Liz and Davis Hamerstrom and their children Ed and Eric moved to Beaverkill from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, in July, 1954. Davis had been working with Tom Benedict in New York during WWII, doing marine drafting for the Navy, with the architectural design firm, Raymond Loewy, and the two couples became fast friends.

The Benedicts had been living in Westchester, but had moved to Beaverkill in 1947 or 1948. They were tired of the commuting life. Dottie was from Roscoe, where her parents owned The Antrim Lodge, and Tom had been coming to a hunting/fishing club in Beaverkill with his father since childhood.

 MH: The Benedicts came first?

 LH: Yes, Tom came up here fishing from the time he was a little boy. Tom and Dottie inherited the house that had been owned by his father and six or seven of his father’s fishermen friends. It was a little fishing club but they were older and no longer had much interest in the place. There was a very desirable part of the river with it. It is now owned by Ann and Raul deArmas.

Tom got a job with the Board of Water Supply which was building the Pepacton and the Cannonsville reservoirs to supply water to New York City. He was a draftsman for them. When he called Dave, he said there was so much work for an architect but no architect to speak of in this area and said, “I think we can make a living here. Are you interested?” We were instantly interested!

We had often come to visit the Benedicts. We loved this beautiful area, and felt we wanted to try a new life in the country. We didn’t like commuting or the constant round of cocktail parties that represented much of the social life of Old Greenwich. We were in our 30s and our children were only 6 and 8 so we felt it was a good time to make a move.  Tom called up a week or two later and said a house was available for rent. That was the Schwaningers’ place where Terry France now lives.

 MH: So you made the decision quickly.

 LH: Well, we took a few months because we had to sell our house in Old Greenwich. Meantime we found this place to buy near the Beaverkill Covered Bridge.
The day we arrived, we drove up to the house on the main road (which is now our driveway) and it was filled with old pickup trucks and cars with lots of people. Most of these people had been drinking beer and they were all slightly drunk. They were helping the people move out of this house to make room for us to move in.

Our moving trucks were waiting at the end of the driveway. We had two small moving trucks instead of one big one because of narrow roads and the bridge. When these people finally pulled out, we got our furniture dumped in the house on top of all the stuff that was left.

They left one bedroom full of old furniture. It was stacked to the ceiling with old iron beds and other odd bits of furniture. They were always going to come “next Wednesday” and get it and they were sorry it was in our way.  But they never came so eventually we hired a guy with a pickup truck to take it to the dump.

The well ran dry two weeks later. We borrowed three huge milk cans from Fred Banks for water until the well was drilled two and a half months later. Fortunately, it was summertime!

 MH: But there must have been something that was appealing about the house too?

 LH: Well, yes, nice old stone walls and beautiful trees and one big maple that is now gone. It was a beautiful place with a nice view.

 EdH: It was much more open. The trees were much smaller and you could see the river glinting in the light.

 LH: Originally it was a dairy farm. The parking lot is where the barn was.

At first we only did cosmetic stuff because at the time we thought that as soon as we got the business going we’d build a beautiful new house in the meadow. We were going to build right up there in the top of the meadow where you could have a nice view, but after we’d lived here awhile we realized that meadow was windswept and exposed and cold. Meantime we had grown to love this place so we changed our ideas and decided to renovate this house rather than build a new one. When we did, we put in thirty- six new windows!

 EdH: After ’29 the state started buying all kinds of land for the forest preserve and campsite. They bought that part of the farm below the road that is now part of the campsite.

 LH: A Dr. Keyes owned the whole thing which is now the lower campsite. They sold to NY State, about 44 acres, and they sold it for a ridiculous amount of money like $1,200. You know, Rural Electrification came in 1947, just seven years before we moved here.

 EdH: This was the end of the line because it came up from the covered bridge.

 LH: Now, for instance, the Benedicts had electricity long before we did. This little piece didn’t get it until 1947.

 MH: Did you go to Roscoe or Livingston Manor for shopping?

 LH: Roscoe, because Dave and Tom opened an office in Roscoe and the kids were in the Roscoe school. Also, Dottie and I did all the office work so we were in Roscoe at least a couple of days a week.

Sometimes we would decide we wanted to ‘have lunch with the boys’ and we’d all go to Antrim and have a couple of martinis. There were many people who ate there regularly and could have a ‘Blue Plate’ special, which was basically a main course but without an appetizer or dessert, so it was very reasonable.

We also went there occasionally on Saturday to dance. They had music and often a live band and we’d dance in front of the fireplace downstairs. It was very informal and lots of fun.

 MH: Didn’t Dottie’s family own the Antrim?

 LH: Dottie’s grandparents started it in 1893, I think, and then her sister Anna Mae and her husband Doug Bury took it over and they operated for many years until they sold it.

 MH: How was Dave and Tom’s business?

 LH: The first Benedict and Hamerstrom office was down by the Roscoe Motel. It used to be Seitel’s Motel and with it there was a little building where they had a little snack shop at one point, but it wasn’t being used, so we were able to rent that for our office. It had a bar where they used to spread their big drawings. It had a horrible old coal furnace that smelled and stunk up the place and Max Seitel would come in sometimes and Tom and Dave would be fussing about the smell and he would say, “Yes, smell that heat!”

Anyway, then the Board of Water Supply employed them to build an office, which was to be converted to a house when the BWS finished their work with the reservoirs. That was the house on Rockland Road.

 MH: What kind of business did they have in the beginning?

 LH: Primarily school additions and renovations.

 EdH: The schools had big additions because of the construction of the dams.

 LH: And also the baby boom and people coming home from the war had kids, and all the schools had to add classrooms so Dave and Tom got all that work.

 MH: Did people come here to work on the dams?

 EdH: It wasn’t so much the dams as the tunnels. There was a shaft right across from the office on Rockland Road which is probably why they built that building there. There was one also on the road going to Livingston Manor where Bowman Owen lives, and there is one going up to Lew Beach and another one on the Willowemoc Road.

 LH: These shafts provide access to the tunnels that carry water all the way to New York

 EdH: Each one of those had several hundred workers.

 LH: The reservoirs were all done before we moved here.

 EdH: When we moved up here, they were working in the Rockland shaft. It took a couple of years to dig the shaft and then dig several miles of tunnel and then bring all the stuff out. This all had to be done before they could use the tunnel for water.

 MH: What did they do with the stuff?

 EdH: It’s really good fill. It’s been used for roads and driveways…there’s a lot of it in Eric’s driveway. Jim Truesdell, who owned the property then, somehow got fill from the construction sites.

 MH: Jim Truesdell?

 LH: Jim Truesdell’s aunt was Katherine Quick, so Tom Quick Sr. was Jim’s uncle. Jim was very, very fond of him and also his Aunt Katherine who was a teacher in the Roscoe School for years and years. She was Eric’s 2nd grade teacher. Tom Quick died a few years ago. He was an old timer in Roscoe. There are all these stories about Tom Quick the Indian slayer who was some distant relative of his. He was a lumberman and a surveyor and he knew every piece of land around here. He was a great woodsman and hunter and a nice man, very nice guy.

So Jim and his wife Eileen were on their way from Florida, where they had been living, to New Hampshire where they had decided they would like to relocate. They stopped in Roscoe to visit Uncle Tom and Aunt Katherine and of course Uncle Tom showed them all around and they thought, “Why go to New Hampshire? Why not stay right here?”

That was around 1958. They found this farm, which is now Eric’s, and bought it for very little money. It was livable but pretty shabby and not that up-to-date, but they loved it and they promptly got goats and dogs and cats. Eileen had grown up on a farm in Maine and she loved farm animals. In Florida she had worked for the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus. She rode elephants, wearing a spangled outfit and sitting up on the elephant’s head, waving at people. She said she didn’t really know much about elephants except how to sit on one.

 MH: How did they make a living here?

 LH: It was very hard. Jim had been an insurance salesman in Florida, but he couldn’t really do that here. So he set up a shop behind their house, and made plaques and various art objects to sell to banks and doctors’ offices, things like that. They were very nice, made from copper and wood—-but he couldn’t really make a living that way.

Then he tried to start a ‘college savings’ club, which was actually a good idea and has now been taken up by the banks, but it was a new idea then. A kind of ‘Christmas Club’ for savings intended for children’s college.

And Eileen was smart and capable of doing many things, but there were really no jobs for her. They adopted two children, a brother and sister who had been born near Roscoe, and of course that kept her busy.

They were full of life and we had many good times together. One of our favorite activities was to go on ‘Elephant Hunts’ up in the fields behind their house. Jim had a little tractor with a flat bed he could pull behind it, and we would all pile on with our picnic and Eric would drive us over the fields. I don’t know why we called it ‘Elephant Hunts’, but we did. Eric learned to drive on that tractor.

But eventually, they had to leave because it was impossible for them to make a living here.

 MH: But there were still quite a few full time residents in the valley then.

 LH: Yes, we were friends with the Quicks, the Truesdells, the Benedicts, and the Schwaningers as well.

 EdH: John Schwaninger was German. He competed in the Olympics as a pole-vaulter for the German team sometime in the twenties. It’s interesting that two Olympic athletes lived within a mile of each other here in Beaverkill, John Schwaninger and Alice Hodge.

 LH: John had a sporting goods store in Queens. And Margaret was a hairdresser. At one time she was the manager of a Charles of the Ritz salon in what was called the Miracle Mile in Long Island. They would come on weekends and then they made the move up here. They made their living having hunters and fishermen come and stay. Margaret was a good cook and she’d make nice meals for them. They had the two houses, so they were able to rent out enough rooms to make a living.

 MH: How did the valley look different in the fifties?

 EdH: Whole hills have grown up with trees. Above Clear Lake Club up toward Seth Sternberg’s, much of that was field. Passaro’s land, the hunting club, was field with just the smallest little trees starting up.

 LH: I remember one time before Mr. Kinch died…he died at ninety-nine and a half, I saw him and he said, “You know we used to have square dances in your house.” In this house, can you imagine square dances in these little rooms with the low ceilings!

 EdH: We’re now better connected to the rest of the world. Roads were dirt roads. Phones were party lines. We got the NY Times by mail in our mailbox a day later.
We got TV eventually but could only get channel 12 from Binghamton.

 LH: Russ Hodge installed TV as a hobby.

 MH: Did you go to Lew Beach often?

 LH: Not really but sometimes we would go up to Lew Beach for steak sandwiches at the Lew Beach Hotel, where The Pub is today. It was a two story building but small, not nearly as big as the Bonnie View. (Now Beaverkill Valley Inn)

Mrs. Hourigan owned the hotel across the road and one day - - I’m not sure what happened, but somehow the gas stove exploded, and started a fire. She was badly, badly burned. In fact she died. The fire was so intense that it caught the asphalt on the road on fire and the fire went across the road and burned down the hotel on the other side. It was a major disaster.

 MH: What do you remember about the Hugginses?

 EdH: If you go up Ragin Road to the end, that all used to be their farm. They have a graveyard up there with nine gravestones, which go way back in the 1800s. There must have been some Huggins family that owned a big chunk of the top of that all the way to Huggins Pond. And I’ve heard that it was cleared pasture all the way down to Berry Brook. Most of the land was sold to the Boy Scouts, and now belongs to the state. When we came, there was just one sister with her retarded brothers. They lived down where Petruska now owns the property.

 LH: The brothers were retarded but the one sister, Grace, was OK. She looked after her brothers. There were four brothers originally, but the only two left were ‘Kayke’ (Gerald) and Billy T., as well as Grace.

I don’t believe Kayke could read or write. He’d never been more than twenty miles from his house in all his life and he walked down here one morning carrying a little alarm clock with a bell on the top. He said, “I come down to get my clock sot”. The clock had stopped and he didn’t know how to set it.

Eventually he was put in an old folks home or something. Gracie had always taken care of him but when she died, they had to do that.

 EdH: I remember one winter day sometime in the late 50s, I went to the house with my father and the state troopers. The Huggins had left, maybe that was after Gracie died and the brothers had been moved to a nursing home. There were two or three dogs shut inside.

 LH: It seems to me the dogs were shut in the house and they had to shoot them because they were wild.

 EdH: They lived right near where Petruska’s driveway comes into the road. There’s an apple tree there. The pond and Petruska’s house are set way back and all of that clearing Petruska did. He decided to plow out an air strip, but he only used it a couple of times. There’s a 4-degree slope so it was too steep and dangerous to fly into it.

 LH: A number of people had planes then; Tom Quick, Russ Hodge - - you find airstrips in all kinds of unlikely places around here.

 MH: Did you ever regret moving up here?

 LH: Never! It’s a beautiful place and we’ve had wonderful friends here. In fact we still do. This valley seems to draw good people.

Interviewed by Mary Hall
12/16/01

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