The Hollow (1975)

Allentown - On a small mountain ridge known as the Hollow, in the foothills of the Adirondacks, indoor plumbing was first installed six years ago and many people still do not have telephones.

There may be a few signs of modernization in the area, which social workers call the Appalachia of the North: Subsistence farmers no longer keep animals inside their homes. Sales people sometimes venture in now. And more parents are sending their children to school, although they say heavy snow on the mountain roads often keeps them from reaching classes during the long winters.

Still, most people in the Hollow, home to several hundred descendants of two farming families that settled here in the early 19th century, continue to make their living as the woodsmen and trappers they have been for nearly 200 years, selling firewood or serving as guides. Few apply for social services, and the authorities rarely intervene in their lives. There are no officials, no leaders, elected or otherwise, in the Hollow, which is 35 miles north of Saratoga Springs and is in the town of Day in the northwestern corner of Saratoga County, bordering Warren County.

"We lead our own life," said Howie Kathan, 34. "That's the best way."

Claude Allen, who has spent all but three months of his life in the Hollow, is among the town elders at age 56. "I've not seen a lot of changes since I was a boy," he said as he tended a pot of boiling soup in the kitchen of the four-room wood home where he was raised. Mr. Allen said that was fine by him.

The Allen and Kathan families stayed behind when most of their neighbors left the Great Sacandaga Valley in the 1930's after construction of a river dam flooded their farmland, and the mills that had been the mainstay of the economy failed in the Depression. Despite their history of hardship, few residents of the Hollow, or Allentown, as outsiders call it, show any desire to make a home anywhere else.

"I left this town a while back, but I came back" after a year, said Jerry Allen, 28, who went as far as Corinth, 10 miles away. "They all come back because they miss it here. Down there I didn't see none of my people. I couldn't take it."

An anthropology professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs said he occasionally mentions Allentown in class "as an illustration that you can do anthropological studies without going to a foreign land." The deputy commissioner of Saratoga County's Department of Social Services calls it "a sociological pocket."

But it is not the dirt-floor shacks or dilapidated trailers that set residents of the Hollow apart from others living in rural poverty and isolation. Rather, over the years, dark tales of inbreeding and abuse -- which county officials say were grossly exaggerated -- made outsiders wary.

Lynn Allen, who is 23 and has enrolled her 4-year-old daughter in a Head Start program in nearby Luzerne, said most of the talk about intermarriage was ancient history. "Everybody up in here's related" but nobody marries close relations these days, she said. "One guy married his first cousin and everyone was condemning him, but he was adopted."

Editors’ Picks

Air-Conditioning for Olympians? It Is a ‘High-Performance Decision.’

Is It OK to Police My Patient’s Financial Choices?

R.I.P. to Yet Another Form of Creeping on the Internet
Still, folklore about Allentown's clannish, closed society eventually became somewhat self-fulfilling, as families from the Hollow withdrew from a world they viewed as hostile.

"A lot of kids get made fun of in school and called Allentowners," said Carol Kathan, 22, who was trying her best to keep her three young children from playing in the mud outside her trailer. "Kids with stonewashed jeans and Reeboks used to tell us to go home and dump our pails."

In 1973, a documentary film called "The Hollow" focused local attention on inadequate health care and substandard housing here. But the attention was unwanted, the residents here said, and most of the social workers from various agencies who offered help were turned away.

Clifford Logan of the Saratoga County Economic Opportunity Council said his agency had weatherized 150 homes in the Allentown area since then. "Once you do something nice for somebody you're accepted," he said, adding that he believes residents of the Hollow are slowly becoming more comfortable with outsiders. "They've been a town with a gate, and they're opening up." No Welfare, Thank You

But Emily Smith, deputy commissioner for the County Social Services Department, said the number of public assistance cases in the entire Hollow was "probably not more than a couple of handfuls" and has not grown in 15 years.

"They still tend to be a very close-knit group and they take care of each other," she said. "Their ways don't change much. They're happy and that's their way of life. To you and me, our standards are much higher but they don't have those high standards and they're not striving to have them."

James Bowen, the Saratoga County Sheriff, said his services are rarely requested. "We don't get a lot of calls from Allentown," he said. "They sort of police themselves."

While a local fire department provides service for the area, he said, "If one of the Allens has a fire, one of the Allens next door will help put it out."

Proud of their independence and heritage of hard work, several residents of the Hollow said they wouldn't have it any other way.

But not everyone is content. The only newcomer who did not marry into the community said he doesn't even want to feel at home in Allentown. "It's a place to live," said Harry Ladd, who arrived 15 years ago but is still considered a newcomer. "But a lot of times people up in here like the way they live. It's a disgrace."

David Allen, 67, mending a barbed-wire fence outside a small house with a "For Sale" sign, said he would move when it was sold, along with two other small structures, a fine pond and three head of cattle, for a total of $20,000. "I got to sell them all together or I can't sell any," he said.

He said he still had not yet decided where he might go if they did sell. "I haven't been much of anywhere, so it'd be hard to tell you," he said.