Katherine Adelia Foote
Contents
Biography
Katherine Adelia Foote, or "Cousin Katherine" or "Kitty," was born in Delhi, Delaware county, New York, 27 September, 1845, probably her parents home, a two-story, wooden clapboard house near the corner of Division and Second Street.
She died, also at Delhi, 31 January, 1941 [New York, Death Index, 1852-1956], and is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, Delhi, New York [death year only listed on Delhi;g.s.].
Colophon for her book, Ebenezer Foote, the Founder...
Morituri Salutamus
With time and eyes and strength beginning to fail me, I seem to find the quotation used by Longfellow at the Commencement exercises of Bowdoin in 1875 a fitting phrase to put at the beginning of my attempts (before they are lost) to get into some form accessible to those who come after me, such a part of the voluminous correspondence of my great-grandfather, Judge Foote, as I possess, hoping that some fragments may have some faint interest for those who have belonged in any way to his village and mine. Therefore, not to Caesar, but to any who can be found to care to look them over, the letters and I say “Morituri Salutamus”.
Katherine Adelia Foote.
The Bookcases
The house was not far from Crompond, and family tradition says that constant communication took place, both official and [13] friendly, between the two Connecticut men. But alas! with thousands of other letters, from Washington down to persons of little importance, preserved by Judge Foote, and a common subject of conversation with the elders of his family during his life, no proofs are left except the comparatively few contained in this volume.
All through my girlhood the trim cases stood, from floor to ceiling, filled with the precious letters, which must have been mutely beseeching us to want and care for them, but all were too busy, and now I, at least, am filled with unspeakable chagrin over having helped to lose the treasures that at last have come to seem priceless to his family, if to no one else.
We loved the traditions but were willing to take them on hearsay, instead of looking for ours ourselves, until fifty years after Ebenezer's death the house was sold, the letters destroyed, and opportunity fled forever. As I am about to die, I have determined to take the time and save from oblivion a good many facts concerning the life and times and friends of a man who was a soldier in the Revolution, a man of affairs in the State, and who died here at Delhi, N.Y., in 1829.
Provenance
- My disappointment is great, that I have so few letters of August and September, 1780, from Arnold's command at West Point to Andre's capture, September 23. Did the most methodical of men preserve them, and someone else not recognizing their value allow them to be destroyed? And also it is more than probable that in a journal that Ebenezer kept during his army days, these events were chronicled, and would have seemed invaluable to some of his descendants. My father as a boy and young man remembered it well, but later in life when he came to the point of wanting to read it carefully and make sure of its contents, it had disappeared, and he was never able to find any trace of it again.
One detail we get from an article by Judge Dyckman of White Plains, published in July, 1889, in the Magazine of American History, edited by Miss Martha Lamb. As a member of a Westchester family he liked to unearth items of [16] happenings of his own “terrain” and as Judge he possibly had easier access to old documents than most people. However this may be, I was intensely interested in 1889, on taking up an odd number of the abovementioned magazine, to find my relative's name in one of the series of articles entitled, “The Last Twelve Days of Andre.” To add to my other infinite regrets, a friend of mine, and also of Judge Dykman's, was also interested in the article, and said she would take pains when next I came to town that we meet, but alas, we never did, they both died, and I am unable to find as I might have from him, two facts which I know to be true, first the short details of Ebenezer's testimony at the trial of Hett Smith, which I once saw in a book at the Public Library in New York, copied and then lost and have never since been able to find the book again; second what Pierre or Philip Van Cortlandt said of Ebenezer in a speech in 1837.
