Date: Fri 17-Oct-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: DOTTIE

Quick Words:

history-Mary-Pat-Brigham

Full Text:

Having Our Culvert And Cow Tunnel, Too!

(with cuts)

BY DOROTHY EVANS

A story in the September 19 issue of The Newtown Bee recounted recent

explorations by Pat and Bill Denlinger and their four grandsons into the

shadowy recesses of a 150-year-old stone tunnel built under the railroad

tracks behind their Grand Place home.

The Denlingers were curious about when and why the tunnel, which was in sound

condition and dry as a bone, had been built. If it was intended only for

drainage, where was the water?

When the Denlingers first bought their home in the late 1960s, they had heard

a rumor to the effect that the tunnel's most recent function had been to allow

a safe passage under the railroad tracks for the local farmer's cows.

Indeed, the land surrounding and including the Grand Place development had

long been used for farming and grazing. One could well imagine that around the

turn of the century, when dozens of trains chugged through the valley each

day, a cattle drive across those tracks would have been risky business for

both the farmer and his cows.

But the argument for its being built as a culvert seemed most likely, its

current dry condition notwithstanding.

Town historian Dan Cruson noted that drainage patterns in the valley have

changed drastically since the railroad was completed in 1840. They were

undoubtedly altered again when the Newtown section of I-84 was completed in

the early 1970s, Mr Cruson said.

Probably the tunnel's only function throughout its 150-year history was to

channel runoff water, or a small stream, into nearby Tom Brook, which fed the

Pootatuck River.

So, was the cow tunnel story merely a colorful bit of local lore with no basis

in fact?

A Cow Crossing

Newtown native Mary Pat [Carroll] Brigham, who is now a resident of

Montpelier, Vermont, read the culvert/cow tunnel story in The Bee and felt

compelled to respond, speaking from her own experiences growing up in the

borough 50 years ago.

What follows are excerpts of her e-mail letter to the editor, dated September

22.

"My knowledge of that opening under the railroad is first hand. I have been

through it many times in the 1940s "helping" John Beers' hired man, Frank,

bring in the cows.

I remember lots and lots of cows, but I now suspect there were no more than

six or eight. John Beers, after all, was not running a dairy.

Cows being cows, one wore one's boots through that tunnel, which was quite

messy, but I remember dry pastures on either side of it.

I think it was built as a cow pass, not for drainage."

Walking To Hawley School

Mrs Brigham also related several other stories from her years growing up in

Newtown as a member of a large Irish-American family whose ancestors settled

here in 1855.

She and her parents, Patrick Carroll and Alice Houlihan Carroll, lived in

several Newtown homes and small farms during the Depression -- on Main Street,

on Currituck Road, on the Boulevard and, in 1940, in a new house they built on

Meadow Road off Glover Avenue.

Mary Pat was nine when she and her younger brother, Jim, and little sister,

Trudy, moved into the Meadow Road house.

Throughout her 12 years' growing up in the borough, Mary Pat walked to and

from Hawley School each day on the dirt roads, often cutting across hay fields

to shorten the trip.

"I was always walking that stretch. I could remember every bush," Mrs Brigham

said of her route down Queen Street and across Church Hill Road.

She graduated from Hawley School in 1949 and then attended college. She was

married in 1953.

Although Mrs Brigham has "lived all over the country," she frequently returned

to Newtown because her mother stayed on in the Meadow Road home for 40 years.

Mrs Carroll lived alone but managed very well, Mrs Brigham said, until in 1990

when it became obvious she needed regular care.

The three Carroll children decided then to move their mother into Glen Hills

Home in Danbury, and that was where Alice Carroll finally died, August 8,

1993.

During her life, Alice Houlihan Carroll had been a longtime trustee of the

Cyrenius H. Booth Library and had served as board secretary in 1980.

In the early years, while her mother worked at the library, Mrs Brigham

recalls that the whole family frequently became involved helping out in one

way or another.

"I'll have to come see my bricks," she said, referring to the new library

entrance walk that has been paved by individual donors.

"I know I can't face my mother up above without doing that," Mrs Brigham

joked.

John Beers' Farm

After the family moved to Meadow Road in 1940, Mrs Brigham spent many happy

hours playing at the nearby farm of John Beers.

Mr Beers lived on the corner of Queen Street and what is today Grand Place,

just around the corner and down the street from the Carroll family's Meadow

Road home.

"That was a very nice farm. John Beers was the owner/farmer and "Auntie My"

[Myra Beers] kept house for him.

I loved to be there around noon when Auntie My fed the cats.

She would bring out from the kitchen an enormous baking pan sized for a couple

of dozen fresh rolls, filled with milk and stale bread.

Then she would call `din-din-din-din-din' in a rather high-pitched tone and 30

or 40 cats, almost all of them barn cats, would scramble from all directions

and eat their dinner."

Walking down Queen Street as she headed north to Hawley School, Mary Pat

Carroll regularly passed the property where Newtown Middle School [built in

1953] now stands.

"To get the feeling of all this, you have to think of both Queen Street and

Glover Avenue as unpaved and the land where the Middle School sits was a

marvelous jungle of blueberry bushes.

I picked blueberries and peddled them all over the neighborhood during the

World War II years for 25 cents a quart."

She recalls that by 1940, the John Beers farm was mostly limited to the

production of milk and the raising of poultry, as well as growing vegetables

for market.

Riding The `Brusher'

While the Meadow Road house was being built, Mary Pat Brigham remembers

spending a "magical summer" in a rented house on The Boulevard.

There was a new baby and there had been a couple of deaths in the family, so

her parents were rather "distracted," she said, as well as being busy with the

new house construction.

As a result, they were not inclined to keep as close an eye as usual on Mary

Pat's activities, nor upon those of her brother, Jim.

"I did get loose that year," she said, noting that a new two-wheeler was her

ticket to independence.

Her favorite pastime was playing at another Beers farm that was located at the

corner of Church Hill Road and The Boulevard, owned by Herbert or "Hub" Beers.

"Hub let us "farm" with him. I particularly remember being allowed to ride on

top of the "brusher" as Hub drove the horse pulling the brusher around the

pasture.

A brusher was made from a dozen or so young birch or poplar saplings, leaves

and all, cut to a size and nailed to two cross boards. The upper one must have

had a seat for Hub and means to hitch the horse.

We kids were allowed to sit on the lower one where we, no doubt, improved its

efficacy with our weight.

I remember asking my father what the brusher was supposed to do for the field,

but I have forgotten the answer."

Mrs Brigham commented that during the war years, there were many small

"borderline" farming operations like those "all over Newtown," more than there

might have been otherwise because of wartime shortages and rationing.

Living in the borough, she felt her family was lucky to have had electricity,

telephone and running water. She remembered that many of her relatives and

school friends lacked one or more of those "conveniences."

"I am sure," she wrote, "that both the Depression and World War II slowed down

the modernization of Newtown homes."