An old photograph, a young woman in disguise, and a night at the theater in Schuyler Lake, NY
There was something about the old photograph that didn’t quite add up.
The young figure staring confidently into the camera is dressed for the West: broad-brimmed hat, boots, trousers and a gun belt. It is the sort of photograph that might easily be filed away as an unidentified cowboy from the closing years of the nineteenth century.
Fortunately, someone wrote on the back.
“Mark Lynch, better known to you as Esther Cushman.”
That inscription turned a curious old photograph into a mystery. Who was Mark Lynch? And why was Esther Cushman better known by that name?
The answer was waiting in the newspapers of December 1896.
A Play at the Bullion House
On Friday evening, December 11, 1896, residents of Schuyler Lake gathered at the Bullion House for a performance of a popular drama called Joe Ruggles ….or, The Girl Miner.
The production was not simply an evening’s entertainment. It was being presented as a benefit for the school library.
The Richfield Springs Mercury announced the performance in its December 3 edition and printed the cast. Among the characters was Madge, a young woman who, during the course of the story, assumes a disguise.
The newspaper described the role quite plainly:
Madge “assumes the character of Mark Lynch, a young miner.”
Playing Madge—and therefore Mark Lynch—was Miss E. Cushman.
Mystery solved.
The apparent young cowboy in the photograph wasn’t Mark Lynch at all. It was twenty-year-old Esther Cushman of Schuyler Lake, photographed in costume for the play.
Joe Ruggles Comes to Town
Joe Ruggles …or, The Girl Miner was the work of playwright Frank J. Dean. The story moved between city life and the western mining country, providing amateur theatrical companies with villains, disguises, romance, comedy and a generous helping of melodrama.
Madge’s transformation into the young miner Mark Lynch was one of its more memorable devices—and presumably a particularly entertaining one for an audience whose members knew perfectly well who was underneath that hat.
Schuyler Lake’s production was apparently an ambitious undertaking.
Another notice in the Otsego Farmer reported that music would be provided by an orchestra led by Miss Williams, a graduate of the Syracuse Conservatory of Music, and that a male quartet would also participate.
The cast included a number of familiar local names. Besides Esther Cushman, performers included Milo H. Pratt, Clyde D. Rose, Kenneth D. Watson, John A. S. Huyck, Stewart Southworth, Lowell Downs, Edna Smith and Myrtle McGarity.
Admission was 15 cents, with reserved seats costing 25 cents.
And the community turned out.
The Otsego Farmer reported the following week that the performance had attracted a large and appreciative audience. The evening also included drills and recitations, and receipts amounted to about $37.
That may not sound like much today, but this was 1896—and the proceeds were going toward books for the local school.
Not Just a Schuyler Lake Phenomenon
The play was by no means unique to Schuyler Lake.
Contemporary newspaper notices show Joe Ruggles; or, The Girl Miner being staged by amateur performers in communities well beyond Otsego County. Productions appeared elsewhere in New York and New England and as far away as Michigan and California.
That helps put the Schuyler Lake performance into perspective.
In an era before radio, movies and television, amateur theatricals were an important part of community life. A play could be ordered, rehearsed by local residents and staged in a hotel ballroom, town hall or school. The audience wasn’t watching distant celebrities.
They were watching their neighbors.
And in Schuyler Lake on that December night, one of those neighbors was Esther Cushman.
The Woman Behind Mark Lynch
Esther Cushman was born in 1876, the daughter of George and Mary Jane Cushman. She would have been about twenty years old when she took the role of Madge in the Schuyler Lake production.
We know frustratingly little about what the evening meant to Esther herself. Did she enjoy acting? Was this her first appearance on a stage? Was playing a young miner considered especially daring or simply great fun? The newspapers tell us what happened, but not what she thought about it.
What they do reveal is a glimpse of a young woman participating in the social life of her community at the end of the nineteenth century. Esther was not merely a name in a census or family record. For at least one evening, she was an actress helping raise money to put books on the shelves of the local school library.
Esther eventually married LeGrande Southworth. She died in 1934.
The performance itself was far more fleeting. The scenery came down. The costumes were put away. The money was counted and the proceeds went to the school. People returned to their everyday lives.
More than a century later, however, a handful of newspaper notices and one remarkable photograph allow us to put some of those pieces back together.
We can picture the Bullion House filling with townspeople, musicians preparing to play, young men and women waiting nervously for their entrances—and twenty-year-old Esther Cushman preparing to walk onto the stage disguised as a miner named Mark Lynch.
The person who wrote on the back of her photograph probably never imagined that those few words would matter to someone generations later.
But that is often how history survives.
Not through great monuments or famous events, but through a newspaper clipping, an old photograph, a name written in pencil—and someone curious enough to ask what it means.
Mark Lynch really was Esther Cushman.
And for one December evening in 1896, the people of Schuyler Lake were in on the secret.