Imagine this: there is a house you’ve driven by a number of times, but you’ve never actually seen it. It’s on the side of a state highway, the speed limit allowing you to fly past without a glance. It’s just another house on a country road, nondescript, set back enough from the shoulder to be cloistered in a ring of shade trees, or even weeds.
For me, such a house sits on the side of the highway to Watkins Glen, which I’d driven a number of times with my friends and, importantly, my parents, when we’d go up for the day to see the gorge, or Seneca Lake. What’s amazing is that I’d driven by this house in the car with my father, the two of us not even realizing that our ancestors lived there—and that one of them was buried beside the road itself.
We had no idea of our history.
In the summer of 2023, when I began to learn about the family that lived in that house, the Lockes, I reached out to a local historian who knew more than I did.
Kelsey Jones, the Chemung County historian, sent me two things: a note from the 1850 federal mortality schedule and a nineteenth century survey map.
I was researching my ancestor, James Locke, who’d died of cholera in a corner of Chemung County, New York—one hundred and twenty years before I was born in the city of Corning, only some twenty miles to the west.
I drove from Kentucky in the summer of 2023 to the Catharine Valley to see for myself the field where the bones of, presumably, my fifth great-grandfather were unearthed by a plow. I also wanted to see the abandoned house along the road—I thought it must have been Locke’s home, long forgotten. I’d enlisted the help of Jones, who’d done his own research into the discovery of the body.
The mortality schedule, Jones told me, lists James Locke as dying of cholera, and that was all. He said he couldn’t find a death notice, but did find that others in the area had died of cholera, as well. The documentation was reassuring that I was on the right track—other documents listed Locke as dying of cholera in 1849. Of course, you can’t rely on documentation that old, but it served its purpose.
The map was from the archives of the Library of Congress, a survey map published in 1853, only four years after James Locke died. In the upper northwest corner of Veteran Township, near the border of Chemung County, is a house attributed to J. S. Locke. It sits at the bottom of a designated hill—I took this to be the “South Mountain” that John V. Beck had written of in his book on my ancestors, including the Lockes—and beside the road that is the Watkins Road, what is today New York State Highway 14.
To the west, the map details Catharine Creek, the Chemung Canal (including the chevrons that I imagine to indicate the locks), and the railroad right-of-way, and just to the south of the house a small creek and, a bit further, the house of T. C. Sleeper, whose wife, Sarah, was James Locke’s youngest daughter. (“T. C. Sleepers SM” is, I assume, his sawmill, as there were plenty in the valley then—white pine was plentiful and valuable for all manner of industry, especially ship building.)
The Locke name on the map clearly belongs to James Symmes Locke, the sole son of the senior James Locke—he must have inherited the house. But I went further, reaching out to the county courthouse for land records—deeds and so forth—and they referred me to a title insurance company directly across the street from them; the clerks were understaffed to take on a records search. I spoke with Christine Merrill-Beers, an abstract area supervisor with the Stewart Title Insurance Company, and within a few days—and at no cost to me, no less—she had found, dated to 1837, a land sale associated with this particular lot, the seller being James L. Locke.
So when, in late August of 2023, two hundred years after my fifth great-grandfather had moved his children to this valley, after I stood before the empty house, I realized that I had stood before an ancestral home. Even the small creek on the survey map that ran just south of the house was there, creeping through the underbrush.
I reached out to Melissa Frost, whose uncle had inadvertently unearthed the body of James Locke, as well, finding her through the Rochester city schools, where she was a librarian. In the end, she had asked me if I was going to buy the bones. Surprised, I wrote back and asked, is that possible? She apologized that she had made a typo; she meant, did I plan to bury the bones. I said I had no idea where they were, or are. They could be in Batavia, still, where they were sent for investigation; they could be in the coroner’s office in Elmira. Or they could well be in the trash somewhere.
Standing along Route 14, the Watkins Road, with my camera, photographing the house in black-and-white film, it was hard to wrap my head around the idea that, before me, stood a house where some part of me once lived. A pastor, a Harvard graduate, who’d come all the way from Massachusetts via Maine, children in tow, with a wife buried along the way, further upstate in Cortland. He landed here, and now his fifth great-grandchild stood where he fell.
Eugene Frost, whose brother discovered the bones, asked me, while he was showing me around the countryside, if I’d gone inside the house. I said no—I certainly wasn’t going to get caught breaking in. Going inside didn’t seem to bother him. He knew the country well, and knew how long the house had been empty.
Thinking back to last summer, when I explored around the area, the abandoned canal and the ruins of old mills, I find myself thinking about how many empty houses I carry around in myself.