Then and Now: The life and services of Sylvan T. Maple

From the 1880s, Mary Jackson lived in a sprawling, poorly maintained farmhouse on Davis Hill. Her youngest son, Bill, stayed on when his father died in 1902, but after World War I he moved his family into town, including his mother. He kept farming the land, but in 1928 he and his brothers tore the old house down and began work on a new one 40 yards away, in the last few acres of pasture. They dug the cellar only a few paces from a maple sapling that appears to have sprouted in 1925.

The new house was meant as a place for Mary Jackson to live out her days, but she had already done that when construction was completed in 1931, and no one had ever lived in it when my father bought it in 1948. Six years later, he retired from the Navy and we moved in, the maple sapling having become a mature shade tree. As a boy I was allowed to chop down any pine trees around the house, where they were springing up by the dozens in the old pasture, but I was warned against taking my hatchet to the maples. That didn’t stop me from pretending to defy paternal discipline, or enlisting my mother to record such mock defiance.