Being Yankee — I’ve considered for years what it means and I have grown to appreciate it is best explained in stories. I invited my dad to share with us the story of my family’s rhubarb and how it came to be his. It’s a tale of generations, of perseverance, and of really great rhubarb. It is also quite Yankee. So too was the process of us working to bring it to you. Enjoy.
Aunt Rebecca’s Rhubarb
by Dick Chase
By the summer of 1953, my grandfather Charlie’s rhubarb planting had all but disappeared; overtaken and crowded out by quackgrass. Quackgrass is an invasive rhyzomniferous grass that kills crop plants.
My Great Aunt Rebecca came to the rescue. Charlie prepared a new planting site on the south side of his cow yard, incorporating plenty of well composted manure. Rebecca provided the rhubarb divisions from her farm next door. This planting thrived and Charlie sold his rhubarb to small neighborhood grocers all over Newburyport — we’re talking pre-supermarkets here.
In the late 1950s, my grandfather, well into his 80s, retired from farming. Without care, the rhubarb planting slowly disappeared. My grandfather passed away in 1963 and my Great Aunt Rebecca followed in 1966.
In 1974 Rebecca’s barn was destroyed by a windstorm. It was a beautiful old barn, with white ash framing, dating from the late 1600s. She had milked goats in that barn for most of her life and her brothers Will and Sam kept their teams of horses there. They were teamsters and contract delivered dories to Gloucester for Lowell’s Boat Shop across the river on Amesbury’s Point Shore. I’m getting a bit off topic.
When we started cleaning up the old barn, I discovered one of my great aunt’s rhubarb plants thriving in an old pile of composted goat manure. I dug up the whole crown, divided it and planted the divisions at our farm on the High Road in Newbury. For several years I kept dividing the plants until I had about 2,000 beautiful plants with high yields every spring.
Things went just fine in the rhubarb business until...in 1985 new neighbors that had recently built expensive homes beside the Newbury farm filed suit to prevent the enlargement of our farm market. As we preferred the location of our older family farm up here on the Old Ferry Road anyway, we made the business decision to sell the Newbury farm.
Before we turned the place over to the new owners, I dug up a hundred or so plants and moved them back to Arrowhead where I planted them in 1986. At that time, we had no on-farm retail sales, and the neglected planting started to go downhill.
Every spring through the 1990s I planned to dig and replant some new rows, but it was low on my priority list and with so much spring work to be done, I never did get to the job. The field the rhubarb was in I eventually seeded as a hayfield.
Forward to Spring 2005 — the family has decided to open Arrowhead to the public for retail sales and I wondered if any of the farm’s original strain of rhubarb was left (not likely, I felt). I visited the hayfield in late April and checked the row of plants I had moved back from Newbury almost 20 years earlier. It didn’t look promising and sadness crept into my heart. But, almost to the end of the row I spied one plant with a few miniature plantlets struggling in the grass. Our head greenhouse grower, John Wieck, carefully separated the plants and potted them into 4″ pots in the propagation greenhouse. After a couple of divisions during that summer we had 105 small plants for field planting in the fall.
The current result is a beautiful planting of Aunt Rebecca’s Rhubarb, now growing in a field that was once part of her farm. This particular strain of rhubarb was first planted at Arrowhead by my family around 1765, and the plants we have now are directly descended clones of those first plants. Rhubarb makes a delicious Spring sauce or pie, sweet and tart at once. As has been the case for two centuries and a half, Aunt Rebecca’s Rhubarb remains the first harvest of the year from the fields here at Arrowhead.