The grass is cut now. It lies in pale rows across the hillside. The late summer sun has turned it the color of old straw, and the sky above River Road is a hard, clean blue.
At the top of the rise stands an old wooden tower. Its shingles have weathered gray. A small windmill crowns the roof. The trees have grown up beside it, watching over the place as they have for years.
Once, this was working farmland. The days began early. There were animals to feed, fences to mend, and fields to tend. A farmer watched the sky and knew that the weather could make or break a season. The windmill had a job to do, perhaps pumping water from a well or from the river for the house or the livestock. Nobody built it for the sake of a photograph.
Down the road, the cows at Cole Farm provided milk for Biddeford families. Before the town was fully awake, the delivery truck made its way past this farm and onto South Street, heading toward town as day was breaking. There was work to be done and milk to be delivered. People depended on those cows, that truck, and the men and boys who got up before daylight to make their rounds. My father was one of those boys. Helping to deliver milk as a 10 year old during the war.
You can almost see the old Divco truck now. The headlights moving along the road in the half-light. The fields still wet with dew. A few lights burning in farmhouse windows. The driver knows the route by heart. He has made it before, and he will make it again tomorrow.
Those mornings are gone. The truck no longer makes its rounds, and the cows at Cole Farm belong to another chapter of Biddeford’s story. The old wooden tower remains on the hillside, keeping watch over a field that has seen many summers.
Biddeford has always changed. The mills rose along the river. The city grew. Farms supplied the families who worked in the factories and lived along the streets. Then the years moved on, and one way of life gave ground to another.
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