WE HAD A FARM ON 62ND STREET

A random day, a random search, a random discovery of two photos from my past: the last Schermerhorn farm house on Manhattan. Somewhere around or north of 62nd Street and on the East River.  Abandoned years earlier, these shots were taken in the late 1800s by an unknown photographer when the farmlands had been sold off and only the house remained.  It was demolished in 1914.

It stood there when my grandmother was a young girl, living on a Schermerhorn farm upstate where I'd like to imagine Jacob Janse Schermerhorn's sons started their gun running [as all the knickerbocker families began with some kind of criminal activity, mine no differently.]  Frances surely visited her cousins in Manhattan, though gone too long now for my questions and days of stories, now lost.  How small the world was back then... Just to know the Schermerhorn farm stood here once - a  Randall farm not far but a river away - both testament to those who want to know what's on the other side of the hill.  Neither stayed put.  The Randalls sailed from England, the Schermerhorns from the Netherlands, and somewhere along the way I inherited their wanderlust.  

No tumbleweed is ever truly alone.