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KIANTONE: Chautauqua County's Mystical Valley invites the reader into a vibrant 19th Century community that impacted Western New York, Indiana, New Orleans, Washington, DC, and Europe. This readable book, part local history and part personal narrative, is extensively researched and often tickles the funny bone as well. Each chapter is designed to function like a quilt block. Thus, the Seneca Indians, early settlers, Congregationalists, Unitarians, abolitionists, Spiritualists, Civil War soldiers, and the stories of other Kiantone residents are examined in detail. Pieced together, these historical blocks become a literary signature quilt offering a panoramic record of Kiantone's history and peoples. Those familiar with Chautauqua County's other Spiritualist center, Lily Dale, founded in 1879, will enjoy the exploration of Kiantone's Spiritualist community, Harmonia, founded in 1853. The book sheds new light on Harmonia's connections with Patriot, Indiana and New Orleans, Louisiana. The author also reveals previously undocumented information about the saga of this unique communitarian group that formed around issues such as the Abolition Movement, Women's Suffrage, and the Free Love Movement. Mystical questions, such as how unique geography affects the human soul, are explored in the context of this very special and seemingly sacred place. Sprinkled throughout the book are suggestions for further genealogy studies and other history research projects that will intrigue and beckon middle and high school teachers, college professors, and both professional and amateur historians. It also contains a detailed bibliography that will prove helpful to both readers and researchers. KIANTONE: Chautauqua's Mystical Valley \s designed to encourage more study and more enjoyment of this rich historical saga.

City founder James Prendergast and other industrious pioneers were drawn to the outlet of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York State because of its abundant waterpower and virgin forests. The skills of these settlers, coupled with the area's natural resources, led to the emergence of industrial Jamestown, known worldwide for its diverse manufacture of quality products, including furniture, metal, and textiles. The authors have chosen more than two hundred vintage images based on historic markers for Jamestown. Thorough research and oral histories reveal contributions made by trailblazing immigrants, philanthropic families, diverse ethnic groups, earnest businessmen, and three hometown notables who achieved global fame: Lucille Ball, Roger Tory Peterson, and Robert H. Jackson.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

The definitive account of the lynching of twenty-three-year-old Matthew Williams in Maryland, the subsequent investigation, and the legacy of "modern-day" lynchings. On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore, author Charles L. Chavis Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland. Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams's death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams's death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie's Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland. Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams's death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of "modern-day lynchings."