TEN MILE RAMBLINGS
BY DON DOUCETTE
As a child in Attleboro’s Twin Villages I was surrounded by family and community with a Franco-American heritage. My first memories centered there when my family lived in “the big block’ next to Phil Dugas’s community grocery store.
Skittish, with the main rail line located nearby, I ran and hid upon hearing the large steam engines approaching. During those days, the trains were many, both freight and passenger. I learned my basic math, a little later on, at Joseph Finberg School.
We kids enjoyed counting box cars on long freight trains as clouds of acrid coal smoke lingered in the air after the train engines passed. We were taught caution to avoid airborne cinders lodging in our eyes.
The Twin Villages consisted of Dodgeville and Hebronville both associated with the New England textile manufacturing movement. My paternal grandfather Doucette was a foreman in the Dodgeville Mill and as for the Hebron Mill, the original Fruit of the Loom logo is connected to that site.
Both mills were originally driven by water power obtained from the Ten Mile River.
I have thought for years that metaphorically, the Ten Mile River Watershed consisted part of my anatomy obtained through the consumption of the many varied and prized vegetables raised in our Dad’s one-acre watershed vegetable garden.
The garden was located on our maternal Pelletier grandparent’s old Thurber Farm situated along the Twin Village line off Thurber Avenue.
Dad maintained our garden with large work horses and an onion hoe; he usually employed inexpensive older Belgians close to retirement. Dad also plowed other gardens around Attleboro for income and was possibly the last person to plow gardens in Attleboro with horses. We tagged along on many of those unforgettable and nostalgic open-air wagon rides.
Both French and English was spoken in our home and including larger family gatherings on the Thurber Farm lawn.
Late at night, I still tune to Quebec radio stations to hear the sound of French being spoken. In public school, we were discouraged from speaking French and I lament the loss of that valuable cultural exposure.
We still maintained a family ice box, no refrigerator. There existed no in-house television. Rather, we listened to radio with the likes of Buster Brown and the Lone Ranger adventures. Froggy the Gremlin was our favorite audible cartoon character. Boston Red Sox games were usually played and radio broadcast during daytime afternoons.
An ice-cold bottle of Coke from the vending machine at the Dodgeville fire barn was ten cents.
It’s during those early days that I first began to connect the geographic dots consisting the larger Ten Mile River Watershed the result of exposure to our family farm’s brooks, wetlands, wildflowers, butterflies and darting water spiders including their many magnified and mystifying brook-bottom shadows.
Thus, my numerous watershed interests today including my off-the-cuff, as here, watershed ramblings.
Don Doucette
Friends of the Ten Mile