Reflections on a True Native

Editor’s Note: Joan and Skip Sherman owned and operated Conway’s WBNC Radio beginning in1959, and in the first years lived upstairs in the rambling white farmhouse that housed the station on West Main Street. In 1962 Joan went shopping for a home away from their vocation, and eventually the family acquired and settled on the old Lead Mine Farm on Ward Hill Road in Madison. The move brought Perley Ward into their lives, and he left a lasting impression. The following story was compiled from a series of letters and recollections Joan put together over the years. It is both theirs and his, and that of many elderly natives who inhabit New Hampshire's remote farmhouses. --Ann Bennett

It seems there have always been Wards in Madison. These days Lead Mine Road is a little dirt thread that connects one end of the Silver Lake community, at the southern edge of Madison, with the other, but at the turn of the century when the Ward family and others farmed nearby, hay wagons, carts, buggies and sleighs bustled up and down that hilly route. And it wasn't in the woods. Fields and pastures stretched for almost a mile in every direction.

The Lead Mine was in operation then and ore was transported over the country roads by oxcart to be loaded on the train to Boston. Fifty or more people lived nearby, and supported a little church, a maple sugar operation, and a one room schoolhouse.

But the land was marginal and never turned a profit, and from the end of the Civil War on, people left steadily. Many just deserted their homes and cleared fields still full of granite boulders or “New England potatoes.” They left to go to work in the factories, and they left to head West in search of gold and more fertile land. There were those who preferred to stay however, and the Ward Family was among them.

Perley Ward was delivered on September 25, 1912, in the family farmhouse on Lead Mine Road, the sixth of seven sons born to Emma and Frank Grafton Ward, Sr. He lived out his years there, too, and by the early 1960s only Perley and his father Frank remained on Ward Hill. Frank spent his last years sitting in the parlor window of the old farmhouse, waving to passersby, and when he died, Perley took his place.

It was a circuitous route that brought our lives to intersect with Perley's, and the relationship took many years to develop. Perley did not give his friendship easily. This story is his, and about how our family came to settle at the Lead Mine Farm, just down the road from Perley. The intention is not to romanticize him – Perley was an odd duck. He never married, didn’t like to work all that much, and rarely washed. He was a rare individual, however, and if this tale seems old fashioned, perhaps it’s because time moved more slowly in sleepy backwaters like Lead Mine Road.

In 1962 I declared that I couldn’t live at the radio station full time, and needed a house somewhere else. Skip  agreed, and I set out in search. There were few realtors at the time, but I finally located one in Sandwich owned by Denley Emerson. Actually, I had first dreamed of another house in 1960, and Denley showed me the Lead Mine Farm then. They were asking $7,500–too much considering its condition–and I continued my search.

I looked in Tamworth and Jackson, at lake property, town property, and view property, but each time I came back to Madison. In 1962, I called Denley back and inquired about the farm. He said it was still for sale and that the price had dropped to $5,000. I snapped it up, and despite the fact that it took three banks, a first and second mortgage, and the entire family “humoring Mother,” in 1962 we became summer people.

In the early sixties, Frank Ward, Perley’s father, was still alive. He used to sit in the parlor window all the time, and we got used to waving to him, though I never spoke a word to Frank Ward.

In those days, Perley worked on the roads in Madison. Sometimes he drove a truck, but most of the time he pitched stones off the road after it was graded. Even then Perley lived with his father at the top of Ward Hill Road, as it’s called on the geodetical map. Perley had a car and I think they might have had a telephone at one time. Eventually the town and Perley had a parting, though, and as they say in these parts, he ‘got through.’ They took his car away and he just stayed home with old Frank.

When we purchased Lead Mine Farm it had been empty for eight years and there had never been central heat. It was several more before we had any installed. For five years we passed the Ward place on our tracks to and from The Farm, waving to Frank as he passed the summer days at the window, until we read the obituary on the radio. It seems he just keeled over and Perley found him.

Perley told me much later that in his last days his father loved to watch and feed the mice. I guess there wasn’t much going on outside the window, and not much inside either, so the mice became pets. Perley never complained, but after Frank died he bought two pounds of cheese and two dozen traps and caught them.

It was close to 10 years of being summer people before we really spoke to Perley. That fall, our daughter Carrie was a senior at Kennett, and she decided to live at the farm after Skip and I moved back to the radio station for the winter. Two wild barn cats kept her company, since there was no one else on the road except for Perley and Professor McNair. It got to be that Carrie and Perley became great friends. They both took walks and met each other on the road. I guess Perley felt he was looking out for her.

But it wasn’t until 1974 that we became fast friends with Perley. After two years of dickering, I finally persuaded Jed Stanley to do the final remodeling of The Farm so we could become year-round residents. He said he’d come in spring and put me off each week. He appeared at Thanksgiving with his man, Harold Dana, like Sanco Panza, to do the job.

It was cold of course, and they had to mix salt with the mortar to do the brick work for the foundation and the chimney. Skip said he’d commit murder if it didn’t draw, but the old contractors like an inside job for the winter, and they like to be warm, and the first thing they did is build the fireplace. Then they burned all the chips and sawdust from their work.

Perley spent the whole winter supervising the job. He came down every morning and watched all day. I don't know how Jed and Harold Dana stood it. I came down every other day to see what was going on, and Perley told me all the time that Jed and his men were wasting time eating peanut butter sandwiches. Perley also told me that the wood shed was too small, which has proven right. And Perley sold me the andirons his grandfather made for $10, and they are perfect.

The work was finally done in June and Skip and I moved in for good. It was almost another year before we really got to know Perley, though. In May he brought us mayflowers for ‘that gal,’ meaning Carrie. Then he brought me a bunch of mayflowers. When Carrie was home from college he took us to the spot in his field where they grow, but we could never find the good dark pink one as quickly as he could. All through the late spring, there was a bunch of mayflowers in the parlor window.

June arrived and Perley began to frequent our place. Skip was putting in a garden, and one day Perley asked him, “Where’s the hoe?” And so Perley began mowing the lawn and weeding the garden. When my parents came up, Perley helped put in their dock on Cook’s Pond. He never bathed and I don’t think he knew how to swim. Perley contended that sharks swam up rivers and streams and into Silver Lake to live in Cook’s Pond, so it wasn’t safe to swim there.

When the strawberries came in I picked quarts for shortcake and jam and Perley was down a lot to sample the fixings. He more than made up for it when the blueberries and blackberries came in, though, bringing as many as 20 quarts of each.

With fall arrived the time to lay in the winter supply of wood. In the past we’d always asked around and bought a cord and had it delivered. But that year Perley suggested that he cut and split some of the dead trees on the property, and so began endless discussions about how should the wood be cut for the cook stove, for the wood stove, the fireplace and the stove at the radio station. And then we discussed how to stack it. Did we want mostly maple, or Birch. or what? These things I left to Skip, and Skip tried to leave it to Perley.

Most of these discussions and conversations began with what Perley had seen out the window. He’d seen deer eating apples in his yard, or he'd seen rabbits, foxes, and other animals. Usually he’d say, “What I can’t figure out is…”, and of course he usually had it all figured out. The inevitable response was “Perley, would you like a piece of pie?” and he’d always say, “I don’t care.” And that meant he would.

Perley had become a part of our daily routine. In time the wood was cut, the stone walls cleared out, and when the snow arrived, Perley shoveled a path and took the ladder up to the roof to shovel it off. At Christmas we decorated the house like the Episcopal church with laurel roping and a 12-foot tree. Perley came down on Christmas morning to sample the eggnog. That's one day we all got drunk before noon and took a nap. He went home with springerles, sugared nuts, fruit cake, and then his niece came to take him to the family feast.

And so the year ran on until April when the sap began to rise. Perley had a few good trees and some old buckets. He never covered them and God knows how he boiled down the sap, but sure enough he arrived one day with some syrup, all full of floating things. Of course I had to sample it while he was there and poured it on some french toast, floating things and all. It tasted fine, and we came to prefer it to the fancy store bought kind.

Mayflowers followed maple syrup, another year had come around, and it was June again. Time for strawberry jam, and on a hot July 4th weekend I drove to Denmark and picked 18 pounds of berries. Only then did I discover I was short of jars, and the stores were out. Perley mentioned that his attic was full of his mother’s jars, and so after 12 years, he invited me to his house.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, Skip was at the radio station and Carrie was climbing Mt. Willard. For some reason I had thought Perley’s house would be empty, but it wasn’t. It was just full of stuff and nothing had been thrown away since his mother had died 21 years before. It had been eight years since Frank’s death, and that was the last time it had been cleaned.

First there was the wood shed, full of all sorts of horse and ox harnesses and lots of old tools. Another attached shed housed the well and hand pump and a hutch table in old red paint was covered with newspapers and a variety of junk lining the shelves. Inside the next door was the pantry, filled with cupboards of jars and tins. Perley showed me one jar and said, “This is goose grease my mother saved to mix with turpentine to put on her chest when she had a cold.”

Perley rummaged in boxes and tin cans and found some jars. Some were ones I’d given him with jam or jelly over the past year, and some had nails in them. There were hundreds of tins, and Perley showed me his mother’s flour barrel and bread board. He moved some things and opened the china cupboard, filled with good china and silver plate. The cupboard and its contents were left just the way it was when his mother died.

The door to the attic led off the pantry, and we went up to hunt for some more jars. There were lots of trunks and wooden boxes, and at least three boxes of jars. We picked them over and selected two dozen usable ones with good lids. Then we moved on to examine the rest of the attic.

There were parts of two spinning wheels, a box of Christmans ornaments, and a frame or hooking rugs. Perley’s mother was an accomplished rug maker, though only one of her rugs remained in the house, down in the parlor. In the corner was an old desk, plain and falling apart, full of books, mouse nests and dead mice. There was a book of poetry by Whittier inscribed by Perley’s grandmother as a Chrstmas gift and a New Hampshire history of the Civil War. There were three or four beds: a cannon ball type fixed with original rope and corn husk mattress, a painted cottage pine bedroom set, and some others not assembled. I guess the Ward boys slept up there while they were growing up.

Perley showed me all the family pictures and portraits that were carefully stored in an old red blanket chest. We looked at snapshots of old Frank drilling granite, and a boy with a yoke of oxen, and a fat grandmother sitting in the front yard with a baby in her lap, a grandchild on each side of her. Perley’s family looked like pictures of my mother’s family – good, proper middle-class people. I couldn’t help thinking how shocked they’d be to see what happened to the old homestead with all its dust, mice, and squalor. Perley gave me a small basket of his mother’s that had some letters and cards in it, a tin candle stick, and a dusty chromo in a nice frame.

At last we came down from the attic and went into the parlor with its horsehair Empire sofa, a collection of Victorian chairs, and a table with an old-fashioned radio on it. Newspapers were piled everywhere. Right in the middle was the remaining hooked rug, and it was a fine one – black with a red rose pattern. The accumulated dust was monumental, but Perley had just washed the windows. He loved to look out the windows.

Then Perley took me to see the ‘spare room’. The bed was made up with a nice quilt, and there were more clothes in the closet, including Perley’s best suit, along with mouse nests and moths. The house is a center chimney cape and there was a fireplace in the room. Perley said that it took 18 to 20 cords of wood to keep both fireplaces and the cook stove going for winter. There were toys in one closet and a stereopticon and slide. I didn’t ask to see it because it was so dusty, and I was tired by then, and still had 18 pounds of strawberries to put up.

Downstairs we passed the front hall closet which was full of farm tools for horse and oxen, including some ancient salve for the beasts. There were more tins, two of which were full of axle grease for the wagon. Leaning against the wall was an open violin case full of ice fishing equipment.

We ended up in the kitchen. The fireplace was bricked up with an old iron cook stove attached. Perley showed me the brick oven in the wall, which was full of more old tools. Every other square foot of space was covered with used dishes, except for a small space near the window. There was one room I didn’t see – Perley’s. It used to be his parents. I finally left after two hours with my gifts and jars.

I tried to tell Skip, Carrie, and my parents about my visit, but the experience was indescribable. I felt as if I’d been an anthropologist rather than a neighbor making a call to gather a few jelly jars.

The next day I told Sharon Ward, Perley’s niece by marriage, who cleans my house. Sharon recalled that Perley’s mother was “nasty neat,” but that she could feed the family of nine with one squirrel and a few potatoes. Sharon hadn’t been in the house since Frank died, but said that Frank had always kept it clean. I still couldn’t believe that I’d seen just eight years of dust, but Sharon said that Perley had always been like that. Once, when he was grown, his mother told him to take a bath or move out. Perley went to live with an uncle and moved back after his mother died.

(To be continued)