The people who live in the rural areas of our country, were and are frontiersmen in the truest sense. They came here from countries like Holland, England, Scotland, and France, and hacked out a living in the wilderness. Much as we've heard of the Pilgrim's first years in the New World, our ancestors in the Hudson Valley and Highlands also had it very hard. The winters were harsh, the ground rocky and not very conducive to farming, the Indians raided from time to time, many died from smallpox, diphtheria, and childbirth. Anyone who ever visits an old cemetery in the area would see many family plots where men had three or more wives, losing some of them to childbirth. You would also see that some of these families had a dozen or more children but only two or three would live to adulthood.

Make no doubt about it, it was a hard life. I've heard it said that anyone who lived through the childhood diseases and worked hard all their life, would probably be so toughened that they'd live to "make very old bones". Cyrenus Rose was one of these as he is listed as the oldest verified Rockland County resident of all time, having lived to the age of 106.

When life is so unbearably hard and fraught with so many hardships, we sometimes wonder to ourselves how did they get through it? Part of it no doubt is that they had to work constantly to eke out a living and they couldn't take the time to feel sorry for themselves. There's a certain natural wisdom about that and I'm sure that part of the reason why there are so many unhappy people around today is because we simply have too much leisure time on our hands. But that's a topic for another paper at another time. I also believe part of how they got through life's unpleasantries was that they had to find their own entertainment. They didn't have to flick a switch and voila they're entertained, as we're so accustomed to nowadays. They had to invent things to distract and amuse themselves.

They used to gather around the pickle barrel at the nearest general store and swap stories and chit chat. Every community had its story-tellers and home-grown comedians. They could usually be spotted over in the corner at the local square dance telling jokes and tall tales with a small crowd gathered. The stories were often flavored with home-spun philosophy and some of it no doubt could be heard in variations in just about any rural community throughout the nation. Some also involved personalities and peculiarities which only local inhabitants would understand and appreciate.

I'll offer some of these in this forum as with so much of the history of the former hamlets, it would otherwise disappear in time. I encourage anyone who reads this who remembers a story your grandma or grandpa told you as a kid to likewise write them down and submit them in an article such as this one.

One of the most memorable people in the mountain hamlets of the Hudson Highlands was the Reverend Audie (Austin) Conklin. He was the preacher at the Methodist Episcopal Church of the Mountains. I'm told that people came from miles around to hear his sermons. Clarence Conklin of Sloatsburg tells the story of how he and his buddies were going fishing one Sunday morning when Audie offered them a lift. Only he didn't take them to their favorite fishing hole, he shanghaied them off to church instead.

My grandfather loved to tell stories of Audie's exploits. There was one time when the congregation had a church supper before the prayer meeting one night. Someone had made a batch of apple dumplings that were simply out of this world. One fellow in the congregation named Abraham was just out of his mind with the taste of the dumplings and when no one was looking he pilfered a few and stashed them in his vest. During the service Audie was up there spewing out his fire and brimstone sermon and started ramming home a point by quoting a passage from the Bible. It was "Abraham, what hast thou in thy bosom?" Audie repeated it, this time more loudly, "Abraham, what hast thou in thy bosom?" Well, I guess the Abraham in the audience got to feeling guilty about his theft so he stood up and blurted out "Apple dumplings!"

Another time there was a church service where a little old lady was sitting up front and she had a son who liked to drink a bit too much. Drinking has always been a terrible disgrace to Methodists then and even today. Her son liked to frequent a watering hole in one of the nearby communities named "Tom Craven's Saloon". Well, the portion of the service arrived when hymn requests came forth and this little old lady spoke up and asked for "Where Is My Wandering Son Tonight?" Some character in the congregation answered without missing a beat, "Down at Tom Craven's."

There were other stories and jokes which are more generalized and variants of them could be heard anywhere from the mountains of West Virginia to the plains of Oklahoma to the forests of Oregon. One goes that there were these two good old country boys who were bragging about how well they could shoot. One says to the other "Do you see that fence post about 500 yards out there?" His buddy answers "Yeah, I see it." The first guy continues, "Then, can you see that splinter on the top to the right sticking out?" The other man answers "Yeah, I see that too." The first man says "Okay then. Can you see that fly walking around on that splinter?" Not to be outdone and seeing where the conversation was headed, he answers "No, but I can hear him walking."

There is another one about a farmer who had a laying hen. One very cold and long winter towards the end of February, he ran out of chicken feed, so he starts feeding it sawdust. Well, this hen laid five eggs and hatched them out. As the story goes, when they hatched, four of them were woodpeckers and the fifth one had wooden legs.

The mountain comedian, like any good storyteller, always had a knack of drawing in his audience in the beginning because he made it sound authentic at the outset. One such story was the one about a man who used to let his horse loose in his cornfield. Then one year there came a terrible heat wave. It got so hot that the corn in the field started to pop. And when the horse saw the popcorn all over the place he thought it was snow so he laid down and froze to death.

Nearing the end of this writing I was lent a book entitled "Pine Barrens Folklife and Folklore" by Wayne L. Reynolds in which a very similar variation of this story is told. It differs in that it was supposedly a man driving a horse-drawn wagon loaded with corn and so on and so forth. So apparently this tale was spread as far afield as southern New Jersey.

There was another tale about a man who had a sycamore tree that was so crooked it looked like a corkscrew. They say it had branches going every which way. The man finally cut it down one year and planned to use it for firewood in the winter. Well, when he tried to burn it, the smoke was so crooked it wouldn't go out the chimney.

And then there was an old farmer back about a hundred years ago. He could have come from anyone of the other little towns in the mountains of the nation. At that time cars were just beginning to arrive on the scene. They were awful contraptions, smoking, belching, and making the Devil's own noise as they ran. Well, this old farmer had never seen an automobile before nor had he even heard of such a thing. He was sitting on his porch one day when he heard this racket coming down the road and way out on the horizon he began to see some strange thing coming towards him. He must have thought it was a monster because he yelled to his wife "Ma, quick, bring me my gun. There's something terrible headed this way." The car came closer and closer, finally getting right in front of the farmhouse. The farmer opened fire "Blam, blam, blam!" The driver jumps out and starts running through the field and the car sputters down the road on its own. The wife comes out and says "Pa, did you kill it?" The farmer answers "No, but I made him let go of that man he was carrying!"

One last piece of advice I'll leave you with came from my grandfather as he told it to me often while I was growing up. He always said that I should never pick up a guinea pig by its tail because this would make his eyes fall out. I was always amazed by this strange fact of science. What I didn't figure out until years later was that guinea pigs don't have tails. I'm glad I never wrote a report about it for science class.

Copyright © 2000 AJS