Reflections of Moving To The Farm... Miz Mary

When my young husband announced that he had found a farm for us to buy (his dream) if we could come up with the down payment, I was not convinced.  We were living in a three-room apartment in the back of his parent's farm home and had no savings.  I was house-bound with a very young son, and it seemed as if it would be a very long time before a house of our own could be a reality.  When the details came out, it started to seem a bit hopeful.  The owner had bought the farm for speculation; had been renting the farm to a succession of would-be farmers who could not meet the rent payments; therefore he wanted to just be rid of the property but had not been successful thus far and was therefore more than willing to try to work out a plan with us.

To be brief, we found an individual who was enthusiastic about going in with us on this venture, and together the money was scraped up.  We sold our newer model car for a clunker, and  so going forth with no debts and a little cash in hand, we were in partnership and moved into the farmhouse.  The terms were daunting, however.  We had to pay a percentage of the milk check for the mortgage (as soon as we had cows).  Any surplus after farm debts were to be shared with our business partner.  We had bought in to the rest of our lives, but at the time, we struggled from day to day, but we were very young and not afraid of hard work.

I finally got to see the house.  As the farm lay on both sides of Rt. 13 between DeRuyter and Cuyler, I had gone by it probably hundreds of times only giving it a glance, and never in my wildest dreams would I have considered actually living there.  It looked like a grand place. The reality did not live up to that impression.  It had been a grand place.  Flat-roofed and made like a big white square, it did have many windows, a side porch, and an enclosed front porch, one on either side.

It was a duplex, we were given the secondary side, there was no argument at that time; but the other side toward Cuyler  was obviously the main part of the house, the rooms on that side were elegantly sized and sensibly laid out.  The rooms we got were on the DeRuyter side and were not laid out in a way that made sense for a second family.  

The home must have been built to conform to the needs of a specific family group, because there was no kitchen there for us, but a small, dark inner room with a window that looked out onto the back porch sufficed after we  installed a sink there, there was a stairway to the cellar from that room.  Also, there lacked a source of heat but a chimney did exist, so we installed a used coal furnace.  A side porch  on the front entered into a very large main room where a corner china cabinet had been built in at a more recent time, and double doors led off it into a large room at the front of the house, which we used as a downstairs bedroom.  This room had been meant for use as a formal parlor because there was a "funeral door" leading onto the side porch.  In that era provision was made, when building a house, for the family funerals to be held in a front parlor and a door leading directly onto the porch was necessary to remove the coffin from the parlor without disturbing the mourners who had gathered in the adjacent room.  (I knew about this because my grandfather's home had one which had been used at both of my grandparent's funerals.)  At the back, off the main room, was a small room which became a little bedroom.  An enclosed staircase led up to two spacious bedrooms, the attic, and a large space at the head of the stairs.  This space typically was where the sewing machine would have been since most all clothing was made at home, especially ladies dresses.

The ceilings were high and the windows were many and tall in order to keep symmetry in the design of the house there were usually at least two windows in most rooms, no storm windows, which with the high ceilings, made it hard to heat.

I tried to make the  upper bedroom at the front comfortable for my brother, Danie, who visited us on his last leave before heading for duty in Alaska, during the Korean War he was to be stationed in the Aleutian Islands.  He loved the idea of the farm for us and looked forward to coming again; however it was not to be, he perished in an airplane crash just short of his destination.

As imposing as the house was, the heart-breaker was that it had a flaw that was pretty much out of our control, no matter how hard he tried to fix it, the roof leaked.  It had done so for so long that the plaster was down in several of the bedrooms on both sides.  The only fix was going to be to build a new roof, and that was way beyond our means, and would continue to be as long as we were on the farm.  So many improvements and so much machinery was needed for the dairy farm to operate that the money was just not there, there was no priority to spend on the house as long as we didn't use the rooms anyway and the leaks never impacted the lower rooms. The leaks had persisted for so long that channels had come about that were undetectable, fix it in the obvious place, but it would leak somewhere else.

The partnership didn't last long, but we survived the split by sheer force of will and resourcefulness and hard, hard work, by both of us.  I cannot digress here to tell how difficult starting up was or how personalities and broken agreements, etc. happened to bring about our taking full possession of the farm.  The one outstanding fact was that we soldiered on taking each day trying to make things work out.

We had faith in ourselves and Providence, and never faltered in our efforts to make a good life for our little family, to do whatever it took. Lots of thanks to be given to my Father-in-Law and Brother-in-Law, both gone now, but they shared farm work and farm machinery with us which enabled us to move forward.

When we were the sole operators, we tried renting out the vacant side of the house, but soon found that the sort of tenants who wanted to live there weren't the sort that we wanted to live in the same house with.  The obvious thing to do was to move ourselves to the main side ourselves. I had always been envious of the kitchen!

I got to do some papering and painting, and new tile was laid over the bare boards of the floor.  I especially loved the dark red paper with small geometric print that I put in the small dining area, which had the requisite built-in white china cabinet.  The dining room was only large enough for my table & chairs, piano on the side, and a couple of antique dressers, small & large, in contrast to the huge kitchen and living room.

The kitchen was truly made for the farm family.  Tall cupboards were built in on two walls, my favorite feature was the built in flour sifter which held a  ten-pound bag of flour, since I did a lot of baking in my apartment-sized gas stove which we bought when we were first married, it was a great little stove.  A red letter day was when the white enameled cookstove was installed, complete with warming oven and hot water reservoir.  Because the rooms were so large, we needed an additional source of heat in the kitchen. When we moved, I missed that stove more than anything else we left behind.  I can so well remember the smell of wet red hand-knit soggy, small red woolen mittens drying on top of the warming oven and six small stockinged feet (another son was born by then) propped upon chairs in front of the open oven door - my three little sons, in from sliding in the pasture.  We had deep, deep snows those years.

Lest I forget, there were no bathrooms in that house.  We did what the original owners did, made do with commodes and galvanized tubs.  Also, there was no hot water for a long time because the house wasn't sufficiently wired to support an electric water heater, also because the source of water just was not sufficient all of the time. I heated water in the blue enamel canner on top of the gas stove for washing clothes and bathing.  When we finally did get our bathroom installed in a small room which connected the two sides of the house I was still heating water on the stove.  As long as we shared the same source of water with the dairy, the "crystal spring" located on the hill above the house, the flow was just not enough for us and the cows both.  When we had dry spells in the summer water had to be brought in for the cows in milk cans from the river - another very labor-intensive task.

It was finally apparent that we were going to have to have a well dug, and this was accomplished in front of the milk house, to serve the barn and the cows.  All of the wonderful, sweet clear spring water was ours, all ours, at the house!

All of the work that was done on the house, installing furnace, bathroom, septic system, fixing roof, laying tile, etc., was done by my husband in whatever hours he could steal from the demands of running the farm.  If we would have had to wait to afford to pay someone to do it, it just could never have been done.  Eventually, though, we did have an oil burner installed in the furnace, because keeping a coal fire going was just too hard to maintain with all of the demands on his time; by then the kids were in school and I had an office job. 

The house was difficult to heat, with the high ceilings and many windows, and we had some very cold hard winters those years.  Bitter cold and illness made it necessary for our three little boys to have their beds brought down from the upstairs front bedroom to the living room temporarily so we could close the upstairs registers.  The living room was easily as large as two rooms anyway, and was very open, having very little wall space, owing to a 3-window bay, two facing onto the porch, door onto the porch, door to side bedroom, door to bathroom, upstairs stairwell, and double door to dining room.  When there weren't little beds there, there was plenty of room to tear around on the tricycles!

I do need to mention that I had an interesting experience from time to time regarding a small bedroom, which was on the side of the house above the kitchen.  Sometimes when I was alone in the kitchen and the house was very quiet, there would be a sound coming from the ceiling above, continuous and rhythmical, like someone in an old rocking chair. (I had an old oak rocking chair that was my Grandpa's, which was my reference.) This would happen on a windless day. I checked out the attic room which was adjacent, and the upstairs room where the sound seemed to originate, without finding any possible explanation for the sound, either inside or outside.  One day when it started, I went upstairs to the room to investigate but it was all quiet when I got there.  I just decided that we had a friendly spirit who had spent her old age in a rocker in that room, and loved the quiet, and the view from the two windows, and was trying to enjoy it still. 

I should tell about the grounds, because there were vestiges of original glory in the remaining plantings.  The house was on an elevation from the road, the road was along the side of the gradual geologic elevation coming up from the river to the high top of the hill behind the house, a good distance.  The house was on a significantly higher level than the road, which ran in front.  Remaining are stone steps leading up to the front lawn were originally installed at the center of the house site, and a hitching post for the horse and carriage which was the transportation of the day.  

Walking across the lawn to the right, we come to the front porch, (which wasn't originally enclosed). Beautiful bridal-wreath spirea bushes are on each side of the steps. Walk around that side of the house and see the large peony bushes that are placed at intervals all down the side lawn.  A maple tree has been planted at each corner of the front lawn, and a long driveway goes all the way around  the house from the road.  The drive may not have been an actual feature of the original property since it was built before autos came into being.

​We had large vegetable gardens in the back; there was also a large chicken house and a rough structure that I gather had intended to be a tenant house, never finished but used for animal shelter at some time or other.  The vegetable gardens yielded bountifully for us.  I filled the shelves in the cellar with canned tomatoes, green beans, corn, pickles and relishes. Potatoes, squash, carrots, onions - we were very self-sufficient, and it all took work, but we acknowledged that the effort paid off well.

The best feature of the grounds, in my opinion, was the apple orchard.  On the hill in back of the house, visible in all of their pink glory in springtime, were magnificent to behold, and they did not disappoint.  In spite of years and years of neglect, they bore fruit freely and although the worms had been there and gone, we gathered them by the bushel, and I made and canned applesauce and apple butter, apple jelly, and made pies.

After we had been at the Crystal Springs Farm for 10 years we had made as many improvements as were necessary to operate as a dairy farm, but it was becoming apparent that the thing that was holding back progress in that endeavor was the lay of the land.  It was a "hill farm", and the original owners must not have had a problem with that, however they did their business and made their money.  However, in the modern age, perhaps more so than back then, sufficient tillable acres to grow corn and alfalfa were at the very basis of successful farming, as important perhaps as the caliber of the dairy cows.  We were able to find a buyer, and a better farm, the criteria being, a bigger better barn, buildings, tillable land, etc., and we moved.

I moved from an old elegant house to an old, small ancient house, but we started all over again, improving, working, raising our sons, and an added blessing, a new daughter.

Crystal Springs Farm will always hold a special place in my heart for although they were often times trying and difficult, they were happy years for our family.