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March 26, 2002
Spring is nowhere to be seen here in North Woodstock. Oh, the calendar says it is, but since that day, we have received more snow than we did in February.
Still, the days are noticeably longer and we have had warm days and cool nights. The harbingers of this early season are frost heaves, road bans and the firing up of sugar shacks.
And so it is at Jim Fadden`s shack right on Main Street. He fired up the evaporator and has been pouring sap into it for a couple of weeks now, boiling it down to the sweet ambrosia of spring, that is so delightful on pancakes, ice cream and butternut squash.
Fadden is name synonymous with farming in North Woodstock and generations of the family have produced maple syrup.
In recent years, Jim Fadden has sugared on a very small scale, but three years ago, he resurrected some old boards that had been moved around town a time or two and constructed a sugar house, reminiscent of the one built by his great-grandfather nearly 75 years ago.
``It`s parts and pieces of a bunch of stuff I had laying around,``said Fadden, a selectman and owner of a contracting business. ``The boards were sawn at a mill where the White Mountains Attraction building is and we had to move them when the interstate came through.``
The door is the same one on which his great-grandfather, Norman, began keeping track of each season`s production back in the 1930s.
``There`s 50 years of records on this door,`` he said.
It`s portable and rests on the patio next to Peg`s Restaurant. Anyone is invited in to watch the sap boil down and last year, Fadden said, legions trooped through the sugar shack.
But more than introducing the casual visitor to the way syrup is made, Fadden said tradition was the inspiration to get the sap house built.
``I started it so that my boys can help me do it,`` he said. ``We`re a family of farmers and if you wanted something sweet, you made maple syrup. I wanted to do it so my own children would know how - so I could teach them just how my father taught me and his father taught him. I think once they learn, they`ll be sugar makers for life.``
As the sap runs - and it was running fast at the end of last week, urged by the warm days and cool nights that promote the natural process - it is not only his sons who help out, but also their friends.
``Last year, we made 250 gallons of syrup,`` he said. ``But there`s not much profit after you get through buying the kids pizza for their help.``
To make the 250 gallons last year, the Faddens and company collected 12,000 gallons of sap. He figures he`s tapped 1,000 trees, most of them high in the woods around the village. Up there, a network of rubber tubing gathers the sap in holding tanks.
But around town, he`s put out 250 tin sap buckets. Again, it`s a matter of tradition.
``Mrs. Willey says she likes to look out her window and see the sap buckets and kids coming around to collect it and the rest of the neighbors say the same thing,`` he said.
The sharp-eyed in town have also noticed buckets tapped into two telephone poles on Main Street.
By mid-morning Saturday, a sweet mist curled around the inside of the little sugar house as the sap boiled down. John Fadden rushed out to gather more from the buckets around town, except for the ones on the utility poles.
In the mountains, where winter still has a firm white grip on the landscape, any harbinger of spring is a welcome one, for however long it lasts.
``I know that things are going to slow down - it`s going to get cold again,`` Fadden said. ``But this is nice.``
March 13, 2002
About 80 of us came out into a damp March night last evening to take care of the fiscal business in North Woodstock for another year at the annual Town Meeting. Ken Chapman thwacked his gavel at 7:30 and we were finished by 8:45 or so.
We passed the article for a clarifier for the water treatment plant with nary a comment. Price tag is $500,000. Last year, we agreed to spend $350,000 for it but in the past 365 days, the cost went up.
Why was that?
``We hired an engineer,`` came the response.
Turns out the first estimate - the one for $350,000 - came from a contractor. When the engineers got their hands on it, the price went up to $850,000.
``Why did we hire an engineer?`` came the response from a tried and true Yankee.
It was not an overwhelming crowd that turned out for the meeting, leaving the decisions to be made in the hands of about one-tenth of the registered voters. Early birds get to sit in the cushy seats lining the wall of the hall - those came from an old theater - while the rest of us have our pick of blue or pink or gun-metal gray folding chairs.
We are there to vote on the town warrant - this year ours contained 15 articles. Town meetings have been called the purest form of democracy - one man, one vote - and we take our responsibilities seriously. Our reward is a basket of candy provided by Deana MacKay, after we cast our ballots.
Ken, who has kept order at town meetings for 26 years, asked everyone to state their names when they spoke.
``I get fuzzier every year with the names,`` he explained.
Yet, he rattled off correctly the name of each and every person who raised a hand to speak or to make a motion.
Even mine. I think he had been working on it. My last name is `Colquhoun.` It`s Scottish, thank you. I pronounce everything but the `q` and the `u,` although I was once told by a boisterous bunch of lads in a pub in Glasgow that it`s pronounced `Ca-hoon.`
For reasons of posterity, which I will explain later, I made a motion to approve article 6 (appropriating $25,000 into the fire truck capital reserve account). Without missing a beat, Ken noted that the motion was made by Lorna `Cal-oon.`
He paused and asked how he did.
``I was thinking `saloon,``` he said with a chuckle.
By making a motion on article 6, my name will be duly noted in the minutes of the 2002 Town Meeting, which will be printed in the town report next year. Town reports, being a fiscal diary of a town, are saved and towns like Woodstock have an extensive collection. A hundred years from now, researchers or ancestors might thumb through the pages and come across my name ...
And wonder how to pronounce it ...
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We`re thinking spring in North Woodstock, but we`ve got a long way to go to bare ground ...
We will all head down to the Woodstock Town Hall on Tuesday night for the annual town meeting. The big ticket item on the warrant this year is a $500,000 clarifier for the water treatment plant. We are told we need one ... or else.
We hope our town meeting won't be as raucus as the one in neighboring Easton a century ago.
Typically, town meetings are friendly, neighborly affairs. A hot button issue, though, can warm up the coolest town hall, and usually order can be restored with the pounding of a gavel in the hand of a competent moderator.
But on town meeting day more than 100 years ago, order got out of hand in a little place called Whitcherville, on the banks of the Wild Ammonoosuc. A fist-fight erupted. A selectman regained order after grabbing a gun and pointing it at those gathered.
From the pages of a 1923 issue of the Granite Monthly, repeated in the bicentennial history, ``A Look Back at Easton,`` comes this account of the first moments of that fateful town meeting:
``(Selectman) Sargent Moody drew from the desk a revolver and pointing it ... thundered `The first man who dares come inside this rail will have a funeral tomorrow!``` the book said.
Don`t look for Whitcherville on any modern day map - like a handful of once thriving lumber towns in the White Mountains, it faded away and has been all but swallowed by the national forest, save for a granite monument among the trees noting its location.
Whitcherville was in East Landaff, according to town histories, and initially a farming community. But through the mid-1800s, the lumber industry went on the rise. Sawmills flourished in the area that is now the Wildwood Campground and in an area known as Bunga. In the Easton Valley, bisected today by Routes 116 and 112, there were at least eight mills.
Whitcherville took its name from the Whitcher family. Dan Whitcher owned a sawmill and a starch factory and he soon saw the need for a better way to get his goods to market.
The town histories say the first effort to build a road began in 1848, with a petition to the Grafton County Road Commissioners. For the next 12 years, it appeared on town warrants in East Landaff, but since there were more people living in the western side of town, the farming community, it was voted down.
But men who believed in the road began began gaining town offices over the next few years and the margin of votes closed as time passed.
``Thus the contention went of from year to year,`` according to `Looking Back at Easton.` ``Voters from other towns were imported by both factions and kept long enough to give a color of voting residence, only 90 days then being necessary. Young men were given their board and allowed to attend school during the winter so as to have them vote on this road question at the annual March meeting.``
Those who supported the road were not above doing anything they could to get enough votes for passage.
``It has been handed down by tradition that one voter living a few rods over the line in Franconia next to East Landaff, and known to be in favor of the road, went to bed one night in Franconia and the next morning waked in Landaff, his house being taken across the line while he was apparently asleep,`` the town history reads. ``He voted for the road and soon after, that the house moving experience was reversed and he once again awoke in Franconia.``
By 1860, there appeared to be enough votes for the Bunga Road issue to pass. At the town meeting that year, a man named James C. Noyes was elected to the town board and ``the Bunga Road was now assured, for that faction had control of the election.``
In his book, ``The Great White Hills of New Hampshire,`` author Ernest Poole wrote about road, based upon the testimony of a woman whose menfolk were on the second floor of the peg mill that March day.
``With Noyes as leader, the road seemed assured,`` Poole wrote. ``However, some of the West Landaff voters raised the cry, `Seize the checklist!` A rush was made to destroy it, in order to make the meeting illegal.``
That was the point, the town histories agree, that Moody drew his revolver. But that didnt stop one William Shattuck from ``seizing an old fashioned chair and pulling it apart,`` handing several pieces to his friends ``to use for defense, if occasion seemed to demand it.``
The historical veracity of these accounts no doubt have been embellished over the years, but the story continues in `Looking Back at Easton.`
``Otis Wiley had allowed his curly hair to grow all winter,`` the book reads. ``Someone with whom he was arguing grabbed him by it and started dragging him about, but as soon as he could free himself, he rushed to a neighboring house and got the woman living there to cut off his curls, regardless of the style.``
No sooner did he return from his impromptu haircut, when he got into a fight with another man and punched out four of his teeth.
Bunga Road was passed that year and the histories arent sure when the road was completed and whether its course follows what today is Route 112.
East Landaff eventually broke away from Landaff and became Easton. The lumber industry ceased abruptly and after the last log drive down the Wild Ammonoosuc in 1911, those who lived in Whitcherville moved on.
Today there is little tangible evidence that such a thriving community once took root. Foundations of the sawmills, starch factory, bobbin mill, saloon, post office and other buildings can be seen just off Route 112.
And there is that granite monument, three miles west of the junction of Route 116, the road through Easton and Franconia.
It`s said to have been set up in the `40s by the daughter of Dan and Nancy Whitcher, Belle Ashley Fullam, who did not want Whitcherville to ever be forgotten.
``In memory of Daniel and Nancy Knight Whitcher, first settlers of Whitcherville in 1860. On Bunga Road, made famous by 12 years of litigation, he owned lumber and starch mills, was prominent in town and church affairs.``