It’s easy to forget that Vermont, and probably New Hampshire too, once moved at a much slower pace. For some residents, not much moved at all other than time and the seasons.
Even in the 1970s and ’80s, people who grew up in the hills on subsistence farms lived much as their parents and grandparents and more distant forbears had. They worked on their farms and were seldom seen, even at the village store.
“Stockings ain’t good for anything nowadays anyway,” Ethel Clough, who lived on her family’s Chelsea farm with her brother Ubert, said into a tape recorder in the early-1970s. “I thought I’d get me some pants, but I ain’t been anywhere to get any. I didn’t know but they’d keep my legs warmer. Everybody’s busy. No time to go anywhere now anyway.”
Ethel and Ubert Clough are among the subjects of In the Light Cellar, a book of photographs and interviews collected by Suzanne Opton when she spent a couple of years in Chelsea as a footloose young artist in the early 1970s.
Opton, who bought a house in Corinth several years ago, returned to the photographs during the pandemic. She’d tried to turn them into a book years before, but it didn’t work out.
“It was a perfect pandemic project,” Opton said in a phone interview.
Photography’s true home is at intersections, where someone on the move encounters people who are absorbed in their lives and records slices of time from those lives. This is true of photography from the beginning, from Matthew Brady’s photographs of Civil War battlefields to the work of contemporary photographers like Opton.
Opton’s parents had fled the Holocaust, and she left her family home, in Portland, Oregon, as soon as she was able. She came to Vermont because of “a guy,” she said.
She had done some reporting and photography at a newspaper in California, but was a novice photographer. In Chelsea, she hung around the village and met people and made photographs.
“That was really where I learned was with those pictures,” Opton said.
Eventually, photographing in the village led her out onto the back roads. She spent a day with Dr. Brewster Martin, making house calls, and met Walter and Frank Hayes when the physician called on their blind mother, Lena. Their siblings had left home, but Walter worked at a furniture factory and Frank stayed home to care for their mother. The brothers also looked after their nephew, Gregory.
She found other subjects just by wandering. “I would just drive around and get lost and meet somebody,” she said.
Although she photographed a lot of people in Chelsea, she spent most of her time with eight households. Some of them, like Helen and Kenneth O’Donnell and Gerald and Edith Mason, were married couples, but the family units were various, including sisters Frances and Eleanor Boyd; Gayleen and Verna Aiken, daughter and mother; Raymond and Benny Moulton, father and son; and Leone Thorne, who lived with her brother Earle and then alone after moving off the family farm.
It was Thorne who gave the book its enigmatic title. Opton recorded many of the people she photographed and the book includes some transcriptions.
“I remember we kept the bees down in the dark cellar on the bee shelf,” Thorne said. “And it was right across, just a short distance from the place where we kept the preserves. And in the spring, the bees, some of them would wake up and come out of the hives. So when you went down past them for a jar of preserves or to go into the light cellar for apples, you could hear them buzzing. They had to be there in the wintertime to keep from freezing. Father and my brother would carry the hives down into the cellar and bring them out again in the spring.”
The Boyds were an artistic family, and Gayleen Aiken, who was the niece of the Boyd sisters and of Raymond Moulton, painted and made cartoons and dolls. She eventually became a well-known outsider artist. Opton kept up a correspondence with Aiken, who died in 2005, and quotes from it in the book.
What they all had in common was a kind of isolation that has become either rarer or less visible. And they were all poor, though they didn’t let their poverty define them.
“It was interesting, because looking back at these pictures, I was more aware of how poor these people were,” Opton said.
When she was photographing them, her subjects were welcoming, generous, curious and flattered by Opton’s attention.
“These Vermonters were the ones who, among other things, never left home,” Opton writes in an introduction. “I think I was particularly drawn to them because they were so disarmingly nonjudgmental and at the same time so definitely rooted in place.”
Opton spent nearly two years, surrounding one winter, in Chelsea. She showed some of her photographs in town and some said that too many of the photos were of “town outcasts,” she wrote in her introduction.
Twenty years later, a Chelsea resident named Spike McCullough put that criticism straight. “Those people weren’t outcasts. They just lived to live.”
“And that, it seems to me, is what set these people apart,” Opton writes. “They weren’t interested in progress.”
Opton’s book doesn’t seem interested in progress, either, thank goodness. She presents the photographs and the people in them without comment, not coldly, but without judgment. The book is a moment of connection, nothing more or less.
Vershire novelist Makenna Goodman, who is married to Opton’s son’s best friend, helped Opton design and edit the book.
Opton had it printed herself, rather than deal with a publisher who might have their own ideas about how to present her work.
Opton went on to a long career as a photographer, and came back to the Upper Valley to photograph war veterans several years ago.
She is now around the age her Chelsea subjects were at the time, and she and her friends have been re-enacting some of the photos she took back then.
An exhibition of the Chelsea photos is planned for spring, organized by the Vermont Folklife Center, in Middlebury, which has digitized Opton’s recorded interviews.
With any luck, viewers will be able not only to see new prints of Opton’s work, but to hear the voices of her subjects.
For now, the book ($50) is available at Will’s Store in Chelsea and through Opton’s website, suzanneopton.com.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
