Sometimes in the summer we would go up the Lower Egypt Valley Road to where the spring was (I'll tell more about that later) and there was a lane that went up the hill to where a farmhouse once stood. There were found a lot of blackberry bushes which we called thimbleberries because they were big, over 1 1/2 inches long. We would have them for dessert with sugar and evaporated milk. We had a concentrated flavoring mixed with water to drink. It was called HO-MIX and came in flavors. Whenever we got thirsty we'd stop for a glass of HO- MIX. It was probably the forerunner of KOOLAID.
The only lights we had in the cabin were Coleman gasoline lanterns and we would read by it at night. We had an outside "john" about 30 feet up the hill in back of the cabin with stone steps cut in the bank. It was a one holer surrounded by blinds we took off an old house somewhere. You could sit inside and run the slats up and down to see out. Sometimes we would take a gun with us and watch for partridge while we sat.
One weekend we arrived at camp to find a dead partridge on one of the beds. It had flown through a window and couldn't get out again. Another time a red squirrel got down the fireplace and really made a mess of the cabin. He even chewed off the wood around the glass in the windows. He didn't get out and we found him in there dead.
We built a dam in the creek to make a place for our Saturday night bath and it was about two feet deep with a nice smooth rock bottom. We had an overflow in the dam to raise or lower the level by inserting or removing planks. We took the planks out during the spring floods. The level area between the creek and the road was large enough so we could have softball games and park cars there.
In those days we often hunted squirrels as I have mentioned. There were many pure black squirrels then and we would hunt for them just because they were different. One place up on top of the hill there were fox squirrels but we never killed one of them. Fox squirrels are much larger than gray squirrels and they have a long bushy tail like a fox. We could see them in the woods but were never able to get close to one. Most of them were up on top of the hill on posted property belonging to the Sanetarium in Clifton Springs. It was called the Sanetarium Farm and they raised farm and dairy products for use at Clifton. It seemed strange that they would have a farm so far away.