Some Interesting History Connected with
The Life and Death of Mary Maria Sprague
Continued from posting of May 31, 2016
The first year Will and Mary spent on the old Sprague farm with his father and with a spinster sister, Hannah, and a bachelor brother, John. The next year his sister Cynthia and husband Isaac Collier changed places with them and they farmed it up by the bullhead pond where Mr. Rose now lives. They were expecting to stay another year on the Collier place, since known as the Henry P. Northup farm, where they had picked hops for John and Henry Northup in the fall of eighty-one and where their first child, the son Frederick Burdette, had drawn his first breath on December seventh of that year, 1881. But the Colliers sold their farm to Mrs. Northup and they had to hunt for a place of their own. In their search they came very near buying the Bresee place which is now state land on the step of the hill west of where Harlie Stowell now lives.
Will, without looking in the filthy, muddy cellar, finally decided on the Benjamin Ferris farm of 93 acres and they moved to the nucleus of the present Sunny Vale Farm in the early spring of 1882, taking three-months-old Freddie along to the spot which during the last sixty-three years has meant home to him. They bought the place under date of March 31, 1882, for $2700, giving a mortgage for $2200, and started in farming on their own farm with scrub horses, scrub cattle, a walking plow and a peg-tooth harrow. By strict economy and with the help of inheritances, they paid for the farm and weathered the depression of 1893 when dressed pork was three cents a pound and they took less than forty-five cents a hundred for milk in June, 1896, from the Campbell cheese factory. The first year they sold mild at one dollar, then in '83 and '84 made butter buying a box churn that is still in service, then returning to the factory where they stayed till it burnt Oct. 5, 1899. After that milk went to McDermott's shipping station at Smyrna, often twice a day by wagon in changing with the neighbors.
The first or second summer in the new home Mary, in a horse-and-buggy accident in which her oldest sister, Emma, jumped to safety on a stone-heap with the baby boy, got bruised and knocked unconscious and received a nasty back injury which troubled her for the rest of her long life. Ambitious Will, who had displaced bones in his neck at the age of sixteen in a backward fall of sixteen feet with Will Hyde unto solid rock, soon strained himself with a heavy, dull grain cradle and started in with the internal trouble that final took his life.
Sept. 3, 1885, a daughter, Bertha May, who married Harlie Lytle Stowell on April 4, 1909, and has a son and three granddaughters, came to grace the home on Smyrna Hill.
But Mary's days of fifty and sixty years ago were not all sunshine. With spasms in her and sick spells in Will they were rather cloudy. Sledding was hard, so hard in fact that Fred and Bertha had to take wrapping paper to school to use in place of the nice, white pads that some of the scholars used.
The 16th day of December, 1892, Will and Mary had tired of getting hay in the swampy lower meadow and bought on Eighteen acres on the hill for $250 of Ziba Tuttle.
June 12, 1895, a second son, Hermon Wallace, named after two cousins who died young, greeted the sunlight. May endured the agony of having him in France in 1918, fighting the Germans in such danger of wounds, death or capture that, when he came back across the Atlantic in 1919, he was the only man left alive out of his squad of eight.
In 1902, May saw her son of twenty years stay out of school and engineer the building of a new cow barn when Will was not in shape to handle the job. The next year she saw the same son graduate from Smyrna high school in its second class. In the fall of 1903, however, real trouble struck her. She was hitching up the pony horses and hauling wood when her husband was confined to the house by illness. Finally he became so bad that she had to ask Fred to stay out of school, acquiring college entrance requirements, and take charge of the farm.
To be continued
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