The Autobiography of Aunt Millie Part Four: The Early Years in Schocopee

     Her oldest [brother], Victor, began to grow vegetables and sell them in the village. Her [father] brought many of his colleagues from Shearer's, the supply house for Tiffany's, and the mother had to cook for them all. A tent was placed on the lawn where at least four of the boarders could sleep.

     The house was very small, and a Peter de Roos [one of the boarders?] bought the eight-year-old a doll dressed in long, long clothes -- the fashion then for babies.

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     Pike County, Pennsylvania, where Schocopee is located, lies on the westernmost edge of the Greater New York metropolitan area and so the train trip there was not a very long one, compared to the trip made by Millie's Uncle Herman who had emigrated to Australia. The farm was located on Schocopee Rd. and is now the site of the Black Walnut Inn in Milford.

     Doris Holm, Millie's niece, has shared much information about the farm in Schocopee, having had the privilege of visiting there often in her youth to visit her grandparents Carl and Emilie and all the aunts, uncles and cousins.

     She writes, "That farm was a typical old self-sufficient place....they raised everything. Milk cows, plow horses, their own hay, pigs, chickens, corn, vegetables, etc.  Aunt Millie sold eggs, milk, butter.  There was a milk house, smoke house for their own hams, an ice house, corn crib, pig pens, several chicken houses.  Before there was electricity, milk and butter [were] kept in a natural cold spring pool across the road.  The spring served a little pond.  My father [Max] built a rowboat they put on the pond. It was named the Cas-mack, for Casey and Max.  Pop also helped build the barn, and laid new flooring in the living room of the house.  Later, a new owner tore up the replacement flooring and restored the old pine boards like the original.....hooray! ...On one of our last visits to Oak Tree Farm, there was a freak tornado that took the whole Oak Tree away, leaving a stump about eight feet tall, and I can remember Aunt Millie and her visiting sister Bertha, standing and staring at the sight, and shaking their heads in disbelief. The house was dated 1859, I think, and the tree had been there from the beginning, hence the name. The rest of the tree was nowhere to be seen....just gone. The twister did not touch the house, nor the barn, but left the corn in the garden lying in circles, as if if had headed toward the barn and changed its mind."

     Susan Titus Mickley describes the area in her book "Milford to the Minisink Valley" (Arcadia Publishing, 2005): "By the early 1900s, Milford had grown into a well-planned, Victorian-style hamlet nestled between the Delaware River and the Pocono Mountains." Gifford Pinchot, first director of the United States Forest Service, governor of Pennsylvania from 1922 to 1927 and a friend of the Case family -- Aunt Millie's third son was named Gifford in his honor -- had constructed a family estate called Grey Towers in Milford in 1886 in the Medieval French style, designed by Richard Morris Hunt who also designed the stone base of the Statue of Liberty. (In 1962, just two months before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy visited the site to dedicate the Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies.)

     Tiffany and Company began to focus on making jewelry in 1902 and evidently Carl Fieg's background as a jeweler helped him find work at a company called Shearer's near Milford. The tents set up in the yard for fellow workers belies the fact that boarding houses were big business in Pike County at the turn of the last century, especially in the summer months. Mickley notes, "Summer visitors to the boardinghouses were very loyal and would come back year after year.... All ages were welcome, but many boarders were young eligible workers from the cities who came to escape the heat." Probably the Shearer's employees were not able to afford a room at a boardinghouse, prompting Millie's kindhearted father to offer them a place to stay, however rudimentary.

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     In 1903 [began] a life long friendship, as on what is now Malibu: L. Harvey Myers and his six children -- Norman, Otto, Lillian, Walter, Hazel and 4-year-old Ada -- came to live. It was a half mile walk on [a] rough wood road for the Old Timer to walk, and what good times those youngsters had. They made it their boast that they climbed every roof of that farm, with the four-year-old given a boost up the ladders. [There is currently a Malibu Dude Ranch just to the north of Milford. It is the oldest working dude ranch in the eastern United States. Could this be the area where the Myers family lived?]

     Rattlesnakes abounded, and Otto would kill them. One snake that he killed he opened up, and twenty-one young wriggled out.

     From them, too, the Old Timer had her first knowledge of the Bible. (Her father was a philosopher, and expressed his religion in kindness, gentleness and love.) The Myers [family] had prayers every night and morning, as they were Free Methodists. No jewelry was allowed, no trimming of any kind on their clothes, and the mother was not even allowed to wear a wedding ring.

     One weekend, the father hired a surrey and took all his family and the Old Timer to Huguenot, New York where there was a Free Methodist church. It was a long boring ride, with a slow team of horses, but the Old Timer endured the long church services [and] admired their Aunt Gussie, with her ten children.

     She remembers a three-foot-high heap of stockings to be darned. What a sweet lovable woman that Aunt Gussie was! Do her children remember her with affection? One son still lives in ( ).

     The [Myers] farm was on Prospect Hill, and Laura worked it with her father [whom] Hazel called cousin Gene. [They held c]hurch services all the time, with no organ.... [One] hot June day, the children asked to go swimming in the pond, and received a flat, "no," [the grown-ups] thus receiving the everlasting hatred of the Old Timer. They tried to convert her to Free Methodism, but she resisted bravely.

     When the Myers family moved from the "Pilman" Farm to Milford, the Schocopee school closed and the Old Timer had to walk 2 miles each day to [and from] school.

     The winter of 1909-10 they lived in the cottage at the Hermitage, while the Ragots lived in New York. Sledding was fine that winter, and a Flexible Flyer that they named Caesar Augustus gave them endless days of riding to school. The Old Timer always had to steer, and Lillian and Hazel managed to squeeze onto the rear. The ride stopped at what is now Hels gas station, and the sleigh was hauled back up [all through the] day. A passing team with bobsleds often gave them a ride up that hill.

     There seems to be no memory of ever feeling tired or deprived because of having to walk. And indeed, as spring came on, those three girls would arise before 5 and take a walk. They were afraid of getting fat!

     Halley's comet appeared in May 1910, and one ... 2 a.m. Hazel and Lillian knocked on the Old Timer's bedroom window, and they walked up the "plateau" for a fine view of the comet and its long luminous tail.

     April of that year was a fine early spring, and the oldest sister was married in the "ballroom" of the Hermitage. The three teenagers gathered bouquets of June berry -- it was the earliest spring in her memory.

     Every Saturday night when the Hermitage opened for summer boarder business, a dance was held. Myrtle Ryder played solo, "Den spielt des Sie das Ting a ling." Did she get applause? Can't remember!

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     Huguenot, N.Y. is 82 miles northeast of Milford -- what a long distance to travel in a horse-drawn wagon! The route passes the town of Matamoras, Penn., site of the Old Stone Fort on the Delaware River, erected around 1740 by Dutch settler Simon Westfael as a refuge from Indian attacks and the town where Millie took her exam to become a school teacher in 1911.

     Free Methodism was founded in Rochester, N.Y. in 1860 and their fundamental mission, according to their official website, is to "emphasize Jesus’ commission: 'Preach the gospel to the poor.' [Founder B.T.] Roberts said the church should do what Jesus did: Take the gospel to people who are hurting and oppressed; people with no hope."

     The nomenclature "Free" was, according to Wikipedia, adopted to indicate two tenets: first, that the church was anti-slavery and, second, that the pews "were to be free to all rather than sold or rented (as was common), and because the new church hoped for the freedom of the Holy Spirit in the services rather than a stifling formality. However, according to World Book Encyclopedia, the third principle was 'freedom' from secret and oathbound societies (in particular the Freemasons).

     "Early Free Methodists enjoyed a cappella congregational hymns during worship,(a)s a reaction to paid musicians in the Methodist Church...."

     The Schocopee Schoolhouse was originally constructed in the late 1850’s just "out of town" on Schocopee Road. It served as a one-room school until 1907, when it was replaced by the new, "modern," school in Milford. The old structure later served as a meeting and voting place for the community; it witnessed Governor Gifford Pinchot casting his vote in many local elections.

     What the Hermitage was and who the Ragots were, I do not know.

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