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History - Sodus

The Literary Light of Sodus Bay

Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet was a prolific writer of the mid 1800's, who was born in Wayne County. She was the daughter of Dr. William Nixon Lummis and his second wife, Sarah Maxwell - one of their six children - and named after Dr. Lummis' first wife, Elizabeth Fries. Her birth date is in question. The Dictionary of American Biography gives her birth date as October 1818. An abstract from the "Record of Descendants of Edward Lummis of Ipswich, Mass.," gives her birth as October 31, 1809. Certain aspects of her career make the 1810 birth date seem more plausible.

Elizabeth Ellet attended school in Geneva and at Friend's Female Seminary in Aurora, New York. In 1835 she married Dr. William H. Ellet, a professor of chemistry at Columbia College in New York City. Also in 1835, Mrs. Ellet published her first book, Poems, Translated and Original, and saw her one and only play performed. She moved with her husband to South Carolina soon after they were married, and lived here until 1849, before returning to New York City. Mr. Ellet died in 1859 and Mrs. Ellet died June 3, 1877.

Between 1835 and 1870, Ellet published eighteen books, wrote numerous poems and articles, and one play. Many of her poems made reference to her native land, Sodus Bay. In her Summer Rambles in the West (1853), she devoted much time to a description of the beauties of Sodus Bay and the activities of the local people. Another favorite topic of Mrs. Ellet was women and their influence on the world. Such works include: Women of the American Revolution, published in 1848; Pioneer Women of the West, published in 1852; Women Artists of the World, published in 1859; and Eminent and Heroic Women of America.

Ellet explained her reasons for writing Women of the American Revolution as follows. "The heroism of Revolutionary women has passed from rememberance with the generation who witnessed it; or is seen only by faint and occasional glimpses... To render a measure of justice, inadequate it must be, to a few of the American matrons, whose names deserve to live in rememberance and to exhibit something of the domestic side of the Revolutionary picture is the object of this book."

Two of the New Yorkers who were mentioned in Mrs. Ellet's book were Catharine Schuyler and Jane Cannon Campbell. Catharine Schuyler was the wife of Phillip Schuyler who represented the American cause in negotiations with the Iroquois. She was noted for her hospitality to friends and enemies. She was even hostess to General Bourgoyne, after his defeat at Saratoga. Jane Campbell and her children were captured by the Indians during the raids into the Cherry Valley. Mrs. Campbell spent a year at Indian Castle, the capital of the Seneca Nation, before her children's and her release was secured in an exchange for the family of Colonel Walter Butler.

Written by Dorothy S. Facer, former WC Historian

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