Roger Lawrence - up the mountain from Addie's house - looking out over the Beaverkill Valley.  Early 40s.

While we were on the subject, I asked Addie about the name of the third road in town. This is the road that connects the other two, dropping down from the Beaverkill Road to the “T” intersection with the Craigie Clair Road, passing on the left of the substantial houses that can be said to make up Midtown Beaverkill, in each of which, at one time or another, Addie has lived or worked. The road follows the lower half of the small tributary valley that begins as a hollow between the two hills above Beaverkill on the East and ends at the River. Addie, who was born well before the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed the State Campsite, knows this as the Campsite Road and is not convinced that it had any formal name before there was a campsite. Above the Beaverkill Road this side valley is known, particularly among the older local hunting set, as Laraway Hollow; named, it seems safe to say, for the Laraway who built the original hill farm near the spring halfway up the hollow. A stone, ”Abe Laraway Civil War Soldier”, stands in the second row of the churchyard of the Beaverkill Church, on the downstream side, and is usually marked by an American flag. I am told that a marker for Joseph Laraway, b. 1822, can be found elsewhere in the cemetery.

For years the part of the Beaverkill Road that ran through the hamlet was also called the Johnson Hill Road, and in the millennial mapping and redefinition of the area by the local authorities, the 911 people, and the Post Office, the latter name was formally adopted. An angry petition quickly circulated, and the road is now, again and officially, the Beaverkill Road. Addie says for the record, that Johnson Hill is the hill that rises from Deckertown up to what was the Edgewood Inn and, further, that the modest downgrade from the Waneta dam to the Campsite turnoff is called Black’s Hill, named for the quondam owner of the property across the road from the dam who ran a boarding house that was standing and housed a small store as recently as the early 70s.

When Addie was born in the Miner farmhouse, the river, or downhill, side of the Beaverkill Road was largely occupied by the Miner farm, with its house, barnyard, barn and outbuildings. The remainder of Uptown Beaverkill, the uphill side of the road, consisted of the Beaverkill Schoolhouse on the bluff above the Campsite turnoff, three or four substantial boarding houses, and a large building on the corner of the Elm Hollow Road to which the Beaverkill general store and post office would move from Downtown in 1930. In the earlier part of the century a bar and inn stood directly across the road from the farm, straddling the road up to Laraway Hollow. At one point, it was owned and operated by Addie’s grandfather, at the time the deputy sheriff for Beaverkill. All of the Uptown buildings have been torn down or, as in the case of two successive Miner farmhouses, burned, and there is today nothing left of that Uptown, except the boarding house now owned by the Brooklyn Children’s Mission near the Dam, a few stone foundations, a couple of horse mounting blocks, and Addie herself. We first met Addie (Estella Marie Miner Virtue), when we came to Beaverkill in 1971. Her house at the corner of the Beaverkill and Campsite Roads commands both the Campsite Road and the dirt road that runs on up to where we now live in Laraway Hollow, since at least the 1860s. She is a vigorous lady with a down-to-earth manner, steady eye and dry sense of humor. Troubled somewhat by asthma these days, she still gardens and mows her lawn religiously and is consistently successful in starting her mower with a hard look and one pull. She can now be found in winter in back of her house, feeding the dozen or so deer who return to feast, undeterred by fencing and the dangling aluminum plates on her garden in the summer. “Feed ‘em in the winter and curse ‘em in the summer”, she says, entirely unwilling to break the habit. She has a kindly feeling towards deer, related somehow, I suspect, to the fact she is an unusually talented huntress and has killed so many of them.

Addie’s present house is only a few yards in the direction of Deckertown from the site of the original Miner farmhouse in which she was born. Addie lived there much of her early life, although from time to time she has lived in a lot of other houses in town. Her mother, born Belle Knickerbocker in Grooville, in the DeBruce direction, kept boarders as a primary source of income, and, because the farmhouse was too small for the purpose, from time to time rented some of the larger houses around. During Addie’s girlhood, the family provided meals and rooms for tourists in each of what are now the Vogel, Root and Levy houses, as well as in a large boarding house that used to stand across from the second general store on the triangle at the corner of the Beaverkill and Elm Hollow roads. Throughout Addie’s youth both Belle and Wilbur also acted as caretaker in a number of houses owned by summer residents. The farm, however, always remained the family base even when one or more of the family moved somewhere else from time to time to take advantage of a job, or, as in Addie’s case, to marry.

Horse and buggy

Belle was in the line of the more or less legendary Manhattan Knickerbockers, a rural tribe which once populated Grooville, and Addie remembers that at one point her mother was visited by a delegation from Trinity Church, which still owns much of the Financial District and Tribeca, asking her to sign documents to help clear title to some ancient Manhattan holdings. Wilbur Miner courted her, “over the hill” to Grooville from the Miner farm by buggy and horseback. The Knickerbocker lineage is a venerable one, but Addie’s roots extend to an even more distant past. Her great-great grandmother was a full-blooded Lenape, the Leni Lenape being the principal tribe that passed through the valley traveling from the Delaware to the upper Hudson or searching game in hunting parties. Addie’s mother was a practical nurse and an important figure in the community who doctored and tended to many, not least as the informal town barber who shaved with a straight razor and, as Addie tells it, was not reluctant to threaten with it to enforce some degree of steadiness in her occasionally bibulous customers. Listening to Addie, it becomes sadly obvious that alcoholism, particularly among those who lived poor and isolated lives on the fringes of the community, both men and women, was not uncommon.

Wilbur operated the farm, milking 22 cows in the years before the Depression, while his wife tended to her own boarders or worked as a cook in several of the hotels around, including Edgewood Inn and, for many years, the Beaverkill Trout Club. The Miners had one hired man who lived with his family in a house, long gone, down the steep bank near the “Glen”, which is what Addie calls the gorge cut by the falls and the stream that comes down from the Waneta dam and ends at the Beaverkill. (Waneta, according to the histories, was created in the 1890s as a trout lake by damming the stream that flowed through what was then an alder swamp.) This is roughly the area where several years ago the road shoulder was substantially widened with fill taken from road work on up the Beaverkill and ‘improved’ with a row of planted trees that are now beginning to look natural to the hillside but which effectively cut off a fine valley view point. In Addie’s youth there had been a dam at the lower end of the stream some yards above the Craigie Clair road, and one of the neighboring householders, "uncle" Aaron Ackerly, who was a celebrated builder and handyman, managed to use it to generate electricity for his house for a number of years. He later moved to Deckertown where he constructed a number of the houses still standing in that community.

Addie worked on and off in a number of the boarding houses in Beaverkill starting when she was as young as 12 or 13. She remembers at an even younger age being sent back to the farm and from one or another of the boarding houses during the summer days, ostensibly to help with the chores but mainly, she is now certain, to keep what she strongly suspects was a young pest out of Belle Miner’s boarders’ hair. After Addie was married in 1948, and ran a bar and restaurant in the Manor, she and her husband lived for a number of years on the Berry Brook road, in the first house after the bridge- what is now Liz Hammerstrom’s place. That house was purchased by Addie’s father-in-law from the town blacksmith whose establishment, remembered by Addie, was in a large red barn between the bridge and the campsite entrance. For some time Addie worked as secretary to Ken Osborn, a retired lawyer and historian of the valley, who lived in what is now the Levy house. Her salary of some $35 a month was considered a good wage and enabled her to meet the $12 payments on a new car.

Addie also worked for the senior Joe Fiddle in the tavern he ran at the Parksville intersection and takes some credit for convincing him to open the ice cream parlor on the corner that has been a major landmark for the Beaverkill bound for years. Addie says that there was always much traffic and good transient trade on the corner. Even when the Quickway came in and by-passed Parksville, the political influence of certain very interested local parties was exercised to maintain the intersection as a grade crossing that netted travelers with the first red light after New York. The light has always come as something of a surprise, and more than one traveler never made it past Parksville. The commercial future of the intersection when and if 17 turns interstate is, of course, in some doubt, and the experience of Parksville after its original by-pass is ominous.

The Miner farm was and remains today one of the larger Beaverkill properties. It had 88 acres running along the Beaverkill Road from the Campsite turnoff almost to the bottom of the hill below the Elm Hollow Road, extending back at that point about to the River and then angling over to embrace the Adams and Lawrence properties and the beaver pond, whence it turns back up behind the houses on the Campsite Road. Once, other Miner properties extended along the Beaverkill Road as far as Waneta. Addie still owns most of the original farm acreage. She fondly remembers the little farmhouse, a saltbox with no porch and the old style horizontal frieze windows on the second, which burned before the Second World War. She remembers the family mules, Mike, a big black, and a little brown called Downey. Both mules were bought in Pennsylvania, their purchase, according to Addie, having been made largely at the behest of her mother to save them from finishing their lives, blind, in the blackness of the mines. She remembers that a pipe from the spring just below the Beaverkill Road carried water to a cistern in the floor of a back room in the farmhouse where milk, butter, eggs and cream were stored.

Barn on Berry Brook

Wilbur Miner sold milk and cream to the local boarding houses whose proprietors would send large cans to be filled each day or two during the tourist season and iced down at their establishments with the ice that had been supplied by Wilbur the previous winter. 10 cents a quart sticks in Addie’s mind. No pasteurization was required, although Addie remembers as a childhood event the regular appearances of the veterinarian driving his horse and buggy from farm to farm to tag the ears of the cows to show inspection for TB. Although there were dairy farms on up the Beaverkill that sent milk on to the creameries in Livingston Manor or Roscoe for shipment to New York, Wilbur and the other farmers in Beaverkill sold only locally.

By the end of the Depression the herd was gone. The economics at that point made them a losing proposition, so that even the Miners found it cheaper to buy milk, and new pasteurization and homogenization regulations were a burden not regarded at all favorably by Wilbur. The family managed to keep one cow for some time and never gave up their pigs, so that at least pork was plentiful. The farm also provided a supply of vegetables which were stored, with the meat, in the root cellar built by Wilbur when he built his second by the corner of the Campsite Road, The entrance can still be seen in the upper bank of the Road just past the turnoff. Addie remembers peeling an endless pile of potatoes from the cellar for the family Sunday dinners that saw at least twenty people at the long table in the new house. It was covered with a prized linen tablecloth that Addie remembers washing in a tub, ironing endlessly with a brace of irons heated on the woodstove, and coming ultimately to detest. The cellar was also home to two large barrels of cider; one ”doctored” by Wilbur for the gentlemen and the other offered for general use.

Addie remembers the Depression well and remembers very hard times in the valley. It was an important part of her youth, but whenever she talks about the hardships she never fails to mention happy memories of the spirit of community, the friendships, and the mutual support that those times also brought.

On the living room wall of Addie’s house, looking out the picture window where a celebrated Tiffany lamp once stood, hangs the stuffed head of a large and particularly handsome buck. As your eyes fall on its rack, you begin to count and realize that it has twelve points and looks very much to be what it is in fact: likely the largest deer shot around the valley in recent times. It is an impressive trophy, although Addie is convinced that he is looking a little seedy and in need of restuffing. Addie relates that in ‘43 she was hunting with her young nephew, her husband to be, and one of his friends, up on Rattle Hill behind the Scullin, now the Ames' place near the top of the ridge where there was a considerable area of windfall and, ideal for losing deer. She was miffed because she had convinced herself that she and her nephew had been brought along for the sole purpose of running game. She sat on a large rock, sulked, and had a cigarette, acknowledging today that this was an egregious violation of all rules of hunting, health not being the issue at the time, when about six deer appeared from the timber fall by a great buck. She raised her gun, aimed, shot, and heard a click. She notes that she always unloaded when she carried the gun but did not always remember her own habit. She was sure that she had lost her chance but quickly re-loaded, shot, and hit the buck, breaking its shoulder. It managed to get away, but she tracked it for some time to where it had cornered itself in a gully and, shooting down, finally dispatched it. She was using her Roberts Winchester, a wedding gift, which was her most successful gun and one that she asserts had consistent killing power.

Cutting ice

She did not wound many animals; generally, she says; she hit them, lethally, in the neck, and she recalls that her expensive Mannlicher used to be something of a failure from this standpoint. She kept and cherished seven deer rifles until she gave them away only a year or two ago. She keeps the Roberts. She needs it, because she has been out every season almost as far back as she remembers, and has already purchased her license with full intent to be out again this year, if only to hunt the lower end of the Hollow. Having taught a number of young people to hunt years ago, she always has sturdy companions in the hills, although she despairs of the way in which television and the computer have supplanted interest in hunting, and outdoor activity generally, among the youth. She has a regular license this year, having refused to take a doe permit, largely as a protest against the manner in which, in her view, Albany mismanages the deer herd and exploits its hunters. She does not admire the hunting bureaucracy and believes that they have done just about as badly with the turkeys as the deer.

The buck weighed in at 240 pounds, 210 dressed, and it took all four of them some hours to drag it out to the road and haul it into the pickup. Old Mr. Scullin came out and declared that she had finally ”shot Old Hickory.” They first drove it to Lew Beach, emptying both hotels and the bars, and then to the Manor where it was paraded around the streets with the cry, "look what Addie shot." Addie entered it in a contest put on by, I think, the Daily News where it came in second on a technicality - to one shot by a woman from Horton. I said to Addie that it seemed unlikely to me that a dressed deer with all hide, entrails and bones gone would have been only thirty pounds lighter than the live article. She looked at me as if I didn’t know where the feet grew from (her locution) and pointed out rather firmly that dressed naturally meant "hog dressed" with only the guts extracted and that I was talking butchered. She apologized and said, "sometimes I forget that you’re not country", which I have taken as a compliment. Addie allows that it was close to unfortunate that her near prize buck was supplemented by another big one shot soon after by her husband, so that they were glutted with venison, kept what they could, sold some to a butcher in the Manor, and gave the rest away. It was the Manor butcher who confirmed her observation that one half of a deer is always tender and the other half tough; as Addie puts it, "too tough to put a fork in the gravy." She entirely accepts this rule and has had a lot of chances to test it over the years.

Addie had always been taught the importance of killing on the first shot, but, if not, to follow any wounded animal, and she reserves great scorn for those hunters, more frequent these days, who do not trouble to make sure whether a shot has missed or has failed to kill. No less scorn is directed at those who shoot near houses or the road. Venison was always an important addition to the larders in the valley, but Addie points out that hunting was considerably more difficult back then. The place was more populated and there were fewer deer, so that a day on the ridges might go by without any sign of game, and a kill was a significant event. To her recollection, hunting always required a license, but sometimes in the depression poaching was a necessary expedient to put something on the table. Addie also hunted birds and remembers that the hillside above her house on the other side of the Beaverkill Road was in meadow and an apple orchard where pheasant would flock. Much of the Beaverkill had, by that time, been set aside as public water, and Addie spent many hours on the river over the years and brought back many trout to the table. She believes that the river held lots of wild trout back then and complains that, while she would like to get back in the stream with her rod, the stocked variety swimming today is far less satisfactory eating. The valley was less forested, with pasture covering much land that is now woods. Apart from the farmland, much of the clearing was attributable to cutting for the acid factories, a long time industry -- wood alcohol, acetic acid, acetone -- that was declining but had not reached its end in Addie’s youth. The companies had timber rights over much of the high lands including the woods on the hills within the loop of the Beaverkill and Elm Hollow roads. Addie remembers the loggers cutting the four-foot hardwood logs that were taken to Hazel or to the factory in Livingston Manor that stood on the far end of town, where the County Garage now stands. Logging roads came down the hills above Beaverkill, and a number of them can still be made out in the Hollow. The slash from the cutting made hunting difficult but created prime ground for wild raspberries. When Belle ran the big boarding house at the corner of Elm Hollow road across from the new general store, she lodged and fed many of the loggers. Generations before, the big houses that became tourist boarding houses had similarly lodged the tannery workers. As I write, another tree harvest is taking place around the valley as property owners are opening their land to more or less selective harvesting of the cherry that has reached good marketable size since the last cropping before the Second World War.

Wildcats were common - we even remember hearing their screams in Laraway when we first moved into the valley in the 70s -- but they seem to have mostly disappeared since -- to be replaced by periodic invasions of coyotes. Addie remembers walking along the Beaverkill road with some family and friends -- she notes that road walking was one of the few available pastimes -- and being followed on several occasions by a wildcat seemingly staking out her territory. Addie recollects one little girl who lived up the Beaverkill years ago, well past Turnwood, who carried a pistol to school for protection from animals. Bears, of course, turn up from time to time, and Addie remembers an occasion when she saw a bear in her front yard while her son Bobby was out with his bicycle but was only moderately nervous until she also spotted two cubs on the other side of him. She somehow managed to get his attention and get him extracted without angering the sow. She tells me that three bears were shot at Shaver’s fish hatchery in Turnwood this year after some substantial damage had been done to the ponds. The State had been trapping and exiling the miscreants from the area but due to budget constraints has more or less had to turn over enforcement to the inhabitants. I should record one wildcat sighting this year very close to a house on the Beaverkill, so, together with the turkeys, they may well have come back. I can also record a bear attack on a house high up above us in the Hollow in which the corner of the house was badly shredded, apparently in the creature’s effort to tear down a bird feeder.

Wilbur worked for many years -- he finally "retired" at age 9O -- at the Campsite. He built the original fireplaces and worked as a handyman whose long experience and knowledge of such secrets as the location of the pipes for the camp water supply caused him to be consulted on and off the job for years. He tried a stint as assistant caretaker for a summer but soon concluded that he did not want to lose his weekends attending on campers. When the CCC came in (the campsite had previously been condemned and was owned by the State) he worked with them but was not then a member of the Corps, although he later did join and worked for a time at Margaretville. Lumber from the farm was used to construct the original retaining walls that control the river by the swimming area.

The CCC era was a bustling one for Beaverkill. Addie remembers that the camp was run in highly military fashion with the workers living in tents at the lower campground and much organized activity attended by bugle calls that echoed through the whole valley in the mornings and evenings. The locals found a source of interest and amusement in the activities and made it an event to go down to the river to watch the CCC ceremonies and other goings on. Addie’s brother worked for the CCC at Ten Mile River at one point, and the Smith brothers from Laraway were able to leave home in the depths of the Depression by the opportunity offered by the Corps.

I had heard it said that Wilbur and old Mr. Kinch, who farmed what is now Vogels' and was thus the Miners’ next-door neighbor, did not get along, Mr. Kinch being a tee-totaler and Wilbur pleased to have a companionable drop when he could. Addie doesn’t agree with this and states that they coexisted amicably as neighbors on the road for many, many years. Mr. Kinch lived to over one hundred and Wilbur Miner died in his nineties, something those of us who regularly drink the waters percolating out of the Hollow choose to take as happy augury. It is true, Addie admits, that they had their differences, the main one being that Wilbur and his family were Democrats while Mr. Kinch was a confirmed Republican. Each morning Mr. Kinch would walk up to his mailbox on the Beaverkill Road where he would encounter Wilbur on the same errand. During election times she recalls that they would sometimes really get going, and that their arguments could echo down the valley, undoubtedly engendering the rumors of enmity. Wilbur used to visit the two bars in the hotels at Lew Beach when he could and also found sociability at the Lew Beach Odd Fellows Hall.

I have not asked Addie about her own politics, but I do know the family history and I have seen among the family photographs on her wall -- the one with the twelve pointer -- a signed picture of her with Jimmy Carter. It was taken when he was in the Valley to support the Fly Fishing Museum and Addie took it on herself to ask him to breakfast at her church. He accepted, attended, and is remembered by Addie as a very friendly and down-to-earth person. There is also a signed picture of Bill Clinton talking to Addie’s great nephew who was in charge of communications in Air Force One and Air Force Two for a number of years.

There was, of course, no indoor plumbing in the early days, and the trip to the outhouse was a trial in the winter. Moreover, Addie states that there was never a well or pump on the Miner property. A spring fed pond that still exists just below the Beaverkill road supplied drinking and washing water, with spring water piped into the house. Just above the road in the gully coming down from Laraway a small dam made a pool where the children would bathe as long as the creek ran in spring and fall. Addie remembers the stream as flowing more consistently above the Beaverkill Road than it seems to me to do today. Below the road it picks up spring flow, and the ultimate outlet into the Beaverkill is fairly constant. In winter, baths were in big tubs heated from the stove. The subject of baths brings Addie to mind of the time when practically the entire school population came down with the "seven year itch" which, in the Miner family, was cured by Lysol baths that Addie judges were likely worse than the disease.

Addie remembers that at one point in the 40s, the up-valley farmers got into a dispute with the creamery in Livingston Manor and asked Wilbur Miner to let them open a right of way over his land extending from what is now the log house towards the foot of the hill on the Beaverkill Road along the River to the present Park caretaker’s cottage by the bridge. This made a short cut that permitted them to cart their milk into Roscoe along the Craigie Clair Road without making the lengthy trip down the Johnson Hill to Deckertown and thence along Old 17 to Roscoe. The road was to revert back to the Miners when it was no longer being used and maintained as the milk route, but, apparently as a result of some misunderstandings reflected in some dubious conveyance, it was co-opted by the Beaverkill Trout Club and a period of argument, strategic tree fellings and, ultimately, litigation, ensued that finally resulted in some damages paid to Wilbur and restoration of his right of way. Having made his point, he ceded it back to the club. The right of way is still passable, according to Addie -- I have yet to explore it -- but both ends are now pretty much closed off, by building at the Beaverkill Road end and washout at the River end. Twice a day in the summer, Wilbur Miner would drive to Livingston Manor with a team, or, later, his Model T., to pick up visitors arriving on the morning train, the 10 O’clock Mountain, or the evening train, the Scoot. With some rare exceptions, tourists were a summer business. The visitors, which, of course, included many fishermen, were mostly from New York, or at least from pretty far "down the line", and most rented for the season. Addie remembers only one year round boarder, a gentleman who got the family their first radio and who, she learned years later, had sought the healthful air of Beaverkill to recover from TB.

In winter the Miners cut and packed ice to be sold to the boardinghouses for use during the tourist season. The ice business was a strenuous one and not a little dangerous. Addie remembers the time when blocks were cut by hand before the advent of the gas saws. Wilbur cut and loaded ice at Lake Waneta, and Belle drove it on the mule sleigh down Black’s Hill, then down the Campsite Road to the ice houses where Addie’s brother Al would pack it with sawdust and stack it for summer. Most boardinghouses had an icehouse, which would be stocked each winter. Addie particularly remembers the one in back of the Roots’ in the direction of the tennis court. She has the recollection that Wilbur charged $25 for filling a house.

The downhill run in a loaded sleigh down from Waneta on an iced-over rough dirt road was treacherous and could be harrowing. Addie remembers when her mother, who was inordinately proud both of her mules and her driving, bet Mr. Knapp, who ran what Addie remembers as an exceptionally beautiful matched team, that she could beat him down the hill. When Wilbur drove the team he would throw out a chain drag to slow the sled and keep it both on the road and off of the heels of the mules, and Mr.Knapp used the same expedient in the race. Addie’s mother drove full out, unbraked and heedless. Wilbur Miner was not entirely pleased when Mr. Knapp reported that Belle had beaten him hollow, and Addie believes that pride and relief were masked by some very stern words to Belle.

The road to the church in front of Trout Valley Farm.  1941

Addie remembers the winters as harsh and the snow as drifting high in the valley. The roads were cleared only by one Mack truck that, it seemed, had to serve the entire valley, and there were many times when Beaverkill was cut off completely. It was cold, and heating was entirely by woodstoves. Fireplaces existed in a number of the older houses but even as today, the feeling always was that they generally took out more heat than they put in. Fires, chimney fires particularly, were feared and common. Practically every week in the winter there would be stories of fires that, usually, managed to be confined to the chimney. Addie says that even as a child she always was slightly uneasy about sleeping upstairs next to the chimneybreast. An early memory is of a fierce snowstorm when the chimney caught fire, and her mother swept up Addie and her sister and threw them out the second story window. The drifts were so high that no damage was done, and it turned out that the fire was only in the chimney and was snuffed out with salt. Wilbur thereafter never tired of telling neighbors how Belle saw this little fire and first thing she did was threw her babies out the window. Belle finally got a pond dug out below the spring -- it remains there today -- mainly for fire protection.

There were several other farms in Beaverkill, smaller than the Miner farm and producing mainly for their own use and that of a few neighbors. The Bulkleys kept cows in the barn that descended to Kinch and is now owned by the Vogels, and George Vernooy lived in what is now the Adams property and kept cows that he pastured from time to time along the banks of the Beaverkill below the bridge. Addie’s family was living in the Bulkley house, and, when the Kinchs took ownership, moved up to the big house that used to stand at the triangle at the intersection of the Beaverkill and Elm Hollow Roads. Vernooy rented from Andrew Ackerly, and ran the Beaverkill general store and post office for many years. In the early 30s Ackerly, who had been living in the Manor, moved back into his house in Beaverkill, and George Vernooy moved with the store and post office up to a large building that was located, until it was torn down in the early 70s, at the Elm Hollow road turnoff, opposite the boardinghouse which the Miners then operated. The store at Elm Hollow boasted a single gas pump in front. Addie remembers that her father paid his rent by cutting and delivering firewood to Mr. Vernooy and that a winter’s supply was around 20 cords. Most firewood was still cut by hand. I have an impression that in later years when the store and post office operated uptown, the Elm Hollow intersection somewhat replaced Downtown as the center of Beaverkill life. For the record, when we moved to Beaverkill in the early 70s, the store building was still standing on the corner but vacant and crumbling, and there were part time stores at Black’s across from the Waneta Dam, at the campsite entrance, and at the trailer camp up in the woods opposite Edgewood.

The automobile came late to Beaverkill, and Addie clearly recalls a time when the horse and buggy were the usual transportation, even as cars began to come in. She remembers the doctor coming in a buggy, and she remembers as a very little girl catching a lift with the postman, John Crum, who would take her down the hill in his cart to the post office. If she were very lucky he would buy her a candy at Vernooy’s general store before driving her back up to the farm. Addie does not remember exactly when the roads were first paved, and her most vivid memories are still of the dirt roads not only in Beaverkill, but also the Beaverkill Road to the Manor and even the road to Liberty and beyond. She remembers her older sister driving Downey to high school in Livingston Manor. Wilbur duly acquired a Model T and, eventually, a Model A. By the time Addie was ready to go to high school, she was transported with 7 or 8 others in a Pierce Arrow hired by the school.

As we are frequently reminded, doctors made house calls in those days, but Addie makes it clear that there is a bleaker side to that story. She remembers when her brother got his arm caught in the belt of a large saw being set up in the field to cut cordwood early one winter morning and that she watched as he was thrown high in the air. It seemed to be a hundred feet but she allows that it was probably only 20. His arm was broken in three places. The only phone in town was at the post office in Ackerly’s place, and by the time doctor Davis arrived from the Manor it was dark, and the arm was set and splinted, very successfully it turned out, by kerosene light in the house. The doctor wanted Addie’s brother to see him in the Manor for check-ups, but Belle was firm that he was not to move and insisted that Doctor Davis drive out for the examinations. The doctor complied. She also remembers her mother going up the road to the Smiths' place in the Hollow to assist Mrs. Smith in giving birth to a daughter.

Belle Miner was a repository of country lore. She had learned wild medicines and the wild greens, such as lambs quarters, pigweed and burdock that the family ate as supplemental vegetables, from her own mother and from an Indian doctor who used to make a circuit of the mountains every year following the Indian trails that ran north from the Delaware. Beech Hill Road, Mary Smith Road and Berry Brook Road were all Indian trails at one point according to Addie and the histories. The old Indian stayed for a few days each year with the Knickerbockers in Grooville, where he taught Belle. Belle was to have been the author of an essay, to be incorporated in Ken Osborn’s history of the Beaverkill, still a main source for early Beaverkill history, treating of the herbs and plants of the woodland serving as food and medicine, but I do not believe that it was ever written. Addie credits her mother’s country smarts with having helped the family survive the Depression.

Electricity came in to Beaverkill only in the 40s and, as Addie remembers it, only when Irving Berlin moved in up the road in Lew Beach. Before that, kerosene lamps provided the light, and many of the ancient appearing lamps in the antique stores around the area were in fact produced for use in the 20s and 30s. An early electric lamp figured importantly in Addie’s life for a number of years. We saw it on a table in her picture window when we first met her and assumed, without inspection, that it was a reproduction of an unusually large Tiffany lamp. It was, in fact, the real thing, bought in New York by her father-in-law, who at one point had been a well to do steamship owner, for $500 in the early 20s. Addie had rescued it from abandonment in the barn some years later when her father-in-law purchased two new, and to Addie nondescript, lamps in town, I think at Hodge’s. He remembered her attachment and gave it to her when she subsequently separated from his son.

It was much admired, but Addie first became aware of its value and the significance that Tiffany has since taken on when she was eventually offered first $14,000 and, later, $21,000 for it. The latter offer came, it turned out, from a couple who some time later returned and stole it from the window and spirited it away in a black van. The house, in Addie’s then custom, was unlocked. A truck driver delivering gravel across the road saw the couple acting suspiciously, didn’t like the look of the black van, and took the license number. After a long period while the skeptical local police had to be educated as to the significance of the Tiffany attribution, attention began to be paid, and the van was ultimately traced to Massachusetts where the lamp was recovered after some negotiation with the thieves who, well connected, apparently plea bargained their freedom against its return in one piece.

Addie could no longer show it, and its possession became a worry. At the advice of a lawyer she finally consigned it at Christie’s, which gave it a full-page color picture in the catalogue, and sold it for $74,000, less, she ruefully points out, expenses of sale that involved Christie’s commission and uncountable bills for transportation, insurance, publicity, catalogues and the like. This, all apart from the lawyer’s share of the proceeds, the size and history of which does not even now, according to Addie, bear public recital. We’ve seen the catalogue and a number of exhibitions of Tiffany lamps and can attest that it was truly one of the best of the line. It had a pierced bronze stand and a magnificent glass shade with eight large dragonflies, head down with extended, clear glass wings, tip to tip around the edge.

Addie attended the Beaverkill Elementary School, which was located above the Campsite turnoff, on the foundations of which a new house has recently been built. When her older sister taught at the school a few years later on there were 17 children in all classes from kindergarten to 12th grade. There was one room and one teacher. Children came from Beaverkill, from over on Berry Brook Road, and as far as the Elm Hollow Road. The Smith family, who lived at our place in Laraway Hollow, sent their children down the hill to the school, which, at that time, was visible all the way down the meadow from the house in Laraway. The owner of what is now the Ames farm cared for a half dozen or so Catholic orphans who were also sent to the Beaverkill School. One later became the local postmaster. Addie believes that the most distant pupil came from farther on down the Elm Hollow Road, which, one gathers, was always somewhat isolated from the activities of Beaverkill. Retention in grade was the educational philosophy of the day, and Addie clearly remembers a number of rather older young men in the classroom during the years she attended the elementary school.

There were a number of small schools scattered around the Valley with the children from Deckertown and the lower Elm Hollow valley attending one on Little Ireland Road, taught at one point, by Addie’s brother. Addie showed me a listing of the pupils in the Beaverkill School in 1893 when her father attended. There were at that time 47 children from age 5 through 18. Many familiar local names appear on the list. Among them, four Ackerlys, five Miners, including Wilbur, seven Scullins from the family that lived in the Ames farm, four Morrisseys who lived in the O’Connell house on Elm Hollow, two Busseys from a house near what is now Alexander Drive, and two Barnharts.

Addie’s family were devoted churchgoers, religiously attending the Beaverkill Church which then had a full time minister who lived in the Manor. Addie’s mother was a stalwart of the church who, with Mrs. Bulkley, did much to keep it going, but it had its ups and downs and was not always open. In summer, revival meetings were held in a tent in the fields in back of the church. She remembers that during one period when the church was closed she was required by her parents to walk to Craigie Clair where there was a Seventh Day Adventist church, her mother holding that church on Sunday was the issue far more than the theology involved. The Church now being a summer institution only, Addie drives to Grooville each Sunday where she is an active church member, finding much support in the church community, but concerned over the increasing difficulty of finding pastors for a small rural congregation. The Beaverkill church building was also the neighborhood meeting place, and Addie remembers at one point that a benefit theatrical production was put on to provide funds for the church. She recollects that with a very pricey admission, maybe 50 cents, they collected $150 which, as she says, was real money at the time. Addie remembers reciting a poem about Beaverkill -- I think it may have been the one that appears in the frontispiece to Osborn’s history -- during the first scene change.

I asked Addie about the local towns, town life and entertainment. Lew Beach was larger than Beaverkill in Addie’s girlhood, with two hotels that remained until the great fire in the 50s. It was big enough in the 30s to support a barbershop, and Addie remembers square dances on Saturday nights upstairs in one of the hotels. Roscoe never seems to have been a focus of the folks in Beaverkill. Livingston Manor was clearly the commercial center and Liberty the nearest big town. Addie described movie theatres and even a vaudeville house on the main street of Liberty. The Manor was a significant and bustling town, and Addie remembers it on a Monday morning with the streets thronged with tourists and locals. The railroad station stood more or less where the firehouse now stands and was the center of activity several times a day. The old high school ran on for years even after its building on Old 17, since occupied by a drilling company and, lately, a taxidermist, was condemned by the State. Where the present high school now stands there was a building known as the Casino where a number of activities, including high school basketball games, took place. The trip back to Beaverkill from the Manor was not always easy; Addie remembers cheerleading at the basketball games that always seemed to end late on stormy winter nights.

Johnson & Fitzgerald's General Store

The main store was Johnson’s dry goods and feed store in the middle of town, more or less where the Sunoco Station and convenience store now stands. There were many other shops and merchants, and Addie’s uncle had a general store, with a garden in back, standing on the plot now occupied by the town parking lot. I told Addie that when we got here in the early 70s there were four bars. She remembers a time when there were 10 bars in town. In fact, she ran one of them in the 40s, selling food as well as drink to what she remembers as mostly the business clientele in town. The bars each found their level and custom: some were fairly rough, and fights were common. A customer who worked in the chicken plant stabbed one of Addie’s friends who ran a bar to death.

The intersection of Craigie Clair Road and Campsite Road, both unpaved.

Addie’s earliest memories of social life in the hamlet were of the young people in Beaverkill meeting at one house or another for a dance or a box social. The furniture would be moved from the largest room in the house, the rugs rolled back and room made for dancing, usually to the music of a fiddler or small string band brought in for the occasion. A big and very central house that Addie remembers as a popular social center was the house opposite Adams on the downstream corner of the Campsite Road and the Craigie Clair Road. Square dances were a popular weekend entertainment that lasted on into the 70s when regular dances were still held in the community hall in Turnwood and down the Beaverkill Road at C.C. Collins’s farm at the edge of Deckertown. The Smith brothers and their father, who lived in Laraway Hollow, were natural musicians, playing the fiddle, guitar and banjo. They played and picked up a little sorely needed cash at dances all around the Beaverkill area, and Addie, who had been tutored by one of the brothers, would occasionally fill in on the guitar. Another happily remembered venue was the unfinished second farmhouse that Wilbur built close to the Campsite Road whose windowless first floor sheltered by the new roof was ideal for dancing. She also remembers a masquerade party held at the house on Halloween, noting that that holiday was always an important one for the children as far back as she can remember.

Telephones were rare in the valley at this time, and the mailman who would distribute flyers along with the mail passed the news of social events. The pool below the Bridge was in those days as inviting a swimming hole as it is today and was the scene of parties and picnics in the summer, even though it was undeveloped and dangerously festooned with the barbed wire strung to control the cows that George Vernooy grazed on both sides of the River. Sledding and skiing from the top of the hills down into the valley were popular in the winter. Addie remembers that when the few cars packed the snow on the Beaverkill road -- and then pretty much left the road by late afternoon -- it was possible to sled from the top of the Johnson hill just about to old Route 17. Usually they would manage to convince someone to tow the sleds at rope’s end behind a car back to the top of the hill. Occasionally Addie and her friends would sled down the long hill from Shandelee to the Manor. The young people roamed and explored all of the hills and ridges around to valley.

A celebration was held, even as today, in a cold, crowded Beaverkill church every Christmas. Wilbur supplied a large hemlock from the swamp, and it was somehow maneuvered into the building and set up at the front of the church where it was decorated with lighted candles. Even now Addie wonders at the survival of the building. The celebration was, I gather, as much a community event as a religious one, although the minister was the central figure, as children recited poetry, sang and performed, and gifts were exchanged.

Addie's house January 2, 2005

It is clear in talking to Addie that the Beaverkill of her girlhood depended on tourists. The townspeople housed, fed, supplied, guided, and transported them or worked for or sold to those who did. When the tourist population ebbed, as in the Depression, times were hard. In the Second World War tourism also dropped, but the opportunity for work outside the valley blossomed. There was some income before the war from the logs and loggers supplying the acid factories but one gathers that not much money stayed in the valley, and the histories tell of the harsh conditions and poor wages of the loggers and acid factory workers. Even in the heyday of the tourists, Beaverkill was in decline in terms of population. Addie attended school with 17 pupils, but in her father’s day in the early 1890s 47 children filled the Beaverkill Schoolhouse. Several generations earlier, in the tannery era, the records tell us that the town was still larger than in the agricultural period of the late 1800s.

We have replaced the hard earned self-sufficiency of a proud little community with a sentimental occupation that owes the old village, its people, and its memories, at least these efforts to record and remember its past.

Postscript: Addie spent much of 2002 in the nursing home in Roscoe, but her wish that she could return to Beaverkill was fulfilled, and she had a number of weeks at home before she died, peacefully, in November of that year.

home | calendar | headlines & happenings | milestones | church

about us | maps | photos| stories | archives

© Friends of Beaverkill Community 1998-2012.  All rights reserved.