The Stotts of Stottville
The story of the Stotts of Stottville is the story of 19th Century America. An able and enterprising youth named Jonathan Stott ran away from his English home to seek adventure and fortune. He founded an industry on the then-new concept of manufacturing with powered machinery, changed the name of a town (Stottville was first known as Springville because of its three mineral springs) and founded a family that for four generations, as it grew prodigiously in numbers, looked to the textile mills and its compound of family houses as its center. Here they created, with their own unique variations, their version of the good life in a large and (generally) happy circle of grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins – plus, at one time, 18 St. Bernards that consumed 40 lbs. of beef a day.
Jonathan Stott, born in 1793 at Failsworth, England (near Manchester), appears to have been a rebellious son. His father was a silk manufacturer – “manufacturing” then being a crude hand operation by any later standards. Jonathan dutifully worked at home until the age of 16 when he enlisted in the army, following the footsteps of his older brother, Joseph, who was then in India.
Joseph was killed in India shortly after Jonathan enlisted, whereupon Jonathan’s mother, wanting him home, bought his discharge; but he refused to stay and re-enlisted and was soon under sailing orders. It is told that when he approached Failsworth, on a home leave before going overseas, he heard the church bells ringing and learned that they tolled for the funeral of “Widow Stott.”
The family business may not have been prospering. Jonathan’s father is described as having lived the life of a sporting gentleman more than that of a businessman. In any case Jonathan’s ties to Failsworth were broken.
His unit, the 2nd Battalion, 6th Foot (later 1st Warwickshire Regiment of Foot) saw two years of action in the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsula Campaign, during which Jonathan Stott rose from private to sergeant. After the campaign, the regiment was embarked for North America where the War of 1812 against the United States was in progress. Sergeant Stott, then 21, has his first sight of America from Lake Ontario, as part of a British command attacking Fort Niagara.
Ordered out on a scouting mission in charge of another sergeant – Jonathan Stott said later it was next to impossible to make the seasoned British troopers stay alert because as victors over Napoleon they refused to take their American opponents seriously – Sergeant Stott and his whole squad were captured by the raw American volunteers.
To this accident of war, the Stotts of Stottville owe their existence. For although Jonathan Stott already had an uncle living in America – William Stott, of the town of Hudson, N.Y. – there is no indication that he enlisted for primary purpose of getting here, as the War of 1812 had not begun when he joined the army the second time.
Sergeant Stott was taken to Pittsfield, Mass., and confined as a prisoner of war. He while away the time constructing models of loom he had worked on in his father’s factory. This attracted the attention of a Pittsfield manufacturer, Leonard [Lemuel –KPJ] Pomeroy, who had visited the prisoners seeking English weavers who might help him teach his workers how to operate new English machines he had just acquired. Jonathan Stott volunteered for this and was soon paroled to work for Mr. Pomeroy. He soon let it be known he wished to stay in America and had an uncle in Hudson, and through the connivance of the kindly prison commander, U.S. General Brown, avoided being sent back to England at the war’s end simply by walking out ostensibly with permission to “visit” his Hudson relations.
(Ten years later he sent to England from Hudson and officially bought his discharge from the British Army for 40 pounds sterling, though this did not clear him of being listed in army record as a deserter.)
Once in Hudson, romantic legend has it, the first house Jonathan Stott stopped at to ask directions was that of John Bennet, another recently arrived Englishman, a hatter by trade, who dispatched his daughter Juliette to guide the traveler to the William Stott house. Two years later Juliette Bennet became Mrs. Jonathan Stott and the co-founder of the Stottville Stotts.
Jonathan Stott saved up $100 working for his uncle before he married Juliette; then he saved a larger sum and opened up in business for himself in satinet manufacture in a house on Hudson’ Front St. near the corner of Allen St. By 1820 he was operating a number of hand looms with several employees at a new and larger location at Warren and First Sts., with a dwelling on Warren and the weaving mill behind it.
The Jonathan Stott house in Hudson, it is said, boasted the first Franklin stove, first French clock and first sofa owned in the city. The big Hudson fire of 1826 destroyed most of what the Stotts owned – the clock, stove and sofa being among the few possessions saved – but Jonathan Stott was soon back in business with a new and bigger factory on the same site and a handsome new brick building as a residence and store.
Changes in manufacturing were a more serious threat than fires, however, and by the late 1820’s the business had fallen in dire straits from competition from the new powered looms. Seeing that survival depended on a large, powered operation, Jonathan Stott raised capital to purchase from the Van Rensselaer family the water privileges of nearby Springville, which was the early name for Stottville when it was only a tiny hamlet on Claverack Creek. The purchase included a fulling mill, and to this was soon added a small satinet mill acquired from one Josiah Barker, this last on the site of the later mill structure known as No. 2.
No. 1 mill in the Stott complex was built in 1848 and outfitted with 11 sets of cards. It was destroyed by fire and then rebuilt and re-equipped with more modern machinery. The mill later known as No. 3 went up in 1859, for finishing; No. 2 in 1865, with 13 sets of cards and No. 4, with 20 sets’ capacity, was added in 1876 by Jonathan Stott’s sons after his death.
Fire and depressions produced several near-disasters in the early history of the business – in fact Jonathan Stott is reported to have “failed” (in the 19th Century sense of the term) three times – but he bounded back after each catastrophe, still in full control of the business and again getting ready to expand. He obviously had financial backers who didn’t hesitate to gamble on his ability: according to one account, the Bennets staked him at critical times; according to another, the main backer in his early struggles was Elisha Williams of Hudson. The Stockport Census of 1860 lists Jonathan Stott’s real and personal property as valued at $275,000, no small sum at the time.
The founder of the mills didn’t live to see them reach their peak of expansion but before he died in the third year of the Civil War the company had become famous in world markets for its fine-quality flannels and large contracts for military uniforms for the Union forces had brought undreamed of prosperity to Stottville.
Jonathan’s two sons, Charles Henry and Francis Horatio, were operating the C.H. & F.H. Stott concern with 270 employees in 1871. After the addition of No. 4 mill in 1878, they were producing 12,000-14,000 lbs. of flannel daily, consuming about 5,000 lbs. of wool and cotton.
The business was wholly family owned for almost 30 years after the Civil War but by the late 80’s several depressions had taken their toll and this plus the problem of management succession that inevitably arises in family concerns brought on a decline which ended in the mills and employees’ houses being sold to A.D. Juilliard Co. in 1901. Juilliard operated under the name Atlantic Mills for a time, then under its own name, until the Great Depression ended woolen manufacture in Stottville once and for all. (One of the mills is still productively in use, as a furniture plant.)
In all, the Stotts’ business was family owned for almost 80 years, through about 2 ½ generations. While the family was growing rapidly, male offspring had diverse talents and interests, not all wanted to be in the business and not all were frugal. The untimely death of William Henry Stott, slated for major responsibility in the third generation, probably had as much to do as anything with the loss of the business.
There were Stotts in Stottville for many years after the sale of the mills, however: the last family dwelling, that of Leila Whitney Stott, being occupied by her until her death in 1947.
In the heyday of the Stotts’ homesteads at Stottville, there were actually three family centers: the two family houses in the village on the west bank where Jonathan Stott and later his children Francis H. and Jane (“Aunt Jane”) lived; the “Red Farm” of Arthur Stott on the land overlooking the creek from Southwest of the village, and the famous compound on the east bank consisting of the Grecian revival Charles H. Stott house, a “cottage” of ample dimensions, and the Leila Whitney Stott house on higher ground, all joined by a great lawn usually peopled on a typical summer’s day with a score or more of children, all Stotts or Stott cousins, or on weekends, by youthful participants in one of the storied Stottville houseparties who had come from all points of the compass. Huge dogs – St. Bernards or Great Danes – were ever present.
The reason Stott family gatherings reached the legendary proportions recalled in family anecdotes is that Jonathan Stott’s two sons between them produced 14 children who reached maturity – 7 boys and 7 girls – who from the beginning formed a happy tribe of closeknit companions and passed on the same tradition of family closeness to the more numerous generation that followed.
Marriages in the second generation brought the names Oakley and Lathrop into the Stott circle of in-laws; in the third generation, the names Whitney, Williams, Pearson, Dean, Franchot, Durant, Evans, Bogardus, Herriman and Dalton.
The Whitneys were in-laws twice over. Charles H. Stott’s son William Henry married Leila Whitney. Her brother, William M. Whitney, married William Henry Stott’s sister Jessie. Thus the descendants of William and Jessie Whitney, and of William Henry ad Leila Stott, have a rare relationship: they are all “double first cousins” to each other.
The fourth generation produced in all 29 children – 15 boys and 14 girls.
The Stotts of the first two generations were business-oriented, and though they didn’t shirk civic responsibility, no Stott ran for any public office of consequence until the fourth generation when Leila V. Stott campaigned for the New York State legislature in 1936. She was unsuccessful, but the fact that she ran on the Democratic ticket with American Labor Party endorsement sent a tremor through the family – and also doubtless through the ancestral graveyards. (No one can recall ever having met another Stott until that time who was not a Republican.) Leila Stott had already prepared the family for her political position by her activities as one of the New York State campaign managers of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in which she had the active support of her sister, Helen Stott Philip, and other enlightened females in the family.
The only professional military service (not counting wartime) of any Stott after Jonathan Stott did his four-year interrupted hitch in the British infantry was the distinguished Naval career of Captain Arthur Stott, son of Arthur S. of the “Red Farm.”
The Stotts of the 19th Century had a highly developed appreciation of the good things of life, and never, if they could afford it, settled for anything but the best and seldom did even when they couldn’t afford it. Their English gardens were unequalled in the area. The great house of Charles H. Stott was furnished and perfected architecturally in a manner that had obviously spared no expense. They were widely travelled. The tradition of an annual European pilgrimage was firmly established, long before steamboats were considered safe (this probably started for business reasons, as Jonathan Stott went several times back to England to fetch skilled workers for the mills).
While no one kept a private railroad car, the Stotts thought nothing of chartering one when it move them to travel far en masse – which they did in the winter of 1885-86 on the famous trip to California aboard the car “Raquette.” The trip was repeated several times.
The family yachtsman was Francis H. Stott, Commodore of the Atlantic Yacht Club of Brooklyn. The keenest horse fancier was Frederick O. Stott, of the third generation, who raced far and wide on trotting tracks. [I think he means Frederick Dubois Stott –KPJ]
“The Commodore,” as he was known all over the world, had a colorful early career. Fascinated by ships from a tender age because of his father, Jonathan Stott’s, tales to his youthful adventures, and his mother’s stories of her father, John Bennet’s, seven months’ voyage from Liverpool on a chartered schooner which was captured by privateers, young Francis Horatio Stott was given a berth aboard the clipper ship “Sea Witch,” skippered by a family friend, Captain Waterman, and made enough voyages over several years as the “Sea Witch” ran between New York and San Francisco and the Orient to become the ship’s first mate before family affairs called him back to Stottville. He refused, however, to give up the sea entirely, and owned in succession, two yachts, called “Sea Witch” and “Viking,” on which he retraced many of the routes of his career before the mast.
Not surprisingly, Francis Horatio married the daughter of a ship captain: Elizabeth Lathrop, of Stockport, whose father, Gideon Lathrop, commanded steamboats on Lake Champlain and the Hudson River.
While the Stotts cared nothing for ostentation for its own sake, neither did they care much if what they considered well worth having happened to be ostentatious. They were prudent and frugal when they had to be, of course, but would always tend to economize on other things than the amenities of life.
Leila Whitney Stott recalled her surprise when, on learning of reverses in the mills, she had offered to reduce household costs by giving up some service, and was told patiently that such action wasn’t really necessary – it was better to wait and hope for better times than make such a drastic move.
She also recalled her amazement when as a bride she was taken to Stottville and shown her principle Stott wedding present – a new and completely furnished 18-room house already staffed with domestics. She also recalled that when she asked her husband for a bank account to keep money to run the house, he reacted with amused surprise; the Stotts of that generation believed that women should not be concerned with money, in fact that money was a subject that was simply never discussed in the family circle outside business hours.
There is also the famous legend that a barrel of cash was always kept in the mill office, and that anyone in the family who needed any stopped by and simply helped himself. This could be partly true. But the companion legend that the mills kept no books, but only toted up the cash and checkbook at the end of the week, is probably apocryphal, as the enterprise did, after all, survive 30 years under second generation control.
In true Victorian tradition, however, the Stotts shunned publicity of any kind. Several years ago, in a letter from Leila Vanderbilt Stott to Edith Williams Blydenburgh, in answer to an inquiry about Stott family history, the writer noted:
“The person who is interested in having it (a Stott family history) is Mr. Henry Steele Commager, the historian at Columbia College. Constance Warren (then president at Sarah Lawrence College) told him about tales of Stottville she heard from Mother (Leila Whitney Stott) and he wrote your mother (Emma Stott Williams, then in her 90’s) asking her to give him a sketch of our family history, but she laughed at the idea.”
Another Victorian virtue, the Stott sense of social and family responsibility, is also widely remembered. Jonathan Stott having brought many skilled weavers from England to teach the local people special skills, the employer-employee relationship in the mills was always close and cordial under the family regime. Weavers and spinners at the height of the mills’ prosperity worked a 12-hour day, six days a week, for $12 and $9 a week, respectively. However, they still managed to raise families and put away savings; village life was pleasant; housing was good. Unlike mill towns that grew up on the great waves of European immigration of the late 19th Century, Stottville until 1890 was almost 100% comprised of English and Scotch stock.
In later years, under Juilliard, unionization became an issue. Ironically, Leila Stott, Jonathan Stott’s great granddaughter, played a leading role in encouraging the formation of the Stottville mills’ first union (a fact which some of her political opponents claimed was a decisive cause of the mills’ closing, though from a perspective of 30 years it seems unlikely that the Stottville textile industry would have survived much longer, regardless).
The Stotts’ building of village houses and the village church was in the typically English pattern.
Their responsibility to the family, however, seems more remarkable to those who remembered the era of the Charles H. and Commodore Frank Stott and lived long enough to see the changes that modern times brought. Leila V. Stott, in her letter to Edith Blydenburgh about Stott history, takes note of the “the way our grandmother and Grandpa Stott took Aunt Liz and her children to live with them when she was deserted by Grandma’s worthless brother.” She adds, “It seemed to be a matter of course in those days even though there was plenty of money then to have supported her elsewhere.”
– JVNP, Jr. June 27, 1970
Talavera, headquarters for the Stott reunion, is the only remaining family-occupied “Stott” house in the area, and that only by marriage. Its owner is Helen Munro Stott (Mrs. J. Van Ness) Philip, daughter of William Henry Stott and Leila Whitney Stott. The Philips and before them the Van Nesses have owned the house since it was built in 1798. The Philip family going back at least three generations had friendly relations with the Stotts, and there was much visiting back and forth between Talavera and Stottville. It was at a dinner at the Charles H. Stott house given by its then owners, Frank and Cecilia Stott, that Helen Stott first met her future husband, J. Van Ness Philip.