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African-American Roycrofters

African-American Roycrofters

 

Roycroft docents giving tours often get questioned as to whether there were any African-American Roycrofters on Campus. We have anecdotal evidence of one employee and his family in the book, “Talk Less, Listen More, Visiting with Aurora’s Elders,” by the Young Yorkers Club of Eggert Elementary. On page 100, Edward Godfrey recalls the Lee family. Mr. Robert E. Lee “was the chef at the Roycroft Inn and they were one of the first black families to live in East Aurora. They were accepted very well and they were friendly with the village people. Mr. Lee was a descendant from a slave who was owned by Robert E. Lee who had lived in Arlington, in Virginia.” Mrs. Lee was employed as a housekeeper at the Knox Estate. Another former Roycrofter, Alice Logel, also recalls “the first colored family in East Aurora,” (page 135) but she remembers him as being a butler and waiting tables for about 15-20 years. As we all know, recollections can be conflicting.  

 

Later in the same book (pp. 120-121), Mr. Charles W. Lee, Robert’s son, is interviewed and gives his recollections of life in East Aurora. “It was a nice, clean, little town. Being a member of the black race, I really at that time, did not know what color you were here in East Aurora, because, to be redundant, it was a close town. Everybody was like family, if you did something wrong, no one had any hesitation at all in spanking you right there, and then telling your parents about it. And this, of course, went both ways, if my parents, if someone did something there, they’d do the same thing.” Charles did recall a burning cross up Main Street when he was a child, but at the time, he did not know what it meant, only finding out years later. He remembered his father keeping the family in the house and his sister being nervous. At the time of Mr. Charles Lee’s interview, July 27, 1980, he was a cinematographer at WIVB, Channel 4.

 

 

- Sue

 

Monday Mottos

Happiness is a habit - cultivate it.

-   Elbert Hubbard

 

From One Hundred & One Epigrams, According to Elbert Hubbard, published by Roycroft Campus Press, East Aurora, NY. For sale at the Roycroft Copper Shop.

End of WWI at the Roycroft

As all Roycrofters - then and now - know, Elbert & Alice Hubbard died during the sinking of the Luisitania in the spring after WWI began. Elbert was making the journey to Europe to see the political situation firsthand and then write about it. He also suggested he might attempt to speak to the Kaiser and broker a peaceful end to the conflict.

 

But with their leaders’ deaths by German torpedoes, members of the Roycroft community had a very personal connection to this war and the end of it was particularly meaningful for them. No doubt many Roycroft employees also had family members who had fallen on the battlefields of Europe. Former Roycrofter, Mary Lefler Bailey*, remembers she was washing dishes at the Inn “when the old bell on the corner of the Print Shop rang out with the news of peace and the whole town was in an uproar and everyone there who had a job went in to the parade on Main Street.” It is easy to imagine the celebration even when standing on Campus today. 

 

It has been quite awhile since America was not in a conflict, so it is not a stretch to empathize with the original Roycrofters. This Memorial Day celebrate our soldiers, both living and fallen.    

 

• Sue

 

*Quote from Mary Lefler Bailey memories of the Roycroft; p 39, “Talk Less, Listen More” by the Young Yorkers Club of Eggert Elementary, 2003.

 

Monday Mottos

God must dearly love the Fools, otherwise He would never have made so many of us.

-   Elbert Hubbard

 

From One Hundred & One Epigrams, According to Elbert Hubbard, published by Roycroft Campus Press, East Aurora, NY. For sale at the Roycroft Copper Shop.

Horse Racing

This coming Saturday will bring the Preakness, the second leg of the Triple Crown thoroughbred races, so I thought this would be the perfect time to indulge in a wee bit of East Aurora’s “horsey history,” a factor that brought Elbert Hubbard to the town in 1884.  There were two rival standard bred horse farms in East Aurora in the late 1800s. Excerpts below on the two farms are from “Recollections of Men and Horse” by Hamilton Busbey, a well-respected horse racing writer.

 

“Cicero J. Hamlin fell in love with the trotting horse in early in life, and, when money matters became easy with him, he bought a small farm at East Aurora and started in a modest way to breed trotters. . . . Mr. Hamlin named his breeding establishment at East Aurora Village Farm, and he enlarged it by the purchase of such stallions as Hamilin’s Almont Jr., Mambrino King, Chimes, and Rex Americus. 

“The transfer of Mambrino King from Kentucky to Village Farm helped amazingly Mr. Hamlin’s breeding industry. The envious sneered at King as a “dude stallion”, but the handsome chestnut silenced opposition by winning championship honors in the show ring, and by begetting sons and daughters that developed gameness and a high rate of speed in Grand Circuit battles.

“For a number of years the rival of Village Farm in Erie County, New York, was Jewett Stock Farm at East Aurora. The Hamlin buildings were modest when compared with the elaborate buildings of Jewett. The latter cost a great deal of money and presented an imposing appearance. There are 400 acres in the place, and the breeding foundations were laid in 1878. The Casenovia Creek flows along the eastern border of the farm. A pet driving mare, cream-colored, that the father of Henry C. Jewett drove on the road, was the spark from which grew the flame. A costly improvement on the farm was a covered mile track, which allowed training operations to go on without regard to the state of the weather.“

Today, horse racing is frowned on by many as an abusive sport for the animals. In Hamlin’s, Jewett’s and Hubbard’s day, standard bred/trotter racing was a way to showcase your breeding stock for sales purposes. Since everyone had a horse as their mode of transportation, everyone had at least a basic familiarity with the animal, unlike today. Horse races were huge social affairs with spectators traveling great distances and making the event an entire day affair. The situation is very different today, largely due to our automotive form of transportation. Now weekly NASCAR races attract huge crowds for the day, not horse tracks. 

- Sue

 

Monday Mottos

Genius consists in snatching success from the jaws of defeat.

-   Elbert Hubbard

 

From One Hundred & One Epigrams, According to Elbert Hubbard, published by Roycroft Campus Press, East Aurora, NY. For sale at the Roycroft Copper Shop.

The Fra on TV

I must confess, I was channel surfing last week and came upon an early 1960s TV show, “Hazel.” I had never seen it when I was a kid, but for whatever reason, I stayed tuned in for the half hour comedy. Hazel was a maid in an upper middle class household and in this episode, she urgently needed to deliver a message to someone for her boss. As she was getting ready to leave, she blurted out, “I could be a message to Garcia!” 

 

Well, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. I could hardly believe I heard what I heard. I am guessing, but perhaps the movie, “A Message to Garcia” - a 1936 film with Barbara Stanwyck as a Cuban rebel and Lt. Rowan’s love interest (talk about artistic license!) - must have been shown on TV at the time, so that the "message" would have been more widely known to the viewing audience. But the Hazel episode was from Jan. 30, 1964, so the more likely scenario may simply have been a writer tossing in an obscure literary repference. 

 

There’s more. A Roycroft fan, volunteer, friend and periodic contributor to my blogging material told me of her “tele-Fra” encounter: last year she was watching the contemporary show, “Criminal Minds.” The writers of that show use quotations that suit the plotline, and she - similarly surprised as I was with Hazel - saw an Elbert Hubbard quote appear on the screen for an episode. Unfortunately, shocked as she was, she didn’t catch which quote they had used. 

 

Beware, you just never know where the Fra will pop up next. . .

 

- Sue

 

Monday Mottos

Friends and credit pursue the man who does not need them.

-   Elbert Hubbard

 

From One Hundred & One Epigrams, According to Elbert Hubbard, published by Roycroft Campus Press, East Aurora, NY. For sale at the Roycroft Copper Shop.

Dard Hunter Comes and Goes from the Roycroft

As with any enterprise, Roycroft workers came and went. Some arrived young, met their mate, married and left. Others simply moved on to other careers in other locales. Some left amicably, others with a chip on their shoulder. Dard Hunter wrote of his feelings both coming into and departing the Roycroft, as revealed in the two quotes below from the book Dard Hunter: the graphic works, by Lawrence Kreisman, which is for sale at the Roycroft Copper Shop.

 

In the late summer of 1904, after his arrival at the Roycroft, Dard wrote the following for his hometown newspaper in Ohio, the Chillicothe News-Advertiser:

(In the Print Shop) “There are statuary, paintings and flowers in every room and pianos on every floor. The workers stop awhile now and then  and play on the pianos or dance in the ball room. It’s more like a palace than a factory. I should not say factory. It is not a factory. It is a place where artists work - where minds produce. The only machine in this artisan’s palace is the hand of the artist driven by the artist’s brain.”

 

He was obviously smitten by this “settlement of peculiar thinking people who make useful and beautiful things,” as he called it. But seven years later, having matured, married, lived and worked in Europe and England, his view of the Roycroft had changed. After his return to America he wrote, “My mind, however, does not run East Aurora way as I believe I have fully recovered from the disease. Poetically speaking, I have been vaccinated by the virus of something better, something nearer the ideal. My time is spent, I believe, as my mind seldom reaches back to that beautiful little village with its surface of good cheer and its gizzard of strife, jealousy and hate,“ Kreisman quotes from The Life Work of Dard Hunter, vol. 1, Dard Hunter II.

 

Whether there was some event or disagreement that changed his view of the Roycroft or he had simply outgrown working for an entrepreneur and was ready to become his own master, I have yet to discover. However I do find it rather amusing that he wrote this in such a Roycroftie style. “...I have fully recovered from the disease...I have been vaccinated by the virus of something better...” is something Elbert could have written. Regardless of the reasons for his departure, I find Dard Hunter’s artistic contributions to be equal to Elbert’s literary ones at the Roycroft. We are all the richer for Dard’s time spent in this beautiful little village.   

 

- Sue

 

Monday Mottos

Fences are only for those who cannot fly.

-   Elbert Hubbard

 

From One Hundred & One Epigrams, According to Elbert Hubbard, published by Roycroft Campus Press, East Aurora, NY. For sale at the Roycroft Copper Shop.