jgiordano@rsmercury.com |
| Aunt Martha and Uncle Don, owners of the Aunt Martha Bed and Breakfast on McKoons Road, display a tea set from the Netherlands with which she likes to serve tea to her guests. (Photo by Janine Giordano) |
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Bright sunny rooms, fresh crisp linens, homemade preserves and down home cooking. These are just a few reasons why people have continued to return to Aunt Martha’s Bed & Breakfast on McKoons Road in Richfield Springs for the last 16 years. They come from as far as Italy and Germany. They stay for as long as two weeks. They return with more friends, their children, and even their children’s children. It has become a family tradition for many, visiting Aunt Martha and Uncle Don. A tradition that results in a 95 percent return rate, according to Martha Vanderway. “I always had it in my head to have a bed and breakfast,” she said. “We always had animals all of our life,” added her husband, who tended to anywhere between 60 and 125 animals on his dairy farm in Sussex County, N.J. “We never could do anything.” “Our work was never done. Now, if we want to go somewhere, we just close,” she said. They retired here after visiting their daughter in her Sherburne home. “We said that that’s where we want to retire,” he said. So they did. They found a great farmhouse built in the 1800s on a nine-acre farm that had once served the South Columbia community as a general store and post office. Today it is home to vegetable gardens, flower gardens, birds and other assorted critters, not to mention the nearly year-round flow of guests who have come to lovingly call the Vanderways “Aunt Martha and Uncle Don.” A stroll through the deceptively large home weaves through a quaint entranceway, with a display of miniature tractors commemorating Don’s farming days, past an old fashioned bathroom complete with a claw foot tub, into the heart of the home, a great kitchen and dining area that can accommodate up to 14 guests at a given time. An open and airy living room filled with inviting sofas and chairs and decorated with stitchery completed by their daughter is as filled with love as it is with knickknacks to “ooh and ahh” over. Everywhere you look there is a memento, a handmade crafted gift, a piece of artwork that tells the Vanderways’ story. Born in the Netherlands, the two, who will be celebrating their 55th wedding anniversary in June, did not meet until coming over to the states. He came in 1947; she arrived three years later, in 1950. By 1951, they met and by 1953, they married. Together they raised three daughters, Theresa, Martha Jane and Renee. Six grandchildren grace their lives. Pictures of their family are displayed throughout the home. Upstairs, the house expands as if by magic, with three areas rentable by guests. One suite has a living room and two bedrooms. The second has two bedrooms, and the third is a single room. All have private baths. All are bright and sunny, decorated in soft pastels. When flowers are in season, Aunt Martha will pick bouquets for the guest rooms. “I like to do that for them,” she said. “They are like family.” In addition to being centrally located, with clean living quarters, good food and a homey decor, they also have the upstairs hall designated as a shopping area. Here is where visitors can purchase hand made wooden items, home made preserves, quilts and scarfs, booties, and other assorted items that might be suitable as a thank-you gift for the neighbor collecting your mail or feeding your pets back home. “We’ve been doing this for 16 years. People said we would burn out in five years but we’re still here,” she said. While they cater to the Glimmerglass Opera crowd they also score a home run with the baseball crowd from Cooperstown. “We just can’t mix them,” he said. “They tend to squawk at each other a bit. Them and the antique crowd. But they’re all nice. We like them all.” The Vanderways have been spending the last few weeks getting ready for the upcoming season. The back deck still needs to be painted, the patio furniture hauled out, rose bushes to plant and vegetable and flowers to get started in the garden. But it will get done. It has for the last 16 years and it will continue to do so, for as long as the Vanderways keep opening and for as long as their guests keep coming back to visit.
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