The meetings extended over four days. After lasting for five years a Legislative enactment interfered with them. At each meeting a dinner was given by Judge Page, at which were consumed one or two saddles of venison, Susquehanna pike—then plentiful in the river, and in the capture of which Henry Ogden was an expert,—wine and brandy. The general meeting place was the village inn, on the site of the present Unadilla House, which adjoined Judge Page’s home and was called Hunters’ Hall. The game mostly sought was deer. From early Indian times this region had been celebrated as a favorite haunt of these fleet-footed and mild-eyed creatures. In a letter written some years after the meetings ceased, Judge Page said:
“We killed twenty-seven deer one week. Among them were twelve large bucks. That week we ran fifty-two well trained hounds. We had thirty-two men who put out the dogs, some in pairs, others singly, and about thirty bloods; some men were on horseback and others on foot; some watching the points of hills, others at the fords of the river, and always one or more at the Indian Monument.[27]
“Imagine yourself on the high bank at Pomp’s Eddy,[28] the sun just resting over Burnt Hill, Round Top at the south, Poplar Hill at the north [the points of the compass are here obviously reversed] the famous eel weir above and the cave bank below you. A hound breaks forth on Poplar Hill; another and still another on Burnt Hill and Round Top. By this time twenty are in hearing. You know not when the dog may come. You hear a rifle at the cave bank and now another at the eel weir, and perhaps at the haystack and Ouleout. Crack, crack, crack, and still the music of the dogs grows louder and more shrill as they approach. All is expectation and excitement. You are flurried.
“At this moment a large buck with antlers erect is seen on the opposite side, making his way directly to you. Pop goes a smooth-bore, and Spickerman,[29] the poacher, has killed him. Your agitation and excitement cease, for you are angry and wish John Carley was there to lick the rascal. You despair of killing anything, but are not discouraged for another deer will soon be along, and as for Carley he will certainly flog the poacher when he meets him.
“The dogs are still in full cry in every direction and your morning’s sport has just commenced. Keep your place for another deer will be here; and so it turns out. You have killed him and Carley has found and licked Spickerman, and got away his buck, but has finally restored it at your request after the flogging.”
Mr. Beardsley wrote of those times thirty years afterwards:
“I have seen nineteen fat bucks and does lying side by side in the ballroom of our hotel at Unadilla. Even in my sleep and often within the last twelve months I have dreamed of those Unadilla hunts, and the well known cries of the hounds that used to traverse those romantic hills. That music has in fact ceased; the deer are all gone; the huntsmen have laid by their rifles, and civilization and agricultural improvements have spread over those rugged hills as well as those delightful valleys.”
On July 4, 1826, the Jubilee of Independence was celebrated with enthusiasm along the valley and on the Turnpike. Toast lists that still survive show with what keen interest the political topics of that time were discussed. The strife of parties and the flow of patriotic speech were as intense in that period as in any that since has passed, save perhaps during the Civil War. It was an important era of expansion and development, in which our new civilization was broadening out into the democratic spirit that has since pervaded it, supplanting the aristocratic tendencies of public life in earlier times. The presidents who had been in office were Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. In the year of the Jubilee, John Quincy Adams was President. Four years later was to begin the long supremacy of Andrew Jackson, with all that this implied in making the general government what Lincoln afterwards declared that it should still be,—a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
In those Jubilee orations were contained valuable suggestions of the political temper and stress out of which the Jacksonian spirit was to rise into control of the National Administration. Along this valley, and in the towns on the Catskill Turnpike with which Unadilla had the most intimate relations,—more intimate than with settlements on the Susquehanna—these political sentiments were everywhere strong.
Among the celebrations was one at Kortright Centre, now a mere handful of scattered farmhouses, but then a thriving village where had gathered for the celebration practically all the population within a radius of perhaps twenty miles. The Turnpike was then in its most flourishing state, with hotels so frequent as often to stand within sight of each other. Along this highway dwelt a homogeneous, though long drawn out, community, ninety miles in length, with its pulse beating as from the throbbings of one heart, its main interests practically identical from Catskill to Unadilla. The oration spoken at Kortright in that Jubilee celebration discloses the prevailing public sentiment of the time.[30] Of Washington the speaker said: