Mary E Stepney drove out to Tioga County in her pickup truck with a camper on the back in 1972, looking for land she could afford. She had two border collie dogs with her, because she had raised sheep in Susquehanna County, and before that, she had cows and sold milk to pay off her first farm.
Coming out on Rt 6 to Mansfield, a real estate agent told her they had a farm for sale, somewhere up on Rutland Hill. She got lost on the dirt roads, stuck in the mud, and a friendly farmer pulled her truck out - twice! She saw a derelict house and a barn that needed repair. Never to be daunted by difficulties, she bought the farm and started raising sheep the next year, 1973.
She sold home-grown lambs for the city every fall, and cultivated sheep of many colors to sell specialty fleeces for knitting shops, even extending her pastures on the neighbor's land. She had as many as 250 head at one point. She grew her own food in a large vegetable garden and planted trees. In 1980 she laid out her blueberry patch, with about 13 rows of “Earliblue”, “Jersey”, “Blue Crop” and “Blueray” bushes. These were added to in 1996, with “Ivanhoe”, “Patriot” and “Early Bluejay” (all early), “Atlantic” (Mid-Season) and “Herbert” (late Mid-Season). There are also gooseberry and black currant bushes on the property, and a grape vine.
In 2019, at the age of 95, Mary finally retired from sheep farming. The flock was sold when she went to hospital with a broken hip. Yet she recovered, and came home again, keeping her dogs, garden and blueberries until today.
In early 2023, she said she wanted a Shetland Sheepdog puppy, because her chief mouse-catcher, Joyce the IX, had passed away. Indecisive as to which puppy to get, she bought both sisters, Sophie (bottom left) and Pippets (bottom right), now chief barkers-at-anything, even planes flying overhead.
Mary Elizabeth Wells was born in England in 1924, from a long line of farmers and craftsmen. She was 15 when the Second World War broke out. She was walking in the Sussex countryside picking blackberries with her older sister Margaret when they heard the siren go off in the nearby village. They ran all the way home, only spilling a few berries on the way, expecting to see Nazis marching up the road. This, of course, did not happen. But like all young women and men of the day, she was enlisted in the Land Army, the Women's Land Army, and went to work on a farm to "feed our lads in Europe". That was in the county of Somerset, in the west, where it was relatively safe from the bombings. After the war, she embarked on a troop ship to Mombasa, Kenya, and worked in a government office. She met her husband there, traveled through many countries, seeing Victoria Falls, and returning to Great Britain from Johannesburg, South Africa.
She worked at various office jobs before marriage in 1950 to Robert JF Stepney. Robert was working with the YMCA and the IRO managing war refugees. So they moved to Linz, Austria, where he was stationed. Later they traveled to Spain and back, and finally returned to England. Robert was finishing psychiatric social work at the London School of Economics, got a job as a county council visiting officer in Newark, Nottinghamshire, but then saw an ad in The Times Educational Supplement for a social work position in Scranton Pennsylvania. Adventurous as always, the couple embarked on the SS Arosa Sky from Southampton to New York in September 1957, just for a few years, they said.
By 1962, she had divorced him, and was helped by friends and started living in a town apartment over a pharmacy, with her two boys and her Shetland Sheepdog brought from England. It didn't take her long to find a farm in the country, get a loan from a kind bank manager, and buy a house and barn on 40 acres near Clifford, PA. This is where she raised cows and sold milk. She paid off the farm and sold it in two lots to people from the city. Then she drove across America in her pickup, with friends, to see the rest of the country. She said, "if I decide to stay and not go back to England, I shall stay in Pennsylvania, because it's the prettiest state in the Union"..
