- BEN FRANKLIN ... not from a distance ...

By Danny McCarthy

Former Southold Town Historian Antonia Booth reminded us that Southold Town reached all the way from Plum Island to Wading River until 1792. According to the Rev. Charles E. Craven’s A History of Mattituck, Long Island, New York: “When the town of Riverhead was set off in 1792, the west line of the Howell farm {in Aquebogue} became the dividing line between Southold and Riverhead.” When the Riverhead Town was formed from Southold, a hamlet known as the “Middle District” was divided by the new town lines. The Middle District became known as Franklinville (named after Benjamin Franklin). The Franklinville Academy was there and at five dollars a term, boarding students from all over Long Island received a fine education.
“Franklinvillagers” didn’t have a Post Office. Mail came to Jamesport. The Franklinvillagers wanted a Post Office of their own in 1898. They learned that in Cattaraugus County, 50 miles southeast of Buffalo, there was a Franklinville Post Office already. “Sequana” was an Indian name proposed, meaning spring. “Laurel” was suggested as well, and the hamlet was renamed with the residents calling it Laurel. The Laurel Post Office opened on February 5, 1898 at Oliver A. Atwood’s General Store, as Mattituck-Laurel Historical Society & Museums Curator/Historian Norman Wamback shared in his May 2008 Peconic Bay Shopper article all about post offices on the North Fork. Oliver Atwood’s General Store is now the location of Elbow Two Restaurant.
Franklinville Academy opened in 1833 and after 57 years of uninterrupted county-wide educational service, Franklinville Academy closed its doors. Esther P. Boucher De Graff wrote in her August 1954 paper Old Franklinville (which is in the Whitaker Historical Collection): “I might mention in passing that the Franklinville district school stood on the corner of Main Road and Aldrich Lane, the site originally chosen for the church. There was a large rock in the front yard on which the schoolchildren sharpened their pencils during recess.”
The Post Road came out from New York City and then onto Long Island and to Orient Point. A ferry brought a postman from Orient to far eastern Connecticut and then on to Boston. According to the Southold Historical Society website, Benjamin Franklin “placed (the) mile markers to mark the Post Road to Boston” in 1755.
Ruth Jernick shared in the October 24, 1991 The Suffolk Times that in the fall of 1990, then Custer Institute director Colin Van Tuyl needed no elbow room (so to speak). He and fellow Custer Institute members had gone on an outing. Van Tuyl found something quite interesting. He came across the broken milestone No. 8 in the woods along the Laurel roadside during that outing. After meeting with Adopt-a-Milemarker chairman Harry Fagan, Van Tuyl “agreed to supervise the reconstruction and replacement of No. 8 on the base where it stood until being hit by an automobile during the 1980s.”
Believe It or Not …
Custer member Bob Farrell joined in an October 1991 Custer Institute “special presentation on historical monuments,” which featured that milestone No. 8. He conducted a study on milestones and thought that Benjamin Franklin never visited Long Island nor that “the milestones had anything to {do with} gauging postal rates” and that they “weren’t placed on the North Fork until after the 19th century.” His best guess he told the Suffolk Times was that they “were put in during the stagecoach era, for their fees.” Mr. Farrell added that “there was no official post office on Long Island until 1795, five years after Benjamin Franklin died.” Harry Fagan said: “I wanted to make residents aware of what we have here, of these historic treasures. And I think I did.”
Griffin’s Journal by Oysterponds (now Orient) resident Augustus Griffin which he published in 1857, says that in 1755 “Franklin passed through this island, from Brooklyn, to Southold Harbor, and in a carriage of his own construction…so contrived with clock work or machinery of peculiar make, that a bell would be struck at the termination of every twenty rods” (a rod was 16 ½ feet). Franklin “stopped at the inn of my grandfather, Samuel Griffin” and “was on his way to Boston to visit his widowed mother.” Franklin’s mother, Abiah Folger Franklin, died May 8, 1752, so perhaps Griffin at age 90 when he wrote his Journal, got the story wrong.
Jared Eliot inspired both Benjamin Franklin and John Adams with his numerous essays. Jared Eliot received a letter from Benjamin Franklin dated October 25, 1750 where Franklin discusses having seen a fence at “Southhold” (sic). It seems Franklin let Eliot know that the minister of Southold named William Throop would at Eliot’s request favor him with information about Southold fences.
According to the July 5, 2013 Dan’s Papers, Yale Professor Leonard Larabee, first editor of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, advances this theory in a letter quoted in Milestoning in Connecticut, 1757–1971 by John D. McDowell. Larabee says: “Milestones were essentially an embellishment…of no particular use to the postal service,” giving “no good reason why Franklin should have spent time, energy, or Post Office money” on them; anyway, “there is no documentary evidence that he ever did.” Perhaps Franklin’s Long Island visit, and particularly the North Fork, could have been in 1750. “Perhaps he was on his way to visit his mother; perhaps his carriage had an odometer. But it seems unlikely he ever visited in connection with the postal duties he assumed three years later, or that he’s responsible for the milestones so frequently attributed to him.”
Erica Bowers shared in the June 3, 2004 Traveler-Watchman that according to Riverhead’s Landmarks Preservation Commission chairman Richard Wines, the stone markers were erected by Benjamin Franklin in 1755 during his historic trip to the North Fork. Wines had come across marker No. 3 which “once stood across from the Hallockville Museum Farm.”
Sounds Like “Highway Robbery!”
A June 24, 2010 Suffolk Times article shared that then Southold Town’s Landmark Preservation Commission member Ron Rossi and commission vice chairman Mel Phaff said that the markers are scattered throughout the North Fork and are five-inch thick and nearly three feet tall. “They have either sunk into the ground or were shortened where roads were regraded.”
We get re-informed by this article that Benjamin Franklin placed 30 stone (markers) during his service as the British crown’s deputy postmaster general for North America. He traveled down King’s Highway (now Route 25) “by horse and carriage, every mile to show a traveler’s distance from {the} Suffolk Court House.” (Suffolk Court House is a building on Main Street in Riverhead and dates back to 1725.) Workers would follow behind replacing posts with granite rocks that were each “marked” with the number of miles from that point.
Chairman of Southold Town’s Historic Preservation Commission James Grathwohl said: “Franklin worked out a measuring device called a weasel so that every mile would pop.” If the little weasel clicked, Franklin stopped his carriage and let the workers know where to put the marker.
Philatelically Speaking!
I did some research and learned that the United States Postal Service (USPS) “traces its roots to 1775 during the Second Continental Congress and Benjamin Franklin was appointed as the first postmaster general.” Also, history holds that the “cabinet-level Post Office Department was created in 1792 from Franklin’s operation and transformed into its current form in 1971 under the Postal Reorganization Act.” Congress authorized the Postmaster General to release the first United States postage stamps on July 1, 1847. Benjamin Franklin was pictured on the 5-cent stamp and the 10-cent stamp featured a headshot of George Washington.
Let’s Be Positive!
This Is First Class!
Beth Young reported in the August 24, 2014 East End Beacon that she was able to go on a journey to look at the condition of the milemarkers along with a Southold Town 375th Anniversary Committee member. The duo made use of the 1991 booklet Benjamin Franklin’s North Fork Milestones written by the late Robert P. Long of Cutchogue.
The Southold Town 375th Anniversary Committee held a Milemarkers Day on Saturday, May 16 {2015}. I had the pleasure of being Benjamin Franklin. Since 1990 I have been a part of every Southold Merchants’ Southold Main Road Fourth of July Parade. I have been seen as a farmer, in colonial attire, or as Ben Franklin.