History from St. Paul's

By David Osborn
Site Manager
St. Paul's Church National Historic Site
Mt. Vernon, NY

May 2008

The President’s Son

Over the years, St. Paul’s Church National Historic Site has been linked with many famous people, and witnessed many somber occasions. No episode so clearly combines those two themes as much as a funeral service held in the church on June 22, 1829.

John Quincy Adams had just been defeated by Andrew Jackson in his bid for a second term as President, ending a stormy and difficult tenure as the nation’s chief executive. Years later Adams would return to public life as a crusading abolitionist Congressman. But on that June afternoon, when Adams and his wife came to the church for a late Sunday afternoon service, he was a grief stricken father, mourning the loss of one of their sons, 28-year-old George Washington Adams.

The church bore similarities to the edifice that exists today, particularly the 18^th century stone and brick façade. The steeple President Adams observed would have been the wooden, largely open belfry erected after the Revolutionary War. The eastern addition was constructed in the 1850s along with the ornamental black iron fence that today guards St. Paul’s. The President and Mrs. Adams walked in the entrance used today, greeted by the tall boxed pew arrangement that occupies the interior.

A Harvard educated lawyer and member of the Massachusetts state legislator, George Washington Adams was the son and grandson of Presidents, and perhaps the press of expectations bore too heavily on him. He was a deeply troubled young man with a tendency toward heavy drinking. In a probable suicide, he drowned in Long Island Sound, toppling overboard from his passenger ship on April 30. Five weeks later his lifeless body washed up on City Island, and was transferred to St. Paul’s Church, the nearest cemetery. He was interred in a wooden coffin in the Drake vault, the only underground chamber in the burial yard. Entries in the church Sexton’s book record opening the vault several times on June 11 and 12 for “the President’s son”.

Aware of the episode, President and Mrs. Adams had been expecting the worst news, and they were in the New York City area in mid June when they received word about their son’s fate. They traveled to Eastchester by horse-drawn carriage on the Post Road. The Rev. Lawson Carter led the religious service that afternoon and joined the President in the Drake vault where a brief prayer was offered, although the President could not bear to look inside the coffin.

To avoid moving the body in the warm weather, the coffin bearing Adams remained in the vault until November, when it was transported to the Adams home in Quincy, Massachusetts, where it was buried in the family cemetery. As a token of thanks for the parish’s services in the family’s hour of grief, Mrs. Adams donated a lovely silver chalice to St. Paul’s.

April 2008

Lost, and Found, Civil War Soldier

More than 1.5 million soldiers fought for the Union army in the Civil War, 1861-1865, and about 360,000 paid the ultimate price. Among those who returned to civilian life, many lived out productive lives, while thousands faced difficult adjustments on various levels. Hiram Slagle, who is buried in the historic cemetery at St. Paul’s Church National Historic Site, is one of the latter.

Living in Sing Sing (today’s Ossining), Slagle was a 22-year-old shoemaker, when he joined Company F, of the 17^th New York Volunteer Infantry, in May 1861, a month after the war began. Nicknamed the Westchester Chasseurs, the 17^th was a Zouave regiment, named for the famed North African fighters of the 19^th century, and noticeable for their baggy red pants, fez and turban hats. According to an enlistment record, Slagle was 5’ 6 3/4” (average for the day), with black hair, hazel eyes and a ruddy complexion.

Private Slagle served in the eastern theatre, where the Union and Confederate armies fought the largest and most important battles. He was captured at the Southern victory of the Battle of Second Manassas, in northern Virginia, on August 29, 1862, but paroled and exchanged in late October, in time to fight at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. The New Yorker was wounded in the hand at the Battle of Chancellorsville, in early May 1863, and mustered out with an honorable discharge on June 2.

He married and had several children with his wife, but for some unknown reason his life tumbled into disarray. Slagle left the family, and wondered into a meager existence. His wife died, and the children were transported west on one of the notorious orphan trains of the 19^th century, where they were adopted by farm families.

Slagle survived marginally for several years in late 19^th century and early 20^th century Mt. Vernon, basically homeless, earning some wages by selling clams or mushrooms, depending on the season. The end came on a wintry night, January 14, 1901. Found unconscious on South Fourth Avenue after tumbling down a flight of stairs, Slagle was transported via horse-drawn ambulance to Mt. Vernon Hospital, but he never regained consciousness. A search of his clothing revealed his Union army discharge papers, a proud memory he preserved despite the downturn in his life. An indigent, Slagle was interred at city expense in an unmarked grave in a section of the St. Paul’s cemetery that Mt. Vernon used as a pauper’s field.

A recent inquiry and visit by a descendant helped to re-discover his sobering tale.

January 2008

The Great Blizzard of '47

Last month marked the 60^th anniversary of the most powerful winter storm to envelop Mt. Vernon in recorded time -- the blizzard of December 26, 1947, which dumped a record 26 inches of snow on the city. While elements of the story of that great storm could be repeated today, other developments reveal the different circumstances of an earlier period in the city's history.

Snow began falling at 3:30 AM and continued steadily through 8:30 PM, paused and then resumed through dawn, with the heaviest pouring down between 3 and 4 PM when three inches fell. The Argus, the city's daily paper, reported on December 27: "Mount Vernon last night and again this morning was like a ghost city. Hundreds of automobiles, trucks along with buses and a few trolley cars were abandoned in the streets, making it impossible for the DPW crews to plow open some of them."

One striking difference was telephones. Long before cell phones, regular landlines were the essential means for communication in time of distress. Partly for that reason, telephone use in Mt. Vernon reached a record level that day. Telephone connections were facilitated manually by a switchboard operator in 1947 so staffing the local phone center was essential. Dedicated operators -- mostly women -- reached their office in Mt. Vernon by various means, many actually walking from several miles from their homes in the Bronx.

Another difference was the hulking presence of stalled, trolley cars buried in drifts that reached ten feet. A bygone means of public transportation, these large, electric-driven cars carried people on street level across Mt. Vernon from the 1890s through the 1950s. But dozens of the trolley cars, which were about the size of a New York City subway car, were camped on the tracks on December 26, 1947.

Perhaps the most dramatic episodes involved Mt. Vernon General Hospital. The blizzard forced 40 doctors and staff to spend the night at the hospital; food supplies were sufficient for staff and patients, but oxygen supplies reached a critical shortage since the delivery trucks were stranded. Blinding snow and tall drifts curtailed ambulance service, and an expectant mother who lived on Gramatan Avenue walked to Mt. Vernon General, while a police officer marched in front and shoveled a path as they proceeded.

December 2007

The Ghost of Rev. Standard?

In 1758, Rev. Thomas Standard, the long-serving minister at St. Paul’s, purchased a church bell from a foundry in England. Not wanting to be forgotten -- a constant theme in his life -- he had his name inscribed on the bronze bell. It was hung from strong rafters in the town church, which at the time was a small, square wooden structure 70 yards west of the stone and brick St. Paul’s church that stands today.

Rev. Standard died two years later, in 1760, and he was buried in a coffin under the wooden church. There was already consideration of erecting a new, nearby larger church, with the understanding that Standard might be re-interred under the new building. Sure enough, in 1763, work on the stone and brick church was begun.

Work on the stone and brick church was about half complete when the upheaval of the American Revolutionary War struck the town in 1776. Following a local battle, Hessians (German troops, fighting on the side of the British), occupied the stone church, and disassembled the old wooden building, using the wood as fuel for fires to stay warm. As a result, when the war ended and regular services resumed in the stone church, nobody was quite sure of the location of Rev. Standard’s coffin. Strange things started to happen, troubling the parish. People riding by the church at night claimed they saw lights and candles flickering inside, as if someone was performing a mournful dance. With nobody pulling the rope, the church bell (inscribed with Standard’s name) would ring -- as if on its own.

A year later, a young boy playing near the former location of the original wooden church, stumbled down a hole, and his shoe knocked into a wooden box, which turned out to be Rev. Standard’s coffin. Finally, the townsmen were able to retrieve the coffin, and re-inter it under the basement of the stone church, and that seemed to end the odd developments, for a while. But soon, the nighttime candle flickering had returned, and worse yet, during services, parishioners heard scratching noises from the basement, as if somebody, or something, was dragging a chain along the floor.

Church leaders realized that while they had re-buried Standard, they had neglected to inscribe a proper gravestone. A plaque bearing Standard’s significant information was produced, and affixed to the basement wall, above his burial spot. And that seemed to end all the trouble, until a few weeks ago, when visitors were in the church, and a sound was heard coming from the historic organ -- just one note, but it played a really long time.

November 2007

The Hessians, of St. Paul’s

Two hundred thirty one years ago, soldiers from the central German principality of Hesse-Cassel died of illness in St. Paul's Church, and were buried in a common grave at the back of the churchyard. Young privates, they were fighting against the American revolution through the common 18^th century European soldier trade -- small states with good armies like Hesse loaned their forces, for a price, to larger powers like Great Britain

The soldiers had landed on Staten Island in the summer of 1776 with the First Hessian division, part of a large British-Hessian force dispatched to crush the American rebellion. Indeed, in August and September, those Hessian troops were part of a determined campaign that registered major victories over the fledgling American army in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

On October 18, their forces were engaged in the Battle of Pell's Point, fought about a mile from St. Paul's in today's Pelham Bay Park. Following the engagement, wounded and sick Hessian soldiers were moved into the half completed extant St. Paul's Church, which was transformed into a field hospital. Construction of the stone and brick church had begun in 1763, replacing a small wooden meetinghouse that stood 50 yards to the west. The older building was soon disassembled and the wood was used to make fires to keep the Hessian troops warm.

A contemporary account of the half completed church during the Hessian occupation reported there was "no floor, the sleepers are not even down, but along the

sides of the building are seen large pieces of timber upon which the sick are sitting or reclining." An open sand pit at the rear of the yard, which was being used to make mortar, soon became a burial site for the Hessian men who died in the church, following a frequent pattern of mass burials for common soldiers in the Revolutionary War.

Hessian records indicate the likely identity of five of those Hessian casualties. They were all privates, ranging from 21 to 28 years old, serving with the Regiment von Knyphausen -- Heinrich Euler, Conrad Roth, Johann Heinrich Grein, Daniel Schaef, and Ludwig Juppert. The men were not students, landowners, or skilled craftsmen -- all of those categories were barred from service in the Hessian expeditionary force, following the 18^th century European policy of keeping the more productive elements of society out of warfare. The Hessians usually also barred only sons from foreign service. Most likely, the five Hessians were second or third sons of rural farm families of modest means.