Editor’s note: Part 1 of this column can be found in the June 4 edition of the Ledger-Transcript.
The barn also became home to my horse, Apache when I was 14. Benton had had a horse named Coco when he was 11. I remember the time my parents bought Coco. I was 6 when we went to the stables where Coco was purchased. I’m sure my brother was excited to be getting a horse but I was too engrossed playing with a puppy to pay much attention. My folks paid for the horse and were about to leave when the man selling the horse asked if I would like to take the puppy with me. Wow, I just looked at my dad, who was, by the way, a devoted dog lover and that was that. Benton had his horse and I had a puppy which my mom suggested we could name her Elizabeth, Liz, for short. Liz it was and she was my dog until she passed away at the age of 14. Unfortunately, while Benton was riding Coco my dad put me up behind Benton. Something spooked Coco and she reared, much like Silver did in the introduction of “The Lone Ranger,” and I slid off over Coco’s rump. I was only 6 and even though I was not hurt, I was afraid to get on a horse until I finally got Apache.
But I loved my dog Liz and she followed me everywhere summer and winter. When we went swimming at Hardy’s Pond Liz lay on the bank carefully watching that I did not get into trouble. On occasion, if I came close to shore Liz would come as close to me as possible and try to catch my hand or arm as though she wanted to pull me onto dry land. I thought it was funny but my mom assured me that Liz was truly anxious for my safety.
Liz was a long-haired border collie and loved the winter weather. On some of the coldest nights she would sleep outside and in the morning, after a snowstorm she was just a lump in the snow, undetectable until called when she would stand and give herself a good shake, ready for breakfast, after which she walked me to Cowie’s store to await the school bus.
One spring morning while I was playing in the yard and Liz was close by, as usual, the insurance man came by for a meeting with my father. Getting out of his car he walked past me and as he did he gave me a playful tap on my head with a magazine he was carrying. Liz saw this as an attack on her boy and launched herself at the man and bit him on the side. The man screamed and my mother or father ran out and grabbed Liz by the collar, but it was too late. The salesman later on sued my folks (I don’t know how that turned out) but Liz had to be quarantined for 10 days in the county animal shelter to determine if she was rabid. She was not rabid (we all knew that) and was returned to me.
Janet and Margaret also had a dog named Cindy for a time. Cindy and Liz would often play in the yard but sometimes they played in front of the Cowie’s store, not a very safe place for dogs or kids to play because of the busy road in front of the store. One day the dogs were playing when a car rounded the corner and hit Cindy, killing her almost instantly. It was the first time I had ever seen an animal hit by a car, and as I watched, Liz ran into the road and grabbed Cindy by the nape of the neck and began pulling Cindy to the side of the road. I never really knew what to make of that other than it appeared Liz was pulling Cindy to safety.
Around my 14th birthday I met a girl at Ed’s Country Auction, Joyce Murray. Her parents were regulars at the auction and became friends with Ed and my parents as well. Joyce loved riding and her family owned three or four horses. Joyce competed in horse shows and had numerous blue ribbons in several classes of horsemanship. She rode with an English saddle rather than western. I liked Joyce and found myself, at her parents’ suggestion, spending weekends at her home and going with her to horse shows. One Saturday morning my parents and I went to a stable where a man was showing off his western riding skills. I believe Joyce and her parents were there since it was their friend that owned the stables. In any case, my dad ended up buying Apache. He was an older horse of the Morgan breed. Coco had long since been sold and now I had my daring charger, Apache.
When I got Apache, Liz was still my dog but she never followed Apache and me when I went riding; maybe she had her feelings hurt when she saw me giving all my attention to a horse. He was a gentle and faithful horse and I liked taking long rides with him in the countryside. On one such ride I went up to Keys Road and onto a road called the Bunker Road. It was a pine-needle-strewn dirt road which connected Keys Road with Temple Road, maybe half a mile between the two. Apache was, as I mentioned, a gentle and faithful horse but he also preferred going back to the barn rather than heading away from it. That day I was riding him bareback with only a bit and bridle; I liked riding bareback and I think he, too, liked being without a saddle. We were doing a nice trot down Bunker Road and going away from home when we reached the end. I turned and considered a gentle canter back the way we had come which was also the direction of the barn but Apache was way ahead of me and when I turned his head toward home he took off like a shot at full gallop. I was in no way prepared for the sudden acceleration and I slid down his sleek back, off his rump and tumbled a couple of times on the pine-needled road. Stunned, lying on my back but feeling unhurt, it occurred to me that I was about to walk home when Apache’s velvet muzzle brushed my nose and forehead. When he realized he had lost me he stopped and came back to see how I was. It was almost as if he was saying, “You okay? You know you’ve got to hold on, right?”
I’m not sure when the barn was built but I assume it was erected in the early part of the 19th century. It had hand-hewn timbers and was put together with mortise and tenons held together with wooden pegs. The original roof was probably cedar shingles. Sadly the barn is now gone. Gone is the barn where Coco and then Apache once stood quietly in the box stall. Gone is the barn where Ingrid and Snowflake, the end of a long line of milk cows, stood in their stanchions eating hay and oats. Where a 5-year-old boy accompanied his father watching as his father milked the cows on a cold winter’s night; snow falling lightly on the pasture. The barn where young boys played in the forbidden hay loft. Where, later as young men, those boys pitched hay into the loft; hay they helped gather from the field across the street. When I drove past my grandmother’s house in 2021 and saw that the barn had been torn down, a sense of loss flooded my being and I knew at that moment it would be the last time I was to visit West Wilton again. The village had changed, evolved, in those many years since I lived there. The house I grew up in had been enlarged, my grandmother’s porch had been removed, and the fields and pastures had grown over with trees. New houses had been built in the field where we played ball. There was no Cowie’s store; Phil’s house had been renovated. The bridges over Blood Brook and Temple Brook had been replaced by newer steel structures. Only the stone arches of the bridge in the center of West Wilton remained overlooking the ancient boulders below. To see the barn gone brought home the fact that West Wilton, as Benton and I knew it, didn’t exist anymore. The Fryes were gone; the Cowies were gone, as were the Abbotts and Adams and the Hardys.
I suppose every village changes as the older people in town die and their children move on. New people, strangers to what was, move in; remove old buildings, renovate others and build new. The dynamics that ran the old village are replaced with new. No one remembers who the Fryes were or which house that family of four occupied. Cowie’s store is an apartment house with renters who have no roots to West Wilton’s past. Oddly enough I may be one of the last of those who remember the West Wilton of the 1950s with the iceman, nickel tonics, wooden-planked bridges, Keys Pond and all the minutiae of a sleepy little village
Raised in Wilton, Bennett built a life rooted in family, hard work, and the quiet values of small-town New England.
