The Fine Feathered Legacy of Looney Lewis in the Middle

By Bob Ferris

I have a recollection of a pheasant-feather hat—sort of a low, pillbox affair.  It might have been my mother’s (Mary Robb Settles), her mother’s (Edna Dora Robb) or could have belonged to my other grandmother (Elizabeth Gouverneur Morris Ramsay).  A church service sort of thing.  An object of fascination that drew stares from children and is not at all fashionable today. A thing of dark closets and mothball smells.  

Thinking about this headgear now opens a field full of recollections and associations.  It makes me think of the three women in question and the ever-changing tableau of fashion.  It makes me think too of the Lacey Act, Theodore Roosevelt, the founding of the national wildlife refuge system and the damage of the style-driven, bird plume trade of a hundred years ago and more.  That biodiversity threat that catalyzed a portion of the conservation movement and gave me purpose and employment years later.  Much of this early movement founded literally on feathers.

This faint memory makes me think of birds in general.  My visits to Aldo Leopold’s fabled shack in Baraboo and watching Sandhill Cranes fly overhead while reclining on the Autumn-cooled, white sands of the Wisconsin River with my friend Murray Lloyd and others.  It reminds me of Trumpeter Swans I’ve known (see above).  And sadly, it also makes me think that those celebrated wildlife gains of yesteryear and others that are at risk at a time when these areas and additional lands are needed most.  

The thought of feathers draws me too into history and family.  The Yankee Doodle-ness that runs so thoroughly within me and my family starts, after all, with a town, a pony and a feather.   Which brings me to the one I call “Lewis in the Middle.”  But some background first.

A Macaroni wig the inspiration for the "Macaroni"mentioned in Yankee Doodle.

In the 17th and 18th centuries there was once a manor called Morrisania named after the family of two Welsh brothers who were soldiers in England and then traders out of Barbados—Lewis and Richard Morris.  I descend from Captain Richard Morris one of Cromwell’s “roundheads” who fled England to join his brother when the political and religious tides turned in their homelands (see here).  Richard bought land in New York in the 1660s that included some acres once owned by a man named Jonas Bronck.  Bronck only lived in the area for four years, but we remember him now by the shortened name Bronx. 

Lewis Morris I, II and III

Most who try to cover our family history during this time come down with what I would call “Lewis Fever” because there are at least five related men know as Lewis Morris—all great men and associated with many of the same large holdings in New York and New Jersey.  In my efforts to make sense of this I  tend to discard the uncle Lewis and also the cousin Lewis (son of a third brother Thomas) and focus on the three men named Lewis Morris who ruled Morrisania as lords of the manor and held “ancient privileges” for roughly a century starting during the closing decade of the 17th Century.  In the middle above is Lewis bookended by Lewis his father and the Governor of New Jersey (Morristown is named after this Lewis) and Lewis the son who signed the Declaration of Independence.   

“Instead of a hat he used to wear upon his head a loon’s skin, an American sea fowl, with all its feathers.” In History of New York during the Revolutionary War (etc.) by Thomas Jones 1879 p. 140

This middle Lewis was no slouch being a judge of renown and brother of Robert Hunter Morris and also father of Gouverneur Morris of US Constitution fame, and Gen. Staats Long Morris who was a loyalist and ended up being governor of Quebec.  But this Lewis gains admission to this blog post and earns the “looney” reference because he was allegedly notorious for wearing a special hat (see above).   But here is the rub: this piece cited above although quoted widely was written by a notoriously bitter, former Judge exiled to England because of his Tory leanings.    When one reads the footnotes on pages 139-140, you can almost see a sneering Judge Jones looking down his nose at the silly, up-start Welshmen playing gentry in the new land.  Jones says nice things about Gouverneur Morris but that is likely because Gouverneur sprang Thomas from jail in July of 1776.  

Judge Thomas Jones

But what of Jones’ narrative to keep?  Perhaps throw out the prone-to-exaggeration part and keep the sloop and dam stories about his father (Governor Lewis) and this bit about loon hat?  The derision is easy to discard but the stories less so. I actually liked the story of the loon hat so much that I have taken to trying to envision what a loon hat might actually look like.  Not a whole lot of loon-skin hats out there and searches are swamped by hats of the Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett type.  But Is wearing a raccoon on your head really more dignified than wearing a loon or pheasant? I don’t know. But there are native dancers that once wore loon hats (see below) and I can almost envision Grandpa Lewis in that get-up strolling the mid-18th Century by-ways of Morrisania during a time when the family lands in New York still offered potential habitat for wild wolves.  But maybe this vision is only as real as the half-remembered memories of the brightly-colored feathered hat in the closet that might not have been.   

Kuskwogmiut or Kuskokwim Loon Dance Hat circa 1910 (Smithsonian)