When I moved to Brattleboro nearly five years ago, I was surprised to learn that my grandmother Joan, my mother’s mother, had been born here. Although we are longtime New England people, she spent her adult life in Eastern Mass, and as far as I knew, she had grown up in Hatfield, an hour south of here, in a big farmhouse near the tobacco fields. She and my great aunts had all worked the tobacco fields as teenagers and learned to drive tractors before cars. Two generations later, my brother and I grew up in Ashfield, a hilltown close by in Western Mass.
My Great Aunt Bea driving a tractor in the tobacco fields in Western Mass
But somehow, Joan had been born in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1928, nearly a hundred years before I moved here with my husband and children. I was so curious. Why had her parents, James and Nellie, moved north to Vermont temporarily? And where, exactly, did they live?
My great grandfather, James Howard Bangs, 6/5/1885 – 10/7/1953
While reconnoitering with family over the weekend, we happened to open a cedar chest that my aunt had packed away when my Gramma passed away 14 years ago. It was full of treasures — hand stitched linen napkins and embroidered tablecloths, film strips, jewelry, my mom’s hideous gym uniform from the ’50s that involved a jumper and bloomers in prison-issue blue, with her name stitched into the breast pocket. But the thing that caught my eye was my grandmother’s Holy Bible. I’m not even sure why I noticed it. I am not religious, not one drop. But I have fond memories of Christmas Eve in church with my Gramma, listening to her sing hymns in her too-high warble. My grandmother had kept this Bible, so it obviously meant something to her. A book person, I wanted it.
My aunts and uncles granted me the Bible, and as I leafed through it, a newspaper clipping fell out, torn around the edges and quite yellow, but still entirely readable. It was my great uncle Clarence’s wedding announcement, and right on it was listed a street:
Highlawn Road. I made a note to do a drive-by and see if I could intuit with my Bangs (that’s my grandmother’s maiden name) juju which house it was. But although the street is only a block and a half long, possessing maybe 15 houses in total, sadly, I didn’t have a psychic moment. So instead, I called the Brattleboro Town Clerk, who thoughtfully paged through hundred-year-old town directories to get to the bottom of things. It turns out that James and Nellie did live on Highlawn, but not until a few years after my grandmother was born. In 1928, they lived at 8 West Street.
I drove by both of these houses and took pictures on my way home from my office that day. The first house of my grandmother’s life is now a multifamily, somewhat ramshackle clapboard thing on a steep corner with a view of a bramble valley below. But presumably back in 1928 it stood more stolidly proud on this corner, and my grandmother’s entire family of parents, eight siblings, and many of their own husbands, wives, and young kids packed in.
What a strange feeling to be standing on the curb on a beautiful autumn day, staring down a stranger’s house which once held your baby grandmother nearly a hundred years ago. This was the yard my grandmother first explored. These streets are where her mother (and more likely, her much-older sisters) took her on carriage walks.The house is close enough to downtown that I can imagine my great grandparents shopping in some of the same buildings, and walking on some of the same sidewalks, I frequent today.
I was very close to my grandmother, whose own mother, Nellie, was 41 when she was born. The last in a suite of eight siblings, she famously referred to herself as “the mistake.” Her next-closest sibling, Howard, was eight years older. The oldest, James, was 21 when she was born.
The Bangs family in all its glory, with my beautiful grandmother as a child sitting near nieces and nephews nearly her own age.
I imagine my poor great grandmother Nellie on her eighth, probably accidental, kid, feeling quite tired and pretty much over it all. I think of myself having twins at 43 — only two years older than Nellie. I’m tired, too, but hey, I don’t have SEVEN OTHER KIDS.
After the clapboard on the corner of West Street, the Bangs family moved to Highlawn. This is what the house looks like now:
This house, too, stands on a corner, and is most likely now a multifamily, although once, it was the residence of the entire Bangs family: James and Nellie and their children James, Clarence, Carlton, Doris, Beatrice, Eloise, June, Howard, and Joan. From these nine children came 14 grandchildren (my mother’s generation) and now, their children and their children’s children.
While the Bangs family were original Mayflower descendants (a dubious honor indeed) and New England residents for centuries, the grandchildren are now far-flung, from Oregon to Ohio to New Hampshire. But somehow, my little family ended up back in Brattleboro where it all began.
My great-aunt Beatrice, who was a second grandmother to me. I knew she had worked as a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Halifax, Vermont, but used to think that was my family’s only historical connection to Vermont.
