The Grow Farm on Grow Hill: the Stone Brothers

The “Grow Farm” is one of the oldest in town. Thomas Grow arrived in Hampton in 1730, like several of our earliest settlers from Andover, Massachusetts, and purchased 100 acres in the northernmost portion of town, at that time part of Pomfret and referred to, for a long while and sometimes still, as “Grow Hill”. There were no buildings on the parcel at that time, though the house, one of the oldest in town, was built between 1730 and 1748 when Grow, who died a few years later in 1755, deeded half of the land, which included the house “where I now live”, to his son, Thomas Jr., and the other half to his son Joseph. The earliest section of the house is the south-facing salt box, which remains on the property and is now part of “Woodhill Farm”.

The “Grow Farm” has been in the Stone family since 1876. Phyllis Stone has lived there since1953, nearly three-quarters of a century, and her late husband and long-time First Selectman Walt lived there all his life. Walt’s father Elmer was also raised on the farm, along with two siblings and four half-siblings, including Harold, whose memories of the farm are recorded in “Hampton Remembers”:

When I was a small boy my day started about ha’ past five or a little earlier than that because we had to have our milk cooled and down to Elliot Station by seven o’clock. We had the stables to clean and the milking and we had to pitch out the silage after we got a silo and pitch down the hay, and feed ‘em the grain…We had to pump the water and turn the cows out into what was the horse barn there because that’s where the pump was and one boy could pump and keep pumping, steady, if two cows were drinking.

Elmer and his sons ran the farm until two of them, Clarence and Walter, purchased it in 1954 when the dairy farm became known as the “Stone Brothers”. Mother and Father Stone lived in the old farm house, in the half facing north, while Clarence and his wife Bea lived in the other half, and Walt and Phyllis raised their family in the house she still lives in. There were plenty of buildings to accommodate the daily operations. Phyllis remembers the big, black barn, a small garage which served as a tool shed and an oil shed, a garage for vehicles, a pig pen, another large barn, and a pole barn beyond it for the cattle, recalling that Walt told his son Walt Jr. that he couldn’t marry his future wife, Pam Colburn, until the pole barn was completed. Mr. Colburn, she relayed, brought a bunch of friends to finish building it.

Harold Stone remembered: We had two woodsheds that would hold twenty cords apiece, plus some extry, and when I left the farm there, those sheds were packed full, and the chunks were in a separate place for the big wood.

Cows were not the only animals on the farm. Heifer calves were raised; bulls were sold. There were pigs in the pig pen. “Mother Stone had chickens in the old farm house yard,” Phyllis recalls. “Walt Jr. wanted to raise chickens, so we bought 75 broilers. When it was time to kill them, he went to help his dad, put one on the chopping block and that was it.” Phyllis did the rest, but she never plucked or cleaned a chicken. Perhaps it was an old wives’ tale, but she was told that if you didn’t do it just right, you could disturb a gland and it would make the meat bitter. In those days, for Sunday dinners guests would sometimes come and kill and pluck and clean the chicken, and then enjoy the meal.

The farm saw many changes through the years, some resulting from growth, others from legislation. When Clarence and Walter purchased the farm, there were 50 cows; the Stone Brothers increased the number to one hundred. Harold relays that there were no more than twenty cows at a time when he grew up there. He recalled:

I had a milking stool that had a little platform in front where you could rest the pail instead of having to hold it tight with your knees the way you do when you use an ordinary three-legged milking stool. It was quite a help!

Elmer Stone milked the cows by hand in the black barn; Walt and Clarence machine-milked. Phyllis remembers when there was no milk room and all the equipment was cleaned in her house and returned to the barn. When the laws changed, a larger barn was built with a milking room, and the pig pen was moved far from the dairy operations. The methods for milk storage changed a lot also. Harold described:

You set your milk in these tin pans about ten to twelve inches across the top, smaller across the bottom. And up home we had what you called a milk, butter, and cheese pantry known as a butt’ry besides the other pantry where you kept your food.

Phyllis remembers when it was stored in milk cans placed in a large container chilled with water. Raw milk, she says, was given to babies, but it had to be from the same cow, according to Dr. Valentine, so that if the baby had digestion problems, the milk could easily be tested. The Stones sold raw milk directly to customers until the laws changed; then the milk was sold to Cumberland Farms. The milk was poured into a bulk tank which was hitched to a milk truck and hauled away.

Phyllis and Bea kept the books for the farming operation, but that was not their only job. An enormous breakfast was prepared every morning for when the milking, which started at sunrise, was finished: fresh juice, cereal and fruit, eggs, bacon or sausage, fried bread, pancakes, milk, coffee, and sometimes homemade donuts. After breakfast, cleaning the barn and washing the pails were among the many farm tasks to complete daily. “There’s always something to do on a farm,” Phyllis said.

Phyllis went to a cattle auction only once to see what it was like. “I didn’t know how to bid, I didn’t understand the process. Just a wink or a nod was sufficient,” she explains. “I bid once by mistake, and Walt asked, ‘why are you bidding?’ I didn’t know I had!” They didn’t wind up with that cow, though they did leave with another. “Elmer always said – look at the back end. It should look like it was hit with a board, and check out its teeth,” Phyllis recalls. “The auctioneer brought out this cow and I thought – look at those teeth! Look at that stature! This must be a good cow!” Walt was part of the bidding, but when it went too high, the bidding stalled. Phyllis asked, “Don’t you want that cow?” Walt answered, “No, it’s too much.” But Phyllis raised her hand at the last minute – sold! For $900! “Walt said – what did you do that for? And I answered – I don’t know – I just did it. Don’t you have enough money?” Walt, she recalls, explained that he was planning on purchasing two cows, not one. Needless to say, Clarence was very angry. “When asked – what are we naming him? – Clarence took off his hat and scratched his head (those of us who have lived here for a long while can all see this) and said – Fort Knox! Clarence never allowed me to go to another auction.”

When Phyllis and Bea tried to milk Fort Knox, the cow broke the milking machine. Phyllis put the machine on, Bea dumped the milk, and when Phyllis went to take the machine off, Fort Knox moved closer to the cow next to her, squeezing Phyllis – hard – but Clarence took no pity. Now she refers to it as “her first hug from Fort Knox,” adding, “She did produce many good heifers.”

The farm was also a perfect setting for 4-H, and for 19 years Phyllis’s local club, the “This n’ Thats”, cooked, baked, sewed, and learned crafts including jewelry, basket weaving, making moccasin slippers from sheep’s wool. “I loved working with the kids,” Phyllis says. The girls also hiked and camped in tents at Crystal Lake – “29 girls!” – and at Goodwin. “Walt helped set up and left the truck there,” she recalls. “I don’t know why – we couldn’t drive it!” Her daughter Ruth and Jennifer Burr were Junior Leaders and baton twirlers. They made their own uniforms, taught the younger girls, marched in the Memorial Day Parade, and later in the parade at Eastern States, exhibiting in Connecticut’s 4-H building where they all earned blue ribbons.

There were, of course, chores for the children on the farm. Harold relayed:

In the summer you had your haying and those days you didn’t kill weeds with pesticides. You had to work. Vacation, I don’t think they knew what the word meant.

The boys milked before school started, Phyllis recalls, and Ruth brought the cows in after school with the dog or her horse. “Walt Jr. was good with the cows,” Phyllis says. “Jimmy drove the tractor. He liked machinery. He used to say — I’d be a farmer if you could teach the cows to take Saturday and Sunday off!”

And, of course, there was time for fun. There was a three acre pond in the back of the property, and Phyllis remembers making hot chocolate for all of the members of the Parish Hill band when the Stones hosted a skating party with a bonfire on the ice. Skating, swimming, fishing, raising chickens, feeding calves, planting, tobogganing: it was a healthy, happy place to grow up.

Well, say, I don’t think the children today have anywhere near the fun that they had those days. They worked hard but of course they enjoyed their time off more. Now everybody has all the time off and…

Harold Stone