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Chapter 13  --  Tent Shows, Plays, and Visitors

Before the days of an automobile in each garage and a TV in every kitchen, Davenport folk relied mostly on themselves for entertainment and play.  We have seen some of the many ways of socializing—dances, religious revivals, church dinners, and “bees” of many sorts.  This chapter will cover the activities that more often involved outside participants—tent shows, fairs, and dramatic performances—and also the increasing numbers of outsiders themselves coming to town as summer visitors and summer residents.

Fairs and tent shows.    Traveling tent shows were an old tradition in Davenport between the Civil War and World War II.  In the 1930s the shows would set up for a few days in Davenport Center.  The shows often included dog tricks, juggling, music, singing, and skits.

Probably as early as 1883 and certainly as late as the 1920s Davenport also ran its own fair.  Excitement ran high at fair time.  The events were held on the flat near Elwell’s Mill and the later Sheffield Farms, Slawson-Decker Creamery just west of Mill Road.  The hit of the fair was the merry-go-round with horses made by Mr. Parks of Parksville (named for the family and located north of Liberty in the southern Catskills).  He is said to have shaped the horses in his wife’s kitchen, leaving her less than pleased.  The horses were hand-carved, each with a different toss of its head and with eyes of glass marbles.

 Zan Devine from New Kingston helped put the merry-go-round together and each year made a circuit of local fairs.  He started from home in the early summer, with the merry-go-round and in later years a Ferris wheel.  He set up at the Prattsville Fair, the Davenport Fair, and the Oneonta Fair.  Devine had a tent arrangement in the center of the apparatus in which he and a young helper lived during the time when they were “playing the fairs.”  Ultimately the merry-go-round broke down, or perhaps the owner ran out of money—in Davenport apparently—and the hand-carved horses rotted away on the fairground.  Great crowds of farm folk no longer came to the Davenport Fair.  Years later, Mike Hanvey told of finding the “marble eyes” in the field.

In the 1920s, Calvin Butts, George Hillis and others on the Fair Committee observed that families arrived with picnic baskets but could find no shade on the whole fairgrounds.  They planted a grove of maple trees for the picnickers near the later CVCS soccer field. 

The fair, a summer highlight for children, held many contests.  Prizes from 25 cents to three dollars were given for children’s calves and flowers and for other animals, canned fruits, vegetables, and farmers’ hand-made tools. The children were also free for the day to meet their friends and enjoy the midway. The ladies competed for blue ribbons with cakes, pies, cookies and, after even greater effort during the previous winter, quilts.  Commercially made articles were banned.

Local men laid out a racetrack (in 2000, the CVCS soccer field), and horseracing on the half-mile racetrack was a highlight of the three-day exposition.  One time, a horse named Maude Adair threw her rider about half way through a race but kept on running.  She finished first, ran her little loop as usual, and then circled back to the winner’s circle.  The judges declared Maude Adair winner, rider or no rider.

At least once a year and sometimes more often, a tent show would come to Davenport Center.  It was set up on the “four corners,” just northwest of the intersection of the Charlotte Turnpike and the East Meredith road, in a small tent and had a series of acts.  It was wise to avoid the noted “shell game,” a trick played by putting a pea under one shell and, by slight of hand, fooling the unsuspecting ones who wagered on its whereabouts.  All in all the music and dancers attracted a crowd.  Jugglers were popular, as were sword swallowers and knife throwers.  Whether Benjamin Beams sold any of his locally made rattlesnake oil (Chapter 5) has not been recorded.

Old Home Days.  Beginning in 1920, Davenport enjoyed a series of Old Home Days.  Nearly a thousand persons, including many from Oneonta and some from more distant places attended the picnic and reunion in 1921.  Dr. Thomas L. Craig welcomed the visitors, and the Hon. Charles R. O’Connor, “one of the old boys in whose continued success all have taken pride,” was the principal speaker.  (Charles O’Connor was the son of Annie and Edward O’Connor.)  Also speaking was James Newell of Syracuse, substituting for Hon. John R. Clarke, “who was compelled to return to Washington to vote on the tax measure.”  (Representative John Clarke was a nephew of John Davenport, Jr.  In the 1926 celebration he was able to escape Washington for Davenport where he was at last the honored speaker.)  At the 1921 Old Home Day, Prof. John F. (Frank) Von Neer of Brooklyn, “whose summer home has expanded until quite a summer colony is centered there, sang a solo, ‘Jesus Savior Pilot Me’ and led the community sing.”  (More on the Von Neer boarding house, below.) 

Several distinguished men of Davenport, including William “Uncle Billy” McDonald, then 86, contributed to one of the 1921 event’s highlights, a baseball game between the “Would-Bees” and the “Has-Beens.”  (Uncle Billy, shortstop, was a Has-Been.)  The Has-Beens (with the help of some ringers from Oneonta) won, 8 to 4.  “The game afforded much amusement, and the spectators embraced the opportunity to cheer and jeer as opportunity offered.”[1] 

In more recent years, students and faculty of the Charlotte Valley Central School have sponsored their own School Fair.

 

 

Plays and medicine shows in Baldwin’s Hall. [2]  The three-story building on the northeast corner of Mill Road and Route 23 in Davenport village, where the Timbers Restaurant and later Vern’s stood towards the end of the 1900s, was for many years a social and economic center of the village.  Built initially by Dewitt C. Baldwin and purchased later by Leslie Wade, it was known from the late 1890s as Baldwin’s Hall and, after 1919, as Wade’s Hall.  The commercial role and history of the building was touched upon in Chapter 7.  This section will recount some of its social story.

The Hall was an impressive building with a general store and Mrs. Baldwin’s hat shop on the first floor.  The Baldwins lived in a second floor apartment.  This floor had a porch all across the front where the Baldwins could sit in the evening and watch the activities of the town.  The porch was a favorite place for taking photographs of the main road (the unpaved Charlotte Turnpike at that time), people passing, and winter snowstorms.

Baldwin Hall achieved its social importance because of its large third floor that at various times served as dance hall, auditorium, graduation hall, and even a classroom and a basketball court.  Local organizations such as the Methodist Church put on dramatic productions there.  And at that time, too, there were many traveling theatrical troupes, most of whom stayed in one of two hotels—either the Davenport Hotel or the Graig and TenEyck Hotel. As Lynda Peet recounts, “The plays could be tragedies or as was more often the case, a comedy.  It depended on which company was in town.  At one time, around 1910-1911, they used to show silent movies, too.”  In the archives of the Davenport Historical Society are announcements and play bills for the comedies, “The Time of His Life” and “Indiana Rose.”  Other programs included a variety show (1917) for the Athletic Association of the Davenport Union School and a musical and oratorical listing for the Union School’s 1926 Prize Speaking Contest.  On two Friday evenings in 1912, in February and again in November, the Maccabee’s held an “Old-Fashioned Dance and an Oyster Supper” (price, one dollar).

 “One of the more common shows that came to town,” Lynda Peet continued in her 1972 account of Baldwin’s Hall, “were the medicine shows.  They were comedies, sort of like melodramas.  If you wanted a laugh, this was the place to go…  [See sidebar.]  After the show, you could always find some sort of patent medicine on sale.  This was probably how it got its name of a medicine show.”

There is a story about a party of ladies who walked more than a mile down to see one of the productions—a traveling version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—one evening about 1919, and had to walk back through the woods to get home again that night.  The next morning they said, “Well, they weren’t sure whether that particular production was worth the walk.”  That comment gives a small hint about the quality of at least some of the performances.

On other occasions the Methodist Church put on plays that were judged to be quite outstanding.  One of the frequent participants was Mrs. Anna (Annie) O’Connor, wife of Edward O’Connor, lawyer (parents of the Honorable Charles, the later Old Home Day speaker, and Judge A. Lindsay O’Connor of Delaware County’s widely respected O’Connor Foundation).  Edward served as occasional performer and stage production manager and was for a while, before moving to Hobart, the editor of The Charlotte Valley News.  (Chapter 7.)

“Plays were not the only things that happened in the ballroom,” Miss Peet recounted.  “There were dances, too.  On the average there was about one a month.  The dances were really big events and everyone enjoyed coming… Around 1920, Will Davis and about ten other men paid a dollar each to have George Stapleton of Oneonta teach them ballroom dancing.  Mr. Stapleton brought a woman piano player and a violinist to the Hall every other week for the lessons.  On holidays or other special occasions, about one hundred people were invited to a ballroom dance.  Engraved invitations were sent out and it was one of the biggest events of the year.”

Bill and Marion Davis were one of the couples at these early dances in the Hall.  They loved to dance and reportedly danced beautifully together.  Years later, for the Bicentennial Celebrations of 1976, they reprised their dance performance for the benefit of an enthusiastic and far larger audience.

“The dances,” Lynda Peet, continued “were very important and provided the townspeople with something to do.  They used to go downstairs and take some root beer out of the barrel by the door…School activities, besides the plays, were held on the third floor [of Baldwin’s Hall], too.  The graduation ceremonies [from the Union Free School, across the road] were held there, and the basketball games took place there.  They had contests on the third floor, too.  It was really a busy place.”[3]

            Several other groups presented plays and musicals to great applause.  Toward the end of World War II a group of Davenport and East Meredith players produced the “Magnolia Minstrel” Show in the CVCS auditorium.  It “brought the house down” before an audience of 300 on two nights in 1944 and was given an encore in 1945.[4]  Though perhaps politically incorrect by standards of today, the 1940s shows were produced in good humor and evoked a certain amused pleasure in town long after the event.  Edward Martz and his piano-playing wife, both former vaudevillians, were well schooled in the old-fashioned routines.

            The greatest musical extravaganza in Davenport history was undoubtedly that put on as part of the National Bicentennial celebrations in June 1976.  That production will be described below, in Chapter 15.

Boarding houses and hotels.  Boarding houses have been common since immigrants began to flood into America.  They were not common in Davenport, however, until tradesmen and laborers began to be employed by the day.  This was roughly in the 1850s when men like William Simpson brought in Irish immigrants to work in his tannery.  German immigrants often “boarded” with blacksmiths, as did medical students with doctors.

During the late 1800s when the railroads were being built, newly arrived Italian workers were a major part of the labor force.  Recruiters hawked men on seaport docks.  They sought new laborers who needed prompt employment and a place to settle until they could learn a new language and a new trade.  Many who arrived in the Stamford-Davenport-Oneonta area stayed for generations; others moved west.

            By 1895, Davenport was a busy little town served by a good road and a railroad.  Hotels and boarding houses had been popular with visitors in Stamford since the arrival of the Ulster and Delaware in 1872.  Families from New York City and even Latin America came to Stamford for the summer to escape the city’s heat, the smells, the constant rumble of wagon wheels on cobbled streets and the cries of city hawkers.

After the turn of the century, following Stamford’s hotel and boarding house boom, some of the summer vacationers began finding their way westward into Davenport.  These new visitors gave a welcome boost to the local economy.

One of the more notable boarding house had been built below the Charlotte turnpike in the eastern part of town, a dozen miles west of the Stamford train terminal and even closer to the new station at Davenport Center.  It was just west of Butts Corners and shortly before the present turnoff to Beaver Spring Lake.  Peter Shellman had purchased the land from Gerrit Smith in 1838.  The land and the house (possibly built around 1838[5]) went through various owners until bought by John Frank (Von) Neer (1868-1936) and Ernest Lambert in 1905.[6] The farm was an easy ride from the new railroad lines, and the two partners took in boarders beginning in 1906.  The Neer family and Frank Von Neer’s brother, Wellington Neer, had lived in Davenport since the early 1880s.  Wellington was already receiving boarders at his home on the Charlotte Creek Road. 

 

 

The new establishment, enlarged over time, became Davenport’s Boarding House Farm (also, Beaver Spring Farm).  Frank Von Neer was a professor of music at Brooklyn College and seems to have added the prefix “Von” upon becoming an academic.  (Or possibly the “Von” had been part of the family name in earlier times.)  At least a part of the boardinghouse clientele was from Brooklyn.  Along with other summertime visitors, they looked forward to the fresh air and the fresh milk, vegetables and berries from the farm.  Visiting families would arrive in Davenport as soon as schools closed in June and would leave just before schools opened in September.  Working husbands would come whenever possible.  The Von Neer boarding house for a number of years was in many ways Davenport’s social center during the summers.

Frank Von Neer was especially well known for the entertainments he organized for his guests.  He led hikes up the hills in search of wildflowers and views and while there he would coach his companions in preparation for the evening musicals.  Von Neer arranged carriage rides for his visitors to explore the countryside.  Dreary rainy days could be deadly, and when he added several bedrooms to the original building he included also a pool table.  In a day when local baseball was a popular and widespread summer pastime, the boarding house sponsored its own team.  Vacationing families returned to the boarding house for many years.  In fact, some stayed on to become permanent residents of the town.

 

 

Summer boarders were fewer during World War I, and numbers again fell off during the Great Depression.  Although some years of gradual recovery followed, World War II intervened, and summer hotels and boarding houses did not survive.  Families by then owned automobiles and began to travel more widely, stopping each night at inexpensive tourist homes or roadside cabins that later evolved into motels.  Some Davenport residents with extra bedrooms found increased income by placing their own “Tourists” sign in their windows.

The Boarding House Farm lasted until roughly 1936 when Frank died.  Elizabeth Von Neer sold out in 1940 to Hans and Lillian Reinshagan.  The pool table addition is now gone, and the old farmhouse is once more a private home.

City folks in Fergusonville.[7]  Other Davenport boarding houses were also successful during these years, and other parts of town began to see summer visitors.  In 1915 Mr. and Mrs. Edward Hoctor purchased the Mary Ann Cottage in Fergusonville from Hattie Hotchkiss and became the first of the summer city folks to be ongoing dwellers in that Davenport hamlet.  The “Mary Ann Cottage” was the former home of Samuel D. Ferguson of the Ferguson Academy.  Mrs. Hoctor’s daughter still owned the building in 2003.

Other families also purchased summer dwellings.  The common practice in those early days, as among summertime guests staying at the boarding houses, was for wives and children to stay for the summer while husbands worked in the city.  Weekends were times for family reunions.

In total at least nine families eventually moved each summer to Fergusonville from their homes in Brooklyn, New York City, Long Island, and elsewhere.  Most bought their own summer properties.  As was the custom, they christened each with a name such as Sidehill Cottage (Barnett, a friend of Mrs. Hoctor), Edelwise Cottage (Horner, a sister of Mary Wagner Barnett), Maple Rest (Jackson), Trevarick Cottage (Evans), and Olde Astor Tea Room (Coulter).  The new owners included a printing broker, an advertising executive, and teachers.

 

 

Lina and Alexander McNeily were year-round occupants of the old Fergusonville Academy who took in boarders and roomers.  They were visited each summer by a daughter, Louida Powell, and four grandchildren from Philadelphia.  Ownership of the former Academy eventually passed to one of the four grandchildren, Joan, who with her husband Alan Taubel, hosted there the annual picnic of the Davenport Historical Society, 1982-2003.  Several of the other summer families were related to one another.

 

 

New arrivals on occasion were greeted with housewarming speeches, dinner and dancing.  The Barnetts in particular were noted for promoting weekend activities in the village.  Amos Barnett, furthermore, was an enthusiastic promoter of the area and served for awhile as president of the Oneonta Society of New York City.

            The mini-summer colony finally petered out as families grew older, wives joined the workforce, and the younger generation lost interest.  In the early 2000s, however, there were signs of renewed attraction by the third generation as the Mary Ann Cottage was refurbished by the family of the earlier owners.

Davenport’s ponds and lakes.  The Town of Davenport contains a total of seven ponds or small lakes.  All but perhaps the three “mud ponds” are known to have attracted summer visitors at one time or another.  Five of the seven are glacial, found on or near the valley’s higher elevations.  These include two Mud Lakes, a small mud pond and bog on South Hill owned by Hartwick College,[8] Sexsmith Lake, and Emmons Pond.  The last, named for the Emmons families who in the early 1800s lived in the valley below, is believed to have served as the summer playground of Indians from the Castle Adequetaga, located at the confluence of the Charlotte and Susquehanna rivers.[9]  (The outlet of Emmons Pond empties into the Charlotte not far from the site of that ancient Indian village.)  The pond and its surrounding land are now owned by the Nature Conservancy and operated as a nature preserve.

Pine Lake near Davenport Center, and Beaver Spring Lake, between Butts Corners and Davenport village, both lie in the valley of the Charlotte River.  These two, along with Sexsmith Lake in the hills above Davenport village, have for many years attracted summer visitors from out of town.  Their three histories follow. 

Pine Lake (once Strader, Goodrich, Sherman).  The current Pine Lake had a series of owners over the years before being purchased in 1971 by Hartwick College.[10]  It has been featured already in Chapter 5 as a source of ice for the new Davenport Center creamery.  The small spring-fed pond lies just to the west of Davenport Center and just to the north of the Charlotte River.  Pine Lake acquired its first name, Strader Lake, from its location on the Strader farm.  The farm occupied the western part of Charlotte Patent Lot #38, sold by Peter Smith to Joseph Strader in 1814.  Strader farmed the land for the next twenty years, followed by four other owners (only two of whom actually lived on the property) before 22-year old George Albert Goodrich (1843-1924) purchased the land and lake in 1866.  The Goodrich family had numerous branches in both Kortright and Davenport.  In the census of 1865, Ira, Albert, Nelson I. and Roswell Goodrich were listed as farm owners.  The Beers Map of 1869 shows as owners of the Lot #38 farm and pond, “T. and G. A. Goodrich,” the “T.” standing for Timothy, the father of young George A.

For the next thirty years the pond passed among the mother, brother and father of George Albert[11], becoming known in the process as Goodrich Lake.  It returned to the ownership of George, now 47, in 1891.  It was about this time (or perhaps under the following proprietorship of Clarence Tallmadge) that photographs were taken of a 25-30 foot long steamboat that plied the little lake.  This is a sign of either the owner’s nautical or commercial ambitions.  How else could a substantial steamboat (eight passengers, with room for as many more, are shown in one old photograph) have come to a small, 20-acre body of water?  The steamboat was subsequently scuttled to a depth of 15 feet, reportedly because of a malfunctioning boiler, marking the end of whatever ambitions had brought it to Goodrich Lake.  Jacqueline Hamblin Yarborough recounts the story of the subsequent, 1972, underwater explorations that substantiated the existence, and demise, of the steamboat.[12]   The later pond owner and resort entrepreneur, Dan Sherman, is known to have operated a motorboat on the lake, but it was nowhere the size of the earlier steamboat.

 

 

Continuing with the chronology, the next owner, Clarence B. Tallmadge, definitely exploited the commercial possibilities of the lake for boating, swimming, picnicking and camping during his 1896-1910 tenure.  He also reinstated “Strader” as the name of the lake.  The campers of the day were always well dressed—even the men wore swimming tops—and preferred eating at tables.  Camping in those days could be a cumbersome business.

 In 1910, Tallmadge sold out to Mr. and Mrs. Dan Sherman, and the pond until 1924 became Sherman Lake.

The Dan Shermans of Sherman Lake.[13]  Strader/Goodrich/Strader Lake reached a high point as a recreation and entertainment center after its 1910 sale to the Shermans.  Mr. and Mrs. Dan Sherman were theatrical performers on the vaudeville circuit.  Billed as Sherman and DeForest, they traveled all winter from city to city, and in the summer they opened their new Sherman Lake Health Resort.  “Sherman gave the lake a Coney Island touch, complete with a theater-dance hall, carousel, shooting gallery, motorboat on the lake, vaudeville shows, dances, and Fourth of July celebrations.”[14]

 

 

Many famous vaudeville stars and show-business personalities joined the Shermans during the summers to prepare routines for the coming season.  Every Saturday night their theater saw performances and public tryouts of the new acts.  Local people made Sherman Lake a popular destination on Saturday evenings.  The actors often performed extemporaneously. 

When material was hard to come by or audience attention lagged, Dan Sherman could always pull out his crowd-pleasing routine, “Over the River, Charlie.”

Sometime local talent participated.  Homer Redfield of Davenport Center, among others, played in the dance orchestra for 50 cents a night.  Dancing followed the performances and  lasted until midnight—not a minute longer.

Dan Sherman’s daughter and son continued the theatrical tradition.  Daughter Theresa, known as Tessie, “was in show business all her life.”

 

Onstage with her parents at an early age, Tessie performed in vaudeville shows at the Lake.  Later [1920s-1930s, after selling Sherman Lake] the Sherman family went into radio for seven years and were known as the “Oklahoma Cowboys.”  Sponsored by “Crazy Crystals” (“nothing more than Epsom Salts, but we sold them to people for medicine”), the Shermans appeared on several radio stations.  They were on WGY (Schenectady) for a long time.  Their appearance on radio gave them advertising for Sherman’s theater.  Tessie [much later] sang and danced on television for a while and then joined “The Sherman Brothers and Tessie.”  With her brother, Danny Jr., and her husband (the two men looked like brothers) Tessie traveled for many years all over the country, singing and dancing in theaters and nightclubs.  (Yarborough, 1992, 21.)

In 1945, at age 32 and a corporal in the infantry, Danny Jr. played in the Army musical, “Stars and Gripes.”   At that point he had “been in show business for 25 years… As a civilian he played the State and Lake theaters in Chicago, New York’s Hollywood restaurant and Leon and Eddie’s and played over stations WHAM in Rochester and WGY in Schenectady, and worked with Ozzie Nelson’s orchestra.”[15]  William Morris, an important theatrical agent in the 1960’s, spent earlier summers at Sherman Lake.  His father operated the merry-go-round and his mother sold tickets.  Local residents looked back in later years and reminisced about the exciting July 4th celebrations at the lake (sidebar).

The original Health Resort hotel, built by the Shermans, burned to the ground in 1917.   Mr. Sherman’s qualities of showmanship and ingenuity saw the possibilities in a wing of the defunct Fergusonville Academy building, by then empty since 1882.[16]  With the urging and help of friends and neighbors and with the assistance of twenty teams of horses, the Academy wing was dismantled and rolled down the Back Road to Sherman Lake.  The principal removal problem was snaking some of the timbers around bends in the road.  For the 64-foot pieces, the horses had to be unhitched from the flatbed wagons, the timbers unloaded and then dragged by the horses around the corners.[17]  In that same year the Shermans also built four new cottages at $100 each.   Overflow guests rented rooms in private homes.

 

 

After several seasons Sherman and DeForest were booked professionally for a full year. This marked the end of an era for theatrical shows in Davenport and vicinity—the vaudeville era.  The Shermans sold the lake and its recreational buildings and facilities to John Cellar and Harry Stiles in 1923 or 1924.  It was Cellar who christened the pond “Pine Lake.”[18]

Many people connected with the theater discovered Davenport’s beautiful hills and valleys through visits to Sherman Lake.  Among those to make Davenport their permanent home were Jessie A. and Edward Martz (singers), Harry Barrett and daughter, Virginia and Frank McDonald, Robert LaSalle, Robert and Anna Lemke, Al Lydell, Etta Kenyon, and Tom Mahoney.  Theresa (Tessie) Sherman, affectionately known as “Aunt Tessie,” and two nephews lived in Davenport Center in the 1970s.  So, too, did Sherman Lake’s Dan Sherman, Mabel DeForest Sherman, and son Dan, all of whom now lie with Tessie and other vaudevillians in the Charlotte Valley Cemetery.  Some say that when passing that cemetery at night they can still hear the tinkle of distant laughter and fragments of half forgotten songs.  After all, it was said that in life Dan Sherman “could make a stone wall laugh.”  Why not a gravestone, too?

A Davenport Center resident of the time remembers Etta Kenyon as having been in the chorus line with Lottie DeForest, Fern Briggs’ grandmother.  Etta had been born and brought up on Webb Hill, a part of South Hill.  Mary Etta Kenyon’s great grandfather, Smith Kenyon (1816-1878) had married a “full-blooded Indian,” Statira Webb (1816-1876).  The Webbs at one time had owned “this whole [Webb] hill.”[19]  At one time Etta had been a teacher in the Webb Hill School.  As a farmer she proved more caring of animals than of housekeeping, living “on almost nothing” and keeping goats in the house.  Neighbors would make sure she was safe and had what she needed.  Lawyers ultimately managed to take her land. 

The first time the author saw Etta Kenyon was in the Davenport Center store.  Etta wore a large farmer’s coat—with a baby goat in each side pocket.

 

 

A succession of owners between 1924 and 1971 attempted to continue the lake’s recreational and resort activities.  None had the charisma, connections, and sheer love of life as Dan Sherman, and most interludes lasted no more than a year or two.  One owner at the beginning of the Great Depression, John Henningson, tried to establish a popular restaurant in the tradition of a famous establishment run by a relative on Long Island.  Bad timing.   His wife Elsie leased the land in 1936 to Harry Soloman who in turn leased the facilities the following year to Winmere Camps, Inc.[20]  Soloman then operated for Winmere a children’s camp at Pine Lake.  This was more successful than recent past ventures and lasted until the early days of World War II.  The camp, known locally as “The Jewish Camp,” brought welcome income to its Davenport Center neighbors when Jewish parents, at least those who would forgo Kosher food, sought lodgings during weekend visits with their children.

Jews (and Catholics) had been largely unknown over the years in Davenport, but the quiet, peaceful village nevertheless harbored the standard rural prejudices.  Some tensions arose over “The Jewish Camp,” perhaps a reflection of Davenport’s brief flirtation in the 1920s with the Ku Klux Klan.  (See Chapter 9.)

William and Lillian Neunzig had bought the camp in 1927 and had run it for two years before selling to John Henningson.  They held a mortgage and foreclosed in 1942 when Harry Soloman’s children’s camp failed.  With their two sons, Kurt and Robert, the Neunzigs took on the major job of restoring the buildings after several years of disrepair.  The roof of the hotel (the old Ferguson Academy wing) was lowered.  Houses, camps, and pavilion were rejuvenated.  Initially catering to telephone company and police families, others soon came from New York, New Jersey, Long Island and other points to spend a week or a whole season at the attractive little pond.  There were (by then) no motor boats, no traffic—just a place to hike, rest and swim.  Upon the retirement of the elder Neunzigs in 1946, son Kurt and his wife Bette kept Pine Lake physically and socially a welcoming place for families, children, grandchildren, and friends.

The Neunzig years at Pine Lake, 1942-1971, were until then the longest stretch of ownership in the pond’s history.  Kurt Neunzig had also been for a time in show business—as a swimmer in Billy Rose’s New York World’s Fair Aquacade, as an understudy for Johnny Weissmuller (of swimming and Tarzan fame), and as an associate of Buster Crabbe.  He and his wife, Elizabeth Carr, a fellow performer in the Aquacade, were a handsome and talented addition to Davenport Center—and especially appreciated for swimming lessons.  (See Yarborough, 1992, for many more details, especially of the Sherman and Neunzig years.)

In 1971 Pine Lake changed its complexion once more, this time becoming a place of recreation and study for the students and faculty of Oneonta’s Hartwick College.  Operated as a nature preserve and bird sanctuary, the pond was especially well-suited for biology classes and field trips.  The public is encouraged to become a “Friend of Pine Lake” with grounds, lake, boating and fishing privileges.  Visitors may also to hike up nearby South Hill to one of the few undisturbed kettle hole “quaking“ bogs in Davenport.  (“Quaking” is experienced when venturing on the floating sphagnum moss near the water’s edge.  Other bogs in town can be found on the shores of Emmons Pond, the two Mud “Lakes,” and near the western edge of Pine Lake itself.)

 

 

Beaver Spring Lake.  About six miles east of Pine Lake and just north of Route 23 lies Beaver Spring Lake and campground.  Frank Von Neer of later Boarding House fame acquired the land in 1905.  In September 1929, Von Neer also purchased, from J. Willis Graig, a small adjoining parcel that enabled him to build the lake’s first dam.[21]  Until then this area had existed largely as a swampy area containing at most a small pond in whose outlet trout would spawn.  Later, in the 1950s or 1960s, its then owner, Carlton (Ted) Morgan started a campground and installed a slightly higher earthen dam, converting the Von Neer pond into a larger, 14.9 acre lake.  Several springs provide a steady, year-round water flow whose volume over the dam’s flashboards has been measured at 200 gallons per minute.

 

 

The little lake and the campground provide a quiet, pastoral atmosphere and electricity, water and sewer facilities, both for tent campers and for those arriving with trailers or motor homes.  The campsite offers views of adjoining farmland and hills while a nature trail descends towards the bordering Charlotte River.   Sharing the lakeshore in the early 2000s was the Beaver Spring Trailer Park, owned by Latham Oneonta Mobile Homes.  A group of permanent trailers on this site are owned by residents who have access to the lake’s shoreline for seasonal fishing.

The pond itself and the bulk of the shoreline belong to Beaver Spring Lake Campground.  This facility has had a number of owners during the seventy-plus years since the first lake was created in the late 1920s.  In 2003 it had 120 trailer sites, of which 70 had full water, electric and sewer hookups.  A separate area was available for tenting.  Campers included nature enthusiasts, families, and retirees.  Stays ranged from one night to several months. 

The grounds had a covered pavilion, restrooms, showers, laundry, swimming pool, children’s playground, canoes and boats.  An onsite store carried propane, camping and fishing supplies.  The facility closed during the winter but was open April 15-October 31.

Since Bob and Betty Taylor took over the proprietorship in 2000, the campground has developed very much in the older traditions of the adjacent Von Neer Boarding House and of Pine Lake before Hartwick College ownership.  (Bob Taylor, from England, is unrelated to Davenport’s earlier Taylor families, nor, as far as is known, to others of Delaware County’s numerous Taylor families.) 

This is to say that in addition to its numerous camping and outdoor facilities, the new owners placed strong emphasis on a full schedule of programmed activities for both children and adults.  On normal weekends these would include bingo, hay wagon rides, cartoons, a family movie, and games and crafts for children.  On some weekends (especially Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day), a visitor might find a chicken BBQ, Italian dinner, Christmas Party with Santa (in July!), a Halloween “Ghost Hunt” (in August), tug-of-war, boat races, story-telling, and fishing, horseshoe or bocce tournaments.  (A prospective visitor could find other details on the web site, www.beaverspringlake.com.)

Sexsmith Lake.  This pond of 30-plus acres is the largest of the six in Davenport.  It represents another and longer-lived aspect of the town’s recreation-and-visitors story.  Prior to 1912 the pond had been mainly used as a water supply for Matthew Sexsmith’s sawmill.  (Hence the name.)  The pond’s water level had been raised by Sexsmith—then spelled Sixsmith—for this purpose.  Matthew Sexsmith was born in 1807 and died in 1886.   Judging by scraps of flint, Indians may have once had a summer encampment to the north end of the pond.  The land on the western shore had intermittently been farmed since at least the 1830s.  Occasional campers and fisherfolk also used the pond in the 1800s.

 

 

Dr. Stephen E. Churchill found near its shores, mostly on lands of the former Matthew Sexsmith farm, the lumber for Stamford’s Churchill Hall (1883), Rexmere Hotel (1898), and Opera House (1900).  Churchill himself briefly owned the land on the eastern shore, 1897-1904, and for a while considered building a large summer hotel at the lake.   Instead he built the Rexmere Hotel as being more accessible.[22]  Orrin “O. G.” McIlwain (1872-1959), a former worker in Churchill’s lumbering operations, acquired the former Sexsmith farm in 1909 from Joseph and Minne L. Brownwell.[23]

Students from the Fergusonville Academy are known to have visited the pond on occasion as did ice skaters from Davenport village and, about 1911, early feminist “bloomer girls” from Stamford.  The pond at that time was a pretty place but a tangle of fallen trees and logs.  Joseph Elwell owned a “rather dilapidated” shack from which he rented out rowboats and even a motorboat.  Charles Phincle owned another shack on land leased from McIlwain while Orrin McIlwain rented out his own fishing shack.[24]  Others, including several local Smith brothers (not the original “Six Smiths” from which the name Sixsmith had been derived in England) occupied tents from time to time.  All those arriving from the east came through McIlwain pastures by way of the former “Churchill Road.”  At this time, about 1900-1910, John and Sarah Adams and later their two daughters farmed the land to the west, and cows from the Andrew and William Graig farm browsed a section of the pond’s northern shore.

The Adams farm dwellers (1892 to 1912 or so) reached Davenport village, 500 feet below, by means of a steep wagon track running north and precipitously downward through the Graig farm pastures.  Before Sarah and John Adams, Abraham Wolfe (1805-1879) and his family farmed the same land to the west of the lake and used the same track to the village.  Wolfe had begun to rent from then owner William H. McClaughry  (and after 1852, from John Sherman) somewhere between 1840 and 1850.  (The Wolfes, their seven children and two others adults, lived in a log cabin, one of the relatively few still existing in Davenport, near the lakeshore at the time of the 1850 census.) 

The earliest non-Indian dwellers may have been a young couple, James W. Frazer, his wife Eleanor and (in 1840) one small child.  Frazer (or Frasier ) was probably a squatter.  He and his wife “sold” back the land and one or more structures (perhaps the ones subsequently used by Abraham Wolfe) in 1840 to the original owner, William H. McClaughry.

In 1912, Dr. James Edsall, an avid fisherman and educator in Brooklyn’s public school system, visited his boyhood home in Prattsville.  With childhood friend Charles Phincle, a cooper from Bloomville, he fished at Matthew Sexsmith’s pond (now partly owned by Orrin McIlwain).  Edsall had visited the little lake in “early manhood,” probably about 1885.  McIlwain offered to build a crude cottage anywhere along the pond’s eastern shore for Dr. Edsall providing that Edsall would rent for the rest of the summer.  Shortly afterwards, the Edsall family arrived by boat, train, and farm wagon from Brooklyn.  They later purchased both the cabin and its small plot of land. 

Others from Brooklyn followed in subsequent summers, in part to avoid the polio epidemics of the World War I era.  Early arrivals, especially Dr. Earl H. Mayne and several young Brooklyn men in his employ, cleared much of the lakeshore of the tangled fallen logs.  The campers purchased their own land on which they eventually constructed a total of eight modest cottages and rebuilt the former McIlwain and Phincle “shacks.”  They also bought two hundred or so acres of former farmland surrounding the lake. 

Orrin McIlwain and his wagon met the Sexsmith Lake campers at Kortright Station where they had arrived from New York City via the Hudson River and, from Kingston onwards, by the Ulster and Delaware Railroad.  Farmer and lake developer McIlwain served for many years as caretaker, and even after automobiles became more common, he delivered to the new summer community fresh milk, mail, and other supplies.  That task was taken over by Ralph Taber in the early 1930s.[25]

The long summers at Sexsmith Lake in the pre-automobile days were filled with socializing, games, songs, performances, picnics, parties, swims, fishing, outings at Simpson Gorge and endless hikes.   (See sidebar).  During World War I (1916-1918) the lake’s matrons, many of whom were active members of the New Utrecht Auxiliary, Brooklyn Chapter of the American Red Cross, met regularly to make surgical dressings, sponges and clothing for war orphans.[26]  Over the years, the summer population has expanded beyond those coming from Brooklyn, but the number of cottages (still mainly quite modest) has remained at ten. 

In 1928 and 1929 a membership corporation was formed and formally incorporated as the Adaquetangie Club, Inc.  A number of the members, possibly influenced by the social mores of the times that discouraged the use of the word “sex” in any form, tried to change the name of the lake to “Adaquetangie” (a further variant of the Indian name for the Charlotte River).  Although still in use by some Club members, the name has never gained acceptance elsewhere.

A Sexsmith Lake community well was drilled in 1934, but it was not until 1948 that electricity reached the cottages, ending thirty-six years of hand pumps and kerosene lamps.  Since that date the appearance of the pond and its surroundings has changed but little except for the slow reforesting of the former fields and hills.  (The old Adams farmhouse, by then an “attractive nuisance,” was torn down about 1958.) 

The principal social change has come with the entrance of more wives into the labor force.  Families today no longer spend entire summers in their lakeside dwellings.  On the other hand, a number of the cottages have been insulated, and family members, some of them from the community’s fifth generation, may now be seen visiting almost any week or weekend throughout the year.

The community has especially valued its several longer-term Davenport caretakers.  After O.G. McIlwain, William E. West (1881-1955) helped harvest ice in 1933 and occupied the old Adams farmhouse as Lake Caretaker from 1935 to 1941.  Edwin H. Buck was the longest-serving community helper at almost forty years, from 1957 to 1988.  He then retired, was made an honorary Adaquetangie Club life member, and was succeeded as caretaker by his Hoseaville neighbor, Robert Merwin.

 

 

            The son of one of the early settlers, Robert Lyon, was an aviator in World War I and later became a chicken farmer in East Meredith until in 1934 he died in an airplane crash.  Less than a year later, in July 1935, a seven-year-old son of his was one of two children who drowned in the Charlotte River below High Point.[28]  Robert Lyon’s daughter, Eunice Ann Lyon, in 1947 married Neils J. Norberg, East Meredith dairy farmer and son of Davenport Supervisor Anker Norberg.  She later was librarian at the Charlotte Valley Central School. 

Richard Strout from Brooklyn, another WWI veteran, married Edith Mayne and during summer visits was a periodic speaker at Davenport churches.  He often wrote of his times at Davenport in The Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere.  One such 1976 piece, “Subject for an Interview,” telling of meetings at Sexsmith Lake with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and with a Davenport porcupine, was later clipped for her scrapbook by Alice More.[29]  It is reproduced in the CD-ROM accompanying the present volume.

The Reverend Clayton T. Griswold married Miriam Mayne, the youngest of the three Mayne daughters, and served for a number of years (1930-34) in the Presbyterian Church of nearby Hobart, NY.  As this account was written, two of Clayton Griswold’s four children and a number of grandchildren lived in Oneonta.

The following additional illustrations to be found here.  

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