I remember Beerston

I was born in 1943 in a farmhouse on a farm known as the Weber farm. It was located on a backroad called Beers Brook. I lived most of my childhood on a farm in Beerston, NY. In 1958 we had to move about 3 miles up the road to a new farm on Southside River Road. New York City took one of the most fertile farming valleys anywhere in the world and turned it into a reservoir to supply water to the city. It was called the Cannonsville Reservoir. Other NYC reservoirs were the Ashokan, Neversink, Pepacton, Roundout and Schoharie. I know that people need water to survive but think of the thousands of people's livelyhoods that were destroyed in the name of an available water supply. I always thought "why do they need our water, they've got the Hudson River!"

Beerston, which was named after the founding Beers family, was an unincorporated village, which had about a dozen farms and stretched for about one mile. Today the only standing buildings left are Morgenthauler's garage and the H.B. McDougal residence. I used to say that we should have named our village "Resume Speed".

The center of activity was the Beerston Church. It was of the Presbyterian denomination although at one point we had a fire and brimstone Baptist Preacher named Rev. Friedley. In fact during one of his sermons, he asked who wanted to be saved and my brother Tom and I, who were both under 10 at the time, raised out hands! Hey, who wouldn't want to be saved if all it took was raising your hand?

Everybody in the Community attended church on Sundays. If the census taker came on any given Sunday, he could get a very accurate count of who lived in Beerston! Just imagine, dirt farmers dressed up in suits and ties; quite a sight. They cleaned up real good! My dad always said that if you couldn't give an hour of your week to the Lord you weren't much of a person. Any work besides milking and feeding the cows was taboo on Sundays. This was just fine with me!

About once a month there was a community dinner at Church. Great food, some kind of slide show of somebody's trip to wherever, or singing was common. We kids used to try to get away by 9 PM so we could go up to the Goodrich's house to watch Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel.

We had a choir, mostly kids and teenagers, with a great variation in singing talent. Ida Graby, my dad's sister, was the pianist (we didn't have an organ) and choir director. My brothers Tom, Sim and I all played the trumpet and from time to time we played in Church. Reverend Friedley played the saxophone ( I think of Boots Randolph playing "Yakkity Sax"!) and we jammed pretty good! Aunt Ida was a terrific muscian. She was an elementary school teacher who had served in WW II in psyops as a codebreaker. Her husband, Bert Graby, who passed away in 1962, was a seaman aboard the USS Niblack in WW II and was in the convoy when the Rueben James was torpedoed and sunk. He never talked much about his war experiences.

This is going to go back and forth in time like the "Godfather" trilogy, so please bear with me.
The farms that I remember in Beerston were; the Legion farm which was run by Mr and Mrs June VanValkenburg and later Don and Reatha Budine; my Dad's farm; Grandpa and Grandma Jackson's farm (my Grandfather, William Thomas Jackson, died in 1951 and my Grandmother, Jennie Jacobson Jackson, ran the farm until the city took it in about 1957); Ed and Esther Parsons farm; Walter Tait/ Reuben and Myrtle Johnson farm; Ken and Marge Graby/ Fred and Alma Beecher farm; Sturgis Goorich farm; and the Earl Barnes farm. Just above Beerston was the Alfred and Leland Neff farm, and up Beers Brook was Jesse Bowker farm and Hobart Wilson farm. There were several farms up Southside River Road which I will write about later. Besides the farms, there were other residences. Ken Harris lived just below our farm; the post office which was run for years by Martha (we called her Marthy) and Fred Mosher and Annabelle Barnhart; Mrs Nellie Goodrich, mother of farmer Sturgis Goodrich; Orville and Ardys Whitaker; the Henry Sherman family; the Richardson's; the Yarter's;Joe Morganthauler's house and garage; Harvey and Bernice Alexander's camp; Harold & Hap Micheal; Bill and Betty Walker. There were several other residences, but I cannot recall who lived there. I know that the Calabrese family lived just south of the Church. When the old Beerston schoolhouse closed it was bought by Oscar and Susan Whitaker and they lived there until the demise of Beerston.

Being from a farm family was a hard, but in retrospect, very rewarding, life. We got up at about 5 AM in the morning to go to the barn. As younger kids we did things like feed the calves, clean out calf pens, feed hay to the cows, let the cows out after milking and put fresh bedding in the calf pens. As we grew older, we were expected to climb up in the silo, throw silage with a fork (usually corn) down the chute into a cart, push the cart down the feed aisle and, using a fork, place some silage in front of each cow to eat. No, there were no buttons to push back then, it was all done by hand. We also got involved in milking the cows. This job consisted of washing off their udder and teats with an antibacterial solution, and hooking up the milking machine consisting of a pail, hoses and what we called teat cups on the cow's teats. An alternating vacuum would extract the milk from from the cow. We would disconnect the machine from the cow, usually in about 5- 7 minutes, change pails, put the machine on another cow. Then we would take the pail full of milk to a room we called the milkhouse, pour it through a strainer into a 10 gallon can, and when the can was full, we would lift it into a vat of cold water in order to cool it down to about 40 degrees. If memory serves right, we averaged about 30 cans of milk per day or about 2,500 lbs. Even back in those days, a top- knotch Holstein would give up to 100 lbs. of milk a day. The whole herd probably averaged about 60 lbs. per day per cow. We milked about 40 cows on the average when we lived in Beerston.

We were big baseball fans when we were kids, and the local radio station, WDLA, had Yankee games on during the weekend. If there was a doubleheader (yes we had those things back in the day!) the second game would usually be on during evening milking, from about 5 to 7 PM. My mom would always say that she knew if the Yankees won or not by how we acted after milking!
I actually remember hearing Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series while I was feeding cows in the barn before the evening milking.

Speaking of baseball and WDLA, I actually got to go to a World Series game at Yankee Stadium in 1958 with Amos Finch of WDLA. Atlantic gasoline and the Yankees used to sponsor a Junior Sportscaster contest on each of their affiliates. I was the local WDLA winner. The game I went to was game 4 where the Milwaukee (now Atlanta) Braves took a 3 game to 1 series lead over my beloved Yankees. Hall of famer Warren Spahn outdueled Whitey Ford by shutting out the Yankees on 2 hits. In the 4th inning, my hero Mickey Mantle hit the hardest ball I have ever seen. He hit a triple to left center that bounced off the base of the old monuments in Yankee stadium. So even though the Yankees lost, it was a thrill to see Mickey get that hit! By the way, the Yankees came back to win the Series 4 games to 3, the first time that had ever happened!

Later in October, 1958, we moved to the old Gray farm about a mile up South River Road. We had an old fashion cattle drive, walking our herd of about 50 cows about three miles up the road to our new farm. Of course much of the community helped and the whole thing went off without many problems. Other cows will follow the alpha cows in the herd. As I remember, we put halters on some of the cows, led them up the road, and the herd followed!