Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  He offered to pay Joseph to travel there. The young man would guide a party intent on finding a Spanish silver mine that the fifty-five-year-old Stowell had searched for in vain on his property. Joseph enlisted on the condition that his father be included in the expedition. Formal articles of agreement were drawn up, declaring that the hunt was for “a valuable mine of either Gold or Silver.” It allotted to the Smiths two-elevenths of all the property obtained.

  The site of the purported mine was near the town of Harmony, twenty-five miles down the river from Stowell’s farm and just over the border into Pennsylvania. The Smiths spent a month directing the search. They uncovered no precious metals, but Joseph found a treasure in Harmony that he valued more highly than any amount of wealth. He had fallen in love.

  Magnificent

  David Stanhope Bates had studied for the ministry and had planned to spend his life praising God’s great work. Now in 1820, trudging through the soggy soil along Irondequoit Creek, he was contemplating what would be man’s greatest work on the continent. The deep gorge lay ten miles east of the settlement on the Genesee still known as Rochesterville. What Bates saw disturbed him. The ground was sandy and unstable, an accumulation of sediment. Seventy feet above him, like a chimera floating in thin air, was the path where the canal would have to pass.

  “At the center of all engineering,” wrote the historian of technology Elting Morison, “lies the problem of converting knowledge to practice.” This problem is both obvious and profound. Knowing is one thing, doing another. Converting the abstract to the concrete is the enormous test of ingenuity.

  While studying celestial truths in the seminary, Bates had become intrigued by mathematics. The interest did not conflict with his religion. As far back as Newton, men had seen numbers as a means for understanding the mind of God. For the young seminarian, science did not exclude the Lord; rather, it offered a clearer vision of His creation.

  Nevertheless, Bates had abandoned his clerical studies, married, and become a merchant. In 1810, a landowner in Oneida County, still the remote frontier, hired Bates to survey his property. The young man moved his family to Constantia, an isolated settlement on the northwest shore of Oneida Lake. His three sons loved the frontier wildness and spent their youth playing with the children of the remaining Oneida Indians. The very summer they arrived, DeWitt Clinton and his delegation passed by on their tour to judge the feasibility of a canal. To pioneers like Bates, the notion seemed laughable.

  But in 1817, the canal was about to become a reality and would pass just south of Oneida Lake. Bates, now forty, already knew Benjamin Wright, the lead engineer on the project. Bates parlayed his surveying experience and general ingenuity into a position as section engineer. He would plan and manage the path of the canal as it moved from Syracuse westward to Rochester.

  After the execrable mire of the Montezuma Marshes, the gash created by Irondequoit Creek was the principal challenge along this part of the route. When James Geddes had surveyed the area in 1808, he came close to pronouncing the valley an absolute bar to an inland canal. He managed to trace a path from the Genesee River to the Irondequoit, avoiding all high ground. The canal could march down the western side of the valley, with plentiful water to work the locks. But there was no source of water to bring it back up the eastern slope. The only solution was to run the canal at a level straight across the wide gap. But how?

  Geddes had discovered three large mounds of soil left by glaciers in the valley. Filling the gaps between these piles would create an enormous embankment on which the canal could ride. The task was Herculean but, he thought, achievable. When Geddes imagined boats that “would one day pass along on the tops of these fantastic ridges,” he felt disposed “to exclaim Eureka.”

  Geddes’s survey had supplied the knowledge; now it was up to David Bates to convert the plan to practice. As the canal trudged westward, the time came when the Irondequoit Valley had to be bridged. The commissioners, who were always nervous about costs, saw a cheaper alternative to Geddes’s farfetched earth-moving project. A seventy-foot-high wooden trestle could be built quickly and at much less public expense. Along its top, a sealed trough would carry the canal. “Economy induced us to make the substitute,” they admitted.

  The commissioners were encouraged by a bridge recently constructed nearby. The town of Carthage lay between Rochester and Lake Ontario at a point where the Genesee River had gouged a deep, seven-hundred-foot-wide gorge. Bolting timbers together, workmen had built a huge wooden arch anchored on the opposing banks to carry a road two hundred feet above the water. It was the largest wooden bridge in the world, a symbol of American know-how. A master carpenter on the job was asked how he had determined what size timbers to use. “I take the average judgement,” he said, “then guess and allow.”

  Workers finished the bridge in 1818. Fifteen months after it opened, the span failed and crashed into the river below. The canal commissioners noted the calamity and thought better of their economical approach at the Irondequoit Valley.

  The decision to build an embankment, Bates saw, raised another issue. Besides its lower cost, a wooden trestle would have been far lighter than the thousands of tons of fill needed to connect the valley ridges. The embankment would have to be thirty feet wide at the top, more than two hundred at the bottom. It would tower seventy feet over the valley. Bates had no basis on which to make precise calculations, but he sensed that the ground along the creek would not support such weight. If the soil shifted, or slid, or subsided, it would disturb the trough, spill the canal water, perhaps cause the entire earthwork to avalanche down.

  Guided by common sense, Bates decided to sink nine hundred log pilings, each a foot thick and up to twenty feet long, through the soil to bedrock. On top of them, workmen constructed a heavy timber mat to support the tons of dirt above. Bates informed Benjamin Wright of his plan, which was based largely on guesswork. The idea, Wright wrote back, “appears to be correct. I pray you to see that the piles are well and faithfully driven. It is all important to the safety of the whole work that there should be no settling nor any precariousness, as you know that would destroy all instantly.”

  Once the pilings and wooden floor were in place, stonemasons used them to support a 26-foot-high, 245-foot-long arched culvert that would allow the creek to flow under the embankment. This impressive structure was finished in 1821. The next year, workmen began to unload and pack in place wagonload after wagonload of dirt. Inspectors examined each to make sure it was not too sandy or too pebble-strewn to prevent cohesion.

  Local farmers welcomed the work. They shoveled the dirt into wagons from mounds and banks around the area, hauled it to the site, and dumped it. All during the 1822 season, they amassed soil, the weight of their wagons and horses helping to pack it down as it accumulated. They piled a mound above the creek as high as a seven-story building. Incorporating the existing ridges, the whole embankment stretched nearly a mile.

  Bates was quick to correct any shortcomings. He was an urbane, good-natured man, very discreet. If he saw a contractor cutting corners, he might comment to an assistant engineer within the man’s hearing that he must have given unclear instructions about how the job was to be done.

  At the top of the embankment, the laborers pounded in additional pilings to firm the soil. They gouged a trench and constructed a timber trough. This they lined with three inches of clay. Along the length of the ditch, workmen performed this crucial “puddling,” applying layer after layer of clay to keep the water in. The work proceeded quickly. In October 1822, Bates ordered the safety dams opened. The water flowed in. Hundreds of onlookers held their breath. If the weight of the water cracked the trough or a significant leak developed, all could be lost. Bates at first restricted the section to only a foot of water. The channel held. Each night, the water was drained. After two days of this, he raised the water level to two feet. Again, the channel proved impermeable, the
structure solid.

  The anxiety did not abate. Bates had never designed such a work, and no one could forget the fate of the Carthage Bridge. At first, this portion of the canal carried only shallow-draft boats. Heavy shipments from Rochester’s flour mills had to be moved by wagon around the embankment before being sent down the canal farther east. During the 1823 season, the trough was lined with another thick layer of clay and filled with three feet of water. Leaks were repaired over the winter, and by 1824 it was ready to be brought up to the standard four feet. The project was a success.

  Crossing the embankment became an experience no traveler could forget. Passengers craned their necks from packet boats. As they glided above the tops of trees they could look down and see people gazing at them from below. The sensation seemed to presage a new era. Boosters at Rochester toasted the Erie Canal as “Stupendous! Magnificent!”

  Ill-Advised Zeal

  Lucinda Morgan waited anxiously in Batavia for her husband to come home. His breakfast went cold. Lucinda paced. She fed her daughter and infant son. She finally left the apartment, children in tow, to make inquiries. Word had gotten around. She was told that William had been bundled off to Canandaigua by six men.

  She spent a sleepless night, then went to see Sheriff William Thompson in Batavia. She knew the game. Freemasons had cooked up the spurious charges against William in order to apprehend him. They held power in western New York, and they were determined to stop Morgan from publishing his book.

  She wanted her husband home, and she was ready to make a deal. If she handed over some of her husband’s papers, would it secure his release? Thompson said it was “very likely.” Masons probably suspected that the papers contained descriptions of rituals beyond the three degrees of the brotherhood that Morgan had already detailed in the book. The sheriff asked if Lucinda had anyone to accompany her to Canandaigua. She mentioned a friend, Horace Gibbs. Gibbs would not do, Thompson said. He was not a Mason. It had to be a Mason. He asked her if she knew a Mr. Follett. No, she did not. He was a gentleman, the sheriff said. A gentleman and a Mason. He would take her.

  She found someone to care for little Lucy, but she could not leave behind the nursing two-month-old Thomas Jefferson Morgan. Before she left, she had to show her husband’s papers to Mr. Follett and another man, a Mr. Ketchum. They “did not want to go on a tom fool’s errand,” they told her. They looked at the documents and, seemingly satisfied, set out with her in a dusty carriage.

  Along the way, they stopped at the hamlet of Stafford a few miles east of Batavia, where they conferred with more Masons. These men suggested that Morgan possessed additional documents that Lucinda was holding back. Now Follett told her he would not waste his time trying to help her. Mr. Ketchum was headed for Rochester. If she wished, he would drop her at Canandaigua on the way. She agreed and they continued, stopping at an inn for the night.

  In the morning, Lucinda rode in silence as they joggled and creaked past fields of late-summer goldenrod. She was scared and angry. Like many women, she hated the Masons. They made it difficult to maintain a decent home life. They encouraged heavy drinking, one of William’s weaknesses. Their all-male, lodge-centered activities left women sitting home alone.

  Mr. Ketchum delivered her to Canandaigua about noon on Wednesday, two days after her husband had gone missing. An outpost on the main road through western New York, the handsome city boasted five schools, several libraries, and three churches. The sidewalks were paved.

  Mr. Ketchum left Lucinda and little Tommy at a tavern while he went to inquire. He returned after dinner and said that a man from Pennsylvania had appeared in the city with a warrant for William’s arrest. He had taken Morgan away. No one knew where. It was the end of the road. Ketchum said he was sorry.

  A frantic Lucinda demanded more information. The petite woman’s powerful personality gave Ketchum qualms. He went away again. Near dark, he returned and confessed that the Masons were holding her husband. Morgan would not be killed, but the brothers needed more of his papers. They also wanted the printed book pages from Miller’s shop. The project had to be stopped, the idea of the book abandoned.

  Ketchum said he would keep the papers she had brought with her. He would give her two dollars traveling money and pay her stagecoach fare back to Batavia. If she turned over the required documents, he could assure her that she would receive twenty-five dollars and maybe as much as a hundred. Outraged, she rejected what was, for her, a serious sum. She wanted her husband back.

  Infant in arms, she boarded the stagecoach on Thursday night for the return trip to Batavia. Back home, she received a visit from Thomas McCully, Master of the Batavia Masonic Lodge. William was still technically a member of the order, he told her. She and her children would be provided for from the Masonic Charity Fund.

  Destitute as she was, she insisted that she would never take help from her husband’s enemies. She had few friends in town, but she would make do. She turned to George Harris, the silversmith who ran a shop downstairs from her apartment. Harris, repelled by the Masons’ actions, offered to help her through the crisis.

  She learned that printer David Miller had also been abducted by the brotherhood. A mob of about fifty men, “most of whom were furnished with large clubs,” had apprehended him and transported him to Stafford. He was “guarded as a criminal,” before being taken on to Le Roy. A magistrate in that town could find no reason to hold him. Unlike William Morgan, he was set free.

  Lucinda was at a loss. Law and order were in the hands of local sheriffs and magistrates, almost all of whom were allied with the Freemasons. None were willing to investigate William’s disappearance.

  But as the news spread, the people of western New York began to stir. The Masons’ flagrant actions offended their sense of civic virtue. Their grandfathers had fought to establish a nation of laws, freedom, and equality. The republic was being mocked by a secretive association of quasi-aristocrats.

  Citizens in surrounding towns called public meetings to discuss the matter. One, in Victor, near Canandaigua, passed resolutions that a newspaper reported “are of a very strong character, calculated to produce effect. This affair is becoming very serious.” A judicious editor warned that the ancient and benevolent institution of Freemasonry “will be brought into disrepute from the hasty and ill-advised zeal of some of its members.”

  The Masons, so recently considered among the most upstanding and respectable of citizens, began to appear shady. Rumors held that their secrecy stemmed from conspiratorial, even criminal motives. The common people were taking a fresh look at their betters. They saw arrogant and calculating elitists.

  Sensing a crisis, Governor Clinton issued a proclamation to state officers and ministers of justice. He declared that “outrages and oppressions have been committed on the rights of persons residing in the village of Batavia.” He insisted that every official make an effort aimed at “the apprehension of the offenders, and the prevention of future outrages.” Grand juries were empaneled to dissect the mystery.

  Publisher David Miller was eager to take advantage of the interest in the case suddenly crackling through the region. In November, two months after Morgan’s disappearance, he hurriedly issued the first ninety pages of the book. Meanwhile, he continued to set type for the rest of the volume. Peddlers hawked the first portion of Illustrations of Masonry around the countryside. They even staged events at which citizens could pay a fee to hear a portion of the text read aloud.

  By December, the entire book was available. That same month, the first grand jury to investigate Morgan’s disappearance completed its work in Rochester. The members found that “the said Morgan was carried through this village on the morning of the 13th of September last, before daylight.” But with numerous witnesses refusing to testify, the grand jury declared that it was “impossible to establish, by competent testimony, the unlawful agency of any citizen of this county.” Befo
re Christmas, the Rochester Telegraph reported that “several persons have been for some days engaged with spears and rakes, in fishing for the body of Morgan, along the Genesee River.”

  Soon afterward, at a public meeting in Bloomfield, on the Canandaigua-Batavia road, citizens passed resolutions condemning “unparalleled outrages upon private property and personal liberty, by an organized mob.” The conclave noted the “studied silence” of journalists. “We condole with Mrs. Lucinda Morgan, in her afflictions,” they stated. For Lucinda, the affair was neither a matter of public outrage nor an intriguing mystery. It was a sharp and unrelenting ache in her heart.

  The political tempest along the canal continued to mount. Citizens resolved to discover Morgan’s fate, “that if living, he may be restored to his friends, and if dead his murderers may be brought to justice.”

  And still the question remained: Where was William Morgan?

  Gold Bible

  In December 1825, the Joseph Smith family faced acute financial pressure. They needed to get their hands on enough cash to satisfy several payments they had missed on their farm mortgage. They also had to meet the demands of Calvin Stoddard, the carpenter they had hired to finish the frame house after Alvin died two years earlier. The situation escalated to crisis when Stoddard showed up with two other men and told Hyrum, “We have bought the place.”

  Lucy rushed to the office of the land agent in Canandaigua. He told her that Stoddard had accused Hyrum of cutting down sugar maples, hauling off fence rails, and doing “all manner of mischief to the farm.” That was why he had agreed to sell. Now he felt he had been duped. At a meeting, the land agent asked Stoddard and his friends not to crush the Smith family’s prospects. But rumors of what Joseph had found on the hilltop had become common knowledge. “Oh, no matter about Smith,” the carpenter scoffed, “he has gold plates, gold Bibles, he is rich.” He relented slightly. If the Smiths could produce a thousand dollars in two days, he would hand over the deed.