Mary Lynde Babcock

Biography

Mary Babcock survived the burning of the steamer Erie on Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes along the United States–Canada border, in August 1841. Her husband, Charles J. Lynde, did not. The disaster came just two years after their marriage and changed the course of her young adulthood.

She was a daughter of Truxton, New York, merchant Asa Babcock and Elizabeth Noyes. The Babcock genealogy records her marriage to Charles on August 6, 1839. A contemporary newspaper from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, identified him as an attorney of that city. On Monday, August 9, 1841, the Erie left Buffalo, New York, for Chicago, Illinois. Fire broke out that evening near Silver Creek on Lake Erie’s New York shore. The Milwaukee Sentinel’s account, published on August 17, named Charles and his brother Watts among the dead and Mrs. Lynde among those rescued.

The report gives an unusually specific account of Mary’s survival. She was in the water with a life preserver when the captain, himself in a swamped boat, threw her its remaining oar. She caught it. The steamer Clinton reached the scene later that night and took up survivors. The Sentinel described Mrs. Lynde as the only woman saved.

The family genealogy records a son, Charles J. Lynde, born on April 21, 1842, after his father’s death. He died on July 23, 1843. Mary’s remarriage followed on February 4, 1846, at Syracuse, New York, to Edward Bartlett Wicks. The early records of Syracuse’s First Presbyterian Church place her admission on July 2, 1847 and explicitly identify her by all three surnames—Babcock, Lynde and Wicks—with her prior church connection at Truxton. This church entry joins the stages of her life in a contemporary institutional record.

Further losses followed. Her daughter Ellen, born in 1846, died in February 1848; a son Edward, born the previous month, died in July 1849. Sons Frederick and another Edward were born in 1851 and 1856. Mary was widowed again when her second husband died in 1872, and she herself died in May 1882.

Her life is recoverable through more than marriages and dates: a named survivor in contemporary disaster reporting, a mother repeatedly bereaved, and a woman whose church record preserves the continuity between her Truxton origins and Syracuse household.

Her son Frederick’s full name in the family record is Frederick Stanton Wicks. Edward Bartlett Wicks worked as a leather merchant and banker. Mary’s recorded burial is at Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse.

The family chronology places her birth at Truxton in 1818, while another compilation gives 1817. Accounts disagree on whether she died at Brooklyn or Syracuse; she was buried at Syracuse.