Celebrating Catskill Mountain Women

Volume 28
Fall-Winter
2002

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When neighbors dropped in for a cup of tea and began gossiping—a pastime reaching an art form in any small community with close social relationships—she would stop them with any number of proverbial sayings . . .employing them demonstrates something about life in small towns with intricate and often limiting social relations. They allowed Nettie to offer comment indirectly, to rely on prevailing wisdom rather than personal beliefs in confronting a distasteful situation.

Melissa Ladenheim currently lives in Stillwater, Maine, where she is a freelance folklorist. She is the author of Birds in Wood: The Carvings of Andrew Zergenyi. The author acknowledges the assistance of Francine Ladenheim, Vesti Snyder, Dorothy Archibald, and Janis Benincasa in the preparation of this paper.

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Headline - Celebrating Catskill Mountain Women: Family Stories, Community History by Melissa Ladenheim

Celebrating Catskill mountain women is part of an international effort to celebrate the drive, spirit, and diversity of mountain women everywhere. Born and raised in the Catskills, the author grew up hearing the stories of ordinary women who had lived there in the past. The stories themselves and the events they recall are, on the surface, unremarkable. Their importance resides in the memories to which they give form, in the past they recall and make tangible in the present. This paper is drawn from a presentation to a Catskill Mountain lecture series held in conjunction with the UN International Year of Mountains.

Photo of Nettie Cole, c. 1900.

There are many stories about famous men and women who made history. I want to tell a few stories about a seemingly unremarkable person. The stories are entertaining, at least for me, but more importantly they provide a window to the past, a way of telling the history of ordinary people living ordinary lives. That doesn’t mean the history is ordinary. It is worth remembering, it is worth repeating because such stories are where the majority of us can find ourselves. Much of our meaningful past resides in local history, in family history, in the stories we tell about ourselves and those who lived before us. These are the stories that define us, give shape and meaning to our lives, guide and instruct us, and provide for us a sense of place.

The stories I tell are from my own family, a family whose roots run deep in the Catskill Mountains. And although they are personal narratives, they are also, I contend, archetypal ones because they deal with universal themes, concerns, and conflicts. My goal in telling these stories is to communicate something of the quotidian history of these mountains and to evoke a sense of the lives of the women who shaped that history in the simple acts of everyday life. . .

Agnes served as a role model for her children in other ways as well, particularly in the causes she supported. She was a suffragette who actively campaigned for women’s right to vote. And as a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she was a dedicated prohibitionist. Family legend has it that she participated in her fair share of barroom destruction in the pursuit of temperance.

Agnes Cole’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union card.

Whether this story is apocryphal or not is really beside the point. The point is that Agnes was a woman of action, a woman who stood up for what she believed in, and she passed on this resolve to her daughter Nettie. . .

Nettie’s older brother George was, as she described him, a bit inept and also slight of build. Being a child from a poor family, he often ended up wearing his siblings’ hand-me-downs, which were patched and often ill-fitting. His build, his demeanor, and his clothing all made him a target for the school bullies, and they tormented him mercilessly. Nettie regularly fought his battles, and one day she decided they both had had enough. And though she couldn’t change her brother or people’s attitudes toward him, she could fix the problem with his clothes. And so she, being all of twelve or so, marched her brother up the stone steps of the Swartz store, the local department store, where The Commons is now located on Main Street in Margaretville, and bought him a set of new clothes, which she charged to her father’s account. "It was a big deal," recalled her granddaughter Francine. "Her father was pretty upset about it, but he paid for them and didn’t make her take them back."

Photo of Nettie Squires with the author, 1959.

Nettie Squires with the author, summer 1959.

Nettie and Denny Squires, c. 1930.

. . . Nettie’s intolerance for the mistreatment of others in word or deed is also apparent in the story about her brother George. Perhaps it was just her nature, or perhaps it was witnessing the pain inflicted on her brother or even her religious faith that contributed to Nettie’s firm stand against meanness and pettiness. She was respectful of others, regardless of class or position, and expected the same in return. When neighbors dropped in for a cup of tea and began gossiping—a pastime reaching an art form in any small community with close social relationships—she would stop them with any number of proverbial sayings. "People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones" simply called attention to the skeletons that exist in all of our closets. But there were others that addressed more specific situations. The following are two of my personal favorites. I’m sure she used the first expression before her youngest daughter found herself, at age sixteen, in the predicament referenced in the saying, but it could only take on new meaning after that. When people would gossip about a woman pregnant outside of marriage, my great-grandmother would say,

The first one comes any time. The second one takes nine months and it happens in the best of families.

And for those situations where you just cannot fathom what one person sees in another, cannot understand the basis for the attraction, or don’t think it’s a suitable pairing whatever the reason, we say,

As Little Grandma used to say, "Love goes where it’s sent even if it’s up a pig’s rear end.

We find these sayings entertaining, even useful, but employing them demonstrates something about life in small towns with intricate and often limiting social relations. They allowed Nettie to offer comment indirectly, to rely on prevailing wisdom rather than personal beliefs in confronting a distasteful situation. This is not to say her proverbs were always received warmly, but she didn’t much care about that: she had neither the time nor the patience for such nonsense. She felt there wasn’t a family who went through life unscathed by the consequences of a bad decision, and there was nothing to be gained from reveling in another’s misfortune. . .

Nettie married George Chauncey "Denny" Squires, a local man twelve years her senior whose family had been in the area since the late 1700s. By her account they had a good marriage. She used to say, "We had a lot of fun when we were young." Nettie bore nine children, seven of whom lived to adulthood. Her first child, Leone (born 1906), died at the age of two, her last was stillborn, and she also had several miscarriages in between. Fertility was not an issue for her: she used to say, "All Denny had to do was hang his pants on the bed and I got pregnant."

Nettie’s children Lester, Louise, and Elizabeth, c. 1921.

. . . My great-grandparents, who lived in the village, raised chickens and grew a large garden to feed their family. The rooster and hens ran freely around the yard, as did the children. Her son Irving liked to urinate outside and, perhaps like other little boys exploring the possibilities afforded by their plumbing, did so flagrantly. In an effort to discourage this behavior, Nettie would warn him that if he wasn’t careful, the rooster might think he had a worm.

And that’s precisely what happened. One day the rooster grabbed Irving’s penis in his beak and wouldn’t let go. And so my great-grandmother did what any mother would when faced with the situation. She whacked the rooster with a stick, killing him. She then chopped his head off—and probably cooked him for dinner. Irving wasn’t permanently scarred by the experience, at least not physically, as he went on to marry and father children. In fact, before he married, Irving may even have been a bit of a ladies’ man: as a young man he was named in a paternity suit. Now the woman in question, it was told, was of dubious character and lifestyle. She had a "reputation." The family could not afford a lawyer and so my great-grandmother represented her son Irving herself. When it came time for her to speak, my great-grandmother was succinct in presenting her case. As the story goes, she said to the court,

"Judge, when a saw cuts through a piece of wood, can you tell which tooth does the most cutting?"

The judge dismissed the lawsuit. . .

Photo of Nettie Squires, c. 1960.

My great-grandmother left a legacy of strength and determination and gifts of wisdom and compassion. In remembering her and the other Netties of the Catskills we garner a sense of what life was like for ordinary women living ordinary lives in the region’s past. She and countless other mountain women led lives that passed unnoticed except by those whom they touched. . .

The photos and excerpts above are from the article, "Celebrating Catskill Mountain Women: Family Stories, Community History," which was published in Voices Vol. 28, Fall-Winter, 2002. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.