Hagan Farms
July 22, 2010 by admin
The original Hagan farm house still stands. The unique architecture of the building distinguishes it from the other houses in the neighborhood.
From the 1930s until the 1950s the area that is now the Spackenkill neighborhood, or Hagan Town, was the property of Hagan Farms.
Jim Warner, who worked at Hagan Farms in the early 1940s, told us that Hagan started Hagan Farms with the money he made putting in roads for the World’s Fair in New York City. In addition to being a model farm with prize-winning Guernsey cows and beautifully tiled barns, Hagan Farms was also an exotic zoo with buffalo and other animals. By the early 1950s, Hagan Farms lost its status as a model farm and Hagan sent all of his Angus cattle from Poughkeepsie down to South America, where he started a new farm. In the early 1960s, IBM bought the land to make subdivisions.
Jim Warner and several other people that we have interviewed remember visiting the Casperkill as it flowed through Hagan Farms.
When asked about swimming in the Casperkill, Jim remembers one spot that he and his friends always went to:
At Hagan farms they had a mill—a grist mill—along the Casperkill, with all wooden gears. I’d never seen it really used, but just beyond the grist mill there were some trees with some ropes set up and you’d go out and drop yourself. It wasn’t in over your head; it was just some place you’d go down and swim and whatnot. We’d go down there. I remember one time and it scared the heck out of this guy. There was a black snake going across the road and he stepped on it. Well when you step on them, they move.
Kathi Bihn used to ride her bike to Hagan Farms from her house:
It was all open. You could ride bicycles down because it was all dirt roads. When we were kids we found this old barn by the Creek. We climbed up inside of it. There was a chest and we opened up the chest, and inside there was Confederate stuff in there. We got really spooked and ran away because we had no business being up there (…) They had this bridge that went over the stream, and it would have these—like in caves, those things that hang down—stalagmites. It was the coolest thing. The smell…I can still smell it. There was just a fragrance that came from the stream and those things hanging down. It would be hot, hot, hot, and we’d ride our bicycles down there and sit by the stream underneath the bridge.
Today, Karen Blonder and her husband live right next to the same bridge:
I’m living here now 38 years. My kids grew up on the Creek and we had heard that the bridge across the stream was the shortcut from Hagan Farms, and the cows used to cross over this bridge to go to the pastures by Pasture Lane and the barn: there was a barn up on Hagan. This was like a cow path, and now it’s the path for kids to cross to go to school. My kids used to play back there and there was an island, which has now eroded and dried up. When they ran away from home that’s where they went, or if they were playing pirate, or having picnics, or whatever. I remember my son had to do a project for school on a religion so he and his friends did the druid religion and went out to the island there and set up torches. Somebody called the police.
(…) We have all kinds of animals there. We have snakes, we’ve seen possum, fox, woodchucks, raccoons. We have eight deer living back there; we see the same ones every year. We have the ducks from Ron Lipp’s house that swim down here. For a few years the Creek appeared to be very dirty. People had thrown things in, and you’d see the foam. I haven’t noticed it recently though, so I don’t know if it’s cleaner. We walk along there all the time with the dogs. It’s just pretty. It’s a nice place if you have time to just go out and look at it.
The bridge over the Casperkill once led up to the original Hagan farm house. Today the bridge connects the backyards of Old Mill Drive and Casperkill Drive.
For more stories about the Casperkill in the Spackenkill neighborhood, check out these previous posts:
– Interview with Ron Lipp, watershed resident
– Fran and Frank Hartenfels enjoy wildlife, battle flooding and erosion
– Old Mill Drive Homeowners Struggle with Sewage and Deer Along the Casperkill