If you are coming out of the village on 52 west and you get to the hideously designed new condominiums for which some genius believed the village’s building height restrictions should be overridden and the building allowed to swell to three stories of bland uniformity while sitting on top of a knoll, if you drive past that without driving into a ditch, also on the left, you might glance at a small brown barn surviving, still, within its current state of considerable distress, since the 1800’s. This was known as Herman’s barn, and I forget now if Herman was his first name or his last.

Herman was a friend of Pop’s and the land once associated with the barn – a compact barn with a handful of cow stalls and box stalls for draft horses and a fine haymow upstairs where we often stored excess hay when our home barn was full -- the land stretched back of the barn west to the eastern base of Houtman’s Hill. Those with some sense of geology and its encompassing hydrology know that very often at the base of, or along ledges of soil riding the sides of hills, seeps, or springs, or wet spots often manifest. The field of Herman’s barn had such wet spots and in one corner of the field was a spring house protecting the constant source and flow of Houtman Hill water.

Pop had a particular affinity for this little field and, with Herman well past the age of active farming, we often took off the hay for Herman and used the hay for heifers and other livestock. I think Pop liked the field for its uncommon birdlife, flush with warblers, and with cardinals and catbirds nesting in the thick red dogwood bushes growing in the buffer between the seeps and the hill. And for the purity of its spring. A tin cup hung inside the door of the spring house and any field hand or hunter or whoever had knowledge of the place took a drink whenever it suited. Such was the nature of country.

During a dry springtime when I was newly a teenager, Pop, seeking to expand the productivity of his one-man farm, plowed this small field and disked it and planted it in corn. The soil, even during a drought, was plenty wet enough for corn, and not having seen a corn seed kernel for a generation, grew a thick, dark green corn like a stand of bamboo. It was tremendous, way over a man’s head and something to get lost in.
It was an odd summer, very hot, but with just enough violent showers and lightning storms to keep the corn growing at top speed. Pop did not grow corn for dried ears, or grain, but rather for corn silage which was best chopped and stored in a silo while still vibrantly green and full of life. There are few crops farmers love watching grow as much as they like to watch corn because it grows like baby geese, so fast you can think you are watching it move as you stand next to it. Progress is immediate and discernible. Pop walked into the field many times that summer, to check the progress and get a drink at the now invisible spring house, overgrown with corn, and he dragged me along with him a couple times, and we looked for bird nests in the back brambles during those few stolen minutes, or he named a warbler, or a vireo.

Of course, all farming stories worth their salt are about tragedy or unimaginable hardship and this one will be no exception.

During the ‘60’s, hurricanes did not have the round-the-clock hyperbolic media coverage they have today, but any farmer schooled in the vagaries of weather knew when one was brewing. The corn was ready for harvesting. All the machinery greased. The blower was set up against the silo. To start the field, Pop had a flatbed trailer hooked behind the tractor. The job was to cut by hand the first rows of corn and stack them on the flatbed. This cutting gave the chopper and tractor and corn wagon room to get into the field without crushing the first rows of corn. As I remember the chopper it was a two-row corn chopper that cut two rows of corn at a time, self-fed the corn into the body of the machine wherein the corn stalk and ears and tassels were all chopped up as the name implies and blown out a chute into a large green silage wagon, pulled behind in triple tandem, with a top to catch the streaming chopped silage.

But the timing was one day off, and the storm came in during the morning and ripped off the top of the maple tree behind the farmhouse’s back porch and toppled it into the pasture and the storm intensified during the afternoon and then raged all night. Our mother stood us in the middle of the house under a doorframe.
By morning the storm passed and when we went to look at the cornfield by Herman’s barn, the corn was lying flat in the field as if rolled out like dough by Gram’s rolling pin. The tractor and chopper were useless and the field wet as a children’s wading pool.

But farmers cannot afford to waste valuable food stores and Pop spent the next few weeks cutting the corn by hand, with a hand sickle (see photo), and loading the wagon which could not get into the field without getting stuck so was parked on the edge of the field, and he cut and carried and brought the corn home load by load, and then fed them stalk-by-stalk through the chopper and then we got it into the blower to get it all up into the concrete silo.

That was the final crop planted on Herman’s farm, and, in subsequent decades, “Winding Brook Homes” grew from that wet but fertile soil. Pop was right when he said the last thing farmland grows is houses. The spring house was torn down and the water source engineered into pipes, and the field drained as best it could, all underground, but you can see the water flow emerge from the culvert under 52, right on the village line, and watch it run east to the Wallkill River. And if you look quick, Herman’s brown barn still stands.