Last fall, a handful of newcomers joined Arlington Grange, in North Whitefield, to revitalize the faltering organization. Hoping to convert the aging membership to their vision of reenergizing the Grange’s agricultural roots, the new arrivals instead ended up clashing with traditions that have shaped people’s lives and values for more than 50 years.
The conflict surfaced during planning for three “local foods” suppers, organized and carried out by the younger members and some of their friends. The meals rely on upfront money to purchase produce and other food from area farms. Older members have complained this is not the Grange’s way – that over the years most of the food has been donated or funded from their own pockets. Whatever money the Grange has it earns through suppers, and that income goes to maintain and insure the building and pay the utility bills. It doesn’t go into a “supper fund,” they argued.
Master Debbie Rollins’ hands have been busy dousing the wildfires. Since calling in the State Grange Master to mediate a late July meeting of the dozen members, however, she said, “I think some things have been settled. So far no one has quit.”
Also, veteran member Laurie Bartlett is now guiding a supper committee, advising them on how to incorporate fresh, local produce into the standard beans and casserole menu familiar to longtime supper patrons. That is the aim of the third, and probably the last “local foods” supper slated for Aug. 21.
Miller has belonged to Arlington for more than 55 years. Hope and concern for its future motivated him to welcome new blood at a time when membership was languishing and funds were low. However, he added, “The way things are now, I don’t want to go back.” Unlike earlier recruiting efforts in the 1970s, when he helped revitalize the Grange by drawing in coworkers and acquaintances, the new group has broken ground unfamiliar to him.
“They’re doing a different kind of supper, what they call a ‘green’ supper, not a baked bean supper. They didn’t want the old members doing anything, but they consented to a casserole table, up against a back wall,” he said.
Miller acknowledged that when the Grange movement began 150 years ago, and local chapters starting sprouting up and holding public suppers, they used locally grown food
The problem at Arlington, he said, is “they wanted the Grange to advance $600-$700 for the first supper.” That sum would have depleted the treasury by half, he said. “Us old Grangers, we’re used to having things donated so there’s no expense to the Grange.” In that system, the person purchasing the ham or turkey for a meal would be reimbursed by donations from the other members.
Frances Miller, now 87, joined Arlington Grange in 1994. She hasn’t been attending meetings, partly because, despite recent knee replacement surgery, she is wheelchair bound and can’t use the chair lift to access the upstairs hall; but also because, “My heart isn’t in it. [To return] I’d have to feel different than I do now.” She and Charlie, who supplied the previous suppers with his own coleslaw recipe, can tick off the record number of casseroles (17), pies (six) and jello salads (two) Fran whipped up for a Masons award supper.
Strong-minded and outspoken, the former Arlington master is unfailingly upbeat when asked about her state of health: “Well, I fell out of my wheelchair four weeks ago, stove my left arm all to pieces, they had to take off some skin, but otherwise I’m all right.”
The injury hasn’t stopped her from preparing and freezing, with Charlie’s help, eight quarts of mincemeat to be folded into pies for yet another benefit event.
Of Arlington’s public suppers, she said, “We always made the casseroles at home, and took them to the Grange hall.” Charlie nodded, except “some people,” he said, “would bring a number 10 can of string beans and heat it up there.”
Gladys Glidden, another 55-year Arlington member, former master and lecturer, and now assistant lady steward, has baked as many as eight pounds of pea beans and yellow eye beans each for a supper, in addition to throwing together casseroles and cheesecakes. Sitting in the kitchen of her Jefferson home recently, she said what she misses are the old customs that knit a strong social network.
“We used to play cards, have dances years and years ago,” she said. “We cooked on a wood-burning kitchen stove and had a wood furnace (in the dining area).” Glidden’s husband Leo, who is currently assistant steward, would help Charlie Miller get the wood in. Hours before a supper, the women would gather and heat hot water in kettles on the stove – “that was before the hot water heater was put in,” she said.
Glidden was relieved a few years ago when the Grange, down to six core members, got a boost from her son, his partner and another family member. Insisting the older folks stay out of the kitchen, the younger ones put on the suppers, a role Gladys was hoping the newest Grange members would assume. She’s worried that the Grange can’t “get ahead” if money is diverted to a supper fund.
“It’s too bad these young people couldn’t come in, fill a chair and cooperate,” Glidden said. She hasn’t been voting lately at meetings and said she’s ready for anyone who “wants my part” to do it, referring to the duties associated with her office. She gets tired. “There’s a lot to it,” she said.
Marcus works for a timber frame construction company and Hammer, a former VISTA worker, contracts with the state Dept. of Agriculture on its Farm-to-School program, teaching teachers about agriculture. Both met at Evergreen College in a club that taught members how to raise a flock of sheep, including pasture rotation and meat sales. They have a small dairy goat herd and a few other farm animals and fowl where they now live.
Marcus, who grew up with three siblings in Whitefield, describes himself as “a first generation prospective farmer.” He reads books and talks to people about agriculture, finding the “best advice” comes from community members who practice agriculture rather than academics who preach it. Trained in botany, he began questioning the science of ecology, how “it puts nature in a box without human intervention. I was looking for a more practical approach, that’s how I got turned to agriculture.”
Hammer grew up 40 minutes from Detroit, in a small rural Michigan town. She taught classes in the city where there are now 300 urban and backyard farmers who bring their produce to market, she said, and where land bulldozed for agriculture is actually more valuable than buildings.
Driven by ideals as well as recognition of the increasing demand for locally grown food, the couple relocated in Marcus’ childhood home, still owned by his father Paul.
Whitefield sheep farmer Beth Whitman, who is a career planner but also makes feta cheese and yogurt at her Townhouse Road Farm dairy, joined the Grange in 2009 and invited Marcus and Hammer to do so also. They jumped at the chance to become involved. What better way to revive the Grange’s original purpose of supporting farmers and their families than to present suppers featuring local foods purchased from area farms?
A year later, Marcus admitted, “We’ve learned a lot.” He and Hammer and their network of friends who helped them but were not Grange members, hadn’t realized the long hours, hard work, and cost of producing such meals. They also failed, in their planning, to understand that cucumbers, billed for the July supper, wouldn’t be readily available that early in the season. Hammer, who was later reimbursed but not without heated debate, put up hundreds of dollars of her own money to pay for food.
She remembers, during a Grange membership discussion of a proposed supper committee, asking who wanted to be on it and who would do the desserts, “there was dead silence.” Her impression was that the older members didn’t want to do the suppers any more and welcomed the help, “but they assumed we were doing it the traditional way.”
The traditional way did not involve hiring a kitchen coordinator/chef, a friend of Whitman’s, to cook the meals; or taking money from the Grange’s treasury to float the suppers; or having an attractive young blonde, wearing a pretty dress and bright red lipstick, greeting patrons as they stepped into the dining room; or charging $10 a plate.
The older members’ reaction, when it came, startled her. “I realized it was a cultural thing, that we had stolen their culture,” Hammer confessed. “We definitely made some mistakes.”
On the other hand, said her husband, “The public had a different take,” evidenced by an enthusiastic spillover crowd at the June supper where roast chicken from free-range poultry and desserts made from locally grown rhubarb were served.
The encouragement rippled out beyond that first success.
At the July supper, featuring sausage and vegetarian lasagna, 90-year-old Whitefield native Lawrence Felt, who lives in Kings Mills, found himself at Arlington Grange for the first time in his life. “I never had occasion to come before,” he said. Now with Marcus and Hammer living across the road from him, in the same house where his grandparents ran a farm and boarded summer lodgers from Massachusetts, the young couple have reached out and befriended him, and he has done the same.
Katherine Chrisman, of South Bristol, was one of the most voluble fans on July 10. She squeezed into the crowded kitchen, bubbling over with praise. “I love what you’re doing with local growers. It’s beautiful! The people at my table had a blast.”
She told a visitor she’d been attending the dinners since she was two years old. Of course, it went without saying, “The change is scary for everyone. The first time I came in and saw Isobel in that dress, I thought, ‘Did she just come from church?’ They’re sprucing up a long time-honored tradition but hanging on to the tried and true,” Chrisman declared, indicating the beans and casserole table, not against a back wall this time but in the center of the dining hall.
Pointing to the recycling bins where leftovers for pigs were being collected, she said, “They’ve thought of everything, and they picked a salad dressing that lets you still taste the greens. It’s very educational, it’s refreshing to see the youth come in and take responsibility.” She added every one of the longtime grangers “deserves a hats off for the work they’ve done through the years. They are blessed to have a group of agriculturally savvy youth.”
Of the two previous local food suppers, Marcus admitted, “We were moving so fast the way we went about it before, it had flaws.” Hammer added, “We didn’t have time to look back. We were improvising and we stepped on some toes. Really we had no idea what we were getting into.”
On Aug. 21, they will present a “combination” supper under the guidance of an older member who “has taken us under her wing and is steering us in the casserole direction while giving us leeway to approach local farms. That’s why we joined the grange – to support local farms,” said Marcus, which is what the Grange manual instructs them to do, he added.
Marcus and Hammer are also discussing learning the assistant lady steward and assistant steward functions, even though each of them stumbles over ritual and its role in the Grange.
Beth Whitman is positive even though she’s unsure whether everything is resolved. She said she joined the Grange in 2009 “because it is a community resource and because I understand the Grange had been a center for social, economic and political purposes, and for education about agriculture in the past.” It was the place for meeting such needs, she said, before the university-based Cooperative Extension Service supplanted it.
Whitman was inspired by the new energy she felt some of her neighbors investing in another old building in town, the Kings Mills Union Hall. Also formerly a grange before merging with Arlington in 1969, the building’s original use as a community center is the hall association’s long-range goal.
“I had this thought, that people are coming back to the community, to farming, to community based education” said Whitman, and even though “I’m not a ritual person myself,” she said she was willing to commit herself to an organization that has helped and supported rural families from its inception.
But he was clear on the role of ritual in Grange activities. “You’ve got to recognize and embrace it, and it certainly grows on you the more you take part in it, and it’s not a lengthy part, just the opening and closing,” he said. “What’s left if you take it away?”
Owens admires the stately Arlington Grange building. “It’s a nice hall, they’ve got capable people. It’s very frustrating. I hope they can work it out,” because, he observed, “the older people aren’t going to be around forever.”
Owens, whose family has deep roots in the Bingham Grange where he was formerly master, is sure the loss of numbers, at Arlington and elsewhere, has had an impact. “Back along you’d see it was different, all the people who came, the big crowds,” as many as 90 or 100 people during district meetings. “People try harder when there are more people taking part,” he said.
As for the inclusion of the younger people, “They won’t ever do it without help and guidance from the older ones on how to account for the money and do the suppers.”
Rollins, Arlington’s Master, thinks Owens’ mediation “brought out a deeper understanding of each other. I think because of that we’ll have a stronger Grange.”
She described the supper fund as “something we’ve never done before. The treasury is healthy enough and we’ve made enough from the last two suppers so we can establish a fund.
“The supper committee can work with the treasurer, rather than taking it out of their own pockets. There’ll be receipts, a paper trail, so anyone borrowing is kept accountable. It’s a way to provide some of these wonderful foods,” she said, that used to come from people’s fields and gardens, in an era predating the grip of national food chains and stressed-out two-income-households.
Rollins, whose buoyant personality warms up the Grange’s public functions, also composed a list of “housekeeping” rules and printed out the bylaws. She presented them to all members to impress on newcomers the protocols for using the hall, including cleaning it up properly after suppers.
She feels confident that once the older members “realize the young people are really sincere,” and that they have to follow Grange rules, there will be a turnaround. “If the hump hasn’t completely gone away, I feel it will eventually, even if we lose a couple of members,” she said. “If this next supper on Aug. 21 goes well, they’re talking about a harvest supper in the fall, with winter vegetables and hams.”
