deeds | On Whirlwind Hill

Before the arrival of my ancestors to the hills of East Wallingford, Connecticut, a meandering river kept company with the land. It flowed through the flat acres at the bottom of the hill and continued on through Northford. The earliest deeds to the farm refer to it as Muddy River. When the land was settled and the farms built, the moist banks made rich pastureland for cows and entertaining playgrounds for children.

Muddy River, Carol Crump Bryner, Gouache

The river connected the two significant farms in my life. It flowed not only through the Hall farm – the farm of my mother – but also through the Newton farm in Northford, Connecticut – the farm of my father’s aunt and uncle. Until recently I hadn’t thought of the two “Muddy Rivers” of my childhood as one continuous waterway. The Newtons and the Crumps gathered at the Newton farm beside the cool stream to picnic near the little summer house and swing on the hammocks. We paddled in the shallow rocky water, caught lamprey eels, pulled leeches off our legs, and refused to enter the spider-filled outhouse. In Northford the river was still a river.

But in Wallingford, by the time I was born, the part of the river at the foot of Whirlwind Hill was gone. In 1943 the town dug a hole and flooded the land to create the MacKenzie Reservoir. I never knew the Muddy River of my mother and grandfather and his father before him. I’ve searched for photos of the way it used to look, but have found only this one of my grandmother Agnes in 1921 with her three children and some of the neighbors. In the background is the farm that belonged at that time to Grace and Walter Ives. The children and my grandmother dressed for a party and brought toy boats to float along the bank of Muddy River.

Agnes Hall and children on the bank of Muddy River, 1921

In 2009 the town of Wallingford drained the reservoir so it could be dredged and cleaned. For the first time I saw the path of the river, the stumps of trees that had grown next to the Muddy River School, and the footprint of the old road where, it is said, George Washington rode on his way from New Haven to Boston in 1775 and 1789. At the far south end of the reservoir an old stone wall emerged from the water. It ran through one of our fields and must have once ended at the river. My brother and I kept meaning to walk out and explore it, but time passed and before we could go the reservoir was filled, and all traces of the past were again out of sight.

Reservoir Drained, 2009

It must have been peaceful and beautiful along the river, but the reservoir is my own personal history, and I love it. I fished there, watched birds there, and found peace sitting on the front steps of the house and looking over its quiet water.

A View of the Reservoir, Carol Crump Bryner, gouache, 1992

On Monday: Decoration Day

In 1968, after I married and settled into a California life, I received a gift from my grandmother Agnes Hall. Folded into a plain white envelope was the 1746 deed to part of the land that eventually became the Hall farm. This document, deeding land to my great-great-great-great grandfather Asahel Hall, had stayed for five generations in a desk in the farmhouse living room, maybe waiting to be sent across the country to me. Inside the envelope with the 1746 deed was a second deed and this note from my grandmother.

“These old deeds take this part of the Hall family back to Revolutionary times…Do what you want with them but they are really family history and perhaps I shall take you back by names and dates to the original founders of New Haven and Wallingford.” Yours with love, Grandma Hall

And this is how my history and knowledge of the farm accumulates. I’ve searched for some, stumbled upon others, and been handed treasures by relatives. For me there are never enough of these bits, and the truth seems never quite complete. I love this quote from Julian Barnes’s novel “The Sense of an Ending.”

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

I hope to proceed with my stories of the farm in “subjective time,” filtering these bits and pieces of history through my memories, and writing about what I hold closest.

My grandmother suggested I frame the deed and hang it on the wall, but I prefer to be able to hold it in my hands once in awhile. More than just a piece of paper, it’s a treasure touched and written on by an ancestor whose son fought in the Revolutionary War. I know it’s a legal term, but the words “Know Ye” seem very grand. The legal part of the deed was printed with hand carved type and the rest written in sepia ink with flourishes added to the letters. In some words the letter s looks like an f, and I can’t read it without thinking about the “heirs and affigns”, which I suppose includes me. I have other deeds to this land, some of which are earlier, but this is the first that mentions a dwelling. I want to believe this is the original Hall homestead. If Wallingford was the center of my world growing up, my grandparents’ farmhouse was, for me, always its heart.

On Friday: April Window

On Whirlwind Hill

An artist's memories of a family farm – Carol Crump Bryner

Tag Archives: deeds

Muddy River

A Piece of the Past