Lee Family Reunion (1903) and Dairy Herd Auction (1915)

My partner in research, my husband Dave, often finds Waterford-related items in past issues of our local paper, the Caledonian-Record (or Caledonian, or Evening Caledonian, as it was for while). He passed these two along regarding the Lee family that has resided near Stiles Pond since 1801. I'll show the 1915 item first, since it's short:

And here is the 1903 Lee family reunion report. Note in particular the presence of Bertha Lee, home from Ohio where she received her schooling; her eventual return to the farm would engage it again in dairying, as well as offering guest rooms. Also note mention of the nearby Asa Lee property on "East Village Road," which apparently became the Hovey farm that remains as The Farmer's Daughter today. "East Village "(East St. Johnsbury) residents may also be pleased to see Charlotte Morrill mentioned; her house still stands in the village. The geographic closeness of the Lee farm and East Village was mirrored in the social closeness of the two, and marriages linked them further. This is a great example of how Waterford's clusters of settlement often stayed closest in most ways to the nearest neighoring village or town, rather than to the (farther away) center of Waterford itself.

National Register Farm in Waterford: The Barn Story

The Caledonian-Record today (October 27, 2018) printed a column by Peggy Pearl that looks at the construction of this Waterford barn from fresh angles. It's called West View Farm in its National Register listing and our town barn census. Here is Peggy Pearl's commentary:

Voices from an Earlier Time in Waterford, Vermont: Dorothy Morrison, Gordon Fleming

This was once the Fleming home, on their dairy farm.

Dorothy Morrison. Gordon Fleming. If you're a Waterford long-time resident, you may have heard their names; if this is your first time noticing them, welcome to the pleasures of local history, where treasures emerge unexpectedly and there's often someone around to add a good story!

This week, on Wed. October 24, the Waterford Historical Society is excited to share newly rediscovered recordings from Mrs. Morrison and Mr. Fleming, thanks to both Diane Willson and Helen Chantal Pike.

Mrs. Morrison was a long-time postmaster, running the post office on Maple Street. You can read more about her post office here. Her parents were Bertha and Lester Pease, and she was born in Center Strafford, New Hampshire, in 1911. She died at home in 2003.

Mr. Fleming, a farmer and dairyman, owned and operated the Fleming Dairy, from the farm more recently known at the Turek home. He was born in the same year as Mrs. Morrison, 1911, in St. Johnsbury Center, to Matthew and Jessie Fleming; he died in 1989. Read more about the homestead that became the Fleming farm, here.

Although this seems like "recent history," times have changed dramatically since 1911. Listen to these two Waterford residents tell about their lives from recordings, and enjoy the insights of other community members, at the Davies Memorial Library in Lower Waterford on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.

Accessible entry; some stairs to restroom. Refreshments will be served.

Google Earth aerial photo of Lower Waterford, Vermont. Can you locate the post office - today's, and the one that Dorothy Morrison ran for so many years?

Geneva (Powers) Wright, Growing Up in Waterford

Geneva (Powers) Wright and her daughter Glenna W. Pasho.

On May 25, 2016, Geneva (Powers) Wright, with her daughter Glenna (Wright) Pasho, told the Waterford Historical Society about growing up in Waterford. These notes (written by Donna Heath and Beth Kanell) are supplemented with added details from Geneva’s written history of the family and from Glenna afterward.

***

The Powers history in Waterford began at the intersection of Shadow Lake Road and County Road South at the farm purchased by Glenn Gilbert Powers and Eva Belle (Page) Powers on April 19, 1919 according to Geneva Ella (Powers) Wright, the eldest of Glenn’s seven children.  There were three boys and four girls. Glenn and Eva moved from Kirby to the farm in May 1919.

The farm was one of the earliest settled in Waterford; in 1792 when Daniel Pike came from Royalston, Mass., he settled on 125 acres there. Daniel Pike’s companions in his move to Waterford were his brother Nathan, and Jonathan Hutchinson and Luther Knight.* Daniels’s son Luther (who would become known as Deacon Luther Pike) took ownership, marrying Anna Caswell. Their daughter Carolina married Nathan W. Millen, who eventually owned the farm, followed by the Millen daughter Laura Jane (Jennie), who married Frank W. Brown of Bethlehem, NH; Frank Brown became a successful dairyman, in 1886 building a modern barn and in 1904 rebuilding and modernizing the house. Frank and Jennie Brown were the owners who sold the farm to Glenn Powers. In addition to farming, Glenn was a Vermont state representative for Waterford in the 1940s.

Geneva (the first child in the family, born September 22, 1919, at the Littleton NH hospital) went to a small (“one-room”) district elementary school in Waterford, the Woods School, and attended high school in Littleton.  During the first year of high school, she travelled to school in the truck that carried the milk cans.  The truck driver would be either Geneva’s father Glenn or his hired man Percy Kezar. For her other three high school years, she and her sister Theresa stayed with a Littleton family during the week, “self-boarding,” and went home on weekends.  The girls had to provide their own food and firewood at the house where they boarded. It was so cold in the winter there, that the girls were able to keep their perishable food supply in the very cold hallway.  Going home on weekends was a time to do laundry (skirts were below the knee), and to bring back more food, assisted by their mother. Geneva graduated from high school in 1937.

The family raised sheep and sent the wool to Maine to be made into wool blankets.  Glenn raised Jersey cattle.  Milk was kept in milk cans placed in a cooler until being picked up by the milk truck and delivered to creameries in Barnet and Concord and Littleton.  The milk cooler was kept cold with ice from Stiles Pond and from the pond at Pattenville, NH (across the river).  Sawdust was used to pack the ice in the ice shed to preserve it. The family made its own butter. It was packed into wooden butter molds and pressed out, and then wrapped in paper, which Geneva recalls doing.

Although Geneva’s high school years were during the Great Depression, her family did not discuss the Depression and the farm provided much of their needs. They milked cows, sugared, raised sheep and poultry, owned horses, made their own ice cream and sold butter. 

One of Geneva’s chores was to take care of house chores (sweeping, washing dishes) when a “hurricane” baby was born in during Vermont’s devastating Hurricane of 1938; her mother assisted at the birth, and often helped other women as needed.  Today, the baby lives in Gilman.

Geneva married Gilbert Augustus Wright (born March 26, 1912, in Lower Waterford) on March 1, 1938.  In addition to several kinds of work, Gilbert also was a road commissioner for Waterford, Barnet, and Kirby at different times, and later in life served as a lister for Waterford.

Geneva and Gilbert Wright would have three children. Their names now are, daughter Jean Wright Hagan, born 1939; son Merle G. Wright, born 1940; and daughter Glenna W. Pasho, born 1950. When the youngest, Glenna, was 3 years old, Geneva told Gilbert that she wasn’t milking cows any longer, so the family moved to St. Johnsbury, ideal for the children to attend St. Johnsbury Academy. When Glenna was 19 and attending college in New York State, her parents decided to sell the house in St. Johnsbury and move back to an acre of land reserved for them at the home farm.

Glenn’s grandson, Keith, now resides at the farm. 

[*Correction to Pike reference, from Pike descendant Helen Chantal Pike, Aug. 30, 2017: Daniel Pike moved with his 2 sons, Nathan and Luther (and at least 2 daughters). I'm descended from Nathan, the river farmer. Deacon Luther became the hill farmer.]

A Little History of the White Village

Classic postcard view of the White Village.

from the June 1919 issue of The Ice Cream Trade Journal

Some Notes on THE WHITE VILLAGE, from Beth Kanell

Dr. Harris's history of Waterford uses a Burlington Free Press article from 1937 to explain the history of Lower Waterford's "White Village." At that time -- shortly after the Great Depression, and only a few years before the Second World War -- the town's focus was almost entirely on farming and the trades that go with it, and Upper Waterford still stood up the river from Lower Waterford. Owners of property in the upper village knew that the second major dam on the Connecticut River would flood out their homes and farms, and they were gradually selling land to the New England Power Company in preparation.

The Free Press article described the lower village at that time as almost entirely a summer place "of the better kind where the summer people stay all season and contribute largely to the life of the community." Sometime after 1919, Mr. John W. Davies, a St. Johnsbury creamery owner and originally from Reading, Mass., purchased almost "the entire village" and established its color theme, the one it's still known for: white-painted structures with green shutters. The attractive appearance quickly became a tourist draw.

When Mr. Davies died, many of his buildings were sold, and his wife continued to reside in what's now the famous Rabbit Hill Inn -- but from 1912 to 1957 was a residence. (There's a detailed history of the inn here.) The Rabbit Hill Inn grew from a 1957 purchase that turned the structure first into a "motel," then in 1980, with fresh owners, into a gracious country inn that continued to rise in esteem and elegance as owners built on its possibilities.

On the same side of the road as the inn are a former village store that in the early 1900s housed the library, and also one of the town's early schoolhouses, the Lower Waterford School, now a private home. Across from the inn stands the Congregational Church, as well as the current library -- named for Mr. and Mrs. Davies (the Davies Memorial Library). Around the corner, using a separate entrance to the lower floor of the library building, is the town office and a limited-hours post office that still serves the village.

The color scheme that Mr. Davies initiated remains in place: The White Village is one of the most photographed locations along the Vermont side of the Connecticut River, and is worth visiting in all seasons, to savor both its changes and its enduring gracious character.

***
A little extra information on Mr. Davies: He was born John Wesley Davies in Union, Maine, on July 10, 1866; he married Marion Florence Lombard in Massachusetts on December 26, 1887. They had three children. Mr. Davies died in 1937 in Lower Waterford, where his wife continued to reside until her own death in 1949. In 1930 Mr. Davies was president of the Manton-Gaulin Mfg Co., in St. Johnsbury, a company with considerable expertise and patents in homogenizing milk and making ice cream; Dr. Harris's book suggests that Mr. Davies owned at least two creameries himself, one in St. Johnsbury, VT, and the other in Littleton, NH. -- BK

Making Hay, Part 1 -- Farming in Waterford

Keeping machinery in use at the Gingue Farm, Waterford.

Making and storing hay take up a lot of the summer for Waterford farmers, as they have since the first settlers in the town. As a general summary, haymaking has had three stages: coping with loose hay (even cut by hand scythes at the start), managing "square" (actually mostly rectangular) bales of hay, and moving to the big white "marshmallows" that are plastic-wrapped versions of "big bales" where the wrapping encourages the interior cut grass to ferment, raising its protein level. ("Big bales" can also be used without plastic overwraps -- the outer layer of the bale becomes the hardened protective "wrap" on its own.)

And now haying seems to have come full circle, as many large dairy farms like Waterford's Gingue Farm harvest the tall grass and transport it, somewhat dried and loose, to silos and other forms of storage -- again, to encourage a higher protein level, which helps cows produce more milk.

Gingue Brothers Dairy recently described this newest process on their Facebook page. Not only is it a way to use machines to their best advantage, but it's also a form of coping with a changing climate:

With these short weather windows it's very difficult to make dry hay at 85-90% dry matter (10-15% moisture.) We make some dry hay every year but seems that mama nature only gives us a couple good weeks of dry weather each year. When we make chopped silage and ferment it in the bunk, we dry the grass to 30-40% dry matter (60-70% moisture) this allows us to chop most of the fields the same day they were mowed. We've been planting more cover crops, no-till planting, and using minimal tillage on the rest of our acres to reduce erosion. It's not easy but we are constantly tweaking our crop planning ad practices to help the environment.

So here's a pictorial look at how hay was made a hundred years ago -- when it was cut loose, dried in the field (weather permitting!), and moved to the upper levels of the barn for storage in the "hay mow" until feeding to the cows.

1. Hay loader. This photo is from New Jersey, but I bought it from a Vermonter who said this was how he loaded hay here from the field to the wagons right after World War II, that is, 1945. We talked about these -- with Willard P. and Dave M. speaking from experience -- at the May meeting of the Waterford History group.

2. Hay forks. These chain-operated "giant tongs" could grasp an astounding amount of the wagonload of hay at once. They were attached to a hoist and track up inside the barn roof. From inside the barn, the crew pulled by hand, by horse, and by machine, to lift the hay from the wagon sitting outside, raise it to the door in the upper floor of the barn, and maneuver it to the particular place in the hay mow for storage. Quick and effective!

3. Barn adjustment for hay forks. Waterford farmers mostly cobbled the fork tracks into their existing barns. But in some nearby towns, barns being built during this mechanical lifting period added a projecting "tooth" at the top of the barn roof (gable roofs), so the hoist for the hay fork could rise straight up from the wagon before being pulled into the upper level of the barn with its load. This photo is from Vermonter Thomas Visser's Field Guide to New England Barns and Farm Buildings.