by Mike Bendzela
I do not remember whether one of our cats had killed it or whether I had run over it with the lawn mower, but I do remember peeling the poor milk snake’s corpse off the grass and walking across the yard with it dangling from my fingertips, en route to the manure pile near the barn where I intended to stow it. When I walked in front of the screen door of the little cottage in the dooryard, I was startled by a sudden “EWW! Take that thing away!” I did as she wished; and when I returned, E. D. (as she was called) was still at the door, shaking her head. Claude had joined her there, laughing. He said to me, “Was that your good buddy?”
“That’s his good buddy, all right,” E. D. repeated. I took this to mean something like its opposite, similar to how the statement, “Well, bless his heart,” an expression my uncle in Kentucky frequently used, meant something like “F— him!” It meant my “good buddy” was anything but good.
E. D. from South Carolina was the second wife of Claude from Tennessee, co-owner of the property in Maine along with his sister, Zelma Bryant, where I have lived with my other half for forty years now. The snake episode happened back in the late eighties or early nineties; it’s hard to remember when events in the distant past actually happened; but it was back when they were both still well enough to drive up from Rock Hill to visit, and when the guest cottage my partner had built for them was so new the unpainted pine clapboards and trim were still bright yellow in color.
“You don’t have to worry about the snakes in Maine,” I think I said. “They’re nothing like the ones you’ve got down south.”
“Ah don’t care. A snake’s a snake!”
And farm life is farm life, North or South.
Siblings Claude and Zelma were the descendents of Herbert W. Dow, their grandfather and the last full-time farmer to live at Dow Corner. In 1910, one of Herbert’s and wife Lizzie’s two daughters, Vera, went down to Atlanta, Georgia to visit relatives. At the boarding house where she was staying, she met Alvah White, who was selling Bibles door-to-door to help pay his way through medical school. They married two years later, and from then on Vera lived at various locations in the south, such as Georgia and Tennessee. After Alvah was called up to serve in the medical corps in World War I, she and the children would follow Alvah to such places as Panama and Coatesville, Pennsylvania, finally settling in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in the 1940s.*
But every summer Vera and the kids visited her parents and her sister, Pearle, up in Maine. Throughout all the various moves the family endured while Alvah worked for the Veterans Administration, the Maine farm remained a constant for Vera Ethelyn Dow, now Mrs. White. She would help her father with the planting and her mother with around-the-house chores, until she and the children returned to wherever her husband Alvah happened to be stationed.
An idea of what farm life in Maine was like before Vera’s marriage might be gleaned from a page of her father Herbert’s “Day’s Works” journal, handwritten in a lovely archaic script, which he kept as a teenager and which my husband found between the ceiling and floor upstairs in the old farmhouse while insulating the attic [quoted verbatim]:
1870 six loads
[June] 9 Hauled^Ben’s manure Edson helped me plow about two hours
” 10-11 Stormy
” 13. Went to Portland after Mothers chambers set.
” 14. Plowed my potato piece harrowed it then planted some Edson helped me all day
” 17. Finished planting my potatoes worked all day used four and a half bushels potatoes
” 18 Hoed corn and picked rocks all day
” 20 Cultivated and hoed corn all day
” 21 ” ” ” ” ” ”
” 22. Hoed corn all day
And so on. Vera would keep up the family farming tradition in Tennessee after her husband retired, milking cows, making butter, and canning vegetables grown in their large garden. When she died in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1974 (Alvah predeceased her in 1968), she left the farm equally to the children, Claude and Zelma.
Thus, ownership of the old Maine farm, held for over two hundred years by northerners, passed to Vera’s southern-raised children.
They continued to visit Aunt Pearle up in Maine in subsequent summers, as was the tradition, taking their own children with them, throughout the 1960s and 70s. But as Pearle began to get infirm, she left the farm to stay with people in the village of Standish until her death in 1976. The house was unoccupied for about two years up to her death, at which point it was broken into and burglarized. Many of its contents vanished — a large collection of pewter, a gun collection, all the oak furniture, Civil War uniforms and guns (Herbert’s brother served in the 7th Maine Regiment), a trunk full of clocks, and all the good tools in the farm’s woodshop.
In 1976, having graduated from the University of Southern Maine with a degree in Industrial Technology, a Massachusetts native named Donald Essman needed a place to stay, and a neighbor told him about an unoccupied farmhouse nearby that was visited only in summers by its owners. Perhaps they would let him stay there? He checked the place out, moved in, and began a decades-long collaboration between himself and the Dow descendents (which I’ve written about here and here) to restore and protect Herbert W. Dow’s homestead.
During his summer visits, Claude would sit down with Don to plan out construction projects Don could undertake in lieu of rent — new roofs, replacement windows, new sills and framing, restored chimneys and fireplaces, etc. One of the largest projects was building a post-and-beam guest cottage in the old style but with modern amenities. That way the main farmhouse could remain close to its original condition (some would call it “primitive”) while allowing Claude’s and his sister’s families to visit without having to worry about cutting firewood, hand-pumping water, or using the outhouse off the barn.
The farm had come a long way even by the time I arrived on the scene in 1985 (from Ohio via Upstate New York), but there was still much to be done. In fact, a place like this is never finished: I’ve lived here long enough to see three roofs replaced: first asphalt, then wood shingles, and finally raised-seam metal. I’ve seen Don install exterior trim and Federal-style door surrounds multiple times as the brutal weather in Maine buffets his work, including weathering out the wooden muntin bars in the multi-paned windows. Claude and his descendents were always eager to have Don continue upkeep as it made their lives much easier when they came up for visits — they didn’t have to spend their vacations making repairs or calling others to do them. I did what I could to help Don (I’m not much of a handyman) but spent most of my time maintaining the fields, tending the gardens and orchard, and taking care of livestock, which was work enough.
It was remarkable to sit with Claude in the farmhouse kitchen as he reminisced about his summers in Maine as a child and young man in the 20s and 30s. He was a surviving conduit of memories about Herbert and Lizzie’s generation, who go back to the 19th century. He remembered sitting in his grandfather’s lap on the mowing machine as he mowed hay with his team of horses, Duke and Jerry. He could enumerate what had been stolen out of the house because he remembered it all. He told how his father would come up to Maine and help keep the place in repairs, including putting on the first coat of paint the house had seen in one hundred years. He could recall where all the big rocks in the fields were (which was helpful for us when we were cutting hay). He even knew what we would find at the bottom of the dug barn well when we pumped it out to clean it — a flat rock that the former wooden pump had sat on and a “vein” of water that came into the bottom of the well from the northwest.
Because of Claude, we know where that corn patch was where Herbert “hoed corn all day”: It lay on the highest ground of the field behind the barn, next to the cow pasture, because Herbert and his neighbor, Fred Sanborn, used to compete over who would have the first corn of the season. That area is all pine woods now.
Don and I became part of Claude’s extended family, and the history of the place and its inhabitants interested us as much as it did him and his children. Over dozens of summers we would meet Claude’s and his sister’s children and even grandchildren from places throughout the South — Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, Washington D. C., South Carolina, Tennessee. After Claude and Zelma had passed the place on to their families, we formed a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farming venture with Claude’s daughter and her husband, getting a little taste of the farming life Herbert, Lizzie, Pearle, and Vera had lived one hundred years before.
As a testament to the family’s attachment to Maine, both Claude and Zelma, despite their southern upbringing, chose to be buried in the nearby cemetery, next to their mother, their aunt, and their grandparents.
Back at the farm, North and South continue to dance together, cheek-to-cheek.
*All details about the lives of Vera and Alvah White come from the family history, The Ancestors of Zelma Elizabeth White, self-published by Michael N. Sundberg (Huntington, M. D., 2019).
Image
Photograph by the author.
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