Two Aarons

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There were two Aarons on the farm when I was growing up, a living one and an ancestor. The living Aaron, my mother’s younger brother, was 19 years old when I was born and seemed more of a cousin than an uncle. My mother taught me to spell “Aaron” by reciting – “Big A, Little a, R-O-N.” This may have been my first spelling word.

Although named after the stately and historically significant Aaron Hall, Esquire, my Uncle Aaron was happy-go-lucky and full of fun. He and my mother shared an infectious sense of humor, and loved a good joke. In this photo from Thanksgiving, 1977, they’ve dissolved into giggles, my uncle trying to keep the turkey in his mouth with his napkin, and my mother laughing until the tears ran down her cheeks.

Thanksgiving 1977, Aaron Hall, Janet Hall Crump, Austin Norton, Carol Bryner, Paul Bryner

Thanksgiving 1977, Aaron P. Hall, Janet Hall Crump, Austin Norton, Carol Bryner, Paul Bryner

My Uncle Aaron died in 2005. He never attained the level of seriousness or accomplishment of his namesake ancestor, but he enhanced my childhood with his joy for life and his love for his family. And he kept the ancestral Aaron alive for us through this name association.

A portrait of Aaron Hall, Esquire, hung in the parlor of the farmhouse. This is where I remember seeing it. My brother remembers it hanging in the living room. It’s possible we’re both right, since my grandmother liked to move the furniture and pictures around every few years. It now belongs to my cousin Patti, Aaron P. Hall’s daughter.

Aaron Hall, Esq, 1760 – 1839

The inscription on the back of the portrait says:

“This picture presented to Wm E Hall by his cousin Elizabeth Upham Jan 11, 1902. Aaron Hall son of Asahel Hall born Nov 11, 1760. Died Sept 29^th 1839. Served in the revolutionary war and participated in the battles of Germantown and Monmouth.”

How different this eighteenth century Aaron Hall was from the Aaron I knew. The curly-haired boy who grew up to become my uncle fought in no wars and farmed no land of his own, although he lived just across the lane from the farmhouse and was always on call as an extra set of hands. He lived in different times, and they shaped him just as his ancestor’s times shaped his long-ago life. More about Aaron Hall, Esq. next week.

Aaron P. Hall, around 1931

On Wednesday: Out on the Sidewalk

May Window

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From the farmhouse windows Lydia could see the orchards of apple trees and watch the activity on Whirlwind Hill, the road that ran between the house and the barn.

There are two quotes for this May window. In the nine years between 1912 and 1921 her life had changed. In 1913 her youngest child, my grandfather Ellsworth, married my grandmother, Agnes Biggs, and by 1921 they had three children. Lydia’s husband William died in 1920.

“May Window,” Carol Crump Bryner, monoprint

Sunday, May 19, 1912 – “Fine morning. Apple blossoms are out and everything looks tender and fresh. Autos are flying by. Boys on wheels. Surrey load of young people, auto trucks with lot of people in all going east for an outing. How changed the times when team after team used to go by with people going to church.” – Lydia Jane Hall

Monday, May 9, 1921 – “Nice day. High winds in afternoon and some warmer. The trees have been loaded with apple blossoms and nearly all gone. Soon time to spray them again. The peonies, the shrub peonies, are out in full bloom. The birds are all here nesting, singing songs. Grass looking fine and heavy. Men busy preparing the ground for planting. The farm never looked more promising to me.” – Lydia Jane Hall

Names

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I’ve always liked the custom of passing down family names, even though my own mother named me after the Christmas songs being sung at the hospital when I was born.

The Hall family followed a rhythm of repetition when they named their children. The first three generations included four Johns, and one Jonathan, the Jonathan being a brother to one of the Johns. And there were three Marys, three Elizabeths, and two Sarahs.

In the fourth generation Asahel Hall and his wife Sarah Goldsmith gave birth to twelve children. Many of them “died young,” and in those days, because child mortality was so common, it was customary to name a surviving child after a brother or sister who had already died. So Asahel and Sarah bore two Aarons, three Asahels, and two Sarahs. The surviving Aaron (Aaron Hall, Esq), lived for seventy-two years, giving birth to his own sons Aaron and Asahel and his own daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. Here and there an odd name crops up. Asahel (itself a bit odd) and Sarah had a Mehitabel and Aaron an Electa.

My great-great-grandfather, Salmon Hall, had a younger brother Billious Kirtland Hall. He seems to have been named after a Dr. Billious Kirtland whose family plot is next to the Halls in the Wallingford Cemetery. I’m still trying to find out more about this family connection. The name Billious was never used again, as far as I know, but one of my mother’s favorite cousins as well as my brother shared the name Kirtland.

Salmon (pronounced Sal-mon) may have been a version of Solomon. Biblical names were popular. This photo, probably taken around 1860, may be my great-great-grandfather. My grandmother wrote on the back “Possibly Salmon Hall.” But recently my cousin Patti sent me photos of two portraits that used to hang in the farm living room. She refers to them as “The Eggheads,” and they may be Salmon and his wife Cornelia. It’s always nice to have a face to go along with a name, but for now I have one name and two faces that don’t appear to belong to the same person.

Possibly Salmon Hall

Also Possibly Salmon Hall

The last name of mysterious origin is Whirlwind Hill. I always thought it was named after the Wallingford Tornado of 1878, but in his book, “History of Wallingford, Connecticut,” Charles Davis says, “Whirlwind is that high land east of the late residence of Luther Hall, and west from Pistapaug Pond.”

Since Davis wrote his book in 1870, our hill couldn’t have been named after the 1878 whirlwind. I read somewhere that it had once been called “Wild Mare’s Hill,” but can’t seem to find that reference again. If anyone has any ideas or clues to the source of the name “Whirlwind Hill,” I’d love to hear about it. For now I’ll just let it conjure thoughts of wild winds, blowing trees, and houses flying over hill and dale.

At the top of Whirlwind Hill, May 2014

On Friday: May Window

The Kitchen

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The room I miss most is the kitchen. So much activity went on there – the morning and evening meals, the coffee hours, the greetings and goodbyes. Almost everyone came into the house via the front porch. You passed the hanging wooden swing on the porch’s east end and walked up a step and through the kitchen door. The electric stove stood to the right as you entered and the wood stove to the left between two doors leading into the dining room.

In the Farmhouse Kitchen, around 1950

Once a year my grandfather whitewashed the kitchen walls. Dirt or grease or dust or unfortunate flies or spiders were covered and became permanent wall texture. Below a strip of flypaper hanging from the light fixture, my grandmother plucked chickens and paid bills at the kitchen table. My grandfather sharpened his razor on the strap hanging on the icebox and shaved in front of a mirror by the sink. He was a slow and deliberate man – quiet in everything he did. We loved to watch him carve the Thanksgiving turkey. No sooner did he have all the plates filled and passed around (there were sometimes as many as thirty people at the tables) than someone asked for second helpings.

Near the white sink and the shaving mirror was a tall narrow gun closet, and next to that the door to the cellar stairs. I loved and feared the cellar. It was dark, cool, cobwebby, and full of dusty canning jars and barrels of hard cider (the farmers’ cocktail). But sometimes there was the excitement of new litters of puppies or kittens in boxes on the dirt floor. After the house burned the steps that felt so scary and dark when I was a child became a part of the outdoors – softened and reclaimed by nature.

On a counter near the icebox my grandmother mixed and kneaded dough and rolled crusts for pies. I could pull open a metal drawer filled with flour by hooking my finger into a metal ring on its front. On washing days the mangle was set up there. Clothes and linens dried outside on the clothesline were brought in and fed through the mangle, a large roller that pressed the sheets flat and saved much of the tedium of regular ironing.

The black and white photo above was, for a while, the only one I had of the kitchen, and for years I’ve thought of it as a not very colorful room. But recently my cousin Nancy gave me a picture taken in 1970 when she visited the farm. I love how sunny and bright the scene is, and I’m amazed at how much a bit of color enhances my memories.

Nancy Teter Smith and Agnes Hall in the farm kitchen, 1970

The heart of the kitchen was the wood stove. It gave heat, hot water, and comfort to the room, and it baked hearty loaves of bread every Saturday and a pretty good turkey on Thanksgiving.

Below is a photo of Thanksgiving supper, 1948. The big dinner was at noon, but some of the family spent the afternoon and stayed for the supper of scalloped oysters, cold turkey, Aunt Glenna’s gelatin salad, and Aunt Betty’s much-anticipated chocolate covered cream puffs. In the photo I’m sitting next to mother, my grandmother, my uncle Francis and my aunt Glenna, and over my shoulder is a glimpse into the north end of the kitchen and a tantalizing peek at the icebox and the door leading into the back pantry.

Thanksgiving Supper, 1948

On Wednesday: Names

Wildflowers

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Spring arrives slowly in Alaska. Piles of dirty snow sit on the north side of the house and in the shadowed patches on the south. Near our front porch the white mounds defy the sun, and hopes for an early spring are usually disappointed. This is when my thoughts turn to Whirlwind Hill and wildflowers.

“Front Door with Snow,” Carol Crump Bryner, gouache and colored pencil, 2013

My mother, who grew up roaming the fields and hills around the farm, knew her wildflowers and birds. The repeated rhythms of her stories about gathering spring flowers on the mountain come back to me in a list of names – hepatica, spring beauty, adder’s tongues, Dutchman’s breeches, trillium, violets. When she was growing up, she and her brothers and sister picked these wildflowers for May Day baskets.

The old-fashioned ritual of hanging baskets of flowers on doors on May first, “May Day,” knocking, and then running away to hide, appeals to me, but it’s not something that’s going to happen in Alaska. Instead, I hang a blue metal basket of hopeful pussy willows near the front door to remind me that spring will arrive eventually.

While my mother was still alive I continued a tradition started by her older brother Francis. Every spring when the adder’s tongues (also called trout lilies or dogs-tooth violets) bloomed in their usual spot by the spring at the cow pond, Francis picked a bunch and brought them up the lane to the farmhouse for his mother, my Grandma Hall. When my mother could no longer walk to the pond I picked them for her. They’re such lovely and cheerful little flowers, but they do have a slight reptilian quality because of their spotted waxy leaves, tongue-like stamens, and curled back petals. They grow in colonies that, if undisturbed, can last for decades. I find them in the same spots, year after year. They come back, much like I do to Whirlwind Hill, because their roots are there.

“Adder’s Tongues,” Carol Crump Bryner, gouache and colored pencil, 2013

From Lydia’s journal, May 5, 1924 – “Nice day. Agnes took Francis to school this morning – he took a large bunch of Adder Tongues he picked down in the meadow to Miss Martin. They are very nice, in full bloom. I think they will make her smile.”

On Monday: The Kitchen

A Window on the Landing

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The Hall farmhouse on Whirlwind Hill set the standards for all the houses I’ve lived in. Its staircases, wallpapered rooms, tall windows, wood plank floors, attics, odd-shaped closets, and paneled doors with round knobs formed my notions of the way a home should look.

In 1973, after living in Alaska for several years, my husband and I were ready to buy a house. Expecting our first child, and eager to start nesting, we were dismayed by how few houses were for sale in Anchorage. Finally, through a friend, we found a downtown house about to go on the market. It wasn’t pretty – certainly not by Connecticut standards. This big pinkish box with brown shutters had a cement front stoop whose left side sank into the ground. But when I walked through the front door I came face to face with a center staircase leading to the second floor bedrooms.

As I walked up the stairs I pretended not to notice the red shag carpet, lumpy plastered ceilings, and shiny black louver doors. I was hoping I wouldn’t be disappointed, and I wasn’t. On the landing, at the top of the stairs, the afternoon light shone through a tall window and cast patterns and shadows on the walls and floor. The bedroom doors were paneled, and they had old round metal doorknobs. It felt like home. We bought the house, and a few years later I did a painting of the landing window. I still have everything in the painting (yes – the plant lives!) except for the window, which, during a 1982 remodel made way for a door into a new bedroom.

“Hall Window,” Carol Crump Bryner, oil on canvas, 1978

In the farmhouse, at the top of the back staircase, there was also a landing with a wood floor, multiple doorways, and a window. I have no pictures of this window from the inside, but I do remember the importance of having that light at the top of the dark, narrow stairs. I also remember the view, which in my great-great-great-grandfather Aaron Hall’s time would have been to Muddy River and his farm’s pastureland. From the outside the window is not striking, but like much of the rest of the house it was on the inside where the memories and the views were made.

“Farmhouse Window from Outside,” Carol Crump Bryner, pen and ink, 2014

On Wednesday: Wildflowers

Violets

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“Cold and cloudy, rained hard during the night. It is lighting up at noon. Think the storm has passed. Agnes has taken the three children [my mother Janet, her sister Lydia, and her brother Francis] in the auto to Sunday School. Quite a chore for her to get them washed, dressed & ready & home again. It needs perseverance – am glad she has got it. Should be glad to help her but have been miserable lately. The apple trees are out in full bloom. Daisies are budded, blue violets all out…” – Lydia Jane Hall, May 1, 1924

Violets may be starting to bloom in Wallingford now. To me they seem the most old-fashioned of flowers. Near the old barn site on my parents’ property the violets still grow in profusion, and I pick a bunch and put them in the middle of the kitchen table when I’m there.

My great-grandmother Lydia’s cousin, Mary E. Hart, painted watercolors and oils of scenery and flowers. (I’ll return to Mary Hart in more detail in the future.) The violets in this painting by her lie gracefully tied in a loose bouquet. Maybe they were a gift or maybe just an arranged still life. But they seem to me as fresh as they must have been all those years ago when she put her brush to the paper.

“Violets,” Mary E. Hart, watercolor, ca. 1860

On Monday: A Window on the Landing

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing the Big Picture

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You may notice that I skip around a bit in my blog posts. Events won’t necessarily be going in chronological order. The way I’m writing my posts is not all that different from my collage-making process.

I started doing collage when I was learning how to paint. I was exasperated because the paint colors I mixed came out muddy and muted instead of bright and clear. My painting teacher suggested I try collage.

Making a collage gives me the chance to “paint” a picture using bits and pieces of color and pattern that already exist – I pick the pieces up, sort them out, and put them together like a puzzle. It’s a searching and discovering way of doing art and similar to my approach to writing “On Whirlwind Hill.”

Pile of collage scraps

I have most of the scraps – the pieces of history, the photos, the journals, etc. I’d like to come upon more. I hope I do.

I’ll put the scraps out there for all of you to see. They won’t necessarily be in an orderly timeline, nor will I use every bit of information I have, but by the end of the year I hope there will be some kind of “big picture.” For me the fun is in the finding-out and in the deciding what pieces to put where.

A Sunny Day on Whirlwind Hill, Carol Crump Bryner, collage, 2014

On Monday: The House