CABOT – Mary Bothfeld Golden recently celebrated her 100th birthday. She came from her home in Maine in August for the annual Bothfeld reunion at the family farm in Cabot.
Golden graduated from Cabot High School in 1942, in a class of 11 students. She now has great grandchildren who enjoy hearing stories about her days growing up in Cabot and how things have changed.
For instance, there were no school buses, so Mary, her brothers and neighborhood children would walk about a mile and a half from Bothfeld Hill down to school in the village and back each day.
“It wasn’t so bad,” she recalled, “we had a shortcut that took us straight to the cemetery.” Sometimes in the winter they could ride down with the milk cans on a sled pulled by a horse from the nearby Paquin farm.
In the classroom she remembered one teacher, Virginia Brown, who seated the students alphabetically. Her brother Dick, was behind her and started pulling on her pigtails. Mary turned and “batted” at him. The teacher saw them and made them stay after school. Mary recalled that she had to write: “I will not swat my brother” multiple times.
“We were worried our parents would find out,” she said. “And they did.”
Some of the students had classrooms at the former Methodist Church while others stayed at the main school on the common.
“Helen Rockwell taught home economics,” she remembered. “We did sewing and cooking and learned home management, things like that.” Cooking was taught one half of the year and sewing was taught the other half. The parents donated food and the students in the home economic classes prepared the hot lunches for everyone.
When dances were introduced Mary said none of the students knew how to dance, so the teachers taught them. Small dances were held throughout the year, but when it came time for the senior prom, the junior class did all the decorating.
“It was formal. That was a big deal for us,” she said. “My mother made my gown.”
When her three brothers (Dick, Walter and Clark) returned home from school, each day, they all had chores to do. “I had enough brothers keeping the farm,” she said. “I did cleaning and some of the cooking.”
Mary’s parents raised 25 acres of potatoes and one of her jobs was to pick off the beetles.
“There weren’t as many back then,” she said. “It was colder.”
A lot of after-school entertainment came through an active youth group at the Cabot United Church. “In the summer there were corn roasts all over the place,” she remembered. “In the winter we went coasting down Bond Hill.”
“I played a lot of basketball. Our top player was Natalie Bartlett,” she recalled. She remembered one very cold game when they played in Groton in a space above a saw mill. The uniforms were tunic tops covering bloomers, supplied by the school. Because there were no school buses the parents transported students to the games.
“After basketball games in Cabot we would always invite the other team to join us for hot cocoa or coffee in the cafeteria,” she said.
“I think I had a good education,” she stated. “And I enjoyed growing up on the farm in Cabot.”
Amanda Legare
