Some may recall the clever ad campaign many years back when two people accidentally bumped into each other, as one was eating chocolate, and the other, peanut butter. One remarked, "You got peanut butter in my chocolate." The other replied, "You got chocolate in my peanut butter."
The result, of course was a well-known peanut butter cup we'll soon be tossing into trick-or-treaters' bags.
It's interesting how discoveries are made like this, whether it's mixing food, or oddly enough, people digging in the dirt in the village of Hartwick back in the 1840s.
Picks and shovels can get rusty and dirty over time. One day some men were digging out a cellar for a house in the village and they noticed how their tools were mysteriously becoming nicely polished by simply digging into the soil.
Meanwhile, a Mrs. Alsworth had a boarding house just south of the village. Tradition has said that some men on a rainy day had tracked in some soil on their boots that was bluish in color. Bending over to remove it, she noticed its unusual composition and rubbed some of it across a knife. The blade was suddenly polished as a result.
As this bluish soil was experimented with, more of it was discovered in the area of today's South Street, or state Route 205. Beds of this polish were opened on both sides. The entrepreneurial spirit soon took over from there.
Sheffield Harrington was amongst the first to see profit in this blue, gritty soil. Harrington was first to ship barrels of it to manufacturers in the New England states from a bed on the west side of South Street.
Rufus Peters put the polish in small packages, selling it as Peters Polish, while Chester Harrington did likewise, simply calling it "blue grit."
Manley Bresee used to walk from his Hartwick home as far as Davenport, selling the polish in three-ounce packets, door-to-door, for 25 cents each.
Polish beds were also operated on John Conklin's farm, now owned by Charles W. Lee.
Extracting the polish put several men to work for a long time. They worked hard and long hours, usually about 18 hours a day, receiving $5 for their labor.
For the most part, the polish was removed from the beds with pickaxes, shovels and wheelbarrows. Two men would dig while two others put chunks of the soil into wheelbarrows, and two more took them to a drying shed. The grit dried in the sun and the chunks then were crushed into powder and put in barrels. Each barrel weighed about 350 pounds. The polish was then sold for $1.50 a barrel, although Rufus Peters once took a barrel to a Connecticut town and sold it for an astounding $200.
If eight men worked each day, they could produce nearly 150 barrels. Not only was it hard work, digging the polish could be dangerous. Quite often the loose polish was so soft that diggers had to keep stepping around, otherwise they'd sink into the pit. There was also the danger of the sides of the pit caving in, burying workers, so wooden curbing was installed inside the pit.
Workers arrived each day with meticulously clean clothes and boots. This was necessary as the polish could be ruined by small particles of dirt being mixed in with it.
By 1918 the demand for the polish from Hartwick was in decline and by 1940 production had ended.
According to an article found in the Albany Knickerbocker Press in the early 1900s, these polish beds had been formed, geologists said, by action of water during the glacier period and a deposit was brought down from the north, ending up in Hartwick.
The beds extended under the village for a mile or more in any direction. The depth was uncertain, although some of the pits reached 70 feet before hitting a different kind of soil.
On Monday: I'll dig into the mailbag to share some interesting correspondence.
City Historian Mark Simonson's column appears twice weekly. On Saturdays, his column focuses on the area during the Depression and before. His Monday columns address local history after the Depression. If you have feedback or ideas about the column, write to him at The Daily Star, or e-mail him at simmark@stny.rr.com. His website is www.oneontahistorian.com.
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