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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