We had a big garden and in the fall I would build a little house of sod, sticks, boards and anything else I could find. It was just large enough for me to squeeze into. In one side of it I made a little fireplace out of clumps of dirt and I would break up the sticks to have a little fire for heat. We had a large prune tree next to the garage and my mother would can a lot of them every year. My father loved them. We would take the pits out of some and put them on the flat garage roof to dry in the sun. We covered them with wire screen to keep the birds away. When dried, they were stored in large bags in the bottom of a big kitchen cupboard. In the winter I would get into the cupboard and sit there eating prunes. We had a large sweet cherry tree in the side yard and mother canned nearly 100 quarts every year. I helped her with all the canning--cherries, prunes, peaches, and pears. when she did the cherries she always left one cherry with the pit in it per quart. The person who got the pit when the cherries were served was given a dime. This was a big treat for us.
Our house was always the gathering place for kids and we were likely to play games like "Red Light", "Hide and Seek", and Holly Golly". We used to make guns out of old tire tubes, sticks and a half clothes pin. We would cut loops of inner tube to shoot as bullets then play cowboys and Indians.
Chapter 2 Years at Berby Hollow
My Years in Berby Hollow (Egypt Valley)
My older brothers were always interested in the Bristol Hills and around 1927 they rented a small house on the Egypt Valley Road which we called a cabin. It had a kitchen, living room, pantry and two bedrooms. There was a porch on the front. The cabin was heated by means of a wood stove. we used to get our wood by dragging in limbs with a rope, sometimes for quite a distance. The painting business was very slow in the winter and sometimes Clarence would stay over there for more than a week. He wouldn't want to spend all of his time gathering wood. Halfway down the hill into the valley there was an old man who lived alone on top of a ridge beyond a deep gully that ran beside the road. He sold firewood, delivered for $3.00 a cord. Sometimes we would buy wood when we had enough money.
The nearest house to the west was one half mile away and to the east there was one a mile beyond us. The roads were dirt and were never plowed in the winter time. Most days in the winter, the only car to come by was the mailman. In the deep winter he might only make it once a week. In the spring when the snow melted the roads were bad and we would simply drive in the ruts that were not too deep. I spent all my Christmas vacations and weekends with Clarence, and sometimes Gordon, at this place.
If the roads were very bad in the winter, my father would take Clarence and I as far as the main road went and we would pull a toboggan, loaded with our food and supplies, about six miles to the cabin. We would have set a time and day for him to pick us up when we were ready to come home. The corner on the main road where he met us was at the top of the hill that goes down into Honeoye. There was Jones' gas station there where we would wait. When we were at the cabin and the weather was good, some of the family would come over for Sunday dinner. My older sisters and their husbands would sometimes join my father in coming. Clarence's friend would often come over to hunt. The rabbit hunting was very good.
When I was old enough to have a gun, Clarence, Gordon and I would start out about 11:00 am to hunt for dinner. We would go in opposite directions and try to get a rabbit then beat the others back to the cabin. I remember one time we got a rabbit and were back in less than an hour, but Gordon was already back and had one ready to start cooking.
The cabin was interesting because we were told that a man who had lived there some years before had sat in the kitchen in a chair and blown his head off with a shotgun. The bullet holes were all there in the plaster in the ceiling so we supposed it to have been true. Clarence was always interested in fox hunting and had a trap line too. I guess at this time I had a BB gun and just followed Clarence around. When I was about twelve years old Clarence bought me a single shot 22 and I used it to hunt fox with him. I don't remember what we ate in those days at the cabin, but Clarence did the cooking. I do remember one time Gordon made a raisin pie. He made the crust and put in a box of seedless raisins then put it in the oven. When he took it out it was just as when he put it in, so we poured the raisins back in the box and ate the crust. Across the road about a quarter mile up in a field there was an old chestnut tree that was killed by blight that eventually killed all the chestnut trees in the East. This tree still had a few green limbs coming out of the trunk and we used to get the chestnuts and roast them. The remainder of the tree was dead and we used it for firewood.
The cabin was on the edge of a deep gully and the creek ran down the gully in back of the cabin. It went on to Honeoye Lake. We used to set traps in the creek for muskrats. Sometimes we would hear wildcats scream in the middle of the night down in the gully. The stove we used for heat had a big ornate top that slid to one side to expose the cooking top. we took this off and had it hanging on a nail in the pantry. One night Clarence and I were there alone and the wildcats were down in the gully. Just about midnight we were awakened by a terrible crash somewhere in the cabin. Between that and the wildcats it made our hair stand on end and the chills go up and down our spines. We finally got up enough nerve to get out of bed, get a flashlight and investigate. The heavy iron stove top had come off the nail and knocked down all the pots and pans. After a couple of hours we got back to sleep again. Down the road, not far from the cabin, a church had burned down at midnight under mysterious circumstances. All these happenings made the place very spooky to someone only ten years old.