A Little WWII Story -- Local Farmers Insure Food Supply

The above photo is of Willey's General Store, once the Cooperative Lockers, now Cambridge Village Market (The photo by Stub Wells, was contributed to the Vermont Electric Co-op Life where the following history was taken from)

I always read with great interest, any history on the Vermont Electric Cooperative. As a young man growing up in a rural area, they played a very big role in a changing life style for me. The present Vermont Food Ventures Building here in Fairfax Village, at least during the time that Steve Alderman ran the store also had frozen food lockers in it, but I do not believe it was part of any Co-op. During WWII, there was rationing, but like it says in the following story, our local farmers made sure there was an adequate supply of food. You will note in the story that there were members from Fairfax who belonged to the Community Cooperative Lockers in Cambridge.

Nancy Crowe, Editor, Co-op Life wrote the following Vermont Electric Coop History story

WWII Strengthens the Co-op Spirit in Rural Vermont:
Community Cooperative Lockers in Cambridge

Harry Bowman, the Coop’s founder and first manager, must have been pleased to be invited to speak at the 1947 annual meeting of the Community Cooperative Lockers, which was also a Lamoille County-based cooperative.

Mr. Bowman, founder of VEC ten years earlier and later head of the Vermont State Farm Bureau, brought along two movies that cold January evening: "Timber is a Crop" and "Stray Lamb." Baked ham and oysters were featured, singing followed, and it was agreed that the evening was one of the winter's social highlights.

The story of the Community Cooperative Lockers speaks to the deep dairying roots and the strong sense of community that were at the heart of the Co-op Country spirit in VEC's earliest years.

The lockers were started by a group of local dairy farmers in 1943 at the height of WWII when the importance of securing the local food supply was more important than ever. Willey Brothers Store - now Cambridge Village Market -was up for sale and one of its enticing attributes was a series of freezers, or lockers.

"Some of us got together and decided the lockers were worth keeping. We could butcher our own meat and store it in the lockers," explained Harold Putnam, a founding member. Other founders included Clark Dodge, Delmar King, who is still farming on the Cambridge-Fletcher town line, Ernest Hubbard, Wesley Pope and Milo Porter, who was also involved in the Co-operative Insurance Company.

"There were a lot of cooperative-minded people in town. Co-ops were not a new idea then and running the lockers as a co-op provided a chance for people to work together to save their food supply in wartime, Mr. Putnam explains.

Shares were sold for $20 each and by the time Mr. Bowman addressed the annual meeting in the enterprise’s fourth year of operation, the capital stock included 237 shares, with most of the 180 members owning one or two shares. The membership list reads like a history of dairy farmers in the towns of Cambridge, Johnson, Underhill, Fairfax, Bakersfield, Fletcher, Waterville, Morrisville, Hyde Park and Belvidere.

Although the Village of Cambridge had had electricity for a number of years, provided by Central Vermont Public Service's dam at Fairfax Falls, Vermont Electric Cooperative had just begun wiring farms in the more rural sections of town in 1940 and money was too scarce during those war years to buy refrigerators for the farmers' kitchens.

At the Putnam home, lights were the first to be electrified, followed by a washing machine and Mr. Putnam - a graduate of Vermont Technical College — built an electric cooler for his farm's milk. The opportunity to be able to store the family's meat at a nearby, co-operatively-run locker was clearly inviting.

"The electric co-op was very new and people didn’t have refrigerators at home. Folks back then never had refrigerators, as we know them today. In fact, it was a new thing to be able to freeze meat, though people did it in winter, of course,” Mr. Putnam recalled. “That’s where the lockers fit it. When the store came up for sale we bought the whole building. We hired Harold Booth (and later Gerald Field) as our storekeeper. He would cut up the butchered meat and wrap it. When farmers came to town, they would customarily pick up meat to last a couple of days."

When an opportunity arose for the co-operative to buy a slaughterhouse on the nearby Pleasant Valley Road, the group saw the advantage of having a local facility nearby and voted for the purchase.

"Even though this was wartime we weren't so aware of the rationing as other people were, because we were raising our own food and storing it and selling it. If you butchered a cow, or pork or fowl, you'd sell half and freeze the other half," he explained.

Annual meetings were grand affairs, held in the former Cambridge Community Hall, also known as the Mary Reynolds Community Center, which occupied the current parking lot next to the Cambridge Village Market until the 1970s, when it was taken down.

Lois Putnam described a typical annual meeting in her history of the Putnam family.

“The people came, usually about 200 of them. Kids were running all over the place, having a wonderful time…the sociability it offered was important, it filled a real social need. We are the poorer now for its loss. "Because this was a store, not a pot-luck affair, we usually ate ham, possibly roast beef. Steaming hot serving dishes of vegetables and gravy (prepared by the Ladies Union of the Cambridge United Church), homemade rolls, gelatin salads in abundance, followed by pies in infinite variety...Milk was served on every table in serving pitchers, Harold Putnam (Lois's husband) saw to that. After all, this was a farming town and a dairy community."
The lockers filled a need till about 1960 when the Cooperative Lockers was disbanded and the store was sold.

The closing of the lockers coincided with the heyday of VEC's appliance division, which sold Hotpoint appliances to members at just two percent interest with no money down and free installation. The appliance division was the brainchild of VEC's longtime manager Walter Cook and run by Roger Johnson and Phil Locke. It wasn’t long before VEC became the top Hotpoint dealer in northern New England and many rural farmers had refrigerators and freezers purchased through the program. VEC discontinued its appliance division in 1976.