When my grandparents bought our place in the 1940’s it was said that traffic on our dirt road consisted of two cars. Or rather one car. It drove down the road in the morning and returned at night.
I don’t know whether the story was true or somewhat exaggerated but I visualize some bulky pre-war Buick kicking up a cloud of dust.
The desire to explore that bygone era is also what prompted me to contact a couple of senior neighbors for a project I’m working on to publish a modest biography of our road and its inhabitants through the decades. My subjects painted a more rustic picture than that exists today, even though there’s still little risk of encountering traffic jams.
Those men were children or teenagers then, attended school in the nearby village of Kinderhook, NY worked on neighbors’ farms during the summer and experienced both the childhood pleasures of playing in nature, of fishing and swimming, and the isolation and occasional loneliness of rural life.
That romance is also what underwrites an affecting photography exhibition that opened last week and runs through the rest of the year at the Columbia County Historical Society’s elegant Vanderpoel House in Kinderhook. Dirt Road Life is a collaboration between the historical society and the Chatham Dirt Road Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to preserving the area’s rural character. The show gathers images of rural county life from the late 19th and early 20th century.
When I think of photography from that era I conjure up images of people in formal, frozen poses. Didn’t anybody smile back then? Why did the men look so dour and the woman deprived of any grace and beauty? The problem obviously had something to do with the camera equipment and lethargic shutter speeds.
The achievement of this show is that, while it doesn’t candy coat the routine hardships of survival back then – I’m thinking of lack of indoor plumbing, among other challenges -- many of the images show people as they go about their lives, and happily so. They’re not posed. They’re encountered. And, as one might have suspected, their lives often look pretty good, even enviable, from the vantage point of contemporary life and all its threats and complications.
For example, Chatham farmers Levi and Richmond Rivenberg reposing by the side of the road in 1900 with their bicycles. Fields rather than forests, or certainly housing developments, predominated. Most of the trees have been cut down to make way for farming.
Or a photo of adults and children careening down a snow-covered road on sleds, past a house, barn and stubbled field. Speed blurs the faces of those in the foreground but you can still detect the thrill of the moment.
There’s even a celebrity photo. It shows teenager Moe Horwitz atop a horse in front of his family’s Chatham farmhouse circa World War I. You may better know him as Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. The Stooges bought the farm in 1916 and worked it to escape military service. Behind him, standing with his mother on a hayrick, is Moe’s brother Schemp, an occasional member of their comedy act. I don’t know where Curly is. And Larry Fine, the third Stooge, wasn’t a family member.
The photo was contributed by Chatham Dirt Roads members Doug and Chesley Welch, who own the farm today and occasionally receive Stooges fans that show up on their doorstep.
The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by author Verlyn Klinkenborg who articulates what it is about these photos that ultimately mesmerizes the viewer.
It’s the allure of an age when time behaved differently, when life unrolled at a more leisurely pace.
“Whoever you are,” Klinkenborg writes, “there’s time to greet one another, to share a few words about the lateness of spring or the heat of summer. And if one of the people in these photographs asked you where you come from, you could say, just around the corner and up the road, and it would be true.”
The exhibition also includes contemporary photos shot by students at Ichabod Crane, Kinderhook’s high school. What’s most surprising about them, besides their confident sense of composition – perhaps that’s a happy byproduct of our TikTok age -- is how timeless they appear. Then again, dirt roads have a way of casting a spell.
And after you see the show you can visit The Mercantile, a new shop at the Vanderpoel House, celebrating Columbia County history. Where else are you going to find custom made President Martin Van Buren gift tags?
My wife gives me a certain amount of grief because I complain about the traffic on our road these days. I have a theory that it’s not just new homes that are behind the increased volume; my hunch is that Google Maps is using the road as a shortcut.
It’s still not a lot of traffic, unless you were raised on the story of that single car making the round trip journey in the late 1940’s. That time is long gone, but as the images in Dirt Road Life display, it remains well within reach.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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