The Woods and the Field:
Reminiscences of Savage Farm, Cayuga Heights, Ithaca, New York in the 1950s and 1960s
By Diane Brook, 15 October 2005
Diane Smith Brook grew up at 711 The Parkway in the 1950s and '60s; her memories are a portrait of the lives of children who enjoyed the land that was Savage Farm before the development of Kendal at Ithaca in the decade of the 1990s. Diane's poem is a lyrical tribute to the natural setting villagers continue to enjoy. Long-time residents may recognize her as the daughter of professor of chemical engineering at Cornell, Julian C. Smith Jr. (1919-2015), and Cornell librarian Joan Elsen Smith (1920-2003), both of whom were active in community life. You can read more about Diane at the end of the piece. To compare with her hand-drawn map, a survey map drawn by Village Engineer Carl Crandall in 1948 shows the layout of the surrounding landscape when Diane was a girl.--Beatrice Szekely, Village Historian
|
The Savage Farm, by the 1950s, was decorated along its southern and western edges with new houses, lined and dotted with embroideries of trees, bushes, and gardens in their green-lawned half acres. All along Hanshaw Road, The Parkway, and Highgate Road, young families moved in, with their children; two, three, four, or more. Between the farm’s field and The Parkway’s back yards, the land was allowed to return to trees and wilderness, a strip only a few hundred yards wide, if that. To us, the children of those houses, it was the Woods, within it the Creek and the Pond, and, beyond it, the Field.
The Woods formed a safe green backdrop to The Parkway yards, a feathery wall beyond which parents rarely stepped. The children knew each of the three paths leading back into its depths, one from the Hedricks at 715, one from the Smiths at 711, and one from the Virklers at 707. Running the length of the Woods and cutting across the three entry ways was the Strawberry Trail or Poison Ivy Trail, depending on the time of year. The paths leading inwards all then dipped down across the Old Road, also running the length of the Woods. It had been planned as a road to further house development and is even shown on 1937 and 1948 maps, but it was never paved and was choked with bushes and then trees.
The boys were sometimes allowed to camp out. The central path had a clearing at the base of a tall pine tree on the far lip of the Old Road. The boys cut earth steps into the banked edge of the Road and nailed cross bars to the pine’s trunk to make a ladder up. A dozen years later, the traces of both steps and ladder could still be seen.
Nature's PlaygroundThe Hedrick path led beyond the Road to the bank of the Creek and a magnificent maple, best in the fall. At the edge of the Creek, or really, in the edge, was an elm, with roots anchoring into the upstream current, spread like a fan. It must have been named by the Hedricks for the youngest of the first four children--it was Sara’s Sailboat. Across the Creek--sometimes easily crossed in dry summers or across ice in winter, black water still running seen in cracks when crossing, or upstream a little on the crossing stones--were two aged apple trees, pink-white blossom cascades in spring, small green inedible fruits in autumn.
|
Move-in day for the Smiths of 711 The Parkway, in 1950; 715 The Parkway is visible in the background of the photo.
The author's hand-drawn map frames the landscape of her childhood memories of playing there as a child. Trails lead to fancifully named play spaces and to the nearby creek. pond, and waterfall.
|
|
Upstream again was an island of shale as the Creek bent around a corner. On the near bank was a stand of straight trees, elms perhaps, draped in huge vines, supple but large enough to take children bouncing and swinging on them, hence named the Jungle Gym.
Pushing upstream further, we would come out at the Pond. The Creek, after coming across the Field, bent over a small waterfall into the Pond, shelved around by shale and earth walls, with large, flat stones forming a bridge where the Creek left it again between stone banks and into the Woods.
In spring, the Pond was visited by pair of mallards who raised ducklings there. The boys frightened the girls and probably themselves with stories of a huge water snake, maybe a water moccasin. Some summers the Pond nearly dried up with messy islands of mud appearing in the shallow parts. In winter, filled again, it iced over, thick enough to skate on. The big boys would shovel the snow off the ice. It would be tested for thickness and, if safe, everyone would skate.
|
This 1948 survey map, by Village Engineer Carl Crandall, shows the lot lines of Diane's family home and those of her neighbors. The center line of an abandoned section of Remington Road runs behind the cluster of homes.
|
The "other" Smiths lived in the white house with red roof and shutters, perched high on the west side of the Pond, above the steepest side. From the roof on winter nights when skating was safe, the Smiths would switch on the flood lights to light the ice.
I remember going one crisp moonlit night to skate, quite alone, when I was only seven or eight, once I had my first figure skates for Christmas.
The Variety of Plant and Animal Life
The Woods and Pond were filled with variety, plant and animal. Even the shale creek banks provided fossil shells. Ducks on the Pond, bluejays and cardinals, robins, goldfinches, chickadees, crows, starlings, grackles, in the bushes, branches, and skies. I remember a scarlet tanager on the lawn in our backyard in 1960, the last time I saw one. Baltimore orioles nested in one of our large, graceful elm trees. The trees of the Woods were pine, elm, and maple. A few were large trees from my first memory, probably old field trees from the farm. There was a large-elbowed tree by the path back from the Hedricks--it appears in my dreams of home. There was the tall pine at the campsite and the old apple trees by the Creek. There was a great cherry tree at the Pond end of the Old Road too. And, even a walnut tree with one year’s prolific nuts much collected. The squirrels fought over them loudly in running arboreal chases.
The undergrowth was varied but I never learned the plant names for much of it. The scrub next to the yards was mostly gray-stemmed bushes mixed with another multi-stemmed bush with purple-black smooth bark and serrated ribbed leaves of an even deeper green. The vines spread and tangled into these bushes as they grew taller. Wild strawberries, tiny but sweet all the way through when ripe, grew in glades but these were shaded out by the 1960s. In the spring the banks of the Old Road by the cherry tree were filled with violets, replaced later in the year with mysterious low plants with one or two large and broad fingered olive-green leaves hiding a single waxy, white, round-petalled flower with yellow center, a couple of inches across.[1]
The plants were mostly mixed throughout the Woods, although the large willows or sycamores only grew by the Pond. At the far end of the Woods, next to the Day’s, behind the Hedrick’s, was a stand of pine trees, their arms spread wide, low and high, for us to climb, daring each other to go higher. From the heights, clutching the pine-pitch-sticky, narrowing, smooth trunks, we could see beyond the houses and trees to a glimpse of the lake and the far line of West Hill. At bottom, amongst the hush of the pine floor with only dry, rust-colored needles underfoot, the trunks stood as columns. We knew it as The Palace. The last child, later than the rest of us, called it her Pine Park.
Animals other than birds were sometimes seen, but mostly we saw only squirrels and rabbits and tracks in the winter. A great rarity would be a momentary sight of a deer. No doubt the local children and free-ranging cats and dogs kept much of the wildlife away or hidden then.
The Field
Once across the Creek, or over the stone bridge at the Pond and up beyond the waterfall, up the slope, out of the shade and detail of the Woods, like a morning beginning, we went into the Field.
|
The sweep and roll, the waves of earth, the Field was our playground. Late summer nights where the boys played football. You could hear the insect-like buzz of the powered model planes that Struthers Smith, the older boy, the son of the "other" Smiths, was always building and flying. (He went on to become an aeronautical engineer, I think.) Hot summer days where we played up, in, and beside one of the field trees by the dirt road which ran across the Field down to the driveway beside the Pond, leading to what we thought had once been the farmhouse (706 Hanshaw Road), still fenced by a graying split-rail enclosure with its interlocked, angled sections holding it up without upright posts. Beyond the Creek in the Field there was a low, boggy area which some years grew with mint and scented the air all around.
The Field was not a farm and we knew that. It was already a test field, a different crop every year and everyone staying away when the strange men came to harvest for a few days. Some years wheat or other grain, some years dense thickets of corn. "No, you cannot pick ears and bring them home. Besides, they are probably not eating corn," we were told. Some years fallow with grasses and flowers of every kind, butterflies and moths. Always red-winged blackbirds, badged on their shoulders in yellow and brightest red and calling in creaking voices, bent wire legs and twining feet on arched straw stems. One spring I walked the deep-ploughed, bare, brown clay furrows, balls of mud building and falling from my red rubber boots, threatening to hold me and tie my boots down, leaving me with muddied shoes and socks. It seemed to take hours to climb the plough ridges back to the edge of the Field, through the Woods and home.
|
The Field |
One winter day I travelled to the sheaves of red-stemmed bushes far up the Creek in a low place in the middle of the Field. In the flying snow and blocks of bitter wind I sheltered there, pretending it was the Wild West and I among mustangs, free in the cold.
Always best was summer, hard ground under grass where I would run, turning the earth away from my feet, feeling every shape of foot to soil, drinking air like cold water, running until there was no more need to run and still surrounded by space on all sides.
|
There were hints of history, an avenue of old elms with arching tops, paired along a farm track running north from the main Field road, leading nowhere, the trees home to beating cicadas in summer heat. In the earliest 1950s I remember the older children telling me not to go near old Mrs. Savage who didn’t like children bothering her. She would sit on a rocking chair on the long front porch of a rather modern-looking house, set on the brow of the rise in the Field, above the Creek, not too far from the Pond. Beyond the house, along the Creek farther into the Field, stood the Barn, a typical red, angle-roofed upstate New York building, holding hay or straw and some farm machinery. If there had ever been animals or buildings for them, these had gone.
|
Front-page photo from the Ithaca Journal, November 12, 1957
|
There was still a post-and-rail fence along Hanshaw Road in November 1957 when the Barn burned down. I remember being excited as I was one of the children standing on the fence rails watching the burning Barn in the newspaper photograph in the Ithaca Journal the next day, although only our backs were visible. Not too long after, a year or so at most, Mrs. Savage died or moved away and the house was torn down.[2] The concrete foundations of the barn remained and were overgrown by trees, but the house seemed to leave no trace at all.
Now there is no Field except a strip along Hanshaw Road; the rest is Kendal where my parents went to live at the end. The Woods remain, although a new house has been built on its edge on the Field side. There are no children in The Parkway houses now, and the Pond is private to the house above it; no skaters come on winter nights. Sara’s Sailboat was cut down when Dutch elm disease hit and the nearby maple has died. The great cherry tree by the Old Road is dead and rotten, but the Palace pines are still growing and the Creek still flows amongst the trees under the summer sky.
[1] Diane notes that this plant is likely mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum).
[2] According to Tompkins County deed records, Genevieve Savage sold the property in November 1956 to Kenneth and Bernice Turk (Book 393, Page 286). The Turks then transferred the lot to developers Albert and Erma Cicchetti in September 1958, with the stipulation that "only one private dwelling house containing no more than 2 apartments shall be constructed on the premises" (Book 410, Page 410). The lot is now known as 701 The Parkway.
[2] According to Tompkins County deed records, Genevieve Savage sold the property in November 1956 to Kenneth and Bernice Turk (Book 393, Page 286). The Turks then transferred the lot to developers Albert and Erma Cicchetti in September 1958, with the stipulation that "only one private dwelling house containing no more than 2 apartments shall be constructed on the premises" (Book 410, Page 410). The lot is now known as 701 The Parkway.
Diane Smith Brook’s dual interests in history and archaeology were inspired by a combination of being shown geology in the fifth grade (by nice and enthusiastic Mrs. Quirk), archaeology books the next year, seeing fossils in the landscape, and reading the family history book her grandfather compiled. Diane started university in America and eventually went on two archaeological excavations in the summer of 1969, both in England. She became most interested in (ancestral) Britain and the Middle Ages in particular. At the second “dig” was a handsome young man from south Wales. She has lived in Wales ever since they married in 1969. Brook studied archaeology at Cardiff University and did an MA and then a PhD in early medieval archaeology, also at Cardiff. Since retiring from the Health Service, Diane now has time for lots of family history and archaeology, being involved with local societies for both. She writes articles for family history journals and has completed two archaeological projects and published her results through a local society.
