JUNIUS THEODORE STAGG BARD (1853-1930)

 

     Junius Theodore Stagg Bard – he was known as “June” – was born on January 12, 1853, in New York City, the youngest of eight children of James Mackie Bard and Sarah Jane Eakin Bard.  Sometime in the late 1850s June’s family moved to Sing Sing (now Ossining), Westchester County, New York, and he grew up there.

     Information about June’s younger years is still being researched.  Regarding his education, available records show that from at least 1867 to 1868 June attended a military academy in Sing Sing called Dr. Holbrook’s Military High School.  The uniformed lad in this photo is probably June during his time at Holbrook's.

     Holbrook's Military High School was a military academy and boarding school for boys located on Briar Cliff, which overlooked the Hudson River near Sing Sing.  The school’s 1869 circular says it was “established some years ago as a Military and Classical Boarding-School” and had been under the present management for about four years.  There had previously been a school at this location known as Saint Denis Institute.  A Mr. Tracy purchased the school and established “Mr. Tracy’s School” in 1864.  Reverend David A. Holbrook, PhD, purchased the Tracy school in 1866 and established Holbrook’s Military High School.  Holbrook’s operated until at least the early 1900s.

     For the 1867-1868 academic year, June was one of the class officers at Holbrook’s.  His title was 1st Sergeant of Company A.  June’s name does not appear on the list of cadet officers in the 1864 circular for Mr. Tracy’s School, and a roster of students is not available.  June clearly got a good basic exposure to the classics at Holbrook’s.  The academy’s 1869 circular mentioned studies in Latin, Greek, French, German and all the English branches.  In the school’s later years students were able to choose from three curricula:  Classical, Latin-Scientific, or English-Scientific.  Students received grades for Deportment, Application, Spelling, Declamation and Composition, Church Attendance, and skill at Military Drill, as well as in classes like Arithmetic, Algebra, French, Latin, and Greek.

     Holbrook’s issued what they called a merit roll every four weeks.  The students were ranked on conduct, lessons and attendance.  At the end of the fall 1866 term (February 1867) June was ranked 13th out of 52 names on the merit roll, and at the end of the spring 1867 term (June 1867) June’s ranking went up to 5th out of 44 on the merit roll.  His older brother Charles also attended Holbrook’s during the same time frame.

     June’s name does not appear on a roster of pupils at Holbrook’s for the 1868-1869 academic year when he would have still been only 15 or 16 years old.  It is currently unknown whether June went on to college after Holbrook’s.

     Sometime after his father’s death in 1874, June and his brother Charles Worrall Bard took over the Bard farm on Bear Ridge in Pleasantville, New York.  June’s daughter, Margaret Wright Bard – “Margie” to everyone – recalled that the father, James Mackie Bard, had left the farm to only three of his children:  Charles, June and their older sister Isabella (Isabella Bard Peck).  But Margie may have been mistaken on that.  In James Mackie Bard’s will, which he signed on November 22, 1873, about a year before he died, he clearly bequeathed his farm in equal shares to Charles and June and to his daughter Sarah [Eakin] Bard, not to his daughter Isabella.  Margie didn’t know why the other children of James Mackie Bard weren’t involved in this inheritance – she thought maybe they had signed off on it or something.

     June had a young neighbor named Cora Marsland, who wrote a letter of condolence to June’s daughter Margie after his death in 1930.  In her reminiscences in her letter, Cora recalled that a family named Stoutenburgh had lived across the street from the Bards on Bear Ridge, and, she wrote, “it was generally supposed that Mr. Junius Bard would some time marry Miss Ella Stoutenburgh.  But you see he didn’t.” Cora  also mentioned that June used to play the cornet and she would accompany him as best she could on her piano.  Cora was 19 at the time and June was 26, so this would have been around 1879.  She recalled that June and his brother Charlie “were fine young men, gracious, courteous gentlemen, whom I remember with grateful appreciation.”

     In 1885 June was a warden in St. John’s Episcopal Church in Pleasantville, New York.  (A warden is a lay official in a parish church.) 

     On April 26, 1888, June married Katharine (“Kittie”) Taylor in Unionville (now Hawthorne), New York.  Margie didn’t know – and never thought to ask while they were still alive – how her parents met.  June was at the ripe old age of 35 when he got married.  (Several of his older siblings also waited until they were in their 30s before they got married.)   And Kittie was considerably younger than June, by 14 years.  Margie also didn’t know what her mother did before she and June got married.  Kittie was the second oldest of nine children, so it’s likely she spent most of her time at home taking care of her younger siblings. 

    
     After their marriage June was employed at Worrall Hall Military Academy in Peekskill, New York, which was run by his brother-in-law, Col. Charles Jefferson Wright, and his sister, Margaret Worrall Bard Wright.  Worrall Hall was a prep school for the New York Military Academy, which Col. Wright founded in 1889.  Between 1890 and 1895 June served as one of the trustees (treasurer) of Worrall Hall and he was on the faculty as a teacher of mathematics, military tactics and gymnastics.  (Margie remembered him as being some sort of athletic director there.)   In an 1892 publication about military schools in the United States, one “Lt.-Col. J.S. Bard” was listed as “Commandant” at Worrall Hall.  Presumably that’s June, and it’s unclear where the military rank came from, but, after all, it was a military academy, so maybe it was an honorific.  (It’s also unclear what kind of academic credentials June had to teach mathematics).

     June and Kittie’s first two children were born in Peekskill – Charles Junius Bard on May 19, 1889, and Donald Gibson Bard on December 30, 1890.

     Sometime in the next two years the June Bard family moved from Peekskill to Cornwall and then later to Unionville (Hawthorne).  Their next two children were born in Unionville – Kenneth Taylor Bard on November 20, 1892, and Moses Taylor Bard on December 23, 1896.  Little Kenneth died in 1895 of pneumonia at the age of two years and two months.  Margie said that her mother never mentioned Kenneth.

     In 1898 the family moved to Pleasantville, presumably to the Bard farmstead that June’s father had left to him and to his brother Charles and sister Sarah.  (Charles may have already been living in the house since James Mackie Bard’s death in 1874. He married in 1885.)  But the Bard farm on Bear Ridge was June and Kittie’s home from 1898 until 1917.

     Another son, Robert McNichol Bard, was born in Pleasantville on August 20, 1901.  Then June and Kittie’s first daughter, Margaret Wright Bard, was born at home on the Bard farm on December 28, 1904.  And on December 5, 1911, their last child, Constance Katharine Bard, was born.  Kittie was in her mid-40s by then, so she had Connie in a hospital in White Plains, New York.  (Like Margie, all of Kittie’s other children had been born at home.)

     The Bard homestead was a big farmhouse on 96 acres of land on the north side of Bear Ridge Road (bottom center on the 1910 map of Pleasantville below.  Notice that on this map north is at the 2 o'clock position, not straight up). 

     Margie remembered that there was also a barn, other outbuildings and an orchard.  The house was divided by a wide hallway with stairs going up.  June and his family lived in one side and Charles, his wife Dora, and their children lived in the other side.  June built a three-story addition to the original farmhouse on their side consisting of a kitchen with a bedroom and an attic above it.  Margie and her sister Connie – who always referred to their father as “Pop” – remembered that kitchen as being dark and gloomy.  The ceiling and walls were narrow brown wooden strips that were varnished, not painted.  The bedroom above the kitchen was June and Kittie’s bedroom.

     The house was situated on the top of Bear Ridge, and, being in such a high spot, it had been struck by lightning on two occasions that Margie knew about.  Once the lightning came in through the telephone line on their side and splintered all the woodwork around that.  And lightning struck once on Charles and Dora’s side and it scorched an oil painting that was hanging on the wall – Margie thought it might have been a picture of Grandfather Bard (James Mackie Bard).  And some big pine trees on each side of the house had been struck too.

     From around 1902-1909, June served as Highway Commissioner for the Town of Mount Pleasant.  Coincidentally – or maybe not – he kept a ledger book over this same time span – 1902-1909.  That remains in the family, as well as another similar detailed ledger book covering the period 1918 to a week before his death in 1930.

     In his very neat and precise handwriting June kept a detailed record of all his expenses, no matter how trivial.  Most of the entries are for personal and family expenses.

     It’s remarkable how much insight into June’s everyday life one can derive by just looking at what kinds of goods and services he bought during those years that he kept the ledger books, how much he spent, how often, etc.  In the first ledger, many of his entries were the dollar amounts (or, more correctly, the cent amounts!) that he paid for train fare to go various places in and around Westchester County.  Since these fares were expenses, he entered them in his ledger.  And he always accompanied them with a notation telling where he went and/or what he did.   These books are not as good as a diary, but, because of the detail June provided in them, they certainly come in a strong second.  They give us a wonderful snapshot of the Bard family life in the early 1900s on his farms in Pleasantville and later in Millerton.

     During the 1902-1909 period June would shell out $10.00 every so often and buy something called a “500-Mile Mileage Book.”  These books were essentially the long-term rail passes of the day.  He would use a book until it ran out and then buy a new one – probably the same principle as a modern-day declining balance debit card.  His train travel cost came out to two cents per mile.  He dutifully kept track of how much he spent on train fares for all his comings and goings.

     June’s yearly expenses for the years 1902-1909 averaged about $1,450.00, and they were even less between 1918 and 1930 – $1,348.00.  It’s amazing how much cheaper things were back then.  For example, in that first decade of the twentieth century he paid 20 cents for his haircuts and ten cents for a shave (slightly more than the proverbial two bits!).  In the 1920s he had to pay 50 cents for a haircut.  In those real early days, shoes for the kids when they were little were $1.25 to $2.00.  June bought four shirts for himself for $2.00 and four pairs of socks for 50 cents.  He paid $3.00 for a derby hat.  A hack saw with seven blades cost him 25 cents.

     Every year around April he paid his half of the state and county taxes in Pleasantville.  These ranged from around $32.00 to $38.00.  He also paid his share of the school tax, but he didn’t make an entry for this every year.  That ranged from around $18.00 to $22.50.  (Since his family and his brother’s family shared the farmhouse, they obviously split the taxes.)  When he lived in Millerton, he paid state, county and town taxes (to Salisbury, Connecticut) in amounts ranging from around $74.00 to $88.00.

     June made very frequent business trips during the 1902-1909 period to places like Tarrytown, Kensico and Valhalla to attend meetings of the Highway Commission or to meet with the Supervisor.  It would also have been routine for the Highway Commissioner to attend Town Board meetings, and June went to Tarrytown fairly often to attend those meetings.  (These references to Tarrytown are probably more accurately references to North Tarrytown.  The village of Tarrytown is in Greenburgh Township, not Mount Pleasant.  But North Tarrytown, which is known as Sleepy Hollow today, is in Mount Pleasant.)  June would also often go to Tarrytown to get money, presumably to pay workers for doing road work.

     Margie remembered how her father used to tie a rag onto the wheel of a wagon and then ride over the roads, evidently using that as an early, crude odometer to measure how many miles he had traveled by counting the revolutions of the wheel.  In fact, on one occasion in September 1909, June wrote that he went “To Tarrytown to see Supervisor Measuring Roads.”  Margie also thought he had to ride the roads to see what condition they were in.

     June belonged to Home Lodge #720 of the I.O.O.F. (Odd Fellows) in Pleasantville and also to an organization called the Junior Order, United American Mechanics.  He paid a yearly dues to both of these organizations during the entire 1902-1909 time period.

     June also worked most of his adult life at home as a farmer of garden produce.  The family always had a big vegetable garden, both in Pleasantville and in Millerton.  In Pleasantville they grew practically everything they ate, except for coffee and sugar and spices and the like, which they would buy.  According to June’s ledger books, he paid for his groceries and meat from the local stores on a monthly basis both in Pleasantville and in Millerton.  In Pleasantville he bought a lot of mutton and seafood.  The Bards clearly liked their seafood – fish, oysters, clams – he bought lots of this stuff.  And he did a lot of his own fishing, too, as you’ll read below.

     There are entries in his first ledger book for payments for vegetable seeds and things like strawberry and tomato plants.  In the spring he paid some other men to plant potatoes.  In May 1907 he paid $5.00 a couple of times to borrow a team of horses from a Mr. Fields to do harrowing and then planting of potatoes.  And in the late fall, he paid men to pick apples, dig potatoes and do the threshing.  June continued farming in Millerton.  In the springtime he continued to buy seeds and plants from the Harris Seed Company.  In 1919 he and Kittie joined the Millerton Grange.

     Margie remembered that June liked his corn on the cob "fresh."  He would start the water, then go out to the garden and pick and shuck the corn, then boil it!

     While they were living in Pleasantville the Bards bought a lot of their sugar and coffee in bulk from R. H. Macy & Company, at least in the early 1900s (June would pay $5.48 for 25 pounds of coffee and he bought sugar in 100-pound lots).  Kittie canned vegetables from the garden.  They usually had pigs and a Jersey cow or two for milk.  And they had chickens for eggs.  Kittie baked 28 loaves of bread a week (eight every other day), churned her own butter, made “pot cheese” from the sour milk, made sausage, head cheese, lard and salt pork.  On the rare occasion that June had to buy a loaf of bread, it cost nine cents.  In the 1920s June bought fat for soap making, so Kittie must have made her own soap too.

     For the entire eight years noted in his first ledger book, the Bards paid someone to do the washing and ironing.  Usually this was once every two weeks, but occasionally more often.  In 1906 he paid $12.00 for a “New Model Washing Machine.”  June also paid a woman to do the sweeping and cleaning once or twice a month, but not for the entire 8-year period.  There were some gaps.  He sporadically paid someone to do the laundry after his move to Millerton.  After his wife died in 1924, June paid for washing for a couple of years.  After that he occasionally paid to have just sheets and things like that washed.  His daughter Margie was keeping house for him then, and presumably his daughter Connie also helped out with the washing and ironing.

     While June made numerous entries in his first ledger book about buying various articles of clothing for himself and his children (and especially about buying and paying to repair shoes very often for himself and his children), there are only a couple of mentions of him buying any clothes for Kittie.  He did pay $2.00 in April 1903 and again in June 1903 for the services of a dressmaker.  In April 1905 he paid 60 cents for a “Kimona for Kittie” and in 1906 he paid $1.25 for a “Shirt Waist for Katherine” and $2.25 for “Stockings for Katharine.”  (The correct spelling of Kittie’s first name is Katharine, not Katherine, but, oddly enough, June spelled it both ways throughout the ledger.)

     Every once in a while June did give his wife Kittie $20.00 (or more or less), often for a (probable shopping) trip to New York City or somewhere else.  In August 1904 he gave her $20.00 for a trip to Lake Champlain.  There are very few indications of any of Kittie’s expenses in this ledger books, except when June bought pills for her or they went somewhere together and he paid the train fare.  And one time he paid $1.00 for a bottle of whiskey for Kittie!

     When they were younger, June paid his boys Charles and Donald for doing small chores around the farm, things like:  destroying tent caterpillars ($2.00), hoeing (20 cents), weeding (20 cents), gathering onions (20 cents), picking stones in the peach orchard ($5.60), picking kindling wood (5 cents) and weeding onions (50 cents).  After moving to Millerton, he paid his daughter Connie 24 cents one day in 1919 for picking potato bugs.

     June continued paying for clothes, shoes and shoe repair for himself and his family after the move to Millerton, of course.

     Margie said that June smoked a pipe, chewed tobacco and had a cigar on special occasions.  She said the kids would find used “cuds” of tobacco on the rafters, etc.  Judging from the entries in his 1902-1909 ledger, June bought smoking tobacco, chewing tobacco and cigars quite regularly – weekly, or even several times a week – so he clearly smoked his cigars more often than just on special occasions.  Unfortunately, no nice, posed, formal photographic portraits of June survive.  Of the several snapshots of him that got handed down, in a couple of them he’s holding either a pipe or a big old stogie.   It looks like tobacco was the man’s major vice.  (It’s interesting to note that in the 1869 circular for Holbrook’s Military High School, there’s a note about Dr. Holbrook’s thoughts on tobacco:  “he still thinks it necessary to prohibit the use of tobacco, placing it, however, on the ground of its injury to the constitution in its formative state and the evil of an uncontrollable habit, rather than denouncing it as a sin by a direct appeal to the conscience.”  Those words evidently didn’t sink in with June.)  In the photo above, dated 1903, June (with his cigar) is on the far right, and Kittie is second from left.  June continued the smoking habit in Millerton, but he didn’t seem to buy tobacco and cigars quite as often as he did earlier.  He bought Tuxedo tobacco from Sears Roebuck & Co. and he would buy other tobacco (by the pound) and occasional boxes of cigars locally.

     Here's a later photo of June with daughter Connie.  Connie was born in December 1911, so this photo was probably taken around 1914 or 1915.  Notice the pipe in June's hand!  Although he's wearing a nice suit and tie in this photo, Margie said her father really didn’t like to dress up;  he preferred working clothes, and would wear a red bandanna tied around his head.

     June always had a couple of horses.  In 1902, when he started his ledger book, he had a horse that he called Tom and another one that he referred to as the “grey horse.”  Margie remembered that he had a pair of plough horses or farm horses.  She might have remembered the team of black horses that June bought in April 1904 for $340.00.  Later there were references in his ledger to horses that he called Bill and Frank.  These could have been June’s names for the black team or maybe they were two different horses.  June paid to have his horses shod nearly every month or two.  He had oxen too.

     And then there was Jennie.  June bought Jennie, a sorrel mare, in January 1906 for $150.00.  Margie remembered that Jennie was always lame and not much of a road horse, but she said June loved that horse and brought her up to Millerton when he moved there in 1919.  In fact, he paid the Harlem Railroad for a car to ship her to Millerton.  He paid to have her shod every month or so too.

     June still kept animals after the move to Millerton.  He bought another horse shortly after he moved there.  He also still had cows and chickens.

     There are many entries in June’s first ledger book for expenses to keep his horses and wagons going.  He bought harnesses and whips and paid for wagon parts and repairs.  And it seemed like he was constantly paying to have harnesses repaired.  Then, of course, he had to feed his horses and his other animals.  He bought large quantities of timothy and clover, etc., presumably to grow for feed.

     In September 1902 June bought 100 peach baskets.  In April 1903 he bought 123 peach trees and an unspecified number of apple trees the following August.  He bought another 100 peach trees in May 1904.  This was probably the beginning of the orchard that Margie remembered.

     Margie recalled that June’s older sister Isabella, who was kind of “tetched in the head” and was living in a nursing home in Canaan, New York, decided she wanted her share of the James Mackie Bard estate in cash.  Margie figured that she wanted the money to pay for her nursing care.  This recollection doesn’t jive with the stipulation in James Mackie Bard’s will about leaving the farm to June, Charles and sister Sarah, but maybe a later change had been made to it.  At any rate, June ended up selling the farm in 1917 (his brother Charles had died in 1913).  The buyer was A.H. Smith, who was president of the New York Central Railroad.  Smith already owned land to the north of the Bard farm, so he probably bought this newly-available land just to add to his estate, which ended up being around 500 acres in size.  Margie thought they got $60,000 for the farm, so presumably June’s share would have been $30,000.  After the sale, June rented a place nearby called the Hunter farm for a year.  It was about a mile from Bear Ridge, down on King Street (see Pleasantville map above).

     On June 3, 1918, Kittie was awarded a Daughters of the American Revolution certificate.  She qualified for membership in the DAR because her great-great grandfather, Elnathan Taylor, had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War.

     In March 1919 the family moved up to Millerton, Dutchess County, New York.  June paid someone $150.00 to move (presumably his household goods) to Millerton.  He also paid the Harlem Railroad for a car to ship all his farm implements to Millerton.

     It’s not clear what the precise reason was for the move to Millerton, but Margie said that her father still wanted to farm.  She surmised that he found out about the farm in Millerton through friends in Bear Ridge.  And, as you’ll read below, he used to come up to the area just north of Millerton to go trout fishing.  He may have discovered Millerton that way too.

     June paid $6,000 for the farm in Millerton.  This new Bard farm, later dubbed “the Hedges” (photo above), was located at a place called State Line, east of the village of Millerton, right on the Connecticut border.  In fact, it was actually in Salisbury, Connecticut.  In the 1920 and 1930 U.S. Federal Censuses, June and his family show up as residents of Salisbury, not Millerton.  He and Kittie voted in Salisbury, and, as mentioned above, June paid his taxes to Salisbury.  When the Bards moved to Millerton, the only children who came along were the four youngest ones:  Taylor, Bob, Margie and Connie.  This was right after World War I, and Taylor had just gotten out of the service.  The two older boys, Chic (Charles) and Don, were both married by then.  Taylor and Bob didn’t stick around very long either.  Life on the farm wasn’t for them!

     The Bard farm in Millerton had no running water for the first four or five years they lived there.   The boys put a sink in the kitchen, and the water just ran out and down into a ditch.  There was no pump at the sink.  They had to bring water in from outdoors.  They had two wells, one for drinking water and the other for washing.  The privy was out back, behind a grapevine beside the chicken coop.  If somebody was inside and June had to go, he’d stand outside and say, “Ahem.  AHEM!”  Whoever was in there got the message and got out in a hurry!   They never had toilet paper.  They always used pages from the Sears Roebuck catalog.  A real treat was whenever they got oranges that were wrapped in tissue paper – they saved that for the privy.

     Speaking of needing to go, one of the family sayings that got passed down by Margie must have been an indication of her father’s impatience.  If June was watching the clock and anxious to do something in a hurry – and there was no real need to hurry – the family would tell him, “Plenty of time, June.  Plenty of time.”

     They also had no electricity in the house in Millerton at first.  They used kerosene lamps.  After Margie and Yorke S. Blanchard got married in 1924, Yorke installed a battery-powered electrical system in the cellar.  There were twenty or more storage batteries mounted in a big rack.  It was a 32-volt system, not 110.  They had to buy special appliances.  Margie remembered having a 32-volt iron, vacuum cleaner, and washing machine.  She could only use one appliance at a time.  Yorke electrified all the old kerosene lamps.  June had a special one that had a red globe on it, and there was a crack in it.  He couldn’t read unless that crack in the globe was showing on his paper!

     There is no mention of anything related to automobiles in June’s 1902-1909 ledger book.  It’s all horses and wagons.  And train travel.  Margie never mentioned her father having a car, but he did enter some car-related expenses in his later ledger book during the years 1919 and 1920.  He occasionally paid for gas and oil.   He bought things like “lights for Auto” and a “belt for Ford” and a spark plug.   He also paid $5.00 in January 1919 for an “Auto License.”  That was while he was still in Pleasantville, and a couple of the other car-related things he paid for were after the move to Millerton.  And he got himself another automobile license in April 1920.   And in August 1920 he bought a “key for Ford.”  But throughout the remainder of the 1920s there are no references in his ledger book to cars or car parts or gasoline.  He occasionally hopped on the train (the C.N.E., or Central New England Railway) for the short jaunt to Millerton or Lakeville.  Perhaps in the later years of the 1920s his son-in-law Yorke provided transportation for him.  And June’s daughter Connie also evidently had a car very early after she was old enough to drive.

     Margie never knew what her father’s source of income was.  He always had a big garden and they had plenty to eat, but Margie didn’t remember him selling anything from his garden.  He planted corn and hay.  Margie said he didn’t sell the hay or board animals or anything like that.  There are a couple of instances in his first ledger book when he apparently did sell some vegetables or fruit, however.   In 1902 he went “To Tarrytown with Potatoes” (presumably to sell).  He paid his sons to peddle peaches on a couple of occasions.  He also bought an ad in the Pleasantville Journal for seed potatoes (also presumably to sell them).  And in one instance he noted that he went to White Plains “to draw Money from Bank,” but that may have been business-related.

     After he bought the farm in Millerton, June obviously still had plenty of money left over from the sale of his father’s property in Pleasantville.  Margie thought her father might also have had some money invested in mortgages, but she said they all went bad and were worthless.  Maybe June was what is known as a private mortgage investor or hard money lender.  In the front of his second ledger book, he kept track of the interest he was paid on various mortgages dating from 1920 to 1930.  His income from those ran from about $640 to $890 a month.

     And in the back of that same 1919-1930 ledger book there are several pages of entries for so-called “first mortgage certificates” that June evidently invested in.  He started earning interest on some of these certificates in 1924 and this continued until a few months before his death in 1930.  Either he got rid of them then or his daughter Margie disposed of them after he died.  So these investments were clearly another rather substantial source of income for June.

     After June died, an inventory was taken of his assets.  That document shows that he got considerable income on the principal from two private mortgages and from a title and mortgage company.  He also earned interest on those two mortgages (one was with Antoinette E. Marks and the other with Sarah G. Baring) as well as from the title and mortgage company, which was the New York Title and Mortgage Company, and from another one called Westchester Title and Trust Company.  June also invested in Liberty Bonds and he had a bank account, and he earned interest from both of them.

     Margie noted that her father liked to fish.  Well, that was somewhat of an understatement.  When he still lived in Pleasantville it seemed like he went fishing all the time (except in the winter) – sometimes either with his sons Charles or Donald when they were younger or with friends later – at places like East River, Wampus (probably Wampus Pond/Lake), Mianus River, Kensico Lake, Byram (probably Byram River), Mamaroneck, Lake Titicus (Titicus Reservoir), Croton Falls, Ice Ponds (possibly near Patterson in Putnam County), Mahopac (also in Putnam County), Rye Lake and Rye Beach.  Margie recalled that he would go down to Long Island Sound and fish there too (Rye Beach is on the Long Island Sound).

     Margie said he also liked trout fishing.  Interestingly, as he noted in his ledger book, on May 19, 1907, June went “trouting” with a companion at Copake Iron Works.  The Copake Iron Works were located in Columbia County just north of Millerton.  Although a search on the Internet revealed that the Copake Iron Works didn’t cease operation until the 1920s, perhaps the ore pit there had been filled with water by 1907 and was open to fishing.  Or there might have been good trout streams nearby.  The New York and Harlem Railroad passed right through Pleasantville on its way up to Copake and beyond (and Millerton before that), so that’s probably how they got there.  A few days after that trip to Copake Iron Works June and his son Donald returned up north to Columbia County and went fishing at Boston Corners (the next train stop above Millerton).

     He may have continued his passion for fishing after the move to Millerton, but there’s no mention of fishing in his second ledger book.  That is probably because he didn’t (or couldn’t) take the train to get to the fishing spots, so he didn’t note the expense.

     June went hither and yon to business meetings and on these fishing trips fairly frequently, but the family didn’t take what you’d call a vacation in the entire eight years covered by his first ledger book.  On several occasions June and Kittie went to Rye Beach for the day, but that’s it.  One time he and his son Donald went on an excursion to Lake George.  And there’s no mention of any sort of vacation at all in the second ledger book, 1919-1930.  June took occasional quick trips back down to his Westchester County haunts of Pleasantville, Peekskill, Ossining, Hawthorne and White Plains in the 1920s, but he must have spent all the rest of his time tending to his farm.

     June also liked to play tennis.  Their neighbors across the street on Bear Ridge, the Shaffers, had a tennis court, and June and Mr. Shaffer would play tennis together.  He also played cribbage.  He went to an occasional baseball game in White Plains and Pleasantville and later to games in Millerton.

     June was a great reader.  Margie said he had many nice, leather-bound books.  He read Dickens, Thackeray, Elbert Hubbard, among others.  He would read the books over and over.  He used to discuss books with his sister-in-law’s husband, ophthalmologist Elmer LeRoy Ryer.  In his ledger books there are notations that he paid for quite a number of magazine subscriptions over the years.  At one time or another he subscribed to the following magazines (not all, obviously, for himself):  American Agriculturist, Youth’s Companion, Oregon Trail (it’s unclear whether that was a magazine or a book), McClure’s Magazine, Rural New Yorker, National Geographic, Saturday Evening Post, American Boy, Pictorial Review, Country Gentleman, Woman’s Home Companion, Nature Magazine, Colliers, and Cosmopolitan Magazine.  For newspapers he subscribed to the New York Herald, the Pleasantville Journal and the Mount Pleasant Compass.  After the move to Millerton, he subscribed to the New York Times and the Millerton Telegram.  Margie said that he would read the New York Times from cover to cover.

     In the context of saying that her father read the New York Times, Margie added that June was a staunch Democrat.  There were entries in his ledger book where he donated $5.00 to the Democratic Club from time to time or attended the Democratic county or town convention.

     There are some indications in his ledger books of June’s compassion and generosity.  A tornado hit Chappaqua, just north of Pleasantville, on July 20, 1904, and on the 30th June gave $2.00 to “Aid to Chappaqua Cyclone Sufferers.”  On April 28, 1906 he donated $5.00 to the “San Francisco Sufferers” (a disastrous earthquake hit there on April 18th).  While living in Millerton, he gave pocket change “to Colored School,” “to Deaf Mute,” and “to Tramp begging.”  In March 1921 he gave $2.00 to the China famine fund (for the North China Famine of 1920-1921).  And in April 1927 he gave $10.00 “for the Flood Sufferers” (of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927).

     June was not at home in Millerton on July 2, 1924, the day his wife Kittie died so unexpectedly at age 57 of a brain embolism (stroke).  He had gone with his friend Steve Kimball to Hartford, Connecticut.  Mr. Kimball used to take a load of milk in a big tank truck to Hartford every day, and he had always wanted June to go along with him sometime.  So that was the day June went.

     Kittie had been cleaning out the cellar at the farm, getting ready for the Fourth of July picnic, when she had the stroke and died immediately.  Margie wasn’t home either;  she had gone on a hike with some of her high school classmates near Indian Lake.  Connie, who was only 12 years old at the time, was there alone with her mother when she died.  They had no telephone, so Connie ran to a neighbor’s house.  The neighbor called Yorke at work at MacArthur’s Garage, and he went and found Margie on the hike and brought her home.

     There was no way to get word to June in Hartford, so he didn’t find out about Kittie’s death until he got home that day.  Margie said that her father sat on the porch railing and cried and moaned.  She had never heard a man cry, and it tore her heart out.  It was such a shock.  (It’s interesting to note that June didn’t enter anything about Kittie’s death in his ledger for July 2nd - he bought a couple of grocery items that day and paid for “2 dinners for Tompkins and Myself.”  He did note the date of her death in the beginning of that journal, however.  And on July 11, he paid 60 cents for probably a death notice in the Millerton Telegram newspaper.)

     June developed asthma after they moved to Millerton.  Margie thought it might have been an emotional reaction to Kittie’s death, but in fact he actually started buying a remedy for asthma about a year before she died.  Margie said he would get anxious and short of breath.  (Maybe it was emphysema from all the tobacco use?)  Margie remembered that her father would put some kind of powder, like incense, in a little tin, which he would light.  Then he would sit in his little rocking chair in the kitchen, put a towel over his head and inhale the fumes.  This was probably a product called Himrods Asthma Powder, which June bought by the boxfuls fairly often from R. H. Macy & Company starting in 1923.  There’s also a ledger entry in 1927 where he bought “Smoke Towels for Himrod.”

     In a February 1928 letter to his son Chic (Charles), June mentioned that he didn’t know when he’d get down to Thornwood because he hadn’t been in good shape.  Later in the letter, when talking about snow, he wrote that he could remember when he enjoyed the snow, but not now.  “Haven’t got the wind to shovel snow,” he wrote.  Because of the weather, he said he hadn’t been to Millerton for over a month.  He worried that he’d get all out of practice walking.  In another letter to Chic a month later, June wrote that he didn’t see any prospect of getting down to Westchester at the present time – “asthma bothers me a great deal in the mornings.”  By June he was complaining about all the rain they’d had, and his garden was “knocked in a cocked hat” [rendered useless].

     In April 1929 June wrote to Chic again and made a comment about his asthma:  “This asthma is queer.  After feeling bum yesterday, today I am almost normal.”  He finally got his garden plowed and harrowed in late May 1929, but he added:  “I am sorry I started the garden, the elements seem to militate against one.”

     After Kittie died, Yorke moved in at the farm and lived with Margie, Connie and their father.  Margie kept house for her father.  Margie and Yorke were married a few short weeks later, on the 26th of July, 1924.  The Bards (and Yorke) continued to live at State Line until the spring of 1930.  In March of that year Margie and Yorke moved out and took up residence in their new house they had built on Dutchess Avenue in Millerton.  June and his daughter Connie were left in the house.

     In April 1930 June had an auction and sold his belongings.  He moved back down to Westchester County, to Thornwood, to live with his son and daughter-in-law, Chic and Elsie Bard.  They had added a room onto their house for him to stay in.   It was known as “Pop’s room.”  Shortly after he moved down there, Chic and Elsie’s kids got scarlet fever.  Everyone, including June, was quarantined.  June wasn’t very happy in Thornwood, however.

     June was obviously aware that his health was failing too.  In August 1930 he wrote the following from Thornwood to his daughter Margie:  “I think Margie it won’t be long before I can’t write so as one can understand me.  My hand is so unsteady.”  In September he went back to Millerton to visit Margie and Yorke in their new house, but a month later he died there in his sleep sitting in a chair.  It was on October 14, 1930. He was 77 years old.

     June’s death certificate says he was a retired farmer of garden produce, and he last worked as such in September 1929.  He had worked for a total of 50 years.  The cause of death was noted as “cardio valvular disease” with a contributory cause of “general anasarca.”  He is buried next to his wife his father's family plot in White Plains Rural Cemetery in White Plains, New York. 

     In August 1938 Yorke and Margie rented the Bard farm in Millerton to a man named Tony Genito.  It is unclear who had been living in it between 1930 and 1938.  Mr. Genito bought the farm in 1946 for $6,000.

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