River's -Legault - Whitcomb Farm

Around 1930 Charlie Rivers and his son Alan worked the Rivers farm on North Street. They had a new 42x200 hip roof barn. This was the largest barn in New Haven at that time. It was built by the same men who built Crosby cattle barn: auction sales (currently, Bub's Furniture Barn) in Vergennes in 1932. The sole difference was that the Rivers barn had a slate roof.

River's & Legault Barn 1949 (before hurricane)
Shingles & Siding put on before 1950
North Street paved in 2001

When my family moved here a portable saw mill was still in use North of the barn. I remember Mark Peck telling of cutting off the logs along North street, the rough swamp on the mountain side. The side-hill was a large grove of old growth pine that supplied the logs. The mill was owned by the Roleau family of New Haven. Charlie Rivers dammed up the swamp on the mountain to make a pond to cut ice for cooling the milk in summer. He built a large ice house where the big pines now stand on the West side of the pond. It was all open pasture when I was a kid. The Legaults drained the pond years ago to clean out the tree stumps. The pond is now owned by the Hardings of New York.

Hattie Pettibone owned the farm for ten years. She was a spinster. Hattie who was into the buying and selling of farms around the Vergennes area. Hattie would find an excellent tenant for the farm and let them run it for a few years on halves. When the family acquired some equity Hattie would back them on buying it. She set a lot of people up in farming. This is how the Legault family started on the farm, working for ten years, and buying it in 1949.

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