This is what the farm looks like today.
Sue went out and took photos. The house doesn't look much like it did then. I think it must have been remodeled a time or two. He has a new barn. I think Sue said he had some animals.
It just doesn't look the same but I suppose with all the time that has passed it wouldn't and I was only 5. My idea or memory of what it looked like then would be sketchy at best. It looks to be a nice place to live. It just doesn't evoke any feelings of home. When you have lived in as many places as we have I don't think you really get attached to one place. I wonder what our lives would have been like today if we had spent all of our growing up years here. Would we be different people? I think we would have. I don't know if the house could have survived as well, in fact, I'm sure it would look pretty sad by now.
Sue said its all dirt roads around there, at least that one still is. Looking at it from this distance it starts to look more like where we might have lived. It just doesn't look familiar. I think our barn was across the road from the house.
This is his new barn and that's Sue's car. Beyond the fence are his cows. I remember a lot of stone walls in my life but I don't remember one being here. In my mind I see us coming out of the house and going to the barnyard right across from the house. It was all like the dirt road with no grass growing outside the barn but to the left and right of it were hay fields. It's difficult to remember when I was so young and Sue was younger.
I don't know what that pink flowering bush is but I really like it.
Beyond the fence and the cows is what our mother called Echoing Valley.
This is what Mom wrote in one of her journals:
The farm in West Pawlet, Vermont was not a good idea. At the time it seemed it
was the future but it proved more capital was needed, more tillable land and
more hay fields. There was a beautiful forest but the bank said we could not
lumber it. It would have paid off the farm if they had let us. The rest of the
land was swamp, wetlands could only be used for pasture or the tillable land was
side hill.
The drought came one year and we had to go deep into debt to get hay for winter.
The sod burned on the side hills. The stock and machinery was seconds or thirds
and was always in need of something. It got so either the children ate or the
cows. One year we ate bread and milk. Another year we ate hog. We had to kill my
pet boar pig so the kids wouldn’t starve. Cliff and I couldn’t eat him.
The girls got sick and Millie came down with pneumonia and Edie got it. Anna got
terrible nosebleeds. Millie went to the hospital in Granville. Ursula was two
months and she came down with it and it went into meningitis. We had a bad time
I had to stay in Glens Falls days and nights, most of the time in the hospital
with her. Then at night at his mothers house.
When I could I’d catch a bus to Granville and go to see Millie. Finally it was
over and Ursula was left a patient in the glass-incased room of the house. For a
year no one touched her but her doctor or me. I had to wear sterilized clothes
and wear a mask. She had her formula out of a whiskey glass. She couldn’t nurse
a bottle. I got pregnant and with Ursula’s care I was pretty upset.
At that time Cliff gave up on the farm even making it and he and a shyster
broker, (David Beecher) got me to sign it and instead of selling the farm the
man gave it away. He said he turned the mortgage over to another couple. He got
a thousand dollars and we got nothing. He dropped dead a couple years later.
I remember some of the times out there on the Jackson Farm. There was a great
stone hill had but one beautiful maple tree on it. We used to take the children
up there on Sundays for a picnic and let them play on the rocks and pick black
caps from the bushes that grew in the cracks.
(I edited a bit in there. She had it all one paragraph and a line between the
last two that spoke of moving to the Tracy farm and then this line about the
Jackson farm. It was confusing but then I thought maybe the farm had been called
the Jackson Farm when they bought it so I took that like out.)
This next is another section of her journal dealing with the farm and how life
was living there:
The West Pawlet Farm
It was in February we first saw the farm. It seemed a dream come true. The
government finally passed the loan and one June we moved in. A beautiful ten
room house, barns and everything to farm with. We also kept the cows, horses and
some of the machines.
We got a farm loan and got a tractor and we got credit for other machinery to
work with. Anything the farm needed he got. The first year we lived on bread and
milk. We never did get a good price for milk so we never got anywhere. He
started selling off the cows to buy food for the rest.
The drought came. The sod in the fields burned so crisp one could reach down and
pick up a handful of sod and it would crumble in your hand. We didn’t have such
a good farm after all. The corn land we planned on turned out to be wet bog the
hay fields were all side hills. It was dangerous to plow. The tractor and plows
could tip over.
The stock was mostly scrub stock. The team of horses couldn’t pull together
unless you chained the female and we never would beat an animal. So the roan had
to be sold and we bought Nellie from C Blodgett in Fort Miller. She was a
western draft horse and a good worker so Bob and Nellie became a team.
One day we left the team in front of the house a few minutes. I guess he came in
for water. Bob and Madeline were hitched to the hay wagon. We heard a noise and
looked out. The wagon was just going around the bend. Something had spooked them
and they took off. I called ahead of them to the farmers to stop them.
Finally I got a call they were stopped almost into West Pawlet. The team had run themselves out and a garage man had stopped them. We took the car and went after them. Some one took Cliff from the state road to the team because I didn’t have a license; he said I could not have a license because he did not want his wife on the road all the time. Today we suffer for it.
Another time we had a tornado. I stood at the window with one of the girls and
watched the things fly. (I was that girl - Edie) I heard the sucking noise and
found everything in the stove went up the pipe and fire was falling outside but
it didn’t catch on fire. Then we watched the five-deck rabbit cage go flying
down side the road, the barrel we kept in the yard for papers and trash was
picked up and set down in the swamp a half-mile away. The hay wagon was in the
orchard running wild with no horses attached. It really was a wild storm.
Valentine’s Day
One cold day in February the two little girls were coming home from school. They
had three quarters of a mile to walk through a dirt road and woods past a now
covered with snow saw mill and a couple of shacks. I was always worried over
them. Anna was in second grade, Millie in kindergarten. It was Valentines Day
and freezing and when they didn’t come home on time I was frantic. I kept
watching the road to see them home safe but they didn’t come. He kept saying
they will come soon.
After a while I saw this tiny figure come around the bend. She was walking so
slow I knew something was wrong. I ran down the road, no coat or hat or boots. I
ran to Millie and asked where Anna was. She pointed down the road. I screamed
for Dad and he came. We got Millie home, I carried her home running all the way,
and dad went back to find Anna. Millie was almost frozen and the snot was flying
and she was crying and Valentines under her arms had slipped all over the roads.
We were picking them up in the next June.
Cliff came carrying Anna. she was bad. He had found her side of the road, a
little more and she wouldn’t have been there. We got her home and thawed her
out. It was a day that makes me cry to remember those two dear little ones all
alone freezing on the side of the road. That was one of the reasons I was glad
to leave the farm. My children meant more to me than the farm. But it was so far
back in the mountains in this little valley. I called it Echo Valley Farm,
because if I yelled the mountains carried my voice all over the hills.