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Family Farm Beginnings: From Horses to Tractors Ya know that we are actually the oldest family in Walpole right now. But, the reason I guess this farm is here is, what I've been told, is that brook. They come up…the ancestors came up here from Seabrook, CT and they probably come up the Connecticut River. When they got up here, they had to have water so they kind of settled or bought land near this great brook, we call it Great Brook. They bought it off of the Bellows. Bellows owned this whole town. John Graves was to my knowledge, the original buyer and he had tree sons and he come up here from Seabrook and bought two tracks of land off from Bellows and he left his sons up here and he went back to Seabrook. Why he went back, I don't know. He was a boat builder. He went back to Seabrook. One of them stayed on the place and the other one went down where Sheldon Sawyer or Crescent Farms is and that one stayed there and built a farm right on the brook and the other one went up the road a little bit, he went up there and farmed and there is still some of his relatives still around here. I mean, there are some Graves that are still around here that are what, 9th cousin or something like that that came from there. Growing up both George and I growing up, we never had any tractor until 1947. When we were farming in the 40's, even in the 40's when I was a kid, we had a pair of oxen. At one time we had a pair of oxen and a pair of horses. And then we had another single horse that we used for raking, ya know, on a horse rake. We used the oxen just like they were a pair of horses, hitched the oxen onto a low-down wagon. We use to, as a kid, pitched hay on by hand. George always did the loading, my father was on one side pitching on and I was on the other side pitching on hay and he was always up on the load. He always had that job. I don't know how he got it. I didn't like the hay chaff down my neck. (Laughs) |
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