Chapter 1

I was brought up to believe that if you worked diligently you could get ahead and rewarded with the finer things in life. I grew up on a small farm located in the hills of Vermont. It had been settled in the late seventeen hundreds by my great, great, great grandfather, Jonathan Rivers, and the family has lived on the land continuously ever since.

I was the fifth generation that has occupied it since it was settled. I was also named after my ancestor who first cleared the land. We were a particularly long-lived clan, but as far as children were concerned, we were not prolific. Usually there were only one and at the most two children in each generation, except for my grandfather's.

While I was growing up, my grandfather lived with us. He had a little room off the kitchen containing just a bed, a chair and dresser. My father and mother occupied a bedroom upstairs and I occupied a room in the attic. My sister occupied the other bedroom on the second story near my mother and father.

I remember her as being a happy person, whom everyone doted on. Unfortunately, she contracted polio and passed away when she was eleven. It is sad, because the next year the Salk vaccine became widely used and I am sure she would be with us today if only it was perfected a year or two sooner.

As I say, my grandfather lived with us. He was old, or seemed so when I was a child. When he could only get around with difficulty, he would ask me to come in to talk with him. He did most of the talking. He was always telling about my ancestors. He had three brothers, him being the youngest. In the late eighteen nineties, his three brothers got the "gold bug" and headed for Alaska. Word from them filtered back over the next several years, but within ten years, they had all died in one tragedy or another. Grandpa was sixteen at the time they left home.

This threw the working of the farm onto him at an early age. His father, my great grandfather, had married late in life so he was already old at that time. My great grandmother was young when her other sons left, but she was soon worn down trying to manage the place with her young son. She passed away in her mid forties, about the same time as her husband who was in his early eighties.

My grandfather married in nineteen-nineteen and my father was born not many years later. He married early the same as I did when I met Brenda. My father died in an accident just a few years after Brenda and I were married.

The condition of the farm had steadily deteriorated over the last hundred years. Some of the fields have grown up to brush. One pasture is ready to harvest saw logs. When I married Brenda, the only open land was a twenty-acre field and a fifteen-acre pasture. I worked off the farm part time while trying to raise a little beef.

I was lucky to attract a fine loving woman for a wife. We had great plans to restore the farm to the condition it was in the late eighteen hundreds. Brenda's parents settled a sum on us when we were married and I used this to invest in equipment that is more modern and a large shed to store it. We converted the largest dairy barn into open housing and started raising a few beef cattle. It wasn't feasible or necessary to tie the creatures up and all they needed was to have a place out of the cold New England weather.

After trying for several years, I realized that I was just turning one dollar over for another and at the end of the year I didn't have anything more than I started with. This was when I took a full time job in town and began to reduce my herd until I did not have any stock left. In a way, I hated to leave Brenda and Ben every day, but there was food on the table and the taxes were now being paid on time. My mother, Selma, now in her sixties lives in the room where I used to spend time listening to my grandfather tell stories.

When I sold the last livestock, my mother, Brenda, and I, sat down, and analyzed why I wasn't able to make a go of the farming business. Actually looking at why the farm hadn't been able to expand in the last hundred years or so. First, there wasn't enough land to make a go of making it a paying proposition. Second, we concluded that there weren't enough hands to do the work and complete all of the necessary tasks.

A certain malaise had settled over us as well. Mom was still a vibrant person. There was always work to do at home and she never had time to develop outside interests. Brenda stayed at home with our son Ben, and was in much the same situation as my mother. She did keep the big garden and did the minor repairs on the place. She worked along beside me when we got wood and did much of the sugaring in the spring.

It was always a matter of catching up, but not enough hands to expand the farm. Brenda and I had a son to educate. We had hopes that Ben would be with us on the home place to carry on the tradition of being close to the land. I felt we had been good land stewards, but it didn't look as it was to continue much longer.

Moreover, to us then came the biggest disappointment of all. Ben had no interest in the land. As soon as he was old enough, he spent his time elsewhere. His explanation was that he was a "people person" and didn't want to be stuck up there in the hills with no one with whom to converse. He soon married, worked his way though college, and started a family. Maybe our hopes would be in the next generation.

You know, for all his high priced salary, he was always in debt, because living with people he had to keep up with them. I think I sleep better at night with my bills all paid, than he does with all of his toys and modern gadgets. He will have a credit card that cost fifteen percent and higher on the balance, until the end of time. This story is not about him though. I was just laying some background of what was to come.

Our house was an old Vermont farmhouse. It had never been enlarged because the family size never required it. It had eight rooms with an attic. The attic was where I slept as a child until my sister had died. Even after she passed, I preferred the privacy that the attic offered. The house is in the shape of an "L." The main structure consisted of foursquare rooms down, i.e. a parlor, one large bedroom, a dining room and a living room. Over these were two huge bedrooms. Originally, the leg of the "ell" formed a huge kitchen on the ground floor with the attic up. A very small bedroom and bathroom had been carved out of the kitchen, where my grandfather slept when I was growing up.

After I was married and my father passed on, this is where my mother slept. In the summer, the whole kitchen was open, but in the winter two thirds of it was closed to conserve heat. A covered porch extended out from the main house and went the length of the kitchen "ell."

There is a huge set of barns. When the homestead was developed, it was planned to be a dairy farm. This called for a big barn because of the necessary storage of loose hay. There was a horse barn for both draft animals and a driving team. Set away from these two barns, there was a hen house and a hog house.

At that time, enough land was cleared to support sixteen to twenty milking cows, and six to eight head of young stock for their replacements. The farm had reached its peak during my great-grandfather's generation, before my great uncles had gone to Alaska. Since that time, more and more open land gave way to brush and finally grew into woodland. It was not that the land was unproductive, it was that there wasn't the manpower to handle all of the work. Now here I am, my wife and I forty years old and my mother in her sixties.

What to do? I loved this place. I had two hundred years of history behind me. Much of this history was at my fingertips in the form of every record and transaction ever made, recorded in journals down through the years. Also, being frugal Vermonters, most every piece of equipment and all the old tools were packed into the barns and sheds. Some of the buildings you could barely get into, they were so full.

Every evening after I returned from my job in town, the subject came up, of what to do? Repairs on the buildings were needed. Brush was encroaching on the one large field that was open. Even with the time-saving tools we could afford, we got behind. It made no sense to hire outside labor. I could do most of the work if I had the time, but I also needed the income from outside. Brenda did drive the tractor, but disliked working with it.

We had to try something and soon! Brenda often declared it was so pointless living the way we were. I even heard her tell a neighbor that she wished she could chuck it all and go somewhere--anywhere. Mother came up with an idea that seemed attractive last winter while we were mulling over what to do. We made the decision to turn the farm into a lodge. We knew that in the earliest part of the century, when it was difficult to travel, people came and stayed at a lodge for months at a time. It was at least worth investigating.

First, we had to find out if we could get the permits. We had to see what we needed to bring our proposed "lodge" up to code. Of course, if the expense were too great, then the whole project would never get off the ground. Brenda and mother were good cooks and the house was clean and neat. Much of the furniture was antique, sturdy, and serviceable. Even the couch in the living room would be fine for a few years.

Our food was not what you would call fancy, but it was certainly wholesome. That took care of the food preparation problem. Then we discussed if we would need entertainment. We decided we would not, because we were only providing lodging. With today's mobility, entertainment was everywhere within a short drive.

When we went to see about a permit to open a lodge, the biggest drawback was not enough bathrooms. The one small bathroom in the ell was located off the kitchen and that wouldn't be permitted close to where food was being prepared.

What we came up with was to dismantle that bathroom and move it up into the attic next to the upstairs bedrooms and make it much larger. The room in the attic would only be used for family, so we planned a ¾ bath beside the other one. Mother, who still had the small bedroom off the kitchen, would now have to use the new one off the parlor and living room in the front of the house. Another ¾ bath backed up to that main facility.

Brenda and I planned to move from the downstairs bedroom to quarters in the attic. We did make it almost as nice as the regular bedrooms. Thus, we ended up with three rooms to rent out to lodgers.

We decided that we would go to the expense and do the plumbing and I hired a contractor for this. Then we looked at the kitchen and thought we would have to update this also. The range was fine, but we certainly would need a larger refrigerator. In addition, we needed a new larger, more modern sink and the need to install more cupboards and storage space.

When it came to serving the meals, we decided it would be in the kitchen where most of the action is anyway. There was an oak worktable that had been used originally for a butcher's cutting bench in one of the sheds. It had been large enough to bring in a small beef or sizable hog to process. Twelve to fourteen people could be easily seated around it.

It was more than a century old and heavy. It was not too fancy, but I took care of that by smoothing the planks with a portable plane and then did a lot of scrollwork with a router on the legs. To finish it up, I put a nice ogee edge around the top. When I finished it looked custom made and pretty damned nice.

April came and we were well on our way to seeing our way to have lodgers installed by sometime this June. It was time to advertise. We decided to place an ad in some of the papers distributed in the New York City area. Not knowing what we really wanted for lodgers, we wrote a pretty broad classified ad, as follows:

Do you want to get out of the city for the summer?
Would you like to spend time in the country?
New Vermont facility needs lodgers.
Tranquility w/beautiful view.
$450 per week/single
$725 per week/couple
Room and all meals included.
Possible working arrangement to defray cost.
Phone, (802)555-5665
E-Mail, jrivers@aol.com

We waited for replies--and we received many replies. Dozens of them. I guess we could have put up a hundred guests if we had the room. I wished we could take more than the three to fill the bedrooms. My wife took care of the phone calls. I looked at the E-Mails. We took names and addresses from all of them and said we would contact them within three days.