Aging Jersey farmer now tends to his memories of the land

The tree, like the man who planted it, is still here. The 200-year-old house is gone, the old southern Somerset County farm has been turned into some 200 new houses. But the sugar maple tree Charlie Grayson planted on Arbor Day when he was 8 is right where he put it. A little stooped and creaky, like Charlie Grayson himself, but still here. Charlie Grayson's tree has weathered nearly nine decades of change in the landscape. Once the smallest tree in a clump of mature shade trees in front of a Colonial- era farmhouse (circa 1700s), it's now the old-timer in a neighborhood of landscapers' saplings and deer-proof shrubbery ringed by black mulch beds in front of Colonial-style houses (circa 1990s).

The boy who planted it is now an 87-year-old retired farmer, who participated in some of those changes and witnessed the unprecedented acceleration of technology in the 20th century. All through the formerly rural areas of New Jersey, there are new houses on old farms where the people inside enjoy the good-schools, safe-streets and big-backyard suburban life. We all know this.

What we forget is there are still people who remember when none of it was here. In the 1910s and'20s, much of rural America, yes, even in New Jersey, was decades behind the cities and inner- ring suburbs in creature comforts. Charlie Grayson was born into a world of horse-drawn wagons rum bling over dirt roads, wood stoves to heat the house and brick ovens to bake bread. It was a world of outhouses and water pumped by hand or windmill.

"Half the house was built in the 1700s, then it was added to over the years," he said. But the world Charlie Grayson entered in 1919 was more like the 18th century than the 20th.

His little New Jersey village was as culturally distant from New York or Philadelphia as North Platte, Neb. “The nearest big town was Somerville,” Grayson said. An all- day trip there started with a wagon ride over dirt roads to the train stop to Bound Brook, then a trolley to Somerville.

“It was $1.49 for the train,” Grayson said. “When you get old, you remember details from 50 years ago, but you can’t remember what you did yesterday.” At 87, there are a lot of yesterdays for Grayson to remember. He lives in a retirement village in Skillman, just a few miles from the old family farm, now called Grayson Estates, traversed by Grayson Road.

“When you drive around the township now, it never looks the same,” he said. “Most of the old farms, most of the old farmers, are all gone now.” Alll history. Live long enough, you witness history. Live longer than most everybody else, and you begin to realize it will die with you. So about 13 years ago, Grayson decided to put it down on paper.

“I started with an IBM electric typewriter, but eventually I got a computer.” With his wife, Lisa, encouraging him, Grayson sorted through a lifetime of memories and published “Gleanings from the Past: Memories of an Old Farmer” this spring. “I had all these stories,” Grayson said. “(Lisa) begged me to get it on record.” “If he didn’t, it would all be lost,” Lisa said. “He’s one of the last who can remember.”

The book is about rural life in the dozen or so villages that incor porated to form Montgomery Township — Belle Mead, Blawen burg, Dutchtown, Harlingen, Skillman and Zion. As late as 1950, there were only 2,350 people in all of those villages. Ten times as many live there now, as farmlands shrank to pockets, and suburban developments grew. But if you look hard enough, you can see still see the past in circa 1750s houses and village churches, in the cemeteries and in the old grange halls. Or if you happen to run into the last of the old- timers, like Charlie Grayson, the entrenched natives who built their communities.

Because in addition to farming, Grayson worked for 19 years as the Montgomery tax assessor and spent 18 years on the school board. He was a charter member of the fire department and served on the zoning board. In other words, he helped usher in the new Montgomery. For him, it began in 1967, when “I sold all the cows,” he said, and part of the acreage. He saw the suburbia coming, right up and down Route 206. Less than 20 years later, the whole farm was gone and the house came down. “They knocked it down with a backhoe,” Charlie said. “There was talk of restoring it and preserving it, but in the end, it was too expensive. The whole thing came down in five minutes.”

Lisa remembers the day — July 21, 1986 — and marks it on her calendar every year. “It was very sad,” she said. “We sat on a bench watching, and we were all crying.” But they didn’t touch the tree, and the memories stayed alive in Charlie Grayson’s head, and even tually came through his hands in a book about a lost landscape and a nearly forgotten lifestyle.

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