hard, a reminder of our time in Schoharie.
As Ginny, Sharon, and I approached our next stop, I exclaimed, “Oh, what a cool house!” The green-shuttered Victorian home with intricately designed woodwork grabbed my attention. Ginny was eager to visit the barn, which not only displayed a barn quilt but also housed a couple of historic carriages. After surveying the iconic vehicles, we ventured into the Best House to meet its director, historian Bobbi Ryan.
“It’s like leather and lace,” Bobbi said of the barn quilt. “The paint on the barn is worn, and you feel the history and richness that’s in it. Then you have a piece of something new that ties in. I love this movement.” The house itself was both the home and medical office of Dr. Christopher Best, a physician who practiced medicine from 1877 until just before his death in 1934. His son, Dr. Duncan Best, also had his office in the home where his unmarried sister, Emma, lived. The house was given to the area library, to be kept as a historical and medical museum.
The ornate house was impressive, with wooden fretwork in many of the rooms and original chair rails still in place. Dozens of photos are scattered throughout, from oval-shaped family portraits to local scenes of hops growers in the nearby fields. I looked around at the carved wooden furniture and horsehair cushions and could not imagine that a modern family had lived among it all.
I had seen homes restored and furnished with period pieces, but the collection of personal items here was astounding, and all had been in the house when it was turned over to the library. The family saved everything, from furniture to Victorian-era dresses, capes, and hats. “You could lock yourself in and stay for days and days,” Bobbi said. “They never threw anything away, and I am so thankful for that.”
The collection also includes quilts, hundreds of them. There is no documentation as to the quilters; some may have been produced by the women of the house and some perhaps given as payment for medical services. As we studied a couple of the quilts, Ginny and I agreed that hand quilting is by far our favorite. The blue and white quilt that is reproduced in the quilt block on the property was a fine example.
Dr. Best House Photo by Bobbi Ryan
The house was built to accommodate the Best family. One side of the house served as the medical offices, which could be closed off from the living area. “The doctor could practice on one side of the house and you could be in your jammies on the other,” Bobbi said.
Medical records of everyone who saw the doctor are still intact, including Bobbi’s grandmother, who was delivered by Christopher Best, and her mother, who remembers that it was a bit scary visiting as a child. “If you lived around here, this was your practitioner,” Bobbi said. Christopher Best was no simple country doctor. He stayed abreast of medical journals and was always cutting edge.
A rather unusual artifact was the electrostatic machine, where a patient would sit with a sort of crown on his head and be treated for any number of things. Bobbi said that the machine was used to treat old age, abscessed teeth, gray hair, and alcoholism. The machine could also generate X-rays, and turn-of-the-century images were found on the premises.
The doctors served as their own apothecaries and filled prescriptions in a room off the examining area. A handwritten prescription for Lysol surprised us, as I had always thought it a modern name brand. Dozens of glass bottles lined a shelf, and Bobbi told me that thousands more were stored on the property. “I guess he knew recycling would be big someday,” she smiled.
The kitchen fascinated me the most. A surgical table was situated near the double sink, and a cast-iron stove was used for cooking meals, for sterilization, and also to heat the upstairs through vents above. The tins and bottles that lined the wooden shelves looked nothing like their more modern counterparts but held many of the same staples—spices, cornstarch, coffee, honey, and corn syrup. Except for that table, the kitchen looked very much like the set for a 1920s movie.
As we exited into a hallway, we heard Sharon exclaim, from upstairs, “Wait a minute, this is hair?” Bobbi explained that she must be looking at a hair loom. We needed to get going, but curiosity got the best of me. The woven hair was kind of creepy but a beautifully intricate work of art. We wondered whether the piece was created from just one person’s hair or from that of several people. Ginny mentioned that she had a hair loom as well, so I supposed they were not that unusual.
Bobbi was right in that I could have locked myself in that house and wandered for a full day, but others were waiting for us. With some reluctance and with the promise of a return visit to the Dr. Best House and Medical Exhibit, we continued our tour.
Marge Becker extended a gracious welcome to Ginny, Sharon, and me, and immediately started talking about her choice of quilt block. “I knew it was going to be a sort of forever thing, and I couldn’t change it with the seasons like I do my wreaths,” she said. Faced with the choice of a single season, Marge picked fall. “When the leaves are all turned, not that I am looking forward to cool weather, but that is such a pretty time of year.” Marge had made frequent trips through Amish country to visit her sons in school and had purchased an Autumn Splendor quilt on one of her trips, and the quilt was used as the model for her barn quilt. I admired the green paint on the barn, and Marge said that it was part of a complete renovation that included a new foundation for the structure.
I was surprised to learn that Marge was more than ninety years old, but her age fit with her discussion of the family business, the local phone company. Her father bought the fledgling company and the phone lines for one hundred farms when Marge was six months old. Marge and her family still run the company, one of a handful of independent phone companies in the state. Marge said, “These days it’s changing so fast. We are getting into the wireless and Internet and all of that. We are running fiber to other towns as we speak.” I have to admit that I was amazed that a woman old enough to be my grandmother was intimately familiar with the latest in telecommunications.
Autumn Splendor
Marge is not just part of the company in name but an active participant, as she has been for many years, even more so once she got married and her husband went to work for her father. Marge taught school but worked at the phone company during the summers. She said, “When my husband needed someone to get easements or get someone to stake a pole line or something, I’d get one of the fellas and go out. I miss that. Teaching school, you were inside all of the time, so during the summer, I loved the chance to be outside. Of course that was back when if you were alive and breathing you could teach.” I chuckled a bit at her assessment, having recently left the profession myself.
Marge went on to talk a bit about the events of the flood. “Every business was closed. We didn’t have a place to go to eat and couldn’t get our mail.” Her hilltop home wasn’t damaged, but Marge agreed with Ginny that the tragedy did benefit the community. “If there was anything good that ever came from that flood it was the resilience—everybody came out of the woodwork. Anybody who had grudges with anyone in the community, it just went away. It was the most amazing thing the way that people helped one another and everyone became so close.”
The surrounding community has been good to the family, and Marge has plans to build an athletic center for the use of all its residents. She said, “I have a big bucket list of things for the village. People have been so loyal; you have to give back. If I can just swim in the pool, that will be okay. But it probably won’t happen in my lifetime.” I left Marge behind thinking about what an incredible lifetime it had been so far.
We headed into Middleburgh where we met up with Bill and Glen, who had spent the day cleaning cattails out of
