Orlando Douglass – Excerpt from January 2003 Digest

Greetings from the Editor!

The various genealogical societies frequently put out a newsletter in which they reprint information from their files that they think will be of interest to their readers, like history of the area or books written in the 1800s or diaries. Those of us who get the newsletters faithfully read them, hoping that there will be some mention of one of our ancestors. Occasionally I have found a marriage record, like the one for Austin O. Lee and Mary Wardwell in Rodman, NY, by the Rev. James Spear, but that is an unusual find. Nevertheless, even one such record is very helpful.

But in August 2002, I received a plum in the Historical Assn. of South Jefferson newsletter. I was reading their reprint of an article from the December 18th, 1906 issue of the Jefferson County Journal. The article was entitled “The Little Old Schoolhouse” and written as a letter to the paper by Theron W. Haight, who had attended the school at “Haight’s Corners” on the edge of the Tn. of Lorraine, about two miles east of Pierrepont Manor, NY.

The part that caught my attention was this: “I am not certain whether it was the winter of 1852 or of 1853 when Orlando Douglass presided over the school. He died of consumption a few years later, but his administrations of our educational affairs was more effective in results than that of any other teacher whom I remember there. All the benches in the building were fully occupied, and a spirit of enthusiasm pervaded the room, and in playtime the grounds also. The proudest moment of my life was when I was the first to find the correct solution of an example in Adams’s arithmetic locally known as ‘the Christian era sum’. It involved the calculation of the number of seconds from the beginning of the era to Christmas of 1848 with allowance for leap years, including the change of the calendar from ‘old style’ to ‘new style’. My fame on account of that exploit extended clear into the next district where the future Col. Henry H. Lyman was then a school-boy, and learned the solution from me.”

You folks have read my interest in Orlando Douglass before. He was born in Jefferson County, 3rd son of Alexander Douglass, and lived in the Tn. of Redfield, Oswego Co, NY, near his sister, Candace Douglass Clemons. He is the man whose will Sue Vickerman found for me, in which he leaves his estate to his wife Charlotte (Joyner) and his unborn heir. Does the above paragraph not fill in so much more about this young man who died at the age of 28? He must have had an encouraging, positive nature to have instilled so much enthusiasm and interest in an arithmetic sum that I doubt any of our school students could compute today.

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