I REMEMBER a time when life was simpler, vastly different, and perhaps in some ways happier.

In 1906 my grandparents, Addison and Phoebe Gilbert English, purchased a farm of about 60 acres from George Spickerman. It was about four miles up the Rossman Hill Road and perhaps three-quarters of a mile off the road. There, they raised six sons and two daughters.

The road to that farm is presently wooded but the location then was all cleared fields with a beautiful view of the Catskills. The farm house was comfortable and there were two large barns and other outbuildings on the property.

In the late 1700s, Rossman Hill was part of the Byrne Patent. One of the partners who owned it was Peter Smith, who referred to the settlers as “a poor sett of people.”

An 1856 map bears the names F.G. Rossman and W. Rossman, the settlers for whom the area is named. My uncle, Guy Swart, wrote that Fite G. Rossman, born in 1817, moved to Michigan and died there at the age of 102, and that Christopher Rossman was the father of 14 children and moved over the hill to Summit where Rossman Vlaie (Fly) and Rossman Valley now bear his name.

By late in the nineteenth century, there were five schoolhouses between the foot of Rossman Hill and Eminence. These schools were Morey District, Rossman Hill, Burnt Hill, Betty Brook, and Huckleberry Kingdom. My grandmother and great-grandfather taught at the Huckleberry Kingdom school.

Despite the number of districts in the town of Fulton, uncle Guy Swart knew some children never attended school because of the distance they would have had to walk, or fear of disease.

My father, Wallace English, would relate that he and his inseparable brother Archie would set traps for animals in the large swampy area that is now Looking Glass Pond, and check the traps on their way to school. They probably trapped in about 1910. They were never fortunate enough to find a mink in one of the traps. That would have made them $12.00 to $15.00 richer. A ’coon was worth $12.00, a rabbit $5.00, and a muskrat only 35 to 50 cents. Usually, they caught muskrats, occasionally a rabbit.

One day the boys found a skunk in a trap. When they appeared at school, the teacher found their presence undesirable and sent them home. Grandma English banished them from the house because the Rossman Hill minister was coming for dinner at noon. The young minister, the Rev. George Barton, traveled by horse and buggy among three parishes: West Fulton, Vintonton and Rossman Hill. Since he would be spending the night, the boys had to sleep in the barn. It was not a punishment, for they loved to sleep in the fragrant haymow.

The church was a well established Methodist Episcopal Church located near the present Looking Glass Pond. It appears on the 1856 map, but due to the dwindling population it closed in the early 1900’s. Then, our family attended the West Fulton Baptist Church. My father and the younger boys would listen for the bell three or four miles away. Most churches rang the bell 15 minutes before the services and then again at the appointed time. When they heard the first bell, the boys would start running through the woods and down Looking Glass Hill, arriving at the church before the last bell rang.

FARM boys were well acquainted with hard work. On Saturday, the English boys would go into the woods where grandpa English had felled trees. The boys would saw the limbs from the trees, trim the branches, and split and pile the wood. They would carry their lunch with them and spend the day working.

Women and girls worked just as hard. The spring that provided water for the house was located about 50 yards away. All the water had to be carried up a short hill. One Sunday not many years ago, while my parents were living with me, Uncle Archie and Aunt Maud were visiting. While talking about the old days, Uncle Archie shook his head slowly as he said, “Ma had to carry all the water up the hill to the house.”

“She had six sons and she had to carry the water,” my sister Vera asked sharply? My father and Uncle Archie had no ready reply.

A man named Jim Hobson lived near Betty Brook, about three or four miles away. He had roofed his house with birch bark and was known as a hunter of wild cats. My father said that they are different than bobcats, having long tails. Mr. Hobson later moved to a small house near the foot of Rossman Hill. The Swart boys (my mother’s brothers) enjoyed hearing Mr. Hobson play his fiddle. My mother sang a song that Mr. Hobson had written about some elderly neighbors, the Wagners, going up to Sapbush “Holler” to trade their butter and eggs. My uncle, Guy Swart, who wrote several unpublished articles¹, once wrote about the large families who lived on Rossman Hill including one that had 18 children, and of the many tragic accidents associated with sawmills, lumbering and backbreaking labor on the land.

Small cemeteries may be found through the old farm lands and woods. I know of one family whose five children died in one year. Their stones are in the Fairland cemetery. Some families lost several children in just a few weeks to diseases such as diphtheria, cholera and childhood illnesses.

The land was stony and the soil thin and acidic, poorly suited to farming. The population of Rossman Hill decreased and in the first decades of the century, the church and school closed. About 1920, after their boys left home, Addison and Phoebe English moved to Vintonton. Grandmother Phoebe missed the community aspect of life on the hill, and she was lonely for friends and family. They continued to have a few cows so that grandmother could continue to make her delicious butter, and she kept a few chickens.

Our family is of Scottish-Irish descent, from the line of Donald, or Daniel, Rose and his wife Elizabeth Grant Rose. Early in the 1800s, the Roses, of Aberdeen, Scotland, settled at Rose’s Brook, Delaware County.

My father, Wallace, was seven years old in 1906 when he came to the hill farm with his parents and siblings, Mabel, Elsie May, Calvin, Archie, Clyde, Clayton, and Leon. A baby girl, Nettie, had died when the baby carriage in which she was sleeping outdoors was engulfed in flames from a grass fire set by the older children while grandmother was helping with farm chores. Another daughter, Elsie, the 21-year-old wife of Jewett Whitbeck of Jefferson, had died giving birth to their first child, who was called Little Mabel.

Grandpa English, like many of the hill people, had worked on farms in a few of the 13 places where the family lived before moving to Rossman Hill, but his real talent was masonry. He was responsible for the stonework on a large barn on the farm then owned by Niram Felter, close to Eminence, and laid many foundations and chimneys. One of the chimneys on my house in Warnerville was built by him with the help of Uncle Clyde. One of his ancestors in Scotland was a stonemason, and a great-grandson is a stone worker and sculptor.

The English family may have been typical of the Palatine, Dutch, English and Scottish Protestants who lived on Rossman Hill. Many had come from New England. Shortly before World War II, immigrants from Germany, the Balkans and Ireland began to move from New York City to the area. Some were able to farm on a small scale and some lived in abject poverty. My father said one man would dig potatoes after dark in my grandfather’s field, to feed his family.

THE farm of Clyde Cook, my father’s uncle, was on Rossman Hill Road about a mile from Eminence. Clyde had married Lavinia Gilbert, who was my grandmother’s sister. They were a hardworking couple who never had children. We always called them “Aunt and Uncle Cook.” Their farm had been owned by Clyde’s father, Charles Cook, who sometimes built simple furniture. The large barn is gone but the nice old house is still in place. It must be at least 150 years old. My father remembered that the Cooks had coats and blankets made of cow and horse hide, which were somewhat common, probably stitched by a cobbler.

Many farm women depended on pack peddlers for household necessities, and when Aunt Cook found two Currier and Ives pictures missing from on the wall one day when she returned after helping with chores, they suspected a pack peddler of the theft. The pictures were never found.

A few years ago I met Mabel Wilday Mau, a lovely lady who is now over 90 years old. Mabel was born on Rossman Hill and lived there until she was five or six years old. Her brother, George, was a schoolmate of my father.

The swamp that is now Looking Glass Pond was owned by the Wilday family and the earliest home is still standing nearby. Dad recalled walking up the hill with his mother, Mabel’s mother and baby Mabel, to attend an auction. Mabel recalled that auctions were a social occasion to visit with the neighbors. She also remembered sliding from the roof of their house on snow that was piled as high as the roof.

Since the West Fulton Rod and Gun Club redeveloped the large swamp area into the lovely recreation area called Looking Glass Pond, many people have been attracted there for fishing, canoeing and just relaxing. The grist mill just down Looking Glass Hill, and the church, schoolhouse and farms, are gone. But a pleasant ride through the peaceful green forest, where one can view a once-populated and busy area, remains.

1. One of Mr. Swart’s articles is published in this issue.