Highlights of Past Issues
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Summer 2007, Volume 7, Number 1 ©
Salesman of the American Dream - Joshua Ruff
Levittown: the name still means "suburbia" to millions of Americans. But Bill Levitt, its namesake, is remembered as a developer whose reach extended far beyond Long Island's post-World War II building boom.
Tempered Vines - Michelle Henry
A devout temperance advocate and his sone parleyed Chautauqua County's grape industry into Welch's Grape Juice, a multi-million-dollar company whose product has become a staple of America's beverage industry.
The Forestport Breaks - Michael Doyle (HTML version; PDF version)
Who sabotaged the Erie Canal? Genealogical sleuthing and historical research reveal a small town on the edge of the Adirondacks as the locus of a homegrown crime that reached throughout the state.
"Fellow Citizens, Read a Horrid Tale..." - Tricia A. Barbagallo
In the nineteenth century,
public officials followed a
code of honor to resolve
disagreements both political
and personal. But that code
was broken one spring day
in Albany.
Watchdogs of the State - Philip A. Bean
A 1957 meeting of criminal minds in Apalachin, a rural town near Binghamton, led to political inquests and a power struggle at the highest levels of state government.
The Forestport Breaks - Michael Doyle
Darkness fell, and the ruffians gathered like ghosts. Forestport was distracted with its customary frolics on the evening of May 23, 1898. Surrounded by six sawmills, the Erie Canal-side town in upstate New York’s upper Oneida County scared the faint of heart. Its bars and pleasuring establishments pulsed with the rowdy river drivers down from the Big Moose River, the wizened and de-fingered sawyers, the canawlers still clinging to their dying trade.
“The citizens are a hardy
class of men, honest in the
main,” the Brooklyn Eagle
would observe in January 1900,“but having among them… the reckless daredevil class
which makes its living away
from humanity and modern
civilization in general.”
Prosecutors would make the
Forestport case more bluntly.“They’ve got more saloons
than houses,” one law
enforcement official would
state in May 1900, “and that
is the way the town is ruled.”
True enough: the town of
1,500 souls boasted half a
dozen saloons, whose owners
pulled the strings. There was Walt Bynon’s place, and big
Dick Manahan’s Getman
House, and Jimmy Rudolph’s
dangerous pool hall, and the
lumberjack’s hotel known as
Doyle’s. Forestport was a
town on the edge, where
civilization merged with the
North Country wilderness.
Remsen was a rather more placid town, twenty minutes away by the New York Central Railroad line. When the detectives from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency started coming, they transited Remsen. But that would be later, after the Forestport canal levees had collapsed once too often and suspicions could no longer be suppressed.“There is no law,” people whispered, “north of Remsen.”
How the Deed Was Done
Erie Canal authorities may
have grown accustomed to
breaks; by the late nineteenth
century, the whole system was
as dilapidated as an old man
with brittle bones. But when
the Forestport levees broke
in 1897, and again in 1898,
and once more in 1899, the
coincidence would provoke
Governor Roosevelt’s team
of investigators. What they
subsequently found, one
prosecutor would thunder in1900, amounted to “one of
the most gigantic conspiracies
that was ever concocted in
New York State.”
On the night of May 23,
1898, four men gathered
unnoticed amid Forestport’s
customary mayhem. They snuck
away from River Street and
crossed the bridge spanning
the Black River, the sounds of
saloon revelry subsiding as they
walked up a hill toward the
Forestport Feeder canal. The
Feeder connected Forestport to
Boonville and the Black River
Canal eleven miles away, but
the men were not going that
far. Instead, they struck off
down the towpath for several
hundred yards, lugging picks
and shovels and a bottle. Two
of them separated to stand
watch. The other two, pool
hall owner James Rudolph
and a local hard case named
John Root, took a warming
pull of whiskey and readied
their tools. “And Root and I,” Rudolph would later testify,“went to digging.”
“There was a regular hole worked into the bottom of the canal 30 or 40 feet deep, and that was working back towards the berm bank and up and down the canal in both directions,” a local man named Charley Pratt would testify in1900. “Dirt was caving into the bottom of the canal and big chunks of earth were dropping into this hole as the water undermined it.”
Pratt’s testimony was
recorded in a trial transcript
found at the Oneida County
Courthouse, as well as in
microfilmed editions of the
Boonville Herald, Rome Daily
Sentinel, and Utica Observer.
In fact, all of the Oneida
County newspapers were
enraptured by the story of the
frequent Forestport breaks
that unraveled over the course
of several years. By the time
a series of criminal trials
began in Rome in April 1900,
reporters were swarming over
the rough-and-tumble town
and its ill-fated canal levees.
Walking Through History
It’s 108 years later, September
30, 2006. Saloon girls sashay
before Scooter’s bar, a rugged
but warm-hearted place that
a newly painted sign identifies
as Forestport’s old Hotel Doyle.
Nickel beers have been poured
since ten in the morning,
enlivening spirits for the firstever
Old Forestport Days. A
parade forms: a mounted
posse, buggies, and impeccably
restored antique cars depart
River Street at a ceremonious
pace. The parade crosses the
Black River bridge and moves
uphill toward the Forestport
Feeder. At the garlanded head
of the canal towpath, Scooter’s
co-owner, Jeannie Wolcott,
dedicates the newest section of
what’s called the North Country
Scenic Trail, a 4,600-mile braid
of trails connecting North
Dakota to Lake Champlain.
Celebrants stroll down the towpath to the place where, 108 years earlier, John Root, James Rudolph, and their cronies had dug all night. Some clues of physical rupture and reclamation endure, and a sepia-toned image forms in the mind’s eye: the diggers slivering away the towpath until the canal water starts sluicing through, carrying chunks of levee downhill toward the Black River. One imagines the wound confronting canal men on the fog-bound morning of May 24, 1898.
I came upon the crime
scene by accident.
While researching my
family history, I learned that
my great-grandfather and
namesake, a certain Michael
Doyle of Forestport, New
York, had owned a saloon
and lumberjack’s hotel. How
colorful, I thought. Growing
up in California and working
as a newspaper correspondent
in Washington, D.C.,
I knew (and cared) nothing
about Forestport—until I began
digging too.
Census records at the
National Archives, and birthand death records in Oneida
County, got me started. Turnof-
the-century county histories
fleshed out names and faces.
At the State Library in Albany,
annual reports from the
New York State Engineer and
Surveyor recorded the Erie
Canal’s rise and fall. Canal
depredations proved to be
well documented; the Archives’
shelves were thick with reports
from canal investigating
commissions established in
1846, 1876, and 1898. “If
the state’s waterways are
used as means of favoritism,
bad appointments, corrupt
contracts or extravagance and
mismanagement to promote
partisan ends at the expense
of public service…there
ought to be exposure,” the
New York Times reasoned in
September 1890.
The Forestport breaks had
been sketchily described in
works like Noble E. Whitford’s
1906 opus History of the
Canal System of the State of
New York, but the breaks
were never explored in
depth. So that’s what I set
out to do when I began the
research that led to my
book, The Forestport Breaks:
A Nineteenth-Century
Conspiracy Along the Black
River Canal, published by
Syracuse University Press
in 2004.
For Money––and Memory
I learned that for decades,
well-connected men had
plundered the Erie Canal.
Businessmen had soaked it
with costly contracts, politicians
had padded it with patronage
jobs, and it had provided dark inspiration for the saloonkeepers
and hotel owners of
Forestport, who had banded
together to hire Jimmy
Rudolph’s gang. Whenever the
canal levees broke, the state
would hire hundreds of workers
and spend tens of thousands
of dollars on repairs, making
Forestport flush—for awhile.
“The Forestport men,”
the Brooklyn Eagle declared in
January 1900, “did not have
the position that enabled
them to make the raid on
the treasury in a polite and
genteel manner, and so they
went at it brutally.”
And Michael Doyle? He had
been in the middle of it all.
Pinkerton detectives peeled
away the Forestport layers until
they understood how—and
why—the breaks occurred.
“I would give $25 if there was another break,” Doyle had told Rudolph in the spring of 1898.
Good old great-granddad!
He inspired the 1898 plotting,
and similar commercial considerations
brought about the
breaks in 1897 and 1899.
Ultimately, thirteen Forestport
men were arrested––the first
time anyone was charged
with conspiring to destroy
Erie Canal property. Several
went to Auburn State Prison,
but Michael Doyle escaped
prosecution by dying before
the Pinkertons arrived.
But today his place still
stands, as Scooter’s bar; the
Forestport Feeder still flows;
and the towpath still beckons,
all of them found through
digging up the archives this
time, a refurbished trail of
ghosts and memory.
