V. JAMES WADSWORTH.

JAMES WADSWORTH,* the author of the Public School Library system in the State of New York, and a liberal benefactor and efficient promoter of popular education, was born in Durham, Connecticut, April 20, 1768, and was the youngest of his father's three sons. The emigrant to Connecticut, from whom the family descended, was a native of the County Palatine of Durham.

He was, as far as is known, brought up in the usual rustic alternation of labor and schooling, until his entrance into Yale College, where he graduated in 1788, with the degree of B. A.

Before his graduation, his father had died, and the two younger brothers, William and James, cast about for some better means of support than their small inherited estate could give. In the pursuit of this purpose, they consulted Col. Jeremiah Wadsworth, of Hartford, whose wealth, influence, and reputation, made him a sort of chief of those of his name, and who, although his relation to them by blood could not be traced, reckoned himself their kinsman.

Col. Wadsworth, having become interested in the "Phelps and Gorham purchase," owned large tracts of land in the then unsettled interior of New York, on the Genesee River; and he proposed to the brothers to purchase part of this land from him, and to become his agents for the management of the remainder.

This offer they accepted, and in so doing displayed remarkable foresight, and decision of character. Their own property consisted of land in Durham, worth some $12,000 or $15,000, but not very Salable, and scarcely more than a basis for credit. They, however, bought a portion of Col. Wadsworth's estate, in the present townships of Geneseo and Avon, on the eastern bank of the Genesee River, and set out upon their journey to settle it, in 1790. At that time, Little Falls, on the Mohawk, was the extreme limit of the main body of cultivated ground in New York. Small clearings were beginning to appear on the German Flats and at Cosley's Manor; a couple of white families, at the sites of the present towns of Utica and Geneva, earned a scanty living by trading with the Indians; and Phelps and Gorham had their land office at Canandaigua. With these exceptions, the

*The first part of the present article is transferred or altered from a Life of Mr. Wadsworth, by Prof. Renwick, in the "Monthly Journal of Agriculture," Oct. 1846.

whole region was a wilderness, rendered more dreary by the necessary ravages of Sullivan's army, and more dangerous by the rancor which those ravages had excited in the breasts of the warriors of the Five Nations, and which was kept up by the influence of traders from the fort at Niagara, over which the British flag still floated.

To encounter the perils of this position, and to bring their land into cultivation, the brothers hired a small band of hardy axemen, in Connecticut, and purchased a sufficiency of farming implements, and provisions to last until the first crop should ripen. The whole party, with its heavy incumbrances, ascended the Hudson to Albany-then often the voyage of a week-made the long portage through the pines to Schenectady; embarked in a batteaux, on the Mohawk, not yet improved even by the partial operations of the Western Land and Navigation Company; and followed its tortuous course to the western limit of cultivation. Here cattle were purchased for future stock and present support, and the party was divided into two, with one of which James continued the laborious task of threading nameless streams, shallow and encumbered by wood-drifts; while William undertook the still more difficult one of driving the stock through the forest. They were at last again united on a small savannah on the bank of the Genesee; a spot hardly altered in appearance even now, although overlooked by a flourishing town, and by unpretending though elegant mansions.

The bold and gallant bearing of William Wadsworth, and the sagacity, moral courage, and strict justice of James, won upon the neighboring Indian chiefs to such a degree that they were the means of averting the ruin which a disaster would seemingly otherwise have brought upon their enterprise. A house had been built with no tools but the axe, crops planted, and the cattle turned out to graze in the meadow. The forest was vigorously attacked, and a clearing rapidly made. But this was followed, in the autumn, by the enervating and unmanning attack of the ague. This, to the Connecticut men, natives of a country where it was entirely unknown, presented such terrors that the hired men broke their engagement, and hurried back to the older settlements, leaving the brothers almost or quite alone in their log cabin. In this situation, mere indifference on the part of their neighbor, Big Tree, chief of the Indian village on the Genesee, might have compelled them to follow their servants; but they obtained from him ready and efficient aid; given, however, for a satisfactory equivalent, and far more than repaid to his race in their waning fortunes.

Next spring more white laborers were engaged, and no further interruption occurred in the progress of the clearing.

The Indian corn of their first crop was beaten into meal, in a mortar, fashioned by the axe from the stump of a gigantic oak, whose pestle was swung on a long and pliant pole. In the progress of the clearing the falls of a small stream were reached, where a saw and gristmill, erected by the Wadsworths, formed the nucleus of the now flourishing village of Geneseo.

The success and gradual extension of the enterprise, and of the land agency business, led to a division of labor between the two brothers. William, stronger and with a better constitution, took the direction of the agricultural labors, and of much of the land office business; while James undertook the traveling needed for their own business, and for communicating with the landholders for whom they acted. That the latter found full employment, may be judged from the fact that the only method which seemed available for using the exuberant fertility of their meadows was the purchase, fattening, and sale of cattle. These were bought young and lean at the east, driven to Geneseo, and, when fit for market, again driven to the remote marts of New York or Philadelphia, or to Hornellsville, on the Susquehanna, thence to be transported, in "arks," to Baltimore.

Emigration to the west, again, had nothing of its later spontaneous movement and seeming fascination. It therefore became the duty of James Wadsworth to travel on horseback, through the most thickly inhabited parts of the country, and endeavor to find buyers for wild lands, or tenants for those already under cultivation, in the places of their birth.

The most ready to remove were the poorest; in many cases, those whose lands, by subdivision of inheritances, had become insufficient for their support. As these could often find no buyer for their property, it was often taken in payment for land in the Genesee valley, or for the outfit necessary to transport a family thither, and was then itself to be sold or rented. In some cases six acres of the virgin western soil were given for one of little better than a rock in New England; whose relative values, after fifty years, have certainly reversed, so that, while the objects of the Wadsworths completely succeeded, those who bought of them have increased their capital thirtysix fold.

The success of the brothers in drawing settlers to their own lands, and to those for which they were agents, being obviously due, in a great measure, to the personal address and business talents of James Wadsworth, caused him to be requested, in 1796, to proceed to England, for the purpose of interesting capitalists there in the lands of Western New York. This he accepted and filled with success; and,

by virtue of the high character of his principles, and the nature of his errand, gained admission into such society, and intercourse with such individuals as were most qualified to enlarge and improve the mind, and polish the manners of a young man of such good natural endowments, and so apt a disposition. Thus, his naturally prepossessing manner and address lost whatever they may have had of native provincialism, and gained their remarkable, and even cosmopolitan polish and refinement.

The results of Mr. Wadsworth's mission to Europe, in the purchase of great masses of land by capitalists there, and in the measures adopted to open them to civilization, and fill them with settlers, had effects on the prosperity of the region in which he lived little understood then and almost forgotten now. In direct contradiction to a common popular belief that great subdivision of landed property is best, and that ownership of large tracts of it is a public evil, it was the case that the region thus settled, opened out as it was by roads and bridges, and set with schools and churches, all liberally aided by these large owners, far outstripped, in improvement, the more accessible and equally fertile Military Tract, portioned out by New York among its revolutionary soldiers. The people of the former, in need. of transportation for their surplus produce, enterprising and intelligent, and led by vigorous minds, formed the popular force, by wielding which, Clinton carried the decision to construct the Erie Canal, against the vote of New York and the river counties.

The foreign proprietors of lands in Western New York, drew their income and spent it at home. The Wadsworths, however, made it a rule to reinvest their profits at home, by purchasing land; so that, while portions of the original estate were sold, it was the case that more land than was sold was added to it.

By the death of Gen. William Wadsworth, James became the sole proprietor of the whole of this estate, which is probably the only instance, since the revolutionary war, of the investment of a fortune, earned by a whole life, solely in agricultural property. Most wealth acquired by trade in land has been invested in city lots, or in moneyed security. The enormous sums thus drawn from Western New York, and the additionally flourishing condition to which it would have risen, had they been reinvested at home, are scarcely conceivable.

The Wadsworth estate was partly kept in their own hands, partly leased, and partly cultivated on shares. The home farm, managed under their immediate direction, was about 2,000 acres, more than half being a rich alluvial flat on the Genesee, and was for many years the only portion which yielded any profit. This came partly from

cattle raising, and partly from the cultivation of hemp. Notwithstanding the value of the adjoining uplands for raising of wheat, grazing was always the chief object on the home farm, on the principle that grain could not be so well raised by hired labor; and the same reason prevented him from raising root crops.

The leaseholds, at first for two lives, were afterward changed to terms of years, which was the form subsequently used. These farms were usually of about one hundred acres, and the rents were fixed at a money standard, though almost never paid in money until the introduction of government funds in that region, during the war of 1812, and the subsequent establishment of banks there.

But

Farms larger than these were usually leased for shorter terms, and for one-third the grain crops, and a stipulated sum for portions not ploughed. Mr. Wadsworth looked for the same punctuality and good faith, in payment of rent from his tenants, that he used himself; and hence was, by the improvident or careless, reputed severe. this was an unmerited opinion, as none acquainted with his benevolence and equable temper will doubt. And careful inquiries, made on the spot, justify the inference that his tenants were, on the whole, more comfortable, and laid up more money, than those who bought similar neighboring land on credit.

Mr. Wadsworth married, in 1804, Naomi Wolcott,* of East Windsor, Connecticut. Of his children by this marriage, three survived him. In his wife he found tastes and dispositions congenial to his own, and all who knew her had the highest opinion of her worth. Under her judicious management, in the difficult circumstances which beset housekeeping in a new country, the mansion at Geneseo was a model of orderly, generous, and unostentatious hospitality.

The loss of his wife, his brother, and a daughter, just married, shed a gloom over his later years; but he still took pleasure in gathering a circle of friends at Geneseo, during the season when it was readily accessible. Intelligent, well informed, and fond of intellectual conversation, he had, in a high degree, the power of drawing out and happily combining the conversational and social faculties of his guests. His visitors never felt ennui; and, though he laid no restriction upon games of chance or skill, it is said that none of them felt any desire for such amusements during the last twenty years of his life.

The success of Mr. Wadsworth's career was in great part due to his regularity and skill in business. By tact and method, he disposed, day by day, of his extensive business as farmer, owner, manager, land

* Miss Wolcott was a daughter of Samuel Wolcott, Esq., and a cousin of the Hon. Oliver Wolcott, secretary of the treasury of the United States under Washington; both were lineal descendants from Henry Wolcott, one of the first settlers of Windsor, Connecticut.