Interview Audio
Interview Transcript
MEMOIR
of
Temby Argall and his wife, Orlena Firuski Argall
Transcript of a taped interview
Narrator: Temby Argall; Orlena (Ollie) Argall
Tape #: 71A
Date: February 6, 1989
Place of interview: Argall home, junction of Route 44 & Taconic Road,
Salisbury.
Interviewer: Jodie Stone
Mr. and Mrs. Argall are descendants of three of the oldest families in the town of Salisbury. These families, the Bartles, Scovilles, and Argalls had no small part in the life and development of the town. Temby and Orlena recount the circumstances which brought their forebears to Lakeville and Taconic and of their activities here .
This is Jodie Stone on the 6th of February 1989 talking with Temby Argall at his home on Taconic Road in Salisbury.
JS: Now, we’re going to get going with you, Temby. Where were you born?
TA: I was born at Sharon Hospital on August 1, 1935.
JS: Who were your mother and father?
TA: Dad was Paul Temby Argall, also born in the Lakeville/Salisbury area. He was born at home. Mother is a Virginian.
JS: And she was a what?
TA: A Richie.
JS: Who were the Bartles? Somebody told me you were related to a Bartle.
TA: Yes. Right. That’s Dad’s grandparents. His mother was a Bartle married to Joseph Argall here in Salisbury. My great-grandfather was Captain William Bartle who was born in Cornwall, England. My great-grandmother was Eliza Jane Temby. She was born in Camborne, which is also in the Duchy of Cornwall. They came to the States after they were married in 1863. He was a mining engineer. He worked in the mines in Cornwall which I gUess now have become pretty much defunct. Initially he worked in some of the ore mines in New Jersey and then went out to Ispheming, Michigan. It’s where they used to have a big ski jump. I think about the same size as the one in Salisbury. I think they still have national ski championships out there. He worked for the Barnum Richardson Company which had long been established here in Connecticut. He worked for one of their mines out there and then came to Ore Hill and was captain or engineer of the ore mines.
The Bartles had fifteen children, twelve of whom became adults. My great-grandfather, Captain Bartle, lived in, I guess you’d call it Ore Hill. It was at the corner of Route 112 and the road to Indian Mountain right.across from Deep Lake Farm in the house I think now owned by Tom Cloney.
JS: Yes.
TA: That was the family homestead, and in turn he or his son, Alfred, was the one who built Deep Lake Farm and lived there for a number of years. My grandmother, Dad’s mother, Ellen, was the eldest of the fifteen. She had been born while they were still on Ore Hill. My grandfather, Dad’s father, Joseph Argall, also was born in England in Cornwall, and he came, I think about the same time as Captain Bartle, to superintend the mines. I Eventually he was in charge of the underground mines. I can’t tell you exactly whe~ they switched from above ground to below ground. I guess things were getting rather scarce. My great-grandfather died in 1904 at the age of sixty, and there’s just a marvelous article in the Lakeville Journal about him. He must have been quite a person.
Just as an aside right here, I always thought that the Bartles and Argalls were Methodists from the days of John Wesley. At least that’s what I got from my Aunt Bessie Argall, but someone sort of hinted that during the winter time it was difficult to get to church – I think that church being St. John’s – because they’d come on a sleigh across the lake, and it was a shorter trip to go to the Methodist Church in Lakeville. But I really thought they’d always been in with John Wesley to start with, the way Aunt Bessie had talked.
There’re not many Bartles around anymore. In fact, John Bartle, who lives on Undermountain Road, is the only Bartle in this area. Of the progency of twelve living children, there were several that I knew. Uncle Harry and Uncle Tom had both gone to Hotchkiss. Uncle Harry eventually became a dentist in Torrington. He died in 1946. He and Aunt Elsie had no children. Uncle Tom was a bachelor, and he and his brother, John Temby, ran a grocery store in Falls Village for years with Aunt Annie, who was a spinster, I guess keeping house for them. She died in ’32.
I grew up in Lakeville, as had my father, and as had his mother for most of her life.They went to local schools. I have a sister, six years younger than I am who lives with her husband in Stockton, California.
JS: What’s her name?
TA: Susan Bell after her paternal aunt, Beatrice Bell.
JS: So you finished here in the twelfth grade. [Hotchkiss. Ed.]
TA: Yeah. Went to college at Yale and medical school at Columbia P&S. Then started residency, then the Army, then after the Army started a medical residency at Hartford Hospital, was married and moved away from Lakeville. I really hadn’t been here since college, since ’57.
JS: And you have children?
TA: Have three daughters. Emily, my eldest is 21, Alix is 19, and Amy is 17. They live with their mother in Newtown. I came back to this area after 29 years in October ’84. [Last name of children is De Marcken. Ed. ]
JS: What do you find different or did you find different about this? I mean, you were an adult when you came back.
TA: Well, certainly there’s a faster pace in life, and yet, I don’t know whether there’s really any basic change. I always remember that the area was very wealthy, that land was very expensive.
JS: Always?
TA: And that really none of my schoolmates stayed here. And that you had to be either independently wealthy or you worked for the person who was wealthy. •
JS: I’ve heard it said, some people I’ve talked to be~ore, that it wasn’t until the “weekenders” arrived and began paying a “decent” wage to the people you’re talking about, the workers, that people were able to survive here. That they were paid almost nothing to cut lawns and clean out stables, and that they were really on very low scale.
TA: Well, I think there weren’t too many middle income families. There was my cousin, Bill Barnett, and his store. Among those old classmates, there are very few around.
JS: Now, how’s Bill Barnett related to you?
TA: His mother and my father’s mother were both Bartles.
JS: And he had the dime store, and where was your father? In that complex next to it?
TA: Yes, the next complex.
JS: Where the Western Union was.
TA: Correct, and where Bessie Miller had a marvelous luncheonette.
JS: Not when I came – I came in ’49 and that was gone.
TA: Carl Isaakson I think owned it then.
JS: Where’you live?
TA: We lived just on the other side of what is now the, is it called the Iron National Bank which used to be the Milk Bar. We were just east of that up on a knoll, a Cape Cod house.
JS: That driveway that’s so difficult.
TA: No, no, a little bit further on.
JS: Oh, further. Oh, all right, I know.
TA: My Mother and Dad bought that when they were first married, and I think it was built by Dwight Cowles. Mother Argall’s house was down on Orchard Street, and another sister of Mother Argall’s had the house on the corner where Evelyn Dann lives now.
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JS: Here we go again. This is Temby’s wife, same date, same house, same address, and her name is Orlena Firuski Argall who was born where:
OA: I was born in New York City but came back here probably a few days old, and my parents had lived here, and I was brought up at the Housatonic Book Shop which was opposite the White Hart Inn in Salisbury, and I lived
there until.my parents were divorced in ’53.
JS: When were you born?
OA: I was born May 21st, 1936, and my mother was Elvia Scoville Firuski, and my father was Maurice Firuski. He was from Brooklyn and had started a bookshop I believe in ’34 after having had one in Cambridge. My mother was born and brought up in Taconic. She is the one, of course, who has the connection around here. Her father was Herbert Scoville, and her mother was Orlena Zabriskie Scoville who was also from Brooklyn.
Herbert Scoville was one of six Scovilles who, I guess, actually they weren’t born here, I guess. They must’ve, I don’t know if they were born here or born out in Buffalo, and then his father and mother were Nathaniel Scoville and Frances Wasson Scoville. Nathaniel and Frances were actually married in Buffalo because Nathaniel and his brother, Jonathan, had gone out to Buffalo from where their farm was on Undermountain Road. Nathaniel was born in 1835 or about then, anyway. He died in 1890. Apparently, and I get most of this information, and I have through the years, from Lois Warner Beers. She really has kept track of this. Nathaniel and Jonathan went out there, oh probably they were in their twenties or thirties, so that was before the Civil War, to ….• On their farm on Undermountain Road there was excellent iron ore. It was apparently seven percent pure, and they had the bright idea of going out there to use the ore to make wheels for the trains. And that’s how they made their money, I guess. They were just two guys who had an idea and went out there, and then there’s proof which I can talk about later that Lois Warner Beers has found out that they really were very successful.
When Nathaniel was there, he met this Frances Wasson in Buffalo, and Lois Warner Beers lived out in Rochester – lives there now – and she found later a map of Buffalo for 1865, and Nathaniel and Jonathan on that directory were advertising the Scoville Car Wheel Works, saying, “the wheels were made of Salisbury pig.” When he was there he married this Frances Wasson who was a lot younger. She was seventeen, and he was in his mid-thirties, apparently. Her father was Archibald Wasson who was in the business with somebody else of transporting produce around Rochester, Buffalo, that part of New York State. His partner’s name was Butterfield, and it just so happened that Mr. Butterfield later became a partner in the Wells Fargo Company, but anyway, that’s a long ways away.
Nathaniel married Frances Wasson who was so much younger, and they had all together six living children and two others who died in childhood. During that time when he was becoming wealthy, he settled his wife in New York eity. They apparently lived there in three successive brownstone houses. He put her there while she continued to keep having children and he died, of course, when she was with these small children, in 1890 which we do know was the date, and the youngest children, Lois Scoville Warner, was five at the time. After he died, he left this widow and I think before that they had built the house, now I’m not sure if it was before he died, they built the house up here on Taconic Road that later was called Stone House, but then it was a timber house, maybe with some stone facing it. It later burned during the first World War, but anyway, she settled here as a very young person and hadn’t been anywhere, and was in New York City during the winter and up here during the summer, and was left to run her share ot the wagon wheel works plus bringing up these young children. They were all adolescents on down to five years of age. So, I think she must have sold out her part of the company. I don’t really know.
Of these children they had, Grace was the oldest who never married.
She actually lived in this house. [Route 44 and Taconic Road on the southwest corner. Ed.] Then came Robert or Rob. Then Herbert, my grandfather. Rob married Virginia, and I can’t remember if her name was Van Deusen or Van whatever, and they had one child called Margo~ Then, as I say, my grandfather, Herbert, married Orlena Zabriskie from Brooklyn, and they had two children, my mother, Elvia, and my uncle, Pete Scoville, who died about three years ago. Then there was Edith, who never married, who had this house. She bought this land and house. I know the deed said it was during the first World War, so I think she bought this immediately when the old house burned, and I remember as a child being here with my great-grandmother. I remember it vividly because they would come here then during the summers, and I think my great-grandmother died either at the end of the war or after the war, the second World War. I can’t remember. Then there was Molly who married John McChesney who was teaching at Hotchkiss School. She died about 1965, and then Lois, the youngest, married Donald Warner who was local. She died in 1964.
In the cemetery [Salisbury. Ed.] I don’t know where Frances, my great-grandmother, Frances Wasson Scoville was buried, but her sister, Mary, was buried down there, and they came from Cuylerville, New York. She was born in 1846. Mary Wasson was born in 1846. My great-grandmother brought her back to live with her, and she died here in Salisbury in 1933.
I guess we’d better catch up on what I know of where the Scoville residences were, and so forth at that time. I think the Scovilles, the father of Nathaniel and Jonathan and Samuel Scoville, who by the way, is buried, I know, down in the cemetery, but he died young. But Nathaniel and Jonathan’s father was Samuel Scoville. I don’t know who his wife was. That older Samuel Scoville farmed, had a farm on Undermountain Road. I assume it’s where the Fisher homestead was, ’cause that’s basically a Scoville house ’cause Jack Fisher was a Scoville. It was probably one of Jonathan and Nathaniel’s sisters who was his grandmother. Fisher’s Pond was part of their farm, and then on down up to the ore mine. Then they must have discovered, these farmers, when the ore was being mined around here that they had excellent ore in that mountain on their farm. As I said ~efore, it was apparently seven percent pure iron, and so the ore mine is back up in there, sort of up in back of what is now the Undermountain Inn, and it’s that ore that they took out to Buffalo with this bright idea of making the wheels for the train cars.
I assume, I can’t say when, but I am assuming that probably Nathaniel built the first, what we call the Stone House, on this road, on Taconic Road, for himself and his wife, Frances, whom he brought back from Buffalo and all his children, and it had to be before 1890, because he died then. That house then burned. It was left then to his oldest son, Rob, and it burned during the first World War, as I said before, and then Rob rebuilt it when he ~as married, probably in the twenties, we think he rebuilt it as the present house is now, and it was then later bought by the Belgian family, the De Marckens. I don’t remember when they bought it. They bought it in the early fifties, I do remember now, and then —
TA: Charles Munson bought it from the Scovilles, I think.
OA: Yes, but the De Marckens moved here in the early fifties. I remember that.
TA: Yeah. I think the Scovilles sold it to Munson.
OA: Oh, all right.
JS: Who was he?
TA: Charles Munson was head of air reduction.
OA: I remember him.
JS: What’s air reduction?
TA: ….. company, I guess, though I can’t’ tell you.
JS: But they weren’t here very long?
OA: No. They had it for a few years. Then they sold it to the De Marckens. They had to have been here ten or fifteen years. Rob Scoville died, by the way who would have been my great uncle. I never knew him. He died in 1934.
Then in the meantime my grandfather, Herbert Scoville •••. He had, I saw photos of it, a large house that was up on the Beaver Dam Road, just right up the road. It was not a very attractive house, and it was a big old house. I don’t know if he built it or not or who originally built it, but it burned down, I know, in the 1920’s when my mother and Uncle Pete were children. Actually, they were staying the night, I remember hearing the story, they were staying the night the fire happened. It was in the winter, I think, and they were staying for some reason in what’s now the Whitridge house on Taconic Road. I don’t know who owned it then. It was not the Whitridges because they heard the fire trucks coming by them. It was their house on fire, and anyway, my grandmother, Orlena, and my grandfather, Herbert, rebuilt that house also, so actually those two houses were rebuilt, the one down on Taconic Road, the Stone House, and then what’s called Hill House, Herbert’s house, were rebuilt at somewhat the same time in the twenties.
TA: What about all the other buildings?
OA: Then I think the other buildings were probably built …• My guess is they were built •… But someone like Jack Fisher would know more.
JS: Hawkins talked about, he said you can drive through that area and see, what was the distinguishing mark, something about balconies, or arches or something he said you can pick them out.
OA: Not the Stone house.
TA: No, no, no. You’re talking about the houses where the tenants lived.
OA: No, the tenants didn’t, oh, where the tenants lived. Yes, but also you see there’s an electric house. The house where the Muyskens are now was a studio. The ones where the Pogues had, and I don’t know who owns· it, somebody Sacks from New York who doesn’t really live there, was, I remember it as the power house. Then there was the stone house next to it which they didn’t build, it’s one of the oldest buildings in the town. They built a lot up in there, I assume. I know the water supply for all of this area, including both the big Stone House and Hill House, was, I remember it, the old pump house down on Pump House Road, and it was amazing the water supply that came from there. And it was pumped up to a big tower which is still on the Hill House property. It was pumped in to all ————, and then by the time the De Marckens bought that property it was all, they all got wells and so forth.
TA: I remember Mr. De Marcken saying that you could have irrigated, you could have watered the entire Taconic area with the water system they had. It didn’t come down here. You had your own. What about the farms that your uncles had?
OA: Yes, then they also owned Grassland Farm. Now I don’t know, you see, and I don’t know when Herbert and Rob bought Grassland Farm. They had a top Guernsey herd there, I know that. And I know I remember hearing that my grandfather had what we called North, the old Lee farm, then it became North Wales farm, and now it’s Ardun’s Morgan farm, but that also obviously land that was right across from the old Scoville farm. That in there, he, my grandfather, imported the first of a certain kind of sheep from England, the first time they came over here. I don’t anything about sheep, but it was a certain, what you hear about a lot. So, that’s really all I know about the property. I know they owned Fisher’s Pond, I know they owned all of that.
JS: Your grandfather, Herbert, had a son named Herbert.
OA: He was Pete.
JS: And his wife?
OA: Is Ann Curtis Scoville. She was from Norfolk.
JS: What about shoelaces?
OA: Well, this isn’t fair, ’cause this is a story really of Lois Warner Beers who was Lois Scoville Warner’s, one of her children. She remembers my great-grandmother obviously better than I do. She remembers some funny stories. One was that my great-grandmother, Frances Wasson Scoville, when she born and brought up in Cuylerville near Buffalo, that when Lincoln’s ••.. My great-grandmother remembers she was about ten years old when Lincoln died and his funeral car came through Buffalo, the casket was taken off apparently for a day in Buffalo and Lois remembers my greatgrandmother, her grandmother, telling her that she had to change the red laces on her shoes to black laces for that day. Lois for the longest time couldn’t imagine why, stuck down in Cuylerville, she had to change the laces. Lois aeducted that obviously she was one of the ones who went by to see the casket and of course a little girl couldn’t go by with red laces to see Lincoln’s casket. And then this Frances Wasson Scoville, she really was uprooted and lived her life out here, in charge of this brood and in New York City.
One of the addresses is amazing. I mean, these houses, these brownstones they had in New York. The last one I know of was at 10 East 52nd Street. I wonder what that is now. Where’s MOMA? Where’s the Museum of Modern Art?
TA: 53rd.
JS: Donald Trump is probably ….
OA: Probably. So, that’s all.
JS: Ollie, what we haven’t got are your children’s names.
OA: I was married before [to Jacques Gignoux. Ed.] and I have two children from that marriage, and their names are, the oldest is Elvia Gignoux, and then Samuel Gignoux. Elvia was my mother’s name. Elvia is now 19 and Sam is now 17.
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TA: Talking about my own family, not the Bartles, talking about the Argalls. My great-grandfather had come here …. My father was the youngest of I think, thirteen, but they all, as opposed to the generation before that, where twelve or fifteen entered adulthood Dad was one of four. They all died at an earlier age. One had, Russell, unfortunately been injured in an accidental death.’ An older brother did marry and had a son who lived in Falls Village. Dad had two older sisters, one a spinster. Another taught principally at the high school in Lakeville and married the Reverend Dann who was the Methodist minister at the time.They retired here in Lakeville. Dad was a barber his whole life until he retired and he and mother went to Florida. So that’s the last Argall in the earlier generation, as I say of the twelve or fifteen Bartles there’s only one left.
JS: And you’ve got three girls.
TA: Well, we’re still working on it!
JS: Thanks, guys.
1989
Property of the Oral History Project.
Salisbury Association at the Scoville Memorial Library.
Salisbury, Connecticut 06068
This is Jodie Stone on the 6th of February 1989 talking with Temby Argall at his home on Taconic Road in Salisbury.
JS: Now, we’re going to get going with you, Temby. Where were you born?
TA: I was born at Sharon Hospital on August 1, 1935.
JS: Who were your mother and father?
TA: Dad was Paul Temby Argall, also born in the Lakeville/Salisbury area. He was born at home. Mother is a Virginian.
JS: And she was a what?
TA: A Richie.
JS: Who were the Bartles? Somebody told me you were related to a Bartle.
TA: Yes. Right. That’s Dad’s grandparents. His mother was a Bartle married to Joseph Argall here in Salisbury. My great-grandfather was Captain William Bartle who was born in Cornwall, England. My great-grandmother was Eliza Jane Temby. She was born in Camborne, which is also in the Duchy of Cornwall. They came to the States after they were married in 1863. He was a mining engineer. He worked in the mines in Cornwall which I gUess now have become pretty much defunct. Initially he worked in some of the ore mines in New Jersey and then went out to Ispheming, Michigan. It’s where they used to have a big ski jump. I think about the same size as the one in Salisbury. I think they still have national ski championships out there. He worked for the Barnum Richardson Company which had long been established here in Connecticut. He worked for one of their mines out there and then came to Ore Hill and was captain or engineer of the ore mines.
The Bartles had fifteen children, twelve of whom became adults. My great-grandfather, Captain Bartle, lived in, I guess you’d call it Ore Hill. It was at the corner of Route 112 and the road to Indian Mountain right.across from Deep Lake Farm in the house I think now owned by Tom Cloney.
JS: Yes.
TA: That was the family homestead, and in turn he or his son, Alfred, was the one who built Deep Lake Farm and lived there for a number of years. My grandmother, Dad’s mother, Ellen, was the eldest of the fifteen. She had been born while they were still on Ore Hill. My grandfather, Dad’s father, Joseph Argall, also was born in England in Cornwall, and he came, I think about the same time as Captain Bartle, to superintend the mines. I Eventually he was in charge of the underground mines. I can’t tell you exactly whe~ they switched from above ground to below ground. I guess things were getting rather scarce. My great-grandfather died in 1904 at the age of sixty, and there’s just a marvelous article in the Lakeville Journal about him. He must have been quite a person.
Just as an aside right here, I always thought that the Bartles and Argalls were Methodists from the days of John Wesley. At least that’s what I got from my Aunt Bessie Argall, but someone sort of hinted that during the winter time it was difficult to get to church – I think that
Argall – page 2
church being St. John’s – because they’d come on a sleigh across the lake, and it was a shorter trip to go to the Methodist Church in Lakeville. But I really thought they’d always been in with John Wesley to start with, the way Aunt Bessie had talked.
There’re not many Bartles around anymore. In fact, John Bartle, who lives on Undermountain Road, is the only Bartle in this area. Of the progency of twelve living children, there were several that I knew. Uncle Harry and Uncle Tom had both gone to Hotchkiss. Uncle Harry eventually became a dentist in Torrington. He died in 1946. He and Aunt Elsie had no children. Uncle Tom was a bachelor, and he and his brother, John Temby, ran a grocery store in Falls Village for years with Aunt Annie, who was a spinster, I guess keeping house for them. She died in ’32.
I grew up in Lakeville, as had my father, and as had his mother for most of her life.They went to local schools. I have a sister, six years younger than I am who lives with her husband in Stockton, California.
JS: What’s her name?
TA: Susan Bell after her paternal aunt, Beatrice Bell.
JS: So you finished here in the twelfth grade. [Hotchkiss. Ed.]
TA: Yeah. Went to college at Yale and medical school at Columbia P&S. Then started residency, then the Army, then after the Army started a medical residency at Hartford Hospital, was married and moved away from Lakeville. I really hadn’t been here since college, since ’57.
JS: And you have children?
TA: Have three daughters. Emily, my eldest is 21, Alix is 19, and Amy is 17. They live with their mother in Newtown. I came back to this area after 29 years in October ’84. [Last name of children is De Marcken. Ed. ]
JS: What do you find different or did you find different about this? I mean, you were an adult when you came back.
TA: Well, certainly there’s a faster pace in life, and yet, I don’t know whether there’s really any basic change. I always remember that the area was very wealthy, that land was very expensive.
JS: Always?
TA: And that really none of my schoolmates stayed here. And that you had to be either independently wealthy or you worked for the person who was wealthy. •
JS: I’ve heard it said, some people I’ve talked to be~ore, that it wasn’t until the “weekenders” arrived and began paying a “decent” wage to the people you’re talking about, the workers, that people were able to survive here. That they were paid almost nothing to cut lawns and clean out stables, and that they were really on very low scale.
Argall – page 3
TA: Well, I think there weren’t too many middle income families. There was my cousin, Bill Barnett, and his store. Among those old classmates, there are very few around.
JS: Now, how’s Bill Barnett related to you?
TA: His mother and my father’s mother were both Bartles.
JS: And he had the dime store, and where was your father? In that complex next to it?
TA: Yes, the next complex.
JS: Where the Western Union was.
TA: Correct, and where Bessie Miller had a marvelous luncheonette.
JS: Not when I came – I came in ’49 and that was gone.
TA: Carl Isaakson I think owned it then.
JS: Where’you live?
TA: We lived just on the other side of what is now the, is it called the Iron National Bank which used to be the Milk Bar. We were just east of that up on a knoll, a Cape Cod house.
JS: That driveway that’s so difficult.
TA: No, no, a little bit further on.
JS: Oh, further. Oh, all right, I know.
TA: My Mother and Dad bought that when they were first married, and I think it was built by Dwight Cowles. Mother Argall’s house was down on Orchard Street, and another sister of Mother Argall’s had the house on the corner where Evelyn Dann lives now.
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JS: Here we go again. This is Temby’s wife, same date, same house, same address, and her name is Orlena Firuski Argall who was born where:
OA: I was born in New York City but came back here probably a few days old, and my parents had lived here, and I was brought up at the Housatonic Book Shop which was opposite the White Hart Inn in Salisbury, and I lived
there until.my parents were divorced in ’53.
JS: When were you born?
OA: I was born May 21st, 1936, and my mother was Elvia Scoville Firuski, and my father was Maurice Firuski. He was from Brooklyn and had started a bookshop I believe in ’34 after having had one in Cambridge. My mother was born and brought up in Taconic. She is the one, of course, who has the connection around here. Her father was Herbert Scoville, and her
Argall – page 4
mother was Orlena Zabriskie Scoville who was also from Brooklyn.
Herbert Scoville was one of six Scovilles who, I guess, actually they weren’t born here, I guess. They must’ve, I don’t know if they were born here or born out in Buffalo, and then his father and mother were Nathaniel Scoville and Frances Wasson Scoville. Nathaniel and Frances were actually married in Buffalo because Nathaniel and his brother, Jonathan, had gone out to Buffalo from where their farm was on Undermountain Road. Nathaniel was born in 1835 or about then, anyway. He died in 1890. Apparently, and I get most of this information, and I have through the years, from Lois Warner Beers. She really has kept track of this. Nathaniel and Jonathan went out there, oh probably they were in their twenties or thirties, so that was before the Civil War, to ….• On their farm on Undermountain Road there was excellent iron ore. It was apparently seven percent pure, and they had the bright idea of going out there to use the ore to make wheels for the trains. And that’s how they made their money, I guess. They were just two guys who had an idea and went out there, and then there’s proof which I can talk about later that Lois Warner Beers has found out that they really were very successful.
When Nathaniel was there, he met this Frances Wasson in Buffalo, and Lois Warner Beers lived out in Rochester – lives there now – and she found later a map of Buffalo for 1865, and Nathaniel and Jonathan on that directory were advertising the Scoville Car Wheel Works, saying, “the wheels were made of Salisbury pig.” When he was there he married this Frances Wasson who was a lot younger. She was seventeen, and he was in his mid-thirties, apparently. Her father was Archibald Wasson who was in the business with somebody else of transporting produce around Rochester, Buffalo, that part of New York State. His partner’s name was Butterfield, and it just so happened that Mr. Butterfield later became a partner in the Wells Fargo Company, but anyway, that’s a long ways away.
Nathaniel married Frances Wasson who was so much younger, and they had all together six living children and two others who died in childhood. During that time when he was becoming wealthy, he settled his wife in New York eity. They apparently lived there in three successive brownstone houses. He put her there while she continued to keep having children and he died, of course, when she was with these small children, in 1890 which we do know was the date, and the youngest children, Lois Scoville Warner, was five at the time. After he died, he left this widow and I think before that they had built the house, now I’m not sure if it was before he died, they built the house up here on Taconic Road that later was called Stone House, but then it was a timber house, maybe with some stone facing it. It later burned during the first World War, but anyway, she settled here as a very young person and hadn’t been anywhere, and was in New York City during the winter and up here during the summer, and was left to run her share ot the wagon wheel works plus bringing up these young children. They were all adolescents on down to five years of age. So, I think she must have sold out her part of the company. I don’t really know.
Of these children they had, Grace was the oldest who never married.
Argall – page 5
She actually lived in this house. [Route 44 and Taconic Road on the southwest corner. Ed.] Then came Robert or Rob. Then Herbert, my grandfather. Rob married Virginia, and I can’t remember if her name was Van Deusen or Van whatever, and they had one child called Margo~ Then, as I say, my grandfather, Herbert, married Orlena Zabriskie from Brooklyn, and they had two children, my mother, Elvia, and my uncle, Pete Scoville, who died about three years ago. Then there was Edith, who never married, who had this house. She bought this land and house. I know the deed said it was during the first World War, so I think she bought this immediately when the old house burned, and I remember as a child being here with my great-grandmother. I remember it vividly because they would come here then during the summers, and I think my great-grandmother died either at the end of the war or after the war, the second World War. I can’t remember. Then there was Molly who married John McChesney who was teaching at Hotchkiss School. She died about 1965, and then Lois, the youngest, married Donald Warner who was local. She died in 1964.
In the cemetery [Salisbury. Ed.] I don’t know where Frances, my great-grandmother, Frances Wasson Scoville was buried, but her sister, Mary, was buried down there, and they came from Cuylerville, New York. She was born in 1846. Mary Wasson was born in 1846. My great-grandmother brought her back to live with her, and she died here in Salisbury in 1933.
I guess we’d better catch up on what I know of where the Scoville residences were, and so forth at that time. I think the Scovilles, the father of Nathaniel and Jonathan and Samuel Scoville, who by the way, is buried, I know, down in the cemetery, but he died young. But Nathaniel and Jonathan’s father was Samuel Scoville. I don’t know who his wife was. That older Samuel Scoville farmed, had a farm on Undermountain Road. I assume it’s where the Fisher homestead was, ’cause that’s basically a Scoville house ’cause Jack Fisher was a Scoville. It was probably one of Jonathan and Nathaniel’s sisters who was his grandmother. Fisher’s Pond was part of their farm, and then on down up to the ore mine. Then they must have discovered, these farmers, when the ore was being mined around here that they had excellent ore in that mountain on their farm. As I said ~efore, it was apparently seven percent pure iron, and so the ore mine is back up in there, sort of up in back of what is now the Undermountain Inn, and it’s that ore that they took out to Buffalo with this bright idea of making the wheels for the train cars.
I assume, I can’t say when, but I am assuming that probably Nathaniel built the first, what we call the Stone House, on this road, on Taconic Road, for himself and his wife, Frances, whom he brought back from Buffalo and all his children, and it had to be before 1890, because he died then. That house then burned. It was left then to his oldest son, Rob, and it burned during the first World War, as I said before, and then Rob rebuilt it when he ~as married, probably in the twenties, we think he rebuilt it as the present house is now, and it was then later bought by the Belgian family, the De Marckens. I don’t remember when they bought it. They bought it in the early fifties, I do remember now, and then —
TA: Charles Munson bought it from the Scovilles, I think.
OA: Yes, but the De Marckens moved here in the early fifties. I remember that.
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TA: Yeah. I think the Scovilles sold it to Munson.
OA: Oh, all right.
JS: Who was he?
TA: Charles Munson was head of air reduction.
OA: I remember him.
JS: What’s air reduction?
TA: ….. company, I guess, though I can’t’ tell you.
JS: But they weren’t here very long?
OA: No. They had it for a few years. Then they sold it to the De Marckens. They had to have been here ten or fifteen years. Rob Scoville died, by the way who would have been my great uncle. I never knew him. He died in 1934.
Then in the meantime my grandfather, Herbert Scoville •••. He had, I saw photos of it, a large house that was up on the Beaver Dam Road, just right up the road. It was not a very attractive house, and it was a big old house. I don’t know if he built it or not or who originally built it, but it burned down, I know, in the 1920’s when my mother and Uncle Pete were children. Actually, they were staying the night, I remember hearing the story, they were staying the night the fire happened. It was in the winter, I think, and they were staying for some reason in what’s now the Whitridge house on Taconic Road. I don’t know who owned it then. It was not the Whitridges because they heard the fire trucks coming by them. It was their house on fire, and anyway, my grandmother, Orlena, and my grandfather, Herbert, rebuilt that house also, so actually those two houses were rebuilt, the one down on Taconic Road, the Stone House, and then what’s called Hill House, Herbert’s house, were rebuilt at somewhat the same time in the twenties.
TA: What about all the other buildings?
OA: Then I think the other buildings were probably built …• My guess is they were built •… But someone like Jack Fisher would know more.
JS: Hawkins talked about, he said you can drive through that area and see, what was the distinguishing mark, something about balconies, or arches or something he said you can pick them out.
OA: Not the Stone house.
TA: No, no, no. You’re talking about the houses where the tenants lived.
OA: No, the tenants didn’t, oh, where the tenants lived. Yes, but also you see there’s an electric house. The house where the Muyskens are now was a studio. The ones where the Pogues had, and I don’t know who owns· it, somebody Sacks from New York who doesn’t really live there, was, I
Argall – page 7
remember it as the power house. Then there was the stone house next to it which they didn’t build, it’s one of the oldest buildings in the town. They built a lot up in there, I assume. I know the water supply for all of this area, including both the big Stone House and Hill House, was, I remember it, the old pump house down on Pump House Road, and it was amazing the water supply that came from there. And it was pumped up to a big tower which is still on the Hill House property. It was pumped in to all ————, and then by the time the De Marckens bought that property it was all, they all got wells and so forth.
TA: I remember Mr. De Marcken saying that you could have irrigated, you could have watered the entire Taconic area with the water system they had. It didn’t come down here. You had your own. What about the farms that your uncles had?
OA: Yes, then they also owned Grassland Farm. Now I don’t know, you see, and I don’t know when Herbert and Rob bought Grassland Farm. They had a top Guernsey herd there, I know that. And I know I remember hearing that my grandfather had what we called North, the old Lee farm, then it became North Wales farm, and now it’s Ardun’s Morgan farm, but that also obviously land that was right across from the old Scoville farm. That in there, he, my grandfather, imported the first of a certain kind of sheep from England, the first time they came over here. I don’t anything about sheep, but it was a certain, what you hear about a lot. So, that’s really all I know about the property. I know they owned Fisher’s Pond, I know they owned all of that.
JS: Your grandfather, Herbert, had a son named Herbert.
OA: He was Pete.
JS: And his wife?
OA: Is Ann Curtis Scoville. She was from Norfolk.
JS: What about shoelaces?
OA: Well, this isn’t fair, ’cause this is a story really of Lois Warner Beers who was Lois Scoville Warner’s, one of her children. She remembers my great-grandmother obviously better than I do. She remembers some funny stories. One was that my great-grandmother, Frances Wasson Scoville, when she born and brought up in Cuylerville near Buffalo, that when Lincoln’s ••.. My great-grandmother remembers she was about ten years old when Lincoln died and his funeral car came through Buffalo, the casket was taken off apparently for a day in Buffalo and Lois remembers my greatgrandmother, her grandmother, telling her that she had to change the red laces on her shoes to black laces for that day. Lois for the longest time couldn’t imagine why, stuck down in Cuylerville, she had to change the laces. Lois aeducted that obviously she was one of the ones who went by to see the casket and of course a little girl couldn’t go by with red laces to see Lincoln’s casket. And then this Frances Wasson Scoville, she really was uprooted and lived her life out here, in charge of this brood and in New York City.
One of the addresses is amazing. I mean, these houses, these
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brownstones they had in New York. The last one I know of was at 10 East 52nd Street. I wonder what that is now. Where’s MOMA? Where’s the Museum of Modern Art?
TA: 53rd.
JS: Donald Trump is probably ….
OA: Probably. So, that’s all.
JS: Ollie, what we haven’t got are your children’s names.
OA: I was married before [to Jacques Gignoux. Ed.] and I have two children from that marriage, and their names are, the oldest is Elvia Gignoux, and then Samuel Gignoux. Elvia was my mother’s name. Elvia is now 19 and Sam is now 17.
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TA: Talking about my own family, not the Bartles, talking about the Argalls. My great-grandfather had come here …. My father was the youngest of I think, thirteen, but they all, as opposed to the generation before that, where twelve or fifteen entered adulthood Dad was one of four. They all died at an earlier age. One had, Russell, unfortunately been injured in an accidental death.’ An older brother did marry and had a son who lived in Falls Village. Dad had two older sisters, one a spinster. Another taught principally at the high school in Lakeville and married the Reverend Dann who was the Methodist minister at the time.They retired here in Lakeville. Dad was a barber his whole life until he retired and he and mother went to Florida. So that’s the last Argall in the earlier generation, as I say of the twelve or fifteen Bartles there’s only one left.
JS: And you’ve got three girls.
TA: Well, we’re still working on it!
JS: Thanks, guys.
END
