My maternal ancestors were first settlers of Colton and among the second wave of settlers of Parishville, which had been almost abandoned during the War of 1812. JESSE HIGLEY I, born in Salisbury, Connecticut, in 1795, migrated first to Becket, Massachusetts, then to Shoreham, Vermont, then all the way to New London, Ontario, before he bought a large tract of land along the Racket River and built a sawmill at Higley's falls. He named Colton after his mother (HEPZIBAH COLTON) a member of a proud Connecticut family that provided a president of Yale College. His daughter, ELIZA HIGLEY married ALEXIS RUSSELL who was born in Vermont. HORACE DEWEY HICKOK came from Vermont to Parishville after the War of 1812. His wife, MARIA PRISCILLA PERRY, daughter of ELI PERRY of Vermont, who was a cousin of the naval heroes, OLIVARD HAZZARD PERRY and MATTHEW PERRY; whe was also a cousin of ALEXIS RUSSEL. The Hickoks had been a prominent Connecticut family in colonial times. One REUBEN HICKOK, was an officer in Washington's army. Others migrated to Ohio and westward; "Wild Bill", for example. The Vermont Hickoks were very puritanical - no wild Williams among them. HORACE DEWEY HICKOK named one of his sons Reuben (lived at Tupper Lake), and another, Sanford, had a blacksmith shop near Potsdam. But the jewels of his family were the "Hickok Twins" : HETTA and HORAL, both of whom married men with politically pretentious names. HORAL HICKOK married HARVEY WINFIELD SCOTT KNOX, gentleman-farmer of Canton. My grandmother was HETTA HICKOK, who married WILLIAM HENRY CLAY RUSSELL, a son of ALEXIS RUSSELL of Colton.
JESSE HIGLEYI was an old man when he led a covered-wagon migration party to new lands for the fourth time. In the vicinity of Higley's Falls the best timber had been cut away, and he had lost his most valuable land in Canada because he let it be confiscated rather than swear allegiance to the British Crown. Stony land in the foothills of the Adirondacks was il-adapted to farming. So, after his eldest son made a scouting trip to Michigan and brought back glowing reports of timberlands there, the elder Higley made plans to move there. Higley lands at Colton were all transferred to Jesse Higley II, who stayed on at Higley's Falls. ALEXIS RUSSELL also sold his land to his brother-in-law Jesse II. (When I examined records in the County Court House in Canton some years ago, these lands belonged to the late Congressman, Bertrand Snell.)
The Higley wagon caravan crossed the St. Lawrence at Ogdensburg early in the spring of 1834 and followed a fairly passable road along Lake Ontario and on to Detroit. From there, it moved northward through the Michigan Wilderness to Lapeer (then only a group of six log cabins). Each head of family took up as much land as the Federal laws then permitted, and the Higleys became backbone settlers of Michigan. Possibly the most distinguished was ALICE FREEMAN, one of the first graduates of the new university Michigan, whose mother was ELIZABETH HIGLEY. After her marriage ALICE FREEMAN PALMER was long connected with Wellesley College.
Pioneer life was hard on the old folks. My great-great-grandfather Higley, who was more then seventy when he went to Michigan, died four years after his arrival. He had been a worthy son of his father Josiah Higley II - - a man with "guts" enough to enlist "for the duration" in Washington's army, though he was in his fifties and knew that he would have the nasty job of handling teamsters in the army's wagon trains. This worthy ancestor of mine was drowned in the Skuykill River while "wrastling" wagons to safety in the dark of night after Washington's defeat at the Battle of Brandywine.
ALEXIS RUSSELL, if he went to Michigan with the Higley caravan in 1834, did not stay there. Possibly his wife did not go; she owned land that was not sold to Jesse II at this time, and she may have been pregnant. The final Russell migration to Michigan did not take place until 1868, after the children were grown up and married, and after the Homestead Act had been passed by Congress. The two eldest sons of ALEXIS and ELIZA HIGLEY RUSSELL were killed in the Civil War (ISAAC and GEORGE). The two eldest daughters (AMANDA and HULDA) married brothers (ZEBULON and GEORGE WHITE of Parishville. The fifth of the family, LUKE RUSSELL was married, had children, and lived on a fine farm near Potsdam when his father planned the migration to Michigan. Luke's wife refused to go so far away from her people (the BARTLETTS). The two youngest children, ANNE and LESLIE, were unmarried, but the sixth of the family - - WILLIAM HENRY CLAY RUSSELL - - married HETTA HICKOK a few days before the Russell caravan set out for Michigan. The caravan crossed the St. Lawrence at Ogdensburg, followed a direct route to Port Huron, and was soon in Lapeer. My mother says in a letter to me: "They went directly to Lapeer where everybody settled down in their new homes except the two Whites and my father. They went about forty miles farther north to Reese and settled down in their new homes within a mile of each other. That was about the month of October, 1868:.
I feel sympathy for my grandfather Russell. According to her own report, his bride wept all the way to Michigan - - because she had to be separated from her twin - - and besides that, during intervals between the birth of seven children, she wept or "swooned" every time she remembered her twin. MRS. HARVEY W. S. KNOX of Canton traveled to Michigan more than once to pacify her sister. On one such journey, in August, 1886, she brought my mother, AGNES RUTH RUSSELL home with her to Canton. Mother, the third of the seven Russell children, was then twelve; she greatly enjoyed life with her Knox cousins. Before long her mother wept her way to Canton and brought with her the younger children. When her husband came after her, she utterly refused to return to Michigan. Nor did she stay long in the little house that was built especially for her on the Knox farm. She stopped weeping and swooning and went off to Brooklyn, where by the time she was forty she had taken training as a nurse. When I last saw her, a few years before her death, she was a superintendent of nurses in one of the buildings of Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. The nurse who showed me through the building assured "Mrs. Russell may be almost blind but you can't fool her; she knows every move we make.
The Hickok twins were truly "identical" - - even to their mannerisms. As old ladies, they put on wieght in the same places. Their cataracts ripened at about the same time and they had operations within a month of each other. It seemed to me that there was a twinkle in grandmother's eyes that my aunt did not have. But the way I really told them apart when they were together was by listening to the rustle of their petticoats. My aunt wore silk petticoats that had a pronounced rustle; Grandmother could not afford such luxuries.
My mother attended Potsdam Normal School and was teaching in a rural school at Pierpont when she met and married BERTRAM GUY SHOEN in 1894. I was born in 1896 and named for my two grandmothers - - HARRIET, after my father's mother, and HETTA, after my mother's mother. If I had been a boy and they had used the same system, I would have been called Ebenezer William Henry Clay Shoen. I'm glad I was a girl.
Of all the families whose genealogy I have traced, I have been most interested in the SHOEN family, possibly because it was so hard to discover its origin. I wasted many shillings in London trying to discover what ship the original ancestor took when he came to New England or Canada. I had to conclude that no one of that name made an official [exit] from a British Port or an official entry into an American port at a date previous to 1809, the year that SAMUEL SHOEN was born to WILLIAM and SALLY SHOEN of Stark, New Hampshire. How did they get here? Did they steal away from Scotland or Ireland on fishing ships and get themselves rowed ashore before the ships made port? Family tradition insists that the Shoens are Scotch-Irish, and they bear not a trace of German, Jewish, or Dutch traits that would be found in people who spelled the name with a C in it - - Schoen or Schon. My best guess is that there was a Shoen among the people who were sent from Scotland by order of King James to turn Ireland into a Protestant country and that he left Ireland secretly and came to New Hampshire. SUSAN SANBORN SHOEN was a sturdy Puritanic character who would not desire the pity of posterity because she had inherited the twinning gene. Ten of her sons grew to manhood and seven of them served in the Civil War. Twin daughters lived to a ripe old age; one was ELIZABETH SUTTON, mother of Leslie Sutton, founter of the Massena Observer, names and dates of births were faithfully written into the big Family Bible, from which I copied them in the 1920's before that Bible was consumed by fire when MIKE SHOEN's farm near Bombay burned. (Mike, who lived near Fort Covington until he died not so long ago, was the son of my grandfather's twin, EZRA.)
Here is a list of SUSAN (her father was EBENEZER S. SANBORN) and SAMUEL
SHOEN's children:
Births:
CHARLES See born July 12, 1832
WILLIAM A. March 13 , 1834
EZRA and EBENEZER, May 17,1836
ASHLEY, September 4 1838
RONALD and ISRAEL, July 28, 1840
ALONZO, September 13 1842
ELIZABETH and LUCY, January 24, 1845
HANNAH MARIA, April 2, 1847
GUY and brother, June 22.1851 (brother died at 6 weeks )
HENRY, May 22. l849
IDA and sister, October 26, 1853 (8ister died aged 3 days)
DEXTER WILDER, April 21, 1859
CHESTER, September 30, 1860
Seven of the eight oldest Shoen sons served in the Civil War. Ezra
stayed home to help his father on the farm. Three were killed:
The eldest, CHARLES SEE, was reported lost; he did not enlist from
St. Lawrence County. LESLIE SUTTON (long owner of the Massena observer)
told me that his Uncle Charles probably deserted from the Union Army and
married in the South, because a Southerner named Shoen once came to
Massena to trace his relatives and was sent to Leslie. When SAMUEL
SHOEN's will was probated in 1888, it named CHARLES SHOEN as among his
living sons. The three who returned from the war were:
My grandfather, EBENEZER SANBORN SHOEN, caught malaria in swampy war camps and it plagued him all the rest of his life under the name of "rheumatizm." When be returned from war, his twin brother (Ezra) was well established as a farmer. Though Ebenezer did not know how to do much of anything else, he just did not like farming. He had heard of the oil boom in Ohio. So he married the widow or one of his war cronies and took his bride and her two children to Ohio. HARRIET COOK SUTTON was the daughter of WILLIAM COOK of Louisville. (Her deceased husband was CHARLES SUTTON a cousin of ALBERT SUTTON (husband of ELIZABETH SHOEN and father of Leslie).
In Ohio my grandfather made some money in oil and lost it in farming before be sold the Ohio land and moved back to Massena. The farm where he lived near Massena Springs is now called "The Ames Place" after a farmer who treated the land better than my grandfather did. FISHER AMES , of Massena told me that the old house, partly a log house, was torn down when his father built the brick house. My father, BERTRAM GUY SHOEN, was born there in 1868, the third of five children. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was six years old. My grandfather ran a motherless establishment that permitted all the children to shift for themselves whenever they liked. With the help of local politicians, he actually received money froml the U.S. Treasury by special Act of Congress for the benefit of his deceased wife's deceased husband's orphans. (I have papers to prove how much of it went to local politicians, so I will not name them.) Some of thatmoney was spent on the orphans, for those two young people went off to British Columbia and never came back. His own two daughters drifted away to Lowell, Mass., where they did not have to do farm work. His eldest son, CURTIS, was a real farmer, who "picked stone" and developed more than one farm near Potsdam and Norwood. His youngest son, BERNARD SHOEN worked on the railroad and lived [in] Norwood. He was killed in a railroad accident in 1911 and his wife and children moved away from St. Lawrence County.
My father (known as "Bert") liked to boast that be has shifted for himself since the age of twelve. It was true that be lived away from home after that age, but he was not without family supervision. His grandfather, the patriarch of the big family did not die until my father was twenty. His uncle DECK, second youngest of the big family and less than ten years older than father, was his idol. Father was a clever, good-looking boy who hated school and shrewdly found ways of avoiding it. For example, he persuaded his two young uncles to take him along when they went to Michigan and wrangled a a drove of horses all the way back to Potsdam and Massena. What boy of twelve could fail to feel like a man after such an experience? Father made that trip more than once. He swelled with pride when he spoke of his Uncle Henry (12th of the big family) who raised horses in Michigan and was author of a book used by veterinarians. After his uncle DECK married and lived on the "new" farm that was made by cutting his father-in-law' s f'arm in half, , my father lived there as much ae he lived anywhere.
Uncle DECK SHOEN was a well-known character in northern New York after he opened a livery stable in Massena. He was a man of brave size . I remember how ELON HORTON, who operated a grist mill in Massena, used his wits to discover what Uncle Deck' s weight was. He managed to get the weight of one of the livery vehicles that Uncle Deck often drove (the springs under the driver's seat were reinforced). Then he maneuvered that vehicle onto the drive-on scales beside the mill with Uncle Deck in it. Uncle Deck' s weight - - a matter of subtractiion - - was well over 300 lbs. We children watched in wide-eyed wonder whenever our uncle was at our house for dinner. His hearty laughter made dishes on the table rattle. He died of diabetes before was graduated from Massena High School.
Horse fancier though he was, my father had served an apprenticeship in ship carpentry in Montreal before he was twenty. He spent several winters in the "Great North Woods" of Canada bossing timber gangs. For such work, he was paid off in a lump sum when the camp broke up in the spring. He had money enough to buy fine clothes and horses. I have been told that my father was quite the "dude" in summer when he drove a spirited horse (I do not mean "mare") around Massena, Louisville, Racket River, Brasher Falls, Potsdam, Norwood, and Canton. He rented his horses as studs.
My father did not marry until he was twenty-five. At that time he was either working on Uncle Deck's farm or living there and working somewhere else. He was a well-trained carpenter and he did harvesting during busy seasons on farms. Late in the summer of 1893, he drove the girl he intended to marry to the County Fair at Clinton. On the way home, they had a lover's quarrel. Off went my father in a huff - - this time to Pierpont where he met a little schoolteacher and married her "on the rebound". The impulsive marriage was doomed to be stormy. What woman would like to have pictures of horses on her dining room walls - - and everywhere else in the house? I was born in a house with such decorations in the township of Stockhom in 1896.
My father liked horses better than land. On a rented farm which must have been near Potsdam he got together a splended collection of horses and used the farm to raise feed for them. Then came tragedy. In the dead of night in winter the barns burned and all the horses in them. The house was burning before anyone awakened. My mother was sick in bed after childbirth. My earliest memory is that of purposely kicking for all I was worth while the nurse carried me under one arm and my baby sister in the other - - trudging through the snow to the nearest neighbor. I thought my mother was in the fire. What a brat I was to treat that woman like that: My father had carried my mother and was at the nearest house before we arrived. Everything was burned - - everything!
We moved into a house in the village of Potsdam where we were living when I was old enough to go to Kindergarten. My father worked at carpentery to retrieve his losses; he could earn more at that than at farmwork. After my year in kindergarten, we moved into "Grandmother's House" on the Knox Farm near Canton. My father was away from home - - working at his trade, building and repairing dredges during the digging of the first canal for Massena's first power house. My father did not get horses again until we lived on the "Stetson Place" near Massena Center. By that time he was also interested in blooded cattle, but he only kept one or two of each breed, and raised hogs for the family's meat supply. He could not be content with farming only. He had six girls - - no sons to help him on the farm. Besides that, he earned much more money by building a silo for some other farmer or working at the aluminum plant in Massena.
I had been teaching for four or five years when my father went to Canton to be in charge of barns and animals at the State agricultural School at St. Lawrence University - - a job that suited him to perfection. My mother had walked out on him, but we girls managed to get them together again in Canton. They had no real grounds for divorce, except that he liked to live in the country, while she preferred the city. Soon my mother left again -an easy thing for her to do after tho example her mother had set for her. Then my father retired from the State job, he was followed by his cousin, ROY SHOEN, Uncle Deck's only son. Roy and my father had always acted like brothers. Long after my father was dead, farmers who called at the college barns for advice did not seem to know that a change had been made. They would call Roy "Bert", and Roy would not bother to correct them.
I had the advantage of beginning my education in the kindergarten of the Potsdam State Normal School. Kindergartens were rare in those days, and that one was a Model. The next school I attended was a rural school at Langdon's Corner's on the Canton-Pierpont road. The teacher there was ELIZA HARPER, a remarkable woman - - a lovely lady. I got the idea that I wanted to be a teacher like Miss Harper - - and I never swerved from it in the years that followed.
I taught Indians at St. Regis and Onondaga reservation schools; then under Federal Civil Service taught part of a year in the Fort Totten Indian School in North Dakota. Congress cut the appropriation for the school in North Dakota at a time when the mercury was 40 to 50 below zero. Teachers were sent on a furlough. I had to get money from my father to get home. Thus ended my teaching of Indians. But I was permitted to do extra study at Oswego and I was graduated that same year.
I taught for eight years in public schools in Millbrook, N.Y., and in Orange, Atlantic City, and Plainfield, N.J. , before I undertook graduate study at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1928. By the time I completed my master's degree, the Great Depression was at its deepest point. There was no job for me. Some of the professors who knew me best persuaded me to matriculate for the Ph.D.
*******
Very sincerly yours,
Harriet H. Shoen
Copyright 2018-2022 by Brenda Becker and Russ Sprague
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