At seventeen, Reese dropped out of school and moved to San Francisco, where she spent a decade and a half working odd jobs and “trying to be cultured,” as she put it. She had two sons, Finn and Lyle; in 2010, she broke up with their father and moved the family east, eventually settling into an old farmhouse on a dirt road in Walden, not far from Hardwick. Reese longed for community, but she didn’t know where to find it. At her sons’ baseball games, she usually sat alone. “I wasn’t a homestead-y mom, and I wasn’t from here,” she said. “And you kind of had to be one or the other to fit in.”
Then, in January, 2020, at seventeen, Finn killed himself. He had been a star baseball player and a volunteer firefighter, the sort of person who could find something to talk about with anyone. “Finn saw the divide in Hardwick,” Upson, the town manager, who coached Finn and Lyle’s baseball team, told me. “He saw the rednecks, the hippies, the alternative kids, and he wanted to bring them all together.” After Finn died, Reese told me, she couldn’t see much point in continuing to live. But then a strange energy began to gather around her, an outpouring of grief for Finn that made her fall in love with Hardwick at last. The Village Restaurant named a sandwich after Finn, and the high school held a bonfire and a memorial service. After the memorial, the school cafeteria served Finn’s favorite lunch—B.L.T.s, clementines, and root beer.
For months after Finn’s death, Reese’s neighbors brought her home-cooked meals. One day, she found a basket of roast chicken and potatoes in her mudroom, with a note from Friedman. Reese and Friedman lived less than two miles apart—in fact, Finn had been an usher at one of Friedman and Lander’s vaudeville shows, to which Reese had always stubbornly refused to go—but the women had never met. Reese sent Friedman a thank-you note, and in December, 2020, they went for a walk together. In that first meeting, they dreamed up the Civic. Before Finn’s death, Reese had wanted to start a café in the basement of a local church; Friedman had been making enormous batches of soup and giving it out in the parking lot of the East Hardwick Grange Hall. They realized that they had been circling the same thing—a desire for communion with the town, something that felt at once transcendent and deeply particular.
“We were talking about the Black Panther free-lunch program. We were talking about bingo night,” Friedman recalled. “From the beginning, it was all about community events and grief.” That November, a local radio producer, Erica Heilman, made a show about Finn, and the town’s collective mourning, for her podcast, “Rumble Strip,” which won a Peabody Award. In the wake of the story, people started opening up to Reese about their own pain. “I think I gave the town permission to be vulnerable,” Reese said. “Not because I was thinking at all. I was psychotic. But even in my psychosis I didn’t want people to shut down.” For the next few months, Friedman, Reese, and Heilman hashed out how the Civic might work. (Heilman, who was on the Civic’s board of directors until last summer, has remained a supporter and chronicler of the organization through “Rumble Strip.”)
In January, 2022, Friedman and Reese organized their first event—a bonfire at a local farm stand around the two-year anniversary of Finn’s death. “I was pounding the pavement to get people to come,” Reese said. “Literally stopping people on the street, texting and calling everyone I knew in town.” Dozens of people showed up at Butch’s Harvest’ore, in Walden, to eat chili and drink Twisted Tea and cry.
Later that year, the Civic hosted a spaghetti-and-opera evening at the American Legion. That night, Ashton Allen, then the commander of the Hardwick Sons of the Legion, was having a beer in the Legion’s downstairs bar. “When I heard there was an opera upstairs, I thought, I have to go up and see this sparse little crowd, because there’s no way that’s going to work at the Legion,” he said. To his amazement, the room was full of people watching “La Traviata” by electric tea light. “I’m sure opera is bad enough in person, but to watch it on a screen, with not the greatest sound system—people were really taking a leap of faith,” he said. “That’s the first of many times I’ve been wrong about the events they’ve done.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, Hardwick had a thriving granite industry. Then the granite boom ended, and the town eventually became notorious for its violent bar fights. For a time in the seventies, the movie theatre on Main Street showed X-rated films at night, and parents didn’t let their children go downtown by themselves. Upson grew up in Hardwick; when he was in high school, in the late nineties, he told me, people were constantly beating each other up. “Over anything,” he said. “Over looking at somebody funny.”
In recent decades, Hardwick has shed its belligerent reputation. But it still prides itself on being hard, and outsiders quickly get sized up. “If you go into the Legion and talk shit about Hardwick, you’ll get your ass kicked, I believe,” Upson told me. “People who come in hot and heavy and want to get on the select board and think they know what Hardwick needs best—they come and go.”
In the late two-thousands, a handful of flourishing food and agricultural enterprises in the area caught the attention of national media, which proclaimed “hardscrabble Hardwick” to be in the midst of a locavore renaissance. “Facing a Main Street dotted with vacant stores, residents of this hardscrabble community of 3,000 are reaching into its past to secure its future, betting on farming to make Hardwick the town that was saved by food,” the New York Times reported in 2008. Around that time, a local author wrote a book, “The Town That Food Saved,” which posited that Hardwick’s artisanal-food movement—largely powered by young entrepreneurs with college degrees and access to investor funding—could be a national model for small-town revitalization.
“People were pretty put out by that book,” Upson told me. Some bristled at the suggestion that Hardwick’s salvation lay in microgreens. (Or, if you like, cheese and shit.) But their underlying objection, Upson explained, was to the imposition of a narrative. The town hadn’t been waiting for anyone to save it. People in Hardwick had been farming and feeding their neighbors for generations, without fanfare or venture capital. The new food and agriculture businesses brought some jobs to the area, but, for most Hardwick residents, life didn’t change at all.
