Artemus Brooks moved to Princeton in the early 1800’s and purchased property on Thompson Road, formerly owned by the Woodward family. He died in 1888 at the age of 77. William S. Brooks was born there in 1846 at the Thompson Rd. home. In 1859, Artemus bought the Watson farm on Worcester Road. It was there that William married Sarah Fay. They had three children, Frank, Mary, and Wendell.
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The main house was built in 1783 and consisted of a two-story brick
building with eight rooms, four up and four down, each room having a
fireplace. The lower fireplace and the upper one were connected to a
single chimney resulting in four chimneys protruding from the roof of
the house. Later an addition was put on the north end, with three rooms
on the second floor [for sleeping] and a dining room, kitchen and large
walk-in pantry on the first floor.
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This building was located near the east side of Worcester Rd., a two-lane highway across from our house. It was built in the shape of a “T”, the top of which faced the road, and the stem forming the main part of the barn being 100 feet deep. The stem housed stalls for four horses to the left as you entered the barn, then came a milk cooling room, and then two bays for hay that ran from the cellar level to the roof: this held a lot of hay.
With the use of the Goddard farm (Hillside Farm once owned by John Brooks) and it’s many one acre fields, which were adjoining the Brooks farm, it gave us the opportunity to take advantage of the smaller fields to plant different crops besides just hay, i.e., ---for the cattle, millet, oats, field corn, and turnips. Read more!
When it was time to cut the hay, usually in June, my dad would hook up the work team to the horse drawn mower, that had a seven foot cutter bar the blades of which were pushed in and out and cut the hay as the team drew the machine on it’s two wheels around the field. Some of the larger fields could take all day to cut. The hay would then lie there in the sun to dry, at which time it would be raked up into windrows.
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It comes to mind that I haven't talked about the use of the pastures, located behind the barn on Worcester Road. They were both used only during the summer months, the one nearest the barn for the cows to go to after their milking was done at night and then into the barn for the morning feeding and milking. Read more!
I was born on November 22,
1919 in the northeast upstairs bedroom of the Brooks farm house located on
Worcester Road, about ¾ of a mile south of Princeton center in Massachusetts,
just northwest of Worcester. This was a very small town and I would guess that
it probably had a population of about 1000 people, many of whom were dairy
farmers.
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