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!
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