The More family of Moresville (now Grand Gorge, just over the mountain from Roxbury) was the closest thing to an aristocracy the Catskills wilderness had to offer. A native of Strathspey, Scotland, John More had emigrated with his wife, Betty Taylor More, and two small children in 1772. Soon after his arrival in New York, More built a house at Hobart, thus becoming the first white man to settle Delaware County. He later moved near the town of Catskill on the Hudson and eventually built his last cabin in 1786 at what became “the Square” in the town of Moresville. Having located himself at the junction of several well-traveled trails, More opened a tavern-inn and became moderately wealthy. While fathering six more children, he also, over time, took on employment as a millwright, magistrate, postmaster, and Presbyterian lay leader. By the 1820s, Moresville had transformed from a lonely outpost to a prosperous and busy village. Betty died in 1823 at the age of eighty-five. The hearty John lived on until 1840. When he died, at age ninety-five, he left no fewer than eighty-eight grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren to mourn him.
Although most of More’s descendants settled outside of Moresville in West Settlement, one son, Alexander Taylor More, remained in town. He and his wife, Nancy Harley, produced fourteen offspring. Their second eldest, Mary, came into the world on 20 June 1798.21 And it was Mary, in the mid-1820s, who caught John Burr Gould’s eye. We know little about her save that she was supposedly comely and nurtured a deep piety that complemented John Gould’s ancestral Puritanism. Their courtship was very likely Testament-based; hence it was also slow. When they wed in 1827, he was thirty-five, she twenty-nine. Mary moved her loom into one of the five large bedrooms in John’s house and also brought a few stray pieces of furniture–tokens and keepsakes of the home in which she’d been raised–which she installed in the large sitting room to the left of the entrance hall, this room being dominated by a huge fireplace. During her first spring at the Gould homestead, Mary spent days upon days digging gardens around the house, eventually surrounding the place with immense beds of roses and hyacinths.
John Gould needed several stout sons to help him run the barely profitable farm. There was not only the herd and the cheese and butter making to tend to, but also–in season–the picking of apples from a small orchard, the running of a cider press, and the tapping of sugar maples. A few sturdy lads would come in very handy. Nevertheless, Mary presented him with five girls in a row: Sarah (1828), Anna (1829), Nancy (1831), Mary (1832), and Elizabeth (1834). Not until 1836 was the couple blessed with a male child, and then just barely: a tiny premature infant. Jason “Jay” Gould was to stay small compared to his peers physically, if not in other ways, for every one of his few fifty-six years.
Chapter 3
TWELVE LINES BY NIGHT
JAY GOULD’S FATHER was a complicated and tragic figure. John Burr Gould’s tribal memory, passed on by his parents, told him that he came from substantial people: all those prosperous Golds, Burrs, and Talcotts who for generations had loomed so large in Connecticut history. Yet John’s own precarious position in life, like that of his father, fell considerably short of the heights scaled by his formidable ancestors.
Granted, by the standards of his own humble neighborhood, John Gould was a success. In other words, he was a bit less badly off than most. In addition to his herd, pastures, sugar maples, and orchard, he also owned the only cider press in town. Nevertheless, his lot in life was not substantial and he knew it. Having been educated more than thoroughly by his well-lettered parents, John Gould was versed enough in the world to fully comprehend his poverty. Early on he developed a bitterness that manifested itself as snobbery. Part of the problem was that Gould had few people among his rural neighbors on whom to exercise his considerable intelligence. In any event, Gould seems to have been the classic provincial intellectual, convinced he was worthy of better things than his confined corner of the country could offer and always looking out at the larger world with envious scorn. John Burroughs would recall “Mr. Gould” as a rather “stiff necked” fellow who sought to live “in a little better style than the other farmers.”1
Still, despite John Burr Gould’s pretensions, the Goulds–like most everyone else in Roxbury–led a modest existence. Mary made all the family’s clothes. The lion’s share of their food came right off the homestead; the furniture was handmade.2 One of the few store-bought items in the house was an imported–but nevertheless inexpensive–tea set, for which Mary had her husband build an elaborate cupboard with glass doors. There the set remained for years, permanently on display but rarely used lest its precious pieces suffer a chip or crack. Jay Gould’s sister Anna would remember the tea set–quite a rare sight in that rural district at that time–serving as wordless validation of the family’s position, marking them as people of a certain quality despite other appearances to the contrary.
Virtually everything we know about the Gould household during the first years of Jay’s life comes from reminiscences penned by Gould’s surviving sisters not long after Jay went to his tomb, these written at the request of his eldest daughter. “When your father came into our home,” Anna wrote, “there were five of us little girls, and when one morning our grandmother told us we had a little brother and we saw him with our own eyes, our joy knew no bounds. It was but a little time before we could hold him and make him smile, and reach out his tiny hands to come to us.”3 Jay’s eldest sister, Sarah, remembered him in his earliest years as the “pet and idol of the household,” pampered and admired by all the girls, part brother and part baby doll.
The recollections of Jay’s sisters also give us the few glimpses we have of Jay’s mother, Mary, who died in January 1841, when Jay was just a few months short of five. “The only memory he had of her,” wrote Sarah, “as he told me during the latter years of his life, was the messenger summoning us from school in order that she might give us her dying blessing. He said he had never forgotten how cold her lips were when she gave him her last kiss of love.” Sarah–who, as we shall see, had reasons to prefer the memory of her mother over that of her father–believed that Jay inherited from Mary all “his ambition [and] that evenness of temper which enabled him to control himself even when a boy, and still more when he became a man. He also inherited from her his ability to turn everything to his financial profit.”4
John buried Mary in the Old School Baptist Church Cemetery between Roxbury and Kelly Corner near Stratton Falls, close by the neighborhood’s “Yellow Meeting House,” where Mary had always worshipped. (Here, thirty-nine years later, Jay Gould would erect an obelisk commemorating his parents and two of his sisters.) Anna Gould, eleven years old when her mother died, remembered snow on the ground as John Gould and several other men carried Mary to her grave. She also recalled the sound of dirt thumping down on the handcrafted casket, and the solemn hymns sung in the windy desolation of the graveyard. Little Jay walked beside her, holding her hand, curious but seeming not to comprehend much of what went on.5
In the next few years, death would be a frequent visitor to the Goulds. Needing a mother for his large family, John Gould married again that summer of 1841 only to see his new wife, a woman named Eliza, die on 19 December.6 John laid Eliza beside Mary in the cemetery of the Yellow Meeting House. Five months later the fifty-year-old Gould–a study in perseverance–was married once more, this time to Mary Ann Corbin, a neighbor more than a decade his junior. After this happy event, the family seemed poised for a period of stability; but fate had other plans. Late in 1842, eleven-year-old Nancy succumbed to a sudden illness. Writing decades after, Sarah Gould described yet another snowy visit to the cemetery, her stepmother Mary Ann large with child as she trudged up the hill. On 3 March 1843, Mary Ann presented John with a son, Abraham, to be called variously Abram and Abie by his sisters and brother. Joy reigned again, for a time. But two years later Mary Ann was dead. Perhaps thinking himself cursed, John did not take any more wives. Instead he left the care of his two boys, now aged nine and two, to his four surviving daughters.
As an old woman, Sarah Gould would observe that Jay had seen a great deal of “trouble” before he reached the age of ten.7 This trouble, Sarah made clear, was not limited to family deaths but extended to other episodes as well, including at least one dramatic, character-defining experience caused by John Gould’s strict adherence to unorthodox and stoutly independent political beliefs.
Unlike the majority of his neighbors, Gould, a Democrat in politics, refused to take part in the general insurrection that dominated the Catskills and the adjacent Hudson River Valley in the 1840s. At the time, the farmers of the region were in arms against the proprietors of various land grantees, among them the holders of the immense Hardenbergh land grant–just under 2 million acres in Ulster, Orange, Green, Sullivan, and Delaware Counties–given in 1708 by Queen Anne to Johannes Hardenbergh and his associates. (“The vast compass of the Hardenbergh patent,” wrote the future monopolist Jay Gould in his History of Delaware County and the Border Wars of New York, “when its limits had been surveyed and located–a grant of something less than two millions of acres to a single individual–was a species of monopoly, which, even the British government, with her aristocratic notions, failed to relish, and an order was [later] issued preventing grants of more than a thousand acres to single individuals, or when associated together, of a number of thousand equal to the number of associates.”8) In the midst of this antirent excitement, armed bands of “down-renters,” wearing calico outfits and painted up as “Indians,” intimidated rent collectors with tarring and feathering while using the same tactic to pressure fellow tenants to join their rebellion. The local Roxbury antirent Indians usually summoned each other using traditional dinner horns. At one point they even passed legislation prohibiting the blowing of such horns for their customary purpose, lest some farmer’s announcement of supper be confused with a warning of rent collectors on the horizon. As Jay would write:
During the summer of this year [1844] parties were frequently seen in disguise, and several peaceable citizens who had chanced to think differently from themselves, belonging to what was termed the up-rent, or law and order party, had been molested and severely threatened. . . . The first open act of hostility was perpetrated on the sixth of July, upon the premises of Mr. John B. Gould, who, regardless of the threats and the timely warning of the association to desist from blowing his horn, had continued to use it as a signal. . . . Upon the day in question, he had as usual blown his horn at noon, when five Indians, equipped and armed for fight, presented themselves at his door, and demanded redress for the insult he had given to the authority of the association. A spirited and angry discussion ensued, when they were compelled to retreat from the premises. . . .
The following Tuesday, another company of Indians set out for the Gould homestead with instructions to seize the horn, and if necessary mete out to Mr. Gould a salutary coat of tar and feathers. The sun had just arrived at the meridian, when a favorable opportunity presenting itself, the signal whoop was given, and the savage horde sprung from their hiding places, and with demon-like yells rushed up and surrounded Mr. Gould, who was standing with his little son in the open air in front of the house. We were that son, and how bright a picture is still retained upon the memory, of the frightful appearance they presented as they surrounded that parent with fifteen guns poised within a few feet of his head, while the chief stood over him with fierce gesticulations, and sword drawn. Oh, the agony of my youthful mind, as I expected every moment to behold him prostrated a lifeless corpse upon the ground. . . . But he stood his ground firmly; he never yielded an inch.
John Gould yelled for his hired man to bring muskets from the house. “Conscious of right, he shrank from no sense of fear–and finally, when a few neighbors had gathered together, a second time [the Calico Indians] were driven from the premises without the accomplishment of their object.”9 The down-renters never again visited the Gould homestead. In 1845 John Gould rode with the local militia to restore order after the governor of New York declared Delaware County to be in a state of insurrection.
The tension of the rent wars entered nearly every phase of life. At one point during the troubles, a larger boy, the son of a down-renter, threatened Jay with drowning at “Stone Jug,” the little schoolhouse by Meeker’s Hollow. Thereafter, John Gould announced that none of his children would ever again attend the school. He and two of his up-renter brothers-in-law, Philtus and Timothy Corbin, built a schoolhouse of their own on lands between their adjacent farms. They named the place Beechwood Seminary.
John Burroughs and Jay Gould–each destined for his own kind of notoriety–attended school together for ten years, first at Stone Jug and later at Beechwood Seminary. More than four decades after the fact, Jay’s sister Elizabeth (known as Bettie) would tell her daughter, “There was always a bond of sympathy between your uncle and [ John Burroughs].”10 Writing when he was well into his eighties, Burroughs recalled of his old friend, “You might have seen in Jay Gould’s Jewish look, bright scholarship, and pride of manners some promise of an unusual career.”11 The two trouted together in Rose’s Brook, Furlow Lake, and Meeker’s Hollow, and Burroughs frequently slept overnight at the Gould family home.12 As regards the most popular schoolyard sport, wrestling, Burroughs recalled that in a match the small and seemingly unathletic Jay was surprisingly “plucky and hard to beat. . . . He seemed made of steel and rubber.”13
Like other boyhood friends, Gould and Burroughs helped each other out of jams when they could. A particularly telling instance occurred one day in 1848, when Gould was twelve and Burroughs eleven. Burroughs, having forgotten an essay assignment until the last minute, copied something from an almanac and tried to pass it off as original. Detecting Burroughs’s subterfuge, the teacher stiffly informed him that he must, as punishment, either hand in twelve lines of verse before the end of the day or stay after class. Shortly, with the teacher not looking, Jay scrawled some doggerel on his slate and, nudging John, passed it under the desk for him to copy. Burroughs promptly (and shamelessly) did so, in this way avoiding detention.
Jay’s verse survives:
Time is flying past,
Night is coming fast,
I, minus two, as you all know,
But what is more
I must hand o’er
Twelve lines by night
Or stay and write.
Just eight I’ve got,
But you know that’s not
Enough lacking four;
But to have twelve
It wants no more.
In supplying Burroughs’s need, Jay demonstrated the stark yet elegant economy that would characterize so many of his later solutions to problems.
His efficient collection of words was designed to accomplish a specific job in the most direct manner possible. Jay completed John’s assignment to the letter of what was required, supplying twelve very short lines: just the amount to meet their teacher’s demand, but not one syllable beyond what was necessary.
Chapter 4
A DELIBERATE STUDENT
JAY GOULD WAS a fastidious and serious child, seemingly delicate until challenged, and possessed of a somber maturity that belied his youth. He was remarkably focused. “I knew him once to work at times for three weeks on a difficult problem in logarithms,” Sarah recalled. “He would never accept assistance in working out hard problems.”1
No small part of Jay’s tenacity derived from the early realization that he hated farming. It usually fell to him, as the elder of only two sons, to perform many of the toughest chores about the Gould homestead. Daily he brought the cows in for milking and then drove them back to pasture. Routinely he worked at the butter churn, did the heavier tasks associated with the making of cheese, and in varying seasons pressed apples and collected and boiled sap into maple syrup. His father relied on him as well to ride the horse pulling the hay rake while the father did the cutting. It all added up to a round of simpleminded drudgery that Jay described to a friend as “torture.”2 Often when his father c
ame hunting him to do some work about the place, Jay would hide himself in some secluded corner to pursue his sums and vocabulary and Latin. “It is too bad,” he told Sarah, “but I must study, you know.”3
During the spring of 1849, after deciding that he’d learned everything Beechwood could teach him, thirteen-year-old Jay petitioned his father to send him to the private academy run by a Mr. Hanford at Hobart, a full nine miles from the Gould farm and its labors. Initially refusing this request, John Gould eventually changed his mind when it became clear Jay was not to be denied. “All right,” the father said after several weeks of constant badgering and argument, “I do not know but you might as well go, for it is certain you will never make a farmer.”4 At Hobart, Jay boarded with a blacksmith, for whom he kept the books, attending the academy by day. This continued for just five months, however, with Jay making the long walk home each weekend to visit with his sisters and brother and check that all was well. He moved back home the following autumn, the Beechwood having taken on an energetic new teacher just recently graduated from the state normal school at Albany.
John Burroughs would recall that it was under James Oliver (whom he described as “a superior man”) that he and several other Roxbury boys got their “real start.”5 Gould, in turn, would write admiringly of Oliver’s high-mindedness and “elevated character.”6 In 1893, as an old retiree, the gentleman whose prominent former students still called him “Mr. Oliver” recalled the fourteen-year-old Jay as a “deliberate” student. “He was not a boy given to play much. He was never rude and boisterous, shouting, jumping and all that sort of thing.” But neither was he, as some biographers had already begun to suggest, a snitch or a brownnose. “His mental and moral fibre were such that it would have been impossible for him to appeal to a teacher against a school-fellow. His self-reliance and self-respect would have revolted against such a proceeding.” Like Sarah, Oliver noted Jay’s stark independence and penchant for refusing help. “If he was sent to the blackboard to work a sum he would stay there the entire recitation rather than ask for a solution.”7
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