LOCKPORT — Once, when Jane A. Porter was visiting Europe in the late 19th century, someone asked her if she had ever seen Niagara Falls.
“Seen them?” she allegedly replied. “Why, I own them.”
She wasn’t kidding.
As an heir to the property bought by her grandfather, Augustus Porter, Jane Porter did indeed own the mighty cataracts—at least until 1885, when the family’s waterfront property was bought by New York State to form the nation’s first state park.
The Porter family’s other land holdings, worth millions of dollars even in 19th century money, were the focus of a series of lengthy court fights in the 1880s and ’90s.
At the end of it all, Jane Porter was declared mentally ill — a “lunatic,” in the terminology of the time — even though it’s far from clear that she was really insane by today’s standards, or indeed by any standards.
She seems to have been done out of her property by a greedy sister and a lawyer who supposedly was on her side but had a blatant conflict of interest.
The story was a sensation at the time, gaining coverage even in the New York Times.
But for a century, it was forgotten until it was unearthed in the basement of the Niagara County Courthouse.
The documents, so tightly rolled up and packed together that they couldn’t be unfurled without damaging them, were restored by a resourceful University at Buffalo graduate student doing an internship in the County Historian’s Office.
Now they rest safely in five large cardboard boxes in that office, available for researchers who someday may grapple with the entire Jane Porter saga.
The story of the case’s rediscovery begins with Deputy County Clerk Wendy J. Roberson.
In the 1990s, before the remodeling of the basement of the courthouse, there was a musty storage closet in a hallway down there.
In 1996, Roberson became curious about a large wooden chest on the floor up against a wall. She kept climbing on top of it to reach items on high shelves.
Painted on the side of the chest were the words, “In Re Jane A. Porter Estate.”
One day, Roberson decided to pull it out and open it.
She found the complete record of the Porter trials — transcripts, exhibits, reports and other documents.
“Scratched in the wood when you open [the chest] is the word ‘lunacy,’ ” Roberson said. “That intrigued all of us.”
Among the documents that could be read were gate receipts from Goat Island, which the Porter family owned and charged admission to in the pre-state park days.
But many of the documents had been rolled up to save space, and after a century of scrunching, many of the pages were stuck together and couldn’t be opened without tearing or otherwise mutilating them.
“They were tighter than a miser’s fist,” County Historian Catherine L. Emerson said. “They’d been that way for so long and in such [bad] conditions, you couldn’t open them.”
“Being so dry, they never would have flattened,” Deputy Historian Ronald F. Cary added.
The County Historian’s Office is a part-time operation, and the few hours that its staff had available would not be sufficient to properly archive and preserve the Porter records.
The chest was emptied out, however, and the wooden crate ended up as something of an end table in the County Legislature chairman’s office.
“The mission of our County Historian’s Office is not to hold artifacts,” Roberson said.
Legislature Chairman William L. Ross, C-Wheatfield, has been stacking magazines and newspapers atop it for the last several years.
But as for the contents, they awaited the right person with the preservation skills needed to save them.
Enter Jason R. Dodson of Williamsville, a UB archives and library science graduate student, who last
year was looking for a “practicum,” a summer project in his field of study that could bring him course credit toward a master’s degree.
The man and the moment had met.
Dodson soon created what is now labeled “The Niagara County Historian’s Office Rehumidification Chamber.”
It’s a Rubbermaid garbage container.
“I didn’t invent it. I learned it from one of my professors,” Dodson said, giving credit to the teaching of James M. Tammaro, UB professor of records management.
Inside the large garbage can is a small, rectangular plastic garbage can, such as might be found next to a typical office desk.
To operate the rehumidification chamber, you fill it with 3 to 6 inches of hot water. Then you put the documents in the smaller garbage can, weighed down with a brick to keep it from floating. Put the lid on the large garbage can and come back six hours later.
The humidity from the water makes the old documents regain some flexibility and enables the archivist to unfurl them safely. Once that is achieved, they are simply placed on a table beneath a heavy object to flatten them out as much as possible.
After the preservation part of the job, it was up to Dodson to organize the documents.
“He had a hard time remembering he was here as an archival intern, not a historical intern,” Emerson said.
But she acknowledged, “You have to know a little something to put them in any kind of legitimate order.”
With help from Internet legal research and a Black’s Legal Dictionary borrowed from the County Attorney’s Office, Dodson pieced together a rough account of what happened to Jane Porter.
Jane, born in 1833, was the daughter of Augustus S. Porter, who was the son of Augustus Porter. The latter had bought the land around Niagara Falls at an auction in 1805.
Jane; her sister, Sarah Porter Burrell; and their mother, Sarah
G. Porter, inherited the estate.
In 1875, the women traveled to England and settled on the Isle of Wight off the coast, in hopes that the sea air might help Jane beat cancer. She recovered, but Jane seems to have felt overmatched by the duties of administering the estate.
“She was ill, and her mother died,” Emerson said. “She kept saying, ‘I’ve never done this before. I need somebody to help me.’ ”
It appears that some sort of falling-out occurred between the sisters on the Isle of Wight. Sarah Burrell, a widow with two children, moved to a country house near London and proceeded to live in luxury, at least for a while.
“In my opinion, she needed the money,” Dodson said. “At that time, she was living like a noble person in England, and she needed the money to keep that up. She was mortgaging property left and right.”
That made unmarried, shaky Jane a target.
“Whoever controlled Jane controlled the estate,” Dodson said.
The sisters’ mother died in England on March 25, 1885. The next day, according to a letter that Sarah wrote to the New York Times, the Lunacy Commissioners of England showed up on the Isle of Wight to question Jane. They also had been assigned to question the mother, unaware she was already dead.
Some relatives thought that this was a mission inspired by Sarah Burrell to have Jane declared insane.
After one day’s questioning of a woman whose mother had just died, it appears that Jane’s uncle, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, put a stop to the Lunacy Commissioners’ investigation by rushing Jane off the Isle of Wight to the nearest seaport to catch a ship back to the
U. S.
Jane and an assortment of Porter nieces and nephews hired a Niagara Falls lawyer, Benjamin Flagler, to succeed Uncle Frederick as Jane’s “committee of person.” That made Flagler the legal controller of Jane’s property, the estate including Niagara Falls, just as the State Legislature was debating the Niagara Park Act that would buy the land for the state.
Jane did not return to Niagara Falls right away. Upon her arrival back in America, she went to live with a nurse in Sheffield, Mass. According to news reports of the time, her sister, chasing Jane back to America, showed up in Sheffield one day, seized the house and had Jane committed to a privately run insane asylum in New York City.
Sarah then faced off against Flagler in court in Niagara Falls to battle over control of the estate. A Surrogate’s Court jury deadlocked—because of prejudice against Sarah, it was claimed by her side.
A change of venue ensued, with the court reconvening the following week in Lockport. A new jury was seated, and its verdict was that Jane was insane and Flagler, not Sarah Burrell, should control her property.
All this happened as the State Legislature was voting to pay the Porter family $525,000 — that’s more than $12.5 million in today’s money — for the land that was to become Niagara Falls State Park. Jane’s share apparently fell into the hands of Flagler.
Sarah contended that Flagler was a director of a company that planned to dig a hydraulic tunnel under the property near the falls.
In other words, he was not an honest broker, but someone who stood to gain personally from a business project that depended on control of Jane’s land.
“I don’t think he was a crook,” Dodson said. “He was a trusted business associate of the family, and they saw an opportunity.”
However, Jane, who was living with a female friend, became dissatisfied with the allowance that Flagler was giving her and in 1889 chose William Putney to replace him.
Flagler did not go quietly. Putney sued him, but according to Dodson’s research, Flagler won the suit and kept control of the estate, selling chunks of it to the state over the ensuing decade to further enrich himself.
In 1898, Putney made another attempt to oust Flagler and succeeded temporarily, although the verdict was reversed on appeal. In this lawsuit, Flagler’s attorney was John E. Pound of Lockport, for whom a Lockport elementary school was later named.
Meanwhile, Sarah, in a bit of poetic justice, was declared insane herself in 1901 and sent to an asylum. When Jane died in 1907, Sarah became Jane’s sole heir but was no longer legally able to control property. The estate came under control of Jane’s new “committee of person,” one Isaac S. Signor.
“None of their motives were pure,” Dodson commented.
Perhaps someday, someone wearing the white cotton gloves mandated by the Historian’s Office, in line with sound preservation scholarship, actually will read through the five cardboard boxes and compile a detailed account of how Jane Porter lost control of Niagara Falls.
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