My name is Norman Sexton. I am 77 years old. I farmed this place from 1946 to 1985 and my son farmed it after me until it was sold in 1998. My granddaughter Karen set up this computer and showed me how to put a page on it. She says to write the way I talk. I don't talk much, so this won't take long.

Four Generations · The Barn · The Herd · The Year · The Auction · The Place Now · The Sale Bill

FOUR GENERATIONS

My wife Mildred and I married in 1947. We raised Paulette, Lawrence and Janet in the farmhouse my grandfather built, and all three of them could milk before they could ride a bicycle. In 1985 Mildred and I moved down to a house in the village and Lawrence and his wife took the farm. I still went up most mornings. Lawrence put up with it.

THE BARN

It is a bank barn, built into the side of the hill. On the uphill side you drive the hay wagon straight in on the top floor and pitch the hay into the mows. On the downhill side you walk into the stable, where the cows are, under the hay. The hay keeps the cows warm and the cows keep the hay dry. My grandfather knew what he was doing.

It is 102 feet long. The frame is spruce and hemlock, cut on the place and put together with pegs. Forty-some men raised it in one day in June of 1894, and the women fed them twice. My grandfather put a slate roof on it the next year. That roof has had patching but it has never been replaced. The cupola was added in 1911. The tie-stalls held 64 cows.

THE HERD

We milked Holsteins. About sixty cows milking, give or take, and the heifers and calves coming along behind them. Twice a day, five in the morning and five at night, every day of the year including Christmas. We shipped in cans until 1958, when I put in a bulk tank, and a pipeline milker in 1971.

A farmer is not supposed to have favorites. Here are some of mine.

• Pearl. Best cow I ever had. Over 26,000 pounds of milk in her best year, and never sick a day. Lived to be thirteen.
• Duchess. Could open the barnyard gate with her nose. We changed the latch three times. She changed her mind about it once.
• Clover. Always first in line at the door at milking time, every day, for nine years. If Clover wasn't at the door, you went and found out why.
• Old Bess. Lawrence's cow. The oldest in the herd at the sale, and the last one onto the truck.

THE YEAR

The milking never changes. Everything else goes by the month.

THE AUCTION

Lawrence came down to the house in January of 1998 and sat at the kitchen table and told me he was going to sell. He had been figuring for two years and it didn't figure. I told him I knew. I had seen the milk checks. In 1997 a hundredweight of milk paid about what it paid in 1980, and the grain and the fuel and the vet and the taxes did not stay in 1980. When I started there were eleven farms milking on our road. When Lawrence sold there were two. I don't blame my son for any of it. I blame the milk check, and I have said so at Town Meeting, for all the good it did.

The sale was Saturday, May 16, 1998. Ernie Schofield cried it. He has sold most of the dispersals in this end of the county for thirty years and he knows how to keep it moving and when to let it be quiet. It was a clear day and cool. About four hundred people came. The ladies of the Congregational church sold sandwiches and pie out of the machine shed and cleared $640 for the furnace fund.

They sold the hay and the small tools first, then the machinery in a row across the lower meadow, then the cattle in a ring in the heifer barn after lunch. Pearl's granddaughter brought the top price. Most of the herd went to farms in Vermont and over in New York. Old Bess went last. I had decided I would not stay for that part, and then I did. Lawrence led her out himself.

I won't say more about that day than that. The whole sale bill is on the next page, with what everything brought, for those who are interested in such things. A good many farmers are, I find. See the Sale Bill.

THE PLACE NOW

The house, the barn and 140 acres were bought that fall by Wilbert and Wendy Deford, a couple from Connecticut, who board horses. They have 22 horses up there now. They took out the tie-stalls and put in box stalls, and they had the slate roof gone over properly, which I was glad to see. The sugarbush went to Pat Israel up the road, who taps it.

The Defords had me up for coffee last fall. Mrs. Deford asked me what the cows' names were, and I told her the ones I could remember, and she wrote them on a board in the tack room. They are on there yet. They are good people. They are not farmers, but they keep the place up, and that is more than you can say for some.

Lawrence works for the town road crew now and coaches Little League in the summer. He sleeps till six. He says that is the strangest part.

visitors since March 1999. Karen says that is a good many.

Write to me at [email protected]. I answer in the evenings.
Last updated September 18, 1999