But a century before Houdini thrilled the country with his sensational escape attempts or Knievel jumped his motorcycle over canyons, there was Sam Patch.

He was a New England textile mill worker (1799–1829) who became America’s first bonafide daredevil by leaping from the top of waterfalls and other precipices of dizzying heights just as the country was beginning its transition to modernity.

“I argue that he was the first modern celebrity,” said Paul E. Johnson, a professor of history at USC whose new trade-academic book about Patch published in June, Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper (Hill and Wang), has won high praise from reviewers ranging from The Christian Science Monitor to The Chicago Tribune and Kirkus Reviews.

As a child laborer in a Pawtucket, R.I., textile mill, Patch started jumping off waterfalls that powered mills for fun with other boys his age.
By the time he’d reached his mid-20s in Paterson, N.J., he’d worked his way up to a job as a textile mill mule spinner, the operator of the mill’s large central machine that transformed cotton into thread.

It was in Paterson that he turned the practice of jumping into a public spectacle by leaping off the city’s Passaic Falls. He followed the feat with jumps into Hoboken Harbor, Niagara Falls, and Genesee Falls in Rochester, N.Y., where he died in a second attempt to fall 125 feet into the water.

Patch became a working class hero who was often inebriated and was fond of taunting the upper classes with his jumps and other antics. After his death, he became a mythic figure who inspired the expression, “What the Sam Patch!” as a common expletive.

He was immortalized in the works of Hawthorne and Melville, and his fame inspired portrayals of him on the London stage. Andrew Jackson named his favorite horse after Patch, and he shared the national spotlight with Davy Crockett, legendary river man Mike Fink, and a fictitious New York fireman named Mose the Bowery Boy.

There once was a Sam Patch cigar, and today, souvenirs of his legend can be bought at Sam’s Gift Patch in Rochester. Patch has even become the subject of a recent novel.

Johnson was drawn to Patch’s story because he was so well known and generated so much folklore. He first learned about Patch while writing his UCLA doctoral dissertation in the 1970s about religious revivals in Rochester. He was also intrigued by the fact that Patch had become a public figure when being a celebrity was still novel, particularly for someone who was not a politician or general.
“The newspapers of the time were just beginning to look for a popular audience after having served as merchant sheets announcing ship arrivals and the like and all of a sudden they began looking for stories like this,” Johnson said. “At the same time popular entertainments were getting started, so you had Sam Patch chap books, and Sam Patch stage plays.”

The newspapers that were creating their new democratic audience for a larger readership latched onto Sam Patch the way they latched onto Davy Crockett and made a hero of him, Johnson added. “At the same time the people running the papers made their own careers by talking about people like Patch.”

Patch’s lifetime also bracketed the beginnings of Jacksonian America when the nation moved from being a heavily rural country with a few seaports to an urban and industrialized society, particularly in the northeast.

“Patch lived through the total economic, social, domestic, cultural, and political transformation by which the northeastern U.S. was becoming modern and in a sense he was a real pioneer,” Johnson said. “At the age of 7 or 8 in 1808, he went to work in a cotton mill and by the late 1820s he was one of the very few Americans who had grown up in an industrial community.

“The book essentially tries to make a constellation out of the world that he was a part of and pack it in around him to tell his story as social and cultural history.”

The book is also the story of the emergence of social classes during America’s industrialization, the question of whether what happened to farmers drawn off the land to work in factories was progress, and the history of labor in America.

But it’s also an entertaining and enjoyable read. “He was a funny guy, and I think anybody reading the book would understand why he was fascinating and became famous,” Johnson said.

08/03