PAUL ROGERS

a town responds
After a devastating fire ripped through Stowe’s iconic Percy farm
dairy barn, friends, family, and strangers reach out to help

STORY : robert kiener | PHOTOGRAPHS : gordon miller / paul rogers

75
 ©STOWE MAGAZINE / SUMMER AND FALL 2022

STOWE FIREFIGHTERS DOUSE THE PERCY’S ICONIC dairy barns with water the morning after the fire, which destroyed the century-old structure and killed 130
of the Percy family’s prized Jersey cows. Stowe fire officials say a spark from a skid loader started the blaze. Ann Marie Hovey, who lives in an apartment in Paul
and Lee Percy’s farmhouse across the road from the barns, took this photo after discovering the fire and calling 911. Next page: Father and son, Paul and Ryan
Percy. Inset: The Girls cross the road from one meadow to the next.

A
small, muffled explosion. “What can that Mark calls his stepfather Paul in Florida where he is on holiday fish-
be?” Ann Marie Hovey asks herself as she ing with his nephew, Chip. Paul, 81, was born in the family farmhouse
sits on her couch watching television in her and has been milking cows in the barn since he was a child. The news of
cozy apartment on the ground floor of Paul the fire is like a gut punch. When he asks his wife Lee about the cows,
and Lee Percy’s farmhouse in Stowe. It is she tells him, “It doesn’t look good.”
just past 11 p.m. on Feb. 2. Alarmed, she Paul is in a daze. He pauses, catches himself, and tells her, “I’ll get a
stands up as Gypsy, her half beagle mutt, flight home.”
starts barking and leaps onto the couch, then Paul phones the farm’s veteran herdsman, David Olcott, who lives just
looks first at her, then toward the front door. up Weeks Hill Road from the barn.
Hovey walks to the door and is startled again “Barn’s on fire,” Paul tells him. “Sounds bad.”
when she hears a second boom, and wonders Olcott, who has raised and cared for all of Percy’s Jersey cows since
if the noise could be a car or a truck backfiring. they were calves, rushes to a window and when he sees the barn ablaze,
“My god!” shouts Hovey as she looks out the apartment’s front win- falls to his knees, overcome with emotion.
dow. The barn across the street—the heart of the Percy family’s dairy But Olcott soon recovers, tosses on his clothes and runs down to the
farm—is ablaze. Flames light up the dark, cold night sky. She immedi- barn to see it collapsing into itself. “No way,” he thinks as he shields
ately calls 911. She then phones upstairs to her mother, Lee, and her himself from the heat. “It’s too late.”
brother, Mark, who is visiting. He blinks back tears as he thinks of the 130 Jerseys, who many call
Ann Marie shouts to Mark, “The simply “The
barn is burning! The barn is burn- Girls.” Over the
ing! The cows can’t get out!” years he has come
She rushes to her front door to to know each of
take a picture of the fire, but the them, and he
heat is so intense she almost burns knows there is lit-
her hand on the door handle. She tle chance they
watches in horror as crackling could survive the
flames engulf the barn. It looks to fire’s thick smoke
her as if the roof is about to col- or the searing
lapse. flames.
“The cows!” she shouts again as Lee, her son
she grabs Gypsy, bundles her in Mark, and other
her arms, and rushes upstairs. It is Percy family
like a nightmare. members and
•••• friends who have
Word spreads quickly. Stowe’s volunteer firefighters receive the alert, gathered on the front porch of Lee and Paul’s home can feel the heat
“confirmed structure fire, Percy Hill Road,” on their pagers and speed to from the fire as they watch firefighters, led by Stowe’s Scott Reeves,
the farm where they are soon joined by members of nine other nearby flood the blaze with water from a phalanx of tanker trucks. Paul’s son
firefighting teams. Some 30 firefighters fight the blaze, which has now Ryan arrives, and he and Mark, Olcott, and others decide to try to rescue
engulfed all the Percy’s barns, parts of which date from the 1860s. the farm’s calves who are penned in a separate holding area. They hurry

76 77
 PAUL PERCY’S FAMILY GENTLY POKES FUN, holding up a framed photo with nine identical photos of Paul with the captions happy, angry, sad, excited, con-
fused, bored, surprised, worried, embarrassed, titled “Guide to Understanding Vermont Expressions.” Paul and Lee Percy on the porch of the family farmhouse on
Percy Hill Road. Ryan, his wife, Courtney, Paul, and Lee Percy on their hillside farm in Stowe with the Green Mountains as backdrop. The family in the farmhouse
dining room, surrounded by mementos, awards, and family photos. Next page: The iconic view of the barns from Percy Hill Road. Pipette, aka 167, mugs for the
camera like any good Jersey girl. Ryan drives tractor in the Stowe 4th of July parade, 2018. The Girls. Inset: After the fire, a thank you from a community member.
PHOTOS THIS PAGE: GORDON MILLER

into the unburned but dark, smoky barn and manage to release all seven
of the three-month-old Jerseys from their pens and manhandle them onto
a cattle truck. As everyone on the porch watches the calves dash out of
the barn they begin shouting, “They’re out! They’re out.”
But the joy is short-lived. The fire is relentless. Despite
the best efforts of the assembled firemen, by mid-morning
the barn—the much-admired, centuries-old landmark of
Stowe—is gone. So are 130 of the Percy family’s cherished
Jersey cows, all of whom have perished in the blaze.
••••
Paul Percy returned to Stowe the afternoon after the fire.
As he drove up Weeks Hill Road a light rain fell onto the
scarred, smoldering remains of the barns he had spent a
lifetime in. He confesses that he had a hard keeping his
emotions in check when he first saw what he had lost.
“I knew those barns like the back of my hand,” he says.
“I’ve spent my whole life working in them. The farm, and
them cows, have been my life.”
The first floral wreath appeared as if by magic. Someone, Lee Percy
doesn’t know who it was, placed it in the snow alongside the still-smok-
ing embers of the barns, in the early morning of Feb. 3. Then another
soon appeared, alongside the first. Someone laid a sign alongside the
ruined barn, saying how much they loved “The Girls.”
Almost immediately, donations started pouring in to a Go Fund Me
site set up by the Stowe Community Fund and another by local veteri-
narian Gregg Goodson and his wife, LeeLee. In time the first would
raise more than $175,000, the other some $60,000.
“So many people called and stopped by, asking what they could do,”
remembers Lee Percy. “Sometimes they didn’t need to
say anything. You could see, by the expression on
their faces, how much the loss of the cows and the
barns meant to them. It was as if they were giving us
a virtual hug. There was such an outpouring of love.
It proved to us how special a place Stowe is.”
Paul nods as he listens to his wife. “The response
has been unbelievable,” he says. “It still hasn’t fully
registered. But it has helped us so much. I guess I’ve
never really appreciated how much the people in
Stowe love this farm and our cows.”
Local artists donated proceeds from sales of paint-
ings and photographs of the farm and its “Percy
Girls” to the family. Restaurants sponsored fundrais-
ers. Many donated anonymously, and others included
notes—“heartbreaking news,” “from our family to your family,” “the
Percys are lovely people” and “because we care.”
Leighton Detora, local attorney, longtime Stowe town moderator and
friend of the Percy family, was the first person to visit the farm the
morning after the fire and offered his condolences. After seeing the
ruined barns and hugging Ryan, who was still numb from the tragedy,

78 79

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: PAUL ROGERS; GORDON MILLER; GLENN CALLAHAN
Detora himself was so visibly shaken that a fire inspector on the scene
came over and asked, “Is this your farm?”
As Detora explains, “The Percys represent a lot of the hard work that
has made Stowe what it is. Their farm is Stowe’s thumbprint in that it
seems to have always been here and hasn’t changed—until this. The fami-
ly also harkens back to a time when neighborliness was so highly valued.”
When Lee Percy told him that she was about to leave to pick up Paul
at the Burlington airport, he drove to Mac’s Market and bought every
cooked chicken they had. “I knew Lee would need help feeding peo-
ple,” Detora remembers. “It’s no big deal, it’s just what neighbors do
for one another.”
Sarah Winch, who had recently moved to Stowe with her husband and
often walked along Percy’s pastures admiring and photographing the
friendly Jerseys, spoke for many when she wrote in the Stowe Reporter:
“My heart aches at the loss of the beautiful, sweet animals, the extended
Percy family, and all those who cared for the cows. To the Percy ‘Girls,’
I will never forget you. You were most definitely creatures great and
small and all things bright and beautiful.”
The donations, phone calls, notes, and visits from locals continued for
weeks. While the entire Percy family was amazed at the response, Paul
80
FROM TOP: PAUL ROGERS; GORDON MILLER
DUSK ON PERCY HILL: The barn at the intersection of Percy Hill and Weeks Hill roads has greeted motorists for decades, a constant reminder of Stowe’s agrari-
an past and peoples’ desire to hold onto it. Previous page: Filling up the manure spreader on a late fall day. A frosty morning, fall 2016. Ryan Percy during a Stowe
Land Trust program. Inset: The aftermath under the watchful eye of the Stowe Fire Department.
and Lee were especially moved by the reactions from people they had Tebbetts, who was raised on a dairy farm, adds, “However, I knew awe of the support we have received. Thank you for everything you’ve
never met, many strangers, including newcomers who had moved to that this was going to be a rough time for done for our family,
Stowe “from away.” Paul. Losing one cow can be heartbreaking from donating to
“You know, there are people who say Stowe has gotten less friendly but more than a hundred ...” fundraising to providing
than it was in the ‘old days’—and I myself may have been one of Three days after the fire Tebbetts and a meals to offering assis-
those—but I don’t think like that anymore,” Paul says. staffer visited Paul to go over plans for dis- tance to sending encour-
Adds Lee, “This showed us that while Vermonters don’t get too posing of the cows. Composting the bodies is aging notes. It’s been
involved in your life, if anything happens, they are there. And they were!” a common choice and Tebbetts wanted to appreciated immensely.
•••• offer his advice on the process. It’s uplifting as we work
Anyone who knows Paul or Ryan Percy, knows that they are both no- “We spent several hours in the kitchen through the process of
nonsense, hardworking Vermont dairy farmers, who are more interested going over details,” remembers Tebbetts. “I rebuilding. We have
in planning for the future than looking back. So, it was not a huge sur- also told Paul that it might be best if he didn’t been incredibly moved
prise when Paul told a Vermont Public Radio journalist, shortly after the take part in the composting. It could be too by how much you appre-
fire, “We’ll probably build something somewhere.” emotional.” ciate our work as stew-
Then he spoke about the family’s loss, adding, “Like I say, there ain’t Paul paused for a moment and then told ards of the land. We
nothing you can do about it. It’s what it is, you know. It’s a bum deal, Tebbetts, “I hear ya. But they are my cows. I understand how much
but that’s what happened.” want to take care of them.” our cows and open lands
“That sounds like Paul, doesn’t it?” says Anson Tebbetts, Vermont’s And he did. mean to you, and we will do our best to bring back what was lost.”
secretary of agriculture, farm, and markets and a longtime friend of the Paul and his son Ryan, who manages much of the farm, eventually And they will. n
Percy family. posted a thank you note to donors on social media: “We continue to be in
81