By Alice Askins, Education Coordinator at Rose Hill Mansion
When the Swans moved to Rose Hill in 1850 their
neighbor to the east was John Delafield.
Most of our information about John’s life comes from the Centennial Historical Sketch of Fayette
by Diedrich Willers, published in 1900. John was born in 1786 on Long
Island. After graduating from Columbia
College in 1805, he found work in a dry goods store. In 1808, his firm made him
super-cargo on a brig going to the West Indies and other ports. A super-cargo managed
trade for his firm. Basically, he sold
merchandise at the ports the ship sailed to and bought goods to bring back
home. A brig is a sailing vessel with two square-rigged masts. Used by merchants and the
navy, brigs were fast and maneuverable.
John’s voyage was not
uneventful. His brig’s captain died of
yellow fever in Cuba, and the mate died two days after they left Havana. At this point, John took charge of the ship. Several days later, the crew mutinied and
tried to kill him. One of the crew
helped him subdue the mutineers and the two men managed to get the ship to
Corunna, Portugal. At this time, Europe
was in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, and France and England were wrangling
over Spain and Portugal.
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The USS Niagara
is a wooden-hulled brig that was the relief flagship for Oliver Hazard Perry in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. The Niagara is one of the last
remaining ships from that war. It is
usually docked at Erie, Pennsylvania, as a museum exhibit.
It also often travels the Great Lakes during the summer.
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I have not found whether John’s
ship was originally supposed to go to Europe from the West Indies, or why he
sailed north after leaving Portugal in 1809.
He must have done so as Mr.
Willers tells us the ship met a violent storm off the coast of France, and
limped into Bristol, England, with a lot of damage. There was tension at the time between England
and the US that would eventually result in the War of 1812. Mr. Willers says,
Mr. Delafield was here thrown into prison for some alleged violation of
the revenue laws and although soon released he was detained within bounds of
thirty miles around Bristol, a stranger and without money. He employed his
time, however, in working for a cabinet maker, and in a drug store, remaining
thus under British surveillance until the close of the war with the United
States.
Eventually John was allowed to go
into business for himself, and he married a Bristol woman. When his wife died in 1820 he returned to New
York City. In New York John became a
teller in the Phoenix Bank and ten years later he became the bank’s
president. John was an early promoter of
the Hudson River Railroad, a director of the University of New York, and an
organizer of the Philharmonic Musical Society. He retired from banking in 1841,
and two years later he bought a farm of 352 acres near Rose Hill. He called it "Oaklands," and dove
into the improvement of farming. He became
president of the Seneca County Agricultural Society in 1846, and remained
president until he died except for 1851.
That year he was president of the State Agricultural Society, and ran
the State Fair in Rochester. Oaklands
won county and state awards.
John was crucial to the farming
revolution that John Johnston brought to North America. When Mr. Johnston was installing drain tile
on his farm Viewfields, his neighbors were skeptical. They assumed that an underground system could
never work. Many thought the system
would clog up and the tiles would all smash from draft horses or oxen walking
over them. Ten years after Mr. Johnston put
his first tile lines down, he uncovered one of them, planning to increase the
capacity of that drain. While he had it
open, he asked John to come see it. It
looked just the same as it had when it was buried in 1838. John decided that under-draining could work
after all, and he imported a Scraggs Tile Machine from England. Benjamin Whartenby of Waterloo was the potter
who had been hand-making drain tiles for John Johnston. John gave Mr. Whartenby the machine, in
return for one quarter of the tiles produced with it. This machine inspired the spread of under-draining
in North America – once one machine was here, someone else imported a second
one, a third man copied the first, and so on.
In 1850, John published a history
and survey of Seneca County. It was the
most extensive and accurate account that had yet been published. The work he was most devoted to, though, was
the establishment of an Agricultural College for New York State. He was involved with that at the time of his
sudden death in 1853, at the age of 67. John
was survived by his second wife, whom he married in 1825, and by three sons and
two daughters. John’s sons became
successful businessmen in New York City and elsewhere.
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The agricultural college was to
have been centered at Oaklands, but after considerable time and debate it was located
at Cornell. The Agricultural Experiment
Station, part of Cornell, is still with us in Geneva to remind us of John
Delafield.
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