Memory Lane: Cruisin' the Strip on Friday Night

Remember 8-track tapes?  I was thinking about those today.  I had five of them when I was young.  I didn’t have an 8-track player, of course, but my buddy Debbie did.  Debbie also had a 1968 Ford Galaxy 500 convertible.  It was red.    

I remember the music as it’s etched indelibly with a time and place of joy and unfettered freedom:  Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “I’m A Writer, Not A Fighter,” John Denver’s, “Annie’s Song,” Johnny Winter, “Live,” Beatles, “Live at the Hollywood Bowl,” and Glenn Miller, “Greatest Hits.”   Yes, I’m a freak who can’t pick a genre.  D  didn’t seem to mind.  Neither did S, who became the third in our little band of mischief makers.

We’d play those 8-tracks as we tooled down the road, my long, wavy hair flowing in the wind behind me, on our way to trouble.  We’d wait tensely for the

inevitable break in the music we knew was coming, as it clunkily switched from track to track interrupting the perfect moment of being everything and nothing at all. 

In Cedar Falls, Iowa, trouble usually consisted of starting the “cruise” up and down University Avenue, which stretched for about 7 or 8 miles through the entire length of both Cedar Falls, the university town, and Waterloo, the town next door.

Even though this was allegedly also Highway 218, there was a stop light every few hundred feet.  For much of the night, we’d drive up and down the strip, stopping at the lights and visiting with all the other cruisers and pull extreme stunts like the dangerous Chinese Fire Drill, where the driver jumped out and ran around the car before the light turned green—sometimes even switching drivers. I never understood why it was called a Chinese Fire Drill, but I’m sure it wasn’t a compliment, knowing the politically incorrect nature of the time and place. Sometimes, we’d see how many lights we could get through without stopping.  D used to like to come to abrupt halts once in a while, just to make sure I was paying attention.  

We used to carry squirt guns to squirt unsuspecting, law-abiding citizens at the stop lights should they be so foolish as to leave their windows open, until that fateful day when the man jumped out of his truck and leaped into the convertible in his attempt to confiscate our weapons.  Never squirt a guy with a clean pickup out on a date. 

Trips to McDonalds or the new place in town, Burger King, peppered our night.  The parking lot became an extension of our social cliques, with the jocks in one corner of the lot and the other groups in theirs.  Hanging with friends and laughing until we hurt, gossiping about who was going with whom and who broke up that week.  If we were feeling particularly wild, we’d cruise along dark and forbidding Airline Highway to the union hall, where we’d invariably invade the den of iniquity, also known as a kegger.  We’d pay our fee and down a couple brews and go back out to cruise, emboldened by our frothy friend.  Sometimes, we’d go our separate ways briefly to enjoy the company of someone who wanted to further our experiments in kissing, only to meet back up later and fly home, exhilarated by our night of decadence.

Somehow, by curfew, I’d be safely deposited at my back door, stepping inside—knowing my dad was awake, waiting for me to come through the door.  I’d slam the door a little, so he wouldn’t question whether I was in fact home and get up to check, then take two steps to the stairs and race down to my basement bachelor pad and climb into bed, wondering how being grown up could ever beat this.

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world. 
~ Sylvia Plath

Copyright 2011 Lori Hahn

Memory Lane: Nellie Bly, Nellyl Bly, Bring the Broom Along

This post is part of my ongoing series of my memories for my children to read if they ever want to. I'm Lori. Some of these have been published elsewhere previously, but I thought while I was doing this, I'd also bring the stories together in one place.  

I’d sit in my little wooden desk, with that attached chair that was also wood and seemed to cause more squirming than not, fiddling with the pencil box tucked safely into the slot under the desk, wondering if I’d ever be so lucky to get a big box of crayons with 64 different colors with that cool crayon sharpener in the back instead of the paltry 32 crayons I currently had. 

I’d wait with barely contained anticipation for the teacher to hand out the book order form. I’d greedily grab the flyer from the teacher and begin to pour over all sorts of glorious books that I had to narrow down to two or three. If things were going well, sometimes I got as many as five. Once I turned in the order, I’d daydream about receiving a stack one day in the not too distant future and how I’d run my hand along the smooth covers and smell the new book smell with heady abandon. They cost in the 50-cent range back then, as I recall. Fifty cents would buy ten bottles of pop from the pop machine at Bob’s Rainbow Groceryland near my house. It was a lot of money.

There were a few books from back then that stood out in my mind, all of which I have—one I ran across the other day. Of course, my kids were never interested in them, despite the fact I saved them for them to enjoy. They are too old-fashioned. 

3^rd Grade: Nellie Bly, Reporter, by Nina Brown Baker. The intrepid girl reporter from the late 1800s, Nellie wasn’t like the other girls. This book, which I picked up last night and started reading, is a clearly feminist look at the life of Bly. Through sheer moxie, she broke into a business that hard-edged, cynical men had held title to forever. And made a difference standing up for the downtrodden masses. The message was: Chicks rock! Girls can do anything! Very different from most of the messages I received when young through most literature and television where June Cleaver was still the epitome of the American woman.

4^th Grade: Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh. Ah, well, I was going to be Harriet. From that point on, I decided observing people was for me. I’d jump on my bike and ride the 1.5 miles downtown and go into Cole’s Cafe near the library on Main Street and order a grilled cheese and coke. I’d sit with my back to the majority of the patrons and open my ears. I’d listen to them talking, try to figure out their stories, then write it down. I’d describe what I thought they looked like based on my surmises.

  

6^th Grade: Rifles for Waitie, by Harold Keith. Well, I didn’t read this one on my own, but I bought it and have read it since. My 6^th grade male teacher, Mr. Staack, a big bear-sized young man with a balding head and a giant bushy beard, read it to us every day during reading time. It was, to me, as epic as The Odyssey. The 16-year-old-boy, full of testosterone and chutzpah, heads out to fight on the side of the North during the Civil War and spends the next four years learning about horror, honor, death, betrayal, friendship, and justice.  

7^th Grade: Captain Blood, by Rafael Sabatini. When I saw the 1935 Errol Flynn movie, I fell in love with his character. The book was far, far more exciting, but it was nice to put Flynn’s face into my mind’s eye while reading it—he was so pretty. I never wanted to be Olivia deHavilland, I wanted to be Flynn. The message: Even when injustice is the call for the day (or week, months, years), you can still live honorably, even as a pirate! I heart good pirates. Sabatini also wrote the exciting adventure, Scaramouche.

So, what books rocked your world when you were a kid?

Copyright 2011 Lori Hahn

Memory Lane: Litchfield Manson

Litchfield Manson, also known locally as Mandalay. (WCF Courier)

When I was young, I lived on a street called “Grand Boulevard.” It was an old tree-lined boulevard with beautiful historic house. I liked to imagine it as it must have been in the early part of the 20th century when they were built—carriages rambling down one side of the boulevard or the other arriving at the stately mansions made of stone or brick which were built every 2 acres or so apart from one another. 

At least one was purported to have a ballroom, servants quarters, and both a front and back staircase, though I never got to see this mythical place from the inside. 

As time went on, many of those palatial lots were subdivided to make room for homes built in 1930s, 40s, and 50s. At one time, it was THE area in which to live. 

Thing was, the boulevard part ended the block before mine, so my part of the street was just a bland street of houses built in the 1940s, 50s and a smattering of those built in the 1960s. Cedar Heights, as it was known in the beginning, was eventually incorporated into Cedar Falls, Iowa in 1935. 

Our family lived in a little Cape Cod 2+ bedroom joint with one bath - 1711 Grand Blvd. It all seemed so huge back then, but was only about 900 sq. feet, all told. Rumor had it that my parents got such a good deal on it because someone in the previous owner's family died in the home. I never knew for sure if that was true or not. My sister and I shared the entire upstairs of that house that eventually was covered in blue/green shag carpeting. We used the little gables as our private offices for the occasional game of “school” or “office.” 

The kitchen was much too small to seat our family of four. Off the dining room in the back of the house, French doors led to the fabulous screened verandah where we spent many a sultry summer night protected from being eaten alive by mosquitoes. 

I would catch the scent of the lilac bushes gently wafting around the verandah on those starry evenings long ago. The ample yard was full of fruit—pear, apples of various types, plums, and gooseberries. With great relish we waited every spring for the fruit to ripen so we could stop mid-play for free snacks. Mom would harvest the rhubarb that grew plentifully behind the garage each year and all manner of baking was had for weeks – rhubarb pie, rhubarb cobbler, and other concoctions of rhubarbilicious goodness happily topped with a little bit of Cool Whip. 

Endless minutes of fascination were provided by the ants scurrying across the peonies blooming in yellow, red, pink and white on the west side of the house before we raced off to finish our duel with trash can lid shields and stick swords. 

The trees were the perfect place to hide in hide-n-seek games held at dusk. Big old hickory trees lined the front yard and a long, curved sidewalk led to the front door. There were no fences in our neighborhood. 

Down near the bluffs, about a block away, and also just a block or so off of the boulevard, was a grand old mansion called “Mandalay.” Some rich manufacturing guy named Litchfield built it in 1922. Back then, it cost about $400,000 to build and had 22 rooms including a shooting gallery, gym, single-lane bowling alley, marble & bronze fountain, billiards room, and pipe organ. It had an early automatic dishwasher, a clothes washer and dryer, vacuum cleaning system, concealed radiators and an intercom. Such a thing had never been seen in our little town. The household furnishings and gadgets were purported to have cost an additional $400,000. The carriage house was nearly as big as the house to me—and had at one time been home to the servants working at the mansion. 

In my feverish imagination, I always pictured William Powell and Carole Lombard and a kind of My Man Godfrey kind of family living there. The people who built it lost it in the Depression. Brothers Arthur and J.E. Fergason ended up buying it for back taxes and $9,000 in 1932. 

The mansion was converted into a nightclub and restaurant. Images of an illicit speakeasy danced in my head—one in which the rich and powerful would arrive furtively, headlamps off, in their 1930 Pierce Arrows or Dusenbergs as they pulled around back and gained admittance through a series of secret knocks. 

Then, it became an inn (I pictured Holiday Inn and Bing Crosby as owner), and finally a bunch of dumpy apartments as the luster was long ago lost (more like the one-season show from the 70s, Hot L Baltimore). 

I always remember it for one particular reason. Trees had grown uncontrolled on the grounds of the apartments, which abutted the bluffs and the river below over the scores of years since it was originally built. One day, a construction crew started to clear the land down the road from Mandalay, extending the road and building a modern version of a mansion for a wealthy family on the other end. The crew needed to pile all the dirt they dug up somewhere, so they cleared some of the land adjoining Mandalay to pile the dirt. As the brush was pulled away, it exposed a fabulous stone gazebo, long neglected—16-paned windows glassless, but hinges and wood still intact—but the perfect place for a fort. 

My pal Doug and I knew we had just found our new home. Brooms were brought, the junk pile near the train tracks was foraged through, and in the end, we had a small wobbly table, two broken chairs, a wooden mantel cross, a stained-glass pyramid, and a Playboy magazine. 

We brought odds and ends from the house to cover the table, sturdy the chairs, and each day we’d ride our bikes to our cool place and eat our lunches, looking out down the bluffs to the river and look in satisfaction at our creation. It was a little bit of heaven. One day we arrived, and inexplicably, it just didn’t feel the same—the thrill was gone. 

The new houses were nearly finished on the street and the dirt pile was dissipating and would soon uncover our little hideout. Then, our Playboy was stolen and we knew for sure we wouldn’t be back, and abandoned it forever. 

Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days when I was young and my biggest problem was what kind of dress to put on Barbie or whether or not I had enough Legos to build a fort. 

 ~Anonymous, the 1960s 

Copyright 2007

Memory Lane Begins: RFK Assasination

My name is Lori. I turned 65 this year and started Medicare and Social Security. It was just yesterday
when I was a bright, young, 17-year-old smart aleck kid who left home in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and joined the Army. One day, my great grandma and I were sitting in her dining room, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. She said, "In my mind I feel like a teenager, but look at these hands, they belong to an old lady." 

I now understand exactly what she meant. She was one-of-a-kind and probably had some pretty thrilling adventures. We'll never know because she didn't write them down or tell them to me so I could keep those memories alive. I wish my Mom could tell me some of her adventures, but she is far too guarded to do that.

All I can do is try to write things down for my own kids.

I want to start with a memory that isn't even mine. It belongs to the kids' dad. He told it so many times, but it's still a good, if doubly-sad story of how a child is impacted by what is going on for the rest of the world. He was about 7 years old and had a gerbil. The gerbil lived in the basement and with some iteration of his brothers and sisters (there were 7), they got the gerbil out of its cage and it scampered across the floor. Mike put his foot out to block the gerbil from going too far, but instead accidentally landed his foot on the gerbil, killing it. This was his first experience with death and he was devastated.

Later that night, he was laying in bed. His parents had to walk through that bedroom to get to their bedroom, which was in the back of the house. His dad was preparing for bed because he had to go to work the next day and his Mom kept popping back to the room to update him on the status of Bobby Kennedy. She'd say things like, "They say he is still alive..." and she continued updating him throughout the night.

Mike said he layed in bed and would hopefully ask him mom, "Is the gerbil still alive?" He thought those updates were on his hamster, not RFK.

Robert Francis Kennedy, Sr. was the younger brother of assasinated president John F. Kennedy. He had been JFK's attorney general. He was running for president as a Democrat in 1968. Things were looking good in the primaries and the momentum was amazing once they hit California. After the California primary results came in and RFK was announced the winner, the campaign held a celebration at the Ambassdador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy gave a brief speech and then moved toward the kitchen, where he and his family would cut out to their limo through the back entrance. He never made it. At 12:15 am on June 5, 1968, on the way to the exit, Sirhan Sirhan jumped out in front of Kennedy and shot him in the head with a .22 caliber handgun. In front of Kennedy's wife and some of his children.

Kennedy was raced to the hospital where doctors struggled to keep him alive. All through the day and into the next night, the news would break in and update America on his condition. At 1:44 am on June 6, 1968, he was declared dead. 

RFK Funeral Train: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYJ6Pk4Mo2Y

MUNSON TALES: Love, Abolition, Suffrage, and Frederick Douglass (Clan Ephraim) Part 2

Part 1 can be found here

The Civil War came and his sons Frederick, Lewis, and Charles all served in various capacities. Finally, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863 and all slaves were free, if in name only. Frederick, on the other hand, met with Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and 1864 on the treatment of black soldiers and how to mobilize the southern slaves in the war effort for the Union. Come the election of 1864, Douglass endorsed John C. Fremont as he was deeply disappointed in Lincoln for not moving fast or hard enough.

In 1865, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were passed, changing everything for former slaves, but again, mostly in name only. They were free, but not really free at all.

During reconstruction, Douglass took some political appointments. He was on the board of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank. His next political enemy was the Klu Klux Klan, freshly rerisen from the ashes of the South to end the progress blacks may have made in the few years following the War. He supported U. S. Grant for president and started his last newspaper, New National Era, in hopes that his country would live by their agreement for equality.

U.S. Grant affixed his signature to the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (the Klu Klux Klan Act) and the second and third Enforcement Acts.

In 1872, Douglass got a surprise—he was nominated as Vice President with Victoria Woodhull as President on the Equal Rights Party! He never acknowledged this honor. 

He did serve as a presidential elector in New York and delivered the electoral votes in Washington D.C. 

Coincidentally, Mary Pitts was at that time teaching black children at the Hampton Institute of Virginia.

Mary Pitts Douglass

Later, she found herself in Anacostia in 1882 when she moved in with her uncle who lived next door to the Douglass family. 

Mary worked with partner Caroline Winslow to publish the feminist newspaper, The Alpha, the newspaper of the Moral Education Society in D.C. Caroline was the 5th woman to graduate from medical school in the United States. 

Douglass’ Rochester home also burned down in 1872. Arson was suspected. It was a big loss of belongings and all of his volumes of two of his newspapers. He decided then to move to Washington D.C. He and his wife built their final home above the Anacostia River in D.C. They called it Cedar Hill. They expanded it from 14 to 21 rooms and bought some adjoining property that would extend the property to 15 acres.

Douglass’ newspaper had failed and the bank went bankrupt. Douglass was struggling financially. President Rutherford B. Hayes named Douglass the United States Marshall of Washington D.C., and he was confirmed in 1877.

An older Frederick Douglass

He was also appointed Recorder of Deeds in D.C. in 1881. In 1882, his beloved wife died. 

Douglass hired Mary, the daughter of his good friend Gideon Pitts, as a recorder of deeds clerk in 1882. After a period of mourning, he started working with famed Ida B. Wells, journalist and co-founder of the NAACP. 

Mary later went to work for Douglass helping him complete his final autobiography and handling his correspondence. Their shared intellectual pursuits led to a relationship that culminated in their 1884 marriage. This, of course, was anathema to nearly everyone. 

Mary brought her new husband to visit her father and he refused to let Douglass cross the threshhold of his home. Douglass’ children were furious, but particularly his oldest daughter, Rosetta Douglass Sprague.  

Frederick and Helen Mary and Mary's sister

Rosetta had warned her father not to get involved with the Freedman’s bank, and now this.

In 1888 he became the first black man to get a vote in the Republican National Convention. And by “a” vote, he got one. Still historic. He continued to lecture and urge other African-Americans to turn away from the idea of going back to Africa. In 1889, President Hayes named him Consular General to Haiti, the first black-run country, a position from which he resigned in 1891 when he discovered that the U.S. had every intention to take control of the country.

On 20 Feb 1895, after giving a speech to the National Council of Women in D.C., Douglass went home and had a massive heart attack that took his life. 

Despite the feelings of others, Frederick and Mary lived a  happy 11 years together. Frederick’s body was taken to Rochester after his service at the Metropolitan AME Church for burial. He was buried beside his first wife. Mary would eventually be buried there also, without fanfare, in 1903. 

The children fought the will, which had some technical errors. Mary was to be the beneficiary of the house and property.  She proposed to the children that she be allowed to live in the house until death and then the house would become a memorial to Douglass. The children disagreed and had it sold—to Mary. Mary spent the last eight years of her life speaking and organizing his papers to keep her husband’s place in history alive. She started and funded the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association. At her death, the National Association of Colored Women raised funds to buy Cedar Hill. 

It is now run by the National Park Service.

MUNSON TALES: Love, Abolition, Suffrage, and Frederick Douglass (Clan Ephraim) Part 1

On 14 Feb 1818, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, who would later become known as Frederick Douglass, was born in what was most likely his grandmother’s cabin on the property of his owner. The scenic property was on the shore of Cheseapeake Bay in Maryland. Frederick would later become the most influential African-American and abolitionist in the United States in the days before the Civil War.

His mother was an enslaved woman and his father was reportedly white, though the definitive identity
of his father was never ascertained.  As often happened, he was separated from his mother in his infancy and raised by his grandmother, a slave, and grandfather, a free black man.  His mother worked on a property twelve miles away. It might as well been 100 miles. He saw her only a handful of times before she died when he was seven.

He was separated from his grandparents and moved to the Way House Plantation and then moved again, in a series of exchanges, to the Baltmore home of Hugh & Sophia Auld in 1828. Douglass reported Sophia had a tender heart. She ensured he had a bed to sleep in with sheets and blankets and that he was properly clothed. According to Douglass, city slaves were almost free men and treated far better than plantation slaves. When he was about 12, Sophia also began to teach him to read and write, but was quickly influenced by her husband, Hugh, to shut it down.  Douglass caught on that literacy must be the pathway to freedom and success. He began to teach himself. 

First wife Anna Murray

Douglass ended up in a couple different new situations in the coming few years, one of which was a brutal time on a plantation where the oveseer believed all slaves needed to be broken. By age 16, he was beaten frequently by the overseer until he fought back and was returned to Hugh Auld. Auld then sent him to William Gardiner to do ship caulking. Also while here, he met Anna Murray, a free woman. She encouraged him to consider escape and he saw freedom on the horizon. In 1838, he escaped disguising himself as a sailor and with papers of a free black sailor and money for traveling from Anna. He jumped a train and then a steamboat to Philadelphia to “Quaker City,” an abolition stronghold, and then to a abolition safehouse in New York City. Eleven days later, Anna arrived with all they needed to start life together. They were married on 15 Sep 1838. His career as an abolition speaker and writer began almost as soon as he arrived. Anna and Frederick started their family with the arrival of their first daughter, Rosetta. Three boys and another daughter would eventually join her—all born into freedom.

He was not only a dedicated abolitionist, but also supported equality for women and the suffrage movement. By now, his work took him all over the free places he could go.

Gideon Pitts, Jr. was an faithful 19th-century abolitionist. He was an “Underground Railroad” conductor who hid slaves in his basement along the route to their next stop. He lived in Honeoye, New York, and was a close friend and supporter of Douglass. Pitts provided financial aid to him and even hosted him in his home starting in the 1840s when Douglass spoke in his area, which he did often. Gideon’s wife, Jane, was the great granddaughter of Ephraim Munson, namesake of Clan Ephraim.  The couple also fought for suffrage.

Jane and Gideon had five children, the oldest of whom was Hellen “Mary” Pitts. Mary attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, one of the “Seven Sisters,”  and graduated in 1859. Mary returned home and continued to work with her father against slavery and for the woman’s vote.

Douglass' daughter Rosetta

In the meantime, Frederick Douglass spent a few years  living in England in the mid 1840s, where he convinced abolitionist Thomas Clarkson to abolish slavery throughout the English Commonwealth. One of his fans led the charge to raise the money to have him freed from owner Thomas Auld in 1846. When returned to the U.S. in 1847 he took the 500 pounds his British friends had given him to start his first abolitionist newspaper, the North Star in New York.In 1848, he was the only person of color who attended the first suffrage convention where he started his long friendship with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He began using his paper to push for women’s rights.

Part 2 tomorrow

[There is so much more to Frederick Douglass' life and I encourage you to read more about him to learn just how much he impacted the world in which he moved.]

MUNSON TALES: Eureka! A straight barrel at last! (Clan Jabez)

It was quite a treat to run across a story from Clan Jabez. The clan is very small. I want to start with Henry Munson’s mother, Lucy Munson. She was the oldest child of old Jabez Munson, great grandson of Thomas Munson. Lucy, who has no husband referenced in The Munson Record, Vol. II, also doesn’t seem to have a husband on record elswhere either.  She had one child, born 29 Jun 1807 in Hamden, Connecticut. Hamden was then known as Whitneyville. His name was Henry Munson and he was an industrious individual.  

He married Jane Ford on 29 Jan 1834 in Hamden. The couple would go on to have six children.

At this time, there were two big gun manufacturers in the area, Colt Armory in New Haven and in Whitneyville, the Whitneyville Armory. Among Henry’s many talents was as an armorer and expert gunmaker. He worked for Whitneyville Armory for many years, but also had other businesses operating at the same time, including his farm. 

In the later middle years of his life, he took a contract to make guns for a customer. Being a man who wanted to do a good job, he found himself having trouble making a barrel that was bored on center of the cylinder of steel.  The custom had been to weld the pieces of the barrel together. He thought on it and come upon a brilliant idea for a small device that would hold the barrel while the bore ran and make it dead center down the barrel! This “little machine” revolutionized the gun making industry.  

Unfortunately, he did not pass “Go” and collect millions of dollars because he never bothered to get a patent.  

A longtime Democrat, the War of the Rebellion caused Henry to change parties to the Republican. He served two terms in the state legislature and served in every position of import in Hamden. During the Civil War he spent a stint helping recruit troops to meet the state’s quote to serve the Union and as was reported, did it better than anyone else. 

Henry’s wife passed away in 1864. He never remarried, but his children remained close by.   

In his post-gunmaking years, he was part of Munson, Morse, & Co., a saddlery in Hamden which he started in 1871. He began purchased many properties throughout Whitneyville, including a piece of land that was ultimately purchased by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. which they used for munitions storage.

Sadly, in 1888, Henry received word from the Guilford police that a body had washed up on the shores and was discovered by fisherman. Henry realized from the description that the body was probably that of his son Robert and went to Guilford to find that it was indeed his son. It was believed that the body had been in the water for up to one week. The marshall believed Robert died of either suicide or accidental drowning. Henry told the inquest that his son had left two weeks previously to look for work and they had heard from him once during his absence. Robert was supposedly going to Bridgeport. He never reached that stop. The loss of Robert left only two surviving children.  

Henry retired about 20 years before his death and spent his last years living with one of his two surviving children, Mrs. Eunice Gorham. He helped people in Whitneyville settle up their estates and did it faithfully. His son Henry Whitney Munson, Jr., became superintendent of the Whitneyville Armory in 1871 and in 1903, having previously taken on his father’s properties and opened up Munson Realty in 1903.

Henry died at age 86 in 1893 of pneumonia that lasted 30 hours. His estate was far from meager, listed at $100,000!

A little segue for historical context:

Eli Whitney of Whitneyville 

Eli Whitney (d. 1825) and his son Eli

Whitneyville was named after Eli Whitney, the inventor of many things, but most famous among them, the cotton gin. 

Sadly, the cotton gin adventure did not travel the trajectory Whitney and his partner had hoped. It made little profit and what little profits he had were eaten up in lawsuits for patent violations.  The partners also had not planned to sell the unit, but to have farmers come to them for cotton cleaning. 

Whitney died in 1825 but the armory continued on without him. His two brothers ran things until his son, Eli Whitney, was old enough to  run it himself. That happened in 1842. He modernized the facility and ultimately sold the armory to Winchester Repeating Arms in 1888.