LOOKING BACK: The Bushes of Branchport | Lifestyle

Dr. Bush was born in 1799 in Florida, Orange County, the identical tiny downstate New York neighborhood as William Henry Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state. Bush was each the son and grandson of Revolutionary Conflict veterans. He acquired his medical license from a college on Barclay Road in New York Metropolis, married Julia Loomis in 1824, then moved to Vienna, N.Y. (now Phelps).

The Bushes left Vienna after just a few years and moved to the home on the little hill in Branchport in 1834. The home had an uncommon function: There was a barn, not at the back of the home, however on the sloping entrance yard. There was a spring positioned there, and the barn was constructed over high of it. This stored the barn cool in summer time, and was rather more handy for watering animals than lugging buckets of water from elsewhere on the property.

Eight youngsters grew up in that dwelling: Elliot, Henry, Irene, Caroline, Ellen, Harlan, Frances, Robert and Julia Gertrude. Bush was a busy nation physician. Though his data don’t survive, up to date Yates County docs spent their days on horseback touring to sufferers, dosing them with drugs and ointments of their very own concoction, bleeding them with lancets or leeches, setting damaged bones and even vaccinating them for smallpox. Some native docs additionally pulled tooth. In an age with no antibiotics, protected painkillers and rife with farm accidents, Bush was a busy man. “We youngsters didn’t see a lot of him,” Robert later wrote. Bush additionally didn’t at all times accumulate his charges and the household went hungry greater than as soon as.

One factor Robert did bear in mind effectively was his mother and father’ intense perception within the abolition of slavery. “They toiled and saved to feed, dress and educate their youngsters, assist the church, and free the bondmen of the South,” he wrote. Dr. Bush, between using to go to sufferers, turned extremely energetic within the native antislavery scene. Like many Northerners, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 galvanized Bush. By 1854, “he was an ardent Garrisonian Abolitionist,” Robert acknowledged. By means of his church, Bush donated cash to arm Northern immigrants to Kansas, who had been attempting to tip the inhabitants stability in opposition to Southern immigrants to the territory to make sure free standing when it centered as a state.

Then, Robert later wrote, Dr. Bush started hiding these escaping slavery in his barn. The home on the primary street by means of Branchport was an ideal spot to harbor these fleeing farther north by the use of Tub or due north from Corning. Robert, on the age of 15, helped his father with this extremely criminality. Hiding the escapees in a hay wagon, younger Robert drove them to Geneva, the place he introduced them to a cabin alongside Seneca Lake. The Bush household’s actions had been harmful for themselves and the liberty seekers.

The Fugitive Slave Regulation of 1850 allowed Southern slave catchers to enter free territory to retrieve escaped folks and pressure them again into slavery. It additionally contained an infinite price of the fashionable equal of $15,000 and a 12 months in jail for these including escapees.

Fortunately, nobody ever stopped Robert Bush on his option to Geneva with a wagon of hay.

Dr. Bush didn’t conceal his abolitionist emotions. He corresponded with each Frederick Douglass and Jermain Loguen, each of whom visited the Bush household dwelling in Branchport and had lunch there (Loguen, like Douglass, had escaped slavery, modified his surname and ended up in New York state. Dwelling first with the M’Clintock household of Waterloo, the place the 1848 Ladies’s Rights Conference had been deliberate, Loguen finally moved to Syracuse the place he participated within the Jerry Rescue and brazenly ferried escapees to Canada. Loguen’s daughter Sarah Frasier was the fourth Black girl physician).

Combating for what they believedWhen the Civil Conflict erupted, 4 of the Bush sons joined the navy. Elliot, the eldest, was killed at Guntown, Miss., in 1864; Harlan was in Appomattox Courthouse at Lee’s give up; Henry ended his profession as a captain; and Robert joined the 185th Regiment NYS Volunteers, reached the rank of main, and was imprisoned in infamous Libby Jail in Richmond, Va. When Robert returned from the battle, he adopted in his father’s footsteps and have become a health care provider. He later served within the New York State Meeting for 13 years, together with one as speaker.

The Bush daughters lived lives of service too. Caroline married Henry Harris Jessup, a Presbyterian missionary and founding father of the American College in Beirut. The Jessups moved to Tripoli and had three youngsters. Caroline died on board ship and is buried in Cairo, Egypt. Irene married the writer of a well-liked grammar textbook. All the opposite daughters — and a lot of the sons — had been effectively educated and labored as schoolteachers earlier than their marriages.

Regardless of Dr. Bush’s tendency to not accumulate charges, the household finally prospered sufficient to buy some extra land in Branchport, simply west of the hamlet. They remained, nevertheless, in the home close to the creek the place that they had aided folks in escaping bondage and raised their giant household. {A photograph} exhibits the entire household gathered to rejoice Wynans and Julia’s sixtieth marriage ceremony anniversary in 1884. The barn over the spring stayed intact into dwelling reminiscence, however is not any extra, only a small despair within the slope all the way down to the freeway.

Wynans and Julia Bush died in 1889 and 1898, respectively, and are buried within the Branchport Cemetery. They’re featured within the exhibit “A Harmful Freedom: Abolitionists, Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Yates County” on the Yates County Historical past Middle.