Today, I’m celebrating the gift of my mother. When I pulled this together, she was still with us, though terminal. Sadly, she passed away late Monday night, August 23, a month before turning 88. Through her hospitalization and return to the nursing home, I was once again reminded how thankful to be for each new day.  Growing up, we kids heard very little about my Mom’s growing up, though I loved visiting my relatives on The Farm, sleeping in the big feather bed with feather blankets and pillows, admiring all the antiques, waking up to the clinking milk cans put on the truck to go to the creamery, walking through the barn and fields with cousins Sandy and Gary, seeing the opening to a ground cave whose waters came out in Cobleskill, eating my first bowl ever of Life cereal at their huge table, the large kitchen with floor to ceiling cabinets from one end to the other along one wall, and playing inside the big farmhouse where once upon a time my mom and her siblings slid down the long railing on the stairs. This was a place I loved, of which I carry my own special memories. Enjoy this look back to my mother’s childhood, the "good ol' days", a time and place that emanates with images of “home.”   

My mother, Reba (Tillapaugh) Visscher was born and raised on a farm in Carlisle, NY at the corner of Cemetery Road and Rt. 20, the Great Western Turnpike. Her parents were Leo and Laura (McNeill) Tillapaugh. 

As #11 of 12 kids, she grew up on a large dairy farm which included pigs and about 3000 chickens, and the ubiquitous draft horses for field work.  They did okay during the depression because their farm and large garden provided food for the family.  Her parents drilled a well for running water after they’d been married about 20 years and had 10 kids.  Though they had an old pump to bring water up in the well, I cannot imagine the work of running a home and farm, and a large family, without running water! 

Grandma T. cooked large meals every day, made delicious homemade bread in her old-fashioned woodstove oven, made scrumptious cookies (I fondly remember her big tin of molasses cookies in the huge pantry from which she let us get our own cookies, after we asked her of course!), homemade ice cream, plus fed traveling crews at harvest time.  She also found time to tat and embroider, raise a vegetable garden to can for winter, grew gorgeous flowers, visited the sick and shut-ins, and more.

My mom remembers that the winters were much worse than they are today -  “It seems like it got cold earlier in the fall than now.  We would pick drop apples in the fall and have cider made.  My mother kept a 20-gal. crock by the back door of the farmhouse.  I remember coming home after school and running to that crock, breaking the ice, and drinking some of that tasty cider!  My favorite black farm cat, Skippy, had 7 toes on his front feet; he’d stand on his hind feet, reach up and turn doorknobs with his front paws!!

I attended the one-room schoolhouse, William Golding, which used a dry cell system for power like my dad did before electric was put in, and the school had an outhouse.  My favorite teacher in the one-room schoolhouse was Miss Santora who went skiing in the fields with us kids!  We had a big woodstove in the center of the schoolhouse, and when it was very cold we would sit around it to keep warm.  I remember the temperature was -25 degrees one morning, but my father was not able to convince the principal to close school that day.  Somehow, we got there, but then it closed at noon.  My sister and I tried to walk home but it was hard to breathe in the bitter cold and wind, so we called my father to pick us up at the Brand Restaurant opposite the school. 

It was normal to get 2 feet of snow in storms or blizzards.  The wind was so bad in big snowstorms you didn’t know which way you were going.  I’m told that in the Oswego area, people tied a rope around their waist to keep from being lost.  We didn’t think of that, but we always made it. 

My father had a big wooden scoop pulled by the horses to clear snow out of the driveway.  In 1943, my father bought a Massey-Harris tractor; later he had the steel lug wheels changed to rubber tires, and a plow was rigged on that tractor.  We had an ice storm, I believe in February 1943, and light poles snapped like toothpicks.  The town had an old Lynn Tractor and it was used to plow town roads; for state roads, they had big motorized trucks.  I don’t know what they did to clear the roads before tractors and trucks were available, but I assume horses were used.

I think it was in 1945 or 1947 when the snow came and the wind blew for three weeks, and we were out of school all that time!  Drifts were so high and hard we could walk the horses on top.  The workers broke all the snowplows in town, but the county had a snow blower which was used to open all the roads.  I heard they had to keep the blower between the light pole wires as they could not tell where the road was.  I don’t know how my dad and other farmers got their milk to the creamery then, but, again, I assume they used horses.

Rt. 20 was the first to be kept open in snowstorms.  My parents often put people up overnight when the road conditions became terrible.  Before Rt. 20 was widened about 1941, the road was very slippery when raining and was icy in winter.  One time a Greyhound bus went off the road and into the field off Rt. 20, south of our house.  They used a bulldozer to pull it out of the field. 

A state trooper would ride a big Harley during the summer.  When he arrested someone, my dad, as justice of the peace, would hold court downstairs; we would be in the room above the dining room, listening through a stovepipe hole!

We had about 3000 chickens in a building west of the main house and we kids helped to water and feed them.  The eggs were weighed, cleaned and crated by hand on Sunday night, and sometimes as many as 7 large crates of eggs went to the hatchery in Albany every Monday morning.  My mother candled hundreds and hundreds of eggs to ensure a quality product was in those crates. 

We took milk to the creamery every day in traditional milk cans, and supplied wood to heat not only our house but the church and one-room school.  We raised several pigs with my father holding a neighborhood butchering day on our farm in the fall.  After the butchering was done, he cut up meat for the smokehouse, put some in crocks of salt brine, and made homemade sausage, etc.

As gangs of local farmers traveled from farm to farm to help each other at harvest, my mother fed the crews when our farm was harvested.  She had all her recipes tucked away in her head, and made the most delicious ice cream, hand cranked by us kids clamoring for a turn!  She even shared beautiful flowers from her gardens with local shut-ins.

About 1938 or 1939, Admiral Byrd’s snowmobile, the Snow Cruiser, was run up Rt. 20 on its way to Antarctica. As a child, age 5 or 6, I was afraid to go inside when it stopped near our farm on Rt.20.  The rubber tires were not appropriate for use in the severe cold, and it was abandoned in Antarctica.  There was an article and photo about it in the July/August 1996 “Reminisce” magazine, pp. 39-40.

My family made our own maple syrup and sold some, and still do that now, nephews still farming the original family homestead from the very early 1800s.  Even the original house is still used!  Back when I was little, my brothers would tap 300 maple trees (which grew to hundreds more over several decades, now limited numbers again) for sap to be boiled down to syrup, so sugar rationing during World War II was not a problem for us.  We trudged through deep snow in the woods each spring to help. 

My brothers also cut ice off the ponds in the winter, stacking and packing it in sawdust in the icehouse on the back side of the barn.  Ice was cut from farm to farm the same way summer crops were harvested - by harvesting bees of many farmers working together.  It doesn’t seem like ponds freeze over long enough or thick enough to do this now.  That ice sure helped make my mother’s delicious ice cream – I think hers was the best at the ice cream socials!"

My Mom shared that growing up in the Great Depression you had to make your own fun.  She and a few sibs took their Little Red Wagon out by the road to pick up the grass mown by the highway dept. They’d pile the wagon high, and pull it back to the barn. Mind you, this was in the days of real horsepower.  So, imitating how their dad and older brothers put hay up into the mow with the huge hayforks on rope pulleys with the horses doing the work (as my mother, and other young sibs, walked the horses back and forth repeatedly), she and her sibs took ice tongs and smaller ropes, slinging the rope up over and above the cow stanchions.  With kids on each side, the ice tongs held bits of hay as the kids on the other side lugged on the rope to pull the hay up and over, and down into the feeding trough for the cows!  Now that’s imagination!  Reminds me how I used to milk cows when I was 4-5.  In the barn with my dad as he milked in Marion, NY, I stood on a bale of hay, moving an old teakettle along on the road-side wall ledge, and stop to “milk a cow” every few inches! 

There are so many memories my mother has shared of her family who she treasured. She greatly appreciated my extensive genealogy research and documentation of every line in her ancestry back to the 1630s New Netherlands Dutch, English, and French, the 1710 German/Swiss Palatines (Tillapaugh came from the Swiss Dallenbach, each of her parents descending from two brothers in one particular German line), 1720ish New England Scots-Irish.  She was proud my work was accepted for publication in three research delineation articles on her Hutton and McNeill ancestry in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. 

My mother's father was a jack-of-all trades, not just a farmer, but a man before his time, passing away too young, when she was only 16.  I learned from my Mom that it was from him I had inherited green eyes.  He built a top-quality registered Holstein herd with Canadian Holstein-Friesian bulls before most other farmers.  I remember seeing bulls as a kid in their pens as I peered between cracks in their wooden stalls.  Besides a dairy herd and chickens, he raised pigs, and sold extra hay. He took community responsibility seriously as Carlisle town highway superintendent, Carlisle school superintendent, Justice of the Peace, and Cobleskill school board member and president. A highly respected man of the community was my Grandpa Leo, as well as Grandma Laura.

Photo Credit: Professional photo taken in 1910 of Hutton Family Reunion, Cemetery Road, Carlisle, NY, original farmhouse built in early 1800s, where my Tillapaugh cousins continue to farm today.