Fossil Collection, Gift to Museum, Goes on Display
SCHOHARIE, June 19, 1936—An outstanding fossil display including the first formations ever to have been taken from Howe Caverns, have come to Schoharie for display at the Old Stone Fort Museum on North Main Street for inspection by the thousands from every state of the Union who annually visit this historic shrine.
The collection is the gift to the museum by Mrs. M. J. Miller of Baltimore, Md., a great granddaughter of Lester Howe, who discovered the caverns in May 1842.
The formations were taken from the caverns in several successive years, during which they were exploited and conditioned by Howe, who made a private collection, which has remained in the Howe family until this time.
Mrs. Miller is one of the last survivors of the Howe clan.
Among the outstanding specimens of the collection, placed in charge of Chauncy Rickard, curator of the museum, are the fossil remains of a Trilobite, the creature in which the first eye was said to have been developed and which existed in the ancient Silurian sea.
Included also are beautiful specimens of calcite crystal formed of countless transparent pyramids and regarded as being 150 million years old.
—From the June 20, 1936, Schenectady Gazette, likely submitted by Chauncy Rickard, curator of the Stone Fort Museum.
WHAT’SON DISPLAY AT THE FORT
The display case containing the Howe exhibit is in the northeastern corner of the second floor of the Stone Fort Museum. It contains the calcium carbonate “brain” coral shown here, a few cave formations and invitations to two events at the cave.
Brain Coral from Lester Howe’s collection at the Old Stone Fort Museum
The first, headlined “Schoharie Cave Party,” invites a gentleman and lady guest to a New Year’s Day, 1845 “Cotilion Party” at Lester Howe’s Assembly Room, starting at 2 p.m. Cotilions are typically a southern affair meant to introduce young ladies to both society and eligible young men. Howe’s daughters, Huldah and Harriet, were pre-teens in 1845, so perhaps the word was used differently in that era.
The invitation begins with an odd quote: “Live while we live the managers say and sport the pleasures of the present day.” Fourteen “managers”—all of them local men—are listed.
In the 19th Century, most entertaining was done at home. An “Assembly Room” in a home was the gathering place for members of the higher social classes, and open to both men and women.
The second invitation is to a “House Warming (sic),” to be held Thursday, Sept. 5, 1849, at the Cave House. Other than noting “Good music will be furnished,” there are few other details. History records Howe as a violinist; his daughters played the piano.
This may have been to show to visitors the second Cave House. The first was destroyed by fire in 1847.
THE PROVENANCE: Following Lester Howe’s death in 1888, the collection was first held by the Howes’ son, Dr. Halsey John Howe, a dentist practicing in Dunkirk in western New York. It was displayed in a local library for several years, according to the Stone Fort’s records. Halsey and his wife were childless, and the collection then went to one of the Howes’ grandchildren.
The description in the display case does not match what was written for the newspaper by Curator Rickard. The exhibit notes Frances Miller of Chevy Chase, Md., donated the collection given her by Dr. Howe to the fort in 1936. Miller was the daughter of Harriet Elgiva Howe Shipman.
Until the late Spring of 1888, an aging Lester Howe and wife Lucinda lived on his beloved “Garden of Eden” property across the valley of the Cobleskill Creek from the cave he made famous. Their children, all of whom had been married in the family’s cave, had moved on.
Huldah Ann, the oldest, became Mrs. Henry Northrup, and Harriet Elgiva married a surveyor for the railroad, Hiram Dewey. Both daughters moved to Jefferson City in central Missouri and raised families there. The Howes’ son, Halsey John, married Julia Redfield, and moved to Dunkirk in western New York, where he practiced dentistry.
The date Howe sold his interest in the cave is uncertain; it may have been as early as April 1869.
Howe would have been 59 at the time—a suitable age for retirement in that era—and he and Lucinda settled into the lush Garden of Eden property1 to spend their final years together. Now retired, he assumed the role of a “gentleman farmer,” raising a few Jersey cows and experimenting with the types of fruits (some exotic to the area) that he could raise on the hillside.
Another view of the Howe Family plot in the Cobleskill Rural Cemetery. The marker front right, is Lester’s, next is Lucinda’s.
It may have been an idyllic lifestyle for several years, but maintaining a farm, even a gentleman’s farm, is a challenge for men and women in their 60s and 70s. In early 1888, the Howes sold property after about 15 years there and moved to Florence Street in the Village of Cobleskill in mid-May 1888. Lester was 78; his wife was two years older. (Their Florence Street home is today the southwestern-most parcel on the block.)
Lester Howe died there on Wednesday July 18, 1888. According to his obituary in the July 19 Cobleskill Index, he suffered “five weeks of paralysis,” apparently the result of a stroke.
Howe’s obituary was succinct. After all, it was nearly a half-century since his famous discovery and his years of some celebrity and news-making were long past.
The Cobleskill paper’s obituary, in part, reads: “Lester Howe is widely known as the person who discovered Howe’s Cave. A strong current of air was known to issue from the mountainside where in 1840, Lester Howe moved to the vicinity of the cave.
Lester Howe Jan. 10, 1810 – July 18, 1888
“Alone, he made investigations and with patient toil—prompted by courage—he affected an entrance into the bowels of the earth and penetrated a great distance or until he reached the lake.
“The [now] deceased erected a hotel at the mouth of the cave and opened the underground cavern to the world. . .
“The discovery of the cave which bears his name fixes Mr. Howe’s name indelibly in our local history,” the writer predicted, accurately.
The funeral service was “solemnized” at the Florence Street home, two days after Howe’s death, on Friday July 20, with a Rev. Buckelew officiating.
Lester Howe’s moment in the spotlight had passed, but his death still made the news. Small notices appeared in many newspapers across the country, including even those on the West Coast. His obituary has been found in papers in both Sacramento, Calif., and in Oregon.
About two months after Lester’s death, his widow Lucinda transferred three pieces of property from her husband’s estate to their son, Halsey. Legally, she may have had to transfer them first through an attorney; a “property transfers” section in the Aug. 8, 1888, Cobleskill Index, gives some details.
For “a nominal consideration,” Mrs. Howe transferred to John H. Shultes 45 acres in the Town of Cobleskill, likely the East Cobleskill/Garden of Eden property; one acre in Cobleskill, possibly the Florence Street home; and two acres in Howes Cave. Shultes then transferred the property to Halsey John Howe.
Lucinda Howe died a little more than a year later at a daughter’s home in Jefferson City, on Dec 18, 1889. She was 81.
The Fredonia Censor, a Chautauqua County newspaper in western New York, carried a small notice, probably placed by her son.
The Christmas Day, 1889 paper carried this: “Mrs. Lucinda Howe, mother of Dr. H. J. Howe of Dunkirk, who recently died in Jefferson [City], Mo2., was the wife of the discoverer of the wonderful Howe’s cave in Schoharie County, and her daughters were married in a part of the cave called the chapel. Her remains will be taken to Cobleskill for interment.”
Lester and Lucinda were married for 60 years. She was born April 28, 1808, in Albany, to Elijah Rowley, 32, and Sally Morgan Rowley, 33. She and Lester were married on Nov. 10, 1828, in Cherry Valley, Otsego County.
Lester and Lucinda, along with Halsey John Howe and his wife, Julia, are buried in the Cobleskill Rural Cemetery. Huldah Howe Northrup is buried in Pittsfield, IL; Harriet Howe Dewey is buried in Jefferson City.
PHOTO of the Howe monument in the Cobleskill Rural Cemetery by Bob Holt
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1The address would have been considered East Cobleskill.
2 Halsey John Howe also moved to Jefferson City after retiring. He apparently suffered from Alzheimer’s—unrecognized at that time—and in late June 1913, Halsey walked away from his nephew’s house where he’d been staying. He was found drowned a few days later in the Missouri River there.
In 1865, the A & S Brought Change —for Better or Worse
“It chanced that the writer, while in a half somnolent condition, induced by a long night’s ride in a railroad car, overheard snatches of conversation which ran somewhat thus:
‘Yes sir: three miles right into the bowels of the earth—nothing like it in the whole country, sir, aside from Mammoth Cave.’
‘Pooh! A mere dripping crevice in the rocks, I presume, or a dirty hole in the ground.’
‘No sir, wide and high, with waterfalls, galleries, and halls for three miles and the end not reached yet’.”
While the account above is imagined, taken from an old advertising pamphlet1, the conversation is probably not unlike other idle chit-chat that took place among passengers on the railroads of New York in the second half of the 19th century.
The Albany & Susquehanna Railroad, from the Hudson River at Albany to Binghamton.
The cave in the conversation is Howe’s Cave, long promoted in that era as a rival of Mammoth Cave of Kentucky. The train was certainly the Albany and Susquehanna, the Albany-to-Binghamton line that first reached the tiny community adjacent to the cave in 1865.
Things were never the same after that. The histories of the cave and the railroad are inextricably, and forever, linked.
The cave Lester Howe discovered in 1842 was a popular, well-known destination decades before the A&S arrived. The cave, one of the few opened to visitors at that time, attracted guests—mostly educated and well-to-do—who were thrilled by the novel, muddy, daylong underground adventure by torchlight. At the cave entrance, Howe built his “Cave House,” a rather plain three-story hotel of about 26 rooms. Guests were attended to by the Howe family: Lester and his wife, Lucinda; daughters Huldah and Harriet, and son Halsey, the youngest.
LESTER HOWE, 1810-1888
Construction of the A&S began on April 19, 1851, from what is today downtown Albany (near Pearl Street) to Schoharie Junction2. This initial effort, a 35-mile stretch along a mostly flat grade, took the train south, then west through communities that are today, Delmar, Slingerlands, and New Scotland before heading south-westerly along a gradual, miles-long easy bend towards the picturesque Schoharie Valley.
Surveyors spread out through the countryside west and southwest of Albany to plot a rail line that served communities, manufacturers, farms, and travel destinations along the route that, of necessity for the steam locomotives that pulled the train, had to be over relatively level ground.
Marking their route along the picturesque valley carved by the Cobleskill Creek, the surveying team likely stayed at the Howe family’s Cave House. They would have made note of the limestone hillside and documented the limestone outcroppings that would need to be removed from the proposed route of the train.
And at least one A&S surveyor made note of Lester Howe’s teenage daughter, Harriet.
Hiram Shipman Dewey won the heart of 18-year-old Harriet Elgiva Howe, described by an heir as “small and retiring with blue eyes and (an) abundance of light brown hair.” Hiram, then in his mid-20s, was described as a good-looking, fun-loving young man, six feet tall, with dark brown hair and blue eyes.
Hiram and Harriet were married in the Bridal Chamber of the Howe family’s cave on Sept. 11, 1854 (There were several weddings in the cave around that time; they made for great publicity). Later settling in Jefferson City, Mo., the couple had five children.
As money was raised, the rail line moved forward west from Albany. It took 12 years to complete the first phase of the A&S, the line reaching Schoharie Junction in 1863. Three years later, a separate 4.2-mile line, the Schoharie Valley Railroad, connected Schoharie village to the A&S at Schoharie Junction.
There was a change of management of the A&S in 1863 as well. Joseph H. Ramsey, a state senator from Lawyersville, Schoharie County, was named president of the railroad. He had been the railroad board’s vice president since 1856 and was instrumental in raising cash and selling railroad bonds.
Continuing west from Schoharie Junction, the lowest spot on the line was the crossing of Schoharie Creek at Central Bridge. As the line climbed out of the valley, the tracks followed the north bank of Cobleskill Creek up to a point around West Richmondville, and then started a down grade that continued to Oneonta and beyond.
An uphill grade and sharp curve are an unwanted combination in railroad construction, not always avoided. One railroad afficianado3 explained: “If you were going to stall a train on the A&S line, it would either happen at Howes Cave or behind (north) of what’s now the Cobleskill-Richmondville High School on Route 7 west of Warnerville. That’s where the combination of grade and curvature are the worst.” Accidents at both locations have proved the point.
On an 1854 map intended to show the relation of the A&S with other trains in New York at that time, Howes Cave is not marked. There were manufacturing concerns in Central Bridge and Cobleskill worthy of a depot for freight and passengers. While the cave and Cave House were well-known, there just wasn’t much else there.
But that would soon change. The railroad’s progress was closely watched by its stockholders, property owners along the line, and investors looking to profit from the train’s arrival. Speculators saw potential in the limestone that had been exposed around the cave; samples of it found their way to the office of the state geologist in Albany. After testing, it was found comparable to the limestone in Rosendale, Ulster County, that was then being used to profitably make natural cement.
It was not by coincidence that three members of the Albany & Susquehanna’s board of directors were the first to learn of the money-making opportunity from Howes Cave limestone. (This would have been before 1863, as plans were being made for the second half of the A&S, from Central Bridge/Schoharie Junction to Binghamton.)
Construction of a depot in Howes Cave began in 1864, it opened the following year. It would be needed to ship stone and cement—should such an enterprise be created nearby.
Richmondville Town Justice John Westover—later founder of the Band of Richmondville—and Jared Goodyear of Oneonta both sat on the A&S board. Along with two others from Otsego County, they were the first to profit from the natural resources around the rail line near the cave. They formed the Howes Cave Lime and Cement Company in 1867.
Two years later, on Dec. 31, 1868, the A&S line’s 142 miles to Binghamton were completed and a gala excursion train from Albany officially opened the new railroad on Jan. 12, 18694.
And later that year, A&S President Ramsey created the second company to exploit the limestone of Howes Cave. His plans for the Howes Cave Association included much more than just making cement.
Ramsey eventually took control of the famous cave itself, in a transaction that history records as being of dubious ethics. The date (it’s not definitive) may have been as early as April 1869 and the exact method is not clear, but Howe accepted $12,000 of stock in the Howes Cave Association after turning down a $10,000 cash offer. Ramsey had declared the Association’s stock to be worth $100,000 – a meaningless amount to everyone but Howe, who became a minority shareholder with little to say about company affairs.
Regardless, Ramsey added to the property, and expanded both the quarry and the caverns’ tour business. In 1872-73, he completed a new version of the Cave House, made of limestone from his quarry. To that, he added the huge, three-story Pavilion Hotel, completed in 1881, envisioned as a summer resort with amenities to rival those of the famous Catskills’ resorts of that era. The imaginary conversation that leads this article was taken from the Pavilion Hotel’s advertising material.
The Pavilion Hotel was destroyed by fire in February 1900.
Working together in 1866, the A&S and Delaware & Hudson extended the A&S rails south of Binghamton to the Pennsylvania rail lines freighting coal. Then, in February 1870. the D&H perpetually leased the A&S for $490,000 per year. Passengers and others continued using “Albany & Susquehanna” as the line’s name for many years.
While interest in the cave waned in the early 1900s, the quarry business boomed. Historical photos from the early-to mid-20th century show six or more railroad sidings going into the cement works, and old news articles document from 15 to 20 freight cars being loaded with barrels and bags of cement each day. With each car having a capacity of from 160 to 300 barrels, each weighing about 365 pounds, a fully loaded freight car would have been carrying 55 tons of Howes Cave cement.
In about 1910, new owners of the cement quarry accidentally blasted into Howe’s Cave, eventually destroying about three hundred feet of it. The cave was closed for nearly 20 years after that. New owners, Howe Caverns, Inc. opened in 1929.
Lester Howe died in 1888. Railroad President Joseph H. Ramsey died in 1894, and the train freight shipped to and from the Howes Cave quarry declined after the second half of the 20th Century and the quarry went to a smaller, bagged system, and shipped by tractor-trailer in the 1970s. Cement manufacturing in Howes Cave ended in 1976.
The A&S played an important role in the success of the Delaware & Hudson Railroad in the second half of the 19th Century. In a commemorative publication, “A Century of Progress, 1823-1923,” prepared by the D&H, the authors noted: “This progress in building the Albany and Susquehanna was by far the most important that affected the later history of the company during this period.
“[The A&S was] part of a larger general plan of affecting rail communication between Albany and the coal fields of northern Pennsylvania.”
The D&H ran independently from 1823 to 1991, when it was purchased by Canadian-Pacific Railway.
Riding the A&S Line to Old Howe’s Cave
The jostling, 39-mile train ride from downtown Albany to Howe’s Cave5 took a little more than two hours, including 10 stops along the way to pick up passengers or make water stops for the steam locomotive. (The water stops were strategically located about every 10 miles through what are now the suburbs of Albany. There were stations with water stops in Central Bridge and Cobleskill.)
According to a January 1868 schedule in Jim Shaughnessy’s 1967 book, Delaware & Hudson, an A&S train left the Albany station about every four hours.
From the other end of the line, Howe’s Cave was 81 miles east of Harpersville, near Binghamton, with 17 stops along the way. If you left on the first A&S train at 5 a.m., you’d arrive at the cave just before noon.
In either direction, it is unlikely the noisy steam locomotive ever reached its top speed of about 50 mph, or if it did, it wasn’t for long.
The ride from Albany—one way—likely cost between three and four cents per mile; affordable to the upper and middle class of that period, but a luxury reserved for special occasions for the tradesmen and other working class New Yorkers. From Albany, then, a round-trip ticket to Howe’s Cave on the A&S likely cost between $1.50 and $2.25. That’s around $30 today. “Parlor Cars” for those needing more luxurious amenities and/or privacy were available at an additional cost.
The Howes Cave depot was built following a common design used during that Civil War-era and was about 200 yards south of the hotel(s) that welcomed visitors to the famous cave. A small country station like Howes Cave would have a station agent living in the building itself, or at least close by. It was not uncommon for married couples to live and work together at a station serving a small population.
The station agent’s responsibilities were many. He served as a dispatcher for trains coming and going, taking, giving, and sharing traffic and freight guidance from the central station. The agent would also handle the paperwork for incoming and outgoing baggage, freight, and mail. Passenger trains often carried the “Railway Post Office,” or RPO designation. Such cars picked up and dropped mail enroute and sorted it inside the car while the train was moving.
The train arrived in Howes Cave before a Post Office did and the few residents there relied on the A&S Depot for their postal needs until the PO was established Nov. 18, 1867.
Passenger traffic on the line increased steadily and by the early 1890s, as many as three passenger trains ran daily to and from the Albany area from Cobleskill, according to the 1895 Grips’ Historical Souvenir of Cobleskill, NY.” Trains also left daily for New York City and Boston.
Also, by that time, between 800 and 1,000 freight cars were leaving each month from the busy cement plant in Howes Cave and the stone quarries in Cobleskill, which produced cut stone blocks for projects such as the Brooklyn Bridge and New York Barge Canal system.
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1 From “Nature’s Wonder: Howe’s Cave,” the second chapter of the Howes Cave Association’s 1885 promotional brochure, “A Summer Home: The Pavilion Hotel, Howe’s Cave, Schoharie County, N.Y.”
2 This is today the intersection of Route 7 and Junction Road, Central Bridge. A Historical Marker indicates the location.
3 Personal e-mail from Gardner Cross, July 20, 2022
4 “The Rail in the Trail” by Susan E. Leath, Bethlehem Town Historian, 2012. Railroad buffs will appreciate that the historian included this: “The line was built with 60-pound iron, and a six-foot gauge enabling it to connect freely with the Erie Railroad in Binghamton. One of the goals was to connect to the southern-tier trains serving Pennsylvania coal country.”
5 “A Summer Home: The Pavilion Hotel, Howe’s Cave, Schoharie County, N.Y.” ibid.
