Chapter 10 – Old Wars and the Great Depression

Davenport has been variously affected by far off events in far off places.  Nothing since has equaled the disruptions of the American Revolution and the ensuing border wars.  Almost all the small population in the area, Rebel and Loyalist, fled the depredations of roving bands of Indians, Tories, Tories-dressed-as-Indians, and, yes, the Patriots themselves.  (See Chapter 2.)  The War of 1812 was hardly felt by the small population of Davenport-to-be.  Munsell reports seven Davenport inhabitants drawing War of 1812 pensions in the late 1800s[1], but probably only three or four had been residents of the Davenport area in 1812.  (These would have been John Cooke (Cook?), James Houghtaling (a probable early resident), Stephen Olmstead, and Peter Swart.[2]) Three or four participants from a population of 840 or so would have been relatively few, but the economic effects of the war would have been felt more widely.  (See sidebar.)  Similarly, minor Davenport participation probably also occurred in the Mexican-American War and, sixty years later, in the brief Spanish-American War.

Little has yet been documented about the effects on Davenport of other major events that from time to time plagued, perplexed or stimulated the United States as a whole.  These included the periodic economic booms and busts, a few disquieting political events, and the occasional waves of religious fervor that swept the country in the 1800s.  On the other hand, Chapter 3 notes the local impact of the distant volcano, Tamboro, and we have seen in Chapter 6 how scientific advances on the equally distant Dutch Island of Java, played havoc with the Davenport maple sugar industry.

This chapter will recount some of the Davenport-connected events of the Civil War.  It will touch on Delaware County’s locally-famous Rent War, on the area’s tenuous though tantalizing role in the Spanish-American War, on the trials of World War I, and on the subsequent Great Depression.  The trauma of World War II and more recent conflicts will be postponed until Chapter 13.

The Delaware County militia.  Shortly after the Revolutionary War it was considered wise, if not essential, to maintain a local unit of militia.  Most towns had such a contingent.  Around the 4th of July these local units camped on the flats in back of Delhi, the county seat, for a week of drilling.  They maneuvered and had contests that attracted both picnickers and campers.  Groups set up booths around the campsites selling souvenirs and drinks of all kinds.

Militia service was required, with a few exceptions, from every able bodied white male citizen between 18 and 45.  Privates and non-commissioned officers must equip themselves.  One account tells of “old flint-lock muskets, horsemen’s carbines, long squirrel rifles, double-barreled shotguns, bell-muzzled blunderbusses, with side arms of as many different patterns, from the old dragoon saber that had belonged to Harry Lee’s Legion to the slim basket-hilted rapier which had probably graced the thigh of some of our French allies in the Revolution.”[3]  When not on exhibition at Delhi, local groups mustered for drill on the first Monday of September at various sites, including Fenn’s Hotel in Davenport.[4]  Later in September or the first part of October the entire regiment would assemble for training.[5]

Little is known about specific Davenport participants.  Munsell  mentions Asa Emmons[6] as being a quartermaster in 1800 and an adjutant in 1802.[7]  A John Shaver, ensign, is mentioned as is a “Colonel Francis, of Davenport.”  (This must have been after 1817 when Davenport was formed.)  Kortright and Davenport-to-be men may have been part of the group that rendezvoused at Delhi on September 8, 1814, for duty in the War of 1812.  David Penfield was captain of the Harpersfield and Kortright company.  The contingent marched to Catskill (two nights) and then took a sloop to Brooklyn Heights where for the first week “they leveled a cornfield for their parade ground and occupied a deserted ropewalk for barracks.”  The men were discharged that December “after an uneventful campaign, in which the only battle was between an old sailor and a landsman; no one was killed…and the wounded never applied for a pension.”[8]

 Finally in 1844 the Delhi week of drilling and training for the militia was abandoned.  The nearby Meredith Artillery disbanded in 1845.  They tried to reorganize in 1849, but this lasted only until 1855.   Munsell reports that after about 1850 “militia exercises fell into general neglect, and the system was abandoned.”[9]

The great anti-rent war of 1845.[10]  This so-called war was actually a series of skirmishes between local authorities, chiefly sheriffs and constables on the one side, and on the other, masked anti-rent protestors, usually disguised in Indian garb, sporting Indian names such as “Big Thunder” and organized in “tribes.”  There was one death, that of an under-sheriff.  Two hundred and forty-two protestors were eventually brought to trial in Delaware County.  Two were sentenced first to be hanged and later to life imprisonment.  Still later, in 1847, a new governor of New York “pardoned all the Anti-Rent convicts, who on reaching their homes were received as heroes and martyrs, with demonstrations of honor and rejoicing.”[11]

 

Anti-rent agitation began in the large, former “patroon” estates and manors of Rensselaer and Albany counties.  It spread to Schoharie County and thence, about 1844, to Delaware.  The principal focus of the protests seems originally to have been the more feudal of the existing leasehold agreements.  These included the retention by the owners of mineral rights, water rights (including those of potential millstreams), the right to collect firewood, and sometimes the right to require annual manual service from the tenants.  The tenants, in turn, seem to have had almost no rights, lacking even that of defending themselves against legal action by the landlord.

Only a few years after the Anti-Rent disturbances, a new state constitution “struck a fatal blow at the remnant of feudalism in this State, specifically abolishing ‘all feudal tenures of every description, with all their incidents’…”[12]

The Anti-Rent War is celebrated in Delaware County for its populism, its colorful Indian mummery, its minimal loss of life, and its satisfactory outcome.  Those affected by the evils of leaseholds and who consequently became the principal actors, however, were primarily from the large patents south of Davenport, mainly that of Hardenbergh, where feudalistic remnants had been most onerous.  While considerable farmland was leased in Davenport, Harpersfield, and Kortright, and while the towns did see some anti-rent activity such as one meeting in Kortright Center[13], these towns seem to have been relatively untouched by the dramatic events to the south.

Volunteers, draftees and substitutes in the Civil War.  In response to President Lincoln’s call in July 1862 for an additional 300,000 men to serve three years, the patriotic fires of Delaware County were rekindled.  The demand of the hour was men.  A committee was formed.  New York’s Governor Morgan gave his permission to raise a regiment, subsequently called the 144th.  The number of enrollees was 1409.[14]

Although Delaware County at the time had no railroads, recruits nevertheless assembled rapidly.  Meetings were held in every town and hamlet and within 20 days, at Camp Delaware on the Delhi county fair ground, the regiment was mustered into the service of the Union.

The regiment marched the next day for Hancock, reaching it in two days.  There, twenty rail cars took them on to Elmira, N.Y., and from where they journeyed south in cattle cars.[15]  Upon reaching Maryland, they helped defend the capital until the spring of 1863 when the regiment was sent to aid General Longstreet in his siege of Suffolk, Virginia.  More than 154 Delaware County men were later headquartered at Hilton Head, SC. (also known at the time as “C.S.,” for Confederate States.)  Some had less arduous trench duty on Morris Island and James Island.  One of their tasks was to guard prisoners who were kept in ships off the coast.

 

 

The Davenport enlistees came from varied backgrounds but most were farmers and laborers.  Carpenters, shoemakers, stonemasons and merchants left home, caught up by the cause, aroused by abolitionists such as Davenport landlord Gerrit Smith (son of Peter Smith, associate of both Sir William Johnson and, later, John Jacob Astor; see Chapter 9).  The Davenport citizens had meanwhile voted, 199 to 0, to raise a $50 bonus for “each volunteer for our Town’s quota of 73.”[16]

As the war continued, Davenport found it necessary to increase each volunteer’s bonus.  The Town raised the recruitment payment to $300 for each man in August 1864 (after defeating a proposal to pay $310), and in September Davenport raised that to a total bonus of $1,000 for each of 52 volunteers.  The following February of 1865, in response to a new call for 300,000 volunteers for three-year enlistments, Davenport paid each man $800.  To fund this last recruitment expense, the Town fathers had to borrow $11,550 from the Norwich Chenango Co.[17]  (In 2003 dollars, an $800 bonus after allowing for an almost doubling of prices during the Civil War, would be about $8,400.  The Town’s 1865 borrowing would have been about $120,000.[18])

Life as a Civil War soldier was difficult.  Most often, food was scarce.  In a letter to his wife, one Delaware County soldier attests to half a loaf of bread and a ration of coffee per day.  With money he could buy a bit more, but they had not been paid, and money from home was infrequent.  There was a vast amount of disease.

James T. Dezell, private in Company D, was a native of Kortright, born February 7, 1842.[19]  He kept a diary[20], regularly commenting on or affirming his “usual good health” and often recounting the ups and downs of his relationship with “Jenny.”  (See sidebar.)  At Hilton Head on July 1, 1864:  “We have been ready all day for to start the expedition.  We did not get started from Hilton Head until dark. There are a lot of troops going.  We don’t know where we are going.”  July 2, 1864:  “We landed at Sea-Brook Island, marched up [to] the bridge that crosses onto John’s Island.  But we had to walk as the bridge was gone.  We saw the rebs as soon as we got on the island.  We ‘ployed and advanced on them, but they only showed us their horses’ tails.  We could not get near them.  Five o’clock and we’re having a rest and supper.” 

From July 3 to July 9 there were more brief encounters with the enemy.  July 9:  “We had a pretty lively time this morning.  Just at daylight the rebs made a charge on our fellows but were repulsed handsomely.  Our fellows gave them all they could carry in their vest pocket.  There were three killed in the 144th.  R. J. Sherman was wounded in the arm.  We have retreated back and expect to go back on board the transport.  Our reg’t has halted in the woods and is going to cover the retreat.”  The next day, July 10, Private Denzell writes that John’s Island, SC, “finds me in my usual good health.  We have not got on board the transport yet.  We are lying by the bridge yet where we stopped last night.  The rebs have not troubled us yet.  Twelve o’clock we are on board the transport and on our way to Hilton Head.  All quiet today.”

The Delaware County Clerk’s listing of  “Davenport Soldiers and Officers in Civil War Military Service” gives 131 names.  These included one captain (John Crawford, who resigned after six months), two lieutenants, two sergeants, one “musician” (N. Delos Houghton), and the rest privates or corporals.  One private deserted, and his cousin was discharged after ten months’ service for “insanity.”  Fifteen of the privates, including six from Canada, served as paid substitutes for other Davenport men.  Sgt. Stafford Howe was supposed to have died.  Fourteen privates were either known to have died or were believed to have died.  Only one of the fifteen total was listed as having died in action.  Pvt. Clarence McMinn served his time, re-enlisted, was taken prisoner, and was believed to have starved to death in the notorious Andersonville prison.  He was listed as “not heard from since.”

In March of 1863, faced with ever-growing needs for the Union Army, Congress passed a conscription act.  The new act, which allowed an exemption to those able to pay a $300 fee, caused bloody rioting in New York City.  Police, naval forces, cadets from West Point, and regular army troops were called in to restore order.  As far as is known, Davenport remained peaceful, but it is likely that the new act led to the need for the paid substitutes noted in the town records.  (In the final tally, only two percent of the Civil War service personnel in the North were draftees, compared with close to sixty percent in both of the later World Wars.[22]

Other illustrative entries from the Clerk’s listing follow.

 

Jacob Schermerhorn, one of three brothers of that name to serve, enlisted in the Infantry, 101 Reg’t, on 18 December 1861 for three years.  He served two years and re-enlisted in the 40th N.Y. Infantry.  He was wounded in the leg and had his finger shot off in the Battle of the Wilderness.  This son of Casper Schermerhorn was discharged at Davenport Center July 13, 1865.  In the 1865 state census he was listed as a stonemason who also worked a small farm of 20 improved and 18 unimproved acres.

 

Other Davenport families with three sons in service were Anson and Polly Hamm (Collins, D. Asa, and Leonard), Hiram and Minerva Olmstead (Anson, Jordon and Stephen), Nathaniel and Louise Roe (Daniel, Joshua and William J.), and probably John and Maria Quackenbush (Edwin, Silas, and George W. or H.?).  Two of the Olmstead boys, Jordan and Stephen, were among those who died.

Nathaniel Hebbard, born in 1830 in Schoharie County, joined the 144 Infantry on 31 August 1862 as a single man.  He was the son of Horace and Samantha (Washburn) Hebbard.  He was promoted to Sergeant and then, in March 1864, to Lieutenant.

Two Shellmans served from Davenport: Philander, born in Otsego County in 1836, for three years in the “Delaware Rifles” (Company I) of the 89th Regiment, and Thomas for 20 months with Company I of the 144th.  Also serving in Company I of the 144th was Oscar Briggs, born in 1845, the son of Luther Briggs of “Brier Street” (later East Meredith).

 

Charles B. Smith, son of Isaac, a tailor, and wife Jane Ayers, enlisted on December 6, 1861.  He served for three years and then re-enlisted, this time as a substitute for Michael B. Smith, probably a cousin.

 

Some Davenport residents, as was the case throughout the north, were not inclined to serve or had pressing family obligations and sufficient resources to recruit substitutes.  The substitutes would then receive the promised official bounty and usually an additional fee, ranging from $50 to $1,000.  As noted above, six Canadians replaced Davenport men for such an informal bounty, among them Henry Bowers (for $500), Elliot Telford Ford, and Walter Trumbull (both for $1,050).

Samuel Ferguson Jayne of the Fergusonville Academy did not join the armed forces, but served by caring for the wounded as an agent of the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian adjunct to (and watchdog of) the Army’s Medical Corps.  (See sidebar.)

Able men on the home front joined the National Guard, trained in Delhi periodically to parade (or be fined if they did not show up), and could be called to active duty.

The Civil War had a profound impact on Davenport and on neighboring towns.  Farms were left with fewer laborers and sons to till the fields.   Farm output declined.  Some of the discharged young men returned to Davenport, but others moved away from the grueling demands of farm life to find jobs in industry, never to return.

 

 

Even before Teddy’s “Rough Riders.”  The United States went to war with Spain in April 1898.  The visiting U.S. battleship Maine, under the command of Capt. Charles D. Sigsbee (no relation to Davenport’s Nicholas Sigsbee as far as yet determined though Capt. Sigsbee did come from Albany), had blown up and sunk in Havana Harbor two months earlier.  Fierce competition in New York City between the “yellow press” lords William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer had led most readers to believe that the Spaniards were at fault.  In reality it had probably been an accident.  The queen regent of Spain informed President McKinley that hostilities were to cease, but passions in the U.S. were high (see sidebar), volunteers were authorized, and a blockade of Spanish ports began.  The short-lived Spanish-American War was soon underway, dramatized by Admiral Dewey’s victory in Manila Bay and Teddy Roosevelt’s highly publicized charge up San Juan Hill.[23] 

Twenty volunteers left Stamford in mid-June, 1898, to join the fray, and these included Frank C. Watley of Fergusonville.[24]  Frank J. Fish of Davenport was another of the Spanish-American War veterans.[25]

 Cubans were popular in Stamford, as they were elsewhere in the United States.  Numbers of the wealthier journeyed to Stamford village each summer to enjoy the climate and the amenities of the Habana and Perla de Cuba Hotels.[26]  The Recorder, for sometime thereafter in 1898, included regular letters home from various army encampments, but none of the local volunteers are known to have reached Cuba or the Philippines.

There may have been an earlier and less well-know involvement of Delaware County men in the Cubans’ rebellion against their Spanish masters.  This Caribbean conflict had been brewing for years, culminating in a vicious and bloody “Ten Years War” (1868-1878) and a new outbreak under the Cuban-Spanish patriot and eventual martyr, José Martí, in 1895.  There was already great sympathy for the rebels in the United States.  This enabled Martí and his equally astute compatriot, Thomás Estrada Palma (later, Cuba’s first president), to establish a very effective Cuban Junta, or council, in New York City with offices also in Washington, DC, and in Florida.  The Junta was charged with propaganda, congressional lobbying, coordinating practical aspects of the revolution, and organizing a flow of arms, material, and men to Cuba itself.

“Filibustering” was the 19th century term to describe privately funded forays of arms and men from the United States, generally to Central America or Cuba.  Martí chartered three fast yachts to inject his first group of combatants into Cuba in 1894 but later, in an effort to ensure United States neutrality, the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (forerunner of the Coast Guard) joined the Spanish navy to interdict the flow of supplies and men.  “In three years of the revolution, seventy-one filibustering vessels sailed for Cuba from American ports.”  Only twenty-six got through.  The Americans intercepted thirty-three and the British, two.  One vessel was actually captured by the Spanish—after having unloaded its military cargo.[27]

 One aspect of filibustering in these early years could even have affected Davenport. The Stamford Recorder reported on May 23, 1896, two years before the war broke out with the United States, that “bills have been posted” in Stamford that week asking for 1200 volunteers to go to the Island of Cuba.  Unmarried men from 18 to 28 years were desired.  It was hoped to find 100 men from Stamford, 100 from Bloomville, 100 from Oneonta, etc.  “Free transportation to the Island and back—if you return—is promised.”  The Cuban Junta in New York City undoubtedly inspired these posters.  The local “excursion” organizer, identified in a similar brief notice in the Oneonta Herald (May 28, 1896, p. 1), was Major Charles C. Kromer, Civil War veteran (where he had been a captain) and editor of the Schoharie Union.  Major Kromer noted hopefully that “Members of the unemployed who yearn for fame upon the tented field have a great opportunity open to them.”

We do not know how many local men, if any, answered this quixotic call to arms, but it could have led to one of the first instances of a Davenport man fighting on foreign soil.  It is certainly true that at about this time others from the United States managed to work their way to Cuba to fight alongside the rebels.[28]

The war to end all wars.  The “Great War,” as it was once known, had been raging in Europe since 1914.  By the time the United States finally entered in April 1917, allied troops were hard pressed.  U.S. public opinion, although still largely indifferent, had been gradually leaning in the Allies’ favor—and against both the Kaiser and domestic aliens, especially German-Americans.  There followed the enormous task of expanding a peacetime U.S. army of a half-million men to eight times that size, equipping that army while at the same time re-supplying the Allied forces, and transporting over two million troops to France.

The war’s impact on Davenport was almost entirely the result of this immense mobilization effort.  Every man between the ages of 18 and 30 (later extended to 45) was liable for the draft, but less than two dozen Davenport men joined the military services.[29]  (Of these, two died on active duty.  Private 1^st class Ralph J. McArthur succumbed to scarlet fever on August 23, 1917; the Navy’s Arthur Leroy Sheldon, apprentice seaman, was killed after the war ended, on May 29, 1919.)[30]   No mention of World War I is found in any of Davenport’s Town Meeting Minutes, 1913-19.

 

         

 

The overwhelming demand for war materials produced other strong impacts, although in this case the effects were both positive and negative.  Davenport residents, along with the rest of the country, participated in “Wheatless” and “Fuelless” Mondays, “Meatless Tuesdays,” “Porkless Thursdays,” and the new, unsettling Daylight Saving Time.  (The latter was quickly repealed after the war.)  Summer residents, the Earl Maynes, in Brooklyn during the record cold winter of 1917-18, suffered greatly from the national coal shortage (this was less of a problem on wood-burning Davenport farms).  At Sexsmith Lake the following summer, the Mayne women made do, when baking nut-cakes, with “many war substitutes—‘eggs-o,’ karo, graham flour, sour cream.”[31]

Davenport’s farmers were affected by many of the tough regulations imposed by the new head of the federal Food Administration, Herbert Hoover.  “By law, Mr. Hoover was empowered to fix the prices of staples, license food distributors, co-ordinate purchases, supervise exports, prohibit hoarding or profiteering, and stimulate production.  He fixed the price of wheat at $2.20 a bushel, established a grain corporation to buy and sell it, organized the supply and purchase of meat, controlled the supply of sugar.”[32]

The good news was that farmers were essential to the production of these many scarce food supplies.  Many men in Davenport were at that time farmers or farm laborers.  This meant that wartime conscription had something less of an impact in Davenport than in some other areas.  Only about one in eleven Davenport men of draft age (18-45) appear to have served in the military during World War I.  This was a modest number when compared with the longer and far more deadly World War II when over five of ten (52 percent) of draft age Davenport men enlisted.[33]

Wartime disruptions also affected nearby Oneonta.  A newspaper report of June 21, 1918, revealed that because of the scarcity of men, “lady ushers” were to be employed for the first time, at least temporarily, by the Oneonta Theater.[34]

 There were also instances of apparent German spying or sabotage in that town.  A German pharmaceutical firm had built an Oneonta plant in 1914, and in 1918 it was discovered that a German manager there “was a major in the Imperial German Army and paymaster of all saboteurs across the region.”  About the same time, a 12-gauge shotgun shell was removed as it was about to go through a grinding disk at the Elmore Milling Company.  The mill had been destroyed by fire earlier, on May 7, 1913, and it was believed that sparks from a disintegrating shotgun cartridge might have produced similar results. The blame in 1918 focused on a new German alien employee who was apprehended, it appeared, just before he had hoped to vanish.  Finally another young German was discovered working at the Delaware and Hudson railroad yards.  He was believed to be a lieutenant in the Kaiser’s army and adept at observing and reporting rail shipments of men and war materiel passing through the important railroad junction of Oneonta.[35]

It was never made quite clear why the Germans had been willing to assign Imperial Army officers such tasks nor why the small upstate town of Oneonta was worthy of their Imperial efforts,[36]  but the discoveries certainly fed into the extreme anti-German hysteria of the time.  The United States was already arresting ordinary citizens and residents for disloyalty—1500 in all—under the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of May 1918, “as extreme as any legislation of the kind anywhere in the world.”[37]  In the case of the Oneonta undesirables, they seem to have been shipped off, escorted by U.S. Marshals, to a secure facility in Atlanta.  They were not again heard of, in Oneonta at least.

The Great Depression in Davenport.  The decade following the Great War was a period of prosperity for most American businesses  (coal mines and firms previously owned by aliens were the exceptions).  Successive Republican administrations assured low taxes, high subsidies, and otherwise favorable treatment.  There were also unprecedented business-related scandals within the brief administration of President Harding.  (Warren G. Harding died, a broken man, in August 1923, before completing his first term.)  These failures hardly tainted the following “roaring twenties” years of “Silent” Cal Coolidge or those of the Great Engineer, Herbert Hoover. 

The boom burst sensationally with the stock market crash of October 1929.  Between 1923 and 1928, “the index of wages rose from 100 to 112 while the index of speculative profits jumped from 100 to 410!”[38]  “Margin” was invented to enable stocks to be purchased on credit.  Bankers prospered and stock trades, at higher and higher prices, increased exponentially.  Many, of that fraction of Americans who speculated, grew rich.  A few were even able to survive the inevitable crash.

Omitted from the boom of the 1920s had been the American farmer.  The farmers of Davenport and elsewhere had benefited from the food scarcities and consequent high prices of the war.  For the United States, the wholesale price index for farm products and foods had doubled between 1914 and 1918-1920, but then abruptly fell by a third for the rest of the 1920s[39].  When the general collapse came in 1929, farmers, “already hard hit, were unable to meet their obligations, and mortgages were foreclosed, often with losses to all concerned.”[40]

The Town of Davenport, in contrast to the country at large, seemed relatively immune to the depression itself.  Davenport’s good fortune was probably due to a low level of indebtedness accompanying a high level of farm ownership and the stability of store credit from sympathetic store owners for household purchases.  Of course farmers could not buy new machinery, and off-farm employment opportunities were few or non-existent.  But farm families had large gardens, and housewives canned hundreds of jars of fruits and vegetables for winter use.  Every family had chickens and eggs and many, even those without a farm, had at least one or two cows.  Beef and pork were produced at home.  Farm prices of course were low, as they had been throughout the 1920s, but food was adequate.

Even the changing natural environment cooperated.  Farming had been declining in Davenport, as discussed in Chapter 6, throughout the later 19th century.  Many small, hilltop farms had disappeared and were returning to forest.  Their abandoned fields, however, were now ripe with berries—in far greater quantities than even thirty or forty years later.  Blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries grew—and were harvested—in great abundance.  Villagers climbed the hillsides to pick blueberries in wetlands now, in the early 2000s, long since grown to mature trees.  One friend of the author canned more than 200 quart jars of blackberries in the summer of 1939.

Wood was still a primary fuel, and most farm families had woodlots to harvest.  The urban poor, in contrast, would send children out to pick up pieces of coal fallen from freight cars as they jostled along railroad tracks.  Urban unemployment was high and pay was low.

One indication of Davenport’s (and Delaware County’s) relative good fortune during the Great Depression were farm and population trends.  Up until 1930 the number of Delaware County farms had been decreasing at an accelerating rate (while average farm size increased).  Farms lost (or consolidated into others) in the first decade of the century totaled 188 or -3.6% of the 1900 number; between 1910 and 1920 the loss was 431 (-8.5%); and from 1920 to 1930, 637 (-14.2%).  The low agricultural prices of the 1920s and the need for labor in urban areas undoubtedly aggravated the contraction in the latter ten years. During the 1930-1940 decade of the Great Depression, the trend slowed down appreciably, to a drop of only 218 farms (-5.5%), and average farm size remained unchanged.  Hard economic times, in other words, encouraged more farmers to hang on to their farm livelihoods where at least food could be raised and firewood hewed.

Similar figures on farms are not available for Davenport, but total population numbers for the town are even more striking.  Davenport’s total population, reflecting the countywide decline in agriculture, had fallen every decade from 1860 to 1930.  (Both the population and the farm totals are from the every-ten-year Federal censuses.  See Chapter 15 for a table of decade end population figures, 1800-2000.)  The 1930 population of 1,197 persons, in fact, was the lowest ever for the town and about one half of its 1860 peak.  But between 1930 and 1940, Davenport began slowly to regain inhabitants.  Presumably this came about because of a “return to the farm” brought about by hard economic times and the scarcity of jobs in more urban areas.  (Population growth has continued for other reasons since 1940, but that is a story for another chapter.)

 

 

Welfare and public works.  The above is not to say that Davenport was untouched by the Great Depression.  As noted, farm incomes remained low, the need for store credit increased, and there was a general, all around belt tightening.  Davenport saw an increase in wandering “travelers” in need of assistance.  A meeting of the Town Board on November 10, 1932, instructed the town’s welfare agent “to provide room and board for travelers,” the allowance to be “twenty-five cents for room and twenty-five cents for meals, and for one day only.”[41]  Ten dollars in total were apparently paid for all “travelers” in 1932 and $52 in 1933.  (The minutes of the county supervisors meetings used the term “tramps” rather than travelers.)

At the beginning of the depression, Davenport continued to handle other public assistance as it had for many years.  This was through payments to storekeepers who had extended credit to specified families, to others who had taken care of indigent families and individuals, and in some cases to the family itself.  The town also made regular payments to the county’s almshouse, to E.B. Dayton in his role as town welfare officer, to J. D. Hall for undertaker fees on behalf of “town charges,” and less frequently to the town’s medical officer, Dr. Thomas L. Craig.  Three days after Christmas, 1929, for example, a motion carried before the Town Board that “Jim Hall, Overseer of Poor, take Lucky Wilbur back to his home and purchase enough food and supplies to keep him until he can get back to work.”[42]

 The system apparently became difficult to manage in mid-depression, presumably because of some upsurge in welfare cases.  Separate payments to the county, to Mr. Dayton (later Mary Hillis), and to Mr. Hall continued, but payments to individuals after November 1935 were made from a new “Poor Fund.”  The annual amount appropriated each year for the latter was generally $500, compared to a 1930-1934 average of about $300 each year in reimbursements to individuals.  Although this may seem like a sizable figure for those days, it may be noted that the $500 annual Poor Fund was only one-half the amount paid each year for street lighting in the hamlets of Davenport, Davenport Center, and West Davenport.  ($500 in 2003 values would be perhaps $7,800; $300, about $4,700.[43])

Payments to Delaware County for Davenport poor at the almshouse and for the county support of Davenport children (at $260/child per year) did increase slightly.  These costs had risen to an average of about $300 annually during the beginning of agricultural hard times in 1920-23.  They had then fallen to less that $100 a year through 1928.  In 1929 the county poor payments rose to $484.84 and, for 1930-34, the yearly average came to about $760.  Still, at no time during the 1930s did Davenport’s total expenses for the poor, including both town and county payments, come to more than about five percent of total town expenditures.

There was a mild flirtation with public works in January 1934 when the town fathers agreed to furnish tools, materials and “machinery already owned by the town” for C.W.A. (Civilian Works Administration) projects in the Town of Davenport.  Unfortunately, the C.W.A. soon collapsed for want of congressional funding, and the Town Board voted unanimously to discontinue the town’s involvement at the meeting of March 27, 1934.  Some activities of the C.W.A. were continued by the Works Progress Administration of 1935, and we know that there must have been some Davenport men who sought emergency relief employment with this successor agency.  Their numbers or names are unknown. Their possible existence is inferred by the fact that on May 8, 1936, Town Supervisor George Hillis and his board (the four Town Justices and the Town Clerk) felt it necessary to declare that Davenport would not pay for transportation “to and from work on any W.P.A. job.”

The town did come close to one project of the Civilian Conservation Corps.  The job, to eradicate wild gooseberry bushes, carriers of white pine blister, was to employ 200 “otherwise jobless youths,” of whom twenty had been recruited in Delaware County.  (See sidebar.)  The C.C.C. camp administration included foresters and officers of the regular army.  It was on a rise of land off Route 23, a mile or so east of the Davenport-Kortright line. 

Despite the modest impact of the Great Depression on Davenport (in contrast, at any rate, with other, mainly urban, areas), the town did benefit greatly from at least one government program.  The Public Works Administration, as recounted in Chapter 8, was chiefly responsible for financing and building in 1939 the Charlotte Valley Central School.

 

 

Milk strikes of the 1930s.  The Great Depression was a time of considerable labor unrest, strikes and violence as workers sought to assert their rights and as industrial unions sought to organize.  The only part of this unrest to affect Davenport and Delaware County seems to have been in milk distribution.  Bad droughts in a number or years took their toll on local dairy farmers, as did the general downward pressure on milk prices.  Believing that the New York State Milk Control Board favored dealers over the cost-stressed farmer, a “milk holiday” was declared at the beginning of August 1933.  In an attempt to withhold milk from the processors, milk trucks were waylaid, and many milk cans were overturned.  The State Police donned steel helmets (but were injured anyway), and striking farmers were hurt in “riots” in Downsville, Margaretville, Walton and New Berlin.[44]  A milkhouse north of Utica, on a farm owned by a Dairymen’s League member, was shattered by dynamite.[45]  Six tank trucks in Oneida County were “pierced by bullets,” and a call went out urging the State Police to be issued machine guns.  They were given 30-30 rifles instead.[46]

 After ten days, general belligerence decreased.  Two hundred Davenport dairymen met in the IOOF hall on August 9 to consider the situation.  Charles Parks (living near Parks Hill Road in Fergusonville) presided and called for a vote on whether or not to resume deliveries to the Dairy League and Sheffield creameries in Davenport Center.  The vote was 60 to 15 in favor of ending the “holiday,” and “100 per cent deliveries” were expected to resume the next day.[47]

 Dairy unrest continued through the remainder of the Great Depression.  A Dairymen’s League spokesman in August 1939, pooh-poohing the weak opening days of yet another milk holiday, was reported to say, “The milk strike is running the familiar course of each of the five unsuccessful strikes of the last five years…”[48]  Nevertheless, the 1939 strike grew in intensity.  By August 17, Delaware County had been hit “with full force” and “picketing proved to be more effective than any previous holdout here.” 

By August 20, Delaware County milk shipments had been cut by “more that 75 per cent during the past three days.”  The Davenport Center Sheffield plant reported receiving only six cans of milk two days previously and none the day before that.  There was violence two miles south of the South Kortright Dairymen’s League plant “when 10 cars of strikers waylayed [sic] two trucks bound for the plant with 10 cans of milk.”  Davenport Center had no trouble “where special deputies were on guard.”  Elsewhere the state police were armed with teargas.  On the steep hills of the county pickets “learned the trick of walking up behinds a tanker in low gear…, unfastening the seals, and opening the valves.”[49]

 On August 21, no milk trucks left Davenport Center, but one incoming truck was stopped and six cans of milk dumped.  Most of the local farmers kept their milk at home and made butter.[50]  (That was the time of the author’s first lesson in butter making.)  A milk tanker was reported fired upon near the western end of Davenport where the Swart Hollow road met Route 23.[51]

 As with the 1933 strike, the 1939 holiday occurred in August after a particularly hot and dry summer.  Both events lasted ten days and ended with marginal gains for the dairymen.  The Dairy Farmers’ union had been striking in 1939 for a base price of $2.35 per hundredweight (five cents per gallon) for August-October milk deliveries.  They settled for a “blend” average of $2.15 per hundredweight.  The price was increased between 15 and 60 percent for four of the nine milk classifications.  The price of the other five classes was unchanged.[52]

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