MG:  This begins an oral history interview with Carson Hinkley for the Madrid Historical Society.  The date is November 5, 2022.  The interview is taking place in East Madrid, Maine.  Well, we can get started if you’re ready.  I’ll have you just say when and where you were born.

Carson Hinkley:  I was born August 12, 1958, at Franklin Memorial Hospital that was in the Fairbanks area of Farmington, Maine, but my family lived here.  My mother, father, sister, and brother moved over here the year before I was born.

MG:  Can you say where here is and where they were before?

CH:  It’s in the eastern part of Madrid, which is known as East Madrid now.  But before that, it was known as the Perham area or the Perham Stream Settlement.  Where the house is, it’s right in the peninsula of the Perham Stream.  The stream goes three-quarters of the way around the house.

MG:  And when did that name change happen?

CH:  The name changed – well, the original village was just a settlement.  There was no name to it.  Then, in 1794, Maine had surveyors come in to survey for town areas.  One of the names of the surveyors was Lemuel Perham.  He named the stream, and then they adopted the Perham Stream Settlement or the Perham Settlement.  Then, in 1836, when Madrid became organized, then it would change to East Madrid.

MG:  Did Lemuel Perham settle here himself?

CH:  No, he was the surveyor.   Lemuel Perham was the surveyor.  He was from Farmington.  There’s a valley – intervale area – known as the Perham Intervale, and that’s where his family was from.

MG:  Okay, it sounds like maybe he has French Canadian roots.

CH:  Yeah, they were French Canadian.

MG:  You said your family moved here to this home the year before you were born.  Where were they before that?

CH:  Across the street, where right now is Perham Stream Birding Trail.  That was Thomas Pickard’s home.  Then it was handed down to – Nathan D. Wing bought it, and then it was handed down to his daughter, and then his daughter to my parents.  My brother and my sister was born in Farmington like I was in the hospital, but they lived over there.  My brother was born in ’56, my sister in ’53, and they moved over here [to] this house in ’57.

MG: What precipitated the move?  Why move across the street?

CH:  To let my grandmother move back over there [laughter] because she was living here.

MG:  Okay.  Which grandmother was this?

CH:  No, I’ll take that back.  My grandmother’s living here.  That was Carrie Wing, and she died in ’57.  Then they moved over because this heated better than that house over there did.  That house, the cellar was starting to fall in places, and the foundation was getting bad.  So they moved over here.

MG:  Did someone move across the street?

CH:  No, it was used as storage.  We still had chickens and cows.  We had them over there.  We had a few milk cows here.  But mostly, it was for storing the hay because the barn over there was getting a little rickety too.  We kept some cows over there and the chickens.  My father used to work on snowmobiles, so he made it his workshop.

MG:  Oh, good.  Well, I’m wondering if we can trace your family history, which I know goes back very far.  Let’s start as far back as you know on your father’s side, on the Hinkley side.

CH:  Miller Hinkley was born in Massachusetts, and they moved up to – not Sebago, but real close to Sebago.  Then he moved up here to Madrid in 1794.  He lived where the town of Madrid is now.  The village was over here, and he lived on Route 4, where the village is now.  The whole village was his whole farm.  When he died, it went to his four sons.  Samuel was next in line.  And then, after they died, George was the next in line.  That was in 1832, I think it was, somewhere in there.  I’m not exactly good on dates, you’ll find. [laughter]

MG:  It’s unusual for me to talk to someone who has access to their family history so far back.  Do you know where Miller Hinkley hailed from?  Where in Europe did he come over from?

CH:  He was born in Barnstable, Massachusetts.  His family came from England, in the Hinkley village in England.  I think there’s still a church over there named Hinkley.  They came over in the 1650s.  In the 1650s, they came over.

MG:  Not long after or far from where the Pilgrims arrived.

CH:  Yes.  Shortly after Pilgrims, there was a big influx from England and France.  It was in that time period they came in.

MG:  Was it for similar reasons, religious reasons?

CH:  What my family has told me is it was because of the taxes.  They just [were] taxed right out of existence over there.  So they had to come over here.  They were always farmers, all the way back.  I’ve got a Hinkley genealogy book, and it goes all the way back to 1192. [laughter]

MG:  What does it say about 1192?

CH:  It tells that the Hinkley name was Hyncliyfe, H-Y-N-C-L-I-Y-F-E.  It tells about the – he was a lord over there, and they had a coat of arms and so forth.  Then there was another one, and he was a captain.  That was when they think they changed it Hincklyne.  Then in – I think it was about the 1300s – they went to Hinkley.

MG:  That’s really impressive.  What kind of people were they?  You said lords.

CH:  They oversaw farmlands was what they did.  They had tenant farmers tending the properties.

MG:  So farming is really in your blood.

CH:  Oh, yeah.  All the way through. [laughter]

MG:  You said earlier, before we were recording, that you’re learning a little bit more every day about your family history.  I was curious about what your resources are and what you’re learning.

CH:  I just do a lot of research and going through archives at different historical societies, and the historian/archaeologist is doing the dig across the road.  He does a lot of it, and he tells me that he’s found this and found that, so I just added to it.

MG:  Well, it must be so interesting.  For most people that I know or that I interview, their family history is lost after a couple of generations.  So, I’m wondering how it shapes your identity or how you think about your place in the world.

CH:  Kind of saddens me that I’m the last of the line, put it that way.  It all peters down, that they either died or so forth.  There’s a few scattered out, but I don’t know where they are.  As for the knowledge of the family, it all comes down to me, and that’s it.  When I die, the genealogy books that I have, and all the farm ledges and all the diaries that I’ve gotten from my great grandmother, and so forth, are all going in the [Madrid] Historical Society.

MG:  Well, hopefully, they’ll safekeep it, and will be available for many more generations to come because of their safekeeping.

CH:  It saddens me that I’d like to get somebody up here to learn from me how everything operated and so forth because I know how all the machinery worked.  A lot of the farming practices they have now – they were telling about the other day that there was a new type of drilling wells that was going to be more cheaper and more economical and wouldn’t be affected by drought.  I thought to myself, “That’s the way the old-timers always dug the wells.” [laughter] And they’re telling about [how] it’s a brand-new idea, but it’s not.

MG:  Well, I wonder if that’s possible.  There’s this renewed interest in homesteading and getting back to the land, maybe it’s possible.

CH:  Well, I think the weather change, the climate change, is going to make people realize they’ve got to go back to the old ways of doing a lot of the things and get somebody up here [to] learn how.  My father took us to the Norlands Living [History] Center down towards Turner.  We watched him for a day, and my father said, “They’re going to kill themselves because they’re doing it all wrong.” [laughter]

MG:  You could teach a master class on those kinds of things.

CH:  Yeah.  Well, when I became disabled, they sent me to a psychologist.  And he says, “I’ve got the perfect job for you, but you can’t do it,” because of my back.  He says, “Teach people how to farm.”  He said, “You can read it in a book, but you have the knowledge of how it was actually done and what works and what don’t.  But you couldn’t take standing on that cement floor all day long.”

MG:  Well, we’ll have to come up with some kind of solution.  There’s no next generation?  Nieces or nephews?  Do you have children?

CH:  No.  I have a son, but he went with his mother after we got divorced, and I haven’t heard a word from him.  My sister never had any kids.  My brother never had any kids.  So I’m the last of the line.  My half-uncle and aunt – one had two girls, and one had two boys.  They had kids, but most of them are disabled or sick, and they don’t have any kids.  This whole area is down to me.

MG:  Well, it’s amazing you’ve preserved it for so long.  I think the ways families are changing and growing, it’s going to be harder and harder to keep these lines intact.  Well, in my notes I have that Miller Hinkley was born in Georgetown.  So what brought them from Barnstable to Maine?

CH:  I think it’s because [there] being so many kids – well, at that time, there was a lot of Massachusetts contracting people to settle up in Maine.  I think that was one of them.  Then, when he got up to Georgetown, a lot of them were there, so he decided to go even further.

MG:  Do you know what he did in Georgetown or what his life was like there?

CH:  He was a farmer.  I guess he married his wife there, I think it was.

MG:  Rachel?

CH:  Yeah.  I think she was a farmer.  I’m not sure.  There were just so many people that he decided to – Moses Abbott, [who] was the governor of the Madrid Township in 1793-1794, allotted it to – sold out to Phillips, [who] had control of Phillips, Freeman, Carthage, Strong, and all that.  And Jacob Abbott was his overseer, and he was out looking for prospectors to settle up here.  I think that’s how they got Miller up here.

MG:  Okay.  Yes, Miller Hinkley was part of a group of early settlers that first founded this area.  Do you know how he found that group or it formed?

CH:  I think it was from the governorships with the heads of the area.  Massachusetts put out the proclamation that they were going to expand more, and they heard about it.  So, they signed up for it and came up.

MG:  Yeah, I think what I read was it was via Lynn, Massachusetts.  So there were folks there who were also making similar efforts?

CH:  Yes.  Because the Dunhams were from Lynn, Massachusetts, and they were coming up through the same time.  As I said, George was the third generation over there.  He’s the one that moved over here in what was called the Upper Neighborhood.  It was behind what is known as the Welch Place.  Then, after George, it was Wesley.  After Wesley, it was Eugene, and then [after] Eugene, my grandfather, Arthur.  Arthur was actually born in Massachusetts because Eugene went down there to live for a year or two for a job that petered out, and then they [came] back.

MG:  What do you think about this area appealed to those folks who were founding the early settlement here?

CH:  The reason that they settled here is because of the old Indian settlement that used to be up above here in the intervale, and this area where this house is and where the Pickard house was, was all corn.  This was all natural open area.  The intervale up there was all open area, and the Indians raised wheat, rye, and clover.  They had a trading trail down through on the other side of the stream down to the Oberton Stream, the old Oberton trading trail, which turned into the narrow gauge Sandy River/Rangeley Lake Line.  It being opened, they didn’t have to do so much cleaning.  Then, as more people moved up here, then, of course, they had to do more clearing.  But it’s good, rich soil is the main thing.

MG:  Were there Native people still living here?

CH:  Yes, there was.  My mother has a basket from the last of the Indians that was up on the end of the interval.  I’ve still got it.  It was given to a white man who lived up there, and then he gave it to my mother.

MG:  Which tribal community was it?  Do you know?

CH:  I don’t know exactly what it was, but I know that Micmacs went through here and the Abenakis went through here.  It might have been some of the Penobscots.  I’m not sure.  But I do know that even when I was a young boy, Madrid selectmen were either three-quarters Indian or full Indian.  So there was no dispute; they coincided with the Indians.

MG:  There was assimilation over the years.

CH:  The Indians helped out, and they help them understand the working of the land and so forth and how to keep it so that it didn’t destroy anything, but nature would work with them.

MG:  So it sounds like there was a symbiotic relationship with the tribal communities that were here.

CH:  Yeah, that and nature, the soil, and so forth, because they never changed much of anything.  They did clear some areas, but they didn’t destroy it, and they learned how to rotate the crops so that it wouldn’t deteriorate the nutrition of the soil.

MG:  Miller Hinkley would have been too young but did he have any relatives that were involved in the American Revolution at the time?

CH:  Don’t know whether he was or not.  I do know that Miller’s father was a serviceman in the Revolutionary War.  He was a corporal.  Other than that, I don’t think they did, except my grandfather was in the First World War.  As for the others, I don’t know whether there’s any that was or not.  I do know that Thomas Pickard was screwed up on the records in the wars because Thomas Pickard – they put a flag on his grave for the Civil War, but he died in 1851.  But he was the right age for the War of 1812.  His four sons, Justice, William, Charles, and Daniel, fought in the Civil War.  And they all came home – well, Justice died in the battle, and the other three came home and died – two of them died from disease, and Daniel hung himself from depression.  On the archeological dig, we found a military uniform button dating between 1809 and 1819, which puts it around the 1812 area.  Then, a week later, we found a brass trigger guard from a British musket, a British “Brown Bess.”  They started to stop making them in 1799, but they used them in the Revolutionary War.  The archaeologists did some research, and in the War of 1812, the Americans used confiscated weaponry from the Revolutionary War.  So we’re putting it as – Thomas Pickard had that rifle in 1812, not the Civil War.

MG:  That makes sense.  Well, it must have been the survivor’s guilt from returning from war.

CH:  Well, William and Charles got diseased from injuries that were from the Civil War.  Daniel was depressed ever since the war, until he hung himself,

MG:  Had he had a chance to procreate before he hung himself?

CH:  One girl.  They had one girl.  I think she married [and] had one boy, but he never married.

MG:  The one girl would have been Nathan’s half-sister.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  Okay.  You’ll have to correct me, if I lose track.

CH:  Yeah.  It’s all right. [laughter]

MG:  Do you know anything about this group of men who came here to settle the area, what their intentions were, and how they envisioned this settlement to be?

CH:  I think they just envisioned it to be a farm community.  That’s all.  Every single one was – most of them were farmers.  There were, of course, the blacksmiths.  They were religious, but they never built a church.  They used either homes or schools to hold the service.

MG:  Wasn’t Miller Hinkley involved a little bit in that first church that was built, the Reeds Mill Church?

CH:  Reeds Mill Church.  Yeah, he was involved in that, and he was involved in very hard pursuing to get Madrid organized as a town, too.  He was one of the ones that really pushed for that.  He was the one that – there was a community, and they decided they needed a place to worship.  That was for the town over there, not for over here.  Over here, there was just – as I said, Miller had the farm in Madrid, and the settlement was here and then just slowly moved over towards Reed’s Mill.  Then that’s when they decided to build a church when the settlement was there.  It was, I would say, more of the village type, the town people – more of building the town because it was more into manufacturing then.

MG:  Was there any connection to Spain?  Why call the area Madrid?

CH:  The reason it was called Madrid is they were going to name it Perham.  But they couldn’t because in Aroostook County, there’s already a Perham.  So they couldn’t use Perham.  So then they decided – they had a committee to discuss it.  Two or three people came up with the idea that – why not call it Madrid in respect of the Spanish helping in the Revolutionary War?  That’s why that became Madrid.

MG:  Was it originally Madrid?  Or has it always been Madrid?

CH:  It was supposed to be Ma-drid, but everybody called it Mad-rid. [laughter]

MG:  I think that’s Maine for you.  What else do you know about Miller Hinkley?  I thought they had eight children, Miller and Rachel.

CH:  Yeah.  There’s five boys and three girls.  One boy moved out, back to Massachusetts.  The other three girls married into other families, but in my Hinkley book – because they’re more on the line of the Hinkley, not the others lines.

MG:  What do you know about their life here?  Where did that family live, Miller and Rachel and their kids?

CH:  Over where the town of Madrid is.  The whole area was his farm.

MG:  I imagine his kids helped out on the farm as well.

CH:  Yeah, and that’s why, when he died, the four boys – it got divided up into four different farms.

MG:  And next in line was Samuel.

CH:  Yes, of mine.

MG:  Tell me a little bit about what you know about Samuel.

CH:  Not much except that he married, and he had a slew of kids.  I can’t remember how many there were.

MG:  I have ten in my notes,

CH:  Yeah, it was about ten.  I think there was one that wasn’t recorded that died at birth.  George was the one in my line.  He bought a place next to his father’s farm.  Then he sold it and moved up here.  They did have a mill over there.  The Hinkley Mill was over there.  Some of the brothers combined [and] made the mill, and that was a lumber mill.  And then after that, they had a carriage mill – not the Hinkleys, but other mills.  That’s when it became more of a town.  They had the carriage and the textile [mill] and all that.

MG:  Which areas were these mills serving?

CH: The Hinkley Mill was serving the area over there on Route 4, because it was on Route 4 on the Sandy River stream, and it was building the houses and the village over there along with a couple others.  This one over here was building this area.  It was a sawmill with clapboard and shingle machines, and it built all these houses in this village.

MG:  In old pictures, can you recognize which houses were built by the mill?

CH:  Yeah, I’ve got them, too. [laughter] I’ve got all the pictures.  The mill originally was like you picture, the old water wheel mill, but later on, after Pickard sold it to Prescott, they took the water wheel off and put a horizontal one underneath the mill so that they could operate during the wintertime.  They had a dam, and they could operate it during the winter.  So it was horizontal underneath.  I’ve got a picture of the water coming out from underneath the mill there.  There’s a small shingle sanding shack down here below the bridge, that once they’d done the shingles, they smoothed them up over there.  That was operated by – get this right – Joseph Masterman, and Joseph Masterman was the brother to Lucinda Masterman, which was Nathan’s wife.

MG:  That name is familiar.

CH:  They came from Weld, the Masterman Settlement in Weld.  Lucinda was one of the triplets.  I think she was the youngest of the triplets.  She was deeply religious too.  She helped form the Baptist community here, and they held the church over there because they had a big parlor room.  They could hold the church there.  Plus, they held the school there two or three times, too, between different school buildings.  The services would be moved to – when they built a new school, they would hold the services in the old school for a while until they used the building for something else.

MG:  Would the Baptist Church draw certain people to the area who wanted to participate?

CH:  Not really.  They did get ministers and clergymen from different areas that come up for weeks or months and so forth and to stay at the houses.  Other than that, they did welcome others in, and they, of course, gave letters for other people who moved out, too.  But if they moved, it was to move to a better – they were farmers, but then the younger ones would progress into more manufacturing, and then other people would move in to take over the farm and that aspect of it.

MG:  Okay.  Would you say most of the townsfolk were part of the Baptist church, or were there other kinds of churches around?

CH:  It was all Baptist.  It was open to everything, all religions.  They just called it Baptist, but they were non-denominal, really.

MG:  That must have been a big part of people’s lives.

CH:  Oh, yeah.  Because it was more of  – well, it’s like in England – the pilgrims.  Everything was based on the Church of England and so forth.  Here, they did peter off a little bit of the [religion] and more onto the Mother Nature type area because of the Indians and so forth joining in.  As my mother used to say – people asked her why she didn’t go to church.  She said, “I got the best church in the world.  Just walk outside and look at the mountains.” [laughter] God built the mountains before man built the church.

MG:  I can understand why she would say that.   Were both Sam and his wife Abigail a farming family as well?

CH:  Yeah, everything right down through Miller, George – everything was all farming.  Of course, they were lumbering the firewood and so forth like that, but they were mainly farmers.  My family was more on the cattle until – my father’s mother’s side was more on the sheep.  Then, of course, when Arthur – he was more of a lumberman than a farmer because he worked in the woods and helped Barnjum Mill and on the Narrow Gauge – he worked on that.  My father was a farmer and caretaker for the out-of-staters who lived up here that didn’t know how to farm.  We had to teach them, like I’m teaching his nephew now how to operate tractors and so forth.

MG:  Good skills to learn, no matter who you are, I guess.

CH:  Right.

MG:  Samuel Hinkley died when he was fifty.  I know that life expectancies weren’t very long.  Do you know what some of your family members perished from or what happened?

CH: I don’t know about Miller, Samuel, and George.  I take that back.  George, I think he died of a heart – I’m not sure, but I think it was related to sugar because they called it the sugar disease, not diabetes back then.  Eugene had problems with sugar too, but I don’t think he died of that.  Wesley, I think he died of just natural [causes].  My grandfather died [of] diabetes after losing both of his legs.  My father died of Alzheimer’s and diabetes.  My uncle and half-aunt both died of Alzheimer’s; that comes from my grandmother’s side on my father’s side because she was senile at the end of her life.

MG:  Who was that?

CH:  Lucinda?  And Nathan spent the last twenty years in a wheelchair.  That’s where my back problems come from, was that side.

MG:  What caused him to be in a wheelchair?

CH:  Back problems.

MG:  Back problems.

CH:  I’ve got his degenerative bone disease in the back.

MG:  Is your guess that he had the same thing?

CH:  Yep.  Because my grandmother died of a liver rupture.  But she had problems with her back, too.  And my grandfather, of course, died.  My father died of Alzheimer’s and diabetes, but he had back problems, too.  Then, of course, I’ve got back problems.  My brother says he’s got it, but he don’t show it.  My sister don’t show it.  But I also had a moose accident.  I fell off a barn roof.  I had a motorcycle accident.  So that didn’t help my back much.

MG:  Certainly not.  No.  So, George married Rachel Davenport.  Do you know where her family hailed from?

CH:  Not exactly.  I don’t even think the book even says where she’s from.  I think I would have sent it to you if it had said.

MG:  It sounded like a dignified last name.  I didn’t know if she came from a prominent family.

CH:  I think she came from a fairly prominent family because I think there was something about a land transfer business with her father.

MG:  Yeah, I’m always curious how people come together in these earlier generations because you can’t meet at a bar or online. [laughter] It sounds like it was maybe –

CH: [laughter] A lot of it was church-related or [the] grange, or things like that, places where they went to go dance and things like that.

MG:  Yeah.  He had been previously married to a woman, Louise Lake, and she passed away.  Do you know what happened to her?

CH:  I’m not sure what happened to her, but I know she was sickly.

MG:  When you’re living here in the 1800s and you’re sickly, what are your options?  Who treats you?  Does the doctor come door to door?

CH:  Yeah, the doctor came [and] visited.  But you had to take your chances because the doctor might not get here for weeks. [laughter] But you took your chances.  Other than that, it was just family.  Because my mother learned from my grandmother, her mother, and my father’s mother, if you scraped yourself, how to take care of it.  My half-uncle came down one time after going up to his camp here.  He was doing some sawing, he fell down, and pretty near cut his thumb off.  He come down, and my mother wrapped it up, pushed it in together, took a needle, and tried to stitch it the best she could.  When the doctor did finally arrive, they said that was one hell of a good job.  It saved his thumb, they said.

MG:  Yeah, you have to be very self-sufficient.  I was curious if there were any remedies you heard about or that were passed down.  I’ve heard about vinegar-soaked bandanas, things like that.

CH:  About the only one that we used around – of course, we had all the family remedies and so forth.  They told about mustard plasters on the chest.  But the one that we always used around here was hot water, vinegar and honey.  You take that, and you take it regularly.  My grandmother taught it to my mother, and she never applied it until I really started high school.  But when we started that, we went through – I’ll take that back.  It was eighth grade that we started using it.  Eighth grade, ninth grade, and all four years of high school, I never had a cold.  My father took it, and he went to the doctor one time for [an] injury on his tongue area.  They said, “When did you have your tonsils out?”  He said, “I never had them out.”  The only thing he can think of is that mixture pickled the tonsils right out.

MG:  Well, I’m going to start trying that.  I’ve got a daughter in preschool.  She’s bringing home every cold.

CH:  What the honey does – it eases the tang of the vinegar, but you want to drink it as hot as possible.  We never had any cold all them years.

MG:  Good tip.

CH:  Now, my brother, if he starts to feel like a cold’s coming, he’ll drink whiskey.  One shot of whiskey, he’s cured.  But if my brother-in-law or my sister [who] live with me – if they start getting one, I’ll start in that vinegar mixture again, and I won’t get it.

MG:  Was there sort of a rejection of modern conveniences and doctors and things like that in your family over the years?  Would you just prefer to take care of things on the home front?

CH:  No, you had to take care of it on the home front because the nearest doctor was eight miles away.  Then, when we got into high school, the nearest doctor was thirty miles away.  So you had to do something.

MG:  Would that have been in Farmington?

CH:  Yes.

MG:  Were there other accidents you heard about in your family over the years?

CH:  Not really.  My grandfather, of course, lost both his legs.  He fell off the lumber car one time.  He was buried under the lumber, and the crew had to pull him out.  Other than that, they listened to the old folks, and they learned from the old folks’ experiences that you don’t do that or you’re in trouble.

MG:  Did Louise and George have any children before she died?

CH:  Louise?  I think she had one, and then she died.  Then Rachel had all the others.

MG:  All the others were four more children?

CH:  Yep.

MG: Were they the family that first moved to the area where we are now?

CH:  What they call the Upper Village.  See, it’s the main village where we are.  This house is virtually the center of the village.  And then you went up over the hill.  It was always called the same village, but the reason they called it the Upper Village [was] because the farms stretched up onto a high hill, which was called Mecham Hill, and then it went down into Barnjum with the upper end of the Perham Stream.  But that’s why they called the farms up there the Upper Village, and the main village was down here.  He had a farm up there, and then Wesley had the same farm after George because George moved into the Welch place.  Wesley was up there, and then Eugene, of course, when he got of age, he went down to do that job which petered out after Arthur was born.  Arthur was one of three kids.  Last I knew, the only one left of his siblings’ line was Erwin III, and as far as I know, he has no kids either.

MG:  Did all the families in this area get along, or were there any Hatfield-McCoy situations?

CH:  No, there’s no Hatfield-McCoys.  There were a few incidents.  They did rob the post office up here one time.  That was my Hinkley side of my family.  The Wing side of my family was the post people. [laughter]

MG:  What happened?  Which generation was this?

CH:  It was Eugene’s generation, which would be my great-grandfather.  It was his cousin.  The diaries mentioned a big robbery at the post office – twenty-five cents.  Of course, twenty-five cents back then was a week’s wages.  But they got twenty-five cents, and they caught him.  The one that caught him was Carrie’s mother – not Carrie.  Carrie was the post-deliverer.  It was Lucinda that found out where he was and, of course, they arrested him.

MG:  What were the consequences for that robbery?

CH:  Nothing, just a slap on the hand. [laughter]

MG:  It must be hard to get away with things like that.

CH:  Oh, yeah.  Everybody knew everybody.  You couldn’t get away with nothing.

MG:  George and Rachel – were they the first in your family to be buried in the Byron Cemetery?

CH:  Yeah.  The other ones in the Byron Cemetery of the Hinkley line – my grandmother on my father’s side started being buried there about the same time.

MG:  How was it determined where to be buried?CH:  See, Miller and Samuel are over in the Dunham cemetery, over in the further part of Madrid because that’s where they were.  Then, the village ones here – they either was in this cemetery up here or out in the Byron Cemetery in Phillips, or they had a plot either out in Phillips or over in Madrid or somewhere, a family plot – ancestors’s plot.

MG:  Were most of the children of these families that we’ve discussed so far staying in the area or were some trying to go West, strike gold, and explore other options?

CH:  Some of the relatives did move out to North Dakota and so forth like that.  There’s a lot of them that went to North Dakota of the Hinkley family.  Other than that, they stayed right around here because, as I said, “Why leave what you got here?”

MG:  What was the prospect of North Dakota?  Were they seeking gold in the Badlands there?

CH:  No, it was farming.  The big land grants that they could get out there – wheat and so forth.  It turned out that that weather was a lot like this weather.

MG:  Wesley Eugene Hinkley was born to George and Rachel in 1856.  You mentioned he was the one that went back to Massachusetts for a bit.  What was the job there that you said petered out?

CH:  Not Wesley.  Eugene was.

MG:  I have Wesley Eugene Hinkley in my notes.

CH:  Wesley is Arthur’s, right?

MG:  I have George and Rachel’s first child was Wesley Eugene Hinkley.

CH:  Yeah.  His children were – I don’t think it was Arthur.  I think it was Eugene.

MG:  Eugene Arthur Hinkley.

CH:  Yeah, because they used Eugene instead of Wesley; he always went by Eugene.  The reason I [inaudible] up is because Arthur’s middle name is Wesley.

MG:  They don’t make it simple.

CH:  I know. [laughter] But he went down to do a manufacturing job and petered out.  Then they came back.

MG:  And when would that have been?

CH:  Arthur was two years old, I think.

MG:  Was the manufacturing job related to his wife, Addie Stroud?  She was from that area.  I wondered if it was her father’s business or something like that.

CH:  No, it was something to do with the lumber and shipping business, building the ship because they were contracting up here, that time period, for the hornbeam trees.  And the hornbeam trees are used for the big, tall mast because they’re pretty near as hard as a rock, the tree itself, and it’s long, straight.  They were harvesting it.  That’s how he got the option to get down there to do the manufacturing to form the trees to the mast.

MG: That must have been a big business, especially with the connections to the Cape.  When he came back, did he continue farming?

CH:  Yeah, he went back to farming just like everything.

MG: Were these farms the kinds of farms that would sustain the family, or were they selling milk and produce to the community?

CH:  They sustained themselves.  They sustained the community.  If there was any extra. they did – because Nathan and Lucinda and their daughter, Carrie, which was my grandmother, shipped chicken eggs to the Rangeley Inn up on the narrow-gauge railroad.  They shipped the wool from the sheep out to the Phillips wool mill.  But as for the meat, dairy, and that type, it was all virtually for use within the community because, as I said, my great grandfather and grandparents [had] sheep and chicken.  The mill owner who lived over here during my great-grandmother’s time raised hogs.  The one on top of the hill – there’s still a cellar hole up there – was a post office.  Before it was a post office, they raised beef cattle.  So if you wanted some pork, I want some beef, I’ll take a chicken – and the house over there between the house was connected through to the barn.  But in that section between the main house and the barn was what they called the milk house or the milk shed.  That’s where everybody brought their dairy milk down to get it separated because they had a cream separator, and they had a butter working table, and so forth.  The butter working table is an easier way to knead the butter to put it into the mold.  You didn’t have to use your hands; you could just use a paddle, an auger, to straighten it out.  Also, on the upper end of the house was what they called the ice shed, [where] they stored all the ice for the ice chests.

MG:  Is it through these diaries that you have that you’re learning about these practices?

CH:  Yeah.  Diaries and all the farm ledgers that I have.

MG:  What else have you learned from those diaries and ledgers?

CH:  I’ve learned all the kinds of weather that they used to have to deal with – the floods, the freshets, the heavy snows.  The snows, in this valley here, would last nine to ten months.  You’d have two to three months of growing stuff, and you had to supply yourself for the other months.  When I was seven years old, I woke up on my birthday, and there were two inches of snow here.

MG:  In August?

CH:  August 12th.  We were using snowmobiles to go to the top of Abraham [on] May 29th on snow and not hit any bare grounds. [laughter] You had very short summers.  When I was real young, we didn’t have any month that didn’t have a frost.  You had to cover everything up every month.  We could hardly get the corn ripe.  You couldn’t grow squash, couldn’t grow cucumbers, you couldn’t grow pumpkin.

MG:  Because of the frost?

CH:  Right.

MG:  So you have some pretty compelling firsthand evidence of how the climate is changing.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  I imagine there are a few fewer months of winter now.

CH:  Oh, yeah.  When I was growing up, we always put snow tires on by Halloween.  Of course, they’re all-season tires now, but you don’t even think about it until December.  But when I was growing up, come September, you was busting your butt trying to get everything in before the snow hit before Halloween. [laughter]

MG:  The summer is when you’re supposed to relax, but it must have been busy.

CH:  No, summer was hectic.  You rested the dark months, and you was busy the sunny days.

MG:  I feel like I should point out that it’s maybe sixty-five degrees out here today.  A very warm day in November.

CH:  Yeah, this valley here, as you come up over the hill, what is Conant Hill, the tarred hill – when I was growing up, you come up there, [and if] the windows were open, you could feel the air drop twenty degrees.  You can still feel it drop about ten.  We don’t have milkweed up here.  It’s too cold for it.  The gray squirrels are just starting to show up.  We never had any gray squirrels.  The stream here, Perham Stream, for the last three years has been very, very low.  My grandfather told me that his father said that if this stream goes dry, man is in trouble.

MG:  That’s your telltale sign.

CH:  Yes.

MG:  How’s it doing now?

CH:  We finally got it back up, but it was low this summer.  It’s been low the last three years.  It’s warmer now.  It used to be when I went out to go fishing when I was young, you step into water [and] you’d feel like you were stepping in an ice bucket.  Now you can go out, and you can feel it’s cold, but it’s not like an ice bucket anymore. [laughter]

MG:  In those diaries, would they talk about how they would pass the time?  I’m curious about what people did for fun, especially during the winter months.

CH:  Well, in winter months, of course, they tended the [animals].    That’s your daily job.  You have to attend [to] the animals first before – you fed the animals, you tended to them and made sure they were comfortable.  Then you fed yourself.  The men were mostly taking care of farming outside.  The women, of course, they’d do a lot of sewing, a lot of knitting.  They played a lot of board games.  Family get-togethers – like that.

MG:  Did any of those games get passed down?

CH:  Yeah.  I don’t know if anybody even knows the word Flinch anymore.  It’s a card game you used to play.  Flinch.  Canasta, of course.  The Canasta we play is not like what they play everywhere else, which I found out from my brother’s wife.  The way they play out there is deceitful.  The way we played it, it was a community thing.  They used to get together to make quilts.  I’ve got three or four friendship quilts and the village quilts and so forth.

MG:  What about meals and holidays?  How are they celebrated?

CH:  They [were] celebrated mainly with the family.  But once in a while, they would get together.  The village did hold community picnics, socials, and things like that.  But mainly, it was the families because the families were big families because you had to have [a big family] to operate the farms.  So there was a lot of feeding.

MG:  You mentioned one family lost a child in infancy.  Did that happen other times?

CH:  Oh, yeah.  There was a lot of that.  It averaged maybe half to a little more than half of the infants would die, even within the first five years.  There was diphtheria and bubonic plague and everything like that.  It was mainly because of how hard it was to get a doctor here.  You had your midwives, of course, and so forth.  But most of it was from labor.

MG:  Yes, I wondered if the remoteness of the area spared folks from exposure, but then it also probably kept them from treatment.

CH:  Right.  Both.

MG:  Was any family member impacted by the 1918 flu epidemic?

CH:  Yeah.  There [were] a lot of deaths.  In the graves, [there are] a lot of young people.  There’s a grave site over in what they call the Henderson area; it wiped out the whole family.  They’ve got a graveyard, and we’ve finally got access to be able to get to it, to investigate it, to map it out, and so forth.  But the whole family died.  I do know that, but not my line, but the Welches lost a lot of kids in the flu epidemic.  The Peters pretty near got wiped out.  The only reason they got it through is because the community pulled together and helped them.

MG:  Is that recorded in a diary somewhere?

CH:  Oh, yeah.  Diaries about going up and comforting them for months afterward.

MG:  That’s a blessing of a small town; everyone can stick together.

CH:  Yep.

MG:  Have you seen that change over the years?  Do you still feel that solidarity?

CH:  Yeah, I’ve seen a change for one big reason.  When I was growing up, my family was the only family up here.  All the others have moved in since.  Either that or they’re summer residents from New York City and Houston and so forth.  They come up for the summer, and that’s it.  But as for the community itself that was here, they either all moved out, or they all died.  When I was growing up, from my birth until 1980, my family was it up here.  We [were] the only ones up here.

MG:  What was your take on that?  Did you enjoy being the only family here?  Did you wish there were others?

CH:  I was never depressed, put it that way.  I’ve never been depressed in my whole life.

MG:  What’s your take on folks from away coming to this area?  Does it change things?

CH:  It does in some ways because it takes away – the ones moving in aren’t nature-orientated like the old village was.  They want to change things completely around, and they don’t want to go with nature.  They want to possess it virtually.  Some of them – they’ve come to realize that their ways of thinking have got to be changed to survive, which, to me, is the way it should have been.  But there’s some that come in here that have moved in here that took right into cooperating with nature.

MG:  So, adapting to the land instead of vice versa?

CH:  Right.  There’s two or three that are trying to be community-orientated and others that don’t want to talk to you at all.

MG:  Yeah.  Well, I think there’s something that must be unique about the folks that find Madrid as a place to vacation or spend their summer.  They must be at least drawn to the landscape here.

CH:  Yeah.  The main thing – they come in for the – well, I know when I opened up the birding trail, a few came in for the birds.  Then they realized what scenery there was in here.  Then the word got out.  Now a lot of people [are] coming in for the scenery.  But now, a lot of people have found out that I’m so knowledgeable about this whole area that they’re actually coming to listen to me.

MG: You’re a tourist attraction.

CH:  Right. [laughter]

MG:  I found the cemetery records for Byron Cemetery and saw that they were two Addie Hinkleys, and maybe it was just a glitch.  I saw Addy Strout and Addie J.  Are they the same person?

CH:  Two different people.  They both married Hinkleys, but two different ones.

MG:  Were they related?

CH:  No.

MG:  What do you know about Arthur Hinkley?

CH:  Arthur Hinkley was my grandfather.  He became diabetic in ’67.  He lost his first foot in ’69 – his right foot.  He lost his left foot – hold on.  He became diabetic in ’62.  He lost his left foot in ’63 or ’64, his right foot in ’65, his left leg in ’66, his other leg in the fall of that next year, and died because he never paid attention to his diabetes.

MG:  Did you get to know him?

CH:  Oh, yeah, he’s the one that taught me not to smoke.

MG:  Was he a smoker?

CH:  Oh, yeah, he was a smoker.  He rolled his own cigars.  He caught me out back of the barn when I was real young, and I had a cigarette in my hand.  He said, “Throw that damn thing away.”  He says, “You smoke this.”  He stuffed it in my mouth.  He lit it, and he says, “I want you to smoke in one drag.”  To his dying day, I could not get in the same room when he was lit up.  I had to leave.  I could not stand it.

MG:  Well, that was effective.

CH:  It kept me from cigarettes. [laughter]

MG:  Where did he live while you were growing up?

CH:  Lived here with us.

MG:  Right here?

CH:  I was the one that had to inject him with insulin.  So when I became a diabetic, they tried to teach me, and I was teaching them.

MG:  You had experience.

CH:  Right.

MG:  Arthur, your grandfather, was the one who served in World War I.

CH:  Yep.

MG:  Do you know anything about his service?  He was in the infantry you said.

CH:  Yeah, he was supply infantry.  He never went across.  He stayed in the United States.  His unit supplied the meals.  They cooked the meals and so forth, packaged them up, and sent them over on the ships to send them over.

MG:  But he was shoreside.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  Where was he stationed?

CH:  Out west.  I think it was Arizona.  I’m not sure.  But it was between Texas and California, somewhere in that area.  He always complained – I never knew it, but when he was at home, he was always complaining, “It’s God-dang hot out there.”

MG:  Well, there must have been an adventure for him to travel so far away from home.

CH:  That’s why they did it.  They wanted to get the servicemen accustomed – the ones out West were shipped up here to the naval station up here because they wanted to get them acclimatized to a different kind of climate.  You’re shipping all over the world; you don’t know what kind of climate you’re going to get into. [laughter]

MG:  Do you know where he did his training?

CH:  Out West.  It was out there in the same company.  I guess they did the training, and the service unit that was doing the cooking was virtually right there, too.

MG:  Did he share other stories with you about his childhood or his time in the Army?

CH:  He told other childhood stories.  He told the stories of the ones that he heard from his father about the old legends.  One was this whole valley was made by a glacier.  There’s rock right out here that’s got glacial scars right on it.  So you know it.  That’s why the water’s so cold.  Another story is this valley was made by a meteor.  As you walk around the area, you’ll see over towards Saddleback on the lower side, on the left side, there’s a plateau that goes out, and then it curves right into a half-moon shape.  That half-moon shape is actually three different nubbles positioned, and it’s in line with Abraham.  Abraham is pulverized on this side and solid ledge on the other side.  The Farmer Mountain is a younger mountain than Abraham, and there’s iron all through this valley.  The compasses don’t work right.  The story handed down to him [was] that the meteor come through and made this valley and pulverized the side of Abraham.  That’s why it’s so much iron; it’s so rich.  Another story is the rubble on Abraham.  The reason this stream is so ice cold all the time is because there’s so much snow and ice in them rocks that it never melts all summer long.  That’s why it’s so cold all the time. [laughter]

MG:  Well, what’s your theory?

CH:  I’m thinking that them stories had some truth to it because a guy with a metal detector went through the stream here, way back here, and went all the way out past the two fields, and there was continual buzz all the way through.  My whole family, my grandparents’ family, and my great-grandparents’ family have never had any iron problems in their blood.

MG:  Because the water is so mineral-rich?

CH:  Right.

MG:  Well, that’s interesting.  Any other local legends passed down?

CH:  Just the stories of the Indians that used to live here and the culture they had here, how they grew the plants, and the trading trail and so forth.  Other than that was my grandmother was the first one to see the first white-tailed deer.

MG:  Tell me about that.

CH:  The white-tailed deer was never here; it was elks before.  The elks disappeared before my grandmother was born.  But when she was seven years old, she saw the first white-tailed deer that moved in the area.  There used to be wolves here.  Now they’ve gone, and they’ve gone in my lifetime because there used to be wolves.  Then there’s the wolves and coydog mix.  Now it’s coydog and coyote, and the wolves have moved on.  That was just in the last five years.  We never had any gray squirrels until the last two years.  As I said, the milkweed didn’t grow.  We used to have the birches.  [There] used to be a lot more white birches.  A lot of gray birches now but they’re dying.  They’re losing the leaves before the rest of them are.  That’s because of climate change in my time.  Other than that, the legend was that all these canopy elms around here – the archaeologist researched – they can’t find any record of a canopy elm.

MG:  A canopy elm?

CH:  Yeah.  That’s that tree right down there.  It’s like an elm.  It is an elm, but unlike most elms that branch out like a regular tree, this goes right up and blossoms out on top and spreads out on top like an umbrella type.  There was twenty-eight of them here in this village, and everyone died of old age, not the elm disease.

MG:  What’s the significance of these canopy elms?

CH:  I don’t know.  It’s just that they was here.  The closest it ever resembled is the American elm, but the American elms don’t really look like these.  There’s a stump out here with a rosebush.  It was cut in 2003.  The smallest one went up forty feet, and then it split into four trunks.  The smallest trunk was 132 years old.

MG:  Oh, my gosh.

CH:  And the one up in intervale they had up here, they had it, and my grandmother – of course, she died before I was born, but my grandfather said my grandmother said that her grandfather remembers that tree up there just being a sprout.  So, that’s four or five generations back.  That’s almost 200 years.

MG:  Yeah, it’s an interesting way to measure time and historical change.  When you were talking about the deer, where were they coming from?

CH:  They come in from the South.  They come up.  My Grandmother Carrie told my grandfather and my father that Lucinda, her mother, was the last one to see the elk.

MG:  They’ve migrated north?

CH:  Yeah, they migrate north, and then the white-tail deer moved up.  That’s just due to climate change and so forth.  And the trout – the stories were that they could go up on the intervale here for a weekend and come back with four hundred trout.  The salmon organization in Maine was trying to get this back into salmon.  Well, I was looking at a diary, and it didn’t say trout in the diary; it said trout and salmon.  So, they took that back to the state to prove that this stream originally had salmon in it.  When I was growing up, it was just brown trout.  But now it’s mostly – it was brook trout.  Now it’s mostly brown trout.  So it has changed the climate.

MG:  What kinds of fishing techniques were they employing to catch four hundred in a weekend?

CH:  Worm.

MG:  Wow.

CH:  That’s how abundant it was up in here.  Because they’d go up to the intervale here; there’s the stream, and then there was the beaver pond in back of the stream on one edge, behind the stream.  They’d go up there, and it was just abundant.  Beavers was here.  My half-cousin could spin a yarn about a beaver the same way that my great-grandfather, Nathan D Wing – he was alive when my half-cousin was just a young boy.  He learned it.  He had the beavers virtually twitching the logs with a rope and everything else, building the dam and construction.  Had one beaver there standing, measuring out this, and measuring out that.

MG:  They had hard hats on.

CH:  Yeah. [laughter] But there is the story of the Peters.  Peter Adley.  We always called [them] the Peter Family, but his name was Adley.  He was a horse whisperer.  He could go up and speak to a horse, and the horse would do anything he asked.  The Welches used to have a horse that was very ornery.  They couldn’t get the horse to do anything.  He’d go up, just whisper [to] it, and the horse would start doing whatever he wanted to do.

MG:  Was that a service he offered?  Was he paid to do that?

CH:  No, he just did it.  Any animal – he could do that.  Just go up and speak to it.  It would do whatever it was told.  It would last maybe a month or so.  And then he’d have to come up and calm it down again.  A lot of the animals – when you’re milking a cow, they like to kick and thrash and so forth.  He could go speak to them, then you could milk them for a week or so with no problem.

MG:  What do you think accounts for that?  Was it what he was saying, how he was saying it, or who he was?

CH:  I think it was who he was because it’s just like these people that can dowse for water.  It’s their anatomy that they can get connected with the animals.

MG:  Do you feel more in tune with nature being so embedded in it?

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  How does that manifest itself?

CH:  It’s just that you virtually know how the animal’s going to react and so forth.  I can do it in some aspects, in some ways, because I will have hummingbirds – when I take feeders out, they’ll set on the feeders and ride out with it, or a squirrel will come and – taking the feeder out, he’ll come and sit in my hand.  I go walk out and hang it up.  Then, he’d go into the feeder.  I’ve had these people up here, the out-of-staters from New York – they had an accountant up here when I was – I think I was twenty-six.  They had a dog.  They was at the building up there, and we was haying the fields.  I started walking up through the field, and the dog come barreling right out, and the woman comes barreling right out behind and said, “No, no,” like that.  The dog come down full blast, and he opened his mouth like that, but he never shut it.

MG:  Right on your arm.

CH:  Right on my arm.  She comes down.  She said, “It bite you?”  I said, “No.”  She said, “That dog has bit five people.”  I said, “Well, I ain’t scared of it.  It knows it.”  There was a woman over in Salem that had a dog, and she wanted me to have it because it was older than what she could take care of.  She said, “It’ll have a long life.”  I was there for a little while.  She said, “I want you to get accustomed to it.  They will have to be accustomed to [you].”  The dog come right up and sat in my lap.  Jumped right up in the lap.  She said, “Oh, I guess, that’s no problem.”  When I was taking it home, I said, “You know this dog’s not going to last very long.”  She said, “Oh, yeah, he’s got seven years of his life.”  I says, “He ain’t going to last very long.”  A year and a half, he died from a heart attack.

MG:  Well, dogs have such a strong sense of people.

CH:  Yeah.  Well, it’s that connection that Peter Adley [had].  He had more of a connection than most people.  He could just go up and speak to any animal.  They would cooperate with him.

MG:  I wonder if there are many people like Peter Adley today.

CH:  They tell about that dog whisperer on TV, but I don’t think he has half of what that guy can do.  There’s a few.  They’re scattered around, but they’re around.

MG:  Getting back to your family tree, Arthur Hinkley married the widow Carrie Wing McLaughlin?

CH:  Yep.

MG:  Her first husband died from pneumonia.

CH:  He had pneumonia.

MG:  Did they have children before he died?

CH:  Yes, that was my father’s – Victor McLaughlin was the oldest.  That was my half-uncle.  And Amber was the younger daughter.  They were before my father.  After Ralph died, she married my grandfather, and then they had my father.  They both died of Alzheimer’s, too, just like my father did.  The only difference between my father and my half-aunt and uncle, my half-aunt and half-uncle kept running away.  You had to chase them down.  My half-aunt died in bed.  She said that she was going to go to the old farm, and then before she got out of bed, she died.  My half-uncle froze to death on one of his wanderings away.

MG:  Due to their Alzheimer’s, they were wandering?

CH:  Yeah.  My father did not.  In fact, he stopped driving because of Alzheimer’s.  He said, “I’m going to stop driving because I can’t remember how to get home.”  That’s the way he was.  He would not get out of this house at all.

MG:  As you get older, is it something you’re concerned about?

CH:  Not as much as I’m concerned that my sister and my brother are going to have it because of the way they act.  But I think the main reason that I’m not going to is because I’m more in tune with my mother, always learning, always getting information.  My sister, all she does is – she stopped cooking.  All she does is just make the meals and so forth.  She used to be a big baker.  She, like my mother, used to be a big baker.  She don’t know how to sew anymore.  My brother, every time he comes up, he’s almost forgot everything that he knew when he was growing up.  I asked him the other day about milking a cow.  He says, “How do we do that?”  You’d sit down, you get the cow fed, you rub her side, and so forth, so you can sit down and milk, so she won’t bother you.” [laughter]

MG:  And your role is as the family’s memory keeper.

CH:  Well, I think that’s why I keep learning.  I know I don’t know that much.  I know there’s a lot more to the history here that I don’t even know.  But I think that’s what keeps me going.

MG:  What are the black boxes for you?  What’s unknown about the history here that you’re more curious about?

CH:  Well, the diaries I’ve got only go back to the late 1800s.  But there’s another hundred and fifty years of history in this area that there’s no record of, and that’s what I’ll keep trying to find out.  Now, the historical society did a calendar for the last two years in this area on the village and so forth, how it was made.  Now, they’re doing the Reeds Mill area.  I just found out about three of the farms way up on Potato Hill that Madrid didn’t even know about – the historical society.  So I’ve found out information, and the woman – I just found her name and called her two days ago, and I’m going to meet with her.  She is a great-grandchild of one of them up there.

MG:  We’ll have to do an addendum after what you learn.  I imagine keeping a diary was standard practice, especially for living on a farm.  But did you learn anything in those diaries that maybe you were uncomfortable learning or was private?

CH:  I learned my grandmother was quite a hot woman around here.

MG:  What do you mean?

CH:  She was running around all over the place with everybody.

MG:  Oh, yeah?  She was having other relationships.

CH:  She didn’t have other relations, but she was –

MG:  Courted?

CH:  She courted.  She was the one that instigated a lot of the relationships.  A lot of them recorded in the diaries, I found out that they stayed the night at her place a lot of times. [laughter]

MG:  This was Carrie Wing.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  That’s not unusual now.  But was it frowned upon then?

CH:  I don’t know if it was frowned down, but it sure was racy in the dairies.  There was one telling about – they was hanging the May basket on somebody, a man.  Her and Jenny Wheeler, which was the postmistress, was hanging a May basket on a guy, one of the Welches.  When they hung it on him, they hung it on his back.  They hooked it to his back on his belt.  They told about [how] they were running away and so forth.  “And that night,” she says, “he spent the night.” [laughter]

MG:  Okay.  Can you say for the record what the significance of a May basket is?

CH:  A May basket was – originally, a May basket was supposed to be a greeting to a person.  It’s almost like a Valentine, but not quite.  But it was also a joke at the same time.  Then, there was the social of the maypole and so forth, dancing and get together like that.  Then it became more of a – the basket became more of a joke.  And then the last I remember, the May basket was – you hung a basket on the teacher.  You gave them a May basket and so forth of fruit.  It’s more of an, “I like you,” sort of, but it wasn’t really a “love you” type.

MG:  These stories must have been from before she was married to either Ralph or your grandfather.

CH:  Yep.  In a week’s time, there was three to four different guys. [laughter] So, she got around.

MG:  Well, I wonder how the rest of the townsfolk felt about that.  Do you think they knew?

CH:  I guarantee they knew. [laughter] You didn’t keep secrets around this time.

MG:  Is there any other sort of local lore like that?  Any figures are stories that stand out?  You mentioned some of the legends and theories about how the land was formed.

CH:  Yeah, that was the theory of land and so forth.  Other than that, it was just the farming.  There was one time that the Welches claimed that their horses could go faster than Nathan’s horses, and they had a race here.  It was a tie. [laughter] Other than that, the only other legend – well, this was actually a fact – was when I was a young boy, an airplane fuel tank fell off and landed up here.  It was full of fuel, and it burst, but it didn’t ignite, and it just evaporated.  It killed all the trees in the area

MG:  In how large a radius?

CH:  It was over six-hundred feet wide.

MG:  Oh, wow.  Was the plane okay?

CH:  I have no idea.  All I know is we was up in the field mowing, and my father looked up, and then he mentioned to us.  We all saw this thing tumbling off the plane, and the plane veered off sideways.  As far as I know, the report was that the plane landed safely.  But that was in my lifetime that that happened

MG:  It sounds like it had a real effect on the area around it.

CH:  Well, it was all in the woods area and nowhere near mills or anything.  But it was a big deal because we had newspaper people up here, and people come in trying to find it and take a piece of souvenir metal and so forth.

MG:  That reminds me to ask about how people were getting the news during the early 19th century and maybe in the 20th century.

CH:  Post office.  Because they had the post office service.  They went down to the railroad to pick up the mail and so forth.  The newspapers and letters to their friends.  Carrie had, I would say, at least seventy-five correspondences she had with people.  Some of them out West.  Some of them down to Florida.

MG:  Were these relatives?

CH:  Relatives.  Friends.  She sent a letter to, and they sent stuff back.

MG:  Do you have those letters?

CH:  I have quite a few of them.  Yeah.

MG:  Oh, interesting.  What were some of the topics in the letters?

CH:  Carrie was into the family reunions a lot.  Because of the Wing Family, that’s how a lot of correspondence got done because a lot of times, people out West with the same name would come to the reunions and things like that.  That’s how she coordinated.  They’d usually have how their life was, how many kids, how the weather was, what they were doing, and then they’d have a page of genealogy with it.

MG:  It sounds like you come from a family of good record-keepers.

CH:  Yes.  My great-grandmother, Lucinda, was a diary keeper.  Carrie, my grandmother, was a diary keeper.  My mother was a diary keeper.  And I’m a diary keeper.

MG:  What do you write about in your diary?

CH:  The weather.  All the birds [and] animals that I see.  The temperatures.  Whatever happens.  Today, I’ll tell you, “Molly come up and interviewed me.”

MG:  Well, it’ll be nice to be in the record for the future in that way too.

CH:  Yeah. [laughter]

MG:  Did Arthur and Carrie meet after the war?

CH:  Yeah.  Well, met before the war, too.

MG:  They knew each other.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  What year were they married?

CH:  I can’t remember.

MG:  I have 1920 here.

CH:  It probably was.  I think it was.  Yeah, it was three years before my father was born.  He was born in ’23.

MG:  Your father is Wilson Hinkley.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  I was curious where the family names come from.  I don’t have the other siblings’ names, but were names passed down?  How were people choosing to name their kids?

CH:  Most of the names were passed down.  I know Carrie was into a lot of passing down names.  She’d go way back in the records to find a person that was related.  Wilson was actually named for Wilson Hinkley back in England.  Those are a sibling of one of my line that was named Wilson, and that’s how she named my father.  Victor was on the McLaughlin side, back.  Amber was on Lucinda’s side.  One of her sisters was Amber.

MG:  What do you know about your father’s early childhood?

CH:  He was a mechanic.  He loved to tinker on things all the time.  He was born here.  He was in farming like his parents.  But he’d tinker on all the machinery all the time, keep it running.  About the time my mother showed up and married – he went down and harvested apples down in Wilton.  That’s how he met her for a while.  Then he got married.  Shortly after they got married, he bought two Dodge touring cars for five dollars together.  They were just a wreck.  [He] chopped them and made them into stump jumpers or tractors.  That’s how I learned to drive was on one of them.  I have one of them sitting down here.  The other one’s in Madrid.  The guy fixed it up and got it running.

MG:  Oh my gosh.

CH:  He tinkered on lawnmowers, tractors, and things like, and other farm machines.  He was always tinkering.  I never got into the tinkering, the mechanic part, but I was good at mathematics.  If there was anything that had to be done with carpentry, I could just look at it and figure out how to do it.  My father one time told me – we had cows out here where the shop is now, and it was starting to fall down and so forth.  He says, “We’re going to have to build this.  Buy some lumber and this and that and everything to fix it because the cows are going to need something for this winter.”  I said, “Okay.”  Three weeks later, he went out.  He come back in.  My mother told me he said, “I don’t know how the hell he did it.  He didn’t have anything to do with it, and he built a stable for the cows.”

MG:  Where do you think that skill came from?  Is it innate?  Did you learn it from somebody?

CH:  I don’t know where I learned it from.  I don’t know of anybody in my family that was a [carpenter].  My father could see an engine and know what was wrong with it and fix it.  I can see something that needs to be built, and I can do it.

MG:  I wish I had that skill.  You mentioned the cars.  When did cars first come to this area?  When did your family first purchase a car?

CH:  My family purchased their first car – well, my father purchased – in ’31, he bought his first vehicle.  Of course, they was all used vehicles and all the way through.  In fact, the first new vehicle I just bought [was] this year, a brand-new vehicle.  Other than that, it was used ones.  But as for the vehicles coming in here, the first vehicle was in ’27.

MG:  Do you remember what kind of car that was?

CH:  It was a DeSoto.

MG:  I can’t picture a DeSoto.

CH:  It’s one that’s long gone, long dead.  It would be like – it’s a combination of them red pickups the have for Christmas and the Model T.  It’s halfway between that in style.

MG:  Okay.  Before that, were folks getting around with horse and carriage?

CH:  Yep.  Horse and carriage.  Horse wagon.  Sleigh.

MG:  Do you know if there was resistance to cars?

CH:  No, there was excitement to it.  The closest vehicle you could get to purchase, you had to go to Lewiston.  So, it was a long time before it got up here. [laughter]

MG:  Your father was maybe seven or eight years old when the Depression hit.  Do you know how people were impacted in this area?

CH:  Ration tickets.  My father was a – I can’t remember the word they used.  He was exempt from the service because he was the only son of a farmer.  That’s why you’re exempt.  It’s the youngest or the only.  Other than that, the only aspect that my father and mother said was gasoline.  Other than that, it was just a normal life.

MG:  He was about eighteen years old when World War II started.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  Was his family relieved that he didn’t have to serve?

CH:  It was to my grandfather.  It was a real relief.  But I don’t think it affected him either way, really.  He was very pro-[America].  They supported it.  A lot of the food and rubber from the tires and so forth, they sent out to service, so they would go into the service – donated that.  They went without vehicles as much as possible to conserve.

MG:  I had asked about the Depression.  Then I was thinking about some of the efforts during the Depression era, like the WPA [Works Progress Administration] and the Civilian Conservation Corps.  Did they come to this area?  Were there opportunities here?

CH:  No, not really any opportunities because it was just farms, that’s all.  There was nothing for them to construct, really, because the railroad had already gone out.

MG:  Tell me a little bit about your mother, her life, and how she met your father.

CH:  My grandfather was a worker at Foster’s mill.  They come from Washington County originally.  They didn’t own a farm.  They was tenant farmers is what they were, and they tended to other people’s farms, animals.  Then they moved to Fairfield, where she was born – Fairfield Center – and then they moved to Wilton.  My grandfather worked in the dairy, dairy farming for an apple orchard farm.  She went through to the second year of high school.  That was it.  She worked at Foster’s manufacturing, making toothpicks.  She virtually met my father by my father coming down working on that apple farm.  Then they went to dances and things like that.  They got married in Wilton, and then she moved up here and fell in love with land just like my father had.

MG:  She seemed well-suited for this kind of life.

CH:  She was virtually a homemaker.  She knew how to sew.  She knew how to cook.  She was a very good cook.  She was a very good sewer.  She was a rugged woman.  She was well-built, heavy-built woman.  She wasn’t fat.  She just was heavy-built.  She could throw an eighty-pound bale of hay [with] no problem.

MG:  She sounds hearty.

CH:  Yeah.  Right.

MG:  You were talking earlier about how we’re losing farming skills.  I think we’re also losing some of those skills that it sounds like she had.

CH:  Oh, yeah.  She taught me how to cook when I was nine years old.  She taught me how to sew when I was eleven.  I made a leather vest for myself when I was twelve years old.  Now my sister’s completely forgot how.  So, I’ve got this sewing machine here, which was almost the first sewing machine in the village.  It’s all preserved.  She used this a lot.  I’ve used it.  I’ve got anothing sewing machine in there.  This one is going out into the museum, now that I got the museum weatherized.

MG:  The museum here?

CH:  Yes.

MG:  Did your father finish high school?

CH:  No.  He didn’t even go to high school.  He finished eighth grade, and that was it.

MG:  Was that so he could help out on the farm?

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  You said your mother taught you how to cook when you were –

CH:  Nine years old.

MG:  Nine years old.  What kinds of things would you cook together?

CH:  Homemade bread.  The reason she told me – she said, “If you’re going to stand here and look at that batter all the time I’m making this stuff, you’re going to make it yourself.”  So I started making it.  I can make pies, cakes, cookies, homemade bread – just everything.  I make my own pizza shells.

MG:  From scratch.

CH:  Yep.  Make lasagna from scratch.  Everything.

MG:  That sounds good.

CH:  Make doughnuts all the time.

MG:  We were talking a bit about your parents.  I was just curious if you know how their early married life unfolded.

CH:  Virtually, they were just here doing the farm and so forth.  As I said, my brother and sister were born while they was living over on the other side, and my grandmother and grandfather were over here.  Then, when my grandmother died, they moved over here to take care of my grandfather, and then I was born.

MG:  Tell me about each of your siblings, their names, when they were born, and a little bit about how their lives unfolded.

CH:  Belinda, my sister, was born in ’53.  She grew up here, of course, with us too.  She had busted her collarbone, falling down the stairs.  She had hepatitis when she was young.  Then she went and took care of an old woman over towards Kingfield.  Then married a man, and they moved to Farmington and then to Nashua, New Hampshire.  She was a security guide.  Then they got divorced, and she married a trucker, a long-haul trucker.  They moved back up to Millinocket and two or three places in eastern Maine, then out to North Dakota, and down to Florida, and back and forth until he became disabled from diabetes.  Then, they moved back here with me.

MG:  Did she continue working throughout her life?

CH:  No, just that one time [when she] was a security guard.  Other than that, she didn’t.

MG:  Was her first husband a Dunham?

CH:  Yeah, Elton Dunham.

MG.  That’s a common name in this area.

CH:  Yeah.  But he didn’t come from the Madrid area.  He came from, I think, the Massachusetts area.

MG:  A different Dunham line.  What about your brother?

CH:  My brother, Kendall Hinkley, grew up on the farm like me until after high school.  When I got a job in the shoe mill, three years later, he got a job at the sawmill.  And then, he worked at different sawmills until he retired.  He’s living in Jay.  But he never wanted to go – he keeps saying he wants to go back to farming, but he never will because he don’t like it.  Never liked it in the first place.  He’s married to Barbara, and she had a son from another marriage.  They’re retired and virtually taking care of her son’s kids now.

MG:  What are some of your earliest memories from growing up in this area?

CH:  As I said before, waking on my birthday with two inches of snow.  The earliest memory is laying in the back of my father’s dump truck and going up to a giant rock in Phillips.  We’re doing it at night, and I was watching the stars and the trees go by.

MG:  Why were you going to this rock in Phillips?

CH:  Because the guy that used to live up here above us from out of state – he owned property up there, and he wanted some trees cleared.  For some reason, they left some equipment up there, and they had to go get it that night. [laughter]

MG:  Can you tell me a little about the house we’re in now, which is where you grew up?  Tell me about each of the rooms and their purposes.  I’m also curious about the history of the home.

CH:  The farm, as I said, was the mill owner’s place after they built – the second owner of the mill built this place.  He raised hogs in the barn.  There’s a big barn.  Right now, part of it is the museum for the Old Village Museum.  That is the big barn.  The barn closest to the main house is the carriage barn, and that was used for hay and to keep the animals in.  The big barn was the hog barn, too.  Then there was the woodshed and the alcove, which now is my brother-in-law’s and sister’s bedroom and dining room.  Then, there’s the kitchen which used to be lower than it is now because it had to step into where we are here in the living room.  This used to be the dining room because there was no dining room out there.  The pantry has always been the pantry.  The cellar has always been the cellar.  The bathroom used to be my bedroom when I got older, and my bedroom now was my parent’s bedroom.  But when I was really young, it was my brothers and my bedroom, and my sister was upstairs.  And my workroom, which has got the bay window on it was always the living room.  When we was young, that was my parent’s bedroom.  The stairway was rearranged because it used to come straight down, didn’t come over this way, and they had a lot higher steps on it.  So it was harder to get up than it is now.

MG:  Was there an outhouse previously?

CH:  Oh, yeah.  At the end of the shed next to the carriage barn, there used to be an outhouse.  That’s where we went to the bathroom.  You had to walk out in the cold to go to the bathroom.  There’s an outhouse between the two barns now.  Just a backup.  Of course, it still brings back memories. [laughter]

MG:  Tell me how it works.  I have a five-year-old.  I can’t imagine her going outside by herself.  Would you go by yourself?

CH:  Oh, yeah.  Well, the outhouse we used to have had two holes.  So you could use two holes.  But you’d walk out, sit down, go to the bathroom.  You had your toilet paper and do your business like you do now.  But you didn’t have to flush it.

MG:  When did you get a bathroom?

CH:  Got a bathroom in – I was born in 1958 – got a bathroom in 2001.

MG:  Oh, wow.

CH:  I used an outhouse a long [time].

MG:  That might be a record.  Why did you get a bathroom at that point?

CH:  Because Community Action had enough money to build a bathroom.

MG:  Oh, good.

CH:  That’s the only way we could afford it because we couldn’t afford it otherwise.  When my family was growing up, the yearly income for the family was eight thousand dollars – the year.

MG:  Where was that income coming from?

CH:  The next-door neighbors.

MG:  Caretaking.

CH:  Taking care of the out-of-stater’s properties, mowing lawns, and so forth.  We got just eight thousand dollars for the five of us for the year.  Other than that, it was self-sufficient.  We had the cows for the milk.  We had chickens for the eggs.  When the cow got old, you slaughtered it, and you had the meat and a couple of pigs once in a while.  Had your garden.  You made sure you had enough food for over a year, so you wouldn’t have to worry.

MG:  Were there any lean years or tough times that you remember?

CH:  No, because you always had supply to go.  There were years that the crops didn’t do that great.  And there were years it was hard to keep animals because of the cold weather.  Because the barns weren’t heated.  Just the animal heat kept them warm in the barn.  A lot of times we had to put two cows together in a stall, so the cold nights, their body heat would heat each other.

MG:  How did you heat the home?

CH:  We heated the home with wood and kerosene.  We had three wood stoves.  I think it was my senior year when I was seventeen years old; there was a week we had forty-five below for over a week.  That was day temperature, not night temperature.  We had closed up all that side of the house, and we was all bunked in the living room here.  We moved the dining room table into the kitchen and had a kerosene heater there and a wood stove there to keep us warm.

MG:  And still have to go to the outhouse?

CH:  Oh, yeah.  Still had to go to the outhouse.  You went out with a winter coat on and everything else you could think of.

MG:  About how old were you when that happened?

CH:  Well, I was seventeen.  It was my senior year.  I graduated when I was seventeen years old.  I graduated with credits so I could be a sophomore in college if I wanted to.

MG:  But you didn’t go on to college.

CH:  No, because I had three teachers that said I didn’t need to.  They said you didn’t have to go to college because you could survive and manage the way you are.  You had enough knowledge to do it.

MG:  You said it was 1972 when your home finally got electricity.  What accounted for getting electricity in the first place?  Was it the poles going in?

CH:  No, the neighbors had electricity before.  My father just said, “Hell, we might as well put it in.”  CMP [Central Maine Power], at that time, would put a pole in free if you needed it.  Now you have to buy the poles if you need them.  My father decided to finally do it.  That was back when they could – as I said, the poles are free.  That’s another interesting story.  When they went to put the pole in, they dug with the augers.  They could only go down to two feet everywhere they tried.  My father come out, and he says, “What are you trying to do?”  “We’re trying to put a pole in.”  He said, “You can’t put a pole in here.  There’s only three rocks.”  He says, “There’s rock out back.”  He pointed to the big iron rock out there, the rock out here that’s got scarring on it.  He said, “And that big rock down there in the stream.”  They kept going and going and going.  Everywhere, about two, three feet down, they’d hammer, and they hit a rock.  Finally, where the pole is setting right now, they brought the auger up, and there was a rock about the size of the pole.  They took a crowbar and popped it out.  There were three rocks angled just like my father said.  They said, “You’re right,” and they stuck the pole right down in that hole.

MG:  It sounds like you both have just real intimate knowledge of the land, its layout, and its makeup.

CH:  When you plant a garden, you got to know where to plant the garden.  You got to know the soil, the condition it’s going to be.  When they dug the well – finally dug the well – we always used river water, piped it in, or went with buckets [to] get it.  But when they finally dug the well in 2002, they was going to dig it, and they would come up and dowse it and so forth.  They took the things.  I said, “Try it right here.”  He did.  He says, “You got three veins here.”  I says, “I know.”  He says, “How do you know?”  I said, “Because I can see the lines of the old cellar holes that used to be around here.  They dug down.  They dug it out.  There’s a five-time reservoir the size of the tiles – five times more.  So I’ve got a good reservoir.  Neighbor come down [and] said there wasn’t going to be water in it.  You could just see it start [to] trickle out.  The next morning, the thing was chuck-full.  They put the rocks in.  They covered it up.  They put the tiles in – everything.  They never had to filter the water.  It was that clean.  Then, they started ditching for the pipe.  He said, “Why’d you have it so far over that way?”  I said, “Because that’s the only way you’re going to get to the cellar.”  He said, “What do you mean?”  I said, “You go ahead.”  They started digging.  They dug through, and they hit the very edge of the ledge that went up over the hill.  They went just by it.  He said, “You know the land.”  I said, “Yeah, you kind of have to.”

MG:  How did life change when you got electricity here?  Did it change?

CH:  Yeah, it made it a lot easier.  Stayed up more at night.  Because before, you went to bed.  When it was dark, you went to bed.  Your candles don’t last very long. [laughter] Kerosene lights don’t last very long either.  It slowly changed the heating over.  Now I’ve got a heat pump and so forth.  Other than that, it’s a heater because of my back; I can’t go out and split wood like I used to.

MG:  Did your family get a TV at any point?

CH:  Yeah, we got a TV.  We had a TV before we had electricity.  We had a battery-operated TV, by the car battery.  We hooked it up.  We could watch it three hours a night, and that was it because we couldn’t run the battery down dead. [laughter]

MG:  What would you watch?

CH:  It was always family.  Everybody was together, sitting on the couch watching.  We watched Gunsmoke and a lot of the old Westerns, [The High] Chaparral, and things like that.  We watched a lot of comedy shows, Andy Griffith [Show] and things like that.  We always watched the news.

MG:  That was my next question.  Did you have this battery-operated TV during the Vietnam War?  In the late 1960s?

CH:  No.  It was after that.  Wasn’t until probably ’69, ’70, we got the battery-operated TV.  That’s one reason we decided to go to electricity.  Dad said, “I don’t want to keep running the battery down.”  Plus, that made it a lot easier because you got the electricity; you could have a water pump.  So, didn’t have to go haul the water.

MG:  That must have been a big chore.

CH:  Yeah, it was a big chore because you had animals you had to water.

MG:  Was that your chore to do on the farm?

CH:  It was one of the chores.  You had chores the moment you got up.  We got up.  We had chores from 4:30 [AM] until school.  As soon as you got back from school, you had chores until bedtime.

MG:  Walk me through a typical day starting with getting up at 4:30 AM.

CH:  A typical day, you’re getting up at 4:30, you get dressed, you went out to the outhouse, and then you went out and tended [to] the animals.  You fed the animals, you cleaned behind the animals, you wiped the animals down, washed them down if you had to, calm them down, rub them like you pet a dog.  You had to pet the cows just to calm them down.  So you could sit down and milk by hand – not machine – by hand.  You put your hand on them teats.  If the cow didn’t like it, you aren’t going to get much. [laughter] Either that or you’re going across the barn floor.  But you do that.  Then you go in.  Then you’d eat your meal.  You cook your meal – breakfast and so forth and have a big meal, and then you’d get ready for school.  During the summer, when there’s no school, as soon as you got done the meal, you went out and started in on the hayfields or cutting wood or whatever because you had to cut the wood for the winter.  Plus, you had to go out, and in the Spring, you have to cultivate the fields and so forth and plant the garden.  Then in the fall, you’d have to harvest it all, and all this time, you’d have to be sawing wood for the winter, too.  Then you get home from school, and then you get the cows in from the fields, and you’d hook them up, feed them, pat them down, rub them down, you sit down, and milk again.  Then make sure that they had enough – when you get done the milk, then you’d make sure they had enough feed and enough bedding for the night.  By then, it was about eight, nine o’clock at night anyway.

MG:  A really full day.

CH:  It was always a full day.  There was no time to worry or stew or complain, “I’m bored.”  There’s plenty out there to do.

MG: How did you feel about this kind of work?  Did you wish you were doing something else, or did you enjoy the hard work?

CH:  I enjoyed it.  It kept me healthy.  Kept me going.  [I’d] go to school; kids would say, “It’s so boring at night.”  I said, “How?  Why?”  I got ribbed because we was the only ones that had cows in the school.  All the other school kids didn’t have any.  There was one other.  My fourth cousin, Mark Hinkley, worked on the farm.  He didn’t live on a farm, but he worked on a farm, so he knew what it was.  But all the others, we called them town folks; they didn’t know anything about it.  Of course, being around cows, you’re going to have the smell of a farm.  So, we got ribbed all the time.  Finally, in high school, the one guy [who] was at me all the time – they were always at me anyways.  I got fed up with it.  Because they were saying, “Here comes the cowboy.  Here comes the cowboy.  Here comes the cowboy.”  I walked up and said, “What the hell are you, a cowgirl?”  He got so pissed and mad.  He was getting ready to attack me, and seven guys stopped him.  They said, “He’s right.  We’re either a cowboy or cowgirl.” [laughter]

MG:  That’s what it comes down to.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  You put something in your pre-interview notes about how these kids wouldn’t last a day in your shoes.

CH:  No, they wouldn’t because they couldn’t handle it.  We had one guy come up here from – well, my friend had a camp up here.  They come up here all the time.  He still comes up.  He talks with me all the time.  I was up there helping him cut somewhat we call widow-makers, the dangerous trees that are going to fall and destroy something or hit somebody.  We was getting them down because they’re busted off or half busted off.  He used to come up, and he came up with a friend that was his neighbor.  The guy came up here and looked.  He says, “How the hell can they do that?”  I said, “We do it all the time.”  It was the fall, and we had an apple tree out front here.  My friend said, “I’d like to go feed the Hereford.”  I said, “Okay,” and we went to feed the [Hereford].  Took the apple out, and we stood at the road next to the fence.  The Hereford was clear on the other side of the field.  The guy says, “How are you going to feed the Hereford?  The Hereford’s clear over there.”  I said, “Just like this.”  I held the apple out and never said a word.  Pretty soon, the Hereford lifted its head and saw it, and she come full barrel.  I mean full barrel, about twenty-five miles an hour speed.  Come right up.  She wasn’t slowing down one bit.  The guy ran to the other side of the road and jumped over the fence on the other side.  I said, “Go get that guy.”  They got the guy.  About twenty feet from the fence, the Hereford just locked all four legs and slid right up and just reached [out and] took the apple out of my hand.  He said, “I wouldn’t dare even think of doing that.”  I said, “That’s how I do it.”  They don’t know how to – they never knew how to milk – if they went out and tried to milk a cow by hand, they wouldn’t know the technique.  The city kids couldn’t throw eighty-pound bales of hay around like a football.

MG:  No, you have important skills that are lacking, missing, and certainly dwindling in society.

CH:  Yeah.  The thing is, they wouldn’t be able – the reason I said they wouldn’t be able to survive [is] because they haven’t the capacity to figure out how much they need to survive nine or ten months of cold weather.

MG:  Yeah.  Don’t you think that’s gotten so out of whack in our society?

CH:  People have stuff in the fridge that will last one day.  I’ve got stuff downstairs that will last me – I’m sixty-four right now.  I’ve got enough food downstairs to last me until seventy-six.

MG:  We were talking earlier about radio and television.  Were you following along with the events of the 1960s, the social and cultural movements of the time?  I mentioned the Vietnam War.  Were you following along with and discussing those kinds of events at home?

CH:  Yeah.  Of course, we had the battery-operated radio before.  But we always kept up with the news, kept up with information going on.  My father was worried about the war.  Him being exempt from going, he was worried that my brother and I were going to have to go, at least my brother.  My brother did have to sign up for the draft.  But when I became eighteen, they’d stop the draft, so I didn’t even sign up.  Then it got so that when he signed up, it was shortly then that Vietnam was shutting down.  He calmed down.  But he was worried.

MG:  He was worried that you would go or wouldn’t go?

CH:  He was worried that we would have to.  Because they’d stopped the exemption of the youngest one or the only one being a farmer.  They stopped that exemption, and he was worried that we would have to.

MG:  Were you talking about the war and current events with your family and around the dinner table?

CH:  Yeah.  We would talk about everything around the dinner table.

MG:  Were your parents politically minded at all?

CH:  They weren’t like it is now; you’re either Republican or Democrat, and you’re evil.  It was never like that.  It was you’re supposed to do what you’re supposed to do right.  You’re supposed to be out there to help humankind and do what you can.  It was never political.  We followed it.  We was always disgusted that they couldn’t agree because there’s no reason they can’t agree because they wanted the same thing anyways.  Just do it.

MG:  In the 1960s, there was the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement.  I was curious about what those big movements looked like in a small town like Madrid.

CH:  Well, I don’t know about Madrid, but over here, there was no civil rights.  You were on a farm.  The civil rights was women have the right to do what the men [do].  Farm?  Women do the same thing as men all the time.  They’re out there working all the time.  There ain’t no gender job; it’s that’s the job, no matter whether you’re a woman, a kid, or what.  That’s the job.

MG:  It reminds me of what you were saying earlier about the Great Depression.  You were governed by survival and not the stock market.  That’s interesting.

CH:  My father always said they ought to stop money and give beans as payment.  Baked beans as payment.

MG:  That might work.

CH:  At least, if you got destitute, you could eat your money.  You can eat beans.

MG:  Yes, and you can plant them and make more beans.  I was curious.  I meant to ask earlier how you came to be named Carson.  And your middle name is Darrell?

CH:  Middle name is Darrell.  My grandmother Carrie, wanted me named Darrell Carson.  Darrell was not spelled like you’d think,  It’s D-A-R-R-E-L-L.  A lot of it is D-A-R-Y-L.  Actually, Social Security has got me two ways: D-A-R-R-E-L-L and D-A-R-R-E-L, just one L.  Got them both ways – Social Security.  So I can have it either way I want.  But I always used the two L’s.  Carson, my mother loved it for the one simple reason – the meaning, beloved son.  And Darrell – she just liked the sound.  My brother Kendall Corey is because Kendall was a friend of hers, and Corey was a distant relative that died early.  Belinda Rose, my sister – Belinda is because my grandmother, her mother, wanted her third child to be named Belinda.  Rose is because my grandmother always loved the yellow rose.

MG:  Did you get along with your siblings growing up?

CH:  Yeah.  My brother was my best friend.  Then he married his wife, and [his] wife just cannot stand me.

MG:  His wife can’t stand you?

CH:  Yeah.  She’s always been jealous of me.  I don’t know why.  She’s still jealous of me.  My brother is actually talking with me more and more now.  But as soon as he got married, it was, “No talking to him.”  He couldn’t talk to me.  But my brother was always money-wise – “Got to have money.  Got to have money.  See what this is worth.  See what this is worth.  See what this is worth.”  Like the sewing machine, he says, “You can sell that sewing machine for three, four hundred dollars.”  I said, “I can sell that sewing machine for five thousand dollars.  I ain’t.  It’s worth more just sitting right there,” because of the history that that sewing machine has got.

MG:  What do you think accounts for that difference in perspective, where you’re seeing the value of the history and the memory?

CH:  And all he sees is that money aspect.  And more so since he’s married her.  It’s money, money, money.  My sister is almost a hoarder.  Any container that she eats food out of, she’s got to keep the container.  My brother-in-law and I throw a lot of it [out].  She don’t even know about.  She’s always doing that.  And she hides money.  One day, he opened up a box, and there was thirty-two one-dollar bills in it.

MG:  Do you think that comes from how you were raised and having to scrimp and save?

CH:  Neither one of them was raised – because my mother and father was very generous.  When we sold hay to other people for horses, they’d pay us for twelve bales; we’ll give them fourteen.  You come to visit; you’re not going home with an empty stomach.  You’re going to eat something.  They would give the clothes off their back to any stranger.  That’s the way we grew up, and that’s the way I am.  You help your fellow man no matter what.  That’s why I’ve got the trail.  People come and say, “How much is this?”  “It’s free.”  They say, “What?”  It’s there.  I didn’t make the land. [laughter] It’s there.

MG:  I think so many people would go in a different direction.  I think it’s great you haven’t.

CH:  Well, as I said, I let that be purchased by High Peaks Alliance to put it in preserve.  I sold it.  They wanted to buy it.  They said, “We got to give you money.”  I said, “They’re not going to give me much money.”  They said, “Well, we got to give you the value.”  Of course, I had to have a lawyer for my side.  The lawyer said, “You know you’re selling this way under value.”  “It’s valued that.”  “No, it’s not.  It’s valued a lot more.”  I said, “That is the tax value.”  I said, “That’s what the state says it’s valued, and that’s what it is.  That’s what I’m selling it for.”  My brother come up and says, “You got gypped.  You could have sold that for three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand.”  I said, “Yeah.”  I sold it for sixty-two for the simple reason it’s going to be there the same way after I’m gone.

MG:  I imagine you’ve had offers.

CH:  I’ve had people wanting to build houses out there.  That’s what my brother wanted to do – divide everything into house lots up there, be eighty acres of house lots.  You can [make] all kinds of money.  But there’s eighty acres of preserved natural land.

MG:  Well, I think you did the right thing.  It sounds like it’s in good hands now.

CH:  Right.  Now, I’ve just got to work on this part, the house part and the museum.

MG:  I want to ask you more questions about your childhood, growing up, and your education.  But I wanted to explore a little bit more your father’s mother’s side.  Was Moses Wing your grandfather?

CH:  Moses Wing.  That would be my great-great-grandfather.  That was Nathan Wing’s father.  He was blind and disabled.

MG:  Moses was?

CH:  He was blind and disabled.  That’s about all I know of him.  He married Cordelia Swift.  Then, they had only one child, Nathan D. Davis, and he bought the Thomas Pickard place over here.  In the deed, it’s deeded that he had ownership of the land and everything, but there was a section of the will that Cordelia, his mother, could live out the rest of her life in one half of the house.  The deed says the upper half, but she was in the lower half. [laughter] She lived the rest of her life there, as far as she could before she became disabled too – invalid.  Then Nathan married Lucinda.  As I said, Nathan was an adamant farmer [and] lumberman.  He was part owner of the mill.  They had the milkhouse, which was a community [milkhouse], and the icehouse, which they harvested the ice out of the pond here.  He raised his sheep and the chickens.  He became wheelchair-bound for the last twenty years of his life.  Lucinda was bedridden for the last five or six of her life.  They had a daughter Carrie, [who] married Ralph McLaughlin.  Ralph died of disease, and then she married my grandfather, Arthur.  They had my father, and Carrie died of liver disease in ’57.  That’s about all the history of that I know, except for my father and grandfather.

MG:  Did you put in your notes that Lucinda Masterman was a teacher for eleven terms?

CH:  Yes, she was.  She taught in these schools here.  There were several schools.  It shifted back and forth between buildings and the house across the road.  Eleven terms.  The terms back then was only either the spring term or the fall term; it wasn’t all winter long.  So, eleven terms – that’s only five and a half years. [laughter] Not like they are now.

MG:  What kind of teacher was she?  What did she teach?

CH:  It was a one-room schoolhouse.  They taught all grades all at once.  They learned a lot more because of that.  They didn’t have to hire an assistant.  They had assistance [from] the upper-grade people.  That was their assistance.

MG:  The older kids –?

CH:  Taught the younger kids.  They learned a lot more because of it because they did have that interaction with the others.  The older kids didn’t ridicule the younger kids because they was helping him.  When I was going through school, a senior wouldn’t talk to a junior, and a junior wouldn’t talk to a sophomore.  That was a no-no.  Back then, you talked to them [and] you helped them.

MG:  I read there were about six or seven schools in the settlement here.

CH:  There was one school, but it kept moving around.

MG:  Okay.  I had wondered why there were so many schools for such a small community.

CH:  The reason is the first school was the Perham School, which was on top of the hill here.  That was around, I’d say, mid-1800s, something like that.  I don’t know the exact dates.  It came to be that it needed a bigger building.  It wasn’t even enough to be a one-car garage.  It was a small building.  It was just a small shack.  And then it came to be that they had to have a bigger one.  But before they could get the bigger one built, they had to hold school, and they held school in my family farm over there for two years while they was building the school.  Then they built the school up on top of these two hills called the Mill Hill School, which was a little bit bigger.  It was actually a one-car garage size. [laughter] That one went to being a shed for somebody.  Then, we got more kids, so they had to have a little bit of a bigger school.  So then they decided that they was going to split the school, the upper neighborhood and this end.  Before they could get them two built, they had to hold the school in a house across the road again for two more years.  Then they built the two schools.  That old school was where the church was held for two or three years until it became a garage out in Phillips for somebody.  Then the upper two schools decided to combine again to one school, which was a bigger one, which would be about – I’d say it’d be about the size of this living room, the pantry, and that cellar-way area.  Before they could get that build, they had to hold it on my family farm again for a year.  Then they built that, and then them two schools went to being sheds for somebody.

MG:  When was the last school here?

CH:  Last school was what they called the East Madrid School.  That was in – it was before ’23.  It was 1921, something like that.  My father never went to that one.  My grandmother went to the Mill School and that one.

MG:  Where did your father go to school?

CH:  He went to school in the Blethen School, which was in Phillips.  Going down that long hill there that you turned – right there on that corner, that house on the right, that was the Blethen School.

MG:  How would he get to school?

CH:  Slide.  Walk and slide.

MG:  I think it might be literally uphill both ways.

CH:  Yep.  It was uphill out, then downhill to the school, then uphill from school, downhill home. [laughter]

MG:  Did either your mother or father share any stories about their school days?

CH:  My father did.  He told me about all the times that he went to school and about the two or three times the kids all got together, and they all walked out; it was the wintertime.  They get to the top of the hill.  And they all decide to see how far they could go down the hill.  A lot of them went down past the school, down past the swamp area, down beyond that, and so forth.  They got to school an hour late [laughter] because they had to walk all the way back.  Of course, when he come home, one time he was coming down the hill there.  They all come down these two hills.  One of them missed the bridge.

MG:  Yikes.

CH:  He went across the bridge, but one of the other kids went right down across the street.  Luckily, it was frozen solid. [laughter]

MG:  You mentioned that some of your family members in the past have had Alzheimer’s.  How was Alzheimer’s diagnosed and treated in that era in the early 1900s?

CH:  It was called senility, or crazy in the head.  That was it.  They either tended to them at home, or they went to the insane asylum.

MG:  Was there an institution nearby?

CH:  No.  Nearest one was Augusta.  There’s one – not in my line, but an offshoot of Lucinda’s from Weld that did go to Augusta.  But other than that, any of them, they just dealt with them at home, just like I did with my father.  We dealt with him right here.  He died in the bed in there.

MG:  Was it your father who had been treated at Togus?

CH:  My grandfather.  That was because he was a war vet.  He was able to go to Togus.  That’s where they operated on his legs.  My father’s Alzheimer’s – we dealt with him for three years here.

MG:  That must have been –

CH:  It was tough.  It was tough for the simple reason – it was hard on my mother.  It was hard on my mother for the simple reason – my brother was here, upstairs, and his wife, and his wife is a certified nurse.  She was a certified nurse.  Any time that he messed his bed, didn’t get out of bed, mom would call me to do it.  With my back injury, I had to lift him up and carry him to the bathroom.  She’s a certified nurse, and wouldn’t touch him.  Then, when he died, I lived here.  The last year and a half, my mother was bedridden.  I had to pick her up and move her everywhere.  My brother and sister-in-law never came up to help.  It was hard on my mother.  She’s got a certified daughter-in-law, and you’re making a handicapped person help her.  So, it was hard on her.

MG:  I imagine there was some tension around that.

CH:  That, and his financial business of losing half the land that we used to own, too.

MG:  Can you explain that a bit?

CH:  My sister-in-law had a debt of a repossessed house.  They foreclosed on it and tried to get it.  Being married to my brother, they put a lien on all this property that we owned.  We didn’t know about it for three years, and they were about ready to foreclose.  The only way we got out of it is because the neighbor up here decided to buy half of our property on the deal that my brother got off the deed.  That was hard on my mother.

MG:  That sounds complicated.  If your neighbors hadn’t stepped in –?

CH:  We would be on the street.

MG:  Yikes.  You couldn’t have listed the property or part of the property to save yourself.  I don’t know how that works.

CH:  No, it was on lien.  It was ready to foreclose and take the property.  The thing was that we’d sold other sections to other people.  Them people would [have] lost their property too because it was on the same time period – we sold after it was put on the lien that we didn’t even know about.  It was real tough.  I almost lost her through that.

MG:  You almost lost your mother through that?

CH:  Yeah.  Because of the stress.

MG:  When was that?

CH:  That was in 2012, 2013.

MG:  Not that long ago.

CH:  No.  As I said, she died in 2017.  The reason she died [was] she went in the hospital because of a calcium buildup in [her] legs.  But the reason she died [was] she had seventy-two ulcers in the stomach and intestines from that stress.  They tried to fix some of them, and died of internal bleeding.  Couldn’t stop it.

MG:  What are your feelings about that?

CH:  I’m disappointed in my brother and sister-in-law, yes, but I don’t blame them.  It’s something that wasn’t really her fault.  It was her fault for not dealing with the financial problems with her first husband.  I don’t owe them any ill will.  He’s mentioned it.  “Well, he’s supposed to have all the land, and I was supposed to have five acres.”  I said, “No, you know our father always wanted all three of us to own the whole land together.  He said something about property and so forth and so on.  I dealt with that.  I said, “There’s only one way that you’re ever going to get back on the deed.”  He said, “What’s that?”  I said, “Get up here and show me that you actually want to do something with the land.”  I said, “You keep saying this for the last twenty-five years, but I ain’t seen you get up and even cut a piece of wood.”  I said, “You do that.”  Then, of course, when I had that opportunity to sell to [High Peaks Alliance] that I know it was preserved, he hit the roof that I didn’t sell it [for] enough money, [and] he didn’t get no money out of it.  I said, “I didn’t either.”  The money went to either repairing or finishing the museum or fixing the house.  The only thing – I bought a vehicle because I didn’t have a vehicle.  I was riding around with my brother-in-law and sister.

MG:  Can you tell me more about the family up the road and their connection to the area?  It sounds like they’ve been close to your family for a couple generations.

CH:  Yeah.  They’re originally from out of New York City.  Bronson and Sophie Griscom moved up here.  They bought a lot of the property in the area.  He went up hiking on Saddleback Mountain one time when he was young.  He said he’d like to own this area.  His father was an ambassador, United States Ambassador to Brazil, and to Argentina, and to Italy.  So, he had a lot of money, and he owned seven newspapers in New York City.  So he had plenty of money.  So when he got old enough and retired, he decided to come up here and start buying property, and he bought property here and bought property over to Phillips, down to Chesterville.  This back half of Saddleback, he owned all of it, and all these other upper farms here.  He wanted to buy my father out, and my father said, “No.”  Then, of course, being from the city, they didn’t know even how to mow a lawn.  So, we became caretakers of the property.  My mother became their cook and so forth.  When we was old enough, we worked on the farm and so forth.  As soon as you start walking, you start working. [laughter] That’s the way it was on the farm.  We worked for them, too.  My brother and sister, and I mowed lawns, and we helped hay their fields and so forth and so on.  We learned what money was right from the beginning.  From kindergarten through, we bought our own school clothes and material.  If we had anything left, I usually bought a matchbox car, or something like that.  You knew how much money you had and how much money you had to deal with.  You dealt with the money right from the beginning.  They did not pay minimum wage, by no means.  They had the idea that they are civilized and everybody is a servant.  So that’s how it was.

MG:  They paid less than minimum wage?

CH:  Yeah.  Way less.  I was working – I think I was working – when I was in eighth grade, I was working – maybe a dollar and a half an hour.  Something like that.

MG:  What would you save up your money for?  You mentioned matchbox cars.

CH:  Matchbox cars, reading books, science fiction.  I loved science fiction books and history – anything on history.  I was always a history buff.  History, math, and science fiction – that was me.  History, math, science fiction.

MG:  Are you still interested in those subjects?

CH:  Oh, yeah.  I think the science fiction comes [from] that night that I told you about riding in the back of that truck, laying down, seeing the stars.  Ever since then, I’ve been always going out looking at the stars.  It was then, in my second grade, I told my mother, “I want a telescope.”  I still haven’t got that telescope, but that don’t stop me from knowing what stars are what out there.

MG:  Maybe you didn’t see it on TV because you didn’t have a TV, but do you remember the moon landing?

CH:  We watched the moon landing on TV.

MG:  You did?

CH:  We had it on battery operated – I was real enthused with that.

MG:  Yes, that was a big deal.  What else do you remember about certain historical moments?

CH:  I remember [John F.] Kennedy.  I remember [Ronald] Reagan.  I never got into sports that much.  I never was into them.  I do watch the Superbowl.  The only reason I watch is to see what the mid –

MG:  Halftime show?

CH:  – halftime show and the commercials.  If they have a decent commercial.  They haven’t had [one] since they had that Budweiser frog.  That’s the only one I really watch.  Other than that, soccer once in a while if I can, but not really.  But there’s more important things than ball games out there to do.  I collect stamps.  I collect some coins.  Other than that, it’s just science fiction.  My biggest hobby is going out and enjoying nature.  People come up and say they’re a birdwatcher.  I see the birds, yeah.  But I’m as much interested in a butterfly or a flower or an ant as I am a bird.  It’s all nature.

MG:  The whole ecosystem.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  Were you always that way, even as a child?

CH:  Yep.  My father, when we was haying, I’d go along.  We’d be haying.  I said, “What kind of grass is that?  What kind of grass is that?  What kind of grass is that?” [laughter] I know all the different kinds of grasses.

MG:  It sounds like you learned a lot from your parents.

CH:  Oh, yeah.

MG:  And that you were close with them as well.

CH:  Yeah.  I think I was closer to my parents than my brother and sister are.  I was in tune to what they were like.  They worked with nature and appreciate the nature.  You’re not going to get ahead.  Well, when we was doing anything – getting firewood and so forth.  My brother would take a hook and a log, and he’d throw it and so forth like that.  My father and I [would] drop a great, big tree.  My brother, “Well, you know that thing’s going to be heavy.”  Dad says, “Work with nature.  It ain’t.”  We’d get it up and put it on its edge and roll it over.  Go to put it on the dray, lean it up, shimmy it a little bit, and then twist it, and then let it roll onto the dray itself.  I said, “You work with nature.  You can lift it and be a brute, or you can work with nature and let nature do it, too.”

MG:  Nature and physics.  I want to ask more about your experiences growing up.  I want to make sure we’re not missing anything from your family history and parents’ generation.  I want to make sure we talk about your mother’s family history.  But we’ve been talking for about three hours.  Do you have enough energy to keep going?

CH:  Yeah, I’m fine.

MG:  Your mother was a Fenlason.  Can you trace her family history?

CH:  Actually, it goes all the way back to Fenderson in Scotland.  It was originally Fenderson.  The first one that was in America was Darius Fenlason.  He was the grandson of the one that I have records of.  One of my mother’s relatives, the last one of the daughters of my grandfather’s siblings – the last one alive – sent me what she had just recently.  It goes to a Fenderson in Scotland, and then his son, and then Darius came over.  They lived in Washington County, in the blueberry barrens.  They was blueberry farmers.  They had several kids.  They moved to Fairfield Center when my grandfather was a little boy.  I found out from that – when I went to one of his siblings’ funerals – that he was pissed off because he had to go with the women in the wagon a week later, not with the boys a week before.  He had to ride with the women in the wagon a week later to get to Fairfield Center.  He wasn’t too happy about that.  He wanted to be with the boys.  He was a happy-go-lucky guy.  He was cheerful right to his dying day.  Darius, I do know – handed down through the history – is where I got my red hair from and my light complexion because Darius died at the age of eighty with a full head of red hair.

MG:  I was curious about that.

CH:  They always said it was Irish.  My grandfather always told me when I was working with him up here in the rose gardens for the neighbors in the gardens, planting flowers.  I’d say something about, “Well, it’s getting three o’clock.”  At three o’clock, you had to be home to milk the animals.  We didn’t have animals then.  But it’s a habit.  You get home to do the housework.  I said, “It’s getting close to three o’clock.”  He said, “Don’t worry about it.”  I said, “Well, it’s getting [to be] three o’clock.”  He says, [imitates his grandfather’s accent] “Shur-n I be a bit-o-Irish, and a bit of Swee-dith, I wern’t be threw, til I be Fin-nish.”

MG:  I’m not sure I understood any of that.

CH:  I did it backward.  As sure as i be a bit of Irish, and a bit of Swedish, I won’t be through until I be Finnish.  That’s what his saying was.  I told my mother.  She said, “I grew up with your grandfather, and I never heard him say that.”  I said, “He said it to me all the time.”  So, that’s why I think that we was actually Irish, Scottish, Swedish, and Finnish.  We’re Scandinavian.  We’re the Vikings.

MG:  I can see that.

CH:  I had a woman come to walk the trail.  She’s from Sweden.  We got talking about it.  I told her that.  She said, “You’re more Swede than I am.” [laughter]

MG:  It sounds like you don’t have as much information on this side of the family.

CH:  No, I don’t because my grandmother, Ada Fenlason, her name was actually Mary Ellen Philbrick, not Ada May Moore.  She was adopted Ada May Moore by her aunt.  Her parents died in a car crash when she was three years old.  The family records of the Fenlasons and the Philbricks were burned up in the church.  All I got is just hearsay of what they said, and that’s it.

MG:  So, Dexter Fenlason married Ada May.

CH:  Which was Mary Ellen Philbrick, actually.  She was Mary Ellen Philbrick and became Ada May Moore.

MG:  Do you know anything about the details of the car accident?

CH:  No.  All I know is they was killed in the car.

MG : Going back to Darius, I found a record online that said his first marriage was to an Annie Belmore, and his second marriage was to a Mary Berry.  But then in your notes it said his second marriage was to Hattie Adelaide.

CH:  Yeah.  The second name you said?

MG:  Mary Berry.

CH:  Mary Berry is his brother’s wife.

MG:  Okay.  So his second marriage was actually to Hattie.

CH:  Right.

MG:  He had nine children with Hattie?

CH:  Yes.

MG:  Your mother was one of two children.

CH:  Right.

MG:  What do you know about your aunt?

CH:  My Aunt Olive married – she was a flirtatious woman, too, evidently.  She married everybody she flirted with.  She married a salesman.  And then that petered out in a year and a half time.  Then she married another person.  I don’t even know his name.  That petered out.  Then she married Chandler (Libby?), and they had a son Albert (Libby?).  Chandler (Libby?) died [in] a tractor accident.  The tractor turned over on him.  Albert Libby was born diabetic.  Then she married Herbert Mitchell, Olive did, and they had Barbara, Billy, and Betty.  They owned the hardware [store] out here in Phillips.  I remember the old Beal Block that used to be in Phillips, that was a hardware section.  They owned the hardware [store] and, later on, a clothing store, and then the mercantile beside it.  Then there was a drugstore at the end.  The only part I remember about the whole store is the hardware office.  I’d go in after school a lot of times.  We would walk down the street to the town to go in there and wait for my mother and father to come out and pick us up.  He’d send us into the office to sit while he tended to customers.  In the back corner, there was a great, great, great big black safe. [laughter] I remember that thing.  I thought it looked like a tower. [laughter] He had it open one time.  The door was that thick.

MG:  Was there a lot of money in there?

CH:  I don’t know whether there was money in there.  He had drawers and stuff.  That’s the only thing I remember about the whole store.

MG:  Did you get to know your grandparents on your mother’s side at all?

CH:  Yeah, I worked with him a lot up here as a gardener for them.  That week that I told you it was forty-five below here, and we closed everything up; that was Christmas week.  My mother said – on Christmas day, she says, “Don’t expect your grandparents to come,” because they’d visit my aunt’s family in the morning.  Then they’d come in the afternoon up here and visit us for Christmas.  She said, “Don’t expect them to show.  They’re not going to come.  It’s cold.  It’s forty-five below here at noontime.”  I look at the window.  I said, “There they come.” [laughter] They wanted to come.  They came.

MG:  They were hardy folks, too.

CH:  Oh, yeah, they was hardy.  When he was a young man, he worked on the snow rollers that parked down the roads in the town, them horse-drawn snow rollers.

MG:  To pack the snow down?

CH:  They packed the snow down so the horses would have a solid ground and the wagons and the sleighs would have solid ground.  It was a great big roller they had.

MG:  That sounds like an important job.

CH:  It was.  Other than that, he worked [in] carpentry in Foster’s Mill.  Actually, he helped build Foster’s Mill in East Wilton.  He was a hardy farmer.  He worked at the apple orchard there.  He was a carpenter.  Him and my grandfather Hinkley both had the same saying.  When we was putting the hay in the wagons or hay in the barn.  “Plenty of room up there.  There’s plenty of room up there.”  They’re out in the field.  Both grandfathers out there.  Grandfather Hinkley said, “There’s plenty of room up there.”  Grandfather Fenlason said, “Yep, space is the end.”

MG:  They were pointing up.

CH:  Right. [laughter] In other words, “Keep stacking.  Keep stacking.  Keep stacking.”

MG:  It sounds like the families got along well together.

CH:   Yeah.  The kids, after high school – Billy, Betty, and Barbara – kind of wandered off and did whatever they wanted.  Albert hung around.  He was always up here, snowmobiling with my grandfather.  My uncle would come up.  My aunt didn’t come up so much, but my uncle was always up.  My half-uncle and half-aunt lived here, and they was always helping out with this and that.  They all worked together.  That’s what the community – that’s the way they use – that was the way people used to live.  You helped everybody.  It wasn’t you; it was them.  That’s the way they were.  We’d work right up until dark, and they’d be just as rambunctious as we would be.  I think that’s why I became a light sleeper.  I was always an early riser.  I was always up, and I was always up at night.  With this disability, it just coincides with what I was doing anyway.  I only get two hours of sleep at night because of my back.

MG:  Which two hours?

CH:  Between twelve and three.  I’m up until twelve or one o’clock, and I get up between three and four.

MG:  If you want to take a rest at any point during our conversations, I’m happy to.

CH:  Whenever I need to, I’ll stand up when I have to.

MG:  You let me know.

CH:  I know.  I deal with it.  I’ve been dealing with it since ’95.  I know pretty well what I can do and what I can’t.

MG:  I want to ask next about your experiences, but I want to make sure there’s nothing we’re missing in terms of your family history or stories from your parents’ generation.

CH: The only other thing is my grandmother, my mother’s mother, died of senility, virtually.  She lost her mind.  But she loved anything lilac.  She’d come up, and first thing she’d say – “Are they budded yet?  Are they budded yet?”  Because up here, the lilacs are always pretty near a month later than Phillips because it’s so cold.  It’d be dying out there.  She come – “Are they budded yet?  Are they budded yet?” [laughter] She loved snowmobiling, going snowmobiling.  There was one time – they moved out to New York for a while when I was young.  The day before they moved out, they was wondering whether they were going to be able to have – it was in the spring.  The snow was pretty near all gone.  I remember my grandmother saying, “I wish I had one more snowmobile ride.  We’re leaving the day after tomorrow, and I’m not going to be able to go snowmobiling again.”  That night, it snowed four inches.  So, she got her snowmobile ride. [laughter]

MG:  What brought them to New York and where did they settle there?

CH:  They settled west of Albany, and they live just below a dairy farm, and he took care of the dairy farm.

MG:  But they ended up coming back here?

CH:  They ended up coming back here and living out in Phillips.

MG:  What years did they pass away?

CH:  My grandmother passed away – I can’t remember the dates exactly, but I would say in the late ’70s, and my grandfather died in ’89.  He was just like a boy the day he died.  He’s just as active.  They always complained about – my mother and I both inherited one thing from him, and that’s our high instep on our feet.  So we have to work hard finding shoes. [laughter]

MG:  And you had a hookup with your shoe factory work.

CH:  Yep, I became a shoe factory [employee].  Back in ’79, ’80, I decided they weren’t going to pay enough up here – Bronson and Sophie.  I said, “I got to get some money into the family,” so I went out.  One of their people they always had up here for supper, dinner – a promotional thing for their status.  He owned the shoe mill out here in Phillips.  So, I went out, and I talked to him.  He said, “Yeah, go talk to my manager.”  I talked to a manager.  He said something about – he says, “Well, can I count on you?”  I said, “I’m a farmer.”  “I should be able to count on you.  I’ll give you a chance.”  I started working for him.  I got to working for him.  I was ten, eleven years working for them.  I was up to pretty near twelve hours a day working.  Anytime they needed something, I was there.  Then I decided – I said, “I got to get back on the farm.  Got to get back to getting stuff done.”  But anytime that they needed help, they’d give me a ring, and I’d run right back and help them for a week or two weeks or whatever.  Then, I went down to – they wasn’t paying enough.  I said, “You’re not paying me what I’m worth.”  I’m doing just about every job there is here in the shoe mill.”  They had new owners.  The owners come in.  “Oh, I’ll give you a dollar more right now.”  I said, “That’s a little too late.  I’m going down to Bass.”  I went down to Bass; they hired me instantly.   They saw my qualifications, they hired me, and I became one of the main workers that they could count on.  I was there at five o’clock in the morning, and I wouldn’t leave until twelve o’clock at night.  I was working double shifts.  Later on in the year, they said, “We got to stop double shifts.”  The boss of my night shift went up to the boss of the day shift.  He says, “I could get rid of every single worker that I have and keep Carson and get the same work [done].”  Then he went to the plant manager, and the plant manager said, “Well, we only got one more month of that shift anyways.  It’ll be done.”  They said, “All right.”  “But if you slack on your job during the day, you’re going to have to quit.”  Every week they have a tally of what you do.  The day I was getting done my night shift, I said, “How’d I do?”  He said, “Damnit, every week that you were doing that double shift for over three years, every day’s job increased production.”  I was able to take a shoe from the stitchers and put it into the box.  Put every part of the sole on.  I became one of just two workers to do that.

MG:  It sounds like you enjoyed this work or at least found some value in it.

CH:  One of the jobs was – it’s called Little-Way.  It’s a stitching machine that stitches the sole onto the shoe.  I don’t know why it’s called Little-Way.  The machine is a right-handed machine.  I’m left-handed.  The boss down to Bass says he could never figure out how a left-handed person could use a right-handed machine.  I said, “Because left-handed people are in their right mind.  We can do things that other people can’t do.”  That’s how I got started up in Phillips was on that machine.  Everybody, even up in Phillips, was thunderstruck that I was left-handed [and] could operate the right-handed machine.  All the time I was working, I had – it’s called Little-Way.  I’m working a little way up in the world.  I’m working my little way up into the world.

MG:  That’s cute.

CH:  But I became disabled.  I said, “I got to get back to land.”

MG:  Backing up a little bit, I want to hear about your school experiences growing up.  Where was the school that you attended for elementary school?

CH:  Phillips.  Phillips Elementary School.  That was from kindergarten to eighth grade.  Then we went to Mount Abram High School, which I fought all four years.  It’s supposed to be Abraham, not Abram, but they wouldn’t listen.

MG:  What happened there?  What do you mean you fought for it?

CH:  My sister went from ’72 to ’76, the spring of ’76.  They started the Mount Abram consolidated school in ’71.  They went around and asked all the towns what to name the school and what to name the mascot and so forth like that.  Everybody in Phillips wanted the Falcon, but all the other towns wanted the Road Runner in Wile E. Coyote.  So, we lost on that.  I was the only one – and my brother and my sister – in Phillips that said it ought to be Abraham.  Everybody else said Abram.  It’s at the foot of Abraham Mountain in Abraham Township.  Mount Abram is in Bethel, Maine, with a ski slope on it.

MG:  What was their rationale for Abram?

CH:  Because everybody didn’t want to say Mount Abraham.  Abram is shorter.  My sister fought it all the years through high school.  “It’s Abraham; it’s not Abram.”  They kept saying, “Well, it’s behind Mount Abram.  It’s behind Mount Abram.”  “No, no, no.  It’s Abraham.”  Then, we went through the school, we went through, and my senior year, I finally figured out why it was called Abram instead of Abraham.  It’s because nobody’s honest.  If you name it Abraham, they’re not going to think of the [Bible]; they’re going to think of Abraham Lincoln.  Then they’re going to shorten it, just like they shorten everything else, to “Honest Abe High.”  You shorten it to Honest Abe High, that means everybody’s honest.  All the kids were cheating as much as [they] possibly could.  That’s why they had to call it Abram instead of Abraham.  That’s my theory. [laughter]

MG:  It sounds like you have mixed feelings about your high school experiences.  You enjoyed some subjects, but the kids weren’t necessarily kind.

CH:  The kids, as I said, they picked on us because we were the farmers.  I kept telling them, “If it weren’t for farmers, you wouldn’t eat.”  It’s that simple.  Unless you have a farm, people ain’t going to eat.

MG:  Growing up, what were the other industries in the area?  What were other people’s parents doing for a living?

CH:  Lumbering or factory work.  They was town; I was country.  “You’re a country hick.  We’re towners.  You’re a country hick.”  We didn’t get involved in sports and things like that, and dances.  Dances was always after school.  There’s cows to milk.  Sports game?  After school.  Cows to milk.  My coach actually wanted me to join the football team.  I said, “I’ll join [under] one condition.”  He said, “What’s that?”  “You go milk the cow.”  He never come over to milk the cow.

MG:  Looking back, do you wish you had had opportunities to do sports or be more social?

CH:  Not really.  I don’t have any regrets of anything in my life.  Just like getting disabled; it’s a nuisance, but I’ve got to deal with it.  You either can complain about it like my brother-in-law does, who complains all the time, or you can just deal with it.  I had some good times in high school.  In high school, I even proved some teachers wrong.

MG:  Oh, yeah?

CH:  Yeah.  Home ec. [economics] school.  I [took] psychology for half a year in my senior year.  I flunked it.  I didn’t flunk it for not knowing it.  It’s stupid ideas.  [Sigmund] Freud – some of his ideas are way out.  I think he was on drugs or something.  The teacher said, “You’re going to fail this, or you can go to another class.”  I said, “I’ll go to another class.”  He said, “Why are you doing this?”  I said, “Can you figure this out?”  He said, “No.”  I said, “Well, there you go.”  But then I went to home ec.  In my home ec. class, it was all girls except for three other boys besides me.  One boy was from Strong.  He was from a family of farmers.  He wasn’t a farmer, but he was from a family of farmers.  Another boy – his uncle had a farm.  The third guy was my fourth cousin in that class.  The teacher was so pissed off at us every time because when we had that home ec. class – they don’t do it now, but it had the policy – when they did home ec. cooking, the cooks from the school would come in and rate the best foods.  Then they’d take it to the teacher’s lounge for the teacher’s dinner.  We boys, every single week – and the teacher said, “All the girls …”.  They knew why we were doing it.  They knew how we grew up.

MG:  Are you saying you won the cooking competition every time?

CH:  Every time.  She had two girls measuring out ingredients exactly.  You got the exact this, the exact – we’d make a cake.  Dave would say, “That’s enough.  Throw that in.  Throw that in.”  I said, “We got to put a little more of this in.”  No measurements.  We just filled it.  The cooks would come in and taste it.  It’d go right to the teacher’s lounge every time.  We wouldn’t do what the teachers were saying, and yet, we was winning the competitions every time.  Then, one class we had, we were supposed to design a house.  You were supposed to use these fancy big aristocratic decorator’s ideas on how to build a house and how to design rooms.  David, Peter, and George all agreed with me.  We started building it, and we started making rooms.  She flunked us.  She says, “Who in their right mind is going to have a room and have a pink wall, a yellow wall, a blue wall, and a brown wall?”  I look back and [say] to myself at this age, “Interior designers are doing that now.”  She flunked us because of what interior designers are doing now.

MG:  You were ahead of your time.

CH:  I know. [laughter]

MG:  Why did you want four different colored walls?

CH:  It looked good.

MG:  I can see that.

CH:  You don’t have to have exactly the same thing all the way around the room.

MG:  No.

CH:  When you put furniture in a room, you’re not going to put a couch on all four walls. [laughter].  You got to coordinate with what you’re going to do.  In another class we was going to have, it was supposed to be – refurbish this old chair.  David, Peter, George, and I had this old, dilapidated – it was almost falling apart.  She said, “You can’t refurbish that.  You can’t re-stain that.”  Peter said, “You want a bet?”  Three days, we had that chair completely repaired and repainted.  She was pissed off that we could build a chair.  Not just refurbish it.  We built it.

MG:  That should have earned you an A.

CH:  I know.  But she was so pissed off at all four of us boys all the time, upstaging what she was trying to do.

MG:  Something you wrote about in your notes that you were interviewed by the local newspaper for a craft replica of the royal English crown that you created.  How did this come about?

CH:  One of the projects that we had in history – they said that they wanted to – we was [learning] about English history, the royalty and so forth.  People was making paintings.  They were making drawings and paintings and pieces of thing – just a piece of paper.  I come home.  I said, “I got a job.”  Mom said, “What?”  I said, “Everybody’s making a picture or a painting or something about the royal clothing and stuff like that.”  I said, “I don’t want to do that.”  She said, “Well, don’t do that.”  Mom said, “Don’t do that.  Do what you want.”  I pondered, I pondered.  It was Friday, and we were supposed to present it a week later.  It was supposed to be at an open house or something.  I pondered, pondered all weekend.  I said, “I’m going to the library.”  I made wood and cardboard replica – wood and cardboard replica of the royal crown, all the jewels and everything.  The top and the cross on top – with all the fur.  Because my mother had all kinds of cloth and everything.  You had silk.  That’s why they did it.  I took it.  Everything was done at home.  They kept asking me, “Well, how’s your project coming?”  “It’ll be ready.  It’ll be ready.”  “We ain’t seen it.”  The school was having an open house the week that we were supposed to have it finally presented, and I brought it in.  All the kids in my class – the teacher looked.  He said, “Holy smoke.”  They had it open.  Set it out at the open house, and there were news reporters there.  They spotted that.  They took a picture of it, and they wanted to know the information of the student and everything.  They put it all down.  This was in January.  Prom night – school prom – I was a sophomore this year.  At the senior prom, they used that for the crown for the king.

MG:  Did that make you feel good?

CH:  It’s in the yearbook, a picture with him wearing it.  Yeah, it made me feel good that I actually made something that everybody else didn’t even think of.

MG:  Well, it seems like you were a promising student.  You talked about how you earn credits beyond your high school years.  Did you ever consider going to college?

CH:  I considered it, but there’s no way I could afford it on what we was making.  The math teacher, my accountant teacher, and my bookkeeping teacher all said – each class, they had students come up.  The teacher would evaluate whether they should go on to college or whether they should go on to – my school, all the classes did that – whether you go into shop, or whether you go into mechanics, or whether you go into carpentry or science, like that.  All three of them said, “You have the credits.  You could be a sophomore in college with the credits that you’ve earned, but you don’t need to because you can apply it in your life no matter what.”  He says, “College would be just a waste of years.”

MG:  What did you hope to plan or do when you were getting ready to graduate from high school?

CH:  Right here.  This is my life.  This is what I wanted to be.  I wanted to keep the history going.

MG:  You’ve always felt that way?

CH:  Yeah.  My senior year, my brother had the studies, but every day, he had two study halls and every other day he had another study hall.  The other day was gym.  So, he had two to two and a half study halls.  I didn’t have one free class my senior year.  I had Accounting.  I had Bookkeeping II.  I had Typing II.  I had Business Math II.  I had Math.  I had Algebra.  I had three Biology science [classes].

MG:  What made you want to stay so busy?

CH:  I’ve always been busy.  Why waste time?

MG:  I wondered, too, if you thought those classes might help you run a working farm.

CH:  Oh yeah.  You can’t do a farm without math.  You can’t build something that you need to work on the farm unless you know math.  You can’t cook without math.  You can’t sew without math.  For science, you got to have the science to know how to do things – what minerals will help what plant, how nature works with the sunlight and the weather – it’s science.  You’ve got to apply that.  I’ve been good in science, and I’ve been good in math.  I said that’s farm working.  That’s what I’ll need.

MG:  I think you said in your notes something about – you were so good in math that you really didn’t even need to do your homework, but you still aced –

CH:  Seventh and eighth grade, I didn’t do any homework whatsoever.  The teacher was flunking me, [giving] me F, F, F, every day because I wouldn’t do any homework.  Towards the end of the year, I said – Brakley was our teacher – math, algebra, all mathematics.  I said, “My regular eighth grade teacher is flunking me in math.”  I said, “What is the math rating for scoring for the year?”  He said, “If you can do the exam at the end of the year, that’s three-quarters of your grade.”  I got 100 on it.  The teacher stood right over me, watching to see if I cheated.  Because I said, “You watch this.  You watch me when I do this algebra.”  She stood right there and watched me.  She said, “How did you do that with no homework?”  I said, “Why do I need to do the homework when I know it?”  I was helping five other students that year with their algebra.  Why should I have to do it when I’m helping them do it?  It’s just a waste of my time.  The time that I was going to do the homework, I was helping others do their homework.  I wasn’t giving them the answers.  I was teaching them how to use it.

MG:  It’s like the mentality of the one-room schoolhouse you described, where the students help each other learn.

CH:  Yeah, the only reason my brother made it through seventh and eighth grade was because of me through that math.  Every night, he was racking his brain, trying to figure it out.  I kept saying, “Well, do this, do this, do this.  Do it this way.  Do it this way.”  I said, “I’m not going to give you the answers, but I’ll show the directions to do it.”  He managed to get a C in both grades, so he could pass.

MG:  You’ve described all these moments where you have to prove yourself, where someone thinks you’re not qualified or capable, and you have to prove that you are.

CH:  Somebody told me, “You got to be the best.”  I’m not the best.  I’m not going to be the best.  There’s always somebody better than you, but that’s no reason that you can’t strive to be as close to him as possible.  Don’t waste your life when you got a chance to do something with it.  It doesn’t matter that you are the top league.  The only reason that person is top-league is because this person down here is holding you up.

MG:  Tell me a little bit about how your duties on the farm changed over time.

CH:  Well, the change over time was we got rid of the animals. [laughter]

MG: When did that happen?

CH:  When my father got disabled.  Because my brother did not want to do it.  That was about the time that I started in the shoe mill business, or in the shoe mill.  I couldn’t be on the farm as much.  So we had to get rid of the animals.  I think we had fourteen cows at that time.  We just decided that my father couldn’t handle it.  My brother didn’t want to do it.  I said, “I can’t do it and do the millwork, too.”  So, we got rid of them.  We didn’t sell them or anything.  As they got older and older and time to slaughter them, we slaughtered them and had the meat.  We just never restocked it.  That was in, I’d say, around ’80, something like that – ’80, ’81.  Then I just kept trying to keep the fields as best I could and mowed them until the sickle mower cracked.  Then we had friends with Bush Hogs.  They come and did them.  I kept telling them, “You got to get out into the edge of the brushes to keep the field, or the trees are going to increase on it.”  That’s what they’ve been doing.  Then, in 2014, they had the birding trail up on the road here.  I saw them walking around out there.  I said, “What’s going on?”  He said, “We’re losing our bird trail.”  I said, “Well, you’ve never been on my property, have you?”  He said, “Well, it’s not along the stream much.”  He said, “There’s not many birds.”  I said, “Have you ever been out there?”  He said, “Yeah, but I don’t want to swamp trails.”  I said, “There’s no trails to swamp.  It’s the maintenance lumber roads that were out there.”  They went out there, and they just fell in love with it.  I said, “I’ll maintain it, too.”  So, that’s what I’ve been doing.

MG:  When did you start doing that?

CH:  2014.  That’s when the deals with my brother’s business got done with.  They were losing that trail up there.  A woman didn’t want them to walk on it.  I said, “That’ll keep me busy.”  Because I’ve got to keep mobile with my back.  I said, “That will keep me busy.”  Plus, doing the bird feeders and so forth.  So, I’ve been doing it.  Everybody’s been praising how great a job I’ve been doing out there.”

MG:  I’ve seen so many comments online describing the trail, but you’re always mentioned as a significant feature of the trail.

CH:  Well, you can walk out there.  You can see the scenery.  Then, you find your historic sites.  If I go out and I explain a few things on the trail, when they get on it – “Oh, yeah, that’s a peat bog that they harvested out.  Oh, yeah, this is the cemetery.  The old village.  Oh, yeah, that’s where the post office used to be.”

MG:  Going back to your years after high school and working on the farm, was there anything else you wanted to say about that work?  I’ll ask you next about your work at the shoe mills.

CH:  That was the time period where my father had to go down to the hospital a lot because of his disease on his liver and so forth.  It was a time that I started seeing my brother’s true identity.  It put me in a situation.  I said, “I’ve got to keep holding on.”  I keep plugging along.  I said, “I don’t care …”.  He wants to leave, fine.  I’ve got to keep this as best I can like my father and his father did.  That’s what I did.  Then, as I said, money started getting short, and I had to do something to get more money because they weren’t paying enough.

MG:  You mentioned you were married at one point.  Were you married at this point?

CH:  I was married in ’91.  I married in ’91 to a girl that said that she wanted to be a farmer and so forth.  But when I got up here, I was still shoe mill working.  I’d come home, she said, “I got to get out and see people.”  I said, “I’m people.”  That’s when I found out what she was.”  She wanted to be in town.  She wanted a store next door and so forth.  We did have a kid, but it got to the point where she left and took him with her.  Then, he was supposed to have visitation rights.  And every time he’d come, he’d act up.  He’d say I’m being mean and so forth.  She’d treat him to everything.  He had a Playstation.  He had a computer.  He had everything handed to him.  When he’d come to visit my place, he had a few toys.  If he didn’t pick up the toys, he lost the toys.  That’s what he should do.  He had rules to [follow].  With her, he could do anything he wanted.  Then, she moved out West somewhere.  Then she moved back.  The last I knew or that I talked to him – I tried talking to him.  He wanted to talk with me on [the] phone.  Then, I called her up to talk to [him].  She said, “He’s not talking to you.  He’s not going to talk to you.  He’s not going to talk to you.”  That’s where I left it.  I finally got him on the phone.  I said, “If you ever want me, you know where I am.”  I said, “You got my number.  You know where I am.  I’m here.”  I haven’t heard a word for him.

MG:  That sounds tricky.

CH:  I’ve put feelers out there, trying to find out where he is, but I ain’t found anything yet.

MG:  I hope you can reconcile if that’s what you both want.

CH:  Yeah.  I’m hoping someday he will contact me.  I actually got her to contact her family because she’d left her family completely – wouldn’t even talk to them.  I finally [told] her, “You’ve got to talk to your family.  Family is family.”  I got her connected back with her family.

MG:  I wonder what that’s like for you as someone so connected to their family history.

CH:  It’s rough but I got to keep going on.

MG:  Your first shoe factory job was at the J.L. Coombs factory.  Did any of your relatives work for him previously or encounter him?  Coombs had been around Maine in the 19th century, I think.

CH:  He was out there.  The only contact I know of him – I don’t know the original ones that owned it.  But when I was getting up towards [my] thirties, the owner was a frequent supper guest up here.  Then I went out and talked with him and found out that the mill boss was actually related to my half uncle.  But other than that, there was no connection.  Other than that, I just did the same ethics as I did at home.  You did your worth of work.  I got along with all the workers no problem.

MG:  Tell me more about the workplace.  Did everyone else get along?

CH:  Workers get along all perfectly fine.  It got so that everybody – it was a three-story [building].  They worked in the basement.  They worked on the main floor, and they worked on the second floor.  When I got there, each floor was each floor.  As I was working, with my abilities, I got to move [to] all three floors.  I eventually got each floor – they didn’t really connect yet, but they appreciated more how things worked.  Before I got up there, the plant boss said that there used to be hassles, one floor complaining that the supplies ain’t coming down.  But as I worked different floors, I got them to realize there might be a hassle up on top for your suppliers because the middle supply isn’t supplying the upper section.  It all worked together.  Of course, every month, they would have a feast.  Everybody would bring food in.  Well, I brought food in.  Then, I brought food in for the upper floor the first and the second time [and] the third time.  Then, the other floors got wind that I was bringing something up that was disappearing completely because I was cooking it.  So, the mid-floor – I finally brought one for them.  Then, the basement heard about it.  They wanted to try it.  So, I got to my last year working.  I was bringing three meals, one for each floor.  I had a cake.  I called it the whoopie pie cake.  It’s a full cake.  It’s a beet-chocolate cake.  I make the cake, and I cut it in half, take it out of the pan, and cut in two layers, fill it with filling, then put the top on, then frost it.  It takes a whole pound of butter, six eggs, and the mill made a bet.  The first time I made it, the top floor made a bet that they could eat it.  They couldn’t finish it.  So, the next month, the middle and the basement decide to join in.  They did manage.  All three floors together managed to finish that cake. [laughter]

MG:  It sounds rich.

CH:  It is rich.  I made twenty five dollars off of that by one guy.  He said, “I can eat at least half of it.”  Ate two pieces and that was it.  When it got so that I thought they weren’t paying me what I was worth, I said, “I’ve got to go down [to] Bass,” and they was trying to deal with me and so forth.  I said, “No, it’s a little too late.”  I heard that they hired three people to replace me.

MG:  That must have made you feel pretty good.

CH:  Yeah.  Then two years exactly to the date, they went out of business.  Then I went down to Bass there, and then I became disabled.  I worked for a year and a half disabled, trying to keep helping them out.  I said, “It’s getting to the point that I’m working three hours a week, and I’m laid up the rest of the week.  You’re wasting your money.  So, I told them – I said, “I got to quit.”  They didn’t want me to, but I said, “I got to.”  Then I found out, two years after that, Bass closed up.  Then I found out by a worker that after I left, they replaced me with two people to do the job I was doing for three hours a week.

MG:  You must have been very productive.

CH:  I give them what they’re worth.

MG:  Was your disability the diagnosis you received about your degenerative bone disease, or was it something else?

CH:  Hereditary bone disease.

MG:  Walk me through that a little bit.  What was going on with you and in your life when you started to talk to doctors or figure this out?

CH:  I was out here raking the lawn.  I was working at the mill and so forth.  I was working one spring, getting the rocks off from the edge of the road here, and my back snapped.  I pretty near fell over.  My mother come out and my brother and got me into the house.  I rested the rest of the day.  I was out a week of working at the mill.  It kept getting worse and worse.  I said, “I got to go to the doctor.”  I went to [the] doctor.  The doctor said I was a wimp.  I just didn’t want to work.  I couldn’t take pain.  I said, “Talk to the nurses up there to Bass.”  I said, “She’ll tell you I can take pain” because that was after my finger.

MG:  What happened with your finger?

CH:  I got it caught in a sole press machine – this finger – and all the meat ripped right off it.  I could see the bone.

MG:  Jeez.

CH:  I hit the machine to release it, looked at it, took it like, and walked into the nurse.  I said, “I got a problem.”  She said, “What?”  I said, “I think I need a couple of stitches,” and she passed out.  They took me to – they got an ambulance and took me to the hospital.  Got into the hospital.  He looked at it.  I said, “I think I need at least five, maybe six stitches.”  It took fifteen stitches.  He said, “You’re calm about this.”  I said, “What am I going to do about it?  You’re supposed to be stitching it up.”  He said, “Okay, we’ll knock you out and put it together.”  I said, “Okay.”  So, they give me anesthesia.  I wake up.  I said, “Haven’t you started yet?”  “You’re awake?” [laughter] I sat there while he was stitching.

MG:  Oh my gosh.

CH:  He said, “Boy, can you take pain.”

MG:  Were there other accidents?  Would accidents happen regularly at the shoe factories?

CH:  Oh, yeah.  The shoe factories, you always have an accident.  For the eleven years I worked there at Bass, I think the best record we had was fourteen days accident-free.  Because you’ve got sewing machines that – they’re going through leather and rubber and everything; they got needles like that.  Them needles, if they break, they shoot like a bullet right across the room.  Plus, you’re working around knives whipping around fourteen RPMs a minute, and your fingers are right there, turning the shoes around.  The knives are spinning like that, taking the edges of the sole off, and your fingers are right here.  People have lost their fingers and everything else.

MG:  How were they treated when that happened?  Would they receive workers compensation?

CH:  They received workers comp, rehabilitation, everything.  But when they diagnosed my back, they found out it was hereditary, so they didn’t have to pay workers comp.  But they did facilitate in trying to rehab me and so forth.  Nothing they could do because it’s just something that’s going to progress the whole time.

MG:  So, tell me what it is you have.

CH:  It’s a degenerative bone disease in my back.  It’s the vertebrates.  There’s a gel between each vertebra.  The gel is gone.  The vertebrae is sitting right on top of one another.  And it’s S1, S2, L1, L2, L3, and L4.  That’s all the lumbar and two below it.  It’s sitting on – just like that, and there’s nothing to stop it from slipping off.  So, I have to watch how I get up, how I move, and so forth.  I’m living with pain 24/7.  The pain, which most people say pain is six to seven.  My pain, regular pain, would be eighteen or nineteen out of a scale of ten.  or 19.  They put me on medication.  They’ve tried forty-five different pain medications.  And the only one that works is ibuprofen.  I take that.  I’m supposed to take it every eight hours, but sometimes – some days, it’s every three hours.

MG:  How are you feeling right now?

CH:  Right now, on my scale, I’m about a seven which would probably be most persons around a fifteen. [laughter]

MG:  What would be helpful right now?  Do you want to take a break?  Do you want to take some medicine?  Do you need a walk around?

CH:  I’ll take my medicine.  I got to get up and move shortly, yeah.

MG:  Why don’t we do that now?  We can take a short break, and then maybe I’ll ask you a few more questions about how the rest of your life unfolded.  Then we can take probably a break for the day.

CH:  Okay.

[Recording paused.]

MG:  We were talking about the disability that you discovered.  You were how old when that happened?

CH:  It was in ’95 that I found that out.  I can’t figure out days.  Be around thirty-nine, forty.

MG:  It’s degenerative.  Does that mean it’s getting worse?

CH:  Yep.  It’ll just keep getting worse and worse and worse and worse.  I’ve noticed now that it feels like there’s a couple vertebrates higher than the lumbar area.

MG:  And there’s nothing they can –?

CH:  They can fuse it, but they said with the arthritis that I’ve developed around it – with that, they can go in for surgery, but I’d have a five percent chance of getting out of bed.  So, I’d rather deal with pain than not being able to get out of bed.  I’ve dealt with too many people not getting out of bed – my father, my mother, and my grandfather.  So, I’ll keep going as long as I can.

MG:  In your write-up to me, you described a number of things that have happened or that you’ve had.  Maybe start from the beginning.  You said you were born with eczema and psoriasis.

CH:  Yeah, eczema, psoriasis – what they called the skull cap.  I had a crust all over my head.  That developed into eczema and psoriasis, so I get scale-type coverings on my head and lots of dandruff.  Then, I was born with a small esophagus.  So, it made it – I couldn’t take any medication.  I had to have it in liquid form.  Then, when I was about nine, ten years old, I had an accident in baseball, and it hit me right in the Adam’s apple and shoved it backward.  So, that don’t help my esophagus much, and that’s what I was coughing for because a little phlegm on that hangs.  Then I had a motorcycle accident in – let’s get the date right – in ’86 that busted the helmet.  I was banged up for over a week.  Then, I had a – let’s see.  The next thing was I fell off the barn roof and landed on my back on a pile of rocks.  So, that didn’t help my degenerative bone disease much, which I didn’t know about then.  Then I had a moose accident – killed the moose and killed the car, but I survived and had a black spot on my lips because of it.  Everybody thinks it’s [from] smoking, but it’s from the moose’s head.

MG:  What happened?

CH:  I was going to work down to Bass in the morning, and I saw the moose.  The moose was crossing the road.  As I was coming up to it, I was going to veer to the right just in case, and she did – she flipped right around, bolted across the road, hit the front of the car, and come right in the seat with me.  The radio was in the backseat.  The only thing that saved me was the window and door frame on the driver’s side didn’t buckle, and she was a female, not a male – didn’t have the horns.  That was one the only thing that I survived from, but the car was dead completely, and the moose was dead in the ditch.  I’ve still got a few abrasions of glass in my arm.  They don’t bother, but they said if they don’t bother, don’t mess with it.  Then I had my appendix blow, and that was after they discovered my diverticulitis and back injury.  Of course, of the back injury – they didn’t discover the diverticulitis for a while because when the diverticulitis acts up, that’s irritated cuticles on your intestines – when that inflames, it pushes against your back.  When that pushes against the back, it feels just like my back problem.  When my back problem flares up, it pushes on the intestines which causes that diverticulitis to act up.  So, it was a while that they weren’t figuring out what it was.  I was having attacks every single month, keeling over in pain, and then they finally found out it was the diverticulitis that was doing it.  So, then I changed my diet.  Then I had the appendix blow on me.

MG:  You’ve got nine or ten lives, I think.

CH:  That’s why I’m a Leo.  I’m a cat. [laughter] I’m getting to the end of my list here.

MG:  I know.  I think you have just one more.

CH:  That’s why I got to get this stuff down. [laughter]

MG:  You skipped over a couple.  One was a bee sting at nine.

CH:  Yeah, that was dirty bees.  We were running around, playing across the road in the old milk house.  There was an old basket full of rotten apples, and there was a hornet’s nest in the apples.  Somehow, I hit it, and they swarmed.  I had seven stings on my head and fifteen on my left hand.  My left hand blowed right up to a balloon, and I became allergic to dirty bees.

MG:  Can you say what a dirty bee is?

CH:  A dirty bee is a bee that’s made [a] nest in rotten foods.  So, it’s got the contamination of the food on their bodies.  So when they sting you, there’s a contaminated needle they’re stinging with.

MG:  How were you treated for this?

CH:  I was treated with medication and salves.  Of course, being left-handed didn’t help much because that was my left hand.  I was out of school for over a month.

MG:  That’s a big deal.

CH:  Yep.  And then, on the codeine – we found out from my degenerative back disease that I was allergic to that.  It gave me shakes, shivers, and rash.  So, they took me off that immediately.  Put me back on ibuprofen.

MG:  When you were fifteen, you came into contact with a gas plant.

CH:  Yep.  It’s a plant that the neighbors had up here.  She imported it from Europe.  On a full moon, it emits a gas, a liquid that evaporates.  Its liquid is all over the leaves.  It slowly evaporates.  You can take a match and put it to it, and it will burst into flame, the liquid.  It won’t burn the plant, but the liquid will burn.  Being a gardener up here with my grandfather, I brushed against it.  It gave me a rash and sores and so forth.

MG:  How did you treat that?

CH:  That was treated with salves and topical skin lotions and antibiotics.

MG:  Your poor mother.

CH: [laughter] She actually said I was the easier one compared to my uncle.

MG:  You also suffered from chronic migraines, but that’s not something you still experience.

CH:  No.  My mother, her mother, and her mother, as far as I know – what the story was – there’s no records of it because of the burning of the church, but I do know my grandmother and my mother had them.  They’re weather-related.  Any electrical current in the air would give us a wicked massive migraine.  It started in around thirteen, fourteen years old, and would go until you’re about forty, forty-two, and then it’d stop for some reason.  But you would be out for, sometimes, two, or three weeks at a time.  My mother was the same way.  Even now, being in Maine, I can tell when a thunderstorm’s in New York.  When my mother was near a computer, it would shut down.  I have shut down the Bass computer just by touching it.  I was going out to – we had them (SKU?) cards that you run through for the timecard.  We got joking around – coworkers.  I said I could foul up computers.  They said, “Prove it.”  So, when I ran my (SKU?) card through, I put my hand on the terminal, and I ran it through.  Nobody could use it afterward.  Nobody could.  They was working – everything was shut down.  Come the next morning, there was no – couldn’t do anything.  They were getting a crew in and everything else.  They said, “The crew will be here tomorrow.”  I said, “Wait a minute.”  I took my card, put my hand on it, swiped it.  I said, “Now try it.”  Everybody was clicking right in.

MG:  What do you think accounts for that?

CH:  It’s the energy in us.  My mother and I both can take hold of an electric fence, cattle fence, and not bother us at all.  We can feel a little tingle, but that’s it.  But if somebody touched us, that’d jump them right off the ground.  But all we feel is just a little prick.

MG:  Maybe it’s all the iron in your systems that’s grounding you.

CH:  Iron and electricity.

MG:  It’s interesting.

CH:  It’s hereditary through my grandmother somehow.

MG:  In your notes, you said it started around when you were twenty.  Do you know what accounted for its coming on in the first place?

CH:  No.  Anywhere between fourteen and twenty is when it starts.  Around forty and forty-two, it stops.  It always hits the youngest person in the family.

MG:  So fascinating.

CH:  My grandmother was the youngest.  My mother was the youngest.  And I’m the youngest.  My sister says that she has it, but she’s never been out and have to pull down all the curtains and shut all the doors and have complete quiet.  I’ve had it sometimes in the summer, and a cricket outside is driving me crazy – with everybody shut up.  I can’t stand it.  It’s so hard.

MG:  Well, I’m glad that’s gotten better for you.

CH:  What they call a migraine now is not what we have.  It feels just like somebody’s taking a three-ton weight and just set it right on your head.

MG:  Sounds so uncomfortable.

CH:  Yeah.  But it stopped when I was about forty-two.  My mother stopped when [she] was forty-three.

MG:  What would doctors say about it?

CH:  “You’re crazy.  Weather don’t affect them.  There’s nothing to do with the weather.”  There’s one time that I was coming – we was coming back from Waterville, from a family trip.  We was going along, and all of a sudden, I had to pull over.  I was driving.  My father said, “What’s going on?”  I said, “There’s a storm up ahead.”  “No, they’re ain’t.”  Mom said, “Oh, yes, there is.”  As soon as I pulled over – it wasn’t five minutes – there was a massive downpour, lightning banging and thundering.

MG:  Have you lost that sense a bit?

CH:  No, I can still feel any storm coming in.  I can feel it.

MG:  Interesting.  Well, I hope you put that in your diary because I think that’s fascinating.

CH: [laughter]

MG:  You listed a number of other things you wanted to talk about as part of this conversation.  One of them, I think you mentioned, was the 1923 Dodge touring car.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  That was what you learned to drive on.

CH:  Yeah.  As I told you, my father chopped them two Dodge touring cars.  One was a 1919, and the other was a 1923.  He chopped them down to make stump jumpers, and that’s what I learned to drive a vehicle on that was that ’23.  The ’19 is sitting on the birding trail out here.  The ’23 is still actually working in Madrid.  You had your clutch, you had your break, and you didn’t have a gas pedal.  You had a gas lever and a choke.  Your gear shift was all afloat.  You had to hopefully engage each shift, whether it was rear.  You’re going along, you’re going in third, you might pull it out, want to go into second, and it’ll land in reverse. [laughter] It was tricky.

MG:  It sounds dangerous.

CH:  So, by the time I learned to drive, I took my driver’s test in the wintertime.  They usually hold it through – my sister took hers in the summer.  She went through two years of permit before she took it, and she failed it.  Then she had to have a half a year, and then she passed it.  She went in the summer.  My brother took his, failed, and then took his second time in the summer.  I took the written test.  I passed it.  I had two questions I missed on, both dealing with alcohol.  Of course, they didn’t know I had two mai tais before I took the test. [laughter] That’s why when they said how long it took, I doubled it.  Then, when I took my driver’s test, it was in the wintertime.  There was a five-inch snow storm that same day, same night.  I was taking the test, and the instructor was telling me what I do.  He says to park it and so forth like that.  I did everything.  Then, it was going past somebody that somebody had pushed all the snow right out into the road.  He said, “Oh, uh.”  I said, “What?”  And I just drove right straight through it.  He said, “Take it back.  You passed.”  He said, “If you can drive through that, you’ve passed.”  I said, “Well, if you knew what I learned on.”  He said, “What?”  I said, “A 1923 Dodge touring stump jumper.”  He said, “You passed.”

MG:  The other car you drove when you were nine, was a 1964 Comet.

CH:  Yep.

MG:  What does that car look like?

CH:  A Comet is a small Ford.  It would be like a Ford Escort.  It was a two-door.  It was blue.  It was virtually the first compact Ford that they made.

MG:  You were nine years old when you learned to drive that?

CH:  Yep.

MG:  Did your dad teach you?

CH:  Yep.  Well, let’s see.  There was the ’23 and the [inaudible] both because the ’23 was around in the farm fields, and so forth.  The Comet was the one that I actually drove on the roads because that was a licensed vehicle.  The stump jumper’s not a licensed vehicle.

MG:  What was your very first car?

CH:  My first car was a Delta ’88 Oldsmobile.  It was a hand-me-down car from my father.  The family ran it for – let’s see.  We bought it in ’83, and we ran it until – no, it was ’73.  We ran it until ’78.  Then my father got another one.  My brother had already bought his Buick, and I got that one.  It had 198,000 miles on it.  It was a V-8.  I ran that for seven years.  So it was over 300,000 by the time I got done with it.  I told my father, “It’s time to get a new vehicle.”  He said, “What’s wrong with this [inaudible].”  I said, “It’s time to get a new – it’s getting worn out.”  He said, “It’s only got 300,000.”  I said, “Yeah, 300,000, these old cars – they weren’t meant to go over 100,000.”  So, we parked it down here on the intervale, and I got a Dodge Diplomat, and I ran that for a while.  Then, a week later, after I got the Dodge Diplomat, I come up to help my father.  Well, it was here anyways.  Dad said, “Let’s go down and start that Oldsmobile.”  I said, “You know it’s going to start.”  He said, “Yeah, but let’s go down and start it.”  So, we walk down.  The car had dropped to the ground.  The whole frame and the tires and everything had gone right up into the car.  I said, “And you wanted me to keep on the road with that.” [laughter] He says, “Yeah, but I bet it’ll start.”  I said, “I know it’ll start.”  He said, “Go ahead.”  It started right up.  The guy, a month later, came and saw it.  He said, “Is the engine good?”  Dad said, “Yeah, there’s no problem with the engine.”  He said, “I’ll buy it for five hundred dollars.”  He said, “Okay.”  The guy ran over, pulled the engine out, and he raced that engine in his car races for three years.

MG:  That car had good bones.  I think you mentioned the motorcycle accident that sounded pretty heavy-duty.  Was that the last time you rode motorcycles?

CH:  I finally got that fixed up.  The last I rode motorcycles was after I found out about my back.  I bought a Kawasaki 1100 in ’95, and I rode that.  I was supposed to have gone on group trips, but the group peeled out on me, so I went on the trip by myself all the way to Lake Champlain and back.  I spent the night over there and did a lot of running around the state of Maine with it.  I put in close to 15,000 miles on it.  Then I had the accident.  I was going around – well, I had three accidents.  The first accident, I managed to keep the bike upright.  I was pulling out of a restaurant, and there was a car way back – I was pulling out, and I was going to pull out, and a car jumped out of another road and gunned it and almost hit me.  I went down, and I scraped my leg.  The momentum brought the bike back up, so I managed to save myself on that.  Two years after that, I was going up along the road strip, and a crow hit me and knocked me off my bike.  The bike didn’t get damaged much with that.  But the other one was – I was going along the road in the spring, and the dirt from the winter was still on the road, and I lost it, and I busted the helmet and tore up my leather coat and leather chaps.  The front end of the bike was completely smashed.  I took four months to get that fixed, and then I rode for three or four more times.  Then, I found out about my back, and then I said, “That’s it.”  I’m not going to be able to sit on them seats that long anymore now – when they found out about my back, they gave me five minutes standing, five minutes sitting, and five minutes laying.

MG:  You were only supposed to do those things for five minutes at a time?

CH:  Yep.  So, what work schedule is going to do that?  And only lift five pounds.  That was the original – now it’s whatever I can tolerate.  But that was original.  I don’t know of many jobs that consist of five minutes laying, five minutes sitting, five minutes standing, and only lifting five pounds.

MG:  Do you miss riding motorcycles?

CH:  Yeah.  I loved motorcycles.

MG:  Tell me a little bit about the relationships you have with your neighborhoods and their connection to the birding trail.

CH:  The neighbors up here, the ones that are above me here, are the nephew of the original people that we used to work with.  One lives in Rhode Island, and one lives in Texas.  But they had a birding trail up on what they call the intervale, where the Indian village used to be on the upper end.  The woman that owns the land heard there was going to be an outing, an event that the people was going to come, and she thought there was going to be eighty, ninety people, so she said, “No more.”  She’s still not allowing it.  So, they was walking around, and I said something about something.  I said, “My property out here.”  He said, “Well, didn’t want to have swamp trails, and it wasn’t against the stream.”  I said, “It’s along the stream some.”  And the old twitching roads were my ancestors, and they went out there, and they saw this [360] panoramic view of the mountains and so forth and the different bird habitats that I have because I have the fields, I have the woods, I have the swamps, I have the thickets.  I have the river.  So I’ve got all the habitats of it.  I’ve got a sand pit that Kingfishers used to nest in.  They just fell in love with it.  They said, “If you want it, we’ll do it.”  I said, “Well, I’ll do it, as long as I maintain the trail.”  So, it’s now become my trail, not their trail.  The High Peaks Alliance has been – the neighbor, one of the brothers up here – nephews – is part of the High Peaks Alliance, and he was saying something about easing up on my taxes and so forth.  He said, “You know, each year [it’s] getting harder and harder to maintain it.”  So, they come up with a plan.  I said, “I’ve got stipulations I’ve got to have,” and they agreed to every single stipulation.  So, we closed the deal, and now they’re the owners of the property.  They’re going to help me maintain it.  So, I don’t have the whole load all myself and keep this preserved.

MG:  Throughout our conversation, you’ve talked about how you’re aware that you’re the last of the line here.  So, what happens in fifty years or whenever you’re not here anymore?

CH:  That’s what I’m trying to do, is put it into the preserve, so that the whole business is still here the same way it is.  Over there is all settled because that’s going to be preserved the way it is.  They’ve got crews – they had a crew up here last week to help me do some work, and they said they’ll get better at it, get more crews up here to keep it maintained better.  The crew listened to me and did exactly what I told them to do.  So, that’s working out pretty good.  Now, as for this house being the last of the village, I want it preserved somehow or recognized, and somebody get up here and learn everything in the museum because I have used everything in the museum, and I know how it works and know what the history of it is, so they can learn the history, so somebody can take over and keep this going.  If this becomes vacant – any house [that] becomes vacant, falls down quick.  That would be the last of the village.

MG:  It sounds like that would be really upsetting.  I think I know the answer, but I’m curious to hear what you have to say.  Why is this so important to preserve?

CH:  It’s kind of hard, but the root of it is to recognize the people who went out and did the challenge to get this settled and all the hard work that they did.  If it wasn’t for me and some knowledge, all the work would be gone.

MG:  I think that’s so important.  I’m so glad we’re having this conversation and that you’re working with the folks who see the value and want to preserve that.  Not many people have the opportunity to live out their years in the house where they grew up and where their family members grew up and in an area where they’ve had such deep roots.  I think it’s incredible that you’re so connected to this area and want to make sure it continues on.

CH:  Yeah.  The historian/archeologist said that he’s worked for the DOT [Department of Transportation] in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine because that’s what his job was.  When they was going to make a new road, they had to do the research, see if there’s any artifacts that had to be preserved and so forth.  He said it’s very rare that he has the opportunity to go to a place and have somebody actually knowledgeable about that place.  He says, most of the time, he goes in, they tell this is it, but he don’t know what the history is.  He has to really do the digging.  Whereas, talking to me, he’s got it.

MG:  When did these efforts begin in a more concerted way to start to really get the history down and get the surveys done?

CH:  They started about the time that I started the trail, when people started realizing what the trail consisted of.  Because in 2015, when they opened it up, they had a few officials in 2014 come from different areas of the United States.  I think the main one was in the – October 2014, they had seventeen people here all related to National Parks.  One of them stated at the end – he said, “In the United States, there’s only three that include nature, history, scenery, and animal life.”  He says, “You’re one of the three.”

MG:  I can tell that’s so meaningful to you.

CH:  In 2017, a family [came] up here.  I’ll probably break up on this.  Iit’s so meaningful because they came up, and the boy had bone disease in his whole body.  They said they didn’t know how far they could go.  It was about an hour later.  I saw them come down the road.  As soon as she saw me, she ran.

MG:  Can I get you a tissue?  Stay put.

CH:  Thank you.  She ran all the way up and gave me a big hug.  I said, “What for?”  She said, “He made it all the way.”  I said to her, “That’s why I’ve got the trail.”

MG:  Of course.

CH:  The boy is dead now from the disease.  She wrote me the other day.  She said, “That was the best thing in his life.”

MG:  It’s such a special spot.

CH:  That’s why I want it preserved.

MG:  Of course.

CH:  I told that woman – I said, “I don’t care for a cent.  That’s the reason that I made it.”

MG:  That’s precisely why it shouldn’t be developed.

CH:  That’s why I wanted to get this down, so people know about this stuff.

MG:  Well, I’m really glad we’re having this conversation and that this worked out.  There’s still so much more to capture.  Let me pause the recorder, and we can make some decisions about where to go next. [Recording paused.]. We were talking about the need and the value of conserving this land and the different folks involved.  I also wanted to ask about your involvement with the Madrid Historical Society.  You told me, when we were taking a walk earlier, how you got involved.  Maybe you could tell that story again on the tape.

CH:  Well, in 2019, I was going up on the trail.  I always maintain the cemetery on the trail, too.  I happened to see a sign for the cemetery; it said, “Plains Cemetery.”  I said, “Well, that is wrong.”  Somebody stuck it up sometime.  I didn’t realize.  So, I went over.  I knew that Madrid had a Madrid cemetery committee.  I went over to them.  I said, “That’s not the sign.”  He said, “We didn’t make the sign.  The historical society made the sign.”  But I became part of the cemetery [committee] because I told them – I said, “I maintain that cemetery.”  So, they agreed to make me a board member.  I maintain this one.  So, then I went over to the historical meeting that they had.  I said, “Who made the sign on the cemetery up there?”  They said, “We did.”  I said, “It’s the wrong sign.”  “What do you mean?  It’s the Plains Cemetery.”  I said, “No, it’s not the Plains Cemetery.  It’s never known as the Plains Cemetery.”  I said, “Who told you that?”  They said, “A person up at the upper end of the field.”  I said, “He’s from Bath, Maine.  He don’t know it.”  They said, “Well, what was it?”  I said, “It was always the East Madrid Cemetery while Madrid was organize.  But before that, it was called the Perham Cemetery or the Perham Stream Cemetery or the Perham Settlement Cemetery.”  They said, “Well, how do you know that?”  I said, “Because I have a map of it,” and I showed them.  It says, “The map plan for the cemetery on the Plains field,” not the Plains cemetery.  Just above it, it says, “Perham Settlement Cemetery.”  They said, “Well, we didn’t know that.”  I said, “Did you know that in the cemetery, there is a Swedish trapper buried in [the] 1690s?”  They said, “What?”  I says, “Yeah.”  I said, “Well, that’s the story that’s been told through the families, through the generations.”  They said, “1690s?”  I said, “Yeah.”  They said, “Well, when was the cemetery made?”  I says, “About forty, fifty years later, they decided to make a cemetery and used him as the upper right corner.”  They said, “Well, how do you know all this?”  I said, “Because these are handed down stories and tales and so forth.”  And they said, “Well, we’ll get that straightened out and so forth.”  And then I went back to the cemetery committee, and they said, “Well, it isn’t that big a cemetery anyways, and it’s full.”  I says, “What do you mean full? And what do you mean not that big?”  They said, “It’s only a thirty by forty-foot.”  I said, “What are you talking about?  It’s forty by one hundred and twenty.” “What do you mean one hundred and twenty?” I said, “We donated the land to the cemetery.”  They said, “Well, all we know is there’s supposed to be somebody buried up there, but we don’t know how they’re going to get because they’re not there.”  I says, “That’s my mother that’s getting buried up there.” That was 2017, not ’19, sorry.  And they said, “What do you mean donated?”  I said, “Don’t you have the deed?”  “What deed?”  I says, “This deed.”  And I showed them the deed, and they said, “Well, how many plots is it?”  I said, “Well, the plot is four by eight, you’ve got ninety-one vacant plots up there.”  They said, “Really?”  So they had to reorganize, and then I went down to the historical society again and went to another meeting.  They said something about and – I said, “Well, by the way, you don’t have this town map, do you?”  They said, “What town map?”  I says, “This one.”  I showed them, and there was a map showing Madrid, the town of Madrid, and showing the settlement here, over here.  And where the town was, was four farms: Ezekiel Hinkley, Benjamin Hinkley, Nathaniel Hinkley, and Samuel Hinkley.  That was the town.  They said, “What?  Where’d you get this?”  I says, “From the property place down Farmington. The probate court.”  [They] says, “Well, when is this?”  I said, “Well, according to the deeds, by going by them Hinkleys, the four brothers, I dated it between around 1825.”  They said, “How do you know?”  I says, “Cause in 1829, one died, so he wouldn’t own the land.”  And I said, “And the youngest one was in 1818, so between 1818 [and] 1829.”  So I split the difference – 1825.  Cause in 1818, the youngest one was twenty-two years old.  So, I figured it was somewhere around 1825.  And they said, “Can we have a copy of that?”  And then I went to the next meeting.  They said, “Come to the next meeting.”  I went to the next meeting. They said, “You want to be a historian?”  So I became a historian.

MG:  I’m surprised it took until 2017 for you to connect with the historical society.

CH:  The historical society, the one that was running it when it became disorganized – because that’s when the historical society started in 2000 – was a woman that wanted her family to be the big shots of the creation of Madrid.  When they found out that Miller Hinkley was the one that pushed and pushed and pushed to get it organized and that woman’s ancestor denied, denied, denied – but she wanted her family to be the big shots of the town and, therefore, she didn’t want to recognize anything over this way and all the history and everything.  So it was lost until I got over there.  And then the one that was over there, she said, “We got to get started getting the information from you and so forth and so forth.”  And then she died, and the other two, Ginni Robie and Cindy came as the presidents.  They said, “We still got to get this information.  We got to get it down.”  She says, “Because, as you say, you’re the last in the line, and it’s going to be gone.”

MG:  And who is the Swedish trapper?

CH:  The Swedish trapper – there has always been a story around that there was a Swedish trapper that had a lean-to above Farmer Mountain, but this side of Abraham, between Abraham and Farmer Mountain.  He trapped all the way from over beyond Rangeley and over beyond Kingfield.  This whole area, he trapped in.  He worked with the Indians and so forth on trapping and so forth.  He died around 1690s, and they buried him in the fields up there.  That’s all I knew about it.  Well, when I went up there to investigate, there’s seven gravestones, and the map that I had had fourteen graves but no markers, but they had the locations of different places they’re supposed to be buried, and they had the name of the person.  So what I did is I went up, and I measured in correspondence with the map to resize it and so forth.  I found a sort of a little indentation there at every one of them.  So I put a stone, and I put the information on it, and in that back right corner, the upper right corner, there’s a great big boulder, and then there’s a flat stone laying beside it, the other direction from all the other graves.  I said, “I bet that’s where the Swedish trapper is, that the story was.”  So, I put a marker on, just possibly the Swedish trapper.  Well, last year, there were some workers up here helping with this new roof and so forth, Community Action. And one of them lived over in Rangeley, and the other one lived over in Kingfield.  They was talking to me and [were] interested in the museum.  They heard me talk about that.  So they decided to start poking around [with] their friends and relatives.  A month later, they come back; they still was working here. The Rangeley guy come back, and he said, “You know,” he said, “I can almost corroborate that story for you.”  I said, “Why?”  He said, “My grandfather said he had a story of a Swedish trapper that lived on the opposite side of Saddleback.”  I said, “Well, that kind of corroborates it.”  They said it, he said it was around the late 17th century, which would be 1690s.  Week later, the other guy’s shift comes.  He come over.  He says, “I got news for you.”  I said, “What?”  He says, “My great-uncle said that there was a Swedish trapper in the late 1600s that lived on the opposite side of Abraham.”  I said, “Really?”  So, there’s two on the opposite sides of the mountains [who corroborated] that.  Last month, I had a woman come up from Phillips; she dowses different cemeteries to find grave sites.  She hit that three times [in] different directions.  And she says it is laying opposite direction than the others.

MG:  Why would it be doing that?

CH:  Well, when they buried him, they buried him along the edges of the woods. Well, when they made the cemetery, they put the gate up here, and they laid all – put the bodies this way.  So he was always the other angle.  And she says it is laying in the opposite angle than the others are.

MG:  Interesting.

CH:  And she hit it three times.  Three different directions, she hit it.  So that’s three possible connections to my story.

MG:  Definitely.  What are the other efforts of the Madrid Historical Society?  What are you guys trying to do, accomplish, and put together?

CH: What they’re trying to do – what they do is they’re a source for people to come and see if they can find any family records of any information and so forth.  But what they want to do is get the information that I’ve got down and archived.  Because they used to have one that did that – archive it and all the knowledge, but she passed on.  They said they wished they had somebody like you to interview her so they could pull the stuff out of her brain.  But they wanted to get this information down so that they have the record because all they had record of was Madrid was 1806, 1807, it got started, and now I’ve got to 1690s history.  So, they want to get this stuff documented down so that they have it, too.

MG:  Well, is there anything we’re missing about your family history or your life story up to this point?  We’ll talk about the town and the area tomorrow.

CH:  Yeah.  The only other thing is the way that I feel about this land.  It’s open to everybody.  It’s for every– God made the land for everybody’s use.  Working with nature is – the thing I put on my parents’ grave.  I put a natural stone just like the rest of them.  And I put on the grave on my father’s side of the sign: “He was born on the land.  He lived on the land.  He worshiped the land.  He’s back to the land.”  On my mother’s side, I put, “She came to the land.  She lived with the man.  She loved the land.  She’s with the man.”  And under that, I put – well, on top, it says, sixt generation – what is the word?

MG:  Descendant?

CH:  Not descendant.  Starts with a C, I know.  It means conservation.  The word is custodian.  And then the sayings – then underneath “In Memoriam” – from the seventh.

MG:  And where are they buried?

CH:  They’re buried in the cemetery up here.  That Swedish Trapper.  Swedish Trapper is in the upper right corner.  My parents are in the lower right corner.

MG:  You mentioned there’s plenty more plots.

CH:  There is the seven gravestones, and the dowser found all seven of them at the location.  She found all the other fourteen that I put a rock on, and she thinks she’s found four others that’s not marked yet.  So I got to do some more research and try and find it.  But it’s not on the map that I had.

MG:  Is the historical society a place you can go and visit?  A brick-and-mortar office?

CH:  Yeah, it’s the old schoolhouse in the town of Madrid.  The schoolhouse that they had for the village over there.  You have to visit it by appointment.  You have to call the co-presidents, one of them, and they’ll open it up, and you can do research, or you can talk to me, and I can open it up, too. [laughter] I’ve got all the keys.  So a lot of times, I go over there and do some research and to corroborate something that the historian has told me about.

MG:  Neat.  I wonder if we could put all of this into a book someday.

CH:  Yeah, well, that’s what the archaeological historian was hoping that they’d do with his report.  Put it into a book.

MG:  Yeah.  And what was the purpose of his visit and that extensive survey?

CH:  He did it for the aspect of the – virtually the cooperation between the Indians and the white people and the agricultural and cultural aspects of why people came to settle here.  It’s more for the record of the farm industry part of it – use of the land.  Not the people themselves.  It’s the use of the land and how they cooperated and so forth.  It’s still going on.  He’s still in the process.  Mainly, we’re trying to open up the – find the exact place of the cellar because I’ve got the picture of the house outside and inside of every room and now cellar.  So that’s what we’re going by, and we think we’ve found the edge of the cellar, so now we’ve got to do the excavating round.  But the reason is cause that’s a unique cellar because it’s not like most cellars.  Most cellars are a square rectangle like that.  That is horseshoe-shaped. It’s horseshoe-shaped.  In the center of the horseshoe is two stone walls about two feet high.  They’re sixteen inches thick.  And on top of that is two hardwood, sixteen by sixteen beams laying right on top of a lengthwise wall.  Then across the other way, back and forth, to each beam, is eight by eight beams.  Then on top of that is a massive flat rock, and they built this chimney for the house on that.  So they had a cavity underneath the chimney.  The chimney, like this house here, had three fireplaces and a Dutch oven in the bottom of it.  So, you can see the length of this area here.  That whole area is the bottom of the chimney.  It goes from wall to wall to wall to wall.

MG:  Wow.

CH:  That’s a lot of weight.  And that had a well in the cellar, too.

MG:  And where is that located?

CH:  About, just about where we started digging, right next to the gate.  That is supposedly, I think, the corner of the house – as much as I can remember.  Because I remember the first part of that barn falling down towards me when I was a little kid.  I watched the whole building fall down.  When they decided to dismantle the main house, they had a guy come with a skidder, and he said all he got to do is lock onto the corner, pull the corner post out, and they’ll all fall down.  So he made a hole, went around with a cable – the corner post – and he started pulling, and the whole house moved.  Never tipped whatsoever.  He says, “That ain’t coming down that way.”  They had to get two excavators to break it down.

MG:  Oh my gosh.

CH:  That’s how built it was.

MG:  Yeah.  They used to do that.  They used to move houses, and it would be a big event.

CH:  Yeah.  Well, this house here, it isn’t built like the framework that they do now.  You might have a four-by-four beam going down here, and right beside you, you might have a ten by two beam going part-way down.  And then the six-by-six beam going catty corner like that. [laughter] So, this house is almost two-hundred years old, and it’s standing for two-hundred years, it has got to be built.

MG:  Yeah.  Well built.  Can you say a little bit about when the museum started and what one could find in there?

CH:  The museum started in 2016 because I had the stuff all here all the time.  It was stuff handed down through the family and what was left in the blacksmith shop, and what was handed from the old neighborhood to my family.  I decided to get it all undercover and keep it.  I just looked at it and said, “It shouldn’t be just for my enjoyment.  I bet a lot of people would enjoy it.”  So I decided to make a sort of museum out of it.  It’s stuff that’s, as I said, handed down through and all the stuff that is, most of the stuff in there I have used cause my father taught me how to use it cause he was taught by his father and so forth.  And there’s a trip hay rake that most people see.  They’re out on the lawns; they’re all metal.  This one is all wood-framed and wood-wheeled.  There is a hay tedder, which a lot of people don’t know what that is because – they mow the grass down now and they break the grass up and bale it and put it in them plastic wraps and so forth.  They used to have to mow the hay down one day, and then they had to go around in the morning and throw it into the air so the dew would dry it quicker.  They couldn’t put it in the same day because it wasn’t dry.  And I’ve got the British Brown Bess musket trigger guard that we found in the excavation of the cellar across the road of the Thomas Pickard house that we think was Thomas Pickard that he used in the War of 1812.  Then I’ve got another one in there that everybody gets tickled on.  I call it the swing pole.  My mother called it – well, my mother called it a swing pole.  I call it the pre-mower.  What it is, is a pole. You take a crowbar, you stick it in the ground, then you take this – it’s a wooden pole, long pole, that’s got a spring attachment on the bottom.  You put the spring attachment on the crowbar, and then you hook your animal to the pole, and they go around feeding.  And then you can pull it up and move it over, so he can do the lawn.  They get tickled about that.  And then I’ve got a sleigh heater, which is a heater – they light charcoal bricks, put it into the container, and put the container under the sleigh seat.  And then you have your blanket so you can keep warm.  I have a pie plate that you didn’t see yet.  It’s got a knob in the center, and there’s a little metal tray, flat scoop that goes, you put into it.  Then you put your pie crust in and then make your pie.  Then you can slice it, and you can pick this up and have your slice and then put it back down and slide it under the other slices.  And a pot pie plate hook.  They use gloves to reach in to get a pie. Now you have to put a silicone glove on.  You reach in the oven and get the pie.  This was two pieces of wood, and it’s got wireframing on the outside.  You just reach in, clamp onto the pie plate and pull it out.  That’s a few things.  There’s quite a few things in there.  I know the history of everything in there – when it was made, when it was purchased, and how it was used.

MG:  Do school groups come here?

CH:  Rangeley Lakes Heritage Trust in 2018 sent down a whole busload of kids to learn from me.  They had to divide into four groups.  There were twelve in each group.  There was a whole busload.  Some took one trail, some took the other trail, some took another trail, and another one in a museum; they rotated.  And I’ve had four of them kids come with their parents later on to see the museum – not the trail – the museum.  And the archeologist historian has gone and investigated cause he’s got all the diggings that we got, all the stuff we dug up. But he said he’s gone to a lot of the farm museums around the state and in New England, and he says this is almost one of the best ones organized for the simple fact that the person knows what the stuff is and how it was used.

MG:  What’s the name again of the archeologist historian?

CH:  Stephen.

MG:  Sorry to put you on the spot.

CH: Scharoun.

MG:  Stephen Scharoun.  That sounds familiar.  Yes.

CH:  Well, I had to think a minute because I’m in contact with Stephen Rauch that owns the property that has the Indian Trail on it.  So I almost said Stephen Rauch instead of Stephen Scharoun.

MG:  It must be hard to keep track.

CH:  Yeah.

MG:  You’ve got enough to keep in your head.  Well, is there anything else that we haven’t covered today that we should cover in terms of family history or your life story?

CH:  No, just the fact that what I do with the trail and the history is what my parents have done and every generation, [which] is try to keep the information going and get it out to people.

MG:  Before your parents passed, did they tell you that this was important to keep it going?

CH:  My mother and my father didn’t, but my mother did hear from my grandmother, that died before – Carrie Wing – before born.  She told me that Carrie told her I’m the last and the history will be gone before she died.  And my mother said, “No, you’re not, your son is.”  And that’s what she told me.  So there was knowledge that it was getting lost.

MG:  Yeah.  Well, I think we’re doing our best to preserve as much as we can.

CH:  Hopefully.

MG:  And I’m so impressed with you, your memory, and the stories you’ve shared with me today.

CH:  Hopefully, but you get it before I get Alzheimer’s.  Hopefully, I won’t get Alzheimer’s.

MG:  I don’t think that’s going to happen.  Although they do say that you lose what’s recent, not what’s in the past.

CH:  I know that’s one thing that – I listened to the old folks.  A lot of times you can find a history of the past when they’re getting senile because they recalled something way back that you want to put into the history.

MG:  Well, the sun’s starting to go down.  We’ve been talking for a while and taking up a lot of your time.  But I just want to thank you so much for the time you spent with me today.

CH:  Yep.  Well, I thank you for coming.

MG:  This has been such a treat, and I’m looking forward to part two tomorrow.  We’ll talk about the area and its history.

CH:  Yep.

MG:  All right.  Well, thank you so much.

CH:  Yeah, well, thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

Molly Graham:  This begins an interview with Carson Hinkley on November 6, 2022, in East Madrid, Maine.  The interviewer is Molly Graham.  What follows is a series of conversations as Carson gives me a guided tour of the Perham Settlement.  And then an interview about the history of the settlement that supports the Perham Settlement report by Steve Scharoun, which was sponsored by the High Peaks Alliance.

 

Carson Hinkley:  This is a map I [drew] out of the Old Village all the way through, every lot that I know of.  It’s kind of a – I’m not very good drawer.  But it covers all the places.  A few out towards the town line that we haven’t – I can’t get to.  But I’ve got them named here.  This is the first one that’s up here.  It’s the Clark’s now.  This was Zachary McLaughlin, which was Ralph McLaughlin’s father.  Ralph McLaughlin was the first husband of my grandmother.

 

MG:  He’s the one who died of pneumonia.

 

CH:  Yep.  Zachary was the Civil War vet.  And that’s that farm.  And then we come down into the picture – coming down the two hills here of the village that used to be here.

 

MG:  When is this picture dated?

 

CH:  About 1903.  This is when the mill started falling down.  This is a picture of the dam.  The dam set where them cedars are all the way across to them rocks over there.  The water come up.  As you can see in this picture, it’s coming out from underneath the mill, and the dam backed up all the way around to the back corner over there for the pond.  They harvested the ice right out behind the cedars here.

 

MG:  You can see that the water was much higher.

 

CH:  Oh yeah.  Well, it was all up to the top.  The cedars would be underwater.  And these are a few pictures of the old bridges that used to be here.  They replaced this one from a wooden bridge in 2020.  It was a wooden bridge until then.  This is the George True place, which is my place here.  This is a picture of the old Nathan Pickard farm.

 

MG:  Across the way?

 

CH:  Across the way.  This is where the shit house is, virtually.  They had a pump and the two stories the barn.  This was the milkhouse, and this was the house.  This was the “L,” and up on top end of the “L” was the ice shed.  They had a ramp on the backside up to the second story.

 

MG:  What was the purpose of the ramp?

 

CH:  To get the wagons up because they stored the hay in the top part of the barn.  The animals were in the bottom part.  This is the blacksmith shop.  That was located just above the Nathan farm here.  There’s a big black rock up there.  That was the forge rock.  They didn’t have a forge inside the shop.  They forged their iron, like the old Vikings did, in a cast on top of a rock.  That rock has on it “JRP 1860.”  Justice Richardson Pickard, which was Thomas’s son – he’s the one that died in the Civil War.  He signed that before he signed up for the Civil War.  On top of the rock is an X that was etched out by the Indians beforehand.  If you walk by that rock with a compass, it goes nuts.  That’s why it’s always been called the iron rock. [laughter] I figured we’d walk up towards the red house, and I’ll show you that one.  As I said, the Thomas Pickard house here – Nathan bought it in 1866.  Daniel lived in the red house, which we’re going to.  We always called it the Moulton House, but they lived there.  I think Moses lived there before Daniel because that’s where Cordelia Pickard lived when Thomas Pickard was here when he was still alive.  Then, Nathan bought it and let his mother, Cordelia Swift, live out the rest of her life in half of the house.  Daniel died at the red house.  Their daughter lived there for a while.  And then the Sweetsers lived there.  Then the Moultons, which are in the cemetery up here.

 

MG:  Those are all classic Maine family names.  Did they hail from this area or beyond?

 

CH:  Yeah, hail from this area down to Southern Maine and so forth.  My house, as I said before, Prescott built it after he bought the mill.  Then he sold it to George True, and George True, when he moved to Reeds Mill to operate that mill out there, he sold it to Andrew Keen, and Andrew Keen sold it to Carrie Wing, which was my grandmother.  She still lived over with Nathan.  So, when she bought it, she let Zachary, Ralph’s Father, come down and live here.  Then she moved up with Ralph up there at the McLaughlin farm.  Then, when he died, Zachary was still here.  My grandmother moved back with her parents.  And then when Zachary died, that’s when Carrie married Arthur, [and] moved over here.  And then, of course, when my father got married, he moved over [to] the old Nathan Wing place.  Then, when my grandmother died, they moved back over here, and then I was born, taking care of my grandfather.  The blacksmith shop was known as the Moulton-Pickard blacksmith shop when it got started because it was Justin, Thomas, and Dennis Moulton [who] operated the blacksmith shop until Solon Mecham moved down from the Mecham farm to live up on the intervale here.  Then, he took over as blacksmith.

 

MG:  How do you think these people worked out these joint ownerships?  Was that unusual, or is that typical?

 

CH:  It was typical back then because everything was community.  Virtually, it was all combined.  They were virtually all related in some sort of fashion anyways.  But I know the mill, at one time, after George True owned it, then it went [to] Andrew Keen.  By the time that started getting demolished, there were seventeen owners, and that was all of the different families in the area.  It’s the same with the blacksmith shop.  After Daniel Pickard died, Solon was a head blacksmith, but everybody used it.  As I said, it sat right there.  That’s another one that Steve wants to check out to see if there might be any artifacts in the ground from the – because there was a dirt floor in the blacksmith shop, so there might be some stuff fallen into the ground just like old farms.

 

MG:  But that area has not been excavated yet?

 

CH:  This is, as I said, I think was Moses Wing’s place.  Then, it went to Daniel Pickard.  Then, when Daniel Pickard killed himself out back – hung himself – it went to his brother Charles.  Charles sold it to Sweetser, and Sweetser sold it to Moultons.  I don’t know the name, but another person had it before (Bronson?) Griscom bought it in 1949.

 

MG:  That’s the family you worked for.

 

CH:  Yep.  His descendants and family relatives own it now, as they still have a trust – whole family trust.  One of them, Lloyd Griscom, is his nephew.  He’s the head of the High Peaks Alliance, which has over the Perham Stream Birding Trail to preserve it.  The one thing I didn’t tell you was Rangeley Lakes Heritage Trust is a big thing on birding.  They have a festival every year, and they include this one, even though it’s on the other side of the mountain from Rangeley.  I was the first recipient of their conservation award.

 

MG:  I saw that.  I was going to ask you about that. That must have been quite an honor.

 

CH:  Yes.  Just like yesterday’s interview, I broke up.  I couldn’t talk at all.  They wanted me to make a speech, and I couldn’t do it.  It was emotional for the aspect of how my family’s always done things.  It was a virtual recognition of all the work that all the generations have done.

 

MG:  Yeah, finally.

 

CH:  As I said, this was the – we called it the Moulton as I just told you.  This was the original one.  This one burnt in 1903.  Then it was replaced with this one here. [Recording paused.] Now we’re going to go up on what they called the Mecham Intervale Road.  This is the access road that they used to get to the Barnjum mills.  Before the Barnjum mills, there was the Farmer farms.  I don’t know their names.  All I know about it is there was three farms up there.  The old man Farmer had a farm, and he raised two boys.  And later on, they made a farm two farms below him.  That’s all I know about it.

 

MG:  I remember reading and thinking it was convenient their last name was Farmer.

 

CH:  Right.  Well, that’s why the Farmer Mountain was named – because of them.  Up here, the upper end of the intervale, is was where the Indian village used to be.  One last Indian used to live up above, and he gave a basket to a white man that made a log cabin up there.  That person gave the basket to my mother.  Other than that, Solon Mecham, which was the son of a farmer up on Mecham Farm on Mecham Hill, came down and became the blacksmith, and he lived up here on his road.  I’ll take you up to where they used to have a footbridge across the stream.  You can see the yellow birch right there.  That’s where the bridge crossed.  But they still have a little apple orchard right there, too.  This is where [inaudible] in the diaries that [inaudible] the water went right across here and down through.  There’s three times it was a freshet that my place and the old farm place had water up to the windowsills.

 

MG:  Oh my gosh.  When would that have been?

 

CH:  That was in the early 1900s.  There was in 1901.  Another one in 1913, or something like that.  There was one that she reported of an earlier one before; it was in the late 1800s.  But the only one I remember was in 1987, where it took out – it was April 1^st storm.  We called it the April Fool’s shower.  We lost three hundred bales of hay in the barn.

 

MG:  That’s a big deal.

 

CH:  And washed out the road.  Washed out the bridge.  The bridge was never rebuilt until September 29th.  So we were walking you since then.  This is where the footbridge was.

 

MG:  Where the chair is?

 

CH:  Yeah.  It crossed the stream here.

 

MG:  Where would the footbridge take you?

 

CH:  It would take over to a field that’s across the stream.  It’s all grown up now.  But this is where they had the footbridge to cross to have their community socials and picnic events that the community would put on.

 

MG:  Am I looking at the intervale?

 

CH:  The intervale’s up beyond.  They always called this field over that’s grown up on the other side of the stream the island because this was the only access to get to it.  You could go a long way around, which took three or four miles to get to it.  The pictures – there’s one of them right there.

 

MG:  Do you know who built that footbridge?

 

CH:  I don’t know who built this one.  But this one here, this was a second rebuild.  I don’t have the first one.

 

MG:  Maybe it was before you could take pictures.

 

CH:  I don’t know.  But this one here was built by Andrew Keen.  As I said, Andrew Keen lived where my place is for a while.

 

MG:  That was in 1903?  What does that say?

 

CH:  1906 that was taken.  In 1906, the school was at the top of two hill – they called [it] the Mill Hill School.  They had torn down the – used the Perham School for something else at that time.

 

MG:  Do you know who that could be in the picture?

 

CH:  No, I don’t.  I have a feeling it might be Moulton girl, but I’m not sure.

 

MG:  Do you know who took these pictures?

 

CH:  I don’t know who took this one.  But there is another picture at the Madrid Historical Society [that] was taken at the Perham School location, looking down here, and it shows the bridge but not the person on the bridge.  She was a teacher at the school.  I can’t recall her name right now.  But it was in 1911 that they took that picture.  So, that bridge was between 1906 and 1911 anyways.  I don’t know [the] exact date when it went out.  It was probably one of them freshets [that] took it out, and they’d never rebuilt it afterwards.

 

MG:  If we kept going down this road, where would it take us?

 

CH:  It would take us to the intervale.  You’d cross across the stream.  We always called it the Cow Pasture Stream.  It’s a stream that connects to the plains fields down through – the drainage from that down through into the Perham Stream.  Beyond that was the (oat piece?), and that’s where the Indians used to have their (oats?), and where the white man after they settled, continued using it for oats.  Then, you went through a little bit of woods, a little rise [in] the woods where the ledge is, and then it makes the stream turn back, make another curve in a S shape, and that would be the wheat field.  The wheat that you grew there was called proso.  It was a very fast-growing wheat.  The Indians did it, and then the white man did it.  Then, above that was another field that the stream came in on the upper side, very close and then swung back to the left.  Above that was the clover field, which the Indians used and the white man used.  Then there was – they called the Middle Brook.  That came out of a beaver pond up behind the Peter Adley place.  Then it was called the Mecham Intervale beyond that, and that was a thirty-five-acre field.  The upper end of that field was where the village was of the Indians.  This is a picture of Solon Mecham’s house that was on the intervale.  And now, the other place is up on – we can either walk, or we can start our trip to get to the Wheeler place.

 

MG:  Up to you.

 

CH:  Because the Wheeler place is on the way to the car trip road.

 

MG:  Sure.  Whatever you think is best.

 

CH:  So, you can shut it off now if you want. [Recording paused.] When he was younger, was in seventh grade, he had a – it was a foreign-made car, and it had buttons that you push for the gears.  This road up over here was not here.  It was originally between the house – before the milk house and put between the house and the barn of the Pickard place, and it went in back of this one here.  This up here, the Mecham Intervale Road now was the main road.  This one was called the Abbott Road because it went up to Abbot, which was the governor of the village.  Now right here, is where the Perham Stream School was.

 

MG:  Behind this rock wall?

 

CH:  Behind this rock wall.  As I told you, it was just a little shack.  It wasn’t even big enough for a vehicle.  It was only about five or six students at that time.  And then, when they got a few more students, they had to go further.

 

MG:  You mentioned the governor, and it made me wonder who was in charge of the Settlement over the years.

 

CH:  Back before it was the state of Maine, Massachusetts gave governorships as a governing body/president for the area.  That’s what I mean by governor because  the governor is a representative of the whole state.  Back then, governors were for a certain area of land, which was usually the size of one township, or maybe five or six townships.  He lived in the upper village, which would be at that hill right over there.  Covered up is Abraham [Mountain] – that is the northern part of Abraham.  Over there is a central part.  Over a little back further behind the hill is the southeast part, which is behind Abram School, which I said [inaudible].  This here, you can see the fence here.  This fence is a cellar hole, and that one is the well of the Wheeler place, which was the post office and the minister’s house.  They had two barns over here.  That’s a picture of the Wheeler place right there.

 

MG:  That was over here?

 

CH:  Yeah, that was sitting over here.  The road was on that side of the school but on this side of the Wheeler place.  They had two barns sitting over here.  And where that fire pit was the small barn.  This is another picture of the building.  You can see the small barn here.  But I don’t have a picture of the big barn.  The big barn was two and a half lengths of the barn that I have.

 

MG:  Oh, wow.  It was eighty-five feet long barn.  He’s the one that, before Minister Wheeler came, was the farmer, and he had the beef cattle.  That Cow Pasture Bridge drained to that swamp buried down there.  This is the road – this is called the Wheeler Road because this is the Road that – we have shorter access, so that we can get to.  But this is the main road to the cemetery.  It went by a peat bog that they harvested the peat out of for fertilizer and fuel because they burned it for fuel too. This up here is called the plains field.  The reason it’s called the plains fields is because it’s all flat area like plains out west.  But I call it that for the simple reason [that] my half cousin actually landed a plane in here. [laughter] He used to.

 

MG:  Oh, yeah?

 

CH:  He used to be a bush pilot up in Alaska.

 

MG:  Oh, wow.  What brought him up there?

 

CH:  His knowledge of flying the plane.  Because up in them – bush pilots had to land in very short areas.

 

MG:  Was he a guide up there?

 

CH:  Yeah, he was a guide, and he was a tourist person.  He was there only two or three years.  My other half-cousin was a warden on Katahdin.

 

MG:  Oh, wow.  What was his name?

 

CH:  The warden was Rodney Sargent, which was my half-cousin from my father’s half-sister Amber.  (Howie?) was the pilot, and he was Rodney’s brother.

 

MG:  Ginni [Robie] was saying that some Sargents are buried in the cemetery where she is.

 

CH:  See, Amber, my father’s half-sister, which was Amber McLaughlin, she married Irwin Sargent, and Irwin Sargent was descendant of them Sargents over there in that area.

 

MG:  Interesting.

 

CH:  This is a road here that they used.  This is a barn that (Bronson?) Grissom brought in from number six to put in here.  But this was all field.  This back one here was known as the main plains, and this was the lower plain, and then there was an upper plain and a back plain.

 

MG:  This is still Griscom property?

 

CH:  Yeah, but there’s a right to get to the cemetery.  He can’t complain about – and he’s back in Texas right now, too.  This peat bog here is also unique for it’s got the pitcher plant.  A pitcher plant is a carnivorous plant like the Venus flytrap.  It looks like a little pitcher, like a plant vase – a vase for a plant and the flowers.  The insects crawl into it.  So much silky substance on inside that they can’t get back out, and then they drown in the fructose liquid, and then they slowly dissolve, and that’s how the plant gets its nutrition.

 

MG:  Is this the cemetery that was mis-named?

 

CH:  Yep.  I’m trying to get them – they’re still working on it.  I wanted them to name it the Perham Stream Cemetery and have a date of when it was supposedly established around when the trapper was buried here up to when Madrid became a town and got changed to the East Madrid Cemetery.  I wanted to include both names on it.   This marker here is one of them, and that one there is another one that she’s identified.  There’s no marker for.

 

MG:  The woman with the rod.

 

CH:  Yep, the dowser.  This one is Dennis Moulton’s, which was at the red house.

 

MG:  “Died November 15, 1906.  Eighty-four years old.”

 

CH:  Beside him is (Rosana?), his wife.  “Died January 2, 1891.  Seventy-three years, eleven months.”

 

MG:  Ginni was telling me about the legend of a boy who drowned, and they weren’t sure if or where he was buried.

 

CH:  It’s in Center Cemetery just below her place.  The legend over there is a boy that drowned, and they buried him outside the grave plots but inside the fence at the gate.  The legend over here was it was a girl that drowned, and they buried her there because they could not afford to buy a plot.  So, they buried her outside the plots.

 

MG:  So they think it’s a boy, and here, they think it’s a girl.

 

CH:  Right. [laughter] But they don’t know the name of the person.  This is Sarah Moulton.  Sarah was Dennis’s daughter.

 

MG:  She was born in 1852 and died in 1933.

 

CH:  Yep.  Sarah Moulton did live her life out at the Moulton place down there.  I do know that.  She was there when Cordelia was living with Nathan in his farm.

 

MG:  Was she a teacher?

 

CH:  Sarah?  I think she was one or two terms.  I’m not sure.  Then we go to the Pickards.  This is Lucinda Pickard, which was my great-grandmother.  She died May 9, 1890, age sixty-seven years, four months.  As I said, she died bedridden.  She was originally a Masterman from Weld, from the Masterman settlement in Weld.  Sarah is the wife of Thomas Pickard.  I’m sorry.  Lucinda Pickard is not – Lucinda Masterman.  That is the daughter of Thomas and Sarah.

 

MG:  Lucinda is the daughter of Thomas and Sarah Pickard.

 

CH:  Yeah.  Sarah Pickard died October 7, 1882, I think.  Yeah.  Eighty-five years.  No, 1887.  Sorry.  It’s hard reading some of them.

 

MG:  I know.

 

CH:  This is Thomas Pickard.  That’s the one that built the house and built the mill down to the village.  He died at twenty-three [in] 1851.  They put a flag on him for the Civil War.  But he died in ’51, ten years before the Civil War.

 

MG:  He’s who you thought maybe fought –?

 

CH:  He was the right age to be fighting in the War of 1812.  If it is, that confirms that military button that we found and the musket trigger guard.

 

MG:  What does the inscription say?  “The land is my” –

 

CH:  “Strength and my” –

 

MG:  “Shield,” maybe.  “My heart.”

 

CH:  Yeah, “My shield.  My heart.”  Hard to read,

 

MG:  Yeah.  That looks like it’s been rubbed away.  “Something helped.”

 

CH:  Underneath is something “Lord.  In His truth of love.”  It’s virtually scripture.  He’s the one that – I think the records have screwed up, and they put the flag on.  But I think it’s for sons in the Civil War, not him, and he was in the War of 1812.

 

MG:  That makes sense.

 

CH:  This is (Eliza?), their daughter.  She died [in] 1884 at age sixteen.  And I stick the flowers – I stick a flower on every grave here no matter whether I know them or not, just so that the spirits know that they are recognized being here.  Then, down here, there’s a stone.

 

MG:  Do you know (Eliza’s?) cause of death?

 

CH:  No.  But it was the time that there was a lot of disease [and] diptheria going through.  This stone here – somebody’s taken my sign off – was my half-uncle’s first born baby, [who] died after three days.  And this, as you can see, there’s indention here, so I figured it was, and the dowser identified it was here.  Then down here is Norman Welch, only eight weeks old.  This was according to the map that I found in the farm ledgers.  Down here, I’ll let you pronounce that name

 

MG:  (Alberton?) Moulton?

 

CH:  Yes.  Age ten.  The dowser says that that is one, and that’s another one behind it.  She’s not sure, and she identified one up here too.  This one here is another good name. [laughter]

 

MG:  (Ferlinand?) is how I’d say it.

 

CH:  Yeah. (Ferlinand?) Moulton, age seven years.  See, these were about the same time as a lot of that diphtheria was going through.  This is another one here, and all I know is its name said, “Old man John (Rowe?),” and he died an old man in 1850.  The map said that that was his footstone.  But if that was his footstone, he was one long guy.  The dowser says there’s two different graves.  Down here, is where that Swedish trapper is supposedly buried.

 

MG:  Who messed with the placard there?

 

CH:  The weather did that. [laughter] I got to replace it.  But you can see this stone is this way.  The stone goes clear over to here.  It’s just under the dirt and sod and so forth.  But that was the headstone.  She said the dowser said he was buried this direction.  On the lower corner, way down there, is where my parents are buried.

 

MG:  Let’s go see them.

 

CH:  Might as well pick up their basket at the same time.  Now, the cemetery stopped right here.  You can see the original post – iron post.  According to the Madrid Cemetery Society, this is all it was, and it was chuck-full.  It didn’t even have a record of the deed that we deeded all this to them.  That’s why all the records in Madrid got – they almost forgot everything over here.

 

MG:  Well, what a peaceful place to be buried.

 

CH:  Well, my father said he wanted to be buried on the land.  My mother said she wanted to be, too.  I’ll let you read that.  I wrote it.  It’s enough. [laughter]

 

MG:  “Wilson Hinckley died July 9, 2003, eighty years, four months, and one day.  Born on the land.  Lived for the land.  Revered the land.  Buried in the land.”  And then Eva Fenlason Hinkley died February 9, 2017, eighty-seven years, seven days.  Migrated to the land.  Helped with the land.  Manager of the land.  A legacy to the land.  Stewards and tutors of the land.  We will honor their memory, the next stewards to the land.”  I like that.

 

CH:  I found that stone; I put it up.  Eventually, if I get enough money and can find somebody, somebody told me that there’s a person that engraves actual stones instead of these molded ones.  So, if I can find somebody to do that, my father said he wanted a natural stone.  So that’s what I did.

 

MG:  Yeah, that’s all you need.

 

CH:  I will be buried beside them.  My sister and her husband will be buried beside me.  My brother and his wife will be buried up here above them.  But we donated all this land to the cemetery, and the cemetery society never even had any record of it because the one that was the overseer of the historical society and the cemetery, as I said, didn’t want to really acknowledge the stuff over here and never even presented the deed to them. [laughter] So when I got over there, they got a copy of the deed.  So, now they know that they’ve got a cemetery up here.

 

MG:  Shows you need good paperwork and good record keeping.

 

CH:  But I’ve got to do some research to see if I can find them other four that she’s identified.

 

MG:  Who’s the woman who does the dowsing?

 

CH:  Jane Stinchfield, and she’s the head of the Phillips Historical Society.  She has another friend that does it with her.  I don’t know her name.  She’s been up here with her.  Steve Scharoun, the archeologist, says what ought to be done is have somebody come up here with one of them GPS-penetrating things to really identify to see if they are here or not.

 

MG:  I wondered about that.  Do you think in the early part of the 20^th century, the Coast and Geodetic Survey marked the land?

 

CH:  There’s one site on top of the Wheeler hill above the Wheeler place.  They used to have one of them geodetic –

 

MG:  A theodolite?

 

CH:  One of them markers for the altitude.  They chipped it off, and then put it up on the road up here above where the railroad crossed, and the lumber crew destroyed it.  My father said they should have left it right there.  But they said it was on private property, so they had to move it.  They had something about some policy.  They couldn’t have them on private property anymore.  My dad said it was perfectly fine where it was.  It didn’t bother him, and it wouldn’t have bothered me either.  I built this fence three years ago.  I had a friend come up with a post hole digger, and he dug the holes a year before.  I set the posts, and let them settle for – during the winter.  Then I built a fence, and I said, “You’re going to build it a lot like the fence down at the Perham Stream birding trail.”  Everybody’s complained about this one and that one that’s it’s not finished.  I said, “It’s finished for moose because Moose can just step over it. [laughter] They all say it’s got to be all the way up to the top of the post.  I said, “No.”  I want moose to be able to walk across and not have to destroy it.  I don’t want to build it every three times a year.

 

MG:  What’s this in the woods here?  Is that the car you were telling me about?

 

CH:  No.  The car’s back down next to the birding trail.  That pile over there – that pile of dirt over there was a hollow in the field.  Bronson Griscom and his descendants made junk piles out of them – pushed the garbage in.  There used to be a dump over there, but they stopped using it, and then they just started piling it right in the middle of the field.  Looks like an eye sore to me.  I know my father said he was disgusted, too, because we lost seven swathes of hay in that.

 

MG:  Oh, yeah? [Recording paused.] First, say where we are.

 

CH:  We’re  going up towards the Upper Village on East Madrid Road before you get to what – right here is called the Schoolhouse Corner.  Because this right here on the left was the very last school that was built for the area.  I think it was around thirteen, something like that.  1936-something.

 

MG:  That it operated?

 

CH:  Yes.  My grandmother never went to it.  My father did.  But his fourth year, he had to go down to the (Blethen?) in Phillips.  So, it’d be around that time about ’36.

 

MG:  Were boys and girls equally encouraged to get their education?

 

CH:  All the kids were encouraged all the time.  There’s a picture of the school, right there.

 

MG:  This was the school that was here?

 

CH:  Yeah, that is the last – that one was called the East Madrid School.

 

MG:  “The last school located at the intersection of upper village road and Sanders Station Road.”

 

CH:  Yeah, Sanders Station Road is on the opposite side.

 

MG:  That little trail here?

 

CH:  Yeah.  That went down to the Sanders Mill and the post depot station.  They had a boarding house and mail depot.  That’s where they walked down to get the mail.  Ira Wing had a farm halfway down the road.  Ira Wing was a cousin to Nathan D. Wing.  That one right there.

 

MG:  Ira Wing Farm.

 

CH:  Yes.

 

MG:  Through the woods here?

 

CH:  Yeah.  Halfway down to the Sanders mail depot.  The road turned here.  It’s virtually a square corner.  This was originally – East Madrid Road [is what it’s] called now.  But it was originally the Abbott Road because the main road went up on Mecham intervale.  This part here is actually right on a lot range line of the properties – of the town lots.  This road crossing here, they’ve got it named Barnjum Road on the right, and on the left (Potato?) Hill Road.  But this was the Barnjum branch of the narrow gauge railroad, Sandy River Rangeley Lake Railroad.

 

MG:  What happened to the train tracks?

 

CH:  The train tracks, when it went out of business, it was dismantled, and most of the tracks went over to Japan just before World War II to make planes for Japan.

 

MG:  Interesting.

 

CH:  So, we got them sent back to us.  Everything above the tracks was always known – below the tracks was known as the Village, and this was known as the Upper Village.  The train tracks [were] virtually the line.

 

MG:  So, we’re on the other side of the tracks now.

 

CH:  Right.  The Upper Village, the other side of the tracks, as you said.  This is a new place here.

 

MG:  That’s a nice house.  You mentioned a number of people are moving here.  Are they year-round folks?  Are they working in the area?  Staying in the area?

 

CH:  There’s two or three that are year-round.  Most of them are before retirement age.  But what they’re doing is trying to get their place built and buildings and so forth and cleared to settle after they retire, to be here.  This is the location of Peter Adley’s place, and he was the horse whisperer, or the animal whisperer, whichever one you wanted to call.  He lived over – just about beyond where that rubble is over there.  There’s no way of finding the foundation because they brought in fill and everything and buried it.

 

MG:  That’s too bad.  Is this the land that you don’t have access to?

 

CH:  Actually, this is up above.  This is (Conley?) Gould, and he is the great grandson of the Gould Farm that we’ll be getting up to.  But over here, where camp is, that was – I don’t know his name, but his initial was J. Blethen.  He lived there.  There was a cellar hole, but I can’t see it.  They demolished it, but you can see just one little corner.  I can’t get to it because it’s on that land I can’t access.  Up here, where these signs are – this, from here up, was known as the Gould area.  There’s a little (brook? we just passed.  There used to be a fence, open fence, right here – a gate to go in.  This was the bottom of the pasture here.  The Gould Farm was up here.

 

MG:  That sign says Greenfield Hill.  Is that a new name?

 

CH:  That’s the guy that – Rufus Griscom put up.  It’s not the original name of the area.  He brought some Texas name it’s not the name of the area they he brought some Texas names up and put them here.

 

MG:  These rock walls along the side of the road, are they –?

 

CH:  That’s the walls to the pasture.  Now I’m going in here, but I don’t know whether they got the bridge up or not.  This was the Increase Blethen Farm in here, and then it was the Toothaker Farm.  This was one of the big farms in here.  I told you the J – initial J. Blethen – he lived at the lower end of this field right here.  But his road was where I showed you.  He didn’t use the same road as his sister Increase.  Increase never had any kids.  She was a [spinster].  When she died, the Thoothakers bought it from J. Blethen, [who] which inherited it.

 

MG:  Her first name was Increase?

 

CH:  Yep.  She was alone.  I don’t know how many workers she had.  But as big as a farm was, she had to have several workers working for her.  Lloyds up here.

 

MG:  We’re on his brother’s lot.

 

CH:  His brother’s land.  That’s Hope right there.  His wife.

 

MG:  Okay, I’ll turn this off. [Recording paused.]

 

CH:  This was, as I said, was the Increase Blethen home.  This is not the house that was here.  The house that was here was after the Toothakers bought it from her brother.  When they left for Phillips, it was taken down and moved out into Phillips for somebody to use for a house.  I have a picture of it falling down out there.  As you can see, the house was a lot bigger than what this house is.  All this porch was all house.  All this open area here was the barn.  Then, over here, the stump over there – that was the well in the barn.  Below it, it had another barn, a lower barn.  I don’t know what the animals were that they used here, except for one thing.  This raised section here was the chicken house.  They had a little shack here for the chicken.  Then, they had the other – I know that lower barn was a carriage barn, but this one up here was the animal barn.  Over that way, you can see Saddleback Junior and Saddleback.  On towards the right, in the woods there, there used to be an apple orchard.  That’s this location.  This is actually where the gas plant got taken from.

 

MG:  Are you having flashbacks?

 

CH:  Yeah, somewhat. [laughter] But it was over there on that side.  She had a garden. [Recording paused.] – the last place that we did any haying because, as I said, my family was caretakers for the Griscoms.  We started mowing these fields, and that’s when my father came down with his liver disease and was down to Thayer hospital for eight months.  So, it was just my brother and I finishing it up, and that’s when we decided we’re done farming.

 

MG:  Was that a hard decision?

 

CH:  Yeah.  Yes and no.  As much as much as my father tried to teach [Bronson] how to farm, he would do it just the opposite.  When you have cattle, you buy, say, about a hundred cattle.  There’d be eighty, ninety female cows, and a few – ten bulls or something like that.  Every year, he’d slaughter the bulls.  How are you going to have offspring when you’re killing off the males?  In five years time, he just lost interest.  Then it was just hay.  He had a couple of horses, but that was it.  He didn’t want to pay us enough to keep us going to do it.  That’s when I went into the shoe mill and my brother went into the saw mill.  My father, of course, became disabled after that.  That’s when we got rid of our animals.  Then, when I was done the shoe mills because I became disabled, then there’s no way I’m going to be handle a thousand-pound cow.  So, that’s when we’re done. [Recording paused.] This is all pasture, both sides of the road – the Gould fields.  Right up here where them trees are –

 

MG:  Yes, and the fence.

 

CH:  Yeah, just beyond the fence there, that area – there’s a cellar hole right in there.  That’s the old farm.

 

MG:  The old Gould Farm?

 

CH:  The old Gould Farm.  There was a road that went by the farm and out into the woods.  There was an apple orchard out there.  In that apple orchard, they had the Wolf River, the (Worthy?), and the Blue Pearmain apples.

 

MG:  I’m not familiar with those varieties.

 

CH:  There’s an apple tree right here.  Right there.  That is a (Sierra?) apple.  You have to catch that one quick.

 

MG:  It looks like it.

 

CH:  It’s a very sweet and very juice apple.  It’s so juice that when it falls off the tree, it busts.

 

MG:  Like a balloon.

 

CH:  Like a water balloon.  That sign back there, Greenfield Hill – that’s what he’s calling this hill up here.  It was always known as Ledge Hill because you see the ledge right in the road here.  But this hill is all ledge.  There’s just three inches of dirt on top of ledge here.  Right here somewhere there’s a stone marked with some dates on it.  I can’t remember what they were because it was the at that location of the Upper School, which is right up here by that pole.  That was the road to the Hathaway Farm.  Right at that edge of the big evergreens there, one little anecdote that happened was my father was up here tending cattle for [the] Griscoms.  He was up here, and there’s a thunderstorm come.  He was standing just below that, and a cow was underneath the trees.  The lightning hit the tree and knocked the cow over and drove – there was a fence right beside it – and drove the fence post right into the ground.

 

MG:  Wow.  Was the cow okay?

 

CH:  Yeah, the cow come-to.  He thought it was going to die because he saw it hit the tree.  This is the road to the Hathaway Place here, Hathaway Farm.

 

MG:  Beyond this old fence?

 

CH:  Yep.  It went up through there to the Hathaway Place.  The school set right here.  Right beside the road.  That was when they divided the school, one lower and upper.

 

MG:  Those posted signs that say, “Come up here at your own risk” –?

 

CH:  Yeah, that’s Griscom’s signs that he put on the road.

 

MG:  You get a pass?

 

CH:  Yeah.  I got a pass to come up and pick apples.  So, I’m picking apples, even though it’s past time.  But I also come up to help Jimmy check on his brother’s place, too.  This here is the start of the Welch Farm.  Down here, at the lower end, is two or three apple trees.  That is a Strawberry Apple and a Snow Apple.

 

MG:  What’s a Snow Apple?

 

CH:  A Snow Apple is an apple – the skin is very thin on it.  It’s almost the same color as the inside of the apple.  It’s very, very sweet.

 

MG:  Sounds good.  Now, I saw the Welch name spelled a few different ways.  Is their family history lost or unclear?

 

CH:  It’s different people in the family wanting to spell it differently, but the one around here – I know some of them have it marked as a different spelling.  But the ones – John Welts and Edgar Welts and all the Welts here spelled it, W-E-L-T-S, Welts.  This is the Edgar Welts place.  After Edgar Welts died, his son was John Welts.  John Welts had a farm down this way.  After Edgar died, my half uncle lived here for a while.

 

MG:  And here is 1022 East Madrid Road.

 

CH:  Yeah, that’s what they call it.

 

MG:  “Edgar Welts place.”  So, this is what I’m looking at.

 

CH:  Yeah.  It’s quite a lot different.

 

MG:  Yes.  They’ve done a lot of work.  Very nice house.

 

CH:  He has got that – the floors are all heated, electric.  He’s got wifi spread through it.  He’s got at least, I’d say, almost thirty thousand dollars of electricity wiring in that – the security and this and that.  He think he’s got to have the protection.  Here is still the Edgar Welts Farm.  Bronson Griscom, when he owned this, he had this as a horse hovel.  They made this shed.  We always called it the covered bridge shed because it looks like a covered bridge.  We’re coming up to the upper fields of the Edgar Welts place.  This lower side is now Rufus Griscom’s.  But the barn on the left and the left fields is Lloyd’s Griscom’s.  He uses it for his blueberry business.  Up above this field, there’s another field over towards the lower side of it.  Then, there’s a field in back of that, and that’s where George Hinkley lived in that back field.  But he accessed it by going up to the Lovejoy place.  He didn’t come down through the fields.

 

MG:  Is that someone who works for –?

 

CH:  That’s Lloyd’s old farm vehicle.  It’s got a farm auto license on it.  He can only go twenty miles away from his house.  This is what was always called the Horseshoe Pond.  But it was never a horseshoe pond; it’s more of a circle pond to me.  It’s got an island in the middle of it.  It’s now owned by – how do you pronounce his name? – Eben Mehegan.  He owns the Lovejoy place now.  But this is where the Abbott Road turned, right here at this gate.  Down that road, is where the Abbott Farm was – Moses Abbott, the governor of Madris.  And now it’s Gerry Birdsall’s.

 

MG:  Oh, Gerry’s down here?

 

CH:  Yes.  His house is actually just to the left of where the original house was.

 

MG:  Interesting.

 

CH:  I’d go down, but he buttoned it up just three days ago. [laughter]

 

MG:  He just had another grandchild.  How did you meet Gerry?

 

CH:  He come down one time because he knew that we’d always taken care of the area.  He wanted to know the history of the area, so I started telling him.  He was thunderstruck how much knowledge there was – how much it was important to the village.

 

MG:  We should put on the record that it’s thanks to Gerry that this [interview] happened.

 

CH:  Yeah.  It was him because he got me in contact with you, and you with me.  This is the Lovejoy place.

 

MG:  This is an old house.

 

CH:  Yep.  This is how it looked.

 

MG:  It’s missing the barn now.

 

CH:  Yeah, it’s missing the barn and part of the house.  This is the whole barn.  The barn was eighty feet long.  And then there was a section of house and this – and this was the house.  See, all it is now is here – and it was to the barn.  This here, Bronson Griscom took it –

 

MG:  Flipped it.

 

CH:  – turned it, and raised it up.  Then built another level underneath it.  When he did, he ruined everything inside so that all the floors are tilted almost at a thirty degree angle.  You can’t even get to the attic, because you’re almost going [inaudible] side up to go up the stairs.

 

MG:  Like a fun house.

 

CH:  Yep.

 

MG:  What’s it being used for now?

 

CH:  Eben is going to let it fall down because he says it’s unlivable inside.

 

MG:  It doesn’t look like it’s got a lot of hope.

 

CH:  No, he says it’s got to come down.  Eben is younger.  He’s about forty, fort-five, somewhere in there.  When he retires, he’s going to build another house up here he said.  The road is going to get a little more tricky now.  But this is where – you went by the edge of the house here.  You can see a shack out there.

 

MG:  Behind the Lovejoy house?

 

CH:  There used to be a Strawberry Apple here, Wolf River, a Wealthy, a Snow, and the Sierra was all in here.

 

MG:  Apples?

 

CH:  Apples.  The road went through and then turned left back to George Hinkley’s place.  Then we go up a very steep grade.  We’re going up to the Tosier place.  That’s the original Tosier.

 

MG:  T-O-S-I-E-R.

 

CH:  That’s what they built after they burnt.  Then it became Barnum’s place.  Then after Barnjum, it became Roderick’s.  Jimmy Roderick, my neighbor, is the grandson of the one that used to live here.  Before Tosier, it was the Baker place.  In the diaries, it tells about Tosier selling to Andrew Keen, but Andrew Keen sold it immediately to Barnjum.  In the diaries, it said George Tosier sold it to Andrew Keen – “the old Baker place.”  So, it was Baker before.  The reason I took my car instead of yours is because I knew this road. [laughter]

 

MG:  I don’t think I could record and drive at the same time.

 

CH:  I know. [laughter]

 

MG:  You’re doing a good job talking and driving.

 

CH:  Yours ain’t got as much clearance as mine has either.

 

MG:  No.

 

CH:  As you saw, I’ve already hit twice. [laughter]

 

MG:  Can I ask a silly question?

 

CH:  Yeah.

 

MG:  If you need a gallon of milk, where do you go, and how long does it take?

 

CH:  Gallon of milk?  I have to go at least Phillips, which is eight miles or go to Kingfield or Rangeley, which is twenty-two miles or Farmington, which is thirty-three miles.  It was a lot handier when I had cows, and I could just go out milk the cow.  But them days are gone by …

 

MG:  Remind me where –

 

CH:  This is the Tosier place, and it’s pretty well dilapidated.

 

MG:  Yes …

 

CH:  In the diaries, they said Tosier sold it to Andrew Keen, and she named it the Old Baker Place.  This house burnt in 1902, and they rebuilt it to this one, but this one’s remodeled from the one that they rebuilt somewhat.  But the last owner was Moses Roderick.  Moses Roderick was Jimmy and Eddie’s – Jimmy’s my neighbor, and Eddie’s the one that has a trailer up here.  Every summer when Moses would come, he would bring all three of us kids Necco wafer candies.  The reason they did [was] because the keys were at the house.  They stop and get the keys and come up.  A lot of the neighbors that had – it was just summer residents – they left the keys at my family’s place, and they just picked them up and went.  Where that tractor’s sitting right ahead of us was the gate to the Thorpe Place, and that’s the picture of the gate right there.  That’s right where the tractor is sitting.  Before you got – it was quite a road.  It went up the rest of Mecham Hill, then halfway down towards Barnjum to the Thorpe Place.  But before you get to the top of Mecham Hill, it veered to the left, to the Mecham Farm.  Solon Mecham was the one that grew up here, and he had a blacksmith shop in the barn, and when his – when he got old enough, his father was a blacksmith and his brother was [too].  They [were] all blacksmiths.  Solon moved down to the village on the Mecham Intervale and became the blacksmith down there, while the father and the brother stayed up here for the blacksmith up here.  Then, beyond that, down the road, was the log cabin of the Thorpe Place.

 

MG:  That would be up this way?

 

CH:  Be up over and start down towards Barnjum.  That was the log cabin.  That was another picture of it.  It had a full porch on the front side, and it had a good stairway.  Then, from the log cabin, you could see the house and the barn.  The house had a porch three-quarters of the way around it.  It was Fred Thorpe’s place.  Ethel Thorpe was their daughter, their only daughter.  My grandfather, after he went to Togus for his operation for his legs, couldn’t stay with us anymore because of his legs, being just little wooden stubs.  He stayed at Ethel Thorpe’s down to Chesterville.

 

MG:  What was his relationship with Ethel?

 

CH:  Growing up with her.

 

MG:  Friends?

 

CH:  Neighbors.

 

MG:  Was she a nurse?

 

CH:  No, she was the last of the neighborhood kids like Arthur was.  They [were] the last two.  He [had] more access to medical services down there than he [had] up in this area.  But the Thorpe Place was also known as a hotel.  A lot of the residents were workers at the Barnjum Mill.

 

MG:  I read about that in the report you shared.

 

CH:  The house was big enough that they could have fifteen guests at a time.

 

MG: All employed in the area.

 

CH:  Yep.  All employed in the Barnjum Mill.  Barnjum had actually four lumber mills at different times.  One went out, then another started up, and another one started up.  I’ve got records of all four mills that were there, and Thorpe housed a lot of their workers the whole time.

 

MG:  What happened to this house?  When was it damaged like this?

 

CH:  The chimney fell in, in 2016.  It’s just slowly been going in.  They thought they’d take the tractor and try to whack the front a little bit.  Somebody told – “Just knock the stone wall foundation out from underneath, and it’ll come down,” and it’s been sitting like that for three years.  I said, “The older houses were built to hold up.”

 

MG:  Wow.

 

CH:  He said probably next year he’s going to get an excavator up here and take it down because he said it’s getting dangerous.  That’s the neighborhood of East Madrid or Perham Settlement, whichever you want to call it.

 

MG:  It’s amazing how much is still sort of intact.  You can get a sense of where things are.

 

CH:  Yeah, it’s surprising.  But it’s surprising how much the knowledge of everything – if you walked up here, you’d see the old place, but you wouldn’t know anything about the history of who lived here or anything, unless it’d come from me. [Recording paused. When Moses Roderick owned this, this whole hill, he manually placed rocks all the way up the hill.  So, it was all a rock road.

 

MG:  Oh, that’s a big effort.

 

CH:  Yeah.  He did a lot of work, and then the town put some dirt on it, which washed out two or three times.  They had to re-put it every time.  Finally, they got a mixture enough to hold.  But you’re not coming up here with a Cadillac or a limo by no means.

 

MG:  No.  Definitely need four-wheel drive.

 

CH:  A horse wagon – no problem though.

 

MG:  Or a horse and wagon.  When do you think the last horse and wagon went up this road?

 

CH:  Let’s see.  About in the late ’20s, early 1930s would be about the last.  That’s when the automobile started in around here.  I know I’ve got the diary of my Grandmother Carrie going down to Sanders Station with a horse and wagon in 1928 to get the mail.

 

MG:  Was the railroad mainly for commerce, or would people travel on it to visit here?

 

CH:  The main line was for visitors to come to go to Rangeley and so forth, for the people to get in, get out.  There were passenger trains, delivery trains, and so forth.  But as for the Barnjum branch, that was just lumber.  They’d have lumber cars on the trains.  On the main line, where it went through Sanders Station on the main line there, it was just like a bus and – it combined the busses and trucks virtually.  It was either that or take the wagon out over the hill with the horse and be gone half the day.

 

MG:  Was it originally envisioned that Perham would be its own town, or was it always a settlement within Madrid?

 

CH:  It was a settlement.  It was probably envisioned to be the town, but the trouble was when – as I said, my family moved over from Madrid.  The town slowly moved towards there because the main purpose of the town changed from farming to more industrial.  After the industry started, then the whole area became a lumber community virtually because there was a period around the 1920s to virtually World War II that it was just mainly – the only product going out was all these lumber mills, all the textile mills, the wool mills, and all them kind of mills all went.  All the farms – everybody was either going into lumber, or they started – the servicemen – to the wars.

 

MG:  Was there a big population spike in the area when those mills were in operation?

 

CH:  Oh, yeah.  I’ve got in the diaries when the Barnjum mill was in operation that – well, it says one time when it closed, there were eighty shacks of families, of workers besides the ones that were residing at the Thorpe Place up there in Barnjum.  They were putting out pretty near 10,000 cord of wood a day … all these houses have been remodeled, rechanged, or completely [taken] down [and] rebuilt.  The only ones left like it was, is mine. [Recording paused.]

 

MG:  Who’s going to do the excavation here?

 

CH:  Steve Scharoun, the one that made that report, is doing the excavating.  We think we finally found the edge of the cellar hole.  The main house sat here, then the upper house, which Cordelia Pickard lived her life out in, and then the ice house.  Right here, where dug here to that tree, was the milkhouse.  From there, down to that bank, was a double-story barn.  Right here was where the ramp went back down almost to them alders for the ramp to the back of the barn to the second story.  You can just see that 1919 Dodge jalopy down there.  My father married my mother in 1949.  She moved up here, and he was in the process of breaking them two dodges down into stump jumpers.

 

MG:  Did they get married here on the property?

 

CH:  No, they got married in Wilton at the jeweler’s house, the one that made the ring. [laughter]

 

MG:  So, they weren’t wasting time.

 

CH:  No.

 

MG:  What do you think their wedding was like?  Sounds very simple.

 

CH:  Yeah, it was.  It was just my father, my mother, the minister, and that’s it.  Didn’t have a bridesmaid or best man or anything.

 

MG:  And how come it was so small?

 

CH:  Because they couldn’t – all the money my father had paid for the ring.  He was a poor man.  As I said, our income was eight thousand dollars a year.  That’s right there, the Dodge 1919.  Most of it’s gone.

 

MG:  Say again what this was used for.

 

CH:  This was used for the farm.  It replaced the horses, virtually.  It was a touring car.  He chopped it down into what they call stump jumper or jalopy to use for – they put truck [inaudible] in it and so forth.  So he could use it for pulling all the farm machinery.  He re-modified all the horse machinery so that he could hook it to these tractors.  As I said, I didn’t learn on this one; I learned on the ’23.  My brother learned on both of them – how to drive good.

 

MG:  It was a good education.

 

CH:  Yep.

 

MG:  Well, that’s a nice view of your house. [Recording paused.] Thanks for that tour.  That was really helpful to see everything laid out in that way and get a sense of the landscape.  One thing we were talking about on our drive back here was the 1903 fire, which I read about.  So, tell me what happened.

 

CH:  In 1903, they had a drought, a very severe drought.  Everything was bone dry.  And then, Barnjum lumber train was going up into Barnjum to get a load of lumber, and a spark from the rail ignited, and it burnt this area for three days, this whole area around here.  Two or three of the houses was burnt.  I don’t think anybody died from it, but it wiped out a lot of the hay fields.  I think there were seven farms that got burned.  There was a shack up in one of the fields that they use.  They built it afterward, and they marked boards from the 1903 fire that was leftover.

 

MG:  Was this area impacted by the Great Fires of 1947?

 

CH:  Well, it came almost over here but didn’t quite.  It burnt all of the southern side of Spaulding Mountain.  And started over towards Rangely somewhere in that area and burnt all over Spaulding Mountain and almost made it to (Lone?) and almost made it down here.

 

MG:  In 1903, how would you fight a fire like that?

 

CH:  By hand.  Just hand and water buckets, and that’s it, and that’s why it took three days to get it out.

 

MG:  Did any of your family members document or write about that fire in their diaries?

 

CH:  Yep, in the diaries it mentions about the fire, and it mentions how it got started and [how] them are going up and still fighting the fire, and coming back, and telling about the smoke and the cloud from it and everything else – haze and all the weather change.

 

MG:  Any other big fires over the last –?

 

CH:  Not that I know of.  Of course, there was fires out in Phillips that burnt Phillips Upper Village, and then they burnt the Lower Village.  The Lower Village was in my lifetime, but the upper village was before my life time.

 

MG:  We haven’t talked much about Phillips and its history.  It was named for John Phillips.  Is that right?

 

CH:  Yep.  He was like Moses Abbott was; he was a governorship of Strong, Phillips, Freeman, Carthage, and then, after Moses was relinquished, he got Madrid, too, and Avon.  Jacob Abbott was the one that – he was overseer, and he’s the one that promoted – tried to get people to come up and settle.  But that was after the main settlement started up here.  That was to get more people to come up.

 

MG:  Over the last one hundred years, who have been the community leaders and the people in charge before the town was unincorporated?

 

CH:  This community, there was really no leader.  It was all cooperation virtually.

 

MG:  Was there a mayor or a town council?

 

CH:  No.  Was no Council, no mayor.  The only leader would be the spiritual leader, which was – they usually had somebody come in for a month or two to preach, and that was that.  But other than that is just families working with families.

 

MG:  What about in the last fifty years, though?

 

CH:  Last fifty years?  Last fifty years, it was just me growing up with my family here, and that was it.  Nobody else here but summer residents.

 

MG:  In the greater Madrid township, was there someone –?

 

CH:  Over in Madrid and Reeds Mill, there was a lot of community business over there.  But over here, it was almost a separate unit.  They didn’t want to associate over here with us and support – virtually, it was me that went over and made them realize that there was a lot of history over here there was going to get lost.

 

MG:  I sent there’s a divide between this area and the rest of Madrid?

 

CH:  Yeah, it was sort of a divide.  When my family moved over here, the manufacturing – the way of life was changing.  This was farm, and they were changing to more industrial.  And it’s just like every community; you got the townsfolk, and you get the farm fork on the other side.  They’re the country hicks, virtually.  They’re just the country hicks.  They didn’t want to really acknowledge you, virtually.  But we just kept plugging along.  The old saying –  I coined a phrase, and it [stuck] with a lot of people, and the summer residents always joke about.  I may be backwoods, but I’m not backwards.

 

MG:  I like that.

 

CH:  Other than that, we just keep plugging along as I’ve always said.  Your family you got to count on because that’s all that you got, and that’s the way we was raised.  That’s all we had was our family here.

 

MG:  I wondered a little bit more about your family.  Did you guys ever take a vacation or get to travel together?

 

CH:  Oh, we went for outings and stuff like that, but we never went for what they call vacations.  We went out to see the foliage.  We went out to see the Christmas lights, see the spring flowers, or the Apple tree blossoms.  We’d travel around.  We’d, once in a while, go take a trip up to Canada just for a day trip and back.  It was just always day trips because you had the animals.  You had to tend the animals; you had to tend them at night, so you couldn’t really go on vacation like they tell about it.  You can go out, but you got to get back there and tend the animals.

 

MG:  In your adult life, when you stop farming, did you have opportunities to travel?

 

CH:  That was [on] my bucket list, but that never happened because I became disabled when I had the motorcycle [accident].  My bucket list was I was going to travel [with] my motorcycle and hit every state in the United States, make one big, long trip.  It may take two or three years, but then I became disabled; that went out the window.  But it ain’t like –I don’t know about my sister and my brother, but my mother and I – our voyages were in books.  We’ve got massive libraries.

 

MG:  Are you still a big reader?

 

CH:  I’m a big reader and a big movie watcher.  I have over five thousand movies.

 

MG:  What’s your favorite movie?

 

CH:  The [Fearless] Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me [but Your Teeth Are in] My Neck.

 

MG:  I’ve never even heard of that one.

 

CH:  It’s a foreign Swedish movie.  It’s a comedy.  It’s so funny all through it, but there’s one scene in it that scares me.  It’s the scene that scared me the most in my whole life.  Of all the movies [that] tell about scary scenes, that one really – it jumped you right out of the seat when it comes on.  But all the rest of the movie, you’re almost laughing all the way through it.

 

MG:  I’ll have to check that out.  Can you say how the population of this area where we are now has changed, or maybe the greater Madrid area over the years?

 

CH:  I can’t tell about the Madrid area, but over here, it was all the village that settled here.  People kept coming in to make the community and so forth.  And then when the industry changed a little bit, and a lot of diphtheria and flu and stuff killed a lot of the kids, a lot of them moved out or moved to get a different job.  Then it went down to just my family.  We’re the ones that hung that out.

 

MG:  I read that around 1854, gold was discovered in this area.

 

CH: [laughter] [In] 1854, there was a gold strike, and they named this stream as a gold stream.  But the gold didn’t come from this stream.  Down where Perham Stream enters the Orbeton [Stream], where the main line of the Narrow Gauge Railroad goes up through, a person went panning for gold for three months.  He got twenty-four cents worth of gold.  But the gold – he was in the Perham Stream, yes.  But it was where the Orbeton swirled into the Perham Stream, where they connected.  The gold came from the Orbeton Stream.  But they named it because he was in the Perham – they named the Perham Stream as the gold stream.  And every three or four years, there’s somebody [who] comes up here and tries to pan for gold, and there’s no sand to pan. [laughter] It’s all rock.

 

MG:  I think I saw a YouTube video of a couple of guys trying to get some gold.

 

CH:  Yeah, there’s no gold here.  There’s a lot of iron, but no gold.

 

MG:  Can you talk a little bit more about the industries in the area?  The sawmills and the grist mills?  When would this have been?

 

CH:  There was no grist mills here in this area.  There was over in Madrid; there was a textile mill, a grist mill, and so forth.  Over here was just the lumber mill – they had saw machines, clapboard machines, and shingle machines.  The mill here in the village was a mill that virtually built the village.  That’s why it was her, to cut the lumber.  They did make poles and ship them for the railroad, the ties and so forth.  They made them, and they made the telephone poles and so forth.  The Barnum branch went into Barnjum just inside of Abraham Township from here.  But any access that they had out was through this area here, not through Madris.  That was strictly the same thing.  But that was more commercial that shipped out on the rail.  It wasn’t shipped out by horse and wagon.  It was all by rail.  When the rail went out, then the trucks – the lumber trucks come in – lumber companies.  They had a mill after the rail.  Then, all my life there was always lumber trucks going out through here, all in lumber, pulp, paper.

 

MG:  You were saying in the car that it brought a lot of families and boarders here.  Where do you think they were coming from?

 

CH:  Oh, they was coming [from] all over.  Mainly, it was vacationing.  As for in here, there was never any coming from the rail.  They came to visit, to hunt, and so forth.  But if you had any access of any news, or you needed any supplies or anything, that had to come through rail.  Once in a while, the diaries mentioned about my family, had gone down to the station to go visit some distant relative in Weld or down [to] Farmington or Jay for a weekend, and then coming back.  Things like that.  But it was mainly just getting supplies that we couldn’t make here.  You can’t make flour.  They didn’t have a gristmill.  You had to get the flour from someplace else.  You could pound and pound and pound and ground it by hand.  It was largely, they’d go buy it.  Or to get some leather material – leather belts, or leather hat, or clothing like that.  You had to go – because there wasn’t that many animals either.  So, as I said, my grandmother was – my great grandma was the last one to see an elk in the area.  And my grandmother was the first to see the whitetail deer arrive.  Other than that, you had bears, or you had foxes, mountain lions.  Mountain lions are here.  I don’t care what the game wardens say; they are here.

 

MG:  Have you seen them or heard them?

 

CH:  I’ve heard them.

 

MG:  What about bobcats?

 

CH:  Oh yeah, we got [bobcats].  We have both bobcats and lynx.

 

MG:  We talked a little bit about the Reeds Mill Church.  I think I read that there were Hinkleys involved in the founding of the church.

 

CH:  Yeah, that was the Hinkleys that didn’t move over here.  That was the rest of the Hinkley family.  It would be Thomas and Ebenezer.  Because the only one [who] moved over here was George.  All the others stayed over that way.  George went over here, and then the line over here.

 

MG:  And did some family stay in that area over by the Reeds Mill Church?

 

CH:  Not by the Reeds Mill Church.  They was more on the Dunham area and the upper side of Madrid Village, where they had the Hinkley mill.

 

MG:  Did any of your ancestors continue to be involved with the church?

 

CH:  Not really, because the church was a church for that.  And over here, they held the church in the Mecham Farm, the Thorpe Place, down to my family farm.  A house that had a big enough – what they used to call [inaudible] is what it was.  It was big enough to hold quite a few people.  That’s how they held the services over here.  They had Minister come in for a month or so and stay with the family and service until the Wheelers moved up here.  And when Wheeler moved up here, he was the minister right along until his death.  And then they had them come in again.  But as for going over to that, they did go over sometimes.  Carrie’s diary does mention about going over there, but not regularly.  Maybe once or twice a year, and that’s it.  Most of it was right here.

 

MG:  Did you ever attend church services growing up?

 

CH:  Not growing up.  I have attended two or three times afterward.  I’ve gone to the Reeds Mill Chruch three times in my life.  I went last year last Christmas there.  I was married over there.  And my son was baptized over there.  That’s the only times.

 

MG:  Those are the three times.

 

CH:  Those are the three times.  I have gone to Philips Church both [denominations] down there when they were in service.  I did go once to each of them, and I did go once to Strong.  But it’s just like my mother.  They preach.  I enjoyed their preaching and everything.  But they didn’t connect nature and the real God’s creations in it.  As my mother says, “[If] I want to see a church, all I got to do is walk out and look at Abraham Mountain or Saddleback Mountain because that’s his steeple right there.  You walk out in the morning.  You get the fresh air.  You can hear the birds.  To me and my mother, it was more inspirational than sitting down in [a] closed building listening to somebody.

 

MG:  Yeah, that’s your church.

 

CH:  Yep.

 

MG:  One thing I forgot to ask you about is the connection to Wilhelm Reich and Orgonon to this area?

 

CH:  Yeah, I’ve heard of it.  I’ve never been there.  I’ve heard of it.

 

MG:  Where would that be in relation to here?

 

CH:  Twenty-five miles away.  On the other side of the mountain.

 

MG:  Because that was kind of a funky history.

 

CH:  Yeah.  He was a naturalist [but] not like we are.  He’s more of a – it’s hard to say.  More of a spiritual naturalist than a naturalist-naturalist.

 

MG:  Yeah, he had created something called Orgone, and he was trying to manifest certain energies.

 

CH:  My mother and I both – we could walk out and see an ant crossing the dooryard, and look at it and think how much he has to do to make a living.  As small as he is and how much he can carry and so forth.  Or a worm going across – how in-tune nature has to be to function.  I always looked at the night skies or stars.  I know all the constellations.  But I always look at it, and I say to myself, “There’s all that creation out there and all the creation here.  There has to be some – whether it’s a person, or whether it’s even an alien, a superbeing, an energy, that had the knowledge to blend everything together to work.”

 

MG:  That’s your belief system.

 

CH:  Yeah.

 

MG:  We drove by a property earlier with an alien statue on the lot.  Does that signify anything?

 

CH:  No, it’s just something they stuck up there.  They used it for the corner of one of the gardens they had up there, and then it became a conversation piece.  There’s one going towards Weld on the straightaway.  All my life, [since] I was seven years old, they made a scarecrow, and they put it out.  They had an oil barrel behind it to hold it up.  Then, after Halloween, the father of the family threw it into the barrel.  So the legs were sticking up.  And that became a marker to get to Weld to get to Phillips, that to you go so many miles past the man in the barrel.  It became a landmark for years and years.  I bet it was there for thirty years.

 

MG:  We had talked earlier about how diseases really ravaged some families around here.  Was the native population also impacted by those diseases?

 

CH:  I don’t know whether it was or not.  I think mainly the native – there [weren’t] that many real big villages of natives anyway; it was just a small community.  Maybe eight or nine families, something like that.  But I think they just blended right in with the – became part of the community and just interracial – just became part of the – probably half of the village, by the time that the disease has gone through, probably half or more – three quarters of the village probably had Indian blood in them. [laughter] I think they just melded right in with the village, the settlement.  I think they just melded together because there was no squabbling about it.

 

MG:  What about the fur trade through this area?

 

CH:  Fur trade – there wasn’t that much.  The only fur trade I know of is that Swedish trapper.  Other than that, it was – if they did skin an animal, they used it themselves.

 

MG:  And I had asked you in the car about the Coos Trail.

 

CH:  I know the Coos Trail is one of the Indian trading routes, but it’s not up in here.  But they did access – these trails up here did join up with it lower down.  The Indian trading path here went to the Orbeton trading path.  The Orbeton went down through Phillips and connected to the Coos, as far as I know.

 

MG:  Was Orbeton one of the names we saw in the Cemetery earlier?

 

CH:  Yeah, it was one of the boys.  But no relation to the naming of that.  The naming of the Orbeton Stream is because a guy was trying to get his wrench and pliers from a rock before the freshet, and he didn’t make it.  He got caught in the freshet.  His name was Orbeton, so they named the stream Orbeton.  The Perham Stream went all the way to the Sandy River originally.  There was no Orbeton Stream.

 

MG:  So, what happened?

 

CH:  Then they found the Orbeton Stream and changed it from – Perham entered into the Orbeton, and Orbeton went into Sandy.  But when they come up, when they explored up the Sandy, they hit the Orbeton, and the Orbeton – they first named it as the East Branch, I think it was.  It went up to ­– they connected Beal Pond into it as part of the – then, they went up, and they come up to the Perham.  The rest of the Orbeton was just a little trickle on the maps.  There wasn’t really a stream.  They had the Perham going all the way up around, and all the way back towards Rangely by the 1861 map, which stops up in Abraham Valley.  The Orbeton is the one that goes up into Redington area.

 

MG:  That map you’re talking about must have been such an important piece of the puzzle in trying to figure out how this was all laid out.

 

CH:  Yeah.  I used that a lot.  Then, when my sister-in-law – my brother’s wife – found the map down in the probate court in Farmington that was dated wrong, and found out that it was between 1811 and 1829.  So, I marked it about 1825.  That map, showing Samuel Hinkly owning where Madrid is – that showed the Perham Stream and the [inaudible] Orbeton Stream, but it didn’t go all the way around into Redington like the 1861 map does.  1923 map that my father had a map of – and the 1939 town map, which we have a copy of – what I did is I combined them all together and traced other virtually originally where the roads were, and then plotted where the houses were and using the names from each of them of the properties – that way, I could know who owned what after the other person.  That’s how I compiled it.

 

MG: Another name that kept coming up in that report was the last name Dill, D-I-L-L.  Does that ring a bill?

 

CH:  I know the Dills [were] very [influential] in what they called Northern Phillips, which was virtually right south of here –

 

MG:  The narrow-gauge railroad?  Can you say again what you know about that?

 

CH:  The Sandy River Railroad went through in the late 1800s to the early 1900s.  They built up – the main line was from Phillips up through to Rangely along the Orbeton Stream.  What they did is they was on the right side of the Orbeton Stream, and they use the old Indian trading path as the route.  A lot of people think that they use the Fly Rod Crosby trail, the Indian trading trail.  They think Fly Rod Crosby Trail was the Indian Trail, but the Indian Trail was on this side, where the narrow-gauge railroad was.  Then, later on, they decide to connect to Barnjum Mills and get a track up through there to that, so they could get the lumber out.

 

MG:  I just learned about Fly Road Crosby yesterday.  Tell me about her.

 

CH:  Fly Rod Crosby was a naturalist, and she was virtually the first naturalist tour guide, female tour guide, in Maine.  She was [a] very adamant fisher-person.  She went to big meetings about fish conservation and so forth.  Ginni could tell you a lot more about her than I could.  I do know that there is a trail over there, and it is a – I think it’s a twenty-six-mile-long trail.  But it’s a narrow trail.  Whereas my Birding Trail is only two and a half miles long, but it’s a very easy walking wide trail that you can take your time on and relax.  I do know that Fly Crosby Trail – some of it’s kind of hard-going.

 

MG:  What years was she alive?

 

CH:  I don’t know exactly, but I can give you the flyer that I have.  Then you can ponder over it and add to it.  I do have that clipping of her in the newspaper from the – she originated in Phillips. She lived in Phillips, but she went up through Madrid.  With the Fly Rod Crosby Trail, she went up into Saddleback, onto Saddleback, and so forth.  That’s how it’s connected through.  The trail does go on Ginni Robie’s land property there.

 

MG:  I read that there was an economic depression, I think, in 1873, the first great depression in United States history, and that it impacted the expansion of the railroad.  Do you know about that?  Did it impact anybody in your family?

 

CH:  I don’t think there’s any real impact on the family because, as I’ve said, this whole village was virtually self-sufficient.  Except for the big depression, the only thing was the things like flour or leather or gasoline.  Other than that, you can get by without them if you have to.  They had everything stored up.  So, when some hard times come, they was ready for it because every year they had hard times.  They had nine, ten months of winter up here.

 

MG:  So it didn’t really matter what was happening in the rest of the world?

 

CH:  Right.  They was in in-tune.  They knew about it.  They learned about it and was informed about it, but it didn’t affect their daily lives, like it did in the other places.

 

MG:  We talked about the lumber trade and the lumber industry.  Was it mostly white birch being used in the beginning?  What kinds of trees were used?

 

CH:  Evergreen.  Softwood.  It virtually became paper – paper wood.  It all shipped down to the paper mills and so forth.  That was big time.  But before then, and they did ship it – log drive it on the Orbeton – was the hornbeams.  The hornbeams is what they used for masts for the ships.  They did harvest them up here, and they did go down the Orbeton I know.  My father showed me out on the birding – out on our property where the last hornbeam was.  It was an old tree.  It was almost dead when I saw it.  He said, “That is the last one in the area.”  Because they harvested all the others.  When they harvested it, it was just a little sapling.

 

MG:  They didn’t replace –?

 

CH:  Just like the big pines, that time they just cut them and that was it.  There was kings pines.   You cut them – back then, they didn’t think about replanting.

 

MG:  When did the paper and pulp mills close down?

 

CH:  When the internet and cell phones and all that business and the social media started.  Because everything – all the newspapers were going out of business because nobody buys newspapers.  Nobody read books anymore.  It was all on the internet.  That’s when it all petered out.  And they’re starting to realize now they should have kept some of that. [laughter]

 

MG:  I talked with Ginni this morning a little bit about when Madrid was dissolved as a town.  Can you talk a little bit about what happened?

 

CH:  Unorganized.  It became unorganized.  In other words, it relinquished town status and dissolved the town officials and things like that for the simple reason that no people had moved out of Madrid so much the people couldn’t sustain the expense of it anymore.  Over here, everybody was happy that it did it for the simple reason we could get the roads fixed.  Because the town would have the road crew and so forth, but that would be over there, and they had to do all theirs before they’d get around to do anything over here.  When the town [plows] the winter, and the kids got to go school, the road over here wouldn’t get plowed out until two o’clock in the afternoon.  So, my father learned how to drive in the snow. [laughter] In fact, my father was actually commissioned – he was paid by the town to plow this whole road with one his jalopies that he made – or the dump truck afterward.  He plowed the road here.  Just like they paid him to ship us to school every day and get us from school because they didn’t want to bring the bus over here for just us.

 

MG:  How have things changed since Madrid was disorganized?

 

CH:  The roads get plowed first thing, almost before dawn.  The road has been better ever since – maintained.  They’ve ditched the [inaudible] two or three times.  The buses still don’t come up here.

 

MG:  The school buses?

 

CH:  Yeah.

 

MG:  Are there any kids around here to pick up?

 

CH:  In the upper neighborhood, those’s two or three.  They have to take them out to where the Blethen School connection [inaudible] there.  They take them out there to get on the bus.  But when we was going to school, my sister had detention.  She went to school four years before me.  She had a detention in high school and had to stay, and when it come time to bring the kids home from detention, the bus driver refused.  So, the teacher had to bring my sister home.  They came in here one time – they contracted for SAD [School Administrative District] 58 to come in and get all the kids everywhere.  The buses came down over the hill – it was in the wintertime – and they couldn’t get back out.  We didn’t go to school that day, and the bus sat here all day long.  Of course, it didn’t have any kids on it because they was going to pick us up first and then go get the rest, but they couldn’t get back up over the hill.  So, ever since then, the bus drivers refused.  And my sister had the detention, so the teacher had to bring her home.  Then, when she graduated high school in ’72, my brother and I arrived at the high school [in] the fall of ’72.  We walked in to present our names as a student.  The principal was there, signing the kids in.  He said, “You wouldn’t happen to be Belinda’s brothers?”  “Yeah.”  He said, “Oh, great.”  Then, two or three times something happened.  The teacher was going to give me detention.  I said, “Go talk to the principal.”  He’d come back.  “He said no detention.”  For the simple reason there’s no way that he bus was ever going to get here.  The teachers were not going to drive here either.

 

MG:  So you got a hall pass.

 

CH:  I got a hall pass from detention, but I didn’t get a hall pass from missing the bus.  If there was a storm [and] you couldn’t get, my father could drive a regular car through a foot of snow and still make it out and back.

 

MG:  Oh, my gosh.  You talked yesterday about how there wasn’t really any time for extracurriculars because you had to get home to the farm.  Were you involved in anything outside of school or home, like Boy Scouts?

 

CH:  Nope.  My mother was going to sign us up for Boy Scouts.  She thought of it.  And there was a couple of kids in our grade that went to Boy Scouts.  Somehow she found out we was related.  So, she talked to the mother and the father and says, “Forget it.”  She said, “Why?”  He said, “Because your kids can teach them kids.”

 

MG:  You were probably an Eagle Scout at five years old.

 

CH:  Yeah. [laughter] He said, “What the Boy Scouts are teaching is what a farm kid knows automatically because it’s part of their life.”  Boy scouts is based on taking town or city kids and teaching them how to be a farmer.  A farmer already knows.

 

MG:  Did you talk to me about the Prescott Mill?  Where would that have been placed?

 

CH:  The Prescott Mill was across the stream.  That was the True Mill.  It was Pickard Mill.  Then it became the Prescott Mill.  Then it became the Hoyt.  Then it became the Hoyt-Prescott.  Then it became George True’s.  Then it became Andrew Keen’s.  And then it became the community’s, which was up to seventeen owners at once.  They had a quarter share or an eighth share or a tenth share.  It was all community after that.  It was virtually a community anyways.  They had an official name, official owner until that became the seventeen owners.  But it was all the same mill.  One thing I didn’t mention to you – in 1989, a car drove up across the bridge here.  At that time, I was sleeping upstairs.  And on the ceiling upstairs, the plaster, had the name “Alice True.”  And Alice True was the daughter of George True [who] operated the mill and lived here.  One of the girls was raised [here].  Her name was up there.  That car pulled up.  A young fellow got out and started taking pictures all over the place.  I was out in the barn at the time.  I was coming out to check something at the end of the house.  The woman spotted me, drove the car up, and stopped at the end of the dooryard and got out.  I got about halfway out, just about where the door was here.  She says, “Is my great grandmother’s name still on the ceiling?”  I said, “You mean Alice True?”  She says, “Yeah.”  I said, “No, my brother tore it down, but I always wondered what Alice True looked like because that was my bedroom.”  She said, “Well, we got on the internet trying to find relations.  They found George True and Alice and so forth, all the relations.  She said, “We was wondering whether there’s any evidence of anything.”  I said, “Well, I don’t know of that, but I do know everything [about] the area.”  She said, “Mainly, I come up to find out where my great-grandfather walked himself to death.”  I said, “What do you mean?”  She says, “Walking twelve and a half miles to his mill.”  I said, “What?”  She says, “It has that he lived in your house.”  I said, “Yeah, he did.”  “And his mill was in Reeds Mill, and he walked to the mill every day.”  I said, “His mill was right across the stream here.”  She says, “It was?”  I said, “Yeah.  He didn’t walk himself to death.”  I said, “He did, later on, have a mill over in Reeds Mill, but he moved to Reeds Mill over there, beside the mill.”  I said, “He didn’t walk.” [laughter] She said, “Well, thank God for that.”  But on the internet, it said that he walked twelve and a half miles to his mill every morning.

 

MG:  It shows you how easily history can be lost or misconstrued if not documented properly.

 

CH:  And that’s one thing that – a lot of times, if I’m not sure if something, I say it’s [a] possibility, or it’s almost a fact until I’m sure of the fact.  And once I’m sure of it, then I incorporate into the – just like that Swedish trapper.  I’ve had confirmation from three or four different sources, but I still have no actual evidence.  So, it’s still a possibility he’s there.  As for Thomas Pickard, there’s no – I haven’t found the musket yet.  I found the trigger guard, and I found the uniform button, but I haven’t found the actual rifle.

 

MG:  It sounds like there are plans to do continued excavation and exploration.  How’s that going to unfold?

 

CH:  We’re going to continue digging in the cellar, trying to get the foundation, and once we get the foundation – I have the map of the whole farm, the measurements and everything of every section of the building.  Once we find that cellar hole and get one corner, I’m going to take and put a post in every corner of every section so that people can see how big that building actually was.  He wants to excavate the rest of the cellar out, and he wants to excavate the upper cellar out to find the wells and that foundation underneath that opening under the chimney.  And then he wants to go to the blacksmith shop, check that out.  He wants to go up to the Wheeler place, check that place out, and Perham School.  If he can get more permission, to do possibly up to Mecham Farm, Welch’s farm, and maybe the Toothaker – the Increase Blethen farm, to find out more on how they lived their lives.  He wants to tie in the Indian aspect and the trading routes and so forth like that.  He’s going around right now – this year, he’s been doing test pits all over the place.  Because he says that there’s a good, –the lay of the land and everything is a good indication it might be the same kind of site [that] they found down in Strong, which would be ten, fifteen thousand years old.

 

MG:  Wow.  What did they find there in Strong?

 

CH:  They found evidence of knapping stones and stuff to make tools and pieces of tools and everything that dated back to thirteen thousand years ago.

 

MG:  Holy cow.  Where are those artifacts living?

 

CH:  I have no idea where they went.  He don’t either.  He was involved …

 

MG:  Do you want to pause?  [Interruption in the recording.  Recording paused.]

 

CH:  Every year, it’s almost doubled in people coming in to see things.  As we said right there, people are always coming in to see – it’s more and more people are realizing how much history this was in this area.  I’ve even gotten – the people have a nickname now.  There was one person coming up to see the museum.  They was walking the Fly Rod Crosby trail as we mentioned.  They stopped and talked to somebody there that lived in the Reeds Mill area next to the church there.  He says, “Well, if you want to know the real history of Madrid, you have to go see the mayor of the ghost town.”  They’re talking about me.  He says, “If you follow this route and go up and cross the bridge, and you see a trail, and there’ll be a museum.  The mayor of the ghost town will come out and speak to you.  The old man in the woods – I’ve been named that.  Like the old man in the mountain in New Hampshire, the knowledgeable old man.  The old man of the lost town.  People have come up and greeted me that way.  “Are you the old [inaudible] such and such?”

 

MG:  Do you say, “I’m not that old?”

 

CH: [laughter]

 

MG:  We’ve talked about the red house across the street.  I think in the records, there was a Robert Davis on the deed at at somepoint.

 

CH:  Robert Davis, I think, was in 1861 before Moses Wing had it.  Moses Wing wasn’t up here that long.  He was here to have his son and so forth, but then he died.  He blind and half-crippled.  He lived there, and then Cordelia, of couse, and Daniel.  But I think that was the first name – Davis – that lived there.  A lot of the names in 1861 are – the information [about] a lot of the places got handed to another person, but it took a long time for the information to get to Augusta to make a new map.  Because in 1861, most of the ones listed – almost three-quarters of them – had passed on and moved and sold it to somebody else at that time.

 

MG:  It says the red house was burned and rebuilt in 1903.

 

CH:  Right.

 

MG:  Did it burn down because of the 1903 fire?

 

CH:  No, it burned down because of a spark from a stove in the house.  It was in the spring.  They had a cold snap [inaudible] and a spark come from the stove and burnt the house down.  Then, by the fall, they had it rebuilt, and they built it almost exactly the same, except the porch didn’t extend quite so far on one corner.  That was the only difference that made until Bronson Griscom bought it in ’48, ’49.  Then he dug a hole on the lower side to put a door into the cellar from the outside.

 

MG:  Is that when the Griscoms came to this area?

 

CH:  Yep.

 

MG:  And what first brought the Griscoms here?

 

CH:  As I said yesterday, as a child, he was walking with his father up on Saddleback Mountain –

 

MG:  That’s right.

 

CH:  – and he saw that, and he said he’d like to live [there] and own that area.  So when he became retired, he came up and started buying everything.

 

MG:  And I’m sure we’ve talked about the Wheeler Farm.  Can you remind me of its history?

 

CH:  The Wheeler Farm is known as the Wheeler Farm.  I can’t remember the name before it right now.  I think it’s on one of the maps.  The one before it was the one that had the beef animals.  Every year, he would take a jersey –

 

MG:  Who was “he?”  Wheeler?

 

CH:  No.  Before Wheeler.  He would take an old jersey that he had and walk across the longest property all the way to the point of the land and then down over the bank to load, and the beef critters would follow him all the way.  They’d load the beef critters onto the railroad to be shipped out for meat and everything – slaughter.  Then, he’d walk home with the jersey every day.  Well, the bank – they’d walk out there.  It was about a mile out to the top of the bank.  It’s all flat.  And then you got the bank of the Orbeton Valley and the Perham Valley, and it goes right to a point, just like that – a point.  There’s a trail down over.  That point from that top of my land – or was my land – is all flat.  From there to the stream at the Orbeton is 485 down.  It’s about three-quarters of a mile walk down the hill and three-quarters [of a mile] walk back up the steep hill.  It is steep.  He’d do that every fall when it was time to sell cattle.  Then, Reverend Wheeler came from below Farmington somewhere.  I can’t remember exactly where.  He went to Freeman for a while – Freeman, Maine, which is north of Strong.  Then, he came over here and lived.  He was a spiritual leader here for two or three years, and then he died from disease, and his daughter – when the post office started, she became the post-mistress.  Ezra, her brother, was just tending the farm and so forth, but they didn’t have the cattle like the one before did.  They had cattle and milk cows and horses and so forth.  They was mainly either – he was a lumberman and she was a post-mistress.

 

MG:  I read that [Edgar] Wheeler married a Masterman, Cora Masterman.

 

CH:  Yep.

 

MG:  So, as there a connection to your family?  Weren’t there Mastermans in your family?

 

CH:  Yeah.  Lucinda Masterman.  Cora Masterman was a distant cousin of Lucinda’s.  They came from the Masterman settlement in Weld.  Ezra Wheeler – I’ve got a picture of Ezra Wheeler at Cora’s father’s farm.  Ezra Wheeler was Jenny Wheeler’s brother.  I’ve got a picture of him standing in front of the old Masterman farm.

 

MG:  Remind me the location of the post office that we’re talking about.

 

CH:  It’s at the top of the hill.  It’s called Wheeler Hill because of the Reverend Wheeler.  It’s the knoll in back of the main village.  On the top of the hill is where I told you that they had that geodetic marker of the altitude of the land that they moved.  It was right on top of that.  The Wheeler place was on the eastern side, so that the winter wind would flow over the house not in the house.  There was a cellar hole, and I keep it cleaned out so the people can see it, and a well that I have [inaudible] off so that people don’t get injured.  But the well is very good tasting water.

 

MG:  And your grandmother worked in the post office.

 

CH:  Yep.  Carrie Wing.  She was the post deliverer.  She delivered the mail.

 

MG:  Was that challenging to do in these parts?

 

CH:  Yeah, it was horse or walk.  She would have to walk a mile and a half from the post office down to the mail depot at Sanders Station, Sanders Mill, to get the mail, and then bring it back.  Then Jenny Wheeler would sort it all out, and then my grandmother would have to take horse or walk the whole length of the settlement here to deliver the mail.  It was an all-day job.  Sometimes, the upper village didn’t get the mail but once or twice a week, and that was it.  Sometimes, the mail didn’t come from the train, except for once a week because something happened and the train didn’t run, you didn’t get the mail.  There was a lot of train wrecks on that train because it was narrow gauge.  It flipped over easy.

 

MG:  We were just talking about the Reverend Wheeler.  Where would he operate out of?  The common area across the footbridge?

 

CH:  No, he held services – as I said, they held services in the school that was unoccupied after building another one.  Or at a family farm parlor room or a big living room.  They’d hold services.  He’d come to their place and hold the service.  I do have a ledger of the church of when they was using the old Mill Hill School.  I do have a ledger of that.

 

MG:  What else can you tell me about the Prescott Mill?

 

CH:  Prescott Mill was the True Mill.  It was right across the stream here.  It’s the same one, the one that [inaudible].

 

MG:  My notes say, “James Roderick present owner of the mill site.”

 

CH:  Yeah, he owns across the stream here.  He’s the one that brought the map.  He’s the one that owns that property now.  We did own it, but we sold it to him because he wanted a place of his instead of up on the old farm.

 

MG:  So, does he live over there?

 

CH:  Well, on the lower side.  The mill was on the upper side of the road.  The mill yard was where his house is.  Where they put all the trees and everything to be processed.

 

MG:  We’ve covered the Nathan D. Wing Farm.

 

CH:  Yeah, that’s my family farm over here.  Nathan D. Wing.  That was my great-grandfather.

 

MG:  I’m going to go through my notes, but please let me know if there’s things you think we’re missing.  I think a lot of these are things we’ve already talked about.  We talked about the blacksmith shop.

 

CH:  Yeah.

 

MG:  The Pickard orchard.

 

CH:  Well, we ain’t talked to much about the Pickard orchard.  The Pickard orchard is in back of the – it comes down from the Wheeler place down back of the Pickard Farm here before you get to the basin piece.  There was an orchard in there.  That had the Wealthy, the Worthy, the Tolman sweet, the Wolf River, and the McIntosh.  That was on the lower – southern bank of the Wheeler Hill is virtually what it is.  It’s accessed from in back of the Pickard Farm and shop here, up behind the red house and up to the Wheeler place.  There used to be a little road.  The stone wall of the Wheeler place is the upper part of the – at the very top of the orchard – and the orchard’s down this way from it.

 

MG:  Is your guess then that it was a barnyard?

 

CH:  No, it was an orchard.  It had about sixteen, seventeen trees in it.

 

MG:  Was that the area that was converted to a rose garden?

 

CH:  No.  That rose garden is out near [the] eastern side of the Pickard/Moulton place here.  That’s just above my place here on the bank.  From my house, you cross the street on the main road – whatever you want to call it – is on the west side of my place.  The Pickard Farm was on the west side of that.  The orchard was behind on the west side of that farm before they got to the big field and the basin piece and the sheep pasture.

 

MG:  Would your mom cook with the apples from the orchard?

 

CH:  Oh, yeah.

 

MG:  What would she make?

 

CH:  All kinds of them.  Apple pies.  We had baked apples, apple sauce, apple muffins, apple fritters, apple donuts, apple cake.  When you leave here, you’ll have an apple pie.

 

MG:  Oh, yeah?

 

CH:  Yeah.

 

MG:  Did you make it?

 

CH:  Yeah.  My mother and I made it.  It’s still in the freezer.  You can have it when you go home.  You can take it home with you.

 

MG:  Did you make it in 2017, and it’s been frozen ever since?

 

CH:  I had one the other day that was made in 2010, perfectly fine.

 

MG:  People do keep their wedding cakes in the freezer and eat a little bit every year.  Well, that’s really kind.  I feel honored.  If you’re granted permission, what other areas need to be covered in this excavation or exploration?

 

CH:  If I was granted [permission], I’d have every site excavated.  But mainly, the Mecham [property] because he was a blacksmith up there on Mecham Hill.  If we could get permission [for] the Thorpe Place because that was, as I said, virtually a boarding house for the mill people.  The Toothaker Place, which was Increase Blethen’s because that was a very big farm, and it had an orchard behind it.  They had a lot of fields.  There’s a lot of history there that I think there’d be a lot of evidence of – got a big animal barn, a chicken shed, and a carriage barn.  I think there’d be a lot of evidence in the ground to that.  As I said, the Wheeler lace.  There’s very good ability.  You can see the foundation and the front step of the door and everything.  One thing I didn’t mention about the Wheeler place is I remember it pretty near well fallen down.  My father told me not to go into it, but I could look in the door.  When I looked in the door, stood at the door – to the left of the door, it was a wall inside the door.  To the left of the door was another door.  In the door, the top half was post office grates.  To the right, was an entrance to the cellar.  I’ve scuffed enough places on the outer edge, that I found the sink drain through the foundation wall from the kitchen.  I found a piece of pipe from the sink drain.  But I just thought I’d let you know that I did see that post office grate, so I do know that that was the post office.

 

MG:  Did someone live there?

 

CH:  It was Jenny Wheeler.  She was the post mistress.  It was the Wheeler place.  That was the East Madrid post office.

 

MG:  What happened to those artifacts?

 

CH:  Just gone.  Just like over here, Jimmy used to have a pile of the old scrap metal from the mill.  Somebody just swiped it.  Just like somebody swiped my sign up there at the grave.

 

MG:  It seems like you can see who’s going back and forth.

 

CH:  There’s more traffic on this road than there is the main road.  They go the speed of a main road up through here, too.

 

MG:  I’m seeing in my notes something about Goldsmith farm and Goldsmith loop.  Was that the area we drove past?

 

CH:  No, that’s out there to town line at the top of the tarred hill.  That area out there.  When you go back out, you’ll go by an opening with a house sitting there in the trees and the shed.  They’ll be on the right.  That was the Sweetser place.  Then you go through where on the left it says, (Gagne?) Preserve.  Then there’s a little hollow, and in that little hollow, to the right, that looks like an old little road, that was the main road out of East Madrid.

 

MG:  The “Old Main Road?

 

CH:  Yeah.  That went down to the old Reeds Mill Road.  Goldsmith Loop went up where the road is now to a dooryard that’s got a cable over it, and that went up to the Goldsmith farm.  Then it looped back down onto the “Old Main Road.”

 

MG:  Where’s the Noah Davenport farm?

 

CH:  Davenport farm.  I think that’s the one that’s – I think that’s the one that I know as Brimigion, and that would be out here where Clark [inaudible] was the (McLaughlin) Farm.  But right at the end of this side of the house that used to be there, the Brimigion Road went out and connected to the Bray Hill Road.  The Brimigion Farm was that, and I think the Davenport Farm is that area.

 

MG:  You’ve mentioned the Sweetsers a couple of times?  Where were they from?  What kind of family were they?

 

CH:  I don’t know too much about them.  I do know the Sweetsers lived at the red house here for a while.  And the Sweetsers had that place out there that I just mentioned on the road just before the “Old Main Road.”  Other than that, the descendants of both of them live out in Phillips now; that’s all I know.

 

MG:  That’s a common Maine name, too.  We didn’t go back out that way, but is that where the Bailey and Evans farms are?  On Bray Hill Road?

 

CH:  Yeah.  That you can’t get to unless you [inaudible] it or four-wheel drive it.

 

MG:  Oh, yeah.

 

CH: Four-wheeler.  Not four-wheel drive.  It’s mostly [on foot] to there because there’s no more road.  Just a walk path, if that.

 

MG:  Yes, that’s what I’m reading here.

 

CH:  It’s all grown up.

 

MG:  Where was the Mill Hill School?

 

CH:  Mill Hill School was – these two hills that you come – the Perham Stream here – to go out to Phillips, you have to go up over two hills.  The first hill at the top of that is a little bog to the left, and then there’s a – [inaudible] you can see just – this side looks like an old little wood road.  That was the Indian path – trading trail.  On the other side, you can see an opening.  That went all the way down along the Perham Stream and joined the Oberton trading path.  But you went up over the top of the second hill, and that’s where the Mill Hill School was.  That’s one that my grandmother’s – that was her first school that she went to.

 

MG:  Did she ever record any recollections of her school days in the diaries or anywhere else?

 

CH:  The diaries mention it.  I’ve got what they used to call cards.  It was people who signed the cards, and you could collect cards to go to parties.  It’s like – you have to have a card to dance with a person.  I’ve got a lot of them.  I’ve got a lot of teacher cards that teachers would give the cards for recognition of schoolwork or something.  I’ve got a whole mess of them.  I’ve the records of how many students were in the grades with her.  There’s one that’s – she’s got a list.  It’s a little tiny book.  It’s like a pamphlet book.  One page says, “How many (scholars?) with red hair?”  You flip a page.  “How many (scholars?) with blonde hair?”  You flip a page.  “How many with brunette hair?”  Flip a page.  “How many with bobtails?” [laughter] All their classmates – their looks, different complexions, who wore hats, and who didn’t.

 

MG:  Why was that significant to capture?

 

CH:  I have no idea.  She’s got it.  As she got older, she got, “How many men have mustaches?”  How many men don’t have mustaches?

 

MG:  I guess it’s a way to document demographics and trends.  How many men did have moustaches?  Do you remember?

 

CH:  I think she had seven with mustaches and nine without.  She also had how many rats she caught in one month. [laughter]

 

MG:  How many was that?

 

CH:  She had up to up to twenty-five one time.

 

MG:  That she caught herself?

 

CH:  They caught on the farm.

 

MG:  Oh, wow.  I think we’ve covered most of the things that I wrote notes about.

 

CH:  I can’t think of much of anything else.

 

MG:  My brain is very full after the last couple of days.

 

CH:  There’s probably a lot more that I could come up with if somebody could recall it to me.

 

MG:  Yes, that’s why I’m looking closely at my notes.  I want to see if there’s anything that will bring any old memories to the fore.

 

CH:  I know a lot of things I remember, but unless somebody mentions it, I don’t recall.  But as soon as they mention that – “Oh, yeah.”  One thing I did recall earlier when we mentioned about snowmobiles, one year, with my friend that I was telling you about – the Hereford eating the apple?

 

MG:  Yes.

 

CH:  His family had a snowmobile, and we had four or five.  One winter, we made a point of packing this field down, every bit of it all winter long.  Not one piece of field was not packed with a snowmobile track.  I do have eight-millimeter film of a lot of when I was a young boy and so forth [inaudible] family here.  There’s one that we have that my father – which I don’t have the equipment anymore.  But my father and my friend’s father hooked up their ’66 and ’65 skidoo snowmobile to the horse wagon, and we all rode the horse wagon through the snow in the field, all around the field, the two snowmobiles pulling that horse wagon while we were riding it. [laughter]

 

MG:  You should get those videos digitized.

 

CH:  I know.  It ought to, somehow.  Because it virtually records everything that we’ve done on the farm here.

 

MG:  That would be a good idea.

 

CH:  There’s one here – when my brother and I was six or seven years old, we both had a pet calf that we tended to.  We were trying to get – my father filmed us trying to get it from the pasture into the barn.  My brother was pushing is, and I was pushing mine and trying to get them to the barn.

 

MG:  Did you name your pet calf?

 

CH:  No.

 

MG:  I guess you don’t want to get too attached.

 

CH:  I did the name the cows a lot of times.  The Hereford that we had – everybody that came up thought it was a bull because I called it “Harry Ford.”  Harry Ford is the one that I made twenty-five dollars on one time.  Somebody bet me that I wouldn’t jump on it.

 

MG:  But you did?

 

CH:  Yeah, I did.

 

MG:  Tell me about that.

 

CH:  I used to jump on her all the time, no problem.  She would be walking across the field.  I’d go up a run, and I’d jump on her, and she’d stop.  She wouldn’t move until I got off.  Somebody come up one time.  “You’re a little farmer.  I bet you ride cows.”  I said, “Yeah, I can ride that cow right there.”  He said, “[inaudible].  I’ll bet you twenty-five dollars you’ll get bucked off.”  I said, “Okay.”  Jumped right on her.  She stood right there.  I sat there for about five, ten minutes.  I got off.  I said, “Where’s my twenty-five dollars.”

 

MG:  That’s a good payday.

 

CH:  She walked off. [inaudible]

 

MG:  There was so much information in that “Perham Settlement” report.

 

CH:  I know.  Steve done a good job.

 

MG:  It’s really comprehensive.  I’m glad that exists.  A copy of that should be available online or through the Madrid Historical Society.

 

CH:  Yeah.  Well, I think it ought to be put into a book.  Just like you said, this is a ought to be put into a book.

 

MG:  Would you ever think about writing one?

 

CH:  I don’t know how to write one.

 

MG:  You’ve got all the information.

 

CH:  I’ve got all the information, but to put it down – to coincide as a book format, I wouldn’t know how to do that.

 

MG:  It’s a lot of work.

 

CH:  Like the autobiography – somebody else do it for me.

 

MG:  Yeah, get a ghostwriter.

 

CH:  Right.

 

MG:  What’s your vision for this area over the next one hundred years?

 

CH:  My vision is to keep it just the way it is.  If you don’t, there’s a lot of history that’s going to be lost.  There’s a lot of habitat going to be lost for the animals.  Because this farm has all the habitats any animal needs to survive – all types of animals.  It’s got streams, it’s got bogs, it’s got fields, it’s got woodland, it’s got thickets, it’s got open meadows – every kind of habitat that – nature books all say they have to have five, six different types of habitats, and this has got it.  It’s also right at the border of the two climates, the high altitude climates, what they call the high peaks or the tundra, and the lower altitude life-supporting areas.  It’s right at that border.  It ought to be preserved because it’s the only – there’s others farms here, but they don’t have all the habitats that this one does.  I’d like to see this place historically preserved.  As I showed you that – we didn’t mention in the records here – about that door painting out there.

 

MG:  Tell me that story again now that we’re on the record.

 

CH:  There is a type of painting that they do for furniture and doors and walls that they take the wood, they put an undercoat on, and then they take – brushstroke, another technique of painting, so it looks like wood again, but a different type of wood – different types, different style, different graining, different year graining – knots and so forth.  My room in there, my bedroom and my work room, has it on the walls and everything.  They had it on this wall here, but it had so much cigar smoke from my grandfather, we had to paint over it.  And on that door, it’s a lost art, and somebody on that door tried to teach somebody, but they didn’t get the knack of it.  But you can see the difference – how they was trying to teach him.  I put that out in a museum.  That’s got to be preserved somehow because there’s virtually two rooms worth in there of it.

 

MG:  Yeah, it’s a really impressive inventory over there.

 

CH:  And all the farm machinery of the museum.  Somebody get up here – interns to get up here to learn – there is techniques of farming that they have lost.  A lot of them that they’re saying is a new technique is actually an old technique, but they’ve just realized that it actually works better than what they [were] doing.  And get up here and learn from me how that was done, so that it can be passed on and used in other, more productive, more major production for food processing.

 

MG:  I keep thinking the timing is right for this.  With the pandemic, so many people have found areas like this to settle and have become interested in homesteading.  Perhaps, that’s an opportunity.  I know there’s a nonprofit on the coast of Maine that does something similar.  Maybe it’s finding the right partner organization.

 

CH:  Well, that’s the trouble.  Being way back here, all these organizations – until somebody [inaudible] in here, I don’t know about it, and they don’t know about this.  I’ve got to get that connection to say, “Hey, wait a minute.  This place way up in the back woods there – they’ve been plugging it out for over a hundred and fifty, two hundred years.  Maybe they’ve got ideas up there that work.”

 

MG:  There are two Maine-based listservs that might help reach some of these organizations, one for Maine libraries and one for cultural institutions.  It might be worth reaching out to those listservs to see if there are people who are interested or know of other organizations that could be involved.

 

CH:  But see, this is an internet-free zone.

 

MG:  This is an internet-free zone.  This is something I’m happy to do on your behalf.

 

CH:  That’s what, I think, Gerry Birdsall and High Peaks Allliance – we’ve got to get that little last connection in to pull them in here to find out what is here.

 

MG:  Do you have an inventory?

 

CH:  I have a list of everything that’s in that museum.  I have a list of everything in here that is archival, just like this sewing machine.  I’ve got other pieces.  I’ve got the inventory of every board in there that’s got that painting on it.  My ex-wife said I was – what’s the word? – virtually neurotic about lists.  I make sure I have inventory of everything I own.  I’m very adamant on authenticating everything to make sure that it’s identified right.  Just like my geneaology.  A lot of my genealogy history – I have one source, but I won’t say that is it because I know there’s – just like all the old sayings and the old stories.  There is that story.  There might be a piece of it that’s true, and there might be a lot of it [that’s] exaggerated.  But there might be another story that another piece is true.  You’ve got to get all the facts before you can say, “Yes, that’s it.”

 

MG:  Otherwise, it’s a several-hundred-year-long game of telephone.

 

CH:  It’s just like somebody saying, “This is it.  This is it.  This is it.”  Then somebody comes along two hundred years later, and says, “No, that wasn’t it.”

 

MG:  Yeah.  Well, it sounds like we’ve got what it is from at least your perspective, and it’s pretty close to probably how it happened.

 

CH:  I try to keep it ask close – even if my family ended up as the mean, despicable one, I would keep it that way.  Fortunately, my family kind of slid through the middle. [laughter]

 

MG:  Well, is there anything I haven’t asked you about or anything we haven’t talked about?

 

CH:  I don’t know of much that I – as I said, somebody might mention something that I might recall it, I’ll just have to get back with you afterward or through phone.

 

MG:  Perhaps, we can get together again in the future.  I’ll transcribe our conversation so that you can review them, make changes, and then we can share them with some other folks who might say, “Hey, wait a minute, I want to know a little bit more about this.”  And perhaps there’s an addendum that’s required

 

CH:  They might bring it up, and I might recall it a little bit better.  Because I’ve noticed a lot of times that somebody [will] say something, and I tell them about it, and so forth, and so on.  All of a sudden, somebody’s coming in a week later.  I say, “Oh, yeah, that also occurred to that.”  One thing that did pop into my mind just now and it was about my father and his hunting.  He stopped hunting completely.  I think I was fourteen, fifteen years old.  Out there in the field – there’s two fields; there’s a basin field and the sheep pasture beside it.  And there’s a big field behind that.  The big field has a very sharp drop-off, the 480-foot drop-off.  It is almost a perpendicular angle, all the way to the stream.  My father went out and was coming back over the backside of the sheep pasture.  He came out into the very edge of the big field.  And there was a buck at a pine tree on that bank.  He decided to shoot it.  He was a good shot.  I’m [a] fairly good shot.  I can kill something.  My neighbor Jimmy has to take five or six shots to kill a raccoon; I kill it the first shot.  I’ve killed porcupines [on] the first shot, too.  But he shot it.  And just as he shot, the buck jumped over the back.  So the deer went down.  Luckily, it didn’t go 480 feet down.  But I remember it was – I think it was eight, nine o’clock at night.  My mother was kind of pacing.  Being a farmer, you’re a very light sleeper.  I had to do the milking in the morning.  I did the morning chores.  My brother did the afternoon chores because he was never a morning person.  It worked out that way.  Towards the night – it was after dark.  I said, “What’s wrong?”  She said, “Your dad ain’t home yet.”  Pretty soon, he come walking in.  He was soaked from sweat.  He said, “I’m not hunting anymore.  I just chased a buck a hundred and fifty feet down over that bank and had to haul it up over.”  [He] said, “I’m not hunting anymore.”  He went out after that a lot and just sat there and watched deer.  I think I was nineteen at the time.  He went out, and he saw a hole in the stream out here during the winter.  He come back.  “You know,” he says, “I don’t know how a deer can get water without breaking their legs.”  And sure enough, the next day, we saw blood from that hole.  And three days later, he saw a deer out here with his right front leg folded right up like that.  So, he started putting feed out.  She’d come maybe an hour later, something like that.  But he got to, after three years of doing it all year long, that deer would take food right out of her father’s hand.  That deer died, and her doe and buck that she had came afterward.  The doe died.  The buck came for three years, and his kid came.  We had ten years of feeding those deer.  Up in the fox hollow up here, in the first part of the basin that goes towards the cemetery, which you went to, there’s a hollow.  It’s always been called the fox hollow.  It’s just a swampy area.  It’s not a swamp, but the peat bog drains into that area and sits because it’s clay underneath, and it won’t drain out.  It’s always been called fox hollow for the simple reason that all five generations [that] my family’s been here, there has been generations of foxes in the edge of the bank.  There’s dens.  As long as my family’s been here, them foxes have been there.  It’s always been called fox hollow, and it’s – a couple of people have said it’s the Hinkley fox family, like that.  Because as long as we’ve been living here, they’ve been living here.  We’d go up there, and we’d see fox run.  Just a month ago, I had a grey fox right out here, front of [the] house.  Other than that, we snowmobiled all over the place here.  As I said, we’d be snowmobiling after Halloween.  There’d be snow on the ground now.  We snowmobiled when I was twenty-eight years old from this house all the way up to on top of Abraham Mountain with snowmobiles [on] May 29^th and [didn’t] hit a bit of bare ground.

 

MG:  Well, you’ve seen a lot change and a lot not change.  Carson, I think I’m out of questions.  I hope I have an excuse to come back.  I’d love to see you again and continue the conversation.  This has been such a treat and an honor to meet you.  I’m really glad this finally happened.  So, thank you for all your time and your expertise.

 

CH:  Yeah.  No problem.  That’s what I’m here for.  I figure if I know it, somebody else should know it later on.

 

MG:  Well, now we have it for perpetuity.  It’s on the record, and it will be publicly available fairly soon.  I just have to transcribe all of this.  All right.  Well, I’ll turn off the recorder, and we’ll figure out how to stay in touch.

 

CH:  Yep.

[END OF INTERVIEW]