Eccentric Lucy Lobdell

Eccentric Lucy Lobdell

Morning Sun, Norwich, NY, March 24, 1899

Confined in the Delaware county poorhouse at Delhi, N.Y., is one of the strangest and most eccentric characters that ever existed.  Miss Lucy Lobdell, the daughter of James Lobdell, an industrious farmer of Schoharie county, was born in that place about twenty years before the war, where she received a good education and became an accomplished musician. When the girl was about seventeen years of age, her father purchased a large section of woodland at Rock Valley, N.Y., to which place he subsequently removed his family and constructed a saw mill.

 

Soon after their removal Lucy secured a position as school teacher in the village of Goulds, which position she retained until her marriage to John Slater, in 1858 who was killed in the civil war.  The shock of Mr. Slater's death caused his wife's partial aberration of the mind, and from this time she was possessed with masculine instincts.  About two years afterward her father became a hopeless invalid from a severe stroke of paralysis, and was therefore unable to conduct his large lumbering industry.

 

Nothing loth, Mrs. Slater donned men's apparel and continued her father's lumber business, milling the large trees on the mountain back of the mill, transforming them into logs, accurately guiding them down the runways of the mountains to the mill pond below and through the race that led to the mill where her great mechanical eye enabled her to saw the logs into required dimensions without the use of a gauge.  So adept and skillful did she become in her occupation that she was able to take the place of Sylvester Near, an employee who was killed in the runway a few months later.

 

Some time after, Mrs. Slater became seized with a roving disposition, purchased a gun, left her home and lived in a cave near Basket Brook.  She soon became a successful and renowned huntress, acquiring the "dead shot" aim, and captured much game.  Her cave was always lined with the skins of animals she had slain. So masculine did her nature become that she, still wearing male clothing, married a woman. They lived together for a number of years in the cave as man and wife, when the woman's parents came and took her to Wayne county, Pa., but the woman at the instigation of the female huntress soon returned to her home in the cave, where she afterwards died.

 

Mrs. Slater was sensible enough, however, to apply to the government for a pension, writing her communication on birch bark, with the juice of poke berries for ink and using a quill pen.  Before it was granted, however, she became still more demented, and was removed to the Delaware county poorhouse.  Since her removal to that institution, her pension, already amounting to $2000 was granted but the authorities of the poorhouse never deemed it advisable to acquaint her of her good fortune and this strange character is now spending her declining years in the poorhouse.

 

The ruins of the saw mill still exist and the cave attracts many curious visitors.  Binghamton Herald

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Another version of the life of Lucy Ann Lobdell is provided in the following.

 

A Crack Shot

The Female Hunter of Long Eddy

The Kingston Daily Freeman, August 2, 1881

 

Mention has frequently been made in the metropolitan papers of Lucy Ann Lobdell, better known, perhaps as the "Female Hunter of Long Eddy,": and after much search I am enabled to give the first accurate account of the life of this remarkable woman ever published.  On the 23d of October, 1855, Lucy Ann Lobdell, the pretty daughter of an old Delaware county lumberman, living at long Eddy, N.Y., was married to George W. Slater, a raftsman who was then well-to-do.  Lucy was at this time only seventeen years old.  Although, she was alight in figure, pretty as a picture, and a belle in that section, yet her tastes were strongly masculine.  She could handle a gun, shoot a bear, or knife a "buck" as well as any man in the county of Wayne, and was known far and wide as one of the best shots in the Delaware Valley.

 

After about a year of happy married life Slater deserted his wife, then the mother of a babe only a few weeks old, and as her parents were very poor and objected to her becoming a burden upon them in their poverty, she donned male clothing and determined to earn money by hunting and trapping.  She left her little child with her mother, and for many months made her home in the mountains of Delaware, Ulster and Sullivan counties, New York, and in Pike, Wayne and Monroe counties, Pennsylvania.  Occasionally she paid flying visits to her mother and left enough money to clothe her baby and pay for its board.  For eight years the young woman made her home in the forest, only visiting the country towns to sell her wares and purchase ammunition.  She roamed from the Hudson river to the Susquehanna, and was familiar with every inch of ground in Northern Pennsylvania.  Her habitations were about a dozen in number, principally in caves which she had fitted up with cooking utensils and rough pallets.  Her wild life was one of constant adventure and peril and privation and finally, broken down in health, she determined to return to civilization.  Her accumulated savings were sufficient to maintain her and the little child, then in its ninth year, in comfort.  On her return to Long Eddy, Mrs. Slater found that her child had been placed in the county Poor house at Delhi, New York. This affected her mind, and after a brief time she became as "crazy as a loon."  She resumed female clothing, however, and roamed about the country, living on the charity of those whom she knew and would help her. At times she was perfectly rational and related many thrilling narratives of miraculous escapes form death by being eaten alive by bears, gored to death by infuriated deer, or killed by catamounts and panthers. She also suffered untold agonies from forest fires, cold weather, and poisoning.  She was very intelligent, and had had in her youth a good common school education. She wrote an interesting account of her life, detailing the troubles which led her to abandon female attire and become a hunter. The book was spicy and well written but the edition was small, and copies of the work readily bring $10 each.

 

Finally Mrs. Slater, or "Lucy Lobdell," as she was then called, was taken by the town authorities and put in the same poorhouse where her child had been for eight years.  Not long afterward the child was taken from the poorhouse by David Fortnam, of Tyler, Wayne county, Pa., where she found a comfortable home with his family.

 

In 1868, Mary Perry, aged twenty-five years, was brought to the poorhouse where Lucy Lobdell was confined.  Mary Perry had four months before married a brakeman on the Erie Railroad and had lived in Jersey City, where, after three months' married life, her husband deserted her and ran away with a servant girl.  Hearing that her husband was in Susquehanna, Mary started for that place and got as far on her way as Delhi, where she was taken sick, her money gave out, and she was put in the poorhouse.  Lucy Lobdell took a strange fancy to Mary, and her love was returned.  Lucy left the establishment in 1869, and cut off her hair and donned male apparel again.  Shortly afterward Mary Perry ran away, and, strange as it may seem, she and Lucy Lobdell--who then called herself Rev. Joseph Lobdell--were married.  Lucy looked so like a man that the minister who performed the ceremony was hoaxed.

 

One day in August, 1869, the Rev. Joseph Israel Lobdell and wife appeared suddenly in Stroudsburg, Monroe county, and subsequently found a house among the villages on Pocono Mountains, in the Southern part of Monroe county.  For two years they lived there, subsisting on the alms they obtained and what the rifle of the man brought them.  By and bye they became such a nuisance that they were arrested as vagrants and lodged in the county jail at Stroudsburg, and while there it was discovered that the Rev. Joseph Israel Lobdell was a woman, and was consequently identified as Lucy Ann Lobdell, the great female hunter. The companion of the alleged reverend was none other than Mary Perry. The couple then went to Delaware county, N.Y., and were again thrown into the poor house, but only remained there a few days when they again escaped and came to Wayne county, where they claimed to be man and wife, Lucy still wearing her male attire.

 

In the fall of 1875, Lucy Ann , or "Joe", as she was called, came to Honesdale and was arrested and lodged in jail as a vagrant.  The next day "her wife" came to town to look for her and finally secured her release from jail.  The petition for Lucy's release was written by Mary Perry in her backwoods home, and is now in the county Clerk's Office here. The writing is beautiful and regular, the language used is excellent, and when the fact is taken into consideration that the document was written with a pen made from a pine stick whittled to a point and split, and that the ink was but the juice of the red poke berry, the petition is indeed a literary curiosity.

 

After being released from jail Lucy and her wife went to Damascus Township, Wayne County, and lived there together in a house they had erected, until 1870, when "Joe" suddenly disappeared.  "He" was heard of not long afterward and was taken to Ovid Insane Asylum.  "His" companion still lives in Wayne County [in 1881], and was a regular attendant at court during the celebrated trial of Benjamin K. Bortree for the murder of Henry W. Shouse, which took place here last fall.

 

The daughter of Lucy Ann, named Mary Slater, who was adopted by Mr. Fortnam, seemed to have inherited bad luck.  Refusing the attentions of a young man named Kent, after she and grown to womanhood, she fell a victim to a vile plot.  Kent abducted her from home one dark, stormy night in August, 1871, drugged her, accomplished her ruin, and threw her apparently lifeless body in the Delaware River, near the town of Cochecton.  She was washed ashore on an island, where she was found by a man who restored her life, but her reason was entirely overthrown.  She wandered into the woods, was found a day or two afterward a raving maniac and conveyed to an asylum, where in time she recovered her mental  and bodily health.  She than had Kent arrested, but he escaped his merited punishment by jumping bail and leaving the state.  Miss Slater subsequently married a farmer in Delaware county, N.Y., and is now [in 1881] living happily near Delhi, where so much of her early life was passed.--Philadelphia Press, Honesdale Letter.

 

[Note:  Lucy Ann Lobdell Slater died May 28, 1912 at the Binghamton State Hospital, and was buried in that facility's cemetery.  For more information on Lucy's life refer to her findagrave.com entry, memorial #146943750]