September 26, 2007
None other than Boonville’s own Walter D. Edmonds, the man famous for writing books such as “Drums Along the Mohawk,” wrote the foreword to “Boonville and Its Neighbors.”

The Boonville book was written by Tharratt Gilbert Best in 1960 and, as it states on the page opposite the foreword, was “Printed in the United States of America By The Boonville Herald-Willard Press, Boonville, N.Y.”

I’ve been re-reading “Boonville and Its Neighbors” and agree with the Edmonds foreword, especially this last paragraph:  “Tharratt Best’s account of the town has left no event, no matter how small, unrecorded. There is time to tell of an early marriage, or a local fire, to follow the creation of a business, a pastorate, a congregation, the purchase of a fire engine, the sinking of new wells for the town water supply, the building of a small dam on the Black River to furnish electricity as cheap as any you can find across the country. It is a very local book, and for that reason may appeal mainly to local readers; yet the history it recounts is in essence that of any town in the north central United States.”

In fact, elsewhere in the foreword Edmonds writes this: “Boonville is and always has been an average town, yet so typical of the essence of rural America that for a term of years Hollywood chose it as a community in which to try out new pictures in sneak previews - if, after all, that really proves us typical.

Yet in Boonville nearly all the forces that developed America were experienced in what might be called original forms, though generally on a small scale.”

Now, why was I re-reading Best’s book? Because Tharratt Gilbert Best will be inducted into the Oneida County Historical Society’s Hall of Fame on Wednesday, Sept. 26 and yours truly was asked to “say a few words” and so Best is on my mind.

The person who asked me to say a few words did so, I believe, because she knows I will keep it to “a few words” and also because Best’s life went back and forth between Utica and Boonville, as mine does.

Best attended grammar school in Boonville but attended high school at Utica Free Academy, my school.

He loved history. In fact, the Oneida County Historical Society’s reference library is named in his honor. Best was on the Society’s board of trustees.
 
Ditto for me.

Best loved to write. I hate writing, but as someone famous once said, I love having written.

But that’s where the similarities end. He graduated UFA with honors.

Fortunately I had teachers who took pity. Best went on to Princeton and then MIT. He was an educated man, a military man, too. During World War I he joined the American Field Ambulance service and saw action in France and when that enlistment was up he joined the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of colonel.

Best had a variety of skills. After the war, he worked as a civil and petroleum engineer in the Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas oil fields. He came back to Utica in 1921 and worked as a civil engineer for the City of Utica and then went into business for himself. Then in 1924, the board of directors of the First National Bank of Boonville elected him president, a position held by his grandfather, Brinckerhoff Tharratt, and his great-grandfather, Joseph R. Tharratt, founder of the bank.

Best led a great life, great enough to be in a Hall of Fame with some of
Oneida County’s other greats.

By the way, Best lived at 201 Main Street, now the Victorian Country Bed and Breakfast.

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Joe Kelly is the editor and publisher of The Boonville Herald & Adirondack Tourist and THE GRIFF.