The Vedder Research Library

This nineteen-teens post card shows, in the foreground, the mill area of Freehold on Mill Street, today known as Hempstead Lane. Splitting just above the Elmer Story farm (center of photo) is the road going west (left) to East Durham, and the road going north (Big Woods Rd, upward around the bend by the woods). On the far right is a residence and, more noticeable, the church parsonage (today, a private residence). The mills were powered by water diverted from the Basic Creek into pathways called races.

As one looks downstream from the Basic Creek Bridge in Freehold near the end of the 19th century, Jennings’ Grist Mill (right) marks a commercial center that had served Freehold since its founding. The mill building was built in the early 1800s and when it was torn down in the early 1900s, its wood was recycled, with part of it used to build a barn on the current Simone farm (formerly Mygatt and Hunt) on Weed Road. Only foundation stones of the mill remain. Across the creek is the local legend, Cow Slip, a large rock that slid from the cliff, killing, according to local lore, a farmer’s cow. In the inset, the tree and the corner of Ruby’s Restaurant obscures the site of the old mill.

This faded lettering on Greene County Highway Department #4 quietly attests to the dream of Virgil (Junior) Phinney (and other Board members Len Gardiner, Eugene Schmollinger, and Judge Jack Fromer) of producing the Jodel airplane under the company name of Iroquois Aviation. Located about one mile west of Freehold on CR 67, the Phinney farm (formerly Lusk, circa 1800) started a transformation in the late 1950s, first, into a short airstrip, and later, into a half-mile runway, necessitating the removal of two stonewalls and the leveling of terrain. With Phinney’s death in April 1963, so too did the plans for this building. The name Jodel is memorialized as the middle name of one of Junior’s granddaughters. The inset shows a heady day in the early 1960s, with Junior behind the video (publicity program) and the freshly painted sign.

The transition of transportation technology is captured in this wintry scene in Freehold of a horse-drawn bobsled carrying the Phinney truck. Dated possibly in the 1920s, the photo shows Osman and Fanny Phinney standing on the truck bed and in front of their house and property located one mile west of the hamlet on today’s CR 67. The house was owned by the Phinney family for most of the 20th century, with part of the property becoming an airplane landing strip before expanding into the Freehold Airport about 1960. The inset shows current day view.

One of the area’s noted natural landmarks came to a crashing end one quiet night in April 2018. The centuries-old oak tree at the rear of the Freehold Church (inset) was featured in the November 1994 calendar. The five-foot diameter trunk crashed across the Freehold Cemetery stonewall, creating a clean-up situation for the Freehold Cemetery Board. Within a month, and with considerable volunteer effort and work by Ben Buel, Tom and Lorrie Spinner, Bud Vanderpyle, and Charlie Henderson, the proud oak is now a historical memory. Another inset shows the current, no-tree space.

Wayne Nelsen poses with his recently acquired house, one driveway from Nelsen’s Freehold Country Pub near Freehold’s four corners. Long a residence of Purl and Dorothy Howard in mid-late 20th century, and most recently for the past twenty years by the James & Darlene Jollie family, this house has been renovated with a coat of white paint and red trim, a pruning of overgrown branches, and the creation of a stone parking lot in the back that serves both the house and the Pub. The Greenville Local History Group supports the restoring and/or renovating of properties that once again bring a fresh air of community character. The inset shows the house in 1991.

Burrless Chestnut Cottage typified many of the Greenville area boarding houses in the early-mid twentieth century. Carrie Garrison (and husband Lew) took boarders from the “City” from about 1920 till the 1950s, with a capacity of 25 listed in the 1947 Chamber of Commerce brochure. (Daughter Marge Bennett would give up her bed and sleep in the garage attic to secure one more guest bed.) Burrless Chestnut Cottage, named after an unusual tree species in the front yard, defied the usual boarding house progression by not being a farm. Today, in the inset, the private residence is owned by Robert and Johanna Titus who proudly maintain a similar sign. The house is located on CR 67, one-half mile west of Freehold’s four corners.

The left photo shows a dressed-for-Sunday Frances (Fanny) Goodrich Phinney, standing on the Freehold-East Durham Road (today’s County Route 67), one mile west of Freehold in front of her house across from today’s airport. The second photo, taken approximately 1935, is a lighthearted depiction of country living, with Fanny on the left and her sister-in-law Mary D. Phinney Lennon “making repairs” to the road. Fanny had married Osman Phinney in 1916, bore no children, and endured his tragic death in 1939. She became a Freehold fixture—maintaining the farm and 150 acres, helping Phinney family members, supporting her nephew Virgil’s airport project, and living a dignified life until her death in 1981. Her grand-niece Linda Phinney Matthews still resides on land formerly owned by Fanny.