Winter is hanging on here fairly insistently. I taught a poetry round table last Wednesday night in Andes, NY, and crowdsourced daily images of late winter in the Catskills.
Using the 200 or so images I gathered, I put it into a poem and got it published this afternoon in a very fine local online newsletter called Watershed Post (this is the source to which I turn for news of all things local):
http://www.watershedpost.com/2011/coping-february-verse
5 comments:
Frederick Steele was born in Delhi around 1819. Don't know how many people lived there then, but I'd be surprised if the town doesn't have some kind of plaque honoring him as a native son.
He went to West Point, served as a junior officer in the Mexican War and advanced fairly quickly through the ranks to general in the War Between The States, much of which he spent in command of the VIIth Army Corps, occupying Little Rock and environs in what was called the Department of Arkansas.
My great great grandfather's regiment was commanded by a German. It was part of a brigade that was also commanded by a German. The brigade was part of a division that was also commanded by a German, whose brother, a retired Prussian army officer, was the acting governor of Wisconsin from 1862 to 1864.
Steele ended the war by capturing Mobile and then sealing off the border between Texas and Mexico. After the war he spent time in the San Juan Islands north of Seattle before he retired to Monterey in California where he died at age 49, only three years after the end of the war.
Roughly a third of Steele's command in Arkansas was headed by officers who were fluent in German and spoke very little English. German immigrants in Missouri, Arkansas and Texas provided Steele's army with much of the local intelligence they needed to effectively occupy the state.
Does anyone in Delhi remember this guy? Was he fluent in German?
Running right next to the college is a stream called Steele Brook. It floods disastrously now and then. Maybe that was named for him.
I'll send this to the local historian and to the local newspaper historian.
I had never heard of him.
We have a few plaques around here. Charles Hughes taught law here. He led the SCOTUS later on.
A fellow named John Burroughs had a house about twenty minutes away. The house still stands.
A famous photographer named Lewis Hines died about twenty minutes in another direction in a town called Franklin. He was a giant of socialist photography in about 1930, documenting factory conditions in a muck raking kind of way. He was forgotten more or less when he died up here in 1949.
There's lots of famous people tucked away here. Yoko Ono has a house about 15 minutes away. The art writer for the New Yorker is about ten minutes from here.
Some gangsters hung out ehre in the 20s and 30s but got all shot up by Feds.
Maybe Steele Brook is named after your fellow Steele. Plaques now cost about 1250 and anybody can have one made. There's no longer any commission that certifies what goes on them, or whether the info on them is valid.
My guess would be it's more likely the brook was named after Osman N. Steele, an under sheriff in Delhi, the county seat for Delaware County, who was shot three times and killed in 1845 by 'Indians' while enforcing the rights of a prominent property owner with a Dutch surname intent on seizing the livestock of a delinquent tenant farmer. The incident triggered what became known as the Anti-Rent War, which put the county under martial law for more than a year and wasn't finally resolved until the end of the Civil War.
Frederick Steele was probably in the Minnesota or Iowa territories at the time of that incident, enforcing the homestead rights of farmers against the land ownership claims of real Indians, rather than Free Soilers dressed up as Indians.
Osman Steele is a well-known figure around here. The killing took place over in a town called Andes, about 15 miles east of here. It's marked with a blue marker.
This whole area was owned by British absentee landlords whose rents were not collected for reasons I don't completely understand, for a number of years, and then they tried to collect again.
The local post office has a mural from the 30s that depicts the confrontation.
There are several local historians who've written up the incident of Steele's death in books.
And they replay the incident with live actors on the spot every now and then.
How comes it you know so much about local history?
My mother was a Steele. Her people came over in 1754. They spoke German and settled in Pennsylvania. They changed the spelling of their name to Steele from something along the lines of Staehl.
The Steele family in Delhi were defectors from the Massachusetts Bay Colony who moved to Hartford after the Pequot War. Their charter claimed that the trading posts in the Hudson River Valley belonged to them. Officially the Dutch had sold the restored British crown their rights to the Hudson for a nutmeg plantation in Surinam, but they left a few squatters behind.
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