A Change of Pace - a Little Mystery from Cornish, Maine

 OK, those of you from Cornish, Maineand Kezar Falls, Maine - a little mystery that would be nice to solve. I have this picture and can identify Glenna Watson Carpenter Bell and Norman Watson as the young girl and boy in the front row far left and second in. I also know that the little girl with the big bow in the next to the back row and second in is Doris Watson Harmon and next to her is (Aunt) Connie West Clarke (Uncle Allie's wife). It would be wonderful if you someone else here that you could identify. Linda Humphrey, perhaps you could help. I'm gathering it is a local picture of friends and neighbors, but could be wrong.

Spring Time in the Fields - After Plowing

                             

The following was written by my father, Lawrence L. Weeks Sr.  in 2006:

After plowing, it’s time to pick the rocks and put them in the dump cart to haul to a rock pile or to patch a low spot in a stone wall.  This is what Father and his grandson, Chester Chapman are doing while being watched by  “Major” a cross bred German Shepherd and Airedale. That dog was with me all the time that I was outdoors from when I was one year old until the year before I married. We could “sic” him on to anything, man or beast.  He was the only dog I knew that could kill a hedgehog.

The garden would have to be fertilized by backing the dump cart under the barn and filling it up with manure and spreading it on the garden by hand with a dung fork.

This pictures was taken in back of what is now Chet Chapman’s house.

Spring Time. . . Preparing the Fields

The following was written by my father, Lawrence L. Weeks Sr. 

My mother and father started to furrow out rows to plant seeds with a furrowing out plow, or horse hoe.  It makes a row about five or six inches wide with the wings closed, but later on you can go between the rows and hill up the potatoes with the wings open – provided you planted potatoes there, of course. If you look closely, you will see that they hit a rock and broke the plow beam a foot or so behind the wheel that is close behind the horse and belongs just in front of the handles by Father.  My nephew, Chet Chapman still has this plow in the barn on Spec Pond Rd.  Talk about putting things off.

I am including this picture to point our the lean-to shed that covers the manure piles and the well house that looks like a door in the shed. The pole fence is in a lane that leads to the two troughs  used for watering the livestock. It was kept full by a pipe from the well up by the road.

A Change of pace.... Grammie's Love - part one

Our Grammie Hodgdon was a story book grandmother.  The kind all children wish they could have. She treated the three of us precisely the same, and at the time made each of us feel as if we were her favorite.

 Gram was a wonderful cook, and our favorites were always ready and waiting even if we just dropped by.  She made the most delicious molasses cookies, and again,  made sure that each of us had them cooked exactly the way we wanted.  The thin and crispy ones, my favorite, were in the big, ceramic pig cookie jar with the big red bow around his neck, while some were kept soft and chewy in the yellow, enameled soup kettle by keeping a slice of bread on the top.  As a matter of fact, I don’t ever remember going to Grammie’s when there were not homemade cookies of one kind or another in those containers.  We loved to sit and watch while she tied one of her many handmade aprons around her waist, pulled out the pastry board that was built in just above the silverware drawer and started to cook.  She measured, stirred, rolled and cut those cookies while never too busy to let little hands help even when it made a mess or took double the time. We anxiously waited our first taste of the dough before we put them on the pan and into the oven. Finally delicious spicy, sweet aromas surrounded us. We ate the cookies right from the oven. 

Sometimes, she used the same recipe to make her “filled” cookies.  Each of these used two cookies - molasses or sugar which she filled with a thick, rich, sweet cooked mixture made with either raisins or dates.  I loved the date, but not the raisin.  However, it was still worth the effort to nibble to get every single bit of the cookies without touching the filling.  Cookies were not the only delicious things our  Grammie made, but they might well have been our favorite.

A Poem of Introduction by Lawrence L. Weeks Sr.

As I add to this blog with many of the writings of my dad (LLW Sr.),  I found this poem in his notebook that should have come first. I've always believed mistakes can be corrected, so I'll add it now.

 History

As I have Lived It

I am very glad that I was born in the 

caboose of the very last train of the old

fashioned way of life as it chug, chugged

it's way back into the pages of history.

I am, also glad that it dropped me off at a 

time and place that allowed me to live and 

experience, for about fourteen years, a wonderful

life style that most people much older than 

I only read about or heard about from their

parents or read about in history books.

The following pages contain notes and 

illustrations of the way my family and I

lived loved, laughed and worshipped, 

all the while they were teaching me the

most important things of life.

For that, I will be forever grateful.

                            Lawrence L. Weeks Sr. 2005

The Way We Stored Our Food

The following was written by my father, Lawrence L. Weeks Sr.  in 2006:

One big change in life on a farm is the way food is handled.  If we want a drink of cold water now we take a glass, and go to the refrigerator. We push our glass into the indentation in the door get ice and/or water.  Food is kept at 40 degrees inside one of the doors and zero in the other.

I will try to explain what my folks and their neighbors had to do to accomplish this the best way they could.  Until two or three years before I was married, they used what was called “Dumb Waiter” - “Waiter” for short. I have drawn a diagram at the top of this post so that you can see how it works. It used the cool cellar to store the leftovers from the meals.  It worked really well, (not as well as a fridge, of course) in the fall and winter and for very short times in the summer and saved many trips up and down the cellar stairs.

The rocks were added in each side until they balanced the weight of the “Waiter” so that it would stay wherever you put it.  You raised it up by pulling on the rope.  You only had to lift the food and dishes as the rocks lifted the rest.  It did have to be all the way up to open the screen door.  The usable part, above the floor, was about five feet tall, thirty inches and maybe fifteen inches deep.  It didn’t have a light in it. (Can’t have everything!)

Getting the Ice …

                               

First, I would like to acknowledge that these pictures came from the following excellent, informative FaceBook page:  Fhttps://www.facebook.com/CrownOfMaine/posts/10153896233706972

The following was written by my father, Lawrence L. Weeks Sr: 

I have to admit that this is not a picture of Chapman Pond in Porter, Maine, but as I do not know that a picture exists of that,  I will give you an idea of what’s happening as I remember it.   This  appears to be as close to the way that the operation looked when I watched it happen in 1935 or so. Cutting ice was done by the neighborhood farmers that needed a way to keep the milk that they sold cold as well as cooling the other food that they needed.

They “exchanged work” so called and worked together as a group.  The ones that I can remember are  Irving, Frank and Elwyn Weeks; Jesse Brooks; Curtis, Oliver and Fred Chapman.  

Notice that the ice has been marked each way, making squares with the ice plow and used ice tongs to move the ice.  They usually cut an open waterway path to float the cakes from where they were cut to the horse sleds used to haul the cakes to various ice houses.

N

As He Describes Them. . .

Above is a picture of Lawrence with his parents, Frank and Bertha while working on the farm.

The following was written by my father, Lawrence L. Weeks Sr: 
My mother's name is Bertha Mae Cartland.  She was born on November 9, 1894 in Limerick, Maine.  Her parents were in charge of the Town Farm there.  She was named after her brothers as they were named first.

My father was Frank Andrew Weeks and he was born on September 12, 1890 in Boston MA.

 Mother was a quiet lady, medium sized, soft, warm and a hard worker. She had dark hair almost until she died. As far as I was concerned, she was the boss, but in a loving way.

Father was a hard worker from daylight to dark and was known as a jack of all trades. A full time farmer who was one of, if not the last to completely make his living from the farm in Porter ME. He had lost most of his hair when I first remember him.  His average height was about 5'9," and he weighed about 140 pounds or so. 

Mother helped out on the farm in lots of ways, planting, hoeing, haying among them.  She did work in the Cornish Dress Shop for four or five years when she was in her fifties. 

One of the most important things I learned from them was to remember that there are always two sides to everything.  It has helped me not to jump to conclusions.

Below is a picture of Frank and Bertha Weeks and their two oldest children.  Bertha is holding Elwyn and Doris is with her dad.

Springtime in the Fields

The following was written by my father, Lawrence L. Weeks Sr. 
In the latter part of  April or the first of May, it was time to start getting the fields ready to plant.  We had gardens at both the down home farm and the Norton Hill Farm, large enough to raise all of the vegetables we needed for the year as well as a couple of acres or so of field corn for the livestock. (I don't know why they always called them that because it didn't make any sense to me to raise any for dead stock.)

In the picture, my father Frank A. Weeks and I are plowing with a side hill plow, (The furrow board is sort of rounded so you can flip it over at the end of each furrow letting you always roll the furrow down hill.  In the picture above, it is turning the furrow to the left. On the way back, we would be turning it to the right.

If your land was flat you might use a flat bottom plow that only turned it one way.  The were lighter and easier to handle. You started in the center and plowed in a circular motion out or vise versa.

We would take turns holding the plow and driving the horses.  I loved the teamster part, but holding the plow was hard work, when you hit a rock, the plow would jump six feet or so before you could get the horses stopped, then you would have to drag it back to start over.

My Father, Lawrence L. Weeks Sr.'s Decision that the Time has Come

The following was written by my father, Lawrence L. Weeks Sr. on June 27, 2002:   I have recently enjoyed, probably the most touching Fathers' Day season.  I have experienced multiple phone calls, gifts, cards and lunches from my kids and grandchildren but one thing that made me stop and think was for the want of a better word, a family history, that Becky wrote for me.  In it she made the comment that she wished I would put in print some things that I remember about my past for my great grandchildren.

I understand what she meant by that because when she was first married I used to try and get her to do the same with Jeff's great uncle, Albert F. Clarke Sr. who was close to 90 at the time. But as with all of us, time slips by and before we know it, it's too late.

One thing I must mention is the one who really pushed  me into writing my first thoughts by helping me choose a computer nine or ten years ago was my granddaughter, Jess Carpenter.  Thanks, Jess

Sharing the Love of Stories - Oral to Written

Dad, Lawrence L Weeks Sr., has always loved a good story, and once he had your attention he didn't really want to stop.  As he got older his stories tended to ramble a bit more, but he never stopped entertaining.  My daughter, Jessica and I spent a great deal of time trying to convince him to write them down.  He had recognized the importance of preserving stories back when I first started working on genealogy with him in the 1960's.  He made quite a few audio tapes of his conversations with his mother, Bertha Weeks.  But, he was worried about his spelling and the mechanics of writing and wasn't very interested in filling notebooks.  

While my children were away at college, I completed my master's program at USM and some of my classes introduced me to the joy of writing. I started writing some of my own memories and sharing them. After my mom, Evelyn Hodgdon Weeks, passed away in 1992 and Jess went to Denver CO to complete her master's program, she and Gramp began to correspond with each other and share their memories and thoughts.  As time went on, we all started writing and sharing stories, poems - anything that struck our fancy.  Each of us had a different style,  and Dad couldn't be called traditional. He had always loved technology and finally purchased a computer and his interest started to grow.  I had been  asking him to write an autobiography for a  long time, but he just kept putting me off.  Then, Jess started in on him and "no problem",  I went in one day and he handed me a finished story. It was nothing like I expected, but it was clearly written by my father with his quirky sense of humor. He wrote it as if he were "intra utero," and it was hilarious. From then on, he was hooked and wrote poems, stories, letters along with all the wonderful diaries he had kept for years.  He even wrote a couple of presentations for school children - one for his great grandson, Tanner's class when they studied the history of the now abandoned Kezar Falls Woolen Mill.

I  believe that it is my responsibility to help share his views on life and sense of humor with the rest of our family.

Life Goes On, and It Doesn't Slow Down At All, Does It?

January has arrived, bringing with it the cold and a bit of snow.  I remember, back in the summer, when my friends and I were talking  about how busy we all were.  I thought how nice it would be when there were less things do in the winter. I would have more time to start my blog, work on my genealogy, knit,  sew, read, write, organize my family/town history things and do all the other projects that were awaiting completion (or beginning).  Granted, I was forced to take a couple of months off between then and now, but as I look around me - everywhere, my list seems to grow rather than decrease in size.  Of course, I will prioritize and do the things that call to me the loudest - like volunteering with a new group of second graders.  I hear many retired people say how bored they are.  Bored - my goodness, whatever does that mean?

A Peek around our Kitchen and Food Areas

The following was written by my father, Lawrence L. Weeks Sr.:  My mother, Bertha Cartland Weeks (1894-1974) and/or grandmother, Laura Stuart Weeks (1870-1958) prepared most of our food  on a big, Queen Atlantic wood burning kitchen stove with a tank on the end to heat water. a cream separator warming and  three irons heating on top of the stove ready for ironing.   We had a black iron sink with a pail of water with a long handled dipper in it.

A clock hung on the wall,  and there were six kerosene lamps on the shelf behind the stove , A gun always stood ready in the corner.

There was a dumb waiter in the dining room that took food from there to the cellar to keep it cool.  This is a picture of my father, Frank Weeks (1890-1959),  in front of our milk room which was connected to the ice house. There were about fifty yards in back of the house  where a barrel of ice and water would keep stuff cold in the summer.