Post-Star, Glens Falls, NY Thursday, Oct. 5, 1978

 

Picture of Bowyer property

 

Chestertown at Start of Century Explained

By Caroline H. Fish

Correspondent

 

Chestertown – Growing up on Chestertown at the turn of the century was described by Sara Bowyer O’Connor to the Historical Society of the Town of Chester, Inc. at the September meeting.

 

Born in 1895 in the three-story Bowyer House, Mrs. O’Connor was the daughter of the community’s meat market owner, William W. Bowyer and Stella (Remington) Bowyer.

 

She described the property as it was then with its many outbuildings, the icehouse and smokehouse and the large Victorian Mansion that faces Riverside Drive. After owned for years by the Peter W. Sanders family, it has been renovated completely by Robert Sweenie and is an apartment house now.

 

There was no western beef in the small Adirondack communities. She described the trips to Irish Town and other communities to purchase lambs and calves.

 

The beef for slaughter was kept in pastures near the summer slaughter house located across tannery brook to the east of Dynamite Hill and Sunset Mountain area. The sheep and milk cows were kept in Knapp Hill pastures. Milking and the care of the stock, the lambing, and related operation were done by hired men.

 

The large house had three stories, and the hired hands lived in bedrooms on the third floor. Sanitation was handled daily by hired girls. There was no vacuum cleaner as we know it. Mrs. O’Connor remembers their first one was hand pumped. While the hired girl operated the vacuum, it was Mrs. O’Connor’s job to operate the pump.

 

She described the hard job of spring cleaning, the quantities of hand done laundry, the raising of most of their own food. “An apple in the evening as we sat around the table reading was considered a daily treat,” she said.

The women canned and tried lard, which was sold in the market. The family also made sausage and smoked their own hams and bacons. To keep their products cold they cut ice from Cunningham Pond and stored it in the large ice house.

 

She described places of business; Janser’s Drug Store with its fountain and famous handmade ice cream; the busy hotels, the Chester House and Rising House, whose tables had meats and oysters from Bowyer’s Market.

 

Mrs. O’Connor also told about shopping for clothing twice a year in Glens Falls and how the local milliner, Miss Russell, would soon be copying the hats from the Braley Millinery Store in Glens Falls.

 

She said that the merchants in those days stuck to their own lines, Vetter to Hardware, Kettenbach Brothers to staples and dry goods, the harness shops to leather related products, the blacksmith shops to iron working.

 

All this changed with the coming of cars, according to mrs. O’Copnnor. It brought the chain stores with their variety of products closer. Summer people, instead of coming and staying for a month, moved along rapidly. Western beef soon made her father’s operations expensive.

 

Her father dies in 1915 and her mother took lodgers for awhile before selling the property to the Sanders, who turned it into a tea room to accommodate the traveling public.

 

In closing she answered a number of questions about food preservations in the cellars, the making of such things as pot cheese, heating and transportation and related several anecdotes about her maternal and paternal grandparents and other relatives.