88-Year-Old Dairy Farmer Writes Memoir
Submitted by Editor on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 11:55am.
Steve Taylor
New England Correspondent
PLAINFIELD, N.H. — One early spring day about 1936 Albert K. “Abe” Read was driving a car to high school when his vehicle got stuck in the mud. A resourceful young man, he walked to a nearby farm to seek help.
Learning the farmer wasn’t home, he asked if he might borrow a pair of oxen he knew were housed in the barn and the farmer’s wife said it would be fine with her. Read yoked the oxen, they pulled his car out of the mud, he returned the team to their stalls and then he drove on to attend classes.
Stories like that are sprinkled through two spiral-bound memoirs that Read, 88 and a lifelong dairy farmer, compiled between August 2008 and January of this year at the urging of his daughter Joyce Read, an innkeeper and retired teacher.
“Joyce said that I should do it, so I sat down and set to work,” he says.
Practically every day across rural America people pass away without their stories and recollections of life being recorded, either in writing or on audio or video tape. The occasional memoir like Abe Read’s or an oral recording can become a family treasure and, often, a vital part of a community’s historical record.
The Read family was prominent in agriculture and public affairs in New Hampshire’s Connecticut Valley region for generations. Abe’s father and grandfather were farmers, cattle dealers, butchers and officeholders. His mother was the second woman elected to the New Hampshire state senate.
Abe Read’s youth was one of hard work on the farm and close attention to studies at school. At age 12 he bought a veal calf from a neighbor for $12 and got $18 for it when he shipped it to market a few days later, presaging lifelong skill at appraising value and making money on livestock.
In his early 20s he and his wife Kitty wrangled a bank loan and bought a farm for $4,000, which they paid off in just two and a half years. Later they would buy a larger hill farm, then a showplace river valley farm, all the while developing a prize line of Ayrshire cattle and, later, registered Holsteins.
Read chronicles these phases of the couple’s lives, along with those of their five children and serves up many fascinating anecdotes about farm life, weather events, hired hands, hunting, interesting local characters and the good times and the bad. Throughout his work are old photographs from family archives that add greatly to the narrative.
About 60 copies of the two-volume memoir were printed and all but two or three of each have been given away to relatives and friends. Read keeps getting requests for his work, and he’s considering a second printing. He says he’s always thinking of interesting subjects that didn’t get included, so if the spirit moves him he might do a third volume sometime.
Interestingly, a first cousin of Read who grew up on another farm in Plainfield also wrote a self-published memoir. The late Steven King in adult life was a prominent research scientist and administrator for the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. The early chapters of his book describe farm life before electricity and paved roads and such subjects as how the family used to barter eggs and potatoes for groceries at a market in the next town.
Prof. Judith Moyer, a historian at the University of New Hampshire, wishes more people with lifelong involvement in agriculture and farm life would do what Abe Read has done. Moyer has conducted and recorded interviews with many individuals on the social changes that swept rural New England from the 1930s on as part of her academic research.
“In general, not many people sit down and do a memoir like Mr. Read has done. It would be wonderful if there were more of this kind of record,” she says.
Steve TaylorNew England Correspondent
PLAINFIELD, N.H. — One early spring day about 1936 Albert K. “Abe” Read was driving a car to high school when his vehicle got stuck in the mud. A resourceful young man, he walked to a nearby farm to seek help.
Learning the farmer wasn’t home, he asked if he might borrow a pair of oxen he knew were housed in the barn and the farmer’s wife said it would be fine with her. Read yoked the oxen, they pulled his car out of the mud, he returned the team to their stalls and then he drove on to attend classes.
Stories like that are sprinkled through two spiral-bound memoirs that Read, 88 and a lifelong dairy farmer, compiled between August 2008 and January of this year at the urging of his daughter Joyce Read, an innkeeper and retired teacher.
“Joyce said that I should do it, so I sat down and set to work,” he says.
Practically every day across rural America people pass away without their stories and recollections of life being recorded, either in writing or on audio or video tape. The occasional memoir like Abe Read’s or an oral recording can become a family treasure and, often, a vital part of a community’s historical record.
The Read family was prominent in agriculture and public affairs in New Hampshire’s Connecticut Valley region for generations. Abe’s father and grandfather were farmers, cattle dealers, butchers and officeholders. His mother was the second woman elected to the New Hampshire state senate.
Abe Read’s youth was one of hard work on the farm and close attention to studies at school. At age 12 he bought a veal calf from a neighbor for $12 and got $18 for it when he shipped it to market a few days later, presaging lifelong skill at appraising value and making money on livestock.
In his early 20s he and his wife Kitty wrangled a bank loan and bought a farm for $4,000, which they paid off in just two and a half years. Later they would buy a larger hill farm, then a showplace river valley farm, all the while developing a prize line of Ayrshire cattle and, later, registered Holsteins.
Read chronicles these phases of the couple’s lives, along with those of their five children and serves up many fascinating anecdotes about farm life, weather events, hired hands, hunting, interesting local characters and the good times and the bad. Throughout his work are old photographs from family archives that add greatly to the narrative.
About 60 copies of the two-volume memoir were printed and all but two or three of each have been given away to relatives and friends. Read keeps getting requests for his work, and he’s considering a second printing. He says he’s always thinking of interesting subjects that didn’t get included, so if the spirit moves him he might do a third volume sometime.
Interestingly, a first cousin of Read who grew up on another farm in Plainfield also wrote a self-published memoir. The late Steven King in adult life was a prominent research scientist and administrator for the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. The early chapters of his book describe farm life before electricity and paved roads and such subjects as how the family used to barter eggs and potatoes for groceries at a market in the next town.
Prof. Judith Moyer, a historian at the University of New Hampshire, wishes more people with lifelong involvement in agriculture and farm life would do what Abe Read has done. Moyer has conducted and recorded interviews with many individuals on the social changes that swept rural New England from the 1930s on as part of her academic research.
“In general, not many people sit down and do a memoir like Mr. Read has done. It would be wonderful if there were more of this kind of record,” she says.
