The most famous farm in town is renowned for another reason. Trail Wood, wildlife preserve and former home of nationally acclaimed naturalist and author, Edwin Way Teale, and his wife, Nellie. Their lives there placed the property firmly on a literary map and elevated it to a site of national significance when they bequeathed it to the Connecticut Audubon Society. Ten of Teale’s works were written at Trail Wood, including the Pulitzer Prize winning Wandering through Winter, A Walk through the Year, a journal of natural observances there, and A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, reminding us of the property’s former life. Though visitors come from all over the country to witness the flora and fauna that Teale famously wrote of, the property’s stonewalls, 18th century farm house, barn and pastures suggest that it was once a farm. And it was.
According to Teale, the earliest owner on record was the pioneer, Thomas Grow, of Grow Hill, the tract that separates Hampton from Abington. In 1801 he deeded the land to the grandson of John Durkee, who brought his family from Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1715 and settled on ‘land on Little River’. In 1710, Andrew Durkee built the house that’s there today.
Throughout its history, the property served as a farm until the Teales’ 1959 purchase from Margaret Marcus. A lover of nature herself, Mrs. Marcus always felt like the farm was waiting for the Teales’ nurturing hands. Says Teale of their first encounter, “Margaret Marcus…was someone we liked from our first moment of meeting. Now, years later, time and further acquaintance with her kindly and responsible nature has added admiration to that liking.”
Margaret and Axel Marcus ran a chicken farm, selling eggs for a living. There were two large coops and two small ones to house the hundreds of chickens, “cranky Leghorns and another, less nervous breed,” according to their daughter, Peggy Fox. There was a corn crib, and the museum that houses information on Trailwood and the Teales was once a barn. Axel Marcus built an addition on the barn with stanchions for their Ayrshire and Guernsey cows. Peggy remembers Buttercup, Daisy, and the infamous Bossy, though not fondly. “Bossy was some kind of cow – couldn’t stand women or a man in a city suit!” says Peggy. “On one occasion, I was playing in the field in front of the house. Bossy and two of her daughters spotted me and came charging down, and Bossy chased me around and around while I screamed all the while. My mother jumped out of the living room window fast, leaving my grandmother to wonder where she had gone. My father came running and jumped over the fence, catching his foot and falling flat on his face.” Eventually Peggy was rescued, rolling under the fence to escaped Bossy’s wrath. “It was funny, milking Bossy was no problem – just don’t get in front of her face.” At least not if you were wearing a suit or an apron.
Prior to the Marcus family, the farm was owned by Andrew Rindge, who Margaret Marcus described in Hampton Remembers:
“He let the house go to rack and ruin. And he brought the animals in. He lived in that one room and had a fire in the fireplace – in the fall of the year he’d open the window and put a big log into the room coming through the window and just saw off pieces as he needed them. The chickens roosted on the bottom of his bed and the pig lived in the little room off the hall there. He would cook potatoes in one of those iron pots – he would fill that with potatoes and cook them over the fire on the hearthstone and then when they were done and cooled off he’d open the door and call the pigs. They’d come in and eat out of the pot and he’d reach down and get a potato and eat right along with the pigs.”
Teale also relayed tales of the infamous Rindge in A Naturalist Buys and Old Farm. “His buckboard, drawn by an ancient sorrel horse, rolled along on wheels of different makes and sizes. It announced its coming by the squeal of ungreased axles,” Teale wrote. “His unwashed dishes surrounded by a cloud of flies, the sheep he brought indoors at lambing time, quarrels with his neighbors over livestock running wild…provided a pre-soap-opera excitement for the village.” Teale wrote of other former dwellers as well. “Monument Pasture” is named for a hired man who once proclaimed “nobody is ever going to build a monument to me so I will build a monument to myself.” He did. And “Hughes’ Monument” is still at Trail Wood. Others ranged from a man who always “drove high-stepping horses” to a vegetarian couple, “inclined to nudism.”
Teale, however, wrote mostly of the property’s attributes: “It contained woods, open fields, swamps, two good-sized brooks, and a waterfall…the list of things we had hoped for in a country home. Miraculously, they all seemed here.”
There are references to the property as a farm throughout A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, with chapters on “Birds of an Old Farm” and the farm lane, and farmyard flowers: iris and phlox and goldenglow, poppies, moss roses, columbine, lilacs, peonies, and the “high piled creamy masses of blooms that suggest cumulus clouds in miniature. This is the rhubarb. Such are the gardens of our farmyard.” He described the brook which “tumbles in a rushing cascade over a dam of fieldstone,” and the pool below the waterfall which was used for washing sheep. “In this region, from earliest times,” he wrote, “sheep and cows, wool and mutton and milk, have been the chief sources of income from the stony fields.” And he wrote of the old stone walls, explaining “in pioneer times neighbors joined in; farmer helped farmer in wall building. There was always a plentiful supply of stones littering the rocky fields, and most of the early settlers of the region came from England, where stone walls and the construction of stone walls, in many areas, are part of the farmer’s life.”
Trail Wood, Teale wrote, was once known as the “Blackberry Farm”, and at another time, the “Hay Farm”. Aerial photography revealed that the property “has the appearance of a circular piece of corduroy. Parallel lines curve around the slopes of the hill – the cowpaths left by the feet of generations of cattle, each following the track left by those that went before.” In the Teale’s first summers at Trail Wood, Walt and Clarence Stone’s black-and-white Holsteins grazed in the pastures. “Watching the cows became almost as interesting, for us, as watching wildlife,” Teale wrote, describing the birthing of calves and their first hours, and those that “possessed an untamable streak. One remained uncaught for six weeks. It outran and out-dodged seven men who sought to close in on it in a corner of a field. Probably no bison calf on the prairie was ever more wild than that six-week-old animal in a New England pasture.”
After the cows there were horses, a pair of cream-colored palominos, an Arabian horse, a Welsh pony and a race horse who, after “winning races and setting records”, sustained an injury and “the change from crowds and noise surrounded by people, grooms and trainers, to Hampton,” Teale wrote. “All during his first summer, we watched with fascination the silent drama of his gradual adaptation to a new and calmer life.”
“Sitting under the apple trees, walking down the lane, following the wood trails, circling the pond at sunset, our life here has seemed all kernel and no husk,” the Teales said of the land the farmers who came before them cared for and cultivated. “It embraces one of the rarest things in modern life – moments of solitude.” Their generous gift to Hampton preserves forever what Teale would refer to as “a sanctuary farm…a sanctuary for wildlife, and a sanctuary for us.”
From A Walk through the Year
April 29: Hellebore and skunk cabbage are neighbors…In the morning sunshine on this spring day, the almost translucent leaves of both plants glow, luminous in the backlighting…There is much to be said for such simple enjoyment of simple things. I remember all the natural history organizations to which I have belonged and all the organizations to which I still belong. I recognize their contributions in distributing knowledge and carrying on beneficial programs. But I remember how each probably began when two or three or more people got together with the idea of furthering some branch of observation…Hardly do two people become interested in hellebores or skunk cabbage, it seems to me, than they set about forming a National Hellebore Association or a Skunk Cabbage Society of America – electing one of them president and the other secretary-treasurer. Soon there are dues and regular meetings and annual conventions. And all the while what each really desired was the enjoyment of the thing itself.
Edwin Way Teale