Category Archives: House

Foundations

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Last spring we had a Hall family reunion. We came from all over the country to gather on a Saturday in May at the Crump barn on Whirlwind Hill.

On my first day back east before the event I took my favorite walk around the Whirlwind Hill block. The three mile circle starts at the end of our driveway, winds around the reservoir, passes the swampy and woodsy stretch of Scard Road, straightens out and turns to the right on Branford Road, then turns right again to navigate the roller coaster that is Whirlwind Hill. Names of former and present neighbors, some still on their farms or in their houses, come to mind as I pass by – Hale, Riotte. Keogh, Scard, Barnes, Bartholomew, Cella, Foster, Mahan, Kranyak, Pyskaty, Farnam, Parks, Williams, Hall, Ives, and Guidone. Near the end of the walk, on the last downhill stretch, I reach the site of the Hall farmhouse that burned in 1971. Since then, the remains of the house have been taken away, but the foundation endures – a dirt-floored, stone-lined hole invisible from the road because of the trees and weeds and bushes that grow where the house used to stand.

Farmhouse Foundation, May 2013

Farmhouse Foundation, May 2013

My feelings about this spot are bittersweet. I’m sad that the house is gone and that trees grow where the walls should be. But I’m happy that the foundation is still there for me to look at. Looking at it is not easy, however, because I’m afraid of ticks – the little ones that you can hardly see and that give you Lyme disease. I had to steel myself to make my way through the brushy growth to reach the edge of the cellar hole. I stayed only long enough to take a few photos and spent a long time afterward brushing imaginary bugs off my legs and arms and head.

For the reunion on May 4, I sketched a very rough family tree putting our great-grandparents William Ellsworth and Lydia Jane Hall at the top. My cousin Nancy and I made nametags that were color coded to indicate the Hall brothers and sisters who were grandparents to the cousins in my generation. At some point during the day people started adding to the tree – family members whose names I hadn’t known, or didn’t remember, and names of the newer generations, many of whom I was meeting for the first time.

Hall Family Tree with Additions

Hall Family Tree with Additions

The poster board filled up, and by the end of the day it had begun to look like the old foundation. A small stone here, a larger one there, all joined by the mortar of family. I suppose this is a tenuous comparison, but it pleased me to think of the strength of family ties this way.

We had a glorious day – sunny and warm and infused with the joyful cheer that comes when families gather to celebrate the past and build memories for the next generations.

Hall Family Reunion, photo courtesy of Charles Peters

Hall Family Reunion, photo courtesy of Charles Peters

On Friday:  Violets

The House

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On a frigid night in January 1971, my father, a volunteer fireman with the East Wallingford Fire Department, was called to a house fire on Whirlwind Hill. I was living in Alaska then, and it was days before my shocked and grieving mother could bring herself to call and tell me that my grandparents’ farmhouse was gone. The house had stood empty since my grandmother’s death that August. The men fought the fire all night long, but lost. The photo in the paper the next morning showed the ruins of the house covered with snow and icicles.

Farmhouse Ruins, Carol Crump Bryner, pen and ink, 2013

Farmhouse Ruins, Carol Crump Bryner, pen and ink, 2013

This was the end of the house with the five stairways, the six bedrooms, the two attics, the one bathroom, and the large living room with nine doors. But it was the beginning of our memories and our longing.

My brother and I dream about this house that we loved, and in our dreams our grandparents and aunts and uncles are still vividly alive. They greet us on the porch, and we walk together in a hazy silence through the half-remembered rooms of our childhood.

One of the reasons I started this Whirlwind Hill project was to bring the farmhouse back to life in words and pictures. It probably looms larger in my imagination than it ever did in its physical presence, but it was a wonderful and memorable place. For more than two hundred years its walls sheltered my ancestors and watched them move through their daily routines.  During the next weeks and months I’ll revisit its rooms, peek through its doors, look out its windows, climb its stairs, and maybe discover some secrets in the dusty corners.

Kitchen door of the farmhouse around 1920 - the child in the doorway is possibly my mother, Janet Hall Crump at age 2

Kitchen door of the farmhouse around 1920 – the child in the doorway is possibly my mother, Janet Hall Crump, around age 2

On Wednesday:  Foundations

 

April Window

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The farmhouse where my great-grandmother Lydia Jane Hall lived for sixty-two years was a house of many rooms – each room having its own set of long windows, each window its own special view of the surrounding countryside. Lydia kept a daily journal and made patient and sensible observations about the farm and the world around her. Because I’ve read and loved her journals, I feel close to her. I like to picture her sitting at one of the long windows looking out at the seasons of the farm.

During a 1985 workshop at the Visual Arts Center of Alaska, I made a series of monoprints to illustrate some of the journal quotes using views from these windows. I’ve taken a certain amount of artistic license with the “views.” Although these were real places on the farm, they’re not necessarily something one would have seen from a window. They’re places a housebound woman might have been remembering when looking back at her life on the farm.

To make my monoprints, I painted on a piece of battleship linoleum, placed a sheet of printing paper over the painting, and rubbed the back of the paper with the bowl of a wooden spoon so that the paper would pick up the paint from the linoleum surface. There’s usually only enough paint to make one print – thus the label monoprint. The images often appear ghostly – the effect I wanted for these windows from the past.

Because each print illustrated a quote from a single calendar month, I’ll post one a month for the duration of my blog.

In this April entry she writes about being lonesome. Her daughters Hattie and Ellen had married and moved to town. They visited and helped out as much as possible, but they had their own homes and families, and Lydia missed their cheerful presence.

April Window. monoprint, Carol Crump Bryner, 1986Wednesday, April 9, 1913

“A cold morning – getting warmer toward evening. Men harrowing for oats, trimming trees, etc. – alone and lonely. Miss my girls.”

On Monday:  At the Top of the Tree
                       

A Piece of the Past

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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.

1746 Deed

 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.

Hall Homestead, ca. 1750

On Friday:  April Window