The Banished Children of Eve

by Peter Quinn

  Whilst I had some difficulty locating Colonel Robert Noonan, Commander of the 69th on the fateful day, after some investigating I found him living in Brooklyn. Again following your suggestion, I have written the narrative as though it were all from the mouth of the Colonel himself, and, in accord with the practice of the Official Records, have signed the Commander’s name to the article, for which he has given his consent.

  Ironically, in view of these facts, it was Colonel Noonan who was the least communicative of all with whom I spoke. I interviewed him on several occasions, but he seems a man whose constitutional bent toward taciturnity is exacerbated by advanced age, exceedingly poor health, and the particularly deteriorated state of his eyesight, which has left him nearly blind.

  When the work was done, and the manuscript near to its final form, I took the precaution of reading it aloud to the Colonel, telling him to stop me at any part of the narrative that he felt needed to be either amended, or shortened, or expanded.

  The Colonel sat silently through most of my reading, several times loudly clearing his sinuses, which I mistook for a signal to pause, but he waved with his hand, signalling for me to read on. He did, however, stop me at the point in the account of the engagement at Fredericksburg wherein it is related how Father Willet, Chaplain of the 69th, blessed the men as they prepared to undertake their heroic assault. Recounting the event in Noonan’s words, the text reads as follows (p. 16): “Although not a Catholic myself, I was the first man to receive the good Father’s blessing.”

  The Colonel said in a tone I can only describe as challenging, “Who told you that?”

  I replied that several of those I’d interviewed had made a point of mentioning he was a Protestant, but I assured him there was no intent to raise the issue of religious sectarianism. The only purpose was to underscore the unity that existed in the Regiment. I read on (pp. 16–17): “He [Father Willet] then went along the lines blessing each man, Catholic and Protestant alike. As soon as the Father had finished his religious duties to the regiment, I [Colonel Noonan] placed in his hat a sprig of boxwood which I had received from General Meagher, telling the men of the regiment that I would make an Irishman out of the Father that day—the good Father being a French Canadian—and the men had a good laugh for themselves, then stepped as cheerfully to the fray as they would into a ballroom.”

  At this point, the Colonel seemed taken by some sort of seizure of the brain. An incoherent flow of words sputtered from his lips, and his face turned a vivid shade of purple. I summoned his nurse immediately, and she ordered me from the room. She emerged several moments later to inform me that the very delicate state of the Colonel’s health, and the severe turmoil that sometimes clouded his brain, required an end of my interview. I told her of our deadline, and she then instructed me to leave the manuscript with her. She informed me that as soon as the Colonel seemed recovered she would read the remaining part to him, carefully noting any reactions, and send it to me directly.

  She has proved as good as her word. I received the manuscript last evening, and as you will see, there isn’t a mark upon it. In the end, it seems, we passed the Colonel’s muster, and so added a missing chapter to a brave and noble history.

  Sincerely,

  Michael R. Patterson

  Librarian-Historiographer

  Proceedings of the State Historian, Comprising Reports to the Legislature, Correspondence, and Other Papers, Vol. XXIII, published by the state of New York (1900)

  ALBERT J. MAXWELL

  65 Wall Street

  New York City

  December 3, 1903

  Mayor-elect George B. McClellan

  297 East 36th Street

  New York City

  Dear George,

  Mayor-elect! What satisfaction it gives me to put those words before your illustrious name! I know that in the flush of your resounding victory you undoubtedly find yourself besieged by an army of office seekers, petitioners, etc. I hesitate to join that rogues’ gallery but my dearest Lolly has prevailed on me, insisting, in her words, “I know George, and he will do his best!” It is at her bidding, then, that I write, and if this letter be judged a breach of friendship or good taste, let the blame be on the distaff side of our union!

  During her recent convalescence, Lolly was attended by a most capable and industrious nursing companion by the name of Mrs. Sheila Noonan. Good-hearted Lolly, as is her wont, managed to drag out of the woman the details of her life story and, worse, to involve herself in rectifying any and all injustices. (Poor Lolly will ever be the victim of her Huguenot blood!) As it turns out, Mrs. Noonan, a widow, has for some time been seeking to collect the military pension of her late husband, a man many years her senior, who served under your father in the Peninsula Campaign, as a member of the 69th New York. Her husband, Mrs. Noonan says, was a full Colonel, with a distinguished record. His later years were apparently spent in a severe state of physical depletion, which exhausted their funds and greatly strained the capacities of Mrs. Noonan.

  The unyielding pressure of uxorious concern permits me no alternative but to put this matter before you. Lolly will not rest until Mrs. Noonan’s cause is recognized by the government of the United States! And she won’t allow me to rest, either!

  I will be at the Manhattan Club for the Christmas Eve reception should you wish to discuss the matter. And be forewarned! Since this is the one evening of the year the club is opened to spouses, Lolly shall be there, too.

  Sincerely,

  Bert

  HON. GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN

  The House of Representatives

  Washington, D.C.

  December 19, 1903

  Dear Bert,

  Your letter of the third has been forwarded to me here in Washington.

  I should love to oblige both you and your lovely bride. Unfortunately, I discovered a very long time ago that if I tried to give a hearing to all the various claims of those who served, or claimed to have served, with my father, I should have no time to do anything else. Besides, I leave Congress now, to attend to the fortunes of our fair city, and such matters are best taken up with my successor or the War Department.

  I look forward to Christmas Eve, but let us all agree ahead of time that we shall discuss topics more Suited to the season than Army pensions.

  Yours,

  Geo.

  The Correspondence of the Hon. George B. McClellan, Mayor of the City of New York; Vol. 1: 1903-1905, published by the city of New York (1914)

  DEATH CLAIMS COLONEL VAN WYCK

  CIVIL WAR, VETERAN AND BUSINESS

  LEADER SUCCUMBS AT AGE 91

  Colonel Ezra Van Wyck, 91 years of age, Los Angeles business and club man, Civil War veteran, and prominent supporter of many philanthropic causes, died yesterday at the Clara Barton Hospital after a brief illness. The cause of death was given as high blood pressure and uremia. His body was removed to the Rupps Funeral Chapel, 824 South Figueroa Street, where funeral services will be conducted at a date to be announced later.

  Colonel Van Wyck had been identified with a number of business and financial concerns in various capacities during his more than five decades of residence in the state. At the time of his death, he was still actively engaged as a director of the California Trust Bank, the Jefferson Union Fidelity Investment Corporation, and the Arcadia Motion Picture Studio. He was a respected and beloved member of several clubs, fraternities, and social organizations.

  Born in Albany, New York, on May 13, 1835, the descendant of ancient Dutch families (his mother was a Van Vliet), Colonel Van Wyck built a successful lumber business in that city before the Civil War. As the Colonel himself often told the story, he might never have participated in the War Between the States if he hadn’t lost his business during a card game. “It was the luckiest loss I ever had,” the Colonel told a convention of Elks last March in Santa Monica. “I lost a fortune but found my country.”

  In the fall of 1863, he joined a local regiment being raised in Albany. He sa
w much action during the Battle of the Wilderness and Grant’s campaign against Richmond but emerged unscathed. At war’s end, he decided that rather than return to Albany he would seek his future on the frontier. Prior to his arrival in California in 1870, he was a partner in several successful trading companies in the territories.

  Upon first arriving in California, Colonel Van Wyck settled in Sacramento, where he met his wife, Emma Curtis Van Wyck, the daughter of Marcus Curtis, himself a well-known member of the State Bar and a director of the Union Pacific Railroad. Mrs. Van Wyck survives her husband.

  A resident of Los Angeles for the past twenty-seven years, Colonel Van Wyck was sergeant at arms of the California GAR from 1912 through 1915 and was a staunch supporter of the movement for national defense and closer cooperation between the U.S. Army and the National Guard. He was also a member of the First Americans Society, a Shriner, and a member of the Masonic Lodge of Sacramento, the Santa Monica Lodge of Elks, and the American Legion.

  Described by all who knew him as a vigorous, gregarious man, much admired for his patriotism, good judgement, and business acumen, the Colonel was working at home on Monday last when he was removed to the hospital, suffering from a high fever and severe abdominal pain. He died the following night in his sleep.

  Besides his widow, Colonel Van Wyck leaves two sons, Bedford, 49, and Charles, 46, both of Los Angeles.

  —The Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1926

  AMID PAGEANTRY, FORDHAM

  INSTALLS NEW PRESIDENT

  A BRONX NATIVE

  Sunday afternoon, in a ceremony of pomp and circumstance presided over by Patrick Cardinal Hayes and attended by two bishops, ten monsignori, and the presidents of several other Jesuit colleges and universities, Fordham University inaugurated the Reverend Augustine J. Dunne, S.J., as its twenty-fifth president.

  The ceremony was conducted in the auditorium of the University’s splendid new building, Keating Hall, which was recently completed at a cost of $1,343,000 and whose clock tower has become, almost instantly, a landmark of the Fordham neighborhood.

  POLITICAL DIGNITARIES IN ATTENDANCE

  After a Mass of Installation in the University Church, the Cardinal led a procession into the new hall. In attendance were also a number of political dignitaries. Included were: Bronx Borough President James Lyons; Bronx District Attorney Samuel J. Foley; Congressmen Patrick Fitzsimmons, Michael B. Brady, Francis X. O’Hara, and Vincent A. Hickey, all of the New York delegation; Justices Aloysius Flynn, William Purcell, and James P. McManmon, all of the State Supreme Court, First Department; Assemblymen John J. Hanley, Robert E. Murphy, Peter M. O’Donnell, Ignatius O’Rourke, and John Jude Francis Cassidy; New York City Police Commissioner John Moore; Fire Commissioner Morgan Kennedy; and Commissioner of Docks and Terminals Charles Parnell O’Brien. Many of the dignitaries are graduates of the University or its law school.

  WORDS FROM FATHER DUNNE

  The invocation was given by the Cardinal and was followed by a rousing rendition of the national and university anthems by the Fordham Glee Club. The heads of each academic department made an address of welcome.

  In his response, Father Dunne, who served previously as the Regent of the Fordham University Law School, thanked all in attendance. He said that in deciding to found a Catholic college in what was then “a small village on the far periphery of New York City,” Archbishop John Hughes had shown “prophetic foresight.”

  “First of all,” Father Dunne said, “Archbishop Hughes knew in his heart what today is obvious to every eye: This neighborhood would become once and forever Irish.” This remark was greeted with warm applause and laughter.

  “Second, the Archbishop understood that as New York rose to prominence among the cities of the world, it would require institutions that rested not upon the shifting sands of opinion but upon the Rock of Truth.”

  ANCESTOR WAS RESTAURATEUR

  Father Dunne is the first native son of the Bronx to be made Fordham’s president. Born in 1890, in what was then referred to as the Annexed District or the North Side, he attended St. Luke’s Grammar School and Xavier Academy before entering the Society of Jesus. He is the son of James A. and May Dunne, both now deceased. His father, longtime leader of the Tecumseh Democratic Club, owned and operated the Morrisania Insurance Brokerage. His grandfather was a well-known restaurateur in the lower part of the city.

  —The Bronx Home News, September 1, 1936

  Opened in 1961, the Van Rensselaer Shopping Center was for a brief period the largest such retail operation in the Capital District area and represented a milestone in the county’s economic development. The Center’s success, as is often said in the retail trade, was guaranteed by three ingredients: location, location, location. Situated beside the juncture of an interstate highway and the main county road, and anchored by two major department stores, the Center did over $500,000 in gross sales on its opening day.

  The Cannon Development Company of Garden City, Long Island, oversaw construction of the project, which was conceived, financed, and built in under two years. A prime reason for this expeditious completion was the enthusiastic support received from the county government. In light of the controversy that came to surround the selection of the site, this support was invaluable.

  The land on which the Center is constructed had been taken up by a small cemetery and a derelict church. Though familiar landmarks to the long-term residents of the area, few knew the true history of the property, which had for many years belonged to a sect of Negroes that had purchased it sometime after the Civil War. Although never officially incorporated, the small community of houses built around the sect’s church was known locally as Midian’s Well, the same name as the church.

  Most of the residents of Midian’s Well worked as waiters and menials in and around Troy, and there is a passage in one of Phyllis Conner’s turn-of-the-century short stories (which are often set in Rensselaer County) that gives us a vivid, if fleeting, picture of these Negroes:

  In the rear of the drafty horsecar that rollicked up the Schuyler Road was the usual band of silent, dignified ebony creatures, who sat with hands folded as if in prayer, their eyes cast upon the tobacco-stained floor.

  There is also a mention of the Negroes of Midian’s Well in the police report published in the Troy Record of December 19, 1889:

  Negro funeral turns disorderly. Death of local woman, “Mother Maria,” results in illegal ceremony in front of church that blocks road. Warning issued. No summons or further action undertaken.

  Beyond these fragments, nothing is known of the sect or its practices, except that sometime around the end of the First World War the last of its members either died or moved away, and the houses fell to ruin: The church itself was taken over by Negro Baptists and was still in use as late as 1941. Soon after, it, too, was abandoned and, along with the adjoining gravesites, became little more than a rendezvous for local youths on Halloween.

  The condemnation proceedings completed and title to the site transferred to the sponsors of the Van Rensselaer Shopping Center, the work seemed ready to begin. The first step was the removal of the occupants of the graves to a specially designated section of Evergreen Cemetery. On the day the process was to commence, the Reverend Thomas Montgomery of the Mount Pisgah Memorial Church organized a protest. The demonstrators lay down and refused to move until a public hearing was held on the disinterment.

  The sponsors agreed to such a hearing and it was held within a week. Speaking against allowing the disinterment, the Reverend Mr. Montgomery said, “We must not and will not sit idly by while the bones of these holy men and women are wantonly and needlessly disturbed. They are our ancestors in faith and in hope, and their memory must be honored, not obliterated.”

  Replying on behalf of the county, Norman Sandwaller, an attorney with the Office of Deeds and Titles, pointed out that the bodies would be reinterred in dignified and appropriate surroundings. “Subsequent development of the site,” he said, “would benefit
Negroes along with everyone else.”

  The County Commission subsequently confirmed the decision to allow full clearance of the site by a vote of 7 to 0. A week later, on April 14, 1961, construction began.

  —Calvin A. Hutchinson, New Frontiers: From Mohawks to the Modern Age: A History of Rensselaer County (Albany: The State University Press, 1965)

  Each belongs here or anywhere as much as the welloff

  … just as much as you,

  Each has his or her place in the procession.

  —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass,

  1855 edition