The Lives of Barrytown, Part 3: Junk Piles and War Heroes
by Cynthia Owen Philip

This is the third of a four-part sketch of the history of the hamlet of Barrytown. The first article discussed the early settlement and four large estates (Sylvania/Edgewater, Massena, Rokeby and Stein Valetje), while the second described the 19th-century split in the village between large landowners and working people. The fourth and final article on Barrytown will appear in the Spring issue.

Barrytown got along fine in the early years of the 20th century. There were steady jobs for ticket agents, conductors, freight handlers, telegraph operators, signalmen, trackwalkers and maintenance gangs. Five trains a day went north and five went south. The minute the ice broke up on the river, barges started carrying produce from the countryside—chickens, hogs, hay and grains, vegetables and fruit—to the markets in Albany and New York City as well as coal, farm tools, seeds, lime, building materials and myriad other needed commodities to communities in between. Commercial fisherman dotted the waters during shad season. Although the huge volumes of sturgeon were beginning to dwindle, one lucky man landed a female with an 80-pound egg sac. In 1905, revenues of the river men exceeded all previous years.

Inland, estate farms also provided year round work, with great boosts in hiring during planting and harvesting. The mansions' pleasure grounds and greenhouses required high maintenance, too. When the families were in residence, additional stablemen and coachmen and a large staff were needed to open and close the houses and keep the owners' lives moving smoothly.

Margaret Chanler, who had spurred a handsome major renovation of Rokeby by the fashionable architect Stanford White, and had quietly bought out her siblings, was engrossed in creating a state of the art dairy enterprise. She had already built a concrete barn and a modern creamery. Warren Delano III inherited Stein Valetje, the property bordering Rokeby on the south, from his childless aunt and uncle Laura Astor and Franklin Hughes Delano. Wealthy in his own right as well as through his wife, he was busy refurbishing the long neglected land and house. He bought purebred sheep and cattle and tried, mainly unsuccessfully, to raise fancy turkeys and pheasants. His stables housed fine riding, work and show horses. And his 200-foot windmill—the largest in

the state—pumped water to both the farming operation and the mansion. He improved the grounds with hedges of white pine, a new greenhouse and a tennis court. On the waterfront, he built a large boathouse and dock for his sail and iceboats as well as to receive the launch of his brother-in-law's great ocean-going yacht, the Narada. Most important to the working people of Barrytown, he hired and bought locally whenever he could and brought in supplies via the Barrytown docks and freight house when he couldn't.

To the north of Rokeby, Donaldson's Edgewater had been bought by the husband of Margaret Chanler's sister Elizabeth, the Bostonian sage John Jay Chapman, a widower with three boys. The fields, however, were placed on hold, for Chapman was going through one of his recurrent spells of depression and Elizabeth was occupied with what would be her only child, Chanler Armstrong Chapman. It was not until 1910 that they built their mansion on the hill above Edgewater, as Donaldson had once planned to do. Called Sylvania, its walking and riding trails connected with Rokeby's.

Massena was also in a kind of limbo. John L. Aspinwall's widow Jane, once a pillar of the community, was aging. When she died in 1911, the property was sold to Garret B. Kip from Ankony in Rhinecliff and his wife Carola, a very rich New York City socialite and the granddaughter of Tivoli's General dePeyster. In their round of the fashionable world, they would be at Massena only when they were not drawn elsewhere.

One More Icehouse Fire
In 1908 the hamlet suffered a terrible blow. Once again, as in the preceding century, sparks from a coal-fired locomotive set fire to an icehouse, this time the north one. It spread until virtually all the enterprises and many of the houses west of the railroad tracks were destroyed. Little was rebuilt. It would remain a sad site for a long time to come. Nevertheless, with the railroad, shipping, fishing, as well as their own small farms and the estates to sustain them, the hamlet snapped back.To add to family income, more housewives took in summer boarders, escaping the heat and dust of the cities. Whole families pitched in when extra help was needed to harvest strawberries, plums, apples and pears on Red Hook farms.

The children continued to be taught their lessons at the Alexander Jackson Davis-designed school at the top of the hill. Considered to be one of the best in a wide area, its committed staff of two was supplemented by John Jay Chapman reading aloud to the children, both because he believed their learning ability was increased by listening to good literature, and because they enjoyed it. A fine writer, he also created plays for them to perform. In addition, Captain A. C Zabriskie came down periodically from Blithewood in Annandale to deliver patriotic lectures on such American heroes as Lincoln and Grant. He also formed the Blithewood Drum and Bugle Corps for boys between the ages of 12 and 18; many Barrytown youngsters joined it. In a grand affair on Decoration Day, they placed flowers on the graves of civil war soldiers buried in both Barrytown cemeteries.

In 1909, during the great Hudson-Fulton celebration, everyone who could get a seat in a boat went out on the river to follow the replicas of Hudson's Half Moon and Fulton's North River, the parade of 23 historical floats, and the squadron of six torpedo boats as they glided from Kingston to pay honor to the Livingstons at Clermont. Those not waterborne got almost as good a view from the docks.

Life in Barrytown was not all milk and honey, of course. Grownups as well as children died of now preventable, or at least curable diseases. The Twentieth Century Limited added another death to its record when it claimed trackman Benjamin DuBois, who stepped aside as a freight train passed only to be struck down by the express as it roared by in the opposite direction. In another terrible accident, six Polish day laborers persuaded Barrytowner John Malloy to row them across the river at nightfall, even though a storm was brewing. They were nearing Rondout when a sudden gust capsized the boat. Malloy and four of the Poles were drowned; their bodies were not found for over a week. In a lighter, but still unsettling vein, thieves broke into the Barrytown railroad station's ticket office and blew up the safe with dynamite. Ironically, all they got for their trouble was two dollars in change.

Although there would always be a sharp social line between the estate owners and their workers, a mutually respectful bond based on more than interdependency continued between them. Estate grounds became boys' adventure parks. A great expedition was to "hike" them, retrieving from their expansive dumps useful items that could be sold for cash or made into vital equipment such as wheeled carts. The boys also hunted and trapped in their fields and woods, although that was known to be out of bounds.

When in his victorious campaigns first for the state legislature, then for county sheriff, flamboyant Bob Chanler founded the Chanler Brass Band, the Chanler Drum Corps and the Chanler Hook and Ladder Company and also staged the most gargantuan clambakes the county ever knew, all Barrytown joined in the fun. His brother Lewis ran for both Lieutenant Governor of the state and for Red Hook Town Supervisor the same year. More sedate in his presentations than Bob, he campaigned in a fancy touring car, a novelty in that era. He won both offices, to the satisfaction of most all Barrytowners. (Lewis later ran for Governor but lost.)

The Great War
The estate men were the first to serve in World War I. Even before the United States entered the conflict, John Jay Chapman's son Victor defied his parents' entreaties and joined the Lafayette Esquadrille in France as an aviator. Having survived countless dogfights, he received a serious head wound. Undaunted, he took to the skies again, only to be shot down behind enemy lines. The first American airman to be killed, he became an almost mystic symbol of the valor of America's youth. His brother Conrad enlisted in the Navy and served both in the Atlantic and Pacific on convoy ships. In the older generation Wintie Chanler, although 53 and in poor shape because of multiple hunting accidents, was able to wiggle an appointment as an interpreter in the American Expeditionary Force because of his knowledge of languages and customs, from many trips abroad. At the front in Italy and France, he rose to be a major and was as delighted with his life as he had ever been. Margaret Chanler's husband, Richard Aldrich, went to Washington, D.C as a captain in Army intelligence.

It is difficult to tell how many of the working men of the hamlet were called up, for there are no clear lists. However, the Veterans of Foreign Wars are in the process of identifying them and have already surveyed the gravestones in Barrytown. Webster H. Morris, Carulus J. Rada, and N. J. Connelly, who are buried in the Sacred Heart cemetery, were veterans of that war, as were Alexander D'Alessandro, George H. Genzmer, Frederick Harris, Herbert S. Smith and Herbert S. Wheeler, who are buried in St. John's cemetery. But this does not count the servicemen who were killed and buried abroad. Nor those who returned, but did not settle in Barrytown. Their names have yet to be compiled.

Death Enters the Charmed Circle
Both through acts of fate and of willful personality, the estates had a difficult time settling down once the war was at last over. Warren Delano III was instantly killed in 1920 when the high-spirited horse he was driving bolted into an oncoming express train at the Barrytown station. His only son Lyman, who, having been slow to grasp onto an independent business career, had been given a family sinecure, inherited Stein Valetje. With an abundant fortune and a highly organized wife, the transition was made smoothly and the place was able to carry on much as it had done before.

The turmoil at Rokeby was far more prolonged and serious. Lewis divorced his wife to marry his mistress of several years, erstwhile family friend Julie Olin, who also divorced. Margaret, whose stern principles forbade her to recognize what she deemed "plural marriage," cut him out of her life and that of Rokeby, despite the havoc and heartache this would inevitably bring. Former Sheriff Bob, living a legendary Rabelaisian life at his "House of Fantasy" in New York's Greenwich Village in which his two redheaded mistresses alternated as hostesses, was only slightly less stigmatized—apparently because he was an artist and less able to distinguish between moral right and wrong. When he had run through all his money and his heart began to give out, too, he moved his ménage to Woodstock.

Wintie Chanler suffered a stroke while riding during the summer of 1926. He died in a coma, but not before his wife, born a Roman Catholic, had baptized him into her faith. Telegrams and passionate letters flew back and forth among the siblings as to whether Catholic rites should be allowed at his burial in the family vault. Elizabeth and Margaret refused to consent. Neither attended the funeral, which was held at his farm in the Genesee Valley where he had been so happy riding to the hounds, and where his widow still lived.

Within the next decade all of the "Astor orphans" were dead except Margaret and Alida. John Jay Chapman and Richard Aldrich had died as well. After a long downhill course which his drink-abused body could do nothing to reverse, Bob's heart gave out in mid-summer 1930. Three years later John Jay Chapman faded away at Good Hap, the small house he and Elizabeth had built on the place when they gave Sylvania to their son Chanler. Willie died in 1934 on the Riviera; Archie in Virginia in 1935; and Elizabeth as well as Richard Aldrich in 1937.

Of Margaret's siblings, only the ostracized Lewis and Alida, who was cut out when she converted to Roman Catholicism, survived. Margaret tried to make up for these breaks in the family bonds by filling Rokeby with nieces and nephews, but her vision of the place as the center of the Chanler family was shattered. Nevertheless, she would cling without wavering to the principles she had placed above all else.

The Great Depression
Meanwhile, economic depression was scourging the nation. Just before its onslaught, the Kips sold Massena to the Christian Brothers. The working people of the hamlet were delighted, for a large proportion of them were staunch Roman Catholics. The seminary not only shed a comforting atmosphere over the community, but provided a place where their children could receive solid religious instruction. It also offered jobs and, when needed in the hard times ahead, food, coal and clothing.

Another bright spot was that Chanler Chapman, heir to Sylvania, was transforming the farm into a model dairy with a creamery, bottling plant and delivery system. He offered jobs not only in herding, feeding, milking and haying, but in building new barns and outbuildings. A self-styled comedic character, he worked along with his men scolding, cajoling and entertaining with his raucous tall stories and spectacular swearing. He became famous for wearing bib overalls and muck-encased boots everywhere—into his own parlors and, worse, into others'. He even wore them to the dress-up school dinners at which he was honored as a member of the Red Hook School Board. An erratic but tough taskmaster, his larger than life personality brought a special zest to a long workday.

Still, the Depression pinched the hamlet hard. Even so, those who had shared with those who did not. In his monograph, Growing Up in Barrytown, Jack Lewis, the seventh of 11 children, tells of swimming off the old foundations of the icehouse at the Point and raiding estate junk piles, just as the previous generation had done. But as soon as he was big enough he worked for whomever would hire him, picking strawberries for 2-1/2¢ a quart, plums for 4¢ a quart, and beans for 25¢ a bushel. He did yard work and beat dirt out of rugs for 25¢ an hour. For shoveling heavy snow, he got 50¢ to a dollar for long, backbreaking work. To help put food on the table, he scapped for herring and speared eels. It still thrills him when he remembers how his mother would yodel her large brood home to the delicious fried eels and fish stews she had made from them as well as from the muskrats, rabbits and squirrels he and his brothers trapped and shot.

In the spring, Jack fished for shad with his father who took the vacation he got as a railroad signal man to fish for shad with his friends. As a special treat he took Jack along to the camp they set up at the Point. Sometimes Jack would earn tips extricating the fish ensnared in the nets or for helping clean them, carefully setting aside the roe to be picked up by the coachmen of the estates and the "money people" of Red Hook. Other times he got a nickel or a dime for carrying fresh water from the railroad station or Edgewater to keep the beer and hard cider cool. But what he liked best was listening to the grown-ups joking and storytelling and "having a ball" as the cooking fire slowly burned down.

Back to his odd job work, Jack often peddled fruits and vegetables with his neighbors the Zellers for 25¢ a day or a hot dog—but never both. When they could not pay him, he did chores around their farm for nothing at all. One day in early December as he was preparing to throw hay down from the mow, he saw Mr. Zeller walking slowly towards the barn with his head bowed. He was crying. Jack asked what the trouble was. His stark reply was "We're at war." In the marrow of his bones Jack realized that the world he knew would never be the same again. He could not imagine what it would be like. But somehow he understood that it would be a far more complicated, but perhaps not much happier time, when World War II was over.