Halfway Brook

There was still no good way to travel on land in 1828.

Whether you walked or rode a horse, the roads were rough and through the wilderness.

In 1829 whether by foot, horseback, canal or all three, Doctor Perkins journeyed from Poughkeepsie (on the Hudson River), New York, and managed to arrive in Lumberland, where he would be the only physician for over 300 square miles. Fortunately, the people were usually healthy.

Doc Perkins treated disease with one of five or six prescriptions—if he could find the description in his book. He did not like the homelike, superstitious ideas, and notions that prevailed at the time.

Doc Perkins first boarded at Robert Land’s house at Beaver Brook, four miles back from the river and canal. The fun loving, agreeable doctor, always wore a suit of heavy winter clothes, and traveled on horseback without a padded saddle or coated stirrups.

“Thus for 24 years, he traveled many thousands of miles over the rough highways, the narrow timber roads, the cow paths; over hills and through valleys, through dark, dense wildernesses and groves of lofty timber, during night and day, amid sunshine and storm, cold and heat…”

Doc Perkins charged twenty-five cents for a visit to the village or the area nearby, with the option to pay or not. A visit to Ten Mile River from Barryville (eleven miles through the woods), was seventy-five cents. One family of 5 children and a mother, he contracted for $5 a year. Some families never paid the doctor, though he had called on them for 18 years.

The good doctor married Comelia Dabron in 1832, and they moved into the old Hickok farmhouse, two miles from Barryville on the way to Halfway Brook Village.—Johnston, Reminiscences, pp. 340, 342, 343

A freshet is a sudden rise in the level of a stream, or a flood, caused by heavy rains or the rapid melting of snow and ice.

Freshets were necessary to float the rafts of lumber to market, but they could cause much devastation.

May Flood 1832
“During the winter, large quantities of lumber from the Halfway Brook mills were drawn to Barryville, made into rafts, then taken to Handsome Eddy, two or three miles further down the river. There they waited for the spring freshets…

“In early spring 1832, at least 2,000,000 feet, and 20 to 25 double rafts of sawn lumber sat at Handsome Eddy, ready to float to market. The water level of the river remained low through the first week of May, which was unusual.

“Owners were anxious to get their rafts to market; the raftmen were uneasy about doing so in such low water. What to do?

“Starting May 8, 1832, it rained violently day and night for three days and nights. The Delaware River, a raging flood, was covered with the valuable lumber and rafts which had been anchored in Handsome Eddy…

“The May flood, was the highest known until the flood of 1869 and one in 1895, which was 16 inches higher.”—Johnston’s Reminiscences, p. 276.

Freshet Damage in 1846
In Phoebe Maria Eldred Austin’s 1846 letter to her sister Mary Ann Eldred, she mentioned the freshet damage done in Halfway Brook, that year.

Lumberland, July 13, 1846
Dear Sister,
I have delayed writing longer than I intended, but these lines will inform that we are well at present and I hope they will find you the same.

There’s been a freshet in the Halfway Brook. It has done much damage. There is not a bridge or dam left between here and Barryville. It has damaged us more than fifty dollars…From your affectionate sister, P. M. Austin

Around 1764, the year after the French and Indian War, Daniel Skinner built a 15 foot by 80 foot raft from six felled pine trees.

Daniel ingeniously lashed these logs (masts for boats), together, added a rudder, and floated the raft down the river—Timber Rafting it was called.

Leaving Cushetunk/Cochecton where he lived, Daniel and two others (one drowned) rafted about 200 miles down the Delaware River, past the settlements at Narrowsburgh, Ten Mile River, Shohola and the River, Pond Eddy, Mongaup, and Carpenter’s Point, and headed southeast to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Mr. Skinner was paid twenty-four pounds—four pounds per mast.

1800 Lumberland Sawmills
In 1800, Lumberland (then two years old), had a population of 733, most of whom had lumber-related jobs.

Saw-mills operated on various streams—see 1838 Map.

Enormous amounts of lumber were made into rafts and floated down one of the many rivers or brooks in the area that fed into the Delaware River.

The Delaware River flowed to Carpenter’s Point (Port Jervis) and on south to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the lumber could be sold.

The Largest Raft
A Mr. Barnes took a 85 feet wide, 215 feet long raft, loaded with 120,000 feet of lumber down the Delaware River.

Kill or Kille
Kill/e is Dutch for a creek as in Wallkill or Beaver Kill.

Callicoon Creek
Dutch hunters named the area Kollikoonkill because there were so many Kollikoon or wild turkeys.

Whortleberries
Around 1850 George W. Eldred wrote his cousin Stephen St. Gardener that he and a friend had gone to Hagan Pond (Highland Lake) to pick whortleberries.

I had not heard of whortleberries, but a Halfway Brook reader wrote that “those whortleberries are huckleberries, and they still grow in abundance. They taste just like blueberries, only they have a tiny pit inside.”

And as I think about it now, I remember my dad often talking about huckleberries. I’m sure he picked his share growing up.

Delaware River Named
In 1610, a Captain Samuel Argall named both the Lenape River, and the people living on its banks, the Delaware in honor of Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, his patron, a British nobleman and Virginia’s first colonial governor.

Eel Weir
“Fish and eel were plentiful in the Delaware River. The Van Tuyl, Middaugh, Hooker families and others kept a barrel of salted eels for winter meals. Each child’s dinner would be a boiled eel and four buckwheat pancakes.”—from Johnston, Reminiscences.

In the 1930s my mom lived in the Barryville Parsonage. Mom said there were eel racks in the Delaware River. At times their meal included eel cut in two-inch pieces and fried, which mom remembered as tasting good.

Eels are still trapped in eel weirs near Pond Eddy, on the Delaware.

Halfway Brook in the town of Highland, Sullivan County, New York, is a nine mile stream that flows into the Delaware River.

At the end of 1815 James Eldred (my great-great-grand-father) settled with his family in a cabin with a sawmill on land near the middle of Halfway Brook, in what was then Lumberland.

The northwest corner of that Eldred property was later called Halfway Brook Village.

Now called Eldred, it was the area that my father’s ancestors lived.

The Hickoks arrived around 1812 and settled two miles north of the Delaware River. Then the Eldreds in 1815.

By 1834 the Leavenworths lived west of the Eldreds.

In 1852 the Myers and Van Pelt relatives lived on the east side, near Hagan Pond, now Highland Lake.

There were a number of other families that settled on either side of Halfway Brook that were friends or neighbors of my relatives.

Through the years, many of the early settlers’ descendants remained in the area and became related to me through marriage. Meeting some of those descendants who shared their information was one of the many benefits of writing the Halfway Brook Series.

Hello Halfway Brook Friends!
My new series: “Revisiting Halfway Brook,” looks back at Halfway Brook posts which started in fall 2009, the year my husband Gary created this site.

In September of 2009, as Gary completely remodeled our kitchen (at one point we had to walk outside from the living room, to the garage to get to the kitchen), I wrote my first post, welcoming friends and relatives to Halfway Brook to introduce them to my (then) upcoming book, The Mill on Halfway Brook, the first of three in my Memoirs from Eldred, New York, 1800–1950 Series.

Halfway Brook in Cave Creek
In the years since 2009, my office has been in two rooms: first crowded into the “everything room”; next (and currently) in a large former bedroom.

I have gone through at least three computers: a G-5, a Hackentosh, and currently a Mac mini; a number of back up drives; and several monitors—thanks to Gary’s assistance.

The digital backup is one thing, but the paper records and information along with all the Smith and most of my parents’ photos and nostalgia—much of which is in binders seen in the current office photo—is overwhelming.

The original books, seen in the 2011 photo, and my research books were moved to a new bookcase, now in the corner of my office.

Revisiting Halfway Brook
I hope you will enjoy the next series of posts—a visit that starts in 2009 as I discovered so much I never knew about Eldred, New York, and met so many incredibly helpful friends and family. It was a grand time of meeting new friends (and relatives), sharing information, and packages packed with photos, documents, letters, etc. So many great memories!