Tenth Anniversary of the Bovina NY History Blog

This is the 598th entry in the Bovina NY History Blog. And it was ten years ago today that I started this blog, almost on a whim. I had just attended the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference in Charleston, West Virginia and had gone to a session on Web 2.0. An archives friend, John LeGloahec, discussed his blog. Two days later, I went into the blogger software he demonstrated and in about two minutes, had the Bovina NY History Blog set up. 

With almost 600 entries, there's a lot to go through. I do create labels which help in any on-line searching but it still is a challenge with so many entries. So I've created a subject index to the more significant entries at the end of this blog entry. And I'm working on a name index which I hope to get posted by late spring.

There have been several series in this blog. Stories from Bovina Cemeteries is pretty self-explanatory. Faces of Bovina mainly focuses on photographs of Bovina residents taken by Delhi photographer Bob Wyer. During 2011 and 2012, at the start of the sesquicentennial of the start of the U.S. Civil War, I did a monthly series on various aspects of the Civil War and its impact on Bovina. That series also included mini-biographies of all of Bovina's Civil War soldiers.

I did a series that ran a little over a year starting in November 2017 relating the story of James D. Calhoun. He was one of Bovina's World War One fatalities. He was my grandmother's first husband, so I had a lot of information about him, including the letters he wrote home while he was in the service in the U.S. and in France. 

One of my longest series which continues to this day is the "100 Years Ago in 'That Thriving Town.'" The Andes Recorder for many years produced a weekly column about activities in Bovina. I compile these each month and present them on the blog. The series started in May 2013.

To be honest, some series, while a good idea, never really got off the ground. In October 2010, I started a series of entries where I experimented with recipes from the 1911 Bovina UP Church Cookbook. I managed a few of the recipes but others were sort of a bust! 

As well as this blog, I also, since 2014, I have been making daily entries on the Town of Bovina Historian Facebook page. At the suggestion of several people who are not on Facebook, I started doing monthly compilations of these entries. These are posted the last day of each month.

As I've done research, I've found some interesting and sometimes bizarre stories. There was the story of the brothers-in-law who got in trouble with the Bovina UP Church when they went to court over a law suit. I reported that in 2011. Around the time that was happening, I found a rather juicy slander suit involving the two Presbyterian ministers in Bovina. They went to court when one sued the other for slander. That story was reported in 2013.

There's the sad story of the West Point cadet who died in a plane crash in the Bramley Mountain area at the end of World War II. Brought to my attention by Steven Burnett and Chris Ingvordsen, I realized I had a piece of the plane that my father had recovered from the site. I did several entries about this crash, starting in the spring of 2011.  

In 1898 came the closest attempt to bring the railroad to Bovina. This story took four entries to tell, starting in March 2011. Documenting Bovina's physicians took three entries starting in June 2014.  

One of the benefits of a blog is that it is easier to correct mistakes. In 2009, for the Bicentennial celebration of the Bovina U.P. Church, I incorrectly noted (in print, unfortunately), that the community room behind the Hamden Presbyterian Church was the original Bovina Church. The late Dorothy Kubik contacted me when she saw the newspaper error, explaining that the Bovina church went to Delancey, not Hamden (and that building burned in the 1890s). I was able to correct the error, at least on my blog. 

So here's the subject index to the Bovina NY History blog. Hope to have a name index done by late spring. 

Agriculture/Farming

• 6/23/2009 – Bovina Farm Day
• 8/16/2009 – Was Bovina Butter Served at the White House?
• 9/7/2009 – Bovina Farm Day
• 3/29/2010 – Maple Syrup Production
• 12/20/2010 – Prosperous Bovina Farmers
• 1/17/2011 – Past and Future of Bovina Farming
• 1/24/2011 – Bovina Earmarks
• 2/2/2011 – Bovina Farms by the Numbers
• 9/3/2011 – American Success Story
• 7/7/2016 - "The farmers in Bovina are worse off...." - Bovina Farmers in the summer of 1896

Bovina’s History

• 11/22/2009 – How Did Bovina Get Its Name?
• 11/5/2018 – Women Vote in Bovina

Businesses

• 6/14/2009 – Russell’s Store
• 1/10/2010 – Bovina Business, 1855
• 1/31/2012 – Stories from Bovina Cemeteries - Thomas Elliott Hastings
• 4/15/2012 – Businesses in Brushland 150 years ago
• 11/25/2012 – Russell's Store, Thanksgiving 1978
• 12/10/2012 – Gasoline in Bovina
• 6/30/2012 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - A.T. Strangeway
• 5/5/2013 – Russell's General Store Fifty Years Ago and Beyond`
• 10/10/2016 – The Second Raising of Hilson's Store
• 1/1/2019 – Russell's Store Centennial

Celebrations

• 5/31/2009 – Bovina Town Picnics – Past and Present, Part I
• 7/2/2009 – Bovina Town Picnics – Past and Present, Part II
• 6/19/2009 – Bovina Farmers’ Picnic 1889
• 7/4/2009 – Bovina Loudly Celebrates the 4^th – 1919
• 4/21/2011 – “Bovina Center, My Home Town” – this series, starting in April 2011, and continuing through March 2012, shared parts of a script for a Bovina History program presented in 1955
• 8/7/2015 – Celebration at Bovina – 1826
• 7/24/2016 – Bovina Celebrates the Bicentennial of the United States
• 7/22/2016 – Sixty Years Ago - Bovina Celebrates Old Home Day

Cemeteries

• 9/23/2011 – I See Dead People - Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries
• 10/31/2011 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Prepare to Die and Follow Me
• 11/30/2011 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - the Cathels Family
• 12/31/2011 – Stories from Bovina Cemeteries - Epitaphs
• 3/31/2012 – Stories from Bovina Cemeteries – “Our Pastor, Rev. Robert Laing”
• 4/30/2012 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - the Elliott Brothers
• 5/31/2012 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Where is William Thomson
• 6/30/2012 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - A.T. Strangeway
• 7/31/2012 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - 100 and 150 Years Ago
• 8/31/2012 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries – A Bovina Artist
• 9/30/2012 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - “An Infant of Robert and Hannah Scott”
• 10/31/2012 – Stories from Bovina’s Cemeteries - The children of James and Nancy Coulter
• 11/30/2012 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - The American Revolution
• 12/31/2012 – Stories from Bovina’s Cemeteries - Bovina's Oldest Citizen
• 1/31/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - The Müller Family
• 2/28/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Frederick McFarland Goes Missing
• 4/4/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - John Sinclair Burns
• 7/5/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Old Jock Hilson
• 8/24/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Lloyd Oliver
• 10/1/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - the Frank R. Coulter Monument
• 10/19/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - The Chisholm Family
• 11/2/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Jimmie McClure
• 12/13/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - The Tragic Death of Samuel Dean
• 1/10/2014 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Adam Scott and his Tobacco Tin
• 3/20/2014 – Stories from Bovina’s Cemeteries - The Two Mary Ann Coulters
• 4/26/2014 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - This is One of the Many Neat and Artistic Monuments
• 5/23/2014 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Policeman John Gordon
• 7/21/2014 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - The Stott Family
• 12/21/2014 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Bovina's Earliest Burial
• 1/24/2015 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - “A Very Strange Circumstance”
• 3/24/2015 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Death Severs Ties of Sixty Years
• 8/23/2015 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - The Ballentine Family Drownings
• 9/20/2015 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Alexander Brush
• 10/22/2015 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Ballantine Family Tragedies
• 11/18/2015 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Margaret and Jen Get Their Tonsils Out
• 9/7/2016 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Little Arthur Taggart
• 11/7/2016 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - “Who Died on His Passage to California”

Civil War

• 5/29/2010 – Decoration Day and Bovina's Civil War Dead
• 1/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War -Sesquicentennial
• 2/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - Bovina and Abraham Lincoln
• 2/18/2011 – Bovina Civil War Records
• 2/22/2011 – Bovina Civil War Records Update
• 2/27/2011 – Some February news snippets from the Past
• 3/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - Who served in Bovina
• 4/4/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - Those who Served - The Roster
• 4/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - What Was Bovina Doing When the War Started
• 5/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - The Supreme Sacrifice
• 6/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - Recruiting Soldiers
• 7/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - Exemptions
• 8/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - Honoring the Dead
• 9/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - Slavery in Bovina
• 10/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - The First Enlistments
• 11/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - Bovina's Old Soldiers
• 12/12/2011 – Bovina in the Civil War - To Care for Him Who Shall Have Borne the Battle
• 1/12/2012 – Bovina in the Civil War - Soldier Biographies [This series went on monthly through March 12, 2013 – fifteen entries total]
• 4/30/2012 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - the Elliott Brothers
• 2/8/2013 – Another Cathels Family Tragedy
• 4/4/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - John Sinclair Burns
• 11/2/2013 – Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - Jimmie McClure

Education/Schools

• 2/19/2010 – The 3Rs in Bovina – The Numbers
• 3/10/2010 – Teaching in Bovina’s One-room Schools
• 4/4/2010 – School District Centralization in Bovina
• 10/30/2010 – Halloween Night, 1923 (Burning of Bovina District 9 School)
• 12/7/2010 – Another Schoolhouse Fire
• 6/17/2011 – Bovina’s Last Public School
• 6/28/2011 – Some Pictures from the Last Public School in Bovina
• 11/17/2012 - Modern School Building, Excellent Teachers and Many Bright Scholars - Bovina's New School
• 6/4/2016 - Scholars in a Century Old Schoolhouse - the Maynard School in the 1950s
• 10/20/2018 – Bovina School Fairs

Faces of Bovina

• 9/5/2012 – Faces of Bovina – Andrew and Sophie Reinertsen
• 10/17/2012 – Faces of Bovina - Faces of Bovina - Man with Fish [Noel Gonyo]
• 6/3/2013 – Faces of Bovina - Bill Storie - "A Highly Respected Citizen"
• 1/24/2014 – Faces of Bovina - Ruth Rabeler
• 4/20/2014 – Faces of Bovina - Ann Tator
• 12/22/2015 – Faces of Bovina - the McKenzie Sisters
• 8/20/2017 – Faces of Bovina - Craig and Thelma Banuat
• 3/7/2017 – Faces of Bovina - Frank Miller and his horse
• 6/7/2017 – Faces of Bovina - Alan Johnston

Railroad

• 5/12/2009 – A Railroad into Bovina
• 1/23/2011 – The Train that Never Came
• 3/5/2011 – When the Trains Almost Came – Everything Looks Favorable
• 3/9/2011 – When the Trains Almost Came – The Dirt is Flying
• 3/16/2011 – When the Trains Almost Came - Our Supposed Railroad is at a Standstill
• 3/23/2011 – When the Trains Almost Came - Buying a Pig in a Poke
• 6/8/2011 – Delaware Railroad Company - Follow-up
• 3/5/2012 – Investors in the Delaware Railroad Company
• 2/20/2019 – Railroad Meeting in Brushland [1869]

Religion/Churches

• 5/20/2009 – Bovina UP Church
• 7/26/2009 – From the Ministry to Osteopathy
• 10/4/2009 – Bovina United Presbyterian Church Bicentennial
• 10/24/2009 – Hamden or Delancey - Where did the old Bovina Church go?
• 12/2/2009 – Bovina UP Church Bicentennial and 1946 Aerial Photos Now on Flickr
• 12/9/2009 – History of Site of the Original Bovina Associate Presbyterian Church and Cemetery
• 12/16/2009 – The Reluctant Reverend, Part I
• 12/25/2009 – Bovina in Winter - Pictures
• 12/29/2009 – The Reluctant Reverend, Part II
• 1/31/2010 – The Green Pastures and Still Waters of the Sanctuary Below
• 10/7/2010 – Brief History of Bovina Churches
• 10/23/2010 – Gladstones and Biggars Clash with the Bovina A.P. Church
• 12/13/2010 – Road Rage 150 Years Ago
• 5/5/2011 – The Brothers-in-Law, Part I
• 5/17/2011 – The Brothers-in-Law, Part II
• 3/31/2012 – Stories from Bovina Cemeteries – “Our Pastor, Rev. Robert Laing”
• 3/18/2013 – Kennedy vs. Lee - Part I - Libel of Slander
• 3/24/2013 – Kennedy vs. Lee - Part II - The Bed Was Badly Tumbled
• 7/25/2014 – Centennial of the St. James' Episcopal Church
• 9/7/2014 – Bovina Reformed Presbyterian Church
• 12/7/2014 – Bovina's Methodist Church Pews
• 10/7/2015 – Notice to Church Builders [Building of Reformed Presbyterian Church]
• 11/23/2016 – “Found Dead in His Study With Heart Riddled With Shot” – The Death of Rev. Milligan

The World Wars

• 11/11/2010 – James Calhoun and the Great War
• 6/3/2011 – Bovina Honor Roll [World War II roll of Bovina’s World War II vets]
• 10/9/2012, 11/3, 11/3 – Bovina Honor Roll unveiling
• 11/14/2017 – Grandma’s First Husband – the story of Anna Bell Barnhart and James Calhoun [this was a monthly series that went through all of 2018]
• 5/10/2018 – Clark Miller [Bovina’s first World War One fatality]

Bovina and the End of the Civil War

April 9, 2015 will be the 150^th anniversary of the end of the United States Civil War. It was a war that permanently changed the country. 620,000 men died in the conflict. It is estimated that over ten percent of Northern men between twenty and forty-five died in the war.

Bovina’s population at the start of the war (based on the 1860 census) was 1242. By 1865, it had dropped by about 100. Bovina had about forty men serve in the war – twelve of them did not come back. Eleven died in the war and one, David Elliott, was never accounted for after going missing in action (he may have died at Andersonville prison). Bovina’s population drop can’t be directly blamed on the war – it was the continuation of a trend that had been going on since about 1850.

While the war was not a constant presence on the lives of people in Bovina it was an on-going issue. Several times during the war, Bovina voters had to decide on how much of a bounty to pay to meet the town’s quota. In December 1864, President Lincoln issued a call for 300,000 more troops. Bovina went ahead, without being sure of the exact quota to be assigned to it, and paid a bounty of $660 each to twenty men whose enlistment would be credited to the town. The quota ultimately was set at eleven. On April 3, six days before the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox, those who subscribed to the bounty agreed to pay, provided that the “excess of men…stand for the benefit of the said town in future calls if any should be made…”

The same day the subscribers agreed to pay what would be the last bounty, the session of the Bovina United Presbyterian Church met to hear a report “on the state of religion” in the congregation.

And just as it was when the war started four years earlier, Bovina citizens continued on with their lives and said farewell to citizens who had passed away. On April 1, the Delaware Republican and Visitor reported on a former resident, Dr. W. S. McCune, “late of Fish Lake Water Cure…” at Lake Delaware. Dr. McCune was “sick with small pox at the home of his brother in law John L. Frisbee [in Delhi]...The authorities have taken steps to prevent the spread of the disease….” Dr. McCune would struggle for a month and die on April 24.

On April 4, an auction was held at the farm of John Hastings. Cows sold at prices from $54 to $71, averaging $61 head. Six were half-blood Alderney cows, two and three years old and one yearling sold for $22. Also sold that day were oats, at $1.31 per bushel, rye for $2 per bushel, hay from $18 to $20 per ton, and bees from $9 to $9.25 per hive. Thomas E. Hastings was auctioneer.

Four days after the auction, and one day before the war’s end, Milton B. Elliott, the six year old son of James Elliott and Isabella Kinmouth, died. Milton was a first cousin once removed of James and Thomas Elliott, the brothers who both died in the war the previous November.

On the day of Lincoln’s assassination, April 14, 1865, there were two Bovina related deaths. Eliza Yeomans McPherson died in Bovina at the age of 70, survived by her husband, Alexander McPherson and by eight of her ten children. That same day, in Brighton, Iowa, Elijah Hilton Nichols, the son of Elijah Canfield Nichols and Amanda Melvina Hilton of Bovina, died at the age of only 23 years old. While buried in Iowa, he also is memorialized on his parents’ stone in the Bovina Cemetery.

So life and death went on in Bovina, just as it was doing at the start of the war, yet the loss of 11 young men and the uprooting of many more changed Bovina, as it did many communities, forever.

During the last four years, I have written over thirty entries about Bovina and the Civil War on this blog.  Here’s a list of some of the more important ones:

In 2011, the Sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War, I wrote monthly entries about Bovina and the war on the 12^th of each month in a series “Bovina in the Civil War.” The twelve entries in this series were:

·       January - The  Sesquicentennial – A brief entry that introduced the series. [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/01/civil-war-sesquicentennial.html]

·       February - Bovina and Abraham Lincoln – A review of how Bovina voted in the 1860 and 1864 elections. [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/02/civil-war-bovina-and-abraham-lincoln.html]

·       March - Who Served in Bovina – A review of the database I still work on of Bovina’s Civil War soldiers [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/03/bovina-in-civil-war-those-who-served.html]

·       April - What Was Bovina Doing When the War Started – A look at what was happening in Bovina the month the war actually started. [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/04/bovina-in-civil-war-what-was-bovina.html]

·       May - The Supreme Sacrifice – Bovina lost 11 men in the war, starting with John Sinclair Burns in April 1863 and ending with the death of Roman Palmer in December 1864. [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/05/bovina-in-civil-war-supreme-sacrifice.html]

·       June - Recruiting – Bovina, like most communities in New York, had to provide bounty payments to encourage enlistment as the war dragged on. [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/06/bovina-in-civil-war-recruiting.html]

·       July - Exemption from Service – Not all eligible men in Bovina served. A number of them submitted claims for exemption, mainly due to health issues. [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/07/bovina-in-civil-war-exemption-from.html]

·       August - Honoring the Dead – Some of Bovina’s fatalities in the war, along with a number of Civil War veterans are buried in Bovina cemeteries. A sample of some of the stones is presented in this entry. [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/08/bovina-in-civil-war-honoring-dead.html]

·       September - Slavery in Bovina – Bovina had one or two slaves in the 1820s but none after that. Bovina was strongly anti-slavery and the church, in at least one instant, took a member to task for voicing another viewpoint. [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/09/bovina-in-civil-war-slavery-in-bovina.html]

·       October - The First Enlistments – A discussion of some of the early enlistments from Bovina, mainly covering 1861 [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/10/bovina-in-civil-war-first-enlistments.html]

·       November - Bovina's Old Soldiers – A review of those Bovina Civil War soldiers who survived the war. Some stayed while others headed west. [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/11/bovina-in-civil-war-bovinas-old.html]

·       December - To Care for Him Who Shall Have Borne the Battle – In 1888, the Grand Army of the Republic, the union Civil War veterans organization, set up a program to provide assistance to veterans needing assistance. At least one veteran received such assistance that year. [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2011/12/bovina-in-civil-war-to-care-for-him-who.html]

In 2012, I started a monthly series that went on until March 2013 with small biographies of every Bovina Civil War soldier, including those veterans who came to Bovina after the war. The series appears on the 12^th of each month.

In my stories from Bovina’s Cemeteries, I’ve written several times about Civil War veterans buried in Bovina cemeteries:

·       Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - the Elliott Brothers – April 20, 2012 [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2012/04/stories-from-bovinas-cemeteries-elliott.html]

·       Stories from Bovina's Cemeteries - John Sinclair Burns – April 4, 2013 [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2013/04/stories-from-bovinas-cemeteries-john.html]

·       Stories from Bovina Cemeteries - Jimmie McClure – November 2, 2013 [http://bovinanyhistory.blogspot.com/2013/11/stories-from-bovina-cemeteries-jimmie.html]

And though the war ended 150 years ago, there still may be new discoveries to be made concerning Bovina during that time period, so stay tuned.