J.. The Vanderburg Place

Neil Vanderburg: lived there, and she was an invalid, she never got out of bed. I think she just wanted to be waited on. She had money, and that's where the money came for the Coote's Mills and the Cornutt Mills, because she was the mother and mother-in-law of those two boys. I know that they really catered to her. And I used to go in and see her with Clifford Cornutt, we'd go in there and we were ordered to go in and say "Hi" to her. But she never got out of bed and so I don't know what was supposed to be wrong with her, but she didn't appear to have anything wrong with her except she just liked to be waited on.

Bob Zybach: Her name was Cornutt?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, she was a Cornutt. Now do you want to go ahead from here or do you want to move on down to look at where other people lived?

Bob Zybach: Well, from here is fine.

Neil Vanderburg: Well, there is a lot of trees there now. From here I could have seen the school house when I lived here.

Bob Zybach: Well, why don't we go down to where we can see things then.

Neil Vanderburg: Okay.

J. The Vanderburg Place

Bob Zybach: Okay, we're right in front of your old homestead and we're looking at an apple tree due south behind the maples.

Neil Vanderburg: That gravenstein apple was just on the south side of our house and east a little bit behind our wood shed. That had the best gravenstein apples you ever tasted on it, and I see they're ripe right now.

Bob Zybach: You want to go get one and see if they still taste so good?

Neil Vanderburg: I think we better go get one!

Bob Zybach: Okay, let's go do it. ***

Neil Vanderburg: And the mail boxes were just about where they are now. Yeah, they were, beside Coote's driveway. And I don't think it'd be the same and this long back, but you see

Bob Zybach: Now, all these maples were here, it wasn't just a couple, it was a whole row of them.

Neil Vanderburg: No, this whole row was here. But you see the number of people lived in this valley. That's how many mail boxes were there.

Bob Zybach: Oh, so you've got two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen. . . eighteen or twenty names. So you had 18 or 20 mailboxes.

Neil Vanderburg: Those are last names.

Bob Zybach: And each one of those represented a different house in this Beri'y Creek Valley here.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Doesn't seem possible when you look at it now, to think there was that many people there that long ago.

Bob Zybach: No, supposed to be just be the urban fringe now, and it used to be an urban neighborhood.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, only we had a school house, and we had Sunday school, and I mean, you didn't drive to town.

Bob Zybach: This was a regular little community in itself.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, it was a community itself. We didn't go to town to church. It was too far, too expensive. And the cars weren't that reliable that you wanted to take off on a Sunday.

Bob Zybach: And you don't remember a name for that Peak up there?

Neil Vanderburg: No, I don't.

Bob Zybach: I'm looking at what Jim Hanish calls Forest Peak.

Neil Vanderburg: Could be Forest Peak, I never even noticed it when I lived here, to be right honest with you.

Bob Zybach: Kind of a dominant land mark.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, it is. We went this way and we went that way. And Jim Hanish's dad logged back in there, the Chaffin place was back in there Bennett's was back behind Dickey's. So I never realized it stood that high. I mean, I knew there was a hill there, but I didn't realize it came to a peak like that 'dl you pointed it out.

Bob Zybach: But those trees out in the foreground, that was all logged off?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Do you recall any large trees, like I see a couple of old trees up there now. Can you recall any trees like that along the skyline or anything?

Neil Vanderburg: I think that they left seed trees. They left all their slashing and stuff, you know, I mean, they didn't burn and they didn't clean up after themselves. And... but you see old Bill Coote, he horse logged and moved his mills to the logs. See, that's why he's got two mills down here only half a mile apart and another one up there only a mile and a half away. Because he could horse log and he would log down.

Bob Zybach: It was easier to move the mill than it was to move all those logs?

Neil Vanderburg: You bet. You didn't have all that automated equipment. You fall those logs and hook onto them with a horse and drag them out and you wanted to drag them down hill as much as you could, basically on the side hill so the logs didn't go over the top of your horses. And after they logged for a while, they'd get a groove wore in the dirt so the log wouldn't roll down the hill. You always drove your teams from the top side so if it did roll you weren't underneath it.

Bob Zybach: Was there ever an orchard over on the right side? We're looking at, I can't tell, maybe that's a pear tree there off to the west?

Neil Vanderburg: To my knowledge, there was never anybody interested in that type of thing here. They were renters and I don't remember any fruit off that place. The only thing I remember is there used to be a barn down below the house here by the creek, there was an old oak tree down there, and it had black bees in it, honey bees. My dad and I went down there and felled that bee tree and got about 10 gallons of honey out of it. And we got stung royal. Those old black bees were mean. We had a big old tree over here about where that maple tree is. And that was a big old tree and it was a honey tree. And we felled that and we pulled about 40 gallons of honey out of that tree.

Bob Zybach: Was that the whole reason for falling the tree, was for honey?

Neil Vanderburg: You bet.

Bob Zybach: So now we do it for board foot, but back then you did it for honey.

Neil Vanderburg: Well, we made wood out of it. But we felled it because it had bees in it. We wanted the honey. Back in the Depression it was pretty nice to have something sweet. Sugar was pretty expensive.

Bob Zybach: Now, we're looking at a snag there to the southeast, and can you recall very many snags along the creeks or through this country?

Neil Vanderburg: That wasn't a snag, that was a big old fir tree in there.

Bob Zybach: Can you recall any snags in those days?

Neil Vanderburg: No. I'm pretty sure that was a big old fir tree, and that was right on the right of the bridge that the forest built across the creek here.

Bob Zybach: Can you recall blue birds?

Neil Vanderburg: I can't recall blue jays either.

Bob Zybach: Okay. What kind of birds do you recall around here?

Neil Vanderburg: I don't really recall many birds. I mean, it was just about like it is today, you know.

Bob Zybach: Not too many birds around here?

Neil Vanderburg: No. Starlings haven't moved in and I don't think birds were that common.

Bob Zybach: How about pheasants. Did you get pheasants in the fields?

Neil Vanderburg: Very rarely. Very rarely. Once in a while we'd see a pheasant, but it was rare. Once in a while when you were out mowing or something you'd kick one out, but they were pretty well hid. You know, I forgot about those buns on the bottom of those maple trees. Those things had burls on them when we lived here.

Bob Zybach: So those burls are fifty years old at least.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Or older than fifiy years.

Neil Vanderburg: But the strange thing is those maple trees are smaller now than they were when I lived here. You know how things are when you are a kid! Those were big maple trees!

Bob Zybach: And fifty-five years of growing haven't added much.

Neil Vanderburg: No, they really haven't. They're just kind of sitting there in place. You can see, that maple tree, or with that apple tree, you can see where our house laid and our . . . see that fence going along there, that fence is

Bob Zybach: Down along the creek there?

Neil Vanderburg: our line there. And right down there where that. . . looks to me like they put a well down there. See where those electric wires are going right down to where our old pump was.

Bob Zybach: So it looks they're using the same well.

Neil Vanderburg: Looks like they may have dug that old well out. Maybe they had some problems and decided to go with the old well. Because that electric wire's going right down there to where we used to pump. But there used to be a row of blackberries, himalaya blackberries right here, just a ways below that apple tree. But it was still a straight row; it had been planted there. Now they took over the whole world.

Bob Zybach: But that started off. . . when you were a kid those himalayas were just in a row.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, they were planted in a row.

Bob Zybach: Now we're seeing a hedge over here that looks like its been chopped down and grown up, and seeing a rose bush that's up around the edge of the house there that looks like it'd be pretty old. Do you remember anything about people growing old roses, or hedges through here?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Are we still being recorded?

Bob Zybach: Yep.

Neil Vanderburg: We. . . when the Coote's lived here Archie Cornutt was, had the mentality of a 12- year-old or so. And he kept this place looking pretty nice. And there was a hedge here in this honeysuckle or whatever it is?

Bob Zybach: That's St. Johns Wort, the yellow flower there.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, and this rose bush was here and the rose bush was growing up on the front porch and right on the corner of the house there was a tree that was about as high as

Neil Vanderburg: the house, and it was always a joke between Clifford Cornutt and I, I asked him what kind of a tree that was on the corner of the house and he says, "Don't ask me." So after that we always called it the Don't Ask Me tree. So there was a Don't Ask Me tree there. But it's gone now, so I can't point that out.

Bob Zybach: But that rose on the corner there and the one in the front of yard was there?

Neil Vanderburg: And the one by the oil tank. Bill Coote burned wood, however, he didn't have an oil tank there. And right there on that little lean-to there, just the other side of the oil tank, that's where Mrs. Cornutt laid in bed.

Bob Zybach: That was her bedroom.

Neil Vanderburg: That was her bedroom, yeah. We came in the back door and would just turn in there to her bedroom, and I went in there a lot of times because that was one of the things I had to do if I was gonna be a friend of Clifford, was see grandma every once in a while.

Bob Zybach: *** We're standing by, right back by the old shed that's probably from Camp Adair, and we're looking again towards Smith Hill.

Neil Vanderburg: We're actually looking over the tree that we used to hang our beef from when we butchered our beef.

Bob Zybach: That big leaf there? [Maple]

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. And right on, just about straight past that's the old community swimming pooi. Everybody swam in that spot over there. And I'd like to see you get in there now.

Bob Zybach: Haven't been swimming for a couple years. With those berries I think it might have been a couple of years more.

Neil Vanderburg: The only way you can look at the old swimming hole now is by getting in a helicopter and looking down at it.

Bob Zybach: But everybody, all these families out through here and from the school and everything, that was it, that's where they all swam?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, that's where we all swam.

Bob Zybach: And that was on your property?

Neil Vanderburg: That was on our property. In fact, they had a baptismal service there when a group came in here with some preachers, preached at the little Berry Creek School, and they had some conversions here and they had a baptismal service down there. They didn't have to wade through blackberries to get to the baptismal services, even. That was all lawn out there. Are we ready?

Bob Zybach: Yeah, we're facing down towards the old well site there now.

Neil Vanderburg: When we lived here we had a hand-dug well, it was about 4 feet across, and it was 14 feet to water, and the well, they dug it down to 30 feet, and we had a old Fairbanks Morris one cylinder motor, ran a pump jack, and we had a big.

Neil Vanderburg: paid dearly for that.

Bob Zybach: Hold on.

Neil Vanderburg: Okay, this pump that we had, a what they called a pump jack, which was a thing with leathers on it, just went up and down and probably had a 3-inch leather on it, and we would start that up on Saturday morning, and we would fill up this 2,000 or 3,000 gallon tank, about 30 feet in the air, and then meanwhile we would irrigate our garden here which probably consisted of at least a half an acre. And in the summer time we would do both of those every Saturday, and then we'd have enough water to last us to

Neil Vanderburg: the next Saturday. But now they're drilling down 250 feet for water and still not getting enough to take a bath. So I think maybe they, all these people that say witching doesn't mean anything, I think maybe they ought to let me come in here and witch around a little and see if I could find some water for them.

Bob Zybach: Now who witched your well here?

Neil Vanderburg: Mr. White, who lived in back of us with the Tandys.

Bob Zybach: Okay, so Tandy's father-in-law.

Neil Vanderburg: He was an older man. Yeah, he was an older man, he had grandchildren that were in high school at the time. So, he was getting up close to a great grandfather.

Bob Zybach: This whole area in here, you were mentioning how you couldn't get to the swimming hole now. It's all covered with blackberry and weeds; mostly blackberries. Can you describe how the creek looked in the 30's?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, the way I remember it, the creek bed has washed down quite a bit, you know, this has got gravel base in it, but there's been quite a bit of erosion of dirt out from underneath that creek bed because that creek bed is down quite a bit lower than when I lived here. They put this bridge in right in front of us when we lived here, of course they put this road in also, and so they had to make a bridge that had a little more holding power and so forth. And there was a little lumber and stuff coming out through here. So they built this new bridge and I have a kind of interesting story to tell about that, that when they filled in at the end of the bridge they brought in some pretty big rocks because they had about a four-foot hole on each side of the bridge. And the dump truck was a three-yard dump truck and they were dumping these rocks, and one of the rocks was too big to go through the tail gate and so when that rock hit the end of the tail gate well it just picked the front end of the truck up and it was sitting there about straight up and down, and it took about four or five people to get the front end down. It was the first time I'd ever seen that, that was pretty exciting for a 14 year old boy!

Bob Zybach: Was that bridge in the same place as the old bridge?

Neil Vanderburg: Yes.

Bob Zybach: Okay. I've got another question too about the big leaf back there where you used to hang your beef. Did you have a particular name for that tree?

Neil Vanderburg: No, it was just where we hung our beef!

Bob Zybach: Okay, so you'd just say, back on the maple or something.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, that maple was in the barnyard.

Bob Zybach: Can you describe how you got the beef up in the tree?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, we had a ladder and we put the ladder up in the limb up there that was about, probably 12, 13 feet high. And we'd put a pulley up there and run a rope through it and then we'd hook one of the horses up to the rope and pull the beef up as far as we wanted it and tie it off and let the horse stand there and graze grass while we skinned out the rear quarters and so forth, then we pulled it on up to where we could gut it out and skinned the rest of it off, and then we pulled it on up high enough so that animals couldn't get to it and left it there for a few days. Of course, in those days with no refrigeration or anything, well my mother always liked to have fresh beef liver when we butchered, and it tasted just like the inside of that cow smelled and to this day I can't eat liver because of that, but anyway we always had fresh beef liver when we butchered, and then after it'd hung for about 3 days then my mother would can all the beef and we had a fruit cupboard, and she'd put the canned beef in the fruit cupboard

Neil Vanderburg: and that's some of the best eating beef you ever tasted is that canned beef because it's sure nice and tender. Made awful good beef pot pies and stews and stuff like that. Man, that was good!

Bob Zybach: Did you ever smoke any of it?

Neil Vanderburg: Some, yeah.

Bob Zybach: Would you have fresh steaks after it aged?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, we'd have a few fresh steaks, but most of it was canned. Yeah, we had the smokehouse but we usually used that for pork rather than beef. We had the pig pen right down there next to the creek and polluted poor Berry Creek something terrible, but anyway, we would smoke our pork, we did have the smokehouse on the other side of that apple tree that we were just at. And we smoked fish and pork in the smokehouse, mainly.

Bob Zybach: Those trees you say are smaller than you remember when you were a kid. Were those apple trees about the same as you remember when you were a kid?

Neil Vanderburg: Well the apple tree is up a lot higher than it was when I was a kid, because nobody ever pastured under it when we lived here, so

Bob Zybach: I was talking about the flavor, though.

Neil Vanderburg: Oh yeah, they tasted good. My mother used to make fried apples and apple pie and applesauce and the first bite that I took out of that apple, I thought man I'd like some of those fried with a little bacon.

Bob Zybach: One more thing on the creek there. All the weeds that are in next to it. What kind of vegetation was along the creek when you were a kid there?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, on the left hand side here there was just trees and very little undergrowth in there. Mr. Archie Cornutt used to pasture his cows in there, or a cow. And she kept pretty much all the vegetation out from under the trees there. And I'll tell you a little story about Archie Cornutt. One day he went down there to milk his cow and his cow was in heat and she rode him. And boy I'll tell you, he wasn't very intelligent but his eyes sure got big and he sure ran. He got scared. He thought he was gonna get bred! But then there was sheep run on this side, so

Bob Zybach: Okay, on the side of, on the Smith house here.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, clear back to the Dickey place. And they ran sheep clear on up across the creek on . . . they had a fence on up above there.

Bob Zybach: Okay. You said after Coote moved out, is that when the Cornutts moved in?

Neil Vanderburg: Moved in, yeah.

Bob Zybach: And did they live here pretty much then until Adair?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, I'm not sure but I think they lived here until Adair. I think they were still here when we left.

Bob Zybach: Do you know who lived here before Coote?

Neil Vanderburg: No, I don't. I thought Coote owned it when he left here. But they called it the Smith place, but I just thought they called it the Smith place because of some previous owner. But I found out later that Bill Coote didn't own it. But I know that Smith had his sheep; he ran his sheep up here clear up past the school.

Bob Zybach: So these were all Smith's sheep in here. These were Coote's sheep?

Neil Vanderburg: No, Coote just had the house.

Bob Zybach: Do you have a rough idea how many sheep Smith used to have?

Neil Vanderburg: Man, I would think up in the thousands. That was his income. As far as I know, he didn't do any farming. Never put a plow in the ground. And these old fields there

Neil Vanderburg: they'd get full of dry grass, but the sheep and the grasshoppers ate it. You asked me about the flowers and stuff, well there was lots of grasshoppers here. I used to catch them. I used to get 60 cents a dozen for catching them. And Donald Dickey showed me how to catch them. And you don't just try and sneak up behind them, always reach where they're gonna be, not where they are now. So you came in in front of them. And I could catch grasshoppers like that!

Bob Zybach: And you'd sell them to people for bait?

Neil Vanderburg: For fishing, yeah. But down below the Cootes' house here, there was a grass patch that was just alive with grasshoppers. And also up here around the cemetery. And 1 could just catch all the grasshoppers I wanted in that area.

Bob Zybach: Can you remember anything else right this area? It's your old home here, so we're getting quite a.

Neil Vanderburg: Well, except I don't know if I said on the tape that the mail boxes were here and so in the summertime all the girls came down here to get the mail because I was 15 and so were they so they got a big thrill with Neil.

Bob Zybach: One thing we didn't put on the tape either, you said you kind of shy then, though.

Neil Vanderburg: I was very shy, and I'll say right now that Leslie Gardner and Betty White, when I was in the 8th grade they got the teacher to set them across from each other and me up in front of them. And in those days pants had buttons not zippers. So everytime I'd go back to the teacher's desk, well, when I'd walk back they'd each have a hold of the side of my pants and pull my pants unbuttoned, and they got the biggest kick out of my embarrassment, having to button up my pants right in front of them. And I think the teacher was in on it too, because it seemed like she got me back to her desk more than necessary!

Bob Zybach: Were those a couple of girls that would wait by the mail box here?

Neil Vanderburg: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Fact one time shortly after we moved here the two girls got in a big fight because they were jealous of one another because they thought I liked one of them better than the other. And they tore clothes off of each other, including their bras. Teacher made them go home and get dressed again.

Bob Zybach: Wow. And that was 8th grade?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. I was thoroughly embarrassed!

Bob Zybach: Can you think of anything else here? Was that kind of the community gathering place then, the mail boxes?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, it was on weekday mornings, they would sit under our maple trees, course this fence wasn't in here, and the road actually was level there, and they'd sit under our maple trees on the lawn there and wait for the mail man. And I don't think it was really necessary for them to get there an hour before the mail man but they seemed to do it. And this was during the summer time. And then sometimes they'd bring their bathing suits with them and go down and go swimming after the mail came, and so it was. In the summertime it was the gathering place where everybody came and even the Gardners had to walk clear down here after their mail.

Bob Zybach: You said you were the only boy in school above the 4th grade?

Neil Vanderburg: 3rd grade, above the 3rd grade.

Bob Zybach: So is that one reason all the girls were paying attention to you?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, yeah there was four girls and only me! So I was, and man I was handsome, too. You know, you can tell by looking at me now how handsome I am! [Laughs]

Bob Zybach: Well, it doesn't sound like you had a whole lot of competition.