People in Fort Hunter, a Montgomery County hamlet off Route 5-S where the Schoharie Creek meets the Mohawk River, are proud to call themselves “canawlers.”

Chief Ray Tylutki said that the Fort Hunter Engine and Hose Company has a painting on its trucks and T-shirts with the words, “Fort Hunter Canawlers.”

George King, a firefighter for fifty years, said that “canawler” is a word used to describe the people who used to work on the Erie Canal in the days when boats were towed by mule teams.

A picture painted in 1954 by late firefighter William Hovey showing a canal boat being pulled by mules graces the Fort Hunter fire trucks and T-shirts.

The volunteer fire company in Fort Hunter shares a building at 351 Main Street with the Fort Hunter Free Library. The firefighters built the structure in 1984 with the idea of making room for the library, which was founded in 1927.

VROOMAN HILL

The recent column documenting that trolley tracks once traversed Clark Avenue off Forest Avenue in Amsterdam led city native and Ohio resident Richard Ellers to question whether that trolley line actually went up the lower end of Vrooman Avenue. Vrooman is a very steep hill when it starts the climb from East Main Street.

Left out of the recent column was information from trolley enthusiast Jerry Snyder that the steepest part of Vrooman Avenue was abandoned soon after the trolley line was built about 1910.

Snyder wrote, “It was soon apparent that the steep grade at the base of Vrooman Avenue was a challenge to both the equipment and the nerves of the passengers, and the lower section of the line was rerouted over Forbes Street (part way up Vrooman) to join the East Main Street Line at Lark Street.”

That particular trolley route—called the Belt Line—was abandoned altogether by 1928.

Ellers lived at 237 Vrooman Avenue and contributed this memory, “Along that lower section of Vrooman, you may still see lateral bumps in some lawns, the results of earth slides after continual heavy rain. I remember as a kid getting up one morning to see the lawn across the street had slid down, half way across the street. As I remember, when the lawn was restored, the workers drove long stakes down into the subsoil.

“At 237, my Dad attached ropes to either side of the base of our reel mower. The ropes let him guide the mower as it rolled down to cut grass; then he pulled the mower back to the top to start another run.”

History repeated itself this past week when heavy rain caused a section of lawn at 235 Vrooman to spill into the road.

My father worked at the Mohawk Carpet lower mill in the East End. I remember family conversations in the 1950s about his efforts to get up Vrooman Avenue in the winter to our home on Pulaski Street.

A frequent question when the mill’s second shift let out at 10 p.m. on an icy night was whether cars were making it up the hill or were people abandoning Vrooman for more inconvenient but passable routes.

My parents were no strangers to Vrooman hill, previously having lived on the steep part of Vrooman and on Kreisel Terrace, a steep hill off Vrooman—a “hill off a hill” in the language of the day. The city still closes Kreisel Terrace to vehicle traffic in the winter.

FAMILY FUN

Old Fort Johnson at Routes 5 and 67 is having its first Family Field Day event starting at 1 p.m. today (07-26). There will be family fun eighteenth century style, including quoits, graces, a tug of war and a marble pit. Later in the afternoon, they will break out lemonade and gingerbread.