Reaching my home in Connecticut the next day, I was received as one from the dead. Friends had had no word from me since my first arrival at Panama. From California not one letter had yet reached them.
Thus ends a brief recital of my adventurous gold seeking trip to California. Here I must refer again to the great obligations I shall ever rest under to my old friend Capt. Norton. May his days be as long and happy as, were it in my power, I would make them, with the full consciousness that when he goes to his last home, the verdict will be: There was a faithful friend and an honest man. The world in more ways than I have personally known, has been the better for his having been an actor in life’s great drama. God bless him.
Physically a wreck and in no condition for business, I made a visit soon after my return to this beautiful village for recuperation and pleasure among old friends. Meeting with a most cordial greeting and many requests to again become a resident, and having nothing in Connecticut to hold me—I had sold my property there before going to California—; moreover, as is universally the case with those who have spent the whole or a part of life in Unadilla[118] I still held a high appreciation of it and so was pleased again to become a resident, being in this appreciation no exception to the familiar rule.
THE ORIGINAL UNADILLA,
Confluence of the Susquehanna and Unadilla Rivers.
From “The Old New York Frontier.” Courtesy of Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Before returning to Connecticut I bought the old Martin Brook corner property[119] of Col. A. D. Williams. This was in the spring of 1850. The property then embraced what is now the Joyce furniture store and White store lots. As an evidence of the growth of the village and the advance in the value of real estate, let me say I paid Col. Williams $800 for the property, built the office, the same year, and the barn the next. The railroad project was started a few years later and real estate began to boom. I sold the White store lot for $600 and the balance for $3500. The furniture store lot was afterwards sold off and last summer (1889) I re-purchased the balance for more than three times what I had paid Col. Williams for the whole original tract. It is now the most eligible site for a business block, and will undoubtedly be so occupied in the future.
When I had again become a resident in 1850, I had and have always since had no disposition to change until the final change—the common lot of all, which I am ready to accept at any time.
During the war of the rebellion and just after the battle of Antietam[120] I was impelled by sympathy for the poor sufferers from that terrible fight to go down to Washington in company with Dr. Joshua J. Sweet and tender my services, gratis. Judge Turner, of Cooperstown, was then acting as Assistant Secretary of war. He procured an order and forwarded us to Frederick, Maryland, for duty in the barracks hospital at that place. I spent two weeks in charge of a ward where were twenty or more poor fellows suffering every imaginable form of wounds. I saw in that time all the horrors of war that I cared to see.[121]