Pumpkin Hill overlooks Cayuga Lake at the widest point, and the lake reflects an extra dose of sun …. along with a lot of wind … so the thin, hill-top soil is parched in summer.
The Cayuga Indians probably never tried to plant up here, preferring the lower, gentler slopes where the soil is thicker, the growing season longer, and water close at hand.
The Pumpkin Hill section was awarded to one of Washington's generals and was sold on down to a family from Connecticuit : the Morgans, who traveled up here by oxcart, possibly unaware until they cleared the land, of just how thin the glacier-scraped hill-top soil was.
The clearing method that most white settlers used was roughly the same as Sullivan's men used to destroy the Indian orchards around the village below……which itself was was not all that different from the method the Indians had used to prepare a wooded area for a ten year planting cycle before leaving it to the deer and berries : Slash and burn.
But the clearing methods of the white settlers were the most destructive and didn't include moving on every ten years to let the soil come back.
In the first year the homesteaders typically girdled the trees to kill them and let in the light.
When the trees were dead and dry, some would be hewn for barn and house building, but most would be burnt to charcoal.
No doubt some charcoal was reserved for the local forges and kilns, but the majority was burnt and reduced even further….into potash, which they shipped down lake and canal along the line of migration to older homesteads that , five or ten years earlier in the history of expansion, had burnt and sold off their own biomass to yet older settlements.
The Morgan family traveled by Oxcart from Conneticuit to Pumpkin Hill, probably without having seen the soil they were betting on.
In the early years, after rolling the stones off the fields and onto their foundations, the Morgans plowed the ground and planted wheat.
But the plowed fields became like broken pottery in the hot Summers, and the soil got thinner with each season….even with the addition of potash imported from newer homesteads up the route of migration.
The farm didn't prosper long. The Morgan boys one by one moved on down into Aurora, started the masons, and got into politics. In the eighteen twenties, the Morgan son who had become a Senator sold the homestead on down to others who tried poor-soil crops like potatoes, and then beans, then table grapes.
The last owner of the intact farm planted many acres of Red Pines that he planned to sell as Christmas trees to send his kids to college.
In the nineteen seventies, the original house of the homestead burnt down.
The plantation pines are now ship-mast size.
Much of the old cleaerd land is hay meadow or cattle range, much second-growth timber. Most of the hill top and West slope is public hunting land that has not been mowed in many years, and which the state stocks with pen-raised pheasants … which the Coyotes eat most of. Coyotes, Deer and Turkeys thrive.
The four acre remnant of the homestead where the old home was and Dog's Plot now is, has been mowed only with paths, aisles, and small clearings for the last fifteen or twenty years. Honeysuckle, Dogwoods, Wild Roses and Brambles are well established. Buckthorns have come up, grown old and died.
In the meantime, the stumps of the Cayuga village Pear victims of General Sullivan had long ago sent roots traveling and sprouting; the sprouts had become trees that flowered and set seed, climbing the slopes through generations and evolving a local variety with root systems suited to the thin clay of the glacier-scraped lake basin. Over the same period, the fruits themselves reverted to round and smaller forms, like the ancestral pears of the Caucus mountains before European and Asian Pears went their separate ways.
When I first moved here, I busted through the hardpan clay, added soil, and planted a couple of dozen fruit trees, including Pears, which my research showed would be most tolerant of the clay, the poor drainage, and the periods of dehydration we have up here.
I hardly noticed the naturalized Pear trees that spire up through the invasive Buckthorns of Dog's Plot, beating the Ash, Hickory, and Oak out of the woods, into the open … because the naturalized trees were thorny and the fruits mostly small, round, green, bitter, and hard to distinguish form some kind of crab apple.
I went through a couple Summers pumping the well dry twice a day trying to get the new tree root systems established….before I realized that the "Crab Apples" were actually Pears, and it occurred to me that I could take advantage of the evolved and established Pears….by simply grafting cultivated varieties onto them. So I did.
I have been colonizing the Pears for five or six years now. Or eight.
By next Spring anyway, I will have about a hundred and fifty trees here grafted and growing a dozen varieties of European and Asian Pears… some trees already twelve or sixteen feet tall, headed for the sky. I prune out the center and spread the leading limbs.
The late frosts of last Spring prevented fruiting and left the trees to hyper-vegetate instead…which means they should fruit extra heavily next Spring.
By late summer….. if we don't have another double frost and hail disaster….or the lake doesn't rise six-hundred feet, I should be overwhelmed with pears.
I'll put some out by the road for you.
Take a basket of them nd leave five bucks in the cash box.
Thanks.
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