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New York City tenements, like the additions to some Catskills farmhouses, have narrow connected living spaces and shared bathrooms. The use of space was flexible—living rooms could serve as bedrooms or work rooms—and privacy was not expected.Credit: Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. The author acknowledges assistance of Elizabeth Cromley in obtaining the tenement house floor plan.

REFERENCES

American Resort Association. 1902. Catskill Mountain Summer Resorts. Containing selected lists of hotels, boarding houses, and farm houses where summer guests are entertained. New York: American Resort Association.

Cohen, L.A. 1982. Embellishing a life of labor: An interpretation of the material culture of American working-class homes, 1885-1915. In Material Culture Studies in America, ed. T. J. Schlereth. Nashville: American Association of State and Local History Press.

Cromley, E. 1990.Alone together: A history of New York’s early apartments. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

__________. 1992. A history of American beds and bedrooms, 1890-1930. In American home life, 1880-1930: A social history of spaces and services, eds. J. H. Foy and T. Schlereth. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Hareven, T. 1991. The home and the family in historical perspective. Social Research 50 (Spring).

Hubka, T. 1984. Big house, little house, back house, barn: The connected farm buildings of New England. Hanover and London: University Press of New England.

McMurry, S. 1997 (1988).Families and farmhouses in 19th century America: Vernacular design and social change. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

New York State Census. 1892. Town of Middleton, manuscript in Delaware County Clerk’s Office, Delhi, New York.

Ulster and Delaware Railroad. 1902. The Catskill Mountain: The most picturesque mountain region on the globe. Rondout, NY: Press of Kingston Freeman.

Virginia Scheer is the director at the Manhattan Country School Farm in Roxbury, whre she has developed both school and community folklife programs. She holds an undergraduate degree in art history from Smith College and a master’s degree in folk studies at Western Kentucky University, with emphasis on architecture and a master’s thesis on farmhouses. She is an advocate for the conservation of the rural culture of the Catskills.

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SHARING VALUES AND SHARING SPACE IN THE CATSKILLS


By VIRGINIA SCHEER

The mostly urban and suburban families who spent the summer at Crystal Spring Farm enjoyed pleasures not available to them in the city. Photo courtesy of Joe Hewitt.

At the turn of the last century, the gap between income and expenses on Catskill dairy farms led many families to take in summer boarders. The guests were primarily urban working-class families seeking escape from the sweltering—and sometimes unhealthy—city.

For eighty years, boarding houses enabled rural families to supplement their farm income. But how did the families interact in farmhouses not built for the purpose? What physical changes did the farmhouses undergo to accommodate guests? Personal narratives and other primary sources form the basis of three case studies of farmhouses that became boarding houses in southeastern Delaware County. Among the findings: both the urban visitors and the farm families were acquainted with old traditions of sharing beds and bedrooms—a practice untouched by modern Victorian prescriptions for privacy. Moreover, some of the farm families, as immigrants, had lived in urban tenements, where sharing space was accepted. Thus the boarding houses remained viable enterprises until mid-twentieth-century expectations for family privacy and guest services made taking in boarders unappealing—and uneconomical in competition with other tourist attractions in the Catskills and nationwide.

Photo: Sidney Chase Collection,
courtesy of Diane Galusha and David Riordan

To increase capacity on their farmstead, the Mechs built a summer house for boarders, leaving their square-plan farmhouse virtually intact. Photo: Virginia Scheer

Photo courtesy of Joe Hewitt

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