The Lepine Girls of Mud City

Embracing Vermont

Evelyn Earl Geer

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781609494315
• eBook ISBN: 9781614235682
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A biography of three sisters who grew up on the Vermont countryside, traveled the world, and returned to their farm to raise acclaimed cows.

The Lepines' story began in Quebec, from where Maurice and Imelda immigrated to Vermont during the Great Depression. The family farmed, lived off the rich Vermont landscape and instilled a love for it in their daughters, Gert, Jeanette and Therese. As adults, "the Girls" taught school, traveled the world and worked for President Johnson but never forgot their roots. All three returned to Mount Sterling Farm, raising their famed Jersey cows and embodying Vermont's agricultural tradition. Their story is one of hope and valor—of a family who loved their home and neighbors and left their land as a lasting gift for the world.

Praise for the Lepine Sisters

"The Lepine sisters... are the doyennes of rural northern Vermont. The sisters, and the Jersey cows they have been milking, feeding and cleaning up after for more than four decades, are what many Vermonters regard as the real Vermont." — New York Times

THE LEPINE WOMEN’S FARM

The Stowe Reporter asked me in an interview, “If there was just one person you could have dinner with, who would it be?” I said, without hesitation, “Jeanette Lepine!”

–Bambi Freeman, a seasoned shepherdess and 1980 “Farmer of the Year” in Sterling Valley

Jeanette was collecting and selling antiques, as well as farming back in Mud City. She created the Mud City Antique Market at her farm in Mud City.

She said, “I had it for about ten years. People traveled from all over to Mud City to attend the market, enjoying looking at old treasures while picnicking on homemade food. I had over forty-five antique dealers at the market at one time. Sundays from Memorial Day until Columbus Day. People were just craving antiques back then, but now I can’t find any. I used to advertise in the Maine Antique Digest, and I bought out the remains of $12,000 worth of antiques in a shop in Jeffersonville.”

Gert said, “We served refreshments that the people loved.”

Jeanette said, “I had a little garage at my farm where the food was served. Marlene, a friend of ours, ran the food booth. She served hot dogs and hamburgers and cocoa. And one of the girl tenants that was renting from me baked some fancy cuisine. Cookies and squares. It was great fun. Some people came for just the food.”

Mama loved Jeanette’s antique markets. She and Jeanette caned antique chairs and had a good time doing it. Therese bought a farm up the road from the family farm when she retired from her job in Burlington and joined Gert, Jeanette and Mama. This family of women were all farmers again at the homestead. Therese would go home to her own farm up the road at night. At her farm, Jeanette let Clyde, the man she bought it from, have a lifetime lease. She also turned her chicken coop there into a miniature cottage and rented that out. In time, Gert and Jeanette bought at auction the general store building at Morristown Corners. She rented out the store, and she and Gert turned the back of the building into an art gallery. They named it the Jacob Walker Art Gallery, after Morristown’s first settler. The gallery was a quaint venue for Vermont artists and was run as a cooperative.

The Mount Sterling Jerseys in the barn, Mount Sterling Farm.

Jeanette’s silhouette as she comes into the barn at Mount Sterling Farm for the afternoon milking.

Gert haying out in the meadow at Mount Sterling Farm on her tractor.

Jeanette said, “It was the first art gallery in the area.” As time went by, a family approached them about transforming the building into the Green Top Market.

Gert said, “We still own the building, hold a mortgage.”

The market is an elegant, upscale place. Carol and Michael Hamilton are the owners. Carol said, “We carry all local meats. We’re almost 100 percent local, and that’s what we’re all about.” It features cheeses from Sage Farm Goat Dairy located on West Hill in Stowe. As the French do, the cheese makers name their cheeses for the region. They make Sterling and Madonna goat cheese, named for the surrounding mountains, and a great chevre.

But let’s go back again, before so many changes took place. It was just the Girls, now all back in Mud City on Mount Sterling Farm, farming together at last. It was finally Mama, Therese, Jeanette and Gert and their freedom. Nobody to tell them what to do or how to do it—just as Jeanette said when the teacher tried to teach them to throw a ball that they could throw better. Well, they farmed better than anyone who ever wanted to advise them; no one could tell them how to live their God-given lives.

As sole owner of the beautiful Mount Sterling Farm, Gert said, “We plowed the fields, planted vegetable gardens, cut our hay and baled it as my breed of cows, Mount Sterling Jerseys, grew in number.” Jeanette was the veterinarian. Gert maintained the tractors and other machinery and loved to cut wood.

Gert said, “Mama was a great gardener. Always was. So, just like it was as we were kids, she was harvesting vegetables with us. We put in sixteen-hour workdays, and by 1991, they were milking sixty-five cows utilizing four hundred tons of their hay a year.”

It was a women’s farm now. There were no males at all, not even a bull. Mama and Therese were in the family’s two-story farmhouse’s country kitchen, setting the table for breakfast one morning in winter. Therese picked up a pitcher of fresh raw milk, pouring a glass, and then fed the wood furnace in the basement. There’s a sizable vent on the kitchen floor where the heat comes up from the basement. Mama meant it when they moved into this farmhouse that she never would be cold again. Even the barn was warm and friendly. Gert was the fire tender. A clock on the wall that never sprung forward and never fell back read 6:30 a.m. “We were always on Daylight Savings Time,” said Gert. “That way we didn’t disrupt the cows’ milking schedule.”

Jeanette bringing in the Jerseys for their afternoon milking at Mount Sterling Farm.

The Mount Sterling Jerseys crossing on the Mud City Loop, headed for the pasture as the school bus waits.

Mama Lepine caning a chair.

Jeanette and Gert haying in a pasture at Mount Sterling Farm. Gert is throwing up a bale to Jeanette.

When he heard a book was being written about them, a local, Lloyd Shackett, born in the Morristown Corner area of town said recently while he was doing some repair work on my Subaru Outback, “I remember years ago when the priest at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Morrisville changed the time of the afternoon Mass to fit their milking schedule.” Now that’s Vermont for you.

Anyway, Mama finally remembered her prayers, took her bread from the oven to cool and scooped fruit preserves she’d put up into a bowl. Performing her tasks, she peacefully prayed the rosary in French. “Je vous salue, Marie, plein de grace. Vous ete beine entre tout les femmes, et Jesus, le fruit de yos entrailles, est beni. Saint Marie, Mere de Dieu, preix pour nour pavres pecheurs maintentant et a l’heure de notre mort. Amsi sort tie.” How often she had turned to pray in times of thanksgiving and in times of great travail ever since the days at Marguerite D’Youville’s convent of the Sisters of Charity.

Gert recalled, “One time, I remember, Mama, of course, was getting older. Well, she knelt right down here on the dining room floor to say her prayers and was silent. ‘I forgot my prayers!’ she said.” Well, the lucky ones among us age long enough to sometimes forget our prayers. Maybe by then God is saying them for us.

There was this eternal chain that developed over the years of women teaching women and helping one another find their road to solace and independence with a true sense of worth. This story is proof of historically strong women who gave the feminine a sacred voice.

In the evening on Sunday nights, the Girls turned again to the radio, as they had back in the old days. But now they listened to the tales of Garrison Keillor. And now they had a television set. The five o’clock evening news on WCAX’s channel 3, Vermont’s number-one station, became a ritual for the Lepines and in many homes throughout Vermont. Sharon Myers is our weather girl. Blond and cheerful, Sharon has guided us through blustery blizzards, floods, droughts, birdwatching and the thinning of our perennials. She’s always there and always has a smile for the viewer.

Oil paintings by artists, both famous and still green, hung on the walls. The rugs on the floor were Mama’s creations. The family beagle lay curled up near the heating vent, with Therese’s cat curled up next to him.

Jeanette and Gert building a log cabin in Sterling Valley.

Inside the immaculately kept Mount Sterling barn.

A little before seven o’clock in the morning, Mama laced up her leather work boots. Dressed in blue jeans with a rope for a belt, she bundled up in her hat, coat and leather gloves. She walked down the hill through the falling snow, as she had done for many winters at Mount Sterling Farm in Mud City. What were her memories like? Did she reminisce about the old days with Maurice? Of the blessed days when the children were young in Sterling Valley with all their sense of adventure and good times and learning how to survive and thrive?

She still wore her beautiful French twist. It was snow white now. She looked up at the summit of Sterling Mountain, which sheltered the farm like a mother’s embrace, and then Imelda opened a big wooden door to the barn and softly smiled at daughters Gert and Jeanette. A painting of Paris hung cockeyed on the wall, as it had for many years. The Girls had been milking their Jerseys since five o’clock. Imelda got her water ready, content to be working in the barn with her daughters. The beautifully kept barn to these farm girls was like a sleek schooner to sailors at sea.

Although the wind was whipping outdoors, as snow drifted and swirled, sweet-tempered Jerseys contentedly listened to Ella Fitzgerald’s voice in song, a morning feature on WDEV, the Waterbury radio station. Ella sang “Love and Kisses” and “You Have to Swing.” Dawn was breaking.

Jeanette said, “The disc jockey stopped by late one night. He asked me if there was any special music Gert and I liked to milk to. I told him, ‘Give us lots of Ella Fitzgerald. The cows love her.’” The Girls milked twice a day, working on opposite sides of the barn, milking from one end of the barn to the other. Dressed in their favorite clothes—blue jeans, work boots and hats, warm woolens in winter and cotton shirts in summer—they milked 365 days a year, no exceptions. Their chores alone took nine hours a day. Gert hadn’t missed a day of work since 1952, when she put away the teacher’s manual and sat down on a milk stool as a daily ritual.

Gert said, “Jeanette and I milk. We handle two units apiece. And Therese, she’s the third man. She’s supposed to pick up after us, keep the cows scraped down and all that, and she checks the cows, if they need checking. When it comes to cleaning, Therese’s work is the platforms. She does this in the morning. Then she cleans the calves and does odd chores.”

Jeanette said, “There are easier ways and faster ways than to milk four cows at a time, into separate buckets. But it’s the only way you can tell how much milk each cow is giving. We know each individual udder. That’s why we each milk one side.” She expressed the idea that women are better milkers—gentler than men. “We’re not so apt to whack a cow if she kicks.” Worldwide (like in Russia and England) it is women who do the milking.

Charlie L’Esperance, a fertilizer salesman, stopped by the farm one day. He pulled his truck up to the barn and got out, sizing things up. He said, “I kept looking for the man of the house. You know, the guy that was in charge.” Then Gert came out of the barn and asked him what he wanted.

“I’d like to meet the man of the house, you know, the boss.”

Gert said, “You’re lookin’ at the boss. There is no man of the house. This farm’s run entirely by women.”

When the Girls began farming full time, Gert in 1952 and Jeanette in 1961, the majority of women ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Quebec Years
• The Lepines Bid Farewell to Canada
• When a Miracle Occurs
• Early Days on the Farm in Sterling Valley
• More Sterling Valley Tales
• The Lepine Kids Grow Up in an Ever-Changing World
• The War Years
• Changing Times
• The Lepine Women’s Farm
• Heaven-Bound Mama Lepine
• The Lepine Girls Auction Off Their Prize-Winning Jerseys
• Kayaking Days for Gert and Jeanette
• Jeanette: A Key Player in the Morrisville Community Garden
• Seasons of Big Change and Vermont Land Conservation
• Conclusion
• Aftermath
• Recipes from Mama Lepine’s Vermont Farmhouse Kitchen
• Some Interesting Facts About Vermont That Make It Unique
• About the Author