Listen to Aunt Ida’s Diaries (1918-1951) on Wed. April 24

"Aunt Ida," Ida Richardson Caswell Pike, circa 1890 while she was Mrs. Caswell. She is sitting on the porch in Upper Waterford, a village of the town that vanished in the wake of the power dams.

 

WATERFORD, VT – For this riverfront community whose fate changed forever with the construction of Comerford and Moore Dams, finding evidence of how lives were lived is a challenge.

             On Wednesday, April 24, at 6:30 p.m., the Waterford Historical Society (WHS) will share entries from the diaries of Ida Richardson Caswell Pike, a descendant of one of Waterford’s founders from Royalston, MA, who lived most of her life in Upper Waterford until Moore Dam was built.

            The small, slim volumes, written in pencil, are among the ephemera inherited by WHS president/secretary Helen-Chantal Pike when her father, who was Ida Pike’s nephew, passed away. Robert E. Pike, who died in 1997, is best known for two books about the greater Connecticut River Valley’s logging history that are still in print, “Tall Trees, Tough Men” and “Spiked Boots: Sketches of the North Country.”

            From 1918 to 1951, the diaries span the final years of Ida’s first marriage to businessman Charles Caswell through her subsequent marriage to his partner, Harley E. Pike, an Upper Waterford farmer whose ancestors also helped settle Waterford after the American Revolution.

            Pike also served on the Waterford Select Board for 24 years, and some of his wife’s diary entries cover natural disasters, what residents did to raise money for the town’s one-room schoolhouses, and the 1934 construction of the Route 18 bridge linking Lower Waterford to West Littleton, NH, signaling the end of Upper Waterford as the town’s commercial crossroads between Portland, ME, and Burlington, VT.

            Free and open to the public, this program will take place in the sanctuary of the Congregational Church in Lower Waterford. In the foyer, visitors have the opportunity to view models and other objects relating to the town’s history and ask questions of the WHS, which is actively engaged in historical detective work, including family genealogies, to bring Waterford’s past to life. Sweet and savory refreshments also will be served.

        

  

"Aunt Ida" with her second husband, Harley Pike, 1956 in their new house in Littleton NH.