My mother was the youngest of four sisters. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was 12 and she dropped out of school after the 8th grade to help support the family. In the 1930’s and 40’s, many Swiss and Germans who lived and worked in the greater New York City metropolitan area would spend time in the Catskill region of South Central New York when treating tuberculosis.

It was there that her widowed mother developed friendships that led her to meet and marry Arthur Von Berg in her late 40’s. Arthur had a small chicken farm in Maryland, NY and barely made ends meet. Subsequently he wasn’t up to the standards of my mothers other sisters. Because of this, they considered Arthur a ‘dirt-poor chicken-farmer’ and refused to visit their mother which, at that time in the early 1940’s, was a 7-hour trip from the city by car.

When my father returned from World War II in 1945, he and my mother decided to ‘take a drive’ and go visit Maryland, NY for a weekend. They had such a wonderful visit with Arthur and my grandmother, they came back a month later. Then again, and again. When my brother and sister were born, they would spend their summers up there and eventually when I came along years later, I did too. My father would take a bus up from the city on weekends in the summer and always gave Arthur a few extra dollars to help with the farm.

When Arthur’s health started failing in 1960, he sold the farm to my father for a dollar. In the 1980’s, my father passed it along to my brother and sister. It is now on its third generation of family ownership and next year will mark the 75th year where five generations of family and friends gather dozens of times each year to celebrate at this truly special place–this ‘dirt-poor chicken farm’–that sits on Platt Hollow Road.