Summers past in the Mohawk Valley
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 07-04-15
The summer of 1780 was not peaceful in the Mohawk Valley--the American Revolution was underway. The British and their Mohawk allies led by Joseph Brant burned homes in the valley that summer and the fort in what is now Fort Plain became a place of refuge.
CONEY NORTH
Over a hundred years ago, tourists headed north to the 750-acre Sacandaga Park. The park on the Sacandaga River began as a Methodist summer campground. After the Methodists retreated as hard-drinking interlopers invaded their wilderness sanctuary, the Fonda, Johnstown & Gloversville Railroad bought the land and built an amusement park.
The heyday of the railroad’s Sacandaga Park was 1902 to 1920. Nicknamed Coney Island North, the park featured a golf course, bowling alleys, midway, donkey and pony rides, roller coaster, Kinescope Theater, water rides, miniature train rides, boats, swimming and a classic carousel. John Philip Sousa played Sacandaga Park as did Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and W.C. Fields. Baseball teams from Johnstown, Amsterdam and Gloversville drew big crowds.
The amusement park was torn down in 1930, when the area was flooded to create the flood control reservoir today called Great Sacandaga Lake.
SUMMER PILGRIMS
The West Shore Railroad did a thriving business in the early 1900s transporting pilgrims to the Roman Catholic Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville. So many people came to the Auriesville station in the 1930s that rail sidings were occupied for miles with passenger trains waiting to take the pilgrims home. Every Sunday, two big washtubs at the Shrine were filled with coins by the faithful.
SUMMER IN THE CITY
Horses owned by carpet maker Stephen Sanford of Amsterdam became fixtures at the nearby Saratoga racetrack in the late 1800s. From 1903 through 1907, the Sanfords invited the people of Amsterdam to the Matinee Races at the family’s Hurricana Farm on the Sunday closest to Fourth of July. Some 15,000 attended the event during its last year.
Summertime in the 1940s in Amsterdam meant concerts by the Mohawk Mills Band, formed from employees of the carpet mill and directed by Frank or his brother Harry Musolff.
The band played the overture to “Oklahoma” one year and had the tune down pat. A long freight train rumbled by making it impossible for the musicians to hear each other. When the train passed, the trumpets had finished but the trombones were still playing.
On warm summer evenings in the 1940s, the streets of Amsterdam’s West End were sometimes deserted. To supplement food available under wartime rationing, Italian-American residents were tending vegetable gardens on the fertile flat land between the railroad tracks and Mohawk River.
In summer 1952 Darlene Gilligan moved to Broad Street on Amsterdam’s South Side, across from the former Pepe’s Bakery, “The low chatter of conversation and the squeals of delight by the little ones as candy was passed around often went far into the night.”
A BIG CELEBRATION
In July 1954, Amsterdam observed its 150th birthday with a ten-division parade. The Vail Mills drive-in float featuring young women in bikinis was a crowd pleaser.
Festivities went on for weeks at local taverns and social clubs, which had chapters of the Brothers of the Brush (who did not shave) and Sisters of the Swish (who wore long dresses). The Sesquicentennial, as it was called, was a joyous and raucous event that took place at the beginning of the end of the city’s prominence as a carpet-manufacturing center.
One float in the parade was a flying carpet. Within a year, Bigelow-Sanford, one of the city’s two major carpet makers, was moving out of town.
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