Attending the Cazenovia College
Senior Seminar last week was a homecoming for Mrs. Chester Coriell of North
Plainfield, NJ.
"I spent my summers here
as a child, visiting my grandparents on Union Street.," she said.
My mother was Amala Doremus and my grandfather was David Doremus.
He was a cabinet maker and
carpenter, and when he was 22 years old he helped build the Methodist Church
on Lincklaen Street."
Mr. Doremus also served
from 1902 to 1903 as president of Cazenovia village.
Mrs. Coriell remembers the
bandstand on Albany St., and skipped across the grass ("the street was
much narrower then") to hear the music and nibble on popcorn.
"I remember the summer people
taking walks ... and the wealthy people, the Wendells, the Remsons, the
Ten Eycks," she recalled.
She also remembers with
joy the famed Chautauqua that came to Cazenovia every year.
"It was on the green at
Green St., I think," Mrs. Coriell said. "And it cost a dollar for
me to go to all the sessions. That was the first place I ever heard
a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta."
One of the features of the
Chautauqua during the summer of 1918 was the announcement each day of news
of the war.
Mrs. Coriell lived in Syracuse
as a little girl, and came out to Cazenovia by way of a trolley and the
west Shore steam train. From te depot to Union St., she took a horse-drawn
bus.
"I remember seeing the ice
out on Cazenovia Lake in the winter, and discovering the same ice in my
grandmother's ice box in the summer," she said.
Mrs. Coriell's mother, Amala
Doremus, was the first Cazenovia Girl to become a teacher at the old Union
School. Another member of the Doremus family was Spider, a mixture
of pug and fox terrier, who was well known in the village and lived to
be 17 years old.
Glad to be visiting the
scenes of her childhood, Mrs. Coriell quoted a saying of her grandfather:
"If you couldn't be happy
in Cazenovia, you couldn't be happy anywhere."