My grandmother, Frances Knight Marsh, was born at Smiling Hill Farm in 1918 before it was so called – her younger brother Roger would name it for a favorite book.
My great-grandmother Blanche photographed life at the farm: her commercial dahlia garden, my grandmother and her sister Bernice with dolls on the porch, my great-grandfather Perce with his team of oxen, my great-great-grandfather Ben in his Sunday bowtie next to his white rose bushes, my grandmother on her horse holding Roger, my grandparents on their wedding day.
The Sears Roebuck farmhouse was built after a fire consumed the first. County Road was dirt and cars had recently been invented. My grandmother knew every horse and person that passed. She attended a one-room schoolhouse near O’Donal’s. Her father drove the school wagon past the general store and blacksmith shop at Coal Kiln Corner, now an Aroma Joe’s.
An older homestead sat above the duck ponds, abandoned after a child died from a “bad well.” My grandmother played alone in the cool shadows and dusty sunlight of the empty house. She would speak of it like she knew its ghosts.
In 1976, she solved the mystery of Col. Thomas Westbrook, an ancestral uncle and legendary colonist in service to the King, buried in secret in his sister’s woods in winter, destitute from a bad business deal that could have held his body for ransom.
She had listened to her grandfather as they passed an unmarked mound in the woods. “There lies the colonel,” he said, words told to him as a child. The colonel was exhumed and found well-preserved in a grave of shale, his ponytail tied with a silk ribbon. A rusted breastplate bore his name before it disintegrated in the air. At 10, I could literally touch my roots.
Westbrook, his sister Mary and her husband Nathan Knight were industrious. The men surveyed County Road/Congress Street, Broadturn Road and others, built the first bridge over the Stroudwater River, felled pines for masts for the British Navy, “drove” the Native Americans to Canada and cleared Knight’s Hill.
(I acknowledge the impact my ancestors had on land that was new to them, which they worked hard to make their own, at unfathomable cost to the indigenous people who were there when they arrived.)
The farm was left to my Uncle Roger, who had a herd of cows and a crop of kids to sustain it. Raised in Gorham, I often followed my older cousins at their chores, delighting in baby animals and Aunt Sally’s cookies.
In college, I drove a forklift at Hillside Lumber – co-founded by my father Eben. We snuck into the ice cream freezers on hot days. We looked out over the same fields as generations before.
My grandmother was saddened by the noxious development that now surrounds the farm. She suspected the Maine Turnpike Authority’s plan to pave her farm. She worried about the health of Red Brook.
This working farm, historic landscape and significant open space has been in the heart and soul of our family for 300 years, and in the collective consciousness of those who were there when we arrived and those who have visited since.
Places evolve, but the rolling fields of Smiling Hill Farm remain the same, which is why they are beloved by so many. The fields give us pause. They make space. They hold ground. They let us exhale. They connect us to that place and to our past. They tell us we are almost home.
If my grandmother were here today, she would tell Peter Mills to find another way.
Carrie Marsh Dixon is the executive secretary and acting executive director of the Boston Parks and Recreation Commission in Massachusetts. She has a master’s degree in urban and regional planning.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
