A couple of days ago, my son Gabe and I went down the road to a "cut our own Christmas tree" farm. Being on our road, we have passed this farm many times, but we've never seen the owners. A couple of months ago they must have done a renovation on the house because I took a free used and very huge bay window from the roadside for a greenhouse plan I have. The farm consists of some barns that are in the midst of collapsing next to a house constructed within the past couple of decades. The "farm" is actually a large sub-divided piece from the original farm across the road, and only the 19th century farmhouse remains of that. Brooks Mills met us at the door, and it seems after some neighborly conversation that he, like myself, is a New York transplant to Maine having come here many decades ago from Mount Kisco in Westcester. What was even more surprising was that as a young man he had spent some time in Warwick working on a farm. he had a hard time remembering the name of the doctor that had owned the farm but eventually came up with the name Pfeiffer. I have never heard of a doctor with that name in Warwick but maybe someone has? It seems that Pfeiffer was then experimenting with many new farming techniques; he may have been dabbling in hydroponics at this time when it would have been new to agriculture.
A chance meeting with someone up here in Maine who had spent time in Warwick has not been unusual to my experience. The broker who sold me my house had went to Newburgh Free Academy in the early 70s when her father was stationed in the military near there, possibly Steward Air Force Base. She remembered apple picking in Warwick. The guy who hauled away some junk left on my property by previous owners had also lived in Newburgh and was familar with Warwick. These connections still amaze me as I have lived all over the place and often meet people who knew of this little town that I always thought when growing up was so remote from the rest of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment