Last month’s column recounted reports in the Geneva Daily Times of March 14-15, 1900, about a 3-week-old boy found in a basket, abandoned in a snowbank in Canandaigua during the bitterest March on record. The compelling story, caused by her father’s refusal to grant Hattie permission to marry until events made it necessary, inevitably roused sympathetic curiosity about what happened to the young couple after Hattie claimed the abandoned child and married Frederick the same day.
After the eventful marriage in Canandaigua, Hattie, Frederick, and baby Nelson lived on the 127-acre farm in Fayette with Hattie’s father and mother. After leaving his job as a reporter in Newark, Frederick worked as a farm laborer for his father-in-law.
The inevitable undercurrents this arrangement must have caused probably came to a head a month after the marriage. On Monday, April 16, Francis Henry Wooden, Hattie’s father, was taken suddenly ill at the Varick railroad station. Four days later, he died of apoplexy at age 43 while eating breakfast with the family.
Two Geneva physicians declared Francis died “owing to a complication of diseases,” according to the Geneva Daily Times. Were recriminations heaped on Hattie’s head? Did her mother, Mary Louise, say bitterly through her tears, “If you hadn’t gone and gotten yourself pregnant, he’d still be alive today. The shock and shame killed him?”
If not, did Hattie accuse herself? Or, had the family been aware for some time of a disease that was wasting away Francis’ life? Is that why he did not want his daughter and only child to marry rather than fulfill the usual expectation that an unmarried daughter cared for her parents?
Francis’ death prompted immediate changes for the family. Two months later, the census was taken, revealing Hattie’s mother, age 47, living not on the family farm, but in a mortgaged home at 174 Huff St. in Fayette. She identified herself as both the head of the household and a farmer. Hattie and Frederick are listed as boarders, which seems a bit harsh. Hattie is listed as a domestic worker, Frederick as a farm laborer. Their child, Nelson, is living with them.
Curiously, in the same census, Hattie’s maternal grandfather, Newman Henry Noyes, age 79, is listed as the head of household and a fruit farmer on the same mortgaged property, which is categorized as a “farm,” unlike the designation of “home” by his daughter, Mary. He resides with his wife, Martha, and four boarders.
Neither Mary, Hattie, Frederick, nor Nelson, is recorded as living there. It must have been quite a day for the census taker.
Whatever the nature of these complicated arrangements at the Huff Street property, they did not last long. In 1901, Fred Rowe worked as a gardener and lived with his wife, child, and mother-in-law in a house at the corner of Jay and Pulteney streets in Geneva. Mary died there on Sept. 4 at the age of 44 and “had been in poor health for some time,” according to the Ontario County Chronicle. Perhaps his wife’s poor health, rather than his own, led Francis to oppose Hattie’s marriage because he assumed it was Hattie’s duty to attend to her mother.
After 18 fraught months, Hattie and Fredrick were free to follow their own desires and ambitions.
The 1910 census lists Frederick as a commercial traveler for a vending machine company, living in a mortgaged home in Geneva with Hattie and 10-year-old Nelson. They wanted more out of their lives, and in October, they emigrated about as far away from Geneva as they could get: to Vancouver, British Columbia, where Frederick found a job working for the major retailer, Hudson’s Bay Co.
In 1912, Hattie and Frederick had a second child, Helen Olive Isabelle Rowe. The only blot on the family escutcheon seems to have been when, on Aug. 5, 1916, The Province reported Nelson was “assessed … $2 for riding on the sidewalk” on one of “the two-wheeled terrors,” known as a bicycle.
In April 1920, Nelson married Rachel Marion Robitaille in Vancouver, British Columbia. Soon after, they had a child. Hattie and Frederick must have felt Nelson had truly cheated fate the night when the frail, 3-week-old might have died in a snowbank. But the Three Fates who determine Destiny seem to have kept their eyes on Nelson.
He died on Nov. 2, 1921. The obituary did not give the cause of death.
Despite their travails, Hattie and Frederick drew upon their memories of young love to assure the happiness of their daughter, Olive, even during the depths of the Depression. The 1930 census shows Frederick, now 50, and Hattie, 48, living in Seattle in a rented home. Frederick is listed as a self-employed — or, more accurately, unemployed — stationary engineer responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting industrial machinery. This suggests Frederick studied to be an engineer sometime in the intervening years.
Their daughter was living with them, employed as an office worker. At 18, she was the same age as Hattie when she became pregnant and married.
Their boarder was Maurice Stoneburg, a Canadian who seems to have been a family friend. He was 19, employed as an electrician. Two years later, Maurice and Olive received from Hattie and Frederick what they were denied on the cold March day when they were wed without ceremony in Canandaigua. They gave the young couple a beautiful wedding, held in the family home, one described in the Seattle Times as one of the prettiest of the season.
