The Farmers ~ Part One

~Part One~

The Yankee Farmer

Moses Yale Beach was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, in January of 1800.  He was four generations removed from his ancestor John Beach, who had settled and built his homestead there in 1670, after his arrival from England.  Moses was the second child of Moses Sperry Beach, Jr. and Lucretia Yale, who traced her lineage to Thomas Yale, another village founder and the brother of Elihu Yale, from whom the university takes its name.  Lucretia Beach died just months after the birth of their son;  within that same year, Beach’s father married Lois Ives, from another old farming family in the town.   

In the early 1850s, another Elihu Yale ~ at the time, the Postmaster of Cheshire, Conn. ~  gave an accounting of early Beach’s life in a Yale family genealogy.    In addition to its enjoyably nineteenth century phraseology, this biographical sketch is notable in that it was written during Beach’s lifetime ~ perhaps, with his input ~ just as he was returning to Wallingford, upon his retirement in 1849.  

When about four months old he was left without the care of a mother by the hand of death, and as his father’s business called him much from home, he was confided to the attentions of a step-mother.  As soon as his age would permit he was taught to do little “chores”, and at the age of ten years he had the larger ones on his hands, also.  At that time he took charge of nearly all the out-door work, including the care of horses and cattle, besides going nearly two miles to school daily; from four o’clock in the morning until eleven in the evening he was generally up and doing, and yet found leisure to exercise his mechanical ingenuity in the manufacture of playthings for himself and others, and for trade with his school-mates.  

The details of Beach’s childhood within Yale’s biographical sketch are seen often during Beach’s day.   His “simple beginnings” origin, which comes just shy of needing a glass slipper ~ maybe a riding boot ~ to make it complete, does hold truth within the humblebrag.   His father, Moses Sperry Beach, Jr., had inherited the Beach homestead and farm, and at some point became a land surveyor and property owner in Ohio, which had just been admitted to the Union.  However, Moses wasn’t alone on the family’s farm.  Beach’s father and step-mother had four more sons in Wallingford,  in quick succession after Moses had been born.  The sketch also leaves out Beach’s older sister, Sally.  During the War of 1812, young Moses served as a fifer at Fort Hale, in New Haven.  

At a suitable age he was, at his own solicitation, bound an apprentice to a Mr. Dewey, a cabinet maker, at Hartford, Conn.   His industry excited the attention of his master who was a close man, but who finally made a bargain with him by which he was allowed two cents per hour for extra work.  Mr. Beach says he never felt happier at success in any thing than when that bargain was completed.  Early and late he worked, and the pennies began to accumulate; finally he made a bargain for his time after he should arrive at the age of eighteen years, for which he was to pay the sum of $400.   This arrangement gave him new life, and when the time came around he had saved between $100 and $200 more than enough to pay for his freedom, with which sum he commenced life. 

At eighteen, the industrious young Beach moved from Hartford to Northampton, Massachusetts.  There, he partnered with another young furniture maker, named Loveland.   While their work gained some initial notoriety, Moses had larger pursuits in mind than cabinetry.   His attention to his mechanical interests was likely the reason for the quick end of this early business relationship.  

In November of 1819, Beach married Nancy Brewster Day.  She was the daughter of a hatter named  Thomas Day and his wife, Mary Ely, of West Springfield.   They were of Puritan stock, at least one of the parents tracing their line to the Mayflower and to the Brewsters.   A year later, their first child ~ a daughter named Druscilla Brewster Beach~ was born. 

The Beach family had moved to Springfield by 1822,  where Moses had partnered with another furniture maker named Ashley.  Beach had developed a secret method for applying mahogany veneer to inexpensive pine wood balls, which could then be applied as decorative ornaments on sideboards, hall trees, mirror frames, and the like.  None of their competitors were able to replicate the process; certainly a benefit for Beach & Ashley.   This business venture was more successful than Beach’s first.  The partners opened a store on Main Street in Springfield,  and Beach built his first home, next to the courthouse.  It was a two-story brick house, in which most of his children with Nancy would be born.  Druscilla was soon followed by Moses Sperry, Henry Day, Alfred Ely, and Joseph Perkins.

Success also gave Moses the means to explore his other pursuits.  

There are varied, but mostly general, accounts of Beach’s efforts to bring these early ideas to fruition.   His invention of a “gunpowder engine” for use in propelling balloons ~ a relative novelty ~ does not appear to have gotten fully off the ground.   That works both as a terribly bad pun, but also quite literally.  The accounts suggest that the weight of his engine was simply too heavy as to be lifted by the simple gas balloons of the day.  

Another early venture was a steam ferry business to provide goods ~ including pulp for paper manufacturing ~ to the mills along the Connecticut River.   Beach had claimed to have devised a way to navigate the Enfield Falls; which, at the time, were only navigable by way of flat bottom boats and the use of “pole men” to assist in the maneuvering the series of rapids.  Beach apparently ran out of capital, however, to see this project through.  The Enfield Falls canal would be completed within a couple of years; opening just as Beach was leaving Springfield. 

Beach’s years in Massachusetts were notable for those early attempts at enterprise; as much for his failures as his successes.  Young Moses’ resilience, his ability to adapt and to find new opportunities is evident, early on.   The plan for his steamboat route, while unsuccessful, surely sparked Moses’ early interest in the paper mill industry.  He worked with a number of area mills, including the Ames family mills in nearby Chicopee.   His contact with the mills is likely what motivated him to invent his rag-cutting machine.  Although he later claimed to have received no “pecuniary benefit” from the device, it is that invention which would prove to be the mainspring for the rest of Beach’s professional ~ and personal ~ life.    

Moses, even in his childhood days in Wallingford, clearly had a restless spirit.  He tended to require little sleep ~ an attribute he’d pass on to at least two of his sons ~ which left him ample time for tinkering with his ideas, both mechanical and intellectual.   And he was an avid reader.  The Springfield Republican, The Hartford Courant, The Evening Post, and any number of journals would have kept him apprised of not only the events of the day; but of the innovators, who were promoting new ideas in America.   Given his own inherent talent for improving upon a process, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Moses having had turned his eye upon the newspaper business.  He was an advertiser with The Republican, after all;  Mr. Beach surely would have availed himself of any opportunity to have a look about the place.   

Beach had found success in Springfield that any man of his era would’ve been proud to have achieved.  He had an established business as a furniture maker, and he and his family were well-respected members of their community.   But Moses Beach seemed to want something greater; something more grand.   He would not be satisfied making mahogany balls for the rest of his days.

His role models were the very recent and very real heroes of the American Revolution.  His ideals were the propositions put forth by those men in their very novel, and still very new founding documents.   Those of Beach’s generation must have had a truly unique sense of what they’d so recently inherited.  What we know as American history ~ even with the many flaws and failures that we see in it, today ~ was, for Moses Beach, a series of palpable, real-time, live events.  Moses was looking towards the future. 

In 1827, shortly before his departure from Springfield, Beach became one of the original incorporators of St. Paul’s Universalist Church.   Universalism, which had been gaining in popularity at that time, differed from the ‘establishment’ faiths in its concept of universal reconciliation.   The Universalists believed in the potential redemption for all human souls.  They advocated for greater education for women and free public education.   Moreover, they were early foes of slavery; abolitionists, a decade before the movement would begin to take hold in America. 

It was around that same time when Moses became aware of Henry Barclay’s plans for a new waterworks and mill complex, near the village of Saugerties, New York.   The village sits on the western side of the Hudson River, just over 100 miles north of the city of New York, and nearly that same distance from Springfield.   Beach would soon move his young family to the small village of Ulster, NY, for a new opportunity to become that which he’d envisioned; not a Yankee farmer or a furniture maker, but a man of industry and enterprise.  

 The Yale Family, or the descendants of David Yale with genealogical notices of each family.  (New Haven : Storer & Stone, Printers, 1850), p. 191-194.