150th Anniversary of New Ipswich

New Ipswich Historical Society

150th Anniversary of New Ipswich

Tent erected as part of the 150th Anniversary celebration

MOTHER (by Hilma Stark)

Minnie Makela Stark – born July 25, 1880

I cannot remember our mother when she was in good health, but from her pictures, she was a good-looking woman, fat and rosy-cheeked. As her sickness set in she started to lose weight. Her hair which she insisted on cutting, over our objections as nobody bobbed their hair at that time (1930’s) was dark and oily. She had a hard life, all work and no play. Everything was done by hand. She made bread, churned butter, made sheets from flour sacks, milked cows, and even came to help out in the field. She did all the cooking. How she wanted to go to Florida and be warm, but only the rich in those days saw Florida. We could have used E.R.A. in those days. Women were nothing, not allowed to vote, and not counted to pay “poll tax” like the men.

About the only pleasure I can remember Mother having was to sneak a smoke on her own little corncob pipe and sometimes she made some “kalli” a fermented brew with a yakky taste. 

Sometimes she went to the Finn hop. She was a good dancer which none of her children seemed to have inherited because of their extreme shyness. We had two dance halls, both a mile away in different directions, but no church except the one for a very strong religion which we called the “Holy Rollers”  attended by a small minority, but now has a large attendance.

About once a month in the summertime, a Finnish sermon was held at someone’s home and we used to attend with Mother, who came from quite a religious family in Finland. .

Mother came from beautiful people in Finland. I had the honor of meeting a lot of the cousins and their children in the summer of 1978. Their houses were lovely and scrupulously clean and I was treated royally at each one. She had an inner beauty like the lovely lake where she was raised. I visited the home where she grew up and also the one she lived in after her marriage. I sat in her rocking chair and viewed the hundred year organ of her childhood.

Mother’s nephew paid quite a nice compliment in fond memory of Mother. He remembered that she had sent bundles of clothes to them at a time when they had been completely destitute and these clothes were gratefully received. This was in the late 1920’s and a result of their struggle against Russia. Oscar was born in Finland, one of the two children of our Mother and her first husband. Because times were hard in Finland, her husband came to America and found work in the Midwest, but his health failed and he had to return to Finland. He died before Oscar was born. Later Mother decided to migrate to America, leaving Oscar with his grandmother and taking his sister with her. But on the ship to America, the little girl came down with pneumonia and died and was buried at sea. Mother settled in Maynard, Mass. and worked in the woolen mill there. Later she took a position as housekeeper for my Father in New Ipswich, N.H. Oscar remained with his grandmother until he was seventeen and he too migrated to America. He found work in Worcester where he boarded with our Aunt Hannah, Andrew and Oiva. They later bought the Erickson place next to ours.

Reminisces  from Hilma Stark (b. 1917) who grew up in New Ipswich. She was sister to the late Elmer Stark who lived at the family place on Fox Farm Road (uncle of Sharon Anderson Rosenfelder). (probably recorded in the late 1970’s)

James Roger diary entry

18th June 1912

Fine, warm, breezy day. Dave and Walter Hardy cleaning up at Mrs. Parker’s cottage. I planted 2 bushes (snowballs) at back door; also heliotrope on Mary’s grave. Raked some grass and cut some at John Preston’s.

Garden Heliotrope