Strolling Through History With Aunt Molly
As I research ancestral relative Leonora Kearney Barry, conversations with my 102-year old aunt help my notes come alive, and remind me that all of us have the power to shape the world we want.
I attended a wedding in Lake Winnipesaukee-area last weekend. It was a beautiful drive from our home in New Jersey up to Newburgh, NY, then across Connecticut, before cutting north around Worcester, MA. Tim and I make the trip fairly frequently as our son Alex lives in the Boston area. We avoid the god-awful congestion and inevitable stoppages that occur when traveling the more direct 95 corridor. Google maps insists our new route takes longer – but my nerves prefer peace versus the MadMax jockeying around traffic.
The trees hadn’t turned - that’s probably another month away. The view was endless miles of maples, eastern hemlocks, northern red oaks, and white ashes. My Dad’s mother, Nana, was a painter. She had a long table in her Buffalo studio covered with palettes, brushes, and tubes of oils. As I look at the trees, I can hear her clicking her teeth as she mixes colors to be just so – and see her tilting her head back to peer through her bifocals. Her trees came alive as she dabbed different shades with her brush. I wish I could paint to capture the vista.
We met up with Alex and his girlfriend, Kelsey, for an hour or so in an apple orchard, just outside of Boston. We picked a sack of dusty red cortlands before sitting down for a bite. It was a bit surreal to “bump” into them. It’s been six years since he graduated, and I am still not used to his being away.
It was nighttime when we pulled into Wolfeboro, a quaint New England town by Lake Winnipesauke that is listed as the country’s oldest resort town.1 New Hampshire’s largest lake is located in the foothills of the White Mountains. We got up early and headed out for breakfast. The September morning was crisp, but by 10am the sun was blazing. I tied my jacket around my waist. We only had a few hours before the wedding, so decided to walk the nearby (and long defunct) Cotton Valley Rail Trail. The brochure said it was a favorite for joggers, bikers, and families. But at one point this branch of rail introduced the community to prosperity as it met up with the line that linked Boston to Portland, Maine.
Tree lined, the path narrowed at times to only the width of a train track and pavement became gravel. Volunteers keep the rail clear of overgrown brush and trees. As evidence, large sawed off limbs from white ashes were strewn outside the rails. Flecks of purple lupines and yellow black-eyed Susans broke up the greenery surrounding soaring pines.
As we crossed a bridge, I saw the skeleton of an old mill just beneath an inactive waterfall. I stood on a curbstone to peer over and see that a dam cut off the water flow. There was a gap between building and land. Perhaps wide enough for a water wheel? The sign said that early in the 19th Century, the mill made tall masts for the British navy and later became a saw mill to make excelsior. Because of the many waterways and access to rail, the area was an industrial magnet for grist mills, saw mills, granite mines, and textile factories. Blanket factories had sprung up during the Civil War.2
It hit me that it was likely my great grandmother’s cousin, Leonora Kearney Barry, had ridden this very rail. As Tim and I walked the path that may have carried her, I found myself strolling through history and imagining her journey.
A widow with three small children, Leonora was forced to join the ranks of factory workers to survive. Disgusted by unsanitary and dangerous conditions, she became an activist with the Knights of Labor (KoL). In 1886, Leonora became the KoL’s National General Inspector. In her role, she traveled the country documenting the pitiful wages, harsh hours and conditions faced by men, women, and children. Her detailed reports helped convince elected officials to create protections for laborers.
I have been researching Leonora for the past six months, and on Labor Day wrote a piece about her. Her family history is hard to assemble because of the numerous ways the name Kearney/Carney/Kearny is spelled in genealogical databases.
Information about her life’s work is also hard to pull together. She moved to the United States from Cork, Ireland, at age 3. She was known by her given and married names: Kearney, Barry, and Lake. When I search through 19th and 20th century periodicals I use combinations of surnames with first and middle initials. I had a hunch that after marrying her second husband Obadiah R. Lake I might find articles on Mrs. O.R. Lake. And I did! Even though she is heralded by labor organizers and economists for her extensive reports detailing workplace conditions, so little is written about the woman. No wonder. She has been erased by social constructs.
To understand her better, I try to envision her.
Had Leonora walked this very path? When she smelled the pines did it make her homesick for Pierrepont, New York, where her toddler son lived with her sister-in-law? One of the rail’s “stations” was just a raised platform with a roof. Had she stood there - in her long dress, linen duster, hooded cloak, kid boots, and gloves - waiting for the train to take her to the next factory?
What must her commute have been like – a single woman riding the rails, walking along this narrow path, from factory to factory, to document abuses. Suitcases weren’t available for another decade, did she jam extra skirts, blouses, face cloth and toiletries into a carpet bag for what might be weeks of travel at a time — or did she have a trunk?3
For all the beauty I was enjoying, her trek must have been cumbersome, arduous, and dirty. Did she have a moment to appreciate the clarity of the pristine pond? Or, was she deep in thought about the small boys she saw, not much older than her own sons, working in the mill – at starvation-level wages perilously close to unforgiving blades? Did the fishermen on the banks harass her as this 30-something widow passed them?
Whenever I think of Leonora, I reach out to my mother’s sister, Aunt Molly, who was born and raised just a town over from Pierrepont. It’s nonsensical, really. While the two women spent their childhood in Northern New York, Leonora’s final years were in the midwest. She died at age 81 in 1923 when Molly was a baby.
Despite this, for me, Molly is a stepping stone to the past. Born in 1922, she will be 102 at the end of September.4 She is a dwindling voice of a history that is more common to Leonora’s than what I can conjure. Like Leonora, she was a teacher (helping her parents support her younger siblings) until she married. It wasn’t until 1964 that laws forbidding married women from having teaching contracts were repealed. Molly, too, was widowed young, although her five children were college age. And like Leonora she went through the trauma of burying a child.
She answered the phone with a “Are you doing more research?”
I admitted yes.
“Then I want to be careful about what I say.”
Molly is Mom’s eldest sister. There was a decade and four more girls in between. All the sisters and two brothers outlived Mom, who died at age 53.
While Molly and Mom shared the same heritage — they seem discrete to me. Time stopped for Mom in 1986, when I was in my 20s. I never had a chance to stroll through history with her as I was too focused on forging my present.
That loss of history through Mom has created a gnawing appetite to capture it from Molly. It’s such a treat to be able to pester my aunt about life as a little girl — growing up in the same locale as Leonora. Did their family have a car? did they have a horse and buggy? Families had cars in the 1920s — but did they in rural Northern New York?
“Well, we had a car,” she tells me. “Father and mother had a brand new Essex. My grandfather used to visit us in a horse and 2-person buggy, though. We loved playing on it – although we were warned never to touch the whip.”
That made sense. The white clapboard house that Molly and Mom grew up in was on a street corner. There was a single car garage that sat along the stream that ran along the property. Nothing large enough to stable a horse. Mom never spoke about her grandfather’s horse and buggy. I check the dates. Her grandfather died when Mom was 2.
Mom was the youngest of six girls - but the older sister of two boys. There are few pictures but I have one favorite. Mom, probably age 5, sitting on a bench with her two brothers, ages 4 and 2. She nestles her brother Joe close to her - while he in turn rests his hand on the baby, Paul. There is something about the intensity of her eyes that draws me in.
Molly completed college and returned back home to teach. She walked her youngest siblings to the school she taught at. I can recall Mom saying Molly was a bit bossy. It makes me laugh. My two younger siblings have said that about me more than once. Molly was the tiniest of them all - well, maybe Aunt Anne was shorter. Neither of them cracked 5 feet. What they lacked in size, they made up for in tenacity and grit.
Molly resides in Potsdam, NY, not far from SUNY Potsdam and Clarkson University - where one of her great grandchildren now attends. Widowed for more than 50 years, she resides in the same clapboard house that she and her late husband Frank lived in. Despite her small-town living, she is very worldly. She went back teaching business full-time at SUNY Canton in the 1960s and has traveled to China and Europe. Her voice is still strong, although her eyesight has faded.
I am judicious with my questions, as she tires easily. I ask: of all the inventions in your life time - which one stands out the most?
She thinks for a moment before declaring:
“The computer. The telephone was people to people. With television, people watch people. But the computer is about people interacting with machines.”
I’m not certain there is a judgement in her statement - but knowing Aunt Molly, it’s likely.
Without the computer I wouldn’t be able to further my research. Leonora courageously traveled unpaved paths to document labor abuses, laying the groundwork for the rights we benefit from today. Her fight to protect and elevate the dignity of the laborer - continues to resonate, as we fight for fair wages, safe working conditions, and the protection of children. Her story is a reminder that progress is never complete.
Yet, for all of the power of the computer, it is my human connection with Molly that fills the gaps and breathes life into history. Technology helps me uncover Leonora’s story, but it is through Molly’s strong voice, her memories, and our conversations that I feel connected to the women who came before me.
In those moments, history feels alive.
That connection fuels my spirit to capture not only history, but to preserve the voices of the women who shaped it — and who continue to shape all of us. Like Leonora, we are all part of a greater narrative – one where the actions of a single individual can span generations. Any of us has the power to shape the world we want – one step, one story, one action at a time.
Recollections “Victorian traveling dress: guidelines for a proper lady',” Janice Formichella, March 2022
Mary Ellen (Molly) Morgan was born September 29, 1922. Happy Birthday, Aunt Molly — the chocolates are on the way!!!
It's been a busy week and only this morning did I give myself permission to read for pleasure. And what a pleasure indeed! I thorougly enjoyed this essay about Leonora, Molly, and you. I felt history come to life as you walked the train tracks. And describing a sweet Cortland apple makes my mouth water.