The Road to Gowanda Part 4

According to his WWI draft card, Heidi's great-grandfather was a slender man of medium height with brown hair and brown eyes. In 1918 the 39-year-old was disqualified from service, because he had been a patient at the Buffalo State Hospital since October 24, 1910. At the time he was hospitalized, his youngest son, Heidi's grandfather, was just a year old. Earlier that year, the US Census records him as working as a barber and living with his wife and five children.

Census data confirms that sometime between 1930 and 1940, he moved 35 miles south to the Gowanda State Hospital in Collins, NY. But there are no public records that suggest he ever came home.

It's impossible to say why he was hospitalized; anyone who knows the story is long since gone. It's also hard to say why his son never mentioned him, although at differing times and in various sources throughout the years, his wife is listed as his widow, and she did go on to remarry, perhaps without the benefit of a proper divorce.

The NY State archives has extensive records about former inmates in the asylums, including details of their diagnoses and treatments. Some even include photographs. Unfortunately, access to these records is restricted to all but "qualified researchers under certain conditions." Even direct descendants cannot obtain information about their family members. 

There is no statute of limitations on the restrictions.

The Road to Gowanda Part 3

Into the 1990s, unclaimed inmates in NY State asylums (and many other states as well) were buried solely by number. The records for many institutional burials have been lost or sealed, but for this particular hospital, the burial ledger was given to a museum in Buffalo, and has since been transcribed into entries on the Find-a-Grave website. 

That afternoon we walked the lefthand section searching the cast iron markers for one that was stamped 584.

The story goes that when she received the notification call that her father-in-law had passed away Heidi's grandmother was confused. "I thought he was already dead," she told the caller, "kicked in the head by a horse years ago." Her husband never spoke of his father, and although she was in high school when her grandfather died, Heidi's mom never met him. Like her mother, she thought he was dead.

The Road to Gowanda Part 2

A sunlit clearing lined with neat rows of cement markers lay at the bottom of the hill. To our right and through the woods was another opening dotted with cast iron Ts and on the left was another. We turned around and headed back up the hill. I gave a thumbs up as the car came into view and Heidi's mom was climbing out before we got there. "This is it," I told her.

After spraying our legs liberally with bug spray, we leashed up the dogs and stepped over the chain again. Once seen, this is a cemetery one never forgets the description had read, and it was accurate. Our search was over, we had found the Gowanda State Hospital Cemetery where Heidi's great-grandfather had been buried at the age of 83 in 1962 after living the last 50 years of his life in one of New York's state asylums.

The Road to Gowanda: Part 1

The unmarked dirt road was not a road at all, but rather a couple of ruts at the edge of a grassy field. We had already passed it twice, admiring the cute gray cat lounging like a small panther in the tall grass. And we had already taken the only other turn off this short stretch of Wheater Road: a narrow way between cornfields that had dead-ended by an abandoned shanty at the edge of the woods. 

"The written description says it's here," I insisted as we idled on the narrow shoulder. "It's unmarked, at the end of a quarter-mile dirt road on the east side of Wheater between Bagdad and Rt 62." I opened the map app on my phone. Tapping the satellite image, I could see three light green clearings beyond the woods at the edge of the field where the cat was. "We're going in!" I said and put the car in gear. A hundred yards away I turned onto the grassy lane and drove to the back of the meadow. Over a small rise we saw a chained-off driveway that had been invisible from the main road. 

I pulled up to it and hopped out of the car. "I'm going to check it out!" I said.

"I'm going with you!" Heidi replied, and we left the a/c running for her parents and hopped over the chain.

The path curved around to the left and down a steep hill. I knew why they had closed it off; a car could easily get stuck going up or down this way. We flushed a flock of finches to the right and a woodchuck lumbered across the road ahead of us; clearly this trail was not well traveled by humans. It had been mown sometime this summer, but the grass was up to our knees in some places. Rounding the curve ahead of us, I stopped and pointed. "There it is!"

The Old Man

At dinner this evening, Heidi told her parents about a quick visit she made to a neighbor down the street. John was a childhood friend of hers, and he and his wife and their two teenagers live in the house that he grew up in.

"You were where?" her dad asked, cupping his ear. He hasn't replaced the hearing aid he lost a couple of months ago.

"John's!" Heidi repeated.

He nodded. "Were you talking to the son or the old man?"

Heidi was confused. I could tell by the look on her face that she thought her dad had lost his marbles. John's parents have been dead for 40 years. 

"I think your dad is calling your friend John 'the old man'," I guessed, knowing that his son was also named John.

"Right!" her dad waved a cranky hand. "Do you even know the kid?"

"As a matter of fact?" she answered, "I do. And I was talking to both of them."

Burst Bubble

Visiting Heidi's parents is always an opportunity to break out of the cultural bubble we live in. For example, here in Buffalo, the economic dynamic is much different than it is in the affluent, densely populated community where we live, right outside Washington D.C. and economics drives politics.

For one thing, the many national chains that have been sprouting up in the 20 years I've been visiting regularly are still matched by plenty of well-established, local businesses and restaurants that succeed because they have a loyal customer base, and they reliably deliver quality goods, just as they have for years. Another difference is the much higher proportion of blue collar workers and tradesfolk to office workers. Finally, there are many shoppers and tourists who visit the area from Canada, and their spending lifts the economy.

As I've mentioned before, Heidi and her mom are inveterate shoppers, and until the last year and change of COVID, no visit between the two was complete without at least one shopping day. Now that the crisis has been mostly managed, this afternoon we headed up to an outlet mall in Niagara Falls.  

Wow... The place was a ghost town and more than half of the stores were closed-- completely out of business. Those shops that remained open had pretty limited inventory; even Heidi and her mom were hard pressed to find anything they wanted. In our community, only a handful of businesses went under during the pandemic, and it was hard to relate to the reports of economic hardship in other areas of the country, but today I saw an example, first hand. The mall will probably recover, but with the Canadian border still closed, and many local workers still saving to recoup lost wages, it could take a while. 

Some Who Came Before

We spent the afternoon yesterday in the cemetery, or rather, in four cemeteries to be exact. Both sides of Heidi's family have lived in Buffalo for generations, and along with her parents and brother, we went to pay our respects to all 4 of her grandparents, as well as her dad's grandparents, and the brothers who were the first of their surname to come to the United States from Germany back in 1845. 

Remarkably, they were all laid to rest in what has become an enormous cemetery complex just south of Buffalo, in the town of Cheektowaga, NY. Originally known as The United German and French Roman Catholic Cemetery, it was established in 1859 by nine trustees, representatives of six parishes whose congregants were mostly immigrants. The cemetery quickly filled, and over the years several adjoining farms were purchased and used to expand the grounds. 

Five cemeteries are known today as The Mount Calvary Cemetery Group; in addition to Mount Calvary and UGF, the collective also includes Pine Lawn, Ridge Lawn, and Buffalo Cemetery. Adjoining the grounds are also 3 Jewish Cemeteries, a Lutheran cemetery, and two independent Catholic cemeteries, one, Holy Sepulchre, that was founded for Italian immigrants and another, St. Stanislaus, for Polish. Not far away is Holy Cross, originally consecrated for the Irish laborers who came to Buffalo to dig the Erie Canal, build the railroads, and work on the steamships that plied the great lakes. 

Standing in the shade of a silver maple and looking over gentle green hills filled with row after row of granite and marble stones it was easy to forget that each memorialized at least one real person with a whole life of joys and disappointments. Many were carved with a cross that was tilted at an angle, a symbol I was not familiar with until I looked it up. Known as a Portate Cross or the Cross of St. Glbert, it represents a burden laid down after a life well-lived.