West Chazy Campground-Observance Present, Memories Past

DFH Volume 1 Issue 24

Continued from Vol 1 Issue 23

By Camilla [Dayton] Luckey, daughter Of Rev. Charles and Josephine Dayton.

Gerald Ralph was there, old guard and “extended family”— his mother was sister of Charles Dayton’s first wife, Gladys MacDonald, making him cousin of Izzie Hayes. Gerald was putting vinyl siding over the wood siding my Dad and I long ago salvaged from Chazy’s Miner (Minor?) Institute as it was being razed, early ‘60’s (same era as the cement block frenzy began; same era as my dad built that whole row of four or five cottages). The oak flooring throughout the Ralph cottage is still tight and gorgeous. I remember helping lay it. Gerald has changed the windows to vinyl and added an interior partition. He even has installed a hood above the stove!

Gerald stopped for a break, and we enjoyed a leisurely chat about various Daytons and about campground changes. Gerald told me about the Baptist youth group, I believe numbering a few hundred, that rents the grounds for a week or so annually. The kids are quite the “Jesus Group,” he says.  Sounds to me they are what everyone wished my generation to be.  Gerald and I also talked about Gerald’s fabulous collection of vintage woodworking hand tools and his and Carol’s recent move from Corinth to a Queensbury condo. They spend a lot of the summer season on the campground. “It’s home,” he said. They’ve had the cottage for more than forty years, first owners.

Carol was antiquing in Canada with Beth and Amy until Sunday morning, when I caught her in her bathrobe on my last lope, my third that morning, ‘round  the grounds, looking and listening for sounds of people stirring so I could say good-bye before my own departure. There were lights and sounds (these cottages aren’t soundproof) at the Ralph’s. Carol had been awake for hours, she said, but just relaxing in bed, where Gerald serves her coffee every morning!. My intended five-minute chat became a two-hour heart-to-heart; I was her flower-girl in the ‘fifties.

Saturday afternoon I slipped into the tabernacle, closed but not locked. I sat for a while on the platform steps. They seemed in the exact same place, maybe even the same steps, as in the former tabernacle, the one that collapsed under a heavy snow and was rebuilt as The Charkas Dayton Tabernacle in 1970(?). Lots to remember, lots to regret, lots to wish to re-live. Then I worked out a little minor-key melody on the old upright (piano), right next to a timepiece organ (surely not the Stevenson original?!), and finally I dared stand at the pulpit to pray and pretend. Lots of noise in those rafters and that metal roof when the place is empty, and the trees fan the wind. Of course it wasn’t really empty!

Chow Line at Old Dining Hall in early 950’s

The dining hall was closed except for the men on retreat, so I bought a terrific country breakfast at Guma’s, a sort-of-new (new to me) local restaurant on the edge of town and a fave for campers.  Best raspberry jam I’ve ever tasted. I assumed Guma’s was empty, as I walked in at seven a.m. Mine was the only car in the front parking lot and I didn’t know there was another lot at the side. So I was extremely startled when I heard “Cammie! Come join us!” Whoa! Where’s the ghost? And who would immediately recognize me after decades of absence?  But the voice was Phil Hunter’s. He and the campmeeting association president were seated, nearly hidden, in the corner booth. After introductions we three embarked on a conversation so engaging my eggs were cold before I touched them Truthfully, I don’t think we really did finish the conversation, just put it on pause. That’s what I hope.  I can hardly wait for more. The subject was holiness camps and the Holy Spirit. No chitchat breakfast, that one!  I liked both guys and I am pretty sure the new president liked me. He certainly seemed to enjoy our discussion. He is relatively new to West Chazy camp life. His name is Paul Robar.

As you exit the campground, if you turn your head left  (as a driver always should, before turning right) you can see, looming large, a silver silo with … ears?…propellers?…antennae for receiving  messages direct from heaven? No!….there’s a newly built windfarm on yon hill, in the direction of Altona!!

Other than that, the whole area seems as economically depressed as ever, except for the deservedly popular Guma. But the fields and hedgerows are heaven if you love native plants.

Old, Original Tabernacle

The cow creek (remember the swimming hole in the back pasture?) has shifted course a little and has filled in quite a bit. I can’t imagine Bud Hewitt, nephew of Reginald and childless Jo, taking a dive, as I once saw him do. I think Dad dared him. They use the creek for baptisms now. Looks to me they’d have to prostrate themselves to get their bellies under! And they mow to the creek! The place is packed with lovely buzzing creatures, a few flowers and ferns that look to be on steroids, so rich and free.

Shirley Pauling (in his 90s and, as mentioned above, owner of Dad’s fireplace cottage near the tabernacle, between the Seaman and Stevenson cottages) is the association volunteer who mows the “back forty,” the former cow pasture that stretches to the creek. He has an eye—beautiful job, nice balance between mown grass and waving wildness. We must remember, of course, it was the time of the annual men’s retreat, so the grounds were what is probably unusually spiffy. (Meaning: freshly mown.) I hope the Paulings eventually offer Dad’s cottage to me. I have no idea how much they paid or to whom. Or why they chose my dad’s! I told Shirley Pauling,  perhaps not wisely, of the night the priest at St. Joseph’s (across street) noticed a car convoy slowly rolling, lights out, down the campground road beside the dining hall. The priest, good neighbor, called the cops. But by the cops’ arrival the crowd of kids already in the attic of my dad’s cottage was heavy enough that some kids downstairs heard a rafter crack, I learned later. It could have been a catastrophe.

Anyway, before the dissolution of Wesleyan ownership several years ago, long before the association’s re-organization,  I, not being Wesleyan, was not allowed to own, either through inheritance or purchase. How things have changed! This summer I recognized approximately half the cottage names. I wonder, how many are still Wesleyan? The president of the board is not Wesleyan. This year’s men’s retreat speaker was. And the Charles Dayton Tabernacle no longer has pews but cushy, stackable chairs!!

“Everybody” was kind enough to welcome me, a non-member never mind a non-man, at the Saturday night end-of-retreat campfire. Imagine, a crackling, ember-tossing open fire right under those trees!  And my dad was the pyromaniac?! It was a beautiful stacked-stone pit with a Scout-worthy blaze, located midway between the Perry Motel and the kiddie tabernacle area. That area is now furnished with various genuine playground equipment, gone the stony sandpile and its few rusty toy trucks.

Many Dayton readers won’t see much that is immediately personal or relevant in this West Chazy report. Never mind; I didn’t write it for you but for your grandchildren and my own.

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West Chazy Campground–Observance Present, Memories Past

DFH Volume 1 Issue 23

By Camilla [Dayton] Luckey, daughter of Rev. Charles and Josephine Dayton.

AUGUST 2019:   It was my high school 50th— Beekmantown Central, the sprawling, district school a few miles south of West Chazy on Rte. 22. Yes, class of ‘69, summer of love, Age of Aquarius, Woodstock. My class! Maybe I’ll get to my part of that story later.  

Joyce Timpson Schauer, lifelong friend from Corinth, had mentioned that Norma, her sister, spends lots of time in West Chazy these days. Norma stays on the campground, I believe with Lori, John’s widow, who has Uncle Paul’s cottage. It occurred to me that if I were to attend my Class of ‘69 reunion I might as well pay the campmeeting association instead of LaQuinta, if, that is, the new campmeeting association would allow. They would.  Phil Hunter, of that long-faithful Glens Falls family, was my contact, suggested by Norma. Phil seems to be the official groundskeeper, although association members share never-ending tasks such as leaf-raking and roof repair; there are prices to be paid for that glorious old-tree canopy.

I stayed at the Perry “Motel,” built in the sixties-seventies cement-block frenzy that followed whatever year it was that my dad’s autumnal leaf burning ritual—a solo task that year—turned disastrous. One of his several simultaneously burning piles of leaves (he was always a person to multi-task) turned to embers the dorm and two or three cottages that directly faced the tabernacle. In those days, towering shade trees, heavy with leaves, graced the now bare, blistering lawn today used more for parking rather than for picnics.  The century-old wooden dorm and cottages were tinder boxes. Dry leaves had collected underneath and lay there, waiting.  I remember the afternoon but not the year. I know from other afternoons the crafty, peek-a-boo glint of those sparkly orange snakes as they try to curl their way onto the route and destination of their own choice That day they succeeded, and the campgrounds were forever changed.

The Perry “Motel” was built for tabernacle access, like the wooden dorm it replaced, but the Perry is sited at one side, not the front, of the main tabernacle (Charles Dayton Tabernacle) and is equally close to the Missionary Tabernacle, sometimes called the Ladies’ Tabernacle.

The Perry is located approximately where stood what I believe was the Hewitt cottage, the one with the friendly screened-in front porch, the one that should perhaps be intentionally typo’d ‘perch.’ The Hewitt cottage was heart and center of the campground, a watchman’s perfect tower or a gossip’s paradise. Every flow of pedestrian or vehicular traffic was visible and, it seemed, every passerby’s conversation or crunch of gravel was clearly audible. Jo Hewitt’s porch rocker was probably closer to the tabernacle pulpit than was the back row of tabernacle pews, and Jo was anything but a gossip. She was a person of fewer-than-few words and a perfect person to overhear material that needed to be lifted in prayer. She, widow of Rev. Reginald Hewitt, conference president who preceded my father, was a watchman who had suffered much. Reginald had died in 1961(?) in a flaming car crash only a few minutes from West Chazy camp, his destination. My own last memory of the quiet Mrs. Hewitt—remarkable to a child (and to me even as a young adult) for her veined apple-red cheeks and cute little apple-shaped body bestowed dignity by a permanently flawless French chignon and super thick rimless spectacles—was my mother greeting Mrs. Hewitt the summer after Mrs. Hewitt had just endured a winter of chemotherapy. Mrs. Hewitt nodded, not speaking aloud, her cheeks still rosy with red spider veins set now upon a palette of pea greens. Her chignon, maybe a bit thinner, was unchanged. My mother held her horror till we’d passed from earshot. My mother didn’t know, of course, that only a few summers later she herself would have her own pea green chemo pallor.

The Perry, as of 2019, is twenty bucks a night.  It’s a little rough but the water’s hot, the sheets clean, very few spiders (nothing worse!), and there were two bottles of water as well as a souvenir frig magnet in my welcome packet. And air conditioning!  Alas, to have AC, a window unit, meant the sole window was sealed, at least it could not be opened (!), and thus I could not enjoy the melodious sweet summer breezes which I believe are the campground’s hallmark natural beauty, a glory of the leafy trees.

Those fabulous trees are losing the battle to practicality  “Fire and ice” prudent board members have forever intoned, understandably. That’s a lot of leaves to rake. Fires are a proven danger.  Just read the above paragraphs! And who will pay for the roof when age or ice brings down a limb from one of these high and mighty beauties? and the roof moss!! I note that several cottages have been given shiny metal roofs, including my dad’s cottage that Shirley Pauling now owns. Cottages that have been let go, and there are several, belong on movie sets, romantically covered and drooping from pretty, green decay. Nevertheless, if you, dear reader, are looking at these lines  “in future years” and the pragmatists have won and the entire campground is scalped to a silent but easily mown-and-raked grass green, not moss green, with no standing timber.  Be aware that there was another time, a time when Mother Nature (and the Atwood family, local farmers) gifted West Chazy with a sanctuary much bigger than the cement-block tabernacle interior and naked front yard. There was a place where the psalmist would have felt at home, where Nature’s praises of her Creator were in glorious concert. There are just enough trees and just enough space between them to make beautiful worship music, as well as problems.

I was given, besides my Perry key, which I never used, and two water bottles and a frig magnet and registration form, a standardized and very general “holiness” statement requiring my signature. It was so general it presented no problems. Anyway, who doesn’t want holiness?  It’s just the type of lifestyle that puts ten-year-old girls into garters that I find problematic!

 Anyway, the entire experience felt very strange and very precious on counts too numerous to give in detail. One I will mention: the continuity of some of the population.

(to be continued next month—November 2019, Vol 1 Issue 24)