Comeback of an "American Nelson": Schooner Days DCCLX (760)

by C. H. J. Snider

HORATIO NELSON THROOP was indeed not named after the indeed not named after the great admiral for nothing. After the Sophia he had built at such cost dropped under his feet into the deepest hole in Lake Ontario — 130 fathoms off Big Sodus — he faced the world, coatless, shoeless and empty-handed. Save for two torn off door-leaves and a useless tiller. One door-leaf helped him get ashore after five hours swimming. The other, with the tiller, he found on the beach afterwards. With these weapons he resumed the battle of life—for his widowed mother, and for his little brother and sister, all dependent upon this boy not yet twenty-one. And for Sophia, still his secret, though a hundred and twenty years have passed since he launched the schooner that bore the name.

To a stranger fumbling with clumsy fingers among the clues Sophia seems to have been not a dream girl, but a young man's dream of life. Here is only a guess at the basis of that dream.

Even yet the fragrance of Mrs. Sophia Childs Ledyard's presence of a hundred years before lingers in the apple-scented atmosphere of Pultneyville. She was a matron when Horatio built the Sophia, and became his mother-in-law eight years later, for he married her daughter Mary in 1834. "To this mother-in-law," writes a Pultneyville friend now in his eighties, "tradition assigns a very lovely character." She may have given young Horatio encouragement and inspiration which moulded his life; and so he shyly inscribed her name above the arch-board of the little vessel which was the height of his achievement after some years devotion to the adze and ship-axe. For Horatio built his first boat when he was a boy of thirteen.

The Sophia was lost on August 22nd, 1827. On Oct. 20th Horatio and his old boss Russel Cole, veteran of the War of 1812, went to work at building or rebuilding the schooner COMMERCE, and next year they began another, the ENTERPRISE. This was a second Enterprise of Pultneyville, the first being the schooner which Russell Whipple lost to us British by capture, at Olcott, N.Y., in the war in which Russel Cole fought.

It was with mixed feelings we rowed up the wooded banks of Eighteen Mile Creek only last month, to the bend where this poor little Enterprise cowered, stripped of her sails and topmasts, to conceal her from the hawk's eyes of Sir James Yeo's searching bluejackets. They got her, with her sails and her cargo of provisions, and she served as a British transport afterwards. It was odd that when Chauncey, the American Commodore, ran down a fleet of transports off the Ducks, Oct. 6th, 1813, this Enterprise was the only one of the covey that escaped into Kingston. So she remained in British hands.

The new Enterprise of Pultneyville was big for her time, 60 tons, thrice the size of the original, though not one per cent of the tonnage of present day bulk freighters. Hiram Gallop was a part owner, along with Russel Cole and Horatio, and Horatio sailed her as master in 1829, doing all the work on board at times, to make her pay. She was a successful venture. In 1833 his "little brother" Washington had risen to her command.

Two years later, when commanded by. a Capt. McComber, this Enterprise ventured as far as Lake Michigan, the first Pultneyville vessel to go thither. The new Welland Canal, opened in 1829, permitted this long voyage. There she was wrecked, on the sandy east shore, with its then bar-bound harbor ponds.

The Commerce, which Russel Cole and Horatio built that fall after the Sophia disaster, may have been the second of her name, or a rebuild, because the Pultneyville lighthouse monument gives Capt. Horace Morley as master of the Commerce in 1826, the preceding year. Capt. Morley and Augustus Phelps were her owners, and they sold her in 1829 to Henry Fitzhugh in Oswego, who was accumulating a forwarding fleet.

Horatio was soon a "made man." He had retrieved his disaster by the only way — hard work. By the time he was twenty-five he was sought after both as master builder and master mariner and was a figure in the community. In 1834, when York was changing into Toronto, with William Lyon Mackenzie as first mayor of the city, Horatio married Mary Ledyard, and brought her. as a bride to the cobblestone mansion, still standing, which he began two years before.

He was as enterprising as the ambitious "big" schooner of 60 tons he had built and named, and turned his mind to steam. Four years alter his marriage he built and launched Pultneyville's first steamer. This was the EXPRESS, and she just missed being historic. But if we are going into that we shall need another chapter. Next week, eh?

BOY WHO LOST HIS ALL LIVED TO BUILD THIS HOME.

This is the freestone-and-cobble mansion of CAPT. HORATIO NELSON THROOP, built in 1832, and still standing in excellent preservation in Pultneyville, N.Y., across Lake Ontario.