One day, Hagerman lost his wife, two sons and a daughter in the river. Two of the boys had taken a wheelbarrow out on the river in winter “after one night’s freezing.” The boys broke through the ice. The mother came running and one boy told her to slide him a plank. She panicked. She rushed to the hole and broke through the ice herself. A small daughter rushed to her mother’s side and was pulled in by the woman. “All four drowneded.”
Hagerman found the older boy, a good swimmer, under the ice by the shoreline. The boy tried to swim under the ice, but couldn’t’ break through. His toes stuck out of his brand new shoes from his desperate kicks to smash the ice.
“And that was just before Christmas.”
On Christmas Day the bodies were taken in coffins by a scow to Rockport and buried there. Five girls and a boy remained in the family.
From River's Edge: Reprobates, Rum-runners and Other Folk of the Thousand Islands by Shawn Thompson based on his interviews with Chancy Patterson. A surviving daughter of the Hagerman tragedy was Chancy’s mother.