Thomas IV Baker (b. Dec 10, 1799, d. Apr 07, 1883)
Thomas IV Baker (son of Thomas Baker)27, 28 was born Dec 10, 1799 in Hoosick, Putney Co, NY, and died Apr 07, 1883 in Leyden, Lewis Co, NY. He married (2) Sophronia B Talcott on Abt. 1850 in Talcottville, Lewis Co, NY.
Notes for Thomas IV Baker: BIRTH: NORTHERN NEW YORK, Vol.III Lewis Historical Pub.Co. (J.Pitcher 10-93) CENSUS: 1810 NY FHC Film #0193709,Roll 21: Herkimer Co p21,Russia Twp. 1820 NY Thomas Baker IV 1825 NY St.Census Film #0845903, Thomas Baker in Russia Twp, Herkimer Co.2 M. 1830 NY M19# p21,NY Herkimer Co,Russia 1840 NY M704#293 p.96,NY Lewis Co, Leyden 1M40-50 (Talcotvl) 1850 NY M432#562,p.85,Twl.1271,Fam.1301, Thomas 50yo $1200 b.NY; Rosalind(24) Laura Ann (22), Adaline (15), Harriet (12), Thomas (6) Hellen M.(17) all born in NY State. 1860 NY M563#777, p.263, Dwel 2012,Fam.2094, Thomas (IV)60yo farmer, b.NY; Sophronia 62yo, Rosalinda 34, Laura Ann 32,Adaline 19,Harriet 22, Thomas 16 all born in NY State.
OCCUPATION: from Talcottville News, Boonville Herald, 2 June, 1887:"Thomas Baker is repairing the old stone hotel into a private residence with an iron roof, verand and removed the old horse sheds." Thomas evidently had turned the old stone house which he inherited from his second wife, into a small boarding house. In the 1850 US Census of NY, there were two or three families there.
STONE HOUSE STORY: "TALCOTT MANSION" by Ernest J. Wolfe, Jr, 19 Mar.1947. Mansion on the side of the State Road that passes through Talcottville. The State Road, as it was called, was the first state-appropriated highway that ran up through this northern country. Most of the old maps show it beginning in Utica and crossing the Mohawk Valley, and thence to Watertown and Sackets Harbor. Since then, there have been many state roads but only one "State Road". The Talcotts were aristocrats in their own ideas and blocked any industrial development of the locality. They clung to the manorial system that they had brought with them from England; but its usefulness ceased this side of the Atlantic and , by the next generation, they manorial system had been historically shelved in an obscure niche besude patroons and monseigneurs. In his HISTORY OF LEWIS COUNTY, Hough comments: 'This place is located upon Sugar River, at the point where it is crossed by the State Road. With suitable enterprise on the part of the first settlers, it should have grown into an important village, having everything in favor in the way of water-power and location. The opportunity was lost, and the village is, what it was forty years ago, a quiet vicinage, with no great prospect of future change." (1883) Jesse Talcott began his manor in 1800 and it was completed in 1804 of limestone from his own quarries on the Sugar River. Ox-teams hauled the stone from river banks and, during the four years construction of this fine Georgian mansion, the forests were scoured for the finest cuts of native timber to finish the interior. The full three stories of this structure have walls one and a half feet thick with four large chimneys running up their sides. These chimneys provide for fireplaces on the first and second floors and, curiously enough, not one of the eight mantlepieces has the same ornamentation. On entering the house from the front entrance, one finds himself in a broad central hall that extends the length of the main section of the house. A stairway, plain but in good taste, leads to the second story; and a right face at the top of the stairs brings us to a smaller duplicate of these stairs that leads to the large third story. There are two large bedrooms up here on either side of the house and their exposures are through daedal windows under the gables. It was a cold day when I saw this mansion; the February wind was sweeping along the side of the valley and it was a relief to get inside. But the mansion had not been used since before the war and the plaster was peeling in the kitchen and the hand-hewn woodwork throughout wanted a good coat of paint. It was chilly inside and so we went through the old place faster than I should have liked to. Besude, Mr. Munn, the caretaker, had to get back to his store and Jean who made this paper readable by illustrating it, was troubled by a mid-winter running nose. Mr. Munn, who was born there, said that a large wooden, two-storied wing used to run about thirty yards to the limestone barn on the left side of the lot and that it had been used for dancing when the old mansion had been a tavern and a stage stop under his grandfather's proprietorship." Ed. note: Edmund Wilson inherited from his mother in 1951 and spent several years restoring it. Country Historians Note: Talcott Mansion is also know as the Edmund Wilson House and is today listed on the NY St and the Natl Register of Historic Places. from Lewis County Historical Society Journal, Nov. 1996, Vol.XXII
PUBLISHED ANCESTRY: from "Upstate" by Edmund Wilson, pub.1971, p.49,50 "Thomas Baker, my great-grandfather, was to change all this. He was a descendant of a Rev Thomas Baker who was settled in Newport, R.I. by 1653. My great-grandfather was born in Hoosick, NY at the end of 1799. He came to Talcottville in 1825. He first set up a general store, then sold out and became a cattle dealer. He married Laura Shaw, a girl from Trenton, NY, by whom he had eight girls, most of them said to have been attractive, and one son, the last of the children, who had a harelip and cleft palate. Their mother died at his birth. By this time, the Talcotts, who had not prospered, were pretty well depleted in that part of the world, and there were only two Talcott women living in the house alone. Thomas Baker was town clerk and supervisor. Unlike the Tory Talcotts, he was a Jacksonian Democrat and sat as an Assemblyman in 1844. He was something of what is now called an "operator". He worked the farm and shiped the stone from the quarry to market by way of the new canal. He charged the neighbors for the use of his well. But he is said to have been generous and not unamiable. One of my aunts remembers him as "an old man with a round rose face, who would come in and give me big brown pennies or braided bags and slippers that he'd gotten from the Indians in the West." He would burst into tears when she left. My uncles used to joke about him, and the Talcotts regarded him with a certain scorn. The original members of the family had abandoned the New York Talcottville, and I find in the country records that Thomas Baker acquired the house in 1832 from Jesse Talcott, the inheritor by primogeniture and the last male Talcotts who had remained in that region. He was dissipated and generally accounted a rather good-for-nothing character. Their descendants never forgave Thomas Baker for breaking up the feudal unit by freely selling lots to mechanics and so creating the little village whose name he changed from Talcottville to Leyden. It is still included legally in the Town of Leyden. Later in the early ninteen-hundreds, my cousin Grace Reed, a Talcott, who lived in the Stone House in the summers, circulated a petition in the village and got the name changed back to Talcottville. There had been a terrible family feud. Thomas Baker, after his first wife's death, married Sophronia Talcott , a spinster, and moved with his family of daughters into the Stone House, supposedly on March 10, 1851. (It is hard to reconcile this date with the transfer of the property in 1832.) Sophronia's sister, Jannett had married a Baltimore architect, who had died in the epidemic of yellow fever, and she had come back to Talcottville to live with Sophronia. When Sophronia died, it was found that she had left the Stone House to her husband instead of, as Jannett expected, to her. Jannett attempted to break the will on the ground that it had been made under undue pressure when Sophronia was too old and weak-minded to understand what she was doing and that she had made a later will, leaving the property to her sister. Finally, in the fourth will, made in 1875, again leaves the property to the Bakers. There were three wills (for the Bakers) against one (for the Talcotts) and it was no doubt possible for the Bakers to convince the conductor of the probate hearings that it was the only one of the wills which left the house was the producet of undue influence. Oddly, a Talcott, a Lowville lawyer who defended the Bakers in this case. Jannett Daniels and her allies dropped their depositions and the house became the property of the Bakers." 5-3-97
More About Thomas IV Baker: Burial: Apr 1883, Leyden, Lewis Co, NY.
More About Thomas IV Baker and <Unnamed>: Marriage: Abt. 1830, Talcottville, Lewis Co, NY.
More About Thomas IV Baker and Sophronia B Talcott: Marriage: Abt. 1850, Talcottville, Lewis Co, NY.
Children of Thomas IV Baker are:
Rosalind Baker, b. 1825, NY, d. 1910, Talcottville, Lewis Co, NY.
Laura Anne Baker, b. 1827, NY, d. Jun 09, 1892, Talcottville, Lewis Co, NY.
Helen M. Baker, b. 1833, Talcottville, Lewis Co, NY, d. date unknown, NJ.
Thomas IV Baker (b. Dec 10, 1799, d. Apr 07, 1883)
Notes for Thomas IV Baker: