Triangle T Ranch Fire

A family farm burned down on May 12, 2016. There aren’t a lot of those left – now there’s one fewer.  Sometime early on Friday morning on Route 7 in Dalton, a milk tank driver noticed flames and smoke rising from the barn at the Triangle T Ranch.  He pulled into the driveway, called 911, and blew his horn: if you ever heard a milk truck horn, you know it wakes up everyone within a mile. It woke my nephew Luke Therrien, so he could be awake to watch.  The fire took his business, took 100 young calves, and his girlfriend’s horse, and her newborn foal, and his dog, and Stitch, 8 year old Nolan’s dog.  If you ever need to know, 100 years of family farming disappears in about 25 minutes in a barn fire.  Faulty wiring, they said, and it was probably true. At some point, there’ll be lawyers, and adjusters, and accountants, and a settlement that won’t begin to cover what the family has lost.  But in the meantime, it’s spring in farm country. The corn needs planting, which means the seeds need buying. The wheat needs sowing, and the cattle and horses that survived need food, and some of the equipment needs to be replaced. 

Luke has chores to do. We all have chores to do, there’s no one reading this who isn’t a few generations removed from someone who teased his living out of the hard ground.  Our chore, now, today, is to help a man who still does that, who gets up at 4:00 AM and works until the sun goes down and then some, so the rest of us can sell real estate and teach school and practice law without worrying where the steaks will come from on Memorial Day weekend. Luke is my nephew – a strong, honest, and good man who needs help. Please help.  Thank you. It will be appreciated more than you can know.