Galloo - Partial Chapter 8
Chapter 8
Fishing the Galloos
And Shipwrecks
1866 – 1876
ON THE EVENING OF JULY 21, 1875, Adams, NY, attorney Nathan Vickery, 47 and alone, rowed a 14-foot boat with a narrow beam out of the northeastern leeward bay of Galloo Island. He then pulled hard on his starboard oar and headed westward around the island’s Foot. On an extended fishing trip with fellow Adams businessmen, Vickery hoped to catch some black bass from around the shoal extending into the lake. Throwing a 15-pound package-wrapped rock into the water as his anchor, he likely drifted in the waves until his 30-foot anchor line pulled tight in the fetch.
Instead of stabilizing his boat for fishing, the suddenly taut line spun the boat with such force that it tossed Vickery into the water.
A rotund man, Vickery tried to pull his large frame over the gunwale, but the boat overturned, and he went under it. Wearing a heavy coat, Vickery didn’t stand a chance. His bloated and bruised body was found three days later by children out picking berries along the mainland shore near Point Peninsula, northeast of Galloo and east of Fox Island. The location was six miles across the lake. Vickery left behind his wife, Ellen, and two young children.
It was a tragic ending to a summer fishing trip for Adams' business leaders and their Henderson Harbor fishermen among the Galloo Islands.
It began on Wednesday, July 16, when Vickery, feed and coal dealer Cyrus Stone, malt shop merchant Newton Wardwell, grocer Willis Waite, and postmaster Albert Lovelee hired two oarsmen and a sailor in Henderson Harbor and, in two rowboats and a sailboat, ventured to Galloo by that evening. They fished the lake for five days, catching bass for shore dinners at fishing shacks along the eastern shore of the island bay, extending to Gill Harbor. It’s an area where local fishing guides often took their parties, fishing over a wreck known to produce great catches of black bass. On the day of Vickery’s drowning, however, the west winds had picked up, and the party remained in the leeward bay, fishing the pier near the Gill farmhouse in Gill Harbor and catching enough for their dinner.
Photograph
Rowing and sailing from Henderson Harbor, the Vickery fishing party spent days fishing for Black Bass at Galloo Island before tragedy struck. When the others realized Vickery had drowned, the sailboat returned to Henderson Harbor to report the accident and get help. From an early-20th-century postcard labeled "Henderson Harbor." Gemini enhanced.
Afterward, Vickery wanted to fish more, but the others were content to loaf away their time at the shoreline shacks, smoking their pipes and swapping fishing stories. Therefore, Vickery went alone in Henry Brown’s rowboat, the Grace Greenwood, with oars resting on the gunwales of a 50-inch beam. Not long after he rowed out of the bay and around the Foot of the island, darkness began to fall.
Cyrus Stone recalled his coroner’s inquest testimony: “As it began to grow dark, we went to the shanty. The men had just finished washing the dishes and cleaning up, and the lights were lit. Mr. Waite said it was time for Vickery to be back; we'd better send the boys after him to row him back. When we saw a boat coming back, we heard Henry Brown, the oarsman, say that Vickery was drowned.”
Brown found his boat overturned and sunk at the Foot of the island shoal. Inside, he found Vickery’s hat, fishing gear, and one oar. He towed the Grace Greenwood to shore on its anchor line, flipped it over, and drained it. He and Frank Rowe then towed it back into the bay and to their camp. He later said, “On account of the sea that was running, it would have been impossible for him (Vickery) to swim ashore, or any man.”
One of the men in the fishing-turned-rescue party ran to the Gill’s farmhouse for help and to get lanterns. The others immediately launched a search of the lake that lasted until 3 am. They resumed at daylight and searched for the next two days without finding Vickery’s body. The steamer Bogardus, after receiving word of the drowning, cruised the lake northeast of Galloo in the direction a body would have been carried by the wind and current.
When a telegram from Three Mile Bay informed the Henderson men that Vickery had been found, they set off by train while the Bogardus, carrying the Adams men, pulled into the bay between Fox Island and the Isthmus to Point Peninsula.
Henry Overton of Adams told the inquest about the shock of more than a dozen of Vickery’s friends who arrived by train and steamer to recover his body.
“We got to the beach about quarter past 11 pm. We found three men there with a fire on the shore; we also found a body lying on a board near the fire; the body was much swollen and discolored, the hair nearly gone, the mustache and skin on the lip all gone, some beard on the chin; from the appearance of the body, we could not tell who it was, the size of it only indicating it was Mr. Vickery”
The body was packed in ice and shipped home on the train. The coroner closed the case on August 2nd, listing the cause of death as an accidental drowning. The investigation report made no mention of a flotation device, as they were not commonly used in 1875, especially among confident sport fishermen on Lake Ontario. It could have saved Nathan Vickery’s life.
Each of the men in the Vickery fishing party had long-standing connections to summer sojourns among the Galloos. But one, Willis Waite, who said he was the “commissary” of the fishing party, would go on to build a cottage in Henderson Harbor and have his family continue fishing trips among the islands for decades. Waite was the father of Bertha Waite Averill, whose family acquired a small slice of Stony Island in 1923 and continued fishing and boating among the Galloos into 2026. Their story is further profiled in Chapter 7.
Fishing was as much a way of life for the tourists and sportsmen among the Galloos as it was for the men who made it their living. The following article was published in The New York Sun newspaper on Sunday, January 2, 1876. It featured a reporter's visit with fishermen among the Galloos who kept shanties at Dutch John Bay on Stony Island. They fished for bass, lake trout, whitefish, ciscoes, and occasionally sturgeon. It offered a glimpse into the lives of commercial fishermen and guides who sailed their boats well into December each year. Their fishing shack colony was near a gravel bar separating Dutch John Bay in the lake from Stony Island Pond, where they set fishing nets among the many shoals of the Galloos, hauling in hundreds of fish at a time. It later became known as Myron Barney’s fishing camp. Around this time (the 1870s), the bay was named, as described in Chapter 7.
Photograph
A fishing net repair and drying scene at Myron Barney’s fishing camp on the northwest side of Stony Island, circa 1918. The man is unidentified. Galloo Island is somewhat visible in the background. GE Photo. Gemini enhanced.
The article includes a first-person description of a grain-hauling schooner wrecked on Galloo Island Shoal, with eleven sailors lost. However, it appears the Sun reporter conflated shipwrecks or mistranscribed the tale-teller, a veteran Galloos fisherman and sailor, Appleton Sprague of Henderson Harbor.
Deep research finds no reference to a shipwreck in this area for a schooner named Twin Brothers, as reported in the article. Instead, it's surmised that Sprague was recounting his memory of the wreck of the M. Ballard, which struck a shoal on November 30, 1866. M. Ballard's captain and owner was Hugh Coyne of Detroit, and the Ballard was under the command of his brother, John Coyne, which may have led to misinformation about twin brothers. Sprague recounts how the teenage Alden Stevens tied a rope to his waist while trying to rescue one of the Ballard sailors, assisting his uncle, Theophilus Stevens, the Galloo lightkeeper. As noted in Chapter 5, other accounts record the rescuer as David Greene. Since the Stevenses lived with Sprague in the 1850s, when Sprague and Alden’s father, Prince Stevens, were sailors, Sprague's identification of the rescuer is deemed accurate.
Three of the bodies recovered from the Ballard were carried to Oswego on the E.B. Gannett, a schooner named for Emmett Gannett and built on Galloo Island. In 2014, wreck divers Tim Caza and Dennis Gerber found two shipwrecks together on the Lake Ontario floor near Galloo Island Shoal. In 2023, they, along with Carrie Sowden of the National Shipwreck Museum of the Great Lakes, dove the site and determined that one of the wrecks may be the M. Ballard.
Despite its apparent misinformation, the newspaper article is a wonderful description of the lives of Galloo fishermen in the late 19th Century. Except for the vintage quotations, it has been edited to conform to a modern writing and reading style. The writer's name was not provided.
Galloo is a historical story of the Galloo Islands in Lake Ontario. Eleven chapters; the above is an excerpt from Chapter 8.