OBITUARIES: Simon, Shattenkirk, Boseman, Hoefer

By TOM MORELAND

BACK IN THE 1830s-1840s the Woolsey gang roamed the Austerlitz hills, engaging in horse thieving, counterfeiting and burglary. Their leading spirit, Ambrose F. Woolsey, lived on what is now called Fire Hill Road. On Woolsey’s property stood an old house with a barn, and next to the barn was an old well.

In 1848 Woolsey was convicted of burglarizing a Harlemville store. He spent the next five years in prison, and during that time he lost his property in a foreclosure. It was eventually acquired in 1860 by Harvey N. Vincent. His neighbor to the east was none other than Ambrose Woolsey. After serving his prison term Woolsey had purchased in 1857 the former Samuel Rundell farm on Fire Hill, closer to today’s Route 203.

Harvey Vincent decided to clean out the old well, which appeared full of small stones. His neighbor Ambrose tried mightily to discourage him: “You can’t do it. There is more than a hundred load of stones in that well.” Nonetheless, a few years later the well was cleaned and a subterfuge thereby revealed. The stones were limited to a small layer, beneath which were planks resting on sticks that had been driven into the sides of the well. There had clearly been an effort to conceal what lay below the false stone topping. And what lay at the bottom of the well was the body of a man, partly reduced to skeletal form. At this moment Mrs. Woolsey happened to walk by and Vincent’s laborer excitedly told her what had been found. Mrs. Woolsey reacted in horror – “God save us!” — and seemed to be well aware of what was in the well and how it got there. Henry D. Harvey (1851-1928), a man who knew Ambrose Woolsey, wrote that although his responsibility for the body in the well was never definitely established, “all who knew” Ambrose were “without a doubt” of his guilt.

But whose body was in the well? Harvey’s story, first appearing (in part) in 1922, says it was a “Dutch pack peddler.” Mrs. Arthur C. McMillan of Spencertown, in a speech delivered in 1922, agrees, but adds details on how he got there. Mrs. McMillan says that the peddler had stopped in Spencertown and asked the best way to get over the mountains to the east. He was told the quickest way was up Fire Hill Road, but was warned to avoid that road: a “strange and peculiar family” had moved in, and they had avoided all contact with the townspeople. A feeling of danger hung over their road. The peddler, the story goes, ignored this advice, proceeded up Fire Hill Road, and was never seen again — until he was discovered at the bottom of the well.

Mrs. McMillan’s story of how the body was discovered is very different from Harvey’s. She does not mention Ambrose Woolsey or any false stone covering, and her story is set at a later time, when the house stood deserted. When was the house deserted? It could have been between Woolsey’s imprisonment in 1848 and Harvey Vincent’s purchase in 1860. But a more probable time is the early 1900s, since the house likely was deserted after the Vincents sold the property in 1898 and before the next long-term owner purchased it in 1919. In any event, Mrs. McMillan tells of four young ladies, one named Van Woert, who were picking berries in the yard of the deserted house. Suddenly Miss Van Woert fell into the old abandoned well. She apparently was not hurt, but “to her great surprise and consternation she was stepping on bones, the bones of a man, the peddler’s skeleton.”

There is a totally different story of whose body was in the well. It is told in a 1928 newspaper article by Clarence M. Humphrey (1846 – 1933) of Canaan, CT. Humphrey writes that the man in the well was Alva Bigelow, a sheriff who lived in West Stockbridge. Years ago Bigelow had disappeared without a trace — “one of the unexplained mysteries of life” – soon after two members of the Woolsey gang had finished serving a lengthy prison term. The inference Humphrey asks us to draw is that Bigelow had helped put these gang members in prison and that they had gotten their revenge by depositing Bigelow in a well (apparently Woolsey’s). Some 30 years later, probably around 1870, during Vincent’s ownership, “a farmer who lived in Spencertown” had cleaned out the well and discovered a skeleton with pieces of a uniform, “which seemed to solve the mystery of the missing sheriff.” Humphrey says that he had spoken with an “old resident” who had seen the remains being exhumed from the well.

So what is the truth and what is folklore? Your guess is as good as mine. I can tell you, based on research to date: no contemporaneous news coverage about the discovery of the body in the well has been located; all of the various stories seem to have first appeared in the newspapers in the 1920s; so far no sheriff in Berkshire County named Alva Bigelow has been identified; there were Van Woert families living in West Ghent, Athens and Albany, but no proof that any of them had visited Fire Hill Road or Spencertown has surfaced.

Perhaps we will never know the truth. But there is always a chance that some telling diary entry or other evidence will yet emerge from the mists of time. Only recently Steve Ulmer told me of something he had been told by Jack Howes in 1991 (his source unknown): when the body was first discovered a sample of the clothing was sent to the Shakers (presumably in New Lebanon) and they were able to identify the fabric. But that’s the end of Jack’s story as Steve remembers it.

So the search goes on, soon to be in the hands of David Harrison, my successor as Austerlitz Town Historian.

A note on sources: Mrs. Arthur C. McMillen spoke at the sixth annual dinner (in Manhattan) of the Daughters of Columbia County Historical Society. Her remarks are as presented in The Columbia Republican, April 1922. She said this and other stories had been told to her by an “old man” who often visited her Spencertown home (it was next to the Academy and still stands).

Henry D. Harvey’s article was first published as “Austerlitz History” in the Chatham Courier, September 7, 1922, but only in part. The details about Ambrose Woolsey did not appear until Harvey’s full article was published in 1950. “Counterfeiters and Horse Thieves Once Roamed the Austerlitz Hills,” Chatham Courier, May 25, 1950. It is tempting to believe that Harvey, writing in 1922, was the “old man” who Mrs. McMillan mentions as the source of her 1922 peddler story. Harvey had grown up in Spencertown and then moved to Hillsdale, so we can see him coming back to visit the old home town. However, the Harvey and McMillan stories differ in important respects, as noted above.

The Clarence Humphrey story about disappearing sheriff Alva Bigelow appears in the Chatham Courier: “Recollections of Bygone Days,” c. May 1928.

Tom Moreland is the former Austerlitz Town Historian.