January 2011

A year ago, while the nation was gearing up for its Bicentennial festivities, the New York State Department of Education quietly abolished the State Office of History. The office, which formerly had a staff of twenty-eight and a budget of $500,000 a year, was eliminated as part of an economy move by the Department of Education. Five jobs were scrapped, and all other History Office personnel were transferred to other units.

The termination of the office seems a rather paradoxical celebration of the nation’s Bicentennial year; most of the money which the Education Department hoped to save was spent by the State Bicentennial Commission. Dr. Louis Tucker, former State Historian and head of the Office of History, commented on the incongruity of cutbacks in both history teaching and in offices such as his own:

With St. Patrick’s Day approaching, we should mention a strange, little-known monument to Irish contentiousness in Syracuse, New York. It is a traffic light—perhaps the only one of its kind in America—that has the green light on top of the red.

According to John C. McGuire, the unofficial historian of the “Tipperary Hill” area in the western part of the city, the traffic light was first erected in 1925. Dinty Gilmartin, who owned a store nearby, was instantly alarmed and grabbed his telephone: “They got it all mixed up,” he told the local boss, John “Huckle” Ryan. “The red is on top; you better get here before something happens.”

Sure enough, by the time Ryan arrived, the light was smashed. State law said the red had to be on top, and a new light was put up despite Ryan’s protests. It was immediately wrecked, as was the next one. At last the city surrendered, and Tipperary Hill got its upside-down traffic light. It has remained undisturbed ever since.

Each year a million tourists visit Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, but the building there that contains the greatest collection of historic memorabilia is closed to them. It is a sometime high school that now houses the Division of Museum Services, and it is packed with artifacts from national parks throughout the country, all either awaiting or undergoing restoration to their original condition.

The division was established in 1972 to cope with the great number of National Park Service belongings that were falling prey to age or vandalism. To this repository came clocks, oil paintings, guns, tableware, carriages, and even two tents used by George Washington. (These last needed cleaning, an immense task that required the construction of a tank holding four hundred and eighty gallons of water.)

Among the bayonets, pipe bowls, buttons, and other familiar mementos of the American Revolution which were recently on display was one real stunner—the knucklebone from Major John André’s big toe.

The grisly relic is owned by Ethel Gove of Northvale, New Jersey. “It’s a small, dried up thing,” she said. “I never touch it, because I’m afraid it will crumble in my hands.” Miss Gove keeps the toe in a bank vault but, in honor of the Bicentennial, she put it on exhibition in the Closter. New Jersey, public library.

In 1820 André’s body was exhumed from the grave at the place of his execution in Tappan, New York, to be sent back to England. David Doremus, an ancestor of Miss Cove’s, served as apprentice to the carpenter hired to build a new coffin for the occasion. Doremus got hold of the piece of bone, built a small wooden reliquary for it, and passed it down to posterity.

An unusual follow-up to the article on Benjamin Rush in our December, 1975, issue came to us from Gene DeGruson, curator of special collections at Kansas State College:

“I have in my personal collection the manuscript lectures of Dr. Benjamin Rush, delivered before the College of Philadelphia from November i, 1790, to February i, 1791. They were taken down by Elihu Hubbard Smith, a Connecticut wit, physician, poet, and naturalist, and have never been published. Unlike Dr. Rush’s published lectures, these are conversational in tone, filled with charming anecdotes and fascinating asides.”

Here, then, is Dr. Rush, speaking with cranky, eclectic complacency on love and other serious medical problems:

ON LOVE

“It is the Excess, alone of this passion, which constitutes disease.

“The Symptoms are a perpetual silence concerning, or a constant talking of the person beloved: a love of solitude, especially by moonlight, &c.

CHARLESTON GETS RID OF SOME DUMB OLD STUFF DR. RUSH HOLDS FORTH THE RESTORATION FACTORY MEMENTO MORI BICENTENNIAL CASUALTY WOE TO THE ORANGEMEN—AND TO THECOLOR-BLIND