Old Beams and Cold Latches:

Discovering Memories of a New England Farmhouse

Nathaniel Smith

December 11, 2010

Professor Anne K. Knowles

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Growing up, I felt that this house was not “ours.” The kitchen was ours, for I could

remember when we built cupboards and added furniture, and while it has the aesthetic of an

antique-lover it does not feel old like the rest of the house. The old part of the house - the

cold brick fireplaces, blackened by 150 years of smoke; the sloping floors that make a marble

roll backwards; smooth and uneven doorsills; it felt as if an old friend had left us their house

for safe-keeping. I was lucky to live there. Lucky to be in a house with stories not my own,

with the perspective that one day my family too would no longer be there, and our stories

would lie hiding in the walls like secret staircases and little girls’ hats.

I like to know places up close over long periods of time. There is a feeling of

excitement when realizing something new about a place one knows quite well. Counter-

intuitively, these moments come few and far between when living in an old house with very

little records of its past. “Material culture is as true to the mind, as dear to the heart, as

language, and what is more, it reports thoughts and actions that resist verbal formulation,”

wrote the famed anthropologist Henry Glassie. “Like a story, an artifact is a text, a display

of form and a vehicle for meaning…It unfolds in all directions at once, embracing

conditions in simultaneity, and opening multiple routes to significance.”i Researching a

familiar place can teach patience in the face of memories, and hope in the face of

indifference. Memories can be tricky – they feel like the only facts that matter, yet transform

into irrelevance when written down. Deep connection to a place does not require an

exhaustive knowledge of its literal past. However, once informed the imagination can find

more space to dream about the human experience. This is a project about a house my family

has lived in for 25 years and with which we are still getting acquainted. There are memories

of my own embedded within a place like this, and memories of others’ waiting to be

discovered. Exploring these memories has taught me to, like Glassie, “think spatially, not

temporally, lifting [my] stories from places on the land, rather than locations in chronology,

relating them typologically…[and thus] make history into a description of the human

condition.”ii

___________

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My family rarely uses the front door [Image 1]. It is in good shape; it is the same

door that William Page Hayward opened the first time he stepped into his new house in

1838. His family was probably there, celebrating the new house and newlyweds. He

finished construction on his house and married Abigail Maynard from Stow that same year.

Now there were two farms in the family, one on either side of Concord Road on the border

of Concord and Bedford.

The Town of Bedford was land annexed from Billerica and Concord in 1729 [Image

2].iii It was a farming town, with some mills and industry in the 1800s. The men of Bedford

fought in the Revolutionary War, and the Bedford Flag was the only flag carried at during

the battles on April 19, 1775. The town was growing rapidly during the 1830s when the

Haywards built the house at 426 Concord Road. The town grew more, and in the 1865

Massachusetts census there were 212 houses, two churches and six schoolhouses. The

Haywards were an active family in town – Mather was First Lieutenant in the town militia

when they were stationed at Fort Warren in Boston during the War of 1812, and he was

prominent in the town office and church.iv

Mather inherited the farm at 445 Concord Road from William Page. Mather lived

there around the same time that he married Lucy Page in 1800, and upon William Page’s

death in 1812, Mather inherited the farm and all its property. This included property on

both sides of Concord Road, and in 1838 Mather’s son William Page Hayward, named after

the Page family patriarch, built the house and farm at 426 Concord Road [Image 3]. Well, he

may not have actually physically built the house, and he certainly did not come up with the

design. An innkeeper named Joshua Page built houses in Bedford from 1815 until his death

in 1842, and many of the houses he built are strikingly similar to the Hayward house [Image

4].v Bedford town historian Ina Mansur wrote of an 1840 house in Pittston, Maine with

striking similarities, right down to the twin chimneys [Image 5]. “It shows clearly the

influence of people who moved ‘down east’ after the Revolution,” she wrote.vi The

Hayward house just followed the trend.

The farmland behind the house ran back to Elm Brook, which if one followed

upstream led out of Bedford to Concord, and the house in which Henry David Thoreau was

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born a few years before in 1817. This point in Concord Road lies on a small ridge between

the Concord River to the northwest and lowlands and meadows leading to Elm Brook in the

southeast [Image 6]. The old Page house was the last house in Bedford, and out the back of

the house were fields sloping downward and westward to the Concord River. The new

Hayward house faced the opposite direction, so to head to the fields was to face the sunrise.

William Hayward must have liked bringing his new wife Abigail into a strong and sturdy

house with the rest of his family close by. He and Abigail only had two children in Bedford,

Amelia and William Edward.

Until the mid-1850s when the Haywards lived here, most farmers in the area devoted

their land to subsistence agriculture, much of which was used to raise livestock.vii The

Haywards had enough dairy cows that theirs must have been a small commercial farm. The

land use was typical of the time and place. They had tillage soil good for growing Indian

corn and English rye; meadows to provide fodder for the livestock thus producing manure

for the tillage, as well as native meadow hay; English hay fields for feeding the cattle; pasture

“from cowyards behind the barn to the most remote woodlot;” and woodland good for fuel,

fences, and timber.viii The land on which William and his father Mather farmed was five acres

of tillage, six of mowing, fifteen of meadow, eighteen of pasture, five wooded, and three

unimproved.ix They had livestock in the barn: one horse, six cows, and one pig in 1841.x

Hayward does not seem to have been much of a farmer. Abram Brown, in his 1891

“History of the Town of Bedford,” wrote that he was a “manufacturer of trunks and valises

in Lowell and Canada,” and after only four years in the house he and his family moved to

North Cambridge, where he became deacon of a congregational church.xi . From looking at

the agricultural census of 1850 it seems the farm as the Parkers bought it was of low to

average productivity.xii The farm thrived much more under William and his son George

Parker. While it did not grow much in the first few decades the Parkers lived there, it

certainly did in the years leading up to William’s death in 1889. They consistently had

laborers living and working on the farm, and in 1889 they had three horses, twelve cows,

four yearlings, three swine, and thirty-eight hens.xiii The value of the farm in the 1860s, ‘70s,

and ‘80s was average for farms like it in the area. George Parker was 33 years old when his

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father died, and he and his large family lived in the house and ran the farm until he and his

sister Minnie sold it to the Hoyts in October of 1911 [Image 7].xiv

The house the Haywards and Parkers knew was probably painted white with black

shutters, like most houses of that class and period on a main New England road [Image 8].xv

When my parents, Wendell and Luisa, first saw the house in 1985 it was red with aluminum

siding and window frames [Image 9]. “We were looking for a house we could afford, [and]

we were looking for an old house” said Wendell. “Luisa’s saying it had to be at least 100

years old.”

Luisa interjects, “Or 90, it had to be at least 90,”

Back to Wendell, “I don’t know if we had an exact number of years. A Victorian, would you

have taken a Victorian?” –

“Yes, absolutely.”

They had all sorts of qualifications – good school system, affordable, and close to

Wendell’s family in Lexington. The age of the house – its historic character and value – was

arguably the most important. “It was funny, when we were walking through the house, I

remember all the fake things they'd put up, and I couldn't help but clink my finger on the

plastic beam in the middle room,” remembers Wendell. “The curious thing about the way

the house had been lived in - three families had lived here for fifty years each. People lived

in the house for a long time.” There were literal layers my parents were preparing to pull of

before they could find its core. To discover the stories within these layers, and then imagine

their meaning, made my family into amateur material anthropologists, using “objects to

approach human thought and action.”xvi

The FRONT YARD

“I thought it was too close to the street.” My mother knew that Concord Road

would define the front yard of our house. Within the first year, Wendell and Luisa bought

and constructed a fence that blocked the busy road from sight [Image 10]. Wendell planted

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birch and pine trees in front of and behind the fence to create more of a barrier. My sister

and I never played in the front yard. It was small, and often in the shade of the house and

fence. The front yard grew slowly and changed subtly, until a drunk driver drove through

the fence and almost into the front of the house when I was ten years old. Then my father

rebuilt the fence, and reinforced it from behind with a cement block wall. We like to say

that this was to stop any more cars from making it through the fence.

Really, my father wanted to muffle the streets sounds even further. He received a

shipment of large granite blocks from a quarry nearby, heaped in a pile in the driveway and

behind the house. We’re still digging them up from where the vines and weeds covered

them up back there. Some of these blocks went to building a terrace for planting, receding

into the northwest corner of the cement wall [Image 11]. “When your father builds a wall,

he really builds a wall,” said my uncle Evan admiringly.

I only went to the front yard on Easter Egg Hunts and when I was older to mow the

grass. The yard is narrow enough that you cannot look at the entire front façade in one

glance [Image 12]. Lean back, and you see nine windows, twin chimneys, clapboard siding,

and a big front door. Some of the windowpanes have a slight flex – they are original 19th

century glass. That aesthetic was not there when they moved in. Wendell and Luisa knew

they wanted to remove what were then fake shutters and sidings. However, “I knew that we

couldn't take the shutters off until we could afford to deal with what would be underneath it,”

said Wendell. “I still remember when we took them off, the sills were rotting - they had cut

the windows, [and] all the moldings around the windows.” When they could afford it, my

parents restored the sills and frames. “When they put the siding on, they damaged the

original frames, so what we did is we looked at the old paint marks, so we could see what the

pattern of the frame was,” remembers my father of their detective work [Image 13].xvii My

mother stole paint colors from a similar old house a few miles down the road in Concord. A

teal green color with yellow trim and shutters – I was always proud to live in a house of such

unique shades.

There are many similarities between this house and its contemporaries. One man

who grew up in a saltbox house in the early 1800s remembers his house was “built with its

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length along the line of the street…in the front were two rooms, between which was the

door opening onto a narrow passage. From the passageway doors led to each front room,

and a staircase…”xviii While this house was not a saltbox, the basic layout had similarities.

Struggle to get the heavy, old front door open, and you’ll find a narrow passage with doors

immediately on the left and right into the front rooms. The staircase goes up the left wall of

the passage, and the hallway goes down the right towards the back of the house. The back

of that hallway had a door that must have been “always shut when visitors were in the

house,” for it led to the kitchen.xix William and Abigail Hayward only had two children, and

even if there were laborers or servants in the house it must have felt empty for a house of its

time. When William Parker moved there in 1850, he brought with him his wife Mary, four

children, two laborers and a servant. William and Mary must have lived in one of the two

bedrooms upstairs, the children in the other, and the laborers and servants in the small story

above the kitchen or the attic.

The SIDE DOOR

It is difficult to know, once the Haywards or Parkers developed their daily patterns,

if they would have used the front door either. The barn was behind the house, right at the

point in the hill so the top floor could open back on level with the house’s first floor, and

the bottom level opened out into the fields [Images 14-15]. The rear wing behind the house

had a side door. Maybe the Parkers walked in that door after getting off the pleasure

carriage they owned when returning from church on Sundays, where William Parker was

listed a member in 1843.xx My family attends the same church, where my sister and I sang in

choir for the holidays.

Maybe the servant or laborers who lived on the property with the Parkers used the

side door. They had two laborers in 1850, both 24 years old: Warren Gates from

Massachusetts and Pattrick Gleason from Ireland. The servant was 23-year-old Ann Terney,

also from Ireland.xxi They might have lived in the addition, an added 1½ stories off the back.

In 1860 the Parkers had a different Irish laborer, 23-year-old Terrance Links, and in 1880 a

Milton P. Daniels and a William Cahill.xxii When William Parker died and his son George

Parker lived in the house, his large family had a servant, 43-year-old widow Mary

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McLaughlin.xxiii These workers might have lived in the low-roofed second story of the little

house, or in the attic of the big house.

William Hutchly boarded in the rear upstairs rooms with the Lord family during the

1930s, but he probably would have used the front door with easier access to the stairs than

the back.xxiv The rear of the house underwent significant changes around that time. In the

early 1900s, the back was expanded and added upon again until there was a two-story

addition almost as big as the original house itself. This addition had plumbing for a second

kitchen, which boarders and tenants have used since it was built. While their apartments

were in the back of the house, the only staircase remaining in the house at that time was in

the front.

The KITCHEN

There are two back doors now, and both lead to the kitchen. The one from the

driveway gets the most use [Image 16]. It was an awkward room in 1985, with a woodstove

in the middle, a refrigerator at one end, and the sink at the other. “It was so strange that the

sink was here, and the refrigerator was all the way over here, you had to go around,”

remembers my mother. “It was good that it was a bad layout, because that meant that we

really had to do something” [Image 17]. Years of a decent renovation and new patterns have

muddied my parents’ memories a bit, but they think it was 1987 when they redid the kitchen

and some of the downstairs floor plan. It was change born out of necessity, because as my

father said, “Everything built in 1915 was terrible.” When they took out the entire back wall

of the kitchen, they found that “it had been built out of scrap lumber. They used pieces of

wood, where it might normally be a 2x4, it would just be random…4x6s, because that’s what

they happened to have.” A friend of my father’s from college, Duncan Sanders-Fleming,

was the contractor for this set of renovations and the second renovation twelve years later.

Another old friend, Rich Morse, was the architect. They redid the walls, moved the sink,

refrigerator, and stove, and transformed a small back hallway into a bathroom and closet. A

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few years after, my mother’s brother built the counters and cabinets. They were lucky to

have friends and family involved those first few years in case something went wrong.

Wendell remembers “calling Duncan once in a panic, because the central beam that ran

down the house appeared to be sinking. Like the whole house was going to collapse. Duncan

came out and jacked everything up, and put a new beam underneath.” The first years were

full of those kinds of stories.

Now the kitchen is a space of light wood cupboards and counters, pots, pans, dishes,

silverware, and braided garlic bunches from the garden [Images 18-19]. My sister Gemma,

when she is home, does much of her work on the kitchen counter. There my father eats his

late-night bowl of cereal. We gather there to cut root vegetables for Thanksgiving, or lay out

trays and baskets for brunch on Christmas. I like the kitchen more in fall and winter than

summer. The dining table revolves between an antique ovular table and a rectangular new

one. The rectangle is prone to water marks, and so I learned to be overly sensitive to the

need for coasters and placemats. Very few tables are like this, but I grew up thinking it was a

necessary hardship on any dinner table. Above the two radiators that struggle to warm the

drafty room is a wonderful shelf on which my father’s bonsais and potted plants have come

to rest. It was a room with nice old things, but with patterns of use that are all our own. I

feel little connection to the house’s past in the kitchen.

The later renovations in 1999 added a “mudroom” between the door to the driveway

and the kitchen. The mudroom displaced the porch, which then pooled out and around the

corner of the house [Image 20]. The mudroom gave the kitchen more space – boots and

jackets no longer shared closets with cereal and dishware. The door from kitchen to

mudroom has no latch, and my mother insisted there be a kick-plate at the bottom; she

knew my father would barrel in and out of the house with his hands full too often for the

paint at the bottom of the door to withstand his boots. This latch-less door allows our cats

to get stuck in the mudroom, the last stage before their escape into the yard. Every cat

we’ve had has figured out how to force open the door with their little noses. But of course

it is a one-way street – there they are trapped until someone opens a door.

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The MIDDLE ROOM and OLD KITCHEN

The early renovations widened the bay between the kitchen and middle room. This

was the boundary between the old house and the new. A central beam runs front-to-back

from the south central chimney and the rear of the house [Image 21]. With as much care as

the rear wall of the kitchen that was made from scrap lumber, the end of the old beam was

left stranded. Luisa remembers that when they moved in there were also “fake-drop ceilings,

fake beams, and fake wood-grain contact paper [Image 22].”xxv Before those days, however,

this room was the old working kitchen and the functional center of the house. There was a

fireplace, a beehive oven, and a door through which to drop used ashes [Image 23]. With its

two chimneys and five fireplaces, this house was different from many New England houses

where the kitchen was the only warm place in winter. Harriet Beecher Stowe remembers in

the mid-1800s leaving her warm hearth for “bedchambers that never knew a fire, where the

very sheets and blankets seemed so full of stinging cold air that made one’s fingers tingle.”xxvi

The chimney on the south half had fireplaces in both the kitchen and the dining room, and

the bedroom above. The other chimney had a fireplace on each floor. Even with all the

fireplaces it is unlikely that the Haywards or Parkers wanted to increase the strenuous work

of cutting and carrying in enough precious firewood to burn in all of them, and so many

rooms probably remained cold.xxvii

The old kitchen had in its corner a narrow, steep staircase leading to the small upper

story at the back of the house. Their cramped steepness and the easy access to the kitchen

meant they probably led to the quarters of servants like Ann Terney. My family did not

know of this staircase, and neither, probably, did the Dellovos before us. It was only the

width of the bordering fireplace’s depth, and where it would have entered the old kitchen are

drawers and cupboards where we house our stereo. “The hidden staircase!” my mother

exclaims when it is mentioned [Image 24].xxviii We only found it in 1999 when the

floorboards on the second floor were ripped up and there the top two steps remained,

hidden between the stereo cupboard and the chimney. After taking some photos that are

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now lost, the floor was covered back up, and so the steps are still there, hidden inside the

wall, unused since the early 20th century.

Now we simply call the old kitchen the “middle room.” There are bookshelves, and

our stereo, and art that my sister and I made in school. Gemma and I loved to play with the

beehive oven, placing things inside, sending our cats in like canaries in a mine. Gemma

discovered one day that she, herself, could fit in there, a space no deeper than a grown man’s

arm. She promptly layered it with blankets, pillows, books, a lamp, and a small CD player.

The extension cord was all that showed there was a small girl hidden inside, with only room

to lie curled up. The fireplace, while functional, is never used and is where the cat food and

water dishes have come to rest. Whichever table, the oval or rectangle, is not in the kitchen

rests in the middle of this room. It comes to life in November and December with another

table and table leaves, chairs and tablecloths, and Thanksgiving and Christmas food. As

soon as the house was ready for Thanksgiving in 1985 my father’s family moved the meal

from his parents’ house in Lexington [Image 25]. Almost every Smith Thanksgiving meal

since has happened in this room. My mother brings out her collected antique china, silver,

and candelabras. Her calligraphy labels the assigned seats, and dishes and tureens of New

England turkey, root vegetables, salad, and pie line the bookshelves around us. What was

the old kitchen is now our formal dining room in the holiday season.

The ½ ROOM

In 1985 there was a back hallway that led from the new kitchen to a pantry and the

back rooms of the house. One of those rooms was a “½ room,” a small intersection of four

doors, leading to the main hallway, the pantry, a bedroom, and a bathroom. “Four doors!”

exclaimed Wendell. “Which meant that all this was was a – a passageway…it was very

weird.” In the roundabout way we work out our memories, my parents banter back and

forth about the first few years before they work out how long it took them to renovate the

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first floor. “It must have been about five years,” he remembers, “And in that time I was

renovating one room at a time. Before Duncan did any work - ”

“When Natty was born,” Luisa interrupts, “Duncan had already done the work. Because

remember when Natty was sleeping in that little room, it wasn’t attached to the pantry.”

“Oh, and that was our bedroom. And Natty was in here. Okay, so somewhere in the first

few years, Duncan did all the work.”

“You know, that makes sense, because in 1987, I think we had Kaniko come for

Thanksgiving and this kitchen was being renovated.”

“It was all plastic?”

“In the early fall. I think it was 1987, the year before Natty was born, it was being

renovated.”xxix

There is a tone of finality, as if to say “There. We’ve proven we existed twenty years ago. We

have worked out our past; now we can move forward.” Things fall into place, and that

natural order we crave has returned.

Duncan helped my parents renovate the first floor in 1987. They added a back door

out the opposite end of the kitchen, and closed off the awkward pantry hall. That was

subdivided into a bathroom, with washer and dryer, and a walk-in closet for the “ ½ room”

in the back. The ½ room lost its door to the outside, and became a small bedroom. Maybe

it was the same room as in the late 19th century – maybe one of the servants, Warren, or

Patrick, or Ann, or Terrance slept here. Or maybe the children piled in. It was my bedroom

until I was three years old. My parents slept in the next room at the front of the house, by

themselves and then with Gemma when she was a newborn. I have few memories of my

little room, only an image of getting into my little bed that had a sideboard I could remove

and use as a ramp for stuffed animals to climb. I remember crying at night, awake with a

window so close by that opened directly to the backyard. That same bed became my sister’s

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when she outgrew her rocking cradle. When we all moved upstairs, it became a guest room.

A German exchange student lived there for a year. My sister moved back in there for a time

to have her own bathroom. And then promptly moved back upstairs – being alone on the

first floor of this old, drafty house was too frightening.

The MUSIC ROOM

Until shortly after Gemma was born in 1991 my parents rented out the upstairs and

slept in the first-floor bedroom. For three and a half years they passed through my ½ room

to get to the bathroom, and there was a time when my baby sister slept in there with them.

These close quarters, while still more space than individuals had in the early 19th century,

seems reminiscent of the days when a “single bed and unshared room was a rarity and a

privilege granted only guests.”xxx The room has a fireplace, boarded up behind the

headboard of the bed or a futon couch. When my parents moved their bedroom upstairs,

this became a guest room, and when my mother inherited a grand piano it became the

“music room.” In some ways, it has returned to what the Haywards and Parkers probably

used it for – a parlor. Just like parlors in the 19th century, we rarely use the room but it holds

our largest and gaudiest pieces of furniture.xxxi On the opposite wall from the grand piano is

an ornate credenza with a marble top and carvings of game animals hanging as if ready for

butchering on the sides. There were times when my family would host our fellow young

music students and violin teacher here for recitals, when a piano tuner would come and

struggle with the old keys that has not seen proper use in decades. Now, guests sleep on the

futon, we store sheet music on the shelves, and old instruments under the piano. At its best

it is the “music room” – at its worst we call it simply the “back room.”

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The LIVING ROOM

This trip through the back of the house brings one back to the front hall, out a door

at the bottom of the stairs and across from the door to the living room. Our living room

may have started as the dining room, where William, Abigail, Amelia, and William Edward

sat down to eat. It, too, had a fireplace, above and to the right of which the hidden staircase

descended to then open into the kitchen next door [Image 26]. That stretch of wall may

have been blank when the house was first built, but now there is a cabinet with a bottom

door built from half of a proper door somewhere else in the house [Image 27]. It was a

room for hors d’ouevres before Thanksgiving or drinks after dinner, and TV shows late at

night when the workday was done. Most importantly, as a child, it was the room in which

our Christmas tree sat. I used to lie under its branches, the flames from that old fireplace

across the room flickering as the Christmas lights above glistened. Christmas morning, as

the sun began to rise, Gemma and I tiptoed down the stairs to lift the same latch the

children Amelia and William Hayward lifted to go to dinner everyday, to see our benevolent

New England tree with gifts below its branches.

While we never use the front door, and plants overgrow their pots and the big old

lock is always clasped, the glass windows on either side are a reminder of the original panes

that sit hidden among some of the windows [Image 28]. The windows’ symmetry around

the door often strike me, as I run down the hall from the middle room and grab a banister to

swing around and dash up the stairs. The inner edge of that banister’s paint has worn off at

the place where I grab it every time. The stair’s railing was another attempt of my parents’ at

historical accuracy. They disappointed themselves, unfortunately. “It should have been a

fatter railing. It bothers me every time I go up the stairs,” claims Wendell. Their railing

replaced a metal outdoor railing designed for the outdoors installed by the Hoyts, Lords,

Dellovos [Images 29-30]. Climb up the stairs, and above there will be paint eternally flaking

away off the curved ceiling on the bottom of the next flight of stairs to the attic.

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The UPSTAIRS

At the top of the stairs is a hall leading to the rooms in the back. My childhood was

spent in this long narrow hallway, a straight shot back to the door to my mother’s

bookbindery. The hall had no windows, just walls and doors. One door on the left, two on

the right, and a door at the end through which was the back wall of the house.

This was not a well laid plan, as could be seen in the floor’s six-inch drop from the

landing to the hall. The hall was always dark and high ceilinged. When Wendell and Luisa

bought the house in 1985, within the first week they gutted and refinished the entire upstairs,

so it was ready to rent out [Image 31]. “Well, maybe two weeks,” my father admits. “We

had to rent it out to pay the mortgage, so it was like – you’ve got to do it!”xxxii They found all

sorts of different layers of wallpapers in each of the rooms in the house as they stripped and

repainted them - floral patterns, stripes, and best of all a lurid sparkly pink from the upstairs

bathroom [Image 32]. The house’s history was visible in the plaster used to construct the

walls. “The old part of the house is plaster. Now what’s happening is sheetrock, with plaster

on top. But there was this period of time when you could buy this really cheap cardboard,

that was horrible.”xxxiii This was probably around 1915. When the upstairs was finished and

a kitchenette installed in the plumbing waiting for it from when John H. Lord hosted

boarders, my parents then rented out the upstairs for the next six years.

Then my sister needed a real bedroom, and “we must have been able to afford it.”xxxiv

So we moved upstairs in 1991. As children we played in the hall, sliding down the short

ramp that bridged the old house to its unwieldy addition, and ripped our pajamas and socks

on the old nails that refused to stay in their driven holes. If we rolled a toy or stuffed animal

hard enough back up the hall it would shoot up the ramp, over the landing, to clatter or

dance down the stairs. I fetched the missile, ran back up the stairs and across the landing,

and slid down the ramp only to catch myself on my bedroom’s doorframe.

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My bedroom was the widest of the three back rooms, with a window at the far end

and a door on its right wall that led to my parents’ bedroom. This door stood six inches off

the ground, and I remember when as a little child I first realized that this change in height

mirrored the sloping floor in the hall. There are small memories of this room from the floor

where I played and the ceiling where my bunk bed lay. The radiator, like in all the rooms in

the house when I was young, was a chest-height coil of hot water pumped up from the

boiler built in the early 1900s. It would burn to the touch during the winter, so the Dellovos

before us put wooden housing with metal grating over it. When the New England winter

arrived and the heat came on, dust motes and smells of decay would rise up and out of their

slumber in the bottom of these radiator cages. I used it as an object on the landscape to be

explored by my toys and stuffed animals, and I’m sure that when the upstairs was torn apart

in 1999 there was more than one child’s object found behind the grate.

The bathroom was as long as my room but half the width [Image 33]. It was long

enough that, when I walked to the bathroom one morning, I could not quite tell from the

doorway whether it was our cat or a raccoon drinking water from the faucet. It was a

raccoon. My father didn’t believe me until he saw it himself, and after he chased it out the

window and off the roof we figured out where it came from. During recent roof reparations

when a portion of the roof was open, the raccoon must have climbed from a tree onto the

roof and then down inside the wall. My mother and I remembered, then, that a week before

she was reading me a bedtime story and we heard a scratching on the wall. We thought it

must be the cat in the next room, but then the cat came and sat on my bed and the

scratching started again. The raccoon must have been starving and thirsty in the wall, until it

climbed out into the attic and down the attic steps, ambled through the upstairs hallway, and

climbed onto the sink. While this is the largest animal to get stuck inside our house, it is

certainly not the only one. Mice live in many of the walls, and birds often get stuck in the

chimneys.

The raccoon was not the only thing we have seen emerge from the walls. During the

1999 renovations, the workers found an antique bonnet inside of a wall. My mother the

antiquarian learned that because of “the kind of pattern it is, it was definitely from before

1850” [Image 34].xxxv Maybe it belonged to William Hayward’s little daughter Amelia

  16  

Hayward, before her family moved in 1842 when she was only six years old.xxxvi If not hers,

then it may have been one of the Parker girls. Adelaide, Lillie, Mary, or Minnie all might

have worn a bonnet like this one, and it is not hard to imagine them running around the

house with their brothers in the 1850s or ‘60s and they were all between the ages of 4 and

22.xxxvii The boys might have lived in the attic with the laborers. The attic today is much the

same as it was then, and I can imagine sleeping there being exactly as historian Jack Larkin

describes.

“Those who grew up sleeping in the garret remembered the countless sharp shingle

nails sticking through the roof’s thin sheathing that would rip the clothes of anyone

who came too close. In freezing weather, the nail heads from the frost accumulated

from the sleepers’ warm breath.”xxxviii

Maybe one of the boys stole a sister’s bonnet, lost it, and then got in trouble. The hat must

have fallen down a crack in the attic floor into the second story wall. If only we could show

his parents that the hat was not lost, it was there all the time, we could save that boy from

punishment.

At the back of the upstairs was my mother’s bookbindery. It ran the full width of

the house, and was full of paper cutters, presses, and drawers of paper and cardstock. All of

this was just transplanted into the new bindery when the upstairs was renovated in 1999.

Their friends Duncan and Rich did the renovations again, and Rich was the perfect architect

because “he was very interested in historical things.”xxxix My parents renovated a second time

because “the way the rooms were laid out, there were really long, narrow rooms that didn’t

make sense. It was kind of a bad use of space. And we wanted to try to get another

bedroom.”xl They renovated the back four rooms, expanding into the driveway by adding

the mudroom on the first floor, and adding a room where a porch was on the second floor.

The new hallway had wide, original floorboards that my father scavenged from my old

bedroom. “They thought I was nuts. We started ripping them up from your room, for

example, and flipped them over, because the top had a million nail holes. So you turn it over,

you plane it, and it’s pretty good.”xli

The renovated upstairs is airy, with good windows and hardwood floors [Image 35].

It does not have the personality that the older rooms do. Maybe it is the white walls, instead

 17  

of wallpaper or colored paint; it is also the newness of it all. The doorknobs are ordinary,

instead of the old lift-and-latch style. As gaudy as the early 20th century wall sconces are,

they add character that the new lights embedded in the ceiling lack. We never stopped living

in the rest of the house, but when this was renovated it became interrupted. It is only now,

ten years after, that I begin to feel the layers of human connection through objects and

events.

The YARD and WOODS

Windows to the backyard look upon a beautiful garden in any season, with trees

interspersed and meadows and woods beyond. In the 1800s it was a view of tillage soil,

mowing land, pastures, and meadows. That is, if they could see beyond the hulking barn

directly behind the house. There is no way of knowing if it was the same barn from 1838

until 1950 – there were far more animals kept in the late 1800s than the early. Now, all that

is left of the barn is its enormous foundation. How different the property would have been

with an enormous barn in the backyard! If not for barn burnings in Concord in the 1950s,

the Dellovos may have left the barn intact. As it was, for fear of arson, the barn was taken

down after 1953 [Image 36]. Nothing remains of the Haywards or Parkers on the land

except the physical structures, and the evenly spaced ditches and ridges that run through the

woods where they cultivated the meadows.

There are recent signs of farming from the early 1900s, such as a dairy refrigeration

unit that my father found in a concrete shed. “When I ripped it out, gas came out, and I

thought it was going to explode, because it was freon or something. It was an old

refrigeration unit,” remembers Wendell.xlii It would have been difficult for the Hoyts if they

tried to farm when they lived there between 1911 and 1920. In 1920 Frank Hoyt was 70,

Eliza Hoyt 68, and the only other resident was 28-year-old Claudia. David Waye, owner of

the last workhorse in Bedford in 1977, remembered that there were many dairy farms in

Bedford in the 1930s and ‘40s.xliii Perhaps the Lords had a dairy farm after they bought it in

1919, or the Dellovos after 1943; someone must have used that refrigeration unit.

My father has hidden the concrete refrigeration house with trellises and filled it with

bikes and gardening tools. The tools are put to good use. The garden, an acre when my

parents bought the property, could be a full-time job to maintain. The topography has not

  18  

changed since they moved in – the old fifteen-foot stone barn foundation drops back behind

our house to the grass below, and there are avenues down either side of the property to

reach the backyard. While my father seems to hold the entire plan of the yard inside of his

head there is a shelf with stacks of gardening notebooks full of drawings and notes.

“One sad thing about my gardening book is that I have a lot of enthusiasm to write

in the book in the first month of the year. But then the garden really gets going, and

I don’t have time anymore…some people might plan it. But I can’t plan it. I work in

the garden, and over time a plan will sort of evolve in my head for some area.”xliv

There used to be stone steps leading down to small back section of the garden, and when

they started falling down and my father needed a new project he ripped up that whole area.

After a year or two of working around it, he decided that what it needed was a new, big

stone wall and a circular brick patio. While digging and moving rocks we discovered a rusty

old ice skate and several nails. My father was not surprised – he finds relics of the old farm

all the time [Images 37-40]. We worked for a month with the bricks, and in the center of the

circle we placed one of the two old grinding stones we have found in our yard [Image 41].

I remember when I was in second or third grade and the open space to play in the

backyard almost doubled in size when the pool was taken out. The pool and a cabana were

there in 1985 - my father dove in on his wedding day, my mother dove in to pull me out

when I was a baby, and then the pool was filled in when I was seven or eight years old

[Image 42]. It is not something I remember very well, and I think my parents were glad to

see it go. “We're not good at relaxing,” explains my father. “We always had to keep it clean,

and we never relaxed by it. It was very unenvironmental, somehow. You know, a lot of

chemicals had to go in, and the pump had to run all the time. It needed a lot of work, that's

why we took it out. It needed a lot of work.”xlv I was excited the day I came home from

school to watch the backhoe fill in the gaping hole in the ground. My friends didn’t

understand – we were getting rid of a pool? But it seemed like the thing to do, and without it

there was no more asphalt and chain-link fence, just stone walls, plants, and trees. The

poolside cabana remained for a few more years, used only by my friends and I as for

 19  

adventures in the backyard and the woods beyond. Soon even the cabana collapsed, and in

its place my father planted a large vegetable garden.

At the back of the vegetable garden, behind the pumpkins and tomato patch, are

piles of old clay planting pots. Surrounded by remnants a century old or more, I as a young

boy thought they must have been ancient. In fact, they belonged to the Dellovos, who ran a

small nursery and landscaping company from our house and the property they owned next

door. They moved into the neighboring house when they sold the property to my parents.

My mother remembers their friendship starting well. “When we first met them, they were

very friendly, and they really liked us. I think they liked me, because I was Italian, and they

were Dellovo. We invited them to our wedding.”xlvi My father remembers things going badly

almost immediately. “We were in trouble in the first week, because they came over and I

was busy ripping out all the house. And they never came back.”xlvii

Daniel Dellovo had known the house for forty years, since his parents bought the

house in 1943.xlviii After that much time, the speed at which my parents changed the house

and property may have been a bit of a shock. Not as much of a shock as what happened

when they tried to sell more land right behind our house, however. They used to own all the

land around our house and Parker Road, and after years of subdividing the property they

cannot have expected any trouble. It would have been a keyhole lot, practically in our

backyard with a driveway right next to our house. Wendell went and studied the legal

process and told the Dellovos he would object to the development. There was going to be a

town meeting when this potential subdivision was up for debate. “The horrible thing

was…they didn’t understand that somebody could actually object. They had done that other

division. You know, it was their land, they could do what they wanted. So I told them I was

going to object, and they still went ahead and did it.”

“Weren’t there objections on several counts?” Luisa asks.

“Yes, there were many variances. And when it didn’t get passed, he had a heart attack and

nearly died.”xlix

  20  

It is a family story now, of the time when my father fought to keep our land pristine and

gave our neighbor a heart attack. They never really spoke to us again, and the only way we

interacted was when we return their mail to them that has been accidently placed in our

mailbox, 426A, instead of theirs at 426B.

The backyard was a playground for children. My father and I built a tree house in

the large weeping willow, but the deal was that he would only work on it if I was there

working too. I got up every morning an hour before school to work on it. Now it is far too

small for anyone, and the expanding tree trunk is slowly ripping it apart. We had a zip line,

and I can remember flying back and forth while my father and his wheelbarrow trundled

around the yard on Saturday afternoons. When I got older my friends and I would wander

in the woods behind the house. We found an old dump rake from the early 1900s,

undoubtedly from whichever family farmed the property last [Image 43]. Our paths took us

over the ditches and ridges the Haywards dug in the meadows to help water flow through,

and there were many stone walls built with the stones dug up in the field that always result

from farming in New England. And of course, we found treasures buried in the ground like

the piles of old clay planting pots.

Behind the pile of clay pots now lie the Dellovo Conservation Area, Vanderhoof

Conservation Area, and the Mary Putnam Webber Wildlife Preserve. There are paths

stretching several miles back before a fence marks the boundary of Hanscom Air Force

Base. Our yard has grown too small for my father – now he makes regular trips into the

woods to trim the trails and build new ones. I ski east from the yard out over the ridges and

ditches from the Haywards’ time. My father’s trails keep reaching further back into the

Great Meadows that link all of these old, Colonial towns together. Now we ski southeast

across Elm Brook to the house where Thoreau was born. There is a hill I can look from and

see in the distance the steeple of First Parish Unitarian church that William Parker attended

150 years ago. When I ski back home, I pass the remains of the old dump rake, open the

deer fence, cross into our sheltered yard, and sit by a fire at the brick circle where we collect

the rusted farm tools.

 21  

This is land and a house that I grew to love before I knew its history. I understand

more, now, why some things insist on sagging after a century and a half. The floorboards in

the front hall dip down from the thousands of footsteps. Some of the old lift-and-latch

doors no longer close, and the iron latches are always cold to the touch. If I look at the

stone foundation in the winter’s fading light, I can see a bulge in the bottom of the wall.

Perhaps someday the barn foundation will finally collapse, and then we’ll know if this house

is as strong as its beams, windows, cupboards and doors have led us to believe. A

connection to place is only as strong as we let it become, and by exploring my memories and

discovering new ones I have strengthened this house enough in my heart and mind to help

hold it up a long time.

  22  

                                                                                                               i Henry Glassie. 1999. Material Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 46 ii Glassie, Material, 20. iii Kathleen Kelly-Broomer. 2005. Historic Properties and Neighborhoods of Bedford, Massachusetts. Bedford, MA: Bedford Historical Society. 12. iv Abram Brown. 1891. “Genealogical and Biographical”. History of the Town of Bedford. Bedford, MA: published by the author. 17. v Ina and Lawrence Mansur. 1992. A Pictorial History of Bedford, Massachusetts. Barre, VT: Modern Printing Co., Inc. 42. vi Mansur, A Pictorial History of Bedford, Massachusetts, 34. vii Brian Donahue. 2004. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. New Haven: Yale University Press. 158. viii Donahue, The Great Meadow, 158-172. ix Tax Valuations. Series 1 Tax Lists: Subseries A Invoices, Polls & Estates and Apportionments: B. 3 Invoices, Polls & Estates and Apportionments 1835-1861. Bedford Town Assessor’s Office. x Tax Valuations, Bedford Town Assessor’s Office. xi Brown, “Geneological and Biographical,” History of the Town of Bedford, p. 17. xii Bedford, Massachusetts. 1850. Federal Nonpopulation Census Schedules. xiii www.geneology.com. William Parker & George Parker. 1880-1900 US Federal Census; Tax Valuations, Bedford Town Assessor’s Office. xiv Deed of sale from George M. Parker and Lucy N. Parker to Eliza C. Hoyt, 4 October 1911, Middlesex County, MA, Deed Book 3640, page 186. County Courthouse, East Cambridge, MA. xv Jack Larkin. 2006. Where We Lived. Newtown, CT: The Taunton Press. 72 xvi Glassie, Material Culture, 41. xvii Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 32:00. xviii Larkin, Where We Lived, 78. xix Larkin, Where We Lived, 13. xx Notes from Ina Mansur, Town Historian, March, 1981. Bedford Historical Society. xxi www.geneology.com. Warren Gates; Patrick Gleason; Ann Terney. 1850 United States Federal Census. xxii www.geneology.com. 1860-1880 Terrence Links; Milton Daniels; William Cahill. 1860-1880 US Federal Census. xxiii www.geneology.com. Mary McLaughlin. 1900 US Federal Census. xxiv www.geneology.com William Hutchly. 1930 US Federal Census. xxv Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 3:05-6:31. xxvi Larkin, Where We Lived, 98. xxvii Larkin, Where We Lived ,99. xxviii Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 14:40. xxix Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 8:35-14:00. xxx Larkin, Where We Lived, 30. xxxi Larkin, Where We Lived, 24. xxxii Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 8:35. xxxiii Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 8:00. xxxiv Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 27:00. xxxv Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 14:45. xxxvi Brown, “Geneological and Biographical,” History of the Town of Bedford, 17. xxxvii www.geneology.com. William Hayward. 1850 US Federal Census. xxxviii Larkin, Where We Livedi, 32. xxxix Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 30:05. xl Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 28:39. xli Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 30:20. xlii Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 38:00. xliii Michael Rosenberg. “David Waye shows no sign of slowing down.” The Bedford Minuteman. ca. 1977. xliv Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 44:00. xlv Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 41:32 xlvi Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 18:54

 23  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         xlvii Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 18:54 xlviii Deed of Sale from John H. Lord to Mary Lucy Dellovo and Frances Dellovo, 12 May 1943, Middlesex County, MA, Deed Book 6677, page 422. County Courthouse, East Cambridge, MA. xlix Recorded interview with Wendell Smith and Luisa Granitto. October 17, 2010. 21:00

Bibliography Abram Brown. 1891. “Genealogical and Biographical”. History of the Town of Bedford. Bedford, MA: published by the author. The Bedford Sampler. 1974. Bedford, MA: The Friends of the Bedford Free Public Library. Louise K. Brown. 1975. A Revolutionary Town. Canaan, NH: Phoenix Publishing. David E. Cooper. 2006. A Philosophy of Gardens. New York: Oxford University Press. Brian Donahue. 2004. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kathleen Kelly-Broomer. 2005. Historic Properties and Neighborhoods of Bedford, Massachusetts. Bedford, MA: Bedford Historical Society. Mark Kramer. 1987. Three Farms: Making Milk, Meat, and Money from the American Soil. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Henry Glassie. 1968. Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Henry Glassie. 1999. Material Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jack Larkin. 2006. Where We Lived. Newtown, CT: The Taunton Press. Virginia and Lee McAlester. 1984. A Field Guide to American Houses. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Virginia and Lee McAlester. 1994. Great American Houses and their Architectural Styles. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers. Peter T. Mallary. 1984. Houses of New England. New York: Thames and Hudson Inc. Ina and Lawrence Mansur. 1992. A Pictorial History of Bedford, Massachusetts. Barre, VT: Modern Printing Co., Inc. Michael Pollan. 1991. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. New York: Dell Publishing. Henry Lionel Wiliams and Ottalie K. Williams. 1962. A Guide to Old Americain Houses 1700-1900. Cranbury, NJ: A.S. Barnes and Company, Inc. Virginia Wharton. 1974. The Bedford Sampler. Bedford, MA: The Friends of the Bedford Free Public Library. Tax Valuations. Series 1 Tax Lists: Subseries A Invoices, Polls & Estates and Apportionments: B. 3 Invoices, Polls & Estates and Apportionments 1835-1861. Bedford Town Assessor’s Office. Bedford, Massachusetts. 1850. Federal Nonpopulation Census Schedules. www.geneology.com. William Parker & George Parker. 1880-1900 US Federal Census.