MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

Last year I rode on the Ramapo Motorcycle Clubs Fall Foliage Ride.

As always, the club put on a stellar event, and riding to it from Backroads Central I noticed a small historical placard at the con uence of Route 17 and 17A. It claimed that this was the site of the “First Marked Trail in the Nation,” right outside Harriman Park and just north of New York City? Well, indeed so. It seems that nearly 100 years ago Doctor Frank Lutz, an entomologist who would become one of the curators of the Museum of Natural History created the Station for the Study of Insects. Although this marked trail was the rst of its kind and ran only a mile, it changed the way the world looked at discovering nature.

And, to think this happened right at the spot I was making a right turn – one that I have made hundreds of times and only now learned about this.

That got me thinking about signs – especially Historical Signs.

Last July, I told you about the famed artist Charles Wilson Peale and the mastodon he recovered in the Hudson Valley, but up in Cohoes, New York, there is a marker that tells us that mastodons were everywhere thousands of years ago.

The Cohoes Mastodon was discovered in 1866 during the construction of Harmony Mill No. 3 near Cohoes Falls on the Mohawk River. The mastodon’s remains were found deeply buried in a large pothole, which had been worn into the bedrock by the swirling action of water and stones at the end of the last Ice Age. You can see the big fella at the New York State Museum in Albany.

On Route 10, near Bloomville, New York there is a sign that is something of which we all have taken part.

The Shef eld Farm building still stands just outside Bloomville, but it is now deteriorating and used for highway storage. In 1892, L.B. Halsey installed the rst milk pasteurization machine in this building. It was revolutionary, to say the least.

Page 18

Soon, Shef eld Farms was providing New York City with fully 20 percent of all their milk. By the mid-1920s, Shef eld Farms was the largest dairy products company in the world with over 300 stores in the New York City area alone.

This odd marker refers to a neighborhood, just west of Flemington, that got its name through the legend of a chicken stealing family that once lived there who, when forced to move, left great piles of chicken bones at the site. Today, the houses in Bonetown are sizeable and the yards immaculate, not a bone in sight. If it weren’t for the sign that says so, no one would ever think that chicken stealers once lived there.

On November 12, 1932, the aroma of cookies baked by Philadelphia Girl Scouts in the PGE windows attracted passersby, who inquired if the cookies were for sale, and the Girl Scouts agreed to sell to the public whatever extra cookies remained from the nursery project. “I don’t remember how many cookies we baked that day. I do know that we baked a lot of cookies,” recalled Girl Scout Midge Mason. A year later the company decided to hold another cookie bake in the storefront window because of the huge success of the rst cookie sale. In 1934 the Philadelphiaarea Girl Scout Council decided to use cookie sales to raise money. The rst of cial purchase was made by First Lady Bess Truman.

While we are on the subject of tasty treats, here is an odd one from New Jersey.

On County Road 579, in Pattenburgh, New Jersey is one Historical Marker that will grab your eye… and maybe your liver too.

I have passed this marker many times, but the story is always a fresh one.

Born John Garrison near here around 1830, during his life, he did many things. He was a sailor, a scout, a soldier, a gold prospector, a hunter and trapper, a whiskey-peddler, a guide, a deputy, and a constable. But he also was a husband to a native American woman of the Flathead tribe.

The story goes that she was butchered by the Crow and Johnson tracked each of the Crow down, killed them, and then “ate their livers.”

Nice. You probably heard about Johnson… as Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford, was based on him.

I have visited this a few times… but, I’ll bring it up again as it is just, well… amazing and mysterious for sure. Just outside of Cavendish, Vermont is a historical marker that tops them all.

On Route 131 you will nd a plaque to one of America’s oddest celebrities bolted to a rock in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont.

It honors Phineas P. Gage. In 1848, Gage, 25, was the foreman of a crew cutting a railroad bed in Cavendish, Vermont. On September 13, as he was using a tamping iron to pack the explosive powder into a hole, the powder detonated. The tamping iron—43 inches long, 1.25 inches in diameter, and weighing 13.25 pounds—shot skyward, penetrated Gage’s left cheek, ripped into his brain, and exited through his skull, landing several dozen feet away. Though blinded in his left eye, he might not even have lost consciousness, and he remained savvy enough to tell a doctor that day, “Here is business enough for you.”

But, Gage, who was a modest, quiet, and caring man as well as very handsome, even after the gruesome injury, changed – like Jekyll to Hyde - and eventually died years later of epilepsy.

But his story is still there to see, one of the many historical markers along the roads of this Mysterious America.

O’Life Out! ,