Elizabeth Oakes Smith, “The Willows,” and General Washington
Timothy H. Scherman
Plans for archeological excavation at Lakeview Cemetery in Patchogue, Long Island are underway. Specifically, experts will be examining the site of “The Willows,” home of Elizabeth Oakes Smith and Seba Smith from 1859 to 1870. The lives and work of both these writers are significant parts of literary and social history in the area, but more significant, to many, is the possibility that the building purchased by the couple in 1859 was once the tavern where General Washington was entertained or housed on his tour of Long Island in 1790.
Diligent searches for legal records documenting the sequential sale and/or transfer of this property from the late 18thcentury to the date of the Smith purchase have been hampered by lapses in legal records, but the interest of Oakes Smith and her husband in the history of the US, the evidence of their significant investment in the storied life of Washington specifically, coupled with their financial means in 1859, argue strongly that their choice of a new home on Long Island was not random. Most important to recall is that while our records of the property’s provenance are incomplete now, 230 years after Washington’s visit, in 1859, only 70 years after the fact, the sequence of property ownership was doubtless much more clear. Proud of her financial success and continually interested, as a woman writer, in claiming the same rights as men to the documentation of American history, it would be completely fitting that, hearing of the Woodhull mansion’s relation to Washington’s stay, Elizabeth Oakes Smith would have made a special effort to purchase a property with such a link to American history.
Like most white Americans of the antebellum period, and particularly as writers and editors in the publishing industry in the 1830s and 40s, Elizabeth Oakes Smith and her husband read and wrote frequently of Washington as the “father of our country,” a modern mythic figure around which the ideals of the US population were centered. In the summer of 1847, however, Oakes Smith’s relation to Washington became more material and personal, when she visited the family of Judge Hagerman and the Hopper family near what is now Mahwah, New Jersey. There, she dined with an elderly member of the Hopper family who displayed part of a dinner service used to entertain Washington, and she enjoyed a tour of the area, where Judge Pierson, a key land owner in the area, pointed out to her the hemlock that marked the place where Washington camped during the Revolutionary war.
This experience made such an impression upon her that she began to incorporate this local history into several of her works—whether in prefatory remarks (as in her novel, The Salamander (1848), set in the Ramapaugh Valley of an earlier time) or in the main plot (her novel The Ramapo Pass: A Romance of the Revolution, (1848), in which Washington is a principal figure. In fact, Oakes Smith expanded the latter novel with a new more detailed preface remembering her visit with the Hoppers in a serial reprint, The Intercepted Messenger of Ramapo Pass in Emerson’s United States Magazine in 1856, a journal she edited along with her husband from 1856 to 1858, and then expanded the same work again for a novel in Beadle’s Dime Novel series under the title The Bald Eagle in 1867.
Most important, to her, was the authority such “local history” might provide for her as one documenting American history. In an 1849 letter to Benson Lossing, author of The Pictorial Fieldbook of the Revolution (1850), she shared the details of her visit to the Ramapaugh Valley, concluding, “I have been thus explicit, Sir, in giving you these details, because I consider them essential to this part of our history, and as throwing additional light upon the character of Washington.” When her anecdotes were incorporated in Lossing’s work, she proudly remarked in a letter dated March 1, 1851 “I am much gratified at being given an authority in your work, for I am very unwilling to be regarded as a mere Magazine writer, a compounder of mawkish stories, and sentimental poetry.”
Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s lecture career and her turn to the feminist cause from 1850 to 1857 turned her focus away from American history as such, but when she joined her husband as co-editor of Emerson’s United States Magazine (later The Great Republic Monthly) from 1856 through 1859, she returned to her work on Washington. The magazine’s series on “The Capitol at Washington,” followed by fourteen long installments of a serialized “Life of Washington” from June 1857 to November 1858 show a continued dedication to this central figure in US history.
In sum, especially given their immediately preceding work on Washington, lasting at least from 1847 to 1859, it would make perfect sense that Oakes Smith and her husband might choose to purchase the home in Patchogue that local residents knew, better than any lawyer, held a direct relation to one of the figures at the center of their work and American history. There were obviously current residents in Patchogue in 1859 who were living at the time of Washington’s visit, who needed no research archive or legal records to document the connection.