LeRoy Pennysaver & News

LE ROY PENNYSAVER & NEWS - OCTOBER 6, 2019 by Lynne Belluscio I received a phone call from Christel Schmidt in Washington, D.C. who does research for the Oxford English Dictionary. She was looking for a sentence that appeared in the August 18, 1830 issue of the Genesee Repub- lican and Herald of Reform, a newspaper printed in LeRoy. She needed to confirm the date, page, and column in which the word “sink” appeared. (I know this is really esoteric but keep reading.) The sentence reads: “He knows we always objected to Owen’s utopian scheme at New Harmony, that it destroyed individual enterprise, would take away all motives to exertion, and finally sink man into a mere an- imal that would eat, drink, prop- agate his species and die.” The sentence was in an article with the heading “Cayuga Patriot.” I told her that most of my research requests have something to do with Jell-O or family genealo- gies. This was really going to put me to the test. First, I went to the card file and determined that indeed we have a copy of the Gene- see Republican and Herald of Reform. I wasn’t sure I could find it because we have reorga- nized the archives. We have it on microfilm, but our microfilm reader isn’t accessible. So, I called Judy at the County His- tory Department in Batavia and asked her if she could find it, and she did. She confirmed that the pages in the newspaper are not numbered, but the sentence was on page two in column 4. I confirmed that information with Christel. She wanted to know if the sentence was written by O.A. Brownson. So I knew I had to find our copy of the newspaper. I called Sue Conklin who spent a year reorganizing our ar- chives and she said to look for a box marked “miscellaneous” and sure enough there was an acid-free folder with several copies of the Genesee Repub- lican, including the August 18, 1820 issue. The masthead read: “Brownson & Freeman.” So, it appears that the editor of the Genesee Republican, Orestes Brownson, was making com- ments about an article in the Cayuga Patriot. And that was all that Christel needed, but I had a lot of questions. Who was O. F. Brownson and why was he writ- ing about New Harmony in Indi- ana? Who was Owen? Who was Ulysses Doubleday, the editor of the Cayuga Patriot? And were they all connected somehow? Well, first I already knew about Orestes Brownson. Back in 1998, I was contacted by a researcher interested in Brown- son’s writings in the Gene- see Republican. I learned that Brownson was an activist, labor organizer, and a publisher who embarked on a journey to dis- cover the “true religion.” He was brought up in a strict Calvinist family, and then became a Pres- byterian for a while but decided that he really didn’t like Presby- terians. In fact, when he was in LeRoy in 1830, he launched an attack in the Genesee Republican on the LeRoy minister. He then embraced Universalism and then became a Unitarian. In 1829, the year before Brownson came to LeRoy, the editor of the Cayuga Patriot, Ulysses F. Doubleday, published a book with many of Brownson’s sermons. Brown- son was affiliated with the New England Transcendentalists and then, in 1844, converted to Ro- man Catholicism and published a variety of newspapers. When he died, his body was taken to Notre Dame University, where he was buried in the Basilica. So, with information about Brownson, I thought I’d look up Ulysses Doubleday, ed- itor of the Cayuga Patriot. With a name like Doubleday and dis- covering he grew up in Cooper- stown, I was curious to see if he was related to General Abner Doubleday who is credited with founding baseball. Well, it turns out that Ulysses Doubleday was Abner Doubleday’s father! Ul- ysses also was the warden of the prison in Auburn and initiated prison reform. He also served two sessions in Congress. So, now I needed to learn more about New Harmony, which Brownson and Double- day mentioned. It was a social- ist utopian community founded in 1814 by George Rapp in In- diana. In the early years, it was the home of German Lutherans. But in 1824, the Harmonists sold their property and returned to Pennsylvania. Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist and social re- former bought the town in 1825. New Harmony was known for advances in education and scien- tific research. It established the first public library and provid- ed equal education for men and women. Owen’s sons included Richard Owen, who was an Indi- ana professor and the first presi- dent of Purdue University. Rob- ert Dale Owen, was an Indiana congressman and reformer who sponsored legislation to create the Smithsonian Institution. He lived for a while in New York City and maintained communi- cation with Brownson and like his father, Robert, embraced Spiritualism. I wish I knew more. I really think there was a lot more going on in 1830 and I can’t help but wonder what brought Brownson to LeRoy. He didn’t stay long, and the only evidence he was in LeRoy was his masthead on the Genesee Republican and Her- ald of Reform. By 1831, he was in Ithaca, where he became the minister of a Unitarian commu- nity. He began publishing the magazine the Philanthropist. In 1939, Arthur Schlensing- er Jr. Wrote, “Orestes Brown- son, A Pilgrim’s Progress”. The book was reviewed by Henry Steele Commager. I suspect it is way over my head, and I will just have to settle with the fact that the LeRoy Historical Soci- ety has the only copy of Brown- son’s Genesee Republican and Herald of Reform in a box in the archives, marked “Miscella- neous.” The Oxford English Dictionary, New Harmony and Abner Doubleday