May 1991

About this Issue

Note from the Editors

This issue begins with the first half of Bill Kauffman's essay, Back to Batavia, which is reprinted here from the January 1991, issue of The American Scholar by the kind permission of Mr. Kauffman and the journal. The second half of his essay will appear here next month. Bill Kauffman is a Batavia native and an enthusiast for Upstate New York. His articles have appeared in numerous magazines and his novel, Every Man A King, came out in 1989.

In honor of Memorial Day, Robert Koch writes a recognition of the military service of the Iroquois soldiers in the Civil War.

Home at Last, a poem by Frances Richman honors the young men who marched off in 1813 to the Niagara frontier and died in Canada near Fort Erie. Their remains were brought back and interred in the U. S. Military Cemetery at Bath in 1988.

We present a selection from Ansel J. McCall's 1893 monograph on the history of Bath that is contained in The Centennial of Bath, New York published at the end of Bath's first one hundred years. A. J. McCall was a prominent Bath lawyer and the first large accumulator of historical material about Bath. His fellow citizens requested him to prepare a sketch of the their "social birth and history." The illustrated map of Bath on the back page shows the village in 1804 as recalled by William H. Bull. This picture was furnished by Robert Dwyer who is chairman of the Bath Commemorative Committee, 1793 -1993.

Samuel Hammond's fond account of Bath, taken from his book of 1855, Country Margins and Rambles of a Journalist. This piece was furnished by Dick Sherer and Paul Wood.

Bill Treichler contributes a book review of Wayne Franklin's A Rural Carpenter's World: The Craft in a Nineteenth-Century New York Township.

Ed Harris gives us another episode from Harpending's Corners. This time he tells of going off with his 1935 high school graduating class on a trip to Washington, D. C.

This issue concludes with another chapter from Caroline Kirkland's book A New Home. Mrs. Kirkland in this chapter describes the rigors of a full season of insects that every summer the settlers in Michigan endured.

CLR Blog | Site Map | Contact CLR