The Cow barn, the Horse barn and the Land it all sat on.

The Hay loft section of the cow barn stood about as high as a three story building and it dominated the area around it. From the house it was a short walk to the door where the cows stayed. In 1966, two trees stood in front of the cow barn. The one on the right would suffer our tree house. The one on the left would die from the loss of a limb and termites in the late 80’s. At one time the land in front of the barn was terraced and planted with flowers. Where the cow barn and the Hay barn met in the cow barn section was a door to the Barn. To the left down a little ways further in the cow section was the doorway to the hay area.  At that doorway water would always drip freely when it rained so I guess it should have been no surprise that it would fall before the beginning of the 1980’s.

The hay section of the barn was spacious, it must have been set up to accommodate at the time of its building a horse drawn trailer loaded with hay. There was a section walled off with a metal triangle dish with holes in it to feed cow that were about to give birth or had just.There was a space above the little enclosure in the barn that you could climb up to and look down from.  And then there was the section where the hay was stored.  It was open and went to the bare ground. The first time I saw the inside of the barn there was a rope hanging from the pulley in the center of the ceiling that Billy Vines, the oldest son of the owner Bill Vines would swing from.

  The cow section was the direct opposite from the Hay section. The ceiling was low and the interior was covered in peeling whitewash. It had two rows of stalls with the manure collector running down the center and ending outside the barn so it could be dumped into a waiting manure spreader.

 One time we went up to the farm and the rail out the barn had been bent down so the manure collector could not go out the barn. The rumor was Karl bent it down so no one would get dumped out and hurt.

  The barn roof was covered with four by eight foot sheets of corrugated metal attached by metal nails. We one year used the back roof as a slide catching our pants on the nails and ripping them. Why mom didn't get angry I don't know, she just stopped us changing into other clothes when the pants became shreaded and exposed more then you felt comfortable showing.

The other story connected with the barn was one year we went up there and the roof to the cow barn, that consisted of metal sheets and some wood was gone. The man who owned the land on the front of our road, Mr. Garrett, a man who made it his business to know what was going on around him knew nothing about the missing roof and he always knew when we were up at the farm. So I’ll let you do the adding. Anyway someone up there got a slightly used roof for their barn or hopefully their house and they were too poor and not too cheap to buy instead of stealing someone’s roof. It was one of the factors that contributed to the barn falling.

  The Horse barn was never more then a shell that we used as a target gallery. Glass bottles, cans anything that would explode upon impact, that is until we stated having to walk around the horse barn and couldn't because of all the hazzards.

  In 1966 the entrance to the farm, land owned by the afore mentioned Guy Garrett formerly of Brooklyn was a slightly over grown hole in the side of the road. There was no gate, no sign and if you were driving too fast you would end up way past it before you we aware you had passed it. Turning into the road you’d cringe as small trees and wild black and red raspberries would scratch against the sides of your car. Tires would slide through rut that would only grow bigger with each splash and some would make small lakes. Riding on the center of the road, staying out of the larger ruts you would make your way up the first little hill on disappear into the country side. About half way down the half mile driveway you would get to the two birch trees that flanked the road. Sometime in the early seventies some of the Cameron’s came over and talked about using birch bark to make boats and they had taken some from our birch trees on our road. A little further on down the road it flattens out and for many years there was no problem with pot holes and ruts.

  There were two trouble spots on the road. The first one was a break in the stone wall that always seemed too narrow and when we were young too hard to widen. The second spot was the tunnnel of trees and the big ditch near the road. It always felt like you might slide into the hole on rainy days. 
 

  Arriving at the tunnel of trees meant that you were about to enter the property we owned. Down a little hill on the side of the road was a green gate that was never closed. Just before the tunnel of trees there is a large hole dug into the ground. It was a question mark in our minds for years. It turns out that Guy Garrett used his bulldozer to dig up the ground and block the road to the house when Bill Vines owned it. Mr. Vines and Mr. Garrett had it out at one point in the courts and the road became a legal easement and there was nothing any future owner of the property could do about it and Mr. Garrett never tried with us and he was never a warm and fuzzy friendly person either.

  The road ended at the front lawn and every year we would come up in August the grass would be at least waist high, depending on what year it was and how much you’d grown over the previous year.

  One of the first things we would do upon getting up there was to call Mr. Dibble. I don’t remember his first name and they used to populate the mountain like there was no tomorrow. After Mr. Dibble died the clan seemed to die off or move away. There are still some Dibbles up there, but it is not like it used to be when they would all get together and have a picnic and someone I guess Brian Cockcroft said it was called the Dibble day picnic.

  Mr. Dibble would cut our small open space and trim the trees over hanging the road in and charge a few bucks for the job. We would then collect the hay and pile it under the tree fort and jump out of the tree fort into the hay. Back then when kids did dangerous things like that they didn’t get hurt.

  Sometime in the first few years we owned the property, the conversation department was paid to help us put up a pond. They don’t do stuff like that anymore. They came in found a sight bulldozed it put in drainage pipe and the rest was yours. For us that was waiting for it to fill up.

  The fall before it filled up, one of the rare times my dad was up there, we were all down there looking over the pond, us kids playing around. I noticed my dad raking the far side of the pond. He said he was getting all the rock out of the way. So us kids with our short attention span get involved in another section of the pond and since the rocks were too big to pick up we are rolling them down the slopes to the deeper sections of the pond. Our enthusiasm lasts for a short while. Next summer when we go swimming we are all slipping and tripping on all these rocks that we didn’t move and now wished we had, everywhere that is except on the far shore where my dad racked it out.

The Property when we first owned it consisted of about one hundred and twenty-four acres. Bill Vines said it included a rock quarry that he had let some people take stone out of. It was disputed and we made no effort to claim it. Years later the area was surveyed and the rock quarry was not part of it. The property bordered in the east, up the hill the Cockcroft’s, down the hill to the south was once Dugas’s but had been sold to some people who weren’t up much. To the west toward Beatty brook rd. it was the people whose house would burn around the end of August one year and they had a daughter named Fern. And of course to the north was Guy Garrett’s property. Stuck in the northeast corner state land snuck in there. They were usually good neighbor to have. They never had wild parties and never carelessly shot their guns in your direction.

  That was the way it was back in 1966.

The Farm in 1966,The House and the Milk house

The summer of 66’ was the first year we went to the farm. There is no special memory from that year, but there is a picture I took from the back and Eric is walking toward the house. The grass is very tall and tan color. The house is white with red trim and in need of paint. You can’t see the barns from the picture.

  There is a black and white picture of two guys with guns, whose names have been lost to time. They are getting ready to go hunting I think. In the Background you can clearly see the cow barn as it looms over them. In the left of the picture is the carriage barn, or the remains of it.  When we got there it was not more than partial walls a hole filled roof and no doors if it ever had them. This was the building the previous owner was taking boards off to replace on the main house and this is the building I asked my dad, on one of his rare trips up there if we could knock down. It wasn’t much of a building then, but it put up a fight and didn’t fall easily.

The horse barn to the right of the big cow barn was half down when we bought the place.  We used it as a shooting range for the first few years, exploding glass bottles and tin cans and anything else we could find.

The silo foundation between the cow barn and the horse barn we didn’t know was there for many years because of the tall grass.

The house, we were told was once called the mansion on the hill. That could have been true or just a sales pitch. Like all old, or a lot of old houses this one might have been built in sections. There is a house across the valley owned by the Dugas’s  until 2009 that I am told is the same house.  So maybe it was all built at the same time. In 1966, you walked onto the porch sitting about the height of a two by four off the ground. There was a door on the wall to the left that went into the dining room that was nailed shut. A large window, that always seemed to get broken over the years that looked out from the kitchen. Next to the window was the kitchen door. It had a wooden screen door on it that had a spring on it that we were forever replacing. When you opened the door it would close with this solid wood on wood smack.

Continuing down the porch was a window that had been replaced with boards and a door to the wood shed that was blocked off by the kerosene tank in the wood shed. The smell of a kerosene stove brings a smile to my face and brings me back upstate whenever I smell it even to this day.  

Around the corner on the left the door to the wood shed, on the right the milk house. The milk house, about eight to ten feet long by the same, when we first got there had a level floor for three quarter of the floor then a small rise and something to store milk, which I can’t remember. We ended up using the milk house for storage of wood for the fireplace. We tried to replace the roof of the milk house in the early 70’s, without electric tools and the only knowledge, in carpentry, my cousin, Joe. We took sheets of corrugated metal from somewhere in the back of the cow barn and placed them across the roof length wise. The sheets hung over about a foot.  We managed to cut one of the sheets to the correct length. A second sheet seemed to be too much trouble to cut and it would hang over the end of the milk house until the milk house fell down sometime in the nineties.

The back of the house where the propane tanks were had a ditch dug along the back of the house. Mr. Vines had the idea to move the bathroom into a smaller room he had made when he put the fireplace in and expanded that room. The bathroom was never switched by us and the ditch was not filled in until a major renovation done by Eric about 2008-9. The ditch may have contributed to the walls of the cellar falling in over the next several decades. The ditch changed the way the water flowed away from the house, causing the rain and snow run off to go into the cellar between the stones weakening the foundation, who knew back then, we didn't.

In 1966 if you were to walk into the house from the kitchen door you would walk into a serviceable kitchen, not new by any stretch of the imagination, but serviceable. Just inside the door to the left sat a small table from the fifties. Several years later I think Bill Vines took that with several other pieces of furniture he had been meaning to take for several years. On the right side of the door a little forward sat another table from the fifties and on the left side of the table sitting a good three feet from the wall behind it was the combination stove, oven and heater. The right side of the unit was the four burner stove and small oven. Taking up the other half of the unit was the kerosene heater. In its time this unit together must have been the ‘to have’ piece of kitchen equipment. You could make dinner and keep the house warm using two different fuels. The top of the kerosene heater had two port holes to look down into the heating section. In the heating space there were two round burners about four or five inches around with wicks along the almost outer edge. There was a button in the front near the controls for the stove burners you held and then you would stick a long lit match down into one of the port holes to light the pilot, two or three large flame would shoot up about six or more inches into the cavity. You held the button until the flame lit the wicks completely, on a good day it was only a few minutes. I remember cooking on that stove and lighting the kerosene heater many times. The kerosene stove had a float that if not set just right it would not allow kerosene into the heater. The float was hidden in the corner of the wood shed and the first time we tried to use the kerosene stove we had to call Bill Vines,the former owner over to help us get it lit. The kerosene heater always gave off a slight smell of kerosene and after a while I guess the house absorbed the smell and every time you would open the house for the first time the smell of kerosene would greet you and you knew for sure that you were truly upstate. One time we were upstate and it had been a cool night and mom had lit the kerosene heater and we had had breakfast and most everyone had gone outside, I was the last to finish up breakfast. I drank something, most likely milk out of a plastic coffee cup, it must have been a coffee cup, because it had a handle on it, it might of even been red. When I was finished drinking from the cup I placed it on the kerosene side of the stove. Maybe I didn’t finish it maybe I was going to have more. Anyway I ended up outside and I think I was up on the hill not far from the house and I think we were all together when someone noticed that the kitchen was full of smoke. We all rushed back to the house and ran inside. I don’t know what we were expecting to do or even what we expected to find.  What we found was a smoldering lump of melted plastic that had once been a coffee cup. It had been a cool night and my mom had lit the kerosene stove to warm up the house. Sometime in the future kerosene stoves were banned.

Across the kitchen, from the door was another table from the fifties and on the left wall was the sink. When we first took possession of the farm I believe that the only running water was to the kitchen sink and the toilet. The kitchen sink on the left wall of the kitchen was at the very end of the basement and some brave sole had crawled under the floor (could have been less than three feet high) of the kitchen to run the pipe for the toilet on the other side of the wall on the right side of the kitchen. For many years we had no bathroom sink and no running hot water. When we wanted hot water we would boil it on the stove in big pot and take smaller pots of hot water to be mixed with cold to wash dishes and take bathes. Sometime before we bought it someone forgot to drain   the pipes and they all burst in the winter. I don’t know how my mom survived, but being all of eight in 1966, I made do as did my brothers and sister.

The floor of the kitchen was blue and white tiles held in place by black mastic adhesive put down when the cabinets were new. Under it and partly exposed was an oak and cherry wood floor. It was our goal, the kids to uncover that floor and over the years with varying degrees of success we managed to uncover several feet of the wood floor. It was a very pretty floor. With hind sight and experience I am 100% sure we would of uncovered rotted wood around the sink and we would of uncovered holes cut into the floor to run the pipes to the bathroom. We never did, but there must have been a very good reason to cover up that floor, more than just the time involved in its up keep.

On the right side of the kitchen, on the same wall as the stove was the bathroom and the wood shed.

The bathroom was very spacious and empty. The toilet was onthe far wall,near the window, easy to reattach the frozen, broken water lines. The claw foot tub was on the inside wall along the wood shed and the sink was in the worst place, the inside corner next to the kitchen, on the other side of the door. Many years later a water heater and new water lines would be added, but not until the late 80's or early 90's.

The wood shed, that amazing space that held everything. We put wood in the wood shed orginally, until someone, most likely Rob Richie said there was a good chance that we would bring termites into the wood shed so we moved the wood to the milk house. Over the years the wood shed held all the mowers we had up there, pond toys, floats,rafts, boats and a cart that was named Herbie after that famous movie in about 1968 or so called the love bug. This cart was a simple blue cart with two wheels maybe four. We used it to haul wood, bring stuff up from the pond, and to bring the battery to the battery operated tv to the Dugas' to be charged so we could watch the one or two channels we could recieve in that area. 

Purchasing the farm

The thought of a summer home started around the time the Cockcrofts lived on

Klein Ave.

and Bill Vines put his place there up for sale.

  The Cockcrofts place as is my understanding was purchased by Holly Cockcroft and her sister Hermin Koenig sometime in the fifties or maybe it was left to them by their parents. The second is a guess, being it was the fifties and the Cockcrofts were never really rich people.

  Mom and Dad started thinking about a summer place around 1966. They were friendly with Bill Vines and they were friendly with the Cockcrofts. Both properties abutted each other.

  Different places were locked at during the search for a summer place, but they were all summer places in the traditional sense. They were all houses near lakes or streams with little property. One place was on Lake Summit, another was over in Middleburg, somewhere near a stream, that in 2011 over flowed its banks and caused major damage in the area. A third was on Sawyer Hollow rd. and like I said all were in the traditional sense a vacation home.

  Mom said Bill Vines property was always the one that was the favorite. It was near the Cockcrofts, It was owned by Bill Vines, a good friend of the family and it had a beautiful fireplace.

  Mom can’t remember how the place was paid for. No loan was ever taken out on it or on the home in West Nyack. It was possible that we paid cash for it or that Bill Vines let Daddy pay it privately to him.

  The only memory of this time I have is mommy and daddy were raiding ours, Karl and mine, Ruth was six and Eric was four and I guess had none,  piggy banks. We spilled all the change out onto the floor in the living room, now the front of the master bedroom and mom and dad took all the paper money from them. I wanted to help as much as possible so I pushed all the remaining change into the pile that was Karl’s. After that I don’t remember having a piggy bank. I do remember Karl suddenly going on some expensive cruises and buying a brand new blue mustang with a 450 turbo charged…

In the beginning, the summer of 66

Memories over a span of forty-five years become foggy and eventually they pass for fact. So please excuse me for all the facts that I have imagined and please feel free to dispute them and add your own version.

   To me the story of the farm upstate begins at the turn of the twentieth century when Joseph August Muller builds a home on a dirt road that was eventually to be called

Klein Avenue

. During the depression he loses the house. The House is repurchased by his son, William in the early fifties, where he and his wife will raise four kids.

   On the north side of the house there are two building lots owned by Grant Pulley, located at the time at the corner of the Hackensack River and Route fifty-nine.

   A builder from Nyack with a shady background wanted to sell the top soil and put two houses on the lots. Anyone with knowledge of the area even now knows it was and is a swampy area.

   There is even a story about a train engine on a siding somewhere over near Phillips lane that sunk into the swamp. I wasn’t around so all I know is that sometime during the sixties sounding were taken of the area in preparation for building Phelps lane and supposedly a large mass was spotted on the sonar. History or fable who knows?

   The Town folk were in an uproar over the addition of two houses and the accompanying septic systems, they felt the land could not handle any more.

   One afternoon the builder knocked on Cornelia and Bill Muller’s back door. He wanted to sell one of the lots to them for the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars, they accepted. On the far lot a house that was on the Grant Pulley property was moved.

   My Mom remembers kids in the winter sleigh riding from the top soil hill and sliding under the house and out the front while the foundation was being finished.

   What does all this have to do with Upstate you might wonder? The first people to live in that house were Art and Holly Cockcroft. There son Brian became friends with Karl and Holly became good friends with my mom.

   The one think that stands out about Holly Cockcroft was she seemed to have her hair forever in curlers.

   Sometime in 1966, I think Karl was invited upstate to spend sometime with the Cockcrofts. Next we were all invited up. And like always, or almost always my dad didn’t go.

    We spent maybe a week or two up there. We picked blueberries, hunted for fossils and I think we even went to the County fair. We swam in the small home made ponds full of    frogs and rocks. You were told to wear sneakers in the pond, but never told why.

   Mrs. Cockcroft had an old blue car something out of the fifties and she called it Betsey. When she had to transverse the mile long dirt road, to and from their farm house, going up and down hills, trying to stay out of ruts and places where the water had pooled after a shower, she’d say, “come on Betsey, you can do it, don’t let me down.” And for my memories it never did.

   They had a large expanse of grass land that they would cut to keep the trees from filling in. They had a large mowing machine and I asked if I could mow some of the grass. For a parent or an adult this is why they have kids. What they find as drudgery, a child finds fun and exciting, so they let me. After a while Art Cockcroft waves me down and fills the mower with gas and clears some cut grass from the blades. I don’t know what happened next put he steps in front of the mower just as I put it in gear to go forward and I remember him jumping out of the way and me being very afraid that he would be angry at me. My mom kept telling me “No, he’s not angry; he knew you didn’t try to run him over.” They must have bought the farm when it was a working farm all the out buildings and a large portion of the fields were still in good condition.
  The Cockcroft's lived, summered in an old farm house. While we were there we slept in what was a living room or a palor.

I remember two over stuffed arm chairs, one blue, out of the forties or fifties that had been wedged between the beds.

  The out buildings that I remember was a horse barn, a chicken coop and furthest from the house a deluxe two seater outhouse. I don’t remember if the door had a half moon in it, but I do remember it smelled a little and  it was painted red, a barn red every building was painted the same color with the house having a silver tin roof.

  My sister, brother and I were asked if we wanted to paint the out-house, yes red. It was nineteen-sixty-six, my sister was six, Eric was four and I was the old man at eight. We were eager to paint and grabbed the brushes and paint. I don’t remember much about the next hour or so, but I got the brilliant to tell my sister and brother they should paint their arms. They thought it was a great idea. Heck back then I could tell them to stand on their heads in the middle of the road and cluck like a chicken or to paint their arms and they would ask how high we should go, which I answered all the way up. We were out of sight of adults so there was no one to stop the two of them from painting their arms. The paint was not a modern water based paint that would wash off. No this was an oil base paint that needed turpentine and elbow grease to remove. I went ahead of my younger siblings and watched as they came down the road so proud of themselves holding their barn red, almost blood red arms up above their head, laughing and smiling until either our mother or Mrs. Cockcroft asked what the heck have you two done? Their laughing and smiling changed quickly and I remember one of them saying “Joseph made us do it.” I must have gotten yelled at, but it was not something that I remember.

  Eric remembers Art Cockcroft taking turpentine and a wire brush to his arms and how much it hurt. I remember both of them being washed and I guess scrubbed on the front lawn.

  Life moves on and being a little kid on a farm there was always something to do. Someone had dug two small ponds down the bottom of the hill. The one on the left we didn’t go in and the one on the right we did, but only with our sneakers on. I never asked why, I guess I just thought that was the way it was done. We spent time down at the pond swimming and catching frogs and salamanders.

 We went for walks and picked blueberries, which back then I didn’t like. We hunted for fossils in the many stone walls that lined all fields.

  The first time I remember seeing the house we would by was when I walked down the trail between the Cockcroft’s and the Vines houses to play with their oldest son Billy. He was in my Sunday school class, but went to a different school then I did. I remember walking down the hill to the left of where the cow barn stood seeing Mr. Vines taking a board from the old garage and replacing a split piece off the south side of the house where the fireplace was. We played in the barn and I remember Billy swinging on a rope across the area that all the hay would be stored during the winter.

  The cow barn was huge. On the north wall were one or two doors that would slide open on the left was a small enclosure that was for young calves. There was a metal triangle thing with holes in it in the corner which I think was for feed. Across to the right of the doors was where hay was kept. I can still imagine it filled up with hay back when it was a working farm and on cold winter mornings the farmer  coming in the smell of hay heavy in the air, the smell of cows in the attached section waiting to be fed and let out .

  In the area where the cows were kept the manure bucket, a large metal half drum set up on a rail above it that the farmer would fill up and push down to the other end of the barn and out to be dumped in the manure spreader. When we owned the farm we use to ride it in, push it as fast as we could until it hit the end of the line with a loud solid thud.

 I spent time playing with Billy and I think he begun ignoring me and I got mad and decided to go back to the Cockcroft’s farm. I started up the hill following the road until about half way back when the road, more like indentations in the ground disappeared. I turned around to find the trail and I walked back and then I walked this way and I then walked that way and I crossed a dirt road and went up a steep hill and then I went down a steep hill and I crossed a dirt road and I was in open fields and then I was in a forest of old trees and somehow after all that walking I managed to return to the Cockcroft’s. I never told anyone how lost I ha d gotten. It would not be the last time over the years. I even got lost coming up from Rockland with my cousin Joe when we took route 88 instead of route 132 I think. One think to be sure of is if you take directions from me make sure I have already been lose there.

  One of the high lights of that summer was when we went to the Cobleskill fair. All the fairs for the first dozen years were all basically the same and are so different from the way it is now that it’s really from a different era.

  There were two different ways to go to the fair from the mountain. The first way was the quickest going down Richmondville hill, making a right and in through the main section of town, past the Dairy Queen, then another right and to the fair.

  The other way was Sawyer Hollow road, it was a slower decline and it gave you a chance to adjust to the change in altitude and to see some of the farms in the area. By coming down Sawyer Hollow you also avoided the traffic and you entered the fair grounds and were able to park inside the race track.

  One of the first smells and the smell that I associate with fairs and with summer would be the Cobleskill fire department’s tent where they would be cooking chicken over a large charcoal grill. Smoke would billow up and if it wasn’t the fire department doing the cooking I think someone would of called them to put out the fire at the fair. I never did eat any of the chicken, back then I didn’t eat much of anything different. I would eat there, but it would usually be burgers and fries.

  In those days all the barns would be full and you would go pass rows and rows of cow’s butts. Occasionally you would get treated to a freshly made cow pie. Sometimes you could watch it being made. I think there were four barns full of cows back then. You could also see the many different types of chickens and all the pigs and sheep and horses and there were even Clydesdales, these huge mountains of horses. They even had horse races, trotters with the sulkies, I think they are called. Back then I would get tired quickly of seeing all the animals and want to hit the midway as quickly as possible.

  In the sixties you had to pay to see the shows. There were always a sing group and Joey Chichwood’s thrill show. And the show of shows for me, the demolition derby. The announcer, whose name has been lost to time, it was always his production would stand up and announces the show telling the crowd the rules and announcing where each driver was from and what his number was. Sometime during the show he would start to pick on a certain car. He would tell a drive that if his car didn’t stop causing so much smoke he would be disqualified. He would keep on this driver until it got the crowd angry at the injustice. It wasn’t until years l figured out he did this to get the crowd riled up so they would be more into the show.  

   Joey Chichwood’s thrill show was filled with car stunts. Cars driving on two wheels, motorcycles driving through flaming boards and the infamous slide for life, which I think was a guy being pulled around the track at a high speed then letting go of the motorcycle and sliding through light gasoline, with the announcer saying very solemnly that if he stops short he could be seriously hurt. No one was ever hurt.