John Jack Ronan has many memories of Newburyport, but we’re just going to talk about the ones related to cows, horses and hay rakes.
The Ronan family farm was located on Hillside Street and Cottage Court, in what is now called the Back Bay. Young Jack spent a lot of time on the farm and one of his duties was taking the cows to pasture. This was not as easy as it sounds; the cows had to cross Route 1 and were herded down to what is now Graf Road to get to the common pasture in what was called “the outback”. Jack says he all but lived in the barn on the farm where cows and goats had brass bells that clanged out a warning that the bovines were on the move. Every Ronan cow had a bell (and a brand) “what a noise!”
“You needed two people,” he says, “One to stop traffic and the other to herd the cows.” His aunt frequently filled the role of traffic warden. Route 1 had been built in 1934, bisecting Newburyport but not busy enough in the early 1940s to make Jack’s task impossible.
What really caused problems though, was the Boston & Maine railroad bridge over Low Street, called the” Guinea Bridge” because of the descendants of African slaves and servants who lived out back.
The bridge had a clearance of 11 feet. Unfortunately, his family’s hay rake was 11 feet, 3 inches high. As if it wasn’t bad enough to get the horse to go under the bridge in the first place, getting stuck was a virtual nightmare.
“We got hung up in the middle of the bridge” he remembers, “No traffic could go anywhere and the horse got freaked out”. They did manage to get the horse disentangled from the hay rake and traffic flow resumed. “Oh, God, those days!” Jack said.
Haying days on the salt marsh seemed to be always 100 degrees and the kids participating in haying would always say, ”Good day for hayin’, right?” Hay was brought back to the farm loose. ”All summer long we would fill up the barn for storage,” he said.
The barn is still there, on the land that his uncle sold to Bruce Hiller in the late 1950s. Today the property is the potential target of a green development by businessman David Hall. Jack Ronan serves on the Council on Aging Senior Center Building Committee.
Townie Tuesday is contributed to weekly by Gillian Swart of Newburyportbiz.com. She can be reached for comment at gillianswart@gmail.com
