Casperkill Watershed Oral History Project

Vinnie and Helmuth Bihn grew up on Rochambeau Road. Their parents owned a motel there, along with a pond created by damming the Casperkill. Although the dam is no longer functional and the pond has all but dried up, the Bihns still remember what it was like when the pond was deep enough to fish and skate in. Helmuth, Vinnie, and his wife Kathi shared their memories of the Rochambeau pond with us:

When was the pond built?

Helmuth Bihn: The dam was built by people by the name of Perkins. In fact, they call this the Perkins Holdings. They owned everything around here. It was called the Perkins Dam Property originally.

Vinnie Bihn: I had a book of the Hudson Valley School of Painters and it had a map in there; it was from the 1800’s, and it showed the Perkins property.

What do you remember about the pond?

Kathi Bihn: I remember my parents, younger sister and I coming to skate in the pond. They used to have bonfires and there were places you could sit. It was packed with people.

VB: We used to clog up Route 9. People used to park on Route 9 to go skating. It was actually a bit of a traffic hazard. And we had the spotlight at night. My father mounted a spotlight on an old tree to shine over a section so people in the motel and people in general could skate. It was a community gathering place.

And it froze every year?

VB: Oh, yeah. The water was deep. It was basically two or three feet all the way around and maybe 10 or 12 feet at the dam. It would get so thick that we used to be able to get a tractor and plow off the snow.

How long ago did people come to skate here?

KB: Back in the 50’s.

VB: And into the early 60’s. The pond was still there after that, but we didn’t own it anymore, [the new owners of] the motel owned it. They didn’t want to get involved with lawsuits so they wouldn’t allow anybody to skate anymore. And the whole thing changed, you know: video games, TV and whatever. Going out to the pond to skate wasn’t even an option anymore. But it was a wonderful time, you know. It’s hard to describe, but all these families were out there.

HB: People always used to ask me when I was a kid: ‘Helmuth, is the ice thick enough yet?’ Usually right around Thanksgiving.  Now, you don’t get ice until almost Christmas.  Anyway, most of our skating was in the area we called ‘the cove,’ that would be the area around the pool; on the other side of the pool.  Then eventually it all froze.  Of course in the so-called ‘old days’ you didn’t have anything to do: television was in its infancy; there was no place to go, you either had to take a bus to the city of Poughkeepsie or a car to the theatre.

VB: One night, somebody needed fodder for the bonfire, and my parents had patios in some of the motel units with wooden furniture. And we lost some of it. My father wasn’t real happy about that.

There used to be a tree over there, a blue spruce, that we put lights on. That thing must have been fifty feet tall and it would reflect down on the ice.  It was beautiful. And there used to be a little island out there with a big weeping willow on it. It was a great place to grow up. The neighborhood was pretty limited. But I used to spend most of my time in the [Brooklands] farm next door.

That pond, when it was deep, was loaded with bass. I used to live out there with my fishing pole. It was loaded with bass, sunfish, perch, catfish, eel…

We also used to spear suckers. In the late winter or early spring. You had to wait for the creek to settle down a little bit.  You’d go out with a flashlight and you had a broom handle and a spear on the end of it with about four or five prongs.  And with the flashlight you would see them, and then you’d spear it.  They were good sized.  I took them home and cleaned them all, the first time, I had about 18 of these things.  I filled the freezer with them.  Wrapped them in aluminum foil.  And I kept one out to eat it.  I took about three bites of the fish.  Oh, boney.

KB: My biggest thing with the pond was the day my son went through the ice when we were skating on it, and I had to get him out.  That’s the thing I remember most about the pond.  That was about 25 years ago.

VB: It was still deep enough then that you could fall through it at the channel and a kid could not touch bottom.  It was still a decent pond when Kathi and I moved back here.

KB: It was; the kids used to be able take their sleds, go down, and then shoot across the ice.

VB: Back in the olden days, if conditions were perfect—and that didn’t happen very often—we used to start way up at County Club Estates, which is hard to describe but it’s almost a half mile away. We’d come down the old farm lane on our sleds through a couple of treacherous turns, come down through the barnyard, shoot out and come down the road, and then onto the ice all the way to the edge of Route 9.  The whole thing was about half a mile and very few people ever made it.  That was the challenge: to make it to Route 9, because you would probably wipe out before.  You only made it once or twice because the walk back was… I remember one time when it snowed and then it rained and froze. Man, it was perfect.  You would fly.  Except that going around the turns was tough.  The drifts would get so big over at the farm—since it was all open back then—that [my childhood friend] Katie and I used to dig tunnels and make little rooms in the snow.

To read about the Bihn family’s motel, see The Rochambeau Motel