Weir Meadow (1954-Present)
This chapter in Henry Kolm’s autobiography is intended to document
how we bought and helped protect Weir Meadow,
how we built our dream house here,
and what we learned of local history.
It is March 1954. Elizabeth and I have finished our respective graduate theses and are planning a summer tour of Europe on our new Triumph Tiger motorcycle, then find a farm or land in the Walden Pond area on which to build our dream house. Elizabeth wants to do a quick search before our trip and contacts the local Strout real estate agent. He takes us to an old working farm on a main road in Bolton. Not what we want. We explain what we do want. Yes, he does have such a hide-away but can’t show it today. Gotta go buy some chickens. This place belongs to an old couple who don’t really want to sell, it seems. They turned away two or three prospective buyers he had brought. If you really want to look, here’s how to get there; but I doubt you’ll find it in the dark. He didn’t sound at all hopeful this would result in a sale and wanted to get rid of us window-shoppers.
Buying Weir Meadow
It was dusk by the time we rode up the hill on our motorcycle. Rufus and Annie Warren were just finishing dinner. We said the Strout agent had sent us. Rufus nodded, told us to look over the place., and went back inside. When we came back, he invited us to join them for coffee and apple pie. They talked about everything except the object of our visit. They were old New Englanders of few words, and slow to warm up to strangers. But they did eventually warm up when they sensed our enthusiasm for the place. Rufus warned us that there was no electric power, just a 32 volt generator/battery set, and the power company would charge a bundle for setting six new poles. The well was down by the river and had never been tested. There was no bathroom, just an outhouse, and the woodshed roof leaks. Telephone? Forget it! How to not-sell a place. We feared that he had decided once again not to sell, but he was just giving us the acid test. We said we didn’t care to all the above nor did we ask the usual questions about taxes and schools and zoning bylaws and subdivision rights. It was love at first sight.
By the time we left, they had gone into a huddle and decided to ask ten thousand dollars for their 38 acres plus cabin and woodshed. We said we could only pay two thousand down and would have to get a mortgage for the rest, and would they be willing to take a mortgage. . Rufus gave a reply we always remembered: "I wouldn’t let ten thousand dollars stand between us." "So you would he take a mortgage?" we asked. Rufus just nodded. What he really meant to say is that he was willing to wait without any mortgage, we found out later. Annie Warren made us take home a whole apple pie. We clearly had passed muster.
.
We went back to the Strout agent’s house on route 117, and waited until midnight for him to return, somewhat inebriated from buying chickens. We told him we had a deal and asked him to take the place off the market. He wanted honest money. We signed a purchase agreement, and gave him a check for two hundred dollars. Our fate for the next half-century was sealed with a handshake that night, a night we always remembered and often smiled about.
We hired Harry French, a Waltham lawyer recommended by the Strout agent, borrowed the remaining eight thousand dollars from my parents, Elizabeth ’s mother and the Warrens (all of which we paid back with interest), and applied to Concord Cooperative bank for a mortgage to build our dream house, which we thought we could do for twelve thousand dollars. Then we bought a large mailbox at Sears Roebuck, painted our name on it, and set it up in our small attic apartment in Cambridge, waiting for our lawyer and the bank lawyer to finish the title search and other paperwork.
In July 1954 a major hurricane tore through the area. I forget its name. In Cambridge century-old trees were uprooted, sidewalks twisted into rubble, water mains broken, powerlines downed, cars and houses smashed, all major roads blocked to traffic, subway stations and transformer vaults flooded, a state of emergency declared. Worried about the elderly Warrens we made our way to Weir Meadow through pouring rain on our motorcycle, the only vehicle able to navigate through flooded roads and around fallen trees. We found them snug as can be, making tea on their bottled gas range and listening to the grim news on their 32 volt radio. They said "sounds pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as the one in 1947", during which their boathouse floated away. But they were sure that the river would flood the catch basin of their spring at the foot of the hill, and the water would have to be boiled for a long time. They were right. But that was the only impact of a hurricane that left many Bostonians powerless and homeless and car-less. We joined them for tea and went home to a destroyed civilization. The only other problem was that gas stations couldn’t pump gas for two weeks, lacking electric power. That worried us more than it worried the Warrens.
Rufus Warren had "walked the bounds" and shown me what few monuments there are, just as his father had done before him, but our lawyer was unable to establish the bounds with sufficient accuracy to satisfy Concord Cooperative Bank’s lawyer. He talked aout having to get a "land court deed". We were desperate to pass papers. We had terminated the lease on our apartment, and winter was rapidly approaching, with no supply of firewood. Finally Elizabeth had the idea of appealing to old Mr Wheeler, chairman of Concord Bank. He just smiled and called in the president. He said "We are investing in this promising young couple, not in a forty acre woodlot. We don’t give mortgages on land anyway. What difference does a twenty foot uncertainty in the bounds make? Tell the lawyer to call it a construction loan and just get title insurance. Go and do it right now." We talked for half an hour over a cup of tea. Mr. Wheeler turned out to be a music lover and violinist. When the president returned with the mortgage he gave us a check for twelve thousand dollars, a huge amount in those days, and Mr. Wheeler gave us a pot-holder with the Bank’s logo embroidered on it for good luck. He warned: I don’t think you will finish your dream house for twelve thousand dollars, but if you make a sound start, your credit will be good for more. I’ll be visiting you occasionally to see how you’re doing. And so he did. Sometimes he barely got out of his car, and sometimes he climbed the scaffolds and then came inside and asked us to play some chamber music for him.
We did finish our dream house without further loans,by investing whatever money we could spare each month and doing all of the work ourselves. Thus we earned three dollars worth of house for every dollar spent by not borrowing more. When Mr. Wheeler came many years later to announce his retirement and say good-bye, Elizabeth presented him with a tattered, grease-soaked hot pad bearing the embroidered Concord Bank logo, and said: "keep this for good luck. It worked for us!" Another memory we often smiled about.
Buying Weir Meadow was a stroke of predestination, a return to her roots for Elizabeth. We found out only later that her ancestor Joseph Bigelow was born in Marlboro on the first of September 1717. He was the minister who built the first parish church in Sudbury.
Much later, in 1988, another stroke of predestination. We bought a farm in Hudson belonging to Mrs. Norma Haynes, the town librarian, . on which to build a plant for one of m,y companies, Electromagnetic Launch Research. It turned out to have belonged to Joseph Bigelow’s brother.
Building dream house
The winter of 54-55 was hard, but delightful.. Our well was polluted whenever the river flooded it, our dishes froze overnight in the soapstone sink when we forgot and left them soaking, our only heat came from the fireplace, our only vehicles were a Triumph Tiger motorcyle and a classic MG-TC without a top (only a tonneau cover), there was no firewood, only a tilt-table bucking saw with a 36 inch diameter blade driven via a four inch wide leather belt by an old Chevrolet engine which barely started in cold weather, and a two-man saw. In case you wonder: chainsaws had been invented, and I used them while in the Army Corps of Engineers, but they had not yet found their way into the civilian market. And we couldn’t have afforded one if they had.
Our electric power came from a 32 volt battery set of 16 glass lead-acid cells charged weekly by a gasoline generator. Elizabeth worked at Harvard and I commuted to Lincoln Laboratory by motorcycle. Elizabeth brought home drinking water and groceries in the MG, which often stayed at the head of Old Oxbow Road. We had no snow plow, and the town didn’t know we existed. We used snowshoes and a surplus army dog sled. After dinner we excavated about 40 wheelbarrows of basement and replaced one more nail keg footing (an eighteen inch high nail barrel filled with concrete) by an eight foot long oak post. Then we played a Mozart violin-piano sonata (we had bought a piano from the Zacharias family) and ended the day side-by-side in the two-hole outhouse with the door wide open, admiring the moon-lit Sudbury River, oblivious to the cold. Surprisingly, neither of us had a single cold that whole year. A wild cat we named Elsa came to live with us, but she preferred to sleep out-doors in the snow and only rarely tolerated being petted. Eventually we had a German Shepherd, a Norwegian Elkhound, and an Irish Wolfhound, and two more cats. Along with two horses and 20 chickens.
In spring of 1955 we hired Walter Bergquist, and old Swedish ship-wright turned carpenter and his teen-age son Robert to do all the outside work (framing, siding and roofing) on a second floor bedroom and a three-story addition . We also hired Tom Theriault, the chief plumber at Lincoln Lab and his teen-age son to get a plumbing permit and help us with the plumbing. In fall we hired another old Swede and friend of Walter, Arvid Fredrikson to build a concrete block enclosure to retain the earth underneath our field stone chimney. In retrospect it would have made more sense to simply rebuild the chimney instead of losing most of our basement space. We did all the interior floors and walls and electric wiring ourselves, giving up most of our social life except for a weekly folk-dance called by Ted Sannella in Cambridge, and a weekly evening of chamber-music with our friends and my classmates John and Betty King in Dover. We began the evening with a shower followed by dinner.
When winter 55-56 came we had electric power, a furnace and a rudimentary bathroom. The three-story wing was not yet heated. We turned part of the Warrens’ woodshed into a chicken coop and bought two dozen Rhode Island Reds, a hardy breed that thrives in New England winters and lays many brown eggs year-round . We also had a 41 Ford sedan, a gift from my father that needed major repairs and wasn’t road-worthy. In spring 96 we used one of its rear wheels as a capstan to drive a two-inch wash-well, using an oak tripod as derrick and an oak log as drop-hammer. We hit bedrock about sixty feet below grade and could only pump about two gallons a minute due to the well point being in a layer of fine sand, which eventually silted in, reducing the yield to less than half a gallon. But we did have a trickle of clean water, and Elizabeth, nearing thirty, decided it was time to start a family.
Margaret was born in July 57, followed by Juliet in 59, Edna in 63 and Cornelia in 65. In 67 we drilled a second well which also silted in, and by 75 we had four growing daughters, a very busy bathroom, kitchen, washing machine and two very thirsty horses. Water had become a crisis. We also had enough money to have a six inch well 185 feet deep drilled through a hundred feet of solid granite using a rotary percussion drill with three tungsten carbide rollers. We struck an aquifer that yielded several hundred gallons a minute, and installed a submersible one horsepower pump that can deliver over forty gallons a minute of clean, cold, but rather hard water. It is sixty feet below the water table and has never failed in 28 years. We also built a well-pit large enough to hold two eighty gallon tanks and to serve as a fall-out and hurricane shelter. Nuclear war was a very real concern in the seventies.
Weir Meadow History
The Warrens dropped in occasionally during 1955 to tell us what they knew of local history. I am glad they did, because Annie died that fall, and Rufus died a month later, age about 88, meaning he was born about 1867. Rufus’ father Clarence Warren inherited the original cabin built by his father Rufus senior in 1820 on land he bought from the Sherman family, whose original deed was a grant from King Charles , presumably for land stolen from the Indians after King Phillip’s war in 1675. Rufus junior had added a few more parcels. A frequent guest of Rufus senior was a Professor Maynard, a contemporary of Thoreau and one of the first ornithologists at Harvard. Much of Maynard’s field work was done at what he called "the Meadows at Sherman’s bridge". Rufus gave us an old map hand-drawn on disintegrating paper which showed the location of the Indian weir at the foot of our hill, and also a village and burial ground on the Sudbury side near what is now called Pantry Brook . Old Oxbow Road and our present driveway was labeled "Weir Meadow Path" and connected to the old Indian path that followed the esker ridge and is now called Castle Hill Road, a favorite bridle path for our daughters. It was the main north-south road before Concord Road (route 126) was built. A contemporary map in the Concord Antiquarian Society museum shows a long-house near what is now the Macone’s gravel operation. Shirley Blonke, an archeology student at BU did some spot digging and found many charred fireplace stones and stake holes. We also found many artifacts. Quartz bird points for arrows, larger flint and slate deer points for arrows and lances, mortar-and-pestle stones for grinding acorns into flour, a stone for sharpening arrow points, and many charred fireplace stones. Whatever pottery shards we found were clearly white man’s. Local Indians must have cooked in baskets, using hot stones.
Rufus gave us some large glass negatives showing the original cabin. We have a framed print of it. Its ridge was at right angles to the present ridge. He told us they used to come to Weir Meadow from their Waltham home via horse carriage and later model T Ford, but roads were not plowed in winter and they had to come via train to Lincoln station and via snowshoes from there. The railroad was important then. Without it the Warrens couldn’t have spent winter weekends at Weir Meadow. Recall that the railroad from Boston to Concord was built while Thoreau lived at Walden Pond and is discussed at great length in his book.. Thoreau was not entirely against the railroad. He considered it a gateway to the world. I don’t think he would have been opposed to Hanscom Field either. In these days of neighborhood hysteria over Hanscom Field, I always think of Thoreau’s words when flying down the glide-slope for an instrument landing at Bedford airport, and my first ground contact as I break out of overcast is Walden Pond. I always report "Walden Pond in sight" to Hanscom Tower, as my private homage to old Henry’s foresight. I think he is grossly mis-understood, as he was by his neighbors in Concord.
Rufus also told us the original cabin burned to the ground in the thirties when a kerosene lamp fell off the mantle. We also got some orally transmitted history from Dan Sherman, from whom we bought the 1.5 acre strip along Oxbow Road extending from our mailbox to the bridge over Trout Brook. Dan, then in his eighties, had a more detailed account of the fire. Rufus "liked his tea", Dan said, and was dead drunk after a day’s duck hunting with his cronies. He fell asleep and knocked over a kerosene lamp just as we departed, and he would have burned up with the cabin if we hadn’t dragged him out like a sack of potatoes. Dan was evidently one of Rufus’ cronies.
There was a collapsed wooden shack in the woods half-way down our peninsula. Rufus explained with a smile that it was a bootlegger’s still during prohibition, and he remembered the bootlegger driving out the back way in his model T Ford when the revenuers came in from Weir Meadow Path. They couldn’t follow him because he had felled a large oak tree across the only path out and wisely kept his car on the far side of the tree. I had a distinct feeling that Rufus probably got paid in kind for looking the other way. We cleaned up the mess, which included a lot of broken bottles, parts of the still, a collapsed brick chimney, empty kerosene drums, and a cast iron bathtub. They got their water from a shallow well. You can still find the pipe if you know where to look and have a metal detector.
Rufus also told us that there is a deposit of diatomaceous earth in the marsh beyond the tip of our peninsula that had been mined just after world war two. I later located several square pits from my airplane.
Rufus remembered swarms of passenger pigeons that darkened the sky from horizon to horizon before they were slaughtered to extinction. In fact, he had a stuffed one on display in his shoe store on Main Street in Waltham. The meadows along the river were owned by Watertown and Waltham residents who grew hay for their horses, and held work parties spring and fall to clean up debris and dead branches and to mow weeds and "catbriar" (greenbriar) . The Saxonville dam flooded the hay fields, and the Saxonville Carpet Factory dumped enough dye into the river to kill most fish. Only catfish seemed to survive, and Rufus didn’t care much for catfish.
Just before we moved here the state had won a legal battle to stop the dumping of sewage, carpet dye and, worst of all, tannery waste, and the river had just been declared safe for swimming. But at about that time towns along the river started intensive DDT spraying, and one bird species after another disappeared. First the swallows, then the black-crowned night herons, the great blue herons, the kingfishers, and the bitterns, called "stakedrivers" by the old-timers because of the thumping sounds they make at night. We remember waking Margaret when she was about four, to go for a moonlight canoe cruise and listen to the bitterns and night herons proclaiming our progress to each other. Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring" brought an end to DDT. Most species have returned, but not the swallows or the night herons. In the fifties and sixties there was an abundance of muskrats whose houses grew out of the melting ice every March. There were also trappers, whose cruel work we tried to stop by springing their traps as fast as they set them. Trapping ended in the seventies when the market for muskrat furs collapsed, and muskrats proliferated. But for some mysterious reason muskrats vanished completely in the eighties. Perhaps the invasive loosetrife killed the native plants muskrats live on.
Saving the Sudbury Valley
Allen Morgan visited us in 1954 very shortly after we moved in, and explained how Sudbury Valley Trustees and Mass Audubon would defend our endangered environment. We joined SVT and met his group of dedicated workers. Allen Benjamin, George Lewis, Hank Bennett, Robert Morgan (not related to Allen) Roger Stokey, Willys Ryder, Howard Russel, then the Wayland Moderator, and others. We soon became directly involved in a series of events and battles.
Allen persuaded Mrs Campbell, heiress to the Campbell bakery fortune, to donate her estate in Lincoln to Mass Audubon. It became their Drumlin Farm Headquarters.
At about this time we talked Janet Stoney, a friend who had just married Andrew Staiano, another friend, to buy the property adjoining Weir Meadow, at the tip of our peninsula. It was a parcel Rufus Warren had sold to an absentee owner who had just put it on the market hoping to subdivide and sell the abandoned diatomaceous earth deposit to mining interests. I forget his name, but remember that he worked as the projectionist at the Waltham movie theater. Diatomaceous earth had just become valuable for use in swimming pool filters The mining pits are still visible in the latest aerial photograph taken in March 2002, on file in the surveyor’s office in Wayland town office building. The miners had brought in several army surplus steel landing mats to support their trucking operation. The mats are still there, rusty and anchored by weeds. We might have ended up with a mining operation on Weir Meadow Path. The Staianos had thus saved the land and lived there happily until 1974 in a house they built with their own hands.
Janet Staiano’s brother Alan Stoney and his wife Ellen also wanted to live along the Sudbury River, and they inherited some money at about this time. We arranged for them to buy a lot on Round Hill overlooking Pantry Brook, next to an old barn. They built one of the first Core Houses, a prefab house designed by Walter Gropius’ firm "Architects Collaborative" in Cambridge. Core houses were all the rage at the time. The Stoneys house is now the caretaker’s house of the federal sanctuary.
Another bit of history: Thoreau’s Journal contains an entry in which he reports tying up his boat at the tip of our peninsula, at what is now the Tramposch’s canoe landing. He describes the peninsula as a pleasant sandy slope without any trees. Edwin Way Teale, an author who traveled the world in the 1970s wrote many books, including one about the Sudbury River called "A Conscious Stillness". He describes the same landing as one of the prettiest spots he has ever seen.
Environmental Conscience Aroused
The early sixties brought a nation-wide awareness of our endangered environment, instigated to a large extent by Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring", and the Club of Rome’s controversial report called "Limits to Growth".
Incidentally, the president of the cClub of Rome was Dr Peccei. His son studied physics at MIT and lived on a hill off Lincoln Road near what is now the Lincoln-Sudbury High School. They had a daughter Alexandra (Peaches) and a younger son Augustus (Augie). Our kids car-pooled and often played with them. In the seventies Peccei joined the Stanford faculty and they moved to Palo Alto.
Allen Mogan persuaded representative (and later senator) Hatch to propose the Hatch Act to prohibit the filling of wetlands. It was killed by the Massachusetts House, later revived by popular demand and sent to the Senate where it passed and became known as the Wetlands Bill signed into law by Governor Volpe. The bill became a model for other states, and ultimately for the federal government under Secretary of the Interior Morris Udall who was appointed by President Kennedy. Udall created a number of sanctuaries in the eastern states, including the Outerbeach sanctuary on Cape Cod, and the Broadmeadows Sanctuary along the Sudbury, Assabet and Concord Rivers, with headquarters in Concord In 1961 the federal and state governments bought much of the land SVT had protected for a decade, thus freeing up funds that could now be used to protect tributaries and other wetlands. This was proclaimed in the January 1962 SVT newsletter.
In 1963 a developer bought Round Hill and Weir Hill in Sudbury, directly opposite Weir Meadow, and all surrounding land from Lincoln Road to Pantry Brook . It would have accommodated a few dozen homes, and there was talk of a marina. Allen Morgan appealed to the developer to sell at least part of the land to SVT, but was refused. Robert Morgan, president of the Boston Five-cent Savings Bank, chairman of the Massachusetts Bankers’ Association, and head of the Wayland finance committee was sympathetic. "Leave it to me." He was a Sydney Greenstreet type character who didn’t mince words, and had browbeaten Wayland Town Meeting into buying several forty acre elementary school sites all over town, including some not needed, such as the Claypit, Happy Hollow and Alpine Road sites, because he considered it "prudent planning". Robert told the developer to sell the land to SVT, or he would never again get a dime’s worth of credit from any bank in the country. Within a couple of weeks the developer offered the land to SVT for his purchase price of forty-five thousand dollars, providing they can close the deal before the end of next March. Unfortunately SVT didn’t have any money, banks didn’t mortgage land, and it was November. How to raise forty-five thousand dollars in four months? Simple job.. Allen and I went up in my airplane and took aerial photographs along the river from our beautiful wilderness to the ditch the river had become in Saxonville and Natick. Allen made up a bulletin illustrating the impending doom of the Sudbury Valley and sent copies to his SVT and Audubon mailing lists, inviting people to a series of walks on Round Hill during the weeks before and after Thanksgiving. Elizabeth and I served doughnuts and spiced hot cider from a Coleman camp stove on the tailgate of our jeep, while Allen made eloquent appeals in front of his photograph panels under a surplus army hospital tent. Hundreds of people came, many of them came repeatedly and brought friends and neighbors. There were some people who had grown up here and now lived as far away as Minnesota. Donations came pouring in , and we had forty-five thousand dollars before March, plus some extra to pay for lawyers. As I recall, we held several more thank-you walks in spring. The saved land ultimately became headquarters for the Federal Wildlife Sanctuary.
Here are details of what happened next.. .
Janet Staiano hatched the idea of raising money to build a wildlife education center for use by all schools in the greater Boston area. With help from cardiologist Paul Dudley White, famous for saving President Eisenhower’s life and for creating the bike paths in Boston, Janet organized the Elbanobscot Foundation and built the Elbanobscot camp dormitory, which she managed for several years. Many inner-city kids learned to swim and to canoe and to enjoy the outdoors there before Drumlin Farm took over this function.
In 1974 the Staianos’ two daughters Ruth and Andrea had finished high school and Andy was ready for a mid-life course correction. He abandoned the rat-race as an engineer at Sylvania and moved to Hingham where he built and lived on a high-tech concrete sail boat. Later he retired a second time to Maine.. Their contact information is:
Andy and Janet Staiano 26 Dodge Mountain Rd P O Box 602
Rockland, ME 04841-0602
phone: (207) 594-5304 - e-mail [email protected]
Kurt Tramposch bought the Staiano’s house in 74 and now runs a nursery specializing in hostas. He is president of the Hosta Society, which meets at Weir Meadow every spring. Kurt, his wife Cathy and daughter Alyssa are kindred spirits who love the Sudbury Valley Their only complaint: deer like to nibble on hostas.worth three hundred dollars.
In the mid-seventies Allen Morgan invited me to serve on the Conservation Commission’s advisory task force to help create a master conservation plan and interconnected trail system for Wayland and later Sudbury, with help form Margot Black and Tom Myles, a recently enrolled SVT member, a lawyer living on Glezen Lane. A new threat emerged: Boston Edison and New England Electric applied for permission to build a high voltage power line with steel towers marching down the river from Natick to Lawrence. This permit included aerial herbicide spraying along the power line for fire prevention, as is common practice (agent orange?) Despite violent opposition at all the hearings Edison was granted a variance by the legislature. Bob Morgan explained that Edison owns the legislature because they hire all their unemployable relatives. "I’ll see what I can do." After a long campaign with many lost battles, with legal help from Tom Myles, and with help from Margot Black’s late husband, we win the war. The superior court over-rules the house. Edison has to go underground at what they have been claiming will involve unacceptable costs and time delays for the consumer. The cost turns out to be quite modest due to new cable technology and due to the elimination of most maintenance costs. This was a low-profile battle, all but forgotten. Not many people knew how close a call it was.
Further events are current history. Elizabeth died in October 2002, after she and I had decided to add a permanent conservation restriction to our deed, with means for SVT to enforce it in perpetuity. It prohibits any additional construction, and will prevent forever human encroachment into this beautiful wilderness. Brandon Kibbe is implementing this restriction.
In spring 2003 we placed a granite boulder bench on a knoll overlooking the river, near where Thoreau must have tied up, inscribed:
In memory of Elizabeth Cushing Kolm,
who adored this place and preserved it for half a century.
This chapter in Henry Kolm’s autobiography is intended to document
how we bought and helped protect Weir Meadow,
how we built our dream house here,
and what we learned of local history.
It is March 1954. Elizabeth and I have finished our respective graduate theses and are planning a summer tour of Europe on our new Triumph Tiger motorcycle, then find a farm or land in the Walden Pond area on which to build our dream house. Elizabeth wants to do a quick search before our trip and contacts the local Strout real estate agent. He takes us to an old working farm on a main road in Bolton. Not what we want. We explain what we do want. Yes, he does have such a hide-away but can’t show it today. Gotta go buy some chickens. This place belongs to an old couple who don’t really want to sell, it seems. They turned away two or three prospective buyers he had brought. If you really want to look, here’s how to get there; but I doubt you’ll find it in the dark. He didn’t sound at all hopeful this would result in a sale and wanted to get rid of us window-shoppers.
Buying Weir Meadow
It was dusk by the time we rode up the hill on our motorcycle. Rufus and Annie Warren were just finishing dinner. We said the Strout agent had sent us. Rufus nodded, told us to look over the place., and went back inside. When we came back, he invited us to join them for coffee and apple pie. They talked about everything except the object of our visit. They were old New Englanders of few words, and slow to warm up to strangers. But they did eventually warm up when they sensed our enthusiasm for the place. Rufus warned us that there was no electric power, just a 32 volt generator/battery set, and the power company would charge a bundle for setting six new poles. The well was down by the river and had never been tested. There was no bathroom, just an outhouse, and the woodshed roof leaks. Telephone? Forget it! How to not-sell a place. We feared that he had decided once again not to sell, but he was just giving us the acid test. We said we didn’t care to all the above nor did we ask the usual questions about taxes and schools and zoning bylaws and subdivision rights. It was love at first sight.
By the time we left, they had gone into a huddle and decided to ask ten thousand dollars for their 38 acres plus cabin and woodshed. We said we could only pay two thousand down and would have to get a mortgage for the rest, and would they be willing to take a mortgage. . Rufus gave a reply we always remembered: "I wouldn’t let ten thousand dollars stand between us." "So you would he take a mortgage?" we asked. Rufus just nodded. What he really meant to say is that he was willing to wait without any mortgage, we found out later. Annie Warren made us take home a whole apple pie. We clearly had passed muster.
.
We went back to the Strout agent’s house on route 117, and waited until midnight for him to return, somewhat inebriated from buying chickens. We told him we had a deal and asked him to take the place off the market. He wanted honest money. We signed a purchase agreement, and gave him a check for two hundred dollars. Our fate for the next half-century was sealed with a handshake that night, a night we always remembered and often smiled about.
We hired Harry French, a Waltham lawyer recommended by the Strout agent, borrowed the remaining eight thousand dollars from my parents, Elizabeth ’s mother and the Warrens (all of which we paid back with interest), and applied to Concord Cooperative bank for a mortgage to build our dream house, which we thought we could do for twelve thousand dollars. Then we bought a large mailbox at Sears Roebuck, painted our name on it, and set it up in our small attic apartment in Cambridge, waiting for our lawyer and the bank lawyer to finish the title search and other paperwork.
In July 1954 a major hurricane tore through the area. I forget its name. In Cambridge century-old trees were uprooted, sidewalks twisted into rubble, water mains broken, powerlines downed, cars and houses smashed, all major roads blocked to traffic, subway stations and transformer vaults flooded, a state of emergency declared. Worried about the elderly Warrens we made our way to Weir Meadow through pouring rain on our motorcycle, the only vehicle able to navigate through flooded roads and around fallen trees. We found them snug as can be, making tea on their bottled gas range and listening to the grim news on their 32 volt radio. They said "sounds pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as the one in 1947", during which their boathouse floated away. But they were sure that the river would flood the catch basin of their spring at the foot of the hill, and the water would have to be boiled for a long time. They were right. But that was the only impact of a hurricane that left many Bostonians powerless and homeless and car-less. We joined them for tea and went home to a destroyed civilization. The only other problem was that gas stations couldn’t pump gas for two weeks, lacking electric power. That worried us more than it worried the Warrens.
Rufus Warren had "walked the bounds" and shown me what few monuments there are, just as his father had done before him, but our lawyer was unable to establish the bounds with sufficient accuracy to satisfy Concord Cooperative Bank’s lawyer. He talked aout having to get a "land court deed". We were desperate to pass papers. We had terminated the lease on our apartment, and winter was rapidly approaching, with no supply of firewood. Finally Elizabeth had the idea of appealing to old Mr Wheeler, chairman of Concord Bank. He just smiled and called in the president. He said "We are investing in this promising young couple, not in a forty acre woodlot. We don’t give mortgages on land anyway. What difference does a twenty foot uncertainty in the bounds make? Tell the lawyer to call it a construction loan and just get title insurance. Go and do it right now." We talked for half an hour over a cup of tea. Mr. Wheeler turned out to be a music lover and violinist. When the president returned with the mortgage he gave us a check for twelve thousand dollars, a huge amount in those days, and Mr. Wheeler gave us a pot-holder with the Bank’s logo embroidered on it for good luck. He warned: I don’t think you will finish your dream house for twelve thousand dollars, but if you make a sound start, your credit will be good for more. I’ll be visiting you occasionally to see how you’re doing. And so he did. Sometimes he barely got out of his car, and sometimes he climbed the scaffolds and then came inside and asked us to play some chamber music for him.
We did finish our dream house without further loans,by investing whatever money we could spare each month and doing all of the work ourselves. Thus we earned three dollars worth of house for every dollar spent by not borrowing more. When Mr. Wheeler came many years later to announce his retirement and say good-bye, Elizabeth presented him with a tattered, grease-soaked hot pad bearing the embroidered Concord Bank logo, and said: "keep this for good luck. It worked for us!" Another memory we often smiled about.
Buying Weir Meadow was a stroke of predestination, a return to her roots for Elizabeth. We found out only later that her ancestor Joseph Bigelow was born in Marlboro on the first of September 1717. He was the minister who built the first parish church in Sudbury.
Much later, in 1988, another stroke of predestination. We bought a farm in Hudson belonging to Mrs. Norma Haynes, the town librarian, . on which to build a plant for one of m,y companies, Electromagnetic Launch Research. It turned out to have belonged to Joseph Bigelow’s brother.
Building dream house
The winter of 54-55 was hard, but delightful.. Our well was polluted whenever the river flooded it, our dishes froze overnight in the soapstone sink when we forgot and left them soaking, our only heat came from the fireplace, our only vehicles were a Triumph Tiger motorcyle and a classic MG-TC without a top (only a tonneau cover), there was no firewood, only a tilt-table bucking saw with a 36 inch diameter blade driven via a four inch wide leather belt by an old Chevrolet engine which barely started in cold weather, and a two-man saw. In case you wonder: chainsaws had been invented, and I used them while in the Army Corps of Engineers, but they had not yet found their way into the civilian market. And we couldn’t have afforded one if they had.
Our electric power came from a 32 volt battery set of 16 glass lead-acid cells charged weekly by a gasoline generator. Elizabeth worked at Harvard and I commuted to Lincoln Laboratory by motorcycle. Elizabeth brought home drinking water and groceries in the MG, which often stayed at the head of Old Oxbow Road. We had no snow plow, and the town didn’t know we existed. We used snowshoes and a surplus army dog sled. After dinner we excavated about 40 wheelbarrows of basement and replaced one more nail keg footing (an eighteen inch high nail barrel filled with concrete) by an eight foot long oak post. Then we played a Mozart violin-piano sonata (we had bought a piano from the Zacharias family) and ended the day side-by-side in the two-hole outhouse with the door wide open, admiring the moon-lit Sudbury River, oblivious to the cold. Surprisingly, neither of us had a single cold that whole year. A wild cat we named Elsa came to live with us, but she preferred to sleep out-doors in the snow and only rarely tolerated being petted. Eventually we had a German Shepherd, a Norwegian Elkhound, and an Irish Wolfhound, and two more cats. Along with two horses and 20 chickens.
In spring of 1955 we hired Walter Bergquist, and old Swedish ship-wright turned carpenter and his teen-age son Robert to do all the outside work (framing, siding and roofing) on a second floor bedroom and a three-story addition . We also hired Tom Theriault, the chief plumber at Lincoln Lab and his teen-age son to get a plumbing permit and help us with the plumbing. In fall we hired another old Swede and friend of Walter, Arvid Fredrikson to build a concrete block enclosure to retain the earth underneath our field stone chimney. In retrospect it would have made more sense to simply rebuild the chimney instead of losing most of our basement space. We did all the interior floors and walls and electric wiring ourselves, giving up most of our social life except for a weekly folk-dance called by Ted Sannella in Cambridge, and a weekly evening of chamber-music with our friends and my classmates John and Betty King in Dover. We began the evening with a shower followed by dinner.
When winter 55-56 came we had electric power, a furnace and a rudimentary bathroom. The three-story wing was not yet heated. We turned part of the Warrens’ woodshed into a chicken coop and bought two dozen Rhode Island Reds, a hardy breed that thrives in New England winters and lays many brown eggs year-round . We also had a 41 Ford sedan, a gift from my father that needed major repairs and wasn’t road-worthy. In spring 96 we used one of its rear wheels as a capstan to drive a two-inch wash-well, using an oak tripod as derrick and an oak log as drop-hammer. We hit bedrock about sixty feet below grade and could only pump about two gallons a minute due to the well point being in a layer of fine sand, which eventually silted in, reducing the yield to less than half a gallon. But we did have a trickle of clean water, and Elizabeth, nearing thirty, decided it was time to start a family.
Margaret was born in July 57, followed by Juliet in 59, Edna in 63 and Cornelia in 65. In 67 we drilled a second well which also silted in, and by 75 we had four growing daughters, a very busy bathroom, kitchen, washing machine and two very thirsty horses. Water had become a crisis. We also had enough money to have a six inch well 185 feet deep drilled through a hundred feet of solid granite using a rotary percussion drill with three tungsten carbide rollers. We struck an aquifer that yielded several hundred gallons a minute, and installed a submersible one horsepower pump that can deliver over forty gallons a minute of clean, cold, but rather hard water. It is sixty feet below the water table and has never failed in 28 years. We also built a well-pit large enough to hold two eighty gallon tanks and to serve as a fall-out and hurricane shelter. Nuclear war was a very real concern in the seventies.
Weir Meadow History
The Warrens dropped in occasionally during 1955 to tell us what they knew of local history. I am glad they did, because Annie died that fall, and Rufus died a month later, age about 88, meaning he was born about 1867. Rufus’ father Clarence Warren inherited the original cabin built by his father Rufus senior in 1820 on land he bought from the Sherman family, whose original deed was a grant from King Charles , presumably for land stolen from the Indians after King Phillip’s war in 1675. Rufus junior had added a few more parcels. A frequent guest of Rufus senior was a Professor Maynard, a contemporary of Thoreau and one of the first ornithologists at Harvard. Much of Maynard’s field work was done at what he called "the Meadows at Sherman’s bridge". Rufus gave us an old map hand-drawn on disintegrating paper which showed the location of the Indian weir at the foot of our hill, and also a village and burial ground on the Sudbury side near what is now called Pantry Brook . Old Oxbow Road and our present driveway was labeled "Weir Meadow Path" and connected to the old Indian path that followed the esker ridge and is now called Castle Hill Road, a favorite bridle path for our daughters. It was the main north-south road before Concord Road (route 126) was built. A contemporary map in the Concord Antiquarian Society museum shows a long-house near what is now the Macone’s gravel operation. Shirley Blonke, an archeology student at BU did some spot digging and found many charred fireplace stones and stake holes. We also found many artifacts. Quartz bird points for arrows, larger flint and slate deer points for arrows and lances, mortar-and-pestle stones for grinding acorns into flour, a stone for sharpening arrow points, and many charred fireplace stones. Whatever pottery shards we found were clearly white man’s. Local Indians must have cooked in baskets, using hot stones.
Rufus gave us some large glass negatives showing the original cabin. We have a framed print of it. Its ridge was at right angles to the present ridge. He told us they used to come to Weir Meadow from their Waltham home via horse carriage and later model T Ford, but roads were not plowed in winter and they had to come via train to Lincoln station and via snowshoes from there. The railroad was important then. Without it the Warrens couldn’t have spent winter weekends at Weir Meadow. Recall that the railroad from Boston to Concord was built while Thoreau lived at Walden Pond and is discussed at great length in his book.. Thoreau was not entirely against the railroad. He considered it a gateway to the world. I don’t think he would have been opposed to Hanscom Field either. In these days of neighborhood hysteria over Hanscom Field, I always think of Thoreau’s words when flying down the glide-slope for an instrument landing at Bedford airport, and my first ground contact as I break out of overcast is Walden Pond. I always report "Walden Pond in sight" to Hanscom Tower, as my private homage to old Henry’s foresight. I think he is grossly mis-understood, as he was by his neighbors in Concord.
Rufus also told us the original cabin burned to the ground in the thirties when a kerosene lamp fell off the mantle. We also got some orally transmitted history from Dan Sherman, from whom we bought the 1.5 acre strip along Oxbow Road extending from our mailbox to the bridge over Trout Brook. Dan, then in his eighties, had a more detailed account of the fire. Rufus "liked his tea", Dan said, and was dead drunk after a day’s duck hunting with his cronies. He fell asleep and knocked over a kerosene lamp just as we departed, and he would have burned up with the cabin if we hadn’t dragged him out like a sack of potatoes. Dan was evidently one of Rufus’ cronies.
There was a collapsed wooden shack in the woods half-way down our peninsula. Rufus explained with a smile that it was a bootlegger’s still during prohibition, and he remembered the bootlegger driving out the back way in his model T Ford when the revenuers came in from Weir Meadow Path. They couldn’t follow him because he had felled a large oak tree across the only path out and wisely kept his car on the far side of the tree. I had a distinct feeling that Rufus probably got paid in kind for looking the other way. We cleaned up the mess, which included a lot of broken bottles, parts of the still, a collapsed brick chimney, empty kerosene drums, and a cast iron bathtub. They got their water from a shallow well. You can still find the pipe if you know where to look and have a metal detector.
Rufus also told us that there is a deposit of diatomaceous earth in the marsh beyond the tip of our peninsula that had been mined just after world war two. I later located several square pits from my airplane.
Rufus remembered swarms of passenger pigeons that darkened the sky from horizon to horizon before they were slaughtered to extinction. In fact, he had a stuffed one on display in his shoe store on Main Street in Waltham. The meadows along the river were owned by Watertown and Waltham residents who grew hay for their horses, and held work parties spring and fall to clean up debris and dead branches and to mow weeds and "catbriar" (greenbriar) . The Saxonville dam flooded the hay fields, and the Saxonville Carpet Factory dumped enough dye into the river to kill most fish. Only catfish seemed to survive, and Rufus didn’t care much for catfish.
Just before we moved here the state had won a legal battle to stop the dumping of sewage, carpet dye and, worst of all, tannery waste, and the river had just been declared safe for swimming. But at about that time towns along the river started intensive DDT spraying, and one bird species after another disappeared. First the swallows, then the black-crowned night herons, the great blue herons, the kingfishers, and the bitterns, called "stakedrivers" by the old-timers because of the thumping sounds they make at night. We remember waking Margaret when she was about four, to go for a moonlight canoe cruise and listen to the bitterns and night herons proclaiming our progress to each other. Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring" brought an end to DDT. Most species have returned, but not the swallows or the night herons. In the fifties and sixties there was an abundance of muskrats whose houses grew out of the melting ice every March. There were also trappers, whose cruel work we tried to stop by springing their traps as fast as they set them. Trapping ended in the seventies when the market for muskrat furs collapsed, and muskrats proliferated. But for some mysterious reason muskrats vanished completely in the eighties. Perhaps the invasive loosetrife killed the native plants muskrats live on.
Saving the Sudbury Valley
Allen Morgan visited us in 1954 very shortly after we moved in, and explained how Sudbury Valley Trustees and Mass Audubon would defend our endangered environment. We joined SVT and met his group of dedicated workers. Allen Benjamin, George Lewis, Hank Bennett, Robert Morgan (not related to Allen) Roger Stokey, Willys Ryder, Howard Russel, then the Wayland Moderator, and others. We soon became directly involved in a series of events and battles.
Allen persuaded Mrs Campbell, heiress to the Campbell bakery fortune, to donate her estate in Lincoln to Mass Audubon. It became their Drumlin Farm Headquarters.
At about this time we talked Janet Stoney, a friend who had just married Andrew Staiano, another friend, to buy the property adjoining Weir Meadow, at the tip of our peninsula. It was a parcel Rufus Warren had sold to an absentee owner who had just put it on the market hoping to subdivide and sell the abandoned diatomaceous earth deposit to mining interests. I forget his name, but remember that he worked as the projectionist at the Waltham movie theater. Diatomaceous earth had just become valuable for use in swimming pool filters The mining pits are still visible in the latest aerial photograph taken in March 2002, on file in the surveyor’s office in Wayland town office building. The miners had brought in several army surplus steel landing mats to support their trucking operation. The mats are still there, rusty and anchored by weeds. We might have ended up with a mining operation on Weir Meadow Path. The Staianos had thus saved the land and lived there happily until 1974 in a house they built with their own hands.
Janet Staiano’s brother Alan Stoney and his wife Ellen also wanted to live along the Sudbury River, and they inherited some money at about this time. We arranged for them to buy a lot on Round Hill overlooking Pantry Brook, next to an old barn. They built one of the first Core Houses, a prefab house designed by Walter Gropius’ firm "Architects Collaborative" in Cambridge. Core houses were all the rage at the time. The Stoneys house is now the caretaker’s house of the federal sanctuary.
Another bit of history: Thoreau’s Journal contains an entry in which he reports tying up his boat at the tip of our peninsula, at what is now the Tramposch’s canoe landing. He describes the peninsula as a pleasant sandy slope without any trees. Edwin Way Teale, an author who traveled the world in the 1970s wrote many books, including one about the Sudbury River called "A Conscious Stillness". He describes the same landing as one of the prettiest spots he has ever seen.
Environmental Conscience Aroused
The early sixties brought a nation-wide awareness of our endangered environment, instigated to a large extent by Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring", and the Club of Rome’s controversial report called "Limits to Growth".
Incidentally, the president of the cClub of Rome was Dr Peccei. His son studied physics at MIT and lived on a hill off Lincoln Road near what is now the Lincoln-Sudbury High School. They had a daughter Alexandra (Peaches) and a younger son Augustus (Augie). Our kids car-pooled and often played with them. In the seventies Peccei joined the Stanford faculty and they moved to Palo Alto.
Allen Mogan persuaded representative (and later senator) Hatch to propose the Hatch Act to prohibit the filling of wetlands. It was killed by the Massachusetts House, later revived by popular demand and sent to the Senate where it passed and became known as the Wetlands Bill signed into law by Governor Volpe. The bill became a model for other states, and ultimately for the federal government under Secretary of the Interior Morris Udall who was appointed by President Kennedy. Udall created a number of sanctuaries in the eastern states, including the Outerbeach sanctuary on Cape Cod, and the Broadmeadows Sanctuary along the Sudbury, Assabet and Concord Rivers, with headquarters in Concord In 1961 the federal and state governments bought much of the land SVT had protected for a decade, thus freeing up funds that could now be used to protect tributaries and other wetlands. This was proclaimed in the January 1962 SVT newsletter.
In 1963 a developer bought Round Hill and Weir Hill in Sudbury, directly opposite Weir Meadow, and all surrounding land from Lincoln Road to Pantry Brook . It would have accommodated a few dozen homes, and there was talk of a marina. Allen Morgan appealed to the developer to sell at least part of the land to SVT, but was refused. Robert Morgan, president of the Boston Five-cent Savings Bank, chairman of the Massachusetts Bankers’ Association, and head of the Wayland finance committee was sympathetic. "Leave it to me." He was a Sydney Greenstreet type character who didn’t mince words, and had browbeaten Wayland Town Meeting into buying several forty acre elementary school sites all over town, including some not needed, such as the Claypit, Happy Hollow and Alpine Road sites, because he considered it "prudent planning". Robert told the developer to sell the land to SVT, or he would never again get a dime’s worth of credit from any bank in the country. Within a couple of weeks the developer offered the land to SVT for his purchase price of forty-five thousand dollars, providing they can close the deal before the end of next March. Unfortunately SVT didn’t have any money, banks didn’t mortgage land, and it was November. How to raise forty-five thousand dollars in four months? Simple job.. Allen and I went up in my airplane and took aerial photographs along the river from our beautiful wilderness to the ditch the river had become in Saxonville and Natick. Allen made up a bulletin illustrating the impending doom of the Sudbury Valley and sent copies to his SVT and Audubon mailing lists, inviting people to a series of walks on Round Hill during the weeks before and after Thanksgiving. Elizabeth and I served doughnuts and spiced hot cider from a Coleman camp stove on the tailgate of our jeep, while Allen made eloquent appeals in front of his photograph panels under a surplus army hospital tent. Hundreds of people came, many of them came repeatedly and brought friends and neighbors. There were some people who had grown up here and now lived as far away as Minnesota. Donations came pouring in , and we had forty-five thousand dollars before March, plus some extra to pay for lawyers. As I recall, we held several more thank-you walks in spring. The saved land ultimately became headquarters for the Federal Wildlife Sanctuary.
Here are details of what happened next.. .
Janet Staiano hatched the idea of raising money to build a wildlife education center for use by all schools in the greater Boston area. With help from cardiologist Paul Dudley White, famous for saving President Eisenhower’s life and for creating the bike paths in Boston, Janet organized the Elbanobscot Foundation and built the Elbanobscot camp dormitory, which she managed for several years. Many inner-city kids learned to swim and to canoe and to enjoy the outdoors there before Drumlin Farm took over this function.
In 1974 the Staianos’ two daughters Ruth and Andrea had finished high school and Andy was ready for a mid-life course correction. He abandoned the rat-race as an engineer at Sylvania and moved to Hingham where he built and lived on a high-tech concrete sail boat. Later he retired a second time to Maine.. Their contact information is:
Andy and Janet Staiano 26 Dodge Mountain Rd P O Box 602
Rockland, ME 04841-0602
phone: (207) 594-5304 - e-mail [email protected]
Kurt Tramposch bought the Staiano’s house in 74 and now runs a nursery specializing in hostas. He is president of the Hosta Society, which meets at Weir Meadow every spring. Kurt, his wife Cathy and daughter Alyssa are kindred spirits who love the Sudbury Valley Their only complaint: deer like to nibble on hostas.worth three hundred dollars.
In the mid-seventies Allen Morgan invited me to serve on the Conservation Commission’s advisory task force to help create a master conservation plan and interconnected trail system for Wayland and later Sudbury, with help form Margot Black and Tom Myles, a recently enrolled SVT member, a lawyer living on Glezen Lane. A new threat emerged: Boston Edison and New England Electric applied for permission to build a high voltage power line with steel towers marching down the river from Natick to Lawrence. This permit included aerial herbicide spraying along the power line for fire prevention, as is common practice (agent orange?) Despite violent opposition at all the hearings Edison was granted a variance by the legislature. Bob Morgan explained that Edison owns the legislature because they hire all their unemployable relatives. "I’ll see what I can do." After a long campaign with many lost battles, with legal help from Tom Myles, and with help from Margot Black’s late husband, we win the war. The superior court over-rules the house. Edison has to go underground at what they have been claiming will involve unacceptable costs and time delays for the consumer. The cost turns out to be quite modest due to new cable technology and due to the elimination of most maintenance costs. This was a low-profile battle, all but forgotten. Not many people knew how close a call it was.
Further events are current history. Elizabeth died in October 2002, after she and I had decided to add a permanent conservation restriction to our deed, with means for SVT to enforce it in perpetuity. It prohibits any additional construction, and will prevent forever human encroachment into this beautiful wilderness. Brandon Kibbe is implementing this restriction.
In spring 2003 we placed a granite boulder bench on a knoll overlooking the river, near where Thoreau must have tied up, inscribed:
In memory of Elizabeth Cushing Kolm,
who adored this place and preserved it for half a century.