The Pastures

Model Farm of Horace Chenery Belmont, Maine

by Isabel Morse Maresh

December 7, 2006

Belmont — Isabel Morse Maresh compiled the following piece from numerous newspaper items. Many articles have been written about "The Pastures" owned by Horace Chenery in Belmont.

The Town of Belmont, since its settlement in the early 1800s and its incorporation as a town in 1814, had always been a farming community.

Throughout the history of the Town, one generation after another resided on the farms, often several generations at a time in the old buildings.

Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, Horace Chenery, grandson of Governor William Crosby of Belfast, returned from Massachusetts to the area of his roots. He was attracted to the farming community of Belmont. He went about to purchase one farm after another from the elder generations of farmers in town.

It was about this time that a migration to Massachusetts and the western United States was claiming the younger generation of the town. Some returned to Belmont after making their fortunes, but a great number never returned to the town that they once had called home.

"The Pastures" was called a model dairy farm. In 1903, Horace Chenery bought the Lamb farm of one hundred acres in Belmont, which bordered on Tilden Pond. He had a dream of building a large, fancy dairy farm. He then purchased the Fred Farwell farm of seventy-five acres, the Crockett farm of one hundred twenty acres, and the James Bicknell farm of one hundred ninety-five acres. These farms were in Belmont. He also purchased the one hundred ninety-five acre Elmbrook farm in Belfast.

In 1907, he owned six hundred eighty-five acres, which included two hundred thirty-five acres of fields and orchards; two hundred acres of pasture, and many acres of woodland. In 1907, he purchased a farm in Belmont from Elizabeth Miliken and her daughter, Mary Maud of Belfast.

When Chenery purchased the Lamb farm, the farm included a comfortable farmhouse with a well and a large connected barn. He modernized and improved the house. It was there his farm superintendent, Walter E. Quimby, a graduate of the New Hampshire College of Agriculture, resided with his family.

The barn on the Lamb farm measured forty-two by eighty feet. It had a dressing room for the men, who were required to be clean and were usually dressed in white uniforms. He had a laundry, where the uniforms were in abundance, and continually clean. The dressing rooms had hot and cold running water, toilets, and other conveniences. No worker was allowed to go to the barn to milk the cows until he had thoroughly cleaned his hands with plenty of soap and hot water, and was wearing a clean uniform. All of the rooms were heated.

The Lamb farm was the site of his dairy. Chenery had a herd of high-class, purebred, dehorned Jersey cows, one of the best herds in Maine. His bull, "Nonie's Tormentor," of the American Polled Jersey Cattle club, was the only polled jersey bull in New England registered in the Red Books. The bull was a sire for hornless Jersey cattle. The polled trait was so strong that about fifty percent were pure polls of the heifer calves. The herd was a great butter producer. His purebred bull, "Dora's Prince," was from the Billings' farm, in Woodstock, Vermont. Edward Burnett, a man who was highly educated about Jersey cattle, selected the cattle for the farm. Chenery spent most of his time, summer and winter, on the Belmont farms.

The main barn had closets and rooms for harnesses and grain. There were two silos that held one hundred-forty ton of corn silage. The cattle were fed rationed, scientific feed, according to the appetite, capacity, and quantity of milk given by each.

The main cow barn was thirty-seven by one hundred-two feet, which housed the young stock in the basement, which also included a manure pit, separated by a concrete wall.

When it was impossible to spread the manure in the fields in the winter, the manure and liquids from the pit were mixed with the horse manure to make a compost.

Everything on the farm was utilized with the most modern knowledge of the time. Chenery experimented with nitrates, solid and liquid manure, mixed with fertilizers, spread on his fields from manure spreaders and a large tank, very similar to street-watering carts, pulled by his horse teams.

In 1907, Chenery had Arthur W. Gilbert, assistant professor of agriculture at the University of Maine, present a free demonstration on soil management for the benefit of local farmers, who were encouraged to attend.

The creamery was enamel painted and equipped with separators, churns, butter workers, and modern machinery to make the high-quality, clean butter. The milk was never touched by men. From the time of the milking, the milk came to a tank, from there to the separator, the storing vat, and the churn. The butter was refrigerated after being wrapped with paper until delivered to the market. In 1909, Chenery cut and hauled six hundred tons of ice from Tilden Pond, which he used in his refrigeration. All of the milk was pasteurized.

The water system was from a six-inch pipe from a one hundred eighty-five foot, drilled well, through solid rock, with water of absolute purity, pumped into a forty-five-hundred-gallon tank, high in the air, piped from there to all of the farm buildings.

There was a ten-horsepower engine, set in a boiler room that measured twenty-eight by forty feet, where an eighteen-horsepower boiler, heated the water for all of the cleaning and laundry purposes. The water, which the cows drank, was heated to about seventy degrees to take away the chill. The farm had woodsheds that housed the firewood, cut by the workers, which fueled the boilers.

The cattle barn was built with a series of windows that allowed the cows to stand in sunshine the entire day. The inside of the barn was built so there were no sharp corners where germs and bacteria might grow.

The farm did not include a large number of poultry, only enough for eggs for the chefs to use for cooking, and for chickens to butcher for meals. A large piggery housed purebred hogs, which had rooted up rocks, roots, and whatever else was in the ground while clearing an area. Acres of corn for silage, and a crop of potatoes, were planted.

Chenery had a stable housing at one time, more than fifty purebred horses for farm work, riding, and record-setting racing horses. At the annual Belmont Town Fair, held in October, Chenery entered his teams in competition horse-pulling. He umpired the baseball game with W.H. Quimby, with a team of the men from “The Pastures” against the Morrill ball team. The Morrill team won.

Toward Tilden Pond, Chenery had a kennel of several breeds of dogs, including purebred Irish setters, beagles, and English foxhounds. In 1910, Mr. Orff was in charge of the kennel. They showed some of the dogs at a dog show in Boston.

He also had a colony of wild ducks and drakes, which had been trained as decoys. Their wings had been clipped so they could not fly. He had a muck pond built with a wire fence and hiding places for their nests. A reporter in 1907 wrote that Chenery had a duck sit on twenty-one eggs, hatching out eighteen ducklings. Shortly before the reporter arrived, a mink had gotten away with a number of the ducklings.

Chenery had set out about one-thousand apple trees on the Bicknell farm, planted about fifty feet apart. The recommended space was forty feet, but Chenery felt that fifty feet gave more room for trimming, mowing, and cultivation. The Bicknell farm produced one-hundred-twenty tons of hay, which was a lot of hay at that time.

Chenery had his men build about one mile of stone drain, of small- and medium-sized, easy-to-handle rocks. He believed stonewalls caused weeds and brush to grow, and the stone drains were much better for the land.

One of the older workers on the rock drains was Moses Morse, an elderly neighbor, who with his son, John, worked on the farm at various times. Chenery owned a steam sawmill in Belmont, employing several local men.

Chenery was a liberal entertainer. He had cottages at Tilden Pond, where he hosted many Sunday school picnics and entertained distinguished guests.

In 1910, Chenery made a proposition to the town of Belmont that attracted considerable attention. As a large taxpayer, owning the largest farm in the vicinity, on which were valuable buildings, he proposed that he pay his taxes ten years in advance and the town could expend two-thirds of the amount on the roads in Belmont for the coming year.

The work was to be done under competent supervision. He asked to have an article inserted in the warrant to be voted on at the spring town meeting. Chenery was so serious about the matter that he had been in conference with the state road commissioner, a Mr. Sargent, as to how the work could best be conducted.

That same year, 1910, the writer for the town column for Belmont reported “the roads in South Belmont are very bad. The road from Morse’s Mills to the Lincolnville line is a disgrace to any town. Nothing has been done on that road for some time. People who are obliged to travel will soon have to go in airships.”

Horace Chenery’s model dairy farm, “The Pastures,” was a showplace and one of the best-equipped in Maine. It was reported he spent a great deal of money in the town.

It was said he had in his employment about sixty men at one time, giving the local people a good job at good pay. It is not known when the work at “The Pastures” came to an end. It has been told that he lost his fortune with bad investments, possibly during the dark days of the Great Depression in the United States. There are probably many more stories of the happenings at “The Pastures”.