Archives Lost & Archives Found

Last Sunday the main house of Borderland Farm on Rt. 94 burned, with tragic results. This house was about 150 years old, and in addition to the terrible loss of a life, and a home, owner Virginia Martin has lost the archival records of her family & the historic homestead, which she had intended to share with the Historical Society. Our condolences to Virginia and the family; the community sorrows with you.

The same week we were notified that the Lehigh & Hudson River Railway Veteran's Association had gotten a call from Orange County Community College. They needed to clean out an old garage, and discovered 150 boxes of archives of Warwick's Lehigh & Hudson River Railway. Years ago when the railroad office closed, the valuable archive was transferred to OCCC. It was transfered eventually to the railway museum in Strasburg, PA-- or so it was thought. Apparently only some of the records were transferred, and everyone had forgotten this huge lot of records! Many people don't realize that without the L & HRR, and the commerce, jobs, and wealth it gave rise to, Warwick as we know it would not exist.

For more on the railroad, check out Marty Feldner's web site: http://lhr.railfan.net

Over the next week or so the railroad club will rescue the records and store them temporarily, with the finacial help of the Historical Society of the Town of Warwick and the Carriage House Storage owners, Jack and Janice Hubert. There they'll be sorted and an inventory created, so that a new, secure home that is accessible to researchers can be found.

Troublesome Youth

A true sign of spring, when the weather warms up all of the teenagers climb up out of cyberspace and begin to wander around, dazed in the sunlight. This can be very annoying for those who are not teenagers any more: loud music, rude observations, and just generally disrupting anything they feel like. In days gone by, some of the worst youth offenders from New York ended up here in Warwick, at the NYS Training School for Boys-- a reform school, now the site of the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. One of the success stories to come out of the school is that of Conrad E. Mauge' Jr., or "Frenchy" as he was nicknamed then. A few years back we helped a professor from Boston University figure out who the pseudonymous "Frenchy" really was. I've copied the article I did then below, and this photo shows him in 1951.

“Frenchy” is Found

Thanks to the teamwork of several local residents and researchers, the search for “Frenchy” of WVHS in 1950 has been successful. Boston College professor Carlo Rotella was trying to find him for a project involving the book that was written about the boy, “Out of the Burning” by Ira H. Freeman, published in 1960. A pseudonym had been used, and all trace of Frenchy’s real identity had disappeared when Ira Freeman died. Frenchy’s real name was Conrad E. Mauge′, Jr.

Joanne Cheney, librarian at Warwick High School, was able to find his name. It was also verified by several local residents who remembered him. From there his life was traced by the Local History Dept. of Albert Wisner Library.

Conrad arrived at the New York State Training School for Boys here in Warwick in 1949, after a long and hard road as leader of a Brooklyn gang before he was 14.

His arrival at Warwick brought him into a completely alien environment. He had never been in the country, and recalls that he had never had an intelligent conversation until he talked with the State School librarian one day.

Having an I.Q. of 160 and with good behavior at the school, he was sent in a test program to the regular High School with another boy, William Barron. At the public High School he was initially shunned. He says there were only two other African Americans at Warwick High at that time, and even they wouldn’t talk to him because he was from the State School. After a few weeks however, a “Polish girl with an unpronounceable name” invited him to listen to records with her friends. We don’t know who she was, but her invitation was important to his adjustment to a new life and his acceptance at the school.

He excelled in Track, which was his ticket to higher education. From there he went on to finish high school in Brooklyn at the age of 16, and attended Brooklyn College and St. John’s University. He eventually achieved a Ph D.

He ran a recovery center for AIDS and substance abuse victims on his home turf of Bedford Stuyvesant in the 1980’s, and later turned to the study of African religions, publishing several books and articles. One of his hobbies was Calypso music, part of his parents’ heritage from their native Trinidad. His song “Zombie Jamboree” was recorded by the Kingston Trio. He passed away in 1998.

The book "Out of the Burning" is written in first person from extensive interviews with Conrad, and is such a gripping tale of life in Bedford Stuyvesant in the 1940’s and Conrad’s complete change of direction that it reads like a fast paced thriller. The last quarter of the book takes place in Warwick, with vivid descriptions of what daily life was like for the boys at the reform school, and local names popping up from time to time. The Albert Wisner Library has a copy of the book available for checkout--but don’t skip ahead to the Warwick part, or you will miss the true impact of his successes.

Slavery-- A Household Word

Last February we published an article about how scarce information is about the history of minorities in Warwick. Since then some new things have come to light:

As old newspapers are scanned and made available, it becomes possible to recover some of this lost information. This image is from the Orange County Patriot, March 11, 1817. This Garret Post appears to be the same man who owned what is now the Shingle House Museum on Forester Ave.

The most significant find in the last few months is that in the collection of Florence Tate, we found a transcription she did of the old slave births and manumissions register kept by the town. It lists over 100 names of slaves and their owners, and is now posted on the Warwick Heritage Database (go to www.albertwisnerlibrary.org, click on "Local History", and then on the database button, search for "slavery"). These records were kept as a result of the act to gradually eliminate slavery passed by New York State in 1799. It specified that after a certain number of years of service, the slave had to be freed.

War in Springtime

The poet T. S. Eliot says, “April is the cruelest month”, and a generation living though a major war in springtime knows well what he is speaking of. The painful tension between hope at the rebirth of nature, and anguish for our troops and the civilians caught in the storm of battle is something that is difficult to cope with. We are not alone in that struggle. Looking back to another Civil War and the young Warwick men who fought through three springtimes far from home in the most horrific conditions possible, we find that this prior generation came to terms with its experiences.

The “Warwick Boys”, Company D of the 124th Regiment, were mostly young men in their teens and early twenties when they enlisted to fight. A history of the regiment, also known as “The Orange Blossoms”, was later written by Charles Weygant, In recent years Charles LaRocca has authored books and articles on the 124th, as well. But recently a more local view was made available to the Historical Society of Warwick by Tom and Joan Frangos-- a speech given by Capt. James W. Benedict, of Warwick, the leader of Company D. The stone home he grew up in still stands on Colonial Avenue, near the Village line.

Benedict titled his speech “Sherman’s Deffinition of War”(sic) , after the General’s famous rejoinder to a request for a short summary of his experiences: “War is Hell.” It is not written in the restrained, formal language one would expect from an official of his time, but is the impassioned cry of a man wounded in body, mind, and soul, who in later years has come to a kind of balance, if not peace, with the experiences he endured.

We offer here a few excerpts of it, and warn that even though we see graphic images of war in our homes each day, the descriptions are disturbing.

“I followed Burnside across the Rappahanock, on that Pontoon Bridge in front of Fredericksburg on that fateful afternoon of Decr. 12th 1862.

“On yonder frowning heights, the bloody heights of bloody Mayrie; a hundred and fifty black mouthed cannon are vomiting forth through their fiery throats, solid shot and shells, and great chunks of Rail Road Iron into our midst in the vain endeavor to destroy the bridge, thereby severing our Army, and capturing us in detail. From behind the chimneys on yonder housetops, scarce a stone’s throw away, three hundred and fifty Rebel sharpshooters are pouring a deadly fire of leaden hail into our ranks, and at every click of a trigger, at every puff of smoke, at every report of a musket, at every crack, crack, crack of a rifle, some poor fellow down there on the bridge would throw up his hands and with a shriek he would plunge head formost into the icy waters of the murkey Rappahanock, and as his life blood mingled with those cold, dark waters and his spirit rose in great bubbles to the surface and bursting, soared up through cloudland into the presence of Him who gave it, His body floated down the crimson colored waters of the icy Rappahanock. ‘Food for the Fishes.’ ….Burnside, are you crazy? Burnside, are you drunk? Burnside; are you a fool? If you charge those men up against those impregnable works again, the blood of 15,000 of our brave boys in blue will be upon your skirts. But Burnside says Forward, and again those now depleted ranks move forward.

“What about Getteysburg (sic)? Getteysburg, O Getteysburg; Thy hills, and thy valleys, and thy plains are enriched by the blood of nearly 24,000 loved ones. Gettysburg; O Getteysburg! I close mine eyes, What do I behold? A vision comes to me today as plain as was the reality on those awful days of carnage in July 63. Gettysburg; O Getteysburg! I see thy brooks, thy rivulets, thy rills run red with the very best Gore of the Nation.

“I prayed then, and there, that mine eyes might never gaze on such a field of slaughter and carnage again. But God in His Infinite Wisdom, deemed best not to answer that prayer, for in the Wilderness Campaign a scene met my gaze that (if possible) seemed to outdo even Getteysburg.

“On a piece of ground some 3 miles in length and a mile in width, where the contending armies fought for two long terrible days and nights, Neither side giving the other the time or opportunity to care for their wounded, or bury their dead, in places three deep. After the battle I went over a portion of that field, and I believe I could have traversed the entire length and breadth of that ground, and not touched foot to Mother Earth, Just walked on Corpses and dying men, and O, the awfulness of that battle field. Could you have been there and listened to the cries and the groans, the curses and the prayers that fell upon my ears, you would have said, Surely Sherman knows what War is. From all quarters of that battlefield came those piteous cries:

“Water, Water, For Gods sake, give me some water. Others begged of one to hand them a loaded musket that they might put an end to their suffering by their own hand. And the poor fellows died there, and the Wilderness was enriched by the Blood of 20,000 boys who wore the Blue…”

Captain Benedict in this lengthy speech gives descriptions of several of the other major battles in which he participated, and his humanity is found in every anguished sentence and misspelled word as he rushes along in the grip of memory. He concludes,

“Now, I hear someone Ask, did it pay? Yes, I answer, it paid… It struck the shackles from off 4,000,000 Slaves and made them free men and free women… What was the Cost? In money, billions of dollars…What else did it cost this Nation, the North? It cost us 400,000 lives… It made for us 200,000 Widows… It gave to us 500,000 orphans… War is Hell, and I was an Orange Blossom.”