My Valley
Harvest Time
This was hard work for the
grown-ups in the farm family but fun for the children. For the men it meant garnering and
harvesting the crops especially cereal crops like oats and wheat, barley and rye.
Buckwheat came after and where I lived, was usually threshed out by hand with flails on
the barn floor. It was not stored beforehand but was drawn from the field as needed taking
advantage of good weather in about October. Many were the times I have ridden on the loads
of buckwheat and heard the thud thud of the flails as they rose and fell with rhythmic
strokes on the grain heads to produce our "pancake timber" for the winter.
Naturally one would think since Uncle Howard was the proprietor of a grist mill he would
have been privileged to manufacture our own buckwheat flour but not so. Aunt Mary had her
own ideas on this subject and she thought Tillotson mills flour wasn't good enough, so in
the beginning of winter our team was loaded with grain and the hired man dispatched to
Liberty Falls or to the Hatch mill near Monticello where a whiter product could be
obtained.
But I am getting ahead of my story. I started out to glorify the busy times when the threshing machine would pull into our barnyard and prepare to camp out on us for two or three days, the times when the women folks had been baking and cooking for this occasion days beforehand, and I had been scouting around impatient for the day that I could set my teeth into what looked like delectable foods stored in cellar and on pantry shelf. The machinery was of course horse drawn and horse operated. It consisted of the thresher itself which was always handled by the owner as being too dangerous for an amateur; the tread mounted on truck wheels having no knives or other dangerous parts could be intrusted to almost anyone who could drive a team. Accordingly the man who last employed the thresher man sent his team and man on to the next farm to pull the tread mill which was the power that ran the thresher and was usually operated by the owner's team.
Blizzard of '88, March 13
This storm has become an historical event- a real
classic. It raged four days, not only in Sullivan Co. but in Western Connecticut and New
York City. I still hear repercussions of that snowfall, but I can give only my own
personal recollections of it. Uncle Howard had died and Aunt Mary and I were living alone
in the old house.
I had just completed my first term of school teaching four miles south of Monticello, a stout girl of sixteen so I was able at least partly to dig ourselves out. I recall being almost buried by the snow. We had no mail for a week and when John Ferrie started a week later to walk home from Monticello where he was employed in the Monticello bank, up on top of Knowell's hill the drifts were so high and so well packed that he had no difficulty in walking on top and stepping through the telegraph wires of the Postal Telegraph Co. Many other weird tales were told of this freakish storm. A farmer north of Bethel was unable to plow an entire field for oats because of a heavy snow drift in one corner. He then sowed the oats as close as he could to the drift and on July 1st plowed where the drift had stood and sowed buckwheat.
I did not know it then, but in this year of Grace 1948 I learned how much snow did fall on that memorable occasion. According to a weather report over the radio March 13, 1948, I learned that only three and a fraction inches fell the first day, thirty odd the second day, and enough the two following days to make it up to forty-six and a fraction in all four days.
Of course there were no snow plows or any means of disposing of heavy snow falls other than ox-teams and heavy sleds to tramp down the snow so that teams could pass and in time pack down the snow still more to let lighter traffic move. With these insufficient means of opening the roads, gangs of men often just skirted around the drifts making a way through fields by tearing down fences and other barriers.
Many old cemeteries are near habitations or near the church but our old cemetery at Mongaup Valley was placed at some distance from the Valley proper, way off on a side road, a veritable "lover's lane" where the only bit of maiden hair fern in all these parts grew by the roadside. Perhaps the Valley founding fathers thought "the dead should sleep in peace" and so they did for many, many years but now the road past the cemetery is a direct road to Port Jervis and I've no doubt but that many cars pass that way often disturbing the solitude.
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