Bert Stephenson

[Dave]

My most stunning memory of my grandfather Bert Stephenson was watching him eat his peas with a knife. Why I thought that was so much more difficult than using a fork, I don't know. He died in 1947 as I was approaching my fourth birthday, so my memory of him is quite dim. But my mother told me years later that as we sat around his supper table one night on Steuben Street, I sat there with dropped jaw staring at the old man as he scooped peas off his plate with a knife.

"Mary," he said to my mother, "what is the matter with that boy? Get him to stop staring at me."

I've been using fultonhistory.com to try learn more about Bert's early history. My brother tells me our Dad (Bert's son in law) said Bert had been brought up on a farm in West Winfield, leaving because his English father observed some version of primogeniture and as one of the younger sons Bert would work all his life as a slave for his older brother if he stayed on the farm.

But then I found this:




If you click to enlarge and carefully read the top paragraph, it's apparent that Bert was the oldest brother, and in fact when his father, George Stephenson, died, Bert was the only child who was not a minor. And other facts were revealed by this notice.

After my parents died, my brothers and I would have conversations where we tried to recall facts that none of us had ever written down. The two women in Ilion we remembered visiting as children were not "friends of Grandma," they were Bert's sisters, Maud and Grace Junior, known as Babe. Bert's mother was born Grace Green, a neat name! And her name was carried forward by my mother, Mary Grace.

And the final surprise of this notice is that Bert's father died in Whitesboro. In fact, subsequent finds at fultonhistory.com would confirm the family was from Whitesboro, but with a connection to West Winfield.

[Dave]

There are a few questions about Bert that I haven't found answers to yet, but stay with me as I do more research in the newspapers on fultonhistory.com

Or help me out by searching there on Robert L. Stephenson, Bert Stephenson, George Stephenson and other first names such as Grace, Maud, Leman.

I know Bert married before he married the woman who was my natural grandmother. This probably took place in 1897 at age 23 or so. I can't find any notice of the wedding. Perhaps it took place in West winfield rather than Whitesboro and didn't make the Utica papers. But in 1898, he has a son, Bill, my mother's half brother.

[Dave]

As I mentioned, I was told Bert came from West Winfield, leaving his father on the farm. But then we found the notice of his father's estate in Whitesboro in 1895. And Bert's brothers and sisters were still minors.

Bert married and had a son in 1898.

And now we find that Bert and his brother Leman in 1905 opened a hardware business in Whitesboro, a retail store and headquarters for tinsmithing (Sheet Metal Work.) I can't find ads for Stephenson Brothers ... so far. And we know that Bert and/or Leman carried on a business of roofing too.



I can't quite ferret out the number in the statement, "in the employ of International Heater for 1x years." Eleven? 19? I figure from other sources Bert was 34 years old in 1905, so his seniority at IH might have been closer to 10 to 15 years. But I suppose there's no reason to discount the theory in that day and age he came to Utica and began to work for the company at age 15.

I remember Bert's later sheet metal shop. His speciality became the construction of furnaces. He'd come into your home, remove your old stove(s) in the living quarters .... living room, kitchen (unless you were still cooking with it .... and build an "octopus furnace" in your cellar and install the ducts, etc. As different as it seems to us having a fire going in our kitchen (in our stove,) folks back then felt uncomfortable with a fire going in their cellar in a furnace. So Burt would sleep in their cellar in a chair next to the new furnace for 2 or three nights, "to make sure all was safe" he said, but actually until the customer got used to it.

[keith]

So many families lose their family story after just a couple generations. Best of luck reconstructing Burt's story.

Like you, Like you, my Grandfather died shortly before my 4th birthday. Many people have expressed skeptcism that I have memories extending back to my third birthday but I can remember many verifiable events from that time.

[Dave]

I'm pretty sure I remember my grandfather, although no much of him. My father was an inveterate movie taker .. the old 8 mm film that he began shooting in the 1930's ... and so some of my visual memories may come from watching old home movies. But I have memories of Grandpa at night at supper that must have been real.

Although ... I can't swear to them because of a conversation I had as an adult with my mother where I related my memory of being in my crib in the living room of all places. I remembered it was snowing outside. I could see it through the window. And next she's pulling me in a child's sleigh with arm rests to Grandpa's house (six or seven blocks across Cornhill).

"Yes," she said, "you remember it well. You were really sick with the croop (sp?) and I pushed your crib into the living room because in that old house it was the warmest room. But I bundled you up well and took you to Grandma's house through the snow when you started coughing really heavy and I didn't know what to do, but knew Grandma would."

"I survived, I guess," I said with a smile.
"But I wonder how you remember it," she said. "You were only 6 months old."

She must have told the story before in my hearing and I had visualized all the particulars she spoke of.

[Dave]

Well, it's looks like the business begun by Bert and his younger brother Leman didn't last too long. Six months. Here's the notice, duplicated in a few newspapers and my notes. (Click to enlarge, twice with Firefox.)





I wonder what position Bert accepted in the city. In the announcement in January of '05 when the hardware store opened, Bert was said to have years of experience with Int'l Heater. So perhaps he went back to work for them. Bert died in '47, so he still had 42 years of work and retirement left.

He now had a son and wife, so he probably let any moss grow under his feet. (Is that the saying?)

And Leman "removed" to West Winfield. That the only mention I've seen of that town in regards to the Stephensons. Hopefully, there will be more. I wonder what newspaper covered their news?

[keith]

The newspaper of which I know in the area was the Richfield Springs Mercury. I believe it recently ceased publication.

[Dave]

Thanks! Yes, and older issues of the Mercury are on fultonhistory. I have also seen some coverage of West Winfield in the Cooperstown newspaper. And the Utica papers didn't do too bad of a job.

After a couple of hours of research tonight, I'm leaning toward the theory that the Stephenson family ... Bert and his brothers and sisters and parents ... spent most of their at-home family life in Whitesboro. West Winfield may have been where the father, George, came from. Leman was said to have gone to West Winfield when he and Bert dissolved the business, but I've now found Leman's obit that explains more about where they were located.

More to come.

[Dave]

Let's take a couple of sidetracks and flashbacks. Maybe they will help us discover more clues about Bert.

Bert's brother Leman married Mary Cullen in 1900. Five years later he would form a hardware business with Bert and they would dissolve the hardware store 6 months later. One of the articles from 1905 mentions that Leman removes to West Winfield. He dies in Ilion in 1948, one year after his older brother, Bert.




Reading the obit, we see that Leman moved to Ilion about 1911, from where it doesn't say, but he had a daughter in Gravesville. Google Maps places Gravesville just north of Route 28 midway between Barneveld and Poland, south of the Hinckley Reservoir. I was hoping he left a daughter behind who had married and stayed in West Winfield. But of course, since he married in 1900, the daughter would have been only 11 years at the most when Leman went to Ilion.

We see in the obit that his (and Bert's) sisters, Babe (Grace Jr, or Mrs. Albert Riddell) and Maud Stephenson also moved to Ilion. If the Legal Notice of father George's estate listed the children in birth order as it appears to, Babe and Maude (as well as little brothers George and James) would have been younger siblings. Unless the siblings were widely spaced between births, probably at least Babe and Maud would have been adults in 1911 when Leman was about 36 years old.

I remember Babe and her husband Albert Riddell (who went by the name Abe and ran a pool room just off Main St. in Ilion.) Also, I can remember going with my grandmother to visit Maud, who had an apartment in what I think might have been a Hotel building on Main St. Maud appeared mobile and I believe she was a successful woman who traveled a bit, so she may have had a career of some sort. Babe almost always sat in a wheel chair, but always had a cane next to her, so she probably was able to stand up and move about in the house.

Leman had a son, Gene, and I remember him well. He lived with his wife in a nice part of Ilion in quite a nice house. He was apparently successful, but I don't remember what he did. My grandmother was the third Mrs. Bert Stephenson and she died when I was 13. After that we may have driven down to visit Babe, Abe and Maud, as well as Gene, but not very often. Of course by that time I was in high school and would have surely begged off.

[Dave]

In 1895, when his father died, Bert was 21 and the oldest of his siblings. From information in Bert's obit, we presume he is at this time working for the International Heater company. In three years (1898) Bert will be married (to his first wife, whose identity we still haven't discovered) when his first son is born "in this city" or Utica.

I haven't yet found the father's obit. George must have been a respectable age at the time, having a 21 year old son in an era when the life expectancy for a white male was less than 50 years.

But look what was reported the year before, 1894.



Was anyone injured? Did George's loss somehow contribute to his later demise, either physically or mentally?

There was evidently some money available ten years later when Bert formed the ill-fated hardware store with brother Leman in 1905. But that may have come from Bert's work at International Heater. Still, in 1895 Bert was a young father with a wife and surely had other expenses.



Oliver Perry startled the entire country when he robbed trains in the North Country to the west of the Adirondacks in the 1890's. I have the full story in my files and can send anyone the pdf. The contrast is good and it's fairly easy to read. I may try to get it in another thread in the upcoming weeks. Remind me if I forget.

[Dave]

Does anyone know where the International Heather company of Utica was located in the city? I'm trying to find it on the 1883 Map but so far haven't. I thought it was along the Chenango Canal (later the railroad, still later the Arterial), but haven't found it yet.

Evidently Int'l Heater owned the Carton Furnace Company, whose brochure says their foundry was located on Carton Ave.

Carton Ave lies between State and Cornelia Streets, between Oriskany St. and Lafayette. This Bing sat photo shows what could have been the foundry over 100 years ago.




Here is a sample furnace fromCarton's 1897 catalog.

www.apti.org/publications/Tech-Archive/carton-furnaces1897.pdf

Bert would have gained valuable experience working on these, useful for his later furnace installation business. He probably bought the inside boiler and constructed the masonry or sheet metal shroud on the outside.





Is there an engineer in the house? (I know there is!) I've never seen a plenum like that, being used to the round variety. I imagine the shape allows for more surface area and heat pickup, and the "udders" probe deeper into the heat. Also, I'm thinking that the bottoms of the udders would take the most heat, which would provide convenient burn out points, since it looks like they may be replaceable. This would reduce the possibility of having to replace the entire plenum when a burn out point occurred at any old point on a flat bottomed plenum.


And here's Carton Av, then named Rome St. in 1883. I'll show a better graphic next time. gotta go.

[keith]

I'll have to do a drive by of the area the next time I'm downtown to see if Carton Ave is still open. I've never noticed it. The area changed a lot when the Police garage was built. Notice the vacant lot on the corner of State & Lafayette. That was the former electrical supply company building which partially collapsed a few years ago. I think it was mentioned as a former employer of yours in one of the More Stories.

I have never seen a plenum like that either. In the description for their Series A & B furnaces they note its heat transfer efficiencies allowing for slower fires to produce the same amount of hot air. Then follow several series with more conventional designs. Near the end of the manual this plenum is shown with a water boiler placed in the center of the ring producing a combo hot air / hot water furnace. That seems like a clever design.

[dicknaegele]

Carlton St was still open in the 80's when the Hess Station and the bus station were there. The taxis used to come and go through that alley. There was potholes in that street big enough to lose a sedan in, haha.

[dicknaegele]

My grandmother's house at 241 Main St. in Whitesboro had a furnace like that. It was shrouded in white masonry of some sort. It may have been an asbestos compound of some sort. Seeing that illustration brings back memories of my gram shoveling coal into that firebox and banking the fire for the night.

[Dave]

Here's a closer shot of Rome/Carlton Street in 1883:



I lived in two houses as a kid with those old "octupus" furnaces. Boy they were toasty warm!

My father would order a load of slab wood in the fall and it came in through the cellar window directly into the coal bin. He burned the wood on cool mornings in the fall or at night if necessary and when the pile got low, he called up the coal company to order a couple of tons (furnace or stove size, bigger than the chestnut I burned in this house years ago in a kitchen coal stove) and then use the rest of the slabwood to get a great fire going on which to start the bed of coal. He'd leave some wood stacked up by the side of the coal bin in case the coal fire went out during the winter for a restart. But I never remember him letting it go out. He tended the fire thrice daily: before going to work, upon coming home and at night before bed when he would bank the fire by putting on an extra layer of coal and damping the air intake. (Some people had a separate coal bin for pea coal which they used to damp the fire at night. It's small size on top of the fire cut the air flow through the fire and let you sleep later in the morning.) We never went anywhere very far in the winter so the fire never went out. On warm days you just opened the windows and doors if necessary.

You could install the actual furnace (the inside) behind any fireproof enclosure, metal or brick. Most home where I've seen them had the familiar sheet metal shroud around them. After WW II when gas mains were installed in many towns, you could have a conversion done so that it ran on gas. It was a simple device. They ran a gas pipe up from the bottom through the old grate (if they didn't remove that) and placed an ignition device at the top of the pipe, connected to a thermostat. When lit, the flame heated the plenum above through a flame spreader. Depending on the size and layout of a house, with those large cross section ducts you didn't need a fan to get the heat upstairs. Natural convection did the trick and people called this set up a "gravity furnace."

I bought a house in Endicott in 1968 that had a factory conversion in the basement. That meant the furnace had been manufactured as a coal furnace, but sent from the factory with the conversion kit. You could tell the house never burned coal because the gas pipe was immersed in the concrete floor and there wasn't a hint of coal dust anywhere. Mrs. Dave thought she smelled gas one day and called the gas company who sent someone out in less than fifteen minutes. No problem, said the service guy, but he noticed there was no flame spreader installed and said I should get one to save on my fuel bills. I always meant to during that last year we lived there, but my gas budget payment was $16 dollars a month for ten months and that was cheap even in 1968!