By David S. Lewis

NEW SCOTLAND –Developers have announced their plan to build a large outdoor mall on the 179-acre stead known as the Bender melon farm, causing many residents to not only protest the nuisances of large-scale development, but also the loss of a significant piece of Albany County history.

Voorheesville village historian Dennis Sullivan, a poet and a researcher, published Charles Bender And The Bender Melon Farm: A Local History in 1990.  Likely the authoritative text on the Bender farm, the book was first published as a two-part series in The Enterprise in the fall of 1986.

According to Sullivan’s history, Charles Bender began experimenting with muskmelons in 1884 on the family farm.  After 17 years of development, he was finally satisfied, having developed a variety of which he was proud enough to give his name. 

Bender’s Golden Queens, developed from an earlier strain called “Surprise,” were first sold to the famous New York restaurant Rector’s in 1905.  The cantaloupe, a member of the cucurbits family of fruit, became one of the most important melons ever grown in New York State. 

At the turn of the last century, most melons grown in the area were green-fleshed muskmelons; Bender’s variety of the popular “Surprise” had sweet orange flesh that could be eaten down to the outer rind, which was only a quarter of an inch thick.  The melons, at the heyday of the farm, were shipped to 33 states and several European countries. 

The Joseph Harris Seed Company’s 1917 catalogue declared, “We never raised finer muskmelons than Bender’s Surprise.”  Bender, well-known for guarding the farm’s most important secrets, was always careful to keep the seeds.  In the years before genetically-modified vegetables, crops were open-pollinated, and a strain could be easily stolen simply by growing superior seeds and naming them your own. 

“When I talked to Mr. Harris of Harris seeds, which was one of the great seed companies, he said when Harris bought Bender’s Surprise, they regarded it as one of the great coups in their company’s history,” Sullivan told The Enterprise.

Charles Bender, who in addition to exporting melons, sold them right off the farm to long lines of hungry locals in the hot days of summer, especially after weekend races, when cars would form long lines up the Schoharie Turnpike (Route 85).  He would famously slice the melons in half with a knife and scoop out the seeds, carefully saving them to protect him from fraudulent farmers. 

His caution likely did little to protect him, as many farmers would grow and sell “Bender” melons, but certainly added to the mystique of the Bender melons, which could fetch 50 cents per fruit at a time when other melons were selling for around a nickel apiece.

The original strain of Surprise probably arrived in the country from Japan in the mid-19^th Century.  Grower G.H. Price, who introduced the melon in 1876, never told where it had come from, but it is possible that both Bender and Price received seed from the same source-- Colonel James Hendrick, who lived on the Hendrick farm adjacent to the Bender spread. 

The colonel likely received the first seeds for orange-fleshed muskmelons from the United States’ Minister to Japan, Robert Hewson Pruyn.  Japan, after several hundred years of self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, had opened its ports to Admiral Matthew Perry less than two decades before Price announced his “Surprise.”  Charles Bender was one of the first generation to grow the new, wildly popular cantaloupe melon.

Charles Bender was a force on the farm until his death in 1945, at the age of 80.  While he carefully guarded the “secrets” of his famed melons, the dairy farmer who purchased the farm from him in 1939, told Sullivan, “There was only one secret: Baby them in every way possible.” 

The melons were hand-tended and even covered with small, individual greenhouses called “lights.”  Bender used hog manure for fertilizer, believing it the only manure that wouldn’t “burn the vines.”  The seeds were carefully sorted and locked in safe-deposit boxes for the next year’s planting; this thorough approach and his marketing savvy together made Charles Bender the regional success he is remembered as today.

William Taylor had less luck; when he took over the farm, it hadn’t been worked for several years and the buildings and soil were in poor shape.  After conditioning the soil with enormous amounts of lime to correct the pH level, Taylor grew the melons, under close supervision of Bender himself, for only three years before surrendering. 

Labor had become scarce as the war in Europe caused many workers to enlist, and the wartime scarcity of the pesticide, Rototene, resulted in entire fields of melons turning black with the wilt.  Taylor continue to herd cows on the property until he sold it in 1976 to a group of Albany County doctors using the name of MLF Enterprises.

“Who owns that view of the Helderberg Mountains?  Who owns the history of that piece of property?” asked Sullivan. “I don’t want to say it is a sacred space, but it is a space that reflects that collective memory.  To me, that is very important,” he said, discussing the town’s proposed moratorium on large-scale commercial development.  The proposal was voted on at Wednesday’s town board meeting.

He wouldn’t speculate on the outcome, but said that the town’s officials needed to remember to represent the residents.

“You know, you take a look at the ideology of the town board, and you take a look at people’s collective philosophy on these things, and the people we elected become treasonous in terms of this collective consciousness.”