There’s a certain constancy that lingers here, in pockets of woods and runs, in places where time is trapped in the ticking calls of the chickadee above gurgling springs, where kingfishers work the same worn beat as their mothers and grandmothers.
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| Mountain life included getting what you could from nature. Which meant harvesting what was available: Root vegetables and greens in springtime and black bear in the fall. This hunt is from the Ahner clan of Franklin Township who had kin ties with the Eckley clan of the mountain. This shot from 1922. |
Author's note: I've been sitting on this story since last spring (2013). Like many of my stories, I often need some final push to finish them. Most times, as in this case, I'm searching for that elusive last shred of the story that the perfectionist in me must have in order to finish it. In this case, I've been waiting for to hold in my own hands that copper pitcher her grandfather caught alternating drips wintergreen oil and moonshine from the coil of their still. It was a hard winter. I'll be sitting with Joyce tomorrow, but today is the first of spring.
It’s a steady rhythm, the Lehigh waters resound today as they did when the hardscrabble immigrants first gathered around her to work, developing a distinct work ethic unique to these woods and valleys.
The Great Pine Swamp was home to virgin hemlocks, oaks and pines. Development though, soon followed with sawmills and tanneries. Then came Josiah White’s Upper Grand and the railroads and soon the forest was deflowered.
It’s not certain whether the Great Depression ever left from here, it’s embedded in a culture of remembrance, of self-reliant resilience.
Joyce (Eckley) Gaumer just remembers being poor and moving around a lot, from Drakes to Stoney Creek, to Meckesville and back. Her Stoney Creek home for the last fifty-four years once held the postal address “Christmans.” Today it’s Star Route Jim Thorpe or Penn Forest.
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| One view of the Great Pine Swamp of Northern Carbon County. Photo courtesy of PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources website. |
Something can be said for keeping one’s roots here, connected to a land largely unchanged, though surrounded and increasingly permeated by an electronic grid that frazzles the senses and breeds an aversion to sinking one’s fingers into the earth.
Mountain top living was austere, honest and tough. Its people were bound to the earth, in timbering and tanning jobs. But they also found work on the canal and the railroad as boatmen, brakemen, mule boys and firemen.
Joyce’s dad was “Archie” Eckley (Archibald was born October 19, 1898). As a young man, he worked in a stave mill along the Stoney, making slats for barrels. There were many sawmills here around the Great Pine Swamp, there was one where Yellow Run and Stoney Creek come together. Archie’s kid brother Isaac too worked at the same mill, doing the timbering.
Always making do, Joyce’s grandfather Adam Eckley job, at least in the eyes of the IRS, was “distiller of wintergreens.” Their family took on contracts from New York City firms who procured an agreed upon number of gallons of extract a year. It went into all kind of flavorings from ice cream to cough syrup.
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| This is Abraham Ahner, son of Amos Ahner of Franklin Township. He was a brother to Herman Ahner. This photo certainly harkens to the Bonnie and Clyde days. Herman did know his way around the still. In fact, our home today still bears the scorched joists in the cellar from the day Herman's still exploded. According to family lore, the oil cloth on the kitchen floor above lifted off the ground and Herman's wife was scalded. Nearly all the men on this branch of the Ahner clan distilled spirits. Amos had public square dances on his property during Prohibition. Those he knew and trusted got the Applejack. All the rest got Near-Beer. Earning extra money with a still even ran into Herman's offspring. One of his sons lost all his firearms after the ATF descended upon his property in the 1980s for operating a distilling operation. |
Today, teaberry goes largely untouched here on the forest floor, synthetic flavoring being more convenient.
Joyce remembers picking teaberry leaves with her mom and grandmother Amanda Eckley (both Adam and Amanda were first generation German-Americans) at an early age. Later on, once Archie gave up the still and took on the job as a bonded supervisor of the township, they would take their teaberry greens to Purie Green’s grocery store, who also ran a still on the side.
She remembers her grandfather occupying the still’s slack time by making Moonshine between the wintergreen and apple harvests. Applejack season was his favorite. Many a hunter lodging around Lake Harmony in the late fall came calling for his cider spirits.
Another wintergreen distiller of those days was Alexander “Wilson” Smith near Drakes Creek, the grandfather to Curtin Gaumer on his mother’s side.
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| An early picture of the Martin and Anna Guamer home. It still stands today, relatively unchanged, near Stoney Creek, along Route 903. |
Though some considered it bootlegging, to them it was a plain matter of making do. Curtin’s father Martin (born May 13, 1896) died near the start of the war when Curtin was just 17, leaving both he and Anna with an extra burden. Anna like many others on the mountain enhanced her small grocery business with a little speakeasy, selling ‘shine and beer.
Sometimes the revenuers would come to claim their share in raids and stings. But the mountain folk went on about their business, in full knowledge of those possible setbacks, just as one looked upon the coming of a hard winter, taken as a matter of course, as something one simply endured.
The final raid came in November of 1950. The agents, dressed in the clothes of house painters, were escorted by a here to be nameless man married to Joyce’s sister Marie. Legend says the licensed inns on the mountain paid the said man $100 to help root out the speakeasies.
Curtin Gaumer was a veteran of the Great War, surviving the beaches of Normandy. And when he came home he reacquainted himself with Joyce, the girl next door. They married in 1949.
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| Curtin and Joyce Gaumer homestead next door to Anna Gaumer's home. Joyce and Curtin built this home side-by-side, like that did so many other things in life. |
Joyce and Curtin were as natural together as the cool beneath the pines. When he went fishing, Joyce fished too. They loved to fish together, occasionally traveling to Canada. When his old Dodge truck needed a tune-up, she stood across the fender, taking care of the plugs on her side of the block just as well as Curtin took care of his.
In 1959, the wooded lot of pines and oaks next to his mother’s home and store was cleared by Curtin and Joyce with their two-man saw. Together they drew up the prints and took the timbers to Milton Schoch’s sawmill.
Curtin loved to make homemade wines, like dandelion wine, from oranges, lemons, currants, raisins and of course sugar and dandelion. He was a foreman on the railroad and Joyce worked in Dr. Thomas’ office and after his passing she continued working in Attorney Carol Walbert’s office.
When they both retired, they took a cross-country trip, across the north, through the Badlands, Yellowstone, to the space needle in Seattle and along the Puget Sound. They enjoyed salmon cooked on open-grills by the Northwest Indians as well as fresh caught tuna in Oregon.
They returned through California, saw the swallows of Capistrano, then onto Texas, and the Grand Ole Opry. They saw Lincoln’s log cabin of his birth in Kentucky. Joyce was struck by its primitiveness, lacking windows.
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| Spring emerges with promise of life. The horseradish emerges during the dogwood winter in the Gaumer back yard. |
Joyce set the “Dogwood Winter” as our appointed date to meet to make some horseradish, a time of the first warm days just after the last of the snow is gone, when the blooms of the Dogwood set. Had we waited too long past the early, hoped for Spring, the horseradish would otherwise become too “pithy.”
I waited for Joyce to come home, she arrived in Curtin’s old black Dodge, her “fishin’ truck.” Once again she showed up the men at “the Pond” up in the Swamp, catching four meaty brookie’s in less than two hours. She soaked them in the kitchen sink while she went to work chopping up the horseradish roots.
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| Joyce once again shows up the men at her favorite fishing hole. |
We saved the peelings and the tops to replant, most of which ended up on my patch, the former farmette of Herman Ahner in Franklin Township, who also knew his way around a still. And along with it, comes the hope that the tradition will carry on. (Click here to read more on the Herman Ahner family.)
And now, just a few weeks later, the green leaves are already reaching into the air, to produce white flowers by June.
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| One of the smaller roots to go into our horseradish. The peelings though, were transplanted to the Rabenold homestead in Franklin Township so the tradition can be restarted at the former Herman Ahner homestead. |
In talking of these old habits, of reaping sustenance from these springtime offerings, Joyce laments, as perhaps only a Dutchwoman of her generation can, of how “young people today don’t take the time to do the simple things,” like picking dandelion greens for salads and making home-made hot bacon-dressing for on top. (The key is to pluck the leaves before the flowers emerge.)
She was always told how dandelion was good for “cleansing the blood.” Of course there is science today that supports this Dutch wisdom, citing dandelion’s plentiful iron and antioxidants. It’s the same wisdom that tells her to put bay leaves in her cupboards to keep the ants away each spring. It’s common sense. We placed the pieces of horseradish root into her food processor, adding “enough vinegar (only use white vinegar) to hold it together, to make it wet.”
We underestimated the power of our creation, it having thoroughly cleared our sinuses to such a degree that the open window wasn’t enough. We had to finish bottling it out on the porch.
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| Joyce reels from the vapor. |
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| We took to the porch as we were overcome by the strong horseradish vapors. |
We took our rest at the kitchen table, reflecting on our productive day over a glass of Curtin’s last bottle of dandelion wine. It was labeled “1984.”
We were warmed not only by our friendship and our little homesteader’s project but also by Curtin’s labors of so long ago.
We drank a toast, to spring and to the many springtime gifts, to Curtin, and to all good things that had passed, to the simple things, to the goodness of life to come.
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| If you have the pleasure to talk to Joyce you won't miss the joy in her voice when she speaks of her departed husband. The two were surely happy. |
POSTNOTE:
The following account has been transcribed word-for-word from The Miami News of Palm Beach, August 18, 1928 describing the wintergreen industry in the Pocono Mountains:
Waning Wintergreen
The old mountain industries die out as we progress. The wintergreen still, under pressure of the black birch, in on shaky legs. A few wintergreen distillers may be found up in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania and in several adjoining states, but they grow fewer.
The evergreen teaberry, or checker berry, is one of the commonest of mountain herbs. It is a pretty plant. Its flowers are white and bell shaped, its leaves of a leathery texture. Pleasantly flavored red berries follow the blossoms, but the wintergreen is distilled from the stems and the leaves. The checker berry grows in great abundance in the mountains of the Atlantic states and once yielded a fair income to collectors.
The remaining stills not infrequently afford a means of livelihood to several families each. Wintergreen oil was once a common cure for rheumatism. It is widely used now as a flavoring in cooking, medicine, chewing gum and confections. The distiller finds a market for all he can produce, but his small-capacity plant cannot compete with the chemist who produces synthetic wintergreen or extracts, as a substitute, the oil of the black birch.
Most of the gatherers of the checker berry herb are women. An efficient picker can collect 200 pounds a day, but the average is 125 pounds. This is brought to the crude outfit of the distiller, who pays about $3.25 for 100 pounds. The plants are put into the still with water. The container is sealed airtight. A fire beneath the great kettle boils the mixture. The condensed vapors drip from a coil into a jar. The oil sinks to the bottom, and the waste flows off the top. Then the oil is filtered and sold. The day’s production averages from two and one-half to three and one-half pounds of oil.
The distiller as a rule makes little more than 250 pounds of oil in a year. More energetic and larger operators have produced 600 pounds, but that output is rare.
The extracting of the oil from the bark of the sweet or black birch is a forest industry which has supplanted, to a great extent, the picturesque figure of the wintergreen distiller. In time it will be crowded out by the artificial product. The dawning synthetic age is due to bring many changes. It will be a more efficient, but hardly as colorful, era.