Image courtesy Horthfield Historical Society The following is from "While I Remember," dictated by William D. Hassett to Julia McIntire, in The Crier, Vol. 2 no. 3, Julia McIntire, editor.

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"My mother was highly skilled in the household arts. She was born in Williston in 1836 and passed her childhood and teen years in the decade, 1840 to 1850, which was to witness the transition of the Vermont kitchen from the fireplace and Dutch oven to the cookstove. The Dutch oven was the long, all brick compartment close to the fireplace where the family cooking was done. The live coals were put into the Dutch oven, and then raked out with a long handled gadget. When raked out and while the oven was still hot, bread and cakes and pies were thrust into it, according to the degree of heat each required. A pretty laborious process but no one knew the difference; all were in the same boat.

"Those were the days when the busy housewife didn't have time enough in a day for her many tasks. Mother knew how to make yeast, to care for catnip and other household herbs before the 'dog days' set in. She also knew how to make soap, to cure meat and to preserve all of the kindly fruits of the earth. In short, to exemplify all of the arts known to the good women described in the last chapter of the ancient book of Proverbs, learned in her Spartan childhood in Chittenden County. She used to tell us how every Sunday night her father would bring in a handful of tail feathers from the barnyard and fashion a quill pen for each of the children to take to school."

• Mr. Hassett relates a story that tells more about his mother. He recalls his family's relationship with the Elkanah Smith family who owned the home across the crescent, and across the bog, now owned by the Green Mountain Clinic. The bog was filled in by the town in 1935 to make the green. The Elkanah Smiths were the Hassett's family's closest friends.

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"They were probably twenty years older that my mother and they loved her as their own child and all of us children loved them. They were the aristocrats of the neighborhood, not by reason of material possessions for they had little, but for their innate gentility, dignity and reserve and what Henry Taylor called the wise endearment of prudent and temperate speech. To strangers they presented a rather formidable front; to us, to friends they were as open as noonday. After an association of forty or fifty years, even to the end, Mother and Mrs. Smith called each other 'Mrs.' Now and again Mrs. Smith would don her 'Sunday go-to-meeting' clothes and call at our house. On such occasions Mother always set out her best fruitcake (we had two kinds of fruitcake at our house) with a glass of wine. After this Mrs. Smith, who was a gourmet, would say to me, 'I think it is a very pretty custom.'"

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According to Julia's notes, Will's father, David Hassett, was roadmaster of the Mexican National Railroad, headquartered in Laredo, Texas. He was not home often during those years, was once absent for eight years. Upbringing of the eight children was left almost entirely up to Mary Hassett and her daughters. David Hassett returned permanently to Northfield in 1903 and died in 1912. Mary Hassett died in 1914. William was 34 years old at the time of her death.