The Storied Past of a Roadside Building

Early Tuesday morning, there was a fire at the building on Fairview Avenue in Greenport that houses the St. Mark's Lutheran Food Pantry and was, until Planned Parenthood moved to its new location in Hudson, the staging area for anti-abortion demonstrators. The Greenport Fire Department has deemed the fire "suspicious," and an investigation is ongoing.

The incident is an occasion for recalling some history of the building that Gossips learned from local historian Paul Barrett and shares now with his permission. 

Back in the 1920s and '30s, the building was the Grey Goose Diner, part of a tourist camp run by Enos Hamm. 

According to Atlas Obscura, auto camping was all the rage in the 1920s, and presumably the area to the south of the building, now the site of Hudson Valley Auto Sales and Mobile Locksmith, was where auto campers would pitch their tents beside their cars and stay for the night. (At that time, the site would have been surrounded by farmland, offering some level of experience in nature for city dwellers.)

Photo: Library of Congress

What distinguished the Grey Goose Diner and the Enos Hamm Tourist Camp was an actual grey goose, named Molly, that guarded the tourist camp.

Molly's fame was such that in October 1938 she was featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not. 

 The text accompanying the drawing of Molly reads: 

the

WATCH GOOSE

"Molly"

19 YRS OLD

USED AS A GUARD

AT THE ENOS HAMM

TOURIST CAMP

Hudson, N.Y.

The commentary about Molly reads:

The watch goose "Molly" honks and flaps her wings in terrifying manner until Mrs. Hamm comes and tells her "All right, Molly."

The goose is 19 years old, but still lays a nest of eggs every summer.

In 1938, the tourist camp may well have needed a watch goose. According to Atlas Obscura:

In the 1930s, when more people were traveling to find work than to find leisure, auto camps gained a reputation as places where migrant workers would gather, as opposed to relaxing vacation spots . . . . [B]y the end of the decade, J. Edgar Hoover was excoriating tourist camps as the "new home of crime in America."

Gratitude to Paul M. Barrett and to the Columbia County Historical Society, the source of all but one of the images used in the post
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