My first encounter with Wormwood Hill was on a brilliant spring day in 1981.
I immediately fell in love with the rolling green hills of that rocky farm which was laced with stonewalls. The barn listed a little too heavily toward the road and the hay spilled out like water through the cracks of a tired old river dam. It all looked as though it would topple over in a breath.
Without a camera, I carried home images that flashed back to my own childhood -the crowing of roosters, the soft put-put-put of a Farm-all Tractor,
and the bellowing of those beautiful lined-back cows dotting the field.
I was visiting Claude McDaniels to buy some eggs. Claude was an old farmer who lived up the road from me. He was a neighborhood novelty who attracted poets, artists and remnant hippies who would follow him from house to barn while he recounted a yearned for past. Claude’s booming voice with his Yankee vernacular, reminded me of Fred D. Whittier, who owned the small market farm that I grew up on in Massachusetts.
Upon our first meeting I was instantly transported to Grange suppers, and the peculiar smell of kerosene and wood stoves, and those long-voweled, long joweled and apron-clad women of my childhood who so proudly knew how to bake a pie just right, and who kept the world “just-so”.
To me, Wormwood Hill was a wormhole into my own past – that rural childhood caked with dust-between-the–toes from cow paths and tractor lanes, and places rich in local history, name, and place. I recognized Mr. Claude McDaniels immediately as a keeper of place. Like the old folk of my childhood, he had recorded every detail of the neighborhood past and present, and he could recall the memories of those who came before him. The ones who came from other places that have long forgotten names. I took it upon myself to tap that mind-spring and draw water from the deep well that binds us to the land and the places on this earth that shape who we are.
Claude McDaniels had lived on Wormwood Hill in Storrs, Connecticut most of his life. He was born on a farm about three miles away on Upton Road, in Ashford, and his father bought the present farm on Wormwood Hill in 1915 when Claude was five years old.
A famed icon in his rural neighborhood, Claude was known for his long memory and local history. He was certainly a throwback from the past. In his later years, he still farmed his land with the help of some younger cousins, raising the same strain of lined-back cattle that were introduced to the region a hundred years ago. Chickens and scrawny tuxedo cats would collect toll on the road, defying cars that refused to slow down in the dip. Claude relied upon that dip so he could make a mental note of the color, make and owner of each vehicle that passed by. He once helped to solve a murder mystery that way.
It was in the early nineteen-eighties, and I happened to stop by for a visit the day after the murder happened. Claude told me all about it before it even hit the papers. It seems there was a gal living in the old schoolhouse on Wormwood Hill Road, who was discovered strangled in her car in the neighbor’s cornfield. The detectives had stopped by that morning to see if Claude had noticed anything strange the night before. Of course, he did. He knew everyone’s car by the sound of their motors and how fast they drove past his house. It had rained that night, and there was always a seep of water that collected in the dip of the road after a heavy rain. Sometime around the middle of the night, as Claude lay awake on his sagging, ancient mattress, he heard the girl’s car speed by and hit the puddle at full speed. Another car splashed through immediately after, leading Claude to believe that it was traveling in hot pursuit of the first car. It turned out he was right. The second car was driven by her jealous and irate husband who was furious that she had been out late with friends that night. Eventually, he caught up with her in the cornfield and strangled her. There she was found the next morning, dead as a doornail in her car. An arrest was made, and the husband confessed to the murder.
The most remarkable thing about Claude was his memory and his attention to detail. He carried the torch of stories from his own family that went back as far as two hundred years or more. A natural raconteur, he told tales as fresh as the day they were passed on to him by his parents and grandparents, with a perspicacity for detail right down to the weather and what was eaten for supper that day. His stories shed light on a rural New England culture that has slipped away. As a budding historian, I supped on the manna of Claude’s stories, absorbing local folk-lore and historical details that helped me to understand my own people and find my own sense of place in this world.