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The
Widow Smith: Walking Barefoot to Philadelphia
By Robin Van Auken
Williamsport Sun-Gazette
While Michael Ross was settling the City of Williamsport,
selling parcels of land to frontier families and immigrants,
another enterprising resident of the West Branch Valley was
being hoodwinked from her home and business.
Catherine Smith, an old woman "of great business tact
and energy," had erected gristmills and sawmills on White
Deer Creek. According to John F. Meginness' "History
of Lycoming County," Smith "was a child of sorrow
and affliction." She was left a widow with 10 children
with no visible means to support her family except for 300
acres of forested land, which included the mouth of White
Deer Creek. "There was a good mill seat at this point,
and as a grist and saw mill were much wanted, she was often
solicited to erect them," Meginness writes.
The mills, completed in 1774-75, "were of great advantage
to the county; and the following summer, she built a boring
mill where great numbers of gun barrels were bored for service
in the Revolutionary army."
Smith is considered a patriot because of her rifle-boring
business and because she lost a son -- "her greatest
help" -- during the conflicts. In 1779, marauding Indians
burned her mills. Katharine W. Bennet, in her "Stories
of the West Branch Valley," writes that Smith "returned
to view the ruins wrought by war. The pioneers urged her to
rebuild the grist and saw mills."
After much difficulty, she raised the money needed and, in
1783, rebuilt the mills. Before her business was under way,
however, the firm of Claypool and Morris claimed a prior right
to the land and brought ejection notice against her. "As
frequently happened," Bennet writes, "the land office
had given several warrants for the same tract, and the Claypool
and Morris patent bore the earlier date."
Prominent residents and soldiers interceded on her behalf,
and the widow walked to Philadelphia and back 13 times --
in her bare feet -- to plead her case. According to Dr. Lewis
E. Theiss in a 1950 speech to the Muncy Historical Society,
"As I gather from other sources, the lawyers repeatedly
double-crossed her. A hearing would be set for a given date.
The troubled widow would take off her shoes and walk the 170
or so miles to Philadelphia in her bare feet. She could not
afford to wear out her shoes -- probably she had but one pair.
She put them on at the last minute. The pioneers habitually
went to church in the same way. When she got to court, the
case had been postponed. There was nothing to do but trudge
back home -- barefooted."
Theiss contends "there was a lot of fraud about land
sales then. Indeed, when Ole Bull purchased the land for his
colony of Norwegians up in the Coudersport region, well into
the 19th century, he was defrauded and lost the entire tract
of land, just as Catherine Smith lost her land."
No compromise was reached and, according to Bennet, "In
spite of the justice of her claims and the efforts of her
friends, the case was decided against her. In 1801, she gave
up possession of the property that she had labored so hard
to improve."
There was, however, one way to retain her property, writes
Col. Henry W. Shoemaker in a "Now and Then" column
printed Oct. 26, 1934, in the Williamsport Sun.
"On one of her first trips to Philadelphia, she was accompanied
by her beautiful daughter, Cassandra, who created a sensation,
when she entered Independence Hall," Shoemaker writes.
"Of the same witching, dark-eyed type as her mother had
been in her youth, with the proud coronet features, she was
a head taller than the old lady. She won the hearts of the
susceptible legislators. It was asserted that one of the Claypool,
a man of 45, wished to become the husband of Cassandra Smith.
For this, he would quash the firm's claims and restore the
property.
Shoemaker continues, "The lonely 22-year-old girl was
willing to marry him, in order to see her mother made happy.
But the stern old Roman matron refused this patrician alliance
for her daughter and the return of her property by any 'left-handed
bargain,' as she called it, and continued to fight her petition
on to its final inglorious end."
Widow Smith died in poverty and was buried in the ancient
settler's graveyard at the corner of Daniel Caldwell's barn.
In making improvements years later, the farmer leveled the
graveyard with the plow. Smith's bones were disturbed, and
those who knew her well recognized her skull -- on account
of its protruding teeth.
"There is something unspeakably pathetic in the history
of this woman," Meginness concludes. "Her struggles
in widowhood; what she accomplished for the benefit of early
settlers; the fact that she furnished a mill for the manufacture
of gun barrels to aid in the achievement of our liberties;
her misfortunes and her last appeal to the law-making power
for assistance; her death, burial and the final disturbance
of her bones, afford a theme for a volume."
In recognition of her heroism, a state commission selected
a natural memorial to the Widow Smith and named the "noble
culmination of Nittany Mountain, which looks down on the spot
where she passed her most eventful and memorable days, "Catherine's
Crown,' " Shoemaker writes.
For her "relentless pursuit of righteousness, her lofty
ideals and heroic efforts in the cause of freedom," Shoemaker
writes, and "though she was poor and obscure and had
few educational advantages . . . she deserves a place among
the seats of the might, right beside the greatest women of
the land." |
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