HERITAGE OF WEST NYACK FALL FESTIVAL

HERITAGE OF WEST NYACK FALL FESTIVAL - Rockland Newshttps://rocklandnews.com › heritage-of-west-nyack-fall-... HERITAGE OF WEST NYACK FALL FESTIVAL. October 4, 2022. Date: Sunday, October 16, 2022. Time: 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM. Learn More

A week ago on a bright warm fall day the HERITAGE OF WEST NYACK FALL FESTIVAL had its festival over at the Traphagen property in Blauvelt or maybe West Nyack. Poor West Nyack, about 100 hundred years ago between the Clarksville corners and the railroad tracks it had a thriving downtown. Where the Plastic Craft is used to be a hotel, across the street near the tracks was another hotel. Corner of Benson and West Nyack Rd (Rt 59 in those days) there was a guy who delivered milk. used to get my Uncle Ken up real early in the morning to help him out. Just east of the Clarksville Inn was a candy store owns by the Jones', I've been told or maybe it was across West Nyack Road where that house is. There was a black smith shop real early on a spur of the Railroad where there building the park now that a tender and maybe another rail car sunk in the mud. Shops along the northern side of the road heading toward the railroad tracks. It's all gone. I've heard it was a fire. I read somewhere they closed of the crossing at the tracks because a school bus got hit by a train. I'm not confusing it with the one in Valley Cottage in the 70's. We hadn't gone to the fall festival in the last few years. Covid, I think cancelled it for two years and we'd missed the year before Covid and last year we hadn't gotten there. So this year seemed like a good time to go. Nastia was around that day, (yes Nastia that is a little dig at you never being home, but since you don't read this and may never,I have little to fear. I don't use LOL, so, I'll teehee...that is a sinister laugh) Well, Nastia joined Teri, Nancy and I for a warm couple of hours at the Traphagen property.We parked at the Germond's pool and walked the side walk over to the big house.

Off to the left where tractor hay rides sorta (there was no hay people sat in a trailor and were driven around a field.) There were pumpkins strew around that people could pick and buy. It was very popular and they did run out.There were musicians playing in the barn or garage foundation remains. Another house on an the adjacent property was open for the first time, for me. I went inside and it made me feel like I was upstate. It was old and quiet and had that smell of old exposed wood warmed by the sun and cooled by the nights for many years. I walked out the back door and the fields had been cut with a sickle blade mower. There were clumps of grass Nastia and I walked through

reminding me of when Mr. Dibble would come over and cut the grass around the house upstate and occasionally he'd leave those same clumps. Near the top of the hill I turned around and everything thing feels so open, I felt the vast space I was standing in. Someone from 100 years ago would laugh at what I thought of as vast space, it still reminded of Rockland when I was a kid. You don't realize how crowded life has become in Rockland until a time like that. Teri calls for us to return and I am back in the present heading toward the throng of people who have gathered for the HERITAGE OF WEST NYACK FALL FESTIVAL. I walk by a tree and the ground is covered with fallen nuts. I check my handy dandy 'Picture This' app and I am told they are black walnuts on the ground.So, yes I have to pick up a bunch to try and grow black walnut trees next spring. When I get come, I put them somewhere safe and don'tremember where that is. Sometimes I'm so like my mom.

We walk around a little more talk to Karl and Madeline some. Nastia of course is hungry so she has a hot dog, then she wants fries, but the line is too long,so we go. Walking back to the car along the edge of the road I notice the remains of a fence post and rail. To me this is one of the treasures that no one else will notice or value. A simple post that might only be sixty years old, but it might have been used to keep the horses or cow on the property. I

could be romanticizing something that was placed there by one of the last people to live in the house and it is just something that a suburbanite might have stuck on the corner of their property thinking it was cool. You know someone like me did it. I think I am going to go with my fantasy that it is over a hundred years old and Cow or horses were kept on the property and off of the dirt road and out of traffic.

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