The apprentices, including myself,
boarded with his grand-daughter. I used occasionally to go out riding
with the boss, who was very kind to us boys; Sundays he took us all to
a great old rough, fortress-looking stone church, on Joralemon street,
near where the Brooklyn city hall now is--(at that time broad fields
and country roads everywhere around.[5]) Afterward I work'd on the
"Long Island Star," Alden Spooner's paper. My father all these years
pursuing his trade as carpenter and builder, with varying fortune.
There was a growing family of children--eight of us--my brother Jesse
the oldest, myself the second, my dear sisters Mary and Hannah Louisa,
my brothers Andrew, George, Thomas Jefferson, and then my youngest
brother, Edward, born 1835, and always badly crippled, as I am myself
of late years.
Note:
[5] Of the Brooklyn of that time (1830-40) hardly anything remains,
except the lines of the old streets. The population was then between
ten and twelve thousand. For a mile Fulton street was lined with
magnificent elm trees. The character of the place was thoroughly
rural. As a sample of comparative values, it may be mention'd that
twenty-five acres in what is now the most costly part of the city,
bounded by Flatbush and Fulton avenues, were then bought by Mr
Parmentier, a French _emigre_, for $4000. Who remembers the old places
as they were? Who remembers the old citizens of that time? Among the
former were Smith & Wood's, Coe Downing's, and other public houses at
the ferry, the old Ferry itself, Love lane, the Heights as then, the
Wallabout with the wooden bridge, and the road out beyond Fulton
street to the old toll-gate.
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