A 94-year trip in a few words | News, Sports, Jobs

The big farm, owned by the Order of the Sisters of Mercy and known as “the Sister’s Farm,” is located at the end of Hobart Road. It supplied all the food and milk to the huge Gabriels Tuberculosis Sanatarium founded by the Sisters.

I visited there many times as a child; not only did my father manage their farm, but our aunt, Sister Mary Dorothy (Riley), an RN in that Order, entered the convent when she was age 14 and died in her 90s, still working as a nurse at Uihlein Nursing Center.

The only unusual event for me at that farm was falling out of a second story barn window — and I only had the wind knocked out of me! It’s too complicated a story to tell in this short space.

About 1936, we moved to Split Rock farm, which Dad leased from a Mrs. Johnson and her brother, Bert, who lived in the white house near the brook. It was a beautiful place with no highway to Gabriels at that time. The area behind the farm was open fields for our cows and horses, and the field where one can see the split rock today was hay fields back then.

This postcard was sent in 1908. (Card courtesy of my friend Mary Thill)

Lightning struck and the fire leveled the cow barn, machine sheds and hay barn; all was lost. A corner of the house caught fire but was saved by the Saranac Lake volunteer firemen, pumping water from the brook.

The cows and two other horses were luckily in the pasture, but Dad had to run into that burning barn with a butcher knife and cut loose the draft horses tied in their stalls. It was difficult to get the horses out of the barn, as they apparently tried to run back in.

Jack Finegan’s uncle, Frank Noyes, owned an empty house and barns about where Shanty’s horse farm was later located, only a short way from Split Rock. Someone drove the cows up the road to that barn as a rescue effort, because cows have to be milked morning and night. Naturally, all the neighbors pitched in to help. I remember, next morning, all the cars driving by our place to view the devastation.

We moved to the Noyes house, which was previously a tourist home, and our family of eight only took up part of the house.

That is when I had to change schools from Gabriels to Harrietstown and now live in that remodeled school house I attended in 1936.

Depression-era farm boys. My cousin Robbie Hogan, son of Tom and Annie Howard Hogan, on the left and myself in 1939, both age 9. Nine years later, Robbie drowned in that small lake at Franklin Falls.
(Provided photo)

Dad then bought a farm from the Federal Land Bank on Norman Ridge in Vermontville, with about 200 acres. By that time my Grandfather Riley had arrived from Malone to live with us. That farm had no electricity or running water. My brothers and I would get water from a spring, covered with a small building about a half mile from the farm. My brother Ray, at the age of 13, would drive our big black 1930 Buick to the spring. We would take out the back seat, which would hold six or eight 40-quart milk cans.

We would fill each by dipping a pail into the spring and filling the cans to the brim.

We had draft horses, a team of mules, 13 cows, hogs and chickens, so there had to be water for the livestock. Electricity had not yet reached that end of the Ridge, although we had a modern bathroom and septic system and a telephone. Telephone poles but no electric lines. A water pump located over a hill way back of the pastures supplied water for three farms, but the pump was broken and nobody could afford to fix it.

Our water for bathing and washing dishes came from a water reservoir attached to the wood stove which ran summer and winter.

We had a huge ice house directly behind the house and Mom’s washing machine was in this gigantic woodshed attached to the house, right through the kitchen backdoor. The little motor on the machine was like a motorcycle engine. Mom would kick-start the motor by a little pedal on the side of the machine that operated the agitator. The exhaust pipe was stuck through a drilled hole to the outside.

The New York Times, Sunday, July 20, 1930

So, there was yet another new school for us, called the Porter School, now the home of Mark Kurtz.

Even with very productive potato crops, as everyone had, potatoes were sold for 50 cents a bushel. I remember going with my brothers in the Buick to Montgomery’s Store and Gas Station in Vermontville and getting five gallons of gas for two bushel of potatoes. A bushel is 60 lbs.

Despite years of selling many cellars full of potatoes and selling our milk to the Van Cour farm, we couldn’t make it. Dad sold the cows and farm machinery, the Federal Land Bank repossessed the farm, and Dad took a job managing the Oseetah Dairy in Ray Brook. We moved into a beautiful house on the property.

The farm had 80 registered Holstein cows, its own pasteurizing plant, separate horse and hay barn (the farm bought our draft horses). I drove that team during haying season and I loved them. They were named Ben and Colonel.

I started school at St. Bernard’s, by then in sixth grade. The teachers were nuns, all of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy and Sister Mary Martin, our teacher had about 25 kids in the sixth grade class. After a couple of years, the farm changed hands and Dad took a job at Trudeau Sanatarium.

It was early 1942 that Mom and Dad, Dennis and Elizabeth Keegan Riley, bought the house at 5 Pine St. in Saranac Lake. There were plenty of bedrooms and a two-stall garage in the back with an apartment above.

Dad’s job at Trudeau was driving a long box pickup with a top over the 8-foot bed, open on the sides. He and one helper had to move furniture from the various cottages, deliver the laundry and then deliver meals three times a day to the cottages. His shift was from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week.

He said it was the easiest job he ever had and he wasn’t kidding.

I had arrived. That is where I grew up.