In the early days, the hands on the clock of enlightenment busily swept away Grafton’s wolves and bears and trees in favor of houses and farms and sheep. But when its capitalistic motor was stilled, that clock began rusting away, a slow fade of civilization punctuated by fire and flood. Between 1935 and 2002, the county lost 92 percent of its farmland, and fields reverted to impenetrable thickets of bramble, then tangles of young trees. Roads once supported by tax dollars became blackberry patches favored by foraging bears. The most heavily farmed region in the state became the most heavily
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