Of course an event like Hydesville was bound to catch the press and as the news reached the nearest major city, Rochester, the newspapers began to report on it. Sadly the Rochester newspapers for the period have not yet been digitalised so we must rely on the repetition of their articles in other papers. The immediate responses were at best strange, this is reproduced from the Rochester Advertiser, probably from about the 25th April.
Then on the 13th May The Albany Evening Herald copied from The Rochester Democrat
Clearly the whole event was being dismissed as some kind of localised hysteria with no reality.
Then a later report appears, clearly linking the local story with the information from the EE Lewis Pamphlet. This is repeated in the 18th May 1848 Green Bay Advocate with the main story coming from the Rochester Advertiser.
As the article says, we await further developments. However, although articles such as these appeared widely in New York State and even managed to be reported throughout the United States and also in many other countries, the lack of any significant further developments meant that little more appeared over the next 18 months.
What then do we know about that period of time and what the Fox Sisters did, or whether there was any broader spread of the contact with Spirit? What we have to rely upon are some newspaper articles, Samuel Byron Brittan and Andrew Jackson Davis’s Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher and the digitalised records of Isaac & Amy Post, great friends of the Fox Family, who lived in Rochester, particularly their letters and correspondence now available on line ( http://rbsc.library.rochester.edu/ ). The Posts were committed Quakers, who had moved to the reformed sect, which was working within the anti- lavery movement, helping with the underground railway which moved escaped slaves from the South to the free Northern States. Indeed the Post’s house was one of the stops on the Underground railway, with secret rooms where slaves were hidden until they could be moved on. They were also heavily involved in the new women’s rights movement.
We know that when Maggie and Kate arrived in Rochester a circle of friends formed around them to maintain the contact with Spirit, The inner core of this were involved in setting up the Rochester demonstration of mediumship in November 1849. Key participants in teh circle were the Posts, Eliab Capron and George Willets. They were regularly joined by other visitors many of whom came to the Post’s House to discuss the anti-slavery and female rights issues.
Indeed in one of these notable visitors, William Cooper Nell wrote a letter to Isaac Post, on the 11th August 1849, ( https://rbscpexhibits.lib.rochester.edu/viewer/3040 ) saying that ““The Mysterious Knockings” are exciting some interest in Boston
The Chronotype. has published 3 articles. I suppose from the Pen of E. W. Capron the first I send You by Mail, the last contain an account of what was manifested in Wesleys Family“. These are important articles, not just because so little was being written about the “mysterious noises”, but because they are the earliest writings by Eliab Capron on the subject. However, as the only holdings are at The Library of Congres and no publication dates are mentioned it is very hard to get copies of them (albeit the Library of Congress is very helpful to researchers if they have details which enable them to find an article quickly and have helped me with copies of other articles in the past ).
I note from Nell’s writing that the last piece written was concerned the Wesley’s. It is interesting that, very quickly after the November Demonstration in early 1850, Eliab Capron and Henry Barron published a book about the events in which the first 3 chapters cover background history, with the third written about the Wesley’s. It may be a logical jump to suggest those chapters contain the material he wrote about for the Chronotype ( E Capron & H Barron 1850 Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion Withe Spirit https://ia902600.us.archive.org/14/items/explanationandh00caprgoog/explanationandh00caprgoog.pdf )
William Cooper Nell (picture in the public domain)
We do know that the youngest sister Kate was sent to live with the family of Eliab Capron in Auburn hoping to stabilse her life in a normal environment. However all this did was to spread the rapping to Auburn. There are a few mentions of rapping elsewhere but by and large the story may have become just another historical curiosity without a further push by Spirit.
To get this information we also have to rely on some retrospective reporting in books, newspapers and articles. This reliance can be a problem because it is rather unreliable about the real facts, generally in regard to the many books about the Fox Family, but particularly when involving information provided by the elder sister Anne Leah, some 20 years older than the eldest of the two girls at Hydesville. To explain this, at Hydesville Margaretta was in her “fifteenth year” with Catharine 12 years old at that date (See Psypioneer http://www.iapsop.com/psypioneer/psypioneer_v4_n9_sep_2008.pdfRiddle of the records Lis Warwood). Anne Leah was not present at the cottage on the 31st March, she only arrived one month later, “by fast canal barge”, after she was became aware of the events that had occurred. Anne Leah’s involvement with the girls will, over time, be seen to become a problem. Indeed there is early evidence that she, herself, had no mediumship skills. Her reports will embellish the truth, adding things that never happened and progressively make her seem more important to Hydesville than she was. At the same time her age declines, by 1870, some 22 years after Hydesville, when she was actually 57, her age, officially in the census, was 40 and when she writes the almost fictional Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism in 1885 ( https://archive.org/details/missinglinkinmod00underich ) she describes the three sisters as all being “little more than small children”.
Of the other reports to be found, two of the key people involved were also close friends, one was George Willets , cousin to Isaac Post, the other Eliab Capron. Capron had come to know the Posts through their mutual involvement in the anti slavery and women’s rights movement. Indeed they were present at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 that gave birth to the women’s rights movement ( http://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/upload/_7-HRS-SectionI-10-18-08-printed-1EBA.pdf ) . This also shows the close association of the Posts with many leading figures around the abolition of slavery and womens rights. At times several of these figures, like Frederick Douglas, Susan Anthony & Elizabeth Stanton would join who would like Capron and Willets join the Posts and Fox Family in the evenings with Spirit that the two girls held in Rochester with both the friends and visitors over the period 1848 to 1849.
Theoretically this section should continue into 1850. However, with the First Demonstration of Mediumship at Corinthian Hall in Rochester in November 1849 being such a major and vital event in the beginnings of Modern Spiritualism it needs its own post. Then 1850 is the launching pad for Modern Spiritualism with a huge amount of press coverage, across the United States and into Europe. Then the introduction of the term Spiritualist, in S.B Brittans explanatory lecture in New York in September 1850.
For reference http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/univercoelum/index.html
This incorporates The Spiritual Philosopher
Additional Reading
Philosophy of Modern Miracles S B Brittsn 1850 http://iapsop.com/ssoc/1850__dweller_in_the_temple___philosophy_of_modern_miracles.pdf
http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/shekinah/ SB Brittan
http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/buchanans_journal_of_man/
The Philosophy and History of Spiritualism 