Janie, Bonnie, Mom with Margo, Dad with me, Jimmie

I was born in 1938, the fifth child in our family.  [editor's note: The "I" is Fred Banks.]  Mom, whose maiden name was Marguerite Archer, was married before she married Dad and had two children, Janie and Jimmy Edwards. Dad had also been married before and had Bonnie. Mom and Dad met at Stelters restaurant, which is now King’s. They had both gone there for a quick lunch one day when Mom was taking a break from teaching horseback riding at Trojan Lake Lodge and Dad had just delivered some of his hotel guests to Livingston Manor where they would get the train. They married, combining their families and then had me and Margo. I grew up on Trout Valley Farm which was a wonderful place to spend my childhood.

Initially, Dad ran both Trout Valley Farm and Clear Lake Cottages but after six years, Miss Tobey and Miss Grace Stratton took over. While he was at Clear Lake, he devised a system for getting water from a clear spring on the south side of the lake over to the hotel which was on the north side. The water was collected in a cypress tower so it would feed the hotel by gravity. The problem was how to get the water piped over the Lake. Dad was an engineer, so he figured out how to do this. When the lake was frozen Dad, with Floyd Laraway and Wilber Miner sawed a trench through the ice a foot wide and about 25 feet long. They laid planks across the trench and then put a 21 foot length of galvanized pipe on the planks. This pipe weighed about 60 lbs. When that was laid, they attached another section, pulled out the planks so the pipe would sink, and then repeated the process. Dad had graphed out the bottom of the lake, so he knew how much pipe to use. In the spring, he asked Wilber Miner to dig a ditch from the edge of the lake to the hotel for the remainder of the pipe. Wilber said he would do this for $20.00. The ground there was nothing but hardpan, and almost impossible to dig, but Wilber did it. Then they hooked up the pipe to the hotel, where the water ran into a cast iron sink continuously. The drain from the sink was routed downhill towards the Beaverkill River. It was an ingenious method and provided clean spring water to the hotel.

Although Wilber had told Dad he would dig the trench for $20.00, Dad realized that it was much more work than either one of them had thought, so he gave Wilber $40.00. Wilber refused because he insisted he had agreed do it for $20.00. Dad took the additional $20.00 and gave it to Wilber’s wife, Eva, who sometimes cooked for us. (She was the best cook we ever had). He never knew if Eva told Wilber about that $20.00 or not.  The only way you could be a guest at either one of these places was through a reference. It cost $15.00 a weekend, from after dinner Friday through Sunday dinner, which was served right after church. The cost for a week was $54.00.

The buildings at Trout Valley farm were the stone smoke house, ice house, laundry, (which also had two bedrooms and a sitting room where the laundresses lived in the summer) big barn, main residence, two cottages called The Annex and Buttercup Cottage and the Collingwoods’ house.

John and Helen Collingwood built their house after John came to Dad and made a deal. He would build a log cabin on our property and use it for twenty years. Then it would revert back to Dad. It was a verbal agreement, nothing was in writing. Dad paid the taxes but that was it. After eighteen years, the Collingwood parents died and their children had moved far away. Dad sent them $500 for all the contents of the house, and it became one of the rental cottages.

Taken July 1939 Mom 36 years Dad 46 years

This was typical of the way Dad and Mom ran the place. It was like we had an extended family, working, living and enjoying the place together. For instance, Dad had a cousin, Louise Collins, who was orphaned as a child and raised by her grandparents. She married Albert Collins who was blinded in the Spanish American War. They had to live on Albert’s monthly pension of only $15.00, so my parents took them in and let them stay upstairs at the Annex for free in the summer. Louise would help around the place, making butter balls, folding linen napkins, doing dishes and setting the tables. Albert stayed pretty much to himself, but I would often visit him and we would listen to baseball games.

There were no locks on any doors, and as a child, I knew most of the guests and called them aunt or uncle. One couple, the Momeyers, whom I called Aunt Carrie and Uncle Willy, had been coming to Trout Valley Farm since their honeymoon when it was owned by Jay Davidson. They stayed in the best upstairs room which had a porch on which guests often gathered for cocktails before dinner. Guests brought their own liquor, but the Momeyers were also very generous with theirs. They also helped us out one winter when things were pretty hard. Uncle Willy knew things were tough and he sent Dad $3,000.00. He said he was going to leave it to Dad in his will, but he figured we needed it then, not after he died.

With my delivery bike

Most of our guests liked to fish and they cught plenty. After a weekend, we would have huge platters of leftover trout. One of my chores was to get rid of these fish. Sometimes I would bury them in the garden, (great for the soil) but most times I would put them, cleaned and wrapped in paper, in the basket of my Hawthorne bicycle and take them around to give to our neighbors. We would often have left over ham, chicken or roast beef that we would give away as well.

Another one of my chores was to deliver ice. Dad bought the ice for 2 cents a cake, which was about 2 square feet. It was cut from Clear Lake in the wintertime and stored in hardwood sawdust in our ice house. I would haul it out from the ice house, hose off the sawdust and then cut it into three pieces, and deliver them in our old wooden wheelbarrow to our kitchen, to Buttercup Cottage (also called the Hova House after the family who stayed there for many years) and one for the Collingwoods’ cottage.

With Mom and our chickens

I also killed the chickens for Sunday dinner. The cook would tell me how many she needed (usually five or six) and I would chop off their heads with our Black Raven Ax. I still have that ax head.

In addition to our garden vegetables, chickens, and fresh trout, we also got maple syrup from our land. We tapped the maple bush in the early spring and the sap house was behind the church. The darker syrup that we didn’t want to keep was sent to Vermont where it was made into maple sugar. Nothing was wasted.

Mom in the cutter, and me with Nellie

Another chore was to get milk from the Kinch farm. I walked to the top of Campsite Road to meet the school bus and I always took my wagon or my hand sled if there was snow. On the way home, I would stop and buy a quart of milk in a glass bottle for 6 cents. When the snow was very deep, Mom would hook up our horse Nellie to our cutter and meet us at the top of the hill.

One year there were rabid foxes in the valley that bit dogs and even cows. There was a real concern that one of us could be bitten walking home from school so I carried a golf club in case I met up with a rabid fox.

When I was sixteen I taught myself to trap mink, muskrat and raccoon. Dad didn’t hunt or trap and he complained about the smell in the cellar of the furs drying. That year, I caught three mink, which I sent to the Sears and Roebuck raw fur business.

After they received the furs, they called and offered me a price. If I accepted their price, they would send a check. If not, they would return the furs. They offered me $48.00 and I accepted. A week later, when I came home from school there was the check, made out to Fred Banks, lying on the desk. I asked Dad how much coal would cost for the winter, and he said about $50.00, so I gave him the check to cash. He never complained about the smell in the cellar after that.

There are a number of people I remember from those years.

Newman Wagner was a life long friend of Dad’s. His father, Frank Wagner, owned property along the river in Craigie Clair. He donated his land for the school and church there, and in the deed it was stated that if these buildings were no longer used as a school or church, the heirs could buy them back for a dollar. Newman suffered a heart attack when he was forty-five, so he retired from Con Ed and lived on disability. He spent summers at Trout Valley Farm and winters in Florida. When Dad learned that Dundas Castle had been bought by the Prince Hall Masons, he bought the school and church for a dollar each in the name of Newman. Newman came back, tore down the church and fixed up the school house to live in.

Newman and Lucy Ackerly were a couple when I was a kid. They were a twosome at the bridge parties, attended the many valley cocktail parties together and played golf regularly. They were close friends for many years.

Lucy’s dad, Andrew Ackerly sold his land along the river to the state for a campsite in 1927. He still had enough land to keep farming and had milk cows. He would put ten-gallon milk cans in the rumble seat of his little Ford coupe car and drive through the campsite and sell raw milk to the campers for a nickel a dipper. One afternoon, I was walking down to the little store by the campsite (which Andrew owned and ran for some years) to get an ice cream, and I heard his tire go out as he crossed the covered bridge. He must have been determined to sell that milk, because he kept going and drove all through the campsite on the rim of the wheel. Clinkety, clunk, clinkety clunk. I remember that sound today.

I liked to visit Mrs. Husk and her daughter Elsie, who never married but stayed and took care of her mother. Elsie was a nice lady who had one eye that wandered. She would let me hold the old cap-locked Springfield rifle that rested on the mantle piece, which belonged to her grandfather in the Civil War. I would also be invited to come up and play jacks with Elsie’s niece, Ann Sheridan.

Frank’s son Ike married a woman by the name of Mary and moved away, but when she left him, he came back home and stayed with his Dad until he died. His son, Henry, was a coach in Livingston Manor for many years.

The porch brigade

Wilber Miner told stories about the building of the Covered Bridge which he learned from his father, who worked on it. When they were building the ramp to the bridge, on the east side of the river, the boys who were doing the stone work had a small keg of whiskey, to have a couple of drinks while they were working so hard. Suddenly their boss, who was a teetotaller, came down the road towards them so quickly they didn’t have time to hide the keg, so they threw it down into the ramp and covered it with stones. It must still be there today. Wilber’s father also was the one who was chosen to test the bridge by drawing a stone boat, loaded with stones and pulled by two oxen across the bridge. This tremendous amount of weight both tested the bridge for strength and set the wooden pegs along the sides.

Growing up on Trout Valley Farm in the ’40s and ’50s, I was one of the luckiest boys alive. The great sense of friends and extended family will always stay with me.