Category Archives: Ancestors

Birthday Cards for Agnes

It’s November. I need to start planning my Christmas card. I’ve been making my own Christmas cards since I was in college, and I enjoy the process of planning and creating the yearly card. I feel like I’m carrying on a family tradition. Both my mother and my aunt Melissa made cards for special occasions. This one, painted by my mother in 1946, may have been meant for my grandmother, Agnes.

Birthday Card, Janet Hall Crump, 1946

Agnes was born on November 1, 1887 in England, and today I want to celebrate her birthday, just a few days late. When she was six months old her parents brought her across the ocean to Connecticut, where she grew up in a happy household with her parents and brother and three sisters. The Biggs family went to the Episcopal Church in Glastonbury, Connecticut. And even after she joined the Congregational Church in Wallingford when she married my grandfather and came to live on the farm, she remained religious in a practical sort of way – going to church when she was able, and making sure her own children got a Sunday School education.

The Biggs family in 1895. Ethel Rosabell Biggs in front on the left, Agnes Maud Biggs on right. Behind them are their parents, Joseph and Maud Sophia Biggs

Agnes Maud Biggs, eighteen years old

My grandmother was bright and a good student. Her quick mind and cheerful work ethic endeared her to her childhood Sunday school teacher, J. O. Hulbert, who made and sent exquisite birthday, Christmas, New Year’s, and Easter cards to her for over thirty years. When Agnes married my grandfather Ellsworth Hall in 1913, Mr. Hulbert gave her a Book of Common Prayer with this inscription on the front page.

Inscription in Book of Common Prayer

I’m happy that my grandmother, and then my mother, saved these unique cards. I’m sure they influenced my mother’s love of making things. They’ve certainly been an inspiration to me. I admire the care and thought and skill that went into creating such treasures. And I try to picture my grandmother, who I only knew as a mature woman, standing in her parlor wearing her best dress and delighting in the birthday greetings so beautifully made just for her. Happy Birthday Agnes!

Birthday Card for Agnes, J. O. Hulbert, 1898

Birthday Card for Agnes, J. O. Hulbert, 1900

Birthday Card for Agnes, J. O. Hulbert, 1901

Birthday Card for Agnes, J. O. Hulbert

On Wednesday: TV Dinners

Ghosts – Part II

Ghosts – Part I

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Haunting the Cemetery

On my visit to Whirlwind Hill in October 2013 I spent more time with cemetery ghosts than I’d planned to. I had a “bee in my bonnet” and was drawn to the resting place of my early ancestors.

The sign at the entrance to the Center Street Cemetery in downtown Wallingford, Connecticut reads “Established in 1653.” Many of the oldest headstones, especially the ones prior to 1750, are themselves ghostly. The stones still mark the graves, but the inscriptions have been smoothed or crumbled by wind and rain.

Center Street Cemetery, Wallingford, Connecticut

The bee in my bonnet was my great-great grandmother Cornelia Andrews Hall. I wanted to find her grave. I’d seen her headstone during one of my online genealogy searches. A picture of the stone popped up on the “Find a Grave” website, and I wanted to see it for myself. My brother didn’t remember running across it at the cemetery, even though he worked for many years as the cemetery’s caretaker – roaming among the dead as he cut the grass and repaired the stones. So on a beautiful New England October afternoon last year he joined me in my search for Cornelia.

At this Halloween time of year the word ghost conjures images of spectral spirits rising from their resting places in dark and haunted burial grounds. Children wear white sheets over their heads and say boo. People pay money to visit fake haunted houses with creepy, scary, heart-stopping surprises.

But my brother and I were looking for a different kind of ghost – the kind listed in the dictionary definition as “a faint shadowy trace.” Since I started writing down Whirlwind Hill stories two years ago, shadowy traces of my ancestors have haunted me. Every time I find a piece of physical evidence of their presence on this earth I feel the power of life’s continuity. The inscriptions on the headstones prove that the person lived, died, and was mourned by family and friends.

My brother and I started at the far end of the cemetery where my great-grandparents, William and Lydia Hall are buried. We walked back and forth in this flat city-block field of stones, but when it came time to leave we had not found what we were looking for.

So the next morning, fortified by another peek at Cornelia’s grave on the website, I drove back into town by myself and began a more methodical wandering. As often happens when you’re looking for one thing, something even more significant appears. Suddenly I came face to face with my great-great-great-great grandfather Captain Asahel Hall and his wife Sarah. The beauty and grace of their headstones surprised me. Carved with skill and care, the inscriptions remain fairly clear and readable. Here was the first couple to live on the farm on Whirlwind Hill – two people I knew very little about, but who, in that moment, became ever so real to me.

Captain Asahel Hall

Asahal’s inscription reads: “In Memory of Capt Asahel Hall who Departed this Life November 11th AD 1799 in the 79th Year of his Age.”

Sarah Hall

Sarah’s reads: “In Memory of Mrs. Sarah, consort of Capt. Asahel Hall died Feb 25th AD 1789 in her 70th year.”

On Wednesday: Ghosts – Part II – Finding Cornelia

Outbuildings #2 – The Pig Pen

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The real work on the farm happened in the barn, in the fields, and in the house. Some of the outbuildings were so specific in purpose that they were often hastily erected and as quickly abandoned when seasons or activities changed. Others had longer lives and a more major presence. They were spread out around the property in an almost haphazard way. A few of them I remember from childhood, but others I know only from photos. – Outbuildings #1

The Pig Pen

“Pig Pen,” Carol Crump Bryner, pen and ink, 2013

My father took a movie of me when I was about three years old. Dressed in a red coat with a hood and red leggings, I fed the pigs bread crusts, carefully taking each piece out of a basket and sticking it through the slats of the pig pen.

Kept far from the house, this pen moved several times while I was young. The pigs smelled funky, and their dirt “floor” became a muddy mess after months of occupancy. The pigs were born, were fed until they were nice and fat, and then butchered in the open shed behind the house. My mother, when she was a little girl, hid in her room with a pillow over her head when the pigs were brought from the pen to the shed.

My grandparents gave up raising pigs when I was young, and took the pig pen down. But on that same property my uncle Aaron built a house for his new wife Barbara. His daughter Patti told me that after all those years of pig habitation, the soil was rich and dark and perfect for gardening.

On Monday: Walking Down the Lane

Time

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My husband tells a joke about a farmer and a pig. I don’t really get the joke, but I like the punch line – “What’s time to a pig?”

What’s time to any of us? I thought about this recently when the new Apple watch was introduced. It looks very complex and expensive, but I had a similar reaction when the iphone came out, and now I can hardly live without my little magic device.

A digital watch or digital clock lacks the rhythm of big and little hands going around and around and pointing to the hours and minutes. I wear a $40 Timex watch that suits me. I only need to glance at it – not even read the numbers – to tell where in the day I am. My first watch was gold (probably not real gold), and I wound it every night before I went to bed. One of my mother’s friends told me never to wear it when I slept because if I did, lint would get into the workings and it would stop running. Now, I wear my Timex day and night and it only stops when the battery dies. My grandson Henry was looking for something to draw as a gift for his mother a year or so ago and I offered my watch. I’m not sure why he put the double watchbands on it, but I think it looks very cool.

“Henry’s Watch Drawing,” Henry Thomas Kennedy, pencil, 2013

I’m more aware of the dimensions of time and clocks when I visit my brother, because he’s a horologist. He collects and sells and repairs old clocks. His house and his workshop are alive with the ticking and tocking and chiming of hundreds of early American timepieces. He is doctor to many, many clocks. Some are as small as a box of Cream of Wheat, some as large as the Tower Clock at Yale University. He’s on intimate terms with their insides. I admire his expertise and his dedication to keeping the art of time alive. You can read more about him here.

Before electricity and batteries, many houses had some kind of clock. Tall clocks, Grandfather clocks, Mantel clocks, regulator clocks – all were made like works of art. My grandparents’ clock sat on the mantelpiece in the dining room. Keeping it running involved winding it regularly. I can’t remember whether or not it chimed. I think it did. But I know it ticked, and I know it was old. It gave an organic feeling to the house, and even when I got so used to it that I didn’t hear it anymore, it felt odd when it stopped – as though the heart of the house had stopped beating.

My grandparents’ mantel clock

The old clocks were not very accurate and would have to be periodically reset using the readings from a sundial. Most time was local time – dependent upon the position of the sun. When the family clock was the only timepiece in the house, its location and its appearance became as important as the time it kept. If you had to come downstairs to look at the clock in the parlor, you got clues to the time of day by glancing out windows, hearing other activity in the house, and feeling the temperature in the air. And many clocks also provided information about the phases of the moon, the days of the week, and the whimsy of the clock face’s painter.

Antique clock face

And there were tall case clocks with music boxes inside that could play as many as six different songs. Some of the more popular songs that marked the 12:00, 3:00, 6:00 and 9:00 hours were:

The Raptur
Maid of the Mill
The Cuckoo’s Nest
Banks of the Dee
Handel’s Minuet
Air by Handel

But my favorite is “Over the Water to Charlie.” Set to the lyrics of a Robert Burns poem about Bonny Prince Charles, this song has a lovely melody. When I hear it – maybe because my father was a Charlie – I picture my mother standing on the banks of Muddy River waiting for my father to come around the corner and cross the water to Whirlwind Hill.

On Wednesday: Outbuildings #2 – The Pig Pen

The Tree

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“Tree,” Carol Crump Bryner, woodcut

In October 2001, I traveled east to visit my parents. The trip I’d always taken for granted had, after 9/11, come to seem like a miracle. I got on the plane in Anchorage, and eventually got off in Hartford, but it wasn’t until we reached the reservoir and I could see the lights on Whirlwind Hill that I felt the enormous joy and relief of being back home.

After that visit I sent an article to a feature at the Meriden Record. The piece was printed in January 2002, and I’ll reprint it here. The newspaper titled it “And the Tree Lives On.”

“In early October, I made the long trip from my home in Anchorage, Alaska to my parents’ house in Wallingford, Connecticut. Although I haven’t lived in East Wallingford since 1967, I still feel most truly and securely at home there.

The farmland, which has been in our family since before the Revolutionary War, has stayed open and undeveloped. I feel lucky to be able to visit such a timeless treasure and grateful to my relatives for keeping it that way year after year. Each time I come home I walk down the lane and up the hill to sit under my favorite tree. It’s silent there and beautiful, and I’m cheered to see the tree still standing in glorious isolation.

On one of my visits, my aunt told me that when my uncle was a young boy helping his father on the farm, he asked to have a tree planted here. During the long days of summer work he wanted to have a shady spot to put the water jug. Since then the fields have been almost continuously farmed. It must be a nuisance to mow, plant, and harvest around the tree, especially now that water jugs stay cool on their own. The fact that the tree has endured comforted me as I sat under it on October 8, trying to find balance in increasingly unsettling times.

As an artist, I collect images that connect me to the people and places I love. This year when I visited, the tree was still dressed in fall leaves, but in a few months it will look like this photo I took in March, 1972 – an example of the stark, powerful New England landscape I miss when I’m living so far way from home.” – Carol Crump Bryner, October 2001

The Tree, 1972

On Monday: Time

The Parlor

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Gone are the days when guests were greeted at the front door and led into the parlor. “ ‘Will you walk into my parlor?’ said the spider to the fly.” The old poem illustrates the formality of a place where visitors were, in a way, held captive. Because the parlor was where first impressions were made, furniture had to be of good quality. Family portraits and sconces of light adorned the papered walls. Company sat in upright chairs and paid visits. The parlor was a buffer between the outside and inside life of the house.

My ancestors had their picture taken in a parlor that is probably not the parlor at the farm. They appear to be at a wedding. You can see the bride reflected in the mirror. It may have been my grandmother Agnes and grandfather Ellsworth’s wedding or maybe the wedding of Alice Hall to Harry Dickerman. The seated family members wear their best clothes. They look uncomfortable. But I’ve always loved the ghostly look of this parlor photo.

From left: Unidentified relative, William E. Hall, Lydia Jane Hall, Lydia Reed Davidson Hart, Edgar Hall

The farm parlor I remember was a nearly square room with three windows and three doors. It faced south, and provided warmth, light, and sunshine. Cherished paintings and portraits hung on the wallpaper. It was sparsely furnished. A piano took up most of the west wall, and my grandmother’s planters most of the south wall. In one corner an antique marble-topped table held a basket of old photographs. My grandmother often sent me home from my visits with a photo or two from that basket. I’ve used many of them here in my blog posts.

In my mother’s day the parlor had taken on the role of a multi-purpose room. The family gathered around the piano after Thanksgiving dinner to sing songs accompanied on piano by my Aunt Hattie. Toys sometimes littered the floor. Because it was the warmest room in the house, (shutting all three doors kept in the heat from the cast iron radiator and the warmth of the sun shining through the windows) my great-grandmother sat in the parlor and watched her grandchildren play as chilling drafts of air cooled other rooms.

In 1930, when my mother was twelve, her three-year-old brother Luther died of pneumonia, and his little body lay in a coffin in the parlor during the days of mourning. Friends and family and neighbors came in and out through the front door to say goodbye to the child.

But as life went on and the days grew brighter for my grandparents and mother and aunts and uncles, the room again became a warm and cheerful place. The parlor hosted card games and club meetings. In 1932 the local newspaper ran this photograph of my mother and other members of the “Capable Cooks 4-H Club” doing a demonstration called “Many Ways with Carrots.” I wish I’d been there in the parlor to see that lesson. I would like to have known exactly how many ways there are with carrots.

“Many Ways with Carrots,” cooking demonstration, Janet Hall standing on right, 1932

My mother, standing on the right, looks tidy and professional. Because I was a 4-H member myself, I know that 4-H cooking demonstrations have to be detailed and exact. My mother cooked that way for the rest of her life. She measured her ingredients closely, cut her cucumber slices to a paper thinness, soaked cut onions in ice water, and greased and flowered her baking pans so thoroughly that not a single crumb would be left behind after the cake was turned out onto the plate. She learned her lessons well, and was always a “capable cook.”

In my dining room in Alaska, I have a Christmas cactus grown from a cutting of my grandmother’s original plant. In this photo my mother stands in front of one of the parlor windows. Through the window you can see the plants my grandmother Agnes grew – geraniums, Christmas cactus, amaryllis, and begonias – and also, reflected in the glass, the silhouette of the barn across the street with its rooftop cupola.

Janet and the parlor window, 1942

On Wednesday: The Tree

Barns – Part II

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When I was fifteen my parents bought land from my grandparents’ neighbors, Delevan and May Ives. What I didn’t know then, but have found out recently, was that the land where my parents built our new home in 1960 had once belonged to my Hall ancestors. Part of this property included a barn, which my dad used for the next thirty years to shelter his horses. In 2008, when the barn needed major repairs, my father and brother decided to have it taken down, restored, and relocated closer to the house.

“Crump Barn, around 1990,” Carol Crump Bryner, pen and ink, 2014

As George Senercia took down our barn, (see “Barns – Part I”) he realized that the same person who built my grandparents’ barn also built ours. The clues were in the way the timbers were hewn and the framing structured. George became convinced that my great-great-great grandfather Aaron Hall – who also built the barn on my grandparents’ farm – built our barn around 1810, some years before he constructed the barn farther up Whirlwind Hill.

By the time they started working on our barn in August 2008, George and his group, “Northford Timber Framers,” had restored over fifty barns in New England. The work is done by volunteer labor – men and women trained by George in his weekend workshops. George, who had a heart transplant in 2004, makes each barn raising a spiritual experience. For him the old timbers are the “Heart of the Barn,” and give life to the new structure in the same way his new heart gave life to him.

It took two years to clean, sort, and prepare the framing and build the new foundation. All the work was done slowly and thoughtfully, carving numbers into each timber to facilitate the putting-back-together. To put the barn back together, timber framers used tools and methods that would have been employed in 1810. Hand-carved pegs took the place of nails, and manpower the place of cranes and forklifts.

Hand-carved pegs

New and old parts were joined together simply and solidly.

Wooden peg joining new and old timber

Some of the timbers (each made from an individual tree) were long and very, very heavy. To lift them, the workers used pulleys, chains, and stone counterweights. Our counterweights were named “Fred” and “Barney.”

Fred

Barney

On a very hot weekend in July 2010, my brother and father and I held our barn raising.

Carol, Charlie, and Kirt – morning of barn raising

Cousins and friends and workers came from all over New England and around the country. Among the hundred or so people there, sixty were volunteers who worked for two days in the intense heat. The rest of us watched, took pictures, served food, ran errands, brought water, and cheered the progress.

To big cheers, workers raised the first bent on Saturday morning.

Raising of the north bent

Work progressed throughout the weekend. It took as many as twenty people to lift one beam.

Getting ready to lift the beam into place

On Sunday afternoon the Stony Creek Fife and Drum Corps marched down Whirlwind Hill and up our driveway to play for a short christening ceremony in the new barn.

Stony Creek Fife and Drum Corps marching down the driveway.

George placed the American flag on the roof, and then we celebrated with food and drink and a huge cake covered with strawberries.

Crump barn on Sunday afternoon

For two days we were immersed in an unforgettable experience. The past and the present met on this spot, and time seemed to slow down. Now the barn looks like this.

Crump Barn, 2013

As a memorial to my ancestor, George carved Aaron Hall’s name into one of the restored timbers. Every part of this barn has meaning, but for me the barns are not the same barns they used to be.

George, with his new heart, may very well be the same person he was before surgery, but for me, these are not the barns I knew. It’s a question I really can’t answer – this mystery of place. It’s all well and good to say that you have restored a structure and it “lives again,” but for me, the heart has gone out of the barn.

Where I find this heart is in my memories and in the pictures that remind me of the life the barns once held. The most magical moments in the Hall barn came each year on Easter Sunday, when my brother and cousins and I were let loose in the haymow to search for the painted eggs that my Easter Bunny grandfather hid. I can smell the hay, see the shafts of light piercing the dust, hear the swallows swooping in and out of the high window to their nests in the rafters, and feel the excitement of finding a hidden egg. We were never able to find all the eggs our grandfather hid, but when George dismantled my grandparents’ barn, he found nestled in the hay brightly colored eggs left behind so many years before.

Cousin Sue and Carol, Easter Sunday, 1949

On Friday: October Window

Barns – Part I

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“Hall Barn around 1950,” Carol Crump Bryner, pen and ink, 2013

My grandparents’ barn wasn’t really my territory. It was dark inside and filled with cobwebs. The cows, in their stanchions twice a day at milking time, were formidable creatures. They ate hay at one end and made smelly messes at the other while the milking machines attached to their swollen udders vibrated and pumped.

Cows being milked

It was here that my sweet grandfather and my gruff uncle spent much of their time. When I walked into the barn, Uncle Francis teased me. “Why aren’t you in school? Don’t you have anything to do?” He believed in hard work and demanded it from those around him, so, without a job to do I often felt out of place in the barn. I wanted to be like Fern in “Charlotte’s Web” – a girl who understood animals and loved being with pigs and spiders and rats – but I was a reader and preferred to sit in the farmhouse and read about barn life.

And there was so much life in my grandparents’ barn. Downstairs, below the haymow, the cows filled the air with their steamy breath. Cats and kittens surrounded pie tins of warm milk. The bull demanded attention. And spiders – none of them “Charlotte” – inhabited every nook and cranny. Upstairs, swallows and bats swooped through the rafters, and horses stood to be brushed in their stalls. The farmers dropped hay down to the cows through a big hole in the floor – a dangerous spot for children – but when we were allowed to, we played in the haymow, and on Easter Sunday our grandfather hid painted eggs in and around the dusty bales and stacks.

“Haymow,” Carol Crump Bryner, watercolor, 2014

Unlike the house, the barn now seems totally gone. I can still see the house foundation, the well stone, the sidewalk, and the cellar door of the house, but there’s no trace of the barn on the Whirlwind Hill property. Any hole or stone it might have left behind is covered with dirt and grass. I have to guess at where it used to stand.

But, in truth, it isn’t totally gone, because in 1975 a young woodworker named George Senercia read a book that changed the course of his life and the fate of the Hall barn. The book was “Diary of an Early American Boy” by Eric Sloane, a New England artist who wrote and illustrated books about early American barns and tools. This book started George on a lifelong quest to learn and use and teach the process of building and restoring barns the way it was done in 18^th and 19^th century New England.

George Senercia (center) working on a timber

On Easter Sunday, 1977, while driving down Whirlwind Hill, George noticed the Hall barn, which by then was starting to deteriorate. My uncle stopped farming in the early 1970’s, and the barn was abandoned. George knocked on Francis’ door and offered to take the barn down and haul it away for free. When they came to an agreement, George dismantled, restored, and rebuilt the barn as his workshop in the nearby town of Northford, Connecticut.

In the course of the painstaking work of taking apart the barn, George found a beam into which my great-great-great grandfather Aaron Hall had carved his name and the date 1818. George became so interested in the history of the Hall family that he probably knows more about my relatives than I do.

So in 2008, when my parent’s barn was aging, my brother asked George if he would restore it. He agreed, and in August 2008, he began to take apart our barn. It took two years before the Crump barn was ready to be raised again. On Wednesday I’ll tell you about it.

“Crump Barn, around 1990,” Carol Crump Bryner, pen and ink, 2014

On Wednesday: Barns – Part II

On Whirlwind Hill

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

Category Archives: Ancestors

Birthday Cards for Agnes

Ghosts – Part II

Ghosts – Part I

Outbuildings #2 – The Pig Pen

Time

The Tree

The Parlor

Barns – Part II

Barns – Part I

Apples – An Addendum