I have been on a bit of a quest this past month. If you have ever been in the Mt. Pleasant cemetery, you may have noticed the large Rhoades – Cool headstone that is located on top of the hill. Certainly everyone has heard about Kittie Rhoades, the Port Byron girl who made it big on the theater stage in the late 1800s, but I wanted to dig into her family and see how she was related to the Cool family. We might assume a relationship to John Cool, the soldier whom the American Legion Post is named after, however is that assumption justified? And after a couple weeks of work, I still can’t say that the connection is there.

Kittie Rhoades began life in 1855 as Catherine Cool, one of eight children of Harvey James Cool and Ann Cogan. Although many articles say that Kittie was a Port Byron girl, she was born in Cato in 1855. The names of the people they interacted with suggests that they lived in the south-west corner of the town near Emerson. Her father Harvey was the son of Johannes Kuhl, and was born in 1823 near Oppenheim, Fulton County, NY. Her mother Ann Cogan was an Irish immigrant, and when she married Harvey in 1848, she was only fifteen years old, then years younger than her husband. The family were listed as farm laborer’s, suggesting that they did not own the farm they worked on. Our friends at CIVIC in Cato don’t have a file on the family, which also suggests that they were not land-owners or prominent folks.

The family may have come to Cayuga County by way of the canal. In the 1850 census the Cool’s are shown as canal boatman. The 1850 census is one of those interesting records that might have counted Harvey twice, once with his mother and father, and once with his wife. In both cases he was listed as a boatman, and it is possible to imagine that both his mother and wife gave his name to the census taker. (I have the a similar occurrence in my family where my great-grandfather was recorded in two towns.) However, the boating life may not have been agreeable as the entire family moves to Cato by 1855. Catherine attended a one-room-school-house and was taught by Stephen Rockwell. We have yet to determine which school district this was. By 1875 she had moved out of the Cool home, and perhaps this is when she married William Rhoades of Conquest. William then became her agent under the name William R. Ward. This began a couple decade’s long career on the stage, and as a theater company owner, that lasted throughout the 1880s and 90s. In 1895 the Auburn Weekly Bulletin reported that Kittie had been granted a divorce, and it also reported that while staying at the New National Hotel in Port Byron, Kittie and Will had a public disagreement over Will’s jealousy. Kittie was always known as the Miss Kittie Rhoades, so maybe someone didn’t realize that William was her husband?

Catherine’s ties to Port Byron was by way of her youngest sister Myrtle. Myrtle was 18 years younger than Catherine and had married George Brown. (George and Myrtle’s daughter Inez married Earl Moore, and that family lived in the house that is now the Lock 52 Historical Society.) Perhaps to be closer to her family, Catherine and her husband purchased the old Hayden homestead in Haydenville and fixed it up as their summer retreat that became known as the “Rhoades Lodge.” It was a working farm and her parents moved in to become the year around caretakers. While at her home, Kittie was known to host a number of semi-famous people of the period.

By the turn of the century, Kittie was 45-years-old, and her time in the spotlight was over. In 1901 she married Lewis Henderson of Newburgh who was a department store worker in that city. At that point Catherine took up the life of a house-wife as Mrs Lewis Henderson. The Henderson’s sold the farm in 1915, although she continued to return to the village to visit her sister and friends. Catherine died in 1941 and was brought to Mt. Pleasant to lie next to her parents.

As you might expect there have been numerous articles written about Kittie Rhoades over the years, although they tend to parrot the same mistakes. Michael Cuddy Jr. wrote a nice piece in the June/July 1990 issue of The Cayuga Chief, which was the newsletter of the Cayuga Museum. His article summarizes most of what had been printed up to that time, and it should be read by anyone interested in Catherine Cool/Kittie Roades.

The American Legion is named in honor of John Norman Cool, who died in fighting in World War 1. His parents were Warren Cool and Margaret Hitchcock. This Cool line can be traced back through Henry J Cool and Mary Nellis. Henry was born in Canada in 1819 and there his line disappears. His connection at this point is conjecture although there are enough hints to suggest that both came from the same family. Henry and Mary are buried in Weedsport.

Throughout this research, I kept stumbling onto other familiar names such as the Brown’s and the Sponible’s. As you look through the censuses over the years, you see these people living and moving together from the Mohawk Valley to Cayuga County, and their kids move out to Michigan and beyond. It is a small version of the Manifest Destiny, and helps to show that Port Byron is part of a much larger world. We will continue to track these families in the coming year.

So far I have yet to find the connection between the Cool family and the Port Byron Family Tree. Many of the Cool children lived in Auburn and South Butler, and as I mentioned, the only local person was Myrtle. So when the connection is made, it will likely come through the Brown’s, or the Hitchcock’s if I can even connect Harvey and Henry Cool.