The New Rochelle Pioneer, 2 October 1886
His Farm and Monument Near New Rochelle.—His Ultimate Burial in a Grave—A Well-Authenticated Relic.
[The following interesting article is taken from a recent issue of the New York Evening Post:]
The thousands that daily whirl by New Rochelle on the trains of the Consolidated Railroad see little more than the earth and stone walls of a deep cut, and up on the bank to the right a new stone church surrounded by an ancient churchyard. If one leaves the train for a day’s ramble, he finds beyond the stone wall and the church a large town, with many fine old country-seats, and as many modern villas, wide business and residence streets, and as many narrow ones lined with humbler dwellings.
A road stretches north away from the town eight miles to the village of White Plains and its ancient battleground—a highway made smooth and hard by its covering of broken stone, winding between ranks of tall, ragged locusts, their tops dead and broken off, through a beautiful and highly cultivated region. One passes here a country seat; there a new villa smart with a coat of parti-colored paint; just beyond a little cottage with stone walls and gables, low, antiquated porch, green wooden shutters, and huge chimney, that must have been built for one of the Huguenot yeomen who settled New Rochelle nearly two centuries ago.
At one place, on a bluff in a thick woods is an old deserted house that has been without human habitant to care for it for generations, and where, in Revolutionary days, when the cowboys and skinners harried all this region, an old man and his daughter were tortured and left for dead in the effort to make them reveal the depository of their secret hoards. By all rules of apparitions this house should be haunted, but on inquiry the pilgrim could find no record of so much as a ghostly light or footfall ever being seen or heard.
A mile of this road, and then the tourist pauses on the side of a hill whose summit is crowned with handsome dwellings and fine farms, before a marble shaft set in a space some twelve feet square, with an iron fence in front and a solid wall of stone enclosing it from the meadow behind, and from a lane that turns in on the north, and after dipping down to cross a brook, ascends the hill to a modest low-walled farm-house, that with its outbuildings occupies the summit.
On the western face of the monument, next the road, is a medallion likeness of Thomas Paine, with the inscription:
Thos. Paine.
Author of “Common Sense.”
Born in England, January 29, 1737,
Died in New York City, June 8, 1809.
“The palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of Paradise.”—Common Sense.
Above the medallion is Paine’s motto:
“The world is my country.
To do good is my religion.”
The south side bears quotations from the Crisis No. I. and Crisis No. XV. The inscriptions on the east and north sides are taken from the “Age of Reason.” Fertile meadows sweep away to the eastward, cut in twain by the road mentioned. They form part of the estate given to Paine in 1783 by the State of New York for his services in the Revolution.
The history of both monument and farm is interesting. Paine as he lay on his dying bed, evinced considerable anxiety as to the disposal of his body after death, fearing that it would not meet with proper respect. His father was a Quaker, and he desired to be laid to rest in the burying ground of that people. He sent to Mr. Willet Hicks, a respectable Quaker living near and said that, as he was going to leave one place it was necessary to provide another, and wished to be buried in the Quaker burying ground, adding that he might be interred in the Episcopal churchyard, but they were so arrogant, or in the Presbyterian, but they were so hypocritical. The Quakers, however, refused the desired permission.
In his last will and testament, dated January 18, 1809, Paine expressed a wish to be buried in the Quaker burying ground if they permitted it, but if they would not allow it he wished to be buried on his farm, “the place where I am to be buried to be a square of twelve feet, to be enclosed with rows of trees and a stone or post-and-rail fence, with a headstone with my name and age engraved upon it, ‘Author of Common Sense.’” He was so buried in a plot in a field a few yards south of the present monument.
In 1819 William Cobbett, the great English liberal, while in this country, dug up his [body and carried it to England]. [The scan is difficult at this point.]
[Several lines obscured/poorly reproduced.]
After a few years the monument fell into neglect. Those who had known Paine or who remembered the facts attending its erection, had died or removed. As late as fifteen years ago the stone was used as a bill-board, and was literally covered with handbills and posters. At length a movement was set on foot in New York and New Rochelle, funds were collected sufficient to restore it and in 1881 it was rededicated with appropriate ceremonies and the present inscriptions.
The farm in the days preceding the Revolution was known as the “Devoe Farm,” and was owned by Frederick Devoe. “Yeoman,” he is styled in the early records. Devoe was a tory, and according to tradition, piloted the British troops over the country roads to White Plains in 1776, when Howe moved on Washington, where they intrenched. For this offense he was indicted for treason, Nov. 10, 1780, and [judgment was] declared against him July 5, 1783, whereupon his farm was confiscated under the Confiscation Act, and given by the State of New York to Thomas Paine.
Cheetham, in his Life of Paine, says: “The farm contained more than 300 acres of land, and an elegant stone house, 130×28 feet.” In point of fact the farm lacked some 20 acres of the 300, and the house was far from being “elegant,” being a small stone farm-house of a story and a half such as sheltered the yeomen of that day. The original structure, considerably modified and improved, may be studied in the farm-house which we have mentioned as standing on the summit of the hill to the eastward of the monument.
Calling on Mr. Wesley See, the present proprietor, we were shown the parlor which Paine occupied, and the library opening out of it in which he wrote. These have been little changed from the time of the author’s occupancy. “When I bought it,” said Mr. See, “the only relics of Paine remaining were the old Franklin stove and andirons he used; the stove still set into the brickwork in the library. These I let Mr. Walter Bell, the stove dealer, have in exchange for a modern stove and appurtenances. I presume he still has them.”
Returning to New Rochelle, we called on Mr. Bell, and were shown the stove, which, if it never had belonged to Paine, would still possess interest as being the first form that took shape in the inventor’s mind. It is composed of heavy upright and horizontal plates of iron held in place by grooves, there not being a bolt or rod in the whole fabric—a sort of iron box, in which, on andirons, the fire was built.
Mr. Bell has two affidavits to prove that the stove was really Paine’s. One is from Mr. See, stating that at the time he bought the property there was a Franklin stove set in the brickwork of the room on the northeast corner of the house, and a pair of andirons, and that he made inquiries of the former owners, and also of old residents, and from information thus obtained he believed them to be the same as those formerly used by Thomas Paine.
The other is from Augustus Van Cortlandt, M. D., a former resident of New Rochelle, who says that in the year 1841 he was taken by his father to the house formerly occupied by Thomas Paine, author of “Age of Reason,” “Common Sense,” and “Rights of Man”; that while there he was shown the old Franklin stove and andirons, which his father stated was seen by him in 1808, when he presented a letter to Thomas Paine in the same room where said Franklin stove and andirons were, and that from the design and certain marks thereon, he knows them to be the articles shown him as aforesaid and that the same are now in possession of Messrs. Bell and Harmer.
“My object in getting these affidavits,” continued Mr. Bell, “was to prove the authenticity of the relics, and it was suggested to me by the fact that on my way home with the stove I met a man, a citizen of New Rochelle, who laughed at the very idea that I had Paine’s stove in the wagon. Dr. Van Cortlandt was a member of the old Van Cortlandt family, a learned and respectable gentleman, who told me many things about Paine. He said that when his father called on the latter he was clad in a dressing gown that had evidently been made of a blanket, and with a beard of three days’ growth on his face. A deal table stood in the room, without a cover, on which was a part of a loaf of bread, a pitcher of [illegible], a bowl of molasses, from which his breakfast had evidently been furnished.
“He said there was valuable furniture in the room, including a fine French clock, medals given to Paine by various societies, with bronzes and medallions. He said [Paine showed his father] a model of an iron bridge, to cross Harlem River at a single span, a wonderful engineering thing in those days.”
The only woman of [Paine’s acquaintance] in New Rochelle [then discussed in the article] is described as having said:
“He had a love for little children that almost amounted to a passion, and was in turn a great favorite with them.”
She described him as pleasant and social in familiar intercourse, with a fund of anecdote and information, upon which he was always willing to draw for the entertainment of his friends.
The last years of this good old lady were spent in protecting the grave and the tombstone of her friend from relic-hunters. Often has she raised her window and frightened off men who were breaking chips from the edge of the stone. She saw Cobbett’s men when they rifled the grave and warned them away, but they refused to go, saying they were acting under Cobbett’s orders.
“I know of but one person, now living in the town who remembers Paine. That person is Mrs. Davenport, a very aged lady living on Davenport’s Neck. She says that Paine often patted her on the head when she was a little girl.”
In answer to our inquiry, Mr. Bell said he valued the stove at $250, but to a public museum, or to any society where it would be preserved as a national relic, he would sell it for $200. He has had numerous offers for it, the highest, of $160, being from Mr. Delancey Kane.