Collecting local stories so they will live on

When I suggested to Dean Butterfield of Kilburn, Victoria County, more than a dozen years ago that he deserved a profile, he demurred, zig-zagged, side slipped, and suggested several other candidates I might consider.

Dean, I discovered, believed very much in the biblical admonition that “pride goeth before destruction” and felt a story might come across as prideful boasting. I could not convince him otherwise, and years passed and we continued to see one another at story sharing events from time to time.

Each time we met, I brought the idea of a recounting of his life accomplishment to his attention. Last fall I told him Saltscapes accepted my query to tell his story and his suggestion was to see if I could find others in the community who felt as I did about his life’s journey and see if they would help.

I had gotten to know Dean when visiting a mutual friend, Frances Cullen, at her farmhouse home in back of Bath at Johnville. Frances was full of stories about how the Irish had settled the area, and shared openly about their faith, fellowship and foibles. For every story she told, Dean had a similar story, and often a poem, he’d collected or written on the topic Frances had raised. It might be about the ghost of the Keenan Bridge, or celebrations that went awry at the Johnville picnic, or about a poor lady who froze to death as the Beechwood Dam was being built when she went looking for her wayward husband with the intent to burn down his lover’s house.

It is stories like these, which often come in fragments, that Dean has made his lifetime passion to collect and share in both prose and poetic form.

To understand the man and his mission more deeply, I did as he suggested and turned to a few of those who have had close contact with him over the past half century.

One of his oldest friends is John Lang. He moved to Perth Andover from the Edmunston area as a seven year old in 1957 and met Dean while riding the bus to school. “I knew no one,” he says, “but Dean sat near me and began talking up a storm. He had an insatiable curiosity about everything we passed. At his house, the bus went over a huge frost heave, and we laughingly called it ‘Butterfield’s Bump.’ Dean loved the fact that there was something distinctive about right where he lived, something worth talking about and we joked about it every day. I think that is what he has done ever since in all the subjects he’s gotten interested in.”

 “His wide variety of interests” is what his neighbour George Davidson says is so “incredible about a friend I’ve hunted, fished and explored with in every corner of Carleton and Victoria County, since 1975.” He adds, “He’s definitely a different neighbour with a dry sense of humour, and he goes 24/7 in unfathomable directions.” George continues, “His range of interests runs from rattling on about natural phenomena to stories of unbelievable feats of the lumbermen, the ghosts that haunted them, maybe treasure they found. He’s very popular at Tim’s with his non-stop conjecturing.”

Mark Rickard has had a long time reporting and editing role with weekly newspapers in Dean’s home area, especially the Bugle Observer in Woodstock and the Victoria Star in Grand Falls.

The village of Perth Andover.

When Dean was to participate as the only eastern Canadian poet at the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Alberta in 2000, Mark, was asked to write a letter of introduction. He described Dean in rhyming prose as the “Lumberjack from Muniac.” Rickard added that Butterfield had “reached the enviable stature of being a ‘comfortable’ writer, something many authors never achieve in their scholarly careers.” In a more recent interview, Mark adds, “Dean has the mental discipline, tenaciousness, and ability to tough it out. We have an expression in the industry that a good writer has to ‘wear off their shoe leather,’ in their quest for stories. They have to meet and talk with the people, walk the walk, talk the talk, and keep at it and Dean has done that. He has a doglike determination, and looks at the world with a child’s irrepressible curiosity.” Mark concludes, “He loves to share what he finds, and over the years I have watched his writing improve markedly.”

South Johnville resident Ann Brennan describes her 30-year friend Dean as one who can “define a place and its own anima mundi, or spirit of the land.” She adds, “Dean has made a tremendous contribution with his collection and re-telling of the folklore of the St. John River Valley, especially odd adventures in the logger’s camps and those ubiquitous fishermen’s tales of the one that got away.”

Dean’s longtime motto has been “Have Pen, Will Write,” and the most recent recipient of his efforts has been the editor of the Blackfly Gazette, Stephanie Kelley. New to Perth Andover, she was delighted to find someone in the area with an innate curiosity, which she says is, “in very low supply, almost as if people can’t be bothered.” Not Dean, though. “When he comes across something that strikes him, he checks it out, researches it, and engages with others about it.” As an example of his off the wall interests, she says, “One spring he brought over a little collection of snow fleas to my house so I could photograph them and do a story on them. How many people notice snow fleas in the spring? Well, Dean does…and it’s just one of the many curiosities he brings in his columns and his storytelling sessions.”

Dean says, “My greatest joy is simply having someone come up to me and say that they enjoyed a particular poem or piece I had written. If they make a suggestion of something I should write about, that’s just a bonus.”

Dean’s method of dealing with new ideas presented to him is to mull them over in his head for weeks, do some research, and then put the story down, either in poem or prose.

This has been his consistent methodology since he was inspired to seek and share stories as he travelled across Canada as a technician with the Geological Surveys of Canada Exploration Geophysics and Geochemistry Division. Despite being far from home, he would meet what he called fellow “Monquarters” and found they could share stories of the Carleton-Victoria region that rivaled any he heard about other parts of the country from fellow workers all across the nation.

Upon returning home, he discovered the young people were more into TV stories than their own local tales, so began to write up some he’d collected in poetic form while serving as a prison security guard at the Perth-Andover jail. That was how he became known as the “Prison Poet.” To date he had more than 2,000 poems in print. He also began writing for local papers and as of 2021, had done 29 consecutive years of columns and shared hundreds of legends, folktales, and curiosities that would have been lost.

The most widely known of his works is an account of snow sliders meeting a ghostly child coaster in a piece titled, “Three Days Before Christmas.” Dean notes, “It was written in 1990 and has been translated into 32 languages. It was considered by Guinness for their world record book, but lost out to Kipling’s ‘If’.” He adds, “I can’t begin to pick my favourite poem, but many do believe this to be my best.”

As might be expected, to ensure ideas keep coming his way, Dean is very active in his community, and has led the way in a couple of projects that show his deep interest not only in folklore, but in the environment.

When an English White oak, planted from acorns taken from Windsor Castle in 1887, and considered the largest tree in New Brunswick neared the end of its life in Andover, Dean grew seedlings, and to keep the “Royal” link alive, had one planted at Government House in Fredericton.

In 1996, when the proposed twinning of the Trans Canada at Perth-Andover threatened a 200 year old white pine at Four Falls, which had superseded the nearby Royal oak as the largest tree in the province at that time, Dean protested the cutting, and his determined efforts convinced official to change the highway alignment
to save the tree.

That same year, Dean began efforts to save the endangered Furbish lousewort from extinction on a Sentier NB Trail at Aroostook. In 2002, the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa recognized his work when this plant was one of several such species displayed in a Green Legacy exhibit that travelled across the country.

While there are no current undertakings of this stature ongoing, Dean remains committed to collecting and sharing Carleton-Victoria County folklore.

Dean’s eye is always open to environmental situations that need a champion, and which he can share in his “Have pen, will write,” fashion.