Legends of the Shawangunk2 JR.pdf - Friends of the Sabbath ...

48 Legends of the Shawangunk.
sticks. A dance closed the festivities, and all made merry to a sound of the fiddle. All the
hunters and frontiersmen for miles around were required to make up the party. The men
in deerskin breeches and rakish coon-skin caps, and the backwoods belles in garb
scarcely less primitive, showed to good advantage as jigs, four-hand reels and
double-shuffles were executed in true frontier style—for your sedate and spiritless
modern cotillion was to them a thing unknown. The old log house still stands, almost
within sound of the stir and bustle of Goshen, where this couple first set up
housekeeping, and their numerous descendants to-day are among the most prosperous
and influential of the valley. The annual gathering of the Bull family is now a firmly
established institution.
The Cromline log mansion, after this event, speedily acquired a celebrity in border
parlance. It was located on the route leading from New Windsor to New Jersey; its
owner, with an eye to the main chance, entertained travelers between those points, and it
soon grew to a popular inn, and a place of resort for all classes. As was meet for all inns
of standing and pretension, it was in due time graced with a sign, in front. This was of an
oval shape, painted and decorated on either side, and suspended by hinges from a
cross-piece on the top of a pole some twenty feet high that stood apart from the building.
On one side of this sign, out of customary deference to the King—for this was before the
Revolution—was painted the arms of royalty; on the other, in gaudy colors, was
represented a goose, because of the proximity of Goose Pond swamp. That old house
was privileged to behold many a jovial revel, of a different sort from the wedding-feast of
Mr. and Mrs. William Bull. During the wild days of Indian warfare many a redskin
passed beneath the sign of the Old Goose for his drink of fire-water. And during the
trying times of the Revolutionary struggle, it was the resort of Whigs, Tories, Cowboys,
and marauders of every sort, who needed the stimulus of brandy to nerve them to their
work. That house stood for 116 years; when decay and the march of improvement
consigned it, notwithstanding all its associations, to the doom of demolition.
During the War of Independence, the sign with its opprobrious English coat-of-arms,*
came to be the butt of endless jokes and gibes. But the landlord did not choose to abate
the nuisance. The painting finally became weather-beaten; the gaudy colors faded; the
coat-of-arms turned to an uncertain grey, and was derisively dubbed “Grey Coat.” This
was gradually metamorphosed into “Greycourt,”† a name which the locality still retains.
* A crown-stone had been obtained from England at a great outlay for the “old jail” at Goshen. But
such was the feeling against everything that savored of Great Britain that Gabriel Wisner, with the
approval of the people, demolished the offending crown-stone with a hammer.
† It may interest the reader to trace the transition from primitive “Duck Cedar” into classic
“Tuxedo.”