Remembrances: Harry Amos Healey, Jr

Harry "Sonny" Amos Healey, Jr.

I am not sure exactly how this narrative came about.....I do remember vaguely that Grandma Martin and Aunt Julia were working on getting some of the old family stories captured, and I know my dad transcribed some of them.  Hopefully he and others will comment on the specifics of how these were obtained.  In any case, I have in my files a number of neatly typed accounts from various family members that I will share in installments.  Here is Uncle Sonny’s Remembrances, dated January 1990.

On October 27, 1919, I was born Harry Amos Healey, Jr., in the Griffin Hospital, Derby Connecticut. I am the fifth child and only son of the six children born to Harry and Amelia (Gressot) Healey.  My family ran the Balance Rock Farm, a dairy farm on the Bungay Road in Seymour, Connecticut.  We lived in the old Bassett homestead where my Grandmother, Alice Bassett, was born and raised.  I later built my home in 1959?, across the street from this ancestral homestead, on land that has been in my family for nearly two centuries.

My Dad was fifty years old when I was born, so I learned to farm at an early age to help out.  When I was a child, we farmed with a team of horses which was very time consuming.  I learned to harrow when my feet didn't reach the front supports and had o hold on to the seat and drive the team of horses with one hand to keep from falling off the harrow.  Much time was spent repairing fences; but, in years to come, I had the whole farm equipped with electric fences which only needed one wire.

In the winter, we had to cut ice to cool the milk in the summer.  When we were not doing that, we had to cut down trees with an axe and a two-man crosscut saw for wood used to cook with and heat the house.  The wood had to be split by hand with a sledge hammer and wedges.  Then we cut it up with a one- cylinder-engine buzz saw which was cranked by hand to start. We did all of the milking by hand and did not have any running water in the barns, so in the winter we had to Le the cows out twice a day to drink in the brook.  When the weather was very cold, we had to chop holes in the ice for the cows to drink.  When the snow was real deep, we had o carry water from the wall in pails to the cows.  In the years to come, I dug a ditch six hundred feet by hand through very rough terrain to a well and had running water in the barns which ran by gravity.

Bungay School, Date Unknown.  Photo courtesy of Randy Stone 

I had a normal country boy’s childhood.  I attended Bungay School which was a one room schoolhouse with six grades, one teacher, and about twenty students.  We went to school regardless of the weather, and the roads were never plowed.  On cold days, we were pretty cold by the time we got to school, but the pot bellied stove was nice and wam.  They were enjoyable years.  we were like one large family and all got along.

For recreation, I was a 4-H Club member.  I raised my own chickens and sold the eggs to Mr. Krajnik.  I received a blue ribbon for my chicken hopper and rooster at the county fair.  My chicken hopper was made out of old boards and nails that had to be straightened out before I could use them.  The saw left a lot to be desired too.  We also went swimming, fishing, ice skating, sliding, horseback riding, and climbed trees.  We all had boards in the crotches of the apple tree near the house.  Mother would bring us our dinner, and we ate in the tree in the summertime which we thought was great. They were very lean years, but we always had enough to eat and we were happy.

Harry Amos Healey Selective Service Registration Card from Ancestry.com

When I was nine years old, I learned to milk the cows by hand, and got up every morning at five A.M. to do the milking.  We also milked again at five P.M.  One morning when I was a junior in high school, after I helped out with the milking and had breakfast, I went out to the woodpile and started splitting wood because I didn’t want to go to school.  Mother went down to talk with the superintendent and they decided it would be best if I didn’t continue school.  He said I was a good boy, but I spent most of my time sleeping in the classroom.  When I left school, I worked part-time at a neighboring farm and also did my work at home.

When World War II broke out, I went to wok in the Seymour Manufacturing Company.  I worked three to eleven A.M., and was able to help my father with the farm work.  My mother and my sister, Julia, also did a lot of farm work at that time.  I saved enough money to buy my first John Deere tractor.  Later, I quit the factory job and went full time into farming.  I built up the herd which increased the income, and I was able to buy more modern equipment.  I purchased another tractor, a manure spreader, a hay baler, a corn harvester, milking machine, trucks, and eventually a small bulldozer. By that time I was calling my Dad my helper.

Sonny working with "young stock" 1944

Before I purchased the tractor, I used to plant fields of corn by hand planter and cultivate with a horse.  I’d have to cut all the corn by hand, load it into the wagon, and bring it down to the the barn-yard to be cut up for silage. One day we had a strong wind storm, and the silo blew over.  We replaced the one that blew over and also blew another, larger one.  Before we had the hay baler, we had to pitch all the hay by hand.  The new equipment made farming a lot easier; and, when World War II was in progress, help was hard to get.  My friend, Tom McNerny, had the garbage contract for the town of Seymour.  I would help him for about three hours a day for which he paid me and also, in return helped me on the farm.

Sonny, Julia, Mother, and Dad 1944

We had an old barn on the east side of the farm that was falling down.  I needed a place to store all the new equipment so I cut trees, hauled the logs to the saw mill, and got enough lumber to build a new barn over the old foundation.  With the help of Tom, with the mason work, and John Mitchell, with the carpentry, we built a large barn in 1950.

In 1948, my Mother and Dad deeded over to me the property on the east side of the farm that consisted of fifty-seven acres as compensation for all the work I had done on the farm for little or no money over many years.  In the early fifties, the Seymour Board of Education approached me to sell them twenty acres of land to build a new grammar school.  I didn’t want to sell, but they kept after me, and the price was very good.  Dad told me to do whatever I wanted to do, so i sold it for fifteen- hundred dollars per acre, and I continued to use the property they did not need for the school.  I cut the hay each year on the remaining property.  By this time, the farm was in fine shape.  I had cleared the large stones found the fields with the bulldozer which made the harvesting of hay and con much easier.  A bulk tank was installed for the milk.  We used to sell it in forty quart milk cans.  The herd, of approximately 40, was producing top-quality milk and was healthy.


Recalling earlier times, I was proud of the progress that we had made.  In the 1920s, it was found that people were getting tuberculosis from cow’s milk.  Our herd was tested, and almost all of the cows reacted.  We sold the herd and had to fumigate the bars for a month and have them all white-washed with lime before we could buy a new herd.  Those times were bad.  We had plenty of potatoes and eggs to eat, and we had them in every fashion imaginable. But, with persistence and hard work, things got better.  I received commendations from the state for producing an even amount of milk year around.  I did this by arranging to have the cows freshen (calve) at different times throughout the year.  I also used artificial insemination at this time after Dad had a bad experience with the the bull.  It improved the herd better than was possible with a single sire, and it eliminated the need to put up with an unpredictable and dangerous animal.

High school boys and my nephews helped me with the milking and the haying.  In those days, they were happy to work for a dollar per hour.  I also had two exchange students, one Ron Denmark—with whom we still keep in touch—and one from Germany.  I also had a couple of prisoners on parole who lived in but they were not the best.  My sister, Harriette, came home to live with us for a time, and she was afraid of the cows.  But, by the time she got her own home, she was quite the farmer.  When I injured my back in 1947, Mother, Harriette, and Julia kept the farm running.  They did things they didn’t know they could do.

On February 29th,1957, I married Dorothy Wanciak, daughter of Joseph and Portia (Curyk) Wanciak who had built their home on a lot next to the farmhouse sold to them by my father in 19__.
 We bought a new house on Bungay Terrace.  We didn’t like living with such close neighbors so, about two years later, we decided to build a house, in which we still reside, on Bungay Road across from the farmhouse.  We have a daughter Cherl Lynn, born February 1st, 1959.

In 1965, I sold all my property on the east side of Bungay Road for single-family houses because we could not get any help on the farm, and the factories were paying such high wages that we could not compete with them.  Fertilizer and feed prices were also rising much faster than the price of milk.  Farming is a seven-day-a-week, 365-days-a-year job, and with no experienced help available, it was no longer profitable to farm on a small scale.  We kept seven acres on the perimeter of our home.  In the spring of 1966, we sold the whole herd of cattle.  Mother cried as they were being loaded into the trucks.  She loved all of the animals.

I went to work at the Derby Feed Store, in Derby, Connecticut, driving a truck to deliver feed.  I continued to cut and sell the hay on the rest of the farm until the property was sold.  The most I went to work full-time at Derby Feed.  I worked there for seventeen years and retired at the age of 62.  I still have one tractor and a hay baler that I use to cut hay and sell it to people who have horses.  All of the farms in the area are now out of business and the land is being developed for housing.

In my retirement, Dorothy and I enjoy doing crafts.  I have equipment in my cellar for doing all sorts of woodworking, and we have a special sale for Mother’s Day.  I enjoyed my years of farming, especially working outdoors and the animals, and am content in life.  Dorothy and I walk in the woods every day with our two dogs, and we enjoy it very much.










I can't figure out why there are no pictures of Sonny on a tractor?!?!  Someone must have caught him in the act, if so, please provide the evidence so I can post it here.  Thank you!