The Lincoln Squirrel – News, features and photos from Lincoln, Mass.

features

LEGOPalooza brings STEM excitement to Lincoln

Left to right: GearTicks Audrey Gammack, Ben Morris, Erin Crisafi, Laura Appleby, Amelia Pillar, and Prerna Karmacharya at LEGOPalooza (click to enlarge).

By Olivia Crisafi

On November 23, 12 teams of Lincoln School students wrapped up their FIRST Lego League Jr. (FLL Jr.) season at Lincoln’s Reed Field House for the second Annual Lincoln Legopalooza. The event, organized by the Lincoln GearTicks, was created last year to showcase and celebrate the months of hard work each team had put into their Lego models and programs.

The GearTicks are a local FIRST Tech Challenge team comprised of middle and high school students who take pride in spreading their engineering knowledge with students in the local community. Kevin Ji, who attended and helped organize the LEGOpalooza both years, said he enjoyed seeing the kids he mentored using their creativity to solve engineering problems.

FLL Jr., a hands-on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) enrichment program by the robotics organization FIRST, was first introduced to Lincoln’s existing program last year. The GearTicks thought that even earlier exposure to STEM activities would benefit Lincoln’s youth, and parents were thrilled with the prospect of signing FLL students’ younger siblings up for FLL Jr.

Over the course of two months, teams of six K-3 students worked to solve the annual challenge put out by FIRST. This year, the challenge, “Boomtown Build,” encouraged the young engineers to use their love of LEGO to imagine, design, and create a healthy and happy community.

The teams ran with this mission and thought of fun and creative solutions to real-world problems. The Lincoln Elephants were excited to share their mall equipped with a chocolate store, and a Japanese restaurant that featured an industrial-inspired lifting car garage. The Golden Dragons utilized the motor in the We-Do kit to create a moving drawbridge for their castle.

Along with parent coaches and GearTick mentors, teams from Lincoln and Sudbury met after school and on the weekends to build and program Lego models. They then worked to create a “Show Me” poster documenting their process.

To foster a fun environment, the GearTicks led a free build table, a medal decoration table, and a robot pit as well as gave each team a thematic trophy. “I was thrilled to see how far the students had come with their intricate programs and carefully designed models,” GearTick team member Audrey Gammack said.

“FLL Jr. is a great start to the progression of FIRST programs that leads to FLL and FTC for older students,” GearTicks coach Anne Hutchinson said.

News acorns

Flu shots for seniors next week

Lincoln residents 65 and over are invited to get a free flu shot at to the Board of Health/COA clinic at Bemis Hall on Tuesday, Oct. 22 from 10 a.m.–noon. The clinic will have only the regular, quadrivalent form of the vaccine; the high-dose vaccine is back-ordered from the manufacturer.

The Centers for Disease Control CDC recommends that everyone 6 months of age and older get the vaccine, with no preference expressed for any one vaccine over another. If you would like the high dose, please sign up with the COA by calling 781-259-8811, and if the public health nurse is able to get the high-dose vaccine, she will contact you to arrange for your vaccination, which could be as late as mid to late November.

There is no out-of-pocket charge, but please bring your insurance card and wear a short-sleeved shirt. Services provided by Emerson Hospital Home Care.

Codman’s annual Harvest Feast coming up

The centerpiece of Codman Community Farms’ annual dinner in the barn on Saturday, November 2 from 5–9 p.m. will be (for the first time in a very long time) a pig roast! Codman’s own slow-roasted, pasture-raised pork will be served with with cornbread, potatoes, salad and apple desserts. Dinner will be followed by a raffle and a barn dance for all ages, with bluegrass music from the Splinters. Tickets are limited, click here to buy in advance.

Event features racial justice author

Author and racial justice educator Debby Irving, in conversation with the Lincoln School’s Claudia Fox Tree and Sharon Hobbs, will present “I’m a Good Person, Isn’t That Enough?” on Wednesday, Nov. 13 from 6:30–8:30 p.m. in the Brooks auditorium. The event is free, but registration is required — click here to register.

Irving, author of “Five Years Later: Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race,” utilizes stories from her life to explore systemic racism that goes largely unnoticed but feeds long-held racialized belief systems. By sharing her struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective of bias, stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As she unpacks her own long-held beliefs about color blindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated her ill-conceived ideas about race. She also explains why and  how she’s changed the way she talks about racism, works in racially mixed groups, and understands the racial justice movement as a whole. Funded by the Lincoln School Foundation.

Weekend of music, poetry and theater in November

The Delvena Theatre Company presents “The Dickens You Say” on Saturday, Nov. 16 at 1 p.m., and Lincoln residents Evelyn Harris and Mary Crowe present “An Afternoon of Poetry and Music” on Sunday, Nov. 17 at 3 p.m. Both events take place in Bemis Hall and are sponsored by the Lincoln Public Library and the Lincoln Council on Aging.

Through the use of monologues and scenes, the Delvena actors will embody the ridiculous, the romantic and the frightening characters that Charles Dickens created. There’s a bit of scandal and a lot of worship for the writer who loved Boston profoundly. After the show, the cast will lead a lively discussion. Appropriate for patrons 16 and up.

On November 17, Crowe will offer selected readings of poems by Agee, Joyce, Yeats, Dickinson and others, followed by musical settings of these poems by 20th-century computers Copland, Barber, and Hermann played by Harris. The pair will explore how the settings of each piece influence the poetry and vice versa.

Magic Garden open house for infants and toddlers

Magic Garden’s Infant & Toddler Center at 14 Bedford Rd. will host an open house on Tuesday, Nov. 12 from 5–7 p.m. The center has a new playground surrounded in nature for its two groups of children: Little Ducklings (2–15 months) and Little Explorers (15–24 months). The core program hours are Monday through Friday 8 a.m.–3 p.m., with early arrival starting at 7:30 a.m. and latest pick up at 6 p.m. Flexible schedules are available; sign up for two to five days per week.

L-S alumni soccer game

The 27th annual Lincoln-Sudbury Alumni Soccer Game will kick off Saturday, Nov. 30 at noon. Everyone has fun regardless of what shape they’re in – it’s a casual game for alumni from any era. Spread the word and RSVP by posting on this Facebook page and posting there. Questions? Contact Tim Mangini at tim_mangini@wgbh.org.

Lincoln Station gets its own Little Free Library

Lincoln’s Little Free Library (click to enlarge).

Lincoln Station has a new Little Free Library thanks to a donation from Ann Yos, the now-retired librarian at First Parish in Lincoln (FPL), and teachers and students form the church.

Yos provided the sixth- and seventh-graders in FPL’s Neighboring Faiths Sunday school class with some money to be used for a social action project, and the kids decided to create a Little Free Library — now one of more than 90,000 free book exchanges in 91 countries where people can a “take a book, return a book.”

Together with their teachers, Terry Green and Mark Goetemann (and with further funding from FPL’s Outreach Committee), the students researched, planned, designed, built, and painted a Little Free Library, which is now installed at Lincoln Station near the Clark Gallery and Twisted Tree Cafe.

“There is an understanding that real people are sharing their favorite books with their community; Little Libraries have been called “mini-town squares,” the organization’s website notes.

Ann Yos (center), former librarian at the First Parish in Lincoln, with teenage congregation members who built the Little Free Library.

Veteran teacher Gail Wild says goodbye to Magic Garden classroom

By Alice Waugh

Gail Wild and students outside Magic Garden.

Gail Wild came for the music but stayed for the Moonbeams.

Today is the last day as the Moonbeam Room teacher at the Magic Garden Children’s Center for Wild, 65, who’s retiring after a Lincoln career that began as a music specialist. She’s been teaching preschool in various locations since 1975, with the last decade or so in the room populated mostly by three- and four-year-olds. Wherever she was, music has always been a centerpiece of her approach.

“Whether you’re a [classroom] teacher or a music teacher for young children, the most important ingredient is to make it fun,” Wild said. “The younger they are, the more like sponges they are. If something’s fun, they gravitate to it. And music is such a huge umbrella.” She’s introduced her young charges to everything from jazz, blues and opera as well as lullabies and rhyming songs.

Music is an important way to unify children and get them on the same page, at least for a little while. “If you spend time around young children, it can get very loud, with 10 to 20 realities going on simultaneously — everyone wants attention and wants to be heard,” she said. “When we sit for music, we become one voice,” using music to express feelings, or focus on the natural world or being kind.

As a high school student about to go to Tufts University in the early 1970s, “I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do, but knew I didn’t want to wear nylons or sit in an office behind a desk,” Wild said. Her older sister had studied early childhood education at Connecticut College and that sounded interesting, so she enrolled in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts. Since most of the students there were women who many assumed were looking for husbands, the running joke was that “pre-med was on the hill and pre-wed was in child development,” she laughed.

In Wild’s first preschool job in Arlington, about half her students did not speak English at home, so songs like “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and the alphabet song were easily shared experiences for the whole group. “It’s the idea of having a common voice,” she said.

Gail Wild in the Moonbeam Room.

Wild is not disappearing altogether from Magic Garden — she’ll go back to being a part-time music specialist while also spending more time doing massage therapy (she earned her degree in that field in 1984).

“I love doing healing work with people — it’s a wonderful way to connect that’s the exact opposite of working with children. You deal with grownups, stay in one place and don’t talk, for the most part, but you’re still retaining that connection, just doing it with your hands rather than your voice,” she said.

It hardly needs saying that what Wild will miss most at Magic Garden is the people, and not just the children. In the summer, the school hires interns, and some of them are college students who are also Magic Garden “alumni,” she said. “That’s pretty sweet to have someone come back and say ‘I remember when I was in Moonbeam!’”

“I’ll miss the amazing co-teachers I get to spend my days with, and I’ll miss a lot of laughing” —  and of course, her students, she added. “Pretty much on a daily basis, you walk in the door and you have some bright eyes ready to give you a hug and happy to see you. That’s a great benefit you don’t get in some other jobs.”

Just recently, Wild was reading aloud the classic book Corduroy and got to the part where the titular stuffed teddy bear goes upstairs in a department store to sleep on one of the beds in the furniture showroom. “And a kid says ‘But Gail, how can he go to bed there? There’s no toothbrush!’ I just love those moments that make you smile from ear to ear when you get into the world of a three-year-old,” she said.

Wild also looks askance at the increasing emphasis nationwide on education for younger and younger children. “Parents shouldn’t worry about academics at all at this age. It’s more about can your child play, do they have an imagination, can they socially interact with others?”

The most obvious change Wild has seen during her career has to do, not surprisingly, with technology, which has consumed not just children but the adults around them. “Kids have a lot more knowledge at their fingertips, and they’re probably more computer-savvy at three than I am now. It’s their second language. But I worry when I go to a restaurant and see parents checking out their phones rather than engaging eye to eye with their kids. A lot of them will grow up with that—not making eye contact when they’re talking to someone,” she said.

“What children want is [adults’] full attention, and I get that they don’t always have that attention to give when they’re running around trying to make dinner or something. But if your child is acting out or feels sad, you are the sun in their world, and they just want you shining on them—knowing that even if it’s just for 10 straight minutes, it’s about them.”

Five from Lincoln earn Girl Scouts’ highest honor

Lincoln’s 2019 Girl Scout Gold Award winners are (left to right) Anya Elder, Audrey Ory, Ashley du Toit, Alison Dwyer, and Lia Darling.

By Linda Hammett Ory

Five girls from Lincoln Girl Scout Troop 72886 who have been Scouts since kindergarten — Lia Darling, Ashley du Toit, Alison Dwyer, Anya Elder, and Audrey Ory — attained the honor of earning their Gold Award, the highest achievement in Girl Scouting.

All five graduated from high school this year (du Toit, Dwyer and Elder from Lincoln-Sudbury High School, Darling from Beaver Country Day School, and Ory from the Middlesex School).

The girls were recognized at the State House on June 14 along with 88 other awardees from across Massachusetts. Lincoln had the most number of girls at the ceremony of any town represented. The girls received special commendations for their accomplishments from multiple sources, including the Massachusetts State Senate and House of Representatives, their local state representatives, U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, and Gov. Charles Baker.

To earn the Gold Award, Girl Scouts must identify an issue in their community they’a passionate about, and then complete a project to address the issue that will continue to operate in their absence. Each girl created her own project plan and team, and then devoted at least 80 hours to implement the plan.

Darling’s project was designed to address the lack of information about mental illness in her school and community. She formulated a plan and a team that used facts and stories to educate herself, classmates, and teachers about how to be mentally healthy and informed about types of mental illness and prevention.

“Girl Scouting is where you can challenge yourself to do things that you thought you couldn’t do,” said Darling, adding, “it’s a way to make incredible bonds with girls that will always support you throughout life.”

Du Toit focused on bicyclist safety in Lincoln. She worked with Lincoln’s local government and a special committee to successfully install road signs around town letting motorists know that “bicycles may use full lane,” and then wrapped up her project by organizing a bicycle safety event for children. 

“Girl Scouts teaches girls how to speak out and be bold without fear of being criticized,” said du Toit.

Dwyer’s project focused on increasing residents’ participation in Lincoln’s town government. She conducted several studies to identify best communication practices about how town decisions are made, and she developed a curriculum about local government that will now be added to the middle school social studies program.

Through the process of earning the Gold Award, “I discovered I enjoyed working with people I never thought I’d talk to, and I learned from others in the process,” Dwyer said.

Elder aimed to reduce cyberbullying by creating a program that will now be offered annually at her school to educate and bring awareness around the topic, with the aim of reducing the frequency of this damaging online behavior.

Girl Scouting “taught me not to shy away from opportunities or challenges, but rather, to embrace and appreciate them,” Elder said.

Ory developed and taught a financial literacy curriculum for middle school girls to foster both knowledge about finances and the confidence to pursue their interests in related fields. She pinpointed this critical developmental age as an important way to help address the lack of women in the finance industry.

“Without Girl Scouting, I wouldn’t be the person I am today, and I never could have done what I have been able to achieve,” said Ory.

In addition to learning all these life skills, Lia Darling reflected that “Girl Scouting is a way to make incredible bonds with girls that will always support you throughout life.”

Research has shown that girls who earn their Girl Scout Gold Award display a more positive sense of self, participate in more community service and civic engagement, and reach higher levels of education and income. If your daughter is aged 5–18 and is interested in joining the Lincoln Girl Scouts, contact Heather Coughlin at hmcoughlin@gmail.com.

Lincoln resident finally gets medal for WWII spy work — and she’s delighted

Patricia Warner reacts in surprise as she gets her medal on Memorial Day in Lincoln from Rep. Katherine Clark (left). (Photo courtesy Rep. Katherine Clark’s office)

By Alice Waugh

America recently observed the 75th anniversary of D-Day, but 98-year-old Lincoln resident Patricia Warner was serving the country as a wartime spy years before the invasion — and she was finally recognized for her efforts in May with a Congressional Gold Medal.

Warner had been married for only a few months when she learned that her husband, Robert Fowler, was killed in action at Guadalcanal while serving on the U.S.S. Duncan. Out of a sense of duty but also seeking a measure of revenge, the newly widowed Warner left her infant son (who never met his father) in the care of his grandparents and signed up with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. She traveled for two years as a spy during World War II, working in New York, Washington, London, and Madrid.

“I was devastated, of course, and I wanted to help the war effort as best I could,” Warner said in an interview with the Lincoln Squirrel. “As a widow, nobody seemed to want to take me on in America, so I went over on a troop ship to London.”

Although she was listed as a secretary in Spain, her real job was to communicate with the French underground to get downed American pilots out of the Nazi-occupied territories while also socializing and gathering intelligence from Nazi sympathizers in Franco’s Spain, which was neutral in the war.

“I’d be sent to watch people they thought were very iffy and giving secrets to the Germans,” said Warner, adding that she didn’t speak Spanish when she began. “I found out the flamenco dancers were all involved in German activities, so I signed up for flamenco lessons.”

“She was really beautiful. She could go to a cocktail party and get the ear of some high-ranking diplomat as well as staying in contact with those behind enemy lines,” her son Chris Warner said. “But she didn’t really talk about it that much — I just got impressions of going to bullfights and flamenco dancing. We got the romantic side of things.”

The only real danger Warner faced was not from the Germans, but from a black widow spider that bit her. She had to be hospitalized, but her fellow Americans made sure she didn’t suffer alone. “They thought if I were incoherent, there was no telling what I might reveal, so my friends asked if they could be with me in the hospital in case I said anything that I shouldn’t and give away any secrets,” she said.

OSS “mercy missions” at the end of World War II saved the lives of thousands of Allied prisoners of war. At its peak in late 1944, the agency employed almost 13,000 men and women; today, fewer than 100 are still living.

In December 2016, the OSS was collectively honored with a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award in the United States (along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom), but Warner was unaware that she was eligible for the award. With the help of her son Chris, Rep. Katherine Clark’s office secured the award and surprised her with her own medal as she was surrounded by her family and friends during Lincoln’s Memorial Day observance in May.

Post-war career

After the war, Warner returned to New York and earned a B.A. from Barnard College in international relations in 1949. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1951 but turned it down to marry Charles Warner, a history professor, with whom she had five more children. Her daughter Cecily was diagnosed with anorexia around the time the family moved to Lincoln in 1972 and endured years of involuntary hospitalization and forced feedings.

Patricia Warner in her Todd Pond Road home. Behind her is Boston Herald article about her medal. (Photo by Alice Waugh)

Warner immersed herself in the issue, founding Anorexia Bulimia Care in 1978 (later the National Eating Disorders Association), which was named one of George H.W. Bush’s Thousand Points of Light in 1991. She later earned a master’s degree in independent studies (specializing in eating disorders) from Lesley College in 1985 at the age of 64. Just two years ago, Warner published Will You Love Me When I’m Fat?, an autobiography focusing on her family’s struggles with Cecily’s anorexia.

During her varied career, Warner was also involved in the civil rights movement, taking part in one of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and was a painter and board member of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

Warner’s 1939 high school yearbook entry was prescient, noting that her goal was to be a spy or the first female director of the FBI but that she was more likely to be a diarist like Samuel Pepys. In her recent book, she’s modest about her war exploits. “I like to think of myself in the OSS, skulking around darkened bars draped in mascara and allure, dropping truth serum into Nazi officers’ champagne. But I’m not sure I made any meaningful contribution to the war effort,” she wrote.

But others would beg to differ. “It was an incredible honor to celebrate Patricia and her fearless patriotism at the ceremony,” Clark said. “Patricia represents the best of American values: bravery in the face of injustice and an unrelenting commitment to our country’s democratic cause.”

Girl Scouts hit benchmark for community success

Proudly showing off their colorful bench are (left to right) Girl Scouts Lucy Dwyer, Courtney Mitchell, Marielle Soluri, and Rebecca Lupkas.

Lincoln Girl Scout Troop 82742 has installed a pair of six-foot-long benches at the Lincoln Mall shopping area after building them as part of a Silver Award project. 

To earn the award, seventh-grade Girl Scouts Lucy Dwyer, Rebecca Lupkas, Courtney Mitchell, and Marielle Soluri adhered to a specific problem-solving regimen that includes identifying issues they care about, exploring the community to identify needs, finding areas where needs and cares overlap, and engaging stakeholders while developing a long term solution that is also sustainable. 

The benches, made of materials generously donated by Concord Lumber, meet a community need that gives students a place to eat without interfering with other shoppers. Over the course of nine months, the Girl Scouts interviewed students, shopkeepers, landlords, and town officials about problems, researched various solutions, reviewed alternatives with these audiences and responded to feedback

Lucy Dwyer and Courtney Mitchell work on building their Scout troop’s bench.

During the construction process, they learned how to choose materials and waterproofing treatment, transfer design specifications to materials, use a radial arm saw and drills, fasten materials, and apply finishes. The award requires the project to consume more than 50 hours of effort each, which was easily surpassed.

The troop installed the benches at Lincoln Station and are continuing to work with the Rural Land Foundation to add additional bins for trash, recycling, and possibly compost as well as signage for the bins, which was also an identified need.

— Submitted by Carolyn Dwyer and Tara Mitchell, leaders of Troop 82742

Historic but dilapidated Flint homestead plans public event to raise awareness

The Flint homestead on Lexington Road.

By Alice Waugh

One of Lincoln’s founding families is hoping to maintain their centuries-old farmstead for years to come by raising money to turn it into a museum and education center — an effort that will launch with a public event in September.

A few years ago, Tom Flint and his sisters — the 12th generation of Flints who’ve farmed and lived in Lincoln — inherited the original Flint home on Lexington Road, along with about $125,000 earmarked for that building’s property taxes and maintenance. They’re direct descendants of Thomas Flint, who arrived in 1636 as one of the first European settlers in what would later become Lincoln. Some time around 1700, Ephraim Flint built the house on the west side of Lexington Road next to Flint’s Field. Tom and his wife Eri and young daughter, together with his mother Margaret and sisters Sarah and Sue and Sue’s husband Corey, live in a larger 100-year-old farmhouse across the road.

Over the last 400 years, Flints have been central to Lincoln’s history. But now the original home is in dire need of repairs. A study done five years ago said it would cost about $300,000 to get the house and barn (which dates from about 1750) to “a maintainable minimum level to keep it surviving,” said Flint, a filmmaker and educator. “This is not to renovate or restore it for modern living — just repairs and maintenance.”

Meanwhile, after a few of the most urgent repairs were done, the estate’s maintenance fund had dwindled to about $60,000, and rental income covers only about half of the building’s annual costs. “By this time it’s become pretty much a white elephant, unusable and virtually uninhabitable,” said Rick Wiggin, a Lincoln historian who has spoken at events outlining the homestead’s past and possible future.

The Flints hope that future includes a new life for the homestead and barn as a nonprofit entity devoted to educational programs on history, agriculture, and land conservation that includes a museum and antiques shop, and might also serve as a destination for weddings and other events. The family hopes to maintain its direct connection to the property, perhaps with a long-term lease arrangement, but the legal and fundraising issues are complex.

“There are a lot of pieces for this, and frankly we’re still trying to fit them all together,” Wiggin said.

Last October, the Flints hosted a pumpkin-picking event at the farm as a way to “strengthen our connection to the community, a growing portion of which is unaware of the unique history that has helped mold the town into what it is today,” Flint said. The success of that venture inspired them to move forward with bigger plans for making the property more accessible.

On September 15, the family will open up the homestead, barns, and fields for free public tours and attractions, including a reenactment by the Lincoln Minute Men. There will be an antiques market in the barn selling some of the thousands of family belongings that have accumulated over the centuries, ranging from farm equipment and furniture to alligator purses and top hats. There may also be an auction, but the Flints will keep a selection of historic items for future public display and as “props” for use by groups that rent the property for events.

Flint envisions a museum that will illustrate the evolution of a house, farm, and family over hundreds of years by exposing structural elements, furnishings, and even layers of wallpaper from many different historical periods (with echoes of the Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side), as well as pointing out features that need repairs. “I want to preserve this historical and cultural relic for both my family and the town of Lincoln,” Flint said.

“We believe the Flint Farm is the oldest farm in New England and perhaps anywhere in the nation that has been continuously farmed and owned by the same family dating back to the 1600s land grants,” Wiggin said. “This property and the family that’s farmed it represent the heart and soul of the town of Lincoln — the living link between the town’s origins and the modern day.”

The Flints through the centuries in Lincoln

1636 — Thomas Flint arrives in America and settles in Concord in 1640s on about 1,000 acres of land that would eventually become Lincoln’s town center (now Five Corners), as well as Flint’s Pond.

About 1700 — Ephraim Flint builds the farmhouse near the end of the North Field, west of Lexington Road.

1745 — Edward Flint donates land for a meeting house. Shortly thereafter, his nephew Ephraim Flint donates land for a village cemetery next to what is now Bemis Hall.

1754 — The town of Lincoln is incorporated from parts of Concord, Weston and Lexington. Ephraim Flint is elected town clerk, selectman, and treasurer at the first Town Meeting that year.

1775 (April 19) — Mary Flint Hartwell (wife of Samuel Hartwell, a farmer and Lincoln Minute Man) plays a crucial role in passing the word about the British troops marching from Boston. Ephraim Flint and his son John march from their homestead to fight the British and return at end of the day with a British prisoner of war. Five dead British soldiers are buried in Lincoln’s cemetery.

19th century — The Flint farm grows and sells produce for the Boston market.

Early 20th century — The Flints are still farming and serving in leadership roles in Lincoln. They build four greenhouses to expand the growing season, but two are destroyed in the Hurricane of 1938 and a third by another hurricane in the 1940s.

1960s — Faced with development pressures and the economic decline of family farms, Warren Flint Sr. and the town create the Rural Land Foundation, selling some of the Flint land to the town to preserve it for agriculture and conservation. Ten lots are also sold privately

1989 — Two parcels now known as Flint Field are donated or sold to the town.

2003 — The Flint homestead is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the family agrees to preservation restrictions on the homestead property. The original home is occupied by Henry Flint, who continues to live there and farm the land until some time before his death in 2012 at the age of 95.

2014 — A study funded by the town’s Community Preservation Act produces a large maintenance and repair to-do list with cost estimates. Using some of the money left for this purpose by Henry Flint, a few of the most urgent repairs are made, including the roof of the 1750 barn. Still high on the triage list: $184,000 for basic repairs to the homestead and $155,000 for the barn, whose floors are unstable. If the homestead is opened to the public as a nonprofit, it will need lead paint removal, new wiring and other work costing more than $1 million.

2019 — The Flint family looks into turning the homestead and barn into a nonprofit entity that would serve as a museum and historical education site, an antiques market, and a location for weddings and other events.

 

Spencer wields pencil and pad for police work

Lincoln Police Detective Ian Spencer.

By Alice Waugh

Detective Ian Spencer is the Lincoln Police Department’s Juvenile Officer, but sometimes he draws a different kind of duty: creating forensic sketches of crime suspects.

Spencer is a trained police artist who interviews crime victims about what a suspect looked like. The sketch emerges after conversation and continual revisions of his drawing as he goes along to make sure he captured the victim’s visual memory as accurately as possible. His work recently paid off when one of his sketches resulted in the arrest of a suspect in a stabbing in Everett.

After graduating from the fine arts program at Burncoat High School, a magnet school in Worcester, he studied sculpture at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, a path that wasn’t too surprising given his family background — his sister is a music teacher and his brothers are an artist and a dancer who went to the Juilliard School.

“My dream job was a position in movie special effects, but that clearly did not happen,” Spencer says with a chuckle. When he didn’t get into a computer animation program he was aiming for, he finished his degree at UMass-Lowell and went to Plan B: a career in law enforcement. “Police work was something I always wanted to do — I just didn’t realize it was something I could have done earlier on,” he says.

Shortly after Spencer was hired in Lincoln in 2005, he encountered Concord Police Department inspector Jack Skinner, also a forensic artist, and with then-Police Chief Kevin Mooney’s blessing, he began looking into further training in the field. He eventually graduated from the FBI’s intensive three-week Forensic Facial Imaging Course in Quantico, Va., and is now one of the only FBI-trained forensic artists in New England.

As part of a small network of forensic artists nationwide, Spencer has applied his skills all over the country and trained with artists  from as far away as Australia. His work has included creating sketches for the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, using his training an anatomy and age progression to try to visualize what a missing child might look like today.

“If a kid has been missing for years, you can look at photos of the mom and dad at the same age [as the child] and use that to estimate how getting older has changed the missing persons face,” he says. He’s also used some of the same techniques to recreate what an unidentified corpse might have looked like in life.

“Artistic ability is fine, but it’s really the ability to connect with someone who’s gone through a trauma and how quickly we can get on the same page,” said Spencer, noting that many of the people he’s worked with were victims of sexual assault.

Spencer’s sketch that resulted in an arrest in Everett.

The process requires Spencer and the victim to establish a rapport, “letting that person know they’re 100% in control and I’m a resource to them,” he says. “To sit down with someone and ask that person to go back in their mind and think of the worst possible day of their life, sitting in close proximity to another male they’ve never met—that gets really difficult, but sometimes those are the most effective images, “ he says. “In a way you’re revictimizing them, but their memory for this event can be the catalyst for capture, and there’s an empowering component to that.”

Over the years, Spencer has done about 100 police sketches, and perhaps a quarter of them have resulted in identification of a suspect and/or an arrest (though visual identification is not enough in itself), he says.

The sketch work has also broadened Spencer’s reach as a detective. “I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to bring that art component into police work. It’s paid such amazing dividends,” he says. ”That’s 100 cases I never would have gotten a chance to investigate otherwise. It sharpens your ability to talk to people. A pencil and paper can sometimes be as effective than whole team of investigators.”

“Ian is a tremendous resource not only to the Lincoln Police, but other police departments as well. It’s invaluable as an investigator to have that tool available,” said Lincoln Police Chief Kevin Kennedy.

Spencer is currently working toward a master’s degree in criminal justice and hopes to be able to teach forensic sketching in the future. In the meantime, he talks to high school students all over the state about topics such as vaping, drugs and online behavior, but he also tells them about his unusual hybrid career. If a student is interested in more than one field, “I tell them to look at it, examine it, and see if the two or three can be tied in together.”