Forward
In the 1950s I was growing up in Cornwall, New York, a small Orange County town in the Hudson Highlands at the northern end of the Clove. It was a childhood not dissimilar to Mayberry on TV where everything you needed existed in a town surrounded by rural beauty. In elementary school, we would have field trips to nearby historically essential places like Washington’s Headquarters in Newburgh, Knox’s Headquarters in New Windsor, West Point, and Museum Village in Monroe. The trips brought Colonial Hudson Valley to life for me; I loved these visits, especially Museum Village, where you could walk down an 18th-century street and visit each building and shop, see demonstrations, and purchase things made in the old ways.
My Dad grew up in Cornwall, loved our local history, and was an avid genealogist. In the 1950s and 60s, he worked for West Point Military Academy as a photographer and darkroom technician expert in the Army Signal Corps. Back then, if things needed documentation anywhere at “The Point, “ the Signal Corps crew was sent to photograph it. He worked closely with the museum there, and when he came home after some prodding, he told me about the amazing things he might have been working on. It wasn’t unusual for him to photograph Washington’s pistols one day and the Cadet Mess Hall the next. Occasionally, we were visited at home by someone from West Point with an artifact that needed to be photographed, and he would take pictures in a little studio he would set up in our living room. I’d get to watch, and if I was good, hold a light or, an event that astounds me to this day, hold something like Wsahington’s dueling pistols.
My Mom’s family lived on Temple Hill Road in New Windsor, their farm next to the Colonial Encampment of Washington’s Army. There were family stories about plowing up stone axe heads and old coins. My Aunt, Ruth Clark, was on the board of the Temple Hill Organization, which promoted the site that later became the National Purple Heart Museum and Temple Hill Cantonment. We would go there on weekends when reenactors would fire flintlocks and cannons, drill, have fife and drum musters, and reconstruct local colonial life.
My Grandparents were the Town Clerks in Cornwall for 35 years and dutifully took care of records that stretched back to the very beginning of the town. At first, the office was in our home on Main Street, it was eventually moved (with all town offices) to a big old former boys’ school building further down Main Street. Part of my Grandmother’s office held a big walk-in safe, holding all the old artifacts and records and big ledger books with births, marriages, and deaths. I often visited her at work, and she’d let me go through the things “as long as I was careful.” I found my father had done the same kind of investigations as a kid in his father’s office, leading him to trace our family back to colonial times. He kept copious notes that helped form and reinforce my interest in this story.
This project was inevitable for me, I couldn’t escape our history if I wanted to. Many Cornwall families and their kids I attended school with were like us, original to the area even back to pre-colonial times. Many people in this story are the ancestors of families I knew, people I grew up with. In my mind, they looked like the people from whom they descended. The places, things, and people in my life created stories in my imagination. When I think of Claudius Smith, I think of his namesake, who was a year or two ahead of me, when I think of John Earl, I think of my grandfather.
This book is a fiction based on events that exist but without much detail. There are other stories published with sensational “facts” (like Claudius being 7 feet tall), and I admit part of the reason I love these stories comes from these old myths I read as a kid. I have taken liberties in fleshing out the story. Much of it happened, how it happened, I am happy to say, I made up. The story of my family and other people of the Clove’s encounter with Claudius Smith’s Gang of Tory terrorists during the Revolutionary War is still a pretty good yarn.
