I like Ike.  Almost everyone does.  Fast as a cheetah.  Cleopatra eyes.  An infectious giggle and a thrill-seeking shriek that shatters fine stemware if you’re not careful.  Plus, he has more game than EA Inc. on steroids, or Milton Bradley in their glorious Colonel-Mustard-in-the-billiard-room-with-a-candle-stick heyday.  Just before the pandemic hit in March we had a few hours to ourselves one Saturday morning, so he got all duded up in fluorescent sports gear to ride shotgun with me to Tractor Supply for cat food and chicken feed.  He looked like Iggy Pop in a 1980s aerobicize video, blinding me as he catapulted himself into the man van.  On our way down Feura Bush Road, we saw massive plumes billowing up from the tree line due East in an otherwise cloudless sky.  I explained that these weren’t clouds, but in fact steam from the stacks of the old NiMo (now PSEG) plant on River Road, and that his grandfather worked for Niagara Mohawk for more than 30 years.  In fact, Grandpa Joe’s last day of work on planet earth was April 24, 1981 at the company’s Glenmont office on Plank Road, across from Johnny B’s Diner (at that time still called Miss Glenmont), where Ike eats with his grandmother at least three times a week in the summer.  They even make an egg sandwich especially for him: “The Ikey Special.”

“Do you want to see the smokestacks?” I asked.

“Can we listen to Cheap Trick?” he replied.

So with Live at Budokan blast-capping the Bluetooth I showed him the plant down on Route 144 – four massive silos built by NiMo in 1952, only two years after the massive consolidation of over 500 power companies statewide to form the corporation. According to the incredibly well-done historian’s tome Bethlehem Revisited it was the first large-scale industrial site established in the township after World War II.  Those stacks each serve a generator that, combined, can produce enough power to serve a half million people!  A local tree farmer told me that Bethlehem received massive annual payments in lieu of taxes on that site and it was a sweetheart deal for the town – until it wasn’t.

From there it quickly got all 19th Century up in my Man Van, starting with a pullover at 144 at Mosher Road to snap the practically bomb-proof pillar that once marked the road to Ten Eyck Mosher’s summer home.  Mosher was an Albany real estate mogul and Ike thought the date on the pillar, stamped “1865,” was the house number!  Pretty cool to think about what was going down in America when a mason or two banged that thing out 155 years ago.  Robert E. Lee surrendering to Grant at Appomattox to mark the ceremonial end to the Civil War, for starters.  Or President Lincoln killed by an assassin’s bullet after barely surviving the war emotionally due to arrogant, incompetent generals at its onset and the death of his young son Willie a few years earlier.  The founding of Cornell University, as well as the U.S. Secret Service.  The first publication of Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” in the Saturday Evening Post.  And yet, here that stone pillar sits after a century and a half of Upstate New York winters, as if the mortar had just set yesterday.

As a postscript, I just had to show Ike the actual “Lyon Lions” on Barent Winne Road.  These majestic granite statues marked the entrances to the Cedar Hill summer estate of prosperous printer/bookseller J. B. Lyon, and depending on which news account one believes, he either had these carved for him by a guy named Brioschi from New York City or purchased them from the owners of Albany’s Delevan House hotel after it burned to the ground in December 1894.  Lyon ran his successful firm on Broadway well into the 20th Century, in what eventually became the Williams Press building, employing a lot of Bethlehem folk in the process.

Since we were already on Barent Winne, we paid a visit to the gorgeous brick Italianate Victorian home of the road’s namesake, who ran a Hudson River barge-freight company until he was tragically killed in a car accident in 1932.  For years afterward, however, his son Barent Jr. could be seen in his rocker on the back porch, legs wrapped in a blanket, watching the riverboat traffic.  He was apparently a very friendly fellow, and let curious travelers access the waterfront from his landing.  This property has a loooooong and well-documented history and is perfectly situated right on the Hudson River.  It was constructed in 1868 by the senior Winne on the site of an older brick colonial built in 1715 by his ancestor Daniel Winne, son of Pieter Winne, the Dutchman from Flanders who came to America and first settled in Selkirk around 1652.  It remains a single-family residence, with several of its original corn cribs, carriage sheds and other outbuildings still standing (as well as an ancient privy).  I can’t tell if it’s just luck or a true miracle of engineering that the river hasn’t washed it away.

This led to a discussion with my son as to why settlers built homes so close to water in Colonial times (“There was no Amazon.com back then” I told Ike) and how some of these properties became summer homes to wealthy Albany families in the 1800’s, so we cruised over to Van Wie Point – where Winne and son had their warehouses and docks for Bethlehem merchants shipping their goods by boat to points south and New York City – so we could see some more of them.  The spot was also a docking point for large ships and barges headed into Albany since the Hudson was too shallow to get much further in that age.  It was named after Hendrick Van Wie, a Dutch fellow whose trip to America was paid by his sponsor in beaver pelts (hey, it was the 1600s).  A best buddy to both of my kids is a direct descendant, so we paid respects to the site of the original house and also checked out Dr. William Hailes’ Bonnie Castle. Hailes died young from a massive stroke but was a respected Albany pathologist at Albany Medical College during his time on earth.  At this point we had started in on the Alice Cooper catalogue in the van and Ike turned to me, his baseball cap perpetually askew to the heartsick thrum of “Didn’t We Meet?”

“Why did they need summer homes if they only lived down the road?”

Great question, especially considering he’s only eight.  The most poignant inquiry I could make to my father at that age was related to why Cruise Director Julie got kicked off The Love Boat (answer: cocaine) but here was Ike, already doing the math and realizing that downtown Albany is only about seven miles from where we stood.

“Why do you think?” I asked.

“To get away from the poor people?” he said without hesitation.

“Sadly, that was probably true for some,” I said. “But it was also because in those days, traveling seven miles was like driving from here to Sacandaga Lake today.  It was a long trip and you had to plan for it.  Because rocky, muddy dirt roads. Because tolls.  Because horses. Because in the summer some parts of Albany smelled like the carcass of a dead Brachiosaurus.”

“Oh, get wrecked!” he exclaimed, which is his response to everything these days, from scoring a touchdown to watching a hawk snatch a rabbit off the lawn and carry it into a cobalt blue sky, much like the one which we were presently enjoying.

From there, we climbed the hill to see Hidden Acres Golf Course and then paid a visit the Bethlehem Historical Association’s building, which was once the site of the one-room Bethlehem School District #1.  The “little red schoolhouse” was gifted to the town in 1964, when it was the oldest continuously active school building in Bethlehem and maybe Albany County as a whole (district consolidation began here almost 30 years prior).  I checked the time and figured we should at least pretend like we were going to Tractor Supply, so we sped up Clapper Road and hopped on 9W.  At the Wemple intersection Ike asked if we could go into the old Heath’s Dairy ruins still standing on the northeast corner, and while I desperately wanted to oblige, I figured best not to encourage flagrant trespassing, particularly in broad daylight and especially if it involved falling through broken floorboards and impaling ourselves on old farm equipment.

That’s when he asked about the farmer who got hit by the train.  Sort of an odd pivot so took me a second to realize he was talking about good ol’ Cyrus Bender, a one-time owner of our property whose farmhouse sat in the exact footprint of our current family home.  I was told by lifelong Elsmere Avenue resident Virginia Lee Cook (who goes by “Cookie”) that the former was a wooden Colonial that had fallen into disrepair, and the deed abstract for our house indicates that it was likely the original farmhouse of Revolutionary War Lt. John Leonard, who rests in an unmarked grave on the Hamagrael Elementary school property.  The home was referred to as “Tory House,” because it was seized from a loyalist to the British Crown prior to Leonard’s time there.

Anyway, poor Cyrus was ground to hamburger by a D&H railroad train en route to Albany from Binghamton on March 30, 1898.  A successful farmer by news accounts, Cyrus lost control of his horses and carriage where the rail crossing intersects Elsmere Avenue – an at-grade crossing back then – and his fateful decision to stay aboard and attempt to beat the “No. 2 Special” across the intersection yielded nasty results, which entailed getting dragged beneath the engine’s cow catcher for about 100 yards as the engineer pulled the brakes.

Judging from other press stories from that era, Cyrus was one tough son of a bitch, surviving stray dog attacks and taking on two sons of rival farmer Bill Griffiths in a fistfight that left him with a shattered right cheekbone and one of his farmhands brained half to death with a shovel head. He also subtracted 10 years from his age on the draft rolls to sign up for the 43rd New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment under Captain John Orton Cole in the Civil War.  His grandfather was Sgt. Christian Bender, one of two Revolutionary War soldiers buried at Bethlehem Cemetery in Delmar.  Cyrus, however, is buried with his wives Emma Oliver and Rachel Paddock at Elmwood Cemetery in Glenmont, making him only one of two bloodline Benders buried there (most Benders from that era are interred at Bethlehem).  It was this grave Ike wanted to find.  I can’t believe he actually remembered that story… cautionary tale, dads!  We had already passed Elmwood but the cats were probably home just licking the space where their nuts used to be anyway, and it was getting warmer and the sun sat pleasantly in the February sky, beckoning.  So, we spun the car around to check it out.

Inadvertently (if you believe in that sort of thing) Ike had highlighted a Glenmont connection to the people who owned our land in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  I’m not a frequent visitor to Elmwood, but I had visited at least once before, to see the grave of a woman named Jane Louisa Barkhoff.  Louisa, as she was called, was another descendant of German immigrants in Bethlehem who purchased 30-plus acres of sandy farmland from her elderly Aunt Emma soon before her death in 1919, and she subdivided it in the 1930s to set the stage for how our side of Elsmere between Norge Road and Fernbank Avenue looks from the road to this day – including our six acres across from Wellington Road.

In her youth, Louisa was a housekeeper for Glenmont farmer William Wemple, whose brother John was town supervisor for a spell after the Civil War.  Their father Gilbert owned a hauntingly beautiful but long-abandoned Greek Revival farmhouse on the hill along lower Wemple Road (it finally got the wrecking ball in the fall of 2019 – hope you saw it while you could).  She never married and never lived on the land she owned, but she appears to have been a shrewd businesswoman; perhaps it is no coincidence that local developer Greg Biche from Quality PM, Inc. is a direct descendant (her 2nd great nephew).

I told Ike this tale as he sat on the headstone she shares with her sister Maria, like a proud papa sitting in his favorite chair waiting for kick-off.  I also let him know that townsfolk called Maria “Rittie” and she was the last person to live in John Leonard’s old farmhouse before it “got wrecked” to build our 1948 home.   She lived there with boyfriend Bill Bender – our own Cyrus’s nephew – and Louisa’s will stipulated that Rittie was allowed to live in the house after her death for as long as she was able.  And that she did, according to my friend Cookie.

“I was in that house several times, but only was allowed in through the back entrance,” she recalled once, during a phone chat. “That was the kitchen. They didn’t want anyone in the rest of the place.  They were hoarders.”

Cookie also explained that poor Rittie’s personal hygiene wasn’t always the best.  “Bill died before her, and soon after that she couldn’t look after herself,” Cookie explained. “So the church paid my mother a dollar a day to have her live with us.  She had terrible toenails.  She never clipped them, and they curled out as they got longer.  We used to have to give her baths.”

“Get wrecked!” Ike shouted, once again, with glee.

By that time however we were literally walking in circles, trying to find Cyrus’s grave.  Elmwood is small, but damned if we could find it.  We walked in circles for at least an hour, our snowy footprints like coyote tracks peppering every section of the joint.  We explored the mausoleum, which was eerily half open, and we talked about how before heavy equipment existed the bodies had to be stored there until the ground thawed enough to bury them.  We scoped out the only private vault on the property, a Greek temple affair with intact stained-glass windows belonging to the Niver-Eddy family, whose patriarch Peter Niver was on the three-man committee that surveyed the First Reformed Church’s farm property to expand its existing cemetery so they could close the one on church grounds.  One of the committeemen was none other than Daniel P. Winne (owner of that fine riverside haven described earlier) and Robert Selkirk,a direct descendent of James Selkirk, who emigrated from Scotland in 1775 and fought in the pivotal Battle of Saratoga, which resulted in the surrender of British General John Burgoyne.  Man, we even found William Wemple’s grave, and also the resting place of John Witbeck, who once lived across the street from us at 123 Elsmere Avenue in the 1930s.  But our cheeks were getting ruddy.  Our noses started to run.  I was ready to pack it in.  Ike is rugged and I could tell he was really enjoying this scavenger hunt through time with his dear old dad, but I could also see he was getting cold, hungry and tired.

So I did what I usually do in these situations.  I cheated.

Findagrave.com has most of Elmwood’s residents catalogued, most with headstone shots.  Cyrus Bender’s stone came right up on the iPhone, but even though it was atypical for this cemetery – a square stone but with rounded edges – the few we found did not belong to him.  If I was alone, I would have been pounding my pale dome into the unthawed earth in Ren & Stimpy “Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy” manner by then, but I held fast lest my youngest emulate this behavior on the basketball court or some other public place.

Finally, we enlarged the headstone picture and realized we could see a piece of a tall monument in the background that looked like the only one situated to the left of the Niver-Eddy vault.  We also noted the position of a few other monuments as well as the contour of the land in the background, and gradually traversed the grounds until our viewshed matched that of the camera lens and… bingo!  Cyrus Bender.  Massive hugs and high-fives, primal victory screams, throwing articles of warmth in the air and much laughter.  You’d think the Seahawks won the Super Bowl.

The rest of the day seemed pretty tame after that.  We never did make it to Tractor Supply, but that’s OK.  I was aboard the Ikey Special.