Rural View, William and Jane Carson’s Farm By Pat Kinsella Herdeg and CB Taylor Kinsella

William and Jane (Livingston) Carson (my great great grandparents) lived in West Bethany, NY on the farm they called Rural View. Bought in 1880, the Carsons owned Rural View for forty years. A huge horse chestnut tree, which sheltered many a Carson Reunion, was begun by Jane who plucked a horse chestnut, scooped out a bit of dirt near the back right of the house, and planted the chestnut. The tree grew, and grew!

Carson Rural View, circa 1912

Their farm was on a road now named West Bethany Road, at one point also called Creek Road (the 1915 NY State Census).

1904 Bethany, NY Map with Rural View

As we wrote in our blog post about Jane:

http://taylorbakercousins.blogspot.com/2011/06/jane-livingston-carson-by-pat-kinsella.html

she and William raised their eight children at Rural View.

-Albert Livingston Carson was the oldest. He was a wanderer. He settled, for a time, in the Chicago area and married, then went on to Oceanside, CA.

--Our Emma was next—as we know, she married B.W. Taylor and had an eventful life in Oakfield. She died at Woodlawn at age 55 after suffering a stroke.

--Mary Elizabeth was the next oldest. Reading through Emma’s journals, Libbie was her favorite sister. At age 36, Libbie died of a burst appendix.

--Theodore William was the next in the family, four years younger than Albert.

--Anna Margaret was next in the family line. She married and had three children. She died in 1949 at age 82.

Libbie, Emma, Anna

--George Grant was William and Jane’s sixth child. He died in 1946.

--Edward Everett married and had four children. He was born thirteen years after the oldest, Albert, and six years after Anna.

--Harry Hayes was the youngest, born eighteen years after Albert, and seventeen years after our Emma.  Harry married and had one daughter.

Except for Albert, the siblings remained in fairly close proximity through the years, so family tragedies must have hit even harder for them.

Rural View’s house had room for two households, and as the parents aged—the smaller apartment in the home—off the porch and through the back door, was where William and Jane lived, at least by the 1900 census. 

William and Jane Carson

In the 1900 Federal Census, William (aged 70) and Jane (aged 65) were living with their son Theodore and his family. Given William’s age, we have to expect that Theo was doing most of the work on the farm.

In October, 1906, Theo was 43 years old.  By this time, he and his wife Eunice had two children, Charles and Marion. He became very sick with pneumonia and after taking too much laudanum (in confusion or depression), he died at Rural View.

Theo and Eunice, 1897

Our Emma Carson Taylor lived at Woodlawn, in Oakfield, about fourteen miles away. Her journals are filled with trips that she and B.W. and the boys made to Rural View to help for a day of thrashing, planting, etc.

We know from the 1910 census that sometime after Theo died, his brother Edward and his own family moved in to work the farm.

Youngest son Harry and his wife and daughter were living in Cincinnati in the 1910 census, but he came down with tuberculosis; since he and his wife did not want their baby daughter to catch tuberculosis, Harry came back to Woodlawn in Oakfield to ‘cure’. While with Emma and her family, he often made the trip to Rural View to see and visit with his parents. Unfortunately, the cure did not take, and Harry died at age 36, in 1913. 

Harry and Blanche Carson, 1899

William Carson died in 1911 at age 81.

In the NY State 1915 census, Edward and his family are still living with Jane on Rural View farm. Also in the 1915 census, brother George and his wife Jennie are living on Francis Rd, less than two miles away from Rural View.

Edward wanted to buy Rural View, his family farm, but his father’s will stated that for a sale to occur, all children must agree. His sister Anna refused to allow Ed to buy it. So, Ed continued to work the farm, as he had for over seven years, but did not own it.

In March of 1917, after many hardships and disappointments—three horses died, his wife hated living in the country, his oldest son didn’t like to farm-- Edward took his own life in the barn. 

Ed Carson, Six Months before his Death
(with one of the horses that died?)

After Ed died, George and Jennie moved in to Rural View, at least long enough to be registered in the 1920 census.

George and Jennie Carson

By this time, Jane had left to live with her daughter Anna at her home. In the 1920 census Jane, aged 85, can be found living with Anna and her family in Concord, NY.

In early October 1921, Jane Livingston Carson died at age 87. Then, in February of 1922, George Carson, executor of the estate, has an auction for the farm. While horses, cows and hens are auctioned, as well as all sorts of farming equipment and tools, there is no mention of the house and the land. Most likely they too were sold very soon after the auction.

Just down the road from Rural View farm is the West Bethany Baptist Church, the Carsons’ church. Across the street is the one room school house which the youngest four Carsons attended, and later in early adulthood, both Anna and Theo taught at.

One Room School House, 2017

Behind the church is the West Bethany Cemetery. Here we find the graves of William and Jane, and four of their children—Albert (note that Albert does not have a gravestone, rather his ashes are buried at the base of the Carson monument), Libbie, Harry, and Theo and his wife, Eunice. Even in death, they are very near to Rural View.

West Bethany Baptist Church, 2017

For more than forty years, the house, barn, outbuildings and land had sheltered and maintained the Carson family. Rural View certainly saw its heavy share of tragedy; we can only hope that joy brimmed over more brightly for the Carsons.

Rural View, 2017

Rural View, 2017

As I think about the towering horse chestnut tree, with its branches thrown wide toward the sky, I wonder how many times Jane looked out at her horse chestnut tree and remembering its tiny beginnings, felt peace that from so small a piece of nature, such monumental things could grow.

Rural View Dog, taken by Ruth Carson, Ed's daughter

----Many many thanks to my brother Jim, for his 'Taylor Ancestor Tour' booklet which I used while writing this story, AND to Evelyn Taylor and her daughter Pam for making the trip to Rural View in February for these current pictures--Terrific! Thank you also to Linda Schmidt, the Bethany Town Historian for all of her help with this story.

Jane Carson at Rural View--We've used this picture 

before, but I love it!

Thoughts on Cemeteries We Have Visited By Beth Kinsella Sakanishi and Pat Kinsella Herdeg

Beth and I had so much fun writing back and forth about our visit to northern Vermont and its three cemeteries where some of our ancestors lie! See this link:

http://taylorbakercousins.blogspot.com/2016/09/northern-vermont-family-history-tour-by.html

So, Beth pulled out some of her writings from her last trip to Ireland. Here are two more cemetery visits which stuck with her:

This makes me think of other emigrants from Derry, that I found out about only after coming across this blissfully calm, very small, graveyard off to the side on the city walls. I ducked through the doorway simply because I could see a tiny expanse of green, and colorful, delicate flowers. It was like a secret garden towards the end of the walk along four-hundred year old cobblestones, among cannons and cannon balls and views of the surrounding countryside seen from slits in the defensive walls. Once inside, I could see very old grave slabs but the odd thing was they were not upright at the head of each grave, as they always are in cemeteries, but had been  lined up, leaning against the churchyard walls. Apparently, I found out, they had been arranged this way so they would not be damaged by cannon fire during the sieges. This small, enclosed space was beautiful but haunted, after I read that.  

 Derry Cemetery

 Now, I’m a Kinsella, I grew up taking walks in graveyards, reading the gravestones,  often the ones in Perth, after a visit to the Dairy Queen across the street. The dead in cemeteries don’t bother me. But this did. Unsettling me further was the plaque outside the entranceway I had missed on my way in. It said this was the first Presbyterian church in Derry, and I knew from my reading, that the Presbyterians would be almost as persecuted as the Catholics in Protestant-controlled Ireland. The Penal Laws, that so viciously and diabolically discriminated against the Catholics, were also used against the Presbyterians, whose only crime was that they were not the right sort of Protestants (not Anglicans). I learned on this trip to Derry that most of the emigration from Ireland in the 18th century was from this port, and most of it was people we call the ‘Ulster Scots’ and they, to my vast surprise, were the Presbyterians fleeing poverty and discrimination. That majority of signers of the Declaration of Independence that we are taught are Ulster Scots? They were this group, who were leaving a place for a second time, and going to a country where they would fight to make a different kind of place.  

When I was at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, we all went to an Eavan Boland poetry reading which was one of the highlights (she had been my Yeats teacher one semester in Dublin and I had loved her). One of her most moving poems was about the ‘famine roads,’ that went nowhere, that you can happen upon today, still. But she has another of hers that described a certain spot in Dublin I had noticed and had wondered about, when I was in Dublin for a few days before the summer school. The poem captures as well, the depth of loss and displacement and fear that I come across in so much of my reading about the sixteenth century, but also what was felt by those leaving Cobh, and Derry (which I hadn’t known was a Famine port) and Dun Laoghaire (which was just up the road from me my year in Ireland), and the Highlands -- for foreign soil. 

The Huguenot Graveyard in the Heart of the City!

 It is the immodesty we bring to these

names which have eased into ours, and 

their graves in the alcove of twilight,

 which shadows their exile:

There is flattery in being a destination.

There is vanity in being the last resort.

They fled the Edict of Nantes –

 hiding their shadows on the roads from France –

 and now under brambles and granite

 faith lies low with the lives it

dispossessed, and the hands it emptied out,

 and the sombre dances they were joined in.

 The buses turn right at Stephen’s Green.

 Car exhausts and sirens fill the air. See

the planted wildness of their rest and

 grant to them the least love asks of

the living. Say:  They had another life once.

And think of them as they first heard of us:

huddled around candles and words failing as

the stubborn tongue of the South put

 oo and an to the sounds of Dublin,

and of their silver fingers at the window-sill

 in the full moon as they leaned out

to breathe the sweet air of Nimes

for the last time, and the flame

burned down in a dawn agreed upon

 for their heart-broken leave-taking. And,

for their sakes, accept in that moment,

 this city with its colours of sky and day –

and which is dear to us and particular –

was not a place to them: merely 

the one witty step ahead of hate which 

 is all that they could keep. Or stay.

Huguenot Cemetery Gate

I had just about reached the limits my body and mind were willing to go when I came upon a small, dark enclosed space. It was there on a main street, but was set back and guarded by an old-fashioned black iron gate, almost lacy in design. I suppose it is impossible that the sounds truly stopped and that in this corner silence reigned, but that is what it felt like. I didn’t go in because I could see it was a graveyard and I didn’t want to disturb them, whoever they were. It felt an ancient place to me, though, and I did wonder who, in Dublin’s skyrocketing real estate prices, had earned this undisturbed rest. I felt the strength and grace of the place and did not find out until much later, after reading an utterly moving poem by Eavan Boland, that this small, held back place was a graveyard for the Huguenots, who had fled France to a country they had not longed to go to, but which was instead, “the one witty step ahead of hate which / is all that they could keep. Or stay.”

As January runs its course, I think back to a year and a half ago, when we said goodbye to Uncle Harold on that cold October morning at the Waterloo Cemetery. We stood shoulder to shoulder, family and friends, listening to the tones of Taps resonating so beautifully. We prayed and laughed and cried together as we remembered our Harold Baker Taylor. One of the many things cemeteries and walks around them are good for—to pass on the stories of the family who came before us. Again, we thank our ancestors for their rich stories and memories they passed on to us.