Edward Crane

Ed Crane -- a family man, a farming man, a life-long resident of Caledonia County, and a long-time representative of St. Johnsbury in the Vermont Legislature -- died on Tuesday, February 14, 2017.

He was born in McIndoe Falls on February 17, 1920, to John Alaric Crane and Margaret Thurston Crane. He grew up on his family’s hillside dairy farm on Roy Mountain above McIndoe Falls Village with his sister Marjorie, three brothers John, Carlton, and David, and several cousins. He attended the Aiken District one-room schoolhouse and graduated from McIndoes Academy in 1936.  He traveled back and forth to the Academy with Marge in the family carriage and stabled the horse during the day at his grandparents’ home in the village.  In later years, he recalled many times that he’d used a two-man crosscut saw to cut firewood from the maple trees blown down in the great hurricane of 1938.

After studying bookkeeping at the Bay Path Institute in Brattleboro, he worked at the family farm for a few years, during which he also took flying lessons and obtained a pilot’s license.  In 1941, he joined the Army Air Corps, receiving training in aircraft repair in Pensacola, Florida, and on Long Island, New York. Afterwards, for more than three years, he served in North Africa and Italy. He spent the last years of the war at the American airbase in Foggia, Italy, where he repaired P38 fighters and B17 bombers.

All during the war years, Ed corresponded by mail with a St. Johnsbury girl named Ruth Cormier.  Ruth was sixteen when the War began. She’d known Ed as the “pesky older brother” of her friend Marge Crane. Ruth started writing Ed, because girls were encouraged to write soldiers who were away from home and because she already had a crush on him. She wrote almost every day and Ed wrote back. Soon, though separated by thousands of miles, they became sweethearts.  When Ed returned from overseas, Ruth and he hadn’t seen each other in almost four years, but they became engaged within a few weeks and were married a few months later. Shortly thereafter, they purchased a two-hundred acre farm in East St. Johnsbury for five thousand dollars.  It is here that they raised their five sons and lived for nearly seventy years. For the first fifteen years or so Ed raised chickens, as many as fifty thousand broiler chickens annually in ten-week batches during the early years. At later times, he specialized in egg production.  He was a longtime member of the Vermont Poultry Association, serving as a member of its board and as its President. In the late 1960s, when egg production had become unprofitable, Ed worked as a salesman for Calco Inc. selling concrete products. He then purchased and operated the Moose River Campground for a number of years.

In 1972, Ed joined with others to found the St. Johnsbury Farmers Market, which continues today as an important St. Johnsbury institution.  For two decades, he and Ruth grew vegetables to sell each week at the market.  Ed was particularly celebrated for his tomatoes. He also tapped each year hundreds of sugar maple trees and made maple syrup and maple candies that were sold at the market.  In his late fifties, foreseeing many more years of an active life, Ed began an orchard of antique varieties of apples. Beginning with root stock and seedlings, Ed grew around forty-five different varieties of early American apples, which joined the vegetables and the maple products at the farmers’ market.  The farm remains in the family today.  Son Stan and his wife Bobbie have built a home on a high meadow, and Stan is now working with their son Paul to refurbish the farmhouse for Paul and his family.

For much of his life after the military, Ed involved himself in public service, serving the town of St. Johnsbury and the state of Vermont in many ways.  In about 1960, the St. Johnsbury Board of Selectman selected Ed as chair of the newly formed town planning commission.  A few years later, he was elected a member of the Board of Selectmen. After serving two terms as a selectman, he was elected to the newly-reapportioned Vermont House of Representatives, where for seventeen years, from 1965 until 1982, he represented one of the St. Johnsbury districts. After retiring as a legislator, Ed ran for one more office and was elected to serve as an Assistant (or Side) Judge in Caledonia County Superior Court.

Throughout his life, Ed took special pleasure in working outdoors. Into his early eighties, working almost entirely by himself, Ed maintained his apple orchard, pruning, spraying, mowing, picking, and repairing the high fence that kept out the deer. He displayed many of his heirloom varieties at the annual Craft Day at the Fairbanks Museum. In the winter of 2002, after a series of heavy snows, hungry deer jumped the high fence and destroyed many of the trees. Ed was eighty-two at the time and, with grace, accepted that his apple-growing years had come to an end. For several more years afterwards, however, he continued growing tomatoes and other vegetables for use at home.

Ed liked people.  He had a rich sense of humor, enjoyed puns, and told great stories. He believed strongly in education and, together with Ruth, made certain that each of his five sons received the college education that he and Ruth had not been able to receive. He was a man of principle but with the capacity to understand that times change and to accept the various paths his children had taken.

He and Ruth enjoyed good health for the great majority of their lives. With help from their sons, they were able to remain in the family farmhouse until Ed was ninety-four and Ruth was eighty-eight. In the summer of 2014, they moved to the St. Johnsbury Health and Rehabilitation Center. In their last years, as had been true for almost seventy years before, the greatest blessing for each of them was the company of the other.  Ruth died on May 10, 2016 at the Rehabilitation Center. Ed followed her 9 months later, on February 14, 2017.

Ed is survived by his sister Marjorie and by his five sons and their spouses – Richard and Janet Crane of Wayne, Maine; John Crane and David Chambers of West Hartford; Larry and Sherri Crane of San Diego, California; Stan and Bobbie Crane of St. Johnsbury; and Les and Suzanne Crane of Williston.  He is also survived by eleven grandchildren, who called him Poppy: Matthew, Meredith, Corey, Jill, Jeff, Becky, Paul, Ben, Peter, Anne and Emilina, as well as by several great-grandchildren.

A celebration of Ed Crane’s life will be scheduled and announced at a later date.

Memorial contributions may be directed to either The Fairbanks Museum, 1302 Main Street, St. Johnsbury, Vermont 05819 or to The St. Johnsbury History and Heritage Center, 421 Summer Street, St. Johnsbury, Vermont 05819.

Memories and condolences may be expressed on-line at www.sayles.com.