What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero

Magazine|What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero

Sometime in the 1850s or ’60s, at a terrible moment in U.S. history, a strange man seemed to sprout, out of nowhere, into the rocky landscape between New York City and Hartford. The word “strange” hardly captures his strangeness. He was rough and hairy, and he wandered around on back roads, sleeping in caves. Above all, he refused to explain himself. As one newspaper put it: “He is a mystery, and a very greasy and ill-odored one.” Other papers referred to him as “the animal” or (just throwing up their hands) “this uncouth and unkempt ‘What is it?’”

But the strangest thing about the stranger was his suit.

In summer and in winter, in every possible kind of weather, the man wore, from head to toe, an outrageous outfit he seems to have made himself: rough leather patches stitched together with long leather strips, like a quilt. It was stiff, awkward, stinky and brutally heavy. It looked like knight’s armor made out of baseball gloves. To anyone encountering him on a quiet country lane, he must have seemed almost unreal: a huge slab of brown, twice as wide as a normal man, his suit creaking and squeaking with every step.

In the years following the Civil War, the wandering stranger became an object of curiosity, then a frequent subject of the newspapers. People gave him a name: the Old Leatherman.

“I suppose that many of the readers of your valuable paper have heard of the ‘old leather man,’ ” wrote someone from Rye, N.Y., in 1870. “Hearing the reports about this singular recluse, I, in company with others, paid his haunts a visit.”

The Old Leatherman was a sort of real-life Northeastern Sasquatch. Curious citizens went plunging into the woods to investigate. What they found surprised them. The Old Leatherman’s caves were orderly, complete with primitive fireplaces, sleeping areas and stores of food (meat, hickory nuts). Under one slab of rock, he had dug out an apple cellar. In some forests, he kept well-tended gardens.

Month after month, people watched the Old Leatherman clomp past their farms and through their woods and right up the main streets of their tiny towns. At mealtimes, he would stop at sympathetic households — the same ones, over and over — to ask, with a grunt, for food. He rarely spoke, and when he did his words were clipped, strange. In the silence, rumors grew. People speculated that the Old Leatherman was French, or French Canadian, or Portuguese. They said that he couldn’t speak at all, or that he just couldn’t speak English, or that he spoke English perfectly but pretended not to. They said he came from a family in Hartford named Brown. They said he was immune to rattlesnake bites. The more he walked, the more fascinated people became. Year after year, the Old Leatherman was like a song stuck in the whole region’s head.