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Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Farm



I've had better than a year to think about what I should next do with my life.  I am looking for something bigger than myself.  I don't want a job; I want a passion.  In the last twelve months I, together with my family, have made some significant  and life altering choices toward this end.  We opted out of urban living; we chose to declare bankruptcy; we walked away from the upside down mortgage on our city condo.  We moved to Pomfret, Connecticut in hopes of living a simpler, but admittedly no less easy, life.  And throughout these recent machinations, there's been something massive looming - something inviting, intimidating, and wonderful.  An undertaking of a lifetime.  Something worthy.



In 1707 ancestors of my mother-in-law, Polly, purchased several hundred acres of land in Pomfret. In 1713 it became the Mathewson Farm and later came to be known as Fox Hill Farm.  For generations it served as a homestead and source of livelihood to the Mathewson family and its descendants.  Today, as has been the case for three centuries, a large farmhouse overlooks the property. (The house that's there today is the fifth on the same footprint.  As is the unlucky, but common history of old estates, fires destroyed the previous homes.  The house that stands today was built in 1926.)  As the 1700s became the 1800s, and those the 1900s the property was passed down to family.  Over those years some of the custodians of the land sold off portions or parceled acres off to other family members.  But in its 300 plus years of being passed from one Mathewson generation to the next, a sizable piece of unspoiled acreage remains in the family.



In 1908 a modest summer cottage was built and in the 1960s a small addition to it was construcuted.  The cottage would eventually become the summer home of my wife's grandmother, affectionately called Newie.  Her sisters, Aunt Chan and Aunt Hope, were the last to dwell in the larger, 5,000 square foot farmhouse.  When they passed away in the 1980s, the house sat quietly dormant, only the furniture and the ghosts of Mathewsons past remained.  But in the summer, Newie would return to the cottage and there she'd be visited by her daughter and grandchildren.  Polly, in fact, lived there the summer my wife was born, in 1969.  So while Polly wasn't raised in Pomfret and while my wife never really lived here, it's always been a rich and familiar part of their heritage.



When Newie passed away in 1992, the property became the responsibility of Polly and her brother Chandler. Although his interest in caring for his ancestral homestead never faded, Chandler - 16 years Polly's senior - spent his entire adult life living in the south and chose to remain in South Carolina for his retirement years.  This left Polly and her husband, Nick, who lived in Texas then as the sole remaining custodians.  Sometime in the 1990s, the woman who lived on the property in the cottage and acted as the caretaker fell ill.  Her ne'er do well son, desperate for money to support his drug habit, slowly but steadily stole most of the pieces of antique furniture stored in the Big House, as the farmhouse is called.  When Polly's daughter, Patty, discovered this one weekend when she came up from New York City, it was decided that the property couldn't be tended to from afar.  My in-laws packed up their home in Arlington, Texas into a moving van and moved north.



For the past eleven years, they've worked hard to breathe life into the land.  Even while both holding full time jobs, they managed to renovate the cottage addition into a Bed and Breakfast, Inn at Fox Hill Farm, and have transformed overgrown vegetation into a charming swath of green.  They live next door to the B&B in the old caretaker's cottage.  In the colder months, they fill the wood stove with logs to stay warm in the non-winterized country house.  The Big House is a behemoth that would intimidate the bravest of do-it-yourselfers.  Yet work has been done to prepare it for transformation.  It has been gutted to the studs, stripped of its horse-hair plaster.  It stands quietly and nearly ready for updated electricity and plumbing, new windows, insulation, and sheetrock.

Fox Hill Farm - as it stands today -  consists of 75 acres,  25-30 of which are cleared land.  The rest of the land features a pond, a corn field, a hilly meadow, and dense woods.  The cottage looks much as it did when it was built and the B&B hosts regular guests.  The Big House, though re-roofed in 1999 to preserve it, stands at a crossroads.  It's in need of immediate attention.  The windows and basement are far from weather tight.  It must be sealed (to be renovated sooner or later) or it won't last many more seasons; it's structural integrity hangs in the balance.  There is a mortgage on the property that requires a regular monthly payment. There are property taxes to be paid and the bills that go with the maintenance of such a property.  And there is a legacy to fulfill, a family covenant to keep.



Linda and I moved to Pomfret knowing that as my in-laws age this property will increasingly become the responsibility of Linda and her three siblings.  But those siblings are elsewhere right now - two in Texas and one in New York.  It's we who have chosen to move here now.  It's we who have elected to move our family here sooner rather than later to insert ourselves into its history.  We've been thinking about this property for many years now, knowing that eventually we would bear much responsibility for its care.  The undertaking is this:  how can we help to make sure that Fox Hill Farm, the legacy of the Mathewson family, continues to be a family homestead for Nick and Polly's children?  And for their children?  For my son, Max, and his little cousin, Teo?


In the six years that I've been coming to The Farm, I've fallen for it.  Hard.  I want to live here with my family; I want to grow old here.  I want to watch our family play in its fields, pluck its gardens, and sled its hills.  I want the once proud farmhouse to recapture its former stature.  And I want to be a part of its history.  There's more work to do than I even know, but this is, I've decided, an effort more than worthy of my time.


1 comment:

susan weldon said...

we humans have an innate yearning for kinship and a sense of place. note the popularity of the study of genealogy (google has more than 56,500,000 items).

several of my paternal relatives have attempted to trace my family's roots, but have been unable to go back beyond 3 generations as records for eastern european jews have been lost and/or destroyed. those of us in the jewish diaspora ( the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland) have little chance of knowing exactly who our ancestors were, much less where they lived and died. perhaps that is why american jews historically have worked so hard to assimilate. i

it is interesting, but not surprising to me, that you have made such a strong connection and commitment to linda's ancestral home - rich in beauty and history and in promise for the future.