Yesterday I went to the Barnard Town
Clerk's office, to look in the town reports for any mention of Seth
Aikens in the early 1900's. The first town report available was for
1865 or so, and of course I couldn't resist, so I started at the
beginning, and spent an hour and a half perusing the ancient town
reports to find any mention of Charles Aikens.
The first time C.C. Aikens is
mentioned in the town reports is in 1873. He was paid $10.97 for
blacksmith work for the poor farm. According to the online inflation
calculator, that would be 207.23 in 2012. The incomes and
expenditures for the poor farm took up more space than any other
subject in the Barnard Town Report. About every five years, there
would be a report from the School Superintendent, but the poor farm
took up page after page of detailed figures. Charles did
blacksmithing for the poor farm every year until the turn of the
century. After 1900, the affairs of the poor farm were outlined in
even more detail, but blacksmith services weren't listed.
Charles did quite a bit of work for
the town. He also worked on several bridges, including the Putnam
Bridge in 1880. Barnard must have needed a lot of road work done in
1890, because the town paid Charles to shoe oxen for roadwork.
Although the report for 1890 listed $250 ($6,290 today) worth of road
equipment as an assett owned by the town, it did not list any oxen.
Probably oxen were rented from a local farmer, and part of the deal
was that the town would pay to have them shoed. Of course I knew that
blacksmiths shoed horses, but I hadn't even thought about shoeing
oxen until now. Charles also mended some chains, repaired the road
machine, and made or fixed some tools to be used in roadbuilding.
The blacksmith of the late 19th
and early 20th century made the shovels and rakes that
highway workers used to maintain the roads. In 1892 and 1893 Charles
himself is listed as one of the men who was paid for road work. In
those days, each man had to serve his time as a road worker. It was
part of your duty to the town you lived in, like paying your taxes.
By the end of the Civil War, Vermont's
chief industry was dairy farming, and Southern New England was the
recipient of Vermont butter and cheese. In 1869, Vermont was the
first state to have a Dairyman's Association, and the main goal of
this organization was to pressure the Vermont legislature to do
something about the deplorable condition of the state's roads, to
make it easier for Vermont farms to ship their products south.
I noticed that for the first time in
1893, Barnard had a road superintendent who submitted a summary of
the year's road work for publication in the town report. Online
research led me to a 1985 article written by Samuel Hand, Jeffrey
Marshall and D. Gregory Sanford, “Little Republics”. In reading
the article, I learned that in 1892, the Vermont legislature passed a
law that said that every Vermont town had to elect a highway
commissioner and levy a tax of twenty cents on the grand list for the
upkeep of roads.
The road superintendent’s yearly
summary included a list of men who were paid to work on the roads,
but after 1900, it seemed like the same men worked on the roads year
after year. It was a road crew of sorts, although those men weren't
on a payroll like a road crew would be today. They worked as day
laborers, but could count on that income every year, probably, and
the road superintendent counted on them to be available to work.
These same men likely did other day labor jobs around the town as
well, like working during maple sugaring season, putting up cordwood,
and haying for various farmers.
I asked the Old Redneck what kind of
ox-drawn machinery would a town have used on roads. His immediate
answer was “a grader”. Barnard also probably had a snow roller
for use during the winter. Until the advent of the automobile, snowy
roads were rolled rather than plowed. Rollers packed down the snow
to allow sleighs to glide along the top of it. Rollers were also
pulled by oxen or draft horses. Both the roller and the grader would
have needed the services of a blacksmith to repair them.
horse or ox drawn road grader
In 1899, CC Aikens was still shoeing
oxen for the town of Barnard, but in 1903, S.B. Aikens is listed as
having provided blacksmith services to the town in the form of tools
and repairs for town and state highway work. This was the first time
I noticed the mention of the state highway, and also the first time
Seth is mentioned in a town report. This isn't surprising. In 1903,
Charles was 70 years old and Seth was 39. Time for Charles to start handing over the reins to his son.
snow roller
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