This story by Briana Brady was first published in The Citizen on June 5.
Howard Russell — Howdy, to his family — hasn’t rung the bell at the top of his Hinesburg house in years. The rope rotted at some point in the last decade, but Russell said that, soon, someone is coming to trim the maple tree beside the house, and they’re going to replace the rope.
The bell may ring again.
Russell, 71, and his six siblings grew up in the house, which, as of this year, is 200 years old and sits on Route 116 directly across the street from the town hall. It has been in his family, he estimated, for seven or eight generations.
Although he hasn’t rung it for a while, he remembers the bell — perched at the apex of the roof, right next to the chimney — ringing all the time when he was a kid.
“When you heard that bell ring, you came home. That was the rule, that no matter where you are. If you’re on the hill, if you’re down the street playing with your friends, you hear the bell, you come home,” Russell said. “It was what made my parents confident that we could go away and that when they needed us back, we would come back.”
That may not be too far off from its original intention. Russell’s family hasn’t just owned the house since the 19th century, they’ve also been farming the land behind it. While for much of that time, it was dairy farm, most recently, it’s been known as Trillium Hill Farm, an organic vegetable farm owned by Russell’s nephew and his wife, James and Sara Donegan.
According to Devin Colman, the director of the historic preservation program at the University of Vermont, bells on farms served a similar purpose to those we might find in a church belfry or a schoolhouse: communication.
“It’s this mechanism of letting people know the time when people didn’t have wrist watches and smartphones and all of our modern conveniences,” Colman said.
The bell, the house, the farm — Colman, who previously worked as Vermont’s State Architectural Historian for 18 years, said that these objects and spaces that we associate with Vermont’s farming history are often inextricable from family history.
“There is a lot of pride of ownership and multi-generational occupancy of the homestead or the land or in the community,” he said.
For Russell, multi-generational occupancy hasn’t just meant holding on to the house and the farm through the years, it’s also meant bringing together different generations of the family under one roof.
Russell’s grandmother lived upstairs when he was growing up. Then, when he bought the home from his mother decades ago, he renovated the upstairs, making it more of a separate apartment. Now, he and his partner, Paul, live upstairs, while the Donegans, whom Russell has since sold the house to, live downstairs with their daughter.
“It’s always been an upstairs-downstairs house, you know? And when she was really little, her parents knew that if they had to go somewhere, they would just check with us,” Russell said. “It was just easy and natural. It was delightful for me. I don’t have any grandkids, so having a grandniece was like having a grandkid.”
Many of the longstanding family farms in Vermont, like Trillium Hill, are still operational, and people still live in the houses. Because of that, historic preservation often looks a little different than preserving a building or an object for a museum.
“There’s always this sort of push and pull of honoring the history, but also updating for 21st-century life, which is inherent to any historic property, not just farmsteads. And usually, it’s just a matter of thinking carefully about it and finding the right balance,” Colman said.
In renovating the house, Russell said maintaining historic elements of the interior was not front of mind — the floors weren’t in great shape and the walls needed to be insulated. However, upstairs, he uncovered the wooden beams holding up the house. They had been hidden behind plaster and, when revealed, provided a glimpse of the past in an updated, livable space.
“You can see more of the bones of the house now than you could before we started,” he said
When it comes to maintaining the land, Russell said his entire family has been intentional. His mother, before she died, gave the land to him and his siblings, and they’ve conserved most of it with Vermont Land Trust. Some of it also went to the next generation — Russell said it depended on who was interested in stewarding the land. The Donegans bought the part they’ve been farming.
“We all love this land. We know every part of it, and the next generation in our family knows every part of it. They know the nooks and crannies,” Russell said. “The bottom line is, it’s more important to us that this land stay open and in agricultural use than whether the next generation gets equal, divvied up amounts.”
There are other things they’ve maintained, less tangible things like community. Russell said that, during maple sugaring season, the family still gets together to collect sap traditionally, with a horse drawn cart and tin buckets. He said there are people in town who aren’t related who still come to help with the sugaring every year.
It’s not so different from the way he depicts the house as a hub for kids in town during his childhood. He describes his parents as having had an open-door policy — everybody used to come and hang out at the house. Nobody knocked. And like the Russell kids, they knew that when they heard the bell, they needed to head home too.
Coleman said, for him, uncovering these family histories and the stories of the land often starts with observing the world around and asking why. Why, for example, is there a bell on the top of that house in the middle of town?
