Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, thinking about Memorial Day, which is just a week away. Actually, I’m thinking about Decoration Day, which was the old name for Memorial Day, still in use in some places as late as 1967. To be even more specific, I’ve been remembering stories my mother told me about Decoration Day when she was growing up, and the preparations her family made to take in boarders for that weekend.

In New York’s Sullivan County in the 1920s there were over two hundred hotels. That area, in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, was a popular summer vacation spot for people who lived in New York City and Decoration Day weekend was the time when the first wave of guests arrived. The local communities held coaching days—parades featuring coaches, wagons, and floats—but Mom was always too busy at home to attend. Her family owned a farm. In the summer, like families in the neighborhood, they turned their home into a boardinghouse.

farmhouse with the “addition”

To accommodate more guests, they built an addition onto the original farmhouse. It had six bedrooms upstairs and was connected to the main house, where there were several more bedrooms. There was one indoor bathroom (for baths). For other needs, everyone used the outhouse or the chamber pots supplied to each room. Boarders cleaned their own or left a tip for family members to do it for them. Family members also cleaned the rooms and made the beds. Most rooms had two beds and some also had a cot so that an entire family could sleep in one room. Often the same people took the same room year after year.

my mom, one of her aunts, and some of the boarders

So they could take in even more boarders, the family gave up their own bedrooms and slept in the attic. There there was a big bed on one side and mattresses on the floor on the other. My great-grandfather slept on a featherbed on top of the grand piano in the dining room while his two sons moved into a room in the barn. At times there were as many as forty people sleeping in the house.

the other side of the “addition”

Downstairs, the addition contained a large dining room and a kitchen. Food was passed through a hole in the wall to waitresses—the older children in the family. The younger ones washed dishes. Most years my great-grandmother was the cook, but occasionally the family hired someone. My mother recalled one older New York woman, an Irishwoman, who didn’t stay long because it was “too damn lonely in the country.”

boating on the pond

Meals were served at a long table, family style. Breakfast consisted of cereal, juice, eggs, bacon, toast, and sometimes pancakes. A typical mid-day meal was chicken, served with biscuits, a vegetable and a salad, soup, pickles, and a choice of pies, cakes, and homemade ice cream for desert. The evening meal was lighter, typically salmon, cold cucumbers, and potato salad. Much of the food was home grown and the farm also supplied milk and eggs. My great-grandmother and her daughters made their own bread. The family also made their own wine. Yes, it was during Prohibition, but for the most part people ignored that particular law.

Mom and her father, with the outhouse in the background

Mom’s uncles dug a large, spring-fed pond so they could start an ice business. The ice kept food fresh for the guests and the pond did double-duty as a place they could boat, fish, and swim. For summer use only, her uncles built a water tower and the house also had electricity and a crank telephone—all the luxuries, 1920s-style.

guests fishing off the dock

So, that was what accommodations were like for folks who went to the mountains for Decoration Day a hundred years ago. After the weekend, they went back to the city until the real summer season started on the Fourth of July.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.