Miscellaneous, Cook St. John Celebrates 100 Years

Five Generations

Cook St. John Celebrates 100 years

Bainbridge Republican, May 17, 1873

 

There is living in the town of Walton, Delaware county, a man by the name of Cook St. John, who will be one hundred years old the first day of June next, and he is now in good health, with mind and memory unimpaired.  He is living with his oldest son, who is 75 years old.  His grandson is 51 years old, his great-grandson is 27 and her great-great grandson is 7 years old, and each one is the oldest son of each successive family, and all are living within easy call of each other in the same village.  The descendants of the centenarian are 103 living, and including his two wives, are 33 dead.  At the funeral of one of his sons, some six years since, there were 115 together as mourners,--relatives by blood or marriage.  Eighty years ago next month the subject of this sketch went from New Canaan, Conn., with a surveying party to New York, thence up the Hudson to Albany, thence up the Mohawk by batteau, through Wood creek, Oneida lake and Oswego river to Oswego and then to Canada.  He says there was one small log house where Utica is now a city, one house at Whitesboro, and three at Fort Stanwix, on the opposite side of the river from the fort.  Rome was then larger than Utica and Whitesboro, or equal.  This narrative I had from the lips of the patriarch but a few days since.  He also said that he had twice had the yellow fever and twice the typhus fever, and had once been drowned.  His mind and memory seem unimpaired, though sight and hearing have in a measure failed.  There is probably no other like case of five generations living where each is the oldest son.  He is older than the nation, and has voted at every Presidential election save one--and the four generations voted for Lincoln and Grant.  On the first of June there is to be a gathering to celebrate the hundredth birthday of the oldest man living in the town of Walton.  How much of this world's history and progress is recorded in the life time of this one man.