Hi I'm Eric Ford for Made Here.

When Portland, Maine based filmmakers Katy Cecchetti and Kevin Corcoran first met, they realized they both shared a history and a love for a small New Hampshire town.

Strafford.

So they made a film about it.

Strafford: Portrait of a Town is exactly that.

Showcasing the individuals and places that make this small New England town what it is today and reflecting on its history in advance of the town's bicentennial celebration in 2020.

You can watch Strafford: Portrait of a Town and other great Made Here films streaming on vermontpublic.org and through the PBS app.

Enjoy the film and thanks for watching.

My name is Kenneth A. Berry.

Lifelong town resident, 70.

I'm not going to tell you how many years I'm standing in front of Austin Hall.

It was built 1833.

This served as the town and area high school for many years.

The Austin Cake Board of Trustees then donated this building to the Strafford Historical Society, who has struggled to keep paint on it ever since.

Hey, come on in.

Be nice to her.

More like, oh.

Or don't want to be careful not to turn off anything important.

Okay.

These are probably the original stairs.

Judging from the wear.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, this is our museum put together largely by our president, Joanne Brown.

And she and Nancy Hill have done a lot of work up here to arrange the display.

A lot of these things represent former businesses like, for instance, the the sign over here with the cows.

And Strafford was really pretty much of a cow town for a long time.

Carl Hill, who was also a postmaster and general store keeper, also had a dairy here.

What else do we have about Strafford businesses?

Mostly farm artifacts, instruments of farming designed for design, for handwork, most of it.

Milk separator.

Not like the one we had at my house when we had cows, but designed to do the same thing with one of the milk separators that had a crank on it.

Kind of like this.

And one of my jobs growing up on the farm was to turn that crank handle and make that butter.

Oh, let's see.

Parker Mountain Grange As you look around, you'll see a lot of references to Parker Mountain Grange.

The Grange was an agricultural based fraternity, well remembered by a lot of folks as something that did a community together.

And it originated in the late 1800s as a political force to protest how prices were being kept down by the railroad.

So this is exactly sure where this came from, but this is kind of nice that captures the spirit, the grain, the granary, spirit of of the Grangers.

And they're trying to look out and protect the farmers.

And when I was a custodian here, when I was 18, 19, 20 of age, the very few young people coming into the Grange by that time.

But the older citizens had quite a lot to say.

One night when I was here, Walton Stiles questioned the relevance of the Grange to things in general, a little undercutting of the organization that he was sitting in.

He said, I don't know.

I suppose the Grange rituals are beautiful in themselves as they are.

But I just wonder how much longer we're going to want to continue to do this.

What I'm going to be doing is tearing the hay in order to just relocate it so that it dries a little better.

And we anticipate baling hopefully on Wednesday.

So this is the tenor and I'm going to go and start cutting the hay.

My name's George Kitts.

I've lived here in Strafford for about 38 years.

We bought the farm in 1982 for a grand total of $102,000.

The realtor drove in and I was sitting in the front and Katie was in the back and he drove past the barn and right up into the field.

And I was just absolutely taken.

I reached between the door and the seat and I grabbed Katie's leg, which was directly behind me.

And I remember squeezing it and we were at the top of the hill overlooking the mountains, and it took us a full year to find financing.

I continued to be a sales representative in my time off.

I moved the barn sideways.

I cleared this field that was grown up and did all those things.

And on a very bad day, I called my boss and told her that I quit.

And upon quitting, we decided to go to straight agriculture.

In the past, there was a tremendous number of cattle in the Hampshire, and the cattle market was strong enough that you would make hay for cows and cattle.

Unfortunately, at this point, for the most part, dairies at least in this area, are gone and very few cattle remain.

Most of what we sell is actually for horses, and we refer to it more as pet food than as an agricultural product, which is quite sad, but that's who is capable of paying enough to make it worthwhile.

Also, we now post weddings about 20 a year and thank goodness for the weddings getting to be Amish in that you can't use to fill the barn with hay because yes, it's very good fields.

We used to have quite a farm, but this is pretty much the way it's always look minus two cows.

And the day he grew up, there was animals here, but he didn't like a lot of animals, so he found other things to do Want to go outside?

I guess so.

Im Jerry Styles, Mrs. James Styles and I came from Lexington, Massachusetts.

How old am I?

What year is this?

2019.

Ah, 101.

Yeah, very good.

Fresh air and food up here.

So I guess I lasted.

My father had bought a place up here because he had friends.

They went hunting.

Yeah.

When my mother came up to stay a while and I came up to visit with them, my husband was living here with his mother.

I met him because he wanted to come down to our house.

Because with my brothers, there was always something going on.

And I was not going to stay here because she might the end of the world that he wanted to get married.

Yeah, we did.

Yeah, yeah.

And I stayed.

The barn was always too big because we were not farmers.

He had a few cows, we had some milk and sold the milk for a while.

Anyway, this was a barnyard yard, so it went all the way down to the Johnson Borough Road, just guessing 20 acres of open fields.

And then further on back, there used to be fields.

Sometime before my time it was a very good farm.

Plenty of fields.

it's grown up now.

and do you still like living in the town now?

Oh, yes.

I've always been a very good place to live.

Very good place to bring up children and wish them the best.

Yeah, there and here.

Well, actually, this is one of the loon nesting sites right here.

It's known as Blueberry Island, full of blueberries and loons.

Yep.

I've been practicing real estate for 15 years in town and have found myself kind of specializing right here in Strafford.

Because every transaction is personal here, whether it's, you know, me working on behalf of a family, a generational family that I've known and grown up with, or maybe my father has known and grown up with or my grandfather has known and grown up with.

You know, there's always some sort of personal connection.

Some of the houses, the property itself might not come to me offhand, but then when I show up, like, Oh, I grew up hanging out in this house.

This was, you know, my friends houses, you know, maybe sold in the late eighties or early nineties.

And all of a sudden it comes back like, oh my gosh, I remember having a picnic on that lawn.

Being in real estate, I sat at closing tables that people are selling their homes of 65 years, you know, homes that they built when they were 18, 19 years old.

When it comes time to sell a property like that, it is certainly bittersweet.

You know, I've sat at closing tables crying and it comes to a point where they want to be able to pass on their property, but also their history within those four walls.

They want a family that will take that in and appreciate that the town of Strafford itself, there's something so special about it.

And I can't pinpoint all the millions of reasons.

I'm licensed in the whole state.

I could go anywhere, but to me, the most special and sweetest transactions are right here.

As soon as there were people living here, they were meeting for worship in their homes.

But 1843, they built this meeting house.

But it was it was pretty, pretty basic.

The original meeting house would not have had stained glass windows.

Those were added in 1914.

There wouldn't have been any paintings of Jesus or Cross or any of that, no ornamentation of any kind.

I'm Reverend Carolyn Clark, a retired American Baptist pastor.

I've pastored all three churches here as associate pastor, and I was the pastor for the regular pastor at Crown Point.

Now I'm retired and I freelance for the Holy Spirit.

In college, I was a biology major, so history was my week.

But my interest in history is with people and spiritually what's happening.

Some of the histories I've written have been of churches, but they've been spiritual history.

These are the old offering boxes.

You can tell there wasn't a lot of offering.

The people that settled Strafford were of an independent spirit.

Obviously they are.

They probably wouldn't have come out here, but a part of that was a conviction.

They didn't quite agree with the Calvinist approach that that God had chosen some people for salvation, since you don't know the mind of God.

It was a free choice for every person to choose their relationship with God.

They didn't really call themselves free, well, Baptists until much, much later in their history.

But from Strafford, the Freewill Baptist Movement spread out all to the surrounding towns.

Then they then went to Canada and further south.

Some of the bells, I don't know about this one.

If you pulled it too much, you could flip it and then you'd have to go up and repair.

And some some of the many houses I've been in, there was much higher ceiling.

And as kids would pull the rope way down and grab a hold of it and ride it up and up.

But maybe I was littler when I rode it to be.

Weren't some bell for the audio that was pre-revolution that they were settling out here?

This was wild territory, so they had to depend on each other and they were independent spirited, but they knew the importance of working together.

Strafford is very, very unique in that way, that spiritual foundations are really very strong here.

It's such a giving, caring, loving community.

My name is Peter Fresca.

I'm a lieutenant with Strafford Fire Department, and we are in beautiful downtown Strafford, New Hampshire, right now.

And I'm Lieutenant Ben Bickford and has been served with the boiling fire station, having our pancake breakfast, which we do once a year, and doing this when a man after a year, we try to keep it on the weekend, you know.

So that's kind of what we're honing in on right at this hour is when we get back to the community.

What we do is we help people on wintertime fuel assistance, stuff like that.

Somebody come down for the work that needs to cook it in.

We used to go, Yeah, I've been here all my life, so 32 years now.

Yeah, yeah.

Third generation firefighter.

You know, I looked up to my dad, my grandfather and my older brothers.

They did it.

I wanted to do it, too.

And here I am.

I didn't want to go.

Not planning on leaving enough.

I'm Joanne Brown.

I'm president of the Strafford Historical Society.

And we're in the Bulik section of town.

And this building was moved from the corner, which Liz will tell you more about afterwards.

And that's where we are at school at all to make sure to look at things here specifically.

Yeah, this spring here was one of the original post offices signs on the Thorn store that was down on the Village originally where Uncle George's is now.

And this was given by his son and then his father and mother.

And of that cash register came from the original store.

Nancy Hill had gotten it so that these two things from that store down there, we used to know every car that went by your house, you know, you'd be out working in your front yard or something, you know, every car you'd wave to everybody.

And that was like when you folks were small, it was still that size town.

But it's it's doubled in size probably since you were born.

It's grown a lot because when I came here from well, there was one two houses from this corner over to the school.

There was a school.

As long as we can keep a community here and it doesn't end up being too many subdivisions, you know, it's I think trying to keep the historical society going or some of these things are trying to really do up the bicentennial.

We want to keep Strafford as a community and not just a place where there are a bunch of houses where people can express, you know, and that's the challenge right now.

And things hopefully we can.

The town flag was made during the sesquicentennial 150th, but maybe you'd like to see the town back.

Absolutely.

Okay, let me.

Let me open it up.

So the 1732 was somebody's suggestion of the first settlement?

Not sure, because Strafford was part of Barrington.

Barrington was split off in 1722.

So apparently it took them 20 years.

And then of course, in 1820 we split for Barrington so that the dates don't necessarily line up with other things you'd be looking for, but that's the origin of them.

And then you've got to see that settlement settled.

1732 three of the different parts of town they forgot over the mountain, which everybody always does.

So Lake Center, Stratford Crown Point, the lake and the dam where the gate houses that were still there at the time of the sesquicentennial.

And we're very proud of we're very proud of all of it.

And you can take a picture.

It was a meeting place like the Grange is now, where all kinds of groups used it.

So the Civil War veterans used it.

There were selectmen's meetings up here and funny little town meetings up here.

They showed movies up here.

More recently, we had the pool day.

I mean, it's been it's been everything because it was a public space that people could rent and use.

So the you know, the building's been through a lot so it's a nice thing here is just collections of various peoples, things that they love.

They don't realize what they have and it's a good collection.

So that's odds and ends here.

You're not going to find anywhere else.

My pet peeve is people just throwing things where they'll come and ask, you know, what can we do with this?

What can we do?

This is my family member died and we don't want their things and they will toss it.

And so many years you could go to the dump and find their things and do something with them.

Now it's all recycling.

You can't get it.

So it's gone.

It's gone.

But I don't know if I'll get a good shot of that.

And that's an ebony jewel wing, which right now to you.

I'm Scott Young.

And today we're at the Ising Glass River Conservation Reserve, which you'll hear called the I.R.S.

are short.

And we're going to take a walk and show you what this wonderful property is about.

You guys burn it all.

No.

Oh, there's good burning down here.

We got a real variety habitat we're starting right now with that kind of an overgrown old apple orchard slash field habitat will kind of define what birds to expect in an area.

Picking up on their vocalizations is going to tell you what to be looking for specifically, some of the species.

Species.

So that's called picking.

Sometimes if you pick, it'll drop birds in there, curious as to what the sound is and what it represents.

And you might you might get a better view of the bird.

Yeah.

In this case, this is a cat bird in here.

One of the mimics ladies to Mockingbird birds.

They pick up pieces of the birds songs and sing them back.

So it's kind of fun.

I spent my summers in a camp in Michigan that my grandparents owned, and she was a gardener, so she liked to walk in the woods and we go look for red headed woodpeckers and purple martins.

And she used to name the plants, and that's basically how I got my start.

So and maintain that interest.

It was early influence.

Yeah.

Otherwise I was like a suburban kid, you know, that's a bit tricky in Simplex.

I know it doesn't mean anything.

I'm into this small, weird stuff.

Yeah, it's very uncommon.

Yeah.

In New Hampshire, about 70% of native plant species are threatened or endangered.

It's that high.

But most people aren't aware of that.

You know, it's just something that's kind of slipping away.

As a botanist, I'm noticing a lot of our rare plants are really being hammered by the current conditions, but there's always something to adjust for, you know?

I mean, it's always been changing.

Yeah, it's not a static thing.

A couple of times a week I go hiking in Strafford.

There's all sorts of options in this town because we're almost 27% conserved one way.

So easements on private properties are outright purchase.

I mean, in this case, we've got floating peat mats in a beaver pond, and so there's certain species that are attracted to that.

The birds you'd find here would be king birds and tree swallows those species that are and been in fairly rapid decline.

So it's it's good.

This is this is protected, it's intact, it's functioning normally and it's trajectory is to continue.

That's a good trajectory of the bird in the background.

There.

Bluejay I see people walking, dogs sometimes jogging, you know, a lot of just general hikers.

I'd like to see people using the properties more than I do.

I just may not be fashionable these days.

And of course, people have busy lives and with the Internet and everything, I think everybody's indoors plugged in.

Mostly, I'd say today people are not real connected to the ecosystems around them and it's just something people have gotten away from.

We have two species.

This is the big hazelnut and that's to be just a cute you know, you hardly ever get to eat these because all the other animals know about them.

So you got to be fast.

It's pretty cute and it really fuzzy, too.

There's a lot there's a good crop of them this year.

My interests are a little bit different.

The creepy crawly things, the small, seemingly insignificant plants.

So I can I can be anywhere in any woods and and be entertained, you know.

And maybe that's part of that mindset.

I don't know.

Yeah.

You we came here at 8:00 in the morning today and we had 550 bales we had to unload and put into the second story hayloft up there, each trailer that's 125.

We usually have one guy down in the trailer and he'll bring the hay bales it put them on the elevator, it goes up and then there's someone on the second story and they're like the middle man.

It's we have bales coming up probably every 15 to 30 seconds on average.

So it's a very fast process.

You really can't mess up or you'll get a couple of bales behind.

And while that's no fun, that this field right here probably will have like 1200 bales of it, I would say probably have another 700 left, six, 700 left here.

Oh, all right.

It's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun.

It's very rewarding.

And physically it's great for your body to write something down or hard to say, I wouldn't doing this to do it.

I mean, yeah, I know you're all cows.

You the issues if you guys want to take a look here, this right here is where we stack the hay.

You guys want to come on over?

It's always like this.

You always hear the birds chirping.

It's kind of cool.

Yeah, relaxing in a way.

My name is Stephen Sullivan.

I'm 19 years old.

I go to college at Plymouth State University for meteorology and in the off time I come down to Northwood.

I spend the summers and I work at this awesome hay farm.

I work outside where I love it.

I love being outdoors.

It's where my heart is.

And and I get to smell like just the fresh air.

The fresh grass smells right after the hay fields get cut.

It's awesome.

It's really amazing working here.

And I plan to work here next year and the year after.

It's where I want to be.

We have completely cleaned up all the chaff from here around there and it's okay.

Yeah, that's stuck around.

The government is a chance for us.

So I'd like to tell you how we started the blueberry feel.

It was it was my husband Nathan's idea.

We saw in the Sunday paper and said, if you lived in New England and have acidic soil, you can raise blueberries.

And so we planted 1800 plants in our first field.

We didn't even have a tract.

And then my husband dug each hole and we were on the ground planting all those plants.

So there's 1800 in that first field.

And so would you believe we've been 42 years we've been in the blueberry field.

There's a lot of work to do, but it's enjoyable year outside, you know.

Oh, it's just ideal.

So obviously the easiest way to get the berries out of the field is to have someone else pick them for you and so I think that's primarily where the business model was always headed.

When the customers come up, this is all opened up and we greet them here and give them a bucket to pick blueberries in.

And and then we have another we call it the screen house over here.

And you can see there's belts hanging down in there.

The real pickers use belts and put their bucket on the bell and then they have both their hands free.

So they take great pride in exactly where and we keep the, you know, the food jams and jellies and whatever we have in.

Yeah, honey, why not?

And lamb, I think, is the most beautiful color.

It's so pretty, you know, and they are so good for you.

All that antioxidant when that first came out or was that good news for us?

Yeah, we had a big sign put up in front of the blueberries.

You all that antioxidant and how good they are.

You know, if you like being outdoors and you like to be around plants and things that are growing in nature, there couldn't be anything better.

I go up there in the evening and I laugh a lot, but I just sit there and thinking, Oh my goodness, I feel like I just see all this beauty chef and I realize I was born in 1940 and I've lived in town ever since then, except for going away to college briefly.

So I have a long background in the town.

I my memory goes back to a lot of people that have been long gone growing up with some of the old timers to use a, you know, to use a trite phrase of and, and realize during the course of my life the big changes that have taken place, people in town being active, flourishing at some point and then gradually being replaced through the years with others.

The natural progression of things are kind of caught me.

I've always had a yen for history that this is a very dark but I don't know.

That's my mother, Marjorie Berry.

But that's the John Berry place on Dynamite Corner, part of a very significant Stratford historical site.

Photography got to be an early interest, particularly buildings, scenes, roads, landscapes and the town.

I've always loved the town I really do.

I love the town and probably always will just photograph things.

And if my if our original house had not burned in 1977, I would have had some real gems, a lot of the old landmarks, that's one of the worst losses to me.

The mills around here were used for all of the usual milling purposes, first of all, for soaring lumber and lumber products.

You can see one corner of the building poking up down there beyond this, beyond these piles of wood material.

And this is the sad sight of Stratford's last water powered mill.

Well, this is the remains of the Wesley Avery mill, which he built and was running in the late fifties.

This is the the pen store.

This water comes all the way from the lily ponds that were the concrete here has the grooves which held planks and the water backed up into a small pond out that way.

And when West wanted to run a mill, he would raise the planks and allow water to get out.

He is reputed to have and dug the channel from here out to where they find.

I can't believe how much it's grown up here just in the last few years will be the community.

Maybe we had harvested some trees for my woodlot, for me, for woodlot.

We would cut those a year before they would be drying up and growing out.

Scotts making a selection for his snowmobiles.

He had already figured out how many boards of two by fours.

You.

Whatever.

Whatever he needed.

He seemed to be the good blogs, the ones that weren't going to be firewood.

We cut those down for that purpose of getting boards, making boards out of it to the community.

What do you know?

George was on that computer that gives him all these different options of what he wants to cut in the sawmill.

The Sawyer, the man who cuts up the log is the one who can make the money or lose the money just by having a good knowledge as to what's going to come out of that log.

Because we want to cut one by one over the two by four, you know, whatever it is.

And he can look at that log in the side what that should be.

All right.

Let me know if I'm walking.

Lumber was King Lumber.

Lumber was the resource, you know, back in in back in the 17 and 1800s, that was the cash crop.

And they would girdles girdle the trees to kill them.

Okay.

And just like this.

So say that's the tree that we want to cut down for lumber.

That big pine over there.

If they wanted to use it for lumber, they'd cut that down.

But if they only wanted to clear the land for tilling it and of course, they didn't have bulldozers or anything to take it.

So they would then girdle those trees and the younger ones down underneath it, they would put those under and start fires with them and clear the area that way.

And imagine clearing an area like this.

Unbelievable.

You you, you, you and you.

It's hard to imagine the change that happened in the land from European settlement and the clearing of the forest.

Broad scale.

One of the things that that happened was that every single last beaver was trapped out of New Hampshire.

By 1800, there wasn't a single beaver left.

They were reintroduced in our state.

So by the 1980s they were flooding the areas that hadn't been wetlands for almost 200 years.

So many other animals depend on the habitat that they create.

So you take beaver out of the picture and it really changes the conditions for everything else.

So as you can imagine, something like a moose loves a place like this, you know, or well, woodchuck Fred Scott, you know, I mean, that they go sell everything, meat goes to use a beaver pond or anything and it's like they wouldn't take advantage of us.

And so all these spots came back, all over the landscape, you know, and the animal numbers, it really like rebounded because of that.

So we were still missing some big elements.

Mind you, we are and some others are worrisome that are dropping out like the whippoorwill and you know, but so it's not perfect either.

But, you know, they're just everything's like kind of connected to everything else.

And if you stay long enough in one place, you can notice that.

Or you can read it in the textbook.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Here, if you look here, this is a what we call a snag.

A snag, a fancy term for a standing dead tree or a or a stubble even like this.

And when they when they die, you can see the woodpecker holes, which then other species of birds or mammals even will utilize as as a as a nesting site.

So in the manager of the forest, we, we look for trees like that that may become snags or already cavity trees.

They might be still alive.

Really important to to spot those and leave them in the woods, even if some people think they look messy.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

Because what happens is that good for our environment.

That's right.

Let's see.

That's good.

So, you know, I'm looking through all of this.

The invasive plant situation does not look too bad, Scott.

You know, I know I keep pulling stuff here and there.

The section of forest probably originated from a field that was let in the 1880s, maybe, or 1870s.

So some of the oldest trees are not even that old.

You know, it's important to have that mix.

And that's a piece of the ecology that's missing.

You know, in all our local forests that one has bitter, sweet, orange roots.

Mm hmm.

That one.

And this is a remnant apple tree.

You know, this Noel here was was a bit of an orchard, probably in back when this was all farmed.

I was really influenced by a trip I took with a group of foresters in 1983 to France.

We looked at some very old forests, 400 to 500 year old forests that had been managed all that time.

The foresters there were thinking in very long terms, like centuries, our forestry traditions are fairly short.

And so to to see that it was just good acknowledgment that that's possible here as well.

We're not necessarily used to seeing things long term, but that's our job, is to think, what will this be like in 100 years?

What are the results of my my actions today?

How that how is that going to affect things down the road?

Just pretty trees.

You know, there's there's a lot of large pines in here, some large oak trees.

There are older trees.

One of the older sections of the forest.

And we worked on this very carefully, took out a few trees that we had marked.

And this would have been a small light opening in the forest to provide growing space for young growth.

So you could see a little patch of young grass going in there and with the exception of some of the towns up in the White Mountains, were really up there in the list of conserved areas.

And certainly people will want to move here and live here and enjoy the quality of life here.

But but having a high percentage of of open lands, as we do today is is part of that quality of life.

So keeping that conservation going in our town is very important.

So hopefully that is.

What do you think, Scott?

I think everybody's plugged in, subdivide it and built upon.

There is no choice in the future and we know there's going to be plenty of those areas in New Hampshire that have relinquished that choice.

You know, I think, you know, I've seen some painful things happen, you know, in our town.

So hopefully you can have a little bit of an impact in guiding that to keep it natural.

Keep it keep it as a country town, not a not all developed and I, I am thinking of ours here at Christmas in Stratford.

I belong to the Polish Community Club.

Here we are selling homemade sandwiches, soups, pastries, everything.

We have a lot of talent in this town and a lot of wonderful people.

So enjoy.

And and if you ever want to come, it's always the first weekend in December and you go all over Stratford.

It's so much fun to do with your friends and family.

I'm Mary Hoyt.

I am the president of Christmas in Stratford.

We have a craft fair that's town wide, so we have about 26 houses and three venues with multiple crafters.

It's a big group effort trying to get everything done so that we can put on a good show for everybody.

Christmas in Stratford has gotten very big.

Last year we had three articles written by a magazine, two different newspapers.

So we have become very, very popular.

It's a very cozy atmosphere that we have.

A lot of people served snacks while they're doing it.

Everybody's so happy and so friendly when they come.

You know, it takes a lot of time, but it's worth every bit of it because it's so much fun.

And we have young and old.

I mean, there are people who have been doing it for, you know, for almost the 30 years, still doing it.

And then we have the new people coming in.

So there's something to it if people keep coming back to it year after year, and if people keep wanting to open up their houses and finding something that just speaks to you about a person, you know, that's to me when you're going to find something out of fairs, when you see something and it just remind you of a specific person and it's unique.

And that's what I think is the best thing about going to process.

I learned about it when I moved here, so we went two or three years, went out and went to different homes every year, and then I started getting crafty and started saying, okay, I got to do something around here, you know, in the wintertime especially.

And it just turned out, you know, that I started doing Christmas in Stratford and I haven't stopped since and I just Year-Round.

I'm I don't stop.

I keep doing it.

I'm addicted.

So in every year I try to do something new.

Well, my name is John Willette, and my wife Joanie and I have been in Christmas in Stratford for 12 years and it's been very good to us.

And when people come over, it's, you know, it's always fun to show off what you what you made.

And because I like what I do and a lot of people apparently seem to like it as well, produce mainly stoneware, pottery and raku and also sculpture.

That's where I make all my stuff down here, clay and bunch of things over there and the nice thing about having my studio here and everything is I can just anytime I feel like it, I just come down and start something that I can only go so long without either making pots or doing sculpture or something.

And sometimes, like, I'll get ideas in my head during my sleep.

In fact, a lot of ideas come in my sleep and it just almost kind of overwhelms me to the point where I just come down and just do it, you know?

Toad Houses.

Another thing I like doing, they're like for out in the garden, just like a toad can go in and live in there.

Anything more?

There's this one here, and this one here is a Rapunzel toad house.

Where there's a toad.

She can see this one here is a real beer.

And this thing has been sitting here since 2014, waiting for the right glaze.

And it's one of my whale pots I never let myself get attached to anything until it comes out of the high fire.

Until it's out of the fire and it's in it's completely done.

I mean, there's a little bit of a chance in the firing.

Sometimes you'll have something like this over here where it was raccoon that I really liked a lot and came out of the raccoon and just cracked right all the way up.

You can see how it cracked.

So that would never get sold or or given away.

But I haven't brought myself to smash it up yet.

And they'll sit for a while and eventually I'll smash them up with the hammer because I don't want I don't want stuff that's not good out there in the public.

And I want my good stuff out there.

Even when I was teaching school, I would, you know, I'd still come back here.

And it's kind of a great way to do art because I'm not doing it to make a living.

I make the stuff and it's nice.

People come by and buy it.

That gives me a real thrill that somebody is willing to pay me for something I made and created and and I like people to have my work.

So that's it's that to well I'm pretty Dolan and this is my lovely wife Linda Dolan and Linda and I have been doing our show for like 54 years together.

That's why we're stop number three.

There were only three people the first four years, so we've enjoyed its time.

I mean, of course, we live out here in the middle of no place.

And then the only person I ever converse with is my wife.

And then the next thing you know, you're conversing with thousands of people and you go, Yeah.

So what I do is primarily do duck decoys and that type of thing.

These are decorative pieces.

They all go in the water for the most part, and and they're fairly expensive.

This is a replica of a piece that sold two or three years ago at Sotheby's for 1000000 to $1200000.

That's a little discretionary income for something to say that would look nice on a show.

So we have a very eclectic operation because Fred has all of his fine art over here.

And I have a fine IRA for Fauquier.

If nothing else.

So it's eclectic, like potpourri, well-crafted, well-crafted ornaments, you know, just things from around the property.

One thing I was going to ask was sort of how you got started doing this kind of work in particular.

Yeah, that I get asked that a lot and that's a tough question for me to answer.

I had I had a son that was killed and he was killed in an accident, right?

Right up here and at a top of Parker Mountain.

And I really had a hard time, of course.

Right.

You're going to have a hard time.

And so I knew that I needed to do something with my hands to get my mind off of, you know, the place.

It wasn't very good.

So anyway, I started.

I started with a sheet rock knife in a and a block of pine and the first décor I still have it and you know, so it was like a hobby and I was working and then, you know, it was very therapeutic.

And then it became basically an addiction and I quit my job.

And here you are.

That's that's the story.

So that's but that's how I started this sad stock, but probably saved my life, you know, really.

And I couldn't be anywhere else now.

I mean, it's just it's just so quiet.

It's nice, it's peaceful, you know, like I said, it's not for everybody, but I'm ruined.

You know, I've got to not.

Not fit for society any longer.

My friend who went to prison in Florida says that's when his known, for one thing, misery until sometime in March.

It goes away like a thief in the night.

This is Evans Mountain Road.

The house itself dates from 1977.

It's it's a replacement for a the one that burned.

And this is where we spend most of our time this is where I do my writing and my thinking and I'm gathering together materials for a book or at least a manuscript.

And whatever I've got will go to historical society when I get done with it.

The loose stuff is what I work with the most.

A lot of it is Old Town reports and it's amazing what you can find in these things.

You know, from year to year you'd think, Oh, how dull, how boring.

Well, yeah, I could say that, but you don't start it on report, you don't find out these things that kind of lend a little weight to the characters.

And it's fortunate because I can, you know, I snuggle time with a bedside lamp on and and find out things through them.

This is where I get mostly pictures.

If I want something, I've got to hunt over hundreds, maybe of pictures.

I have even photographed the people that plow the roads.

But these are these guys plowed the roads up here a number of years ago, probably 12, 12, 14 years ago.

The child was a man all on his own.

And this one is of my dad.

Halle Berry's up on top of the load of hay and there's yours truly down at the bottom watching.

I've been snapping pictures since childhood, some of the pictures of people that I talk to, just like, oh, snap, snap, snap.

Those folks are gone.

Yeah, well, so Jim Styles and Jim was the husband of Marjorie Styles who just passed away.

I wish I'd been smart enough to take more pictures.

Every time I turn around, I've lost somebody.

Now, this is school number ten, which is where I started off the first three grades.

This was right about the time I was going there.

In fact, I might be in that picture, a couple of school textbooks that were actually used in our our school here, even as a colored map.

Not too shabby for 1853.

Yeah, that's pretty decent for 1853.

So it's a wide variety of topics, but it's not enough.

I've become forcibly made aware that what I know is really very little.

I didn't really start collecting stuff together until I got active in the Historical Society about the Historical Society.

I'm the last founder of it Still Alive.

Right after the town sesquicentennial in 1970, several of us got together Roger Leighton and Ernest Brown as Tim Brown.

Roger is here.

He was president of our society for quite a number of years, and boy, did we miss him.

Roger deserves a tremendous amount of credit.

He was always there to steer us straight when you know, if we got something wrong and boy, I could I could sure use Roger for that as a proof.

Read my stuff.

The Historical Society has it was a lot more numerous than it is now.

A lot of our members have died and we haven't replaced them with younger people.

And this may be the 200th anniversary, but the Historical Society is kind of at a crisis point now.

I mean, look at how old I am and Joanne and Liz and some of the other folks.

And we need people to replace us and we don't have them.

My family came to it was known as Bowling Strafford and we moved in the day after Christmas in 1970.

And a big part of my father's job as the Strafford County Forester was teaching people how to appreciate the land that they had and get the most out of their land and enjoy it.

And this is our maple sugaring season.

This is one of the great ways that we spend time with family and friends.

Every sunny Saturday, people come over and join us and you start to smell spring.

You start to hear the different birds in and setting up their families.

This is a special time of year, yet spring is also must see.

So I live on a dare.

It is money.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So we're going to work with our buckets here.

The nice sturdy food grade bucket.

We'll take these out.

And what we're going to do is, is tapestry tap two trees for these buckets, and then I'll collect some sap to I don't know if we'll see anything right now, but link the hole and stuff like that.

You see there's a much older tap hole right there where these roots would be supplying more of the branching.

And the roots correspond to where you really get a good flow of soil, pull it out, pull out something and bring okay, put that in.

And if the milk strong enough, fine tapping in, that's it.

They're like, sounds hollow for a moment.

And then stocks like with a thud.

Okay, ready?

Nectar of the gods.

It is good.

This is my family home.

Since 1977, when I was in my teens, I think I was more interested in having a license and driving back into town with my friends, but now I'm more and more connected to it.

I'm very, very content to just be out here.

Like to introduce you to my wife, Kristen Black.

Hi.

This is pretty much the setup that we do with the steam coming out of the open, open pan to boil down the sap to get it into the finished product, which is we kill maple sirup.

Ever since my dad came New Hampshire, he always spent this time of the year tapping trees and blowing into sirup.

And for about 45 years or more, we've done it with the same two other families.

Really, to the foremost advocate of doing this whole thing was Adam said, I know it was quite a volatile personality in the community because he promoted this not only for us, but he promoted it and the whole community.

He was so excited about the coming of the season.

It was annoying as.

Hell going, I like Jesus Christ, we're going to get here, you know?

So it's good we know how to do this.

No, but no.

We had to be reminded and it wasn't it was annoying, but it was also, you know, this it was also wonderful.

So then because actually in our hearts we were in agreement.

Well, I hope that we can protect the environment enough to protect the great thing that we do here in New Hampshire and around the world.

We were tapping almost a month earlier.

We used to everybody is yet I don't know if you want an indicator of where the climate is going.

This is a very good indicator of tourism are starting to pump earlier than they ever did.

You know, there are climatologists saying that New Hampshire will not be make making maple sirup by the end of the century.

So my grandchildren, if we sell on the farm, we'll be making maple sirup because that will help us pump from trees like we are.

But it's like that little thing that people say, Oh, that's the basic idea.

And let me boil it inside.

I've been doing this now since about 1982.

There's nothing to the process of making sure other than reducing it from about 35 gallons to one gallon.

So you can do it at home.

You can do it.

People do it on a grill.

But this is called an arch and evaporator.

Just a little bit more.

But that's it.

That's the whole process is amazingly boring, but it does produce wonderful stuff.

Obviously, kids like it.

Henry, where's your spoon?

Where's your spoon?

That's been served.

There's that's what makes it easy because they like that.

Yes.

It's really fun.

And one topping as you're getting the food to take on this project.

So Pine is actually the most preferred, it seems only with pine and hemlock.

They're softwood, they bark wicked hot.

And obviously you got to have the vented roof.

If not it sometimes it'll actually fill the room right with sheet.

If it's raining or snowing and you're on the inside of the sugar house, it's just it's it's really neat because you, you feel so protected and it's so nasty out there.

We're all just sitting here with this wonderful smell.

Yeah, well, we're in center stratford's bottom of Parker Mountain, and at the kids farm, and it is the first day of March 2020 second.

It's the second day.

Yeah.

All right, I'm off one day.

$20.

Yeah, my things are six.

I, like, totally changed.

It's it's really like a Stephen king wrote the script for the for the year 2020.

So many projects, particularly in the public sector, have slowed straight down because of COVID 19.

The bicentennial celebration was canceled until hopefully next year.

We had planned on having parade units will come in.

That was orchestrated by the fire department and the participation was limited to mostly fire vehicles.

They had some old cars there, which was they were good to see.

It was it was small scale, but people enjoyed it.

I would imagine that next year will see at least one much larger, more elaborate parade.

So the economy has slumped in some ways and picked up in others.

And I think it's going to be interesting what they say at the end of the year about it.

It's too bad that so many folks lost jobs, but I've been told fairly good authority that jobs are going to be lost anyway because of the automation.

And the big questions are how how are people going to get a living if if they can't work?

I mean, some people will say, well, they can find workers always jobs, but what kind of jobs are the jobs which allow people to have a secure, satisfactory set of living or families be able to plan for educating their youngsters?

Any of these other things that have been so important actually learn to drive on that truck.

The 1946 Dodge that used to go back and forth between Stratford and Boston every every night.

Where is this?

This.

That's the mill that used to be beside the road down here, built by Western Avery.

It's just a pile of old lumber.

Now, if you need help, captioning these later.

Let me know.

I 100% definitely will.

Stratford being a bedroom community, it's I think the shift to working at home is going to be very significant and it that may have the result of keeping stratford's population from shifting too much I'm thinking I mean they're talking about paying people to stay at home so much a month, although the so much a month is it doesn't seem enough to attract anybody to want to stay at home.

So I think this 2020 is the start of a lot of shifts and turnarounds in our society.

A photograph has to be pretty darned clear in order to be used in a book store would be a good one for you to scan because it was a town landmark for so many years.

It was a hangout for the kids from Austin Kurt Academy.

Notice the gas pumps we used to have three, three gas stations in town at 1.4, Ed Pash wrote a poem, a book about the little girl in this one.

You having your friends that.

Oh, I did.

Probably did.

Yeah.

Here's the little girl with her big pet.

I got fortunate I've got I got a lot of it stuffed to in order to pull things together with no that looks like the the house repair painting is looks like it's going to get accomplished.

I think I can return to my writing, which I have neglected this summer.

Fortunately, but it's still there and I actually have some new ideas to work in to it.

My dad, Halliburton Berry, bought the place in 1943.

I was here from sometime 1945, 1946 to 1971, when my folks sold a place to kind of downsize and get ready for old age.

It broke my heart to leave here.

But George and Katie cats are just the right people to have it.

This firm has an old and interesting history, very unique place.

My bedroom was.

There was a little square window beyond the dormer window.

And Victor Cavalier, who's an old time I used to used to live here.

He's he was caretaker here.

And he told us many things.

He said that lot of the farmers, after our loss, took in foster children to help work the place and a visitor coming here, standing in the yard, talking as we are now, would hear the children coughing up in those two rooms, possibly even the one where I was.

And that probably was not a happy story.

But most of the history of the place has been pretty much a happy one, as Kurt spent many, many an hour playing under the under the tree here with our little cars and trucks making our roads and stuff I remember once looking down from the window up there, telling my mom, it's too bad.

Look at how the ground is all bare around that tree, what we've been playing.

And she said, Don't you worry, the grass will grow back soon enough.

And so it did.

Well, here we are at the crest of a hill here, and this is the first probably false Hodgdon Cemetery up here at the top.

This where Aaron Foss and his family are resting.

It's a beautiful spot.

You can see why the fossils would like to be buried up here.

I mean, we're on the top of the world and that's where they are.

That's where their farm is down there.

It's it's a sublime place.

It certainly doesn't take much to inspire a person to poetry.

This this farm, it's it's just really something.

Bicentennial friends.

Hello.

Celebrating friends.

All right.

It is time to start the festivities in the recognition of important people in.

And we're going to enjoy some music and some poetry.

So I'd like to welcome you all to our bicentennial plus one to start things off.

I'm going to hand things over to Adam Blatt, who is going to be performing sense of our community.

Have you thought about your community today?

You view its problems in the same way, and when you're asked to help in town, do you give the same old ground?

Because it's not your job any way.

You've got more than you can do at your own.

You've got kids to raise and problems of your own.

They are those with the spare time.

And besides, you know, spare time, if it's done, it'll be done by someone advocate.

We don't live this life alone.

We don't do it on our own or we all need a place to be.

So if we all lend a hand and while in LA Land, let us have a sense of our community.

Is there trash out there for everyone to see?

Is your town is needed your own home?

Should the let us find ourselves today and we'll throw the trash away and we'll know our town is okay.

What have we done in the town where you live?

What have you done with the time you have to give?

Will you help it with a smile?

Oh, will you help it with a frown?

Tell me, what can you do for town?

It all starts with the first move to put you in an earth.

Really give a hand and your town will.

Sure.

What have you done in the town where you live?

What have you done?

With the time you have to give?

Will it help you with the smile?

Or will it help you with a frown?

Tell me, what can you do for your town?

We don't live this life alone.

We don't do it on our own.

Or we all alone need a place to be.

So if we all lend a hand, then wall and fire that let us have a sense of our community.

Let us have sense of our community.

Thank you very much.

Vermont Public partnering with local filmmakers to bring you stories made here for more visit vermontpublic.org