THE WIZARD'S KIN

      “I was to assist David Dunning and Mr. Teed and receive an amount of $1000 to be split between me and Dunning. The plan that was fixed upon was for Dunning to walk out with Jennings if he could get an opportunity. I was to follow and shoot him. Mr. Conklin loaded his gun with bird-shot and handed me a horn and bag of shot to take with me. He told me to go across the fields and Teed and Dunning would be waiting at Teed’s house. This was Sat. 20^th Dec. last. Turned out only Hannah, Charlie and Dunning was there. They said Mr. Teed gone to NY.”- Jack Hodges

     Feeling cornered by both his mother and uncle, James Teed acquiesced to Conklin’s gumming up of the legal process….. until he could figure out something better. The plan was to buy time, squeeze Richard Jennings for his outstanding debts, using this leverage to secure the property for Teed and his sister Hannah. David Conklin would spend months buying up Richard Jennings’  financial obligations. After obtaining a majority of Jennings’ debt, David Conklin hired the Goshen constables to collect. Cattle were confiscated under questionable writs and even the Jennings women took up arms in defense of their family livestock and property, to no avail. They would be disarmed, tied up, and hauled off to the gaol. For some reason the Jennings women, Sally and Mary Ann were never called as witnesses at any of the trials, but they were directly involved throughout this period. Referred to in court testimony by A. O. Houghton, as coming “violently upon us with weapons,” you’d think their testimony pertinent.

     Because there is little or no political undercurrent in 1819, accounts of the trials reported in the local newspaper, “The Orange County Patriot,” conveniently ignore the possible societal underpinnings, or past civil unrest, that made my female cousins run down the road waving loaded muskets. The tories, Indians and whigs of the revolution were only a generation removed in 1818. It was one thing for James Teed and David Dunning to occupy the house (now officially owned by Conklin), cut timber and burn brush. It was another for Conklin to hire law officers to take cattle, call in loans, and attempt to demolish a standing building. For the women to take up arms in protection of their domain from private interests, as well as civil authorities, was extreme for the times but not unheard of in the not so distant past. In either case, the harried constables knew all too well that a man’s permission was not required for a woman to pull a trigger. Everybody stay calm.   

        On April 7, 1925, The Shamokin News-Dispatch ran an engagement notice for Ann Maria Osterhout and Theodore Edison. They misidentified her father Dr. Winthrop Jon as “William J. Osterhout, of Harvard University.” Theodore Edison graduated from M.I.T., while Ann was still an undergrad at Vassar. The wedding was to take place at Appleton Chapel at Harvard. Because of the fame of Thomas Alvah Edison the Edison-Osterhout nuptials were announced in newspapers across the world. The Oakland Tribune printed a picture above the fold on the April 26th front page, announcing the former Ann Osterhout of Berkeley, “Becomes Wizard’s Kin.” The United Press wire service also carried the wedding announcement noting breathlessly, “The Edison-Firestone-Ford triumvirate gathered again this afternoon for the wedding of Miss Ann Maria Osterhout…” Our noses were closer to the screen than I ever thought possible.   

        I know more about the Edisons, and Ann and Winthrop Jon Van Leuvan Osterhout than I do about my own great grandfather Andrew. He remains an enigma. I know even less of my great grandmother Elsie Decker. The silence is telling. I’m assuming Andrew’s illiteracy, poverty, bad temperament and bad breaks contributed to their rocky marriage and divorce, while ostracizing his children. This very early snipping of the Osterhout umbilical cord after their divorce was why my grandfather had never heard of the wealthy Osterhouts of Harvard and U.C. Berkeley, or the connection to the Edisons of NJ. These buds all sprouted from the same withered and stressed Wawarsing branch. Who knows why one became a Harvard professor, while another worked for the Crabtrees. Andrew was, just like Jack Hodges’ parents, “ignorant and poor,” and for whatever reason his plight in life would never get much better.

     Ann Maria’s paternal grandfather John Osterhout came from the same secluded nook of the Catskills as my farmhand/seamster, great grandfather and his wife Elsie Decker. Again, these were not distant relationships. Winthrop’s father Rev. John Van Leuvan Osterhout, Andrew Osterhout and Elsie Decker were all born in the “bird’s nest,” (Wawarsing), NY, a small flat of corn fields and creek bottoms a few square miles wide. This particular John Osterhout left the bird’s nest in the 1860’s. Andrew followed, finding his way 20 miles east to Montgomery. Somehow avoiding the Civil War, John went to college, seminary, and became the pastor of the Broadway Baptist Church in Providence, R.I. Andrew got a job at the mill. That’s where the brilliant Osterhout genes ended up- Rhode Island!   

     In a parallel universe the youngest son of the most famous man on earth married the daughter of a prominent University of California and Harvard professor with a very long Dutch name. This had no effect whatsoever on my grandfather or any other Montgomery or Walden Osterhouts. My grandfather was also falling in love in 1925, courting the pretty, older, Maude S. Miller. I don’t think they ever quite fit, but they got, and stayed married anyway. Ann and Theodore Edison did fit and their childless union would effortlessly fold into the Edison dynasty. 

     As it turned out the entitled couple wouldn’t wreak a fraction of the havoc that men like Thomas Edison and his buddies Ford and Firestone would. In fact, the pair were dedicated, socially aware, and actually did some good. They stayed married, worked quietly, took Ann’s ailing mother into their home, and lived into their nineties…… never making much of a fuss. Credited with saving a small everglade forest with their activism, their little green legacy lives on. Ann’s father left us the “The Journal of General Physiology,” and her father-in-law Mr. Edison, left us addiction to convenience, and the burden of paying for it all. The debt is mounting. Little sister Olga (the artist) married a Sears. The Osterhout sisters would become famous for marrying well. Celebrity trailed closely behind the electric light bulb, catalog shopping, and ever better ways to view pornography.