Patrick Dellavalle has lived at the Country Cousins ranch on Averyville Road in Lake Placid since 1981. (News photo — Delainey Muscato)

LAKE PLACID — An old cow poop chute still runs through the center of Patrick Dellavalle’s home.

Dellavalle lives at 143 Averyville Road, in a house that used to be an operating barn. The land originally belonged to the state of New York, acquired after the War of 1812, and the state sold it to abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Jack Borgos and his wife Sue D’Avignon purchased the property in 1953 and began running Country Cousins greeting cards there. Kay Jones, United Press International photographer for Mount Van Hoevenberg’s bobsled events, bought the property in 1973. Dellavalle purchased the home in 1981 and has lived there ever since.

But now he’s moving. He said he and his wife Theresa want to travel, and the upkeep of the ranch is becoming too much for them.

So they are selling. But before they move, Dellavalle wanted to share the history of the ranch with the public. He fears it may be torn down by the buyer and the history would be lost.

Wood from the original barn in 1849 still stands in the house today. Beams from the 1910 reconstruction can be seen in the living room and second story. The original Country Cousins sign from 1953 still hangs in front of the house.

Country Cousins ranch on Averyville Road (News photo — Delainey Muscato)

Dellavalle said he cannot control what someone will do with the property once they purchase it, but it would make him sad to see the place go if torn down.

“There’s so much history here,” he said.

Dellavalle raised all his kids there, and Jones raised three of her six children at the ranch.

Amidst taking care of her children, Jones spent much of her time at the bobsled track taking pictures. She took her most famous photo in 1966, capturing the fatal accident of Italian bobsledder Sergio Zardini. The dark room where Jones worked is still in use today inside Dellavalle’s home.

“She would develop her pictures right here and then send them all over the country to different newspapers,” he said.

This darkroom at the Country Cousins ranch on Averyville Road was once used by local professional photographer Kay Jones. (News photo — Delainey Muscato)

The USA Bobsled and Skeleton Hall of Fame inducted Kay Jones on March 23.

Dave Jones, Kay’s son, also became a photographer.

“Both (me and my mom) followed in my father’s footsteps. He was a photographer first,” he said.

Dave said his father handed his mother a camera and told her to “snap away” at the bobsled run. She became successful at that kind of photography.

Dave still works with cameras today. He transitioned to videography now and often helps out on video crews in town. He loves covering the Miracle on Ice Fantasy Camp at the Olympic Center’s 1980 Herb Brooks Arena every spring.

A little while after the 1980 Olympic Winter Games, Kay started Country Cousins Antiques. She sold antiques out of the barn for a few years before selling the ranch to Dellavalle.

Kay was a bit of a collector herself. According to Dave, she owned over 1,000 dalmatian figurines and statuettes.

“Some were little one-inch figures and others were life-sized,” he said.

Both Kay and Dave had dalmatians as pets while growing up. A dalmatian,Tucker, named after former Giants running back Tucker Fredrickson, was buried in the backyard of the ranch. Dellavalle returned the headstone to Dave, and it now sits in his garden.

Kay bought the ranch in 1973 from Jack Borgos and his wife, Sue D’Avignon.

They were going through a divorce at the time because Borgos sold pieces of their land without D’Avignon’s knowledge. Before pieces of it were sold, the Country Cousins ranch stretched all the way down to Old Military Road. Now there are separate properties in between.

The greeting cards were made right in the house. Dellavalle still has some of the original tables they were made on. Women would gather at the tables and use manual printing presses to create the cards.

Borgos wrote some of the jokes. D’Avignon, her brother Sid and Robert Whitney designed the art on the cards and came up with most of the witty text.

Dave said that he still has a box full of the original greeting cards. He also said when he lived at the ranch, he and his mother covered a wall with hundreds of greeting cards.

Before Borgos and D’Avignon owned the ranch, the Lake Placid Club owned the land.

When the Lake Placid Club owned the ranch, it operated as a true farm. Cows lived in the barn, where they were fed and milked. A slaughter pit, which is still there today, sat in the back. The farm provided milk, beef and eggs to the Lake Placid Club.

A service bull, responsible for breeding all the females on the farm was kept in the back. The bull, which Dellavalle said was as big as a Volkswagen, had to be chained on all four feet to four different posts, which are still there. The bull leaned against one of the posts and you can see where the wood is worn away.

The aforementioned poop chute runs from one end of the house to the other. Though the chute was filled in, you can see the outline on the floor. Cows stood throughout the length of the house facing the road. They would eat hay dropped from trapdoors in the ceiling. Dellavalle said the chute operated on a kind of crane system where someone would use a shovel to pull the poop down the chute and out of the barn.

Gerrit Smith was famous for being a financier of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. In 1846, New York state enacted a law that required Black men to own $250 worth of property in order to vote. Smith gave away 120,000 acres of land in Essex and Franklin counties to 3,000 Black men with the hope they could increase the worth of their property to at least $250 and earn the right to vote.

Dellavalle purchased the home from Kay for $118,000. The place is currently listed for $1.9 million.

Dellavalle said he will be 72 years old soon. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to continue maintaining the farm as he gets older. Maintenance like shoveling the roof, attaching a plow to his truck, plowing the driveway and taking care of the horse is a young man’s job, he said.

Dellavalle wonders if the land will be turned into a historical landmark because of Gerrit Smith’s connection to John Brown. The John Brown Farm State Historic Site is just a short distance from the ranch.