Winchell Mountain Burying Ground, Millerton, NY

We interrupt your regularly scheduled program of reminiscences from the 2015 AGS Conference to bring you this brief glimpse into the Winchell Mountain Burying Ground in Millerton, NY, where my ancestors are buried. Well, not all of my ancestors; to be more specific (my direct ancestors in bold):

Joshua Hamblin (1722-1797), my 7th great grandfather

Major David Hamblin (1743-1806), my 6th great grandfather
Hannah Townsend Hamblin (1740-1781), my 6th great grandmother
Mary Bishop Hamblin (1751-1824), David's second wife

Joshua Hamblin (1758-1799), my 6th great uncle (son of Joshua and Mary)

Solomon Hamblin (1770-1790), my 5th great uncle (son of David and Hannah)
Elijah Hamblin (1772-1776), my 5th great uncle (son of David and Hannah)
Hiram Hamblin (1789-1790), my 5th great uncle (son of David and Mary)
An unnamed infant (1791), my 5th great aunt (daughter of David and Mary)
Colonel Hiram Hamblin (1796-1831), my 5th great uncle (son of David and Mary)



Joshua, David, and Hannah were all born in Barnstable, Massachusetts. Barnstable is where the first Hamblins in America - James Hamblin and his wife Ann Scott - settled in the 1630s after migrating from Reading, England.

Shortly before the Revolutionary War, David, Joshua, and Joshua Jr. moved to Dutchess County, NY, where David served as second lieutenant in Captain Abraham Hartwell's Company, Colonel Morris Graham's Regiment, of the New York Militia. Joshua Sr. and David were among the signers of the Articles of Association in the North East Precinct in July 1775.

After the war, the Hamblins took ownership of two adjoining farms on Winchell Mountain, in the town of North East, near the village of Millerton. This is an atlas from 1867 showing the family's property in the upper left corner ("Hamplin" = Hamblin). The small "Cem." (cemetery) to the south of the Hamblin farmsteads is the Winchell Mountain Burying Ground.

The Winchell Mountain Burying Ground is also known (to me) as the place where my cemetery mania properly started. But to explain why involves going back through the generations again. After David, the next in my ancestral line is David Hamblin Jr. (1774-1844), who married Lydia Roe (1778-1864) and managed the family farm for several decades before he and part of his family relocated to Ohio (a common destination for agricultural families from New York and New England looking for fresh opportunities). 

Among the Hamblins who remained in New York were my 4th great grandfather, Myron Hamblin (1807-1897). He married Rachel A. Tripp (1811-1899) in 1839. Rachel was the daughter of John Tripp and Cynthia Adsit, and came from a long line of Quakers who lived on Quaker Hill in Pawling, New York. 

I have obituaries for both Myron (pictured right) and Rachel Tripp Hamblin, preserved by my great-grandmother. According to his obituary, Myron was "a successful farmer, always worked hard and by economical management saved enough of this world's goods to make himself and [his] family comfortable and easy." It further states, "no one can point to an unmanly thing he ever did." Concerning his death, he was "taken ill, with something like pleurisy. He had had several previous attacks but this one was unusually severe and he could not survive it. During his illness he was cared for most tenderly by his family and [his] nurse, A. S. Austin." Myron was the first in his family to eschew burial at the Winchell Mountain Burying Ground in favor of Irondale Cemetery, a much more modern property in the village of Millerton (i.e., off of the mountain and in the middle of civilization). As for Rachel Tripp Hamblin, her obituary states that she "was a woman who never gave much time in society, but everything to her centered in and around the home circle. She had strong convictions of right, and was not afraid to advocate her principles ... She was a firm believer of honesty, truthfulness and virtue."

Myron and Rachel's four children are pictured below (from left to right, James, David, Hiram, and Mariette):

James Hamblin (1841-1924) was the first-born and my 3rd great grandfather. He married Frances Collier, the daughter of Simeon Mace Collier and Eliza Thomas, in 1865. She was also from a long line of Quakers of Quaker Hill. According to my mother, who heard it from her great-grandmother, Frances Collier Hamblin spoke several languages and worked as a schoolteacher prior to her marriage. James and Frances had two children, Myron and Marion.

David Hamblin (1844-1925) married his sister-in-law Sarah E. Rowe, the daughter of Robert Rowe and Almira Wheeler, in 1872, and was a farmer. He and his wife had four daughters.

Mariette Hamblin (1848-1943) married Wheeler E. Rowe, the son of Robert Rowe and Almira Wheeler, in 1871. He was a farmer. Mariette was a prolific craftswoman and created several large, intricate pieces of needlework and a large framed wreath made out of seeds. She and her husband had no children, which is how these pieces came to be passed down through my branch of the family.

Hiram Hamblin (1854-1940) was (no surprise) also a farmer. He married first, in 1880, Elizabeth S. Howland, and after her death in 1922, married Mary L. Chapman. After his second wife's death Hiram moved in with his widowed sister, Mariette. He was also childless.

All of the above were buried in Irondale Cemetery. While the family no longer used the old burying ground, they continued to inhabit the same farmsteads and would have passed their ancestors' graves each time they took the road leading down into Millerton. In fact, assuming that there were no trees in the way at the time, they would have been able to see the old cemetery from the more southern farmstead.

This was the northern farmhouse, which no longer exists. However, the barn is still there, and you can still read James Hamblin's signature on one of the interior walls.

James and Frances's son Myron married Aletta Moore Card in 1892 at the home of her parents, Eason Card and Mary Jane Moore, by Reverend Miller of the East Ancram Methodist Church. Prior to her marriage, Aletta worked as a schoolteacher in the district schools.

Myron attended the Seymour Smith Institute (for agriculture) at Pine Plains and worked for six years as a clerk in a general store at Ancram Lead Mines before he purchased the farm pictured above from his father, which he ran as a dairy farm. According to his biography in Columbia County at the End of the Century (1900), he had "a herd of thirty of the finest cows in the vicinity, and owns about 200 acres of land." He was a member of the Millerton Grange for 32 years. 

Myron Hamblin and his mother, Frances Collier Hamblin, circa 1868

For the first years of their marriage, Myron and Aletta lived at the Octagonal House in Ancramdale, which was built in 1880 (during a very short-lived fad for octagonal houses in Upstate New York). Below is a newspaper clipping preserved and annotated by my great-grandmother (their daughter Ruth).

And here is the house as it appears today (or more specifically, last Sunday):

The Octagonal House is located just a few miles west of the family farmsteads on Winchell Mountain. The Presbyterian church that Myron and Aletta attended while they were living in the Octagonal House still stands, in a very sleepy little hamlet called Pulvers Corners.

Aletta and Myron on their wedding day, 1892

Myron and Aletta's only child Ruth Card Hamblin was born in their farmhouse on Winchell Mountain on September 16, 1896. In order to attend school, Ruth had to ride on her parents' horse-drawn wagon into the village of Millerton, where she boarded with a family during the week, and took the wagon back up to her parents' farmhouse for the weekends. When she left the area to attend New Paltz Normal School in 1914, it was with the intention of leaving the agricultural way of life behind. She taught fifth grade for several years in New Paltz and Mount Kisco before marrying my great-grandfather, Ernest Gracey Waldie, a Scottish-Canadian tinsmith, in 1923.

From left to right, Myron, Aletta, a family friend, and Ruth at the farm with their horse-drawn wagon

Ruth and Ernest settled in the suburbs north of New York City, where Ernest ran a successful tin roofing business. Just one year after their marriage, Ruth's parents sold the farm on Winchell Mountain and moved in with their daughter and son-in-law. This effectively ended the Hamblin family's tenure on Winchell Mountain, but connections to the area endured.

For decades after Myron, Aletta, and Ruth left Winchell Mountain, they continued to visit the village of Millerton, where several of their relatives lived, including Myron's uncle Hiram, his aunt Mariette, and his sister Marion, who married Charles Herbert Pulver and had two children. These visits continued even as Ruth and Ernest's children grew up and had their own children. My mother remembers visiting Aunt Marion, who died in 1965, in the early 1960s. 

By the time I was born, there were no more relatives (aside from distant cousins) living in the Millerton area. Furthermore, my great-grandmother Ruth - the last generation to have been born on Winchell Mountain - had died. However, my mother, who always had a very strong bond with Ruth, continued to maintain our family's connection with the old farms through stories and regular visits to Winchell Mountain. I first saw the old burying ground when I was too young to even remember, but it left a lasting impression.

The connections in this burying ground run both ways, backward in time to Barnstable, Massachusetts, where Joshua and David were born and their immigrant ancestors settled, and forward in time to Ruth, the first in her family to leave the farm behind, and her descendants who are alive today. This weekend, I took Ruth's youngest descendants (ages 6 and 8) through a tour of Winchell Mountain Burying Ground. I think they liked it, since they kept asking me to read aloud the inscriptions on the stones (and asking questions like "You can die when you're 18?!"). 

This last picture is great because it captures so much of what makes this cemetery, and by extension all old cemeteries, so great. In the left background you can see some of the earlier stones that still preserve the old "bedhead"-style form even though the material of the stones has changed (their earliest precedents, back in Massachusetts, would have been sandstone, but since there was none available on Winchell Mountain, the oldest stones there are slate, followed by marble). In the center you can see an obelisk dedicated to several members of the Winchell family, for whom the mountain was named. And finally on the left you can see a large granite marker, erected in 1896, squatting on top of an older marble monument.