MINOT — Noella Hemond and her husband once donated a firetruck to the town — in secret.

Gifted a bag of yarn at age 90, she knit mittens for two classes of local schoolchildren. She helped plan the town bicentennial celebration in 2002 and started a college scholarship five years ago (only Minot residents need apply.)

For gestures big and small, and decades as a town booster, selectmen and the Spirit of America Foundation honored Hemond this summer. She’s demure, but pleased, and talks up the beautiful bouquet of flowers she received.

Hemond has carried on the active civic life against the backdrop of running a dairy farm, where the 93-year-old is still very much in charge.

“We call her ‘Congress,'” said granddaughter Laurie Miner. “Nothing happens unless it passes through Congress.”

Hemond and her late husband, Roland, bought their dairy farm on Pottle Hill Road, where she still lives, in 1945. R.E. Hemond Farm has racked up a slew of honors in the decades since, including Oakhurst’s “Producer of the Year” four years in a row.

“You start small and you grow,” she said. “Just like when you get married. You start with one baby, then two, then three.” 

In children, the couple stopped at nine. In cows, they started at 20. Today, the number is 600-plus.

“When the kids were old enough, one could push the carriage, I would go out in the barn,” Hemond said. “I would help feed the calves — that was my job for years and years and years.”

For a time, she also drove a milk delivery truck on Sundays so a hired hand could have the day off.

In 1966, Hemond found herself on the Board of Selectmen after being unexpectedly nominated during the town meeting.

“The head man said, ‘We’ve got to have somebody else,'” she said. “I was elected on the spot.”

Hemond served two terms for a total of six years.

“Someone told me I was first selectwoman in the state of Maine,” she said. “The townspeople were so good to me. Somebody had some (griping) to do, they wouldn’t look at the other two selectmen — they’d look at me.”

Hemond took it as a compliment; she had a good listening ear, she said.

In 1980, at another town meeting, residents bought tank equipment for a new, donated firetruck. It took a little time for word to get out that the Hemonds had bought the cab and chassis.

She shrugged and said they were able to do it, so they did.

That truck lasted until this year.

“She’s done so much for the town,” said Eda Tripp, Minot assessor and selectman. “She has been one of the top 10 taxpayers in Minot for I don’t know how many years, but going back to the ’40s or ’50s.”

Tripp praised Noella and her daughter, Lucille Hodsdon, for their work on several town books and Noella and Roland’s work at the Maple Grove Cemetery in neighboring Mechanic Falls.

“She’s just an outstanding person,” Tripp said.

After Roland died in 2007, Hemond created the Roland and Noella Hemond Scholarship for a college sophomore, junior or senior from Minot. She picks the winner each year after lots of study.

She also studies her livestock: Miner regularly reads Hemond the stats of each of calf born on the farm, based in part on the parents’ DNA, and she decides on their potential as good milkers.

She continues to do two loads of laundry every day, washing and folding 300 cloth squares that get dipped in iodine to wipe the cows’ udders before milking.

“You don’t want to stop,” Hemond said. “You slow down, but you don’t stop, because if you stop, you’re all done.”

Know someone everyone knows? Contact staff writer Kathryn Skelton at 689-2844 or kskelton@sunjournal.com.

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