The last of Johnstown - Johnstown, NY

National Review, Sept 16, 1996 by Richard Brookhiser

JOHNSTOWN, New York, is an hour west of Albany on the New York State Thruway. The hills of the Mohawk River Valley, in which it lies, are wrinkled rather than rolling. Occasionally a traveler gets a side view down the rows of a cornfield. But the soil is mostly too rocky to support anything but dairy cows.

This plain setting had its share of great events, thanks to the Indians who once lived there. Father Isaac Jogues, one of the seventeenth-century French Jesuits who tried to convert them, was martyred just across the river. The historian Francis Parkman cuts short a description of his torments with the remark that further details "would be as monotonous as revolting."

A century later the British focused on Indian trade and politics. Their man in the North American version of the Great Game was William Johnson. Johnson looked after settlers and the fur trade, and adjudicated Indian disputes. His wife bore him three children, and an Indian mistress bore him eight more. He passed judgment on colonials, such as Col. Washington of the Virginia militia: "too ambitious of acquiring all the honor." To celebrate his success in the world -- he was made a baronet -- he built himself a neat little country gentleman's house in the wilderness. On one occasion, his guests left hatchet marks in the banister.

At century's end, the frontier moved on, leaving in its wake Johnson Hall, a county courthouse (still in use), and a tiny stone fort. Johnstown's second flowering came in the next century, thanks to the cows, when someone thought to turn their hides into gloves and their hoofs into gelatin. A local magnate built a fine house for himself on a hilltop, with Tiffany lamps in the dining room. When the house was sold, not long ago, for the price of a Manhattan studio apartment, the new owners more than made back their investment by unscrewing the Tiffany and selling it off. It is the Johnstown Four Hundred which hangs, like the fruit of Tantalus, over the hero of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

I knew about Johnstown, not because of its historical or literary resonances, nor because of any ongoing grandeur -- the gloves and the magnates are long gone -- but because it is where my mother grew up. She moved a few hundred miles away, to the suburb that was my home. But my grandmother and my aunts Marjie and Mary continued to live there, and I spent many of the holidays of the first twenty years of my life -- usually Thanksgiving or Easter -- with them.

My mother and her sisters had grown up in a house across the street from the old fort, which then served as a jail. One woman, locked up for drunkenness, would call out to my grandmother from her cell window, which must not have pleased my grandmother. After World War II, my grandmother moved to a new house, but furnished it with a number of her old things: a Victorian sofa and chairs; a photograph, dim and romantically arty, of trees and streams; nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Sir Edward Bulwer- Lytton. Upstairs there was that Lar of the bourgeoisie, an upright piano, whose tone was as soft and occasionally cracked as its white keys, with some sheet music mourning the assassination of William McKinley.

The Bicentennial fireworks I saw were in Fonda, the town down the hill from Johnstown; afterward, we watched the fireworks over the Statue of Liberty on TV. I played frisbee with my brother in the middle of South William Street under vase-shaped elms. There was a town clock that tolled the hours and the half hours. A car on the street at night was an event.

My aunt Marjie's last car was a pink Rambler. It was years before she took the plastic covers off the back seat. She never drove it over fifty, or farther than Gloversville, and gas-station attendants were forever beseeching her to part with it. She kept it till she bent a fender (how?), then let it go.

My aunts led different lives. Aunt Marjie, who was older, ran the family business, a dry-goods store. (Dreiser mentions it.) Aunt Mary went to Mount Holyoke, and was a social worker in New York and New Haven. I remember a mild dispute they had the last time I saw the two of them together. They were never big women; in their mid eighties, they seemed light as maple seeds. There was a family from Africa or someplace that the Johnstown Presbyterian Church was supporting. Aunt Marjie observed that it cost money. Aunt Mary said that such expenses fulfilled the mission of the church. The ways of the WASP: do good works, so long as someone minds the store.

My grandmother died twenty years ago. Marjie died in 1993, in December; her funeral was held on a day of snow and cold. Mary died this winter; there was a memorial service in the Presbyterian Church in April. Presbyterians, I thought for the many-eth time, ask forgiveness for their debts, instead of their trespasses. There weren't many of either to my aunts' accounts.

There is no reason now for me to go back to Johnstown, except memory, and what kind of a reason is that, in America? People in other countries stay put, or when they come in from the provinces, like Balzac characters, it is to the Metropolis -- London, Paris. But there is no American Metropolis. People move here and there, for all kinds of reasons, or for none. I was doubly removed, for even as my parents left their hometowns, so I have left mine. My connection with Johnstown, though intense, was slender, and now it has snapped. I've left it to its living, and its dead.