May 1989

About this Issue

Note from the Editors

This issue has been expanded to sixteen pages to feature the famous "Aisle of Pines" in Wayne. The information, letters, pictures and advice for the stories in this issue were very generously provided by Donald A. Rowland who is the historian for the Town of Wayne and a student of the Mitchell, McDowell and Hallett families.

There is not much information about the designing and constructing of the elegant plantation-style house that 27-year-old Sam Hallett had built for his young family on a magnificent site in Wayne in 1854. Nor is a lot known about Samuel Hallett's early life or the true circumstances of his death. There are conflicting stories about his assassination, and some people even questioned that he really had been killed. Hallett probably was in a very stressed financial situation at the time he was shot.

The earlier accounts of Sam Hallett tend to be adulatory—editors and publishers in those times seem to have been very impressed by wealth and business success. Later writers have featured the eerie legends that grew up around the house when Hallett's widow lived there.

Donald A. Rowland, who is historian for Wayne, has gathered a thick portfolio of clippings and pictures, maps and accounts of the Halletts and their successors. He has worked out family relationships and chronologies for their lives and for the times of the fabulous house. He very generously provided for this issue all of his information about the place and the families who have lived there.

Certainly the most interesting and probably the most credible account are the letters of Margaret Hallett Lang written in 1951, 1968, and 1969. Her long letter written February 12, 1951, from Norway Hill, Hancock, New Hampshire, to Lola Austin Morse.

Also in this issue is another installment of the series about the mills along the outlet from Keuka Lake. These stories have been written by Frances Dumas and illustrated by Patricia Rios.

another chapter from Peter Henderson's Gardening for Profit

Caroline Kirkland's story of frontier life in Michigan, A New Home, continues.

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