February - March 2003 Edition

Lamring Dairy   By Raymond Street Resident   It looks forlorn now, another old and empty house awaiting demolition on an overgrown, weedy lot. There is nothing remarkable about it at first sight. A glimpse down the stone driveway might make a passerby wonder what the funny looking garage is all about, but that’s probably as much attention as the property would get from most of the drivers on River Road.   Taking an informal poll of my neighbors, most of them hadn’t particularly noticed the house before the windows were boarded up. Only my immediate neighbor, who bought his home in the late 1940’s, remembered that it had once been a dairy and that a family had once lived in the house. Another neighbor knew that her house on Lamring Drive was built on a former farm, but had no idea that the house had anything to do with the dairy, or that the building behind the fence at the curve in her street was a dairy barn.   Of course, in the history of things, most of us in town are newcomers. When the first owners of my home walked up Raymond Street in 1927, they knew that they were living on the edge of a farm that had been there for at least forty years. Black and white cows grazed on grass or dozed under enormous pecan trees on land that would become a housing development and a schoolyard, but not for another forty years.  They lived in a town with many active farms that were just beginning to give way to development -- as the train made it possible to work in the city but to live in the countryside. The big grey George Washington Bridge proposal was half a decade away from completion and few people had cars – the first owners of my house did not have a garage – but the trains made it easy to get here, the taxes were low, and the air was fresh and clean.   Down the block, the Lamring Dairy was in full production, supplying milk to Fair Lawn and neighboring towns.     The forlorn view from across River Road on a stormy day. The barn is down the driveway to the right.  The wooden addition to the original house is visible in the rear.           The stone dairy barn and the attached processing building, as seen from the driveway of the house. Notice the hayloft door on the processing building. Cows were kept in the center section of the barn, calves and tack in the smaller part on the extreme left. Because cows must calve to produce milk but calves could not be allowed to suckle, they had to be kept separate. Some were kept as replacements for the dairy, but most ended up at the butcher.      The dairy barn as seen from Lamring Drive. The single door in the rear would have been used to turn out the cows to graze in pastures where the houses on Lamring Drive, Raymond Street, Richard Street, and Westmoreland Avenue are now.         From the earliest settled times, the area that became Fair Lawn was a farming community, with abundant fresh water and large tracts of inexpensive land, in close proximity to the burgeoning industrial city of Paterson. In an era before refrigeration and easy transportation, new immigrants went to the city looking for work in the mills, and the farmers fed them. As trains made getting goods to market easier for the farmers in the 1870’s, it also bought suburbia to eastern Bergen County, the first suburbs of New York City, and the farmers of the west and north fed them and prospered. The farming descendants of the first Dutch settlers made this an attractive area for new Dutch immigrants like the Lamring family and they joined the existing community of farmers and dairymen.   Sometime between 1890 and 1910, the recently emigrated Lamring family erected a house and dairy barn on a hillside facing a busy county road. The house and barn were distinctive, built from timber and small stones from the field, a quaint, “country” style that was nearly unique for the area. Looking at the house now, you have to think about the backbreaking work of gathering the stone in barrows pushed by hand, and slowly matching stone by stone to make an even wall. Finding the right stones must have been a matter of luck, and some parts of the house’s walls show that there were days when large rocks must have been hard to find or too hard to use to make an even lintel or window. Looking carefully, you can see areas where the gaps had to be filled with mortar instead of stone. The dairy barn, not as important as a home, is more haphazard, but the stone is still carefully made even, with a decorative flourish here and there.   The family must have done well, and a wooden addition was added to the house. Another was added to the barn. A daughter of the family married one of the founders of a local lumberyard, and thus the Lamrings joined with the Kuiken family and became even more a part of the growing town.  Suburbia marched onward, and by the incorporation of Fair Lawn in 1924, farms began to be subdivided into housing lots as development surged, spurred on cheap mortgages and speculation. Land that had been part of one estate became part of the subdevelopment containing the house I now own.  Others were built on the Acker estate, the original “Fair Lawn”, and began to ring the surviving farms as small farmers struggled to keep ahead of taxes and market competition. The trolley company abandoned their service, replaced by roads and buses, and some of their right-of-way became a part of new housing, some of it purchased or taken by the new borough for future growth. The train station was relocated and rebuilt as Radburn began to take over more farmland, bringing in even more new residents.   Just as the market fell and the Depression of the 1930’s began, dairy farms were hard hit as the invention of refrigerated trucking made the need for a local dairy obsolete. Some farmers converted from dairy to “truck” faming. The survivors found themselves competing with large cooperatives like Fair Lawn Dairy. By the end of the Second World War, their land was worth more than any profits from farming, and taxes on its worth took away what was left. The remaining farmers found themselves in the situation that still faces farmers in New Jersey today - land-rich and money-poor at the same time. Some hung on by using their land for other businesses or selling off parcels one by one until there was nothing left to sell.   In the late 1950’s, the land that had once been the Lamring Dairy’s pastures was sold and became a housing development.  The family home and the dairy barn remained in the family, on a large lot; the dairy barn on a steep slope with its back up against a newly-created Lamring Drive, the house on an increasingly commercial River Road. Parcels of land on either side of the house were also sold, and a neighboring house demolished to make way for a convenience store in the late 1960’s, the ironically named “Garden State Farms”.   To add insult to injury, as River Road was widened for increasing traffic and the new Shop Rite, the already narrow front lawn of the house all but disappeared, leaving the front lemonade porch a few feet from the road. Businesses continued to use the barn and rear yard, and the house became a rental property. Slowly, it fell into disrepair. In 1997 or 1998, the Lamring house and dairy barn were placed on the market; in the past few months, the house has drawn more attention as an eyesore, boarded up, vandalized and vacant. It now stands as a forlorn, and probably doomed reminder of Fair Lawn’s 300 hundred year agricultural history.        The chain that let the farmer keep the door open  while keeping the cows inside (or out) is still here,  almost fifty years after the last cow departed.      (Thanks to borough historian, Jane Lyle Dipeveen, for her help with information on the property. A picture of the Lamring dairy barn, pasture, and cows appears in her book “Images of America – Fair Lawn”. )