Plessis

COMMUNITIES IN THE TOWN OF ALEXANDRIA

PLESSIS IN THE HEART

By Laurie Lind Petersen, from the Thousand Islands Sun, June 10, 1998, courtesy of Jeanne Snow, editor

Plessis--Only a couple of years ago, Hubert Collins could have reeled off names and dates to go along with his narrative about growing up here. Now, gamely, he tells everything that surfaces to mind, and it's still a lot. But no one can be blamed for misplacing a few programs when the hard drive's almost a century old.

Hubert says he will turn 97 in November had has to take it easy, although he decides, "I got a lot to be grateful for."

Not the least of these must be the independence of living in his own home--not to mention having a full head of hair while men of his great-grandchildren's age easily could be losing theirs. Recently he spent a chilly June afternoon reconstructing a life-and-a-half's worth of memories. Subtly the real story evolves from Plessis-as-it-was to a celebration of prevailing through all those careers, deaths, and changes in technology.

To begin with

Hubert doesn't get into the reason, but all of his birth family wasn't raised under the same roof. He says his father came to this part of the river "from the other side of Morristown," and his mother grew up near Rockport, Ontario. The family lived in Canada for a while. Hubert's older brother, John, remained there to be raised by his Rockport grandparents.

Next youngest was the boys' sister, Pearl. At some point the family moved to Wellesley Island; after that there were two tragedies, and Hubert carefully tries to get it right.

"Matter of fact," he remarks, "boy, time goes back 70 or 80 years, and you get mixed up."

What happened was that a younger sister, age five, died, and two years later a younger brother followed her.

"So they were the same age when they died, both five," he remembers. "Two of them, and they're buried on Wells Island.

"Wellesley, they call it now. A man by the name of Wells from Canada settled part way across the island where there was an unusual stone. You can see it, as you go by, where it had been cut years ago. "But [after that] there was a summer man by the name of Wellesley. He was a millionaire, and he called it Wellesley. That's how it got its name.

"We lived there for a couple of years where my dad worked for [George] Boldt's back farm, and I went to school over there on Densmore Bay--that's pretty well down there toward the foot of the island. I don't think they taught seven grades like they did there later; they doubled it.

"Gee whiz, then, in order to get to school, you had to walk, and of course there wasn't any roads plowed. The school is still there; I was by there about a year or so ago and they were making it over into something. [It's now a volunteer fire station--Coordinator]

"Boldt had teams of horses and coach rigs. He had a lot of cattle, too. I remember Boldt--he lived up at the front farm. He used to drive up past the school about every day. He had a driver, and he'd be alone. Quite often when he'd be coming back, we had a recess, and he'd always stop and we'd talk to him for just a few minutes. He was very common; originally he wasn't a rich man. My sister Pearl, who's been gone for many, many years, worked for them in the summer at the castle.

"And he had a daughter, Clover. Clover married a man called Graham Miles, and they were common people, too. You wouldn't think Clover was any different from anybody else, to talk to her.

"My dad ran the farm for a couple of years and then worked for George Boldt's blacksmith shop, that's where he learned [blacksmithing.] We lived there before we came to Plessis, here."

Setting down roots

Hubert moved to Plessis, he says, over 90 years ago.

"Yeah," he reflects, "things have changed so much. There was a feed mill, a cheese factory, a blacksmith's shop--my dad was the blacksmith, in fact, that's why we moved here.

"My father trained me, but I didn't go for the blacksmithing. At that time they had to shoe horses; if it hadn't been for the horses, I liked the blacksmith shop. You'd get a horse foot up, and they'd reach around and get you, or yank their foot, and you'd have the nail through the side.

"We used to get 20-foot-long pieces of metal to make things out of, wheels, sled runners, everything for farmers, just about, and he did welding, too.

"To make wagon wheels, you had to make a circle, and weld the ends together.

"It was a bellows forge. You had to crank to get the air to it so it would burn, and my dad would make me do the cranking.

"Now the cheese factory was down over the hill to the left here, across the bridge. They made cheese every day. All the farmers came with their milk, by horses; the cheese factory bought milk twice a day. The cheesemaker put it in a big vat and put some stuff with it and then made the cheese.

"He used to have to rub that cheese for 30 days; it used to come in about a little more than two pounds. Then he had a place he shipped it out to. I was just a young kid, and I used to go down to the cheese factory and help stir the cheeses. But what I went for, I used to love that cheese curd. The stuff would come right through my fingers. And he let me get by with it.

"Well, let me think. On the corner there used to be a general store; they handled other things besides groceries. Roy Priest ran it.

"Then next to it--there was a space in between, it wasn't over a foot wide--Makepeace ran a store. That's where the post office was at one time.

"[Most things sold in Plessis were] shipped through Redwood. There was a train that came through Redwood twice a day, and carried produce from Carthage and other places.

"There was a fellow here with horses, Algie Reynolds, who used to go over in the morning around eight o'clock or so and leave the mail; the train carried the mail to Ogdensburg and then Clayton. We used to get the mail twice a day back then, when the train went through Ogdensburg. And produce came from Carthage down through for the stores.

"The stores here didn't close till nine o'clock, or later if they were busy. The people came from farms around--with horses, they didn't have cars--and they couldn't come until after chores.

"Back then, salesmen would come over to the stores. Right across the street here was a big hotel; it's gone now.

And the school was just down this first street, about three or four buildings down. The schoolhouse is still there. We went through six grades. Then you had to go to Redwood. The ones that went, went there, although they could have gone to the Bay or Theresa probably.

"But a lot of people didn't go on back then. They didn't have the education. Later, I was 21 years old and I went back to high school with kids that were younger. I lived alone in Watertown at that time. I didn't go long. So I never had the education like a lot of them.

"My parents were gone; my mother passed away when I was still young, and later on I had to leave home.

A time away

During Hubert's coming-up years, he left Plessis for a while. He doesn't say why, but he must have been pursuing work. For a while, He lived in Alexandria Bay, and remembers the trolley that ran for a few years between there and Redwood.

"When I moved to the Bay, I used to go over to Redwood by trolley," he begins. Redwood was interesting because "the freight and everything came over to Redwood by train. The trolley car went into Redwood twice a day."

One day, though, without benefit of trolley, he remembers, "Another guy and I hitched to Redwood. We walked all over Redwood. Then, to go back to the Bay was a long way, six or seven miles.

"Gulf Hill was a stteper hill then; the road doesn't go that way now. A guy came with a engine that couldn't make it up the hill. It didn't have the power. The other guy and I had to push him up the hill, and then we jumped on and got a ride the rest of the way to the Bay."

Just by the logic of numbers, most Thousand Islands boys must have put in time working on local farms, and Hubert confirms that's so.

"Oh, yeah," he says, "I used to work on farms in the summertime, haying. The hay was loose; we didn't bale it. We used to rake it, we'd pile it up." He particularly remembers working on Bill Kepler's farm.

"There was over 300 acres and we had five horses. We had 26-30 cows and drew the milk. There used to be a milk station just as you cross the bridge; they used to bring milk across the river. There was a cheese factory there. Boy," he laughs, "it makes my mouth water now."

You Can Go Home Again

Hubert held one more job away from where he really wanted to be--Plessis--for four and a half years at a typewriter factory in Watertown or Syracuse, he's not clear which.

"Then I left," he said, "and came into Plessis, and worked for the cooperative."

That was the Plessis Farmers' Cooperative Store, which Hubert ended up running, he says, for "gracious, I don't remember, twenty-some years. Part of the store from back then is gone. They tried to get 50 farmers; they got 48. You had to be a farmer or a retired farmer, or you couldn't join.

"The farmers gave a note to the bank, to Redwood first, for $4,800. They didn't handle feed at that time. Then, they put feed in and had to have more money. Redwood couldn't furnish it, so they went to the Bay.

"The Bay loaned them another $5,000 for the feed store.

"When I was working there, the farming equipment used to come into Redwood by train, and we'd go get it and I'd have to put the stuff together.

"And I was married here, when I was about 24. Well, I came back to Plessis here because of a lady, more than anything else."

Hubert met his future wife, Lotta, at the Plessis United Methodist Church.

"My mother's people were Catholics," he remembers, "but my father's were Protestants. I went here because it was a Protestant church, that's all. The church over here, of course, is not as active as it used to be. There used to be 75 or 80 coming to Sunday School and church. And they don't have this now, every Monday night all the young people used to get together at one of the persons' homes. On the first Monday they'd have a meeting, about an hour. On the other Mondays they'd just get together and have a good time, sing and dance. We used to play cards, too--not gambling cards--and I played checkers. Just to get together in different homes.

"But at eleven o'clock we went home. There wasn't any question about it."

Married, with children

Lotta Collins taught, Hubert says, "at the district school, and later at this school."

The couple had three children. Theron, the first, died from diphteria when he was only three.

Vivian was born in 1929, and lived until 1987. Rupert, Hubert's surviving son, was born in 1931. A retired Oswego County health commissioner who lives in Sandy Creek, this week he is laid up in the hospital after a nasty car accident on Route 81.

"Rupert retired," Hubert muses, and--at least before this accident--"he's busier than he was when he was working."

There are nine grandchildren, eighteen great-grands.

But that's jumping way, way ahead. We were still back at the part in Hubert's story where it was many, many years before the senior Collinses, themselves, retired. Somewhere in his anecdotal resume, Hubert took a hiatus from the Plessis Farmer's Co-op to convert a Redwood cheese factory to a feed mill. That variation on a theme lasted seven years.

"That was a Dairyman's League milk plant," he explains, "and when that quit, I made a feed store out of it. That train made it handy. It used to be I had a feed store here and had to truck it over; but there, the railroad ran right by. And from the railroad they had a special track that came into the feed mill, just a spur.

"A minimum carload was 20 tons, that was what you paid for; then you paid for the extra. There was half a dozen different kinds of feed. But, I [still] lived here in Plessis. That's one of the reasons I quit, going back and forth."

In 1949--Rupert would have been 18--Lotta becme a licensed practical nurse. The Collinses used to run a nursing home out of their house.

"We were licensed for eight adults," Hubert remembers, "unless they were bedridden--then we usually didn't take them, or the old, old people. It was too much."

He talks about old, old people without a trace of irony. Among the couple's charges was a retired Alexandria Bay river guide they called Grampa Gladd, and one "youngster who needed help."

Meanwhile, there were a few hats Hubert hadn't gotten around to wearing yet. He waves at a shelf full of Gould manuals and mentions, "When they first came in here, I put in I don't know how many water pumps."

That must have been after--or was it before?--he was a local school commissioner. He pulls down an old roll-up map peppered with former area school districts; the map, which is undated, silently echoes Hubert by showing Wellesley Island as Wells Island, with three schools. Grindstone Island had two. Quickly scanning southeast, there was one at Hyde Lake, one at Sixberry Lake, one at Browns Corners. And more in between.

"In the Town of Alexandria," Hubert says, "there was 23 schools, but only 21 working when I was commissioner. Two down on the river closed. About every so many miles there was a school. There was schools all over. There was five school districts in the Town of Alexandria. Each district had a school board made up. The Bay itself made up two districts."

Before Lotta's death in 1973 or 1974, she was Plessis's postmaster for "twenty some years," Hubert continues. That building is gone now. Then we brought [the post office] over here."

Now Plessis post office is part and parcel of the Collins house. Hubert rents out the space.

"That used to be my parlor over there, where the post office is now," he gestures. "Everything in there I own. There was a post office that closed a long way from here, and I bought the postboxes.

"The last few years," he adds, "my wife wasn't able to do it. She was still postmaster, but I ran it for her. I was assistant postmaster, but other than her two week vacation, I didn't get paid. I quit my job at the cooperative; the last couple of years she wasn't able to do anything.

"It's one thing I won't do now. I won't run the post office unless something happens like when I had to put a new water line in there."

Coda

At the end of a long conversation, it's suppertime, and some stomach--either a senior or junior model--keeps interrupting. It's time to get out of Hubert's very-much-intact hair, but he's philosophical about the hurried apologies.

"Oh, time doesn't mean anything to me any more," he assures visitors. He provides a last-minute first-floor tour, including a wall full of fishing rods, and a tiny bathroom whose light fixture pull string is weighted with a lead sinker.

"I liked to fish," he says unnecessarily.

He spends long days alone in the house, rattling around among artifacts from the past, like the old framed photos he can no longer see. Rupert's wife, Bev, drives up a couple of times a week, he says, to take care of his books.

"I don't know what I'd do without her," he goes on. " I sit here all by myself. It's long days and nights."

His circumstantial boredom doesn't stop him from wanting to keep up with his longtime habit of Bible-reading. Maybe he's found some way to magnify the words, because he says, "I'd miss it if I didn't. There's so much in it that helps you."

He wants to make sure to show off the front porch flower pot that someone left on his steps. It's got a couple of brilliantly red flowers, and he's in love with them.

"I found it there," he explains. "I had an idea who it was, but it was only an idea."

Outside, a 97-year old man who probably shouldn't be standing hatless in the air that's turning a little raw--but who is indisputably durable--feels, rather than sees, the first big, cold raindrops from a quick shower.

"Beginning to spit," he observes, calmly.
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[Although your coordinator did not know Mr. Collins personally, she certainly knew of him. He was a pupil of her mother's at Densmore Bay School on Wellesley Island; his son and daughter were schoolmates of hers, and her mother regularly got commemorative stamps from the Plessis Post Office. During a period when a genealogist from Oklahoma was working in this area, she wrote of her contacts with Mr. Collins in connection with the Brookside Cemetery in Plessis. I trust no one will be offended by a slight bending of our rule regarding no mention of people or events past 1925. I feel this article contains valuable information about a way of life long gone.]

~~ * * * ~~

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