9.. The Chaffin Place

9. The Chaffin Place

Neil Vanderburg: Okay, well if you went on up the creek here, probably a mile and a half, there was the Chaffin place.

Bob Zybach: Now, would that be up this road here?

Neil Vanderburg: No.

Bob Zybach: Not towards Bennett's Mill, but up past.

Neil Vanderburg: Up this. . . see, there's a knob goes between this and this.

Bob Zybach: The one that. . . Okay. Between the two Berry Creek forks there?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Okay.

Neil Vanderburg: You went up the south fork. And you went up there probably a mile and half, two miles. It was a pretty good walk. And the Chaffin place was built up there and I knew Ralph Chaffin, who was a child when they lived up there. And they never built a road up there, and all their stuff was done with horse and buggies. And when we moved there the Chaffins had moved out because Mr. Chaffin had had a heart attack riding back up in there. He rode horseback, in and out of the farm there, and one night he didn't come home and his wife went down and. . . I met his wife also. And she went down and found him dead. The horse came in and he didn't, and she found him dead. And so she and the boy moved out. But he had built a nice two-story house there with a two-story fireplace in there. And I had quite a bit to do with that because we were hard up and there was a meadow down below the house. And we moved our cows up there in the summer, and we pastured that meadow and milked up there at the Chaffin place. But one of the big memories I have was, here was all these buggies up there -- about five of them. And being the mechanic I was I took all the bodies off of them, and then I could ride on the wheels and reaches and ride down the hill full tilt. So I destroyed a lot of valuable wagons, buggies. And then one of them that I took down there we ultimately made a cart out of to move our milk cans on. My dad.

Bob Zybach: How long had the Chaffins lived up there?

Neil Vanderburg: I have no idea. That's all I know about it, they were gone when we moved there. And they moved into Airlie. And where I met them for a short period while, we went to the, there was an Evangelical Church in Airlie, and we went to that church, Mrs. Chaffin and Ralph went to that church. And that's where I met them. But they never talked much about the history of that place. Of course, Ralph, he was kind of interested in my sister, too, all the single guys were around that area. But, anyway, I thought I ought to bring that in because I hadn't heard you mention the Chaffin place.

Bob Zybach: Well, I know where it is. And there is remnants and all this of an old homestead, we don't know...

Neil Vanderburg: Is the old fireplace still there?

Bob Zybach: That might be. They've got it marked from ten years ago. But to know the name of the family, and why they moved out, all that, the fact they had buggies there. .. Was the house still standing, when you were up there, pasturing up there?

Neil Vanderburg: Yes.

Bob Zybach: But no families moved in there or anything?

Neil Vanderburg: I wasn't pastoring, I was pasturing. [Laughs]

Bob Zybach: Okay, pasturing.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, we would stay there overnight. We had brought our bedrolls up there and we stayed overnight. And at that time, in the summertime, we could get in there with our old '29 Nash. And we would haul the milk out in the '29 Nash every morning, and then my dad and I would do our farming and stuff during the day, and then we'd go back up there at night and go find the cows, and.

Bob Zybach: But it was called the Chaffin place?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, it was the Chaffin place.

Bob Zybach: Okay. Was there any other families back in there, or anything back up on that road?

Neil Vanderburg: No, I don't.

Bob Zybach: So from that on, all the way back to the Chaffin place.

Neil Vanderburg: That was a beautiful walk back there, because that was old growth and the moss was about that deep, and in the spring it was just covered with these lady slippers, I don't know if you know what they are or not, but anyway it was just purple with ladyslippers on that road up there because the timber hadn't ever been cut between where Bill Coote quit cutting and where their house was.

Bob Zybach: Can you remember an orchard or anything associated with that house?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, yeah, there was an orchard in back of the house. A year or two later a family that lived in Airlie, her son was pasturing sheep up there, where we pastured our cows and there was two of them, two guys up there pasturing them, and the one guy got appendicitis and it had to come out, and so his mother asked my mother if I could go up there and stay with him so that he wouldn't be up there by himself. And so I went up there and stayed with him [Jerald McKibbenj probably ten days because it was a about a ten day recovery period for appendicitis at that time. And he had five dogs and he had built a holding pen for them at night and I hadn't ever seen dogs work much before that. And it was very interesting to punish a dog for not doing what it was supposed to. Hey, he had to stay with us all day. And that poor dog would just cry and fuss and whine and so forth all day long. The next day, it minded. But we would take those sheep out to a green patch, and then we'd find a shady ttee to lay under and watch those sheep all day, and whichever dog saw a sheep getting out of place, well it was the one that got to bring it back in, so they were all sitting there watching the sheep, and we were sitting there playing mumbly peg and one thing and another. Just to kill the time. And anyway, at night, we had a vee that came in to the pen and the dogs would get all the sheep up in this vee. We had 443 of them . . . no, 543. And so those dogs would line those sheep up around the vee that went into the pen, then one of us stand on each side and count the sheep as they went in and if there wasn't the right number then we sent the dogs out looking for them. So, it was real interesting to me to see how those dogs worked those sheep. We never herded sheep the whole time we were there, we just told the dogs what to do.

Bob Zybach: You were going through that old growth timber, but then you had all those sheep. So there must have been meadows or pasture .

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, there was some big meadows around the Chaffin house. And actually we could go from the Chaffin house and go on around and end up in Hanish's timber place. And...

Bob Zybach: Were there any other pastures or meadows up in that country there, or just around the Chaffin place?

Neil Vanderburg: Just around the Chaffin place. And they were natural meadows.

Bob Zybach: They weren't anything that Chaffin graded or anything?

Neil Vanderburg: No, huh uh. There was no stumps, and in those days you'd see stumps because they didn't bulldoze them out in those days.

Bob Zybach: Do you have any idea how big those meadows were?

Neil Vanderburg: I would say there was probably 40 acres in one and about 7 in the other. And then there was a couple of little small ones, three or four acres that we could take the sheep out on for a couple of days, to pasture them.

Bob Zybach: Then on those meadows, can you remember any of the types of grasses, or plants, any trees growing in there or around those meadows?

Neil Vanderburg: There was a kind of a swampy area down in the middle of it, right down in the middle of it. Like there was a spring in it, probably more than anything. I think they had spring water piped into the house there. They had pipes running. And they had put a bunch of buildings up there, they had a milk house up there and so forth. I have an idea that he probably separated and sold his cream and, with the cream you only had to take it out twice a week, so probably he didn't have too much, could put it on a pack horse or whatever, and take it down to sell it. Anyway, that's all I can tell you about the Chaffin place. But I thought you might be interested in it.

Bob Zybach: Oh, I'm real interested. That's absolutely all the information we have on it. And we know where ruins are around the forest, but we don't know who owned them or what they did, or don't know how they herded sheep, so all this is the type of information that we're exactly looking for.

Neil Vanderburg: We were on horseback there herding those sheep.

Bob Zybach: Doesn't sound like you needed them very much, sounds like the dogs did the work.

Neil Vanderburg: No, we just went out and back! But Gerald McKibbon was the guy I was herding sheep with, and he.

Bob Zybach: He's still alive, and I'm supposed to do an oral history with him.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, he's back on the old McKibbon place now. He lived over in Lebanon for a number of years. And I knew his brother-in-law over in Lebanon. Today, but

Bob Zybach: I've been meaning to talk with him for some time. He's the person I'm supposed to interview. I've got two or three people I still haven't interviewed and he's one.

Neil Vanderburg: Well, he could probably tell you some more about that Chaffin place.

Bob Zybach: Good, and that's good to know, because I didn't even know to ask about that. I'm mostly concerned about Camp Adair with him, because he lived along there through Camp Adair. Okay, so we've covered the Chaffin, and Coote s Mill up on top, and the Gardner fr1mily there, and the two earlier mills that closed, so as we come around back towards Hanish's wood patch, and move back towards the highway, would Hanish's be the first place you'd run into then?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, Hanish's was the only habitable place in there.

Bob Zybach: Now, he mentioned finding back in the hills -- he didn't know the Chaffins, but he knew that there had been people living back in there. He mentioned that he found skulls of sheep with curved horns. Do you know anything about that at all?

Neil Vanderburg: They were probably Chaffin's sheep, but I couldn't tell you.

Bob Zybach: Anti you never heard of any other family living back in that country or anything?

Neil Vanderburg: That's the only one that I know of that was back there.