The Richmond Place

After I shared a picture on Facebook this week of Penny's piglets my Aunt Mary Jane comment on the pride my grandpa would have to see me raising pigs.  My paternal grandparents were farmers.  My dad is the youngest of eight children raised on a diverse family farm on Chelsea's Bobbinshop Road.  When my dad was growing up life revolved around caring for the milking herd of Jerseys, laying hens, pigs, and the horses.

As a child I remember visiting the main farm were my uncles then milked a couple of hundred Holsteins and the "Richmond Place" in Tunbridge where my grandparents moved when the Bobbinshop farmhouse burned in the late 1960's.  My grandparents "retirement" farm was a magical place.  Grandpa always had lots of ponies and gigantic workhorses.  He leased them out each summer as riding horses.   When I was five Grammie and Grandpa gave my sister and I a pony foal.  She evidently had followed my sister and I around the barnyard whenever we would visit and my grandparents believed all grandchildren needed a horse.  Although my dad sometimes was stuck with caring for my horse it certainly taught me responsibility at an early age.

I have vivid memories of the pigs at the Richmond Place.  There was a barn where sows were keep in farrowing crates when they had babies and the piglets would scurry everywhere.  I remember Grandpa giving a sow grain so we could pass through the pen into the creep area and play with the older piglets out of moms reach.  One day Grandpa caught a runt piglet for us and we brought it into the house.  Grammie shook her head, but when you are one of the youngest grandchildren you can get away with a lot.  I know we wanted to keep that piglet but we were told it was a pig and needed to be in the barn with the other pigs.  I also remember the piglet getting loose in the house and how difficult it was to catch it.  I think Grammie was the one to catch it and then it went back to the barn.

As an adult I have brought a piglet into the house just briefly and only a couple of times.  Once or twice we have found a chilled, weak piglet who managed to get out of the nest the first night and figured it could possibly be save by warming in the house.  

The Facebook picture not only led to my reflection upon my grandparents it also led to a visit by a neighbors four year old daughter to play with the piglets.  I love showing young children around the farm... Who knows maybe one of them will decide to farm someday.