Hay time is coming home time for Josephine Jacobs

Josephine Jacobs says she's been haying this Lebanon field across the street from the house she grew up in for as long as she can remember. (Harrison Thorp photos)

WEST LEBANON - If hard work is its own reward, Harold and Josephine Currier Jacobs of Rochester should be all smiles most days.

As they do every year, the two of them, along with their son, Jim, were up on Prospect Hill on Saturday haying their 10-acre field on a warm and humid June afternoon.

It’s not only a labor of love and a small cash business for the Jacobs. It’s a habit. She and her family have been haying this field for as long as she can remember.

She grew up in the house across the street at 174 Prospect Hill Road.

“We sold everything on that side of the road,” she said as she raked hay into winrows for her husband, Harold, to collect on his tractor and circle baler. They sell the large circle bales for $30 apiece, square bales for $3.50.

“He doesn’t like to charge too much because he wants folks to be able to feed their livestock,” Josephine Jacobs said.

The smell of fresh cut hay spreads a dry sweet scent through the field. In the middle of the field Jim Jacobs pushes the huge circle bales to where they’ll be picked up by hands from the nearby Marsters Farm on Poplar Hill Road.

Harold Jacobs with circle baler as son, Jim, rakes winrows.

The Jacobs live on a 45-acre farm in Rochester off Portland Street that spreads out to Eastern Avenue and Highland Street.

Most of their livestock has been sold off, but they still have a couple of oxen and a cow.

Much of their 80-acre parcel in West Lebanon off Prospect Hill comprises woodland that sits behind houses along the road.

Between helping her husband with the Rochester farm and summer haying through the years, Josephine Jacobs squeezed in a 39-year teaching career, mostly as a seventh-grade teacher in Dover, N.H.

She loved her career as a teacher, but she’s glad she’s out of it now.

“Teachers don’t have any rights anymore. They can’t discipline the kids,” said Josephine Jacobs, who retired in 2000.

She, herself, worked her way through Gorham State Teachers College by raising strawberries and other crops.

Circle bales dot the Jacobs' field on Prospect Hill Road.

Growing up she attended Milton Grammar School and Nute High School.

After teaching all those years she loves the independence of working her own fields, helping her husband and son haying several fields in Lebanon and Rochester through the summer.

“It’s nice to be out here working in the fresh air where you’re free to make your own decisions,” she said.
She said this will be a bad hay year as there was no rain in May, and the field grass is already going brown on top.

She said some years they might hay three times in a summer but she suspects they’ll only do it twice this year.

After a quadruple heart bypass in February, Josephine Jacobs, 77, shows no signs of slowing down.

“I’m doing pretty good,” she said as she walked around straightening winrows and helping her son.

Harold Jacobs, who manned the tractor nonstop, turns 79 tomorrow, June 30.

For him, it’ll probably be just another work day, too.