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From
the Back Cover --
Early one morning in June 1971 I rode my trusty gelding
Majorca to the top of Weir Hill. We stood there for a few minutes
looking down on the Stevens Mill below, then rode down the western slope
and up onto the old railroad bed. It ran behind Stevens Pond, crossed
Stevens Street, skirted the back yards of the row of mill houses there,
then opened onto Osgood Street. The rails had long since been removed,
but the cinder bed made a nice level path. When we got to Osgood Street,
we turned right and trotted along the grassy verge of the road,
following the stone walls. The old Captain Peter Osgood house stood on
our left, and as we jogged along beside the big hayfield there, we could
look up ahead to the Isaac Osgood house standing guard at the far end of
the field as pristine as the day it was completed in 1803. We crossed
over to the head of Stevens Street, where the Johnson House faced us,
then up to the main entrance to the farm. Two big elm trees, their
foliage hanging as thick as grapes over the road, shaded the drive by
the front house, with its lilacs in full bloom. The big barn loomed up
ahead, its double doors wide open in the heat of the day, and in the
distance the haying machinery worked the upper hayfield, pulsing like
some great mechanical heart. By then, we had already sent a man to the
moon. Yet on this morning, riding that mile or so from Weir Hill back
home to the farm, I experienced sights and sounds no different from
those of the last century, and almost no different from those of the
last two hundred years. In the coming years, the farm and its
surroundings would undergo more changes than it had for those two
hundred, but at that moment, that rare day in June, it stood unchanged,
timeless – the epitome of the New England farm in Spring.
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