël,” Southern Literary Messenger 15 (July 1849), 380-81; “My Lost Darling,” Continental Monthly 4 (August 1863), 160; “General Grant and the President,” The Living Age 95 (12 October 1867), 126; “The Imperial Sam Patch,” Appleton’s Journal: A Magazine of General Literature 4 (22 October 1870), 504; “Popular Lectures,” New Englander and Yale Review 8 (May 1850), 193-94. (These and subsequent citations from nineteenth-century magazines were collected from the Making of America Web site: http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/.)

Lloyd McKim Garrison, “Robert Habersham, A Young Harvard Poet,” The New England Magazine 17 (September 1894), 57; “Editorial Notes—American Literature,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art 4 (October 1854), 450. Mark Hopkins, Baccalaureate Sermons, and Occasional Discourses (Boston, 1862), 16. (Address delivered in 1850.)

Some sample anti-entertainment and anticrowd editorials: Rochester Telegraph, 26 November 1828 (shooting matches). Rochester Album, 6 June 1826; Rochester Observer, 4 July 1828, 11 July 1828, 19 June 1829 (July 4 and militia parades); 8 January 1828, 11 January 1828, 15 November 1829 (theater). Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph , 15 October 1829; Rochester Republican, 29 November 1829; Rochester Observer, 7 November 1828, 31 July 1829 (public executions). Joseph Penney, The House of Mirth: A Discourse Preached in the First Presbyterian Church in Rochester, December 20, 1829 (Rochester, N.Y., 1830). On Rochester’s culture wars of the 1820s and 1830s, see Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York, 1978). Guilty audience: Mary B. A. King, Looking Backward, or, Memories of the Past (New York, 1870), 118; Rochester Observer, 20 November 1829; Anti-Masonic Enquirer, 17 November 1829; Albany Daily Advertiser, 17 November 1829; Freeman’s Journal (Cooperstown, N.Y.), 23 November 1829 (quote); New-York Commercial Advertiser, 18 November 1829; Providence Daily Advertiser, 21 November 1829.

Providence Daily Advertiser, 21 November 1829. Englishman: Rochester Daily Advertiser, 2 March 1833 (SPSB). “Loafer”: Rochester Daily Union, 11 November 1852 (SPSB). Robert B. Thomas, The Farmer’s Almanack … 1836 (Boston, 1835), unpaginated, but the Patch reference is for October 1836.

Portland Courier, 13 October 1829 (no lotteries); 21 December 1829 and 1 January 1830 (museum). On Seba Smith and Jack Downing, see Mary Alice Wyman, Two American Pioneers: Seba Smith and Elizabeth Oakes Smith (New York, 1927), and Milton Rickels and Patricia Rickels, Seba Smith (Boston, 1977).

The issue of the Courier in which the poem appeared has not survived, but the piece was picked up by other papers. For instance, United States Gazette (Philadelphia), 9 February 1830. Major Downing is revealed as the author in [Seba Smith], The Life and Times of Major Jack Downing, of Downingville, Away Down East in the State of Maine. Written by Himself. (Boston, 1835), 261-67.

Henry J. Finn, ed., American Comic Annual (Boston, 1831), 216-20.

[William Haliburton], The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick, of Slickville (Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1836), 39-40; anon., The American Joe Miller (Philadelphia, 1839), 49-50.

Falconbridge [Jonathan Kelly], Dan Marble: A Biographical Sketch of that Famous and Diverting Humorist, with Reminiscences, Comicalities, Anecdotes, etc., etc. (New York, 1851), 77-79 (Canada).

Unless otherwise cited, information on Dan Marble’s Sam Patch is from Frances Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on Stage (Austin, Tex., 1964), 221-39. Uncle Sam: Joseph Jefferson, cited in Richard Moody, America Takes the Stage: Romanticism in American Drama and Theater, 1750-1900 (Bloomington, Ind., 1955), 112-13. The first announcement of the play that I have found is in the Rochester Daily Democrat, 13 December 1836 (SPSB). On the enduring popularity of Marble’s portrayal, see Dorson, “Sam Patch: Jumping Hero,” and Constance Roarke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York, 1931), 74.

Kelly, Dan Marble, 89, 90-94.

George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1928), 4:321. Kelly, Dan Marble, 109. The conversation between Sam Patch and Frances Trollope has not survived, but Kelly (22-27) tells of a (staged) conversation on a steamboat between Trollope and Dan Marble. Marble overwhelms the Englishwoman with western tall tales about the “big slantendicular puddle” of Niagara Falls, and the fountain of brandy hidden in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. He concludes: “You should have been born in America, my dear Ma‘am: but as you were not, you may possibly die here, and that’s some consolation for you.”

Anon., “Sam Patch, the Jumper,” Plays Submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, Catalogue (Add. Mss.) No. 42979 (2), the British Library, London (microfiche). “Monsieurs”: Working-Man’s Advocate (Rochester, N.Y.), 14 March 1840 (SPSB). Marble’s combination of the Yankee and Western characters is central to Hodge, Yankee Theatre, which includes a chapter entitled “Dan Marble and the Western Hybrid.” The hybrid, transregional democratic hero was a source of some concern (as well as fundamental misunderstanding) for critics who thought that the vernacular speech of Yankees, frontiersmen, and other regional types should be rendered with ethnographic precision. A New York critic had this to say about “Down East,” a Yankee farce that appeared in 1830: “In order to depict local manners the author would have been bred on the spot; or at least should have spent some years among the people whom he attempts to represent. That the author of Down East is not well acquainted with New-England peculiarities of language, is very evident from the fact of his putting into the mouth of his Yankee hero, Major Joe Bunker, such words and phrases as ‘corn-cob,’ ‘I reckon,’ ‘rowing up Salt River,’ &c. which everybody knows are Southernisms.” The Constellation (New York), 24 April 1830.

Composition Book of Charles C. Brown, 1835-38, Chautauqua County Historical Society, McClurg Mansion, Westfield, New York. Spelling and punctuation in the original. (Thanks to Katherine Martinez.)

“The Nicaraguan Question,” United States Democratic Review 41 (February 1858), 117; “Gossip of the Month,” Ibid. 20 (January 1847), 96. On the Democratic Review, see Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 104-17.

Hawthorne, “Rochester,” 18. The sketch first appeared in the New England Magazine 9 (December 1835).

Herman Melville, Redburn, His First Voyage (1849), Chapters 15, 24. (Thanks to Sean Wilentz.)

“Andrew Jackson at Home. Reminiscences by his Granddaughter Rachel Jackson Lawrence,” McClure’s Magazine 9 (July 1897), 793. Robert V Remini, Andrew Jackson: Volume Three: The Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845 (New York, 1984), 432. Quote: John Dizikes, Sportsmen & Gamesmen (Columbia, Mo., 2002; orig. 1981), 10. Phone conversation with the Research Department at the Hermitage, 20 September 2001. We cannot know whether Jackson named the horse himself, or whether the horse was named Sam Patch when Jackson received him. If the latter is true, it is interesting to note that Jackson did not change the name.

Anon., The Wonderful Leaps of Sam Patch (New York, ca. 1875); William Dean Howells, Their Wedding Journey (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), 68. Howells’s novel was originally serialized in Atlantic Monthly 28 (1871).

Richard Dorson’s first (annotated) Sam Patch essay appeared in the New York Folklore Quarterly 1 (August 1945). He revised this for a series of popular accounts: “The Story of Sam Patch,” American Mercury (June 1947), 741-47; “Sam Patch: The American Mock Hero,” in John A. Garraty, The Unforgettable Americans (New York, 1960), 183-89; “The Wonderful Leaps of Sam Patch,” American Heritage 18 (December 1966), 12-18; “Sam Patch the Mill Hand,” in Dorson, America in Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present (New York, 1973), 92-98. Children’s books: Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Sam Patch, the High, Wide, and Handsome Jumper (Eau Claire, Wis., 1951); Irwin Shapiro, Sam Patch, Champion Jumper (Champaign, Ill., 1972); Carol Beach York, Sam Patch, the Big Time Jumper (Mahwah, N.J., 1980). Sam is also featured in a reader intended for home schoolers: Morrie Greenberg, American Adventures: True Stories from America’s Past, 1770-1870 (Northridge, Calif., 1991), 30-35. Novel: William Getz, Sam Patch: Ballad of a Jumping Man (New York, 1986). A recent privately published novel is built around Sam’s undying love for an Indian maiden: David Tinling, There’s No Mistake in Sam Patch (Xlibris, 2000).

Anon., A Visitor’s Guide to Passaic Falls (Paterson, 1859), 32. Devlin: “One of Sam Patch’s Scholars,” typescript from a Providence paper dated October 2 (the year was not transcribed, but internal evidence suggests 1890), in SPSB.

The 1830 edition of one of the principal guidebooks included a hurried insertion about Sam’s Niagara leaps: [Gideon Minor Davison], The Fashionable Tour: A Guide to Travellers Visiting the Middle and Northern States, and the Provinces of Canada, 4th ed. (Saratoga Springs, N.Y., 1830), 272n. For later examples, see D. W. Clark, “Two Days at Niagara,” Ladies Repository 16 (September 1856), 560; Mrs. S. S. Colt, “The Tourist’s Guide through the Empire State. Embracing all Cities, Towns and Watering Places, by Hudson River and New York Central Route (Albany, N.Y., 1871), 194; J. Disturnell, comp., Sailing on the Great Lakes and Rivers of America: embracing a description of lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan & Superior, and rivers St. Mary, St. Clair, Detroit, Niagara & St. Lawrence … (Philadelphia, 1874), 306. Philip Mason, Niagara and the Daredevils: The Story of the Niagara River and the Men and Women Who Defied It (Niagara Falls, Ontario, 1969), n.p.

Attempts to rebury Sam: Albany Daily Advertiser, 25 March 1830; New-York Commercial Advertiser, 25 March 1830. Pictures in boats and taverns: Rochester Daily Advertiser, 2 March 1833 (SPSB). Bear at hotel: Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London, 1984; orig. 1839), 334. Travelers: Davison, The Fashionable Tour, 250; John Fowler, Journal of a Tour in the State of New York, in the Year 1830 (London, 1831), 104-5; Henry Tudor, Narrative of a Tour in North America: Comprising Mexico, the Mines of Real del Monte, the United States, and the British Colonies; with an Excursion to the Island of Cuba. In a Series of Letters, Written in the Years 1831-32 (London, 1834), 1:222; Rev. Isaac Fidler, Observations on Professions, Literature, Manners, and Emigration in the United States and Canada, Made during a Residence There in 1832 (New York, 1833), 122; C. D. Arfwedson, The United States and Canada in 1832, 1833, and 1834 (London, 1834), 2:302-3; [Rev. S. Gilman, comp.], The Poetry of Traveling in the United States. By Carolina Gilman (New York, 1838), 103. Clam shells: reminiscences of Mrs. Mary Pollard, Rochester Post-Express, 11 April 1903 (SPSB). Sam Drake: Rochester Evening Times, 13 November 1909 (SPSB). Hollenbrook: Rochester Daily Democrat, 17 June 1848; Rochester Republican , 22 June 1848 (SPSB). Sam Scott: Ricky Jay, Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women (New York, 1986), 147-54; Jenny Marsh Parker, Rochester: A Story Historical (Rochester, N.Y., 1884), 190.

Author’s on-site observations. Railroad: Wisbey,”Reply to Gerald Parsons’ ‘Sam Patch,’” 79. Marker in parade: Rochester Post-Express, 11 April 1903 (SPSB). Grave: David Coapman, “The Grave of Sam Patch,” New York Folklore Quarterly 5 (Winter 1949), 291-95. The canal boat is operated by Cornhill Transportation; Sam Patch Nitro Porter is produced at Rohrbach’s Brewery.