'I WILL NOT LEAVE' by Howard Mansfield
THE POWER OF PLACE
ROMAINE TENNEY LOVED HIS FARM TO DEATH
IN THE SUMMER OF 1964, ROMAINE TENNEY WAS A BACHELOR FARMER
He milked 25 cows by hand on his farm in Ascutney, Vermont. He had no electricity in his house, used no gas-powered machinery He cut his firewood with an axe and a saw; cut his hay with workhorses. He didn't own a tractor or drive a car. When he went to the nearby big town of Claremont, across the river in New Hampshire, he'd walk the six miles -- except that he probably never walked all the way. People always picked him up. Everyone knew Romaine. With his long beard, felt hat, and overalls, he was a familiar sight. Romaine enjoyed visiting on these rides, and all his neighbors liked him. His farm was right on the major road between Ascutney and Claremont; the road hugged his cow barn, and neighbors would often stop to chat. He rose late and worked late into the night. "You could drive by at midnight and there he would be in his barn, fixing some harnesses or just puttering about," said Deputy Sheriff Robert Gale. It was as if Romaine held the office of Bachelor Farmer in town.
Romaine's house, trimmed under the eaves with Gothic-style gingerbread, stood behind a row of majestic maples. Tourists loved to take pictures of the house, and he'd sometimes pose for them. If they wanted a true, old-time Yankee, he'd oblige them. He was the real thing, happy to play the part for a moment, sending a tourist on his way with his prize catch: hook at this old farmer I found in Vermont. Milks his cows by hand. No electricity, no car, no tractor. Romaine Tenney was the Vermont they wanted to find.
Romaine looked good in every picture. "What I remember are his beautiful blue eyes and his eternal smile," said his niece, Rosemary Safford. "He was always smiling." And that's what everyone said. "He had a wonderful twinkle in his eye," said his neighbor, Roily Cann. Romaine was born on the farm and spent his life there. He loved his family: his many brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces. He loved his animals. He was a happy man -- until his farm was destroyed to build Interstate 91.
Vermont's first six miles of Interstate highway, a section of 1-91, opened in 1958. It ran from the Massachusetts border to just south of Brattleboro, and drivers marveled at what we now take for granted: It was straight and smooth. It was the shape of things to come, and they couldn't wait. When a new section of 1-89 opened up near Montpelier in 1960, 300 cars lined up to drive the six miles to Middlesex. The Interstate was more than just another road; it was a belief in progress. The highway would rescue Vermont -- take the state "out of the sticks" and put it "right in the economic mainstream of the country," said Elbert Moulton, the state's economic development chief under four governors.
"The Interstate was seen [as] the answer to many, if not most, of Vermont's problems," said Paul Guare, executive secretary of the state Transportation Board at the time. "It was universally applauded." When the government condemned houses and farms in the way, filled wetlands, and leveled hills, "people were mostly happy to settle with the state." Progress as a religion permitted everything. It was the gravity of America; it was the force that held everything in its course.
Dedicating a new section of T91 in 1961, Senator George Aiken said, "We're on the verge of the greatest development Vermont has ever seen." That section of highway had buried the senator's boyhood home.
Romaine Tenney's farm was 90 acres of good pasture and woods, with a southern exposure and plenty of water. There was a spring up the hillside that almost never went dry, a brook, and a hand pump in the kitchen sink. The fields were good for three hay crops a year. There was an orchard and a 10-acre woodlot. In the farm's prime, in the 1950s, Romaine milked 50 or 60 cows and had about 100 head of livestock total. He kept two teams of workhorses and a couple of dogs to bring the cows home.
Romaine's father had bought the property in April 1892. The following January, Myron and RosaTenney came over Mendon Peak in a wagon with all they owned in a trunk or two, so the family story goes. He was 45 and she was 25. The house had been built around 1843. The family who sold it to the Tenneys had dressed up the home and the barns in the latest fashion, Gothic Revival, giving the house leaded windows in a diamond-pane pattern, gingerbread trim, two false dormers, and a big porch. The Tenneys liked to sit out on the flat porch roof to enjoy the long view down the Connecticut River Valley. "It was a real showplace when my people came there," recalled Ruth Tuttle, their oldest child. "My father was very proud of the big meadow beside the house, and he used to sing and whistle as he worked there."
Myron and Rosa had nine children. Romaine was their fourth, born in 1900. His father died when he was 14, leaving his mother alone to raise the large family and run the farm. At times all they ate was oatmeal. All the children, except for Romaine, left the farm. He lived there with his mother until her last years, when she moved in with a daughter nearby.
Romaine was closest to his brothers Myron and particularly Emerson, who was the youngest and lived in Clare-mont. Emerson saw Romaine all the time, picked him up for Thanksgiving dinner, and brought his children by to play and work on the farm. They loved it; it was a thrill. "I remember all of us piling into the car and just so excited," Rosemary said. "I remember stretching my neck, and I could see the train trestle, and I knew we were almost there. And then the big metal bridge that crossed the river. You'd look down -- the floor of the bridge had holes in it, so you could see the water -- and then you knew the farm was right up there. And then the beautiful trees with the house just nestled in. And we were there. And I think perhaps before Daddy even got the car in park, those back doors were open, and we were gone.
"When we got there, Daddy would say, 'Don't go near the horses.' We always rode the horses." They rode them through the fields for hours, ran barefoot all over, played in the barn, drank from the cows' trough, rolled down the hills. "Can you imagine four or five little kids running in and out of the barn, in the house, and up the fields?" Rosemary asked. "And he's just smiling. We'd run by and he'd squirt the milk toward us … I can remember running behind the hay wagon, and thinking we were really helping. It took two of us to lift a bale of hay. We'd pick it up and drop it, and pick it up and drop it, but they were so patient. They were all very kind, gentle people -- all the brothers and sisters."
Her sister, Gerri Dickerson, remembers her uncle cutting the tall grass by the house. "His broad shoulders swung in harmony with the scythe," she wrote. "The muscles in his forearms moved like liquid in a repetitive pattern. It was difficult to tell whether it was the man or the tool that led and controlled the motion. This exercise would have me spellbound. Watching and listening would soothe me as I sat in the soft swath of grass left by Uncle Romaine's rhythm."
Thinking of those days, Gerri said she could still smell the freshly cut grass and hear the "swishing cadence of the scythe … I am brought back to a safe and happy childhood. It is not just an image of Uncle Romaine; it is as well an image of Vermont."
The new highway was inserting itself into that image of Vermont. Rod Tenney, the oldest of Emerson's children, had worked on the farm for several summers. He had a friend who was on the crew surveying the route for the highway down the valley.
"They were coming from the north," Rod recalled. "And it was toward the end of the day, and people were ready to call it a day and go home. The guy in charge said, 'We'll get just one more site. We'll just shoot it on that barn down there,'" picking out Romaine's cow barn. "And that's how the Interstate highway ended up going right through the middle of the property. If it had gone five degrees one way or the other, you know, things would have been very different. But highways have to go somewhere."
By 1964, the Tenney farm had seen better days. "The barn and parts of the house were just coming down around him. He wasn't a carpenter at all," said another nephew, Ron Tenney. The woodshed toward the end of the ell was falling in, and the porch was gone. Tourists who liked their Vermont picture perfect would ask his neighbors why someone didn't buy that house and fix it up.
Romaine lived in the ell, which had a large kitchen with a wood-fired cook-stove, a soapstone sink, and waist-high piles of newspapers and magazines -- agricultural journals, National Geographic -- and a transistor radio by any chair he might sit in. He cooked simple meals, things like oatmeal, biscuits, or beans. He didn't have a garden, except for a large rhubarb patch. On hot days when he was haying, he drank switchel, a homemade mix of ginger, vinegar, water, and molasses or maple syrup. He slept in a room upstairs over the kitchen. He followed his own routine; he didn't change his clocks for Daylight Saving Time. Why bother? The cows didn't know the difference.
He never went into the main house, which sat just as it had been 40 years earlier, a dusty museum with lace tablecloths, curtains, kerosene lamps, portraits, sepia-toned family photos, mirrors, and an old organ -- all sitting in the dark because there was no electric light, and the big maples shaded out the sun. No one ever entered the house, except when his nieces and nephews would sneak in, and just once when he invited his neighbors Roily and Lois. "He showed us his mother's dresses still hanging in the closet. He never wanted to give them away or anything," Roily said. "He hung onto his earlier life."
Romaine's dairy operation was in decline. Small dairy farms like his were closing in record numbers. The creameries were no longer picking up milk cans; they required bulk tanks, a setup too expensive to be supported by the average herd, which at the time was just 17 cows. All across Vermont, families had to face the end of their dairy farms. In the 10 years after the first bulk tanks in 1953, one-third of the state's dairy farms closed.
Romaine did attempt to modernize. He had some arthritis in his hands, so a neighbor helped him install electricity in the barn for milking machines. But Romaine didn't like the machines and soon went back to milking by hand. He also hired hay balers, who came with their machines; before that he had stacked the hay loose in the barn.
The highway was pressing in. He was supposed to be out by April 1, 1964, but he didn't move. Romaine's old house and barns were an island in the midst of piles of dirt and boulders. By June the crew was dynamiting within 100 yards of the house. Rocks from one blast had gone through a wall. They leveled the rolling meadows, removing 100,000 cubic yards of earth on both sides of the house. Bulldozers crossed the front yard; the diamond-pane windows were covered in dirt.
Neighbors pleaded with Romaine to auction his antiques and buy a trailer to live in. They'd look after him. They offered him a room and a barn for his animals. They offered to raise money around town for a new house. Romaine refused; he'd take care of himself.
The Tenney family looked into moving the old brick house, but a construction company told them it couldn't be done. And anyway, it wasn't the house alone that Romaine cared about -- it was the farm, too. The state offered $10,600 for the land and buildings, and then a jury increased the offer to $13,600. Romaine owned the farm with his eight siblings and his mother's estate; that amount would be split 10 ways. But it didn't matter. He wasn't leaving his land, he said repeatedly. He'd been away only once, for military service.
Under eminent domain, the government has the power to take private property for public use without the owner's consent. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says that the owner must receive "just compensation," which has usually been defined as market value. But you couldn't put a market value on Romaine's love for his land.
On the afternoon of Friday, September 11, one week after Romaine Tenney's 64th birthday, Sheriff Melvin Moore and his deputies arrived with a court order. They emptied the horse barn and the sheds of tools, plows, harnesses, wagons. The men "moved gingerly," one report noted, looking at Romaine, who watched from a side porch for a few minutes before going inside. They stacked it all in two piles under a big elm on the hillside: including the beautiful old bridles with a gold T on the blinders that he took pride in, and an old sleigh. "He loved that sleigh. He used to spend hours polishing it, painting it," said Emerson's wife, Peggy.
The first call came in at 2:50 a.m. on Saturday, September 12. The alarm could be heard for two miles; the night sky glowed orange. Romaine's house, sheds, and barns were blazing. The cow barn across the road was on fire, as were the two piles of harnesses and tools.
Rod Spaulding was one of the first of 30 volunteer firemen on the scene. The whole ell, where Romaine lived, was burning. Spaulding and the fire chief tried to enter the house. The front door was spiked shut. They knocked the door down. Romaine's dog Spot charged in after them. But a few feet inside there was another door -- the one that lead to where Romaine slept -- and it was either nailed shut or blocked.
"We just couldn't go any farther," Spaulding said. "At the time, we didn't have any breathing apparatus. That entryway, the hall, was all filling up with smoke. There's nothing more we could have done. The fire was crackling and setting to burn overhead. Just too far gone." The fire chief ordered everyone out, knowing the worst: that Romaine was in there. They had to hold Spot back.
Sometime after midnight, Romaine had let his horses and cows free and set the barns on fire. Neighbors believed that he had timed the fire so that no one would see it. The local machine-tool companies were between shifts; no one was on the road. He put his beloved dogs outside, barricaded himself in the house, and set it on fire. Then, probably, he shot himself.
It was an extremely hot fire, so hot that it melted the plastic light on top of the fire chief's car, which was parked about 80 feet away. "With our little engine with only 100 gallons of water on it, we couldn't do a thing," Spaulding recalled. The nearby town of Windsor had also sent 10 men and an engine, but it was no use. The firemen rounded up the cows and spent a half-hour reviving one calf. Neighbors would take the cows and Spot; Romaine's niece Rosemary would take his other dog, Prince.
Almost 50 years later, that night still upsets Spaulding: "It's a terrible, helpless feeling. Been through it a couple of times. It's just terribly hopeless. You go because that's what we do, and you get there and there's nothing you can do."
On the solemn morning after, Romaine's family stood by the smoldering ruins with hundreds of others. They had been there all night. "'This can't be true. This can't be true,'" Rosemary recalled thinking. "I didn't know where the animals were. I didn't know where he was. It was just a total, total loss. And this beautiful farm and this beautiful man and those animals loved him as much he loved them. And it was gone. All over a ridiculous highway -- which could have, and should have, taken a big old turn."
She had seen Romaine just hours before, around midnight. She and her sister, Joan Newcity, and her brother Ron had gone over to the farm with her father to move some of his things to their house. They thought he was going to move in with them. Romaine and her father always took a long time to part, chatting by the car. "That night Romaine cried," Rosemary recalled. "I remember him saying, 'I didn't even milk the cows today' He was very emotional."