My Valley - Page 19

The land chosen and surveyed by Grandfather Gillespie was a sandy knoll overlooking the tannery pond from a distance, lovely in the summer, but in the winter cold and bleak, the road usually piled high with snow drifts which required much back- breaking work to let funeral processions through. I recall the death of one very old cantankerous man who was noted his whole life for his ill natured remarks. When he died the snow banks were high and one of the neighbor women said, "Wouldn't it be awful if the hearse should tip over?" Her daughter having a sense of humor replied, "Well, if it does, I'd expect the old man to jump up and rip out a whole volley of oaths."

The cemetery land was given by Wynkoop Kiersted and a large plot was reserved for his own family, all neatly fenced about and well kept. A row of beautiful balsam fir trees were planted along the road side, their slender tops always recalled to me:

"I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER"

"I remember, I remember
The fir trees dark and high
I used to think their slender tops
Reached up into the sky.
Then 'twas childish ignorance
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm further off from heaven
Than when I was a boy."

The graves of many old settlers are here to be found nearly all in a state of disrepair and neglect. Many families are entirely gone and the few remaining members are too far removed, or too scattered to take sufficient action to keep up the appearance of the old burying ground.

Last winter one evening while idly twirling the knobs on my radio dial my attention was suddenly arrested by the words "Swan lake" "Sheldrake" "Stop", I said to myself, "these names sound familiar". Immediately my mind began going in circles. Swan Lake- Stevensville Pond- Oh yes, the road used to dip down from Liberty to sort of a viaduct crossing the water, clear on one side, full of old tree stumps on the other, then up into the village of Stevensville past a general store and on to White Lake five miles distant, "Sheldrake" now where is that? Why in Sullivan County of course where I had my start in life. Hey, this sounds interesting, I'll listen, and listen I did, horrified, for what I heard did not tie in with the old horse and buggy days to which my mind had reverted.

This was it- a gang of assassins in N.Y. City had murdered a man, thrown his body into a car and speeded their way up into present Swan Lake which has in recent years been raised by a higher dam to a fine looking sheet of water. Here the corpse had been thrown, and the murderers had driven off secure in feeling that their crime would never be discovered. Then another band of thugs carried another corpse up to Lake Sheldrake which they threw in and hurried off in the same belief that since nobody saw them do it, nobody would learn the enormity of their crime.

The radio voice went on to state (F.B.I. by the way) that if these assassins had understood physics they would have picked a better place to hide their misdoings than a man- made lake with water of warmish temperature or even a spring-fed lake like Sheldrake having much colder water for in either case a human body would decompose and the ensuing gasses would float it to the surface in longer or shorter time according to the temperature of the water. As I listened still further, I was informed that in due course of time, the Swan Lake body arose and the F.B.I. at once got onto the murders. Likewise the Sheldrake corpse made its appearance, and the F.B.I. clamped down on both sets of murderers thus bringing the killers to justice.

All this took me back many years to when I was a small child and memories of those times flocked into my mind. I knew of course what a difference there is between the slow horse or ox-drawn travel and the swift automobile age. This dumping of corpses 100 miles from the scene of murder could not possibly have taken place 100 years ago or even when I was a child some 70 odd years ago or even in later years after, when I was a mother with three or four children traveling by Ontario and Western R.R. up from Scarsdale to take the children to visit their grandparents near White Lake. The only method of travel at that time was by train which we would board at the Weehauken terminal in Jersey City. Grandfather Royce would meet us at Ferndale with the big wagon and away we would go behind old Dick and Fletcher to Grandpa's farm near the close of the day.

But now I must leave these interesting episodes and go back to pick up some odds and ends of an earlier day which I would like to include in my childhood recollections of Mongaup Valley.