# Fields of Freedom **A Century In Cattaraugus** Strong • Newman • Crandall • Easton For more than a century, a cluster of interrelated families — Strongs, Lanes, Newmans, Crandalls, and Powells among them — worked the land in and around the neighboring towns of Farmersville and Freedom in Cattaraugus County, New York. Their story begins in the hill country of New England and follows a Yankee migration westward, taking root along Clear Creek in the 1820s and 1830s and holding fast there through the Civil War and beyond, until at last one branch loaded a boxcar and set out for the far Northwest. This chapter follows those families to the eve of that departure, and no further. ## The Land and Its Settlement Farmersville and Freedom lie in the rolling upland country of southwestern New York — a landscape of broad-shouldered hills, wooded ridges, and narrow stream valleys, some sixty miles southwest of Rochester and forty-five miles east of Jamestown. The district was drained by Clear Creek, along whose valley the region's first road was laid out in October 1813, when the ground that would become Freedom and Farmersville was still part of the older town of Ischua and the county itself was raw frontier only recently opened to settlement. The valley floor offered the flattest, most workable route through otherwise broken terrain, and it was along that line that the country first opened to the settlers who followed. This was a country of hard winters and short, intense growing seasons, suited to the mixed subsistence-and-market farming typical of the western New York hills — grain, hay, oats, dairy cattle, orchards, and woodlots — rather than to any single cash crop. The soil rewarded labor but did not lavish wealth. The men and women who broke it were the kind who stayed put, married their neighbors, and filled the local burying grounds with a familiar rotation of surnames. The families who came here in the 1820s and 1830s arrived when the region was still being carved out of forest. Among the earliest was **Matthias Lane**, a Revolutionary War veteran and pensioner, who lived out his final years in Farmersville and died there in 1850. His presence marks how thin the interval still was between the founding generation of the young republic and the settlement of this frontier — men who had marched in 1777 were living to see their grandchildren break the first fields. ## Connecticut to Vermont: The Strong Line The Strong family's roots reach back to **Reuben Strong**, born 8 May 1733 in Colchester, Connecticut,— 2nd great-grandson of Elder John Strong —who married **Lydia Hutchinson** on 10 December 1761. He made his way north to Thetford, in Orange County, Vermont, where he died on 13 December 1775, in the earliest years of the Revolution. His son **Walter Strong**, born 19 September 1770 in that same town, married **Elsa Lucy** in 1790 and carried the family westward into New York State, living in Lima, Livingston County, when last recorded there after 1850. It was Walter's son, **Ezra Brewster Strong Sr.**, who established the family in Cattaraugus County. Born 25 March 1798 in Thetford, Ezra grew up in a hilly, hard-won landscape of small farms still within living memory of its frontier days. Like many young New Englanders of his generation, he did not remain in the state of his birth; the pull of cheaper, more open land drew him westward into New York, and by 1820 he had settled in Ontario County, part of the great tide of Yankee migration that peopled western New York in the decades after statehood. In 1818 Ezra married **Eleanor Jane Lane**, a daughter of **Matthias Lane**. Eleanor had come of age in the settled river country of central New York, born 10 February 1796 in the town of Charleston in Montgomery County, where the Mohawk Valley of her childhood had only recently passed from frontier to established farmland. Together she and Ezra built a large household through years of movement and settlement. From Ontario County in 1820 they moved to Parma, in Monroe County, by 1830, and on to Farmersville by 1832, where Ezra settled on a farm that later generations would remember as the place owned by Mrs. Bradford Jones. He was among the early settlers of that township, and the years ahead were defined by what one account plainly called "a manly struggle with poverty while rearing and educating a family." Eleven children were born to Ezra and Eleanor — among them Lucy Eleanore, Sally Merana, Mary Ann, William Nelson, Jacob Lane, **Ezra Brewster Jr**., Harriet, Walter Van Cleat, Joseph Gardner Haskins, Eleanor Josephine, and Reuben E. Raising so many children through the 1820s and 1830s demanded the full measure of a woman's endurance, in a household where domestic labor, farm work, and the constant care of the young left little idle time. Not all survived their parents; Harriet and Mary Ann both died before them. Their children scattered into lives of their own across the country. William, the oldest, became a wealthy farmer in Michigan; Sally was widowed by Henry Chaffee; Josephine married Danforth Shattuck; Lucy married into the Hellman family; and Joseph Strong served as a captain in the 28th Iowa Infantry, carrying the family name into the Civil War. Walter Strong took up farming at Machias, while Jacob Lane Strong — named for Eleanor's own father — settled in Freedom, married Phebe Phelps, and became a lifelong Baptist who served as a deacon of his church for over thirty years. It was said with quiet local pride that Jacob and his six sons all voted in the same election district, the sort of settled, multi-generational rootedness that defined the place. Eleanor spent her final years in the Cattaraugus County country she had helped settle, dying on 2 July 1855 in Freedom, at the age of fifty-nine, and was buried among the community her family had joined more than two decades before. Ezra outlived her by two decades. In his final years he followed the westward path once more, joining the family's presence in Michigan; he was living in Watertown, Clinton County, by 1870, and died there on 25 September 1875, at the age of seventy-seven. He was buried at Wacousta, far from the Vermont hills where his long and laboring life had begun. ## Ezra Brewster Strong Jr. and Priscilla Crandall Among Ezra and Eleanor's sons was **Ezra Brewster Strong Jr.**, born 15 May 1829 in Farmersville, the town that would remain the fixed point of his entire life. By the time the 1875 gazetteer of Cattaraugus County took his measure, he was known as a carpenter and a farmer, working a modest holding of two and a half acres along Road 5. The pairing was a common one in the hill country, where few men could live by a single trade alone; a skilled hand with saw and plane could frame barns and houses through much of the year while tending his own ground in season. In a town such as Farmersville a carpenter was a valued neighbor, his work visible in the very fabric of the community. Where many of his generation drifted westward with the frontier, Ezra Jr. remained remarkably tied to his native town, appearing there through census after census. He died before 1880 in Farmersville, the same town in which he had been born some five decades earlier. Ezra Jr. had married **Priscilla B. Crandall**, born 5 August 1822 in New York, a daughter of **Henry Sprague Crandall** and **Martha J. Guile**. Her childhood, too, unfolded in Cattaraugus County when it was still very much a frontier, and by 1840 she was a young woman on the threshold of her own family life. She and Ezra raised at least two children in Farmersville — a daughter, Elizabeth M. Strong, and a son, **Walter Ezra Strong** — living by the demands of the soil through more than thirty years of settled household life. The most striking turn in Priscilla's own story came late, when, widowed and past sixty, she left the New York countryside that had held her family for so long and made her way west with her son. But that journey belongs to the family's later chapter, and to the far Northwest. ## The Newmans of Freedom Into this same web of Clear Creek families married the Newmans, whose lives were bound to the town of Freedom and the small settlement of Sandusky through much of the nineteenth century. The eldest of them, **Daniel D. Newman**, was born 2 June 1817 in New York and became a man of standing in his community, serving as Commissioner of Highways for the town of Freedom. In that office he left a permanent mark on the landscape: in 1877 he oversaw the erection of the first iron bridge in the town, spanning Clear Creek at Sandusky. It was the beginning of a wave of such improvements — by the close of the century the town counted thirteen of these substantial structures, a quiet measure of how far the district had come from the single mud track of 1813. Daniel lived out his long life in his native county, dying 21 January 1891 at Eagle. His generation and the one that followed included several who spent their lives close to Freedom. Lucy Newman, born 13 November 1838, remained largely within Cattaraugus County, with a period spent in China Township in Wyoming County, and died 2 May 1909. **Franklin H. Newman**, born in 1839, lived in Freedom and Farmersville; his life was a short one, ending in May 1872 at Freedom in his early thirties. His daughter **Jeanette "Jennie" Lydia Newman** will marry into the Strong line. Chester C. Newman, born in June 1841 at Cattaraugus, was of all the family the most rooted in Freedom, where he passed nearly the whole of his very long life, keeping a grocery at Sandusky and earning his living as a village merchant; he lived to a great age, dying at Freedom on 4 February 1931, nearly ninety years old. Lillie Newman, born in 1855 at Freedom, made her home in the town. ## An Era of War and Change The decades in which these families flourished were among the most consequential in the nation's history. They settled during the Jacksonian era of westward expansion and internal improvement, and the generation that came of age here in the 1850s and 1860s grew up, as one family account put it, during the years of slavery, the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln's presidency and assassination. Cattaraugus County sent its sons into the Union armies, and this family was no exception, Joseph Strong's captaincy in the 28th Iowa attesting to the reach of the war into these households. The technological revolutions of the age reached the region as well. The children born here in the 1820s and 1830s had grown up before the railroad; within their lifetimes rail lines threaded through western New York, and the community itself came to be known as **Farmersville Station** — a name that testifies to how thoroughly the railroad had reordered rural life, turning isolated farm towns into points on a network. ## The Marriage of Walter Strong and Jennie Newman It was that railroad, in the end, that would carry the family clear across the continent — but first two of these long-intertwined lines were joined. **Walter Ezra Strong** married **Jeanette "Jennie" Lydia Newman** at Farmersville Station. Jennie had been born there on 12 December 1859, into the same corner of Cattaraugus County that had held both their families for a generation and more. With their marriage the Strong and Newman lines, neighbors along Clear Creek since the days of iron bridges and Baptist deacons, were united in a single household. By the marriage of Walter and Jennie in the summer of 1875, the Strongs and Newmans had woven their two lines together within the same few square miles of Cattaraugus County soil that had held them for half a century — the farms above Clear Creek, the Baptist meeting house, and the small stores at Sandusky. Nine years later, a chartered boxcar would carry the couple and their kin out of that settled world and toward the far Northwest, but that departure belongs to the next chapter.