Day seven in the archives: Anna Comstock, Ben Bailey, and what to do at a dead end
Dead ends are never dead in a final way. Consider the yellow dead end sign at the end of the residential street in a small town; the bent old guard rail curving around the edge of the road; the old trees and untended weeds and grasses growing behind, up, and around the rail; perhaps a wildflower open, or a monarch butterfly, and then the deer that peers out and startles you with its unexpected appearance to your suddenly awakened vision. Perhaps the road isn’t leading where you’d like it to, but it has led you here, and now there is more to see.
Today was a day for deer and weeds. A deer literally did surprise me on my hike up the Slope from where I park my car half a mile down on University Ave. to avoid fees. Such encounters are one of the benefits of the academic year’s end and the new quiet that has spread over campus. But, to roll with my opening metaphor, it was a day in which I didn’t find what I was hoping I might find in the boxes I had requested from the Bailey Papers—such as further correspondence with Booker T. Washington (a bit of context here), or definite clarification of the transformation of Arbutus to Bailiwick (context here) and whether it entailed a change in the property’s management or practices — but I did find some unexpected gems, some wildflowers growing along the margin of my dead end. (I did get closer to the Bailiwick question, but no silver bullet. No new B. T. Washington finds — I have read a bit of his correspondence on previous visits.)
Because the wonderful thing about archives — physical archives — is that you go in with your eyes open. I did find some information related to Bailiwick in today’s box (Box 34), such as a really touching thank-you letter to L. H. and his wife Annette Bailey, written by friend of the Baileys and champion of the Nature-Study Movement Anna Botsford Comstock on November 28, 1929, after she found that the Baileys were going to donate a large portion of the Bailiwick property to her to be used as a girl’s camp. “Mere words cannot express what I feel in this matter,” she wrote along the top of the page. In the body of the letter addressed simply “Dear Friends,” she writes:
I have always loved Bailiwick — and I have felt lonesome about it since you have not found it possible to live there each summer. I could not bear to think of any other people owning it or living in it.
Now I simply gloat over the happiness and the love of beauty which it will bring to these many young lives. I am profoundly grateful to you two dear generous people — that you have been willing to do this truly great thing. Its influence will last long — long after we are gone.
Camp Comstock, recently renamed the Comstock Adventure Center, still operates on old Bailiwick/Arbutus land. A transcript of an interview with Bailey from after the sale of the property confirms that Bailey was considering the possibility that part of the property might become a camp for children for some time, and in another folder I found a recommendation of his that the orchards be taken out and replaced by native forest trees purchased from the state conservation office. Perhaps such trees grow there today; perhaps an apple or two lingers on.
But on the topic of the unexpected, the box I was searching through also contained a large amount of material related to Bailey’s brother, Marcus, who went by his middle name, Ben. Ben is sort of the mysterious member of the family from South Haven. When I was at the museum, we never quite seemed able to track down a whole lot of information on him — we knew that he worked as an electrician for Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show and possibly for Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, that he had patented a few inventions, and that he had been the first to leave the farm, apparently due to some sort of family dispute. With the eldest son, Dana, having died at a young age of scarlet fever, that left just the youngest, Libby, to work the farm with his father and their hired help, until young Lib got the urge to head to college. But Ben never did so well for himself, his reasons for leaving the farm were more personal, and the record was more silent about his fate. He was married, it seemed, to a woman named Agnes, about whom I know nothing else. So, when these folders seemed to present themselves to me, in the absence of anything more relevant at hand, I had to take a peek.
I don’t believe we were ever quite able to determine when Ben died or where he was buried — not with the family in South Haven, and not with his brother’s family in Ithaca. But now I do know — and the answer was somewhat shocking, personally. In my first semester at NYU, my friend Nate and I took off over a three-day weekend to camp in the Catskills, and we rented a car from an Enterprise rental in the Bronx, because rentals there were cheaper than elsewhere in the city. After we got off the train, we had to trek through a massive and disorienting graveyard called Woodlawn Cemetery to get to the rental place on the north side of it. Thanks to a tiny clipping from the New York Times, I now have another association for that cemetery, which is the final resting place of Bailey’s brother — who I never even knew to have lived in New York City.
This discovery led me to look further into the legal documents regarding Ben’s final days. His younger brother evidently paid for Ben’s hospital fees at the end of his life, as well as for the funeral, coffin, gravestone, etc. Liberty had been loaning money to his brother and bailing him out for years, as other documents attested, and he was helping him out to the very last, as he corresponded with Ben’s niece (presumably through Agnes’s siblings) afterward about what was to be done with various belongings. And through letters from LHB to banks and subscriptions in Ben’s name, I discovered that Ben likely lived his last years at 2091 Webster Ave. in the Bronx. I look forward to visiting in the fall, when I’m back in the city, and to looking up the grave at Woodlawn.
And the most delightful find about Ben Bailey had to do directly with the main thing that we who have worked at the Bailey Museum know about him, which is that he wrote light verse (to put it generously — vulgar poetry, to put it the way that I have often heard it described — and I can attest that much of it is quite awful, although sometimes also quite funny). They made up perhaps the most notorious set of ephemeral artifacts in the museum, never advertised for public viewing or display. But the notoriety of it at the museum might partially explain my surprise to find, in a letter to Ben’s niece, after having gone through the scant belongings that Ben left behind after death, Bailey writing this: “One of the greatest surprises of my life is to find that Ben wrote rhymes. As close as I have been to him all these years, I had not the least intimation of it. In the package he left addressed to me, I found a sealed letter written on the [typewriter] in which he tells me how he got started in the writing of them.” Bailey then made a point of collecting the poems — handwritten manuscripts, mostly — and, apparently, had them transcribed into type. Many of the manuscripts are in the archive at Cornell, including a massive handwritten tome titled “Bailey’s Joke Book;” the transcribed typescripts seem to be what the museum in South Haven inherited, the existence of which we commiserated over from time to time, but now means so much more to me.
By all accounts, Ben was something of the black sheep in the family, but it seems clear that his younger brother loved and cared for him to the end. And when he hit dead ends along the way, that support must have been important to him, as well as, perhaps, the relief of a big blank journal and the chance to pen a bawdy rhyme. I’m glad to have had a little bit more of a glance at him today, even if it has nothing to do with my research or what I set out to find.
On my way back down the Slope after the archives closed, I saw my deer friend in about the same spot as before, but having wandered into a neighboring cemetery, and joined by a couple family members. Three cheers for the unexpected startle in the midst of our routines. Archival work, like the rest of life, wouldn’t be the same without it.
For some context, see my intro post. To get in touch, use my website.
The archive archive: Intro | Days 1–3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6
Quotes and new insights all gleaned from Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21/2/3342, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
