McClenons from Ireland to New York and beyond....

Direct Line Ancestors - John McClenon came from Ireland
-John McClenon born about 1784 in Ireland, married Elizabeth Wells (3rd great grandparents of PCR)
-Thomas McClenon born 1819 in NY, married Frances Anne Benedict in NY (2nd great grandparents)
-Rufus B. McClenon b. 1852 in NY, married Adeline M. White b. 1854 in NY (great grandparents)
-Walter H. McClenon b. 1887 in WI, married Ruth M. Koester b. 1893 in OH (grandparents)
-Mary McClenon b. 1928 in Takoma Park, MD, married Scott A Ray b. 1929 in Atlanta, GA (parents)

The following is from Chuck McClenon:

McClenons

Today, Walton is a town of 3000, situated about 75 miles east of Binghampton, and 200 miles northwest of New York City, as the crow flies. By road, it would be a winding and picturesque journey through the Catskills. Like most of Upstate New York, it is dairy country. Rocky and hilly from the glaciers of the Ice Age, it is not good land for plowing, the winters are cold, and the growing season short.

In the early 1800's, the land was available, and it was there that John McClenon settled, probably in 1804. He had come from Ulster, probably as an indentured servant, exchanging seven years of future service for his passage to the New World and a promise of his own land later. John was barely literate, and the name McClenon is probably an accidental misspelling. On one document, he wrote it as McChlanon. It perhaps derives from the Scottish clan name McLennan, and is similar to the Irish form McClanahan.

The Scotch-Irish descend from Scottish Presbyterians who emigrated to northern Ireland  in Reformation times. The English crown had offered attractions to these comparatively loyal Protestant subjects to settle in troublesome Catholic Ireland. Ireland is flatter, more tillable, and not as cold as Scotland, and for a century or two life may have been tolerable, but by the time of the American Revolution, opportunities were few and potato crops were beginning to fail. The Scotch-Irish were beginning to emigrate again, to the American frontier, especially the hill country of western New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Difficult land, but land nevertheless.

We know nothing of what John left behind, or where exactly in Ulster he came from. The best clue we have is from a biography of Rufus McClenon, in which it says his grandfather "came from Ireland - from the north of Ireland - very near Scotland in fact." That is evidently from the account passed down orally from John to his sons and grandsons, and if so, the mention of Scotland suggests that this was significant. At from the northeasternmost corner of Ireland, it is only 8-10 miles across the water to the Scotland. Was John from that part of Ireland, where on a clear day he could see Scotland?

John settled in the Walton area and married Elizabeth Wells (or perhaps they immigrated together. They had six children. Lawrence, the eldest, was born in 1804, followed by Phoebe, Eliza, William, Thomas (born Christmas Day, 1819), and Isaac Newton McClenon, and the spelling "McClenon" was established. A few other immigrants seem to have occasionally, randomly chosen that spelling, too. A genealogical publisher in  1992 found 75 listings for McClenons in American phone books. Of those, six are in Walton proper, four more within the same area code, and I can identify a half-dozen telephone listings of John's descendants, myself included, elsewhere in the U.S., but there are others unrelated to us, with other immigrant histories.

I have the family Bible of the Thomas McClenon family.

On February 25, 1849, Reverend William Baldwin married Thomas McClenon and Frances Anne Benedict at North Walton. 

Thomas McClenon & Frances Anne Benedict

 Rufus Buel McClenon was born November 18, 1852, and Mary, Charles, and William followed over the next seven years. Mounted in the Bible are undated photographs of the various family members, including the grandmother, Maria Priscilla Raymond Benedict. Both of Grandmother Benedict's grandfathers, William Raymond and Jeremiah Eells, had served in the Revolution. The Benedicts, Raymonds and Eells all descended from early New England settlers. The town of North Walton changed its name to Franklin in the late 1800's; biographical materials and obituary for Rufus McClenon list his birthplace as Franklin.

The summer of his eighteenth year, Rufus was left at home to mind the farm while the rest of the family went into town to watch the parade on the Fourth of July.  Rufus, deciding that he didn't want to be tied to a farm for the rest of his life, saw education as his escape. He had completed the eight years of public school which were in those days standard, and so, after being out of school for probably four years, he applied to Walton Academy, a private high school, and graduated in 1874. He then went to Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Williams College was founded in 1793, and remains to this day a small college, with an enrollment of about 2000.

Williamstown is in the northwestern corner of the state, a stone's throw from New York and Vermont, situated on the main line (formerly the New York Central) which runs from Schenectady to Boston.

Rufus B. McClenon

In a graduating class of 44 students in 1878, Rufus McClenon at age 25 was the third oldest (the youngest was a mere nineteen). The college yearbook lists his intended vocation as teaching, his politics as Republican (as were most of his classmates) his nickname as Mac (also noted in his obituary), his height as 5-7, 135, hair brown, eyes blue, shoe size 7, hat size 7-1/8. The curriculum was heavy on Greek, Latin and Mathematics. Following graduation he returned to Delaware County and sought employment as a teacher. According to one tradition, when the school authorities saw the name McClenon they snickered at the idea of one of those illiterate farmers teaching, but when they saw his college degree, they offered him a position as a principal.

Thomas McClenon died November 3, 1880, and on July 27, 1882 Rufus married Adeline White, of Walton. Rufus' younger siblings, having been to the Fourth of July parade,  were evidently satisfied with that much independence. None ever married nor strayed far from Delaware County.

William Augustus White was a prominent citizen of Walton, in business as a cooper, and for some time the publisher of the Walton Chronicle. His family, which descended from the Puritans and Pilgrims, had moved from Connecticut to North Walton shortly after his birth in 1820. He married Semanthy Eveline Metcalf, and Addie, as she was known, was born March 11, 1854, the fifth of their nine children. (In the family Bible, her birth is recorded as Mary Addeline White, and her marriage as Addie M. White.) Sometime during the Civil War, William White led a posse in pursuit of deserters, but encountered them in a dark alley and lost an eye in the scuffle. The assailants escaped.

Addie graduated from Walton Academy and went on to Vassar College. The school's motto was supposed to be, "Not to be ministered to, but to minister," but the young ladies reworded it as, "Not to be ministers, but ministers' wives." Addie was evidently a

dreaming and intellectual type, seldom accused of practicality. In her later years, it was said of her that she could get lost in a town with one street.

Practical or not, the White girls were adventurous. After graduation from Vassar in 1878, Addie took a teaching position in Newburgh, New York not far from Vassar, but after a year or two moved to Jacksonville, Illinois, one county west of Springfield. Her sister Nancy married Ernest Johnson in 1880, and they headed for the Dakota Territory. Their youngest sister Annie married Charles Edgerton in 1884 and headed for Iowa and later Kansas.

Addie White and Rufus McClenon had been classmates at Walton Academy and maintained communication through their travels. They were married in the summer of 1882, and took teaching positions together in Lake Geneva, Wisconin. A year later, on August 4, 1883, Raymond Benedict McClenon was born in Yankton, Dakota Territory, apparently while visiting her sister Nancy Johnson, whose new baby William had been born in March of that year.  Yankton is today a county seat, with a population of 12,000, on the Missouri River in the Southeast corner of South Dakota. The Johnson's second child, George Metcalf Johnson, was born in Yankton in 1885. He later wrote Westerns, and taught literature at Yale. Spyglass Range, published by Grosset and Dunlap in 1933, is the tale of a cowboy trekking around the country and joining posses while seeking vengeance for the death of his best friend who was shot from behind. By some theory of literary criticism, this is probably derived from his grandfather's experience many years previous in New York.

After three years in Lake Geneva, Rufus McClenon was offered the position of high school principal in Oconto, Wisconsin, about 50 miles north of Green Bay. Walter Holbrook McClenon was born there March 25, 1887.  That was followed by two years in Beloit, Wisconsin, before they finally settled in South Dakota the year it became a state,  in 1889. He accepted the position of principal of the high school in Sioux Falls. In 1893 he became superintendent of schools in Madison, S.D., about 50 miles northwest of Sioux Falls; that's where he was in 1898 when a brief biography of him appeared in a compendium of biographies of prominent citizens of South Dakota. An obituary notice published in the Williams College Alumni News in 1921 indicates he was superintendent of schools in Sioux Falls; he apparently returned there sometime after 1898.

Truth is stranger than fiction. When I first drafted this piece in 1994, I had heard something about "Superintendant of Schools, State of South Dakota", and had assumed Rufus McClenon had held that position.  It appears instead that the position was an elective office, and that in 1894, he ran for it, on the Prohibitionist ticket.

Raymond McClenon graduated from Yankton College and attended graduate school at Yale. He became a Professor of Mathematics at Grinnell College in Iowa. Walter graduated from Grinnell, and from the University of Southern California School of Law.

In his later years, Rufus and Addie evidently moved to southern California. He died in Artesia, California, May 26, 1920. Artesia is today between Long Beach and Anaheim.

Later, in her old age, her sight dimmed by cataracts, Addie lived with various relatives, mostly in Walton but at times with Walter and his family in Takoma Park, Maryland. Ever the intellectual and studious type, she learned to read Braille. She also managed to get lost inside the house. She died in 1939.

Perhaps because he grew up on the plains, where the roads are laid out due north and south, or perhaps as a reaction to his mother's disorientation, Walter always had an absolute sense of direction, and a fascination with geography and travel. Sometime during his college years, he studied in Germany.

Most of us, in our youth, believe we understand politics and have solutions to most of the world's problems. Only as we grow older do we recognize the complexity of the problems and the difficulty of simple solutions. In 1909, responding to the arguments of the day, Walter spent his own money to publish a book entitled "A Compromise with Socialism." Many years later, Norman Thomas, the perennial candidate of the Socialist Party, quit running for president, because, he said, everything he had advocated had been achieved. And so it is that almost everything in Walter's book has in the years since been achieved, through compromise.

In 1914, Walter worked in Sacramento for the Progressive Party. Political campaigns run night and day, and the desk he used during the daytime belonged in the evenings to a young stenographer, Ruth Koester. She complained that he left his galoshes under the desk. He invited her out, and for their first date, he took her to the state capitol building, and commented on how many steps it had. After the elections, he moved to Washington, D.C., but continued to correspond with her. They were married November 6, 1915. That may not have been the date originally planned; there is a story of missed train connections as she traveled east with her mother, but it must have been a small and impromptu ceremony.

Walter McClenon