BRATTLEBORO — “When my grandfather, whom we called John, went deer hunting, he wore his simple plaid jacket, carried his Winchester rifle from the 1940s and went out to the woods at sun up. He walked patiently all day, and came back when it was dark,” says native Brattleborian Michael Fairchild, now 59, who spent part of his youth growing up on Marlboro Avenue, the backyard to Oak Grove School.
“He taught me patience. For a young boy, that's a wonderful skill to be taught to you by a grandfather. John was a lean, kind, quiet sort of guy who was sensible and practical in every kind of way. He was humble; he didn't have a lot, but he didn't need a lot either. I was fortunate to have lived two houses away from my uncle, and he, John, and I used to go hunting and fishing together. We'd take a Thermos and a simple sandwich and we'd head on out into the woods,” remembers Fairchild.
John Russell lived with his wife Jenny on Highland Street. Before they were joined, Jenny owned the house, and since she was raising two sons alone, she used to rent out rooms in the 1930s. Russell was a boarder there and eventually the two were married.
Working at the C.F. Church factory on Elm Street, he helped make the toilet seats that earned the company its motto, “the best seat in the house.”
Russell walked to work every morning because he'd never learned to drive and spent his weekends doing the things that renaissance men who had grown up in the country did on the weekend - hunting, fishing, and bee keeping.
“Many years later,” says Fairchild, “I moved with my family to Westminster West. Initially, my father was a tailor who owned Fairchild's Clothiers on Main Street (where Zephyr Art Store is located today), and my mother ran a store in the basement selling fabrics and notions. She was a dressmaker by trade. When we moved from Marlboro Avenue, my parents closed their stores, and my father bought the Putney General Store, which he ran for many years.”
Bob Gray, the two time U.S. Ski Team Olympian from Putney, was a good friend to Michael Fairchild. Gray's parents were friends of Scott and Helen Nearing, who lived in Jamaica. The Nearings were back to the land enthusiasts who published the classic book Living the Good Life in 1954. The Grays worked at Putney School and were familiar with, and practiced a lot of the same skills as, their friends the Nearings.
“Their son Bob was about my age and knew bees. He introduced me to the old time skill of tracking bees,” says Fairchild. “If you think about the term 'making a bee line,' you'll understand what we were doing.”
Fairchild explains that these days, those thinking about becoming bee keepers can go to a catalog and purchase anything that they might have needed, including the bees themselves. In older times, skills like “lining bees” or tracking them were common.
“It's the kind of skill that generations of people passed on to their children,” he says, “the kind of thing that my grandfather John was raised with. When I was growing up post-World War II in the 1950s, these were skills that the old timers around still had. And bees were different then, too. In those days you could go out in the backyard, and if there was a patch of clover, you'd find a wild bee working it. That isn't so common anymore because of disease and pesticides, among other things,” he says.
While Fairchild knew that his grandfather had many of the old skills of his day, he didn't realize that John also knew about bee keeping.
“I was in my early 20s. I'd already been exposed to the hunting and the fishing, but John was getting hives set up in the backyard of his house on Oak Grove Avenue and had been tracking bees to fill his hive,” says Fairchild. “I doubt there were many old time skills he didn't know about, but I hadn't realized until that day he knew bees.”
Bees can be “tracked” back to their hives because they are a working community. The bees responsible for finding pollen are out looking for flowers and grasses to provide them with the means for creating honey, their food. An experienced bee keeper has the patience and the skill to see a bee working a flower and with a good eye, can track it back to its hive. Other than perhaps a small initial circle of flight, a bee will travel from the flower on a “bee line” back to its hive.
Sometimes, bee keepers put out a jar of sugar water to attract a wild bee. From there, a bee keeper can either follow it or take some colored chalk to dust the top of the bee to see how long it takes for the bee to collect the sugar water, bring it back to the hive, and come back for more, giving the bee keeper an idea of how far away the hive might be located.
Fairchild remembers, “I got a call from my uncle that John had tracked a hive and needed help getting the bees to the hives that he built in his back yard because he didn't drive. The remarkable thing is that he tracked that one bee from his house on Oak Grove Avenue, all the way across the Connecticut River to the side of the Wantastiquet Mountain in New Hampshire. That takes some serious skill.
“This was the early 1970s. We jumped in my truck, and John brought me to the area where he found the hive on a steep embankment on the side of the mountain, in the hollow of a big pine tree that was almost dead. He was nervous because we were on state land. The bees were buzzing all over the place. He didn't want to fell the tree because he didn't have permission, but I looked at it and decided that we were only going to fell a dead tree and leave it in a better condition than we found it. I went home and came back with a chain saw to take the tree down. We didn't want to have to climb a dead tree to remove the hive.”
Fairchild brought the tree down and then, with a few swift hits of his axe, opened up the hive.
“There was now sawdust inside the hive, and there were about 20,000 bees flying around in a panic. The bees are really more concerned about what happened to their home than getting the bear that did the deed. That's why people use a smoker to calm the bees down. It brings their attention to the hive and not to you,” says Fairchild.
The pair had brought along one of the hive boxes that Russell had made. They laid a white sheet on the ground, put the box on top of it, and then looked inside the hive for the queen bee.
Fairchild says, “There are several sections to a hive. There is a brood area and a storage area where the honey is kept as their food supply, and there is an area where the queen lives. It's important to find her right away because once in the bee box, the other bees will follow her into the hive. We were able to do that pretty quickly, because if you know what you're looking for, she's a very distinct bee.”
The pair placed the queen into the bee box on the white sheet.
“It is a miracle. Bees are incredible. I'll never get tired of watching an event like that. It's fascinating. We put the queen inside the box, and you could watch the other bees walking across the white sheet and moving right into that bee box. It's like an army of 20,000 men just marching together. We let them get settled, and then in the early evening went back to the box, closed the top, put them in the truck and took them back to Oak Grove Avenue.
“These days, well even then, you could go to another bee keeper and purchase hive materials. There is a sheet called a stamping that you can buy that is like honey comb. The bees will start building out their comb from there, but not John. He didn't buy anything; he made all of it himself. Where someone might spend some serious money to get started with bee keeping, John spent hours instead. He bought himself about $8 worth of pine boards and built everything himself. That's the old school way of doing things, and I really respected him for that,” recalls Fairchild.
“I know that he put up a lot of honey over the years. One of his granddaughters used to sell it at the Farmer's Market for him. But the next time that I was involved, it was the early 1990s and it was because John had died. My uncle called and asked me if I'd like to have his bee hives and equipment. It was so great to have these pieces that he had handcrafted himself. In fact, I also am the proud owner of his rifle,” says Fairchild.
“I was really lucky. I feel like, even though I still live in Brattleboro now, I grew up in a time that is no more. These were the good old days, and it feels like they're gone. We had the black-and-white television that only had three stations, so we didn't sit around watching that. Instead, we ran around Marlboro Avenue like a pack of dogs. Our parents didn't always have to know where we were. We'd walk down the street with guns, going off to practice shoot at the sand pit near the high school or over in Wilson's Woods, practicing for hunting season. Can you imagine now what would happen if five boys walked down the street with guns? There would be a SWAT team over there in minutes,” says Fairchild with a shake of his head.
“John grew up in an orphanage somewhere over in western New York State and made his way here by foot. He wouldn't tell us about his growing up, but I imagine he was raised at an old orphanage that was a county farm. Every town has a road called County Farm Road or Town Farm Road. Those were usually the roads, just outside of a little town, where the poor people, the single mothers, the orphaned kids lived, supported by the state and by the farm where they all worked. John had a lot of skills that he must have learned in those places, and I feel lucky that I grew up having him teach me what he knew.”