DUMMERSTON-Eleanor Emery will turn 97 years old in October - a fact that she conveys with some pride.
"Who knew?" Emery asks, throwing her head back and laughing.
Born at the family home in West Guilford in 1927, Emery remains as sharp as a tack. This time of year often stirs two memories.
The first is of the one-room District No. 1 schoolhouse, where Emery was a student from 1933 to 1941.
"My school years were during the Great Depression. Everybody was poor, but we didn't know it," she says.
Each year, an annual get-together at Halloween would take place at the church, "and people would come," Emery says.
"Christmas was the same way. They always had a Christmas tree, and we'd get a gift from our teacher and there would be a program. We kids would have to learn a piece to repeat," she says.
Emery recalls how her mother, Gladys Coleman, would help her prepare for the programs.
"My mother would say, 'People will want to be able to hear it,' so I would go into one room in the house, and she would stay in another, and she would say, 'Say your piece loudly so I can hear it all the way in here!'
"She was always proud that I was one of the loudest kids and everyone could hear my part," Emery says smiling.
Emery's mother was a second wife, she explains.
"My father's first wife died in childbirth, so there were already four kids in the family," Emery says. "Then they had my sister Sadie, three years older, [they had] myself, and then my younger brother Norman, four years younger than me."
A blacksmith's life
Emery's father, Sidney Coleman, had apprenticed to his blacksmith father while still a boy growing up in Halifax, according to his obituary, "driving his first horseshoe nail at the age of 14."
The building where he operated his blacksmith shop is still standing near the family homestead in West Guilford.
Emery remembers her father's "beach wagon," which included a portable forge, anvil, and tools.
"If the horse couldn't come to him, he went to the horse," she recalls.
She says that "Coleman, the blacksmith on the corner" - as the signage on his car described him - "went all over the place, did all the horses at the Putney School, he went to Dover, anywhere he was needed."
Emery remembers her father's pride when he was asked to shoe a descendent of the famous thoroughbred Man o' War.
Described as an "equine freight train" by the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Kentucky, Man o' War was regarded as "one of the greatest racehorses of all time," winning 20 of 21 races. He was the 1920 American Horse of the Year (an unofficial contest) and, after his racing career, he became one of the leading sires in North America. He died at age 30 in 1947.
One of this famous horse's progeny was in the Brattleboro area on Aug. 9, 1941, for a benefit for "two national war-time organizations," on Black Mountain Road.
The gathering featured the famous horse and his rider, along with other activities, including an auction and a barn dance in the evening.
'The neighborly thing to do'
Despite the success of the family business, life in Guilford wasn't easy during the Great Depression.
Looking back, Emery observes that "we were all the same."
"We could grow some food or trade an animal for something we needed," says Emery, smiling as she remembers. "All us kids helped with the garden, snapping the peas and cutting up the green beans to put by for the winter."
The family did have the only telephone in the neighborhood "because Dad had to travel to shoe horses," she says. That also meant the family were kind to the other neighbors and allowed them to use the phone to call the doctor during an emergency.
"It was the neighborly thing to do," she says.
Emery recalls that during her childhood, the family never had electricity or running water; they had a water pump in the kitchen. The three-hole "spice box," or outhouse, was attached to the back of the building.
"For a while, my father talked about putting electricity into the blacksmith shop, but I can tell you that wasn't going to happen unless the house also got electricity. My mother wouldn't stand for it!" Emery recalls, laughing. "So, none was put in until all us kids were out of the house and married."
School was close by and within walking distance, a source of sadness for young Eleanor in only one respect.
"The mothers would make a casserole - the [parent-teacher association] organized that - and all the other kids had to have that for their lunch at school. Those children had to walk to school, as there were no school buses in those days," Emery explains.
The Coleman family, on the other hand, "lived close enough to walk home to eat," she says.
"My older sister and I hated that, because the other kids had something different. I felt like all we ever got to eat was tomato soup and johnnycake," she says with another energetic laugh.
The children at the No. 1 Schoolhouse would play baseball behind the building in the good weather.
"We always took our skis in the winter, and we would ski all over the bank," declared Emery.
A deadly storm
Emery's other distinct memory is of the Great New England Hurricane, which struck in September 1938 when she was 10 years old.
In an interview with The Commons in 2011, after Tropical Storm Irene whipped through Vermont, Emery recalled what happened on Sept. 22, 1938, near her home in West Guilford in 1938.
"We had no radio. No one knew about the hurricane. It had been raining so very hard for several days, and water from the Green River was coming right down the back of our home."
A neighbor, Walter Petrie, had seen the rising water and, concerned for the family's safety, came down in his car to assist the family in moving away from the brook. Emery's father, mother, sister Sadie, 14, and her brother Norman, 6, were all at home that evening.
Also in the household that night was 1-year-old Roger Miller, Emery's cousin, who was staying with the family while his mother, Flora (Wetherhead) Miller, was in the hospital. They all piled into Petrie's car.
The Green River jumped the bank, and the family found themselves surrounded by water on both sides of the house. Petrie tried to drive to the bridge, but the water pushed the car back.
Then he tried for the other bridge and, just before they were about to drive over it, the swirling flood waters swept the entire bridge away.
The group abandoned the car, deciding to try to return to the house. Emery's father put Norman on top of his shoulders, and Petrie carried little Roger in a blanket in his arms while Sadie, Emery, and their mother walked together toward the house.
"I started walking behind Mr. Petrie," said Emery, "and as we headed back toward the house, the road had broken through and the water was coming towards us. We had a small bank there and Mr. Petrie went up that bank," she said. "I was following him. He was going up there to put the baby in the house. I didn't see exactly what happened."
The house was in sight, and about 200 yards away. Petrie lost his footing while wading through the strong current and fell. When he stood up, the blanket that he was carrying no longer had the baby in it.
"Gathering darkness and rapidly rising water made it impossible to locate the body of the child and Petrie devoted himself to rescuing members of the Coleman family," the Brattleboro Daily Reformer reported.
"He finally managed to reach shore and get a rope. With this he eventually reached Mr. Coleman, who for hours was marooned in the stream as he held his youngest child Norman on his back. Mrs. Coleman and the two other children managed to keep their stand in the shallower water at the edge of the stream until Petrie reached them."
"Well, here I am, standing over here in the water," Emery recalled in 2011. "Mr. Petrie went to the barn and got a rope, and he threw it to me and yelled, 'Tie it around your waist!'"
Around that time, a neighbor farmhand, John Russell, arrived and carried Emery across the brook and through the field and took her to neighbors Winifred and Dorothy Wilde.
Emery attended school the next day but spent the next two weeks at the Wildes' home, next door to the schoolhouse.
"There was never anything worse than that day," Emery said, a sad look crossing her face. "That baby was never seen again. The body was never found. And none of us ever discussed what happened again. In those days you didn't talk about things, you just kept moving forward without discussion."
Emery learned years later that her mother "went through hell" because "everyone said, 'You shouldn't have left the house. You lost the baby.'"
"How were we supposed to know?" Emery now wonders aloud. "We didn't have a radio to tell us what the weather was doing. Mr. Petrie was just trying to help us. That poor man went through hell the rest of his life, too. It wasn't his fault that he fell. There was water swirling everywhere."
Emery sees significance in today's flooding. She went to visit her homestead after the flooding of Irene.
"It looked exactly as it did when I was 10. The water acted the same way 73 years later," she says.
"We can look to the past to tell us what climate change will be doing in the future," Emery says, shaking her head. "We must learn. It's going to keep happening now."
High school years
Her last year of school in eighth grade found Emery with new duties.
"I lived the closest, so my last year there, I was the one who would get up and walk from my house over to the school to start the fire. I earned $7 that year," she says proudly.
Her duties included keeping the fires going, cleaning the chalkboards, and sweeping the floor.
The following year, Emery was supposed to attend Brattleboro High School.
"There was no bus, and most of the students lived in Brattleboro, but we couldn't afford to do that, and I had no transportation," says Emery. "The only way I'd be able to go to high school would be to board with other families."
Her older brother Charles helped her to find her places to board during the school year, where she was often a mother's helper to earn her room and board.
She lived with Dr. John R. Malloy's family for one of those years. "I had to take care of one of their kids, and I wasn't too happy living there because I had to serve them their meals," she says.
"Then I lived for a year or so with Mrs. [Jane] Hobson, the main librarian in Brattleboro, and I also lived with a family on Washington Street, which was nice because I could walk to school from there."
Emery also worked during her last two years of high school at Wright's Grill on Putney Road, where McDonalds is now located. How did she get there?
"I walked back and forth to school, and Mr. [A. Chapin] Wright, who owned the restaurant, allowed another high school girl and I to live in a little cabin in back of the business, during World War II."
Emery graduated with the class of 1945 and married Robert Reay, the brother of one of the other waitresses. He died in 1964 at age 40. Her second husband, Clifford Emery, died in 1992 at age 75.
Guilford students were educated in the District No. 1 schoolhouse until 1957, when the Guilford Central School opened.
Despite the challenges and the poverty of the times, Eleanor Emery has fond memories of her youth, growing up in tight-knit Guilford.
"I still won't look at a box of shredded wheat biscuits," she says laughing.
"But we all got by and entertained ourselves playing cards at each other's houses and playing games with my sister," she recalls.
"They were tough times, but we made the best of it," Emery says. "Seems like it wasn't all that long ago."
This News item by Fran Lynggaard Hansen was written for The Commons.