Coming Home One - Lemon Fair

First post in a four-part narrative.

On a crisp November morning in 2005 I drove over Brandon Gap, the mountain pass that leads from our farm in South Barre to my family’s farm in Sudbury. It wasn’t lost on me that Sud is French for South, and therefore these two farms I love so much were both in places with sort of the same name. It also wasn’t lost on me that I needed to quit making this trip. I needed to let one of these farms go. If you count the home farm before we left in ’86, we had lived on four beautiful Vermont farms in the last 20 years and every one had felt like where I belonged and where I was going to stay. But, as they say, ”Man plans, God laughs.” I had been content to say “I grew up on a farm in Sudbury that my great great grandfather settled and where my brother is a dairy farmer.” But then my brother was gone and the childhood home stood empty. It was increasingly apparent that if I didn’t come home it was going to fall out of the family. I came over the top of the gap thinking about all the things I should be doing back in Barre and decided right then that before I came back over that divide I was going to decide. 

Like all of Vermont, our valley was shaped by the retreat of the glacier. A patchwork of fields lies nestled between wooded ridges that run north and south. The Lemon Fair River bisects the valley and forms the boundary between the farms that line each side. When I was a kid I never heard it called anything but Lemon Fair or, more commonly, just “the Fair” so I grew up thinking “Fair” was another word for a brook –– probably Scottish. I was shocked, and a little pleased, when I found out our valley is the only place in the world where that’s true. There are different theories about how it became Lemon Fair, among them that it is Anglicized either French or Abenaki. Maybe “Limon Faire” which sort of means “to make mud” and sort of makes sense since the Lemon Fair valley is clay plain built up in the days of the inland sea. Until the days of black top, “mud season” challenged anyone's ability to get anywhere around here, which probably led to another theory that the name comes from a mired carriage operator’s fulmination about a “Lamentable Affair”. And also led to the old Vermont joke about the flatlander seeing an old Vermonter on the other side of a deep mud street and asking “How did you get there?”

“Born here.” And also led to my great grandfather keeping a pair of horses harnessed all through mud season in the early days of automobiles because as soon as he unharnessed, someone was sure to knock on the door looking to be rescued.

But that lamentable mud is Vergennes clay, a very fertile soil type, prevalent in all of the Champlain Valley and found in the fields that roll gently up from the Fair to the barns and homes that were built along the old stage route that is now Rt 30 on our side and Horton Rd on the west side. We look across at 5 farms, or their remains, and a falling down Dance Pavilion, the Horseshoe, and they look back at the remains of 4 farms and a falling down hotel, The Hyde Manor. I say remains because these were all dairy farms in my youth and only one ships milk today. Unlike many of Vermont’s hill farms, all of the fields are still farmed, a mixture of pasture and hay meadows, but like many of Vermont’s farmers, most of us have had to figure out a way to support our farming habit. Which led to another old joke about the farmer who was asked what he would do if he won a million dollars. "Oh, I guess I’d just keep farming ’til it was gone.”

From the road the land rises more or less steep behind the farms and was mostly cleared for sheep pasture, mostly by settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut. Mostly, they were a line that couldn’t get along with their neighbors in England and then couldn’t get along with their neighbors in Connecticut and ended up here. This was true of my people who came from Simsbury in the mid 1700’s. It was also true of Ethan Allen, who was thrown out of two towns before he landed in Vermont. The first one was for vaccinating himself against Small Pox on the church steps against the mandate of the church anti-vaxxers. The second town had had enough after he took a neighbor’s pigs into custody for trespassing. Well, and beat the crap out of the owner when he complained too vociferously. The old farmers still milking cows all around the valley in my youth reflected that cussed independence. They would be pretty quick to say we had the right idea when we formed an independent republic and we should have stuck with it. They also had a strong belief in “live and let live.” As long as it doesn’t interfere with me or mine, what you do is your own business, not that we won’t gossip about it. But life was hardscrabble and they relied on each other in times of trouble.

I have a great grandfather Clyde story that illustrates this pretty well. Sometime in the 70’s, we needed a switch and an outlet or two replaced. We were unsure who to call and my mother suggested we might call Grant Crotoe. “He must be close to 90, but he did the wiring here in the ’30’s and maybe he can recommend someone.” So she called and he said that, indeed, he was long since retired but that “just a couple of outlets, he would just as soon come out,” which he did. When I asked if he wanted me to shut the breaker off, he said “Nah, I’m not worried about it, standing on this wood floor.” After he changed the fixtures I asked,”What do we owe you?”

“Nothin.’“

“What?”

“My dad died when I was nine and that winter your great grandfather Clyde was in Jones’ store and overheard Jones refusing my mother any more coal on credit. She came home empty, but a short time later Clyde backed up to our coal chute and unloaded his load into our cellar. I said right then if I could ever do anything for that man or his family I wouldn’t take any money, and I haven’t and I won’t.”

I don’t think Clyde was all that exceptional in looking out for his neighbors. One March night when I was 15, my mother and I were awakened at three in the morning by the phone. It was my Aunt Helen Tupper, whose farm we see across the valley. “Marge, Ted! Come quick the barn’s on fire!” We threw on clothes and sped around to the Tupper’s. By the time we arrived, there were already 30 or more neighbors there. Aunt Helen had it wrong. The cow barn roof had collapsed under the weight of snow and the cows were trapped underneath. The structure of their stantions, a pipe arrangement known as comfort stalls, had knocked the cows down but supported the collapsed ceiling about 3 feet off the floor. By daylight there were 50 men digging snow and then ripping off roofing, and then tearing apart timbers and finally ceiling, and freeing the cows one by one. By midday the cows were wandering loose all around the yard. By dark, heifers and calves had been shifted around to make room for the cows and temporary milking and water apparatus had been set up and weary neighbors had gone home to milk their own cows. I stayed on the couch in my cousin Donny’s mobile home and didn’t go home until school started that fall. All any of those neighbors ever got was something they already had. The sure knowledge that if they ever needed help, their only problem might be finding enough shovels and crowbars.

Growing up, this valley was my home and these were my people. These are the people whose stories I want to tell, whose stories I hope won’t be forgotten. Many of them are gone now. Some people say your life ends when the last person who remembers you dies. No one alive remembers my great great grandfather Rodney and no one ever told me anything about him. He moved the house that was here and built the house I live in. He built the barns, except the sheep barn which was here. I have so many questions I wish he could answer. So I’m going to try to answer a few questions from my time here. Will anyone ever ask them? Who knows?