THE SCRIBBLER II
The Cavendish Historical Society Newsletter
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PO Box 472 Cavendish, VT 05142
802-226-7807 margocaulfield@icloud.com
Spring 2022 Vol. 16, Issue 2
UPCOMING EVENTS
May 27-28 (Friday-Saturday): CHS Annual Plant Sale; 5-7 pm Friday; 9-Noon Sat. We will have container veggie plants, including tomatoes (Cherry, Sungold and Early Girl) and lettuce buckets. If you are interested in one of these containers, please order ASAP using the above contact information. Moonlite Meadows Farm will also be on hand with their grass fed beef and other products.
May 29 (Sunday): Museum opens for the season 2-4 pm
June 18 (Saturday): Midsummer Night’s Eve Cavendish Village Ghost Walk. Meet at the Museum at 8 pm. Wear comfortable walking shoes and bring a flashlight. Lots of new stories this year.
July 30 (Saturday): 11th Annual Town Wide Tag Sale, 9-2 CHS booth will be on the Proctorsville Green
August (Sunday): Cavendish Gorge Walk (see article below). Date to be determined.
September 11 (Sunday): Annual Phineas Gage Walk & Talk, begins 2 pm at the Museum. Wear comfortable walking shoes.
October 9 (Sunday): Last Sunday the Museum is open
December (Date to be announced): Christmas Ghost Walk Proctorsville
The Museum is open on Sundays from 2-4 pm from Memorial Day weekend to Indigenous Peoples weekend. To visit the Museum at other times, please use the contact information above to arrange a date and time.
REMEMBERING SEYMOUR LEVEN
It is with sadness that we report the passing of Dr. Seymour Leven on Feb. 15 at 99 years of age. A WWII vet, he was a valued member of Cavendish as well as CHS.
In 2013, he, Carmine Guica and Jim Hasson spoke to the 6th grade at Cavendish Town Elementary School (CTES) about their war experiences. At that time there were six WWII vets living in Cavendish, and eight from Cavendish who lived elsewhere. Seymour was the last of the 2013 group. Jim Hasson died in 2021 and Carmine in 2016.
Originally from Grand Rapids, MI, Seymour had several reasons for enlisting: to keep up with his older brother; his dislike of school (he had already finished two years of college) and he had family in Lithuania who were forced into the concentration camps.
Initially in officer’s training school, he was moved into gunnery and bombardier training. Instead of going to Europe, as he had hoped, he was sent to the Pacific as a tail gunner on a B-29 bomber, serving with the 881st Bomb Squadron, 500th Bomb group. At one point, Seymour’s crew went stateside for additional training. While it was top secret at the time, it later became apparent that his flight crew was among those that would be the back-up for the Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Completing 23 aerial combat missions, Seymour’s division, located on Saipan was featured in the War Department’s film The Last Bomb-US Army Air Force, B 29 Raids on Japan, WWII 22050.
After the war, Seymour took advantage of the GI bill to complete college and graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School. He became a psychiatrist, eventually becoming the medical director of the Nassau County, NY Mental Health Department. Working with combat veterans, including those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of his areas of interest was post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). After retiring from a full time medical practice in 1978, he worked until he was close to 90 as a “locum tenens,” where he traveled around the country, filling in for other doctors.
Seymour had lots of interests including golf, cooking-more than once he noted that if he had it to do over again he’d be a chef-, boxing, story-telling and a great love of quantum physics. His granddaughter, Jade, summed it up best, which she posted after his death, Wherever you are now, Poppy, hopefully already spinning around at the speed of light as a neutrino, enjoying a Pina colada and a plate of oysters (as nonsensical as that might be), know that we love you and we miss you
Seymour was a CHS board member in part because he wanted to support his wife Gloria. However, he helped to shape the CHS attitude of “just get it done.” As he pointed out at a meeting, “I don’t have a lot of time, so let’s just do it and stop talking about it.” If you knew Seymour, you know his actual language was a tad more colorful.
In honor of Seymour, there will be a military salute at the Cavendish Village Cemetery on High St followed by a gathering at the Cavendish Baptist Church on Saturday, June 4th 2022 at 2:00pm. Please bring your stories and remembrances.
Our condolences to his wife Gloria, his two sons Andy (Mary), and Bobby, granddaughter Jade Lily Ormrod-Leven, great grandson Jasper and his sister Liz Wolfson.
CAVENDISH GORGE
In August, CHS will conduct a walk to the Cavendish Gorge. In preparation for the tour, we came across a survey report from July 1983 by J.C. Jenkins as part of The Water- Falls, Cascades and Gorges of VT: For the Agency of Natural resources Dept of Environmental Conservation and the Dept of Forests and Recreation. Below are excerpts from the report
The
gorge is on a back road about three-quarters of a mile from the center of town.
The nearest houses are about one- quarter mile away. The entrance road is not
marked, and is comparatively rough; hence, the area is accessible but not
obvious.
Both
sides of the gorge are wooded with second-growth pine and hemlock stands. To
the east is Hawks Mountain and to the west a small cobble which isolates it
from Route 131 and the Town of Cavendish. At the head of the gorge is a
concrete dam about 30 feet high and 75 feet long, with a steel catwalk to
service the flashboards and two small buildings. The water is diverted into a
buried penstock north of the gorge. At the bottom of ~he gorge is a
medium-sized powerhouse probably built in the 19 20 s. Note: The Powerhouse
was built in 1907 and is now owned and operated by Green Mountain Power.
The
gorge turns a corner about 50 yards below the dam, and has high steep walls;
hence the dam, powerhouse, and the penstock are not visible from the main part
of the gorge and much of the gorge is undisturbed and private.
The Black River is a medium-sized river averaging 20-40 feet wide above the gorge. It receives treated waste in Ludlow and Proctorsville, and is classified as c water for two miles below Cavendish. Despite this the water in the gorge actually appears to be quite good, with no taste or odor and very little turbidity. There are good mayfly and stonefly populations within the gorge and we may assume that the water is well oxygenated. Note: Black River Action Team (BRAT) tests the water quality of the swimming hole just below the Gorge weekly during the summer months. Unless there has been a recent rain, the water quality is good and suitable for recreation.
The
gorge averages 50-lOO feet wide at the base, with slanting or sheer rock walls
from 50-80 feet high. The rock is a hard quartzite schist with garnets and
quartz veins, described by the geological map as the Cambrian Hoosic Schist. It
is not at all limy. There are boulders ten to 20 feet high in the stream
channel, and in the lower part of the gorge many of these have had potholes cut
into them. Some are almost cut entirely away.
There are no major falls; rather, the channel consists of a series of small falls or chutes linking pools of various sizes. The largest and finest of these is about 70 feet by 40 feet with a depth of nine feet at low water. It is almost completely circled by high, moss-covered rock walls, and is the sort of private swimming and sunning place that everyone dreams about (although swimming is discouraged in Class c water due to the health threat).
Because of the lack of soil, all the vascular plants in the gorge are confined to ledge tops and cracks in the walls. The flora is simple, consisting only of a few common species, mostly ferns, grasses and tree seedlings. No rarities occur. No list of vascular plants was made. As a whole, they play a very casual part in the botany of the gorge.
Visually it is a striking place; the rocks and the mosses are beautiful, the water is clean, and there are high walls and handsome pools. You cannot hear cars from the gorge, and because it is narrow and winding you have a strong sense of privacy and isolation. A lovely and satisfying place in good condition.
Some people refer to the area as “Lover’s Leap” with two different stories connected to it.
The first story comes from “Myths & Legends of Our Own Land,” Charles Montgomery Skinner published in 1896. At a turn in the ravine rises the sheer precipice of Lover’s Leap. It is a vertical descent of almost eighty feet, the water swirling at its foot in a black and angry maelstrom. It is a spot when lovers might easily step into eternity, were they so disposed, and the name fits delightfully into the wild and somber scene; but ask any good villager thereabout to relate the legend of the place and he will tell you this. Two young farmers went to the gorge to gather rocks for a foundation wall. A quarrel ensued and one the farmer’s lost his balance and fell into the Gorge. Expecting to see a mangled corpse, the other farmer peered over the edge and saw the other man climbing up the side of the precipice. “Are you hurt much?” the first farmer shouted. The victim slowly and painfully stood, then began to search his pockets. A look of grave concern crossed his face. “Waal, I ain’t hurt much, but I’ll be durned if I haven’t lost my jack-knife.”
The second story is of an Indian maiden and a young man who were in love. Fearing they would never be able to marry as they came from different cultures, they jumped from Lover’s Leap. We learned of this interpretation while compiling materials for a Cavendish Players production back in 2011.
100 UNIQUE THINGS ABOUT CAVENDISH: PART II
Part I in this series appears in the Winter 2022 Scribbler II, which is available at the CHS blog, address above. It covers the following topics from Bruce McEnaney’s October 14, 1991 talk entitled “100 Unique Things About Cavendish:” schoolhouses; Belknap’s; Cemeteries; the Durkin House (Coffeen homestead); Dairy farms/cows; sugaring; and marble quarry. Bruce’s talk comments appear in italics, with current status in plain text.
The View from Derby’s: There are few places that still have a view that you can look off like that or where, what I call the uplands fields. Not unique to Cavendish, there are a lot of places in Vermont where you can look off on a hillside and look down to a valley below, but that is ours. The view from the S Reading road is very popular, and is often photographed in the fall.
High Brook Farm/Mad Wives Stable (Bates Mansion at Brook Farm):
The Steps to No Where: I think that it is an interesting part of the past when you consider that you, not too long ago, and many of you remember, I barely do. You could walk from downtown Cavendish, walk down to the train station and go right up at the top of those stairs and you could go wherever you wanted to go. We call it progress now and you can’t even do that. The stairs at the underpass on Mill St. still lead to “no where,” the site of the old Cavendish Village Depot.
Pleasant St (formerly Polaski St): I love this street. I think what I like most about it, and maybe, at least this has been to me and I have no reason to doubt it, all of those houses up along there were built as a direct result of flood [1927 flood], when people who lived in the village lost their houses. They surveyed out a road, or marked out a road and sold off some lots up there so most of those houses were built in 1928 or 1929? Is that right?. Someone in the audience “Francis Couliard’s was built in 30, the one by the windmill is. They didn’t lose anything in the flood. He just bought the lot. The Gay Brothers owned the property at that time.” Okay, so they deeded off the lots and enabled the people that were wiped out in the flood to build. Interesting street and interesting circumstances leading to a string of houses. According to Barbara Kingsbury’s history of Cavendish, between the Red Cross and contributions, money was raised to help those who lost their homes but had no flood insurance. “The Red Cross saw to it that the two houses partially under minded by the flood were moved back to safer sites. They provided funds to build houses for Tony Prokulewicz and Lucy Sperry, an elderly widow, on what became Polaski Street and bought a house on the street to the cemetery for Harry Bemis.” According to Bruce, the Gays donated the land. Why Polaski St.? The name Pulaski is used throughout the United States in memory of Gen. Casimir Pulaski, who was an American Revolutionary War foreign military volunteer. Since Tony Prokulewicz was a valued Gay Brothers’ employee, it is suspected the street name was chosen to honor his Polish heritage.
PRESERVE & SERVE
The CHS Carmine Guica Young Historians (CGYH) program’s Preserve & Serve has students cleaning and greening up for spring/summer. The 6th graders have been helping one of our neighbors who can no longer do yard work. They’ll also be laying flags on all the veteran graves in the Cavendish cemeteries and will follow up with grave stone cleaning. Fourth and 5th grades are tackling the school park. It’s amazing how much you can get done with a group of hard working kids. Special thanks to our students, volunteers and to the Cavendish Community Fund, whose grants has help equip the students with ample gear.
The end of the school year is a busy time as not only do the Young Historians help to “preserve and serve,” but they also have an opportunity to take some field trips. This year the 4-6th grades are going to St. Gaudens and to the Precision Valley Museum. The third grade will participate in a program at the Enfield Shaker Museum. A special thank you to Ernestine van Schaik whose generous support helped to start the CGYH and makes these trips possible.
BECOME A MEMBER, RENEW YOUR MEMBERSHIP, DONATE
If you have not joined the Cavendish Historical Society, need to renew your membership, and/or would like to be a volunteer, please complete the form below and sending a check, payable to CHS, to CHS, PO Box 472, Cavendish, VT 05142. All contributions are tax deductible.
Name: _______________________________________
Address: _______________________________________________
Phone Number: _____________________ E-Mail: ____________________________
Membership Level
__ Individual Member $10 __ Senior Member 65+ $5 __ Sustaining Member $500
__ Household Member $15 ___ Contributing Member $250
Volunteer
___ I would be interested in serving, as a volunteer .I would be interested in serving on the following committee(s):__ Program Planning __ Fundraising __ Building (Museum)
__Archives _ Budget –– Cemetery __ Carmine Guica Young Historians
Donations are always welcome and can be designated as follows:
__ For general purposes __ Young Historians __Publications
__ Archaeological Activities _ Museum & Archival __ Special Events
__ Rankin Fund __ Williams Fund __ Solzhenitsyn Project
__ Other (please specify) __ Cemetery Restoration __ Preservation Projects
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