The May and June display at the Owasco Town Hall was called “Planting Time” and featured old magazines from the 1930s called The Farmers Wife.
There were also old flower seed catalogs from 1909 (from Paris, France) and 1918.
I bought these from a book dealer at an antique show at the state fair grounds.
I wanted them because they all were sent to an Owasco resident named Ray Selover of R. D. 2 (now Rockefeller Road) Auburn.
Ray was an avid horticulturist and began his hobby when he was a young boy. He purchased packets of morning glory and sweet pea seed to brighten up the fence of a cow pasture across the road from his parents home. They were so pretty that each year he added some more varieties.
Tom Riley and his wife Esther of Sennett raised gladioli and gave Ray some glad bulbs. My husband, Milo, was raised in Sennett and remembers Ray and his wife, Ruth, when Tom and Esther brought him as a young boy to visit them on Rockefeller Road. Milo helped Tom with his gladioli fields and knows what was involved in the gladioli storing in the fall from the labeling, planting, hilling and selection for the market of the flowers.
Ray found the work raising glads labor intensive. The bulbs had to be dug each fall and wintered over after being graded, labeled and sprayed. Ray switched to raising lilies. He first has to modify and fit the soil for the bulbs, and amended it by mixing several tons of sand to his clay soil to provide the proper growing median for the bulbs.
In a newspaper article dated July 16, 1959 in The Citizen, Ray was interviewed about the dramatic impact his lily field made in the area in sight and smell. The explanation for his switch to raising lilies soon became understandable.
Ray was blind. He began to go blind in 1949. When this happened, he channeled his love of flowers into a hobby to occupy his time.
He was quoted as saying, “I can raise lilies by touch. They don't require a lot of fussy work. They stay right in the ground year after year; they don't mind the cold weather (although they do mind extreme heat), and they give rich rewards in fragrance, color and lovely texture.”
His great niece, Marcia Walker, living in Maryland sent me the pictures shown here and described her Uncle Ray.
“He always had lily pollen on his nose because he liked to smell each variety,” she recalled. “He had a short handled hoe and would move along the rows on his knees weeding. He could tell a weed from the feel. He would have a string from the house to the garden and could follow each row by the string.”
The picture above with the Selover homestead in the background shows Ray on the ground next to his lily field. It can be identified as the recent Karpinski residence. If you look closely in the center of the second picture, you can see the string at the end with rags hanging on it that signaled the end of the row.
Many people remember Ray. He was a patient man and did not mind waiting the five years for the lily bulblets to mature. When he was interviewed in 1959, he had 16 varieties of lilies growing, many from bulblets.
He did not let the loss of his eyesight prevent him from doing repairs around the farm. Neighbors did not have the heart to tell him the rows of shingles on the new roof of a shed he had just completed were not straight. He climbed a ladder, carried the shingles up and probably worked again with a string guide and feel.
Visitors were always welcome to their home, and Ruth had her own garden of vegetables, and the article said “They were both tanned from working together outdoors.”
Mable Crosby, a former Niles historian, called Ray Selover the “Historian of Owasco and Niles.” I do not know if he ever was appointed officially, but he was always ready to help someone with history. He had Connecticut Yankee and New Amsterdam Dutch in his heritage. Three generations of Selovers lived in the house before Ray and Ruth did.
I never got to meet the Selovers personally but know them from the paper trail of history and family stories I so enjoy collecting. As a lover of flowers too, I also missed the scent and sight of Ray Selovers lilies. But the house still looks the same, and the Indian spring my great-great-grandmother Hannah Bodine Mattoon mentioned in her writings is still spouting across the road from the house. I have pictures of the spring frozen in a grotto of blue ice in the winter .
Sources: “Niles” by Mabel Roscoe Crosby, reminiscences from Marcia Walker, bound citizen books from the Waite History Room and The Citizen on microfilm from Seymour Library.
Laurel Auchampaugh is the Owasco Historian and can be reached at the Owasco Town Hall from 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoons or at nowthenwasco@aol.com
I bought these from a book dealer at an antique show at the state fair grounds.
I wanted them because they all were sent to an Owasco resident named Ray Selover of R. D. 2 (now Rockefeller Road) Auburn.
Ray was an avid horticulturist and began his hobby when he was a young boy. He purchased packets of morning glory and sweet pea seed to brighten up the fence of a cow pasture across the road from his parents home. They were so pretty that each year he added some more varieties.
Tom Riley and his wife Esther of Sennett raised gladioli and gave Ray some glad bulbs. My husband, Milo, was raised in Sennett and remembers Ray and his wife, Ruth, when Tom and Esther brought him as a young boy to visit them on Rockefeller Road. Milo helped Tom with his gladioli fields and knows what was involved in the gladioli storing in the fall from the labeling, planting, hilling and selection for the market of the flowers.
Ray found the work raising glads labor intensive. The bulbs had to be dug each fall and wintered over after being graded, labeled and sprayed. Ray switched to raising lilies. He first has to modify and fit the soil for the bulbs, and amended it by mixing several tons of sand to his clay soil to provide the proper growing median for the bulbs.
In a newspaper article dated July 16, 1959 in The Citizen, Ray was interviewed about the dramatic impact his lily field made in the area in sight and smell. The explanation for his switch to raising lilies soon became understandable.
Ray was blind. He began to go blind in 1949. When this happened, he channeled his love of flowers into a hobby to occupy his time.
He was quoted as saying, “I can raise lilies by touch. They don't require a lot of fussy work. They stay right in the ground year after year; they don't mind the cold weather (although they do mind extreme heat), and they give rich rewards in fragrance, color and lovely texture.”
His great niece, Marcia Walker, living in Maryland sent me the pictures shown here and described her Uncle Ray.
“He always had lily pollen on his nose because he liked to smell each variety,” she recalled. “He had a short handled hoe and would move along the rows on his knees weeding. He could tell a weed from the feel. He would have a string from the house to the garden and could follow each row by the string.”
The picture above with the Selover homestead in the background shows Ray on the ground next to his lily field. It can be identified as the recent Karpinski residence. If you look closely in the center of the second picture, you can see the string at the end with rags hanging on it that signaled the end of the row.
Many people remember Ray. He was a patient man and did not mind waiting the five years for the lily bulblets to mature. When he was interviewed in 1959, he had 16 varieties of lilies growing, many from bulblets.
He did not let the loss of his eyesight prevent him from doing repairs around the farm. Neighbors did not have the heart to tell him the rows of shingles on the new roof of a shed he had just completed were not straight. He climbed a ladder, carried the shingles up and probably worked again with a string guide and feel.
Visitors were always welcome to their home, and Ruth had her own garden of vegetables, and the article said “They were both tanned from working together outdoors.”
Mable Crosby, a former Niles historian, called Ray Selover the “Historian of Owasco and Niles.” I do not know if he ever was appointed officially, but he was always ready to help someone with history. He had Connecticut Yankee and New Amsterdam Dutch in his heritage. Three generations of Selovers lived in the house before Ray and Ruth did.
I never got to meet the Selovers personally but know them from the paper trail of history and family stories I so enjoy collecting. As a lover of flowers too, I also missed the scent and sight of Ray Selovers lilies. But the house still looks the same, and the Indian spring my great-great-grandmother Hannah Bodine Mattoon mentioned in her writings is still spouting across the road from the house. I have pictures of the spring frozen in a grotto of blue ice in the winter .
Sources: “Niles” by Mabel Roscoe Crosby, reminiscences from Marcia Walker, bound citizen books from the Waite History Room and The Citizen on microfilm from Seymour Library.
Laurel Auchampaugh is the Owasco Historian and can be reached at the Owasco Town Hall from 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoons or at nowthenwasco@aol.com
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