In the Lee of Appleboom Point: Schooner Days DCCXXXII (732)

by C. H. J. Snider

APPLEBOOM POINT now broad abeam, hard-a-port for the turn of the road, and once more our old friend Lake Ontario greets us with big blue rollers booming in with iridescent foam caps all the way from Canada.

Against the spray-filled background on a patch of sward at the bend stands a miniature stone lighthouse, capped by an iron anchor and a stone cathead.

On the bronze plaque on its side, in raised letters, are the names of twenty-seven captains sailing schooners and steamers out of this village. And what a list! Right back to the War of 1812 and behind it. That war here seems as recent as World War what's-its-number.

BRITISH CANNONBALLS LEFT THEIR MARKS

This fine white house of Richard P. Lovelace's at the corner of Jay street and Lake Road was built by Jeremiah Selby in 1808. It has marks of British cannonballs on it. So has the John Lagasse house, around the corner from the monument to the twenty-seven captains and their twenty-seven ships. It is a wooden one rebuilt on the foundations of the stone house built before 1812 by J. H. Hallett. These are souvenirs of Commodore Yeo's raid in the year 1813, when he penned the militia in the hollow with broadsides converging like a pair of scissors, before coming ashore to lift the district's supply of flour. The shrewd Yankees negotiated a surrender long enough to get all their good flour into the back country and gave up a hundred barrels of mouldy stuff.

This has long been a fruit and flour country, a mellow land of orchard farms and cabbage fields with orange pumpkins gleaming among the ripened heads of purple, red and green. Mulberry trees mingle with patriarchal maples on the roadside, and on the highway front cobble-walled houses in Georgian style with quaint grilled attic windows under the generous eaves, and gleaming white Colonial mansions, carpentered from white pine growing on the ridge a hundred and fifty years ago.

Where the apple trees have gone to wood for a hundred years there may project the weather browned clapboarding of a lapstreaked drying house, with its big flue of clay sheathed in wood, elbowing the humble brick chimney which served the family fireplace.

Treasured clippings from Civil War newspapers tell how someone's great-grandmother—Mrs. John Britton "of this place" she was—made 1,700 lbs. of dried apples "with her own hands in the past fall (1863) besides doing all the duties connected with the house." That was the kind of war bride extant eighty years ago.

That wooded headland has been called Appleboom Point since 1800. There was then an apple tree with a projecting branch looking like a jib-boom or bowsprit from the lake. Dutch settlers may have call it Appleboom from their word for an apple tree, but the term originated with the sailors whose names still look at it from the lighthouse plaque. Cider instead of champagne should have christened every vessel launched at this port - and there were many.

CAN YOU GUESS THE NAME OF THE PLACE?

The place is as modern as 1946 - and redolent of three centuries. It bears the name of a baron of Bath of Walpole's time whose heirs sold acres of wilderness after the American revolution. It has a yacht club much like the one at Port Credit.

Clarence R. Burcroff, secretary of the club, tells us it revived in '43 with six members and two boats, one of them a Royal Canadian Yacht Club dinghy. The first yacht of which they have a record is old Capt. Throop's 100-foot pleasure steamer Magic, which he built here for his own use in 1867, after a strenuous life of seagoing, underground railroading and managing the Ontario Steamboat Co. and American Express Line. Now they have a hundred members and a mixed grill of ten yachts—the dinghy being reinforced by power cruisers and sail craft of no great draught and tall Marconi masts. One of the fleet is the smart sloop Scud—remember the Scud in Pathfinder?—laid up awaiting the homecoming of the secretary's son, Capt. Richard T. Burcroff.

With hospitality typical of this Apple Land he throws his front door wide open. This shows over the fireplace, photographs of Scud coming across from Canada in such a gale that the father had to stand on the pier end and signal to the boy not to try to make the harbor entrance. The same boy threaded a more difficult needle after Pearl Harbor.

Having begun his sailing in a Lake Ontario coal schooner out of Oswego in 1925, he was second officer of the steamer Falcon in South America when the United States got into the war. And he entered troop transport. He took part in the New Caledonia landings and in carrying troops to Iceland, England and Scotland, and Suez and Italy and Africa and boots to Russia under the fire of German bombers. In 1943, when the yacht club was formed, he was master of the transport steamer Pierre Dupont. Next year, as master of the Cape Gaspe, he carried the 149th Infantry into the Leyte campaign. Attacked by Japanese suicide dive bombers, his gun crew shot 'em down, and Jan. 12th, being the Old Man's birthday (the "boy" is now thirty-seven) they presented him at sea with the 5-inch shell case from the gun that did it.

This trophy from his shipmates lights tire Scud picture over the fireplace, He is now bound for Belgium with the Liberty ship W. R. Grace, of which he is master. They hope to have him home to sail Scud in the annual contest for the greatest prize in this part of the world, the Browne Handicap Trophy.

BRAVE BLOCKADE RUNNER AND HIS BRIDE

But, like the Ancient Mariner, we refuse to be diverted from the bronze list of ships and captains whose requiem the lake sings. Third in the column is Capt. Charles Snow, along with his schooner Lark, a troop transport in Commodore Chauncey's fleet, from Sacket's Harbor, bringing Dearborn's army to burn York in 1813.

Charles Snow was a stirring young man in the War of 1812. His Lark was built before 1809 at Salmon River which may be the name of the creek which flows in here, or the larger stream where Port Ontario was founded a quarter of a century after the Lark was built. The vessel was owned here by Colt and Ledyard. Caught by hostilities in Ogdensburg, opposite Prescott, young Capt. Snow attempted to run the British blockade of the river on the night of June 29th, 1812, with six other schooners, and was one who succeeded where three or four failed. The night was very dark and it was blowing a gale up the river. He ran the "Lower Narrows above Brockville," close in with the Canadian shore, where he had a three-knot current against him and a rocky passage so narrow that even the 60-foot Lark could not tack but had to take it on the run.

His vessel, like the steamers commanded by Capt. Burcroff a hundred and thirty years later, was taken into the U.S. government service as a trooper, After the war was over he obtained command of the Oswego schooner Julia, built by Henry Eagle in 1811, which had fought on both sides in the conflict, being converted into a man-of-war and captured and recaptured and used as a transport and gun schooner by both British and Americans.

This schooner was built by Matthew McNair and named after his daughter. One would like to think that she was the young lady whom Capt. Snow married on attaining command of this fine vessel when peace returned to the lake. Be that as it may, they sailed together in her from Oswego on their wedding trip on Oct. 24th, 1815, all the little town turning out to see the handsome couple start on their voyage of life, with bands playing and flags flying high.

LONG VOYAGE SOON ENDED

That voyage was brief. At night it came on to blow and thick snow filled the reefed sails. Next month a black hulk on its beam ends washed in a mile above Appleboom Point, in another gale. It was the Julia, missing then for weeks. But the wedding party, Capt. Snow and his bride, and all who sailed from Oswego, are still missing. No trace was ever found of them. This miniature lighthouse with its stone cathead is their sole memorial.

The fatal Julia, four years old at the time, was refloated and refitted. Capt. James Whitney of this place sailed her.

There are twenty-six other names on the tablet, with other stories having happier endings. If your patience holds out we shall try to tell them.

Have you yet guessed where "this place" is?

"This fine white house of Richard P. Lovelace bears marks of British cannon balls."

"The turn of the road shows … a miniature lighthouse capped by an anchor and a stone cathead."