CHAPTER ELEVEN- "YOU EAT MY LIVER AND I WILL EAT YOURS."

    “Thus have I stood and listened at my door till the last tread of the chaplain’s feet died away in the distance…. Reader, those was the dark and gloomy days when gross darkness hovered over the prison, and the prisoners sat in one total darkness of ignorance and heathenism. Those dark days when no prisoner was allowed to write a letter to his friends or to make one single mark with a pencil  and though the Hon. Wm. H. Seward was chief justice of the state, yet he in all his power couldn’t grant the prisoner the privilege writing one kind word Home to his friends, though they laid at the point of death”.- Rob Reed The Life an Adventures of a Haunted Convict

      In 1842, a cousin of John L. Hardenbergh, Cornelius W. Hardenberg was sitting in the Monticello, New York jail writing furiously. Like Austin Reed, he was working on his life’s work, and he didn’t have much time to spare. He’d been sentenced to hang for the murder of a prominent family member, his uncle Anthony Hasbrouck and the clock was ticking. His manuscript was aptly titled: The Life and Confession of C.W. Hardenbergh, and just like Austin Reed, it was his summing up of things, after a hard life. He didn’t want to leave anything out. The complete manuscript has disappeared, but there’s enough printed material left to piece together Cornelius’ story. Newspaper publisher, and local Sullivan County historian James E.  Quinlan printed parts, (just like I’m doing) in serial form, in his Monticello Republican Watchman.

   C.W.’s father Dr. Benjamin Hardenbergh and mother, Cornelia Wynkoop, (another prominent local Dutch family with deep roots in the Catskills) resided on Lot #3 of the Hardenbergh Patent, in my backyard, between the towns of Liberty and Neversink. The accused murderer grew up spoiled and entitled, in his own words, “nursed in the lap of parental indulgence.” After his father, the manor lord Gross Hardenbergh, was murdered, Dr. Benjamin Hardenbergh (surgeon and bootlegger) moved his family up the old mine road to Stone Ridge. There, the family started a small distillery and both father and son developed a hereditary taste for booze, carrying on the alien tradition of becoming hopeless alcoholics.  

    After a short time in Stone Ridge father and son moved back to Liberty, leaving Mrs. Hardenbergh to see to the still. In Liberty, the handsome Cornelius got an impressionable young Liberty debutante pregnant, an event that would haunt C.W. the rest of his short life. In his jailhouse memoir C.W. Hardenbergh  concentrated many passages on the unforgettable pregnant girl drifting through his dreams; at times holding a bloody baby, imploring the wayward father to take the child—and a little responsibility.

   Father and son drank most of the Hardenbergh fortune away, eventually ending up in squalor and  bankruptcy. The entire Hardenbergh family inheritance and property holdings were now gone. Eventually C.W. forgot the abandoned young mother, married and had more children. According to newspaperman Quinlan, Hardenbergh now with  a wife and five kids to feed, destitute, and living near South Fallsburgh, looked out his window one day and saw a tornado bearing down on the family shack. He took to his knees in prayer.

   Unlike a book, you can hold in your lap, with a serialization you have no idea how long the journey will take. I feel like I’m putting you at a distinct disadvantage. The lucky reader of the printed page knows how many pages he or she has left in the book. To those of you (family or not) who have religiously followed this online writing I offer my sincerest thanks. We are on page 208.You don’t have far to go. One day I hope to intoxicate you with a shiny cover, the weighty page and pungent smell of ink….until then…. please keep reading.

     As I write this all my siblings are alive and well, but not all on on speaking terms. When I first started researching the Richard Jennings murder I told my brother Ross it reminded me of a similar family argument over real estate, warning him that bodies may soon start popping up along the wood line. He just shook his head and groaned. We both knew what I was referring to.

    Over a decade ago Ross, my sister Susan and their respective families, went into a partnership on a beautiful little piece of property in Vermont, overlooking Lake Champlain. They called it Camp What the Fuck. I remember seeing snapshots of all the adults and kids from both families, smiling, working, playing together, mugging for the camera. It looked like a hell of a lot of fun. But, behind the scenes, the place was fraught with problems from the very beginning. Shifting mud slides, collapsed spring lines, algae blooms and contentious disagreements over sketchy construction plagued the property from day one. Still, they were all family and happy to be in it together. Nobody felt there was a problem they couldn’t overcome. Until…..

    A couple of years into constructing their duo-family vacation dream home, my sister and her husband decided their finances were tight and they wanted out of the dream that was turning nightmarish. I don’t know (nor do I want to know) all the details on how this was communicated. Through emails, phone calls, letters, lawyers, bankers, and a shitload of miscommunication, my brother Ross and his family ended up with the property (all the problems) and a lot of bad blood on both sides. I hesitate to even broach the subject, but feel as the “family historian” I must. I love my brothers and sister dearly. But! What the fuck? It kills me that neither side has resolved this tear in the family fabric. I know it’s none of my business, but I can’t help myself. Tick-fucking-tock! PLEASE TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. If anyone hears of a hit being offered to a sailor and a ranch hand in Connecticut, over a small chunk of real estate, call me first. I may have just lost two of my most loyal readers.