My older brothers were always interested in the Bristol Hills and around 1927 they rented a small house on the Egypt Valley Road which we called a cabin. It had a kitchen, living room, pantry and two bedrooms. There was a porch on the front. The cabin was heated by means of a wood stove. we used to get our wood by dragging in limbs with a rope, sometimes for quite a distance. The painting business was very slow in the winter and sometimes Clarence would stay over there for more than a week. He wouldn't want to spend all of his time gathering wood. Halfway down the hill into the valley there was an old man who lived alone on top of a ridge beyond a deep gully that ran beside the road. He sold firewood, delivered for $3.00 a cord. Sometimes we would buy wood when we had enough money. The nearest house to the west was one half mile away and to the east there was one a mile beyond us. The roads were dirt and were never plowed in the winter time. Most days in the winter, the only car to come by was the mailman. In the deep winter he might only make it once a week. In the spring when the snow melted the roads were bad and we would simply drive in the ruts that were not too deep. I spent all my Christmas vacations and weekends with Clarence, and sometimes Gordon, at this place. If the roads were very bad in the winter, my father would take Clarence and I as far as the main road went and we would pull a toboggan, loaded with our food and supplies, about six miles to the cabin. We would have set a time and day for him to pick us up when we were ready to come home. The corner on the main road where he met us was at the top of the hill that goes down into Honeoye. There was Jones' gas station there where we would wait. When we were at the cabin and the weather was good, some of the family would come over for Sunday dinner. My older sisters and their husbands would sometimes join my father in coming. Clarence's friend would often come over to hunt. The rabbit hunting was very good. When I was old enough to have a gun, Clarence, Gordon and I would start out about 11:00 am to hunt for dinner. We would go in opposite directions and try to get a rabbit then beat the others back to the cabin. I remember one time we got a rabbit and were back in less than an hour, but Gordon was already back and had one ready to start cooking. The cabin was interesting because we were told that a man who had lived there some years before had sat in the kitchen in a chair and blown his head off with a shotgun. The bullet holes were all there in the plaster in the ceiling so we supposed it to have been true. Clarence was always interested in fox hunting and had a trap line too. I guess at this time I had a BB gun and just followed Clarence around. When I was about twelve years old Clarence bought me a single shot 22 and I used it to hunt fox with him. I don't remember what we ate in those days at the cabin, but Clarence did the cooking. I do remember one time Gordon made a raisin pie. He made the crust and put in a box of seedless raisins then put it in the oven. When he took it out it was just as when he put it in, so we poured the raisins back in the box and ate the crust. Across the road about a quarter mile up in a field there was an old chestnut tree that was killed by blight that eventually killed all the chestnut trees in the East. This tree still had a few green limbs coming out of the trunk and we used to get the chestnuts and roast them. The remainder of the tree was dead and we used it for firewood. The cabin was on the edge of a deep gully and the creek ran down the gully in back of the cabin. It went on to Honeoye Lake. We used to set traps in the creek for muskrats. Sometimes we would hear wildcats scream in the middle of the night down in the gully. The stove we used for heat had a big ornate top that slid to one side to expose the cooking top. we took this off and had it hanging on a nail in the pantry. One night Clarence and I were there alone and the wildcats were down in the gully. Just about midnight we were awakened by a terrible crash somewhere in the cabin. Between that and the wildcats it made our hair stand on end and the chills go up and down our spines. We finally got up enough nerve to get out of bed, get a flashlight and investigate. The heavy iron stove top had come off the nail and knocked down all the pots and pans. After a couple of hours we got back to sleep again. Down the road, not far from the cabin, a church had burned down at midnight under mysterious circumstances. All these happenings made the place very spooky to someone only ten years old. During these years I used to tag along behind Clarence while he was hunting and taking care of his trap line for fox and muskrat. Fox pelts were worth about $20 then, which was a lot of money. In all the years that we hunted them, I can not remember getting one. It was fun setting and baiting the traps and finding where the fox had gotten the bait without springing the trap. One winter Leon stayed at the camp and worked for Tony Miller on his farm down the road. This is where he met Louise as she was the school teacher at the school the other way from the cabin. At that time teachers would board near the school and she stayed at the Miller's. Leon said he worked very hard there, from sunrise to sunset, cutting wood and doing chores for small wages and one meal a day. For a change sometimes in the summer, we would go down about two miles toward Honeoye and there was a place you could drive a car along the creek away from the road to where the banks got steep. There was a nice point by the creek where the ground was level and there were lots of tall pines. Clarence had a panel truck and there was a mattress in the back to sleep on. We would set up a canvas cover to cook and eat under. It was a beautiful spot where we could stay for the weekend. Sometimes I would take Ray Smith or Chuck Spears with me. There were places where the creek was a couple of feet deep and we would go skinny dipping. I often think of all that I would have missed doing if it had not been for Clarence. About 1930 or shortly there after, Clarence and Gordon bought five acres of land from Tony Miller along the edge of his farm. They paid $30 an acre for it and about four and one half acres of woods, then the creek with a clearing beside it. After we had it surveyed we put up some markers at the back corners which were up the hill. It was level for about 1/2 to 1 acre at the bottom and the woods went up the hill fairly steep. About two months after buying the land we were walking around the property line and found that Tony Miller was cutting down the big trees, 2 to 2 1/2 feet in diameter, and dragging them onto his property. He had cut about ten of the big trees and didn't think we would be over there to find out. We went down to Bristol Center and got the local Sheriff (big deal) and had him serve papers of some sort on Tony Miller. We never got any of the big trees back, but he didn't cut any more. There was one big oak about 3 1/2 feet in diameter that had been cut down and still on our property. I would go up there and sit on it and hunt squirrels. We never did cut it up for firewood as we never had a saw big enough to do it. The knowledge of trees that I learned in Boy Scouts gave me an interest in the trees that were on our property. There were pine, oak, maple, beech, basswood and a very hard wood. The ironwood did not grow very big and had a twisted trunk. The bark was slate grey, smooth and it was properly named because it sawed like iron. We bought the lumber for the cabin at Davidson's Lumber Yard on West Avenue in Canandaigua and they delivered it for us. I remember being over there and waiting for the truck to get there. The driver got lost and it took him half the day to find us. After we had unloaded the lumber, he sat and visited with us the rest of the day. I was about 12 or 13 years old so could help my brothers saw the boards and nail them up. I recall putting the wood shingles on the roof. We even had a front door that we could use when we had company. Gordon was good with mason work so he put in the cement block foundation and built the big stone fireplace at one end of the cabin. We had a lot of good fireplace fires and used to sit around it by the hour. Sometimes we would find a piece of apple wood to burn, which makes a beautiful fire. We also had a wood burning stove which we used for cooking. The cabin had one large room and two bedrooms partitioned off at one end by six foot high partitions. The walls were just the clapboards on the outside so it was not very warm in the winter. Just about like Horseshoe Camp I imagine. It was nice and warm, however, if you kept the fire going. We had a wood bin in the back of the cabin that came out into the room a couple of feet and had a cover that lifted up. On the outside we had a door on hinges that would raise up and thus we could fill the wood box from outside. One time someone broke in through that woodbox and stole a couple of my brother's guns, but that was the only time we were ever robbed. We used to drink the water from the creek even though there were cows pastured not far up stream. We thought that if the water ran five hundred feet from the cows that it would be pure again. It never hurt us but we soon found another way to get water. There was a small gully next to the cabin that was wet most of the year, so we drove an iron pipe back in the shale three or four feet and put a pan under it to catch the water that dripped out. In the summer it would drip about a gallon a day which was enough for drinking. I forgot to mention that the first thing we had to do before we built the cabin was to build a bridge across the creek. We cut two trees about the size of telephone poles and nailed boards on top. At least twice during our years there, the bridge was washed out by the spring floods. Usually it was found not very far downstream so we would drag it back and renail the boards down. I mentioned before, the Scout trips to Camp Woodcraft which usually took place on a Saturday. It must have been nice to have all the energy that we had at that age. After running all day at Scout Camp, Ray Smith and I would walk to Berby Hollow after the rest of the troop left for home. We followed the edge of the big gully down into Bristol Valley and then walked south on the road until Mud Creek passed under the bridge to our side of the road. It was too deep to cross anywhere else. Then we would climb the hill to the west, which is about where Bristol Mountain Ski Area is now located, then cross the top of the hill, which was fairly flat, and Down into Berby. We Couldn't get lost because I knew this area very well and when we came to the Berby Hollow Road I knew whether to turn right or left to get to the cabin. It was about a six mile walk and we could make it there by dark. We only did this when Clarence was planning to be there and we could spend the night and come home with him the next day. After we got the cabin built we planted some pine trees in the yard along the creek. I remember getting six pine trees from a nursery. They were so small that I carried them inside a small cereal box. The last time I was by there they were all living and about fifteen feet tall. We named the camp "Hunting's End" and we had a sign on a post out by the road near the gate we made to keep people from driving in. When you crossed the bridge we had three stone and concrete steps up the bank and Gordon cemented a sundial on top of a three foot high stone and concrete base. It was accurate and we used it to tell time. This area of Bristol was sparsely populated in those days and there was no house between the cabin and Honeoye. Sometimes we would need extra groceries and would go to Treble's store in Honeoye for them. After high School I went with his daughter Althea for a while. We bought most of our groceries in Canandaigua before we left for camp and could get enough food for two of us for a week for $5. We bought them at a little grocery store on South Main Street owned by Ernie Watts. Most of our meals consisted of boiled ham, Pancakes and jello. We probably had other things but these are what I remember. Most of our meat is what we got hunting. We often had fried squirrel, rabbit or partridge. We used to start hunting partridge right from the back door of the cabin and once Gordon got a bird about 100 feet up the hill. At times in the winter we would get up in the morning and see deer and fox tracks in the snow within ten feet of the cabin. The cabin was in a valley with a hill to the west so it would be almost dark by 4:30 PM so we would start a fire in the fireplace and eat our dinners early. We would heat up the sliced boiled ham and eat it with pancakes. We had a large round cast iron griddle and cooked with it on top of the wood stove. Clarence would make his pancake (always about one foot across) and then sit at a table in front of the fireplace to eat. While he ate his, I would cook mine and he would be done when mine was ready. We took turns like this until we were full and then we would eat our dessert together. We didn't have to hurry any as the evenings were long. Sometimes in the summer we would go up the Lower Egypt Valley Road to where the spring was (I'll tell more about that later) and there was a lane that went up the hill to where a farmhouse once stood. There were found a lot of blackberry bushes which we called thimbleberries because they were big, over 1 1/2 inches long. We would have them for dessert with sugar and evaporated milk. We had a concentrated flavoring mixed with water to drink. It was called HO-MIX and came in flavors. Whenever we got thirsty we'd stop for a glass of HO- MIX. It was probably the forerunner of KOOLAID. The only lights we had in the cabin were Coleman gasoline lanterns and we would read by it at night. We had an outside "john" about 30 feet up the hill in back of the cabin with stone steps cut in the bank. It was a one holer surrounded by blinds we took off an old house somewhere. You could sit inside and run the slats up and down to see out. Sometimes we would take a gun with us and watch for partridge while we sat. One weekend we arrived at camp to find a dead partridge on one of the beds. It had flown through a window and couldn't get out again. Another time a red squirrel got down the fireplace and really made a mess of the cabin. He even chewed off the wood around the glass in the windows. He didn't get out and we found him in there dead. We built a dam in the creek to make a place for our Saturday night bath and it was about two feet deep with a nice smooth rock bottom. We had an overflow in the dam to raise or lower the level by inserting or removing planks. We took the planks out during the spring floods. The level area between the creek and the road was large enough so we could have softball games and park cars there. In those days we often hunted squirrels as I have mentioned. There were many pure black squirrels then and we would hunt for them just because they were different. One place up on top of the hill there were fox squirrels but we never killed one of them. Fox squirrels are much larger than gray squirrels and they have a long bushy tail like a fox. We could see them in the woods but were never able to get close to one. Most of them were up on top of the hill on posted property belonging to the Sanetarium in Clifton Springs. It was called the Sanetarium Farm and they raised farm and dairy products for use at Clifton. It seemed strange that they would have a farm so far away. You can check the map for the location of some of the places I write about. We were told about a spring on the Lower Egypt Valley Road where we could get water that was really pure. Just down the bank at the side of the road there was a pool of clear water about three feet across with the water bubbling out of the rocks at the bottom of it. This water was so cold that it didn't even freeze in the winter time and on the hottest summer day it was so cold that you couldn't hold your hand under it. Eventually, Stuart Caves of Caves Lumber Company in Holcomb, built a lovely summer home on the lot including the spring, but they always allowed people to get water there. There was an intersection in the road just down from the cabin with a telephone pole. We made arrow signs with cities and mileage painted on them and nailed them to the pole. They pointed towards Honeoye, Naples, Rochester and Canandaigua. They were still there for years after the camp was sold. Several times Clarence and I walked home to Canandaigua just to see how long it would take us. It was about 15 miles distance and we always made it in about four hours and fifteen minutes. One time when it was snowing I was wearing a heavy pair of overshoes and about halfway home they got too heavy for me, so I took them off and hid them under a large rock beside the road. The next time we went to camp I picked them up. We had a black and white cow hide for a rug in the cabin. Across the road and up on the hill was a berry patch and in the spring there would be berry pickers up there, when they looked our way, I would put the cow hide over me and chase Clarence around the yard. They were just far enough away that it may have looked real to them. At least they used to stand there watching us. One of Clarence's friends had a fox hound that we would keep with us for fox hunting. His name was "Shimmer-boo" and he was large. One Christmas vacation we got snowed in and the fellow who owned the dog came after us in a truck. I lost three days of school which was a treat. We slipped and slid around in the snow on the hill, but finally made it up the hill, on to home and back to school. We all rode in the front seat of the truck with that big smelly dog on my lap all the way home. You know how big and gangly those fox hounds are. I'll never forget that ride home. We had a trapdoor in the floor of the cabin with a four foot square pit dug out beneath. We would store foodstuffs down there where it was cooler. There were all kinds of nut trees around and at one time we had two bushels of butternuts, one of walnuts and two of hickory nuts (all shucked) down under the floor. After they were there a couple of years we took them out and burned them in the fireplace. Two bushels of hickory nuts would be worth a fortune now. Halfway up the hill on our property there was a pine tree about three feet through the trunk and very tall. The limbs came straight out of the trunk so you could climb up it just like you were climbing a ladder. About forty feet up I built a platform and used it for my secret hideaway. I could see down to the road and when we were expecting company, I would go up there and watch for them. We used to do a lot of partridge hunting and there was an older man by the name of Bill Brooks who went along with us, without a gun, just for the joy of walking in the woods. He carried a flask of whiskey and every so often would stop to sit on a tree stump and have another nip. He never bothered our hunting and was nice to have along. He was the father of one of the girls Gordon used to go out with. We had to cut all our firewood with a two man crosscut saw or a one man crosscut saw about three feet long. Our only problems were when we went over to camp for a weekend, we had to spend the first day cutting wood and the second day hunting. We never got very far ahead with our woodpile. We would cut trees one to two feet in diameter. At the back corner of the cabin there was a gully that went up the hill but it never had any water in it's six foot deep depression. After we cut the trees into chunks we would roll them over to the gully and start them down the hill. They would bound up in the air and sometimes jump out of the gully where trees would halt their flight. They would go about 40 feet and then we would start them out again. At the bottom they would be traveling quite fast so we made a barricade of chunks about the size of a cord of wood, to protect the cabin. It was an easy way to get the wood down the hill and the chunks ended up right by our wood pile for splitting. We would cut the basswood chunks about a foot long as it was a very straight wood, soft and wonderful to split for kindling. I would sit on one chunk of wood and split another with my scout hatchet. It would split almost down to the size of a pencil and I always kept a big pile of it to start fires with. When we were cutting down trees we would put all the brush into piles so that there would be places for the rabbits to hide. When we were hunting rabbits, we could kick the pile with our foot and scare them out. We had a basswood tree with a nest of honey Bees in a hole about 10 feet up the trunk. One day when it was about zero degrees out, we cut the tree down and when it hit the ground the bees flew up in the air about ten feet before the cold got them and they fell to the ground. We got out all the beeswax comb and took it back to the cabin and made honey. On top of the hill in back of the cabin there were a lot of open fields and in one we found a big old wagon wheel that we could roll way up to the top and start it down into the open fields. It would roll a long way before it came to the woods. Next time we came up we would bring it with us. Sometimes we would carry our skis with us about two miles up the hill and then ski down criss cross all the way back to the cabin. Once I was sitting on top of a brush lot hunting fox and I heard a noise behind me. I turned around very slowly and there were three deer eating grass about ten feet behind me! One moonlit night at midnight we went up there and sat watching for foxes to cross the open field. With the moon light on the snow you can see for a long ways and it was very quiet. It is amazing how you can do something like that just once in your life and never forget it--the sight, sound and feeling. I can close my eyes right now and see those open fields and trees just as clearly as fifty seven years ago. We did not have anti-freeze for the car in those days. We put alcohol in the radiator to be safe at about zero degrees. You couldn't put anymore than that because every time the car got warm it would boil over. On very cold nights we would drain the radiator into a large pan and take it into the cabin. One night it went down to 26 degrees below zero and I believe that is still the record for this area. We took the mattress off the other bed and put it over us and a big wooden chair on top of that to keep it from sliding off. Clarence always got up first in the morning and I still hear him crumpling newspapers to start the fire again if it was out. We had a trap line to see to as we were leaving home later in the day. I put on every piece of clothing I could find and was so stiff I could hardly walk. We had to go around the whole line and spring the traps as we would not be back for a week. We then put the anti-freeze on the stove and melted it as we had left it outside all night and it was frozen. We put it back in the radiator and headed home. Halfway down the road into Berby Hollow was an old dirt road to the right that went along the hill through the woods. It crossed a deep gully with a sharp S turn and crossed an old wooden bridge. Just on the other side was an old abandoned house whose basement windows were covered by iron bars. It was all grown up with brush and vines and we speculated that slaves or prisoners had been kept there in the basement. It was a very interesting spot to a boy. Near the back of this house we found the remains of an old wooden railway track. It went from the top of the bank alongside a deep gulley and down to the creek in Berby Hollow. The ties and rails all made of wood and rails were about 18 inches apart. It was very steep and ended at the top of a cliff down by the creek. We never did find out what it was used for. It was still recognizable as a track however. It may have been used to get logs down to the creek and a sawmill when the water was high enough. We had a 22 rifle that was probably purchased in the 1920s by one of my brothers. When he needed money he sold it to another brother for $1 less than he paid for it. Whenever the owner needed money, he would sell it again with the one dollar loss. I finally bought it for $5 and still have it. It is a very good gun and shoots straight. I used it to hunt woodchucks for many years up to the 1960s when I hunted with Harold Kennedy and Brownie. It is the rifle I taught Lynn to shoot with. My time at Berby was from age 9 to the end of high school in 1935. After that I used to go there with the fellows I played ball with and we would have parties and go hunting. After high school I never spent a night there. When I was in the Air Corps, Clarence and Gordon sold the camp for $1000. If I had been home at that time I think I would have bought it. It would make a beautiful summer camp even today. Goodbye to a lot of good times.