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, 18^th 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

Dear Auntie Mac,

What sort of a stuffy town is this? While perusing the shelves of the library recently and chatting with three other patrons who I assume were from Hampton, one of them mentioned something that triggered a joke I remembered. After checking first to make sure there were no small children around since the joke was mildly dirty, I told it. Well…my small audience looked as though I’d just dropped the F-bomb in front of a group of kindergarteners, and then my pants!  After which they proceeded to hastily leave the room! I know this is New England, but just how puritanical is this place?

Sincerely,

Loves to Laugh

My Dear Neighbor:

Fortunately, Auntie Mac is not without her resources, or her agents, in town. (Some less kind residents have called them “spies” but why quibble?) She believes she is well aware of the incident of which you speak. Since I’m told that you are fairly new to town you can be forgiven for not recognizing three of the region’s most prominent members of the Junior League. And while one might cast an extremely wide net into the waters of altruism before landing a fish as civic-minded and painfully earnest as a Junior Leaguer, one is equally hard pressed to imagine her either in grubby work clothes at the transfer station cracking wise with the regulars, slugging back a shot of bourbon at Tony’s Bar, or anywhere she is not fulfilling the League’s mission of enhancing the social, cultural and political fabric of civil society. The fateful day in question saw the trio buttonholing the librarian in the garden section to ask about the proper way to once and for all eradicate unsightly vines from local telephone poles in the interest of roadway tidiness. I am told that you walked in just as the librarian suggested, a bit too lightly, that goats might do the trick, since they ate everything. To which a joke told by your great aunt Barbra, involving a farmer, a goat, an open window, an Irish judge, and the line “A good goat’ll do that,” leapt to your mind and before good sense could clap its iron hand squarely over your mouth the whole thing burst forth like that creature in the film with that lovely actress Miss Weaver, and the damage was done. Honestly, dear, this is Hampton, remember. People take their goat-related information quite seriously. Possibly try your material out on a more receptive audience first next time, say, next Sunday at coffee hour after church. It’s just a thought.

Your Auntie Mac

Gardening doesn’t provide many opportunities for humorous material.  “Funny” has a different meaning in the garden.  “That’s funny — I thought for sure the exotic magnolia that consumed my entire annual budget would survive in this spot”; or “That’s funny – the deer only seem to like the expensive hostas.”  Not, I can assure you, amusing moments. In my monthly column, I’ve tried to make light of my mistakes. Like the forsythia roots that infiltrated our septic pipes and destroyed the system. Or the rocks lining the driveway which have required the assistance of AAA to dislodge vehicles stuck on them. Or shrubs I initially misplaced and tried to transplant, their removal “the emotional equivalent of extracting teeth without the benefit of Novocain”. The consequences of these errors are far from hilarious.

The task of humor, therefore, has fallen to “the Reluctant Gardener” who first introduced himself in 2002 as the husband of a gardener who “comes up with one hundred and one reasons why I should appreciate the opportunity to get muddy.”  Many readers commiserate with the Reluctant Gardener who succumbs to gardening projects because there’s no point in a discussion “we know we cannot win once the wife has made a decision disguised as the question – hon, do you have minute?” He continues to contribute a column whenever the yard really irks him.

The Reluctant Gardener’s complaints are seasonal.  In spring, he wrote of pruning the roses, the cultivated varieties and “their sinister cousins – the wild roses — they slash me at every opportunity they can, and I’m left looking like I just broke up a fight between the neighborhood’s feral cats instead of the benign activity of mowing the lawn.” He claimed that trimming shrubs was easy enough “as long as I complete the entire task without my wife’s supervision so that I only have to hear the accusation that I’ve ‘scalped’ them once,” and confessed, “I don’t mind cutting wood with an axe; it’s when I cut the ornamental grasses that I wish I had a chain saw.”

He also wrote of the aforementioned forsythia and “Other Tough Customers” such as wisteria, arguing that “not even the most punctual reluctant gardener could have kept pace with this vine” when it ripped the arbor apart. And when the Reluctant Gardener “Tackled the Subject of Weeds” he expressed fear of the most noxious  – poison ivy – suggesting that his desert heritage resulted in a systemic rash through “mere eye contact”, and criticized the “weapons” I use to extricate weeds, stating “her tools are innocuous enough – trowel, rake, gloves, clippers. But she gives them vicious names like claw and dead-header. This, of course, is under the guise of that allegedly gentle language she calls garden parlance.”

The Reluctant Gardener announced that in the summer his name changes to “Manuel La Bor”. He predicted, “I haven’t heard of a project involving rocks yet, but I’m certain there’ll be one,” and complained that he can’t create his own schedule: “Today I am going to – (fill in the job) – after I do some general goofing off” because “the grass and apparently the trees, shrubs and lawn furniture wait for no one.” In subsequent summer columns, he opined on “garden projects” describing the restoration of the water garden as wading in “primordial ooze with a stench reminiscent of a pig sty” and explained the process of rebuilding sections of the stonewall, in which he employed the masonry style of the ancient Anasazi instead of New England fields stones, an error resulting from a failure to consult “the nose-to-the-grindstone” for advice. “After days of hauling, jabbing, evaluating, posturing and swearing, my son and I patted ourselves on the backs for our efforts and proudly announced that our mission was complete…obviously, we were wrong,” and the project that should have taken less than a week to complete consumed the next five months.

In the fall with “The Reluctant Gardener Muses on Leaves”, he observed that “there are more on the ground than there ever were in the trees” and suggested the task of raking be rechristened “autumnal futility” because “the majority return in the spring. Like migrating birds.” Critical of the role of the elements — “If only the wind took a few away instead of bringing more to my yard,” he grumbled about “seeing neighbors with more trees than I have whose yards have less piles.” As to the maples’ inability to decompose (“they’re like tires”) he suggested a communal disposal area – a leaf arena, a maple complex, a foliage stadium for kids, noting that “maybe that would increase youthful involvement” in the chore.

In winter, “The Reluctant Gardener Sings the Lumberjack Blues” addressed dealing with trees destroyed after damaging storms, lamenting that he not only lacks the right tools, “I don’t even have the right outfit. I do not own a single flannel shirt, a watchman’s cap, suspenders, or anything plaid.” He promises to submit an article on the laborious task of turning those fallen branches into fuel for our woodstove without benefit of a chainsaw. Or flannel.

So there you have it — the sum and substance of the garden column’s humor, which I, alas, cannot claim. Though some people thought I was pretty funny when I offered advice meant in all seriousness, which I repeat here in the hope that it’s heeded:

• As you prune, remember that shrubbery was not designed to sit upon
• Plastic was never meant to be planted
• Orange rhododendrons don’t belong near their fuchsia and magenta siblings
• Certain deer deterrents also deter visitors, barbed wire, for example, or dirty socks
• Never plant annuals in geometric patterns unless you’re landscaping a park
• Use topiary, pagodas, and gnomes sparingly
• Red tulips and yellow daffodils are a metaphor for spring (and catsup and mustard)
• A weed is a plant that’s in the wrong place
• Ornamentation is enjoying a surge of popularity, but there’s no place for Jocko, the lawn jockey
• This also goes for decorations that bend over to reveal polka-dotted pantaloons

If someone has newly moved to New England from anywhere else in the US, he may wonder just what a New Englander is like. If he moved here from the south, he will find that no one comes over within a week of his move to give him a baked goodie and to say, y’all drop by anytime. Actually, if you have ever lived in the south, you will recognize this as friendliness, and not really an open invitation to drop by any day of the week and any time of the day.  It’s just a very friendly welcome to the neighborhood.  In the 1950’s in the north they had welcome wagon ladies who dropped by. Now there is the internet and the assumption that only those who have impaired computer skills would actually want to meet and circulate with neighbors and make new friends. In fact, churches in the south have a lot more holy rollers than those in the north, and the parishioners are more outgoing and friendlier than the New England ones are. That’s why religious people in New England are known as the Frozen Chosen.

To define a New Englander you have to come up with a definition. The other day I was in the library. I was one of three people in line to see the librarian and check out books.  The woman ahead of me was vigorously discussing with the librarian a question she had about a book she was returning. She asked the librarian if she had ever had the same feeling that she had had when reading this book that was all about how to do something. She said: a book about how to do something is just not like actually doing the thing. You mean it’s a book about sex, I asked. The librarian, the questioner and I all burst out laughing. The third person in line, behind me, said, “Not in a library.” That made it apparent that the librarian, the questioner and I were not born in New England, and the shocked third lady in line was a New Englander, meaning she was a prude or puritanical. Actually, it’s kind of ironic that everyone thinks of the Puritans as so strictly religious and prim and proper, because some historians have carefully searched birth records of early Puritans and found that over one-third of the times a first baby was born to a Puritan, it was born only six months after marriage. Considering the fact that they did not have neo-natal nurseries in hospitals (or even any hospitals) in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, it is amazing that the vast majority of those premature babies survived. More likely the early birth after marriage happened because of premarital sex and a shotgun wedding, just not something admitted or openly talked about.

Another definition for New Englander would be someone who is thrifty, who does not throw out something he might use in the next century. This is also known as not buying something you are looking at in a store because there must be a store someplace else in New England where you can buy this cheaper.  In other words, a cheapskate.

And how about the term stubborn?  A New Englander is someone who does not give up.  He figures he can never be wrong as long as he keeps to his point. After all, sometimes a New Englander is called a Swamp Yankee. This is not someone who lives in a swamp, like a muskrat, but rather, someone who is thrifty, stubborn and prudish.

I went to a New England restaurant recently for a take-out lunch.  I ordered a sandwich and two desserts, one for today and one for tomorrow (we must be optimistic and give ourselves something to look forward to, after all). At this restaurant they give the customer a playing card once you make your order, note the playing card on the order, and then deliver the order to the customer with that playing card. After a bit the waiter gave me a bag and asked me what playing card he was holding in his hand.  That should have been my clue, but I was hungry. I said I don’t know, and he snatched my playing card, dropped a bag on the table, said good-bye and left.  When I got home, the bag only had my sandwich in it, no desserts. I was just cheated out of the $5.50 the two desserts cost me. Why not drive back to the restaurant and complain?  It was pouring out and the drops were verging on freezing rain. But how could I have failed to check the inside of the bag before leaving the restaurant?  After all, I was born and raised in New York, and we from the Empire state are cautious.  I didn’t check the bag because I have lived in New England for so long now that I have become trusting.  Sigh. I guess I could visit New York for a day or so and relearn to suspect all vendors as guilty until proven innocent.

So was the waiter lazy, incompetent, or planning to keep the two already paid for desserts for himself? I don’t know, but I can assure you that the fact that a skunk mysteriously appeared in his basement recently had nothing to do with me.

Angela Hawkins Fichter

Things happen. Yes, they do. Good. Bad. And everything in between. Esmerelda found this out one warm summer afternoon. She was sleepily perched atop the waterer in her temporary home, a trailer housing around fifty or sixty of her fellow flock mates, when her lazy afternoon was suddenly interrupted. “Oh, she’s a pretty chicken!” my daughter exclaimed pointing to Esmerelda.

“We’d like to adopt that one please,” I said to the shopkeeper. So, in he went, fully intent on capturing the beautiful chicken. She was a breed called ‘Ameraucana’. They are easily distinguished from other breeds by the tufts of feathers around their ears which give them the appearance of having a beard. The Ameraucana is an American version of the ‘Araucana’ originally from Chile. They are also one of the few chicken breeds that lay blue and green eggs.

“This won’t take long,” the shopkeeper informed us as he carefully opened the door to the trailer. Esmerelda had other plans. Just as soon as the shopkeeper reached out to grab her, Esmerelda jumped down off that waterer and ran as fast as she could to the other end of the trailer. She zig-zagged up and down, over and under and in between her flock mates, who were now also running this way and that, squawking in panic. Feathers flew. Chickens ran and clucked in protest. Roosters crowed at the tops of their lungs.

Esmerelda was stealthy and very fast. Approximately fifteen minutes later, an exhausted shopkeeper and one very hysterical chicken emerged from the trailer. We put her in our boys’ carrier that we had lined earlier with fresh shavings. Star and Duke weren’t going to the vet anytime soon, so I knew we could use the cat carrier as a temporary coop. “She’s a feisty one,” we all said. I was slightly concerned about how she’d get along with our girls at home. They were all older and set in their ways. “I hope those guys don’t pick on Izzy (short for Esmerelda),” I said to my daughter.

“We should get another one to keep her company,” she answered. All of the chickens for sale were only a few months old with plenty of laying years ahead of them.

“Ok, sure. Why not?” I replied. We went back to the trailer to peruse the many hens awaiting a forever home. One, in particular, stood out from the rest. She was pure white with a bright red comb and wattle. We caught each other’s gaze and our eyes locked. I had never considered adopting a white chicken. But there was something about this one. She looked longingly at my daughter and me, almost as if to say: “Take me with you. I’ll be a very good girl.”

“Look at the her,” I called my daughter over. “Aw, she’s adorable.” The hen stood there so peacefully, and she was so lovely. She looked like a little angel. “We’ll call you Lily,” I cooed to her as she willingly went with the shopkeeper from the trailer to the cat carrier. She and Izzy sat down quietly together and didn’t make a peep the whole way home.

After a nice dinner and plenty of water, we put Lily and Esmerelda outside in their own separate area so they could see the other girls and the other girls could see them. Brownie and Gert had been through this before and just rolled their eyes and went about their day. Porridge was very interested in getting to know her new playmates. She ran over to their fenced area and immediately started to tell them all about herself and about how much fun they were all going to have together. And finally, Checkers. Well, Checkers was not interested in this upheaval and less than thrilled about the intrusion. She walked by them a dozen times, looking at them only out of the corner of her eye. “Oh boy,” I sighed, “she’s going to be trouble.”

The next day, all seemed to be going smoothly and better than expected. Lily and Esmerelda would remain separated from the others for a week or so, until everyone got to know one another. Although they were able to see each other through the poultry netting, the two young ones were not happy to be limited to just their little area and desperately tried to fly over the fencing. Their attempts to fly over the fence only led to them being stuck in the fence. “Geez, that is not good!” I said to my husband. Although the young hens’ area was not hooked up, the rest of the yard’s fencing was electrified.

“It’ll only take one time touching the fence and they’ll learn,” he said. Poor babies, I thought to myself. What a quandary. Do I merge them with the flock and risk the little girls being hurt by the others – more specifically, Checkers, who was very disgruntled at this point. Or do I let them try to figure the fence out?

I did not have to deliberate for very long. “Honey!” my husband hollered. “Look out the window!” I ran to check out what had gotten him so rattled. There was sweet, innocent, angelic little Lily on the OTHER side of her fence right in the middle of our four big girls!

“Geez! Oh geez!” I yelled as I charged outside. At the precise moment I arrived at the side yard, Izzy proceeded to fly right over her area, over the electric fence and into the back yard! “Little stinkers!” I scolded them. Brownie, Gert, and Checkers were now squawking and clucking and running all over the yard. Porridge, on the other hand, had sauntered over to Lily who had crouched down into the grass, now regretting the escape. And Esmerelda, true to her stealthy, speedy nature, was sprinting all over the back yard trying to figure out how to get back in with the others. “How am I going to control six spazzy, freaked out chickens?” I ran to the shed and grabbed the treat bucket, back to the fence and flung treats into the side yard. The distraction worked. All five girls calmed down and dove for the mealy worms to see who could gobble up the most. “Now to get Esmerelda back in without getting her zapped by the fence,” I whispered to myself. I hadn’t even finished my sentence, when she ran right toward it, flapped her wings a few times and flew high over the top, landing safely back in the side yard. Now, I had heard stories of fellow chicken mommies finding their young family members perched high in neighboring trees. But I never thought for a minute that one of them would be mine. “Don’t you guys know how dangerous it is out here? Naughty girls,” I called to Lily and Izzy who looked at me as if to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!?”

“Alright, back in your yard you go,” I said as I ushered the two of them back to their assigned area. Fortunately, dusk was upon us and all of the ladies were now tired and eager to settle onto their perches. “Enough excitement for one day,” I thought to myself. I spent a few minutes with our big girls, telling them how pretty they were, and what good girls they were, and that everything was going to be okay. And I spent a few minutes with our two new little ones. I assured them that they’d be so happy here and that Brownie, Gert Porridge and even Checkers would be nice to them, and that we were so glad that they were part of our family.

Yes. Things happen. The past year was a hard one for us. But seasons change and life goes on. There will be challenges, a few pulled out feathers, some arguing, and I’ll probably find a hen or two over the fence from time to time. But all and all, adopting Esmerelda and Lily has turned out to be so wonderful. All six of our girls are content and peaceful and sweet. “Goodnight my babies,” I called to them. “Love you and I’ll see you in the morning when we will all start another new day together”.

Cindy Bezanson

The Finance Board’s decision to fund a Mosh Pit at the Hampton Reservoir has been temporarily postponed due to the threat of a law suit from a neighboring town.

Discussions on the possibility of an outdoor concert venue for the reservoir began last fall when a local grunge band appeared before the Inland, Wetlands & Watercourses Agency (and you thought their meetings sounded boring) to seek approval since the IWWA has jurisdiction over any activity that occurs close to the water. It was determine that, while those in attendance might harm one another, there’s really little harm to the environment, as long as participants pick up their own trash after the event.

The Finance Board was quick to approve funding for the proposal, citing minimal costs and enormous returns. The area provides plenty of space for not only pogoing and crowd surfing, but ample room for the Circle Pit and even the Wall of Death. No structures are necessary, and though parking might pose a problem, it’s assumed (albeit stereotypically) that many participants will arrive on motorcycles, and the proximity to the “Airline Trail” provides another use for that preserve as well. So eager was everyone to start the endeavor that “Vampire Weekend” was immediately signed for the first concert.

Plans stalled, however, after our neighbors to the north threatened a law suit. Though officials and attorneys representing the Town of Pomfret were reluctant to comment, apparently it’s the competition they object to. The only on-the-record remark: “It’ll kill our artisanal scone and afternoon tea business. Who can compete with that?”

When the woods are coated in frost and ice stills brooks and streams and the full moon glows on fields of snow, Hampton sparkles. That beauty inspired the Recreation Commission to honor the season in Winter-Fest, a celebration of community, art, and life in our Town.

Winter-Fest invited numerous town institutions to join in planning and participating in a weekend festival. As organizations volunteered, the reach of the festival extended deeper into our town. Hampton Elementary School and Parish Hill Middle/High School sponsored after-school puppetry classes for children interested in storytelling and performing in a puppet slam. Fletcher Memorial Library sponsored a lecture and demonstration about puppetry and masks and assisted with promotion. The road crew built an ice rink on the Town Hall ball field which the Fire Department flooded in hopes the temperatures would cooperate (oh well…). The Agricultural Commission sponsored a hot chocolate and cider station for ice-skating and the bonfire, and the Selectmen’s Office did everything else.

The festival began on February 6 and ran through February 10, and every event reached capacity crowd, and then some. Derron Wood, Executive Artistic Director of New London’s Flock Theatre, began the festival with an entertaining Library lecture about puppets and masks from around the world. He brought seven types of puppets and over a dozen masks to illustrate the breadth of the art form and gave a mini-lesson about how artists send energy into their puppet to make it look alive (it’s in the breath). More than once, the audience watched in wonder as Derron transformed little more than paper bags and burlap into living beings.

On Saturday, Derron returned to the Community Center with artists from Flock Theatre, guest puppeteers Bobbi Nidz and Jim “Nappy” Napolitano, and school children from Hampton’s public schools to perform a two-act puppet slam that featured object theater, shadow puppets, full body puppets, rod puppets, and mask. In short stories and song, the evening elicited laughter and glee and quieter moments of reflection and sorrow. The school children performed like professional puppeteers in “Shadowland” and “Arap Sang and the Cranes.” The evening ended with the incredible shadow puppetry of “Nappy”, who had everyone laughing at his and his puppets’ antics.

On Sunday afternoon, the Coast Guard Dixieland Jazz Band, all uniformed members, played a ninety-minute concert of classic jazz for a standing room only crowd at the Community Center. During the concert, which featured works by the great American composer W. C. Handy, each musician played multiple solos, and the audience knew they were listening to consummate jazz musicians: Mark McCormack on bass, Cedric Mayfield on clarinet and soprano sax, Thomas Brown on trumpet and vocals, Sean Nelson on trombone, Robert Langslet on keyboard, and Nathan Lassell on drums. The sound engineer was Robert Holtorff. Between songs Mark shared the story of how the new art form came to be and how it was received in cultural capitals like New York City and London.

The band enjoyed Hampton as much as the audience enjoyed them. They loved playing in the Community Center, and as one would expect of jazz musicians, they were ready to improvise. They found the “On Air” and “Applause” sign that Hampton players have used in staged radio plays, and they incorporated it into their act.  More impressive, while the band set up, the pianist began to play the unturned old piano that sits backstage, and he liked its honky-tonk sound so much, for the concert he substituted Hampton’s piano for his electric keyboard. The piano is not just old, though; according to a local piano tuner, it’s practically unplayable. Cedric said Robert’s performance on Hampton’s piano was about as impossible as if he had been invited to a dinner party and arrived to learn he was expected to make the dinner in a kitchen with none of the ingredients he needed and a set of pots and pans that weren’t right for the dishes he was asked to prepare.

Spirits soared by the end of the concert, so the band played “When the Saints Go Marching In” as an encore, and marched into and around the audience like a New Orleans jazz line. Flock artists in full body puppets danced in the aisles. After the concert, everyone went out to the ball field to watch the bonfire, sip hot chocolate and cider, and munch brownies, but most important, in the spirit of Winter-Fest, to visit with family, friends, and neighbors.

Anne Flammang & Gay Wagner

On Wednesday, March 20th, from  6 to 8PM, Fletcher Memorial Library welcomes the new season with High Notes, Big Plans: a Spring Reception, featuring music, both sweet and savory refreshments, a mini back room book sale, and the kickoff for a capital campaign for an expanded event room.

Music will be provided by Bob Oxenhorn on guitar/bass, Ellen Iovino on guitar and vocals, and Hampton resident, Donna Tommelleo on percussion. The group plays a blend of jazz, folk, country, and R & B, a sweet accompaniment for an assortment of treats from Hampton’s notable bakers.

The event will also provide a look at the library’s plans to expand the present sun room into a usable and accessible event space on the ground floor. Currently, the library’s many events are either held up a steep stair case or interfere with access to the fiction stacks on the first floor. “We feel this is essential to our continuing efforts to best serve our community,” said library chairman Anne Christie.

Architectural drawings will be on display and volunteers will be available to answer questions. The library is also in the process of launching a capital campaign which includes a GoFundMe listing where online donations are accepted. Contributions will be most welcome.

Janice Trecker

If one were to envision an ideal New England farm, it might well resemble most closely the one that resides on either side of the Old Kings Highway. Approaching from the north, rolling hills and an old stone wall ramble toward the red barn and the barnyard, and from the south, an apple orchard and a brook; and across  the road, stone hitching posts and a white well house stand like  sentries in front of the beautiful colonial, circa 1730, framed with old oaks and maples.  Another fruit orchard crosses the yard, separating the house from the valley where the Little River flows, traversed by the wooden bridge of an old farm road and lined with the brambles just starting to flush with their spring garnet. This charming property has, in all its aspects, the appearance of a quintessential country farm replete with crops and animals.  And it was, long ago, and promises to return to those roots.

The property dates to the earliest period of Hampton’s colonial history and includes two of the Town’s prominent families, the Kingsburys and the Stedmans. Records held at the Town of Windham show that Thomas Stedman purchased the property from Nathaniel Kingsbury in 1731, and the parcel had a dwelling house. Thus the location has been a farm for over 300 years.

The property at 91 Old Kings Highway belongs to Rob and Ann Miller now, though it seems as though we only recently started calling it Frank Postemski’s place, as it was known to us as Denny’s for as long as I remember, and for those few whose memories reach even further, it’s still the Schmeelks, the family who once farmed there. And one member of the Schmeelk family can tell us not only of the long ago farm, but she describes her life there in verse — Doris Schmeelk Buck, who is 94 years old and lives in neighboring Coventry. Her niece, Pauline Wrzesien, is a little closer. She is the friendly face in the Building Department at Town Hall where she serves as Clerk. We only recently discovered that her maternal roots are here, and she knows quite a bit about them, too.

William and Myra Schmeelk operated a typical Hampton farm. The family raised crops and animals: cows, chickens, horses and geese. The children helped milk the cows, feed the chickens and collect their eggs. Farm chores were largely dependent on the age of the child, with older children assigned skilled roles and younger ones relegated to less strenuous tasks, like laundry. Regardless of their ages, everyone weeded the gardens, where corn, potatoes and other vegetables grew, an assignment they claimed to “hate”.  Planting and harvesting would also be crucial seasons. The Schmeelk children lived in an era of rural America when the responsibilities of the farm dictated the calendar and the clock, and children were expected to help.

And there were plenty of children to help – eleven — as a matter of fact. Elizabeth, Jack, Henry, Raymond, Teddy, Florence, Margaret, Doris, Albert, Dorothy and Marion. Pauline says that her mother, Marion, and her sisters, Libby and Peggy, were known as the “Three Musketeers” for their antics. Peggy Fox remembers Doris and Dot and Marion from school. Together Lucille Gunther, Marion Schmeelk and Peggy Fox formed another threesome. Peggy confirms, “Marion was a lot of fun.” She also recalls, not as fondly, the Schmeelk’s dog, a German shepherd named Boots, who was very protective of their property.

Pauline also shared some of the stories she heard from members of her family of farm life in Hampton. Of the potato patch on the hill, and the potato wagon their father hauled to the top to transport the potatoes and the children, equipped with a brake and navigated with a rope – the oldest children steering while the younger ones looked side to side calling directions.  The shortest route to the barnyard was over the wooden bridge that crossed the brook, but when it was flooded, the children were supposed to travel all the way around on the road, a route that seemed far too long, and so down the slope they went, over the bridge, right into the barnyard with the evidence of their misdeeds in the form of mud. There was swimming in the Little River in the summer and becoming covered with leeches. Those of us who went swimming in the pooled places can attest to the presence of bloodsuckers. But for those who believe that the presence of the bobcat here is relatively new, think again. A bobcat followed the Schmeelk children home from school every afternoon, walking on the stonewall alongside of them. One of the older brothers escorted them with a shot gun – just in case, but he never had to use it. The bobcat never harmed them. Other memories of the Bell School are dearer, and formed the basis of a poem Doris wrote for which she won a national award and which we will publish in September when we revisit our one room school houses.

Doris Schmeelk Buck has written a poem especially for this issue of the Gazette, “The House on the Hill”, handwritten in a steady script, a lovely cursive. She has also recorded some remembrances: “A big dining room with a long table to hold all of us. High chairs for the little ones. A big fire place to toast marshmallows. Me, when little, a tall black pair of shiny shoes on the mantle above the fireplace. I wanted to wear them. Mom said — wait. So, when she went out to get clothes off of the clothesline, I walked outside into the snow and got my shoes wet. She took me inside and put my new shoes on me. I walked all over, looking at them on my feet. We had a piano and a guitar and a violin to play together. Played card games and checkers and chess. We all helped keep the house on the hill clean.”

How can we account for the recollections which remain with us throughout our lives? For images which linger, for whatever the reason, in broad strokes and in minute details?  And yet, we all have these, places we remember as though we were just there, moments we recall as though they occurred yesterday. And that is what Doris shares – memories which have survived for nearly a century on the tapestry of a family’s life.

Fast forward to the future and Ann and Bob Miller are reviving the farm with necessary repairs and, of course, animals — cows, horses, and sheep, and crops — apple orchards and hay fields. Of their four farms, this property is their current priority, with the overall objective of maintaining farm land and farm life here in Hampton.  What a blessing — to have this farm preserved, and its memories as well in words and in verse.

“The House on the Hill”

A beautiful eleven room one

Up at dawn, work and fun.

Always on the exciting run.

To get everything done.

Collecting potato bugs in cans out in the field,

Hand picking off of plants until none.

Fun things: two sisters in a truck

Driving over a bridge in the meadow

And up the hill

To the farm house on the hill,

Laughing, stalled truck on the top.

Riding horseback in the fields,

Racing with them to see who yields.

Jumping the brook on horse bareback

Off in the brook, a big splash

And a good fun and laugh.

Two sisters driving old cars in the field

To learn how to drive over bumps,

Fun and laughter fills the air.

Back to work until night fall,

What a wonderful time at the house on the hill,

Year after year until all left to go to live

Somewhere else, near and far.

Eating cookies from a jar,

While I remember the house on a hill.

Doris Schmeelk Buck

Lois W.  Kelley – March 11, 1924 – December 25, 2018

It was with sadness that we recently learned that Lois Kelley, former and first Director of the James L. Goodwin Conservation Center, died on December 25, 2018 in the 94^th year of a very full life. Serving from 1970 to 1986, she was affectionately referred to as “Mother Nature”, and was one of Goodwin Forest’s dearests “Friends”. After retiring from the position, she brought her considerable knowledge to Old Sturbridge Village as a featured performer and interpreter for over 20 years, eventually moving to Indian Lake, New York to be closer to family. Yet it doesn’t seem as if she ever really left us, with such an indelible mark remaining on our environment, in the hearts of all who knew her, and on the pages of The Hampton Gazette.

A member of the Editorial Board from 1995 to 2000, she contributed over 70 articles from 1978 to 1999, including one in the very first issue of the Gazette called “The Bear Truth” where she reported on rumored sightings. In our anniversary year, we’ve repeatedly celebrated her presence here in Hampton. Lois contributed articles of historical interest such as “Rivers, Bridges, Turnpikes and Trails — Travelling in Connecticut in Earlier Times”, and answered questions like “Where are all the Mocking Birds?” and “Winter Ice – What’s Safe?” She researched “Thanksgivings Past” and “Christmas through the Ages”, provided gardening advice and advocated for conservation. She wrote several articles on our natural treasures – the Little River, Trail Wood, and Goodwin, describing “the primordial feeling” of canoeing on the lake within fall’s flame of “russet, dusty rose, yellow ochre, burnt umber, sienna”. She was a gifted writer who gifted us with her words, enticing and welcoming us to the natural world.

“Lois and her husband Robert lived at Goodwin and greatly influenced me as a child and as an adult,” Jo Freeman says. “Lois was a wonderful teacher of the natural world and really wanted people to learn and experience all that was part of it.”

“On weekends I brought my children to Goodwin,” says Pete Vertefeuille. “Oftentimes Lois would come out to join us. She would tell us stories and help us identify all sorts of plants. Every trip out to Goodwin became an adventure. I believe it was a way of life for her.”

This sense of adventure carried through her entire life, Marcia Kilpatrick says, noting her “bravery” in moving and building a new house in her very advanced years. And a new garden.

Lois inspired nature enthusiasts and artists alike. She convinced Pete to give a presentation on photographing flora and fauna at the Conservation Center, which included a display of his photographs and a hands-on demonstration in Goodwin Forest that motivated others. It was Lois Kelley who encouraged me to continue to write a garden column with kind words for which I am forever indebted. It’s no small accomplishment to preserve someone’s natural artist, or some place’s natural art. A published poet, “Elegy to a Wild Cherry” is one of her award winning verses on nature. Originating from her life at Goodwin, Lois said that it was the most difficult, and the last poem, she would ever write.

Our condolences to her family, her grandchildren and great grandchildren, her son, Robert, and her daughter, Daisy, who, we’re told, considered Lois’s passing on Christmas as a gift:  paper whites were blooming on the kitchen table, there were two baskets of bulbs under the Christmas tree, carols were heard from the street and the residents’ lights illuminated the cold star lit night.

“I agree with Daisy,” Jo says. “Perfect timing for this diminutive dynamo of a woman.”

Lois suggested donations to a local soup kitchen in her memory, or make a good soup to share.