Last summer, during the week the Kinsella family spent at Lake George to celebrate Aunt CB and Uncle Jack's 60th wedding anniversary, our brother, Jim, organized a History Day. He's writing a history of our Baker ancestors and he wanted to see the area where they lived, near a town called Granville, not far from Lake George, when they first came to New York.
Today's Granville is a small village of about 2500 people, nestled up against the Vermont border. One of the sights our relatives would have seen every day were the Green Mountains of Vermont in the near distance. While Granville would eventually become the ‘colored slate capital of the world,' the slate deposits were only discovered in 1850, when the Bakers were long gone. Instead, back in their day, theirs was an agricultural life.
We trooped into the Granville Historical Society offices and librarians brought us dozens of books, some hundreds of years old, so we could search them for references to our family - which we found! Then we piled into two cars and drove out into the countryside to find what might remain of the area called "Truthville" where our family had first settled.
We drove and drove until, at last, Jim veered off to the side of the road and pulled up in a desolate area. He sat staring straight ahead. Pat, who was in his car, realized that he was staring at the Green Mountains across the state line in Vermont, soaking in the sight that must have been so familiar to our ancestors. But there didn't seem to be anything left of the settlement.
I pulled my carload of history buffs up alongside Jim's and he called over to me, "You know that dip in the road a little ways back? That was where Truthville was supposed to be." He looked dejected. "It looks like there's nothing left now. I'll just try one more small side road and if we don't find anything there, we'll go back. I'm sorry ...."
I followed him as he turned down a nondescript country road. It looked just as unpromising as the previous dip in the road. But then ... we came around a corner and laid out before us was a small settlement, anchored by a white clapboard Baptist church. The sign in front of it said, "Erected 1784, The First Baptist Church in the Town of Granville." Jim cried, "This is the Truthville Baptist Church our Baker family founded!"
We saw a woman coming from the church lot and Jim ran up to her, crying breathlessly, "Is there a river behind this church?" Yes, she said, there was. Jim again, "Is there a grist mill on the river?" She wasn't so sure of that, but her brother owned the house next door, on the river, and Jim could go look - or see it better from a bridge nearby.
Dad, Jim and I went into the church, which was getting ready to celebrate its 225th anniversary of continuous use. A deacon took Jim to see the original books describing the founding of the church and the early activities there, hand-written by one of our relatives. He actually held in his hands the same book our ancestors had held and written in 225 years before!
Jim was also given some of the beautiful lapped cedar panels from the original ceiling. I went up into the ancient attic to see remnants of the original wallpaper and building construction, while Dad took pictures of the sanctuary from the balcony. Pat, Tom and Christi, Mom and Chris went across the street to the cemetery and found many Baker gravestones memorializing our ancestors' siblings, nieces and nephews.
It was all deliriously amazing, but I really wasn't sure what I was seeing until Jim filled us in on the history. This is the story that he wove:
After arriving on the Mayflower, our Baker family eventually settled on the eastern side of Connecticut, near Rhode Island. In 1769, Jerusha Baker married John Joe Backus, who was from another family that had lived in the same area for many generations.
Both families had been leaders in the "Great Awakening," an evangelical religious revival promoted by independent, open-air preachers who drew large and emotional crowds. Benjamin Franklin devoted many front pages of his newspapers to these sermons, spreading the word even further.
This movement is credited with playing a key role in the development of democratic concepts leading up to the American Revolution. In particular, it challenged the traditional British conviction that social stability depended on deference to the privileged class. Instead, the preachers of the Great Awakening taught that the Bible declares all men created equal, with the true value of a man indicated by his moral behavior, not his class, and that the souls of all men can be saved. They called for religious freedom, claiming that liberty of conscience was an "inalienable right of every rational creature."
This attitude did not sit well with the Congregationalist Church, which was the establishment in CT, and those who did not conform to its authority were subjected to severe discrimination. Are you surprised to learn that the Baker and Backus families were among its targets? In fact, they were leaders in the very first church in New England to separate from the Congregationalist establishment and two of our ancestors' brothers served as pastors in this Separatist Church. The sanctions against them became so severe that John Joe and Jerusha decided to leave CT and follow her parents north to Jericho, MA.
Then the Revolutionary War broke out. Jerusha's brother, Solomon Baker, helped Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen (a distant Baker cousin) capture Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake George in what is now NY, from the British. John Joe volunteered for militia duty and marched with his MA comrades to the fort to help hold it.
The area around Fort Ticonderoga was a wild territory, with no roads, only trails too narrow even for wagons. There were very few settlements and the still-strong, fearsome Iroquois Indian presence discouraged migration. In addition, there were continuous raids by Tories who had fled to Canada after losing the Battle of Saratoga. Furious about losing their homes and lands, they frequently returned with the Indians to burn and ravage any area settlements attempted by American pioneers.
Are you surprised to learn that the Baker and Backus families found this to be a bracing and exciting opportunity? John Joe brought Jerusha from MA and they settled into a house abandoned by Tories, one that included a near-by grist mill. He convinced his in-laws, the Bakers, to join them, as well, in a settlement near Granville called Truthville.
The American victory in the Revolutionary War in 1783 brought peace to most of the colonies, but not to Washington County, where Granville and Truthville were located. Tories still mounted devastating raids on the area from Canada and, in one of those raids, John Joe and Jerusha's grist mill was burned down.
They were assaulted from other directions, as well. The debts incurred during the Revolutionary War crippled the nascent country for years and the Articles of Confederation exacerbated the situation by refusing to grant taxation authority to the central government. Farmers were hardest hit since taxes were calculated by their individual states largely based on the amount of land they owned.
By 1786, the inhabitants of the Granville area were beginning to believe they had traded one tyrannical government for another. Several local farmers were put in debtors' prison, a number of others had their property and even homes confiscated, and the rest grew angry at their treatment by New York State. Trouble erupted in January when the residents of Granville forced a sheriff to actually EAT the writs for payment he had brought with him and then ran him out of town.
As one of the leaders in the town, John Joe Backus was almost certainly involved in this incident. NY sent in its militia and Jerusha's brother, Solomon Baker, a lieutenant of a company in Granville at the time, surely would have been among those sent in to quell what was termed a “rebellion." Luckily, or actually most likely because it was Solomon Baker versus John Joe Backus (relatives and friends), conflict was avoided.
(However, on an historical footnote, a farmer named Daniel Shay heard about this rebellion and started his own revolt in MA six months later. This "Shay’s Rebellion" is cited as the main reason the Founders scrapped the Articles of Confederation and created the stronger Constitution. Once again, our relatives quietly changed the course of the nation.)
By 1798, Granville's assessment listed 400 heads-of-household, with the Baker and Backus families among the richest. They had settled down to farm. As the county prospered through building bridges, creating highways for stagecoach lines, and increasing population, they prospered also. Stores, mills and blacksmith shops sprang up, and also churches.
By this time, probably still upset about the discrimination that had driven them out of CT, our families had turned their backs on the Congregationalist Church and become Baptists. Jerusha's brother, Benjamin, opened a tavern in Truthville and served as the first Deacon of the local Baptist church.
Yes . . . the same Baptist church that we discovered still in use on our History Day 225 years later! And the same Benjamin whose writing is in the original church log book that Jim held in his hands, and whose gravestone, along with those of his children, is in the cemetery.
Alas, despite having lived in the area for nearly 25 years, there were also storm clouds gathering. John Joe and Jerusha did not have clear title to their land. Two different people claimed to be the original owners. Our ancestors had paid one of them but the other claimed that he was the true original owner and should have been paid instead. In 1798, he sued.
Just as today, it took years for the lawsuit to wind its way through the courts, with several verdicts returned in our ancestors' favor. But in 1810, a higher court of appeal found against them. To settle the suit, our ancestors would have had to buy their land all over again, but this time at the much higher value created by their decades of work to make the area so prosperous. Are you surprised to learn that they said, "No way!"
So after more than 30 years, John Joe and Jerusha, along with most of their children, and Jerusha's brother Solomon, with his family of boys, vacated the land they had lived on for so long and pioneered again. This time, they chose land in an area that had been left unsettled when the first wave of pioneers had leapfrogged to the Genesee Valley.
Our Baker and Backus ancestors had started out young in the untamed Washington County near the border between NY and VT. Now in their sixties, they became the first settlers in a frontier land again - this time, the untamed territory of Cortland County, in southern New York.
In 1817, the families intermarried again. John Joe and Jerusha's daughter, also named Jerusha Backus, married Ira Baker, who as the son of Solomon, her mother's brother, was also her first cousin - a common pairing at that time. They would have a son whom they named Leonard Timothy Baker. And Leonard, in time, would become the grandfather of Ethel, Adin, Ruth and Lillian Baker of Center Lisle, in what is now Broome County in New York's Southern Tier.
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Photo 1: The History Tour group outside the Washington County Historical Society library in Granville, NY - Aunt CB, Pat Herdeg, Christi (Tom's sweetheart), Tom Kinsella, Sue Kinsella, Jim Kinsella, Chris Kinsella; Photo by Jack Kinsella
Photo 2: Researching family history in the Historical Society library - Jim, Aunt CB, Christi, Tom, Chris
Photo 3: The Truthville Baptist Church in the township of Granville - and here's a mystery: Notice that the right side of the church, near the window, is blurred, as though a mist or something is passing over it. I (Sue) took this picture after Jim, Dad and I had investigated the church, and after Jim had held the church's log book in his hands and I had explored the ancient attic. The pictures that I took before and after this are all crisp, and even the left side of the building in the picture looks fine. Note that the room where Jim read the log book is inside where that window on the right is. Do you think that maybe one of our ancestors could have come back while we were there to meet his future family while we were meeting our ancient one? Just asking.
Photo 4: Sanctuary of the Truthville Baptist Church
Photo 5: Original log book from building the church and its first years of service, written by Benjamin Baker, who was the brother of Jerusha Baker Backus
Photo 6: Gravestone of Benjamin Baker in the church cemetery
Photo 2: Researching family history in the Historical Society library - Jim, Aunt CB, Christi, Tom, Chris
Photo 3: The Truthville Baptist Church in the township of Granville - and here's a mystery: Notice that the right side of the church, near the window, is blurred, as though a mist or something is passing over it. I (Sue) took this picture after Jim, Dad and I had investigated the church, and after Jim had held the church's log book in his hands and I had explored the ancient attic. The pictures that I took before and after this are all crisp, and even the left side of the building in the picture looks fine. Note that the room where Jim read the log book is inside where that window on the right is. Do you think that maybe one of our ancestors could have come back while we were there to meet his future family while we were meeting our ancient one? Just asking.
Photo 4: Sanctuary of the Truthville Baptist Church
Photo 5: Original log book from building the church and its first years of service, written by Benjamin Baker, who was the brother of Jerusha Baker Backus
Photo 6: Gravestone of Benjamin Baker in the church cemetery
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