-
Title
-
Jack VanBuren November 23, 2018
-
interviewee
-
Jack VanBuren
-
interviewer
-
Lorene Sugars
-
Date
-
2018-11-23
-
Subject
-
John Deere
-
Antique Power Days
-
The Grange
-
Tractors
-
Quicksand
-
Roseboom, NY
-
Technological Change
-
Schools
-
Belvedere Lake
-
Cherry Valley, NY
-
Description
-
Jack VanBuren lives at 131 John Deere Road in Cherry Valley, New York. The area in which the VanBuren family lives is also known as Roseboom. Located between Cooperstown, New York and Cherry Valley, New York, Roseboom was established in 1840. Once a bustling and active farming community, Roseboom has declined over the years. At one point it was home to a John Deere Dealership, a cheese factory, multiple operating dairy farms, an active Grange, and many other community shops and groups. Today, Roseboom has a population of around 711. Of that 711, the median age is 48, with the highest percentages of the population being between 50 and 64.
Mr. VanBuren grew up in East Worcester and moved to Roseboom in 1966 as a young man with his growing family. The VanBurens have lived on John Deere road ever since. After coming to Roseboom, Mr. VanBuren took an interest in the history of the town and the people who lived there, gathering knowledge from those he met. Out of this respect for and interest in history, as well as his own sense of need to preserve history, the VanBuren family started the annual event, Antique Power Days. Mr. VanBuren hosts Antique Power Days on his property each year on the third weekend in August and it is always free and open to the public.
I interviewed Mr. VanBuren in his home on John Deere Road the weekend after Thanksgiving. He prepared himself for the interview by conducting more research on the town of Roseboom to ensure that any dates or names he gave me were correct.
I have attempted in this transcript to preserve Mr. VanBuren's speech patterns and Central New York dialect, but for purposes of clarity in the transcript grammatical changes were made. It is impossible fully to reproduce aspects of speech in the written word so researchers and interested parties are strongly encouraged to also consult the audio recording of this interview.
-
Transcription
-
LS = Lorene Sugars
JVB = Jack VanBuren
[START OF TRACK 1, 0:00]
LS:
This is Lorene Sugars interviewing Jack VanBuren at his home in Roseboom, NY on Thursday November 23 [2018] for the Cooperstown Graduate Program Oral History Project, which is part of the Research and Fieldwork course.
So, Jack, thank you so much for letting me interview you today. Just to start off, can you tell me a bit about Roseboom when you first moved here?
JVB:
It was kind of like a retirement community. We were the young couple when we came here. My wife was 19 and I was 21. The people we bought the farm off of said that they were the old people in town, and after a few years had passed we found out they weren't that old. They were in their late 40s-early 50s, but most of the people here were retired at that time. There was a John Deere dealer next door and that was basically the only business in town other than dairy farms. I think we had the only children in town, well there was one family next door to us that had one boy that was going to school, but we had the only children in town at that time. We had all boys, and they said that there was only one girl that had ever been born in the town of Roseboom at that time. But like I said, there was not many children here. Back to the John Deere place, of course I'm a John Deere enthusiast. We had farm equipment that was John Deere, so it was kind of unique that we had a dealership right next to the farm and everything. You could just walk down the street and get parts or service or whatever you needed. I kind of became interested in the John Deere place and over time we found out that it had burned in 1952 and they rebuilt it in 1953. To go back a little further than that in where it originated, there was a fella named Harmon Howland that lived in 1862-63. He had a saw mill there where the John Deere place was. Kind of strange but that also burned in 1862. At that time, they said that they had to hurry to get it rebuilt because they had to saw planks for the road to go to Cherry Valley. Plank road. They always talked about when we were kids pulling up the sidewalks after dark. Even then, before that the bridge over here on the main road was built sometime in the late [19]40s, early [19]50s. Well, [19]50s because they rebuilt Route 165 down here. There are still remnants of the plank road where they built the bridge the other side. You look down in the stream, and you'll see the plank road. They said there was a huge demand for plank, so they had to get it rebuilt. So, at that time, Harmon Howland, he had a son that was only 12 years old, and he joined his father and the business became [E.H. Howland & Sons?]. They not only had the saw mill, but they had a grist mill, a cider mill, and they ground buckwheat flour. That changed in 1940 when it became the John Deere dealership. Then in 1950 Harmon Howland or Ed Howland, turned it over to Ed Murdock, which was his son-in-law, and Ray West and they started the rest of the business from 1950 until 1968, when they closed the place down here. But the building, the original building here, burned November 10th, 1952. They rebuilt it the next spring in 1953. That became, I think in [19]55, just Ray West. Murdock sold him his half of the business. It was kind of the stories they told about the building down here. There was quicksand within five feet of the top of the ground, and they had nothing really solid to build the building on, so they cut timbers and dropped them in the quicksand and they built the building on these timbers. In 2018 the building still stands on timbers that they cut and dropped under the building down there. To back up, when Harmon Howland had the business there before it became the John Deere dealership, or really when it still was, they had two big grinding stones in there. That backed up to 1836. On the upper side of the road, past our house here, they had a grist mill that was built by the Ellwells in 1836. They actually had Belvedere Lake built to provide the water for the mill. They went until 1940. They had the grist mill until 1908, and they moved that [the mill] in 1908 to the Howland mill, where the John Deere dealership was. Of course, that was in there and they always attributed the fire in the dealership down there, when it burned in 1952, was because of all of the grain dust from using the water wheels and grinding the feed and the buckwheat and stuff and all the dust that was in there. There were so many things that were kind of unique between the two places. Like I said, one of them was that they actually built Belvedere Lake. That wasn't there before they decided to build the mill above us. In our deed for the farm, we were going through one of them at one time and there's a right of way, or an easement. From behind the John Deere place, there's a foot bridge and they built a phone line that went up over the hill to Belvedere Lake. When they got ready to run the water wheels they would call up to the lake and have them release water. We had across the road in front of our house, which was done before we got here, a holding pond about eight feet deep right at the edge of the road. It went under the bridge and is there still today. If you look down below at the foot of the bridge, there is a four- or five-foot tile that sets in the stream, sets upright, and that's where the water funneled in to go through into the John Deere place to run the water wheels. We had a couple of barns that were above the house that had fallen down back in the years when the mill was above here. They were built to house the horses when the people brought their feed in to be ground, or whatever. John Deere Road was named after the business. That was quite a hub of business for the town, compared to [the rest of town]. Although we did have other things; we had a cheese factory over street back then. We had other things too. We had a blacksmith shop. When they rebuilt the new roads everything kind of disappeared over street, but John Deere remained on John Deere Road until 1968. Of course, there were lots of stories. When you stop and think about back when they built that dam for the pond up there, for the lake, I mean they didn't have heavy equipment like they have today. That had to have been dug pretty much by some sort of implement pulled by horses or by hand. I really have no idea what they used. It's just flat stone [that] they laid the wall up for the dam up there. Back six, eight years ago, when we had the flood here in Roseboom, they came down and they wouldn't let us stay in the house, because they said the dam was going to break up at Belvedere. We had to evacuate, so we did, but we didn't think that anything was going to happen with the dam. And it didn't, and to this day it's still there, even through the flood. So, the technology, even if they didn't have the technology we have today, we built things that lasted. The grist mill that was above us here, after that vacated after 1940, they tore the building down. The main structure that housed the water wheels and the stone foundation of that building is a house that's located over in Cooperstown at the head of the lake. That was kind of the same thing when you think about all the heavier rock or flat rock that they moved all the way over there to build that house in the 1900s, [it] had to been done by horse and wagon also. Well, they got up and did a day's work and they didn't think much about it. Prior to 1940, over on Main Street even today, there's a building, a store. There was an owner that was there in the early 1900s; the people that owned it were known by the name of Roberts. They sold it to another family and then it was called Arrowhead Store. They sold it in 1912, to Albert Clearwater, and after that he sold it to a man called Frank Turbush, who was the John Deere dealer before the John Deere place was here on the corner. He was a John Deere dealer until 1940, and then they turned that dealership over to Ed Howland on John Deere Road. You could go to your corner grocery store to buy a tractor which was kind of different, but I guess whatever it took to get things done, you know?
[TRACK 1, 12:24]
LS:
With all of these businesses that obviously are serving all of the farms around here, what kind of farming happened here?
JVB:
It was mostly dairy. I would say probably all dairy. Farms weren't big back then. I read an article once, they said farmers back at that point in time weren't looking to get rich, so they expected if they could pay for their farm and raise their family that's all they expected to do. I know I went into a farm at one time and the guy when he turned the light switch on, the milk pump came on. He actually milked seven cows [chuckles], course it was just him and his wife. The average sized farm was probably 15 to 25 cows with 25 cows being a large dairy for that period of time and then of course that led way to the creameries that were around and the milk truck drivers that came around and picked up canned milked. Every morning they did that. That was long before bulk tanks. A lot of things back then were related to agriculture. While there still is today, it's gradually drifting away and everything's getting bigger. Back then we had feed stores, but they delivered feed, and now it's bulk feed. We had canned milk and the milk truck driver came every day and picked it up. Every town, pretty near every town, had a creamery. In Cherry Valley, they had one and of course Roseboom had its cheese factory. Walt Reary ran the store in Cherry Valley and he said that the farmers were predominantly most of his business. He said when they came to the creamery in the morning and on the way home, they stopped. They bought a loaf of bread, or a chew of tobacco, or something. They didn't buy a lot, but when they stopped everybody bought something and that made a difference. When they closed the creamery, all those farmers didn't stop anymore. He said it really hurt his business. Now if you want to go to a John Deere dealer, you've got to travel 50 miles or 90 miles, there's no more small-town [dealerships]. At that time, back then, every town with a creamery, they [also] had a John Deere dealer. There was one over in Worcester and over in West Winfield and one in Sharon Springs and one in Cobleskill and of course the one right here in Roseboom. They [are] all gone, and that's history. [Chuckles]
LS:
Does the dealership and its presence here have any sort of lasting legacy in the community?
JVB:
We are farmers and use that type of equipment. Most people if you were to talk to them today, they didn't. They all think I caused this to be called John Deere Road, which isn't true. Most of them don't even realize that the business was here. That's gone by the wayside with the older people in the community. No, I don't think it has any bearing on anybody anymore; it might have up until 1975, but most of the people now are like myself [and] have moved in here. Of course, we came in [19]66. Most of the people here now came in the late [19]70s or middle [19]80s. The place has been converted to a house, so there's no remnants that it was ever a John Deere dealership. Like I say, most of the young people, they might have heard a hint of what was there, but it has no meaning to them. Even my own children they know that it was there, but they never saw it. They were too young. So, we always refer to it as the old John Deere building. It's been sold four times, mostly to downstaters. Well, the first fellow that bought it came over from England, a young fella, and his parents were in the consulate. So, we always thought that they sent him up here. [laughs] He came, and he was 18 years old. Him and his girlfriend came right over here from England and slept in a tent out in the yard in October, because she was afraid of mice. They used to bathe in the creek. We said to the young man, we asked him what he wanted to do? He said, “Well, I want to work in the post office,” and we said, “Well everybody would like to have that job!” Then it was sold to a couple from, I want to say Virginia; no, they were the people that were the authors. Then there's a gentleman now from down on Long Island that has it that just basically comes up, oh, three or four times a year on holidays. Even the people who have bought it didn't, well I don't think they knew. They just saw it as an empty building. They have no idea it was ever a machinery building.
[TRACK 1, 18:53]
LS:
Earlier you mentioned the quicksand that is around here. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
JVB:
We had a heifer once that got caught in quicksand down along a drainage ditch. We were just young then. We had only been down here a year or two and we weren't really familiar with it. When we found her, she was pretty well down, so I got my wife and we went down with the tractor. I tried to get a rope down beneath her center parts to see if we could pull her out. She was past that point, she sunk too far, so we put the rope round her neck or round her head. I said to my wife and said, “Well you go slow I'm going to try to break the suction of this quicksand,” and she said, "Well I'm going to pull her head off!" [laughs] And I said, “Well, if we don't get her out of here, it won't make any difference!” Well, we pulled her up out and she laid there in the field for a better part of a day, but she finally got up and she was alright. The previous owner Badgley Webb had told about going through the barnyard out here. A team of horses had sunk in the quicksand and they couldn't get them out. They actually sunk in the quicksand right here in the barnyard. We had to drill a new well, and it's quite a distance from the house where we dug a ditch. We were down about four feet and we were in quicksand all the way, and the fellow come to back-fill the ditch, and he said, “you got to push the pipe down.” I remember standing on the pipe and pushing it down in the quicksand, but the minute I stepped off it would pop right back up out of the ground. So, we had quite a time trying to get that reburied. The power company came here once to set a pole and they had their auger running. That guy said, “This is going to take all day here; this is a slow process.” I said, “Let me tell you what, when you get broke through there just a little ways, you ain't gonna have to worry.” He laughed and when I came back you couldn't see the auger it just went [makes whooshing noise] all the way the way down. The fellow said to me “You were right!” I said, “Yup.” Now we got to go get stone to put down in there to hold the pole up. I don't know in the whole community; I think it's pretty much true. Now they have done some study here to see where the rock ledge or where the edge of the hill side comes down to the valley, and how deep the rock formation is. I guess you've got to get down pretty close to the village here to hit the quicksand. It's not that far back, but the valley is pretty wide. I know the neighbors over here had problems down in their hay field the same way. Once you get down a few feet. When you are on one of those bigger tractors, you can almost feel the ground shake when you go over it. I've always figured one of these days a farmer [is] just going to be sunk and go out of sight and that would be the end of it, but we're still here, we're still here.
That goes back a long time and all I can tell you is some of the stories I had heard. When the hotel was over here in the center of town, that was called Union Hotel, and that was built in the early 1800s. It had two stories, and the upstairs had seven rooms, a large ballroom, and later on some apartments on the second floor. The first floor had a ballroom[barroom?], a dance hall, a kitchen area, and living quarters. That was built in the 1800s, and then in 1973 that burned. That was owned by a fellow named Robert Sturgis. Before that, from 1957 until 1970, Clayton Clouthier and his wife Dodie owned it. They ran the ballroom[barroom?] and they served meals. They didn't have a dance hall, but they served meals in there. His wife did the cooking in the kitchen. Then that burned in 1973, and another fellow bought the property and built a little garage. He sold used cars over there. And then when he left, I can't remember what year it was, the gentleman who owns Belvedere Lake, Chuck Wannamaker, he bought it. In the meantime, that was when they built it for the used car place. After he left, they converted the used car building into a diner and it was a pretty popular place. It was a quick stop for a cup of coffee or you could go in there for a meal. There were a few[three?] different people in there who ran it before it was sold it to Belvedere Lake. Now most of the time, people come in and try to run it, but it doesn't last very long, maybe four months, six months. That's because of the gentleman that owns it, he doesn't want to sell it and it's pretty hard to make a commitment with him. So, people stay awhile and then it gets pretty expensive to run, so people can't make enough income to keep it going and usually that's the end of it. We have a pizza shop there at the present time, so hopefully that will keep going. A lot of people liked it, especially like the state crew or the truckers, because it was a good place to stop for a cup of coffee or something in the morning. A lot of people like that.
[TRACK 1, 25:38]
LS:
So, you've been in Roseboom for a while, and you remember what it was like when you first moved here and now, what are some of the changes you've seen over the years?
JVB:
It's still a retirement community. The people now are even older than they were when we moved here. Most of us that are here now are in our mid to late 70s. We have a few people here that are in their 90s or middle 80s. Outside of my boys, they are the youngest people in town right now, there's the neighbor boys next door, there's two families. Even my oldest is 52; he was a year old when we moved here. We did have two churches at one time, now we have not many people, but we only have one church on Sunday. We had a Grange hall that was very active when we moved here. We surrounded the building there with our property. So, when they got down to 10 members left, and they had probably 75 when we came here, they dispersed and decided to sell the Grange and they offered it to us. So, we bought it and that's where we house Roseboom Antique Power Days and have for the last 18 years. Before we did that, though, they always had at the Grange in the summertime - seems like it was in June - they used to have Roseboom Days. They had a parade, and some different things going on at the Grange. But there's nobody to do those things anymore, most of those little community events. A lot of towns used to have those, but they don't any more. The people that used to do them are getting older and young people don't want to do it and so just the same way, they fall by the wayside. That's the way with the Roseboom Antique Power Days. People come there, and they say how much they enjoy it. They ask us why we do it and we say that we just want people to see how it used to be years ago, what we had as far as equipment to work with and some of the different things that people display there. We have people that sell products like maple products and pancake breakfast. One of the big things people enjoy the most–they tell us when they come–is that they get to sit down with people they haven't seen in years. They sit down and visit with them. It was like the third or fourth year we had four gentlemen. Two came from Schoharie County, one of them lived here in Cherry Valley, and the other guy came up from downstate by Poughkeepsie and they'd all went to college at Cobleskill College. Unbeknown to any of them who was going to be there; they ran into each other and all four of them sat down at one table and spent all day just visiting. They didn't care anything about what was going on, but they had a great time. My own children have even remarked to us before when we talked about things of the past. My kids will say to us, “Now Dad, it couldn't have been like that.” Well, it was like that. The other thing people say to me is
[START OF TRACK 2, 0:00]
you should charge people to get in to see this. No, that's not what it's about. Everything's not about money, and I said the day that I have to charge people to get in here that will be the end of it. They just can't seem to understand that. What we have invested in that is minimal and if you can go there for two days or a day, whatever you want to do, and enjoy yourself and not spend any more than what it costs you to eat, we think that's just a great thing. People come back, it's been 18 years, so they keep coming back. I guess they enjoy it.
[TRACK 2, 0:44]
LS:
Can you tell me a little bit more about what happens at Antique Power Days?
JVB:
[laughs] One of the things that happened a couple of years ago, we had the Amish there and they were making homemade ice cream with an antique engine. We had a gentleman that was probably as far as from here to the road that had this enormous motor and you had to start it with another tractor with a belt and when you did it would backfire, and fire would come out of it and soot would fly out and everybody would get this black soot on them. It got to be afternoon, I think somewhere thereabouts, and the Amish gentleman came over to the guy who had the motor wanting to know when he was going to start it. The guy with the motor felt a little bit [laughs] he felt a little reluctant, because he thought the Amish guy was upset because of all the noise and the mess that it made. The Amish guy kept insisting, “Well, when are you going to start?” “Well, it will be a little while, yet,” he says. “Well how long before you're going to start that?” He said, “Well, maybe another hour.” He said, “Well it's a great thing,” he says, “when you start that motor everybody comes over to watch you start that and when you get done and shut it off, they all come over and buy ice cream.” There was a case he thought he was going to be upset, and he was more than excited to have him start it. We have a fellow that comes, and he grinds corn. He shells it off and then he grinds it. We've had people come and they buzz wood. We've had a tractor rodeo where they strap an egg to a draw bar and see who can get across the field to a certain distance without losing the egg. They run around, drop ping pong balls in a barrel, or they back a wagon up. It's all time-related but people enjoy that. A few years ago, we had what they call a kiddie tractor pull, which is basically the same as a full-sized tractor pull but it's just kids with petal tractors. We haven't done that in a few years cause there's just not enough of us to go around. Then on Sunday, the big event. At one o'clock on Sunday afternoon, we have a parade around the block over there. They thought this year, nobody actually counted, but I guess we could go back and figure it out if we had to, but they figured it was 200 tractors in the parade. One fellow said he didn't think it was ever going to end. [laughs] A few years, about six years ago maybe, that was the year of the flood. It started raining on Saturday night and it was still raining Sunday morning. There were a few people there, but not a lot. We were kind of just standing around and this lady came down and she says, “Now I drove all this way to see this tractor parade. Are you going to have a tractor parade or not?” It was raining, pouring cats and dogs, and we looked at one another and said well if she wants a parade, I guess we'll give them a parade. There was about 75 or 100 people out there along the way but that was a pretty funny deal. We have a lady that paints slates. We have people that come with toy tractor displays. We have people that come with lawn mower collections, antique cars. My wife has a Chinese auction that's very popular. This year we had what they call a stationary bailer or hay press where you feed the hay in loose and that runs off of a small motor and that makes the bail, you don't run around the field, you pick it up loose, and everybody was excited about that. We have for the kids what are called barrel buggies and we pull them around. Just a barrel that the kids can get in and ride going around the yard over there or the lot and there's always a line of kids waiting to ride in that. We've been asked before to take those to some other parades other places, but what happens there is these were built for little kids, and when we get to these other places the big kids want to get in them but they're too big and that doesn't work so we kind of stay away from that. Oh, let's see what else, something I'm probably missing. We have a guy that has a chainsaw collection, a lot of antique, well we are getting more antique engines than we've had. We've had a guy that came with a milking machine collection. Another fellow came with a collection of milk bottles from different milk companies around the state. He had different things other than just the bottles. There's a lot to see if it's something that interests you. I tell people, when they ask me, I say well if you are interested in that stuff then it's great, but if that doesn't excite you that's no place to be, because it's just not going to be any fun. I had to go in for some surgery here three years ago. Our family we just do it, we don't think nothing about it. One of the head nurses here, she looked at me and she says, “Well, I finally get to meet Mister John Deere!” and I said “What?” [laughs] “Oh my husband just loves that tractor show over there,” she says. There's a number of places you can go that you'd be surprised where somebody will bring up that tractor show. You could be in the dentist office. You could be in the doctor's office. You can be most anywhere. You can be in Schenectady. You can be in a restaurant and when they recognize you, they say, “Aren't you the fellow that has that tractor show?” “Yup.” We're glad we can do it. We think that kind of keeps Roseboom back in the early days. We hope it does. We have a lot of pictures of things that went on here before we moved here, like when they built the new road down here. That was all dirt road in 1953 and the vehicles were always stuck, and the school bus would be stuck, and they couldn't plow the road. It seemed to me like that was in the 1950s that the lady next store, a lady in South Valley, sent her a postcard and it took her like three weeks to get it. [laughs] From South Valley to here. Course they weren't plowing the roads, so the mail didn't go through. Things were different, but you know that's the way it was, and they didn't think much about it. They did what they had to do to survive. Even when we had the flood everybody pulled together here. It made it difficult but there were thirteen bridges that were out in the town here and we didn't care. We didn't have the milk truck or anything then, we were the last bridge to get fixed. The only reason we got it fixed is because all of the people here went to the town board and said, “What are you thinking? You fixed all the rest of them.” That happened up here, a tree fell across up here, they said, “Suppose a fire truck or an ambulance had to get there?” They couldn't have got there, so they finally did come and fix the bridge. We were alright until the tree, well we were alright then, they came and cut the tree out and we were still ok. The back side of our barn used to be on top of the hill, and they went up there and nailed it all together with plank or something and rolled it down here on trees. I thought that was pretty fascinating. Most people would have torn it down brought it down here and then built it back up. The little blue building down next door, that was up here back where the water wheel was, and we drew that down there. Nothing much really has changed as far as from when we moved here as far as right here in town. Well this new house over here, that is different, but basically all the rest of the houses were here when we came. Well, not this fancy house, just below the blue house. Those were the only two houses that [have] been built here since we moved here. They've been done, well this one I think was in the last 10 or 15 years and this one down here in the last five or six. Those are things happening everywhere, not just in Roseboom. Everything is kind of building up or closing in, whatever you want to call it. Time marches on.
[TRACK 2, 11:27]
LS:
Very true.
So, I wanted to go back for just a second. Can you elaborate on what the Grange was originally, before you bought the building?
JVB:
Well, that was a group. That's what we talked about, most of the people here were farmers and that's what the Grange was. That was a group of farmers that band together like a co-op and they had strength in numbers. So, if they wanted to deal with someplace to buy fertilizer or someplace to buy any kind of a farm product whatever it might be, whether it was feed or fertilizer. They go up to a feed or fertilizer place and say alright, we've got this many members and this is how much fertilizer we're going to need. What kind of a price can you give us? So, they were kind of like a bartering group to get the best price for whatever product they needed. I don't know if that worked the other way around whether they used the Grange to, I would think maybe possibly, to sell their product if they wanted to. Of course, there's never been much strength in any band of people to get a better price for their products in agriculture, even today they don't. When you look around maybe there was more than 75. Pretty much every place you went to where you see a barn there were cows then, not anymore, but there were then. Maybe there were more than that. In the summertime, they had events going on over there. They used to have square dances on Friday nights or Saturday nights. Then on Sundays they used to have softball games. They had fellows that used to box. Trying to think, to see if I remember some of the different things, I remember them telling about. I remember a fella, and it always struck me as funny, but he was 100% right. He said to me, stopped here once, I don't know what I was doing, and he said, “You know people today are always in a hurry, you know I got to go” and I said, “I know I hear that all the time people are always in a hurry.” He said, “You've got everything, you've got milking machines and you've got tractors, and you've got equipment.” And he said, “When we were farming, we milked our cows by hand. We might have a tractor, but most of us had horses.” He said, “On Friday or Saturday night, we went to a different person's house and we had dances and whatnot. We went to other people's houses and had supper.” He said, “You people don't even have time to do that and you've got everything to work with.” And I said, “I don't understand it either.” But he was right; it was true. That was kind of a lost art; people don't visit anymore. Back then too farmers used to change works with one another. Down here there was, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 farms that worked together. They only had maybe seven acres of corn or eight acres of corn, or if they did oats whatever they had to thrash. They'd all start, and they do this farm, and then they move to this farm, and then they all go to this farm, until they got all done. Of course, the big thing there was when they did that, you talk to any of the young people that remember doing that, it was always kind of a competition between the farm wives to see who could put on the best meal when they were there for lunchtime. They always said the best part of that was when they got to go to eat. They always seemed to be done by wintertime. Nobody had to have all that equipment. Today everybody owns their own equipment, does all their own work, and doing twice as much as they used to do or even more than that today. Back then, most of them, they put their corn in with a silage blower, so they had one of those and somebody else had the corn harvester they went around and cut it with. Today everybody's got 450 thousand dollars' worth of equipment to do their jobs or more. It just seems like we're spinning out of control. Everything's got to be bigger and bigger and bigger; I don't know where it ends. I know you get old fast. It doesn't seem like we've been here 50 years, but numbers don't lie. [laughs] Oh goodness.
[TRACK 2, 16:52]
LS:
Well, we are starting to get to the end of our time, so just to kind of finish and wrap up is there any topics or stories or anything that we haven't touch on that you'd like to tell?
JVB:
One I find kind of unique, and there again most people might not, and I'm not sure if I'm 100% right on this, but I do know that it did happen. This was back during World War II and there were young men, five young men that came to Roseboom from Germany. I'm not sure if they were prisoners of war or whether they were allowed to come here on like a work release program. I don't remember the name of the other four but the gentleman that I distinctly remember, I had talked with him and visited with him and he owned a farm just up the road, his name was Arnold Philips. He came here when he was about, oh 26, maybe 27 years old. He had to stay here. He didn't have a choice; he had to stay with those people. I don't know how long he had to be there, but anyways he was. When his time was up, the people asked him, they wanted him to stay and work with them, and he did. They eventually made some kind of an arrangement with him and he bought the farm. You would've thought maybe back during the war there might have been people that would resent that, but they didn't. The people accepted that, and he was, you know, a good part of the community, him and his wife. They must have had children. I don't remember, but I do remember them. They were good people. Otherwise than that I don't know too much of anything that went on here that as far as history. There probably is that I'm forgetting. Same thing every town just like creameries or milk plants or whatever they all had their own little school. We had three of them here within, oh my goodness, probably four miles. The biggest class, I think, was seven children. [laughs] You think that teachers today if they got 15 or 20, they think they're overloaded, but I guess they would've thought they were really on easy street if back then if they had six children. Even from my own memory. When it was originally built, it was a high school. They had 12 classes that went through it as years went on, of course. I grew up over in what they call East Worcester and then there's Worcester. They had the high school, but there was seven of us in grades 1 through 6 when I went to school. We had two teachers. I guess one taught first, second, and third, and one taught 4, 5, and 6 but those teachers did everything with you. They went to lunch with you. They went out for recess. They were the ones that taught you everything, whether it was math or social studies, or English, or spelling, or whatever. They closed the school, and I had to go to high school for sixth grade. That was different. You went to school with, oh I guess there was probably 15 or 20 kids in that class. So that was different from today's education too. They do the same thing with that as they do with everything else. They want the schools to consolidate or get bigger and so you're going to have bigger class sizes. I think kids learn more in a smaller class. I think the teacher has more time to spend with them. My niece, her daughter graduated from Cobleskill this year and there was 125 in the graduating class, there was 32 in mine. If you get with some of these smaller schools, they are lucky if they get 10 or 12 that graduate in some places. Those were things of the past, things that you remember, things that have changed, and they'll continue to change. I guess that's the difference in the way things are or the way things were. There's more technology today than there's ever been, I'm not sure how far this is going to go; that seems to go on and on also. Cars that drive themselves and people that don't have to think if they can use a calculator. [laughs] I'm rambling now. That's no good.
LS:
[laughs] That's ok!
JVB:
No, I'm trying to think of some other things maybe that might have been of some interest. Everything was a farming community. Probably back when this hotel was as popular or as big as it was, apparently it was something. People who came through here or stayed in Cherry Valley or Roseboom for maybe a week or so. I don't know why you would need a hotel that big. Of course, there was one here and there was one in Cherry Valley. I'm sure there was maybe something that drew the people to this community at that time, not that I'm familiar with it.
LS:
Well this had been fantastic. Thank you so much for being willing to be interviewed today and doing this interview. And thank you very much.
[END OF TRACK 2, 24:11]
-
Coverage
-
Upstate New York
Cooperstown, NY
1945-2018
-
Creator
-
Lorene Sugars
-
Publisher
-
Cooperstown Graduate Program, State University of New York-College at Oneonta
-
Rights
-
Cooperstown Graduate Association,
Cooperstown, NY
-
Format
-
Audio/mpeg
27MB
-
Image/jpeg
2MB
-
Language
-
en-US
-
Type
-
Sound
-
Identifier
-
18-019
-
Abstract
-
John Deere - 1:02 Track 1
Cherry Valley, NY; Roseboom, NY - 12:35 Track 1
Quick Sand - 19:03 Track 1
Roseboom Antique Power Days -26:40 Track 1
The Grange - 11:39 Track 2
Technological Change - 13:49 Track 2
Schools - 19:12 Track 2
