Dorothy’s father, a commanding figure with a receding hairline and a bushy walrus mustache, was known in Auburn for his quick wit and his generosity. On his birthday every year, all of the guests would find twenty-dollar gold coins in their napkins. Dorothy looked forward to the formal family dinner each night, seeing it as an opportunity to spend uninterrupted time with her parents and her older brothers and sisters. She particularly liked sitting next to her handsome brother Carl, despite his occasional offhand cruelty. One evening she showed him her new pair of white button boots, and when he teased her about her baby fat, she burst into loud sobs and was sent to her room. There was no discussion about who was to blame. Mrs. Woodruff was a strict disciplinarian, and the children were forbidden to interrupt or ask questions at the table. Nevertheless, Dorothy, the product of a pre-psychoanalytic culture, looked back on her childhood in almost idyllic terms. She said of her father, “We just swallowed everything he said and thought it was perfect.”
She spent much of her time with her maternal grandmother, Anna Porter Beardsley, a short, erect woman with a strong but embracing personality. Anna had four colonial governors in her lineage, and Dorothy was expected to know their histories. That branch of the Beardsleys lived in a rambling clapboard Greek Revival house, with extensive formal gardens and a level expanse of lawn on which the family gathered to play croquet. The grounds were kept by a gardener who had a square-trimmed beard, a strong Irish brogue, and always kept a clay pipe in his mouth.
On cool days, Dorothy often found her grandmother reading on her bedroom sofa, a wood fire burning in the fireplace. The room contained a bed, a bureau, and a dressing table, painted a pale green, that Dorothy’s grandparents had bought soon after they were married. She was told that the furniture had been made by Italian inmates at the Auburn state prison on the other side of town, and she noticed that they had decorated it in delicate brushstrokes with butterflies, trees, and flowers. In the summer, the gardener lined up tomatoes and peaches to ripen on the railing of a porch off the dressing room.
The drawing room, with a white marble fireplace and tall windows covered by embroidered French white curtains, was used only for formal occasions, such as funerals and the Beardsleys’ holiday dinners. “The Beardsley family and its connections by marriage had grown so large,” according to one account of early Auburn, “that when the family Christmas dinner was eventually reduced to twenty-five, it seemed to some of the members so small [as] to be hardly worth having.”
Dorothy’s mother and father were married in the Beardsley mansion in 1872 near a wooden full-length mirror set on a low marble stand. Her father told her that the only thing he remembered about the wedding was looking into the mirror and seeing the shine on his boots—“not very romantic to my young ears.” To Dorothy, the dining room was memorable chiefly for the heating register in the floor, where she and her sisters liked to stand and feel the warm air billow their skirts around their legs. Her grandfather had his own use for the heating vent: a servant warmed his pie on it before it was served to him.
Alonzo Beardsley had an aquiline nose, very blue eyes, a bald pink head with a fringe of white hair, and a trailing white beard on which he was apt to spill food. He and his brother Nelson were among the richest men in Auburn. In 1848, along with several colleagues, they had invested in a cornstarch factory nearby. The many uses for cornstarch—from stiffening shirt collars to thickening blancmange—were just being discovered, and in the decades after the Civil War, the Oswego Starch Factory became the most extensive factory of its kind in the world. Each year it burned six thousand tons of coal and used 701,000 pounds of paper and five million board feet of lumber. After dinner, Alonzo retired to his library, which had a floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcase with glass panes in the door. The only books Dorothy ever took out were James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, and she read them all.
She was happiest when she was with Rosamond. The Underwoods’ good spirits were contagious, and Ros, who had three brothers but no sisters, cherished her companionship. Ros’s mother, Grace, was almost completely deaf—the result of an attack of scarlet fever when she was thirty. No one took much notice of her handicap, despite the ear trumpet she sometimes used. “Mrs. Underwood was a remarkable mother,” Dorothy said with unintended poignancy, “because she was so understanding of children and used to play games with us.” Mr. Underwood called her “Dotty with the laughing eyes.”
Judge Underwood had a keen sense of humor and was a gifted musician who had taught himself to read music and play the piano. At family gatherings, he produced jingles and poems he had written, and Rosamond loved the evenings “when Papa sat alone at the beautiful Steinway piano, sometimes for hours, roaming over the keyboard. He could pass from jazz to grand opera, from hymns to Gilbert and Sullivan’s productions, singing the latter with his good voice.” Dorothy remembered that one night, after the judge and Ros and her brothers returned from a musical at the Burtis Opera House, he sat down and played the entire score by heart.
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As Dorothy grew up, she absorbed the city’s spirit of entrepreneurship and noblesse oblige, along with some of the radical thinking about the rights of blacks and women and the working class that had infiltrated an otherwise conservative stronghold. The children of Auburn’s gentry learned most of their American history through stories their parents and grandparents told about the city’s prominent citizens. William H. Seward had moved to Auburn as a young man and married the daughter of the judge he had worked for before starting his own law practice. Dorothy’s great-uncle Nelson Beardsley later became a partner of Seward’s at Seward & Beardsley. One of her aunts, Mary Woodruff, was a good friend of Seward’s daughter Fanny.
Seward, the foremost of the Auburn radicals, was short and clean-shaven, with red hair, a raspy voice, and a sharp, swooping nose that prompted Henry Adams to refer to him as “a wise macaw.” In 1846, after serving two terms as governor, Seward represented a twenty-three-year-old black man named William Freeman who was charged with stabbing to death a white family of four in nearby Fleming. The victims were a pregnant woman, her husband, her son, and her mother. People in Auburn were stunned by the crime and warned that whoever defended Freeman could expect retribution. As Freeman was escorted to jail, he was almost lynched by a mob.
Seward’s wife, Frances, was passionately interested in abolition, women’s rights, and her husband’s work, and she helped him with his research. Freeman’s family had a history of mental illness, but the Sewards believed that he became deranged after repeated beatings in the Auburn prison, where he was held for five years for horse stealing, a crime he almost certainly did not commit.
During the trial, Seward made an early use of the insanity defense. His library on South Street, which today is filled with the pleasant smell of moldering leather bindings, contains a dense volume published in 1845 called Principles of Forensic Medicine. One of the passages that Frances marked in the margins with two heavy lines in black ink was “Non compos mentis is one of four sorts.” In Seward’s summation to the jury, he argued: “I am the lawyer for society, for mankind, shocked beyond the power of expression, at the scene I have witnessed here of trying a maniac as a malefactor.”
Although he lost the case, he appealed to the New York Supreme Court, which reversed the conviction. Freeman died in prison before a second trial could take place. Seward was out of town, and Frances wrote to him with the news: “Poor Bill is gone at last—he died alone in his cell was found dead this morning. . . . I am glad the suffering of the poor benighted creature is terminated. . . . The good people of Auburn can now rest quietly in their beds ‘the murderer’ has no longer the power to disturb them.”
Seward had earned a national reputation as a man of unimpeachable integrity. Three years later, he began the first of two terms in the U.S. Senate, and after contending unsuccessfully against Lincoln in the 1860 presidential contest, he became the secretary of state. Lincoln liked to call him “Gover
nor,” but when Seward returned from Washington, his once disapproving neighbors referred to him respectfully as “the Secretary.”
The Sewards provided financial backing for the abolitionist newspaper North Star, published out of Rochester by their friend Frederick Douglass. In the 1850s—along with half a dozen or so other Auburn families—they harbored fugitive slaves in their basement. Through their work with the Underground Railroad, they became close to Harriet Tubman, and after the Civil War, they convinced her to settle in Auburn, selling her a wooden house and seven acres a few miles down South Street for her and her relatives. She also looked out for other African-Americans in town, opening the first home in the country for indigent and elderly blacks. When Dorothy and Ros were small, the elderly Tubman rode a bicycle up and down South Street, stopping to ask for food donations. If she had specific needs, she sat on the back porch and waited for the lady of the house, with whom she would chat and ask for bedding or clothing for her residents. One of Ros’s nieces said, “Mother had coffee with Harriet and would always leave a ham or turkey for her for the holiday.”
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The Woodruff fortune rose and fell according to the demand for buttons, so Dorothy’s family did not have all of the luxuries the wealthiest families had, such as a summer cottage on Owasco Lake. But Ros’s parents did, and Dorothy spent most summers with them. One of the Finger Lakes, Owasco was a few miles south of Auburn. About eleven miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide, it was surrounded by lush and hilly farmland that dropped sharply to a wooded shore. In the summer months, the women and children of Auburn society took advantage of the fresh air and clean water, and the men commuted to Auburn by steamboat or train. People came all the way from New York City to escape the “vapors” and epidemics. The lake also was a popular spot for entertaining U.S. presidents and other dignitaries. In the mid-1800s, there were legendary parties at Willowbrook, the family compound of Enos Throop, New York’s tenth governor. Presidents Johnson and Grant and General Custer were among the guests, stopping for a banquet in their honor during Johnson’s “Swing Around the Circle” tour in 1866, an unsuccessful effort to boost support for his Reconstruction policies.
Ros’s father taught the children to swim, row, and sail. When the girls swam, they wore the heavy bathing costumes of the day: short-sleeved wool dresses to their knees, over drawers and black stockings, and bathing slippers—all topped with oversize caps to protect their hair. The picturesque “Lady of the Lake” steamboat made two round trips a day, delivering groceries, mail, and guests to the cottages. Residents hoisted flags on their docks when they wanted the boat to stop, and, Dorothy said, “No ocean voyage was more thrilling than those trips on our little twelve-mile-long lake.”
One summer Dorothy’s extended family rented Willow Point, a spacious two-story shingle house owned by a particularly esteemed Auburn couple, David Osborne and his wife, Eliza. The tracks of the Lehigh Valley Railroad ran behind the houses on the lake, and Dorothy remembered that when the freight trains went by, transporting anthracite coal from Pennsylvania to Ontario, they rattled the house.
David Osborne, a friend of the Woodruffs, Underwoods, and Beardsleys, was one of the city’s most influential entrepreneurs. His business, D. M. Osborne & Company, sold harvesters, mowers, and other farm equipment. Its phalanxes of factory buildings along Genesee Street had thirty-five hundred employees, and by the turn of the century, it had become the third largest enterprise of its kind in the country.
Eliza Osborne was one of the most prominent suffragists in Cayuga County. Her mother was Martha C. Wright, whom an Auburn neighbor referred to as “a very dangerous woman.” Martha Wright organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights, along with Eliza’s aunt Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Eliza was a tall, regal woman whose glorious black eyes, according to Stanton, were brimming with “power and pathos.” Ros’s mother considered her a close friend, even though Eliza was a generation older. Eliza’s father, David Wright, worked with Seward on the defense of William Freeman, and the Wrights, too, hid runaway slaves. Beginning in the 1860s, Eliza Osborne hosted her own meetings with Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and other feminist leaders at her home on South Street.
When Dorothy was seven years old, Eliza bought her grandfather Woodruff’s former property next to the Seward House. For two decades Eliza was the president and principal financial patron of the local chapter of the Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union, a group devoted to the moral and social welfare of local working girls. She greatly expanded the house, turning it into the Osborne Memorial Building, an august four-story structure of red brick, for the growing activities of the Woman’s Union. It contained a dressmaking classroom, a cooking school, a gymnasium, and a day nursery. Before long, a “swimming tank” was added in a new wing. Many of Auburn’s socially prominent women donated money and time to Eliza’s undertaking. Eventually, Dorothy and Ros were among them.
Eliza doted on her son Thomas Mott Osborne, who inherited his elders’ commitment to political reform and social justice. In middle age, he befriended and advised young Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1911, when FDR was a twenty-nine-year-old state senator, they worked together to fight the corruption of Tammany Hall. They were also active supporters of Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 presidential campaign, lobbying behind the scenes at the Democratic convention in Baltimore; Wilson secured the nomination on the forty-sixth ballot. Osborne was gratified when the new administration appointed Roosevelt assistant secretary of the navy, but he abandoned politics in disgust after many federal appointments went to Tammany Hall and its sympathizers. Instead, Osborne convinced the governor of New York to appoint him chairman of a long overdue state commission on prison reform.
The young ladies of Auburn were mostly protected from the uglier outgrowths of the industrial age, but the state prison, a vast complex on State Street across from the train station, was unavoidable. Auburn’s rapid growth from a quiet village on the edge of the American frontier into a major industrial center would not have been possible without it. Two octagonal stone towers framed the main gate, and the high, long walls enclosed a grim collection of cell blocks, workshops, and the administration building, heavily hung with untended ivy.
The prison opened in the early 1800s, and four years later, inmates began providing cheap contract labor—an attraction for fledgling industries. Convicts made steam engines, sleighs, shoes, nails, furniture, and other products. Factories quickly sprang up nearby, along the Owasco Outlet, an excellent source of hydraulic power. Auburn’s officials promised an innovative approach to rehabilitation, and their methods, known as “the Auburn system,” were admired throughout the country and Europe. So was the prison’s intimidating architecture, which became the model for most U.S. penitentiaries.
The Auburn system was designed to instill good behavior through confinement in individual cells, strict discipline, and work at various trades. Silence was maintained at all times. The inmates marched in striped uniforms to workshops in the Auburn-invented “lockstep.” Anyone who broke the rule of silence was flogged with the “cat”—a cat-o’-nine tails, with lashes eighteen inches long, made out of waxed shoe thread, which were said to “cut the flesh like ‘whips of steel.’” Eventually, the cat was replaced with a three-foot wooden paddle covered with leather. Others were subjected to the “shower bath”: stripped, bound, and placed inside a barrel. A wooden collar was fastened around their necks to immobilize their heads as a spigot dispensed ice-cold water. The shower bath was discontinued in 1858 after a prisoner drowned during treatment.
Thomas Mott Osborne often hosted elaborately costumed theatricals at his home, and he had a gift for impersonation. In 1913, a few months after taking the job as prison reform commissioner, he posed for a week as Tom Brown, Inmate #33,333X. When he got out, he and a former prisoner founded the Mutual Welfare League, devising a form of limited self-government in the prison and helping to prepare inmates for life outside. O
sborne’s work put an end to the rule of silence and secured prisoners the right to go out into the yard for an hour each evening. He wrote a book about the experience, Within Prison Walls, and his exploit as an inmate and his reforms were recounted in papers around the world.
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Dorothy never fully reconciled the two Auburns. She told her grandchildren about a horrifying early memory: the execution of William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, who in 1901 was put to death in the prison, in the world’s first electric chair. She was fourteen years old at the time, and some eighty years later, she said she had been upset to hear that there would be no funeral for him; he was to be buried in Fort Hill Cemetery in a far corner in an unmarked grave.
Fort Hill Cemetery, set on eighty-three verdant acres, played a vivid role in her imagination. Fort Street was only one block long, and the Woodruffs lived by the cemetery’s entrance. In the sixteenth century, Fort Hill—the highest spot in the vicinity—was a fortified area in a Cayuga Indian village. Dorothy’s grandmother Anna had her own story of back-door visitors when she was a child in Auburn: hungry Indians who occasionally appeared outside the kitchen asking for food. The road was steep and winding as it entered the cemetery, and during Auburn’s heavy snows, Dorothy and her siblings went sledding there. On weekends in warmer weather, Dorothy and Milly explored the cemetery. Mamie packed their lunches in shoe boxes, which they supplemented in the fall with ripe beechnuts that dropped from the trees. Their sister Hope had died of whooping cough in 1884 when she was six weeks old, and the girls were sentimentally drawn to the graves of children. As soon as they could read, they wandered among the tiny tombstones, making out the dates and the weathered inscriptions.
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