Susie Born 1861 Died 1913; Jennie Born 1864 Died 1932

St. John’s Reformed Church Cemetery. Large, white column monument up front, south of the church building

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Sisters and Teachers

Susie and Jennie shared many things. Both were daughters whose names appear on their own side of a smaller monument as well as engraved on the big Fulton monument.

Susie and Jennie were the daughters of Ephraim Elisha Fulton and Margaret Smith Fulton. Both grew up on the Fulton Farm on Turkey Hill Road in the Town of Milan. Both never married. And both are buried at St. John’s along with other Fultons of their family. Their names appear on their own side of a smaller marker as well as being engraved on the large Fulton family monument.

Susie and Jennie were both teachers at one time or another at Jackson Corners, Cokertown, Elizaville, Rock City, and Mount Ross. Susie taught kindergarten in Red Hook in a large “double house” at the upper end of North Broadway, and school at District No. 7 in Rock City before 1872 when the school was in its old locationShe played a “rich-toned and sweet” Esty organ at the Cokertown church and “had a fine musical taste, and considerable ability,” per Burton Coon’s memories.  He reported that Susie Fulton was a “person of culture and refinement, a graduate of De Garmo’s institute, member of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.” He considered her a community leader in these respects and had nothing but good things to say about her. In May of 1903 Susie was sent home sick with Typhoid fever from her teaching job at the “Poughkeepsie Orphan House and Home for the Friendless” (which exists today as Children’s Home of Poughkeepsie). Their website gives a brief history of the organization, including remarking on trouble with contagious disease at the same time that Susie was made sick. She left that facility and taught in July of 1903 at the Newburg Orphan’s Home. The Poughkeepsie Evening Enterprise thought that she was “a superior person for the responsible charge.”

The Fulton Homestead made quite an impression on many people. A family friend, James M. DeGarmo, wrote a poem inspired by it, calling the site Fultonia, according to Upper Red Hook: an American Crossroads by Roger M. Leonard. Leonard quoted DeGarmo’s introduction to the poem: “Fultonia is the ancestral home of a branch of the Fulton family, handed down from father to son for several generations. It is situated in Milan, Dutchess County, and is owned by John P. Fulton, who now resides there with his family and two sisters. To them this poem is dedicated.”

The penultimate stanza of DeGarmo’s poem describing Fultonia (and quoted by Leonard) is:

“Thy heartfelt welcome all have known,
Sincere, and warm, and kind;
Who from thy genial hearth hath gone,
Leaves tenderest wish behind.”