— From the Guilderland Historical Society
Written in pencil on the reverse of this photograph is: “Baldwin apple tree on farm of Martin Blessing, Fullers, N.Y., yield in 1903 ten barrels of apples.”
— From the Guilderland Historical Society
Leininger’s Cider Mill on Carman Road, north of Old State Road, was an autumn destination for large numbers of cider lovers until 1989. Today a medical building occupies the site. This photo was taken in about 1942.
“Hank Apple’s tap” was immortalized by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in his Anti-Rent War narrative poem “Helderbergia” when he has innkeeper Apple “replace the feast, while gin its reign resumes.”
The local men, travelers, and drovers frequenting one of Guilderland’s many late 18th- or early 19th-century taverns did imbibe gin, brandy, rum, and whiskey. However, it was also very likely that cheap, locally-made hard cider or applejack flowed from the “taps.”
An 1814 bar book from the Severson Tavern, once located at the base of the Helderberg escarpment in what is now Altamont, recorded that Wm. Truax owed 9 pence for 1½ mugs of cider; Lot Hurst drank 1½ mugs of cider at a cost of 9¼ cts.; Jacob Zimmer spent 18¾ cts. for 3 mugs of cider; and Evert Barkley downed 1 cider eggnog, an extravagance of 12½ cts.
The drink of choice among all age groups during these years, cider was widely produced by local farmers from the plentiful apple trees thriving in Guilderland and wherever farmers had settled in New York State. Although Esopus Spitzenburgs, Northern Spy, Yellow Newtown, and Lady Sweet were among the apple varieties that could be found at that time in the state, most early farmers had little concern about named varieties or their apples’ attractive appearance as long as the trees on their farms produced flavorful fruit.
During these early year,s most apples not eaten fresh were crushed into cider by family members or they dried slices chiefly for their own use. However, sometimes they bartered these for goods or services.
According to John Winne’s account book of 1810-1818 recording the transactions of his Dunnsville store and tavern, local families could barter one bushel of dried apples for $1.50 worth of merchandise at his store or one barrel of cider for the value of $1.00. A day’s labor for Winne earned only $.50 credit, illustrating the economic importance of apples at that time.
Knowersville’s Dr. Frederick Crounse was willing to accept a barrel of cider in exchange of $1.50 worth of medical treatment and for that price would “excise a tumor.”
The cider those hardy folks drank was not the pasteurized stuff we drink today. In those days, the sugar content of the pressed apple juice rapidly fermented, creating the low alcohol content of “hard cider.”
The hard cider could further be distilled into potent apple brandy or applejack. Old timers could put out a pail of hard cider on a bitterly cold winter’s night and, come morning, the water content would be frozen, leaving a small amount of highly alcoholic applejack.
Later in the 19th and early 20th centuries, local farmers could make their families’ cider supply with inexpensive cider mills such as “The Little Giant Cider Mill” for $7.65 that could be ordered from the 1897 Sears, Roebuck Catalog. Or they could buy a barrel of cider already pressed from W. D. Frederick for $2.88 as noted in his 1888 account book or at other cider mills in the area.
Another product of cider was vinegar. In the 1880s, A.V. Mynderse was a “manufacturer of and wholesale and retail dealer in cider and vinegar” in Guilderland Center.
Cider and vinegar producers advertised in The Enterprise, urging farmers to bring in their apples at what were much lower prices than for high-quality fruit. However, for drops or a farmer with only a few trees, it was a way to earn ready cash even if the price per bushel was under $1.
During the last years of the 19th Century, larger scale apple production had turned into an important source of cash income for town farmers. Paying calls at local farms, out-of-town buyers sought good quality fruit to be shipped out by rail to big-city markets.
One year, Fullers farmers were visited by a Utica buyer purchasing apples to be sent to Philadelphia. A.M. LaGrange, a farmer living in that part of town, sold 100 barrels in 1889. He had “the reputation of growing some of the finest apples in this locality.”
Each of the town’s four railroad depots were the scenes of the departure of carloads of apples destined for East Coast cities. Reporting from Guilderland Center in 1901, “The first installment of apples purchased here…was shipped from this station to New York last Saturday.”
Prices for either grade of apples varied, depending on scarcity and demand. In 1892, farmers received $2.25 for a bushel of fine quality apples, but it was unusual to receive that much per bushel. In 1896, The Enterprise noted, “Apples are cheaper this year than ever before in our recollection, prices ranging from $.50 to $.75 per barrel for nice choice fruit.”
After 1890, area apple-growing farmers found a steady market for their apple crop when Charles H. Burton and A. Elmer Cory of Albany opened up a cider and vinegar manufacturing plant near the D&H tracks in Voorheesville capable of crushing 9,000 pounds of apples daily. Named the Empire Cider and Vinegar Company in 1891, it was eventually known as Duffy-Mott.
It was an immediate success and, within a year after opening, several 1,000-gallon tanks were added to the operation. Advertisements in The Altamont Enterprise urged farmers to bring their apples to the Fullers and Altamont railroad stations for shipment to the new processing plant.
By 1900, three-thousand bushels were pressed daily during a 70-day season. In later years, apple juice and applesauce were added to the product line. Duffy-Mott closed down the plant in 1955, striking a serious economic blow to farmers who lost a ready market for their apple crops.
At first, the variety of apples didn’t seem to matter much for individual farmers. In 1895, apple trees of no particular variety could be purchased very inexpensively from Jas. Hallenbeck of Altamont when he offered 5½- to 7-foot trees for only $.15 each.
This casual attitude changed as buyers grew increasingly picky about quality. Diseases affecting trees and fruit such as scab and codling moths and by the 1920s the “skeletonizer” disease had appeared, making “arsenical applications” necessary to save the apple crop.
Until the mid-1950s, extensive acreage in and around Guilderland Center was devoted to apple orchards. A wildfire that threatened the drought-stricken hamlet in 1947 succeeded in destroying the 1,000-tree fruit orchard of Edward Griffiths on the western end of the village.
However, a 1950 aerial view of Guilderland Center appearing as part of a Knickerbocker News article revealed row upon row of apple trees on the site where today stand the firehouse, the school bus garage, the high school and its playing fields, and houses — all once owned by A.V. Mynderse, the vinegar-maker.
With the closing of the Duffy-Mott plant and the pressure of development, all of Guilderland’s orchards are gone now except one. Altamont Orchards remains to carry on our town’s apple tradition.
The original orchard was planted by Dr. Daniel H. Cook, a prominent Albany doctor who used the land as his summer home and gentleman’s farm. He was a serious agriculturalist who planted 3,000 apple, pear, and plum trees, considered a very fine orchard in 1899.
In 1967, the Abbruzzese family took over the property, opening up a farmstand in addition to running the orchards. Operating a profitable apple orchard today is a tremendous challenge, requiring the owners to do more than tend the trees.The competition from other states and countries is fierce.
State health regulations control the making of cider, now requiring it to be pasteurized. There is no more amateur hard cider, although professionally produced hard cider has had a revival recently.
Today, in addition to their farm stand and orchard, the Abbruzzese family has established a golf course and restaurant on the property in order to stay in business.
Solely depending on income from an apple orchard is not practical these days for a farmer in Guilderland unless other avenues of profit are explored. The time may come when Guilderland’s apple history is all past history.
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This bell not only rang for classes, but was reputed to ring mysteriously on Halloween. Here it is visible in the cupola atop Guilderland District 4 School on Willow Street. The empty cupola remains on the building now housing a New York State Police substation.
Many decades ago, peals of bells housed in cupolas atop local schoolhouses signaled dawdling children that classes were about to begin. Once standard equipment for old-time schools, most school bells have disappeared along with most of the school buildings where they once hung. Fortunately, a few of Guilderland’s historic school bells have survived.
In 1900, Guilderland’s several common school districts were scattered throughout the town to be within children’s walking distance from home, offering education up through eighth grade.
With district numbers in parenthesis, they were: Settles Hill (1), Dunnsville (2), Parkers Corners (3), Hamlet of Guilderland (4), Wormer School (5), Guilderland Center (6), Altamont (7), Gardner Road School (8), Osborn Corners (9), Cobblestone School on Stone Road (10), McKownville (11), McKownville Annex (11A), Fullers (13), and Fort Hunter Bigsbee School (14).
District 12 had disbanded in the 1890s, followed by the closure of the Wormer School in 1906. By 1902, Altamont had become a Union Free District and had opened its high school.
Early in the 1930s, New York State began to urge rural areas with many small local districts like Guilderland’s to merge into centralized districts, doing away with old-fashioned, one-room schools and offering modern high school education.
In 1941, the Voorheesville schools centralized, including Guilderland districts 5, 8, and 10. That same year, Guilderland Center residents voted to pay tuition, enabling their children to attend Voorheesville schools even though they didn’t become part of that central district.
Eventually, Guilderland’s remaining districts plus North Bethlehem voted to form the Guilderland Central School District in 1950. Once modern Fort Hunter, Altamont, and Westmere elementary schools opened in 1953, the old one-room schools were auctioned off.
Whatever became of the school bells?
Parker Corners bell to inspire modern scholars
Hidden away in a grass-covered courtyard at Guilderland High School rests the bell that once warned the little scholars attending the Parkers Corners District 3 School that classes were about to begin. The three-foot high bronze bell, cast in 1864, is inscribed in raised lettering, “Joy and gladness shall be found therein, Thanksgiving and the voice of melody.”
The bell is 33 inches in diameter and originally called worshippers to the Old State Road Methodist Church. Charles Parker, a wealthy New York City man who lived for a time in the area, donated $4,000 in 1864 to build a Methodist Church near his home. At that time, a church bell was purchased from Jones and Company Bell Foundry of Troy, a foundry in operation from 1852 to 1887. By the late 1930s, the dwindling congregation forced closure of the church.
Nearby on West Old State Road stood the Parkers Corners one-room school where one November morning in 1942 fire erupted just as pupils were arriving. While desks, books, and the adjoining wood shed were saved by neighbors’ immediate action, the building was a total loss.
Realizing that, due to World War II shortages, there was no chance of arranging the transportation of students to another district, residents quickly noted the empty church building in their midst would be the perfect solution. The former church served as the Parkers Corners School until 1953 when students began attending Fort Hunter Elementary School.
After having been sold at auction, the building burned in a suspicious fire, but not before the bell had been removed to be placed by the flagpole near the front of the new Guilderland Junior-Senior High School when it opened in 1954. The bell was to serve as a “symbolic link of the ten former common school districts with the new centralization.” Today, because of the extensive expansion of the high school building over the years, the bell is now in an enclosed courtyard.
Guilderland bell traveled to Greece
The trip from Parkers Corners to the new junior-senior high school was a short one compared to the journey traveled by the bell from the Guilderland District 4 School.
In 1847, the District 4 School became the town’s first two-room school. When the building was remodeled and enlarged in the 1890s, it boasted a “fine” new bell donated by village residents Messrs. Newberry and Chapman, owners of the Guilderland foundry. Because casting bells was such a specialized operation, it is unlikely the bell was cast at their foundry.
After the 1953 opening of Westmere Elementary School, the Willow Street school building served as Guilderland’s first real town hall before becoming a State Police substation.
As Nazi invaders swept through Greece in 1941, they confiscated anything that could be of value to their war effort, including the bell that hung in St. Nicholas Church in the small Macedonian village of Siatista. Communist unrest in that area of Greece during the years immediately following the war prevented the villagers from replacing their cherished bell.
Mrs. F.C. Cargill of Guilderland became aware of the village’s loss and knew that the Society of Siatisteon Siatista, a New York City group of former Siatista village residents, sought a replacement bell. She contacted William D. Borden, president of the Guilderland Board of Education to inquire if one of the district’s old school bells could be donated.
The board quickly approved, giving the bell from the Guilderland District 4 School to the society which took over the responsibility and cost of shipping the bell to Greece. After its arrival, the bishop sent a gracious thank-you for the bell to the board of education saying, “By its sacred tolling it may summon Christians to worship God.”
Dunnsville bell at Town Hall
The Dunnsville District 2 one-room school dated back to 1875 when it replaced an earlier 1820 building. In 1882, a bell cast at the Clinton H. Meneely Bell Company, a Troy bell foundry, was placed in the cupola of the new school where it rang out 15 minutes before classes began, again at class time, and then again at noon.
Viola Crounse Gray, a Dunnsville student in the early 1900s, recalled her father and other local farmers coming in from their chores for their midday meal at the sound of the school’s noon bell. As the last trustee of the school, in 1953 she had the opportunity to purchase any school property not needed by the district.
Sentimentally, she wanted the bell she remembered so fondly from her childhood. In 1982, when she and her husband, Earl Gray, offered the bell to the town, it was placed in front of Town Hall.
Stone Road bell at historic house
Once ringing out from above the Cobblestone District 10 School on Stone Road, today the school’s 320-pound bell rests silently in front of the Mynderse-Frederick House. Because this Guilderland district became part of the Voorheesville Central School District, it isn’t clear when the building ceased being used as a school and became a private residence.
At some point, its bell came into the possession of the Albany Institute of History and Art, later passing into the hands of the Christ Lutheran Church in McKownville. When the bell proved too heavy to place in the church’s bell tower, it languished in a storeroom for 30 years.
Eventually, the church historian got in touch with then-Town Historian Fred Hillenbrand to offer the bell to the town. After Guilderland Highway Department workers refurbished the bell, cast in 1868 at the Meneely Bell Foundry of West Troy (after 1896 renamed City of Watervliet), it was placed in its newest location in front of the Mynderse-Frederick House.
Cobblestone school still has its bell
To have a genuine glimpse of the past, observe the old Cobblestone District 6 School in Guilderland Center with its bell still in its cupola as you drive by on Route 146. The building was erected in 1867 and is still owned by Guilderland Central School District.
During the period of time when these rural schools were built, the cities of the Capital District were manufacturing centers employing countless workers. Among the factories in Troy and West Troy (Watervliet) were bell foundries turning out thousands of bells sold all over the country for schools, churches, and government buildings.
When you pass by the bells at Town Hall or in front of the Mynderse-Frederick House, remember the early system of common-school education they represented as well as the industry that was once so important to this area.
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Now an apartment building at 131 Maple Ave. in Altamont, the District 7 common school building, built in 1879, once stood on School Street (now Lincoln Avenue). After the Altamont Free Union School opened in 1902, James Keenholts bought the old school building at auction for $875 and had it moved to Maple Avenue.
America’s advances in technology and the growth of business activities at the opening of the 20th Century made it obvious that educational skills beyond those offered by the traditional eighth-grade common schools, then typical in New York’s rural communities, were needed.
Altamont’s School Street (later renamed Lincoln Avenue) had been the site of District 7 common school since 1879, but by 1901 many in this prosperous and expanding village were questioning the adequacy of the education received there by the village’s youth.
Calling a meeting of taxpayers in early April 1901, school trustees sought a consensus either to repair the current school building or to choose a different site and erect a new one. The trustees had heard complaints about the poor and limited quality of education available in the District 7 common school, often deterring outsiders from settling in the otherwise up-and-coming village and forcing villagers to send their children to board in the city if they wished them to get schooling beyond eighth grade.
The trustees made it clear they had hopes of winning approval for a new building large enough to allow Altamont to eventually become a union free school district permitting a high school department. Uneasy taxpayers were assured that enough non-resident students would attend a high school, paying tuition to defray any additional expenses.
The special meeting brought out a sizable number including a few taxpayers who were no happier at the thought of higher school taxes than taxpayers a century later. One suspicious attendee demanded to know why the meeting had been called.
In answer, one trustee read to the assembled group a letter received from the State Department “calling attention to the deplorable condition of the school building and grounds.” A resolution was made to raise $500 to repair the old school but, when it was pointed out that the meeting was not called according to a state law that mandated school meeting notices could only be issued by a person who is also a taxpayer, the resolution died.
With that, the meeting became an informal gathering where the talk drifted over to the need not only for a modern school building, but a school that would offer more advanced studies than the common school. W.S. Keenholts, one of the school trustees who obviously had come prepared, immediately launched into the requirements that applied to a union free district, legally necessary to establish a high school in New York State.
At that, attendees signed a petition almost unanimously for the trustees to call a second meeting to have an official vote on becoming a union free district. The sentiment seemed clear that Altamont needed a new building offering a higher level of education to keep up with the times.
As the meeting approached when legally eligible voters would decide the question of becoming a union free district, arguments in favor appeared in The Enterprise. “Progressive up-to-date people of the district” not only felt it was a good business proposition, but would give more children the opportunity to get an advanced education.
The old attitude that the eight-grade common school was good enough for my father and good enough for me was “false reasoning.” A comparison between the old common school and the academic department of a union free school made it clear “more extensive book knowledge” was a necessity in “the professional, the industrial, the commercial and the political world” of that day.
The night of the meeting, Mr. Thomas E. Finnegan of the New York State Department of Public Instruction and two other men representing communities that already had become union free districts spoke of the advantages of this type of district.
Advocates of change triumphed when the votes in favor of the new type of district were 124 to 14. A board of education was elected to look into a site and plan for a new building.
By early July 1901, the board of education called a meeting with plans for a new school building and the necessity of raising the sum of $10,200 for construction costs. In addition, $1,800 would be needed for heating and sanitation, and $500 for furnishings in the new building. An additional $800 had to be raised to purchase a two-acre plot on the corner of Grand Street and Fairview Avenue. It was planned to issue bonds to be paid off $1,000 plus interest annually.
The building’s architect was Altamont resident Wilber D. Wright. The notice calling for contractors to submit bids called for an eight-room, two-story school building of solid brick, 50-by-78 feet with a basement. It was to have the capacity for 250 students.
No bid was as low as the figure set by the board of education but, after a way was found to get the additional $3,000, the construction contract was awarded to the lowest bidder, Mr. J.W. Packer of Oneonta.
The old school was auctioned off in 1902 once it was no longer needed, purchased by James Keenholts for $875. Soon after this, he had the building moved over vacant lots to Maple Avenue.
By October 1901, Crannell Brothers, then located in Altamont, had brought in D&H carloads of lumber and Rosendale cement. Work on a foundation of bluestone brought from Fred V. Whipple’s quarry was soon underway.
Many spectators walked over to Grand Street during the next few months to observe the construction progress. Once the exterior was complete, Altamont’s A.J. Manchester installed the heating and plumbing while George T. Weaver put in lathing and plastering. By early summer 1902, the building was completed and formally accepted by the board of education.
The principal of the new school was Professor Arthur Z. Boothby, who had already been hired by the district fresh out of Albany Normal School in 1900. His salary for 1901-02 was $540.40.
Also on the faculty were several women who earned in the $300 range. A janitor had also been hired. The total school budget adopted by the board of education for 1902-03 was $2,495.50.
With the school’s opening imminent, the school board put out publicity, encouraging out-of-town tuition-paying students to attend. Promoting the new school as having “all the latest in equipment in sanitary arrangements and provided with all necessary apparatus for pursuing higher studies,” enrolled students were to be taught by a “competent corps of instructors.”
Tuition rates for non-resident students were given per quarter: academic, $2.50; intermediate, $2.50; and primary, $1.75. For those living along the D&H line, commutation per month was: Delanson, $3.00; Duane, $2.50; Voorheesville, $3.00; and Meadowdale, $2.50. While the costs of construction, personnel, and commutation seem very low, these figures are for 1902 dollars.
A general invitation went out to Altamont’s villagers, urging them to attend the dedication ceremony on Sept. 18, 1902 when the school building would be open for people to wander through. Even though the weather that day turned out to be rainy and unpleasant, a large crowd turned out to participate in opening ceremonies held in the large assembly room.
The program included prayers; scripture readings; and speeches, followed by Dr. Jesse Crounse, president of the Board of Education, who reviewed the rules of the school including one holding the parent or guardian responsible for any damage done by a child to furniture or the building.
School opened Monday with an enrollment of 154 pupils (this number included Altamont’s elementary grades as well) including 10 non-residents. The high school’s first graduating class in 1905 had 11 graduates.
By rights, Altamont residents were extremely proud of their new school, built at great financial cost for such a small village. The school was in use until the centralization of Guilderland’s schools took place in 1950.
By 1953, the new Altamont Elementary School, built on the same plot of land as the old Union Free School, and a year later Guilderland Junior-Senior High School in Guilderland Center were open. The once-modern building in Altamont stood empty.
In December 1955, when it was decided there could be no possible future use for the structure, the board of education of the Guilderland Central School District awarded Jackson Tree Service a contract to demolish and remove the debris of the grand old building for a bid of $3,250.
A New York State Historic Marker stands on Grand Street to indicate where the Altamont Union Free School once stood. It is ironic to think the solidly constructed school was razed, replaced by a lawn and a marker, while the inadequate District 7 common school building is still standing today at 131 Maple Ave. and is now used for residences.
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Just in from the west side of Meadowdale Road, the small Meadowdale Depot stood south of the D&H tracks behind the stationmaster’s house. This photograph of the station appeared on a postcard.
Without a GPS to route them to Meadowdale, Gardner, or Frederick roads, few current Guilderland residents could find their way to Meadowdale, and once there would wonder: What’s Meadowdale?
Although difficult for us to believe today, a century ago Meadowdale was one of Guilderland’s small hamlets with an identity all its own, reflected in its little weekly column in The Altamont Enterprise.
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the locale was an area of scattered farms tenanted by leaseholders of the Van Rensselaer West Manor. With the Helderberg escarpment rising just to the west and the Black Creek meandering through the fertile farmland, it was a very scenic spot.
A site was chosen here to become the only stop on the Albany & Susquehanna Railroad between Voorheesville and Knowersville when the railroad laid track through that part of Guilderland in 1863.
Within a year, a small passenger depot and freight office was erected in a location where the tracks crossed a dirt road now called Meadowdale Road; the sign hanging from it identified the stop as Guilderland Station.
A few years later, the A&S Railroad was absorbed by the Delaware & Hudson Railroad. A sizable amount of the D&H’s profits stemmed from summer passenger service: group excursions, day trippers off to a scenic spot, urban vacationers either boarding at country hotels or with farm families who took in summer boarders for extra income.
The logic of D&H executives renaming the stop from its original pedestrian name Guilderland Station to the more attractive sounding Meadowdale is obvious. Annually, the company published the “D&H Directory of Summer Hotels and Boarding Houses” where the prospect of stopping at Meadowdale would certainly seem lots more appealing to prospective visitors.
Each sunny weekend, numerous day trippers came out from Albany to the little depot, planning to hike the two to three miles up the “old road” through Indian Ladder Pass to the top of the escarpment. An Altamont livery stable owner usually would send over one of his wagons to transport for a small fee those who were unable to do the vigorous hike themselves up the escarpment road. At the end of the day, the weary hikers journeyed back to Albany after their day in the country.
Boarding houses on Thompson’s Lake would often send a wagon to pick up expected guests as well. And farmers came by to pick up boarders who were coming to stay a week or more at their farms.
In later years, many Boy Scout troops came to hike up and camp out on top of the escarpment. Local trains were frequent and inexpensive with a 1909 timetable listing fares with the price of a round-trip ticket from Albany to Meadowdale 79 cents while one way was 42 cents.
By 1900, the area around the little depot had become a much bigger railroad complex with a water tower across the tracks, a necessity in those days of steam locomotives. Nearby was a utility shed for storage of track maintenance equipment and across the tracks from the depot was a freight yard where numerous freight cars that brought up coal from Pennsylvania mines could be parked until the fuel was needed to feed the fire boxes of D&H locomotives.
For many years, large quantities of hay was shipped out of Meadowdale, a major profit-making crop for local farmers during those horse-drawn years.
In the 1886 Howell & Tenney History of Albany County, the name is still given as Guilderland Station, characterized as “a hamlet of about 100 people,” with two dealers in cut hay, a blacksmith and a “general merchant.”
A few years later, in 1897, when Landmarks of Albany County was published, rather confusingly Guilderland Station get a one-line paragraph saying it was a small hamlet with no post office with a second one-line paragraph following, mentioning Meadow Dale as a hamlet with a post office in the “extreme southern part of town” — strange since both the store and the postmaster who ran the post office in his own home were only a few hundred feet from the depot.
Soon after the opening of the depot, a Guilderland Station post office was established there in August 1864 and renamed Meadowdale in 1887. While at first the post office was actually in the railroad station, it was later either in the postmaster’s house or more commonly in the community’s general store.
Most of the mail was generated by summer visitors who hiked up the escarpment or were boarding with local farmers. The photograph of the railroad depot appeared on an early 20th Century postcard, one of many sent out with a Meadowdale postmark, though most were of scenes of the Indian Ladder Road or from atop the escarpment.
The general store, for many years run by William Schoolcraft and his wife, not only served folks as the post office, for groceries and other farm necessities, but also as a gathering place to exchange news and gossip. Schoolcraft traveled the area from Voorheesville to Altamont, selling groceries and picking up fresh produce.
School-age children trekked to Gardner Road to the District No. 8 one-room schoolhouse built in 1885 to replace an earlier building. The schoolhouse was not only used for education, but often hosted Sunday afternoon religious services and served as the meeting place for a Christian Endeavor group as well.
A little record book exists labeled “Meadowdale Union Bible School list of membership 1910 – 1912.” No church was ever built in Meadowdale, and probably most people had membership in either an Altamont or Guilderland Center church, but in the horse-and-buggy era, especially in bad weather, it wasn’t feasible to go that far.
In spite of the population being spread out on farms, having the general store on one road, the schoolhouse on another, and no real center to Meadowdale, the people who lived there definitely identified as being from Meadowdale. The little Meadowdale column that appeared with regularity in The Enterprise listed the births, illnesses and deaths, farm news, social events, and endless visits back and forth.
The appearance of the automobile and the rapid growth of travel by car spelled the end of Meadowdale’s prosperity and identity. People no longer rode the train to board with local farmers or to walk up to Thacher Park as the area atop the escarpment had become by that time.
No longer having a market for hay, farmers had to switch to dairy farming or raising chickens or get out of farming entirely. Meadowdale’s store became obsolete once a short drive to Altamont’s A&P or Grand Union markets became possible. During the mid-1920s, the building that once housed the general store was dismantled and reconstructed in Voorheesville.
In 1925, the D&H Railroad, facing a major decline in profits from passenger travel, went before the New York State Public Service Commission, claiming the year before the revenue generated by the Meadowdale station was $1,424.15 while pay for the station agent there cost them $1,779.03.
In 1924, there were only 17 freight cars forwarded and one received because area agricultural production was declining. The D&H’s chief engineer presented the information that there were only six dwellings and a combination store and dwelling with a graveled road (Meadowdale Road) running through.
Seven residents appeared to protest removing the station agent and only opening the station when a train was expected, but the Public Service Commission granted the D&H’s request.
By 1931, passenger trains no longer stopped in Meadowdale and shortly after the station was taken down and the utility building moved down Meadowdale Road a short distance for someone else’s use. Today there is no trace of the station, water tower, or rail yards, though a single track still cuts across Gardner and Meadowdale roads.
In 1926, the post office was closed and residents began to receive mail delivered by Rural Free Delivery to their mail boxes. The one-room District No. 8 School educated the local children for many years, eventually becoming part of the Voorheesville Central School District.
Farmers continued to hang on in the Meadowdale area, struggling with the changes and competition in farming and the challenge of surviving the 1930s Depression.
May Crounse Kinney, written about by Melissa Hale-Spencer in The Altamont Enterprise, grew up in the Gardner Road area, attending the District No. 8 Gardner Road School until she was 14. She married local farmer Solen Kinney, farming his Gardner Road farm with him until 1949.
Her description of working 365 days a year, running her house and helping with the heavy work on the farm, planting harvesting, getting firewood, caring for animals as well as putting up 300 jars of fruit and vegetables, churning butter and sewing clothes illustrated the lives of Meadowdale farmers and their wives during the early decades of the 20th Century.
All this without electricity or telephone service until the 1940s. The first electrical lines were run out to the Meadowdale area only in 1936 by New York Power and Light Corp.
The Kinneys gave up farming when the price of newer farm machinery cost more than they could possibly afford, which is the story of most of the farmers in our area.
Today, you can drive along Meadowdale, Gardner, and Frederick roads and still see the old farmhouses and cross the railroad tracks, but Meadowdale as a community exists only in memory.
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— Photo from the Guilderland Historical Society
The adult craze for wheeling came to an abrupt end when the first automobiles began rolling into towns and chugging out past the farms on country roads. This postcard view of Altamont’s Lainhart block tells the story. After that time, bicycles were for children. The Lainhart block, on Maple Avenue, not far from Main Street, burned in the late 20th Century; a public parking lot fills the space today.
— Photo from the Guilderland Historical Society
These three youngsters posed with their bicycles in front of the Dunnsville Hotel’s crowded porch. The photo is probably about the same vintage as the Altamont postcard view.
One September weekend in the mid-1890s found Fred DeGraff of Guilderland Hamlet and four friends mounting their wheels, pedaling over to Pittstown to visit a friend while, on another I.K. Stafford, Fred Keenholts and Andrew Oliver traveled from Altamont to New Jersey to Asbury Park for an extensive cycle tour.
They reported to The Enterprise, “The wheeling in New Jersey was very fine.” As interest and participation in cycling spread, The Enterprise was abuzz with local bicycle news during the decade of the 1890s, often called the Golden Age of the Bicycle.
This craze for wheels, as bicycles were then commonly called, took off in the 1890s as the technological advances of the previous decade came together to create a practical modern bicycle. It began with the concept of two spoked wheels of equal size on a tubular frame followed by the invention of pneumatic tires to provide a smoother ride and propulsion from pedals connected to a chain driven sprocket.
However, early braking systems were less than adequate until the invention of the coaster brake in 1898. Wheels didn’t come cheap, ranging from $25 for a used bicycle in the mid-1890s to over $100 for the finest models in 1890s’ dollars, a luxury for most people at that time.
Advertisements of bicycles for sale showed up in The Enterprise as early as 1890, some inserted by the manufacturers themselves. Monarch Cycle Co.’s appeared frequently, claiming theirs was “absolutely the best” with elegant designs and unsurpassed workmanship using the finest materials.
H.A. Lozier & Co. not only bragged about the Cleveland bicycle’s construction, but added the practical information that its “resilient” tire could be repaired “quicker and easier than any other tire in the market.” Several Albany dealers jumped into the market and, sensing a good business opportunity, some Altamont men began selling wheels and advertising their wares in the paper as well.
“Notes From Gotham,” a July 1893 Enterprise front-page column, noted there was “a growing interest in bicycling as an amusement,” claiming that there was “a popular craze” for the sport, “destined to be the most popular form of outdoor entertainment that has ever engaged the American people.”
While bicycle owners could be found in all parts of Guilderland, by far most cyclists seemed to be concentrated in Altamont, so many that in 1893 sixteen men joined together to organize “The Altamont Wheelmen.” After electing officers headed by I.K. Stafford, plans were made to find club rooms.
Soon they moved into “commodious” and “airy” rooms on the second floor of J.S. Secors new warehouse where a new coal stove supplied not only heat but hot water for the bathtub they installed! It was claimed that they had a “very cozy room and it makes a pleasant place to spend one’s evenings, if they must be spent from home.” A year later for reasons not given, they moved to space over the post office
Immediately after the club’s formation, its members began planning runs to Amsterdam, Albany via Voorheesville, Guilderland Center, Averill Park, South Bethlehem, Slingerlands, and Sloan’s (now Guilderland Hamlet). Remembering the dirt roads of that time, this was an ambitious undertaking but reports in the ensuing weeks indicate that they really did pedal their wheels to these destinations.
As 1894 came to a close, 36 men had been voted into membership, especially once it was made known that actually being a wheelman wasn’t a requirement to becoming a member. The Wheelmen had become not only a cycle club, but a male social club as well.
At the last meeting of 1894, members were treated to an oyster supper, followed by “soft drinks” and cigars, all this hosted for the 25 men present by the club’s president I.K. Stafford and Altamont bicycle dealer Fred Keenholts.
Another dinner the next year mentions an “elaborate spread, merriment and good cheer.” Another type of social function were “smokers” where the men entertained themselves with reminiscences of the past season’s cycling “through columns of smoke.”
“Bicycle Notes,” a sporadic column appearing in The Enterprise, related the latest bicycle chatter from around town, including the names of those who had recently purchased a new or used bicycle. Abe Tygert got a high-grade Niagara while Andrew Ostrander purchased a 22-pound Relay — those were just two of the many proud owners identified over the decade.
If used, the previous owner’s name was also listed: “Lucius Frederick is the possessor of a wheel, having purchased the one ridden by Aaron Oliver last season, and Chas. Stevell who now rides the wheel which J. Van Benscoten rode during 1894.”
Ladies, too
Appearance and manners were topics once touched on in “Bicycle Notes” when the writer, pleased that more riders were sitting upright, described any rider as “silly” to “hump” himself over the handlebars unless racing. And ladies should always sit upright so as not to “stoop in the slightest degree.”
Noting that pedestrians had the right of way, cyclists were to respect them and, in addition, to avoid running down children and old people. His parting comment was, “There are all sorts of road hogs in the world and it is regretted some of them ride bicycles … Young boys and fresh young men are the greatest offenders.”
A rumor appeared in “Bicycle Notes” that some of the ladies were learning to ride and soon their names began to show up in print. Miss Blanche Warner’s wheel was a “handsome new Remington,” while Miss J. Libbie Osborn chose an Erie. Herbert Winne finally bought a used bike to enable him to accompany his wife, the experienced rider of the family. Unlike the men, women were never mentioned riding any distance from home.
Risky business
Racing appealed greatly to younger, athletic riders and quickly became a popular local spectator sport with the racetrack at the fairgrounds the perfect venue for competition. Independence Day, the Altamont Hose Company’s Field Day and Clam Bake, and the Altamont Fair itself all became occasions for bicycle races.
Prizes were given in cash, objects such as a $5 clock or certificates for merchandise at Albany stores. Often local wheelmen traveled out of town to participate in races. Pity Lew Hart who lost count of the number of laps in a Cobleskill race and missed being one of the winners.
Being a wheelman was a risky business due to inadequate brakes; locally hilly, rutted roads; and in some cases the riders’ own inexperience. One time at the fairgrounds, three entrants tangled during a race resulting in bruises and badly mangled bicycles. During another race, Elias Stafford had his ego rather than his body bruised after a spill at the race track when the paper commented the next week, “The spectacle was too ludicrous for anything.”
Guilderland Center resident John Stewart took a bad spill on the curvy hill at Frenchs Hollow, but the most tragic accident befell an Albany man out riding with James Keenholts near Altamont. He was seriously injured after losing control as he turned his wheel, going down off a bridge near Altamont onto some rocks below.
After Dr. Barton tended to his obvious injuries, he was helped to board the evening train heading to Albany. “It is feared he is hurt internally” was the comment in the next week’s Enterprise.
L.A.W. and order
The League of American Wheelmen, an organization promoting cycling and good roads, had been formed in the 1880s. So many Americans were swept up in the bicycle craze that by 1898 membership in L.A.W. topped 102,000 including some of the Altamont Wheelmen. I.K. Stafford, one of the founders and president of the Altamont Wheelmen, became sanctioned by L.A.W. to officiate bicycle races, which he did at the Altamont Fair for many, many years.
Long before automobiles were traveling the nation’s highways, L.A.W. began to press for improved roads for cyclists, preferably paved. Locally, there was a call for cycle paths, at that time more commonly called sidepaths.
By 1898, pressure from wheelmen forced the Albany County Board of Supervisors to create a County Sidepath Commission. Routes out of Albany were being considered and of course, a route to Altamont through Guilderland Hamlet and Guilderland Center was hoped for by residents here.
A sidepath went out as far as Albany Country Club (now the University at Albany campus) east of McKownville with William Witbeck extending it west as far as his tavern (site of present day Burger King), but it never went beyond that, although sidepaths were laid out from Albany to Schenectady and from Albany to Slingerlands.
The Enterprise reported the discovery that, not only did the cyclists like the sidepaths, but pedestrians found “that it makes a very desirable walk.” In 1902, it was reported the Albany County Sidepath Commission had spent $5,000 building new paths and repairing old ones. License badges — “same price as last year” — had to be attached to bicycles.
Wheeling was difficult enough over the poor country roads, but the lack of signs made finding your way, once out of your own immediate area, maddening. By 1896, The Enterprise demanded that “sign boards should be erected at every crossroad in the town” for travelers and especially the many out-of-town cyclists who passed through.
Within a few months, it was announced that L.A.W. would begin placing in all parts of the state blue metal road signs with raised yellow lettering that would identify the village or hamlet and give the distance to the next one.
As is typical of developments in American technology, prices of wheels came down, the market became saturated, owning a bicycle was no longer so fashionable, and a new technology had arrived to take the bicycle’s place. If he felt there was nothing “to be compared with the exhilarating excitement in riding a light running and responsive wheel,” wait until the wheelman had his first automobile ride!
Within a few years membership fell so low that L.A.W. and the Altamont Wheelmen were disbanded and bicycles were relegated to children.
Location:
One September weekend in the mid-1890s found Fred DeGraff of Guilderland Hamlet and four friends mounting their wheels, pedaling over to Pittstown to visit a friend while, on another I.K. Stafford, Fred Keenholts and Andrew Oliver traveled from Altamont to New Jersey to Asbury Park for an extensive cycle tour.
They reported to The Enterprise, “The wheeling in New Jersey was very fine.” As interest and participation in cycling spread, The Enterprise was abuzz with local bicycle news during the decade of the 1890s, often called the Golden Age of the Bicycle.
This craze for wheels, as bicycles were then commonly called, took off in the 1890s as the technological advances of the previous decade came together to create a practical modern bicycle. It began with the concept of two spoked wheels of equal size on a tubular frame followed by the invention of pneumatic tires to provide a smoother ride and propulsion from pedals connected to a chain driven sprocket.
However, early braking systems were less than adequate until the invention of the coaster brake in 1898. Wheels didn’t come cheap, ranging from $25 for a used bicycle in the mid-1890s to over $100 for the finest models in 1890s’ dollars, a luxury for most people at that time.
Advertisements of bicycles for sale showed up in The Enterprise as early as 1890, some inserted by the manufacturers themselves. Monarch Cycle Co.’s appeared frequently, claiming theirs was “absolutely the best” with elegant designs and unsurpassed workmanship using the finest materials.
H.A. Lozier & Co. not only bragged about the Cleveland bicycle’s construction, but added the practical information that its “resilient” tire could be repaired “quicker and easier than any other tire in the market.” Several Albany dealers jumped into the market and, sensing a good business opportunity, some Altamont men began selling wheels and advertising their wares in the paper as well.
“Notes From Gotham,” a July 1893 Enterprise front-page column, noted there was “a growing interest in bicycling as an amusement,” claiming that there was “a popular craze” for the sport, “destined to be the most popular form of outdoor entertainment that has ever engaged the American people.”
While bicycle owners could be found in all parts of Guilderland, by far most cyclists seemed to be concentrated in Altamont, so many that in 1893 sixteen men joined together to organize “The Altamont Wheelmen.” After electing officers headed by I.K. Stafford, plans were made to find club rooms.
Soon they moved into “commodious” and “airy” rooms on the second floor of J.S. Secors new warehouse where a new coal stove supplied not only heat but hot water for the bathtub they installed! It was claimed that they had a “very cozy room and it makes a pleasant place to spend one’s evenings, if they must be spent from home.” A year later for reasons not given, they moved to space over the post office
Immediately after the club’s formation, its members began planning runs to Amsterdam, Albany via Voorheesville, Guilderland Center, Averill Park, South Bethlehem, Slingerlands, and Sloan’s (now Guilderland Hamlet). Remembering the dirt roads of that time, this was an ambitious undertaking but reports in the ensuing weeks indicate that they really did pedal their wheels to these destinations.
As 1894 came to a close, 36 men had been voted into membership, especially once it was made known that actually being a wheelman wasn’t a requirement to becoming a member. The Wheelmen had become not only a cycle club, but a male social club as well.
At the last meeting of 1894, members were treated to an oyster supper, followed by “soft drinks” and cigars, all this hosted for the 25 men present by the club’s president I.K. Stafford and Altamont bicycle dealer Fred Keenholts.
Another dinner the next year mentions an “elaborate spread, merriment and good cheer.” Another type of social function were “smokers” where the men entertained themselves with reminiscences of the past season’s cycling “through columns of smoke.”
“Bicycle Notes,” a sporadic column appearing in The Enterprise, related the latest bicycle chatter from around town, including the names of those who had recently purchased a new or used bicycle. Abe Tygert got a high-grade Niagara while Andrew Ostrander purchased a 22-pound Relay — those were just two of the many proud owners identified over the decade.
If used, the previous owner’s name was also listed: “Lucius Frederick is the possessor of a wheel, having purchased the one ridden by Aaron Oliver last season, and Chas. Stevell who now rides the wheel which J. Van Benscoten rode during 1894.”
Ladies, too
Appearance and manners were topics once touched on in “Bicycle Notes” when the writer, pleased that more riders were sitting upright, described any rider as “silly” to “hump” himself over the handlebars unless racing. And ladies should always sit upright so as not to “stoop in the slightest degree.”
Noting that pedestrians had the right of way, cyclists were to respect them and, in addition, to avoid running down children and old people. His parting comment was, “There are all sorts of road hogs in the world and it is regretted some of them ride bicycles … Young boys and fresh young men are the greatest offenders.”
A rumor appeared in “Bicycle Notes” that some of the ladies were learning to ride and soon their names began to show up in print. Miss Blanche Warner’s wheel was a “handsome new Remington,” while Miss J. Libbie Osborn chose an Erie. Herbert Winne finally bought a used bike to enable him to accompany his wife, the experienced rider of the family. Unlike the men, women were never mentioned riding any distance from home.
Risky business
Racing appealed greatly to younger, athletic riders and quickly became a popular local spectator sport with the racetrack at the fairgrounds the perfect venue for competition. Independence Day, the Altamont Hose Company’s Field Day and Clam Bake, and the Altamont Fair itself all became occasions for bicycle races.
Prizes were given in cash, objects such as a $5 clock or certificates for merchandise at Albany stores. Often local wheelmen traveled out of town to participate in races. Pity Lew Hart who lost count of the number of laps in a Cobleskill race and missed being one of the winners.
Being a wheelman was a risky business due to inadequate brakes; locally hilly, rutted roads; and in some cases the riders’ own inexperience. One time at the fairgrounds, three entrants tangled during a race resulting in bruises and badly mangled bicycles. During another race, Elias Stafford had his ego rather than his body bruised after a spill at the race track when the paper commented the next week, “The spectacle was too ludicrous for anything.”
Guilderland Center resident John Stewart took a bad spill on the curvy hill at Frenchs Hollow, but the most tragic accident befell an Albany man out riding with James Keenholts near Altamont. He was seriously injured after losing control as he turned his wheel, going down off a bridge near Altamont onto some rocks below.
After Dr. Barton tended to his obvious injuries, he was helped to board the evening train heading to Albany. “It is feared he is hurt internally” was the comment in the next week’s Enterprise.
L.A.W. and order
The League of American Wheelmen, an organization promoting cycling and good roads, had been formed in the 1880s. So many Americans were swept up in the bicycle craze that by 1898 membership in L.A.W. topped 102,000 including some of the Altamont Wheelmen. I.K. Stafford, one of the founders and president of the Altamont Wheelmen, became sanctioned by L.A.W. to officiate bicycle races, which he did at the Altamont Fair for many, many years.
Long before automobiles were traveling the nation’s highways, L.A.W. began to press for improved roads for cyclists, preferably paved. Locally, there was a call for cycle paths, at that time more commonly called sidepaths.
By 1898, pressure from wheelmen forced the Albany County Board of Supervisors to create a County Sidepath Commission. Routes out of Albany were being considered and of course, a route to Altamont through Guilderland Hamlet and Guilderland Center was hoped for by residents here.
A sidepath went out as far as Albany Country Club (now the University at Albany campus) east of McKownville with William Witbeck extending it west as far as his tavern (site of present day Burger King), but it never went beyond that, although sidepaths were laid out from Albany to Schenectady and from Albany to Slingerlands.
The Enterprise reported the discovery that, not only did the cyclists like the sidepaths, but pedestrians found “that it makes a very desirable walk.” In 1902, it was reported the Albany County Sidepath Commission had spent $5,000 building new paths and repairing old ones. License badges — “same price as last year” — had to be attached to bicycles.
Wheeling was difficult enough over the poor country roads, but the lack of signs made finding your way, once out of your own immediate area, maddening. By 1896, The Enterprise demanded that “sign boards should be erected at every crossroad in the town” for travelers and especially the many out-of-town cyclists who passed through.
Within a few months, it was announced that L.A.W. would begin placing in all parts of the state blue metal road signs with raised yellow lettering that would identify the village or hamlet and give the distance to the next one.
As is typical of developments in American technology, prices of wheels came down, the market became saturated, owning a bicycle was no longer so fashionable, and a new technology had arrived to take the bicycle’s place. If he felt there was nothing “to be compared with the exhilarating excitement in riding a light running and responsive wheel,” wait until the wheelman had his first automobile ride!
Within a few years, membership fell so low that L.A.W. and the Altamont Wheelmen were disbanded and bicycles were relegated to children.
Location:
— Photo from the Guilderland Historical Society
John D. Ogsbury, on the far right, is shown here as a much younger man than when he ventured into the Helderbergs to witness General Electric’s experimental long distance TV transmission.
One uncomfortably warm June morning, 82-year-old John D. Ogsbury climbed into Warren Baker’s car for a drive up the hill out of Altamont into the Helderbergs for one of the most memorable experiences of his life.
Ogsbury, owner and senior editor of The Altamont Enterprise, had been born three years before the Civil War on a farm near McKownville. His family moved to farms in Parkers Corners and then Dunnsville where he received his education in the one-room school.
Leaving the farm in 1874, he worked at a variety of jobs, some taking him out of the area as far away as South Carolina and California. On his return, he continued to be unsettled until, in 1886, his new mother-in-law loaned him $300 to buy a part interest in The Knowersville Enterprise.
John D. Ogsbury had finally found his niche! Initially he was in partnership with Junius Ogsbury, but in 1914 he became sole owner of The Enterprise.
A few years later, in 1920, he brought in his youngest son, Howard, to be a partner. Within a few years, his son was in charge of the day-to-day operations while John D. Ogsbury acted as senior editor. After 1933, he began an annual winter sojourn in Florida, and on that June morning he had only recently returned from his Florida hiatus, having first stopped off to attend the opening of the 1939 World’s Fair.
Officially inaugurated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 30, the fair had spread out over 1,216 acres in Queens, New York, and focused on the future with an upbeat opening-day slogan: “Dawn of a New Day.”
Emphasizing modern technology, American companies such as General Electric, RCA (Radio Corporation of America), and Westinghouse erected large buildings featuring their products and research. One of the attractions that succeeded in capturing the public’s attention was television, which at that time was called a “futuristic technology.”
The G.E. building included a complete TV studio where intrigued visitors could stand in front of a camera, look over at a screen and see themselves on television, while an actual DuMont television was an eye-catching object in the lobby of the RCA building. There, a sizable display area had been given over to television in an effort to stimulate consumer interest in the new medium.
Schenectady’s G.E. was at the forefront of television research beginning in the 1920s, initiating WRGB in 1928, at first an experimental station broadcasting under the call letter W2XB. Soon after this, G.E. started W2XBS (now WNBC) in New York City.
Even though stations were being established, television programming was extremely limited in 1939. In spite of the decade-long Depression and the European war clouds generated by the aggressive actions of Germany, Italy, and Japan, by the close of the decade, several other American companies were competing with G.E., engaged in research and development to make television an attractive consumer product.
G.E. engineers knew current television transmission that couldn’t reach beyond the horizon severely limited its range, in turn limiting its potential audience and sales of television sets. They began maximizing the area that could be reached by WRGB, considering possibly even receiving transmissions from atop the Empire State Building, chose high elevation atop the Helderberg escarpment to erect an antenna near Thacher Park seeking to expand WRGB’s viewing area.
Then, on Mr. and Mrs. K. Vander Kruik’s Pinnacle Point Road farm in New Scotland, G.E. had constructed a small metal building, variously referred to as a shack or shanty, where an experimental television receiver and antenna poles had been installed.
John D. Ogsbury’s destination that day was this odd little structure where he would be one of a very few invited guests to witness the live television broadcast of Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the World’s Fair, transmitted from New York City to upstate New York as an experiment to test its feasibility.
As tensions and the threat of war grew in Europe, the royal couple was on an extensive tour of Canada with an American side trip to Washington, D.C.; New York City; and a weekend at Hyde Park entertained by the Roosevelts, all with the goal of winning support and friendship for Britain.
The American public was enthralled with the details of the king and queen’s progress and, when they visited New York City that day, in spite of the early June heat wave, an estimated three- to four-million people turned out to see them at the various places they visited in the city or along the routes in between. G.E.’s plan was to televise their visit to the fair live. At that time, there were only a few hundred sets in the New York City area that would have been able to pick up the broadcast.
In the meantime, on arriving at the location of the G.E. relay station in the Helderbergs, it was necessary for the 82-year-old Ogsbury to climb a steep incline in hot midday temperatures.
As Clyde D. Waggoner, the engineer who had arranged for Ogsbury’s invitation recalled, “At first Mr. Ogsbury felt it would be too much for him, but when I explained world history was being made right here on the doorstep of Altamont he agreed to take the chance.”
Ogsbury described his experience in the June 16 edition of The Enterprise, reporting that the climb was “a fairly steep grade one-third mile to the top.” At the G.E. shack, the doors and windows had to be kept closed so as not to admit light, which would fade the picture on the 8- by 10-inch television screen, creating a very uncomfortable, overheated situation for the cramped audience.
When the royal couple arrived at the fair, late because of the huge crowds en route, Ogsbury and the others were finally able to get a glimpse of them live as they emerged from their car, walking into the Federal Building for lunch. During the time when they were to be inside, scenes of the fair were to be broadcast, but by now the elderly man felt he had had enough, returning to Altamont.
Those who remained in the shanty had a second look at the king and queen as they emerged from their lunch, walking within 10 feet of the camera. Not only did the audience in the small metal structure have the thrill of seeing the royal couple, but by being witnesses of the experiment, they were the first to view long-distance transmission of a live broadcast.
Normally John D. Ogsbury did not write content for The Enterprise, but on this occasion, after being urged by Clyde Waggoner to record his impressions of this historic moment, he summed up his experience with the words, “It seemed impossible that I could be right here on the outskirts of Altamont and see instantly what was taking place in New York, 130 or 140 miles away.”
He recounted seeing the king and queen of England better than the one-and-a-half million people at the fair because he had a “ringside seat.” Telling his readers that he had had a “hot and hard climb up the rough ground of the hill,” and once at the top, he noted that the small metal shanty holding only eight to 10 people became “dreadfully warm inside.”
Then he gave a full description of the royal arrival and with help from engineer Waggoner, was able to give a layman’s version of the G.E. experiment. Ogsbury ended his lengthy article with the enthusiastic comment, “All in all it was a red letter day for me. I had never hoped to see anything so wonderful.”
In June 1939, any local Enterprise reader who wanted to buy his own television could call Television and Radio Service Co. in Delmar, a business that advertised regularly in the paper. At that time when most sets cost between $600 and $700, the average annual income during this Depression year was $1,850.
That same week as the Delmar company was advertising in the paper, there was a tire dealer offering used automobile tires for “$1 and up,” and a large ad to convince visitors to see Knox Cave said admission was $.40 – “See it soon so that your $.40 can be used for payroll and keep men at work.”
It’s unlikely that very many Enterprise readers could have afforded a television in June 1939, as wonderful as it was.
A rainy Memorial Day in 1928 found three very elderly Civil War veterans present at ceremonies being held indoors that year at Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church due to the bad weather.
The three men, members of M.H. Barckley Post, No. 198 and the last of what had once been a sizable contingent, had been accompanied by a number of World War I veterans from the Helderberg Post American Legion and joined at the church by members of the public.
At the conclusion of the ceremony, which included a local judge’s patriotic address and music performed by the Clarksville band, American Legion members escorted the three veterans to Prospect Hill Cemetery to decorate the graves of the Civil War dead.
In 1862, while the Civil War was churning out its endless casualties affecting every community in the country, both North and South, the Prospect Hill Cemetery trustees set aside a section to be known as the Soldiers’ Lot where fallen Union soldiers could be interred without cost. Six years later, $650 was spent by the trustees to erect a memorial monument of a stone shaft surmounted by a bronze eagle in the midst of the Soldiers’ Lot.
As an Enterprise article noted in 1898, “A goodly number of those who fell in battle or died in service were brought home and their remains interred here so that today upwards of one hundred veterans are sleeping under its sod.”
Civil War deaths from both sides, the combined result of battle and diseases, especially dysentery and measles, totaled approximately 620,000. Surviving Union veterans, who often returned home suffering from physical or psychological effects of the conflict, began banding together, beginning in 1866, for support and fellowship in a veterans’ organization that became known as the Grand Army of the Republic. In the years that followed, thousands of veterans formed hundreds of GAR posts across the nation.
Chartered by local veterans on Jan. 24, 1881, Altamont’s new post was called the M.H. Barckley Post, No. 198, following GAR tradition of naming a post in honor of a local soldier who had fallen in battle. Lieutenant M.H. Barckley, a Knox resident who had served in the 7th New York Artillery Regiment, was wounded at the Battle of Cold Harbor in 1864 and died shortly after having his leg amputated. Post members included not only men from Guilderland, but Knox and other nearby towns and at its peak counted 49 members.
In 1868, Major-General John A. Logan, first national commander of the GAR, issued Order No. 11 proclaiming that May 30 should be observed annually as Memorial Day to remember and honor those who met death in the war with the words, “Let us gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of springtime … .”
Because Union regiments were recruited from local areas, many men from the same vicinity would be living and fighting together during the war. Twenty-five men from Guilderland and 14 from Knox served in the 7th with Barckley along with others from nearby towns.
Visiting cemeteries where the war dead were interred was a deeply felt emotional experience for the living because the dead men frequently had been the veterans’ schoolmates, friends, neighbors, or perhaps one of their relatives. Early Memorial Day ceremonies had real meaning for both veterans and community members who also had grieved for these losses as well.
The first Memorial Day service at Prospect Hill Cemetery was held in 1868, the year of Major-General Logan’s proclamation, but details of early observances aren’t available. Once The Enterprise began publication, a record of activities on Memorial Day (or Decoration Day as it was sometimes called) provided accounts of how the day was observed.
In the 1880s, with the newly organized Barckley GAR Post and the formation of community bands, more elaborate ceremonies could be staged. Each year in mid-May, the GAR post inserted an announcement in The Enterprise to solicit donations of flowers to decorate the graves.
Taking 1887 as a typical example of Memorial Day in Guilderland, in early morning a crowd began gathering in front of Sloan’s Hotel in the hamlet of Guilderland, waiting for the veterans to arrive. In the meantime, the GAR veterans had left Altamont with their flowers, stopping along the way at both Fairview and Guilderland cemeteries to decorate Civil War graves there, and then proceeded to Sloan’s.
That year, the Knowersville Band accompanied them, though in the years ahead many different bands played at the event. When they arrived in Guilderland, a parade was organized with a grand marshal in the lead, followed by both the Fullers and Knowersville cornet bands, the veterans from the Barckley Post, and lastly members of the public.
Marching along the Turnpike to the sounds of the bands that “discoursed excellent music,” the parade reached the cemetery where a large crowd had already gathered.
Entering the cemetery, their first stop was the Soldiers’ Lot where the proscribed ritual of reading aloud Major-General Logan’s Order No. 11 and strewing the graves with flowers opened the day’s ceremonies.
Next, the veterans, bands, and the crowd that had marched along the Turnpike moved to another section of the cemetery where dignitaries were seated on a platform and a much larger crowd awaited them to begin the program. Later, the estimate was given that there were 2,000 people present that day.
Once in place, as the combined bands played “America,” the crowd burst into song. Next, accompanied by an organ, a choir sang “We’ll Dress the Graves Today,” followed by a prayer offered by Rev. H.M. Voorhees.
A solo “The Empty Sleeve” was sung by Rev. J.C. Fisher, followed by a lengthy patriotic address given by Rev. T.J. Yost, Altamont’s Lutheran pastor, printed complete in the next week’s Enterprise. The program concluded with Henry Swann, the “conductor” of the exercises, making remarks, the choir singing “Tread Lightly on Their Graves” and finally a benediction was given by Rev. Dr. Belden.
The program varied little over the next several years, but one addition in 1890 was the presence of the popular local poet Madelene LaGrange who probably brought tears to the eyes of many when she read her sentimental poem “The Tried and True,” which began:
We come today, remembering the loved, the tried and true,
To deck the place where lie in peace the boys who wore the blue;
Our boys who died that we might live in rest and peace today,
Who shouldered arms at war’s alarms and marched to join the fray… .
This ceremony became the pattern followed as long as the Civil War veterans were alive. After a few years, the address would be given by a political figure instead of a minister and the participating bands varied, but ministers always continued to play a part.
Choirs were usually from one of Guilderland’s churches. There were a few years when the Barckley Post went to Knox or stayed in Altamont for village Memorial Day ceremonies and Albany GAR posts participated instead, but most years Barckley Post members were an important feature of the Prospect Hill Memorial Day observances.
Large numbers of people poured into the hamlet of Guilderland and the cemetery itself for this annual event with no indication of what facilities were available for a crowd of that size. The traffic jam created by all those horse-drawn vehicles hauling spectators and the mess left by the horses must have been quite a sight.
An announcement came from the trustees in 1897 indicating a railing on study posts would be running the length of cemetery property along the Turnpike “for the purpose of tying horses.” In the later 1890s, it became possible to shelter your horse in either of the church sheds or in the hotel shed where for a moderate price a man would feed and water your horse.
Rain could interfere as it did in 1892, driving people indoors to Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church. Cemetery trustees took the preventative step of acquiring a tent that would shelter 1,000 people from inclement weather, making it known that spectators should not stay away because of rain or threat of bad weather because they would be kept dry under the big tent.
The GAR’s political power was such that Memorial Day was quickly made a national holiday after its initiation. From the beginning, most people considered it not only a day for solemn remembrance, but also an opportunity for leisure and recreation, something obvious from the columns of The Enterprise.
Traditionally, a baseball game was played in the hamlet of Guilderland on the Iosco team’s ballfield either before or after the ceremonies. An especially popular leisure activity that day for many people was visiting friends or relatives.
Some of the fellows went fishing. For others, taking one of the excursions offered by either the D & H or West Shore railroads or cruising on a Hudson River dayliner to Kingston Point for the day was a delightful way to enjoy the holiday.
One group of people who had little chance to relax were the women and the few men involved in putting on strawberry festivals or serving dinners, all to raise money. The strawberry festivals were held in the hamlet of Guilderland by the ladies of the Methodist and Presbyterians churches and the Templars at Red Men’s Hall. After the turn of the 20th Century, the church ladies began serving lunches or suppers instead of strawberries and ice cream.
The best food event was in Frenchs Hollow where, depending on the year, the Guilderland Center women from either St. Mark’s Lutheran Church or from the Helderberg Reformed Church alternated offering meals with fanciful names and entertainments in the late afternoon and early evening of Memorial Day at the empty old factory building there that had been used many years for community events.
For a modest price, people returning from the cemetery ceremonies could stop on the way home to dine and relax. In 1887, the Lutheran ladies served a supper with the additional attractions of the Knowersville Band’s music and a broom drill performed by a brigade of 12 young ladies in “appropriate” costumes, described the next week as “an interesting feature of the entertainment, each one performing her part admirably.” Seeing that the proceeds of the evening totaled $268, the supper must have been well patronized.
The Japanese and Pink Tea Party, Orange Tea Party, Chocolate Tea Party, Rainbow Supper, Columbian Entertainment Supper, and New England Supper were samples of Memorial Day events at the old Frenchs Hollow factory sponsored by one or the other of the two churches. Finally, in 1901, the annual supper was to be held at Helderberg Reformed Church parlors in Guilderland Center instead of what had become the very rundown old factory building.
The comment was made, “There is general satisfaction that the Supper has been removed from the dangerous factory in French’s Hollow.”
The ladies of the two churches continued to offer Memorial Day suppers and entertainments for many years.
That time was creeping up on the veterans was indicated when, in 1899, The Enterprise commented “… the ranks of the old ‘vets’ have been materially thinned of late, some seven in this vicinity having answered the roll call and joined their comrades in the spirit world during the last year… .”
With the new century and the aging of the veterans, the annual ceremonies continued, but less attention was paid to the events at Prospect Hill. Whoever wrote the Guilderland column in the paper in the early 1900s never even mentioned the Memorial Day event unless it had to do with the church serving lunch or dinner that day.
The veterans who were able continued to solicit donations of flowers, and traveled to the cemetery as always to decorate the graves, where there would be the traditional band and speaker.
Cemetery officials proudly noted in 1915, “Guilderland gave freely of her boys during the Rebellion, many of whom never came home and for forty-six years in succession appropriate exercises have been held in their memory.”
By 1919, only 10 GAR men were present and now they were taken by automobile to the cemeteries while the Altamont Boy Scouts collected donated flowers and did the actual work of placing them on the graves.
In 1923, when only six veterans took part, the Boy Scouts not only decorated the graves, but did the traditional GAR readings. And finally, 1928’s observance saw the last of the Civil War veterans. The M.H. Barckley Post, No. 198 Altamont disbanded shortly afterward, bringing an end to an era.
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— Photo from Guilderland Historical Society
Trained bears and their wandering keepers, very possibly part of a traveling Gypsy group, were photographed as they performed for members of the Cook family, who summered at their farm on Dunnsville Road. Always attracting curious onlookers, the men were hoping for coins to reward their performance.
Any strangers observed passing through Guilderland during the late 19th and early 20th centuries were quickly spotted and carefully observed by the locals who were familiar with their own friends and neighbors. Respectable travelers and salesmen presented no problem, but certain other groups of transients were scrutinized warily: Gypsies, tramps, and thieves.
Gypsies, who today prefer to be called Roma, began immigrating to the United States from eastern Europe in large numbers after 1880. With the arrival of warm weather, bands of Gypsies, moving about in their brightly colored wagons, arrived on country roads, telling fortunes and trading horses.
Local columnists in The Enterprise often noted the presence of Gypsies, signaling to people in nearby communities that Gypsies were nearby and may be heading your way next. As early as 1886, the Guilderland column noted “plenty of Gypsies on the road nowadays.” People living along the Western Turnpike or Schoharie Road, Guilderland’s main roads at that time, were most likely to see outsiders wandering through.
Gypsies were regarded with both fascination and fear. The fascination was fueled by such stories as some printed in the early editions of The Enterprise with titles like “The Gypsy Queen” (1884), “The Gypsy’s Story” (1887), and “A Gypsy’s Sad Life and Death” (1888).
Their reputation as fortune tellers attracted curious people to seek them out and for a time they set up fortune-telling tents at the Altamont Fair. Their mobile lifestyle, exotic dress, tents, and travel in their painted wagons may have even made local hard-working men and women leading their somewhat dull lives slightly envious of the excitement and constant change of scenery experienced by the Gypsies.
But there was also a dark side that caused communities to be quite wary. This may have been that era’s version of an urban legend, but children were seriously warned to beware of being kidnapped by the Gypsies, especially if there was one of their encampments in the area.
There was also fear of being cheated in sales, particularly that of horses. The story from South Berne of the man there who bargained for a horse from the Gypsies, and only “a few days after found the horse dead in the stable,” was enough to cause area farmers to be reluctant to have any business dealings with the Gypsies. When in 1908 the Guilderland Center correspondent noted that Gypsies were camping just outside the village near Becker’s Bridge, it may have been a coded warning.
Tramps were scorned or pitied
Tramps, the homeless men of that day who made up the second group of wanderers going through town singly or in groups, were greeted by the local residents with varying degrees of pity, scorn, and suspicion.
A Parkers Corners writer questioned, “Who will take care of all the tramps that are traveling the road and stopping at every house? They should be looked after by someone.”
In the opinion of the Fullers correspondent, “The alms house is the place for them.”
In one pathetic case, the body of a man characterized as an “imbecile tramp” who had been wandering in the area acting in a “strange and threatening manner,” was found on James B. Hilton’s farm near Altamont. After the coroner ruled that the unfortunate man probably died in a fit, he was interred in the Potter’s Field portion of Fairview Cemetery.
The Enterprise printed a piece of humor of the day, originating from an outside source written by a man who offered “a tramp suppressing or tramp dispensing device.” He suggested the tramp’s greatest fear is that of soap and water. Forcing a tramp to wash up will cause him to “dance, howl, shriek, and beat against his prison bars.” Once free he’ll make a “beeline” out of town, chalking a mark, warning away other tramps.
Tramps were viewed as nuisances, stopping by homes along the roads to ask for food. Their reputation for chalking mysterious symbols on fences or piling rocks a certain way to signal that food was usually available at this or that house was well known. Sometimes camping on farmers’ land, tramps caused problems as the one that occurred when their campfire set Ira Hurst’s woods on fire.
Suspicion was that, if opportunity presented itself, tramps would steal from householders and farmers. People in Fullers got the warning to “lock up your buildings as three or four old tramps are seen on the road daily.”
“A suspicious character” was noticed lurking around Meadowdale’s general store. Harvey A. Vosburgh, Overseer of the Poor, fed a tramp one night who repaid his hospitality by stealing money from the pocket of Vosburgh’s hired man, then sneaking away. In one of the few cases where a thief was actually apprehended, the tramp was taken before Esq. McKown who sentenced him to three months in the penitentiary.
In quest of a good meal, tramps commonly made thefts of defenseless hens leading many farmers to keep a goose or two whose loud honking would give warning if an unwanted visitor entered the henhouse after dark.
Thieves: local or professional
Reports of thefts occurring in various parts of town were noted in The Enterprise’s local columns sporadically over the years. The perpetrators seemed to fall into three categories: tramps, light fingered locals and professional thieves.
A Meadowdale housewife, upon discovering a tramp climbing out through a window of her home, gave chase only to have him get away with two gold rings. Many of the petty thefts like this from houses and barns noted in local columns were likely to have been tramps who kept on the move and were never caught.
Some of the thefts were definitely pulled off by local neighbors. Someone absconded with a turkey from Keenholts’ Altamont market. The Village & Town column in the next issue of The Enterprise carried a sharp warning to the mystery person that he was well know and better either return the turkey or $2 by Saturday or “he will be exposed by one who saw him do it.”
When Emmit Blessing’s watch was stolen from his house, suspicion “pointed to a young man living near here.” Then there was the Guilderland Center man who pulled a switch, substituting an old pump for a new one at H. Van Auken’s well. “We know who you are,” was the blunt statement in the next Guilderland Center column, warning the culprit to return the pump to save himself trouble and embarrassment.
The threat of public humiliation and ruined reputation was probably enough of a deterrent to keep most of the neighbors honest.
Major break-ins must have been the work of professional criminals. Petinger’s Guilderland Center general store was burglarized by blowing open the safe, netting the criminals $35 in silver and a large number of postage stamps.
Another time, burglars used explosives to crack the safe at Guilderland Foundry. For all their effort, their haul was a disappointing $8.
W.S. Pitts’ general store in Altamont was broken into through a side window. The three men who did it carried off a goodly quantity of merchandise and, even though witnesses saw them flee, they managed to get away.
Thieves in McKownville hit the jackpot when in one night they managed to enter the Albany Country Club’s Clubhouse, Witbeck’s Hotel, and the schoolhouse, removing $150 worth of valuable silverware, clothing, and cigars.
In the years before World War I, thefts and break-ins targeted chiefly homes, barns, and businesses, but schools, railroad depots, and St. Lucy’s Chapel were also victims at one time or another. Commonly taken were things like cash, postage stamps, jewelry, men’s clothing and shoes, harnesses, and horse blankets.
But who stole the altar wine from St. Lucy’s? Books were carried off from schools on Settles Hill and from Guilderland, while at Altamont High School the most bizarre loot was pilfered — all the drawing compasses in the school! Various general stores and the foundry had been burglarized multiple times over the years.
Townsmen blustered in print about the consequences if the “miscreants,” “Midnight marauders,” or the “chicken thief fraternity” were to be apprehended. Threats came from all over town that “house revolvers should be kept handy” and “if captured (he) will be summarily dealt with” or “A warm reception awaits the next company of midnight marauders.”
One man stormed, “If he caught the fellow who did it, he would make it hot for him.” Another advised, “Our citizens should oil their rusty revolvers and be ready for business.”
Frank Spurr seemed to be the only man to actually manage to fire off shots at a fleeing burglar who had broken into the barber shop and store in Guilderland. He missed!
Year by year, in those horse-and-buggy days, life in Guilderland was actually very safe and quiet, but every now and again unwelcome strangers caused some excitement, giving the local residents something interesting to talk about over the back fence, after church, or around the potbelly stove at the local general store. Comfortable with each other, they did not regard unwelcome strangers kindly.
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— Photo from Mary Ellen Johnson
After breaking a passage through heavy snow blocking the Delaware & Hudson tracks early in the 20th Century, this specially equipped locomotive plow had halted at the Meadowdale Station. Even if a unit this powerful had been available in 1888, many of the hard-packed drifts were so high, manual shoveling would probably have been necessary. The station, removed in the early 1930s, once stood near the Meadowdale railroad crossing.
“Spring is coming,” The Altamont Enterprise editor announced in the March 10, 1888 “Home Matters” column. “Blue birds have been seen in various neighboring localities.” Local readers of the newspaper, having enjoyed the mild weather of recent days, were eagerly anticipating dry roads and spring planting, blissfully ignorant of the monster winter storm just then crossing the Great Plains.
As it reached the North Carolina coast, the storm combined with a coastal low, pulling in huge amounts of moisture. Simultaneously, an Arctic front thrust down from Canada, the blast of frigid air colliding with the moisture laden nor’easter. Once all these components were in place, the worst winter storm ever recorded on the East Coast aimed its vengeance at New York and New England.
Early Monday morning, March 12, as farmers tended to their chores in barns across Guilderland, the steady rain that had begun falling the night before quickly changed to snow as temperatures started to plummet. Within a few hours the winds picked up, reaching gale force as the night wore on.
Heavy powdery snow continued to fall all day Tuesday, whipped into huge hard-packed drifts by the ferocious wind, later estimated to have been a sustained 35 to 45 miles per hour. By Wednesday morning, the storm had subsided, but the near-zero temperatures remained.
Officially, 47 inches of snow fell in Albany during the three days of the storm, the most of any storm ever recorded in the immediate area. The East Coast from Chesapeake Bay to Maine was paralyzed for days afterwards with roads and rails blocked and telegraph lines down.
On Wednesday, in Guilderland’s various hamlets and on outlying farms, having been isolated by the huge drifts across roads and railroad tracks, the mammoth job of digging out began.
The last D & H train arrival in Altamont had been Monday, the day the storm began in earnest. The next scheduled train to roll into the station arrived at 6 p.m. Wednesday pulled by three locomotives necessary to push through the snow. Finally some mail and newspapers had arrived!
To clear the tracks in those days, men had to be hired to manually shovel. At Van Aernam’s Crossing, a 20-foot drift covered the D & H tracks for a quarter of a mile. A few days, later the D & H brought out a squad of Italians to shovel out its rail yards at Meadowdale.
Over on the West Shore, local men were hired for $1.50 per day to remove the drifts from the tracks. Unfortunately, several of them had their eyesight affected by the glare of the sun on the snow and were forced to quit. One tale passed down in later years was that the drifts were so high in places that sometimes it was possible to hang a coat on the top of a telegraph pole!
Stalled train
The first issue of The Enterprise after the blizzard ran a lengthy account in two 9-inch columns — very unusual to find a locally written story of this length in those early days of the newspaper — entitled, “The Storm.” It detailed the great adventure experienced by Altamont residents D.G. Staley, Chris Hart, I. Knower and Mr. Stafford, passengers on the D & H’s 6 p.m. Oneonta train that left Albany Monday evening with 24 riders on board.
Pulled by two locomotives through the snow, the train successfully climbed the steep gradient out of Albany, but became “embedded” in a huge drift somewhere between Elsmere and Delmar. All efforts to move the stalled train failed and within hours the raging storm had buried it under a blanket of snow. It turned out that the boiler of Engine No. 150 had developed a leak, lost steam, and, with that, power.
Engine No. 261, the second locomotive, did not have sufficient power to haul both the incapacitated locomotive and the cars through the already deep and drifted snow. Two D & H employees left the train to walk back to Albany to get help in spite of the dangerous conditions.
As hours passed with no help forthcoming, the hungry passengers began foraging, uncovering a barrel of bread “bound for Slingerlands,” several pounds of pork chops, a pail of oysters, a chunk of beef, a ham and four pounds of coffee. Mr. Baker of Slingerlands took over as caterer and, using a coal shovel to roast the meat, arranged “a splendid table d’hote.
As the night wore on, many of the passengers made themselves comfortable enough to sleep in the passenger cars, while others adjourned to the baggage car where they spent the next several hours “in songs and merriment of various kinds.”
Tuesday morning, a man who could see the stalled train from his house brought various eatables, another party also came with additional food for the stranded travelers. By 2 p.m., some D & H employees arrived with more provisions and the message that as soon as the storm abated D & H workers would be there to rescue the train.
Reaching the stranded train had taken them three-and-a-half hours to travel the three miles from Albany, the men becoming encrusted in ice by the time they arrived. When the snow finally ceased Wednesday, four engines and 60 workers arrived to extricate the stalled train, finally getting it pulled loose and returned to Albany. The four engines pushed on through the drifts, reaching Altamont at 2 p.m., the first train to arrive since Monday.
Hardships and heroes
In Guilderland’s hamlets residents dug themselves out and carried on with their chores and business with few comments about the effects of the storm on their daily lives. The Meadowdale correspondent apologized two weeks later for the dearth of news “on account of the blizzard” with no stories of how everyone was coping.
The postmaster of Guilderland complained that no mail had arrived in Guilderland between Saturday and Wednesday and, to make matters worse, he took in only 18 cents during the whole time. Three weeks after the blizzard, what the Guilderland writer considered the biggest drift in the town was to be seen on the Western Turnpike near S. Westfall’s.
In Fullers, the big blizzard news was that M.W. Siver’s wife had given birth to a 10-and-a-half pound boy during the storm. Mrs. Jacob Becker of Guilderland Center had hung some laundry to dry on their covered porch, only to have one of her sheets disappear during the height of the blizzard. Days later, it was found blown over half a mile, having landed in David Relyea’s hen yard.
The “Home Matters” column in the Altamont section of The Enterprise led off with the question, “Wasn’t a blizzard, though?” Praise was in order for the Knox-Berne stage that rolled into Altamont Monday morning, arriving on time in spite of the storm with the comment, “Jud is one of those fellows that don’t stop for wind or weather.”
Sympathizing with his correspondents, the editor understood that “due to the severe storm and blocked condition of the roads” they were unable to submit their columns. To the disappointment of Altamont’s teetotalers, the literary entertainment to have been put on by Mrs. Jesse Griswold at Temperance Hall, at first postponed because of the storm, was now cancelled indefinitely. It was noted that people living on Altamont’s Main Street really appreciated the efforts of little Allen Van Benscoten who shoveled through “the snow blockade” to open up the street.
Really hard hit were the farmers who had to be able to get out to their barns to feed their animals and where necessary, were forced to dig tunnels through the drifts to get there. Sometimes drifts were so high people had to crawl out second-story windows and in a few cases youngsters slid down from a second story window over a drift and out over the snow covered lawn.
When snows finally melted, some of the local fruit trees were discovered to have been damaged as the drifts that covered them settled and the weight cracked branches.
Overwhelmed or blasé?
Guilderland residents who actually lived through the Blizzard of 1888 seemed blasé as evidenced by the lack of commentary about it in The Enterprise except for the detailed description of the stranded train.
Perhaps then they were so overwhelmed they didn’t have much time to talk about it, but as the years went by many references were made to the storm in the press, either at the time of another big storm or on Blizzard of ’88 anniversaries such as the 25th or 50th.
By then, the survivors were aware they had lived through a historic event, the “Great White Hurricane” that took the lives of 400 people along its path, and began to provide details in The Enterprise never mentioned at the time it happened such as tunneling through the snow or sliding from the second-story windows.
Nothing has ever measured up to the greatest snowstorm of all. When another ferocious blizzard paralyzed Guilderland in February 1958, the headline that appeared in The Enterprise read, “Blizzard of ’88 Still Tops Says Weather Bureau.” The story continued, “The blizzard of ’58 can’t compare with the blizzard of ’88. That was the granddaddy of ’em all.”