ESU Spring 2025 Meetings

News

May 2025

We finished up our 2024-2025 season with a meeting featuring an afternoon tea. Members of the Syracuse Branch donned their hats and experienced  a sampling of tea sandwiches, a cream tea and sweets, along with a choice of teas and tisanes (herbal teas). Members Alice Borning and Pearl Fischer presented a broad spectrum of "tea experiences" they have enjoyed in both the U.S. and internationally. In addition, an ideal method of preparing a pot of tea was explained.  

Pearl Fischer (L) and Alice Borning (R)

April 2025

Sam Dance, a retired social studies teacher who volunteers as a tour guide at the Seward House in Auburn, NY, was our speaker.  Assisted by his wife Candy Dance, Mr. Dance presented a slide show and talk about the Seward House.  He introduced us to Seward's political achievements, his close friendship with former former political adversary Abraham Lincoln, and Seward's wife Francis's connection to the Underground Railroad, including her friendships with abolitionist sisters Lucretia Mott and Martha Coffin Wright and neighbor Harriet Tubman.

Precisely 160 years prior to our meeting date, plotters carried out the assassination of Lincoln and attempted to assassinate his Secretary of State, William H. Seward, as well. Mr. Dance's retelling of the attack on Seward held the audience in suspense.  But Seward lived to return to his Auburn home, dying there in 1872.

Sam and Candy Dance

March 2025

Our March meeting featured speaker Ciarrai Eaton, the Operations Director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center in Fayetteville, New York.  Her topic was Irish Immigrant Working Women in Syracuse and Onondaga County.  Beginning in the 1850's these young immigrants earned money by carrying out domestic and animal care chores, but as industry expanded, female workers in Onondaga County were employed as seamstresses, shoe makers, and cigar makers.  

They sewed shipping bags for the salt production industry or worked for the Onondaga Pottery china factory.  Former domestic workers found employment in the hotels and boarding houses that sprang up along the Erie Canal and the railroad lines which passed through Syracuse. Others found seasonal jobs, such as picking hops for the many companies producing beer in central NY.  

Throughout this time, the young immigrants sent money home to support their families and to pay for additional family members to travel to America. Thus, the process of chain migration was begun. 

Ciarrai Eaton (L) Jean Spicer (R)

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