Perry farmhouse tells history filled with stories

Walls may not be able to speak, but they can provide a window to look back onto life on a hardscrabble farm long ago. When Bill Kendall and his daughter Georgie decided recently to rebuild the kitchen in their 200-year-old farmhouse, which is one of the oldest still-standing houses in Perry, they found in the old walls a history of the home, the 45-acre farm on Boyden's Lake and the family. Like those of many families Downeast, it's a history filled with stories and life lessons of joy and sadness passed down from generation to generation. And it's a history of being shaped by a sense of place.
Kendall's great-grandparents, Robert and Martha Golding, bought the house in 1854 from the estate of William Bugbee, who had built the house around 1820. The Bugbees were among the early settlers of Perry.
Kendall, now 83, relates that all of the beams they've uncovered were hand-hewn, with wooden pegs called trunnels or treenails used to fasten them together. Following the renovation, the beams will be left exposed in the kitchen. They also found large split shingles that did not have any knots, which "had to be from old growth wood," he notes. For the walls, before the days of laths foot-wide boards were split to hold the plaster.

Walls with a history
Among the items found in the walls were a number of shoes, with Kendall noting that leaving shoes in a wall was considered good luck. He says there were four sizes, but he doesn't know whose shoes they were. In an age when it was more common for children to die young, his grandmother Georgiana lost a daughter, Lillian, as an infant, and a pair of the smallest shoes could have been hers. Another pair might have belonged to his father Everett's youngest brother, Robert. Everett was the second of six children, and he and the older brothers, John and Howard, had stayed home to work the farm so that the two younger sons, Joe and Robert, could go to high school. Two weeks before he was to graduate from Shead Memorial High School, Robert was walking back home along the Golding Road when he developed a pain, but he kept going. He had ruptured his appendix, and the peritonitis infection "sent him to a screaming death." He died at the house, and with no painkillers "there was nothing to help him," Kendall relates with sadness in his voice. "I'm sure it was agony." His father was never able to talk about Robert's death.
Bill and Georgie also found homemade ice-fishing tip-ups that Robert may have made and "a young boy's curiosities" of sticks and trees that grew with crooked bends, possibly kept as poignant reminders that the family was not able to part with.
Other items included an old wooden beehive with a cut-out frame for glass to watch the queen and a wooden niddy-noddy tool that was used to wind yarn off a spinning wheel to make skeins. His great-grandmother Martha Golding, who was born in 1820 and died in 1903, had a spinning wheel, but it wasn't used after she passed away. The family hadn't been able to get the wheel upstairs to store it, so they took the base off. Kendall had kept the wheel at his house on the Shore Road, but he was never able to locate the base, which his father had told him was upstairs at the Golding Road home. As he and Georgie were taking apart the upstairs, they were quite excited to find the base in the crawl space above the kitchen. The wheel and base are now together again and stored in the barn next to the house.
One piece of furniture that will be staying in the kitchen is the mahogany table. Slightly chuckling, Kendall remembers that his grandmother Georgiana used to tell a story about a man coming by and telling her that it was solid mahogany, but she told him it was only a veneer. The man then cut a notch out of the table, and she realized it was indeed solid mahogany.
Where the bathroom now is located in the home had been Georgiana's bedroom, where she died in 1953. His father Everett, who was born and died in the house, had his bed moved into the old dining room after he got sick. Bill Kendall is now sleeping on a bed in the living room, between the rooms where his father and grandmother died. "There's certainly a message there," he ruminates.

Self-sufficiency on farms
During the 1800s and later, life on small family farms could be a struggle, as farmers grew and raised their own food. "People were self-sufficient as much as they could be with what they had, whether you had land or animals or a garden," Kendall recalls. His father had horses that were used to haul wood, mow the fields, plow the garden. He remembers that when he and his brother Frank were children the farm had milk cows, pigs, chickens and a garden. Root vegetables like potatoes, turnips and carrots, along with apples, were put down in the cellar to last all winter. The farm also has quite a few sugar maples, and he and his brother and also his mother, Leona, used to tap them to make their own maple syrup. The fields were mown for hay that was stored in the barn to feed the horses and cows. Oats, mullet or barley were grown to supplement the hay.
The house used to have a pantry with six shelves where shallow pans holding the milk from the cows were placed. The cream would rise and be put in a pan to sour and make butter. The milk also was used to make cottage cheese. Later his father bought a cream separator, and Kendall still has the separator in the barn. With some self-deprecation, he notes, "I tend not to throw stuff away -- to the point of sickness, because the barn's full." He observes that most people used to save what they had. His father didn't have a steady income, and his mother, Leona, was "a good organizer. I give her a lot of credit for stretching whatever we had." Although Everett was a fair bit older than Leona, they had "a really lasting, nice marriage."

Life lessons
Although he worked hard and didn't have much growing up on the farm, Kendall relates, "It was pretty fun. I always felt poor. My father's car always had a bad tire. I don't ever remember going hungry, but I remember not having shoes." Instead, he and Frank went barefoot all summer long. He fondly recalls that they would go swimming in the lake, and he and Frank would race Skip Kinney and Dr. Iveney in boats with 2 1/2 horsepower motors -- "it would take all day to get across the lake." They would hunt for turtles and loons and played a lot of baseball. The patch of ground where they played ball was all pressed down, and his father told him he would mow it again when "you boys grow up." In the winter they would go ice-fishing. "It was a fun time. We had it better than we realized."
In 1955 Kendall went into the Air Force, and when he came back in 1958 the house now had running water and a bathroom. "When I got out of the service in '58, my father was sick and I started cutting wood, and I haven't stopped since." He likes looking at healthy trees, and the trees on the farm have been a source of wood for generations. His love for the woods led Kendall to work as a forester for Georgia-Pacific for 31 years.
What he learned from growing up on a farm continues to this day, including the value of hard work and honesty. Telling another story, he remembers he used to go trapping with his father Everett for muskrats and beavers. The season on beavers was during January and February, and they would snowshoe out and back to Howard Lake and the Penknife lakes in Robbinston, which would take all day. Beaver pelts, though, were worth $40 each, which was a week's wages at the time. Once when they were trapping muskrats down by the Boyden's Lake outlet, they saw that someone had stolen one from their trap, as the chain was placed over the top of the trap. Muskrat pelts were worth $3, which was equal to the pay for four hours of work. The next day they saw a muskrat in another man's trap, and "I tried to get dad to take it, but he said no. He was a very honest person," and helped instill that value in his son.
Of other lessons he learned from his father, Kendall pauses then observes, "I still don't like to owe debts" or borrow money. But he says that life "is a lot more comfortable now." His father used "to worry a lot. I worry, too. It's his fault. But life is better. It's certainly not so hard."
Life may not be as hard, but in his retirement Kendall still works splitting wood on the farm -- a life lesson that is among many that have been passed down through the generations and will always be with him.