[39] This paragraph is in the handwriting of George H. Noble.
[40] After this was written, he was naturally pleased to be told that besides Queen Victoria, there were born in that year several men who rose to great distinction—John Ruskin, James Russell Lowell, Cyrus W. Field, Walt Whitman and Charles Kingsley.
[41] Laurence Kortright, after whom this town was named, had obtained a large patent in that region late in the eighteenth century. He was a son of an old New York merchant and was himself a merchant in New York for many years. In a house which stands on land formerly part of the Kortright Farm in Harlem, New York city, the previous chapters in this volume and all those in “The Old New York Frontier” were written.
[42] Thomas’s line in England ran back from his father Robert to John (1529). The family were of the Golden Parsonage of Great Gaddesden (near Hemel Hempstead) in Hertfordshire, where Thomas Halsey was born and baptized. To his great grandfather the parsonage had been granted by Henry VIII in 1545. It is now the home of Thomas Frederick Halsey, a member of the British Parliament. The Hertfordshire family, it is conjectured, came originally from the manor of Lanesley in Cornwall, near Penzance, where the line has been carried back to 1189.
[43] Dr. Joseph White was a native of Chatham, Connecticut, had served in the Navy during the Revolution and settled in Cherry Valley in 1787. His practice was so extensive that he was called to Albany and even to Buffalo. In 1817 he became president of the Fairfield Medical College.
[44] He went to Kortright in 1817 from Bainbridge where he had married Mary Church, a daughter of Richard Billings Church and granddaughter of Colonel Timothy Church, the pioneer who came from Vermont. He died on December 18th, 1835.
[45] The Rev. William McAuley who had become pastor of the Kortright Presbyterian church in 1795 and died in 1851.
[46] The beginnings of Hartwick Seminary date from 1754 when the Rev. John C. Hartwick, the German Lutheran, born in Thuringia purchased for a hundred pounds his tract of land embracing the present town of Hartwick. By his will all his property was devoted to religious and educational purposes. In 1812 a building for the school was erected, and in 1815 it was opened with Dr. Ernest L. Hazelius as principal. In 1830, Dr. George B. Miller succeeded him as principal and remained until 1839.
[47] Erastus Root, a native of Hebron, Connecticut, was a graduate of Dartmouth and settled in Delhi in 1796. He sat in the Legislature from 1798 to 1802 and was then four times elected to Congress, and later was several times sent again to the Assembly. From 1820 to 1822 he was Lieutenant-Governor of the state, in 1821 a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, in 1824 a member of the commission which codified and modified the laws of the state; was three times Speaker of the Assembly; again was State Senator in 1840-44, and for many years was Major-General of the State Militia. The latter office he held when these two boys from Kortright presented their letters of introduction. He was an ardent Democrat of the George Clinton type. The poet Halleck made reference to him in one of his works. General Root died in New York in 1846.
[48] The Fairfield College was officially known as the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of New York. It had been established in 1809, and enjoyed a wide reputation for thirty or forty years. It was one of the first medical schools established in the United States—in fact it has been said to be the first. Its decline followed the establishment of rival schools at Geneva and Albany, and in 1844 its union with the Albany school took place.