Vernam Spring

Just read your postings on the Vernam Spring. A great piece of Town History!

Quite a few things even I didn’t know about the place!.

As a child growing up in Oakland I remember the Spring house very well. It was my favorite place to hang out, especially in the hot summertime- it was always a bit cooler up there next to that cold Spring water. Mrs. Vernam was long gone by the time I was a youngster, but my father remembered her very well. When I was growing up, the Spring and nearby ponds were used as a Goldfish Hatchery. But the water proved too cold for these types of fish and after a few years they moved out to Allendale, NJ.

I remember there was an old Japanese caretaker who basically took care of the place, he lived in a small shack on the property, his name all that I knew was “George” My father who lived through World War Two was always careful of him because of his ethnicity as he remember how the Japanese had attack America on December 7th, 1941. But “Old George” as us kids called him was very nice and a gentle soul. Every Christmas he would hand carve us kids wooden toys as presents. But he did have a nasty little black dog he kept that always helped guard the place. After The Hatchery business moved out and George went away, the place began to rapidly be reclaimed by the surrounding woods. Muskrats chewed holes in all the earthen dams and the ponds drained away and the property grew up in Berry bushes.  The blackberry bushes however provided an annual harvest of delicious berries that we picked for mom to make jam and pies out of! 

Many people would hike up to the spring and fill jugs with water and my grandfather even had an iron pipe line that provided water to his house. Years later I remember this pipe broke near our own house and we filled water jugs from it. I never knew that there was a watercress business there, but my dad always said the watercress had grown there naturally and was merely monopolized by others who saw value in it.   

The Springhouse itself was a five-sided structure with big doors that swung up on hinges and was held up by chains from the roof. The Spring itself was inside in a concrete enclosed well and I often watched the “little tornadoes” of upwelling water in it’s bottom. They were fascinating to watch and I often wondered where they came from deep in the earth. There were lots of artifacts around the grounds and I would find bottle stoppers in the shallow “outflow” of the Spring which I still have a few of them. It was much later that I discovered that one of the Earliest owners of the property had been my Great-Great-Grandfather, John H. Speer who ran a Trout hatchery there with his brother Jacob before the days of the Civil War. It was their father, Henry Speer that built the sawmill on the lower part of the brook known as “Hank Speer’s sawmill”

“Unofficial protector” of the Spring

I fancied myself as sort of the “Unofficial protector” of the Spring when I was young and spent a lot of time there. On the East side above one of the doors were large brass letters that read “R. Vernam Spring” An old wagon road ran from the Spring out to Mrs. Vernam’s house on Long Hill Road. I always suspected that another building may have been there but it wasn’t until a photograph of it was posted in the Oakland Post Office one day by the postmaster. This large multi-storied boxlike building had been Mrs Vernam’s bottling plant. Large glass bottles or “demijohns” were loaded on wagons with special cribbing and hauled to the Railroad station for transport to New York City restaurants and other places.

I developed quite an imagination and could nearly see these wagon loads of water jugs pulled up the old wagon trace by teams of horses. The wagon road continued in the other direction through the woods and eventually came out at my grandfather’s farm on Valley Road.   My father told me the small addition was built on the back of the original Springhouse by the Boro of Oakland when it utilized the place to augment the town water supply. That’s where the large three cylinder Goulds water pump came from. An electric line was run in from Long Hill Road and a 12 horsepower electric motor powered the water pump. My father worked for the Boro for awhile and operated the pump for the town. For this a 2 inch iron water line was laid out to Long Hill Road and connected to the water main that also filled the large water tank at the top of Long Hill road for pressure.  I was told my Grandfather, Andrew Spear contracted to lay the pipe line to the Kanouse water plant on West Oakland Avenue.   

For awhile, the Kanouse Company rented the the top floor of the saw mill for a bottling works. Mrs Vernam only used the building at the Spring which she had had built. A New York City Archeitectural firm actually built the ornate Springhouse, date unknown.

When I visited the area in 2016, I located the spring, which still bubbles from it’s concrete well in the overgrown woods. It brought back lots of memories.

The tall “whitewood” or CATALPA trees that grown nearby the spring are hundreds of years old and are like forest cathedrals, few people know about them and they should be saved at all cost.  The ancient wagon road was still there when I visited, and some of the large boulders left by the ice age.

I wrote a letter to then President Kennedy and he answered me back

When I was in grammar school, I wrote a letter to then President Kennedy and he answered me back, about my concern for saving such places

The Spring has always been and still remains a “special memory” for me but I’m sad to say the years have caught up to me now at 71 and with a bad hip, it’s unlikely I’ll ever get to revisit the place.

I want to thank you for posting the story of the place and you may use any of this writing for any future story if you care to.  Meanwhile I’ll try to locate and re photograph any of those old bottlecaps I still have I once found in those cold waters.

As an adjunct to this.  Years later when the place was abandoned the weedy “run-way” as I called it was only about a half foot deep, could be found schools of small native brook trout. I often wondered if they had been survivors from the “Speer Brothers Trout farm” that once was there. Life it seems carries on through the years. The cold water was ideal for native trout.

I hope some day to get back to Old Oakland and visit again with you and have a cup of tea on your front porch like we did once before and talk about old times.

Thanks again Kevin.