Dutchess County Historical Society Yearbook Vol 064 1979

July 4, 1925 THE OLD PLANTATION

By Burton Coon "All up an' down re whole creation Sadly I roam Still Zongin' for de oli plantation an for de ol' folks at home."

I felt something like that when my boys and I started out this morning to search for "Judge" Jackson's old cabin.

I had not been there in 40 years, so I was not very sure of finding it; but as it happened we had no trouble. We went up across the fields, looking at the corn and the pastures and our neighbors' crops. When we struck the other road we took to the woods below Mike Borich's and followed a wood road for about half a mile until we came to an open field.

I was not sure where I was, but we went on in the same general direction until in the near distance I saw some old cherry trees and two or three old apple trees. I said to the boys, "Here we are," and so it proved.

Forty years ago my uncle and I went up to see Judge, and I still remember how he came out to meet us with the same old twinkle in his eyes and the same puckery smile playing about his mouth. But today he was not there. The roof of the cabin was gone--nothing but the bare stone walls standing in mute testimony of a human habitation. Nearby was the inevitable clump of lilac bushes--the one universal mark of civilization for a hundred years. Wherever you find them you may know that somebody has lived. The whole place was overgrown with an old-fashioned garden flower the name of which I have forgotten. We found the old well now filled with stones; the old pear tree by the potato patch; and the foundation of some kind of an out building. But we could not find the graves on the hill back of the house where the smallpox victims were laid. Probably they were never marked.

We came back down the little lane and out through the clearing by the path that Judge had travelled so often in his journeys to and from the outer world. I was lothe to leave the place, for the man who lived there and his sister were connected with the earliest recollections of my childhood.

I can yet see "Black Sarah" cleaning my grandmother's pantry in the old house on the farm where my mother spent her early womanhood and where she often used to take me as a child.

As we left "the old plantation" we went up along the edge of the meadow and suddenly came upon another old house place. I think it is where Peter Patrick used to live. It is a more extensive ruin than Judge's cabin. It fronts on the meadow, and there is a narrow lane leading over toward the highway, down which I imagine he often came, with his children running out to meet him, and the dog barking at their heels, while his wife stood expectantly in the doorway. As we stood looking into the old cellar I said to the boys "Somebody once lived here, and they lived the same human life that we now live. They had the same human passions and temptations--the same loves, hatreds and prejudices--the same hard struggle to make ends meet that we have. And their moments of joy and of sorrow were as keenly felt." How I wish that I might have a picture of them