Jacob Snell was "unceasing and unrelenting" on behalf of the Republican Party.

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette and Amsterdam Recorder

     The Canajoharie Courier wrote, "A campaign once begun was waged until the polls were closed on Election Day, so in case of a narrow defeat he never felt the chagrin that he had not made his best and most ardent fight."

Snell was born in Stone Arabia in the Town of Palatine in 1847 and lived on a farm with his parents. While in Palatine, he was elected supervisor and town clerk, running as a Republican in a Democratic town.

Snell married Nancy Nellis of Palatine in 1867.   They had two sons and three daughters.

A popular and powerful leader, the Amsterdam Recorder reported "prolonged cheering and hand-clapping" when "Uncle Jake" entered a 1903 Republican county convention.

Boss Snell's large girth made him a target for political cartoonists. The New York Journal in 1901 showed a seated Snell with a diamond stickpin on his tie, which was lying atop his stomach.

The caption said, "Jacob Snell, whose diamond looks him square in the face."

About 1870 he moved to Fonda. Two of his ancestors "an earlier Jacob and Alexander Snell" had been elected Montgomery County sheriff. Jacob Snell ran for sheriff in 1884 and lost. He was elected two years later, serving three years as sheriff. He became chairman of the Republican county committee, was a state committeeman and president of the village of Fonda.

Snell owned a company that did roadwork and he was president of Mohawk Valley Broom of Fonda. He owned a downtown Fonda hotel, later known as the Hotel Roy. He was president of the County Agricultural Society, which stages the Fonda Fair, for two years. He was superintendent of a section of the Erie Canal for a time.

Although both were Republicans, Snell and Gloversville Congressman and glove industry mogul Lucius Littauer were at odds over the years. Snell had threatened to run against Littauer for Congress in 1902 but dropped out of the race, reportedly to improve his chances of getting an appointment to be a prison warden.

It took a while but Snell got what he wanted. He sought the job of warden at Clinton Correctional Facility, also known as Dannemora state prison in northern New York. Snell didn't get the job.

Finally, in 1904 Governor Benjamin Odell named Snell the warden of the four-year-old Napanoch Reformatory in Ulster County.

Snell died at the reformatory on December 22nd, 1905 at age 58. "An abdominal abscess and acute kidney disease, surgical treatment of which was not practicable because of his immense girth, were the primary causes of his death," wrote the Schenectady Union.

There is an often repeated story that when Snell died, the door of the room where he perished at the reformatory had to be enlarged to get his body out.

The Little Falls Times reported that Snell weighed 500 pounds and that twelve men were needed to carry his casket.

Amsterdam's Democratic paper, the Morning Sentinel, actually came to Republican Snell's defense on the subject of his size. The Sentinel scoffed at the Little Falls Times report, saying Snell did not even weigh 400 pounds and that "six small men" had no trouble handling the casket.

When he died, newspapers called him "one of the best known Republicans in the state."

At the funeral in Fonda, popular Reverend Washington Frothingham, a Mohawk Valley historian, paid tribute to Snell's Revolutionary War ancestors, saying seven of them had given their lives for their country.

After the funeral, Snell's body was taken by train for burial in the Canajoharie Falls Cemetery.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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An Amsterdam tavern, a paint brush factory and a pool Hall

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette and Amsterdam Recorder

     The late Shawn Kevin Duffy contributed stories to this column on many topics including O’Shaughnessy’s, his family's East End tavern. 

O'Shaughnessy's Tavern was once owned by Duffy's grandfather Martin J. O'Shaughnessy.  Located at East Main and Eagle Streets in a building no longer there, O'Shaughnessy's regulars included movie actor Kirk Douglas's father, Harry Demsky. The Demskys lived at 46 Eagle Street at the end of the dead end street.

The Historic Amsterdam League marker for Kirk Douglas’s boyhood neighborhood was placed where the tavern used to be on East Main at Eagle.

Duffy wrote, "The bar survived Prohibition as so many did not. My mom, Mary O'Shaughnessy Duffy, told me that she used to help make bathtub gin when she was around ten, actually in the bathtub. Her brother Martin Junior (who had polio) sold the moonshine off the back porch to make ends meet during these hard times."

Eventually the “O” was dropped from the tavern’s name and it became known as Shaughnessy’s.

Duffy also had memories of working at Edy Brush Company on Brookside Avenue in Amsterdam, a firm that made paint brushes out of hog bristles imported from Poland in the late 1960s.  Edy Brush closed in the 1980s and the building, originally the Wasserman broom factory, was destroyed by fire in 2010. 

Duffy’s job was to dye the hog bristles black in a large vat of boiling dye.  He also cut long tubes of synthetic bristles with a hand chopper.  He sometimes thought his arm was going to fall off.

“I broke the elevator by loading boxes of bristle almost up to the limit of the elevator,” Duffy wrote.  “A co-worker and I were also told to stack boxes of bristle in a large storage room as high as we could.  The ceiling was probably 30 to 40 feet.  We made stairs out of the boxes as we stacked and therefore got right up to the ceiling.  I don't think the foreman really expected this and we were in trouble again for doing what we were asked.”

Duffy used to visit his aunt, Loretta on the grounds of Amsterdam City Hall on Church Street, the former Sanford mansion.

Duffy wrote, “At that time, the landscaping at City Hall was outstanding, with three levels of gardens and hedge bordered walkways.”

Duffy also spent some time at Louie Allen’s pool hall on Market Street near the old Rialto Theatre.

Duffy wrote, “Louie Allen would occasionally play the good players that would sometimes come around as he was a very good player himself.  The strange thing was that Louie had one crippled arm and played with only his good arm, using the rail as a bridge.  The story was that in his younger years Louie once hustled the wrong person at the wrong time, and they made sure he would never do that again by taking him out back and giving him a non-pool lesson, (not sure if this story was true or just hype). Louie also had an assistant by the name of Joe Corrigan who was close to a world-class player while still in his teens.” 

Corrigan joined the Navy and Duffy was informed that Corrigan was killed in an auto accident in about 1970 while still in the Navy.

Duffy, born in Amsterdam in 1949, died in 2019 at his home in Lake St. Louis, Missouri, at age 69. He was a Navy veteran and worked for General Electric and other firms in the turbine generator business.  When he retired he was part owner of Turbine Generator Technical Services.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Amsterdam Native was Theater, TV and Nightclub Star

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette and Amsterdam Recorder

     Arlene Fontana, an Amsterdam native, appeared almost two thousand times in the national company of Flower Drum Song. In a show business career spanning four decades, Fontana sang on many TV programs including Ed Sullivan and played nightclubs in New York, Chicago, London and Miami.

"Her greatest appeal was her energy and her appearance on stage," said Fontana's husband and theatrical agent Carmen LaVia.

Born in 1936, Arlene was the only child of Marty and Palmera Masson Fontana. Marty Fontana came to Amsterdam as a young child from Genoa, Italy. A salesman for WCSS radio and other companies, Marty played trombone and violin in his own band, the Knights of Rhythm.

Arlene began taking tap, toe and ballet lessons at age ten. She studied piano. When she was 14, she did song and dance numbers in variety shows directed by drama coach and later high school principal Bert DeRose.

In 1949, she attracted a regional following by appearing on the WRGB television program Teenage Barn. At the time, television was a rapidly growing medium and there were several local music shows. Fontana sang with WRGB performers Gary Stevens and Earle Pudney, toured New York, Massachusetts and Vermont with Teenage Barn and did summer stock at the Malden Bridge Playhouse.

In high school, she won an essay contest on the dangers of Communism and worked on a WCSS radio theater series directed by speech teacher Grace Rutherford.

When Fontana graduated from Wilbur H. Lynch High School in 1954, former Amsterdamian and family friend Joe Miller offered her a contract to sing at Miller's Shell Room Lounge in Miami. Fontana and her parents moved to Miami.

For a year, she sang in Miami nightclubs then secured bookings in Pittsburgh, Washington, Detroit, Cleveland, Dallas, Houston and Las Vegas. She was a favorite on Television Nacional in pre-Castro Cuba. Her recording of Easy backed with I'm In Love on a 45 record in the late 1950s did well in England, getting her club dates in London.

In the early sixties she was auditioned by Richard Rodgers for the part of Linda Low in the national touring company of Flower Drum Song. She played that role 1,972 times.

Over one thousand of those shows were done at the Thunderbird in Las Vegas where Fontana met her future husband. She and Carmen LaVia married at St. Michael's Church in Amsterdam in 1965. The couple lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where LaVia worked for the Fifi Oscard Agency. He became Fontana's agent in 1972.

On television, she appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, Merv Griffin, Tonight Show and the Mike Douglas Show.

As a birthday present for her father, Fontana played a concert in 1971 at the then Coliseum Theatre in Latham. Marty Fontana died in 1974.

In 1984, Arlene Fontana was diagnosed with breast cancer.  “She was in her last stage show -- This Joint Is Jumpin' -- in 1988.

Cancer returned and she died of a stroke at New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in May of 1990. Her mother, Palmera, survived her daughter by more than a decade. Palmera died in Amsterdam in 2001. Fontana's husband Carmen LaVia died in 2017 in New York City.

NOSTALGIA NEIGHBORHOOD

John Angerosa, an eye, ear, nose and throat physician and accompliahed jazz pianist, passed away on April 24. His love of music carried over to his medical practice, treating many musicians with special awareness of the importance of their ability to continue to perform.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Long distance love

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette

     In the summer of 1931, my parents lived on what my father called ”long distance love.”

Born in England in 1909, Clarence Cudmore came to America with his mother Elizabeth and three siblings in 1912. My grandfather Harry Cudmore and oldest uncle were already in Amsterdam, weaving silk at Fownes Brothers glove mill. The family settled with other relatives in the East End on Eagle Street.

Julia Cook, my mother, was born in Randall in 1914 and moved to Amsterdam with her mother and two siblings after World War I. Her mother Margaret was a widow and started a boarding house on Forbes Street to support her family.

Clarence and Julia met at East Main Street Methodist Episcopal Church.  Clarence left school to work in Mohawk Carpet Mills. Julia skipped two grades and graduated high school in 1930. She went to Albany Normal School to earn a teaching degree but left school because of emotional and money problems.

She and her sister Jane spent the summer of 1931 working as maids at a Jewish Catskill resort.. Their mother had grown up near Phoenicia and relatives kept their eyes on the girls.

That summer Julia and Clarence exchanged 24 love letters.  “It seemed awfully queer and funny to me Sunday not having you come after me and loving me too, “ Julia wrote in June.

Clarence responded with a story about a rain-soaked church picnic in Tribes Hill where the minister’s car got stuck on wet grass and Clarence and his friends put chains on the tires, “I had my new suit on, so you could imagine how mad I was.” 

“Oh, by the way, I have an appointment with my cousin on Thursday to go to see “Dracula” at Fleischmanns,” Julia wrote. ’You don’t mind, do you? He’s my cousin and we’ll be chaperoned thank God.”

Clarence had a sudden expense--$3 to fix broken glasses. His sister, Gladys, was mad when he told her how much it cost.

In July Julia had an attack of hysterics. Clarence told her of a wedding at their Amsterdam church where the groom was late and the 100 guests were served sandwiches which were left over from a church picnic. Julia refused two dates and said business was brisk at the inn. Clarence hitched a ride with Julia’s sister’s fiance for a visit in Phoenicia.

Clarence wrote, “Gladys (Clarence’s sister) asked if you threw your arms about me when you saw me. I told her ‘What did you think she was going to do, break out with smallpox?”_

Julia came down with stomach ulcers. A doctor prescribed medicine and a bland diet for the rest of the summer. “Nothing but milk and cereals,“ she wrote.

Clarence responded, “If I was the doctor, I wouldn’t give you anything but love and kisses.”

Clarence made another trip to Phoenicia and came back with pictures to show his mother, “After my mother looked at them for five minutes, she said ‘Is that Julia?’ I told her it was Greta Garbo!”.

In August, Clarence wrote, “I don’t like the idea of living on long distance love.”

Julias health had improved but she was fearful after a summer of swimming because infantile paralysis was spreading in the Catskills. “They are closing the movies and churches,” she said.

Julia and Clarence were married in Amsterdam by the Reverend Frank T. Love at East Main Street Methodist Church in Amsterdam in 1934. They raised two children and had been married 60 years when Clarence died in 1994. Julia died two years later.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Death at the Armory 

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette 

     Members of the Forty-sixth Separate Company of the National Guard were preparing to depart for the Spanish American War on Sunday May 1, 1898 at Amsterdam’s four-year-old Armory on the city’s south side. The Armory today is a hotel.

A concert was in progress and Shaw’s City Orchestra was performing “My Country Tis of Thee” for a crowd of two thousand.

At that moment Private Calvin B. Van O’Linda, who had enlisted the previous Thursday, was showing his equipment in the soldiers’ locker room to Anabelle Turner. Two friends, Wilbur Jeralemon and George S. DeGraff, entered the room.

Jeralemon, sixteen, wanted to see the revolver Van O’Linda had purchased the night before. The soldier found it in his hip pocket and handed it to Jeralemon.

As he did so, Van O’Linda said, “Look out! It’s loaded.” No sooner were the words uttered, according to a Recorder account, when Jeralemon accidentally pressed the trigger and a thirty-eight caliber bullet entered DeGraff’s right jaw bone.

Van O’Linda, who had been studying medicine on Long Island, held DeGraff and applied a handkerchief to the victim’s mouth to try to stop the flow of blood. DeGraff staggered and fell face down. A doctor was speedily summoned but DeGraff died a minute after the physician’s arrival.

The sound of the gunshot was so muffled in the locker room that it was scarcely discerned in the armory hall where the concert was taking place. The orchestra finished playing “My Country Tis of Thee” and then played “Auld Lang Syne.”

National Guard Captain Vunk wanted to avoid panic and kept the news of the death from spreading through the crowded building. He placed a guard at the locker room door and the audience was asked to leave the building when “Auld Lang Syne” concluded.

The newspaper wrote, “While many knew that some accident had occurred, but few were aware that the result had been so speedily fatal.”

The body of the young victim was moved to the city morgue and about midnight was taken to the home of his aunt, Elizabeth DeGraff on Grove Street, where he had been residing. Miss DeGraff apparently had taken care of her nephew since he was an infant.

After the shooting, Jeralemon was “stupefied”, wandered about the room and fainted. Van O’Linda was overcome as well. The doctor gave Van O’Linda morphine but it was midnight before he revived from his comatose state.

An autopsy of the victim found the bullet drove parts of the jaw bone to the spinal cord and also perforated the jugular vein. The newspaper reported, “Death resulted from hemorrhage, which filled the lungs immediately, and had this been otherwise, the injury to the spine would have resulted in death within a few weeks.”

The day after the accidental shooting, what was now known as Company H of the New York National Guard departed from Amsterdam for the war after a rousing sendoff. The brief war with Spain ended before the local soldiers could get to the battlefields in Cuba. In a sense, though, one young Amsterdamian had already lost his life because of accidental friendly fire.

GEORGE S. DEGRAFF

The victim was attending Amsterdam High School. His father, Dr. E.E. DeGraff, was a dentist with a practice at 9 East Fourteenth Street in New York City. Young DeGraff had been planning to study dentistry and go into practice with his father.

The newspaper wrote, “He was greatly beloved by his schoolmates at the high school and was making every effort to complete his education at that institution this year with fitting honors.”  He was buried at Green Hill Cemetery.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Artist was drawn to Country Homes

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette 

   He slept in barns and relieved the pain of rheumatism with alcohol.

He spoke broken English and died at the Montgomery County almshouse in Yosts in 1900. And he left a collection of 200 drawings that became the subject of an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City in 2003. The retrospective was also displayed in Cooperstown and Orlando, Florida.

No one knows what Fritz Vogt did during his first 48 years of life in Germany, where he was born in 1841, wrote New York Times reviewer Ken Johnson. In 1890, Vogt came to America and spent his last ten years as a traveling artist, recording what Johnson called “lucid descriptions” of the homes of his clients, primarily farmers in Schoharie and Montgomery counties.  He did 40 drawings of farms, churches and other buildings in the town of Sharon, for example, and 25 in Canajoharie.

W. Parker Hayes, Jr., project director for the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling exhibition service, produced the catalog for Vogt’s retrospective, ‘Drawn Home: Fritz Vogt’s Rural America.’ The catalog was published by the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown.

At first, Vogt drew realistically with graphite pencils then switched to colored pencils and his work became more complex with multiple perspectives.

“Somebody could have happened to buy him a set of colored pencils,” Hayes said.  “Or somebody said ‘I want this in color’ and all of a sudden his constituency decided, ‘Hey I want my work in color.’”

Why did farmers want pictures of their homes? Hayes said New York State agriculture was facing competition from the Midwest. There was nostalgia for the dwindling numbers of gentleman farmers. Vogt’s drawings also mirror another19th century social trend: publication of county atlases depicting homes of wealthy people.

Hayes chronicled Vogt’s life from oral histories recorded in the 1960s, interviews with people who had known Vogt when they were children. Hayes created a database of Vogt’s work to fill in biographical details in that the artist dated and described each drawing.

The oral histories state that Vogt picked hops. “In August of every year from 1891 until he died he didn’t do any drawings,” Hayes said. August is the beginning of the hops picking season. You can prove or verify what’s out there about Fritz Vogt through what the drawings say.

A few drawings indicate Vogt was paid a couple of dollars for a specific piece. Vogt was more often paid with a place to stay, meals or alcohol.

Vogt fit in with the region’s existing German-American population. “He relied on an ethnic network to get the basic things in life and to find patrons,” Hayes said. Vogt had a “good rapport” with children and may have earned money by teaching German.

Hayes wrote that Vogt was “a short, smallish man with a quick step, yet slightly rotund.” Hayes added: “He wore five or six second-hand shirts layered over each other, the underlying shirts visible through holes in the outer layers. He slept in the shelter of barns between two buffalo-hides on a pile of hay.

When Vogt entered a home to complete his drawings, he wore a pair of slippers fashioned from carpet remnants.

“There often are little things in his drawings,” Hayes said. “The way a certain cornice has some flourish. He saw those things. He knew the homeowners who lived there were very attuned to that. But at the same time he had a perspective that was different because he didn’t have a home.”

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Amsterdam Woman was Pioneer Union Leader

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette

     An Irish immigrant woman became a leader in the fledgling union movement while living in Amsterdam in the nineteenth century.

Leonora Kearney was born in 1849 in Cork. Her parents, John and Honor Kearney, fled the Irish potato famine and settled in Pierrepont in northern New York where her father worked a farm.

When Leonora was in her early teens, her mother died. Her father married a woman a few years older than his daughter and the two women did not get along.

Young Leonora took lessons from the head of the Colton Girls School and earned a teaching certificate at age sixteen.  Leonora taught school for seven years.

In 1871 she married a house painter and musician, William Barry, who lived in Potsdam. William, too, was born in Ireland and came to Canada when young. He served nine years in the British army including assignments in Gibraltar and the Mediterranean.

The Barrys moved from town to town seeking work. They settled on Amsterdam’s Voorhees Street with their three children.

William Barry died in April 1881. The obituary of the 38-year old said he had suffered lung ailments for two years. He was a “well-known musician” and composer who led the Amsterdam Cornet Band and played in the Thirteenth Brigade Band. The Barrys’ three-year-old daughter also died that year.

Now a widow with two young sons, Leonora could not go back to teaching because only single women were acceptable candidates for teaching positions. She went to work at Pioneer Hosiery, one of Amsterdam’s many knitting mills. It was located on the south side of 31 Main Street, between Market and Church Streets.

Barry wrote. “Day after day, I sat sewing men’s trousers for five cents a dozen.”

In 1884 Barry joined a women’s branch of the Knights of Labor in Amsterdam. There was a knitting mill strike and management lockout of the union in 1886. The mill owners eventually prevailed in ousting the Knights, at least temporarily.

In 1886 Barry attended a Knights of Labor convention in Richmond, Virginia, and was named to the new department of women’s work. Leaving her children with relatives, she traveled the country.

The Biographical Dictionary of Notable American Women described her as tall with a commanding presence, gifted with Irish humor, blue eyes and spontaneity.

Barry advocated equal pay for women and fought against child labor. She spoke against sexual harassment, saying men used the power of their positions to “debauch women and boys.”

In 1888, at Susan B. Anthony’s invitation, Barry spoke to the 40th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention for women, held in Washington, D.C.

In 1890 Leonora married Obediah Read Lake, a printer from St. Louis. Leonora didn’t think married women should work outside the home unless there was economic necessity. She resigned from the union.

Known as Mother Lake toward the end of her life, she lived until 1923 and was popular on the lecture circuit as an advocate for temperance and women’s rights.

After marrying Lake, Leonora lived in St. Louis until 1916 when she moved to Minooka, Illinois, to live with her husband’s sister. A baseball fan, she visited Chicago to see baseball games. She died of cancer in 1923.

Former Montgomery County historian Jacqueline Murphy was instrumental in getting an historical marker honoring Barry placed at the east end of the Riverfront Center in downtown Amsterdam in 1998.

NOSTALGIA NEIGHBORHOOD

Mohawk Valley sports reporter John Thomas enjoyed the article on NFL quarterback  Russell Wilson’s Amsterdam ancestors. Thomas wrote, “In the twilight of his career we finally have him back home. Thanks for the memories.” 

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Bicycling in the old Mohawk Valley

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette

     An organization called the Clerical Bicyclists reached Amsterdam on August 10, 1886 and stayed the night at the Warner Hotel on Main Street.

The pastors and their machines, on a summer outing according to the Daily Democrat newspaper, boarded a train for Canajoharie. There they went “to their wheels” and cycled to Sharon Springs for dinner.

Pedaling preachers were just part of the explosion of interest in bicycling in the late 1800s and early 1900s in America.

Amsterdam merchant Seely Conover, who served twice as city mayor, once rode a high-wheeler, a bicycle with a large front wheel and a smaller rear wheel. The chain drive bicycle, invented in 1879, kept the user nearer the ground and became the standard design.

The Amsterdam Wheelmen organized bicycle trips every summer in the 1890s. They staged “lantern parades” with lights attached to their bikes.

Amsterdam historian Hugh Donlon wrote that bicyclists did face a problem, “Dirt roads with deep ruts and large stones encountered in inter-village travel provided a kind of obstacle course, but when cindered sidepaths were built about the turn of the century the going was easier.”

The Sidepath Law had passed in 1899 when Theodore Roosevelt was Governor. Pedestrians had to give the right of way to oncoming bicycles on sidepaths. Wagons and cattle were supposed to stay off the sidepaths altogether.

In 1900 the Montgomery County Sidepath Commission collected a thousand dollars by issuing sidepath permits to bicycle riders. The permit cost a dollar a year. Within five years though the amount collected fell to $50. Donlon wrote, “Cycling scofflaws could be very nasty.”

Edward DeGraff of Amsterdam, who later moved to Albany, was a prime mover along with other wheelmen in constructing sidepaths along miles of roads east of Amsterdam.

Donlon wrote in 1934, “One of DeGraff’s prized possessions is a photograph taken forty years ago which shows him in cycler's costume on his trusty vehicle under the gateway to the sidepath he built out of Amsterdam.” The picture is in Donlon’s Amsterdam history, “Annals of a Mill Town.”

DeGraff was quoted as saying, “It was all we could do to keep the sidepath from being rutted by wagons. The truth was that the sidepath was much better than the road.” People gradually came to the conclusion that the roads themselves needed to be improved.

Perhaps Amsterdam’s most famous cyclist was E. Adelbert Payne.

“Dell” Payne was born near Oriskany. He married, settled in Amsterdam and operated a bicycle sales and repair shop on Chuctanuda Street.

Payne and DeGraff once traveled 201 miles in one day, going from Amsterdam to Saratoga Springs, Glens Falls and Lake George, returning by way of Albany.

Payne set a record in August 1901 by pedaling from New York to Buffalo in 42 hours and 55 minutes. He sold and repaired the “National” brand bicycle that he used in his racing career. 

Fire destroyed most of Payne’s Amsterdam shop in late 1913 and he was only partially insured. In 1916 Payne got a job as a lock tender at the then new Mohawk River/Barge Canal lock adjacent to Guy Park Manor in Amsterdam.

On June 22 1917 Payne was on the bridge of the lock trying to remove a log that was impeding the water’s flow. He leaned out, lost his footing and fell into the rushing river.

Soldiers were guarding the lock against possible sabotage as America had entered the Great War that year. Private Albert Munton reached Payne but could not save him.

Payne’s body was recovered the next day. He was 45. He and his wife had no children.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Football star Russell Wilson's Amsterdam Roots

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History for Daily Gazette

     NFL quarterback Russell Wilson's roots go back to an African American family in Amsterdam.

Wilson and the NFL Giants have agreed to a one year deal, according to multiple sources.

Wilson was starting quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks in 2013. He and the Seahawks defeated Denver in the 2014 Super Bowl. The Seahawks lost to New England in the 2015 Super Bowl.  Wilson is coming off his first year with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Wilson's great grandfather, Harrison Wilson, Sr., was born in 1888, the son of a formerly enslaved man in Falmouth, Kentucky. Harrison Sr. migrated to Amsterdam in 1910 where he had relatives.  In Amsterdam the Wilson family lived at locations including West Main, Cedar and Pine Streets.

Harrison Sr. and his wife Marguerite (Ayers), also from Kentucky, raised eight children and stressed education. Marguerite's grandmother had taught at a one room school in Kentucky.

Harrison Sr. was a plasterer, although racial discrimination kept him out of the union.  He later was maintenance man for Amsterdam builder and landlord Thomas McGibbon.

Harrison Sr. saved the lives of two female pin setters working at a bowling alley in a downtown building owned by McGibbon, which caught fire in 1943.

McGibbon died later that year. The Wilsons were then able to make their livelihood by operating a private parking lot in busy downtown Amsterdam on land behind East Main Street that had been owned by McGibbon.

The Wilson children pursued careers in education, health care, industry, law and sports.

Harrison Sr.'s namesake Harrison Wilson, Jr., born in 1925, shined shoes and delivered newspapers as a seven-year-old.  His mother told him he looked like his grandfather and that instilled pride in the young man.

Harrison Wilson, Jr., was the only African American on Amsterdam High's championship basketball team during the 1942-43 season. Coach Ed Cionek called him the team's "key player."

Harrison Jr. and his siblings were childhood friends of the late restaurateur Sam Pepe Jr. when both families lived on West Main Street. Pepe recalled going to YMCA summer camp with Harrison, Jr. and Harrison’s brother Willis.

Harrison Jr. played every sport he could in high school, even speed skating. After graduation, he entered the U.S. Navy and was tops in his class at basic training. He became a hospital corpsman.

When World War II ended, Harrison Jr. was a student and basketball star at Kentucky State, and then basketball coach at Jackson State in Mississippi. He taught at Jackson State and earned a doctorate at Indiana University. He was president of Norfolk State University, a historically black institution in Virginia, from 1975 to 1997.

Harrison Jr. frequently visited his parents in Amsterdam and provided help to young African Americans who wanted to pursue higher education.  He was guest speaker at Amsterdam High graduation in the 1990s.

Marguerite Wilson died in 1960.  Soloist Marilyn Lyons sang "He Will Understand and Say Well Done" at Marguerite's funeral. Harrison Sr. died in 1982 at age 94. Harrison Jr. passed away in 2019, also at 94.

One of Harrison Jr.'s six children, Harrison Wilson III, was a Dartmouth graduate and attorney who almost got into playing professional football with the San Diego Chargers.  Harrison III died from complications from diabetes in 2010.

NFL quarterback Russell Wilson is the son of Harrison Wilson III and grandson of Harrison Jr.

Russell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1988 and raised in Richmond, Virginia.  He played football with his father and older brother at age four.  He had a college career at North Carolina State and the University of Wisconsin.  He played professional baseball with the Colorado Rockies organization.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Amsterdam’s mill girl’s long and Productive Life 

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette

     Amsterdam’s mill girl died August 24. 2018, at Albany Medical Center.  Sophie “Sue” Fraczek was 94. According to her grandnephew, Dominick Fraczek, she died at Albany Medical Center but had been living in a second-floor apartment on Amsterdam’s Guy Park Avenue.

Her parents, Dominick F. and Mary Kosiba Fraczek, were Polish immigrants. Her father worked at Mohawk Carpet mills in Amsterdam. Her mother, who died young, sometimes worked at Bigelow Sanford, the rug mill that bordered the Fraczek’s Park Hill neighborhood.

Aunt Sue, as she was known to her nieces and nephews, attended Amsterdam High and took a power machine course at Vrooman Avenue School in 1940. She worked at Novak’s shirt factory on Edson Street and the Amsterdam Coat Company in the West End.

Bigelow Sanford hired her to operate a twisting machine toward the end of World War II. The mills hired many women then to take the places of men who were in the military.  She worked in Building 54.

“When I went to work (at Bigelow, I was scared to death,” she said in an interview. “It was my first time in a carpet mill. It was hot. It was noisy.”

The machine she used took two or three strands of wool and twisted the strands into yarn that was used to weave carpets. The yarn left the twisting room on spools or bobbins which fed the yarn into the looms.

Her pay was based on piece work, in her case determined by the weight of the bobbins of yarn she produced. She recalled making $45 for 40 hours work, a lot less she said than carpet weavers made.

Her picture was taken in front of her machine, a photo that ended up at the Walter Elwood Museum in Amsterdam. Television producer Steve Dunn picked that image to symbolize the 2000 WMHT-TV documentary he and I produced, “Historic Views of the Carpet City: Amsterdam, N.Y.”

Dunn said, “It is a really good picture, technically good. The black and white content expressed the whole theme—industrial workers in a mill town. I loved the way the spindles receded in the picture, and I loved the bandanna and the period clothes the woman wore.”

The photo was used in the documentary and illustrated newspaper articles about the film. It was displayed on the cover of WMHT’s viewer magazine.

Aunt Sue did not know the photo existed until she saw it on television. According to a grandnephew she would tell people, “I’m the mill girl!” The photo is one of two pictures of her in the collection of the Elwood Museum.

Dunn and I did not know the identity of the mill girl until several months after the documentary appeared. School teacher Gerry Brown stopped to talk with me at the Amsterdam Price Chopper and identified the mill girl as her godmother and aunt. Aunt Sue was the topic of my first column for the Daily Gazette in November 2000.

She stayed at Bigelow Sanford until the company left Amsterdam in 1955. She then did a similar job for Mohawk/Mohasco Carpet for six years.

Later she worked at several textile mills, retiring in 1989 from Stratojac a company that moved to Amsterdam in the 1980s to make coats.

She was not the only Amsterdam mill veteran who could say, “Almost every job I lost was because the company moved out.”

Sophie “Sue” Fraczek never married but spent years helping raise children in her extended family. She had a great eye for selecting gifts for nieces and nephews. She liked listening to the radio and loved to read, especially the classics.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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