Sailor Cenotaphs on Two Shores: Schooner Days DCCXXXIV (734)

by C. H. J. Snider

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PULTNEYVILLE, that pleasant village on the lake shore east of Rochester, after you cross Irondequoit Bay and Bear Creek, is the happiest find among all the vanished ports and havens of Lake Ontario. The usual evidences of a "portly" past such as ruined piers, tumble-down buildings, sunken hulks and black lighthouses are entirely lacking. but the stranger is greeted immediately on entry with a monument, in excellent taste, to the twenty-seven schooner captains plying from the port, with the names and dates of their first commands.

There is nothing so fine as this on the north shore, nothing even nearly approaching it, except the touching BLANCHE monument in the Lakeport cemetery, or the graves of the yachtsmen of the FOAM at Niagara on the Lake. These are only individual memorials. Our harbors, from Toronto east and west, lack evidences of love and pride in the men and ships who made them and made Canada.

The Pultneyville monument is in the shape of a little lighthouse. Pultneyville had a lighthouse once, but it has been gone these forty years. Capt. Walter F. Kirk kindly dug up these port particulars from an old number of Scott's New Coast Pilot, the vade mecum of Lake Ontario in 1909:

"Pultneyville, at the mouth of Salmon Creek, 10 3/4 miles to the westward of the piers at Big Sodus, and 21 miles to the eastward of the piers at the mouth of Genessee River. It has no lighthouse. The harbor works consist of a pier running easterly from the west shore, and thence northerly into the lake, with an east pier parallel to and about 200 feet from the northerly arm of the west pier. Length of west pier from the shore arm, 558 feet. Length of east pier, 572 feet: the west pier extends about 300 feet further into the lake than the east pier. Depth at low water, 6 feet."

Pultneyville was never a "big" port. Now it is none, save for the yacht nest in the creek mouth. At its palmiest it was the equal of contemporary Oakville or Port Credit in size and shipping. It is much smaller than either today, but preserves an air of well-being and interest in past and present rare in Canadian villages. Perhaps it is an inherited fragrance of the orchard land in which it is situated.

ONE OF TWENTY-SEVEN

Last name on this bronze plaque giving the names of the captains of the Port of Pultneyville and their commands is Capt. Marvin V. Pallister, of the Schooner Fred L. Wells. We knew the Fred L. Wells in boyhood. She was one of mother's lovely surprises for us. In those days we were avid for schooners and news of them, and mother came home on the Empress of India from a visit, with the name of a new schooner she had seen abroad, laden with a cargo of cedar posts. The name was Fred L. Wells and to our joy we ourselves found her at the Queen's Wharf not long afterwards.

She then hailed from Oswego and although she did not look it she was already very much of an old-timer. Lewis Shickluna had built, or rebuilt, her at St. Catharines in 1854 from the bottom of the Schooner Raney, of unknown vintage, probably 1849. So she might be a hundred years old were she now alive. But she passed out in the tail of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, missing the piers at Oswego and going to pieces on the beach, the same night as the Albacore and the T.R. Merritt.

Though over forty when first seen she was still a pretty craft, 158 tons register, with a nice clipper bow and a good sheer. She was painted white and lead color, with green rail and covering board and a red beading. Her rig was antique. Three swifters instead of four in her lower rigging, futtock shrouds and deadeyes aloft, and two peak halliard blocks on the gaffs instead of three. All evidence of days when manpower was plentiful.

NOT AN EIGHTEEN-TWELVER

Capt. Pallister had sailed her in 1861, the tablet says. He also sailed the Sylph from this port when he was twenty-one, which would be either the same year or the next. At first glance this would appear to be another link with the War of 1812, for the Sylph, launched at Sackett's Harbor in 1814 in 21 days from the time her timbers were still trees in the bush, was a famous man-of-war, of Baltimore clipper model, the fastest vessel in Commodore Chauncey's fleet. She was rigged both as a schooner and a brig. After the war she was sold and was a lake carrier for thirty years.

Capt. Van Cleve, a contemporary, recorded that she was sunk at Clayton in 1847. Unless this Sylph was resuscitated, young Capt. Pallister's pride was a new Sylph, built about this time and rebuilt in Sodus in 1872 by H. Doviel, when she was renamed the Wanatee or Waumatee. So we may wipe Capt. Pallister off as an 1812-er, even by succession. He was born in 1841 and was 85 when he died.

Captain Pallister's first sailing was done in 1859, when he shipped in Oswego in the Schooner Thomas Kingsford, out of Pultneyville, with 600 barrels of salt for Chicago. She got there in two weeks, a very fast trip for 1,300 miles of sailing and canalling. In Chicago she loaded grain and was back before the month was out. Capt. Samuel D. Tomlinson of Pultneyville was master of her in 1859, and she was then nearly new, having been built in Oswego by G. R. Rogers three years before. She was 375 tons register, "full canal size" for the second Welland Canal.

APPLE-CARRYING PILOT

Capt. Pallister also sailed the Pilot out of this vanished harbor in 1868. He was a partner with some of the Roys family, who went whaling out of this very port. Not on Lake Ontario, on the Pacific.

The firm of Roys and Pallister had, according to the priceless Commercial Advertiser, then published here "constantly on hand at their warehouse, near the bridge in this place, flour, salt, plaster, waterlime, grain bags, etc., etc. Their schooner Pilot will make excursions from this place July 4th."

This was in 1868 and the Pilot was then two years old. The little Pilot, about 38 tons register, and able to carry 100 tons at a pinch, was a puff-and-pucker bowed schooner with low rig and tippy tendencies, futtock shrouds aloft, squarish stern, straight sheer and cutwater knee. When we knew her, long afterwards, she was green with a red bottom, but she had been white. Built in Wilson Creek, she was an apple carrier from "this place," when the streets and wharves were heaped up with fresh picked fruit. She also carried grain and lumber and in the latter trade passed into Canadian ownership and plied the Bay of Quinte and sheltered waters under Capt. Frank Barnhart, of Deseronto, Capt. James Oliver, of Portsmouth ("Saucy Jack"), and Capt. James Mahoney. She died of old age in the Cataraqui River some time after 1910, after fifty years of usefulness.

We want to come back to Pultneyville as soon as circumstances permit. There are other stories, grave and gay, told by the simple names on the lighthouse monument.

"In Memory of the Lake Captains of Pultneyville"

Captain of the Schooner

"Erected in Lasting Memory, 1935"

MARINERS' MONUMENT, PULTNEYVILLE

THE BLANCHE MEMORIAL AT LAKEPORT

"Erected according to the resolution passed by the Presbyterian Church by friends and acquaintances in Lakeport and vicinity, assisted by the Masonic Lodge of Colborne. Token of respect for the departed and sympathy for the bereaved. God is Love." Those lost on the fine moonlight night of May 28th, 1888, in the sudden squall which descended on the schooner Blanche somewhere off the Scotch Bonnet, were Capt. John H. Henderson, Mate William Seeds, sailor W. E. Haynes, and Anne Smith, cook, all of Lakeport. From the list the vessel seems to have been short-handed.