BUCKLAND — Lifelong resident Alta Clark is the town’s oldest citizen, and she will receive the town’s Boston Post Silver Cane Award.
At 98, Clark still lives in the Buckland Center home that she grew up in, says Elaine (Clark) Thomson, one of her daughters.
“She’s lived here all her life — her father built the house — and that’s where she brought all us kids up.”
Alta Griswold married the late Royce Clark in 1940. The couple had nine children — six sons and three daughters. Royce was a logger, and she was a homemaker, who baked and cooked, sewed and loved her flower and vegetable gardens, Thomson said.
Living in the small town center, Clark knew the town’s famous artist, Robert Strong Woodward, who lived nearby until his death in 1957. Also, Clark was the niece of Wallace Nutting, a minister, photographer and artist who is most famous for his landscape photos of New England.
Clark’s award will be a certificate, not the actual silver-headed cane. In 1909, the Boston Post newspaper presented gold-headed walking sticks to 431 New England towns with populations of more than 500, on the condition the cane be given to the oldest citizen for use as long as he or she lived. The Post went out of business, but the tradition of the cane survives. The original cane was made of ebony with an engraved gold handle and tip. Buckland’s original cane may have been lost and replaced with a silver-handled replica, which is kept in the Town Hall.