Question: The house in this week’s photo had an interesting past. Do you know its varied uses and where it was located?
Last week’s answer: The roads leading to the Lysander hamlet of Little Utica were heavily traveled on Saturday, May 7, 1887. More than 600 people were headed for a home on Lamson Road where a “once in a lifetime experience” awaited them. They would be celebrating the 100th birthday of Sarah Adams Bassett Coffin.
Of the 62,000,000 people living in the United States at that time, the Dec. 30, 1900, issue of the New York Herald estimated that fewer than 20 of them had reached the 100-year mark. To know one of them was extremely rare. To be one of them was much rarer still.
Lysander pioneer Sarah Adams Bassett Coffin was born May 7, 1787, in Chilmark, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Sarah came from notable and hardy stock. Her great grandfather Bassett had been a colonel in the English army. Great-grandfather Mayhew Adams was reputed to have lived to the age of 115.
When Sarah was 12, her family moved from the Massachusetts seaside to New York to protect her brothers from impressment by the British Navy.
In 1808 Sarah married native New Yorker Reuben Coffin. Two years later the couple caught “western frontier fever” and forged their way through the wilderness to Lysander, where Revolutionary War veteran Jonathan Palmer had settled in 1793. The Coffins’ first home was a log cabin constructed by Reuben in four days. A fine house (seen in the photo) would follow.
Sarah bore 10 children, six of whom were living at the time of her celebration, along with 36 grandchildren, 84 great-grandchildren and 19 great-great-grandchildren. Members of each of the five generations were at the party. Overall, celebrants that day numbered over 600. They came from neighboring farms, distant counties, and even out of state.
Tables laden with hospitality were set up under two tents in the side yard. Guests enjoyed a midday meal between 10 a.m. and noon. Photographer Asa Warner had traveled 10 miles from Baldwinsville to document the grand occasion.
At 4 p.m. the program began. Frank Sharp had the honor of tolling the bell in the Little Utica Methodist Church tower 100 times. Singing followed and Judson Merrifield offered “a fervent prayer.” Speaker of the day was Rev. J. L. King, who began with “Venerable Mother Coffin, thrice favored sons and daughters, ladies and gentlemen.”
He continued with a sketch of Sarah Coffin’s 100 years as girl, wife, mother, pioneer and friend.
Sarah Adams Bassett Coffin passed away Jan. 1, 1888. She is buried in Jacksonville Rural Cemetery, one mile west of the place she had called home for 78 years.
Contact Editor Sarah Hall at [email protected] or leave a message at (315) 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 before the deadline, 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.
