THE DAVID KELLOGG CARTTERS IN ROCHESTER, N.Y.

James Bruce was born January 13, 1815 just ten months after his father David Kellogg Cartter (1), his mother Elizabeth, and his three older brothers had made that difficult cross-country journey from Lowville in the Black River Valley of New York state to a little unnamed settlement later known as Rochester, N.Y., a settlement located near the mouth of the Genesee river on the south shore of Lake Ontario. Little has been recorded concerning this trip which traversed wilderness country and was made largely by horseback following Indian trails.

We can imagine how James Bruce later envied his brothers as they told their tales of hardships, danger, sight of wild animals, views of natural beauty, forests, waterfalls and rapidly moving streams. They would tell of those times when trails were uncertain, when fatigue at the end of the day was to be endured and when unpredictable March weather was upon them. These were all things which must have spelled adventure in capital letters to James’ brothers 7, 3, and 2 years of age at the time of the trip. The family did arrive safely March 28, 1814.

This family move followed a quick trip to the same destination made by David alone in 1813. The first trip had probably been prompted by the suggestion of his brother James Bruce (1) that this new country held many promises for a young family and for its breadwinner David, whose trade was classified back in Lewis County as “carpenter and mill-wright” with experience in both fields.

On the date of the Cartter arrival there were only fourteen buildings in the settlement, which was later to be known as Rochester. One of these buildings was a small one and a half-story house built by Uncle James next to his blacksmith shop. This house he turned over to the new arrivals. James Bruce (1) (the first bearer of the name recorded in the Cartter family) had come to Rochester in 1812, the same year that Colonel Rochester had surveyed an area of some 655 acres for settlement. Uncle James had the distinction of being Rochester’s “first blacksmith and tool maker.” He is credited with “ironing the first wagon built in the settlement.” His shop was located on the grounds now part of Front Street on the bank of the Genessee River.

For a glimpse of what the settlement provided, here is a quotation recorded by Jenny M. Parker in her Rochester a Story Historical. She is quoting Mrs. David Kellogg Cartter.

“I remember my first Sunday in Rochester” said Mrs. Cartter. “It was in 1814. There was Enos Stone’s family, Colonel Issac Watson’s, Abelard Reynold’s, Hamlet Scrantom’s and Elisha Ely’s. There may have been others that I have forgotten. The only pleasant rooms in the place was the cellar-kitchen of Mrs. Reynold’s house, and that stood where the Arcade did afterwards – – – I went to meeting that Sunday in Barnards tailor shop. Silas O. Smith had a few prayer books and read the Episcopal service. Mrs. Barnard, Delia Scrantom, and her father and mother did the singing.”

During the summer of 1814 Rev. Chauncey Cook, brother-in-law of Mrs. Cartter, visited the settlement and preached a few times. All of the early services were union in nature. The first move to establish a church came from these meetings and resulted in the establishment of “The First Presbyterian Society of the Town of Gates” August 15, 1815. The first church, Presbyterian, was built, and services were begun May 1, 1817. Rev. Cook preached the first sermon and later was a member of the Genessee Presbytery for nineteen years.

Jenny Parker further quotes from Mrs. Cartter with respect to Rochester’s first school. “At the organization of the first school too few scholars were reported to justify the employment of a teacher. There were in this exigency eight bachelors here who generously proposed each to pay for a pupil, whether one came or not to receive their bounty. Soon after, a school was opened in the rear room of Barnard’s tailor shop, and Miss Huldah Stong, a sister of Mrs. A. Reynolds, was engaged as teacher. The first school room and the shop it was located in was on Buffalo St. a little East of the present entrance to the Arcade.”

At this time mail was carried from Canandaigua to Hanford’s Landing and Rochester once a week on horseback and part of the time by a woman. The year 1817 seems to have been a significant one for the new settlement. On March 21 the request for a village charter was granted. The New York Legislature approved the completion of the Erie Canal to be routed through Rochester, crossing the Genessee River by way of an aqueduct. This structure when completed was hailed as one of the nine wonders of the world.

The first flour mill with four runs of stones was erected in 1815 plus several smaller mills all of which helped to build Rochester into what was later to be known as “the Flour City.” Buildings flourished and trade grew. Population increased from a 331 census count in 1815 to 1,049 in 1818 and gave promise of even more rapid future expansion.

At this point let us pause a bit and turn back the Cartter pages of time another generation, to the fifth, in order better to understand the western movement of migration out of the mother state, Massachusetts. This migration climaxed in the 18th and 19th centuries. David Kellogg Cartter (1) and James Bruce Cartter (1), whom you have just met, were two of six brothers caught up in this movement. You will be introduced later to the others. The spirit of extended migration had arisen and they with others were to pass this spirit on to succeeding generations.

You are the lowest form of life, you know that? If you wanted one, for crying out loud, buy one at Wal-Mart – they are less than two bucks! If you didn’t have the two bucks, you could’ve waited until I came out of the store, I would have given it to you if you had asked.

Oh, wait – you didn’t want one, you just didn’t want me, a veteran, to show support for the troops? That little magnetic yellow ribbon so offended you that you had to take it off of my vehicle? The vehicle with the Marine Corps logo sticker on the back window and the veteran plate? You are now lower than the lowest form of life. You didn’t take it for yourself, you took it so I couldn’t have it.

You are entitled to your opinion. You have the right to express yourself freely. Your right ceases to exist at the beginning of my private property, including my vehicle. I don’t know who you are, and that’s the only thing that is keeping me from…

…praying that God will have mercy on your thieving soul. I pray that God opens and softens your heart to realize that by your actions you have condemned yourself to eternal pain as in a lake of fire. And really, if you had wanted to confront me with your opinion, I would have thanked God He allowed me to serve this country and, by extension, you, in order that people may have the right to disagree with the status quo.

Check out this lady – she does more by the end of the day than the Army thinks about in a week!

You realize, of course, that the previous statement was meant as humor, on a couple of levels – I am former Marine Corps, therefore digging on the Army is my responsibility; and it’s a neat rift on the old Army commercial.

I think she can stand down. She has made the point the media has wanted her to make and the President has made it clear he is not going to meet with her for a second time.

I wasn’t going to write on this, but it just kind of snapped this morning. As a veteran, if I had died while in service of my country and my mother decided that she needed to protest the president, I would come back from the dead just to slap her and remind her that I had volunteered for that service, and I believed in what I was doing right up to the end. My mother would have no right to demand the president answer for my demise. My mother would have to comfort herself with the fact that I died doing what I wanted to, with no regrets. Yes, that’s pretty rough, but you know what? There are no guarantees in life. That includes whether or not you end up burying your parents or they end up burying you. It is not for man to say; the timetable is in God’s hand and He’s not sharing.

1) EARLY WISCONSIN BEFORE JAMES BRUCE ARRIVED

James Bruce Cartter, a native New Yorker, more recently from Michigan, arrived on the Wisconsin scene in 1843 at a time of rapid change. Peoples’ attention was again being turned westward and the migration was on – migration which had repeated itself in successive stages ever since the first settlers had come to New England’s shores.

Was James Bruce typical of these migrating Americans? Yes in many ways he was, for he represented the seventh generation of a family who, like so many, had pioneered its way westward from New England. Thomas Carter, of English and Scotch ancestry had arrived at Boston in 1635. Since that date his descendants had through the years settled at Dedham, Watertown, Woburn, Lancaster, Leominster and Westfield in Massachusetts; and at Lowville and Rochester in New York state. From Rochester James Bruce himself was to move on to Utica in Michigan, and to Racine County in the Wisconsin Territory. The journey for James was not to end here; it would take him deeper into Wisconsin Country to the Black River region, later to be known as Jackson County.

But what of the Wisconsin which James entered from the southeast? It had been organized as a territory in 1836 comprising in addition to its present area the lands now known as Iowa, Minnesota, and part of the Dakotas. Tenney and Atwood in their book Fathers of Wisconsin painted the following word picture of early migration to the territory.

“Except about military posts and with slight other exceptions, permanent settlement first began in Wisconsin about 1826, in the lead region, or present southwest counties, and for many years population pressed in by way of the Mississippi river before the route by the Great Lakes was opened. For a long period Galena was more of a commercial mart for supplies to the interior of Wisconsin than Milwaukee of other lake ports, while Chicago was scarcely known in that connection. Lead mining had developed into a leading industry on one side of the territory, while agriculture was commencing on the other. The two streams of settlers finally met about midway, but several years elapsed before the eastern current largely dominated. As a result, the diversity of interests, ideas, and modes of thought between the two sections were much more striking in early times than at present.”

The tremendous lumber harvest for which Wisconsin became famous was building toward its peak at this time. It would soon overtake mining as a major source of income only to be later surpassed by agricultural productivity. The output of pine lumber from Wisconsin’s saw mills in 1853 alone, was estimated at 200,000,000 board feet. The varied nature of occupations available explains in part the rapid growth of population and the wide diversity of nationality attracted to its borders. The 1840 U.S. census shows a population of 30,945 which increased seven times in the next ten years to 305,391, reaching 775,000 by 1860. H. Russell Austin in his book The Wisconsin Story says, “More than one-third of Wisconsin’s people were foreign born in both the 1850 and 1860 census. German born were more than one-third of the foreigners in 1850 and nearly one-half in 1860. – – – Wisconsin was in this period (1850-60), the most polyglot of states having also significant groups of Scandinavians, Irish, British, Canadians, Poles, Dutch, Belgians and Swiss. – – – New Yorkers and New Englanders were among the earliest Wisconsin farmers. – – – Nearly two-thirds of Wisconsin’s 305,000 people in 1850 were American born and more than one-third of these, nearly 69,000, were New Yorkers; 10,000 were Vermonters and roughly the same number were from the rest of New England.”

Another factor attracting large numbers into agriculture during the 1830’s and ‘40’s was the development of the U.S. Government Survey which made it possible to sub-divide land and establish positive ownership. It was in 1831, when Wisconsin was still a part of the Michigan territory, that Lucius Lyons, U.S. Commissioner, while surveying the northern boundary line of the State of Illinois set a post and erected a mound of earth six feet square at the base and six feet high at a point where this boundary line intersected the 4th Principle Meridian. It was from this point that the Wisconsin public land survey was begun in 1832. It was completed “up north” in 1867. Lyons surveyed sixteen townships in S.W. Wisconsin in 1832-33, which opened this Territory for settlement.

The intersection mentioned above is referred to on a Wisconsin Historical Highway marker, placed one-half mile east from a nearby highway, as “The Point of Beginning.” It was from this point that all survey lines East, West, and North were established. Government land sales were opened in 1834 at Green Bay and Mineral Point and in 1839 at Milwaukee. By 1840 all Wisconsin south of the Fox-Wisconsin waterway was divided into surveyed townships and was being settled rapidly.

This then was the situation into which James Bruce Cartter, age 28, projected his energies and experiences. Would he find his future home here or be inclined to move even further west? What of his background? His family back in New York state? His brothers widely scattered? His training and experience? How about his more distant ancestors? Who were they? What of his own descendants who were fortunate enough to have known him? And what did he add to Wisconsin’s past and future?

It is our hope that the following chapters may be of interest to our readers as they attempt to fit time place and person together into a proper perspective; we do this not that we may pass judgment on past generations but in order that we may more fully understand the contributions made by those generations. In the process it is hoped that we may become better informed concerning those relatives of ours who through the years have been separated due to the constant migration occurring in the history of all American families.

This narrative does not pretend to be all-complete concerning the life of James Bruce and his family. There are many gaps in information that the author would like to have filled and many personal experiences that it would be desirable to relate. Perhaps someone else may bring these added facts and bits of information together.