Living in historic times is no fun. The following article is something I originally wrote back in August of 2020 for the Catskill Daily Mail, and it opened with a naive intro in which I assured readers that precedence for current events could always be found in the past. That is most certainly true to some degree, but it is a rare thing indeed when one is forced to reference a bibliography’s worth of scattered events from the last two centuries of our history to explain the insidious absurdity of the past twelve months. I suppose we can at least take heart in knowing that neither Trump nor Biden has ever made a personal habit out of shooting people they disliked. It is also nice that none of our current congresspeople have yet beaten a fellow congressperson to within an inch of their life during a floor debate. Perhaps we can at least chalk those two episodes up as “lessons learned.”
Indeed, our forebears didn’t need to contend with conspiracy theorists sacking the Capitol, nor with pandemics run amok and fanned to flames by the perpetuation of lies, but we ought to give ourselves a break… we can’t always compare ourselves to great-great grandparents who were mystified for quite some time by fecal contamination of drinking water. If we want to merely assuage our fears about political divisiveness and ascendant demagoguery we need look no further than the Town of Ashland as our Balm in Gilead. Ashland is a product of a political climate as fraught as ours, though on the whole our forebears carried on political strife with more panache.
To speak on the Town of Ashland as support for this thesis might seem a bit of a stretch, but that is only because we’ve failed to consider the town’s name. By even our standards the situation that led to its selection in the spring of 1848 must have been tense. To understand how Ashland got its name we must first speak of Henry Clay; plantation owner, statesman, three-time presidential nominee, and most importantly a founder of the Whig Party. Ashland was the name of Clay’s plantation, seen by his political acolytes as the seat from which sprang all Whiggish theory and goodness in antebellum America. Andrew Jackson and his Democrats spoke of Ashland and Mr. Clay in less glowing terms.
Which brings us to our dear friend and late county resident Zadock Pratt, Jr. — the son of a Revolutionary War veteran and the man who singlehandedly transformed the sleepy hamlet of Schoharie Kill into an epicenter of the Tanning Industry in the United States. Pratt’s influence was formidable and his followers many. His industrious nature rewarded him with seats in the Federal Congress in 1836 and 1842, and he even sought the nomination for Governor of New York in 1848. Additionally, Prattsville, an incorporated township, was carved out of Windham in 1833 and humbly named for its premier resident and benefactor.
Pratt was a Democrat, aligned lock-step with the Democratic administrations of Jackson in the White House and Van Buren in the Governor’s mansion at Albany. A visitor to Prattsville at the height of Pratt’s power remarked on how Whigs setting foot in the hamlet in the mid-1840s were given the silent stare-down by residents and storekeepers on main street until they took the hint to move along. Prattsville residents wanted little to do with Clay and his Whigs.
Such was the political climate in the western part of this County at the height of the age of Jackson. Massive political rallies by the Whigs in Catskill were starkly contrasted at the western end of the County by continued electoral success of Zadock Pratt and his Democrats. The newspapers, rather than operating under the illusion that they were supposed to stay neutral in political discussion, quite literally made wagers of large sums of money in bets against rival editors. The Messenger, Catskill’s Whig newspaper, never missed an opportunity to make a jab at the Advocate, Prattsville’s Democratic publication.
Editorial from the Catskill Messenger concerning the formation of Ashland in 1848.
The creation of Ashland, named for Clay’s Kentucky home, was a blow to the political status quo in Greene County. Formed “from the Whig portion of Windham” as one editor put it, this new town quite possibly meant another opposition seat on the County Government. The Democrat, a newspaper in Catskill, morosely speculated that perhaps by sequestering all of the Whigs formerly of Windham in a new township that Windham may in the future simply become one more Democratic Seat. Regardless of the outcome, the advent of the formation of Ashland had to be seen as a low blow by Zadock Pratt’s friends in Prattsville. To think that Henry Clay, who had never lifted a finger for the betterment of Greene County, could be honored by the naming of a new township must have rankled those who knew the effort Pratt had expended in the creation of the town that bore his name.
And thus, over 170 years later, we are still saddled with the trappings of one small aspect of the great political contests of the Jacksonian era. While such stirrings of the past may seem to pale in comparison to the present, I humbly offer in conclusion that despite everything these last few years have thrown at us we have yet to hack apart any of our current fourteen townships in the sole name of political gain.
By Jonathan Palmer, Greene County Historian
Questions can be directed to Jon at archivist@gchistory.org