Tle other day I had occasion to be talking with the Contractor and the State Engineers about the drainage on Ashfield's ravaged Main Street. Standing in front of the hardware store I pointed out the old hitching post just to the west and related how it got there. They agreed to move the stone to a safe place before a machine broke it and replace it when the job was finished. So much for promises for a fifteen minute job.
Albert Howes, the man who previously owned my former farm, put it there about sixty-five years ago when the state was rebuilding and widening Route 116 in South Ashfield. They trucked away or buried the stone walls along the roadside. Among the stones was an interesting rock that had a base of conglomerate and a standing softer stone that was apparently washed to slim spire. It would make a great hitching post. Postmaster and store owner George Henry commissioned Bert to move it up to town. He loaded it on a stone boat and with his team delivered it for one dollar.
Bert was a veritable fountain of old tales about Ashfield and its people. I wish that I had paid more attention and remembered more as he related the lore of the old timers like Dar Pease and W.W. Whitney. ( That's at least two ruminations for the future). Once I said, "You know so much about Ashfield's history, you ought to attend the Historical Society's meetings." He replied, "I don't trot in that class."
Bert was bom in 1876. A frail baby, without modem incubaters or such modern miracles, he was lucky to survive. At the age of ten he was stricken with appendicitis, was buggied to Williamsburg, where they took the train to Northampton. On the way his appendix broke and peritonitis set in, an almost certain death without antibiotics. He was carried to Cooley Dickinson Hospital where he was to remain for several weeks - but he survived.
A couple of the favorite stories he related were about being a boy on the farm in those times: When the men were hand-mowing (with a scythe) it was his job to scatter out the windrows of hay each man made to his left. By working furiously he could catch up to the men so he could listen in on the man talk. About that time his father would say, "Boy, go get the water jug". He would consequently fall behind again. Each summer his father would set him and his brother to cleaning out the sheep barn on the hottest day in August. With the manure and hay walked on all winter by the whole flock of sheep it was like cement. The clouds of ammonia and the heat would fairly choke a worker. Each boy would take his ire out on the other and make a long hard day seem even longer. His father would say," It's good for the souV
His father Charles was a County Commissioner and Bert would often have to drive him in the buggy to meet the trolley at what is now the Sunset Trail Service Station, which was at that time a livery stable barn and a very big house which sometimes was a traveler's inn. The house burned in the early forties and the barn was replaced by a cement block garage in the twenties. The County Commissioners would meet every month and a Commissioner would have to stay at The Mansion House, a classic hotel, until their business was finished. That hotel on the comer of Main and Federal Streets burned in the late forties.
Bert would often take a wagon load of lumber or apples to the train at Bardwell's Ferry, a nearly all-day trip. His father, getting to the County Seat every month, could line up sales of produce for his farm and others in Ashfield.
Bert married Esther Fuller in 1907 and they carried on the farm until 1948. Each year except one, he stated, they were able to save a little money.That is the old fashioned definition of profit. Without Social Security and the modern government aid it was up to the individual to provide for himself in his old age. Everyone knew it and for those who didn't understand, were unlucky in life, or didn't have children to care for them, there was always the poor farm
He and Esther had one single child, a girl named Sarah, the light of their lives, who was stricken with a brain tumor at ten. They took her to Boston where the eminent surgeon Dr. Cushing operated on her. But that was experimentally chancy and she lived blind for two more years. Even after forty years they became choked up and teary when her name came up. Thereafter, they lavished all their considerable love on their nieces and nephews, some of whom had lost their mother. By the time we moved to the farm, our kids acquired another aunt and uncle. They were always quietly helping out people who were sick or had some other misfortune.
After Esther had passed away he was over to the farm more often and we had to find things for him to do and talk about. Once when I told him a story or a choice piece of gossip he teared up and said the worst about being alone is the thought, I must remember to tell Esther when I get home
Bert was so moderate in everything he did that the neighbors always said that if he bought a team of spirited horses they soon became as slow and calm as their owner. When I bought the farm he presented me with a chain forged out of scythe blades by Dolph Handfield, Ashfield's blacksmith, with same reverence as if he were presenting a Damascus steel sword blade . He said that I would never break it. I had a relatively small tractor at the time but the first time that I used it I broke it twice in the first five minutes. I still have about six feet of that chain, complete with a modem repair fink, hanging on my garage wall as a symbol of the times when things were slower and simpler, and a good chain would last at least two generations.
Bert had his eye on a beautiful large quartz stone in the pasture on the hill. I dragged it down to his lawn with a modern chain and a larger tractor. Whenever I see the stone I think of the best neighbors a young couple could ever have and a simpler time when there was beauty in something as mundane as a rock.