Genesee Cheeseboxes

A trip to the Potter County Fair always brings a visit to the Oswayo Valley Historical Society building at the edge of the fairgrounds in Millport. This year as I made my way through the exhibits, my attention was captured by this:

While I imagine my grandfather (W.D. 'Golly' Fish) might question the syntax of the label affixed to this particular cheese box, I expect he'd wonder if it made at the cheese box factory in nearby Genesee Forks - known today as Genesee

His words from a long-ago "Golly" column.

When I was a young fellow, before I absorbed a lot of printers' ink in my system I learned to make cheese boxes. There was a cheese box factory at Genesee. Ambrose Veley owned the plant. It employed a dozen or so men at a mill a bit south from the present school building.

The plant made the heads for the boxes from bolts purchased locally. The bolts were sawed on a machine known as a "slasher," a vicious machine that every now and then clipped off a finger or two for the operator.

The heading was taken to an outdoor yard and piled loosely so it would dry quickly. After two or three weeks it was returned to the plant, pieces assembled wide enough to make a head, the pieces matched together and rounded on a small concave saw.

The sides for the boxes were of elm cut by a veneer machine but purchased from Oakes & Burger at Cattaraugus, N.Y. They were called "hoops."

The box maker was called a "nailer" and he was the elite of the plant and for the reason he earned more money than others, his work was "piece work." He received 80 cents for making 100 boxes and 100 covers. The best nailers, when all went smoothly, could complete 200 boxes in ten hours of top speed effort.

A dollar and sixty cents was real money when the common laborers were getting but one dollar or less. just the same the elite earned their pay as they drove nails and tacks at top speed for ten straight hours.

Board at Vern Teater's Hotel (not a trace now marks the site) cost $3.00 a week. Sweet Caporal cigarettes, ten in a package were five cents a pack.

This was around 1895 and before a brick plant was erected to manufacture sand-lime bricks and long before a long cement walk was built to the busy railroad station, a junction of the Buffalo & Susquehanna and the New York & Pennsylvania Railroads. It was long before the building of the huge milk plant with a high stack said to have cost $25,000.

It was even before Dick Coyle, hell-raiser and Irish wit, was a telegraph operator, and before genial Jim Sullivan was the village tonsorial artist.

This scribe knew a lot of people, fine people, years ago at the "Forks," but now only a few.

Even the "Old Folks Reunion," for years a big annual event with a brass band, a male quartet, silver tongued orators and a bountiful dinner has fallen by the wayside, with J.H. Tilburg as its moving spirit. Coming as it did in late summer politicians never missed the event with glad hands extended filled with campaign cards. 

A.J. Borden is no longer blacksmithing, and Henry Clark long ago stopped shoeing horses and hung his leather apron on a peg following his last lay at the anvil. Victor  Allen and the Genesee Times – gone!

How times change!

Where A Wendell Berry Poem Took Me

Though a busy late-summer schedule has taken me away from my online groups for the past several weeks, Thursday morning I set aside an hour to join others from all over our earth who make time to write together in a Zoom room.

Lucy, who leads this gathering from Spokane, Washington, chose this poem by Wendell Berry  – "Before Dark" – as the morning's first prompt and I was off - the thoughts evoked coming faster than I could move my hand across the page.

Written by Jane, September 3, 2026:
My mother's father was 94 when he left behind this place on our earth. When I remember him - remember him from my memory and not from the way I've been coming to know him through his writing - it's at camp. There he is – seated in the faded green canvas chair on the little porch that faced the pond where my little brother nearly drowned one August afternoon.

Wendell Berry, also a man who counted his years with a 90, wrote of kingfishers, and this morning we heard those words, and this writer felt that tug to remember, to put down the memories of a little girl and the kingfishers at the pond, at the camp.

He called it a miniature lake in his writing, my grandfather. But sometimes he called it a big mud puddle - that pond with a little island in the middle with its cattails in the fall and a riot of late blooming old-fashioned daffodils on its banks in May. And the water lilies that the big boys always had to be watching out for.

The Kingfisher, with its be-crowned head, perched on the wire that stretched to the springhouse tucked into the hillside. "Watch the Kingfisher. See the Kingfisher, Janie? He'll soon find his supper."

Then the swoop, the splash, the swift flight over the trees to the place where the creek – The Nine Mile – flowed to meet Commissioner Run on to Pine Creek. 

It's not just the Kingfishers I remember. It's the phoebes who made their nests on that porch, splattering mud on the gray shingles and white trim. As the young fledglings left the nest, white trails of bird droppings made their way down the picture window. Every spring the nests would reappear, moved only slightly from the prints left on that siding despite the scrubbing with a wooden handled scrub brush and a galvanized bucket of sudsy water.

One year someone – Uncle Bill perhaps – tacked up something I know now as hardware cloth into the corners of the porch. It looked even uglier than the muddy nests. The phoebes moved to the little stoop-like porch on the kitchen side.

... The rest of my camp memories I will save for a different day. But here are my grandfather's words from camp as he wrote in his Golly column in The Potter Enterprise:

Kingfishers (belted) often find a perch in a tree high above the little lake and evidently search the water for a meal. Their vision must be extremely keen to locate a fish in the water. Once located, a power dive is almost certain to reduce the fish population by one.

Our bird book tells us that the belted kingfisher is one of the few cases where the female is more colorful than the male.

Golly at times is provoked by their watchful waiting but when he thinks that it is the nature of the bird, he realizes that the kingfisher has to eat, and he is forgiving. Mother Nature takes care of all such things. Golly has shot at Kingfishers (never hit one) but he'll shoot no more. (1958)

And I'll finish on this Labor Day weekend in 2026 with this piece he wrote just before Labor Day weekend in 1961. Perhaps that weekend the Heimel kids were at camp too - though the peace and quiet would have been elusive.

The old-timer, who writes this column, is planning for a long holiday weekend at Golly's Folly.

An order has been filed at the weather factory for more sunshine and less rain.

That vine-covered porch invites Golly to loaf where he may watch the miniature lake.

Kingfishers perch at times in trees hoping for a fish dinner. A breeze sets the waves dancing. Autumn leaves fall and float on the surface. Occasionally a deer picks its way to the lick nearby and later drinks at the water's edge. When the light is just right the image of the graceful arrival is mirrored in water – a scene Golly loves to behold!

Birds come to the lawn to pick worms and insects from the grass, but at this season there are no lilting songs.

There is peace and quiet in the Black Forest.