Narrator and Words Trail co-producer Steve Hooper introduces Chestnut Hill, a special little neighborhood just above Downtown Brattleboro marked by an old reservoir, houses with spectacular views and access to the lovely Retreat Trails network. Steve describes visiting his grandparents, Howard Crosby and Amy Rice, his aunt Marion McCune Rice and uncle Howard C. Rice Jr. at their respective homes there. The Rice family's creative, cosmopolitan and community-minded lives and spirits helped shape the identity of Brattleboro. Howard and Amy were the first to build a house at the apex of Chestnut Hill after a former park created by publisher George Crowell was closed. That house at 105 Chestnut Hill, with its wonderful view of the Connecticut River, still stands today. Howard C. Rice was the first editor/publisher of The Brattleboro Daily Reformer, launching its first edition in 1913. (The Reformer was founded as the weekly Windham County Reformer in 1876.) He led the paper for more than 40 years until his son-in-law John S. Hooper (Steve's dad) took over for a collective and continuous leadership of the daily paper for more than 60 years. John S. Hooper married the Rice’s eldest daughter Marion in 1931 in the rose garden behind the house. Together they founded and led the Stephen Daye Press, one of the best regional book publishers in New England at that time. The press was sold after WW2 and John Hooper assumed the reins of the Reformer when Howard C. retired. Steven introduces the story of his Aunt Marion, who lived at 90 Chestnut HIll, a World War I American Red Cross nurse for four years in the thick of fighting in France. Her extraordinary body of letters and photographs, which Steve discovered after her death, poignantly describe her war experience. Steve's daughter Althaea reads from the letters in the first half of the podcast. Steve's wife Jackie Hooper narrates the second half of the podcast about the founding of the Reformer and family life with Howard C. Rice and Amy and gives a brief history of Chestnut Hill itself. Actors recount colorful vignettes of life at the time, including tales of stolen rings and dogs. She also tells of Steve's Great Uncle Howard C. Rice, Jr.and his wife France Chalufour Rice, who lived at 160 Chestnut Hill in a house closer to the famed Retreat Tower. Howard Jr. was an assistant librarian for rare books and special collections and an associate professor at Princeton University from 1948 until his retirement in 1970. He wrote several books on Kipling including “Rudyard Kipling in New England.” His research papers, originally housed at Marlboro College, are now at the University of Vermont library providing crucial information on Kipling and his Brattleboro friends. All in all, the podcast provides a charming account of the achievements of an extraordinary family with a very special place in Brattleboro history.
This episode was a labor of love from the Rice/Hooper family who wrote and produced most of it. The Nurse Marion piece was written, produced and narrated by Steven L. Hooper, who also narrated the intro to the podcast. It was edited by Donna Blackney. Research was by Steve and Jackie Hooper. The voice of Nurse Marion was by her great, great niece, Althaea Carroll.
Music used:
‘Endless’ by Dana Boule (freemusicarchive.org)
‘The Bluff Trail Instrumental’ (freemusicarchive.org)
‘Werdenfelser Trompeten Landler’ by Strassmeir Dachaur Bauernkkapelle (freemusicarchive.org)
‘La Marseillaise’ by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, Performed by United States Navy Band https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Marseillaise.ogg (public domain)
‘Streetlife’ by Lobo Loco (freemusicarchive.org)
The second segment on the Rice Family of Chesnut Hill was researched, written and narrated by Jackie Hooper. Audio Producer & Editor was Donna Blackney. The Voice of Amy Jones Rice was: Shannon Ward and the Voice of Howard C. Rice was Riley Goodemote. Executive producer, Lissa Weinmann. Podcast editing, Alec Pombriant. Original selections were mastered by Guilford Sound.
Music used:
‘Old Strange’ by Black Twig Pickers and Steve Gunn (freemusicarchive.org)
‘Wild Horse of Stony Point’ by Black Twig Pickers and Steve Gunn (freemusicarchive.org)
‘Fisher’s Hornpipe’ (traditional by James A. Fishar) Performed by Adam Boyce and Harold Luce. Archive recording courtesy of Vermont Folk Life Center
‘Not Drunk’ by The Joy Drops (freemusicarchive.org)
‘Dill Pickles’ by Heftone Banjo Orchestra (freemusicarchive.org)
‘Patriotic Songs of America’ by New York Military Band and the American Quartet (freemusicarchive.org)
‘Parisian’ by Kevin MacLeod (freemusicarchive.org)
Steve Hooper produced a History Channel documentary about his Aunt Marion's war time experience “An American Nurse at War” which can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mmy2kdYGWo
Steve also mounted a July 2021 Brattleboro Words Trail exhibition "You Have No Idea What It's Like Over Here..." on same at 118 Elliot Gallery https://118elliot.com/event/july-2-opening-you-have-no-idea-what-its-like-over-here-photos-letters-from-brattleboro-ww1-nurse-marion-mccune-rice/
BRATTLEBORO WORDS TRAIL PODCAST MAY 2025
BRATTLEBORO WORDS TRAIL PODCAST
News and Nursing: The Rice Family of Chestnut Hill
MAY 2025
Host/Lissa Weinmann: Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
Narrator Steve Hooper: Chestnut Hill is a unique little neighborhood just a few blocks up the hill from the center of Downtown Brattleboro. It’s centerpiece is an old reservoir that used to provide water for the town. It was the center of a town park before the first home was built on the highest point on the hill. My grandparents, Amy and Howard C. Rice, built that first house at the apex of Chestnut Hill with a magnificent view of the Connecticut River. Howard and later my dad John S. Hooper ran the Brattleboro Reformer daily newspaper for more than 50 years.
My name is Steve Hooper and I have many fond memories from my visits to my grandparents' house on Chestnut Hill. To me it was like exploring a castle with fun nooks and crannies. We had wonderful family gatherings up there because my Uncle Howard, his wife France, AND my great-aunt Marion McCune Rice all lived up there. They were educated, curious people who epitomized the kind of ‘cosmopolitan villagers’ you still find in Brattleboro today.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
When I read about the Brattleboro Words Trail in the Brattleboro Reformer a few years ago, I knew I wanted to get involved with producing audio stories about my family for the Trail. The Words Trail’s fascinating approach to Brattleboro history also intrigued my brother John Hooper, who became very involved in helping publish the book the Project was also working on – Print Town: Brattleboro’s Legacy of Words. Soon my wife Jackie Hooper and my daughter Althaea Carroll were devoting their talents to researching and telling how our family helped shape Brattleboro history.
It was fun to dig into this history together. Better still to be able to share our stories with tourists and people living here today. We all have a stake in preserving this town's unique cultural legacy. So let’s listen to the stories of Chestnut HIll we created for the Trail….
We'll start with the story of my Aunt Marion McCune Rice. She was a World War I nurse whose letter and photographs, sent from France to her sister-in-law Amy Rice, paint a poignant portrait of the war. I wrote and narrated the piece and my daughter Althaea Carroll is the voice of Nurse Marion.
After that we’ll hear my wife Jackie Hooper’s story about Chestnut Hill more generally, about the reservoir and the park. You’ll get a flavor of my grandfather and his founding of the Brattleboro Daily Reformer, and some antics of his children – my mother, who wrote the wonderful book Friendship Is A Sheltering Tree, and my Uncle Howard C. Rice Junior, who was a Princeton librarian and noted scholar of Rudyard Kipling. I think you will enjoy these stories, so let the Chestnut Hill adventure begin!
Musical Interlude
MARION VOICE Althaea Carroll (ACTOR IS Marion’s GREAT, GREAT NIECE READING FROM Marion’s LETTERS): March 4th, 1915, Dear Amy, our last day on shipboard was rather exciting. They removed all the electric bulbs from our state rooms and got every lifeboat and raft ready to swing off at a moment's notice. We could see the searchlights from the English coast sweeping the water, and we passed a lot of mine draggers. It wasn't a terribly cheerful feeling that at any minute we might go up in smoke, as we've been told, we carried much ammunition, arms, motor trucks and so forth. We thought we'd be a prey worth hunting for.
STEVEN HOOPER, NARRATOR I didn't know my great aunt, Marion McCune Rice was a World War One American Red Cross nurse when as a young boy, I would visit her in her small cottage on Chestnut Hill. Years later, I stumbled across a treasure trove of her letters and photographs that brought to life her wartime experiences. Our family is delighted to share Marion's letters with the Brattleboro Words Trail read by Marion's great great niece, my daughter Althea Carroll.
MARION VOICE: We are not on duty yet. They're letting us get acclimated. I am more than enthusiastic over the whole thing. I shall never forget a bit of it, and I wouldn't have missed it for anything. Will you please save my letters for me as I am not keeping a diary and I should like to have them? Lots of love, Marion.
HOOPER: I found great Aunt Marion's fascinating archive after my uncle, Howard C. Rice Jr., passed away and I helped clear out the Chestnut Hill House in a dresser drawer. To my surprise, I found boxes of two by four inch negatives, black and white prints and scrapbooks all neatly labeled by Aunt Marion, who took the photos herself during her four years in France. (French music ‘La Marseillaise’) I found a journal written mostly in French by soldiers as they recuperated from their wounds, and I found the many letters she sent back home to her brother and sister in law. Howard and Amy Rice. It all started in the summer of 1914, when Marion, then aged 32, was traveling in Europe and was detained in Germany at the outbreak of World War One. She did not like the way she was treated in Germany upon her return to the US. Marion, who worked as a head nurse in a Philadelphia hospital, contacted the American Red Cross and volunteered for a nursing assignment overseas. Marion served at three hospitals in France with the same American medical team from 1915 to 1919. She went over there long before the United States entered the war.
VOICE OF MARION April 21st, 1915, Evetau, France At first, they had only a few hundred typhoid cases here. Not long ago, they received one hundred and fifty wounded men from hospitals near the front. There were a few Belgians, five or six Turks, the rest French. They are a cheerful lot, you should hear them whistle and sing while they peel potatoes. If anyone would give you any jigsaw puzzles, I'd be glad to have them. The men love the jigsaw as above everything. We put boards between the beds for tables. (music continues)
I am supposed to be the supervisor. Official title is night sister and duties include: matrons made, General Overseer, errand girl, office boy, Coal Heaver and Fire Stoker, lamp filler, night cook and dishwasher, light extinguisher, gas saver general buffer, besides other duties too numerous to mention, however, I am crazy about it all.
(Sounds of war and blasts) September 3rd, 1916, we are awfully busy. I have a sort of breathless feeling most of the time. There is hardly ever a chance to draw a full breath. Now, the men are not directly from the trenches, but from hospitals at the front. You never smelled such smells or saw such sights. I can't tell you how many amputations there were, which had been done in other hospitals. Most will have to be done over. When I see these men shot full of holes and suffering the tortures of hell and maimed for life, all for nothing, all because One Nation was bound to fight. Well, I won't say what I think. (war sounds end)
February 14th, 1916, Dear Amy, you will not find many Americans over here who have much pride in the way our country is acting. Won't people ever wake up and realize what the Germans are after and how they are using us as they see fit? Have you ever heard the bombs and seen the result? Have you ever felt that your turn might come next? Have you ever seen men choking and strangling with poison gas? Have you ever seen wounds too horrible almost to be looked at? Have you ever talked to people whose lives are in the hands of Germans whose wives and children have dropped out of the world for them? Have you ever seen flocks of tiny Serbian refugee babies, or long processions of Belgian children, whether they are orphans or not, no one knows. It is all right to say how much we've done for the war. We have given money and lots of it, but it is a long way off to you over there and you haven't the faintest idea what it means.
November 25th, 1918. We are just as busy as ever. That is what comes from being a bone hospital. But it looks like before long we shall all be home. It may sound strange, but it makes me homesick to think of leaving France as much as I want to see you all at home. I foresee I shall always be torn in two directions.
HOOPER Marion returned to Brattleboro to recuperate in January 1919. Two years later, she was teaching nursing students at Simmons College in Boston, where she was named director of the School of Public Health Nursing. She retired early due to poor health, which I suspect was triggered by her sometimes horrific war experiences. She died in 1955 at age 73 and is buried in Morningside Cemetery next to her parents, Fanny Crosby and Charles Bingham Rise. It is sad that there is no grave marker indicating that she was a war veteran because I consider Marion McCune Rice a true hero for serving without pay to care for soldiers for four long years in France.
Musical Interlude
Rice Family of Chestnut Hill Segment
NARRATOR is JACKIE HOOPER: Throughout the last century, the place we today called Chestnut Hill was the beloved home of the Rice family, whose creative community minded lives and spirits helped shape the identity of Brattleboro as a special place it is today. Before the writers and the European colonists came to this area, the Abenaki people likely frequented this unique forested hilltop where chestnut trees flourished and multiple springs gushed forth above cliffs that afforded magnificent views of today's Connecticut river, which they call the Kwenitekw with Mount Wantastiquet head to the East. They would have harvested the Wôbimizi, their word for chestnuts, to make flour and bread.
After colonial settlement, Brattleboro Carpenter and musician Isaac Hines acquired the property in the early 1800s. He tried to build a reservoir to store water from an aqueduct fed by those springs. Hines later sold the property to George Crowell who in 1865 gained fame publishing the wildly popular The Household magazine, the first devoted entirely to women's interests.
Crowell completed the aqueduct and Reservoir, and it became Brattleboro’s main water supply. Crowell set the property aside as a public park and named it Chestnut Hill, which the citizens of Brattleboro greatly enjoyed for 28 years, from 1884 to 1912, Amy Jones Rice writes in a memoir written for her family record:
Voice of Amy Rice: There was a picnic ground, a croquet court with swings, summer houses where band concerts were given and a log cabin with a stove where we could make cocoa to have with our lunch. There were lovely roads winding around the park, walks and rustic seats.
Hooper: The park included a three story Swiss style cottage with towers and turrets, where Mrs Crowell hosted 40 to 50 New York Tribune fresh air children each summer. The women of Brattleboro contributed food for the children's meals. By 1912, Crowell had turned the waterworks over to his son, Christy B. Crowell, who had no interest in continuing the park and sold off the land but retained the waterworks which the town later purchased. Amy and her husband, the young newspaper publisher Howard Crosby Rice, were among the first families to buy land in the form of Park. Their house at 105 Chestnut Hill still stands today.
Voice of Amy Rice: This hill proved a perfect place for children to grow up in, and the woods in which they spent practically every minute of their playtime was all we could desire.
Hooper: The Rice’s raised three children in this house and resided there until their deaths in 1965, just nine days apart. Howard Rice was the editor and publisher of the Brattleboro Daily Reformer, which printed its first daily edition in 1913. In a memoir written for his family, Howard Rice said the decision to publish a daily newspaper was bold for the time.
Howard Rice voice: Despite the belief of many local residents that we were crazy in our view that Brattleboro would support the daily newspaper, plus our ignorance of the technique of daily publishing. The reformer did quite well from the outset.
Hooper: The newspaper was founded as the weekly Windham County Reformer in 1876 by Brattleboro lawyer Charles and Davenport Davenport son Charles H. Expanded to five weekly editions, including a statewide Brattleboro Reformer County and local editions of the Windham County Reformer and separate Bennington Vermont and Greenfield Massachusetts editions. Another longtime editor and publisher of the reformer John S. Hooper married the race's eldest daughter, Marion, in the Rose Garden behind the house in 1931. John and Marion Hooper were co publishers of the Stephen Day press, named after the first printer in the English colonies. The Hoopers worked together to build Stephen Day Press into one of the best regional book publishers in New England. During the 53 years the Rice family lived on Chestnut Hill, they used the property to raise bantam chickens and Irish terriers. Marian Rice Hooper, in her book Friendship is a Sheltering Tree, recalled
Voice of Marion Rice Hooper: During this era of the Bantams, my aunt gave me an opal ring. If I turned my hand into the sunlight, it would glint pink, green and yellow. I turned my hand often. One morning, I went to feed the Bantams and the rooster charged my hand and picked that lovely opal right out of my range. She rushed to the house and phoned her father at the Reformer. Howard came home immediately and sifted all the bedding in the henhouse, searching unsuccessfully for the opal. It was then four o'clock and the paper boy was on time. It may have been a small miracle that they put out the newspaper that day without father, but here it was. As always.
Hooper: Howard commented in his memoir about replacing the chicken coop with dogs
Voice of Howard Rice: For some unexplainable reason, Irish Terriers took my fancy. In 1948, my name made the front pages of newspapers all over the country because of the theft of a bitter mine enjoying the somewhat earthy name of alehouse. Annie, which was stolen at the close of the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York City and later recovered in a basement on the Lower East Side.
Hooper: Through the years, the Rices entertained a great deal, and because the House was large enough to accommodate guests, hosted many visitors, including the poet Robert Frost, along with Vermont governors and U.S. senators, especially when Howard Rice served in the Vermont General Assembly in the 1930s and 40s, while Howard Rice was busy raising his children and building the Reformer into a profitable newspaper business. His sister, Marianne McCune Rice, volunteered in 1915 to serve as a World War One American Red Cross nurse in France. After the war, Mary Ann worked as the director of Public Health Nursing at Simmons College in Boston. She retired to a small cottage at 90 Chestnut Hill on the opposite side of the reservoir from her brother, Howard's house. Howard and Amy Son, Howard C. Rice Jr. and his wife, Frances Rice, lived at 160 Chestnut Hill in a house closer to the Retreat Tower. Like his aunt, Marion Howard, Rice Jr. was fluent in French and his command of the language led to his service in World War Two, writing radio scripts for the military to broadcast to people in occupied France. Howard Jr. was appointed to the staff of Princeton University Library in 1948 and served as assistant librarian for rare books and special collections with the rank of associate professor until his retirement in 1970. He wrote several books on Rudyard Kipling, and his research papers are housed at the University of Vermont. Today, we still call this area Chestnut Hill, even though a virus decimated almost every chestnut tree in America at the beginning of the 20th century. The Rice family picked its last chestnut around 1920. But the family legacy lives on through the Brattleboro Reformer, and their many other written works.
CREDITS
This episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast was broken into two segments. The Nurse Marion piece was written, produced and narrated by Steve Hooper, who also narrated the intro to the podcast. It was edited by Donna Blackney. Research was by Steve and Jackie Hooper. The voice of Nurse Marion was Althaea Carroll.
The second segment on the Rice Family of Chestnut Hill was researched, written and narrated by Jackie Hooper. Audio Producer & Editor was Donna Blackney. The Voice of Amy Jones Rice was: Shannon Ward and the Voice of Howard C. Rice was Riley Goodemote. Executive producer is me, Lissa Weinmann. Podcast editing is by Alec Pombriant. Original selections were mastered by Guilford Sound. Musical selections are listed on the podcast page. Thanks for listening and we look forward to seeing you next month on…the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.