Stewards of Goshen leave strong traces

By Ginny Privitar GOSHEN — In honor of Presidents Day weekend, take a close look at the dollar bill. A family that lived in Goshen for almost two centuries claimed kinship with the famous portraitist, Gilbert Stuart of Rhode Island, whose 1796 portrait of George Washington is seen by millions of Americans every day. In fact, the first six American presidents were among the 1,000 portraits he painted of the celebrated men and women of his time.

Gilbert's ancestor John Steward, born in 1718, left Blandford, Mass., for Goshen with two of his brothers. Sometime between 1740 and 1744, he married Elizabeth Bradner, daughter of Goshen's first Presbyterian minister, the Rev. John Bradner.

Their first house was later described as a fine ten-room house with wood paneling “in the English manner.” But you won’t find any trace of it. The property is now the Westgate Industrial Park.

The Steward mansion included three buildings. The center building, circa 1740s, was the oldest. To the left was a 1860s mansion built by Daniel Jackson Steward, and to the right a circa 1900 service or kitchen wing designed by one of the last occupants, Mary Bogert Steward, to look like the original building. There was also a tenant house, where a Dairylea plant later stood.

Early patriots John Steward II (the family name varies in spelling) was a blacksmith, and his neighbor, Henry Wisner (1720-1790) owned a gristmill. Both were active in the cause of the American Revolution. According to historian Mildred Parker Seese, John made weapons for the patriots in a forge behind his house, and Wisner built three gunpowder mills At one point in the war, Wisner was shipping 1,000 pounds of gunpowder a month to Washington’s army. He also was part of a committee that erected defensive works and cannon overlooking the Hudson River. Steward and Wisner were so dangerous to the Crown, the Tory paper of occupied New York, Rivington’s New York Gazette, excoriated them: “Rebellion...is constantly fomented by two firebrands, Squire Steward and Old Wisner.”

Another neighbor, Moses Hatfield, supplied hides to the Continental Army. The only reminder of his presence is Hatfield Lane, a former farm lane.

On July 20, 1779, Joseph Brandt, a Mohawk and a captain in the British army, led a band of Loyalists and Indians in a raid on Mahackamack — present-day Port Jervis — which they left in ruins. Survivors reaching Goshen later that day related what had happened. A hastily assembled and inexperienced colonial militia set out to avenge the deed.

William Steward left with the militia, which on July 22 caught up with Brandt at Minisink Ford on the Delaware River. The Battle of Minisink was a crushing defeat for the patriots, many of whom died there. Their bones were collected 43 years later and buried in a mass grave under the monument in Goshen's Church Park.

According to family lore, related by Mary Steward to Seese, Steward's horse returned to its stable in Goshen without its rider — the first indication residents had of the massacre. Gabriel Wisner, Henry's son, also died at Minisink.

Town and country John's son, John III (1747-1829), was in business with Dr. Samuel S. Seward, who was the father of William S. Seward, the secretary of state. A Steward descendent remembered seeing their Seward and Stewart sign in the attic of a family home as recently as the 1950s.

John III eventually moved to New York City and developed his business interests there. He bought No. 1 Pearl Street from the Gracie family, who had lost their shipping fortune during the War of 1812 and moved to their farm in the country (now Gracie Mansion). John later built a fine home at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 20th Street.

But for the next two centuries, Steward family descendants continued to live in the Goshen homestead, if only for the summer.

In a dark chapter of the family history, the Stewards, like many others at the time, owned slaves. On their homestead, “on a hillside...thirty rough field stones mark the last resting places of thirty buried slaves,” in addition to a family crypt. Before the mansion was destroyed, family members were removed from the crypt and reburied in Slate Hill Cemetery. But the graves of those African-Americans probably lie there still, unknown and unmarked.

John Steward IV (1777-1854) married Martha Jackson of Chester in 1811 and had two sons, John Steward V and Daniel Jackson Steward, and two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. His family also lived in the city. He owned the Goshen homestead and a meadow across the way that the Erie Railroad wanted to cross in order to eliminate the long loop into the Village of Goshen.

John V's son, Campbell Steward, who died in 1936, built another house on about five acres of the original Steward land. This house later became, briefly, the Hambletonian Inn. The state seized it in the late 1940s to build Route 17.

John IV's son Daniel Jackson Steward (1816-98) married Mary Anna Bogert in 1856. He was a successful wholesale dry goods merchant in New York City, an artist, and a philanthropist. According to "The History of Orange County" by Russell Headley, he was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History, where he was first vice president for years. He gave the museum many fossils and Indian artifacts, some from Orange County, in addition to a collection of rare and beautiful shells.

According to family lore, Mary Anna got the Erie Railroad to give up its plan and instead lay tracks through her own family’s land. According to Seese, Harold Jonas of Goshen remembered seeing in childhood the ties along the abandoned roadbed.

Where are they now? John Steward, as he was traveling in Italy in 1956, wrote in a letter that his brother Gilbert lived in Topsfield, Mass., with his wife and three sons, and that another brother lived in Santa Barbara, Calif. — “All far from Goshen which I, at least, regard as home."

Mary Bogert Stuart (1860-1955), the eldest of Daniel Jackson Steward's four daughters, was one of the last Stewards to live in the Goshen family home. She had a quick mind and incredible memory. She was apparently heartbroken when the state laid the cloverleaf approaches to Route 17 within yards of her home, where once a dairy farm stood.

No more Stewards lived in the house after Mary and her sisters left. Their furniture and other household articles were sold at auction in June 1959. Their last address was 1165 Fifth Avenue in New York City.

There seemed to be no more male Stewards left in Goshen. But Steward daughters from prior generations had married into many local families.

Around 1960, Eugene Leone of Central Valley and New York City — owner of the famous New York City restaurant Mama Leone’s, founded by his mother — bought the Steward property. He had first intended to develop the house into an elegant inn, but the cost was too great. Vandals had stripped the house and taken up the floorboards, even when a caretaker lived on the property. Leone decided that in order to build his industrial park, the house would have to come down.

Before the house was destroyed, a mantel was saved and later acquired by the State Museum in Albany.

Leone enlisted the help of the Goshen Fire Department to bring the house down. On March 1, 1965, the historic building burned to the ground. A photograph of a beautiful woman in an elegant, probably bridal, gown was saved from the carriage house. It's now in the Goshen Library and Historical Society collection, with a penciled inscription relating how it was found.

The Stewards' copy of the Declaration of Independence sold at Sotheby’s. The Declaration exists in a number of forms. One of the original first printings, known as the Dunlap Broadside, was presented to John Steward (born 1747) of Goshen, who had signed the original. This copy was considered one of the best-preserved of 21 then-known copies. It was kept in the family for 199 years, then in 1875 sold at auction at Christie’s in London, where it fetched $90,000. It was later acquired by the Chicago Historical Society.

These traces lead to a family long scattered, their homestead gone. But the family's influence is felt in the independence of our nation when it was still new, and the settling of the countryside when it was still rough.

And whenever you reach into your wallet, where George's unsmiling face gives continued reassurance that your dollar bill is serious money, you'll know a Steward was there.