Battles Museums of Rural Life History

Asa Battles Sr. (1786-1848), a veteran of the War of 1812, moved to Chautauqua County New York after he married Elizabeth Brown of Vermont on November 20, 1814. He later bought an excess of more than 300 acres in present-day Girard during the years 1822-1824. When Asa Battles died he left his fifteen-year-old son and the youngest of six children, Rush Sobieski Battles, the bulk of his estate. The estate, which was slightly smaller in land size due to his father’s sales to the town for the Erie ExtensionCanal, came with responsibilities. Rush was to care for his family’s homestead, as well as his mother and two unwed sisters, Alcina and Lucina.

Rush Sobieski Battles took up law in addition to his father’s farming legacy and was practicing in Girard when the yellow Italianate style farmhouse was constructed in April, 1858. Today, the house is interpreted as an early 1860s farmhouse.

Shortly after the completion of the farmhouse in 1859, Rush entered into a business partnership with one Henry Webster in order to create the firm called Battles and Webster House of Banking, a firm which remained intact for over eighty years. The following year he began to court Webster’s sister Charlotte, whom he married on March 28, 1861. The couple returned to Girard after their honeymoon and began construction on their new home, now the Charlotte Elizabeth Battles Memorial Museum. The house is actually named after Rush and Charlotte’s only surviving child, and showcases a century’s worth of the family’s heirlooms.

Charlotte Elizabeth Battles was a very determined woman who attended college at Lake Erie Seminary in Painsville, Ohio and the Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington, D.C. She was married to one Charles Barber on October 16, 1886. She traveled extensively in Europe, took over her father’s bank as the sole inheritor to his estate, and donated large sums to the Girard community to fund school construction.

She once wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in response to his banking moratorium during the Great Depression that said, “Mr. President, we’re minding our business, you do the same. Since I do not presume to tell you how to run the country, please do not presume to tell me how to run my bank.”

Because of her influence, the museum was given her name after it was granted to the Society as a historic property by her inheritor. Her legacy and the legacy of the Battles Bank lives on in Girard through several buildings and statues that were funded by Charlotte and, of course, in the Battles Museums themselves.

For even MORE information, join us for a tour of the Battles Museums of Rural Life.