Event: Telling Tales Out of School #1
Oral History Project Interviews
Location: Old Lyme Town Senior Center
Date: November 15, 2009
Interviewee: Jim Noyes
Interviewer: Sousan Arafeh
I’m Jim Noyes and I’ve lived in Old Lyme. I was born and brought up in Old Lyme but I
haven’t lived in Old Lyme all my life, yet! I’d like to tell you a little bit about my
childhood, my background. I was born in a family of seven children, seven siblings. We
lived in a big house at the intersection of McCurdy Road and Shore Road. The house is
still standing today but its not in the family any longer. My father had a little farm there
as many people did in those days, this is during the depression or at the beginning of the
depression. I think just about every other family in town had at least somewhat of a farm,
a big garden and a cow maybe, some chickens and so forth. For us the way we lived in
those days my father was by trade an upholsterer and furniture finisher and he worked for
Stanley Davis who was a furniture manufacturer in Old Lyme and had quite a few people
working for him. But during the depression he had to lay my father off and I often
wondered how he felt laying off a man with seven children. And all of them less than 19
or 20 years old. One of the results was my oldest brother Bill had to quit school when he
was in the 7th or 8th grade and go to work to help support the family, which happened
pretty often in those days. I started to tell you about my father’s farm. One day a friend
of his from Texas came by and my father was out there milking the cow and he said to
my father, how do you make a living on this little farm. My father told him the details of
what he had and so forth as I’ve already stated and the Texan said, out in Texas where I
come from I have a ranch that it takes me all day to drive my car out of. My father said I
used to have an old car like that too. So anyway, my father was milking the cow and the
Texan said Charlie, what time is it? And my father looked under the cow and said its
2:30. That marvelous, you look under the cow and hold the utters up and you can tell
what time it is. And Charlie said, if I hold them up high enough I can see the village
clock. You’ve heard this story before. Well, that’s as good as it gets.
Speaking of farms as I already stated, everybody had somewhat of a farm in those days
but there were some quite large farms here too. I could start at the Post Road at the
border of East Lyme and name off at least a dozen or 15 farms along the Post Road alone.
And they weren’t large farms like you’d expect out west today, but nevertheless for those
times they were pretty large. And that’s how a lot of people made their living of course.
All the stores in Old Lyme at that time sold grain because it was a typical farm
community. Most people today don’t realize this. There’s one store just opposite the
barbar shop in Old Lyme that had a building out behind it that was just for grain. And I
can remember when I worked at the A&P Store I was carrying grain out many, many
times in 100 pound sacks, none of this small packaging stuff, it was bulk grain. And all
this grain came into Old Lyme on the railroad silage which was across the tracks from
what is now the OLCC. It was quite a big building and it was always full of grain and
many rats around. We used go, I lived right next door to it, I was up there quite a bit, it
seemed to be a place for kids to hang out near the railroad tracks. Not a very safe place
and I’m sure if my parents knew I was there they wouldn’t have been too happy.
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Event: Telling Tales Out of School #1
Oral History Project Interviews
Location: Old Lyme Town Senior Center
Date: November 15, 2009
Interviewee: Jim Noyes
Interviewer: Sousan Arafeh
But speaking of stores, there was an A&P store on the corner of Ferry
Road and Lyme Street and that building is no longer in existence. Later it moved up
across the street from what is the Library. And many people today, the building does not
exist either, that was torn down. As a matter of fact I’m a building contractor and I tore it
down. People argue with me where it was and there isn’t any argument because I knew
exactly where it was. We tore that down and I sold the lumber there as we pulled the
building apart. I sold second hand lumber. I broke even on it, believe it or not, it seemed
not too likely that you would, and I didn’t loose any money and I kept my crew busy for
the winter. It was a bad winter for construction. So that’s about all I can say about that, I
guess. At that time the A&P store moved up to what is now the Hall’s Road. And that is
where most of the shopping is done today and was from that time on. This was back in
the Fifties.
Lets see, I told you about Stanley Davis. Old Lyme was a farm community.
Tell me about some of the farms. You were saying you could list them. Do you
remember some of them?
Oh, yea, I remember a lot of them. Sure, but they were typical New England farms. I
don’t remember anything special about them, they all had milking cows. Starting almost
in East Lyme, there was the Davy Farm. There are davy’s around to this day. Elizabeth
Davy, Olgel her name is, lives on part of the property of the farm. And the property that
the Lyme Senior Housing is on was part of her farm. They owned a lot of land. All these
farmers owned a lot of land. And coming along a little further from East Lyme up the
Post Road was Gene Caulkin’s farm and he lived right there by the little stream that goes
under the road there. And then coming up the road a little further at Two Sill Lane there
were two farms on Sill Lane—the Cone and after it became the Roberts Farm and then
the Ely farm and the list goes on and on here. Up across the street from what is now the
Pro Auto there was a farmer there called Imer or Limer, I never could figure out his
name, Carl Imer or Limer. Somebody might remember. He had a farm there. Mostly all
milking cattle as I can remember. And most of these farmers delivered milk from door to
door in an old truck, never a new one, times were tough in those days. Coming along up
the Post Road my distant relative, Judge Walter Noyes had a huge farm and his home was
opposite the Bee & Thistle, a big yellow colonial house there, I don’t know who lives
there now, it’s just been reshingled for about the 5th time in 15 years that I know of, I
don’t understand why they have to reshingle it all the time, but that’s another story I
guess. And coming on Lyme street, Sam Tooker had a farm and he was the grandfather
of Judith Tooker who is our tax collector and she lives ther eon the old farm but most of
the property is gone because its now occupied by schools. And coming along up to
Library Lane, there was a farm run by a man named Cliff Howard and surprising enough
his father ran a farm at White Sand’s Beach and his uncle ran a farm at Brighton Beach
and all those beaches were farms at one time. Oh here’s a point I wanted to make. When
all these farms were around, they cut the wood, there were no trees around, no where near
like there is today, and it was, I had a relative of mine who lived in North Dakota which
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Event: Telling Tales Out of School #1
Oral History Project Interviews
Location: Old Lyme Town Senior Center
Date: November 15, 2009
Interviewee: Jim Noyes
Interviewer: Sousan Arafeh
is kind of barren of trees, and he got stifled by all this, he felt hemmed
in, smothered and he never forgot that. I talked to him a year or two ago and he reminded
me of that. So you could see, I lived on the Shore Road and in the old days there was a
big open field for hay across the road, a large field and you could see the Long Island
Sound just by standing on my front porch and you could see Saybrook Point. You can’t
see 500 feet now. Also the same thing on Johnny Cake Hill. You could go half way up
the hill and look over toward Ferry Road or the River and you could almost see the river.
It was all clear, there weren’t any trees at all because the farmers and the people cut these
trees to burn or to build and at one time there was a lot of boat building going on, but not
in my time. So getting back to the farms, there were two farms on Mile Creek Road.
One was owned by Lea Marsh who was a prominent politician in town, he was speaker of
the house and our town representative for many years and a very good man. His wife is
still living on part of the farm. And then there was John Muller’s farm on Mile Creek
road, he had a pretty big herd of cattle. He was also a politician and ended up working
for the State of CT in the husbandry business. And then going down toward the Shore on
Route 156, the Shore road we used to call in this day, there was a man named Phil Peck
who had a farm. It goes on and on. And then further down there was Risley, had a farm.
To give you an idea on how crowded it was with farms around here. You couldn’t go
very far without getting your foot cut. You know what that means, stepping in the
manure. Its an old saying.
Getting your foot cut? Why did they say that?
It’s just an expression. Stepping in manure, cutting your foot, I don’t know how it came
about. Soemtihing else I wanted to say about was the trolley system in Old Lyme. It
only ran for from 1913 to 1919, I believe. And the trolleys used to come out from New
London, through Waterford, East Lyme and into Old Lyme on the Post Road. Always
followed the Post Road and to this day in East Lyme, on the Post Road just west of
Lover’s Lane you can still see remnants of where the trolleys went. There are indented
areas where they leveled the earth off to make it easier for the tolleys. The trolleys used
to go down Lyme Street and proof of it all is 3 or 4 years ago when they were rebuilding
the road on Lyme Street they found a lot of trolley ties, that’s what the tracks went on, of
course, so that’s proof that the trolley did run down through there. Many people, nobody
my age, it was gone before I came along, but people I knew used to ride the trolley. My
father and my brother used to come up from Black Hall to go fishing in Rogers Lake,
they took a trolley up to church corner and rode up the lake and rented a boat to fish for
the day then took the trolley back again. I think they rode a bicycle, they didn’t have a
car in those days. The trolley didn’t last long because the automobile was coming along
and everybody could be a little more independent they didn’t have to depend upon the
trolley. Although it was cheap, for five cents you could ride all over the place. And by
all over the place I mean you could go as far as Boston on the trolley if you made the
proper connections or into New York City and the trolley ran down Lyme Street and
around church corner, down to what is known as 156 now and it went north on 156 to the
car bridge, the first car bridge that was built over the Connecticut River and the tracks
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Event: Telling Tales Out of School #1
Oral History Project Interviews
Location: Old Lyme Town Senior Center
Date: November 15, 2009
Interviewee: Jim Noyes
Interviewer: Sousan Arafeh
used to run right down the middle of the bridge and as they rode across
the bridge and got to the Saybrook side, they took an immediate left and that was Ferry
Road, Saybrook. And at the end of that street was the powerhouse and the buildings are
still in existence to day and you can see it well defined by the huge tower you can see
across the river if you’ve ever been down that way and you rode along and went back
onto the Post Road in Saybrook and you rode the trolley to downtown Saybrook which
wasn’t a big community in those day. Probably 2500 people, incidentally Old Lyme in
those days was only about 1200 or 1300 and the trolleys went behind what is now known
as Beard’s lumber and there was a big high concrete abutment which the trolleys went
over, they crossed over a couple of roads there and went out to Fenwick and also, going
back to the CT River, the trolleys followed old Route 9 up to Essex and to Deep River. I
think they dead ended in Deep River then turned around and came back again. Another
reason the trolleys didn’t succeed, they had a motorman strike and they couldn’t ever
settle the strike. There were several bad accidents where people were killed and this kind
of helped to destroy the trolley. There was one trolley after the system shut down that
stayed on Lyme Street for several weeks after there was nothing going on, it was just
dead. And we had a motorman from Old Lyme, his name was Spicer Huntley. And his
son later became postmaster in Old Lyme and he has a granddaughter who lives here to
this day and her name is Linda Whiteman, I think. And she is on the grange thing that we
do. But she is not a member of the historical Society.
You were telling me about the motorman and the trolley and you had a couple of
weeks. Did you drive it around at all during that time?
No, no, it was just stuck there. He was quite a guy. He later became a salesman for the
CL&P. Here’s something nobody knows, I just found out today, speaking of the power
company, Old Lyme had its own power company at one time back in the 1900’s I
believe. Probably a little later than that. But getting back to Spicer Huntley, he became
the, in those days each town had its own court system. They had an elected judge, he was
not necessarily an attorney, judge of probate, no not judge of probate, that’s something
entirely different, of course. The prosecuting attorney so to speak and then the defense
attorney and the judge which I already said. So they had their own court system in town
and any minor arrest that was made, they heard the case. And it was kind of interesting
sometimes. I don’t remember anybody going to jail for very long, but nevertheless. The
motorman had several jobs on the trolleys. He didn’t just stand there and drive the
trolley, he took tickets, sold tickets or whatever they did, probably like tokens, as a matter
of fact I think I’ve seen tokens of the street railroad, they call it also and you drove the
car from each end. As soon as you got to the end of the line, you just went to the back of
the car and drove it from that end just like you would the other end but the motorman had
to get out and turn the wheel around which was on top.
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