Caroline and Albert Stage

The only daughter of Joseph & Phoebe Cowen, the first owners of Cowen Farm, was likely born in 1838 as Caroline Cowen. Though little is directly known about her childhood, she lived on the farm for at least much of her early childhood. In 1857, at the age of just 19, Joseph willed the land of Cowen Farm over to Caroline with the stipulation that he have the right to use the land for the remainder of his life. The transfer was a common practice to ensure that the valuable land where a profitable canal traversed remained within the family, and in this case prevented the land from passing to one of Phoebe's children from her first marriage. Female ownership of land was common during this time in Sullivan County.

Caroline Cowen and Albert Stage married in 1864 at the ages of about 26 and 29 respectively, the same year that Joseph Cowen died. They continued to work the land of Cowen Farm and are known to have produced milk, butter, rye, Indian corn, Irish potatoes, and eggs for market. They also implemented new agricultural methods of the 1880s to give them higher yields given the beginning of the economic downturn for the canal. For example, they produced more eggs than their neighbors despite having a smaller number of chickens. At the time, scientists had recently discovered that raising chickens in warmer, sunnier, conditions led to a higher production of eggs and healthier chickens; it is likely that the Stages implemented many of these practices on their farm.

Similarly, in a newspaper report of a social gathering that the Stages held, they were noted to have strawberries and cream that were “seldom equaled, and cherries, too, of the very best such as Mr. Stage knows just how to cultivate.” The source went on to reiterate that “the strawberries go ahead of anything we have seen of their kind raised in this county.”

Caroline and Albert likely sold their goods to the public as Caroline’s father did, however agricultural census records indicate that they had significantly less of an output than what Joseph Cowen produced. This suggests a smaller reliance on farming for their day-to-day existence.

Moreover, their strawberries and agricultural goods were not the only thing that made the Stages a prominent name in Sullivan County. Albert, for example, was a public school teacher and later elected the School Commissioner of Sullivan County from 1862 to 1866. After that position, he worked in the mercantile business and was employed by lumbermen, tanners, and manufacturers. In other words, it was much more than Cowen Farm that kept the Stage family busy.

All in all, Albert and Caroline Stage worked their way up from humble beginnings to become what a neighbor, John Willard Johnston, called a “union of virtue and intelligence,” and later remarked that Caroline was a “model in domestic and social life.” This is a stark contrast to that of Caroline’s parents who were known to be quite bold and brash. Albert and Caroline had two sons together who likely enjoyed more comfortable living on the farm than Caroline did. In agricultural censuses, the farm was valued on the high end of their neighbors ($3,000 in real estate and $1,500 in personal).

After the closure of the Delaware and Hudson Canal in 1898, local farms were not able to operate as they once did without the business that the canal brought, and the growth of large, high-production Midwestern farms made it difficult for small farms to compete in the national market. The agricultural fairs in Sullivan County stopped in 1915, one year after Caroline Stage died. Cowen Farm was later sold as a vacation home as both sons were living out of the area. The Cowen-Stages ultimately owned the land for a minimum of 80 years.

According to the Port Jervis Evening Gazette, it is believed that at the time that Albert died in 1915, he was the last surviving passenger who traveled on the first train of the Erie Railroad, which then ran from Lackawaxen, PA to Binghamton, NY. He was the youngest person aboard that train at the age of 13 when it departed in 1848, another testament to the deep roots that both Albert and Caroline had in the Upper Delaware River Valley.