Elias Rickard:
Who are you?
That’s the question Tony Desmond is asking after finding a bundle of about a two dozen letters, most of them addressed to an Elias Rickard of Howes Cave, forgotten in a desk in his late parents’ Canajoharie home.
Mr. Desmond found the letters, most of them postmarked circa 1887, in the attic of the Route 10, Marshville house his parents spent their entire married life in.
He’d like to get them in the hands of someone with ties to Elias Rickard and though Rickard is a common enough Schoharie County name, so far all of his efforts have been dead ends.
“I went through the phone book and left a lot of messages, but never heard back from anyone,” Mr. Desmond said.
“There was one woman who said the Rickard I needed to talk to, the family historian, had just died. So maybe I’m just too late.”
Mr. Desmond, who lives in the Town of Sharon and is the former Schoharie County sheriff, has had the stack of letters for nearly two years.
He came across them after his mother died, upstairs in the attic he’d played in as a child.
What confounds him most, he said, is that he can’t think why his parents, who both grew up near Canajoharie, would have letters from someone in Howes Cave.
There are no familiar names in the letters, he said—one’s from a Millie Baldwin; another, a sort of bank statement, is from a GP Foote Esq. from Hobart—and there’s nothing special about their contents: in the days long before phones and email, they’re all along the lines of “sorry I missed you when you stopped by yesterday.”
Likely because they were stored in a dry, dark place, the letters and the few postcards are all in excellent condition, the ink and pencil they’re written in unfaded over time.
It’s possible, Mr. Desmond said, that the desk and the letters were in the house when his parents bought it in 1941, but the previous owner was a Byers, he said, not a Rickard.
It’s possible, he said, that his parents never knew the letters were even there, “Though my father would keep everything,” he said.
“I’d just like to get them in the hands of Elias’s family,” he said. Maybe some young kid…it might not mean something to them now, but this is history.”
Anyone who might know who Elias Rickard was can contact Mr. Desmond at…