Mathias Hutchinson's Notes of a Journey (1819-20)

Notes and Documents MATHIAS HUTCHINSON'S NOTES OF A JOURNEY (1819-20) Edited by Pat M. Ryan* When Mathias Hutchinson, a 23-year-old Bucks County Quaker farmer, journeyed westward by horseback in the fall of 1819, from Newtown through central Pennsylvania and upstate New York into Friends' settlements of Upper Canada (Ontario), he kept a daily log of those travels. About 1947, Dr. Edith Flower Wheeler made a typescript of these Notes, then owned by a man living in Homer or Ithaca, New York; and upon her death, in 1967, this copy was left to a cousin, Edwin B. Spelman of Irondequoit, New York, who indexed the anonymous journal and ascertained from Quaker historian Frederick B. Tolles that it had been written by Hutchinson.1 During 1978, in the course of interviews for the Irondequoit Oral History Project, Spelman lent me Wheeler's typescript; and I soon discovered that the original manuscript had recently been purchased from Craig Ross, a Medina antiquarian bookseller, by the Division of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Archives of the University of Rochester Library. After editing some Genesee country segments of the Notes for an issue of Rochester History (an endeavor that occasioned my physically retracing parts of Hutchinson's itinerary, and locating his will, in Auburn, and other records, in Aurora) , I extended my biographical studies and textual annotation to embrace Hutchinson 's larger career and the manuscript in toto. What follows is a product of these researches. "Amiable, benevolent, cultivated, with a spice of eccentricity . . ." Mathias Hutchinson was born December 24, 1795, in Solebury Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to Thomas Hutchinson and Ann Cary (Walker) Hutchinson, who had been married Jan- *Pat M. Ryan lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. 1. Edward Hicks, who was Hutchinson's companion on the journey, refers to him in his Memoirs . . . (Philadelphia, 1851), p. 72, as "an amiable young man of Bucks Quarter." Cf. also pp. 79 and 81. 92 HUTCHINSON'S JOURNEY93 uary 15, 1794 in the Buckingham Friends Monthly Meeting,2 i.e., Quaker congregation. Thomas and Ann Hutchinson had four children: two died in infancy; Mathias and a sister, Martha, survived ; and prior to 1821 Martha was married to a man named Johnson.3 Mathias' paternal grandfather was Matthias Hutchinson (1744-1823), an associate judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Bucks County;4 and, according to an anonymous memoir, he was "bom and bred in affluence . . . , but . . . was remarkable for simplicity and moderation" in his habits.5 Hutchinson was living and farming with his parents in Newtown by 1819, when his friend and neighbor Edward Hicks (17801849 ), a carriage-maker, painter, and Quaker minister, determined to travel, visit Friends, and hopefully recover his health: Working too steadily [at painting sign-boards, fireboards, furniture, etc.], day and night, whilst my bodily health was delicate, brought on an affection of my lungs, with all the symptoms of pulmonary consumption . In this situation the Heavenly Shepherd in mercy and goodness laid upon me a concern to travel, first to the South in the spring, and in the autumn to the North, in New York and Canada.6 Hicks was an untrained primitive artist, whose fame today arises 2.Records of Buckingham Monthly Meeting; marriage certificate now owned by Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Heffernan, King Ferry, N.Y. Ann Cary Walker's parents were Emanuel and Ann Walker. 3.Edward M. Paxson, Petition for Judicial Settlement, Estate of Mathias Hutchinson, November 19, 1896, Clerk of Surrogate's Court, Auburn, N.Y. Cf. Ann J. Paxson, Memoirs of the Johnson Family (Philadelphia, 1885), p. 182: "He is my nearest relative by the maternal side,—the only son of my mother's only brother." The Paxson, Hutchinson, and Walker family connections are more evident in Joseph Walker's Last Will and Testament, found among Hutchinson's papers in his Ledyard home: Joseph's sister Sarah married Mahlon Paxson; and his sister "Nancy C." married Thomas Hutchinson (she was apparently Ann Cary Walker, Mathias Hutchinson's mother). The assistance of Edward Kabelac and Elizabeth Lyon Kabelac, of Aurora, N.Y., is gratefully acknowledged. 4.Records of Buckingham Monthly Meeting. Judge Hutchinson signed his name "Matthias" in a deed of July...