Dear Icestation; Thank you for your excellent historical piece (12/16/03) about West Brattleboro. Your childhood memories recaptured some of my past recollections that I have not thought about for fifty years.
Unfortunately, I can not identify the mystery woman at the Hayes Tavern. Living on Western Avenue across the street from Judge Gibson’s home, a Saturday bike adventure was just too dangerous beyond the Creamery Bridge. The Avenue was a narrow two lane concrete road whose sidewalks were treacherous dirt paths along the edges of the street.
There were occasions, however, when our family would visit friends on Bonnyvale Road during the years before the West Brattleboro Fire Station and Academy School were constructed. I also distinctly remember hearing the railroad boxcars thumping and bumping at night from West Brattleboro. The answer to my inquiry about why I could so clearly hear the trains will be the starting point for “A Remembrance - Part 4” to appear on ibrattleboro at a later date.
Your description of the sawmill across from WKVT on Williams Street is accurate. The wood strips you picked up for your furnace were the cut offs from the bolt ash mill owned by Harry Clark.
Directly behind the sawmill was a series of open sheds with fans mounted along the back wall. The ash was cut green into dimension stock and carefully stickered on one foot centers inside the storage sheds. The fans were used to expedite the air drying process to evaporate the free water. The dimension stock was then shipped to various sporting good manufacturers throughout the United States. During those years tennis rackets were cut from a single piece of white ash. The process of lamination had not yet been invented.
Harry Clark was one of the wealthiest individuals in Brattleboro. Unlike most fiscally prudent Vermonter’s, Harry was not afraid to spend money. He lived in the brick English Tudor house on the corner of Western Avenue and Highlawn Road. Because Harry despised getting into a cold vehicle during the winter months, the attached brick garage on the north side of the house was heated to seventy-two degrees from December to April.
For his Granddaughter’s birthday, who was a senior at BHS (before it became BUHS), Harry bought her a new beige Chrysler 300 Sport Convertible, one of the hottest and most expensive cars made in America. The neighborhood preteens, myself included, would spend hours peering over the brick wall at her car parked in Harry’s driveway pretending how many times a day we would drive it to out run a Brattleboro police cruiser.
Although I was never in the Clark house, one Halloween I summoned up the courage to ring the front door bell. My intention was to confirm the rumor that all of the door knobs in the house were made of cut crystal glass. When the scary dungeon looking wood door ever so slowly creaked opened, I ran off in terror. I had no intention of dieing to confirm a stupid door knob rumor.
Clark’s Ash Mill was subsequently sold in the 1970’s to Victor Morse, who, when he was not running the sawmill, was the editor of the Brattleboro Reformer. Victor wrote a wonderful paperback book entitled, 36 Miles of Trouble: The Story of the West River Railroad, that dealt with the on going disasters of the West River passenger rail service.
Unfortunately, ash tennis rackets followed the demise of wood skies (Northland) and buggy whips. Clark’s Ash Mill was subsequently torn down. The land was subdivided and a multi-housing facility was built by students from the BUHS career center.
If you rode your bike around the ash mill down Williams Street, kicked off your shoes, and climbed down into the middle of the Whetstone Brook, there were four enormous plywood structures filled with steel rebar that extended straight up into the open sky all the way to the Moon. Well, maybe they were not that high, as the rectangles were the forms into which the concrete piers were poured for the new interstate bridge over Williams Street.
Observing the construction of that bridge from inception to completion was far more exciting that watching a fuzzy twelve inch black and white television tube with contestants behaving like idiots to “Beat the Clock”.
Shortly after the interstate was constructed and the north and south lanes were opened from Brattleboro to a temporary exit in Guilford just shy of the Massachusetts border, there occurred a hellacious accident on the Williams Street Bridge.
During the night a vehicle traveling in the northbound lane stalled on the bridge. The driver shut off his lights to save his battery. When he exited the vehicle and opened the hood, he saw two cars in both lanes next to each other headed right for him. Realizing the bridge was not wide enough for three vehicles, he jumped over the bridge railing and hung onto the top rail to get out of harms way. When the driver on the right saw the disabled vehicle in his lane, he swerved left into the vehicle in the left lane side swiping the disabled car on his right pushing it into side of the bridge so hard the driver of the disabled car lost his grip on the bridge railing. As he fell sixty feet onto the sharp rip rap rocks below, his blood curdling scream below woke up the entire Williams Street neighborhood.
There were no rescue services in Brattleboro. The mother of a Green Street School classmate of mine was first on the scene and wrapped his head in towels to stop the bleeding. A station wagon with a fold down rear seat was located and the individual was transported to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. He survived the fall.
A Remembrance – Part 3 will explore the ramifications on a neighborhood when the bulldozers, blasters, and bridge builders cut a massive swath through the heart of Brattleboro.