A little over 100 years ago, Garey Waterman set off from his family’s farm in Norwich for what was likely the greatest adventure of his life.
Waterman went first to Burlington, for training at the University of Vermont, in June 1918, then to New Jersey for more training. Assigned to Battalion B of the U.S. Army’s 80th Field Artillery Regiment, Waterman shipped out for France in late August on the U.S.S. Lenape and landed just as the second Battle of the Somme was ending.
His letters home are mundane, full of the details of everyday life: what he ate, the weather, vehicles he saw that piqued his interest. Later, after the Armistice, which took effect on Nov. 11, 1918, he could say more about what he saw in France, but still, the young farm boy, then 22 years old, longed for home.
“Mothers of the 7th Division sure will be glad to get their letters, for we are ‘Homeward Bound,’ ” Waterman wrote on May 11, 1919, in a letter that begins, “Dear Ma.”
“Every one is singing and whistling the song ‘Homeward Bound.’ … It goes, ‘When General Pershing gives the command you are Homeward bound what a wonderful, wonderful sound.’ ”
Lauren Pidgeon, a Hanover High School senior who lives in Norwich, has written a series of web posts about Waterman after she and two other students, James Eiler and Hank Trimble, transcribed the Norwich soldier’s wartime letters home. Titled “Soldier’s Mail,” the posts are now collected on the Norwich Historical Society’s website.
The experience of writing about someone close to her own age but of a different era was at once fascinating and a bit puzzling, Pidgeon said.
Pidgeon has grown up in England and New England, coming to the Upper Valley when she was 2 while her father was a student at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, then going back to England at age 4, then to Norwich at age 8. Her father now teaches at Tuck. After graduation, she’s heading to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Life was quite different for Waterman, for whom the trip to France might have been the extent of his travels.
“I guess his worldview … was definitely a bit different,” Pidgeon said in a phone interview, adding that when he encountered people who weren’t white or Christian, he made note of it, she said. “I’m not sure if he traveled anymore,” she said.
Waterman experienced the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was at its worst during his military days. It isn’t clear how much he knew of the devastation the so-called Spanish Flu wreaked on America and the world.
“He really didn’t talk about that very much,” Pidgeon said.
In one letter home, he makes note of a friend who’d died of the flu, and appears never to mention it again.
“You’d think it would be a big part of the world for him,” Pidgeon said. It seems likely that the government didn’t tell the troops much about the flu, for fear of worrying them about their families back home, she said.
It wasn’t until well after the Armistice, and after Waterman thought he’d be sent home, that he saw much of the front lines. “Every few min. the whole earth and house shakes,” he wrote in a Feb. 18, 1919, letter home that Pidgeon cites. “They are blowing up mines and duds, that is shells that did not explode. No mans land is not more than 1 mile from here. There are trenches and wire entanglements all along the roads and all over the fields but of course they are not the front line.”
Waterman and Dorothy May Campbell were married in 1922 and they lived near the family farm in Pompanoosuc before moving to Upper Main Street to live with Dorothy’s mother. He died in 1965. He and Dorothy didn’t have any children, but he remained close to his brother’s family. He was one of more than 35 men from Norwich who served, Pidgeon writes.
The “Soldier’s Mail” project started as a way to maintain social connections during the coronavirus pandemic, Sarah Rooker, director of the Norwich Historical society, said Tuesday.
The society has volunteers working on a range of projects, including a series of diaries written from the 1870s to the 1920s by Norwich resident Ella Sargent. A group of women in town is transcribing them at home and meets on Mondays to talk about their findings. There are three boxes of papers from a farm in Norwich that residents have begun digging into.
“They’re only coming in one at a time to work on it,” Rooker said.
The society’s collections are deep, and there’s no shortage of opportunities for residents to connect with it.
“There’s so much,” Rooker said. There are good opportunities for young people to research local subjects and learn to write for a wider audience, as Pidgeon has done.
Pidgeon has always loved history and started volunteering with the society about a year ago. She transcribed part of a diary kept by then-15-year-old Norwich resident Mary Slack last year. She plans to continue to study history at St. Andrews, she said.
It was a bit odd getting to know Garey Waterman through his letters. His experience as a young person in Norwich was so different from hers, and his wartime letters are the only written window into his life. His life seemed more circumscribed and yet he had this great adventure, sailing across the Atlantic and living in France for the better part of a year, all the while longing for home.
“He really was looking forward to coming home,” Pidgeon said. “God’s Country, he called it. I think he seemed to want the simple life.”
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
