Gideon Leonard

Willimantic, Connecticut

While the interesting beginnings of Willimantic, Connecticut were pre-Civil War, it fits with the boom town beginnings, lasting well into the early 20th Century. Was like a town within a town, yet abandoned (absorbed actually). Another single mill driven town that reaped the rewards, for a while.  Should be a plethora of life stories to be found...beginning with the three Jillson Brothers!

A Hubbardston Flea Market Find

Another good day of mining for hidden history at a flea market with a couple of noteworthy finds.  Today it was a trip to Hubbardston, Mass just for kicks.  As flea markets go, this one is worthy of an occasional look-see and usually houses its share of stalls hawking antique books, old photographs, and the historic map or two.  I admit to losing track of time when presented with boxes of this type of stuff and today's find was an old map of a town named New Milford, New Hampshire....one of those maps hand-printed as part of a town survey back in the late 1800s/early 1900s.  The details of the author to draw house size to scale with occupants names and businesses has always amazed me.  And why did they use "rods to the inch" as their scale??   The other find....a book only a retired professor would remotely be interested in, "Pros and Cons - Both Sides of Live Questions Fully Discussed", by A.H. Craig.  Written in 1897 it seems to be about how to argue and win!  And who will I debate with, the dog?

Ding! Dang! Where is it on the map?

You'd think that with today's triple-mega world wide web search engines, at least something would pop up incline about New Milford, New Hampshire.  Well....nada so far!  Oh there's aplenty on New Milford, Connecticut and New Milford, New Jersey, then there's a whole bunch of Milfords....with the one in New Hampshire about the only clue.  I may have to punt on this one. Tomorrow I might try and decipher the phone number on the back of the map if I can.  It's in pencil and most of the numbers are blurred.

No Answer....But an Answering Machine

Let's see....waterboarding torture or trying to figure out a 10 digit phone number where half of them are faint pencil scratches?  After that 6 hour obsessive project, I came up with a phone number (or 6)!  Three of them weren't in service.  One was a Dairy Queen.  One was a woman that surely thought I was a prank call but was clueless on anything New Milford.  Which leaves the one number.......no one answered except the automated robot voice.  I did leave a message as a last hope.  Talk about a mission to find this place!

Askwith Maine

While not my favorite research tool by any means, I consider "googling" a necessary evil that can peak my interest on occasion when idle hands have no books to plunder.  In a search today for research foder, I came across an obsure article about an unsolved murder that occured outside of Askwith, Maine in the late 1800s/early 1900s.  It mentions just enough to make me want more...things like, "it was a logging town that sat on a railroad spur on the western edge of Moosehead Lake."  Well its not on any of my Gazetteer maps so it must be a gonner, which makes it ripe for further research!  And I haven't been to the Moosehead Region in years so now I have an excuse!

9-1-1 on New Milford

Not the first time I've ever reached a dead end on my research and certainly not the last I'm certain.  But this is one of the most frustrating ones as its not often you get tangible evidence (the map, especialy a map!) on a place and can't find it.  I've called all my contacts in New Hampshire and round about New England with no luck! No call back from the number phoned, even left 2 more just in case, and its been about a month since the last one.  Time to file it for later and move on.  This is one helluva mystery, mister!

Oh Happy Day

I've been called the eternal optimist, but all hope had faded on coming up with anything about the location of New Milford, New Hampshire for nearly 2 months....and then the phone rang yesterday that changed it all.  Someone finally listened to their phone messages, of which 6 were from me!  But given the circumstances that I now know, I must forgive the extreme response delay despite the weeks of excruciating pangs of anxiety and curiosity that mint-condition old map caused.  Sure glad I'm not one that believes in alcohol therapy!  The return call was from a woman in Plymouth whose aunt of 77 had taken a fall at home in early May and following surgery had been admitted to a Rehabilitation and Nursing facility, where she still resides.  The niece, in this case, had been put in charge of checking on the house, picking up mail, etc., but failed to notice the indicator on the answering machine until her son came to the Aunt's home with her last week.  In favor of maintaining goodwill I did not say out loud how utterly ridiculous it is to be checking on someone's home and NOT check the answering machine!

Long story short, the Lady mentioned New Milford to her Aunt last week and she knew something of it!  Guess who'll be taking a road trip to the Rehab Nursing Home...and soon, as summer is fleeting!  Funny....I don't think most people would be that excited about such a destination, particularly a man of my years!

Rehab Road Trip

Preparing to be away for a couple of weeks on field research is fairly easy when its for one adult and one canine..could be away more if lead information is top shelf stuff.  With all this summer rain, who needs to worry about the garden and I already told the neighbors to come by and shop, but no fighting over the zucchini.  And no need to come in and check my phone messages either since that's just unheard of... unless a person is away from home for 2 months!!  Ok, I'm armed and ready for the Rehab place; leaving tomorrow.

I Saw The Queen

Well as it turns out, I was interviewing the Queen of St. Francis Rehab evidently, or at least her actions indicated I was in the court of royalty.  Oh she was a literal fountain of information, but it was dispensed to me on her terms only and over a 2-day time period at that.  In addition to contact names and addresses, directions, and a few New Milford stories, I also learned about the entire history of New Hampshire's secondary school system, how to pick a good bridge partner, what they secretly put in the food at nursing homes, and costume jewelry must be some form of currency in places like this.  Note to self: get ALL my joints and organs replaced within the next 5 years so this won't be my destiny, but I digress from the findings. 

It turns out that Aunt Queen had some good recollections of visiting New Milford when she was a youngster, er Princess, recalling how it was never an easy trip to make and the relatives they visited always made her eat onions.  She recalls walking down to the stream to play and seeing so many buildings boarded up looking like a ghost town.  And that was in the late 1930s, which was the last time she actually was there since the relatives moved around 1940. As for the mystery of her phone number on the back of the map...that would have been from some of her husband's stuff she thinks that would have been sold with his belongings that she had no use for after his passing; he collected "stuff" according to the Queen!  As he was at one time a Board member of the something called the New Milford Land Trust!

False Start

I knew in my head it was a big risk throwing sanity into the wind and taking off to find this New Milford with only the long-winded directions given to me by the Aunt.  She may be the Queen of St. Francis Rehab and Final Resting Place, but giving direction is not one of her best qualities. The dog even knew we'd circled the same mountain 4 times looking for an elusive dirt road turn-off to the east and this pesky rain didn't help either.  Just give me a sign...any sign, I kept saying to the mutt.   Then like a black hole carved into the woods, there it was on the right, well hidden and not much more than a wagon trail from the looks of it that simply fell out of sight.  Well common sense still didn't come to my rescue as I put the turn signal on, for some idiotic reason, and drove right down into that abyss with all the excitement of a freshman at the senior prom!  What an error of judgement it was. There are just some places you should never take a beige 1992 Volvo 740 station wagon, despite the "Turbo" under the hood. We didn't even make it 50 feet down that hill before the sliding began, then the fishtailing, then the 180 spin that left us slightly cockeyed but generally headed back up the hill!  Who could argue with fate at this point, so I gunned that Turbo-power into action which sort of spit us back out onto the road we never should have turned off of in the first place. Thank God there wasn't another vehicle in sight...and not only for safety reasons but the shear embarrassment of someone seeing us squirt out onto the highway unexpectedly like that.  Tomorrow it's monster truck rental time somehow......and tonight its unexpected laundry time!