July 24, 2009

You can see history at Glen Brook. We have many living traditions in our activities: grace before meals, square dancing and contra dancing, work periods, marking time using a bell instead of watches, sharing work and play – often with a song – and many other customs. History is also visible in our land. From the glaciers that deposited the granite rocks in our fields (making the earth very hard to till) to the first European to settle the land, Jedediah Tayntor, a farmer from Massachusetts who fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill and in Washington’s Army. In fact, Tayntor built Glen Brook’s Main House in 1776. Today, the Foxes discovered some of this history for themselves as they scampered over many of the stone walls that divide our fields and pastures. It was a difficult task, especially in our age of tractors and heavy machines, to imagine that the stones that form the miles of our walls we moved each by hand by farmers over the past two centuries. The Eagles harvested peas and planted basil, the CITs moved a lot of firewood, and all the groups did their daily clean up of their cabins – thereby continued our tradition of stewardship of the land.