The personal story behind a Colebrook property

My folks bought the property on Beech Hill in 1931 from a Robertsville farmer named John Northway. The following events led up to that purchase:

My parents were married on Sept. 6, 1929, in New York City. The crash that took down the stock market occurred the following month, on Oct. 30. My father was a quite successful marine artist, meaning that he specialized in portraying ships and water scenes. At one time he had two or three in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but when the economy crashes, the arts are among the first to feel the crunch. He not only lost the money that he had in the bank, he didn’t have any buyers for his art.

My mother was teaching at a high school in New Rochelle, N.Y., and therefore was taking home a decent salary. Very shortly after the crash on Wall Street, they realized that this economic downturn was not only going to be severe, it was also going to last a long time and they had better make plans immediately for their future. As they wanted to start a family, it was reasonable to expect that she would have to resign her teaching job while the Depression would still be in full swing. The solution was to buy a farm and live on whatever they were able to produce.

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My mother’s family on her mother’s side was from Nova Scotia. From the time she was a little tot, she had spent all of her summers there, and when she became old enough, was assigned various jobs on the large farm her grandfather owned. By the time she was in her late teens, she had a working knowledge of how to raise cattle, handle horses and plant and care for crops and orchards, among a myriad of other bits and pieces of farm lore. In other words, it was not on a whim that she decided to risk everything by living off the land — as long as it was your land and it was not encumbered by mortgages or liens.

So the search was on. Weekends were spent driving around Dutchess and other lower Hudson River Valley counties, but without finding the right combinations to guarantee survival. Then a real estate agent who specialized in farmland told them about a large number of available farms in Litchfield County, Connecticut — did they want to look that far afield?

The end result was that the farm that John Northway had purchased the year before for the specific purpose of turning out his young stock was now back on the market, primarily because of the economy. The agent came up Route 8 to Robertsville, picked up John and Elsie Northway, and drove to the top of Beech Hill. At that time, the 125-acre farm consisted of 40 acres of cleared land (for cultivation and pasture) with the rest in forest, about half of which had been recently lumbered. It had two streams (one of which had native trout), a two-storied barn and not much better than a shack for a dwelling.

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Originally, this building had started out as a one-room schoolhouse in Canaan, probably in the late 18th century, and had been taken to Colebrook shortly after the Civil War to act as a woodworking shop at the site of the present 21 Beech Hill Road (the first house on the right after crossing Viets Brook). There it stood for a few years until it was taken to what is today the intersection of Beech Hill Road and Moses Road. The reason for this move was that the house at the last mentioned site had recently burned and the shop had proven to be smaller than what was required.

What attracted my folks to the place was obviously not the house, but the land and barn. After inspecting the property, my father and John Northway were dickering about the terms. John, like most farmers at that time, did not want to sell the place outright, but wished to retain a mortgage. The reasoning behind this was that a mortgage guaranteed an income, at least until the principal was paid off. Perhaps more importantly (especially in hard economic times), in the event the purchaser defaulted, the land reverted to the former owner, along with whatever monies had already been paid.

Knowing this, it was the one scenario that my mother did not want to undertake. She insisted that they would pay the asking price in cash — $1,300. As the men bargained, the two women were standing off to the side, and my mother was getting nervous. At that moment, Mrs. Northway touched my mother’s arm and in a whisper said, “My dear, don’t you worry, if you want this place, you shall have it� (and here she lowered her voice even more) “because it’s in my name!�

And that’s what they did. My folks copied the ownership pattern, with the property in my mother’s name. Somewhat different from these days of pre-nuptial agreements and messy, long, drawn-out court battles over ownership rights. Perhaps there was a risk, but not in this case — they lived there happily for more than 50 years.

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The purchase price is interesting: Here is its history, such a far cry from the way real estate transactions are conducted nowadays.

After the Civil War, there was a severe economic downturn and one result was the low value of farmland. The returning veterans who had seen what wonderful farmland existed in what is today our Midwest caused this. The railroads had blossomed during and after the war and it was possible to travel long distances in a few short days, or perhaps even hours, at a reasonable price. This immediately made the steep, rocky, gravelly upland farms in western Connecticut and Massachusetts practically worthless. Farm and woodland could be purchased for between $1 and $10 in just about any amount you wanted. Farmers walked off their now unwanted property in droves, leaving the banks and towns holding the bag, and with no easy solution.

It was the banks that came up with the idea of sending agents to New York to meet the arriving immigrants from Europe, who were arriving in ever-increasing numbers. One such agent met a ship carrying, among others, three brothers from Ireland by the name of O’Neil. They had come from a rural background and responded to the agent’s report of two adjacent farms in Colebrook. One had 125 acres, the other 100, and up the road a short distance in Sandisfield, another comparable farm. The result was that James bought the 125-acre farm, John the 100, and Daniel the Sandisfield property. James and his wife, who purchased what was to someday be our place, remained the owners until 1930, when they sold it to a lumberman from Winsted named Avery, who, after cutting a portion of the standing timber, sold it the same year to John Northway for his cattle to fatten up on.

Now the remarkable thing: John O’Neil paid $1,300 for the farm in 1871; Avery, in 1930, bought it for the same price, made his profit by cutting some timber, and sold it to Northway for $1,300. John, who probably would have normally held onto the land for more than a year, decided that the tough economic times dictated that he should sell it for the same $1,300 if the chance arose.

Our family was always pretty sure that most of the residents in town who knew them figured that in a short time they, like so many others in similar situations, would be long gone.

My daughter and her husband now own the farm. They have a modern house and beautiful grounds, but they pay in taxes many times the original purchase price each and every year.

Bob Grigg is the town historian in Colebrook.