By Dorothy Heller
Clay Town Historian
The namesake of Soule Road in Clay lived a very interesting life.
Nathan Soule was born in August 1790 in Dover, Dutchess County, New York, the second son of Latten and Lydia Soule. He was one of 12 siblings, one of whom was Ephraim Leech Soule, who, like Nathan, would become a prominent resident of Clay. While still young, his father moved the family to Danube, Herkimer County, New York. About 1808, he married Christina Christophorus and they moved to Fort Plain, Montgomery County, New York, and started their family of 15 children, including: Harvey, Andrew, James, Lydia, Lucinda, Harriet, Rhoda, John, Alfred and Nathan, Jr. During the War of 1812, Nathan served as a sergeant in David Quackenbush’s Company, John Prior’s Regiment, stationed in Plattsburgh, New York until the autumn of 1814.
By 1818, Nathan was living in Sand Ridge, a small hamlet northwest of the village of Fort Plain, where he initially worked as a carpenter. The little riverside community needed law enforcement and a court system. This is where his political career began, first as a deputy sheriff and later as a justice of the peace and a county judge. In 1826, the Black Rock Gazette lists him as a delegate to the Jefferson Republican County Convention. (This is not the modern GOP but a separate, now-defunct party.)
In the 1920s, the Erie Canal was being built through this area, and Nathan became involved with its development by serving as a lock tender at Fort Plain. Later he was a contractor for the enlargement of the Erie Canal on several locks in Cohoes and a supervisor of a section of the canal (one of only 13 supervisors in the state). He also served as a contractor on the Chenango Canal, which ran from Utica to Binghamton. In at least one case, Nathan was not properly compensated for his work, which resulted in an 1838 law being passed by the state legislature entitled, “An Act for the Relief of Nathan Soule and Others.”
Nathan’s political career in Montgomery County culminated in his election to the United States House of Representatives in 1831, where he served a two-year term. As a member of the newly formed Democratic Party, he stood by President Andrew Jackson during the “Nullification Crisis,” a confrontation between South Carolina and the federal government over tariffs during which South Carolina threatened to secede. Was this a forewarning of the Civil War to come? A mixture of diplomacy and threats of military force eventually persuaded South Carolina to back down.
At the end of his term in 1833, Nathan and his family moved west to the town of Clay. Here they purchased land south and west of the hamlet of Euclid. The original Soule homestead was probably on the west side of the present Soule Road. The history of his farming activities included the fact that by 1860, Nathan and his family amassed more than 450 acres of land stretching from west of Soule Road, across parts of the modern Fairway East neighborhood and Soule Road school complex, past Morgan Road with the east border at or near Mud Creek. The 1855 Census states that the land he personally owned (not counting his sons’ portions) produced oats, barley, buckwheat, corn, beans, tobacco, turnips, apples, cider, poultry and eggs. He had a large herd of sheep (260) from which he produced wool and flannel cloth. He also raised horses, oxen and cows for milk and butter. There was abundant timber on the west side of the farm for making wooden implements. The Soules were truly self-sufficient.
Thank you to Zachary Peelman, MSEd, for his research material.
