Buffalo Beachers

Our newest book, “Buffalo Beachers,” is now available for sale at Amazon.com. You can reach the site through our web site    http://www.jxmartin.com   We hope you enjoy the tale.

 

Joe & Mary Martin

 

Prologue to “Buffalo Beachers”

 

 

A Bunch of Squatters

 

 

During the shipping season at the Erie Basin Marina on Buffalo’s waterfront, you can often watch the massive bulk of a lake freighter glide by the nautical eminence of The USS Sullivan’s, The USS Little Rock and The USS Croaker. The warships and submarine, moored at the Naval and Servicemen’s Park, are floating memorials and naval monuments to the bravery of another age. The scenic walkway here runs along the Buffalo River and looks across to the 19th century eminence of the China Lighthouse at the U.S. Coast Guard Base. Looking out at the lake from here, on a windy day, you can feel and see the undulating Lake Erie rollers as they swell and crash over the cap rocks of the offshore breakwall, in a spume of frothy spray. The mesmerizing rhythm helps the mind drift back to a time before there was a City of Buffalo.

 

The Seneca, Iroquois and French traders camped here before it was the far frontier of a new America. A sole trader, named ‘Indian Joe,’ was the first recorded permanent resident of the area in the 1790’s. Later, the Erie Canal helped funnel the new country’s westward expansion through Buffalo, a wild and bawdy frontier town. The brothels on Canal Street were without number then. In the saloons, unscrupulous barkeeps were apt to slip the unwary patron a ‘mickey finn’ in his beer. The unfortunate and unconscious pilgrim would then be fleeced of his poke and dropped into the Buffalo River, through a trap door in the back room. It was a rough and ready existence where the ruthless and the cunning prospered. Great tall-masted sailing ships, with spider-webbed rigging and fluttering sheets of billowing canvas, plied the harbor and added more cargo and sailors to the already bustling tumult of the canal district.

 

The crumbling grain elevators on and around Kelly Island, are towering cylindrical reminders of a time in the 19th century, when Buffalo was second only to Chicago for grain storage, beef production and rail yards. The grain merchants hired the immigrant Irish in droves for the dusty and dangerous job of scooping and unloading the grain. The new Americans, with their lilting brogues and hickory backhoes, shoveled the mountains of grain from the waiting freighters.

 

       The eclectic architecture all around the area is the pride of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Richardson, Stanford White and other visionaries who were building a new America. The Delaware Avenue mansions stood as great gilded retreats of the privileged, symbols of Buffalo’s new-found commercial wealth.

 

       The Pan American exhibition of 1901 was a wonder of the modern world. President McKinley was shot here and later died. Teddy Roosevelt was inaugurated shortly afterwards in the Wilcox Mansion. Jack London spent time in our county jail and Mark Twain was a newspaper editor here in the 1840’s. U.S. Presidents Grover Cleveland and Millard Fillmore, hailed from Buffalo at a time when the city was a commercial and industrial colossus.

 

The great open heart of Canada lies a few yards across the Niagara River. From the headland of the upper terrace, the mind’s ear can still hear the ancient echo of booming cannons from Forts Niagara, George and Erie. The thundering cannons still ring in our collective consciousness. The remembered and acrid smell of burning timber reminds us of the time during the War of 1812 when the British and their Indian allies burnt the new village of Buffalo to the ground. We have seen and weathered much in this town.

 

Buffalo is a series of villages, linked loosely together in a confederation, that gives the city color and life. Buffalo has the vibrancy of New York City and the laid-back charm of the Midwest. Chicken wings, beef on weck, Bocce’s pizza and any kind of beer attract the faithful in great shuddering throngs. Our baseball and football stadia reflect the emergence of the rowdy working class to the pursuit of leisure. The games have the clash and ring of the Roman Arena, only in Buffalo we are more serious about the contests.

 

The scattering of saloons in the ethnic neighborhoods, is a smoky archipelago of warmth and companionship, a place where bankers and bums can rub elbows in a confraternity of the befuddled. Buffalo is a great ethnic swirl of color and diversity. But, beneath the patina of the Theater District, art galleries and museums however, beats the remembered heart of a sprawling frontier town, lusty with life. In that respect, little has changed in Buffalo.

 

We are children of the weather. The snow and the wind often roar across the waterfront and then just as suddenly, are gone. It is like sharing sleeping quarters with a ten-thousand pound elephant. You soon grow sensitive to its needs to toss and turn. Coping with the weather in Buffalo shapes and defines the mental toughness of our character. We are a city of immigrants that struggled much to get here and liked what we found.

 

For the last few generations, on the outer fringes of Buffalo’s waterfront, sat an old industrial area that had lain waste for generations. Nothing much grew there but weeds. A small boat harbor is the only bright spot that drew people to the area.

 

In the first decade of the 21st century this all started to change. Under the leadership of a young South Buffalo Congressman, named Brian Higgins, the area started to blossom. Many layers of government contributed over a span of years to the redevelopment, but the ‘go to’ guy became Brian Higgins.

 

The Tift Nature Preserve had evolved over the last few decades. It is an area where garbage had been buried and fluorescent puddles of noxious chemicals once sparkled in the noonday sun. It is now a wonderful nature preserve for all to see and enjoy many types of wildlife.

 

In addition, the once-worn roadways are now flower-lined boulevards accompanied by bike trails that link the downtown area to the outer harbor. Gallagher Beach, the Bouquard’s small boat basin, the NFTA boat harbor, Wilkeson Park, The Times Beach Nature Preserve and the remains of the old Coast Guard base, with its iconic 1837 China Lighthouse, all line the waterfront. The concert venue here draws tens of thousands to it, employing aging but big names bands like “Guns and Roses.” The area had literally risen, like an urban phoenix, from the ashes of the old. We were both stunned and pleasantly pleased to enjoy the sights and sounds of Buffalo’s place on the sea. From the quiet headland of the new Wilkeson Park, you can watch the sailboats cruising inside and outside the old, outer seawall.

 

One day, I walked into the quiet precincts of the “Times Beach Nature Preserve.” It is a bucolic and restful place with two wooden blinds to observe the flocks of geese and birds that settle in the reeds or make their nests here. On the deck of one viewing area there is a series of metal plaques that spell out the history of the area for all newly arrived visitors. I was enjoying the verbiage until I came upon the few sentences that drew blood to my neck and face. It said that in 1917, the City of Buffalo had evicted a ‘bunch of squatters’ from the site for industrial development.

 

‘A Bunch of Squatters?’ I thought to myself. Was this anonymous functionary referring to ‘The Beachers,’ this grand origin of Buffalo’s Clan Na Gael? It must have been an inadvertent slur. The writer had probably been raised in a middle-class home with clean sheets, hot and cold running water, central heating, free education and three meals a day. All wonderful benefits of the grand Republic of America that we enjoy today.

 

But, it wasn’t always that way. Buffalo Mayor Samuel Wilkeson had coordinated the erection of the earth and mortar inner breakwall, just off the mouth of Buffalo Creek, to form the Buffalo harbor area. Later, a more solid outer breakwall had solidified the harbor entrance. The ten-ton, limestone cap rock barriers, on the outer barrier, kept the November storms and winter ice from crushing the fragile wooden ships in the harbor area. It was the beginnings of a prosperous modern Buffalo.

 

Just before the inner breakwall’s construction, the first wave of Buffalo’s Irish immigrants had arrived, digging the Erie Canal to its completion. They now populated the city’s west side and near south side. But, it was the next wave that were to settle near the original inner breakwall, the area where I now stood, so peacefully gazing upon the avian life along the shore.

 

During the 1840’s, the famine Irish hit these shores like a beggared tsunami. They left a million of their own behind them who had fallen in the fields, victims of starvation and disease. Many had green stains around their mouths from eating grass, the last signs of a beggar’s attempts to stay alive. These famine Irish flocked across the ocean in rickety coffin ships, which lay waste large numbers of them from starvation, scurvy and rickets. And yet, still they came on. They crowded atop the narrow canal boats, of the newly dug Erie Canal, in great hordes, yearning to settle in this place on the eastern end of Lake Erie. It is here in Buffalo, where they hoped to make a new life for themselves, a place where they could work and practice their religion and raise their families without persecution. It wasn’t streets of gold they were looking for, but a place to earn their daily bread and live their lives in peace.

 

Many arrived here with the shirts on their backs, their shoes and pants held together with bits of rope or twine. They were dirty and poor and hungry. They had no one and nothing to sustain them. The good offices of the kindly Sisters of Mercy and the sainted Bishop John Timon helped ameliorate their misery. They had not even the wherewithal to settle in the slums and tenements, for those abodes cost money, which they did not have. In desperation many chose bits of barren land, plots of stones, sand and scrub grass in the lee of Buffalo’s new earth and mortar inner seawall, as a place to lay their heads until something better could be arranged. They gathered bits of wood and stone and grass to create miserable shanties behind the earth and masonry seawall, to keep the elements from themselves. One can only imagine laying there, freezing, struggling to survive, during the harsh months of Buffalo’s winter. But they did ‘squat’ there and they survived.

 

The first waves of cholera during the 1830’s and then in the 1850’s mowed the immigrants down like newly grown summer wheat in a farmer’s field. The Seiche of 1844 claimed many of the original settlers with a brief and deadly wall of water. And yet, they still they survived and persevered. They wanted to be part of the grand new Republic of America. My own great, great grandfather who lived there on the beach, earned his citizenship in 1857, wanting to be part of the new republic. Many others earned their citizenship with the barrel of a gun, in the Irish American regiments, during the American Civil War. It was the sweat of the Irish that helped build the rising cities of Eastern America.

 

Slowly, these ragged peasants made their way in a new America. Through the auspices of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School, and other generous Catholic institutions, the immigrants learned to read and write and enter the work force. The miasma of politics also proved to be an avenue for these many new voters to climb out of their misery.

 

The Erie Canal, the railroads and Lake Erie freightage poured industry and commerce into the area during the 1800’s.The new immigrants worked on the ships and new grain elevators as ‘scoopers,’ unloaders of grain from the many boats from the vast interior of America. My own grandfather, Emmanuel, was one of them. The Union Steel Company, the railroads and many local industries enabled the newly arrived immigrants to build their stake in America.

 

Along Times Beach and the land south of it,  the mean huts had been replaced with grand shacks that the residents were proud of. By today’s standards they would not be much, but then they were symbols of ownership and property, a concept foreign to most of them. Some even prospered enough to add a bit of paint to the trim of their house. The Irish, ever mindful of those trying to act above their station, sardonically referred to these huts with paint on them as ‘Mansions.’

 

The Celtic American Rowing Club, the Lighthouse Rowing club, the communal bath house, Myer’s Fish House, M. Burn’s Junk Shop and Donovan’s Tavern all served as  central community centers for the settled in Irish. To be sure, there were rascals and crooks among them, including the crew of the fabled ‘Annie.’ But most of the Beachers were now becoming immersed in their new society, paying taxes and earning a living.

 

The fourth generation of these immigrants was being born during the period just before the First World War. The City of Buffalo, in its wisdom, decided that they needed this land along Times Beach for transportation and industrial improvements. They allowed railroad crews to send in gangs of workers to tear down the grand shacks of the 4^th generation Irish settlers and evict them from their homes. It was a sad commentary on the fate of an American Irish community that had no real political influence. That would change in the decades to come.

 

The City of Buffalo, perhaps fearing suits of adverse possession, awarded each of the home owners up to a level of $2,000, for displacing them from the land. The city records indicate that my great great grandmother Catherine Tevington, her son Thomas and his daughter and my grandmother, Mary (Tevington) Martin were awarded this amount for being displaced from their homes. They settled in on Louisiana St. and other avenues of the First Ward, alongside of Irish immigrants who had come before them.

 

The Beachers, as they were then called, didn’t like it, but they moved into houses along Louisiana and Fulton Streets, to join the other members of Buffalo’s Clan Na Gael, who already settled there. It is from this point on that the Beachers and their colorful history slipped into the mists of fading memories of the ‘old ones’ among us. They were mentioned not often, usually after a few beers at a tavern or family picnic. But it is here on Times Beach that many of Buffalo’s Clan Na Gael got our start in America. Four lines of my own family, the Carneys, Martins, Greens and the Tevingtons hail from these humble beginnings.

 

It is with fierce pride that I remember and commemorate these early immigrant settlers who risked everything to come to these far shores of Lake Erie and found our families in America. Thus, it is with mild umbrage that I reacted to the term ‘Bunch of Squatters’ on the plaque at Times Beach Nature Preserve. A ‘Bunch of Squatters’ indeed!