Dead farms:
Powers, Thomas
But it was the uncertainty about what lay behind the visit Due to space limitations, John Garvey's regular column which caused most of the comparative coolness. Its raison dare was...
...When the barns falling in under the weight of ne- they work hard still...
...remain-speak of the stone crop...
...But no one wants to woods where fields once were, or at the lar...
...up...
...How the twisty, narrow roads of County of Ireland's most neglected and backward counties...
...auction meant one less farm...
...was falling down...
...No words were down Knock and its reputed miracles for half a century: why spoken...
...Not everyone in Ireland is comfortable with the devo- Paul 11...
...Agricultural experts refer to such operastone boat, pulled by oxen...
...If because they are no longer needed...
...Since it wanted the things money can buy-cars, soon as the first crop of peas came in, and doesn't produce money, but only "sub- freezers, weekends, snowmobiles, denthey kept it up all summer long...
...Hitting your fingers is Two might bring ten times as much now...
...I the next, so the old places are broken up...
...It is a prosperous hamlet in the middle of one people are expected...
...A box of books might cost a dol- by the first of June...
...A collapsing sill would granted, and did not put two and two pass on the farms from one generation to throw a wall out of line...
...The over the previous century, one section at milk can hammer, a short-handled affair things which were so cheap at auction 25 a time...
...You You can't walk up the hill...
...V ERMONt farmers-such as some of these stones is breathtaking...
...It least a dozen farms along Broad Brook the snow comes late in Vermont the must have taken a day or more to move Road between South Royalton and East ground may freeze down three feet and one of those big old stones and wrestle it Barnard...
...work and not everyone bothered to gather which were created with labor eventually A couple of weeks ago a young man in them...
...The rocky fields of New England walls for barns which have burned or How the builders of the wall got the are of course legend, but the farmers caved in beneath the snow or been dis- stones up I don't know, but it certainly speak of a literal crop...
...The bureau...
...A farm putting them up all at once in a day or so...
...hundred years ago on a rainy August night, fifteen local people DESMOND FISHER claimed to have seen the apparition...
...Whole lifetimes so she might do her mending next to it on WE LIVE in an age rich in government were spent clearing land, hauling stones, cold August nights...
...see them at the base of old foundation You've got to scramble up on all fours...
...nation for the new crop of stone, turned wise disposed of by time and neglect When I was ten or twelve there were at up whenever a field is plowed, is frost...
...The construction was post and with a heavy head...
...Was the Pope coming mainly to visit is not appearing in this special issue devoted to John Knock...
...no one needed a barn of nuts...
...John, appeared-all of them as solid, three- Ireland...
...The ida, color televisions, college educabut finished up last year's canned peas tools and animals would accumulate tions, chainsaws-and while the "marand corn while this year's were being put slowly, like the buildings and stone walls ginal" farm offered a fine life compared...
...road I bought a bag of chicken grit for a ford the houses they grew up in move to About half the barn remains but another quarter, thinking it would be perfect for a trailers, which are not much loved by the big section is already beyond repair...
...Some sistence," no one with any sense would tal work, two-week vacations to Florfamilies never ate fresh vegetables at all, ever invest money to create one...
...The average might have stones were dragged to the side of the but work and you had to put the things been a couple of thousand dollars a year...
...except hasten the demise of the "margi- prided themselves in leaving to their It never quite occurred to me that every nal" farm...
...The crisis there, with its religious connota- dations for the sick, offices and a major basilica which can tions, is the most significant reality in Ireland today...
...year but somehow it never got set up and know, was ever intended to do anything The men who did the work must have it is still in the attic...
...Of several minds: Thomas P owers around fields, flanking cattle runs, in sheep folds and the like...
...First they have to be dried so the came to be worth money, but the people East Barnard showed me around his famsticky husks can be removed...
...I know A LOST INHERITANCE OF ACCUMULATED LABORS of one wall which runs right up a side hill so steep that in effect it forms a wall 60 feet high, the stones piled on top of each other and only leaning against the hill...
...At the height of blackberry season, and fields...
...it's too steep...
...But the figures were so real play them up now...
...In a long evening Of course no one wants to farm them...
...They THOMAS POWERS 14 September 1979: 487...
...Picking stone is a mantled for their weathered siding, must have required a heavy investment of seasonal chore...
...and it had been done right, but even so it extremely easy to do...
...ily's barn...
...These roads and up in the old pastures with five ing up to brush, and then forest, and the people have always worked hard and gallon galvanized buckets...
...This has the effect of literally into place...
...The old farm would let in the water and a pocket of rot When I was a child I took the farms for families which remain can't afford to would set in...
...My mother once bought a small, work the land, for the most part...
...field on a heavy wooden sled called a somewhere...
...It was just too much of cracking you might accumulate a quart You might almost say that their value in work to maintain...
...Then they who did the labor never saw the money...
...Marianism to entice him to Ireland for political or institutional Today, Knock is a thriving center...
...point to crack it open neatly so you can worth $4,000 at the end of World War It had obviously been a mammoth job, extract the meat...
...Cows provided the In the old days-which means more or bulldozer to the final coat of paint...
...At the time of the First World must be cracked open, and the only way By the time the market for Vermont War, according to his grandfather, it had to crack open a butternut is to set the farms as summer places began to quicken been one of the biggest barns in the valround end into a pocket in a rock and hit in the early 1960s, the old farm families, ley, a huge U-shaped complex put up the pointed end with a hammer...
...The marginal farmers them- children something of permanent value...
...productivity as land...
...In the really The amount of work which went into tions as "marginal" or "subsistence" old days-which means more or less up one of the old Vermont farms is hum- farms, and the families that worked them until the turn of the century-the stones bling...
...tract house from first arrival of the logging and sugaring...
...splinter, more water and snow would loved the auctions...
...The roof rafways to hold the nut but in the end you now-$100 for an ox yoke, $50 each for ters were logs sawed on two sides, each always come back to holding it, gingerly oak kitchen chairs, $150 for a butternut about 30 feet long, Someone, a long time and reluctantly, with your fingers...
...But it was the uncertainty about what lay behind the visit Due to space limitations, John Garvey's regular column which caused most of the comparative coolness...
...There is room for only 500 could the Pope come to the country without making a signifi- visitors in the houses of the village itself-there is no hotelcant intervention in the crisis...
...She will ever put them back together again...
...Women started canning as cumulated labor, not money...
...The conventional expla- prized by interior decorators, or other- time and labor...
...A farm of a hundred and fifty acres got along by keeping chickens and pigs, were then used to build wall...
...Everything was extremely left lying in May will be lost in the grass at the stone walls which run through the cheap...
...Land which once sold for $5 an ago, must have spent an entire winter shell of a butternut is extremely hard, and acre now brings $300-400 in large par- cutting the beams to measure, and then it takes a considerable blow right on the cels, and $1000 in small parcels...
...A leak in the roof worth...
...In a bright light, on the south gable of the little church, the virgin Mary, flanked by St...
...She oiled it every programs, but none, so far as I making barns and pasture and gardens...
...It's almost more trouble than it's money is in inverse proportion to their that size anymore...
...Its raison dare was not obvious...
...All round the original purposes...
...the regrettable thing blackberries were done the butternuts glect and snow...
...chapel, where statues represent the apparition, are the magniAnd always the burning question-would the Pope visit ficent new buildings of the shrine-rest homes and accommoNorthern Ireland...
...How hold a 15,000 congregation...
...On the day of the Pope's None of this uncertainty and doubt has affected the village expected visit, Sunday, September 30, at least one million of Knock itself...
...of Independence, askew in its frame, for land...
...Building a barn foundation with only eight or ten milk cows...
...At least squeezing the stone up to the surface, might have taken a month or six weeks, two were farmed entirely with horses, which is why picking stone is never which is longer than it takes to build a and a couple of the others used horses for done...
...is that the land was abandoned when the began to fall, but butternuts take a lot of It is an odd fact that the old farms old style of farming came to an end...
...Were the bishops using the Pope's known that some of the old women tried to touch them...
...The slingshot (which it wasn't), and an en- summer people who can afford the young man explained how they planned graving of the signing of the Declaration houses...
...tional aspects of the shrine...
...A "subsis- selves may bitterly regret the prices they They can hardly have imagined it would tence" or "marginal" farm is an organic took 25 years ago, but I doubt many of all be simply thrown away...
...Once the tools and animals to that of the peasants of India, say, it beginning about the middle of August, were dispersed, a process of irreversible looked pretty thin next to the California you would see women out along the decay would begin, with the fields grow- suburbs of television sitcoms...
...the, brush growing up in the fields which reGothic parlor stove with a great many farms are being broken up, and no one main, it is hard not to marvel at the sheer little doors and windows for $15...
...The size of might have two miles of stone walls and occasionally goats and sheep, along Commonweal: 486 with the cows...
...At one just up the Middle-aged Vermonters who can't af- enter and the process would accelerate...
...Stone cash income on all of these farms, and it less up until the Second World War-the was used because it didn't cost anything wasn't much...
...Desmond Fisher is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Joseph and St...
...You may try twenty years ago bring astonishing prices beam, pegged at the joints...
...Nothing has happened to the to save the remainder...
...Most were small operations, mom...
...thing...
...Ideal is a for the most part, were long gone...
...human labor it took to build these farms dreamed of putting it in her sitting room, out of the virgin forest...
...Out walking in the woods you may come across a fourfoot-high wall in the middle of what appears to be nowhere, running right DEAD FARMS through a mature forest which hasn't been cut over in a hundred years...
...The Irish church has tried to play dimensional figures-for nearly two hours...
...siding would together when I went to the auctions...
...no message was given...
...It grows slowly and represents ac- them miss the life they escaped...
...Here, a Mayo will cope with the invasion will be a miracle in itself...
...it is still so productive that anything Looking at that great hulk of a barn, or fifty cents...
...and for 5,000 within a 25-mile radius...
Vol. 106 • September 1979 • No. 16
