Father of the Man Dr. Peter L Colman

The most recent patriarch of the Colman clan of Auburn was none other than ‘Grandpa’ Frank Thomas Colman. Like many of his rustic peers in the late nineteenth century, he did not enjoy the disadvantage of a formal education; his was a ‘privatized’ farm-style education - slopping hogs, harnessing horses for the fields, and splitting and stacking kin’dlin’ and firewood for the long cold winter. He also invested time in raising a large family, working night and day to assure that the children stayed healthy, learned to appreciate hard work, and eventually married and earned a respectable living. New Englanders had little time for the superficialities and impractical, costly distractions which seem to preoccupy successive genera-tions. Grandpa Colman did allow himself one innocent distraction, and that was holding his grandson, little Bob, and posing for pictures, though grandpa was rarely known to smile, and never smiled for the camera. The Colmans and the Moys of old Chester and Auburn were a sturdy breed, and sired a stubborn, resilient, raucous, but fun-loving litter of sons and daughters. But the die had been cast…bitter-sweet days lie ahead.

The intervening years of my father’s childhood are sketchy. Times were hard. During the depression, my great, great grandfather, Frank Colman, his wife, M. Fannie Eastman, and their five surviving children: Flora, Waldo, Horace, Joseph and Sumner Chase (my grandfather), apparently moved temporarily from Auburn (at that time an extension of the old town of Chester) to Troy, in western New York State. Years later, some members of the family returned to the district of Brattleboro and Wardsboro, presently in the county of Windham in south-eastern Vermont, not far from the New Hampshire state line. Generations earlier, another Thomas Colman (b. 1771), and his wife, Abigail, had moved to Auburn, NH, and settled on a hill there, which to this day bears the name ‘The Colman Estate.’ It was here that my great-grandfather, Frank Thomas (mentioned earlier) resided with his wife, M. Fannie Eastman. Frank and Fannie sired several children during their life-long sojourn at the old clapboard, one-story dwelling; among them: my grandfather, Sumner Chase (b. 1897) and his brother, my great-uncle, Horace. The ancestral core of the Colman clan is currently resting peacefully in the old Auburn Village Cemetery. Horace Colman, though the record has yet to be confirmed, settled in a small village called ‘Newfane Hill,’ adjacent to Wardsboro. Horace was a blacksmith in Newfane for most of his earthly life, and an avid connoisseur and collector of Native American artifacts.





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