History repeats itself: A tale of two Recorders

Pictured left to right, Pieces of the Recorder of Jan. 7, 1876.Pieces of the Recorder of Jan. 7, 1876. The Recorder of Nov. 21, 1874. Dom Dorman’s post about his find.

By JEFF MORRIS

This is a story about coincidences. Or serendipity. Or fate. Or a cosmic confluence of unrelated events all occurring within a limited geographic area and timeframe.

Or it could just be a cool Halloween tale that isn’t the slightest bit spooky.

It all began earlier this year when the founders of this newspaper were trying to think of what to call it. Somebody came up with “The Recorder” and everybody thought that was a good idea.

When the name was conceived, nobody thought it had any historical significance.

Then, in May, while doing research for a story on the Katonah Fire Department’s 150th anniversary, writer Herb Foster discovered something: a local Katonah paper called The Recorder dated Nov. 21, 1874. Again, none of the people involved with this publication had been aware the earlier one existed.

So that was weird, but then something else happened.

On Sept. 7, a post appeared on social media about a find Katonah resident Dom Dorman had made — a find so exciting that he had to share it at once.

In the course of renovating his Katonah house — one of those that had been moved from Old Katonah — he had found among the old floorboards that workers had tossed into a dumpster, crumpled and torn but still legible after 148 years, pieces of a newspaper from Jan. 7, 1876.

The Recorder.

As Dorman tells it, he had been living on Katonah Ridge when he saw, on Edgemont Road, “this house with a mansard roof” that had been a two-family. Always a sucker for old houses and a kind of history buff, he knew he wanted the house. Then the price came down and that was that.

It was kind of an odd house. The rooms didn’t match; one side of the house was different from the other; it had two entrances and three back doors. And it was one of the houses that had been moved from Old Katonah in 1897.

In the fall of 2022, he and his family moved in. They lived in it for a while “and were sort of deciding what we wanted to do.”

He said they put some plans together, had to get a variance for one of the items, went before the historical commission and told them “everything we knew about it,” and commenced work in the spring of this year.

They were trying to save some of the flooring, he says, but the floors were uneven and sagging toward the middle of the house. They realized they had to replace the entire subfloor.

“There was one pantry underneath the staircase that I wanted to keep as a bar off the formal dining room,” said Dorman. “I kind of liked the floor in there, it was really old, but the workers didn’t understand and wound up pulling up all the flooring.”

After they pulled up the floor, he said, “I noticed a bit of old newspaper about the size of a silver dollar. The thing is, we hadn’t found anything interesting up to that point, and I was really bummed because I was hoping to come across something in a house this old.”

Dorman went out to the dumpster and saw a bunch of old newspaper crumpled up under floorboards that had been dumped on top of it.

“I saw it and started losing my mind because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said. “I’m such a fan of Katonah history and history in general. And I was just saying to my wife a couple of days before, ‘Gosh, I can’t believe we didn’t find anything.’ And this showed up in what was literally the last 3x5 square of flooring they were pulling up.”

The newspaper actually had nails through it. He carefully removed all the pieces he could.

Being a history buff, Dorman had researched the house. He knew it had been part of the Hoyt Brothers furniture store in Old Katonah, and they had a number of stores.

“There are pictures of the house as it was being moved, but I can’t find any pictures of it in Old Katonah,” he said. “Apparently it was built in 1869, and moved in 1897, so the paper moved with the house, as part of the floor — which is just insane.”

One of the stories in the paper says that “Boss Tweed” was spotted in a Katonah dry goods store.

“I would say that was the first celebrity sighting in Katonah,” said Dorman.

William “Boss” Tweed was a politician who was most noted for being the head of Tammany Hall, the 19th century Democratic Party political machine, who was convicted for plundering between $30 million and $200 million from New York City. Unable to put up the $3 million bail, Tweed was locked up, although he was allowed home visits. During one of these on Dec. 4, 1875, Tweed escaped and fled to Spain, but was eventually discovered and brought back to New York on Nov. 23, 1876, and was returned to the Ludlow Street Jail, where he died April 12, 1878.

Could he have been in Katonah in January 1876? Deirdre Courtney-Batson, former chair of the Katonah Historic District Advisory Commission, and a senior adjunct professor of history at Pace University, has her doubts.

“The reference to Boss Tweed being in Katonah is intriguing but highly unlikely,” she said. “Tweed, who had been living in Spain for sometime, was extradited and arrived back in the United States in November 1876. If he visited Katonah in 1876 it would have been really big news. I suspect  the article is just a general one about Tweed — the papers at the time were full of stories about him.”

As for the house itself, Courtney-Batson confirms it was moved from Railroad Avenue in Old Katonah, where it had housed the Hoyt Brothers furniture store.

“This meant that it most probably also housed Katonah›s undertaking business, since Samuel B. Hoyt, the store’s proprietor, also served as Katonah’s undertaker. Such combination of careers was common in the 19th century — after all, what is a casket if not furniture?”

What, indeed? Not spooky at all.