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Morgan, Vermont, Home of Monk Besaw - A Man Who Makes New Things Old
by Scott Wheeler
It has been decades since horse-drawn snow rollers were used on Vermont's roads, but don’t try to tell that to Roland “Monk” Besaw (standing). He built this life-size working roller earlier this year. With Besaw in this photo are Marc Farrow (seated) of Holland and his team of Belgium horses, Brumby (left) and Bob. Photo by Scott Wheeler
Before truck-mounted snowplows cleared Vermont’s deep winter snows from the roads, and before cars and trucks were a common sight on the roads, winter roads were made passable by horse-drawn snow rollers. Instead of plowing the snow to the side of the road, the weight of these huge, heavy wooden rollers compacted the snow into a hard surface that horses, buggies, and wagons could travel on.
There isn’t much demand for snow rollers of the days of old, but don’t tell Roland “Monk” Besaw that. Earlier this year, while on his winter’s break from his job as a bucket loader operator with Pike’s Paving, the longtime Morgan resident built a snow roller. This is not a miniature roller built to scale, but a life-size one that he estimates weighs about 1,800 pounds.
Although Besaw has lived in Morgan since the 1960s with his wife, Gail, he was born not far from the junction of Burton Hill Road and Creek Road in the village of Irasburg, the son of Richard and Lumina Besaw. At 64 years old, Monk Besaw remembers life in a less mechanized world, but his memories don’t extend back to the days in which snow rollers rolled the streets and roads of the state. Instead, he learned about these goliaths of the winter roads from an elderly neighbor.
“I used to go down and talk to Ben Cutler,” Besaw said. “He was an old guy and he used to sit there and tell me how they used to roll the roads. They could reach out and touch the telephone wires. I wasn’t very tall at the time and of course telephone wires are pretty high but back then they had the short poles so the wires weren’t very high.”
After getting the idea in his head to build a snow roller, Besaw had to find a blueprint. He found one in the pages of the fall 1995 issue of Small Farmers Journal. Using spruce and fir, he began work on the project in the early days of 2007 and completed it by early March. He figures he put about 60 hours of labor into building the snow roller.
Building the snow roller isn’t the first time that Besaw has built something “old” from scratch, at least almost from scratch. In 2001, using the chassis of a 1928 Model A, he built a truck, not with metal, but out of wood. As with his snow roller, the wooden car isn’t just for looks; it can be driven.
“I always wanted to make a wooden body,” Besaw said. “I had a chassis of a car so I figured it was easier to make a pickup.”
Then there is the buckboard wagon that he built four years ago for his daughter Kelly Rockwell in North Carolina. It took him three months to build that.
In addition to replicating old things, he also collects truly old things—everything from his knife collection to his wrench collection. He also has a collection of various farm implements including a corn chopper and a milk separator.
Besaw just chuckles when he is asked how he comes up with his ideas, antiques, and various pieces of history to make his own reproductions, and says he just stumbles onto them on his travels.
“He isn’t telling the whole story,” Mrs. Besaw laughed. “He goes driving all over the place and checks out all the fields to see if he can find old junk wheels or anything else. Then he’ll go knocking on the door and ask if they want it or if they want to sell it.”
Mrs. Besaw said that one person, seeing her husband driving around with a little bit of this and a little bit of that in the back of his truck, said her husband reminded him of Mr. Haney, a character on the 1970s sitcom Green Acres. A “wheeler and a dealer,” Mr. Haney traveled about Hooterville peddling his bargains. But whereas Mr. Haney sold pawned goods from his truck, Mr. Besaw, the “Mr. Haney of Morgan,” goes about the countryside looking for more bargains to bring home.
So, if you’re out on an afternoon drive through the Kingdom and you should come upon a man sitting high upon a snow roller, or a man driving a wooden truck, you’ll know that you are in Morgan, “Home of Monk Besaw.”
