Читать книгу John E. Parsons - Paul DeForest Hicks - Страница 7

The years John Parsons spent as a boy at his family’s Lounsberry estate in Rye instilled in him a lasting love for country life and rural communities. It also helped to keep alive memories of his father, who, as he once wrote, had an Englishman’s love of the countryside. Although Edward Parsons became a naturalized American citizen, he wanted to maintain ties with England for the benefit of himself and his family.

Once the construction of Lounsberry was completed, Edward planned to acquire an additional home in England where he could stay during business trips and house his family when they joined him. During his trip there in the fall of 1838, he wrote to Matilda, “As to our future residence here, London or its area will suit us much the best … the country is fine, and the cottages and dwellings large … I think we can manage to contain all the comfort and independence of our own house without its trouble or the necessity of always stopping at houses.”

He took time during his business travels to explore the possibility of having John attend one of the English boarding (called “public”) schools. The caliber of education then available at the better public schools like Eton, Harrow and Rugby, would have been superior to most of the secondary schools in the New York area. Moreover, an English public school education could provide useful connections for John as he prepared for a career in the family’s Anglo-American trading firm.

Matilda Clark Parsons (courtesy of Rye Historical Society)

If Edward had lived, he might have sent John to Rugby School, located not far from his family’s ancestral home town of Cubbington in the county of Warwickshire (not far from Stratford-upon-Avon). Rugby’s headmaster, Dr. Thomas Arnold, had recently introduced educational reforms that were gaining wide recognition for him and the school. Although Arnold put a high value on learning, he believed that the greater goal in a boy’s education was the formation of his character.

Edward’s death ruled out English schooling for John, which might have led him down a far different path in life than the one he took. In many respects, however, the religious, moral and intellectual guidance he received in his youth from his grandfather, Ebenezer Clark, and other family members was based on the same Victorian principles as those of Dr. Arnold.

Ebenezer Clark was born in 1769 and raised in Wallingford, Connecticut, where his colonial forbears had settled in the late 1600s. He moved to New York City as a young man and started in business as a coach maker, the first step in a long and successful career as a merchant. In 1796, he married Annetje (Anna) Marselis, a member of an old New York family who traced their lineage back to Dutch settlers who arrived in New Netherland in the 1660s.

The Marselis family’s “Knickerbocker” (Dutch colonial) ancestry would prove to be especially valuable later in life for John Parsons as he made his mark in the social and professional worlds of the Gilded Age in the late-nineteenth century. It was then that one of his prominent law clients, Mrs. William Astor (born Caroline Schermerhorn), headed the list of the “first four hundred” in New York Society, which included many other family names of Dutch origin, including Stuyvesant, Roosevelt, de Peyster, and Van Rensselaer.

Like other prosperous New Yorkers in the early 1800s, the Clark family resided in lower Manhattan, moving from Broad Street eventually to the corner of Broadway and Houston. William E. Dodge, a close friend of John Parsons who lived in that area as a young man recalled later in his life that “the Battery was the great point of attraction as a cool and delightful promenade, and in the warm season was crowded every afternoon and evening; the grass was kept clean and green and the walks in perfect order … In the summer and early fall a band of music in the evening enlivened the scene, and the grounds were crowded with the elite of the city …”

Although the harbor views and breezes at Bowling Green and walks along the tree-lined paths in City Hall Park made urban life more bearable, residents still had to put up with the noise, smells and dirt of urban life. The better neighborhoods expanded steadily northwards. According to Dodge, however, “There were no police in those days, but there were a few watchmen, who came on soon after dark and patrolled the streets till near daylight. Their rounds were so arranged that they made one each hour, and as the clocks struck they pounded with their clubs three times on the curb, calling out, for example, ‘Twelve o’clock, and all is well,’ in a very peculiar voice.”

The nearby neighborhood known as Five Points, named for the intersection of five streets, was developing from what was once a desirable residential area into a slum that would later became a notorious center of crime and gang violence. Then in 1819, an epidemic of yellow fever that claimed dozens of lives convinced the Clarks to seek a healthier life for their invalid son and four daughters outside the city.

In 1821, they moved to the Town of Rye in rural Westchester County, close enough to the city so Ebenezer could still look after his business interests from time to time. Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of the famous novelist, told in her memoir of growing up in the nearby towns of Mamaroneck and Scarsdale in the early 1820s. She wrote that when her father needed to meet with a printer or publisher in New York, he traveled the twenty-five miles to the city, “sometimes by the Mamaroneck stage, sometimes in his gig, occasionally on horseback.”

Named for a town in the south of England, Rye was settled in 1660 by colonists who had moved there from the nearby settlement at Greenwich, Connecticut. According to the historic records, they purchased an area lying along the shore of Long Island Sound from the local Siwanoy band of Lenape Indians for “eight cotes, seven shirts, and fifteen fathoms of wampum.” The following year another tract of land was acquired from the Siwanoys, which included the Lounsberry acres that were subsequently purchased by Edward Parsons.

During the Revolutionary War, the residents of Rye lived in what was known as the “Neutral Ground,” enduring many raids, skirmishes and other hardships caused alternately by British troops, Tory sympathizers, patriots and outlaws. The troubled times were captured by James Fenimore Cooper in his popular novel, The Spy: a Tale of the Neutral Ground.

Set in Westchester County, the story is loosely based on the exploits of actual American intelligent agents who spied on Tory loyalists, including members of the Lounsberry family. Cooper is said to have conceived the idea for the story from his friend, John Jay, who was responsible for the American counterintelligence activities in the early stages of the war.

Memories of the war were still fresh in the minds of older Rye residents when John Parsons was a boy, giving him vivid accounts of the sacrifices the older generations had made to win independence. Later in life, he acknowledged that the example of John Jay, who was buried in the family cemetery on the adjoining Jay property, had been a major influence on his choice of a legal career.

In the census of 1800, the population of Rye numbered just under 1,000 inhabitants, but two decades later the town’s population had increased to 1,342, including 177 who worked in agriculture, 80 in manufacturing and 35 in commerce. The economy of the area had recovered slowly from the disruption of the War of 1812, but was beginning to show signs of prosperity by the time Matilda Clark married Edward Parsons in 1827, followed by the birth of their son John in 1829.

A sketch of Rye, as it existed around 1840 (when John was not yet in his teens), was included in Chronicle of a Border Town—History of Rye, Westchester County, New York, 1660–1870, written by Rev. Charles W. Baird in 1871:

Thirty years ago, this was still a secluded village, separated by a journey of several hours from the stir and thrift of the city. The houses number about thirty-five or forty. The Boston mail passes through daily. A steamboat touches every week-day at Rye Port, to and from New York … Rye is much resorted to in summer by citizens of New York. There is no regular hotel, or place of entertainment … The post-office is kept in the “Square House,” one of the oldest houses in the place … It stands on the post-road in the village … near the 26 mile stone …

In 1836, Ebenezer Clark and his family moved from a comfortable dwelling into a spacious new home in the small Village of Rye that was part of the larger Town of Rye. Running through their estate was Blind Brook, a tidal stream that emptied into a harbor on Long Island Sound where it was bordered by the properties owned by the Jay and Parsons families. By timing the tidal flows correctly, it would have been an easy journey for the Parsons children to travel by canoe or skiff between the homes of their parents and grandparents, instead of going on horseback or by carriage.

A staunch Presbyterian, Ebenezer Clark discovered upon his arrival in Rye that the local congregation had been on the wane ever since the Revolution. A history of the Rye Presbyterian Church quotes from a manuscript in the church files describing the conditions in Rye about the time of Clark’s arrival: “At that period … the people were in no sense religious … attendance at public worship was not the order of things; and the Sabbath day seemed to have scarcely any other use than listless idleness or application to vain pursuits …”

However, with the moral leadership and financial support of Clark, the Presbyterians began to be revitalized, hiring Williams Howe Whittemore as their new minister in 1829. The church became the center of John’s closely-knit family, especially when the Rev. Whitte-more married his mother’s sister, Maria.

One of the reasons for the growth in membership was the popularity of its Sunday school, in which John Parsons was enrolled from an early age. When he was working as a young lawyer in New York City in the 1850s, he drew on his own experience to start a mission Sunday school for children living on the Lower East Side, acting as its supervisor for more than twenty years.

When a new Rye Presbyterian church was built in 1841, Ebenezer Clark provided 5,000 of the 6,000 dollars required for its construction. It is likely that he also had a strong say in the selection of its architectural style, a classical Greek temple with four Doric columns, since it harmonized with his home, located directly across the street.

After his death in 1847, one of his admirers wrote of Ebenezer Clark: “He was not swayed from his convictions of truth and duty, was outspoken in his sentiments, had no patience with idleness and vice, much less with dishonesty; and yet was he kind toward the erring and ever forward to provide for the poor. There was an honest candor about him, verging on bluntness, at times amusing as it was timely …”

For John Parsons, his grandfather’s character, especially his firm commitment to religious, philanthropic and civic principles, had a strong and lasting influence. Clark also provided financial security for Matilda and her children when the surviving partners of Edward Parsons lost more than one-half of his estate’s investment in the firm. To reduce costs, Matilda leased Lounsberry for several years and moved her primary residence to New York, but she and her children frequently stayed with her parents in Rye.

She was also able, with her father’s help, to have John educated at a school in Rye run by her brother-in-law, Samuel Underhill Berrian. A Latin and Greek scholar as well as a published authority on grammar, Berrian was married to Edward Parsons’s sister, Eliza Parsons. After teaching classes for several years at an historic building in the Village of Rye, known as the “Square House,” Berrian opened a school at his home for boarding and day students in 1834. Called the Christomathic Institute, he ran it successfully for many years and attracted students from a wide area.

Berrian took a special interest in the intellectual development of John. Writing to Matilda in 1842, he described John as “a spontaneous and voluntary student, which is saying a great deal for any boy in this age of lax exertion … he has added Greek to his Latin and is making good improvement in both.” A year later, he wrote Matilda that, “I have never in my twenty years as a public school instructor, had a pupil better grounded in Latin and Greek … than he has at his present age … His standing in Mathematics is almost as good …”

The loving support he received from his extended family helped John to overcome the loss of his father and develop the maturity that, combined with his intellectual talent, enabled him to enter college just short of his fifteenth birthday. He was leaving the simple and secure life of rural Rye, for the complexities and challenges of undergraduate life in New York City, which Washington Irving had nicknamed “Gotham,” after a city in England whose residents had a reputation for madness and trickery.