Event: Telling Tales Out of School #1

Oral History Project Interviews

Location: Old Lyme Town Senior Center

Date: November 15, 2009

Interviewee:Jim Noyes

Interviewer: Sousan Arafeh

I’m Jim Noyes and I’ve lived in Old Lyme. I was born and brought up in Old Lyme but I haven’t lived in Old Lyme all my life, yet! I’d like to tell you a little bit about my childhood, my background. I was born in a family of seven children, seven siblings. We lived in a big house at the intersection of McCurdy Road and Shore Road. The house is still standing today but its not in the family any longer. My father had a little farm there as many people did in those days, this is during the depression or at the beginning of the depression. I think just about every other family in town had at least somewhat of a farm, a big garden and a cow maybe, some chickens and so forth. For us the way we lived in those days my father was by trade an upholsterer and furniture finisher and he worked for Stanley Davis who was a furniture manufacturer in Old Lyme and had quite a few people working for him. But during the depression he had to lay my father off and I often wondered how he felt laying off a man with seven children. And all of them less than 19 or 20 years old. One of the results was my oldest brother Bill had to quit school when he was in the 7th or 8th grade and go to work to help support the family, which happened pretty often in those days. I started to tell you about my father’s farm. One day a friend of his from Texas came by and my father was out there milking the cow and he said to my father, how do you make a living on this little farm. My father told him the details of what he had and so forth as I’ve already stated and the Texan said, out in Texas where I come from I have a ranch that it takes me all day to drive my car out of. My father said I used to have an old car like that too. So anyway, my father was milking the cow and the Texan said Charlie, what time is it? And my father looked under the cow and said its 2:30. That marvelous, you look under the cow and hold the utters up and you can tell what time it is. And Charlie said, if I hold them up high enough I can see the village clock. You’ve heard this story before. Well, that’s as good as it gets.

Speaking of farms as I already stated, everybody had somewhat of a farm in those days but there were some quite large farms here too. I could start at the Post Road at the border of East Lyme and name off at least a dozen or 15 farms along the Post Road alone. And they weren’t large farms like you’d expect out west today, but nevertheless for those times they were pretty large. And that’s how a lot of people made their living of course. All the stores in Old Lyme at that time sold grain because it was a typical farm community. Most people today don’t realize this. There’s one store just opposite the barbar shop in Old Lyme that had a building out behind it that was just for grain. And I can remember when I worked at the A&P Store I was carrying grain out many, many times in 100 pound sacks, none of this small packaging stuff, it was bulk grain. And all this grain came into Old Lyme on the railroad silage which was across the tracks from what is now the OLCC. It was quite a big building and it was always full of grain and many rats around. We used go, I lived right next door to it, I was up there quite a bit, it seemed to be a place for kids to hang out near the railroad tracks. Not a very safe place and I’m sure if my parents knew I was there they wouldn’t have been too happy.

But speaking of stores, there was an A&P store on the corner of Ferry Road and Lyme Street and that building is no longer in existence. Later it moved up across the street from what is the Library. And many people today, the building does not exist either, that was torn down. As a matter of fact I’m a building contractor and I tore it down. People argue with me where it was and there isn’t any argument because I knew exactly where it was. We tore that down and I sold the lumber there as we pulled the building apart. I sold second hand lumber. I broke even on it, believe it or not, it seemed not too likely that you would, and I didn’t loose any money and I kept my crew busy for the winter. It was a bad winter for construction. So that’s about all I can say about that, I guess. At that time the A&P store moved up to what is now the Hall’s Road. And that is where most of the shopping is done today and was from that time on. This was back in the Fifties.

Lets see, I told you about Stanley Davis. Old Lyme was a farm community.

Tell me about some of the farms. You were saying you could list them. Do you remember some of them?

Oh, yea, I remember a lot of them. Sure, but they were typical New England farms. I don’t remember anything special about them, they all had milking cows. Starting almost in East Lyme, there was the Davy Farm. There are davy’s around to this day. Elizabeth Davy, Olgel her name is, lives on part of the property of the farm. And the property that the Lyme Senior Housing is on was part of her farm. They owned a lot of land. All these farmers owned a lot of land. And coming along a little further from East Lyme up the Post Road was Gene Caulkin’s farm and he lived right there by the little stream that goes under the road there. And then coming up the road a little further at Two Sill Lane there were two farms on Sill Lane—the Cone and after it became the Roberts Farm and then the Ely farm and the list goes on and on here. Up across the street from what is now the Pro Auto there was a farmer there called Imer or Limer, I never could figure out his name, Carl Imer or Limer. Somebody might remember. He had a farm there. Mostly all milking cattle as I can remember. And most of these farmers delivered milk from door to door in an old truck, never a new one, times were tough in those days. Coming along up the Post Road my distant relative, Judge Walter Noyes had a huge farm and his home was opposite the Bee & Thistle, a big yellow colonial house there, I don’t know who lives there now, it’s just been reshingled for about the 5th time in 15 years that I know of, I don’t understand why they have to reshingle it all the time, but that’s another story I guess. And coming on Lyme street, Sam Tooker had a farm and he was the grandfather of Judith Tooker who is our tax collector and she lives ther eon the old farm but most of the property is gone because its now occupied by schools. And coming along up to Library Lane, there was a farm run by a man named Cliff Howard and surprising enough his father ran a farm at White Sand’s Beach and his uncle ran a farm at Brighton Beach and all those beaches were farms at one time. Oh here’s a point I wanted to make. When all these farms were around, they cut the wood, there were no trees around, no where near like there is today, and it was, I had a relative of mine who lived in North Dakota which is kind of barren of trees, and he got stifled by all this, he felt hemmed in, smothered and he never forgot that. I talked to him a year or two ago and he reminded me of that. So you could see, I lived on the Shore Road and in the old days there was a big open field for hay across the road, a large field and you could see the Long Island Sound just by standing on my front porch and you could see Saybrook Point. You can’t see 500 feet now. Also the same thing on Johnny Cake Hill. You could go half way up the hill and look over toward Ferry Road or the River and you could almost see the river. It was all clear, there weren’t any trees at all because the farmers and the people cut these trees to burn or to build and at one time there was a lot of boat building going on, but not in my time. So getting back to the farms, there were two farms on Mile Creek Road. One was owned by Lea Marsh who was a prominent politician in town, he was speaker of the house and our town representative for many years and a very good man. His wife is still living on part of the farm. And then there was John Muller’s farm on Mile Creek road, he had a pretty big herd of cattle. He was also a politician and ended up working for the State of CT in the husbandry business. And then going down toward the Shore on Route 156, the Shore road we used to call in this day, there was a man named Phil Peck who had a farm. It goes on and on. And then further down there was Risley, had a farm. To give you an idea on how crowded it was with farms around here. You couldn’t go very far without getting your foot cut. You know what that means, stepping in the manure. Its an old saying.

Getting your foot cut? Why did they say that?

It’s just an expression. Stepping in manure, cutting your foot, I don’t know how it came about. Soemtihing else I wanted to say about was the trolley system in Old Lyme. It only ran for from 1913 to 1919, I believe. And the trolleys used to come out from New London, through Waterford, East Lyme and into Old Lyme on the Post Road. Always followed the Post Road and to this day in East Lyme, on the Post Road just west of Lover’s Lane you can still see remnants of where the trolleys went. There are indented areas where they leveled the earth off to make it easier for the tolleys. The trolleys used to go down Lyme Street and proof of it all is 3 or 4 years ago when they were rebuilding the road on Lyme Street they found a lot of trolley ties, that’s what the tracks went on, of course, so that’s proof that the trolley did run down through there. Many people, nobody my age, it was gone before I came along, but people I knew used to ride the trolley. My father and my brother used to come up from Black Hall to go fishing in Rogers Lake, they took a trolley up to church corner and rode up the lake and rented a boat to fish for the day then took the trolley back again. I think they rode a bicycle, they didn’t have a car in those days. The trolley didn’t last long because the automobile was coming along and everybody could be a little more independent they didn’t have to depend upon the trolley. Although it was cheap, for five cents you could ride all over the place. And by all over the place I mean you could go as far as Boston on the trolley if you made the proper connections or into New York City and the trolley ran down Lyme Street and around church corner, down to what is known as 156 now and it went north on 156 to the car bridge, the first car bridge that was built over the Connecticut River and the tracks used to run right down the middle of the bridge and as they rode across the bridge and got to the Saybrook side, they took an immediate left and that was Ferry Road, Saybrook. And at the end of that street was the powerhouse and the buildings are still in existence to day and you can see it well defined by the huge tower you can see across the river if you’ve ever been down that way and you rode along and went back onto the Post Road in Saybrook and you rode the trolley to downtown Saybrook which wasn’t a big community in those day. Probably 2500 people, incidentally Old Lyme in those days was only about 1200 or 1300 and the trolleys went behind what is now known as Beard’s lumber and there was a big high concrete abutment which the trolleys went over, they crossed over a couple of roads there and went out to Fenwick and also, going back to the CT River, the trolleys followed old Route 9 up to Essex and to Deep River. I think they dead ended in Deep River then turned around and came back again. Another reason the trolleys didn’t succeed, they had a motorman strike and they couldn’t ever settle the strike. There were several bad accidents where people were killed and this kind of helped to destroy the trolley. There was one trolley after the system shut down that stayed on Lyme Street for several weeks after there was nothing going on, it was just dead. And we had a motorman from Old Lyme, his name was Spicer Huntley. And his son later became postmaster in Old Lyme and he has a granddaughter who lives here to this day and her name is Linda Whiteman, I think. And she is on the grange thing that we do. But she is not a member of the historical Society.

You were telling me about the motorman and the trolley and you had a couple of weeks. Did you drive it around at all during that time?

No, no, it was just stuck there. He was quite a guy. He later became a salesman for the CL&P. Here’s something nobody knows, I just found out today, speaking of the power company, Old Lyme had its own power company at one time back in the 1900’s I believe. Probably a little later than that. But getting back to Spicer Huntley, he became the, in those days each town had its own court system. They had an elected judge, he was not necessarily an attorney, judge of probate, no not judge of probate, that’s something entirely different, of course. The prosecuting attorney so to speak and then the defense attorney and the judge which I already said. So they had their own court system in town and any minor arrest that was made, they heard the case. And it was kind of interesting sometimes. I don’t remember anybody going to jail for very long, but nevertheless. The motorman had several jobs on the trolleys. He didn’t just stand there and drive the trolley, he took tickets, sold tickets or whatever they did, probably like tokens, as a matter of fact I think I’ve seen tokens of the street railroad, they call it also and you drove the car from each end. As soon as you got to the end of the line, you just went to the back of the car and drove it from that end just like you would the other end but the motorman had to get out and turn the wheel around which was on top.

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