A KILLING FROST

It takes a while to get to know members of a church, particularly if you are new in town.  So it was for us after my husband became minister in Burlington, Connecticut. As we learned names of people we slowly became familiar with them. The oldest members of church, who had been attending this church since childhood, had some of the most interesting stories to tell, and because these members were so old, the stories were really part of local history.

Burlington was a very rural town until a time in the 1960’s when if a farmer sold his farm, it became a subdivision. What had been a farm was now a large number of homes that were frequently inhabited by people who took Route 4 through Farmington onto Route 84 and then into Hartford, where these people worked for insurance companies, the State, or other Hartford jobs. Burlington also has a two lane state road that goes from the center of town into Bristol. The northern part of Bristol was country in the early part of the twentieth century. Now it’s mostly subdivisions until you get to the real city part of Bristol.

We told one elderly church member about the frost on the vegetable garden that we had recently planted.  The vegetables had sprouted but were killed by the frost.  His reaction was “that’s nothing.” Then he told us about his neighbor in that northerly part of Bristol that abuts Burlington, where he lived as a child. It was all farms back then in what was a rural part of Bristol. His neighbor was a dairy farmer, and he raised his own hay and his own field corn for his cows.

One of the things I noticed, when I practiced law and did title searches for people buying property in the country, was that many years ago farmers got mortgage loans on the farm in the spring in order to buy seed for the farm. The loans were paid off after harvest time.  The neighbor of our church member, around 1914, took out a seed loan early in the spring, then planted his seed to raise the corn he needed to feed the cows. The corn germinated and was coming up nicely. It was about six inches high on June 15 when that area of the state received a hard frost. All the corn seedlings died. This meant the farmer might not be able to get more corn seed planted in time to raise a crop before the fall, and he would have to take a second mortgage loan on his farm to get the money to buy more seed. He wasn’t sure he could get a second loan. This so upset the farmer that he had a fatal heart attack.  The church member then said to us, “Now that was a killing frost.” All of which goes to show you that when you think you know what a common expression like ‘a killing frost’ means, you really don’t know the whole story.

Angela Hawkins Fichter