[77] On or near the site of the grist and saw mills built by the Tory John Carr before the Revolution. Here stood the first mills ever built in this part of the valley.
[78] John Butler was born in 1804 in Connecticut and came to Unadilla when a young man. At the time of his death, Dr. Halsey wrote a sketch in which he said Mr. Butler, in that “dense forest, rolled up a rude log cabin and started to hew himself out a farm which became one of the handsomest hill farms in the town.”
[79] Dr. Halsey was six feet two inches in height, but towards middle life, gained in weight and thereafter until he was about 70, weighed considerably more than 200 pounds. I can never forget the proportions of his figure as I saw him after death when he lay against the parlor wall in a suit of black. Taller he seemed than ever, his shoulders broader, the chest more dome-like, the features more aquiline, the forehead more ample—altogether the stateliest human figure I had ever seen recumbent.
[80] The date of this case was Oct. 13, 1840—six months after his arrival in Unadilla.
[81] Daisy died while the object of his long devotion, Miss Lavantia Halsey, was attending school in Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson, a school to which he could not go with her.
[82] Dr. Odell had then been practicing in Sidney for seven years. He was a native of New Berlin where he had read medicine with Dr. Ross. He died in Unadilla in 1883, at the age of seventy-four. In the year 1839 when he settled in Sidney he married Mary A. Mulford of New Jersey.
[83] Files of New York papers for those days show the wide extent of this fever. Horace Greeley’s Tribune, then eight years old, had a standing headline “The Golden Chronicle,” continued regularly on the first page, and each time filling about two columns with accounts of companies that were being organized in cities and small villages all over the Union.
[84] It was a panorama showing “California and the Gold Diggings” and had been introduced as a feature in the representation of a voyage around the world. Smith and Parkhurst were the proprietors. The entertainment was given at the Minerva Rooms No. 406 Broadway.
[85] On the company’s books, now in possession of the treasurer’s son, A. H. Dresser of Plainville, Connecticut, appear other items of credit for sales as follows: one-half barrel of pork, $14; butchers’ knives, $77.50; 2 bottles of mustard, $3.75; beads and finger rings, $39.00; 1 basket champagne, $45.00; one case of gin, $40.00; one case of claret, $27.00; 18¼ pounds of pork, $18.25.
[86] The California had reached Panama on her first trip January 30, 1849. She had accommodations for a few more than one hundred, but took on board over four hundred and left behind many more. Steerage tickets were sold as high as $1,000. Many persons were glad to find beds in coils of rope. The steamer reached the harbor of San Francisco on February 28, “a day forever memorable in the annals of the State,” says Bancroft.