Hi I'm Eric Ford for Made Here.

A Hill Farmers Story, directed by Kathryn Youngdahl-Stauss from Granville, Vermont centers around diaries Kathryn discovered written by the former residents of her land.

The writing details, the lives and practices of early 20th century Vermont Hill farmers and opens a window to the past.

You can watch A Hill Farmer's Story and other great Made Here films streaming on vermontpublic.org and through the PBS app.

Enjoy the film and thanks for watching.

When my children were small, I used to tell them, Never forget, you grew up in a beautiful place.

Granville, Vermont, in the heart of the Green Mountain National Forest headlands of Two Rivers, the mad running north to the Winooski and the white flowing south to the Connecticut.

I didn't tell my boys.

It is also a hard place to live.

A tough place to make ends meat.

A treacherous half hour from groceries, farther to a hospital.

But it has been my home for 34 years.

And it is what I have become.

A Vermont Hill farmer.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a young New York television producer, no one would have predicted I'd wind up here.

I don't like digging in dirt, let alone weeding or mowing or plucking or mucking or any of the other things associated with the good farm life.

But my husband, Roger, insisted on a country life, and over time, my connection to the land has grown deep roots.

I feel it most on my daily trek Up Masted Hill.

It's about a 20 minute walk to my turnaround point, the North Hollow Cemetery.

I thought I knew this place well.

And then last summer, something remarkable happened.

I was given the journals of two early Granville Hill farmers, mother and son, Elmer Ford Bostwick and Riley Bostwick.

Be prepared for a lot of details about the weather.

Also, they haven't all aged well.

The faded pencil.

The personal shorthand.

And then there's the huge gaps in time.

To say nothing of their attractive flavor to rodents.

In her characteristically colorful language.

Elmer writes, We were all shocked to hear that Mr. Trombley was killed at the blare of an ear this morning, a piece of lumber.

The machine came such force as to break and puncture and heart hurling.

It's like reading, erasure, poetry.

The missing spaces create openings for my mind to wander back a century to a place that is both strange and achingly familiar.

Riley Boss Brook was born on September 9th, 1889, exactly 100 years and 11 days before the birth of my own first son.

In 1901, when Riley was 11, he kept a journal whose spare entries sound like haiku.

All winter, he records working in the woods alongside his father, Edward.

It was hard.

Labor, men's labor.

Was it drudgery for Riley?

Thrilling.

In any case, business was booming.

Granville had mills and factories.

Even a steam engine named Diana to keep the timber flowing.

By early spring, the bass strokes were transitioning to sugaring season 11 years old, and Riley was boiling the sap, a process that requires patience and constant attention.

And what about school?

Did Riley not attend, or were geography and multiplication not even worth mentioning compared to what was happening at home?

Riley's brother, Irving, was three years younger than him.

His appearances in the 1901 Journal are brief but sweet trips to the village, dancing and always fishing.

As farm boys Riley and Irving made their work, their entertainment.

Something I saw in my own children, too.

So when I'm thinking about life on the farm.

I guess it would primarily be associated with play as that was what we spent most of our time doing.

But there were there was a fair amount of work.

There were the morning chores.

There was haying in the summers, though, that in and of itself was also kind of fun.

Yeah, I think of the farm and just such a lot in general as this really cool place where the work leisure buffer is a lot more gray than it is other places, because so much of what we did here was really difficult, like really challenging, laborious tasks.

But it also was kind of the point of it was that you able to be in nature and interacting with nature.

And even when you're doing one of these big chores like haying or gardening or mowing the lawn, you kind of make it fun because it's part of life.

And I think that's a good way of living in general, because it allows you to break down the barrier between nature and people.

And I think that's what you do here every day.

Living way up on West Hill, a few miles north of my house, the Bastrop boys made a good team, but by 17, Riley was thinking about a different kind of companionship.

There's Carrie P, who was worthy of a kiss, Ada H, who was marriage material, and poor Diana W who was hated.

Strangely.

These objects of desire were all 22 Why girls five years older than himself?

Maybe it was because he admired his own folks.

His mother, Alma, was five years older than Edward.

The life they'd created seemed pretty good, was all at home.

Charles came over.

We bought logs.

Edward went to the top of the hill with five loads.

I went to the village in the evening with butter, mowed with the machine and handbrake and cocked it up.

Irving went to North Hollow, stayed to Uncle Herb's.

I got the first cows at the farm.

Irving and I went fishing at Bristol Pond, 113.

We all went down and got our hunting licenses.

Warm.

Pleasant was all at home.

Cold.

Rainy was all at home.

Stormy was all at home.

And that is where the first set of journals ends.

But it's not where the story ends.

During the 16 year gap, there is a heartbreaking accumulation of loss.

80% of Vermont's trees and nearly all of its old growth forest vanish into houses, ships and planes.

There's a flu pandemic and a world war.

Riley served in Vermont's three hundred second field artillery in France.

In his five year diary, spanning the years 1923 to 1927, none of this is mentioned.

Yet absence is everywhere.

In April 1925, Riley Records 12 grueling days that he spent nursing his Uncle Charles through pneumonia, to no avail.

In her 1926 diary, Elma reveals an earlier tragedy.

The day our Irving left us, she writes.

He passed in 1913 a victim of flu.

Days shy of his 19th birthday.

But there are also ripples of renewal.

In the fall of 1923.

Anna mae White of Newark, New Jersey, sold Riley some chickens.

Apparently, she was a good farmer and a good company.

And in between, Riley's diligent accounting of timber hauls and hay production, Mae appears for walks to Moscow and falls a movie night in Rochester.

And foraging trips for edible wild ferns.

Still, nothing quite prepares me for this entry.

A horse's slaughter, a sudden wedding.

I read this entry many times, and it still stuns me.

And then two months later, there's this.

I have been walking to this cemetery for more than half my life.

Always drawn by the little monument right in front.

But until this year, I never paid any attention to the name on the stone.

I've been visiting Rileys and Mae's only child in the company of her uncle Irving and great Uncle Charles.

How did they cope with such enormous loss?

The journals give me no clue.

I hoped to.

People who still remember Riley could help me understand.

Bruce Flewelling and Sandy Pierce was searching this area.

This is the White River Road.

This is the Rob Ford Road.

This is West Hill extension.

And this is the Boston land right here.

Fantastic.

Bruce, a retired forester, told us he could show us where the Bostwick homestead had once stood on West Hill.

Sandy, who gave me the diaries, was curious to see where her onetime neighbor had grown up.

We called him and his wife, Uncle Riley and Aunt May.

We were very close to them.

I always thought we were related until my father told me we weren't my father.

He was a good friend to Riley.

But when Riley died, he was the executor of his estate.

And so we ended up with the diary.

So there's actually I knew Riley only from his visits and when he would come in to the office in Rochester.

And he was a great talker and he loved to smoke when he came in the office, too.

And we had a secretary who also smoked it in those days in the 70s.

And Riley would come in and he would start talking and he would talk and talk and talk.

And I would eavesdrop from my my desk in the back and finally, the secretary would have to say, well, I need to get back to work.

And off he would go.

But I remember him coming in there with his top hat and his long trench coat.

He was quite a sight when he came into town, and I used to when I would take a walk with him.

Riley Bostwick was intelligent, a master of the outdoors, and very interested in conserving land.

Riley viewed the land around this valley as an important resource to be conserved, and I think he had seen what some of the early timber management was like when they would cut all the high grade timber and leave all the junk wood behind.

And I think that bothered him to the point where he wanted to conserve more land and have it managed, but well managed in a scientific manner he wasn't directly involved with the management of the Green Mountain National Forest, but he certainly let the congressmen and senators know his feelings about conservation and and he was important.

And in kind of shaping what some of the policies were coming out of Washington.

I was just wondering, you all passed right there.

But I think I think the house and that remains.

What else do you think as well?

I remember the door and a couple of windows and believe it was two stories.

Oh, really?

Looking at the view from the ghost house, I was struck that here was Riley's legacy.

The farm wasn't lost.

The wilderness was recovered.

What happens to people who let a farm go back to nature?

Alma and Edward knew their hill farm could no longer sustain them.

One needs more money than the farm brings in to farm today.

Alma wrote.

And so the past weeks looked for other ways to supplement their living.

Alma jumped on the shiny new bandwagon of American consumerism.

She and Edward became agents for catalog companies, marketing ready made products, which they ordered for their clients and then delivered from Granville to Rochester.

You can get anything out of a catalog, but their biggest selling item seemed to have been hosiery and Riley.

Riley saw a new opportunity for trees.

In 1923, a Vermonter was in the White House, something that Bostwick noted and took pride in.

When Calvin Coolidge called for a Christmas tree for the White House grounds, it was natural that he looked to the green mountains.

Local legend has it that Riley Bostwick was the one who found that balsam in the bread loaf wilderness.

The felling of the first national Christmas tree made a big splash.

A newsreel of the event played in movie theaters across the country.

But the only names mentioned were the big wigs the president of Middlebury College and the president of the United States.

Whether Riley was involved or not, the event sparked his imagination.

He started harvesting wild Christmas trees to be sold in urban markets.

He also harbored a dream to grow the perfect tree.

But I heard tales about how he would take care of that tree and shoot the porcupines if they were near there.

And sometimes he would trim some of the limbs just to make it more beautiful.

Shape.

Shape it more.

After 40 years of careful tending, Riley's tree was selected for the Johnson White House.

Riley was 78 years old.

I feel conflicted about the past weeks.

Move from self-sufficiency to consumer culture, from butter to silk stockings and ship mass to disposable decorations.

But I'm also astounded by Riley's tenacity.

He never stopped thinking about a path forward.

He had beef cattle.

He sold some beef.

He made maple syrup in the spring.

He did that.

He cut some firewood a certain time of year.

And I'm thinking to myself, he had no job and yet he had many jobs.

I don't really think the world works in duality.

I don't think anything's ever black and white.

And I think I learned that from living here.

I think you have to be really flexible and you have to realize that everything's, like, full of nuance and paradox.

And this place has taught me that the day is coming when Roger and I will no longer be able to keep up with our farm.

Somehow this hill seems to be getting steeper.

It turns out, like everyone who came before us, we're just passing through.

We'll have fun where we can and be good people while we can.

And yeah, support each other through hardship.

Do the best we can with the time we got for long after we faded from memory.

A hill farmer's story is written on the land.

Management of the land has changed over the over the centuries.

Hey.

Come over here.

Hey.

Yeah.

I love you, too.

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