Mulberry and mill towns

Our old house is well known in our parts. A blacksmith, and his wife, lived in the house for over 50 years before us. They were quite self-sufficient: the wife had a large garden, and canned until she couldn't anymore. On the small acreage, there was a horse, a few milking cows, pigs up in the back field, and a chicken coop. A wood stove heated the "front cape" and a coal burning cook stove heated the kitchen ell. There was no central heat until the couple was into their nineties, and the wife, during a stint in a local nursing home, said she wouldn't return home until there was a modern furnace. So, in 1995, an oil-burning furnace and hot air ducts were installed. But still, after the wife died, the old blacksmith reverted to his old rituals of wood burning -- collecting, cutting and stacking downed branches and trees, much to his daughters' dismay.

So everyone knew the old man. For at least three years after we bought the house, people would stop by, admiring our restoration efforts, and inquiring about the previous owner. We told them that his health had failed, he had gone to the nursing home down the road, and that is when he sold the place, but that he had come back for a visit not long before he died. His daughters brought him, so he could see the house again, and the barn rehab. And he seemed pleased with what we had done.

Our old house is perched at the crossroads at the old Killingly Hill church, precipitously close to the roads to the north and east. Our protection from wayward plow trucks and speeding teenagers is a tree, a very large tree, in the tiny front yard. It towers over the house. We had just begun some major structural work in the summer months after buying the place when one of the contractors asked about the big tree. He had noticed that the branches had leaves that didn't look at all alike, and that fruit was falling from it, staining the roof, and the road. Some research quickly revealed that our main defense from the road was a mulberry tree. Another mulberry tree grows in the center of the back field, but the trees don't look alike, although their fruit does.

Was the mulberry tree planted hundreds of years before, evidence of an effort of early settlers to start a silk industry? Or, perhaps, more likely, it is a native upstart, allowed to grow and flourish for the same reason we appreciate it: a natural barrier from the unnatural. Several years ago, a local historian provided me with a photograph of our home around 1930. The mulberry tree was only about ten feet tall.