The Mountain Climbers: An Allens Hill Base Ball Team

 

 

by Joy Lewis –

Part One of Two:

This photograph of ten ball players has been dated to about 1910.  The inscription on the back reads “Allen’s Hill base ball team The Mountain Climbers” and includes the names of the men.  A bit of digging into Census records and material on file in the Historian’s office provided information on each player – what they were doing in 1910 and what they accomplished in later years.  They were an interesting bunch.

Raymond C. Francis (1894)

At age sixteen, Raymond C. Francis (1894) was the youngest player on the Mountain Climbers base ball team.  He was the only child of his parents Clayton and Anna Kennedy Francis.  His father owned the general store in Allens Hill, where the family had lived since shortly after Ray’s birth.

In the summer of 1917 Ray was twenty-three when he enlisted in the Army.  He attained the rank of Sergeant in the Motor Transport Corps and served overseas for about eighteen months.  Returned home after the war, he found work in a garage as a mechanic.  A few years later he married Grace Treble; they had no children.  He became a bookkeeper and worked in a bank in Honeoye Falls.  Ray died March 9, 1979.

John Joseph Meehan (1892)

John Joseph Meehan (1892) was born in Allens Hill, the only son of James and Mary McGreevey Meehan.  He had a younger sister, Jennie.  In 1910 he was seventeen years old and worked as a “hay presser.”  In company with three or four other men, John traveled to area farms with a primitive wooden hay baler.  This was a tall contraption, four sided, with openings at top and bottom.  Hay was forked into the chute, then by means of pulleys and ropes pressed from the top into a compact bundle.

In August 1917 John was drafted; he served in Europe for over a year during the First World War.  Later he married and moved to Canandaigua; he and his wife Evalina had no children.  John worked for several years as a chauffeur at Oak Mount Sanitarium in East Bloomfield.  He died at age sixty in 1952.

John Ellis Deal (1889)

John Ellis Deal (1889) had deep family roots in Richmond.  His father, Asa Deal, and his mother, Maggie Patterson, were both from Allens Hill.  The Deal farm was on the north side of Allens Hill Road, about half a mile south of the Bell Road intersection.  Asa’s father, John, served in the Ontario County Militia during the War of 1812 and Asa was a private in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Asa and Maggie’s son John was the youngest of their ten children.  In 1910 John was twenty-one and single.  He was enrolled in the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine and graduated the following year.  He married Grace Johnson in the autumn of 1915.  (She was not related to Lafayette Johnson.)  For more than two decades he practiced veterinary medicine in Allens Hill and the surrounding area.  He and Grace had three sons: John, Roy, and Edward; and three daughters: Ruth, Marian, and Harriet.  Dr. John Deal died September 14, 1973, at his home in Vernon Center (Oneida County), New York.

Wales Duffy (1889)

Wales Duffy (1889) was twenty in 1909 when he married Jessie Ogden.  She was the sister of Wales’ teammate Ray Ogden.  The two young men worked together, operating a steam sawmill on the shores of Honeoye Lake.  Wales was also related to another teammate, Albert Belcher.  Though only five years older, Al was Wales’ uncle, for Wales’ mother was Albert’s older sister.

Wales was born in Mendon, the son of Ira Mann Duffy and Emma Belcher.  He came to Ontario County to work as a lumberman.  He married a local girl and they set up housekeeping in Allens Hill.  By 1920, when the couple separated, they had two children: Ogden and Gretchen.  He moved to Syracuse, while Jessie remained in Ontario County where she obtained a divorce.  In 1935 Wales married Marian Stone; they had no children.

Wales’ grandfather James Duffy suffered a tragic death in 1911.  The sensational story was carried in newspapers nationwide.  One snowy February evening, the elder Mr. Duffy, then seventy-three years old, was in his home in Honeoye Falls with his seventeen-year-old granddaughter Verna Duffy, and the girl’s aunt Elizabeth Webb.  At about seven-fifteen in the evening, a knock came on the door and Mr. Duffy told the person to enter.  A black man carrying a club came into the room and asked Mr. Duffy if he had any money.  Standing up, Mr. Duffy jokingly replied, “Lots of it!”  This seemed to anger the man; raising the club overhead with both hands he brought it down upon the head of the elderly farmer.  Again and again Mr. Duffy was struck with the club.

Mrs. Webb, a woman in her sixties, attempted to flee the room intent on getting help.  She too was clubbed to the floor, suffering a wound to her head six inches long.  Verna ran out the door, trying to go for help.  She didn’t get far before she was grabbed by the intruder.  She tried to scream, but the man choked her until she was quiet.  Dragging her by the hair and arm, the man ran back into the house and out the back door, toward some woods.  Verna continued to struggle – her arm was broken in two places – and at last managed to scream loud and long.  Her screams attracted attention and the would-be robber let go of her and fled down the street.

Verna returned to her home with some of the neighbors.  There she found her aunt recovering from the blow she’d received and her grandfather in his bed.  His wounds had been cleansed and the doctor summoned.  However, he was grievously wounded; three days later he died.  In May 1911 the intruder, James Williams, was tried in the courthouse at Geneseo for the murder of James Duffy.  He was found guilty and condemned to death.  On September 16, 1912, Mr. Williams was executed by electric chair in Auburn State Prison.

Wales Duffy died in 1932, twenty years after this event, in Syracuse.

Ray Ogden (1887)

Ray Ogden (1887) was twenty-three years old in 1910 and single for most of the year.  Then in November he married Bertha Fairchild of Seneca County.  Within the month the couple moved to Omaha, Nebraska.

The son of George Ogden and Minnie Riggs, Raymond was born in Boone County Iowa.  He had an older sister, Gertrude, who died at age nine, and a younger sister, Jessie.  Ray’s father had been born in Allens Hill in 1860.  As a young married man he’d emigrated to Iowa, where he was a successful farmer in the Des Moines area.   Through the years, however, he and Minnie maintained ties to family in Ontario County.

Sometime in the early days of the twentieth century the Ogden family returned to Allens Hill, where they quickly became a valued part of the community.  Ray sang in the choir at the Methodist Church and played ball with the Mountain Climbers; his sister Jessie married local boy Wales Duffy.  The two young men worked together felling trees and running a steam sawmill at the head of Myers Gull on the east side of Honeoye Lake until Ray moved to the Midwest.

While living in Nebraska Ray’s only child, Virginia, was born in 1911.  After a time the Ogden families – father and son – moved to Texas.  Ray worked as an insurance salesman.  It is not known when he died.

The lives of the other members of the 1910 Mountain Climbers Team will be featured in the April 20, 2018 issue of Owl Light News.