Katherine Adelia Foote
Biography
Katherine Adelia Foote, or "Cousin Katherine" or "Kitty," was born in Delhi, New York, 27 September, 1845, probably her parents home, a two-story, wooden clapboard house on the corner of Division and Second Street. She died (probably at Delhi) February, 1941.
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.
