Feeding the soldiers who guarded Lock 13
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 08-20-16
Margaret Cook fed soldiers who guarded Lock 13 on the Mohawk River/Barge Canal against sabotage in World War I. Margaret, my grandmother, lived south of the waterway in Randall along what is today’s Route 5-S. The soldiers were stationed north of the river in Yosts.
This summer the state opened a rest stop on the westbound side of the Thruway in Randall, adjacent to Lock 13. The Taste of New York store there, operated by Liberty Enterprises, offers goods from the Mohawk Valley and information on historic sites. My history books and others are sold at the rest stop.
Born Margaret Wright in the Catskill Mountains hamlet of Chichester in 1873, my grandmother was married twice. Her first marriage to Brooklyn carpenter John Haas ended in divorce but produced one son, Harry Haas.
In 1909 Margaret married Yates Cook, who was twenty years older, and moved to Randall, where her new husband managed the local store. His brother was Willett Cook, founder of the Canajoharie Courier newspaper.
Yates Cook’s first wife, also named Margaret, had died in 1908 when hit by a freight train near the passenger station in Fultonville as she crossed the tracks on the West Shore line. She and Yates had no children. She had gone to Fultonville by train to attend a surprise party for her sister.
Yates and my grandmother had three children--Jane, Yates Junior and Julia, my mother. My grandfather died in 1915 from a ruptured blood vessel as he hitched up a horse and wagon for a trip to Fonda.
The outbreak of war and the need to feed soldiers guarding the canal lock, then an important freight transportation link, made it feasible for my grandmother to remain in Randall during the war.
She left behind a photo album made by one of the soldiers. Margaret was a cook by name and nature and the photo captions all use that word to describe her--Cook and the Midnight Mechanic, Cook and the Loafer and the Roughneck and the Cook.
A young woman called Sis is pictured holding a rifle while wearing a soldier’s coat. My mother’s photo caption is Julia—the queen of Randall.
One of my grandmother’s “boys” is identified because of a 1917 clipping pasted in the photo album from the Utica Saturday Globe newspaper.
The article quoted Private William J. Allen of Fonda, a member of Company C, Second Regiment, New York Infantry, “Private Allen writes that Mrs. Cook is a widow with three small children. She has been cook for the boys at Yosts since the war broke out and 14 of ‘her boys’ are in France and seven more are in training camps. She has mothered them all and the boys look to her for smiles and other necessities as well as for their meals.
“Mrs. Cook has seven Liberty Bonds and is buying (war stamps). She asks for her change in Thrift Stamps of which she has several books. The boys in France who have boarded with her she does not forget but sends them cigarettes or money to buy them. She is now sending
Christmas gifts. Her constant thought is to keep the boys happy and contented with army life. Private Allen wishes there were more who would buy bonds and help the government to bring the boys back to America.”
When the war ended in 1918, Margaret Cook and her children moved to Amsterdam where she ran a boarding house on Forbes Street in the East End. She lived with us when I was young and died in 1953 at age 80. She and her husband Yates are buried at Maple Avenue Cemetery near Fultonville.
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