My parents were divorced when I was three years old. I don't remember all of the
particulars, but Mother came to Stockbridge around that time to keep house for LeRoy
Pratt, Sr. and his parents. They purchased a farm on Gay Hill (now known as Music
Mountain.) from I believe a person by the name of Ed Putnam. The farm consisted of
approximately 325 acres. Actually in its time it was really two farms. The house in its
day was really a show place. When built originally it had a porch on the front facing the
road. It had four French windows and a door opening out onto the porch (The porch was gone
when we moved there).
There was a "buttery" built on the backside of the house over an eighteen-foot deep dug
well. This building was used to put pans of milk on the shelves to cool and enable one to
skim cream off the top for butter and cheese. The skim milk was sometimes made into
cottage cheese or fed to the pigs.
We had running water for a while until the spring dried up above the house. The water was
fed through a lead pipe into a wooden upright barrel by the kitchen sink. We finally drew
water most of the time from the well and filled the wooden barrel. Hot water came from a
reservoir on the kitchen wood stove, teakettle, etc.
No indoor plumbing at all. The privy was in the building next to the house, actually in
the backside of the garage. You didn't linger much in the wintertime!
We had kerosene lamps. LeRoy (Roy) bought a wind charger and put it on the garage roof.
We wired for one light in the kitchen, living room and downstairs bedroom. About the
only times we used the lights from the battery was when we had company! In order to have a
brake on the wind charger, he ran a wire down into the garage and would hang a bucket of
sand on the wire when he did not want the charger to run.
The house had four rooms downstairs, combination kitchen and dining room, a large living
room, and a large bedroom. There was a room off the kitchen that was used as a workroom,
having a workbench, vise, etc. Roy was a good carpenter when he wanted to be! There was
a door to the cellar and a hall leading to the stairway off the kitchen also a door at the
end of the living room that went into the hall and into the downstairs bedroom. Upstairs
there were actually six rooms; an open room at the top of the stairs, a large bedroom and
small room (my room) on the left, one large bedroom over the living room and two smaller
rooms. One of which we never used. There were no windows and perhaps that is why it was
never used. The only heat upstairs was what came up through the register in the floor.
The only heat we had was a "Round Oak" stove in the living room and a "Glenwood" wood range
in the kitchen. If you sat too close to the "Round Oak" you roasted, and a short ways away
from it you froze! Hardly any between!
The cellar had a dirt bottom, but one section of it was filled with huge rocks. I believe
they filled one section with the boulders they took out of the other. Vegetables kept
very well down there as well as canned goods Mother made.
Attached to the garage was a string of buildings. One was used for a duck house (I had
several). Two other sections were used for pigs and that never was used and was torn
down. There was one real large building at the end of the pig pens. I don't know what it
was built for but all the time I lived there it was used for a hen house. We always had
lots of poultry.
We had a large sugaring operation. I don't recall how many taps, but we made 300 to ??
gallons of syrup. Roy had quite a pipeline. At that time it was all metal spouts,
goosenecks, and pipe strung on telephone wire. There was a dumping station for the sap
that came from buckets here and there. This all ran into a large storage tank at the
sugarhouse. My job quite a bit was to walk the pipeline making sure it was not frozen or
plugged up anywhere. Mother did an awful lot of boiling. The old sugarhouse was torn down
and moved farther up to more or less centralize it with the sugar place. Every bit of that
pipeline from spouts on down had to be washed at the end of the season. It was interesting
to note that Charlie Townsend who sugared at the Bowen Orchard used to come across the
pasture and visit. He said it was so great to see a stream of sap run into the storage
tank and no poor soul was gathering it!
Roy worked out a lot, raised vegetables and poultry. He sold a lot of this to Camp
Killoleet in Hancock. He rented the big pasture above the house to different one's for
summer pasturing---quite a few sheep.
There was a goodsized farm across the road. We had a horse, sheep a couple pigs and cows
for our milk. Horse's name was Nellie. I drove her in a horse rake and she was a handful,
she had a mean streak a mile wide! She did however produce a couple of nice colts.
At one time Roy worked for P.W. Green at his Ford garage in the village. He told me he
helped unload the first Model T Ford that came to the garage. Roy had a Model A Ford and
then he bought a used telephone truck with a short bed on the back. This truck was a
Model B Ford. He bought it with the bonus check for World War I veterans! It was a
telephone truck driven by James Gratton with the utility body cut in half lengthwise!
I couldn't wait until I was sixteen, get a license and drive that truck thirty-five miles
an hour across Grammy Bird's flat!! I never got to do it as I left there at fourteen!!
Roy's father had been a ship's carpenter on the old sailing vessels. They told me that on
St. Patrick's Day he would wear a big orange ribbon and walk along the docks just defying
everyone! He was a fairly large man. Mother used to put him up a lunch. He would take
his axe and saw and cut wood. He usually ate his lunch at midmorning. I always got a
kick out of that!! Lots of nights when he went to bed he would chant a lot of the old sea
shantys or songs. I always wished we could have had the words to them as they were real
interesting. He would sing himself to sleep (and me). He used to drive the horse and
buggy down to the village once in a while, and on one of his trips I was walking home from
school and wanted a ride home; he appeared to not recognize me and wouldn't let me ride!
I managed to get into the back of the buggy without him seeing me and rode home anyway!!
He was quite sick with the grippe and he had a bed downstairs in our living room; he
asked for a Smith Bros. cough drop while sitting on the edge of the bed, he sat there for
a minute, got up and looked out of one of the French windows for a moment, laid down on
the bed and passed away. This made a great impression on me! I haven't liked Smith Bros.
cough drops to this day. Silly! Huh!
Roy had a Merino Buck sheep, a beautiful animal, but ugly as heck. He would bunt you
every chance he got. One day Roy's father had been flaying some beans on the barn floor,
the flails leather that held the two pieces together broke so he was going outside to the
house to get some new string. The old buck was outside the barn and spotted him; the buck
came hell bent for the old man, but he had made a terrible mistake. That flail was made
of hardwood and was pretty rugged, when the buck got almost to the old man he swung that
hardwood stick, hit the buck ram in the head and knocked him out cold. I thought sure he
had killed him, but the buck finally came to and lost all interest in the old man. Until
Grampa's dying day the buck stayed well away from the old man! The sheep did one time
however put LeRoy Sr. right up into the tailgate of the truck when he was loading wood.
I was inside the cab and I had seen him coming, hollered to Roy, he turned around just as
the old buck nailed him! Needless to say he didn't see it as humorous as I did!
Roy kept quite a few sheep and lambing time in the Spring was fun for me. My job was to
feed the lambs that the mothers wouldn't own; with a bottle with a rubber nipple on it.
This was one chore that I really liked. One time the sheep were in the big pasture above
the house and I was in the barn early one morning and heard Mother screaming and carrying
on, I ran for the house and she was pointing to the sheep in the pasture. They were milling
around and a large lack bear was running right in amongst them. It was as if it had picked
out a certain sheep for his dinner. The bear stood up, struck one of the sheep, picked it
up bodily and headed up the mountain with it. Roy had an old 8mm German Mouser, Mother had
me take it and go to our neighbor (Frank Bird- Bird Kribstock) and have them go after the
bear. We did. Bird took the gun away from me as we spotted the bear starting to devour
the sheep. He shot at it, but didn't get it. The bear took off and Frank's remark was that
when the bear ran, he opened and "shot"! His back paws going out beyond his front paws and
did it go!!! It is interesting to note that as the bear tore the skin off the sheep, it
rolled it up with the wool inside with the flesh outside. At this particular time, people
raising sheep were having problems with bear.
Another problem was the Red Tailed hawk or Cooper hawk would get a chicken now and then.
One way to get the hawk was to bait a trap, set it on a fence post and catch them. Wouldn't
that go over big today?!!
I left there in 1939 at the age of fourteen to live with my father in Sunapee, NH.
I hope to find out what happened to all these places someday.
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I couldn't get over the change as I drive by the old farm.
There was a building back of the house that had a large cast
iron scalding tub set in bricks for butchering, wood fired.
There was storage on the upper floor and I remember there
were two antique guns in there, bell-shaped on the barrel ends.
Across the road from the house was a carriage shed. He kept
farm machinery there and also his car in one end. There was
a small hen house by the building also. As you approached
the drive on the left coming up the hill from Stockbridge
Common the barn was on the left. There was a watering tub
for cattle enclosed (covered) and also it had a wood fired
heater in it. The house on the right had a porch across
the front and a woodshed on the upper end. The barn, I
remember starting from the driveway. He kept a carriage in
the end, then horses. From the house you went through an
area which he kept pigs in pens and from there into the
stable where the cows were kept. Milking was done by hand.
In the far end of the stable there was a cream separator,
you could crank the separator by hand or you could use a
sheep to crank the machine. Of course only cream was
shipped then. The cream was picked up by Lee Johnson
and sold to David Butterick.
The stables were cleaned through "scuttle holes" in the gutters and the manure was stored
under the stable. Uncle Fred Bowen usually had a pig down there and he always kept hay in
one corner for the pig to bed down in. One could drive up a ramp into the hay barn with
the haymow to the right. Under part of the stable and mow he kept about 35 or 40 sheep.
The sheep had access to both outdoors and to a shed by the end of the barn for cover and
their hay.
I remember one time Uncle Fred was taking some hay through the door to the hayrack and
there was a woven wire fence directly in front of the door. As he bent over and started
through the door (he had a Merino buck sheep that was a little ugly) the sheep smacked him
squarely and he went head first into the fence! This provided quite a little entertainment
for some time!
Directly up from the barn there was a large corncrib and I used to like to crank the
corn sheller. It is hard to believe that all of these things are gone. The house looks
somewhat the same, but I am sure it probably has changed in the inside. I know the house
is famous for the tunnel under the road and the irons hanging from the ridgepole by the
stairs inside. Aunt Bertha always cautioned me to never go into the tunnel. I always
thought the iron rings were for hanging smoked meats in there. I probably was wrong.
But I have no doubt that the tunnel was part of the Underground Railroad.
Uncle Fred and Aunt Bertha were the only ones on the hill who had running water and a
bathroom. By running water I mean a flush toilet, hot water tank, etc. This was all
gravity fed because there was no electricity when I was there. I have fond memories of
them. Memories of me sitting on the wood box by the kitchen stove drying my wet socks
and boots with Aunt Bertha treating me to a piece of chocolate cake with white frosting.
I purposely got my feet wet to get this treat and Aunt Bertha wasn't fooled for a minute
and she told me I could have the treat without getting soaked!! She and I would meet
sometimes fishing the brook. She loved to do this when she could.
I moved away in 1939 (?) to go to Sunapee, NH to live with my father, thus closing that
chapter of my life. It was a long time ago, but seems like yesterday.
