Memories of Sand Hill Road
Mary Carlson is a lifelong Greenfield resident who has written stories of her experiences growing up there. Her memories of attending Daketown School are featured in the recent film “Town of Greenfield – A Forgotten Crossroads” available for viewing on the Saratoga County History Center YouTube channel.
In the 1940s, driving north from Saratoga Spring toward Middle Grove about a mile west of Rt 9N is Pages Corners where Sodaman and Sandhill Road intersects with Middle Grove Road. At the corner is the Callenius dark gray house, Mrs. Receal’s small white house whose son is in WWII, and larger white houses are on the other two corners. Taking a right turn onto Sandhill, you are climbing up the mountain toward Lake Desolation.
Between the corner and the beginning of the first hill is a very large beaver pond cattails and all, one of the many places still being trapped. Going up the great sledding hill on the left was acres of large tree belonging to the Chatfield farm. My dad Ernest Rhodes cut logs there for Mr. Chatfield, the schoolteacher’s father, often taking me with him. There is a short flat stretch with a nasty curve, then down a hill. Halfway down is Art and Grace Perry’s home with their kids Jean, Billly, Erma and a black dog who assumed the job of protecting the mailboxes of Perry, Potter, Wilsey, Rhodes, and Webb at the intersection of Sandhill and North Creek Road. Lillie Tooker’s mail was left in the Wisey’s mailbox as she was their live in housekeeper. The mailman kept going straight toward DakeTown Road. The Perry farm which had a female Wilsey md ember was part of the original Wilsey parcel on North Creek Road. My own home is on the corner of North Creek and Wilsey Road near there.
Crossing North Creek Road going down the hill is the Kayaderosseras Creek with its plank floor bridge and high iron rails. One cross bar is just the right height to lean and watch the water flowing by, maybe even seeing a trout if you were lucky. A few feet downstream just before the curve is the sheep dip, the place where sheep were washed before shearing when my dad was a boy, and now the favorite swimming hole of many. All the fields on the right belong to the Perry farm. The field on the left is part of the Vanna farm. Going up a tiny hill, the road splits. Daketown Road on the left leads to the one room schoolhouse I attend, and Sandhill continues to the right.
On the left is an old tall dark gray weathered house, the cellar built into the hill. This is Aunt Lizzie Dake’s house. She is a very old poor widow lady living in her summer kitchen that looks like the cellar from the outside. Aunt Lizzy is a large lady and can hardly get the door open far enough to get in and out. But somehow, every morning she always knows when our dog Tippy comes over to check on her and she gives him a scrap saved just for him. Next is Walt and Lucy Dake Kibb’s small newer white house and turnaround place for the snowplow in winter. Around the corner is an old barn and a great sledding hill. On the left are rows and rows of small pine trees Mr. Mann had paid my dad to plant in 1936, the year I was born.
At the top of the hill on the left begins the Humes property of my grandparents Pearl Humes Jones and Clarence Jones. At the bottom of the hill is Blue Brook with great fishing holes on both sides of the plank bridge. Many times, I heard my grandfather say “Get the frying pan our Pealie, we are having fish for supper!” He would grab his pole and come back with three or four trout. Going up the hill from Blue Brook there is a long line of big old maple trees but no houses. On the left is an old orchard, huge strawberry patch, and finally the old Humes house side yard appears, lined with deep red peonies and irises of yellow and purple. I have many vivid memories of my grandparents and that house that I will share in a later story.
From the Humes driveway turning left onto Sand Hill Road to the top of the hill. The property on the right belongs to Mr. Kaul who lives in a big gray house at the corner. When my mother was walking to school a family with a parrot lived in that house. Everyone the parrot saw was called a son of a bitch. The left side of the road is still part of the Humes farm. At the top of the hill are three large chicken houses with many many white leghorn hens laying eggs for the Saratoga Markets. This is owned by Emma Humes Morrison and her husband Alex. Their white house is at the corner of Sandhill and Coy Road. Uncle Alex and his brother George, both Irish born, built this house over a natural spring with its little stream running under the cellar foundation.
Much later that house was purchased from the Morrison family by Ron and Alice Feulner when he retired from teaching and moved back to the foothills of the Adirondacks where he and his parents grew up. He loved the mountains – hiking them, studying them and the mines with all the old lore. He wrote and published several books and became the Town of Greenfield Historian until he recently passed away in his late eighties.
He and Alice are resting under a simple field stone in Hutchins Cemetery on the old road to the mines off of Coy Road, with his parents and his mother’s family, close to the Morrison family. Members of at least five generations of the Humes family also rest there. Traveling along these roads today brings back many memories.