High View Church Farm School

When I was a child I lived for a time in a religious community known as the High View Church Farm School (otherwise know as "the Farm" or HVCFS) in East Lempster, New Hampshire.  (All six of my siblings stayed or lived at the Farm at one time or another and we all spent different amounts of time there.)  I lived there for approximately four years with very limited interaction with family members.

I'm not exactly sure why we all ended up at the Farm.  I think one of my cousins talked my Dad into it because we could all live together as a "family" and  it was supposed to "be good for us". Anyway, I do know that my family moved around a lot when I was little and that is where we ended up for a time.

In a span of approximately ten years, my family moved from Maine to Kentucky, then back to Maine (where my sister "C" and I were born); then we moved to Virginia (where we lived in three different homes in three years) and then to "the Farm" in New Hampshire.  My parents moved away from the Farm after a year or so to a house in Hudson, NH and then they moved back Maine, leaving five of us kids at the Farm (My oldest sister refused to stay there and after only two weeks went to Maine to live with my grandparents).  Finally, after four long years in NH we all finally moved back to Maine again.  I was the last to leave the Farm.

The first year at the Farm, I lived with my parents and went to kindergarten.  I moved to the "Big" school on my fifth birthday and spent the next three years there.  The school was very isolated from the outside world (on a mountain top with no radios, TV, newspapers, etc.).  I did get to go "home" on rare occasions for short periods of time, but never more than a week or so.   I finally left HVCFS two days before my eighth birthday (August-1971) to live with my, then estranged, family in Maine and had to learn how cope in the "real" world.  The following blogs include my memories of those years.

Note: because I was so very young, some of my memories from those years are pretty vague, however others seem crystal clear.  I will try to differentiate between the two.