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| Holiday card from the Fords send to Merritt and Maude Agard |
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| Holiday card featuring one of Pete's boats anchored at Taughannock Falls State Park |
From their oral history. The change in fonts indicates who's speaking:
About 1920 we moved down here,
just above Taughannock Farms.[1]
[We
lived] on south Gorge Road, just up from Route 89 about a quarter of mile. Dad
always wanted to be a farmer, I guess.[2] It was all fruit farms and
orchards. The five acres on the
other side of the road, they were mostly Alberta’s and Dad never thought much
of them anyway, but the state bought that portion way back. So it was only 25
acres.
Also, Dad liked the water.
When they were looking for farms they looked for places near the water. So,
that is where they settled.
Peaches were the main crop,
and apples. Peaches we sold. We
would send out cards every year to certain customers that would want to know when
the peaches would be ripe. And they would come and be lined up all the way up
the road. And they weren’t the varieties they have now. The kind they came for
mostly were the Rochester and they didn’t keep well at all. We used to send Tompkins County apples.
We had this one customer who always wanted to send a barrel of apples –
Tompkins County.
[The Kings were prominent
fruit growers in the area. They had a] cherry orchard – we picked cherries at
Kings.
When
we first moved there we had horses.
We had one that ran away. As a team they were all right, because
the other horse was slow. She probably couldn’t have run anyway.
It was a wonder she didn’t kill somebody.
She spooked every once in a while and ran. The first time we had the team, we
were going to go to church; we went up to Jacksonville to church, and dad
hooked up the buggy to the cart, and two or three of us – I don’t know how many
of us were going, and we got up about where Stover’s lived and met a car. There
weren’t many cars then, and that scared her. Mom pulled on the reins to try to
stop her, and the people that lived just up above Stover’s called up the road
to Clyde Wintermute, and told him there was a run away horse coming up and he
came out and stopped her and lead her back. Dad came up to meet us because they had called him and he
lead her almost all the way back. So he got in the buggy and she started
running again. He drove her into the farm and that slowed her down.
[1] This interview was
conducted by Ed and Ruth Farrell on November
4, 1991.
[2] The Ford family consisted of Elwyn
(Pete), wife Anna, and children: Verna, June, Caryl, Frances, Leon, Merle,
Frank, Virginia, and Louise.
