the last of Josies stories The little building where we served meals was known as the Tea House. During the boarding season, we all slept in what we called the Hen House, of course it was all cleaned out. Anyone who worked for us slept there also. If we had an overflow of boarders, we had some cots up in the barn. Dan O’Connell’s brother came to stay and we didn’t have any rooms left, so he took a cot up in the barn. He had just gotten comfortable when the cot broke. We all got quite a chuckle out of that. Our boarding season usually ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day. After that my family would move out of the hen house and back into the big house for the winter. Mayor Thatcher used to come swimming and he would rent a room just to change in. George Sisson from West Berne used to be our meat man and my brother Arnold used to drive to Albany for our other supplies. We didn’t have property enough to have a garden of our own so we had to purchase all our food for the boarders. Zeb and Grace Strevell where great friends of my mother and father. They ran a boarding house next to the Warner’s. The Hinman’s lived there also, Martha and I used to pal around together. When my mother first ran the boarding house, there were no electric lights, we had carbide lights. We had running water, but only in the kitchen sink. We used to employ a couple of local girls as chambermaids and my cousin Betty Gage and I waited on table. We used to have music at the house. Ed Smith was the bandleader and he had a camp over on Thompson’s lake. Ed used to bring his dog with him when he would come over to play. We would have parties where there would be beer on tap. There was always a basin under the tap to catch the overflow, and the dog would drink from the basin and get drunk. Later he would try to go up on the porch, and he would fall over backwards down the stairs. I knew Jay Engle and his wife Lydia. Lydia was not a very attractive lady and she was cross-eyed. Jay used to sell furs at the trading post and he told us he caught them all himself, but I think he bought them. He also had a pet bear that he kept at the trading post for a while. The bear was quite an attraction for the city folks who used to come up to the lake. We used to walk over to the pine grove when they had dances at the pavilion. We would be like old Elias and peek in the windows, but we never went in to dance. I remember my father being tossed from the ice wagon when the horses spooked and hitting his head on the ice. He got a concussion and never regained consciousness and died a few days later. I was about 18 years old at the time. We used to go over to Hayden’s a lot. I remember sitting at the bar and seeing a cow stick it’s head through a hole in the wall behind the bar. Mayor Corning and his friend Polly Noonan used to stop at Hayden’s and she always had her little poodle dog with her.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 10:16:04 +0000