A Syracuse Story

West Genesee Street, Syracuse, 1900

Jane looks out steadily, as if you hadn’t just surprised her by opening the case. She’s trapped in a daguerreotype, surrounded by a decorative brass mat. No rings yet adorn her fat fingers. It is 1860 and she is wearing a complicated day dress with ridiculous plaid puffs along the sleeves and a shawl and drooping headdress.

A scrap of paper is stuck to the velvet; faint message from the past:

PJ Bumblebee the hardest customer in Rochester City. He came to Oswego to ask consent. His courage failed. He finally concluded he would not marry at all.

Now it’s clear – she is waiting for the Bumblebee. 

PJ finally gets courage and she accepts. They move to Syracuse where he starts in men’s furnishings. He builds a fabulous shop with counter cases made of French plate glass and walnut. He employs tailors who work all night sewing Continental style suits. The business grows and PJ becomes a wealthy man.

Three daughters were born: Neeltje, Annabel, and Jessie. 

They didn’t come in a rush; 1864, 1870, 1877. PJ and Jane made sure that their daughters rose to the top of Syracuse society. There was a lot of money. The city’s economy flourished with the salt industry, banking, diverse manufacturing, and Syracuse’s development as a railroad center.

Debuts and balls, the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts,  summers at Saranac Lake, an expansive home on West Genesee Street . . . 

No wonder that Neeltje (known as Nellie), who married Henry Elmer of West Springfield, Mass., in 1890, brought her son and daughter to Syracuse for such protracted visits.

I just don’t understand how Henry and Nellie met. He hardly ever left his house, let alone West Springfield.

In the meantime, Annabel and Jessie married Syracuse men and continued to enjoy busy lives close by their parents. When PJ died in 1902, he knew they could afford lifetime upper-crust memberships. Their husbands prospered. It helped that they were well-launched by wealthy fathers.

Annabel married a man named William Buell Gere, the son of William Henry Harrison Gere who served in the New York State Legislature, worked as New York State Division Engineer, and made money in iron and salt.  

William B. Gere spent his career as the secretary and chief inventor of the Merrell-Soule Company, which developed a modern method for creating a powdered milk called Klim (milk spelled backwards). William B. Gere also led the invention of low-moisture canned mincemeat (“None Such”) and vegetable and soup powders, as well as new types of canning and food packaging. He held numerous patents, including one for pumpkin powder. He died prematurely in 1915. In 1927, Borden acquired Merrell-Soule.

Jessie married a man named Alfred Howlett Durston, Ph.B., Yale, 1899; class president. Son of James Franklin Durston, president of Lefever Arms Company, a Syracuse gun manufacturer best-known for its hammerless shotgun. Alfred worked in the factory and sales, and as secretary and vice president. He received a patent for a gun cleaner in 1902. It looks like Lefever produced automobile gears as a side business for some years. In 1916, the Durstons sold Lefever and reincorporated as the Durston Gear Corporation with Alfred as president, a position he held until his death in 1926.

And then there was “poor Nellie,” stuck in tiresome West Springfield with her in-laws living right next door on Main Street. Her husband Henry had attended the public schools and worked at a hardware store, then for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. He obviously adored his hometown, serving as school trustee, town selectman, and treasurer of the West Springfield Co-operative Bank.

After Nellie died in 1926, he married Lilian. A schoolteacher, she had been a boarder in the Main Street house for some years. She lost her first fiancé in World War I.

Henry never made a lot of money or held a patent.

His glory days arrived while he served as treasurer of the town of West Springfield. 

During World War II, Henry defied New Deal fiscal guidelines for local governments yet managed to secure the town’s largest cash balance in 170 years. 

It’s family lore that The Wall St. Journal cited this achievement in an editorial, but no one has been able to confirm that.

See post 2/10/16

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/02/syracuse-calling.html?m=1

Well Jess you have got the best of everything

North End Bridge over the Connecticut River, seen from West Springfield, 1900

Jessie already seemed wise beyond her years by the time her brother was born. Their parents, Henry and Neeltje, were 40. The children had four grandparents, two great-grandparents, and a dozen aunts and uncles who had treated Jessie as an adult since she was small. 

When John came along in 1901, her maternal grandfather, Pieter John Brummelkamp, wrote to her from Syracuse:

My dear Jessie, What news did I hear. I must have dreamed it that you have a Brother. Am I right or wrong. If I am right then enclosed you will find a Bill. Go down the street and buy him a pair of boots and tell him to get up and shovel snow. If you haven’t any snow tell him to come to grand Pa, we have got plenty. Well Jess you have got the best of everything. It isn’t everybody that can have a Brother. Love to Ma & Pa, PJB

Two cities dominated the children’s early years: Syracuse, N.Y. and West Springfield, Mass. In both places Jessie came down from a long line of Jessies. Her mother’s mother, sister, and great-grandmother all were Jessies. Her father’s mother was a Jessie and his great-great-grandmothers both were named Jessie. 

This particular Jessie, born in 1894, would be the end of the line; married late, no children.

The families wore their homes like badges of honor, posing for photographs on Easter Sunday, the afternoon sun shining right into their eyes. 

In Syracuse, they composed themselves in lawn chairs with the photographer clear on the other side of West Genesee Street so that the figures are barely recognizable. 

In West Springfield, they sat under an enormous beech tree surely 200 years old.  

Jessie and John’s parents were not an obvious match. Neeltje thought West Springfield unfashionable and decamped each year for the social season in Syracuse where she stayed and stayed, often bringing the children with her. They moved between the sumptuous décor and service of the Brummelkamp home and rough-and-tumble West Springfield where John chopped down a dead apple tree, repaired a canoe, and fetched sugar from the A & P when they were down to two lbs. 

Neeltje was one of three beautiful daughters whose mother was one of five lovely daughters. PJ, a stocky immigrant from Utrecht, had business with Jane Brewster’s father and fell madly in love with her. 

After PJ and Jane married, he brought her to Syracuse where he built a successful men’s furnishings store. He ran it until 1883 when Governor Grover Cleveland appointed him superintendent of the Onondaga Salt Springs Reservation.* In 1890 PJ was photographed “at camp” in the Adirondacks, wielding a fishing rod and dressed prematurely like a Rough Rider.

Onondaga Salt Springs, 1908

After PJ died in 1902, some thought that Henry and Neeltje might grow closer but that was not to be, for Neeltje spent even more time in Syracuse with her mother.

As Jessie later said of herself, she was “born raised” and largely brought up John. 

She enabled him to carve out a childhood. 

She insisted that her father take his son skating on the Connecticut River during the long frozen winters. 

She encouraged John to become manager of the high school baseball team and apply to Tufts because he hoped to be an engineer. 

She appreciated John’s enthralled interest in the future although her manner and views always marched resolutely out of the Victorian past.

*Jesuit missionaries first discovered salt springs around Onondaga Lake, about 6 miles northwest of Syracuse, in the mid-17^th century. Between 1797 and 1917, the Onondaga Salt Springs Reservation produced more than 11.5 million tons of finished salt.

See post 2/17/16

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/02/well-jess-you-have-got-best-of_10.html?m=1