Rubbing Shoulders with Ghosts

Mr. and Mrs. Swaney stand in front of the Old Mission house they built nearly a century ago.

By Stephen Lewis

It's not ghosts exactly.

But every time I drive down Center Road on Old Mission Peninsula toward town and I pass these two houses, I feel a presence that has nothing to do with the present occupants.  The first house was built by Woodruff Parmelee, probably in the late 1880s or early 1890s.  The second, about a mile closer to town, was occupied by the Curtis family.  In the summer of 1895, Woodruff was convicted of killing Julia Curtis.  Were I to drive a mile or so to the east and south, I would pass the spot where Julia's body was found.

Of course, these places and people have special meaning for me because I have fictionalized their story in a novel.  But for my present purpose I cite them because they represent a particularly dramatic example of an important generalization that informs my thinking about the significance of place.  Insofar as a particular place offers physical evidence of lives lived there it links us to the past.  Without this link, to my way of thinking, we lose our mooring.  When the new obliterates the old, it is as though we are being born into a new world.  As exciting as that idea sounds at first blush, we also have to recognize that in this new world we no longer have the compass to guide us that would be provided by our connection to what went before.

We live in a farmhouse that will be a century old next year.  On the wall in our living room is a picture of the young couple who built this house.  Parked at the side of the house is an automobile from that period.  The man in his white shirt and suspenders stands at the front of the  vehicle, the woman in her gown reaching to her ankles leans against the door on the driver's side.  The car itself looks like a motorized carriage whose body not many years before would have been pulled by horses.   One large tree at the side of the house is no longer there, having been cut down when a kitchen was added.  But at the border of the picture are the branches of another tree that still occupies that space in our front yard.

No, it's not ghosts that I am talking about.  I don't sense the Swaneys, for that is the name of the young couple, lurking about our house and perhaps casting a disapproving eye on the changes that have been made to their dwelling.  Rather, it is the sense that this house is a footprint of the events of the past, a physical fragment of the lives that were lived here.

When I take my morning bike ride north, the first intersection I come to is Swaney Road.  Sometimes I turn on it and then make a left on Brinkman Road, heading north again to Tompkins Road, all these roads bearing the names of the families who once worked their farms here.  Even though I am not native to this area, I feel as though I am traveling among old friends.  Perhaps because I am a novelist, my imagination is unusually engaged by these echoes from long ago.

My wife grew up here and her family has roots going back a hundred and fifty years.  People here still give directions by saying, "That's right by the old so-and-so place," identifying a location with the name of the persons who lived there.  This method of locating by family name creates a sense of community so that even I, a newcomer to this area, can feel connected to its past.

I grew up in Brooklyn and was living there when I got my first teaching job in 1966. For my interview at Suffolk Community College in Selden, Long Island, about sixty miles east of my apartment in Brooklyn, I drove out to the end of the Long Island Expressway, which begins at the Midtown Tunnel, which connects the east side of Manhattan to Long Island.  When I stopped at a red light on the service road, I took out the paper on which I had scrawled directions.  Turn left they said, and so I did onto County Road 111.  That's where I saw a sign that read,  "Fresh Eggs and Poultry."  I didn't realize it at the time, but I had reached the boundary between the inexorable, obliterating process of development and that which was being obliterated.  For Long Island was farmland before increasingly it became a bedroom community for New York City.  As the Expressway was extended farther and farther out onto Long Island, the farms gave way to one subdivision after another.  Here and there the old historic towns, some dating back to the seventeenth century remained, thrusting their presence against the tide of the new.  By the time we left Long Island, thirty-five years later, the Expressway had reached another thirty or forty miles east.  Nobody in the wake of its extension was selling fresh eggs and poultry or giving directions to the old so-and-so house.

This is not, however, a lament for the loss of the agricultural way of life.  It would be ridiculous for me, a kid from the streets of Brooklyn, to offer such a complaint.  It is, however, an observation about loss, whether it be of farmland, or an old factory or warehouse in downtown Manhattan.  It is not what has been lost, but that something that was no longer is.

I don't know if there is any significant sociological or psychological inference to be drawn from this loss.  I do know that for as long as I can -- for on the Peninsula, like Long Island, farms are giving way to subdivisions -- I will enjoy the subtle pressure of the past that I feel as I rub shoulders with the ghosts of Woodruff and Julia and the Swaneys and the Brinkmans and the Tompkins -- all those others who went before me on Old Mission Peninsula.