South Butler, New York, is a forgotten byway in American history. Its moment of notoriety came and went. Now it is just a crossroad hamlet struggling to matter like so many other such places in rural America. But once it did matter. In the decades before the Civil...
Because a number of my maternal ancestors settled in South Butler, New York, and surrounding communities in the first decades of the 19th century, I have mused on any possible connections between my family and the social ferment bubbling around them. In the course of...
Some of my maternal ancestors were early settlers in South Butler, New York. My great, great, great grandparents, Zenus and Eliza Stone, came to South Butler at some point before 1830 and raised a passel of children there. Zenus is listed on census rolls in those...
There isn’t much to South Butler these days. But, improbably, something did happen here that sets it apart. Samuel Ringgold Ward. Antoinette Brown Blackwell. Gerrit Smith. All three were major players in the social reform movements that swept the Northern states in the Antebellum years.
