Almost every time I’m in the car with a relative, I learn something new about my family’s history.

Sometimes it’s a small graveyard with the remains of one of our 1700s ancestors. Sometimes it’s an unexpected link to historical figures like Ethan Allen or George Dewey, who was from Montpelier and became Admiral of the United States Navy. Sometimes it’s something humbler – a pasture with a beautiful view that was once owned by another branch of the family.

I wasn’t born and raised here – I grew up near Washington D.C. – but these connections to Central Vermont have been important to me since I was a kid. We often visited family here and soaked up stories about the past from older relatives. When I moved here with my family in 2015, I saw all this history with fresh eyes and started to appreciate how much the past is tied up with the present and the future.  

The place where this all comes together for me is what my family calls the “Old Farm,” at the end of Slaughterhouse Road outside of Northfield Falls. It’s all the way at the top of the hill there.  

My great-grandfather had this idea in the ’60s to turn the land into a red-pine farm that could be harvested for telephone poles. My grandparents, my dad and his five siblings spent a lot of time planting trees on this 160-acre piece of land. Every school break they would be out there planting.

By the ’90s, the trees were grown, but no one wanted to cut them down. The land was too beautiful and filled with wildlife – we see moose tracks up there and “our bear” comes through regularly. It’s one of those places where Vermont’s past and present coexist.

Casey Kolb Nava is the medical director of the Central Vermont Medical Center hospitalist group. She’s been with us for more than nine years.