End of Sheep Business

New Ipswich Historical Society

Marion Davis Audio-Tape Transcriptions

Sometime before her death in 1986, Marion Davis recorded her memories at the encouragement of her brother, Walter Buck. The recordings were transcribed by a secretary.

The Friends of Wapack have made these available to the Historical Society. Marion was born on February 8, 1894 in Fitchburg, MA.

Only Sammy Remained

We had bought some sheep of a man over near Exeter and I called him up and asked him if he had any more sheep to sell. He said "Yes, I want to sell my whole flock. I'm now is business so much I haven't time to take care of them and my parents are old people now and they can't do it for me. So I'll sell the whole bunch." I said, "Alright I'll take them". I forget how many there were. I went to see Fred Hill; he said he'd get them for me so we went down for those. I can remember going; it was early in the fall, a miserable day. We got down there and we got the sheep loaded. We got almost to Manchester on the way home when his truck went on the fritz. It was beginning to snow and he had to go to a garage- luckily there was a garage not too far from where the truck kind of stopped. They got the truck pulled into their garage and went to work on it. They told us, "You'd better not go down through the middle of town because they're watching all these people who have livestock coming in here with open trucks". Of course sheep with wool on it wouldn't have hurt them but we took his advice and went a back road and started for home. We didn't get home until 2 o'clock that morning because it took us so long to get the truck fixed. We had to unload the sheep there at the Lodge in the pasture. They stayed there; they didn't go off anywhere. It was a few days later when we took those sheep back to the farm we drove them back. The next spring I sold them; they were mostly old sheep and they didn't amount to much. That was the end of my sheep business.

We saved one little lamb from the sheep that were bitten by dogs. One of the sheep had triplets and out of the 3 we were able to save one little ram. His name was Sammy; we made a little cosset of him and he stayed with us a number of years.

Photo Archives

Brenton MacKaye, Frank Robbins and Benton's students from the Bridgeman School in Shirley on the porch of the Wapack Lodge (which was located on the property of Wilfried Eggers).

James Roger diary entry - Pullets 20

16^th January 1913

Mild, fine day; wind variable from E. To West. David and Daniel cutting and burning brush round the top field. I went to mail; got papers only. David said the lecture last night was very good. He (the speaker) gave his own impressions of the country. Pullets 20.

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