BRATTLEBORO — Growing up at the Lilac Ridge Farm her family began in 1937, Helen Thurber vowed she’d never wed anyone who worked in their grueling before-sunrise to after-sunset business.
“I thought, ‘I can’t live that kind of life,’” she recently recalled.
Then Helen met her brother Stuart’s friend, Charles Robb, at his family’s farm a mile up the road.
“As we headed down the aisle, my dad whispered to me, ‘I didn’t think you were ever going to marry a farmer.’”
Exchanging rings in 1964, Helen Robb and her new husband went on to run the property his great-grandparents purchased in 1907. There they welcomed four children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild when not toiling, tilling or tending morning until night.
Back at Helen’s childhood home, a similar scene unfolded when her brother married a year after she did, then ushered in four children, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild amid the ups and downs of the Thurber family’s own fields.
Saunter up Brattleboro’s Ames Hill Road this past Saturday and, at first glance, the landscape of red maples, white barns and blue skies remained unchanged. But more than 300 people who gathered there for a memorial knew everything was different with the loss of Stuart Thurber, who died Aug. 27 at age 84, and Charles Robb, who died Sept. 23 at age 86.
“This is a blow to agriculture,” said lifelong friend Paul Miller, the 86-year-old patriarch of his own family dairy in nearby Vernon.
The dirt Ames Hill Road boasted three times as many farms when Robb and Thurber began their careers six decades ago.
Robb, who had seen his father deliver glass milk bottles in a Model T Ford, had high hopes when he moved to selling milk to a processor that favored plastic jugs. But by 1983, drowning financially in a national dairy glut, he considered a buyout offer before acquiescing to his son’s plea to pass on the farm.
Fifth-generation steward Charlie Jr. has survived a rough ride. He was chainsawing a tree just after Christmas 2004 when a flyaway branch shattered every bone in his face. More painful still was selling the milk cows in 2011 in hopes of saving the 360-acre property by tapping its maple trees for syrup.
Change hasn’t hit the Thurbers as hard, but they’ve nonetheless felt it. After Stuart’s son and daughter-in-law, Ross and Amanda, joined the 600-acre Lilac Ridge Farm a quarter-century ago, they switched its conventional dairy operation to organic while diversifying into such crops as vegetables and flowers.
The Robbs and Thurbers aren’t the only ones branching out. Although the number of Vermont dairy outfits has plummeted almost 90% from 4,000 in the 1960s to about 500 today, the state currently reports nearly 7,000 farms aiming to cultivate a 21st-century “working landscape” ranging from food and wood production to solar and wind energy.
Charles Robb was still alive when People magazine featured Brooke Shields — a celebrity he never met — recommending his family’s maple syrup, spurring readers coast to coast to discover the farm’s website.
Thurber, for his part, saw Lilac Ridge’s summer introduction of the first certified organic soft-serve ice cream stand on the East Coast. Sweeter still, he held his first great-grandchild shortly after.
Long fueled by what friends identify as grit and grace, both families are vowing to forge on. Take Ross Thurber, who writes poetry when he isn’t milking or haying. His recently published collection, “Pioneer Species,” includes a work titled “Making Spring.”
… Little death, little death
press my lips: this sprig,
this bud from how began
what we have left.
Ross read another poem, “Business Partners,” at his father’s service last month.
… after we have finished chores,
Set up some fencing, mown a hayfield, changed
A tire on the hay tedder, hauled a load of sugar wood
And checked on the dry cows – “There is one due on the 15th” –
The morning has spilled into Thursday and is threatening Friday …
The Robbs appreciated the words so much that they asked Ross to repeat them at Charles’ weekend memorial.
… I focus on the six cows that are waiting
To be milked. He heads out to the other barn to feed
The young stock. “We’ll get there” he says “We’ll get there.”
What I don’t say but think is: Dad, we’re already here.
