The Hill
The following is an essay I wrote in 1974, my freshman year at Cornell, as a final project for freshman english. I entered it in a college wide essay contest ... and, (knock me over with a feather,) it won! I am sharing it with you now, not because it is so spectacular, but because despite my youthful arrogance and somewhat sketchy grasp of her history, I could feel the hill's specialness even then, and it showed. I call this section A Sense of Place, because my family has always referred to our hill as "The Place," as in "There's no place like this place so this must be "The Place."
Welcome to...
The Hill
Our hill hasn’t always been the way it is now: acre upon acre of state land filled with neat and not so neat rows of scotch pine and spruce and a few volunteer hemlocks. My father’s one hundred fifty-odd acres are bordered on three sides by state-owned land and on one side by a Camp Fire Girls’ camp. The state makes a decent neighbor and, when they aren’t there, so do the Camp Fire girls and their weekend tenants. The people who use the camp have the disconcerting habit of wandering onto our hayfields to build bonfires, into our pastures to tempt fate by petting our overly friendly heifers who like to knock you over if you don’t scratch their heads hard enough, into our woods to build “natural” campsites by chopping down trees, and learning to make maple syrup by using sap out of the buckets we set out in our sugar bush.
The Camp Fire Camp had been a private farm until its owner died of old age four years ago. There had been a house and barn as well as a sap house and chicken coop, but now the house and barn are gone, torn down, and the sap house remodeled into a bunk house. I suspect the chicken coop will suffer the same fate.
We used to visit Burch Hammond before he died and his place changed hands. He lived mostly in the kitchen of the old house, a bed squeezed into one corner with a gas lamp tipping out from the wall over it. A huge wood stove, its white-flecked blue enamel chipped on the corners and smoked on the sides stood away from the wall opposite. A sink with a drain but no running water sat in the middle of a kitchen counter that ran the length of an inner wall. Two steps from the bottom of the bed was a door that led out of the kitchen down a few rickety stairs into a lean-to that served as a woodshed. At the head of the steps to the right was another door that opened into an indoor outhouse. There were two more rooms downstairs; a small, square living room empty except for a broken down overstuffed chair, a cluttered table, and a wall shelf near the kitchen door from which a stuffed snowy owl glared, and an unused bedroom. I hadn’t liked going to Burchy’s house because he was so old and talked with difficulty, and his house smelled of gas and stale food, and other things I couldn’t place, but he was the first to tell us about the hill.
John McGraw, father of Jennie McGraw Fiske, was born three rods northeast of Burchy’s chicken coop. He ended up a double millionaire, but he didn’t get his millions on the hill.
The soil on the hill was, and still is, the worst in the region. Burchy liked to tell my father how he was doing the spring plowing once, and a lady in a buggy stopped and watched him work for awhile. Finally she couldn’t stand it any longer and asked - “Lord love you, man, how do you make a living?”
Burchy’s place is the newest ruin on the hill, but by no means the only one. The Depression cut down at least a dozen small farmers who finally had to sell out to the state for four dollars to the acre. Their buildings were auctioned off and carted away whole or piecemeal. Burchy’s parents’ house was sold and taken to Brooktondale where it is still standing across from the town barn. The fifty acres it stood on was sold privately and changed hands several times before we bought it. Burch alone made it past the Depression on the strength of a bank account. He also had no children. Most of his land he sold to us when he was in his late eighties, retaining about eighty acres - some of it around his house, and the rest in a fair sized field, a patch of woods and a sugar bush across the road.
One man he used to tell us about didn’t wait for the Depression to send him off the hill. Starr Stanton, for whom the hill was named, didn’t think it a good place to stay. He lived just over the crest of the hill from Burchy’s parents, but he spent a lot of his time at the Hammonds’ telling Burchy’s father that he (Starr) and Mr. Hammond should sell out and leave. His chief fear was of having a heart attack and dying before a doctor could get to him. He finally convinced himself and moved to Dryden where he had a job as a clerk for a short while. When this didn’t work out, he moved to Cortland where he farmed for a while before he died of a heart attack. The doctor didn’t get to him in time. Starr’s place is just a broken down cellar hole now. The man who bought the place from him couldn’t make it through the Depression, and sold to the state like the rest. The driveway is just a few ruts barely visible here and there through a rotting pad of leaves and fallen trees, and most of the time it isn’t there at all. Sometimes, a gone wild rose bush growing next to the cellar hole puts out a few blossoms.
Below us a little way, there is the remains of a spring garden underneath a large oak where the daffodils and lily of the valley bloom in greater abundance every year. A little later the tiger lilies cover the banks of a small stream a short distance away, and in summer a few perennial sweet peas fight up through the golden rod. Between the spring garden and the sweet peas are the ruins of a cellar hole, a young oak tree growing up in the middle. Across the stream and a little farther on, cement supports, a few still ringed by the remains of wooden barrels, jut up from the briars. On the far edge, a low wall - all that’s left of the barn wall - joins two of the supports. Farther back from the road and equal distance from the house and barn holes lie a pile of stones that might have been a spring house, ringed around a shallow well. Beyond the well is the inevitable grove of apple trees. This is Miss MacKellar’s place.
We know very little of Miss MacKellar except that she was an old maid who loved flowers. Her name might have been Mary, she may have been the last of her immediate family alive, (as not many women owned property in the eighteen hundreds.) She may have had other siblings. We do not know.
Down on the Hammond Hill Road just before Starr Stanton Hill Road veers left and goes up the hill toward our place is another set of cellar holes ruins. The MacKellars also owned this place. On one side of the road had been a twenty room house and on the other, a barn.
The MacKellars had some troubles late one winter with a downer cow. They called in the neighbors and together they rigged up a sling around the cow and looped the rope, for lack of a better place, through a pulley in the peak of the barn. The other end was hitched to a yoke of oxen. The oxen were then to be led forward a little way and the cow would be on her feet. It didn’t happen that way. Once started, the oxen kept on going until the cow was dangling way up in the barn’s peak.
The rope broke.
Blood red sumac rings the cellar holes of the second MacKellar place. If Miss MacKellar had a spring garden here it is gone, but perhaps the sumac in fall is more appropriate. No garden is needed to complete the memory of this place - the ill-fated cow is enough. Her story has been repeated for more than a century.
After Burchy died, a relative of his, Mrs. Burns, came to remove his things from his house before the Camp Fire Girls took over. She visited with us for an hour and told us of another of the hill’s families.
Burch’s uncle, she told us, had owned two places: the one he had sold to Burchy and which now belongs to the Camp Fires, and the old Ballou place, across a gully and a little further on from the first place. The Ballou house was the first on the hill to be made from saw milled planks, brought as far as they could by wagon, and then dragged a few boards at a time up from the road a half mile away. Mrs. Burns told us that her mother had gone to a party there once. During the party, a snowstorm set in, snow drifting across the roads and making travel home impossible. They were held there three days until the storm broke and a path for the horses could be broken. Mrs. Burns couldn’t remember much about the house except for the wonderful long banister she slid down when she was a little girl. It must have been a showplace.
Three large lilac bushes are grouped around one corner of the Ballou cellar hole. It is huge - the largest on the hill - and still a little better defined than the others despite the briars and sumac growing up from the middle. The barn’s cellar hole is on a little rise east of the house. It is also very big. The apple grove surrounds the house on three sides, a small clump of plum trees close off the rest of the circle. There is a large open space south of the holes, perhaps the remains of a lawn or garden. There are two levels. The ground slopes down toward the west and a faint trail follows the grade, curving a little to end by a spring well sheltered by two old apple trees. The lawn continues west a little ways and peters out into the edge of state reforestation. When the lilacs bloom in the spring, it is almost as if the place could be, all over again.
There are a few more cellar holes, small ones, which no one seems to know anything about, but someone must have lived there. The ever-present apple groves clump around the little clearings and their cellar holes, and if you look hard enough you can always find a spring, choked with leaves and silt perhaps, but if cleaned out, it will soon fill with water.
Before the farms, the hill belonged to the Iroquois. Irish Settlement Road, which runs by the hill, was a main trail of theirs, and an old logging road on the other side of the hill, now labeled Red Man’s Run on the maps, was an Indian trail before the settlers came. Burch Hammond had a box of arrow heads, some complete, some not, that he had found. He gave a few to my brother.
After the farms, the state owned most of the hill. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) planted most of the three thousand five hundred forty three acres of the new state land with spruce and pine. They built several new roads - fire trails- interlinking Starr Stanton and Hammond Hill with Beam Hill and the valleys on both sides. On one of the fire trails, they built two large wells for use in fighting forest fires.
The water surfaces of the wells are duck weedy, and moss covers the ringed stones. They have not been needed, and their purpose grows almost quaint as the forest grows taller around them.
The hill is a different world now. One used to be able to go to town across the fields if the snow were thick enough, but now it is impossible to navigate that route without dodging under snow laden branches, unless you like the load of it dumped down the back of your coat. One needs ice cleats if he means to walk in more open areas, as snowmobiles overrun the hill at the first dusting of snow. In fall the sportsmen come, decked out in down hunting jackets, authentic checkered shirts and corduroy sportsmen’s pants, guns nestled in the crook of their arms. Once we were trapped behind a road-hogging pair of hunters as they cruised along, narrowly scanning the horizon for deer. We watched as they passed the MacKellar place, missing the three does and a four pronged buck that stood near the cellar hole. Early summer sees the trails inundated with motorbikes or horses whose riders may be competing in the annual trail riding marathon, but spring belongs to us and the black flies. The hill is a sea of mud. That alone is unchanged.
Instead of farmers there are forest rangers, checking the forest regularly for fire hazards and disease. New York State troopers pull into the yard occasionally and ask, “have you seen any marijuana gardens?” or perhaps “A 1974 Cadillac’s been stolen: light blue, license plate 374 TOP, wide wheels, fancy hubs. Seen it?” When there’s dirty work to do, the Camp McCormick boys are there cutting down trees, limbing, or digging culverts out of the spring silt.
The deer have grown so numerous it takes a long hunting season every year to control their population. Turkeys, reintroduced only ten years ago, can be scared out of the tall grass in flocks of ten or twenty. There are foxes and owls and hawks in the woods. The hill now harbors a bobcat again. Raccoons steal from the bushes to ravage their neighbors’ corn patches. The woodcock and grouse and pheasant can find enough for themselves and their chicks. And deep in the woods, one can listen to the hermit thrush sing
Afterword:
The hill has passed from forest to field, then back to forest again. Might it become field again? Perhaps. I love the hill the way it is now and I know I would fight to keep it this way as long as I could, but then too, the farmers fought for their fields until they could no longer pay the price.
Ann Georgi
12/6/1974