By Lauren O’Brien.
I grew up in the sticks of Auburn, Massachusetts. Almost every house on the street had a large plot of land and grew an extensive amount of vegetables which they sold to the neighborhood. Two streets down from my house was a large farm that was part of my daily five-mile walking route. A few houses down from mine, on the nearby South Street, was a blue house with a horse stable.
I remember that these natural fixtures in the neighborhood were a comfort to me, but walking the street now, the field is visibly overgrown, the white fence broken. The man who lives in the blue house is named Charlie and uses the space to hold his trucks and scrap the metal from old cars. He rents the house from my late great grandfather, who once owned three streets on this side of town. It’s easy to interview him, as he works from home.
I approach him on a Saturday morning when I see him working out in the yard. The tools he’s running make it impossible to hear, and he doesn’t see me approaching. To the left of where I stand is a Rottweiler, barking wildly, a sign ‘Beware of Dog’ behind him, as well as a few ‘Private Property’ signs. I’m not worried about the trespassing as much as I am about Charlie abruptly turning around and attacking me with whatever tool is in his hand. It’s well known that Charlie is addicted to pain pills and has had some trouble with the law. He notices me to his right and shuts down the tool, asks me what I need. I say to him, “Hey Charlie, I have an assignment for class, I just want to ask a few questions about this house and the fields and such. You know, the horses and Melissa, the previous owner.”
“This house is shit,” he says, “falling apart. I pay too much for it.” I find the comment to be asinine, as the amount of land that accompanies this house makes it worth much more than he is paying. I poke and prod about the subject, what the land used to hold, why it was abandoned, who owned it, etc. Charlie gives me a brief summary.
He tells me that the house belonged to a woman named Melissa, who passed away from lung cancer at age 52. She hoarded animals, having no less than three cats a time. “She was stupid,” he said, “every cat she had got killed on this street and she just kept getting them.” He said that the cats were her obsession but that she had two horses named Dolly and Simmy. Simmy died young, an accident, and Dolly lived until she was old. Charlie was close friends with Melissa’s husband, who owned a car garage across the street. The two divorced young, and he married her sister. He said she let the fields go after that.
I asked if he would show me around the fields, and he agreed. The fence has large gaps in it now, to make it more accessible for Charlie’s work. He told me that the fence always had problems and that the horses used to escape into the road. “That’s how Simmy died,” he said. “Your great grandfather tied him to the fence, rope around the neck, to try and keep him out.” I’m alarmed by the comment. My great-grandfather owned this street yet told us nothing of its residents or the land. “He was dumb, sold an entire street of his for 1,000 dollars about twenty years ago. Flurry family wanted to purchase it, asked him to name a price, and he said, ‘Just give me how much I paid for it,’ which was 1,000 dollars at the time. Street was easily worth $80,000 now.”
It’s almost impossible to reach the horse stables now, as the path to them isn’t cleared. They still exist, in a far corner of the plot, part of the roof concaved. Charlie tells me that the field was never great for walking. He said that everywhere you’d walk, you’d get burrs stuck to your shoes, or almost step in huge piles of ‘horse shit.’ He told me that Melissa’s grandchildren would try and push each other in it or ‘piss off the horses’ by pulling on their tails.
He told me that it was inevitable that this land die. Auburn became a town of industry after the ’60s, abandoning our farming roots. We cared more about Goddard’s rockets than we did about the hundreds of farms that existed in our town. He pointed across the street to the sewerage company owned by my grandfather. “You should know better than the rest,” he said; “your grandfather used to be a farmer.”
I think back to the stories my mother told me when I was growing up. Ones like the day that her family barn burned down, how traumatizing it was to lose such an important piece of history. When my grandfather lost his farm, my mother would walk to one nearby, harvest vegetables, ward off pests, and earn enough money to go see a movie with her friends later that night. The farm she used to work on is one of the few that remains intact. I often wonder if they’d accept the help of a college undergraduate, so that I can somehow connect myself with the experiences of my mother.
I want to bring life back to these farmhouses and stables that were replaced, bulldozed, and talk to the families that had to shift their ways of life. I walked to another house, across the street from this horse stable, one that belonged to my great grandparents for quite some time. I remember asking my great grandmother, Rita, what the neighborhood was like, about her neighbors. She told me that they were “not all there.” I asked for particulars and she told me that once her neighbor, Tracy, chased her husband around their large backyard, topless and carrying a hatchet. The area was remote enough that one could ‘get away’ with such a spectacle.
I’m envious of my grandparents for knowing the town when there were only a few notable families. On my side of town, which has the few leftover farms, everyone is referred to by last name. “Mahlert came over today,” my grandfather would say, or “Flurry should come by and fix those cabinets.” The families were tight-knit, the population small. It took a specific type of family to flourish here. The thing they had in common was their love of hard work – all farmers, carpenters, mechanics, etc. My mother would describe a few of them to me, saying, “I remember one of my neighbors, Ian, had a bunch of goats. There was a day he was standing behind one of them, none of us were sure what he was doing, but it didn’t look appropriate. So we walked close enough to get the whole thing on video, and narrated over it.” She had another one, about David, whom she described as someone who “was so obsessed with keeping the land pristine that if our lawn was ever overgrown, he would just come over and mow it. We tried to offer him beer, but he would just grunt at us, tell us he didn’t drink.”
I am fascinated by reconstructing Auburn’s farms and the odd characters that my family and friends describe. The town has a rich colonial history, one that cherished small family-owned general stores, small soldier graveyards. The land now has realtor signs all over it, or has already birthed numerous businesses (the majority as car dealerships). I often tell new friends of mine that I am from Auburn, a farmtown next to Worcester. The first thing they say to me is, “Oh, exit 10 from the Pike? Your mall looks huge.” Other times they ask, “Oh, the Auburn Rockets, with the phallic mascot?” It’s better than our other name, though, ‘E-Town’. Due to the ‘tough suburban life’ in my town, we had an issue with students selling and taking ecstasy, and all I can think of is that they’re bored, that these problems came as a result of losing our town’s major extracurricular activity. It’s a shame that we’ve become a sort of joke, and that the older generations have to witness this deterioration.
Websites often list our town’s industries, or Goddard’s rocket launching site, as our notable tourist locations. In a way, our emphasis on this town icon, the rocket, is as much a removal from our past as our popular shopping mall, car dealerships, and industrial parks. The rocket itself is emblematic of progress, and once this type of scientific industry began taking over our town, the number of Auburn farms reduced from over 100 in the 1850s to only 4 operating farms in 2012, according to the Auburn Town Guide website.
The website also contains this quote: “While Auburn is struggling to maintain its small town flavor, there has been major business development along the main roads.” The choice of the word ‘struggling’ highlights the nature of the Auburn resident. We crafted our homes on history. We take pictures of the outside of the colonial buildings, forgetting that the inside is a renovated nail parlor. Unless we focus on interviewing the older residents, the town’s few Republican-party-war-veterans, we come nowhere near the town’s past. Most residents don’t know that the town was once called Ward and that the name was changed for individuality – that it sounded too similar to Ware. I often hope that our ability to adapt to a town name change and mascot change from the ‘Dandy’ to the ‘Rocket’ would carry into our ability to cope with this massive industrial takeover. Except, we ‘struggle’ with it, become residents with large plots of land, overlooking machinery and growing nothing.
Works Cited
“Welcome to Auburn, MA.” Welcome to Auburn, MA. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Nov. 2012. <http://www.auburnguide.com/pages/index>.