James K. McGuire: Boy Mayor and Irish Nationalist

2. Life in the Salt City

4 2 Life in the Salt City Optimists in 1870 believed that Syracuse might be destined to become “perhaps, the largest inland city in the state.” It had grown swiftly and consistently throughout the previous fifteen years, from a population of 25,107 in 1855 to 28,119 in 1860, to 31,784 in 1865. Growth in the next three years had been even more dramatic. By 1868 the population had risen by 7,226 to 39,010. The following year, 2,440 came, including James McGuire with his wife and son, and the year after that saw 3,346 follow. Recounting the history of Syracuse in 1870, the publishers of Boyd’s Syracuse City Directory, noted, The city commenced its incipient growth in 1795, by the emigration from the State of Massachusetts of Mr. William Dean, who built a log house on the road leading to Salina, which was the continuation of Clinton Street, running on the low land part of the way on the west and for some distance on the east side of where Oswego Canal is now channeled. Mr. Dean located on this road near where the Van Buren Tannery is now situated, and this was the first house and the first settler of what is now the attractive and the extensive city of Syracuse.1 Development initially proceeded at a snail’s pace. By 1811, there was a “single place of human habitation, Cossett’s tavern,” located in the area. Until 1825, when the Erie Canal was completed, the Village of Syracuse had a population of only 300.2 Upon arriving in Syracuse, the McGuires took up residence at 149 North Salina Street near Butternut Street on the city’s near north l i f e i n t h e s a lt c i t y | 5 side.3 They found a city teeming with life and ripe with opportunity. Bisected by the Erie Canal with various subsidiary canals running north and south of it, Syracuse boasted 5 hotels, 38 manufacturing concerns, 36 churches, 13 newspapers, 22 bakers, 10 flour dealers, 10 dry-goods dealers, 85 boot and shoe stores, 173 grocers, and a saloon or liquor dealer for every 190 people. It had a new limestone courthouse erected on West Genesee Street, facing the canal; St. Joseph’s Hospital, run by the Sisters of St. Joseph on “Prospect Hill”; and St. Joseph’s Asylum, an orphanage for boys, which included a boarding school run by the Christian Brothers, four miles west of the city. The city offered education in a school system that had a new high school built on the corner of West Genesee Street and Wallace Street on the eastern bank of Onondaga Creek, which ran north and south through the city, emptying into Onondaga Lake on the city’s northern boundary. The system also included eighteen other neighborhood schools including two that served orphanages in the city. The school year was forty weeks, divided into three terms. There were 16,004 children between the ages of five and twenty-one living in the city that year. Approximately half, 8,001, were enrolled in the school system. Daily attendance was even lower, averaging only 5,180. The Board of Education employed 171 teachers with a teacher/student ratio of one teacher for 30.29 students attending per day. The average amount expended per student who attended daily was thirteen dollars and twenty-seven cents per year. Teachers were paid salaries ranging from as low as two hundred dollars per year to as much as two thousand dollars for a high school principal and teacher of languages and English literature. In addition to the students in the city school system, another 1,639 were educated in private or parochial schools. That year, according to the 1870 Boyd’s City Directory, an institution of even higher learning was contemplated: The establishment is to be in the interest of the Methodist denomination , and will lend additional importance, as well as architectural attractions to the already imposing public buildings of the city. It will 6 | Ja m e s K . Mc G u i r e be under the control of the Board of Trustees, composed of prominent men among the citizens of Syracuse, and others selected from different parts of the State. The enterprise is in the incipient stages but it has been fully inaugurated as to insure its permanency and...