The Hatching Cat of Gotham

I came across the following story while conducting some research for my upcoming Cat About Town cat-themed walking tours of Brooklyn Heights (more to come on these tours shortly!). The tour will be ending at the Plymouth Church, so imagine my surprise when I found out that Henry Ward Beecher, the famous first pastor of this church, was a cat man!

Henry Ward Beecher was an American clergyman, social reformer, and speaker known for his support of the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, to name just a few of his passionate causes. In 1847, Beecher became the first pastor of the Plymouth Church on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights.

In addition to his clergy duties, Beecher was the chief editor of the Christian Union. In April 1870, he wrote the following lengthy tribute to cats in this publication (the “we” may be implying that his wife, Eunice White Beecher, also liked cats):

When we profess a warm liking for cats, we don’t wish to be judged by too rigorous an ideal. We do not like them above all animals, but simply among other things. It is folly to compare them with horses, dogs, birds, and judge them by qualities which they were not sent into the world to possess. It is as cats that we like them.

They hold a place in the series which nothing else can fill, and in their place they are to be admired. They are reproached with fierceness, with selfishness, with treachery. But the fierceness is ancestral. The cat is appointed of men to destroy vermin.

It must match itself with the game it hunts. In the battle of wainscots and crevices where rats do harbor, and mice, cats must be fierce. Every litter of rats is a threat at the pantry and cupboard, and a defiance to cats. What a cat’s normal constitution is, we have no book that discloses. But if there is a rudimentary conscience in a cat, without doubt the alleged fierceness is but an irregular action of the moral sense. It is eagerness in performance of duty.

Do we not like inflections of conscience in the human race? ls the cat anything but the inquisitor of the cellar and the barn? Is it not the heresy-hunter of the feline sex? With what unerring instinct does it suspect!

How keen is its eye, how still its bearing, and how terrible its spring, when some luckless heretic of the granary or cupboard ventures to publish himself? If nature has whispered to the cat, “Lo I make thee ruler over all vermin,” ought not every conscientious cat to exercise justice to the uttermost?

They are called selfish. We sorrowfully admit that cats are not generous–but we see no evidence of a grasping, avaricious selfishness. They have self respect. They know instinctively whether they are liked or hated. They hold themselves aloof from strangers because they have had too much experience of the world’s opinion of cats.

It is said that a cat will court you, rub against your knee, solicit your hand upon your head, for the mere sake of its own pleasure. As this is an exhibition never permitted in human life, no wonder you are disgusted with it! But our own experience and observation teach us that cats are susceptible of attachments among themselves and toward men, and even toward animals of different species.

If kindly treated, they will often manifest as much affection as a dog…Is there not in such a cat something of the fidelity of the dog? A cat is sooner taught the properties of life than is a dog, and well grown, with half a chance, is far neater than dogs or horses. Only birds are as neat as cats.

Their power, grace, agility, and shrewdness are known of all. If we were obliged to choose which we would have, a cat or a dog, we should unhesitatingly say, Both of them!

The attachment which human beings form to cats speaks well for these domestic hunters. The family cat is as much the joy of children as the family dog.”

Hoosier Cat

At the end of Beecher’s extensive essay on cats, he mentioned a letter he had received from a young boy in Boone County, Indiana. The boy told Beecher that his family was moving to Arkansas, and his father told him that they could not afford to pay for the cat to come with them.

According to the boy, the female cat was about two years old and gray with white feet and a white nose. The boy asked his father if they could ship the cat to Henry Ward Beecher, but again, his father said they could not afford to ship the cat.

“I know you like pets,” the boy wrote to Beecher. “If you do not want the cat, I will not expect to hear from you. And if you do want him you can let me know.”

Beecher did want the cat. He responded, “We accept the care of the cat, and will be as good to it as we can. It was a humane thing in you to see that your cat had a good home. With your leave, she shall be called the Hoosier Cat. God bless in your new home.”

As Beecher explained to his readers, he directed the boy to send the cat in a box by express, directed to Peekskill, NY. “The expressmen are kind on such occasions, he said, and no doubt will feed Pussy, and see that she has fair play on the road. If they will be reasonable in charges, he would not begrudge the bill for the sake of receiving the Hoosier boy’s cat.”

“Here is a Hoosier boy, who has a favorite cat, and being about to move to Arkansas, he looks about to pick the man on this continent most likely to do justice by the cat; and, blessing on his head! He has selected us! It is the most flattering compliment of our lives. The Universities that were about to offer degrees can step aside now–we have no need of them.”

A Brief History of Beecher’s Brooklyn Heights

When Beecher moved to Brooklyn in 1847, he lived at 126 Columbia Heights, just a few blocks west of the church. In 1870, when he agreed to adopt Hoosier Cat, he was living at 82 Columbia Heights (today the site of the Harry Chapin Playground), which is where he resided from about 1859 to 1878.

Beecher’s last residence was at 124 Hicks Street (corner of Clark Street), a 19th-century stone mansion built for Navy Rear Admiral Silas Horton Stringham and his wife, Henrietta Hicks Stringham. It was in this home, which Beecher leased from Mrs. Stringham, that the preacher died in 1887.

This home, pictured below, was torn down in 1907 to make way for a modern apartment building.

When Mrs. Stringham died in October 1888, she was the last of of the famous Hicks family, who were among the very first of Brooklyn’s settlers. Her father was Jacob Middagh Hicks and her uncle was John Middagh Hicks.

Brothers Jacob and John were the sons of Maritje Middagh Hicks and Samuel “Woods” Hicks (a lumber dealer) and the grandchildren (on their mother’s side) of Jan Gerrittse Middagh and Hannah Middagh.

The Hicks and Middaghs were two of the largest property owners in Brooklyn Heights, then called Clover Hill. The Hicks brothers inherited most of their property–all part of the original Middagh estate–through their mother.

The Middagh farm dates back to about 1657, when Aert (aka Anthonze or Teunsen) Middagh, a hatter from Utrecht in the Netherlands, came to the new settlement. He and his wife, Brekje Hansen Bergen, married around 1661.

In the 18th century, John Middagh, also a hatter, built what was called “John Middagh’s big house,” which stood on the southeast corner of present-day Old Fulton and Henry Streets. The first Church of England services in Brooklyn took place in the Middagh barn behind the house until 1787. A portion of the home was still standing as late as 1866.

During the Revolution, the lands in this area were used as a burial ground for British soldiers and sailors; the graves were leveled off at the end of the war when the Hicks family first established their home.

Jacob lived with his wife and children in the Hicks homestead, a stone farm house which stood in the fields not far from what is now the intersection of Hicks and Old Fulton Streets (back then, Old Fulton was called Old Ferry Street; it was originally a cow path leading to the ferry).

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the home as “an ancient, roomy, low roofed house of stone, roughly plastered over and shaded by two immense willow trees.” The large homestead is noted on the map below.

John and his wife lived small frame house on the southwest corner of Hicks and Doughty streets. This is the smaller house noted on the far right of the map below. (The map was drawn by surveyor Jeremiah Lott of Flatbush, following a dispute between the Hicks brothers and their neighbor Aert Middagh as to the boundary line between their respective properties.)

Although Jacob and John had more than enough money to live comfortably without working, Jacob sold lumber and John sold milk. In later years, the brothers built three new homes for themselves on Hicks Street near Clark Street. John died in 1829 at the age of 77 and Jacob died in 1843 at the age of 93.

In closing, here is a limerick written about Beecher by poet and fellow cat-man Oliver Herford:

Said a great congregational preacher
to a hen, “You’re a beautiful creature.”
And the hen, just for that,
Laid an egg in his hat,
And thus did the Hen reward Beecher.