Idyll Banter Read Online Free

almost fifteen years.
    The congregation raised the money it needed to move the old Methodist church a half-mile, drop it in place on the hillside, and restore it. The effort cost $164,000—and thousands of hours in volunteer labor. While half of the money came from insurance, another half was raised by the congregation through venison suppers, bake sales, and hundreds of letters requesting grants and private donations.
    Bill Finger, who spent summers in Lincoln as a boy and moved to the town permanently in 1974, recalls, “That fire galvanized the church and the community. A lot of people still feel it was an act of God that in the long run brought a lot of people together.”
    The congregation completed the restoration of the church in 1983, and, motivated by what Paul and Wanda Goodyear’s daughter Linda Norton describes as “the desire to give something back,” a second restoration project was begun. A group of parishioners raised money to buy two houses across the street from the church, one on the verge of collapse, and convert them to use as affordable housing for the community’s elderly. Today, the housing complex consists of ten separate apartments in three buildings, all of which look like well-kept private homes.
    That project cost $250,000—not including volunteer carpentry, wallpapering, and painting—and transformed the four corners that comprise Lincoln center into the sort of idyllic picture postcard that entices advertising executives and unit trust traders away from New York.
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    Cynthia Price’s nightmare—waking up to find the barns next door replaced by a development—could happen. But it’s not likely. The town has safeguards to prevent such things. With the exception of the apartments for the elderly, the town does not allow new homes to be constructed on lots smaller than one acre.
    But as the farmers sell off their land, there is no question that houses do appear. Ivis and Stewart Masterson farmed in South Lincoln for three decades before calling it quits in 1968. At one point they owned 275 acres. Today they own less than two. “We started selling off the land thirty years ago, and people started building houses,” Ivis says. “There are so many more people now.” At least fourteen houses dot the land that was once the Masterson farm. Adjacent to that land is an eight-house development.
    Although the first influx of out-of-state people was hippies, the second influx was young professionals who chose not to settle in cities. Flatlanders like my wife and me began arriving in the 1980s; many of them now commute to Burlington or Middlebury or Vergennes.
    Karen Lueders and her husband, Jim DuMont, are both attorneys. She is from Boston, he is from New York City, and they are raising their three children in a farmhouse near land that until recently Norman Strickholm was maintaining as one of the two active dairy farms in Lincoln.
    â€œEverything that happened to us here was touched by kindness,” Lueders says, recalling 1986, her family’s first year in Lincoln. When part of the roof blew off their house one Christmas when they were gone, their neighbors immediately repaired it; when they failed to make arrangements to have their long driveway plowed before the first blizzard, Strickholm cleared the snow at no charge.
    Lueders would take her young children and wander to the farm to watch Strickholm milk his Ayrshire cows. In 1991, Strickholm moved his herd to Colorado, where land is cheaper and where he thought dairying would be more profitable. “Norman’s leaving was traumatic for our family,” Lueders says. “Just knowing he was out there milking the cows was a part of our life.”
    Like Strickholm, Ivis Masterson farmed Lincoln’s rocky soil, and she understands why none of her five children chose to continue the family’s dairy tradition: “They knew the hardship of our lives. They