I’m thinking about spending four days or so in the next few weeks in Dutchess County, New York. You know, the Poughkeepsie area, about an hour or so north of Manhattan, where the most popular time for a visit is fall foliage. When I told a work colleague about my plan, he looked at me as if to say, “Are you nuts?” (I think he may have even actually said it.)
My reason for going has nothing to do with leaves or even much to do with lunacy. It has to do with some of my ancient ancestors, Nathaniel Chatterton and his wife Mary Manning Storm Chatterton, who have fascinated me ever since I first learned about them back around 1992.
I have more than two dozen ancestors who fought for our country’s independence. Mainly, they were farmers who stepped up… some at the cost of their lives. But none was as colorful as Nathaniel.
Born in 1755 in New Haven, Connecticut, he served as a private and a matross in the Connecticut Line during the American Revolution, and was at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, the war’s last major battle. But like many New Yorkers, Nathaniel was ambivalent about the cause. In fact, he had been indicted in October 1780 in Dutchess County for adhering to the enemy.
In 1783, he married Mary Manning Storm, whose first husband had been killed in the Revolution. Two weeks before their third wedding anniversary, Nathaniel was charged with running a disorderly tavern. They still were living in Dutchess County’s Clinton community with their daughters when the 1790 census was taken. But within a few years, they and much of the rest of the community had moved to Quebec’s Hemmingford Township. There were many reasons, probably some political, some the availability of land, and some the fact that the border was more fluid in those days. By the time of the War of 1812, some of Mary’s Manning clan were actively spying for the British in the LaColle area.
No matter what Nathaniel’s feelings were, they didn’t stop him from applying for a U.S. service pension in 1828. Ultimately, he received it, and died on August 2, 1835, just across the border on Vermont’s Grand Isle. Mary went on living in Quebec with family members and died in 1855 at the age of 104.
I’ve walked the steps of my ancestors in many places: the Wisconsin and South Dakota churches where my grandparents married; the spot in Petersburg, Va., where a great-great-grandfather’s Civil War line turned on itself, injuring him and killing one of his brothers; the homestead claim my great-grandparents staked in South Dakota. But I’ve never felt as connected with an ancestor as I have at Yorktown and Grand Isle. Now, it’s time to see what he saw in Dutchess County.
And I sure hope that tavern’s still around–and just a bit more orderly.
