Pompey House on the Hill, Pompey, NY

Daniel Ryan - Farmer, Saloon owner and Hotel owner

 In the beginning there was a newspaper article which implied that there was a connection between the Pompey House in Syracuse and the one in the village of Pompey.  It took a while to sort out all the information but it now appears that the Pompey House, in the city of Syracuse, possibly had a small connection to the town of Pompey, but not to the Pompey House run by Daniel Ryan. However, it appears that the Pompey stagecoach never stopped at the Pompey House, in Syracuse.     

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Among the many proprietors of the Pompey House in Syracuse, one stands out among the others, and that was Frank Jewell (Benjamin Frank Jewell). Frank and his new bride came to Syracuse from Clyde, NY in Wayne County, shortly after their marriage in 1878. Initially Jewell was employed at the Kingsley House and by 1880 he was the coachman for Jacob Crouse, a wealthy Syracuse business man. In 1892, probably with financial help from Crouse, Frank Jewell purchased the Pompey House. After two years he bought the Dixon Hotel with a partner but by 1895 Jewell had purchased the Pompey House again. By the fall of 1900 Jewell had purchased the Lakeview Hotel in Skaneateles, NY. It was while he was in Skaneateles that Frank Jewell, who had been a well-known horseman in the Central New York area, really became notorious. Jewell’s wife of 28 years died while on a visit to her hometown of Clyde in 1904. Within a year of his first wife’s death Jewell married a second time. This time it was to a young girl employed at his Lakeview Hotel by the name of Lucy Stanley. Her sudden death, under suspicious circumstances, at the same hotel in late March 1906 was described in long articles in the local newspapers. Ultimately Jewell was found not to have caused his wife’s death but the people of Skaneateles exiled him from the village none the less.

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 The Jamesville Plank Road   

The stagecoach era was entering its last decades of existence in 1883. While the longer routes had long ago been taken over by the railroads, the stagecoach drivers probably felt secure about their local routes. The automobile, or machine, as it would affectionately be known, was not on anyone’s radar screen, which also had not been invented yet. Transportation was still needed out and back to the smaller villages surrounding the larger cities in addition to shuttling passengers to and from the train depots. Thomas Mahar was the last driver of the Pompey stagecoach.  

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Even before his lease on the smaller Smith’s Hotel, the former Alexander homestead, was terminated Uncle Lew began his search for a new hotel. His efforts ultimately led him to a location in the town of DeWitt, on the Jamesville plank road near the Rock Cut just inside the town of DeWitt border. . “Strawberry Mansion is the cognomen by which I designate my recent hotel purchase,” said “Lew” Smith to-day, speaking of the place on the Jamesville plank road known as the “haunted house” and situated about two and one-half miles from the city.  

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While pulling together a web page for Jerry Conan’s General store, to incorporate some new pictures and architectural drawings of the store, I began to notice some more connections. Jerry Conan was the postmaster of Pompey and his 1st cousin, Thomas Mahar, was the mail carrier and also the Pompey stage coach driver. This led to a connection with the Jamesville plank road, the Pompey House hotel in Syracuse, and to one of its more well-known proprietors named Frank Jewell. One of Jewell’s early employers, after he arrived in Syracuse, was Jacob Crouse, a wealthy businessman, and a boulder with his name on it that became a moving tourist attraction and billboard in 1904. There was also a possible Pompey House connection with a strange character named Lew Smith and then that led to a really strange roadhouse on the Jamesville plank road, also run by Smith, called the Strawberry Mansion.

Pompey House: 1883-1936; Town Club: 1936-1942; Clover Club: 1943-1967

The original point of interest was the determination of the connection, if any, between the two Pompey Houses and that led to the “picturesque character” D. Lewis Smith, a noted hotel operator at that time. It turned out that although Smith had run a small tavern, called Smith’s Hotel, at the corner of Fayette and Montgomery, his connection with this hotel was ended in the Spring of 1883 when the Vestry of St. Paul’s Church purchased the corner property from the descendants of the Alexander family and bought out Smith’s lease. There was no hotel or tavern in Syracuse prior to 1883 that was known as the Pompey House, this name was given to the old Alexander homestead after it arrived at its new location. Two new characters entered the picture at this time with the removal of the tavern and other buildings from the corner to make way for the construction of the 3rd St. Paul’s Church. German C. Potter and James L. Hill submitted petitions to the Common Council for permission to move the structures to a new site on the southeastern corner of Almond and Cedar Streets.

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Each character described in this paper seems to have a connection with yet another character and in most cases that character was a person. However, Frank Jewell’s early employer, Jacob Crouse, had a posthumous connection with a huge eighty ton granite boulder which today bears the Crouse family name. Crouse died in November 1900 and by 1904 the family had decided to have a large granite boulder placed on the family plot in Oakwood Cemetery. The chosen boulder was on a farm near Split Rock and it began its journey in February 1904 while the country roads were still frozen. The journey took about four months while the newspapers reported its daily progress over the city streets and gave its location so that interested persons might visit the traveling landmark. Saloon keepers offered money if the boulder would stop in front of their establishments while other persons posted advertisements on the moving billboard.   

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