The barn fire wasn’t mentioned in his obituary, but it was included in hers. They lived on the family farm. A dairy farm. In North Monmouth, Maine. A call to the fire department came at 9:30pm on Saturday, August 8, 1970. According to an article in The Lewisport Daily Sun, the barn had measured 40 by 60 feet and usually contained 32 milking cows. Thankfully, the cows had been turned out to pasture just 20 minutes before the fire was…
He was assigned the rank of Musician in the U.S. Army when he enlisted from York County, Maine, during the Spanish American War. I asked Farmer Gary, who reads a lot of military-history books, if that meant he was a drummer. “Bugler, probably,” was his reply. That makes sense. From the start, I’ll confess to not (yet) finding a place for Augustus in our family tree. The more I dig around, though, the more it becomes clear his story is…
We moved around a lot when I was a kid. Frankly, I never got attached to any particular home or community. Not attached enough, anyway, to consider any of the houses a homestead. In these past several years as I’ve sifted through generations of family photos, I’ve seen my maternal grandmother’s handwriting referring to her parents’ New Haven house as a homestead. That was technically correct, as the Lombard Street property included a house, a barn, and an outbuilding or…