We are frequently told that the rocky road through the woods up Laraway Hollow is intimidating, particularly after storms. It clearly deters casual exploration. I could probably count on one hand the number of wholly unexpected visitors over the years: the troop of Boy Scouts from a lake camp beyond Elm Hollow looking for the Campsite, the 911 people with one eye on the road and the other on the global positioner, the Beaverkill Fire Department. checking whether their trucks would fit (or, more urgently, could emerge without scratches), and the hearty Seventh Day Adventists, possibly practicing for wilderness service with the Board of Foreign Missions. That’s about it.

It was therefore with curiosity and doubt that, probably a dozen years ago, we watched a large white Cadillac wallow up the road and stop in front of the farmhouse. A distinguished white haired gentleman emerged and asked somewhat diffidently if he might stop and look around. “My name is Gurden Smith,” he said, “I grew up here.”

We welcomed him warmly and, hanging on his heels and every word, followed him as he wandered around the place. He said that his boyhood at Laraway was during the ’30s and that his family rented the property – I believe from Mr. Ackerly, the ubiquitous local landowner, who was a successor in title to the Laraways whose ancestor must have first built the farm, probably before the 1860s. I note that the raison d’être of the farm is a flat area in the hollow served by an unusual spring that comes out from beneath one of the series of sandstone and bluestone bluffs that surround the hollow in a series of steps and terraces marked by tumbled, angular, boulders “plucked” by the glacier – typical geology in the hills around Beaverkill. It appears that during the ’30s the place was let out for tenant farming, and Clarence Loucks, a long time Manor and Willowemoc resident, told me that he visited as a child when his uncle also farmed it and remembers a big barn in the middle of the hollow. Gurden pointed to the spot where the barn once stood and to our pond area where the farmyard lay. About all that was left of the farm when we took ownership were a rotting shed, sheep fencing around the perimeter, now welded into the maples and a peril to chainsaws, and an inordinate number of horseshoes in the area around the barn site.

To my recollection, the family consisted of the parents, three or four brothers, and a sister. Addie Miner told me that she remembered her mother climbing the hill to assist in the birth, I think, of the sister. According to Gurden this substantial family managed to get its whole subsistence from the farm. They had the typical farm animals, and my impression is that sheep were the main source of income. He did not mention crops. It was clear that the family was very poor, even in an age and place of generally modest lifestyle. The house, which was never, as far as I can tell, winterized, was, as Gurden remembers it, cold and drafty, and the floors were covered by tarpaper. The family spent much of the colder nights throwing wood in the old and drafty stoves. Gurden told us the number of cords of wood that were used in the course of a winter; the number that I recollect – 30 cords – seems improbably high, and my memory may be wholly wrong, though after seeing what we burn in sealed stoves during a cold fall month, I have a feeling that the number is, if anything, conservative.

They earned a little cash from the sale of bluestone. There was a small quarry below the house, the cuts and spoil piles of which are still in evidence, and once a month a truck came up the road to collect the pieces that had been split out of the large slabs with wedges, dragged down, and cut. This was a common sideline for farmers throughout the Delaware watershed. Even today, individual landowners sell small lots of bluestone, and you will still see in the offices of the big stone suppliers on the East Branch blackboards showing prices offered for cut pieces of different sizes and thicknesses. Another source of cash income was, curiously, the sale of ferns. The family collected them from the woods and pressed them between sheets of newspaper to be taken by train for sale to florists in the city who used them in flower arrangements. I later learned from Addie Miner, who was a contemporary and good friend of the family, that the Smith brothers were excellent musicians who tutored Addie and picked up some cash by playing at dances and parties around the valley.

It appears that as the Depression deepened times grew even harder on the farm, and I suppose that the growing family was becoming harder to maintain. The brothers got jobs with Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps which performed such work as the construction of trails and campsites, including the Beaverkill Campsite and swimming beach. My recollection is that they were not assigned to the Beaverkill project but worked elsewhere in the Catskills. When the war came Gurden entered the service. When it ended he took advantage of the GI bill. He eventually worked for General Electric at the big facility in Binghamton, and prospered. It is hard to imagine a better American story.

I have been unsuccessful in getting in touch with Gurden again, and perhaps the story was best left where it is, though I would have loved to know more about the details of how a living could be wrung from the land on that hillside and about the social perspective down the hollow into the valley where golf, tennis, and sociability held sway.

As the visit ended we asked Gurden about what had impressed him most about the place – we were somewhat proud of what to us were improvements, and, I suppose, were fishing for approval. He looked serious, considered, and said that his main feeling was disappointment. “It’s all overgrown”, he said, somewhat wistfully and clearly without compliment. He observed that when he lived at Laraway he could stand on the porch and look down to the schoolhouse and the Beaverkill road. The land between, which is now almost entirely wooded – and has already yielded a crop of sizeable cherry logs – was all meadow, with some orchard, and the Smith children would walk over the open fields to the school which was located on the bluff overlooking the campsite turnoff (A house now stands on the spot, built on the old foundation.) The areas of more level ground in the hollow above the house were also in meadow for the Smith animals, and you could see far up towards the woods that apparently have always capped the ridge.

We had always felt that we were sheltered in a wilderness forest. Gurden made me realize that this was not remotely the case, and further that, for a farmer, woods have no charm compared with a field, cleared for crops or grazing. Thinking further about it, I see that the most obvious physical difference between our own valley and the Beaverkill of the first half of the last century, as chronicled in this volume and reflected in its pictures, was the absence of trees. Although the hills and the ridges have always been wooded, all of the land that is flat or rolling was in grass. The entire bottom of the bowl of hills that surrounds Beaverkill was meadow or, even, manicured, to the culminating extent of golf greens.

We moved to Beaverkill assuming from its somewhat overgrown character that it had always been a fairly wild and woodsy place and that its essential spirit was that of the tanners, lumberjacks, hunters, fishermen and campers. In fact, the era prior to ours was one of the civilization and domestication of the valley which had by then become bucolic rather than wild. Our woods are not part of a forest primeval but the scene of reconquest by the trees pushed back in battles with the hemlock loggers, the acid cutters, the farmers, and the golfers, and which are today in a renaissance of an unknown duration.