Adopting An Abandoned Farm
BY KATE SANBORN
1891
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I.—FROM GOTHAM TO GOOSEVILLE
II.—AUCTIONS
III.—BUYING A HORSE
IV.—FOR THOSE WHO LOVE PETS
V.—STARTING A POULTRY FARM
VI.—GHOSTS
VII.—DAILY DISTRACTIONS
VIII.—THE PROSE OF NEW ENGLAND FARM LIFE
IX.—THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCKS
X.—LOOKING BACK
An old farm-house with meadows wide,
And sweet with clover on each side.
MARION DOUGLASS.
ADOPTING AN ABANDONED FARM.
CHAPTER I.
FROM GOTHAM TO GOOSEVILLE.
I have now come to the farmer’s life, with which I am exceedingly
delighted, and which seems to me to belong especially to the life of
a wise man.
CICERO.
Weary of boarding at seashore and mountain, tired of traveling in
search of comfort, hating hotel life, I visited a country friend at
Gooseville, Conn. (an assumed name for Foxboro, Mass.), and passed
three happy weeks in her peaceful home.
Far away at last from the garish horrors of dress, formal dinners,
visits, and drives, the inevitable and demoralizing gossip and scandal;
far away from hotel piazzas, with their tedious accompaniments of
corpulent dowagers, exclusive or inquisitive, slowly dying from too
much food and too little exercise; ennuied spinsters; gushing buds;
athletic collegians, cigarettes in mouths and hands in pockets;
languid, drawling dudes; old bachelors, fluttering around the fair
human flower like September butterflies; fancy work, fancy work, like
Penelope’s web, never finished; pug dogs of the aged and asthmatic
variety. Everything there but MEN—they are wise enough to keep far away.
Before leaving this haven of rest, I heard that the old-fashioned
farm-house just opposite was for sale. And, as purchasers of real
estate were infrequent at Gooseville, it would be rented for forty
dollars a year to any responsible tenant who would “keep it up.”
After examining the house from garret to cellar and looking over
the fields with a critical eye, I telegraphed to the owner, fearful
of losing such a prize, that I would take it for three years. For
it captivated me. The cosy “settin’-room,” with a “pie closet” and
an upper tiny cupboard known as a “rum closet” and its pretty fire
place—bricked up, but capable of being rescued from such prosaic
“desuetude”; a large sunny dining-room, with a brick oven, an oven
suggestive of brown bread and baked beans—yes, the baked beans of my
childhood, that adorned the breakfast table on a Sunday morning, cooked
with just a little molasses and a square piece of crisp salt pork in
center, a dish to tempt a dying anchorite.
There wore two broad landings on the stairs, the lower one
just the place for an old clock to tick out its impressive
“Forever—Never—Never—Forever” _à la_ Longfellow. Then the long “shed
chamber” with a wide swinging door opening to the west, framing a
sunset gorgeous enough to inspire a mummy. And the attic, with its
possible treasures.
There was also a queer little room, dark and mysterious, in the center
of house on the ground floor, without even one window, convenient to
retire to during severe thunder storms or to evade a personal interview
with a burglar; just the place, too, for a restless ghost to revisit.
Best of all, every room was blessed with two closets.
Outside, what rare attractions! Twenty-five acres of arable land,
stretching to the south; a grand old barn, with dusty, cobwebbed,
hay-filled lofts, stalls for two horses and five cows; hen houses, with
plenty of room to carry out a long-cherished plan of starting a poultry
farm.
The situation, too, was exceptional, since the station from which I
could take trains direct to Boston and New York almost touched the
northern corner of the farm, and nothing makes one so willing to stay
in a secluded spot as the certainty that he or she can leave it at any
time and plunge directly into the excitements and pleasures which only
a large city gives.
What charmed me most of all was a tiny but fascinating lakelet in the
pasture near the house; a “spring-hole” it was called by the natives,
but a lakelet it was to me, full of the most entrancing possibilities.
It could be easily enlarged at once, and by putting a wind-mill on
the hill, by the deep pool in “Chicken Brook” where the pickerel
loved to sport, and damming something, somewhere, I could create or
evolve a miniature pond, transplant water lilies, pink and white, set
willow shoots around the well-turfed, graveled edge, with roots of the
forget-me-not hiding under the banks their blue blossoms; just the
flower for happy lovers to gather as they lingered in their rambles to
feed my trout. And there should be an arbor, vine-clad and sheltered
from the curious gaze of the passers-by, and a little boat, moored at
a little wharf, and a plank walk leading up to the house. And—and oh,
the idealism possible when an enthusiastic woman first rents a farm—an
“abandoned” farm!
It may be more exact to say that my farm was not exactly “abandoned,”
as its owner desired a tenant and paid the taxes; say rather depressed,
full of evil from long neglect, suffering from lack of food and general
debility.
As “abandoned farms” are now a subject of general interest, let me say
that my find was nothing unusual. The number of farms without occupants
in New Hampshire in August, 1889, was 1,342 and in Maine 3,318; and I
saw lately a farm of twenty acres advertised “free rent and a present
of fifty dollars.”
But it is my farm I want you to care about. I could hardly wait until
winter was over to begin my new avocation. By the last of March I was
assured by practical agriculturists (who regarded me with amusement
tempered with pity) that it was high time to prune the lazy fruit trees
and arouse, if possible, the debilitated soil—in short, begin to “keep
it up.”
So I left New York for the scene of my future labors and novel lessons
in life, accompanied by a German girl who proved to be merely an
animated onion in matters of cooking, a half-breed hired man, and a
full-bred setter pup who suffered severely from nostalgia and strongly
objected to the baggage car and separation from his playmates.
If wit is, as has been averred, the “juxtaposition of dissimilar
ideas,” then from “Gotham to Gooseville” is the most scintillating
epigram ever achieved. Nothing was going on at Gooseville except
time and the milk wagon collecting for the creamery. The latter came
rumbling along every morning at 4.30 precisely, with a clatter of cans
that never failed to arouse the soundest sleeper.
The general dreariness of the landscape was depressing. Nature herself
seemed in a lethargic trance, and her name was mud.
But with a house to furnish and twenty-five enfeebled acres to
resuscitate, one must not mind. Advanced scientists assure us of
life, motion, even intelligence, appetite, and affection in the most
primitive primordial atoms. So, after a little study, I found that the
inhabitants of Gooseville and its outlying hamlets were neither dead
nor sleeping. It was only by contrast that they appeared comatose and
moribund.
Indeed, the degree of gayety was quite startling. I was at once invited
to “gatherings” which rejoiced in the paradoxical title of “Mum
Sociables,” where a penalty of five cents was imposed on each person
for speaking (the revenue to go toward buying a new hearse, a cheerful
object of benevolence), and the occasions were most enjoyable. There
was also a “crazy party” at Way-back, the next village. This special
form of lunacy I did not indulge in—farming was enough for me—but the
painter who was enlivening my dining-room with a coating of vivid red
and green, kindly told me all about it, how much I missed, and how
the couple looked who took the first prize. The lady wore tin plates,
tin cans, tin spoons, etc., sewed on to skirt and waist in fantastic
patterns, making music as she walked, and on her head a battered old
coffee pot, with artificial flowers which had outlived their usefulness
sticking out of the spout; and her winning partner was arrayed in rag
patchwork of the most demented variety.
“Youdorter gone” said he; “’twas a great show. But I bet youder beaten
the hull lot on ’em if you’d set your mind on’t!”
My walls were now covered with old-fashioned papers, five and ten cents
a roll, and cheap matting improved the floors. But how to furnish
eleven rooms? This brings me to—