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.
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