By Natalie L. Coolidge

A chance question to a man who once lived across the street from John Gallup’s Farm at the top of Westcott Road in Danielson gave me more information than I had anticipated.

I remembered, as a young girl growing up in the area, the few times I had been to Gallup’s Pond in the winter to join my friends who were skating there. Not being much of a skater, I had mostly viewed others enjoying that pastime as I rode by in my family’s car. All I knew about the pond was that someone flooded the field in the winter for skating.

Now, in the last months of this millennium, I happened to meet Marshall Spaulding and asked him what he could tell me about Gallup’s Pond. He was the right person to ask for he related the following information.

Marshall said the area was flooded every winter from about 1925 to 1945 to protect the cranberry bushes. John Gallup would block a drainage culvert with eight or ten sandbags so the water could not flow out. The deepest spot anywhere under the resulting ice was only about three feet deep. Near the end of the winter, John would ask some of the young local boys to sprinkle sand on the ice. When they asked why they were doing that, Mr. Gallup told them cranberries thrive in a sandy soil.

The cranberries that were harvested each year were sold in the market on the corner of Main and Academy Streets in Danielson owned by John Gallup, his brothers, Arthur and Daniel, and his partner, Bert Lindner. Marshall said, "John Gallup would come up from his home in Danielson in his Model T touring car and pick up the cranberries to take back to the store." Bert Lindner would take one look at the bright red berries and say, "We’ll sell all these before daybreak tomorrow." And they always did just that.

I asked Marshall who the young folks were that he could remember skating with. He quickly named [Dr.] James F. Jones, Avery Tanner, John Keeler, Howard Knox and Robert Wilson. He said they spent many hours skating and playing hockey. I’m sure many other have fond memories of the fun they had on Gallup’s Pond.

WEDDING ANNOUNCEMENTS TO REMEMBER

In Newstead, N. H. by the Rev. Mr. Crook, Mr. Ichabod Crane to Miss Susannah Hook:

By hook or crook this loving pair

Are bound in wedlock’s chain,

What is a hook without a crook—

Or a hook without a crane?

---From Ancestral Notes from Chedwato

At New York Mr. Thomas T. Hogg to Miss Eliza Hurry:

There was a Hogg, chas’d by a dog,

Which put him in a flurry—

He sought relief, from care and grief

And found it in a Hurry.

---From Ancestral Notes from Chedwato