Question: This photo shows the many names that the Baldwinsville area has been known as over the years. What do you know about them?
Last week’s answer: Daniel Warner Marvin’s memorial stone sits in the Warners Main Street Cemetery. Located on Canton Street Road directly across from the Methodist Church in the hamlet of Warners, the cemetery is readily visible from the road.
Young Daniel was the great-great-grandson of Van Buren pioneer Thomas Marvin. Connecticut native and Revolutionary War veteran, Marvin came to Van Buren in 1811 with his six sons and soon established Onondaga County’s first brickyard.
Among the many Marvin descendants was Harry Norton Marvin (1862-1940), entrepreneur, inventor and pioneer in the motion picture industry.
The well-to-do H.N. Marvins were part of the New York City social scene, as was the Frank Farquharson family. In 1911 Farquharsons’ daughter Mary and H.N.’s son Daniel sought parental approval to marry; both were 17. Denied because of their youth, the pair eloped in January 1912.
Upon learning of the elopement some weeks later, both sets of parents insisted upon a formal wedding. The elaborate affair took place March 12, 1912, at the Manhattan Riverside Drive home of the bride’s parents. The event was a featured item in the “City Social Notes” column of the Sunday edition of the New York Times.
Following the ceremony and the reception, the bridal party, accompanied by family, the minister and numerous guests, traveled to a motion picture studio in which the wedding scene from the Riverside Drive home had been replicated in detail, from the altar to the floral decorations. The entire ceremony was repeated in front of the cameras and was hailed as the very first wedding to be “cinematographed.”
The day after the wedding the young couple left for a European honeymoon aboard the luxury steamship Mauritania. Plans to return to New York five weeks later on the liner Carpathia were scuttled in favor of an invitation to sail on the prestigious maiden voyage of the Titanic as personal guests of the captain.
The catastrophic end of the vessel also brought a tragic end to the Farquharson/Marvin marriage. At Daniel’s insistence, Mary boarded the last lifeboat and was ultimately rescued. Her young groom went down with the ship.
Daniel’s parents placed his memorial in the Warners Cemetery in the midst of his ancestors, who were already interred there: grandparents Daniel Warner Marvin and grandmother Ellen Jane Weed Marvin; great-grandparents Norton Francis Marvin and Wealthy Warner Marvin; and great-great-grandparents, pioneers Thomas Marvin and Anna Norton Marvin.
Direct descendant and namesake Dan Marvin was one of those to respond to this History Mystery with the following message via email:
“The monument to Daniel Warner Marvin is located at the south end of the Warners United Methodist cemetery. Though he was lost at sea and there was nothing to bury, the monument was placed to honor a hero of the Titanic. The Marvin family has been in Warners for a long time; Thomas Marvin started the Onondaga Brick Company there after fighting in the Revolutionary War. I was named after Daniel and actually worked as a groundskeeper in that cemetery in high school.”
Contact Editor Sarah Hall at [email protected] or leave a message at 434-8889 ext. 310 with your guess by 5 p.m. Friday (please leave the information in the message; we are not generally able to return calls regarding History Mystery responses). If you are the first person to correctly identify an element in the photo, your name and guess will appear in next week’s Messenger, along with another History Mystery feature. History Mystery is a joint project of the Museum at the Shacksboro Schoolhouse and the Baldwinsville Public Library.
