For the better part of two decades, Bob and Marilyn Stone grew and sold strawberries in the spring, corn and blueberries in the summer, pumpkins in the fall and flowers throughout the year at their Cedar Circle Farm on the Connecticut River in East Thetford.
And long after they sold the business and the land in 2000, then moved to upstate New York in 2009, their daughters and their Upper Valley customers, employees, neighbors and peers cherished the way the couple also cultivated relationships and gave out memories.
Make that the ways the Stones sowed and reaped and shared, until Marilyn died late in 2019 and Bob breathed his last this past February.
“When my daughter was a baby, she had her own crib in the greenhouse,” Thetford Center resident and former farm employee Wendy Cole said earlier this month. “We like to joke that Bob Stone taught her her first word — ‘Oreo’ — because he was always giving one to her whenever he came through.”
Never mind that Marilyn was selling homemade sweets galore right next door.
“Some friends of mine started a Facebook page for comments about my dad,” Carrie Stone Coreas recalled from her home in California, “and one of them wrote how she started out picking strawberries in the field, only she wasn’t quite fast enough.
“In the nicest possible way, he said, ‘Maybe Marilyn has a job for you in the bake shop.’ ”
The bake shop evolved into an integral part of the operation from the early days, during which Marilyn and her own mother cooked up treats in the Stone family kitchen and sold them from a folding table in front of the house along with Bob’s produce.
“Eventually they bought one of those little sheds, and it sat on the front lawn,” Briggs said recently. “It was pretty much self-serve. We weren’t there all the time.”
Bob, who had grown up on his father’s dairy farm in Meriden in the 1940s and 1950s, threw himself into the operation full time in the late 1980s, after leaving his day job with Agway’s farm-credit subsidiary.
By then, Marilyn had built up the retail operation, and soon the Stones became part of the network of small farms that was growing around the Upper Valley.
“They made a hell of a team,” said Steve Taylor, Meriden resident and former New Hampshire commissioner of agriculture. “They complemented each other so well. Marilyn was a genius at building up the farmstand dimension and the greenhouse operation, and Bob was a field-crops guy.
“He knew how to do it and to make it happen.”
Bob had learned his first lessons in farming from his father Rolland, who “milked 45, 50 cows” on their spread in Meriden, Taylor recalled. “Rolland was kind of a conservationist and steward of the land, ahead of his time in those things. Bob picked that up and put a lot of it into practice.”
Taylor, whose family was living near Plainfield village at the time, got to know Bob through the 4-H youth agriculture program. In their teens, they kept in touch in the trenches during the annual football contest between Lebanon and Hanover High Schools, with Bob playing all-state-level defensive end for the Raiders and Taylor playing tackle for the Marauders.
“He was big,” Taylor recalled. “Broad across the shoulders. You knew he was going to smack you and knock you down on your ass.
“We’d be laughing at each other after every play: ‘Made you look good!’ ”
After representing Lebanon in the Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl all-star tilt between the top senior gridders of New Hampshire and Vermont, Bob Stone did a post-graduate year at Kimball Union Academy in his hometown of Meriden, then went to the University of Vermont to study agriculture and star for the football team. After graduation, Bob moved to the Northeast Kingdom to teach and coach at Lyndon Institute. There he met a student teacher named Marilyn Linsley, who was majoring in home economics at UVM.
Marilyn had grown up in North Branford, Conn., across the street from her grandparents’ farm, and “was very involved in 4-H,” Briggs said.
Early in the ensuing marriage, while still teaching, the Stones bought a farm in the nearby town of Kirby, Vt., where “Bob raised replacement heifers,” Taylor said. “I bought 10 from him at one time.”
By the late 1970s, Bob was ready to return to his native Upper Valley. And not long after the Stones bought and started working the Cedar Circle property, they adopted an infant girl and named her Carrie.
“When I was little, I’d go down in the morning and hang out in the strawberry patch,” Coreas remembered. “I started seriously working around the age of 11, at the point where I was an asset, not just in the way.
“I especially loved being in the farmstand. Once I was (a student at Thetford Academy), a lot of my friends came to work there. Every year, there would be, like, 30 kids. Probably hundreds over the years.”
Meanwhile, Jennifer, 11 years, her senior, “kind of eased into the operation as it grew, helped out in various ways,” Briggs said. “Once it became a full-time job for my parents, I became the baker. That was my summer job sophomore year (at Thetford Academy) all the way through college. I loved it. It felt like a natural part of what we did.
“And I was kind of my own boss.”
The bosses, meanwhile, developed a knack for finding the right roles for the workers whom they took under their wings, and “making us fit into the chemistry of the whole operation,” Wendy Cole said.
“The companionship, the whole atmosphere on the farm, was so welcoming,” Cole added. “The age range that Marilyn and Bob pulled in … was pretty impressive.
“Most people who worked one season came back.”
After tackling a variety of jobs at Cedar Circle in the summer and fall of 1998, 20-something Lebanon High graduate Jeremiah Brophy returned for two more growing seasons, including the Stones’ last, in 2000.
“Working on the farm really gave me a nice grounding — no pun intended — with the earth, with the circle of life, as it were,” said Brophy, now a South Royalton resident who co-owns a music production company. “Seeing how the plants are adapting to the seasons, and our part in it. You plant a strawberry, and you cultivate that strawberry for three years before you see fruit.
“I rarely went to farmstands before that, since the prices were higher than most grocery stores. After working there, I realized the amount it works to generate that product.”
As much as they lived and breathed that ethic — “Every memory I have is of the farm, and the people who worked there were an extension of my family,” Carrie Coreas said — neither of the Stones’ daughters seriously considered following in their parents’ footsteps.
“My husband and I would have loved the business portion of the operation, but the farming portion … it wasn’t us,” Jennifer Briggs said. “I’m sure my parents would have loved it if we’d wanted to, but they understood.
“There was no pressure.”
The Stones had taken some of the pressure off in 1990, arranging a conservation easement through the Upper Valley Land Trust and the Vermont Land Trust to require subsequent owners use the property for agriculture.
The couple to whom the Stones sold the farm in 2000 turned it into an organic operation, and the current owners now operate Cedar Circle as a nonprofit education center as well as a farm.
“I haven’t been back for quite a while,” Coreas said. “A friend of mine told me she walked through not long ago and said that ‘it was very emotional.
“ ‘There’s so many memories.’ ”
After selling Cedar Circle and moving to North Thetford, Bob and Marilyn kept a few beef cattle for several years. And after moving closer to Jennifer near Rochester, N.Y., in 2009, “they built a small greenhouse off the little barn they had,” Briggs said. “They still had land they could take care of. It was what they loved. It was their joy.”
Which made things all the harder when health problems compelled Bob and Marilyn to sell the property and move into a nearby assisted living community.
“It was more upsetting for my dad not to have anything to do than my mom,” Coreas said. “She always found things to do, like quilting and cooking.”
And after Marilyn died in December of 2019, Bob endured a parade of injuries and heart-related operations, going back and forth between rehabilitation facilities and different apartments.
“He seemed sort of lost,” Coreas said. “The day before he died, he was very out of it. He was saying, ‘I’ve got to go out to the field.
“ ‘I’ve got to go out to the field.’ ”
The Thetford Congregational Church on Thetford Hill will host a celebration of Bob Stone’s life on July 8. The family welcomes memorial donations in his name to Thetford Academy, which Stone served as a trustee for a number of years. The starting time of the service will be announced in the spring.
CORRECTION: Robert and Marilyn Stone ran Cedar Circle Farm in East Thetford for many years. Their surname was incorrect in some instances in a previous version of this story.