The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell (38 page)

This article was written by Thomas J. Ham, editor of the
Herald,
and it is clear from its content that Ham was not aware that Lucy Lobdell was no longer free or was, according to the
New York Times
, already dead. Several weeks later, however, Ham received a letter from the subject of his story.

“I do not write this for insertion in your paper,” wrote Marie Louise Perry. “I do not seek fame, but as you kindly state, far prefer to work out unmolested my own
problem of life
.”

Acknowledging that the letter was not intended for publication, Ham published it anyway, saying that Perry “so well expresses her views on matters of public interest, we take the liberty of putting it in print.”

In her letter Perry offered her appreciation for the “kind sympathy” evident in Ham’s notice, but she went on to voice her own thoughts:

I am sorry you did not dwell longer upon “the avenues to employment” not being more “open” to persons of my sex. If, instead of styling me “The Female Hunter’s Wife,” you had said his
apparent widow
, I think the expression would have been more correct. I do not know why the companionship of two women should be termed “strange.” Men are often seen in close companionship, and, Mr. Ham, my sex are not inferior to yours.

Perry went on to describe a woman’s tenuous position in society:

The abuse and injustice which she often has to endure, and which has such a crushing influence upon her existence, seems to be a wrong on the part of the administrators of the law and the voters who create them. If woman has no voice in the making of the laws of our country, she should as recompense, be granted sufficient other privileges to preserve her equality of rights. How this is to be done is the information which many of the stern sex seem to need. Will you find it convenient to inform them? You will thus oblige a friend and sister.

Marie Louise,
the Apparent Widow.

Shortly after this letter was published, and perhaps because of it, Marie Louise Perry decided to leave Wayne County. According to William Guinnip, “One day she said she was going back to Boston, and started off, intending to walk the whole distance.”

*
Note: In this section and the one that follows, I refer to Lucy as Lucy and not Joseph, and I use female pronouns. I do this for simplicity. It conveys no attitude or judgment toward Lucy’s (or Joseph’s) personal journey, which I honor. And just which of the modern labels of sexual orientation or gender should be applied to the historic Lucy is something I will leave for others.

Author’s Afterword

I
HAD LIVED along Basket Creek for twenty years and had never heard of Lucy Lobdell. Then one morning Jack Niflot asked if I would meet him for lunch at the East Ridge store in Hankins.

When I got to the store, Jack was seated in the back, a leather case on the chair beside him. He was a square, chunky fellow, then about sixty-five, a councilman for the town of Fremont, a trustee of the village church, and the founder of the Basket Historical Society. For years Jack had worked for the
Sullivan County Democrat,
and he had the practiced eyes of someone who has witnessed a variety of human folly played out on a small stage. His most recent project had been a book published by Praeger the year before, a collection of letters written by six brothers in the Union Army to their sister on Basket Creek.
Dear Sister
had barely come out when Jack was struck down by a heart ailment. He had just emerged from his convalescence.

Once I was seated, Jack leaned back and asked if I knew who Lucy Lobdell was. I shook my head and asked if I
should
know. He gave a sly smile and said that I might have heard of her, since my old farmhouse was said, a century ago, to have been haunted by her ghost. Having assured my attention, Jack went on to say that Lucy had lived along Basket Creek before the Civil War, and that he’d spent years collecting anything on her that he could find, making a pest of himself at libraries and historical societies and sifting through boxes of letters in the attics of Basket Creek old-timers. He had planned to write a book about her, but no longer felt up to it. As he told me this, he reached into his leather case, picked through papers, and pulled out a copy of something from the
New York Times—
an obituary dated October 7, 1879.

“DEATH OF A MODERN DIANA” was the headline. Next in smaller capitals: “THE FEMALE HUNTER OF LONG EDDY … DRESSED IN MAN’S CLOTHING SHE WINS A GIRL’S LOVE.”

The story was long and complex, more like a feature article than an obituary. When I was done reading, I looked up at Jack. He said that most of what was in the piece was accurate, but some of it wasn’t. The biggest mistake, he said, was that Lucy wasn’t dead when the obituary was published—wouldn’t be for years.

Basket Creek passes through fields and over rock ledges as it runs down a narrow valley to the Delaware River. The first white people to settle along the Basket were John and Mary Gould and their eight children, who in 1842 took possession of nine hundred acres at the head of the valley. When the Civil War came, six of the seven boys volunteered. More than one hundred years later, their letters home would be gathered into a book.

Also arriving in that first decade were James and Sarah Lobdell, who came with their son John and their daughters Mary, Sarah, and Lucy Ann. They settled midway up the Basket at a place where the valley briefly leveled to provide land for grazing and then dropped off to create an ideal spot for a sawmill.

A few years after the Lobdells, Patrick and Ellen O’Meara moved to the Basket from County Tipperary, having escaped the natural and human cruelties of the potato famine. The O’Mearas settled on a hundred acres overlooking the east branch of the creek and right away set about harvesting hemlock bark and maple sap while they cleared the fields and built a barn. As their farm prospered, a larger house was built around the first to accommodate a growing family—four sons and three daughters. In time, the boys left for New York City to become policemen. Mary, Elizabeth, and Ellie stayed on at the farm.

Ellie O’Meara never married and lived until the late 1950s. She had earned something of a strong-minded reputation when she was young, but even as an old woman, Ellie was dauntless. “I have tapped the big maple,” she wrote to a friend when she was eighty-four. “Only one spike, but it will keep me busy when it comes time to boiling.” As the last link to the first settlers, Ellie embraced her duty as local historian by, as she described, “taking notes of passing things and hardships willed to be forgotten.” She assisted Leslie LaValley in the preparation of
The Basket Letters
, a book about the region’s early days. She was particularly involved in the chapter on the Lobdells and their notorious daughter, for whom she had a special fondness.

My wife, Jean, and I purchased the O’Meara homestead in 1980. At that time, the house was showing its age—objects rolled freely on sloping floors, copper plumbing was strapped to the walls, and, upstairs, the roof of Patrick O’Meara’s original dwelling, chimney and all, protruded awkwardly through the attic floor. Much of each weekend was spent sweating pipes and patching roof leaks.

When our children came, the old house was once again filled with activity. There were the sounds of babies crying, dogs barking, and people laughing at the kitchen table. The echoes of these moments joined those of the first settlers and then radiated their warmth back into the rooms, creating the feeling that life, however out of plumb, was good.

The O’Meara farm is seven miles over the hill from Fremont Center, a tiny town with a sometimes-open gas station and one church. The Fremont church had been Methodist, but during the 1990s, declining membership had led the Methodist Conference to the difficult decision to close the doors. The remaining parishioners wished to continue, and what followed were negotiations and lawsuits.

The pastor of the Fremont church was (and still is) the Reverend James O’Rourke. Born Catholic, a long-distance truck driver by profession, Pastor Jim had come to the ministry late in life. From the pulpit he preached on the power of love, and his week was spent living his words, often shouldering the cares of others. This he did for a remuneration generously described as
gas money
—less than one might think, for often the highlight of each Sunday was when the good pastor, in his early seventies, silver-haired, handsome, but a little overweight, roared up to the church astride his 800cc Kawasaki Vulcan.

It was during this time that I began to count myself among those who wished to save the old church—it might have been the twin to the Baptist church into which I was born. On my way to service in those days, I would pick up Thelma Herbert, a church elder who lived between our house and town. In doing this I was completing a circle that had begun many years ago, for as a girl after the First World War, Thelma would set off on foot for church in Fremont to be picked up most Sundays by Ellie O’Meara, driving a wagon and team of horses on her way to Saint Mary’s in Obernberg.

Thelma was a connection not only back to Ellie but back to a time when the Fremont church was robust with children, choirs, potlucks, and picnics. No more. Thelma still sat in the second pew, but the voices behind her had dwindled. Those of us who remained would bravely fight our way through each hymn and, after the service, retire to the annex, where we would drink instant coffee and eat the dry cake left over from the weekly senior’s card social. During this snack, gossip was exchanged and, for a time, the Methodist Conference spoken about in somewhat un-Christian terms. It was here one morning that Jack Niflot asked if I would have lunch with him.

I think a nonfiction book about Lucy’s life is what Jack had in mind when he handed his research to me. His previous efforts and my own were in this realm. The problem was, although the outlines of Lucy’s story could be confirmed by newspaper articles, letters, and other recollections, the core, the very essence of what would be interesting, wasn’t there. Thus, any purely factual book that I could imagine was destined to be hollow.

In 1982, an historian from Minnesota, Mindy Desens, wrote to Jack, looking for information about Lucy. She was working the story from the western end, where Lucy had become known as the “Wild Woman of Manannah.” Desens confessed to Jack that the project had become an obsession. “I had a dream the other night.” she wrote. “I had Lucy by the shoulders and I was shaking her, begging her to write a memoir so we could know about her life after 1855.” Desen’s frustration was similar to my own following my meeting with Jack, and not long after, I concluded that Lucy’s memoir, the one that she had promised to write, would have to be found. Then I too began to have dreams.

I am usually polite with people who believe in channeling. I don’t. That said, I must relate that this book was written with the aid of numerous four-in-the-morning sessions with Lucy. It is quite normal, of course, for authors to wrestle with language in the dark late at night. In this case, since the entire story is told in Lucy’s words, it was always her voice that rattled around my head, giving the sensation, at least, that my imagination had been captured by her spirit and not the other way around.

I was well into the project before I discovered what Jack had meant when he told me that my house was said to have been haunted by Lucy’s ghost. I ran across it in one of the
Basket Letters
. As the story went, when Ellie O’Meara was a girl and acting a little frisky and tomboyish, the neighbors would say, “Sure, if it isn’t the Female Hunter come back to live with us.” So sometime in the 1880s, Ellie O’Meara was said by her neighbors, in a light-hearted way, to be the reincarnation of Lucy Ann Lobdell. Not the kind of haunting one would make a movie about, but then, more than one hundred years later and up late at night in the attic of the same house, I had plenty of time to wonder just what the official definition of haunting should be.

After I had begun work on this book, a difficult time occurred for my family. Our house, the O’Meara homestead, burned to the ground while we were on vacation. Every physical object that connected my wife Jean and me to our past was wiped out in an hour, along with a beloved four-legged friend. The cause of the fire is unknown to us, but the circumstances surrounding it—too complex and bitter to recreate here—were such that arson would have to be a strong possibility.

But an odd thing happened beforehand. As we were departing for North Carolina I heard a warning voice in my head. I stopped the car in the driveway, went inside the house and gathered all of Jack’s research and all my work on this book, threw it into a box, and carried it over to the garage, where along with my garden tools it survived the blaze. I have wished many times that I had paid more attention to that voice.

For several years after the fire, I was not able to work on the book, as a great deal of energy went to re-creating a secure situation for three children and to building a new house where the old one had been. During this time, I did not have conversations with Lucy, and I wondered if, after such an absence, she would come back. Do spirits perish in fire?

One Sunday, while we were still living in a rented house in Pennsylvania, I felt the impulse to drive over to New York and attend church in Fremont, some forty minutes away. I arrived late—not uncommon for me, even when I lived nearby. When I came through the door, I saw several people standing by the great table at head of the church. Reverend O’Rourke was with them, and seeing me come in, he asked if I would come forward and serve as a witness. I walked to the altar and stood beside him. The couple holding the baby I had not seen in church before, but I knew who they were. It was a beautiful morning in May, and I was, quite by accident, participating in the christening of the great-great-great-great grandson of Lucy Ann Lobdell, a moment of some meaning for me.

One year later, our family returned to our land along Basket Creek, where I was able to resume work on Lucy’s memoir. This is her story as I have heard it. It has been a long journey and a great privilege.