Chenango Lake Years Ago - 1934

Chenango Lake Years Age And A District School Teacher

by S.J. Gibson

Chenango Telegraph, June 1, 1934

Forty years ago in June [1894], I was completing my first year as principal of the Norwich high school.  One Saturday before the close of the term I walked to Chenango lake, dined at the Inn and had a pleasant visit with the proprietor, Colonel E.J. Loomis. The main object of this visit was to select, with his permission, a site for a camp during the vacation.  The spot selected was south of the Inn on a bluff under the "murmuring pines and the hemlocks" overlooking the lake, where now stands the cottage belonging to the estate of the late Mr. Bryant of New York city. A few days after the close of the term, Mrs. Gibson and I, with our two sons, Edwin and Kasson, were conveyed to the lake by the liveryman, George Hickok.  Frank Stockwell, a Civil War veteran, who lived at the south end of the lake, assisted us in erecting our two tents, and we soon felt very much at home in the woods. The odor of the pines and hemlocks, the fishing, the walks to the hilltops, the visit of friends to our camp, the meeting of friends on the grounds around the hotel on picnic and other days are now "beautiful pictures that hang on memory's walls."

Tempus fugit - time flies - and with it what changes!  The summer of 1894 there was only one cottage at the lake, the one a few rods south of the Inn.  County Clerk Jay Holmes, one of my former schoolmates in New Berlin academy, bought of Russell Colwell, a farmer, a few acres of land on the north side of the lake.  He sold lots to judge A.F. Gladding Hon. S.A. Jones, Dr. Linn Babcock, Mrs. Merritt, all of whom, including Mr. Holmes, built cottages there.  Since then, from time to time, new ones appeared, and the "village" of Chenango lake now comprises more than fifty cottages.

We spent three vacations in our tents.  Mr. Holmes sold me an acre of land northeast of the lake across the road from the schoolhouse. We built a hemlock, bark-slab cottage. The view from it looks down on the Great Brook valley and across to the grand old hills far above the Unadilla, where I, when a boy, tramped, fished, hunted and had day dreams of the future.

One of my favorite walks during these vacations was on the road northeast of the lake, passing by the schoolhouse and along by the colwell farm. Across the road from the never-failing spring in the woods and from where the Robinson cottage now stands, was an old dilapidated, deserted house.  I often stopped and looked at the flowers that grew there. Every week or so new ones appeared ot greet me.  The beautiful white roses in particular I loved ot look at.  I was reminded of Tennyson's "Deserted House," the first and last stanzas of which are:

"Life and thought have gone away

Side by side.

Leaving doors and windows wide,

Carless tenants they."

"Gone away! for life and thought 

Here no longer dwell;

But in a city glorious--

A great and distant city  -- have bought.

A mansion incorruptible."

I inquired of a farmer about the house and the flowers.  He told me Mrs. Preston, the daughter of Noah Mathewson, the first settler at the lake, lived there.  She was a district school teacher, a lover of flowers.  She it was that set them out.  It seemed to me that those flowers symbolized the life and work of a true treacher. They bloom on long after she is dead and forgotten.  Let us believe that she had the true spirit of a teacher, a spirit that desires to be useful to the pupils, that feels the great responsibility of a teacher, a spirit that inquires what is right and what is wrong, and is impressed with the importance of school work.  Let us believe that she did not "by work or deed send a blight on the trusting mind of youth," and that in the words of that great teacher, David P. Page, the first principle of the Albany Norman school, her "work was acceptable in the sight of God, viewed by the light beaming out of His throne."

There were many teachers years ago, and there are many now with that spirit.  Fortunate are the pupils who come under their influence!

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Writer Misinformed

Norwich Sun, June 9, 1934

S.J. Gibson, whose article "Chenango Lake Years Ago and A District School Teacher" was recently published in The Sun announces that he has been told by an old man who was a student of the teacher mentioned that she was never married, and was not the daughter of Noah Mathewson. She lived in the house mentioned with a brother and sister.