Bud Thompson: "Finding a Place in the Circle"

Founded Shaker Museum and Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum

 By Gail Thorell Schilling 

When Charles "Bud" Thompson was 7 years old, a Paucatuck Chief urged him to find his talent and use it. Now 84, Bud has found and used many talents. Yet the founder of the Canterbury Shaker Museum and the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner shies from limelight. After all, he's just doing his part: making the world a little better, finding his place in the Circle.

A Place in the Circle

            A native of Newport, RI, Bud recalls that life-changing day in second grade. "Our teacher told us we were going to have a visitor. Then in walked a huge, handsome Indian. Our eyes popped out of our heads, but he wasn't threatening." Sachem Silver Star invited the children to sit on the floor in a circle, the Native American's most sacred symbol, "because when you take your place in the circle, you belong." Eyes twinkling, Bud continues. "Silver Star told us that when you're born, you're given a special gift, a talent. When you find it, use it."

            That evening, little Bud described the encounter to his family, including his older sister who had nicked named him. "She said 'Write him a letter and tell him how great he is. Tell him you hope he'll read about you someday.' So I did and my sister corrected my spelling." Silver Star duly responded, enclosing a photo of himself and thanking Bud. "He said he was already proud of me for writing the letter."

            That summer, young Bud visited his grandparents on their farm in Connecticut, where he enjoyed working alongside his grandpa in the garden. "It was a scorcher of a day," Bud recalls. "I was drinking cold water under a maple tree when I saw a little stone. Grandpa told me it was an Indian arrowhead, probably a spear point or a knife blade. Grandpa told me it was like a voice out of the past telling me someone had once lived here." The discovery had a profound effect on the small boy who began to collect more artifacts from Grandpa -- Algonquin, Pequod and Mohegan -- even as he discovered his own talents.

Passing the Torch - Father to Daughter
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Musical Gifts

             By age 16, Bud performed as a "singing cowboy" on WMEX in Boston. He chuckles. "My sister typed official looking-letters so we could get free booklets about cowboys like Wild Bill Hickock. Then I'd tie in a song with the cowboy stories." The show helped to launch his country music duo, Babs and Bud, which toured the United States. Darryl Thompson of Gilmanton describes his dad's musical career as "opry to opera," because Bud studied voice with Alexander Kipnis of the Metropolitan.

When Bud lamented the lack of original folk songs for his repertoire, someone suggested that he investigate songs of American Utopias. Again, the twinkle. "Utopia? How do you spell it?" The simple suggestion, however, resonated with his philosophy of life: "Read, read, read -- then try it." While researching groups that tried to find "heaven on earth," he found the Canterbury, NH, Shaker Village, and perhaps, his own piece of paradise.

            Founded in 1792 by the Shakers, a deeply spiritual group espousing communal living, pacifism and a simple lifestyle, the Canterbury community had peaked in the 1840s. By the time Bud arrived, the once-vigorous Shaker enterprises -- agriculture, furniture making, handcrafts,-- had sorely declined. The few surviving Sisters struggled to hang on, giving tours of their home and selling items amassed over 160 years. The treasure trove included thousands of Shaker hymns, many written at Canterbury.

Shaker Village Years

            Bud remembers, "In the 1950s I took a tour [at the Shaker Village] and bought a hymnal in the antique shop. When Sister Lillian Phelps saw my hymnal, she asked, 'Would you like to sing some duets?'" The friendship would endure for decades.

"We corresponded, and the family and I were invited for Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations." The family by this time included Bud's wife Harriett; and one son Darryl.

Darryl, now a Shaker historian, explains: "The last Shaker brother had died in 1939. Since it was hard for the sisters to climb stairs, they wanted to close the tours. They had already advertised their season, so they asked Dad to do the tours." Already Bud had become a collector of Shaker artifacts, buying them as the declining village sold them. He added his own pieces to his entertaining Meeting House lecture, the better to educate his rapt audiences.

By 1959, Bud's folk singing tours, sometimes 13 concerts a week, had taken their toll. "I had worked all summer for the Shaker Village, dreading a tour of Wisconsin and Minnesota in the fall. When the sisters asked me if I'd consider staying, I stayed." For the next 32 years the Thompson’s called East House home. "We never worked for more beautiful people. They represented what Christianity should be."

Darryl says, "Dad's title was 'curator,' but it's hard to give a title to what he did because he did everything."

Preserving Shaker Legacy

            Perhaps the most important thing Bud did was to persuade the last Shaker women that their property did not have to be sold. "I loved it and knew it had to be saved, but the Eldress wanted to phase it out." When Bud suggested that the entire Village become a museum, the Eldresses were tentative, skeptical, cautious and a bit bewildered. According to Darryl “A historical restoration was outside of their frame of cultural reference. To them, a museum was a building. They could not conceive of an entire community as a museum. To them, a museum had four walls.”

"So I took them to Sturbridge Village and the Shelburne Museum" said Bud, places he took his own children to see living history. Three of the surviving Shaker sisters: Eldress Bertha Lindsay, Sister Lillian Phelps, and Eldress Marguerite Frost participated in these visits and were convinced. They became the core of support needed to gaining the support of the remaining sisters.

When a feasibility study also suggested that the Shaker Village, a group of 20-plus original buildings, could become a "living" museum, the Eldresses agreed and attorney Richard Morse, a member of a Manchester law firm, set up the legal corporation.

During his years at the Shaker Village, Bud worked as the historical director and remains an honorary trustee. Nancy worked as a tour guide, then as director of education. These experiences would serve them well as they pursued "retirement" and a dream deferred -- their own museum.

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Completing the Circle

            Inspired by Silver Star, Bud had continued to collect Native American artifacts all his life: baskets, beadwork, clothing, tools, weapons. Now it was time to share them. Bud sold property, which had been in his family for four generations, to buy a horse farm in Warner, NH. Situated atop a hill near Mt. Kearsarge, the 12-acre spread had both a house for the couple -- and an enclosed riding arena for their museum, which would open in 1991. Bud insists that the venture would not have happened without the partnership of his wife Nancy. "I have a lot of wild ideas. She's the filter system that makes them practical. I'm just a lucky guy surrounded by people more intelligent than I am who helped me."

Darryl had always wanted to contact Silver Star to surprise his father and to let the Chief know what an impression he had made. The research savvy historian, to Bud’s "utter amazement," connected with a grandson of Silver Star in Rhode Island. Though the Chief had passed away, Bud and Nancy honored 32 members of Silver Star's family on opening day of Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum -- a circle completed.

            The circle also figures prominently in the floor plan of the 8,500 sq. foot museum, both for symbolism and, as Nancy says, "surprise." Guests can see only a few regional galleries at one time.

Museum Director Krista Katz says, "They [the galleries] take you on a journey of the United States, in which New England Woodland Tribes form the most significant focus." The thousand "stellar artifacts" include a 3-4 foot Apache olla, a Nez Pierce cradle board, a Chippewa/Ojibway adolescent boy's ceremonial outfit and Southwestern pottery 7,000-12,000 years old.

Katz marvels, "The thing that amazes me is that an ordinary man -- not a man of wealth and privilege -- has the perseverance and dedication to share with the public in this way."

            Significantly, the museum has little signage. Bud explains, "I wanted a museum with a voice. Let the tour guides flesh out the artifacts. Just show what they [the Native Americans] loved. Touch the heart. Touch the people."

            Artifacts are just the beginning. Bud worked for four years at the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University's Botanical Gardens, so plants play a prominent role in the setting. The museum's acreage includes a Medicine Walk through nearby pine woods where signs identify plants used by Native Americans. Heritage corn grows in a nearby garden. A tipi and sweat lodge on a grassy hilltop command a view of Mt. Kearsarge. Bud says, "I wanted to make a tranquility zone where people can find peace, not just a mausoleum of artifacts. We want this to go on long after we're here." In addition to pow wows and festivals, the ever-growing Museum offers educational camps and workshops. Last year alone, 6,500 school children visited the Museum. "Without the help of my wife, Krista, the staff and volunteers, none of this could happen," Bud maintains. "we're all connected."

These days Bud says he's "fishing" for a new project. Coming from a family with longevity genes-- one aunt lived to 105 -- he's not done yet. The octogenarian idealist still tells stories, mows lawn, lugs rocks and plants trees. "Life isn't worth anything unless you leave it better than you found it," he says -- unless you find your place in The Circle.

Ed's note: This article was produced for Heart of New Hampshire Magazine and HeartofNH.com and transferred to this website to assure that the stories and articles written for the magazine would never be lost to the public.

Our Time Comes

Color Image by Wayne D.King

Taken at the National Mall, Washington, DC at the Pow Wow celebrating the opening of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian.

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Biography: Dave W. Presby - A Man on a Mission

In the shadow of the Presidentials, Dave Presby works magic in ways that might just help save the planet.

by Barbara Bald & Wayne King


Dave W. Presby is a man on a mission ... a man with a dream.

With the majesty of the Presidential mountain range and the rolling fields of Whitefield and Jefferson as the backdrop for his growing company, it’s probably no surprise that a fellow like Dave Presby would consider himself an avid conservationist and environmentalist. Yet his business, septic disposal systems, would seem to steer him in a contrary direction. Not so.

David Presby’s mission is to honor the legacy of his forebearers and his homeland by turning over a world that is cleaner and safer to the next generation.  While he is already playing his part in that grand tradition, he hopes to do that in a way that will ultimately change the way we dispose of sewage – to achieve drinking water-quality outflow from a septic system that is less expensive to build, longer lasting, and can be built on any kind of terrain.

He’s already within striking distance of those goals. The Presby system is, by most accounts, about 40% less expensive than a traditional system. It also does not require a flat surface, as most conventional systems do (several ski areas are using it under their slopes), and it uses considerably less space. The biggest challenge still ahead is to produce drinking water quality effluent, but even that is achievable to his mind.

Talk with Dave Presby and he’s sure to get that faraway-look in his eyes as he describes the vision of standing in front of a crowd of people and filling his water glass from the downstream-end of his septic system and drinking it as they watch . . . “We’ll do it,” he says with confidence.

Americans in general - and NH folk in particular - love ingenious inventions and revel in the success stories of people who manage to bring their dreams to life. Behind each inventor there is a unique story to tell and something in each individual’s background that instills an unwavering confidence in both themselves and their inventions. Dave Presby embodies that spirit.

Born in Littleton, NH, Dave has lived his fifty-one years within a ten-mile radius of the town of Sugar Hill, where he now lives with his wife Sheila, four dogs, two cats and two horses. There, they also successfully raised their children. While this may give you the impression that Dave is parochial, that could not be farther from the truth. On any given day you might find Dave jumping into one of his planes and flying off to a convention or a training or to convince some stubborn bureaucrat that his system is, in fact, “all that.”

A burly man with the presence of a North Country icon, Dave has a twinkle in his eye, brawny arms, and a persistence that’s hard as a rock. He credits his distant relative Ozzie Heath for this creativity and tenacity. From the ages five to eleven, Dave spent summers, weekends and holidays with him. Since Ozzie had no children, Dave was like a son to him and describes Ozzie as a “thrifty tinkerer who knew how to survive.” Under Ozzie’s tutelage, Dave learned to work with wood, repair machinery, use vintage tools, garden… and become self-reliant.

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Dave’s second mentor was his grandfather, Lester Presby, “ an interesting, crusty, frugal man who disliked banks and heated with wood till he was eighty.” Dave adds that while everyone else was plowing their fields with horses, his granddad bought the first tractor in the area and began plowing his own fields, as well as the fields of others. His income went from $.50/day to earning enough to purchase a piece of the Mount Washington Hotel. What was his biggest lesson? “Never quit. If the job seems impossible, it means it’s just gonna take a little longer.” Some other behind-the-scenes influences on Dave’s life were his mother, “who backed you no matter what you wanted to do, and always pushed you to do more and better”; Ross Coffin, who among other things got him interested in flying; and Shirley Mann who, in 1972, taught Dave to fly.

In his younger years, Dave worked for his father, who had started Presby Construction in 1948. He also worked other jobs that reflected his broad range of interests and his voracious appetite for learning and doing. Presby Construction’s forte was dirt work, and by the time Dave bought the company from his father in 1986 they had become a major player in various phases of construction in the North Country including septic system installation, maintenance and consulting. Dave had also worked with Gibbs Labs on water systems. It was the nexus between these experiences that started his entrepreneurial gears grinding and meshing with the inventor’s passion that had consumed him since his youth.

Conventional septic systems, he theorized, seemed to work okay in terms of putting the problem out of sight; however, they caused too many groundwater problems because the bacteria needed to break down the waste couldn’t survive in the environment of a conventional system. They also were prone to failure on a regular basis.  Dave saw the need to develop something that created its own unique ecosystem… something where the bacteria needed to break down the septage would not only survive but would flourish. As he puts it, “the faster the (good) bacteria grows, the cleaner the water will be when it emerges from the system.”

Having framed the problem, Dave’s mind then went to work on the solution. First you needed surface area for the bacteria to grow – lots of it. Where conventional systems were oxygen starved (anaerobic), you needed instead an aerobic environment with plenty of circulating oxygen, an environment where the bacteria were not killed off by the sludge bonding to the surface of the pipe. With these things in mind, a conceptual framework began to develop in his mind – a multi-layered system of transfer for septage that went far beyond the traditional pipes of a conventional system to create an underground ecosystem of “scrubbing bacteria.”

At the time, of course, nothing of the sort existed. In fact, even the pipes necessary to form the inner layer of his theoretical system didn’t exist. Dave searched around and found a Canadian company that manufactured a pipe that came close to his needs, and he then invented his own machinery to perforate the pipes. Dave began to experiment with various media to achieve the goal of an underground ecosystem until he had come up with a system that he named and has patented as the Enviro-Septic Leaching System.

In 1995, the Canadian company that had been producing his pipe sent a representative of the company to tell him that they were doubling the price of the pipe. When Dave protested, the representative told him that he had nowhere else to go and he’d just have to live with the increase. What would have been a disaster for most companies was just a bump in the road for David Presby. Within months, Presby had put together a plan for his own specialized plastics extruder using machinery invented from surplus sawmill machinery and wheelbarrow parts. With the help of the North Country Investment Corporation he built the equipment and began manufacturing plastic piping precisely to his own specifications. Best of all, our environmental-inventor used recycled plastics for both the pipe and the matting that would surround it, to further minimize the environmental impact of the process.

Today, as you stand on the cement floor of the giant, steel-beamed warehouse, you see an efficient operation with two manufacturing lines along the walls. The center of the building provides a vast inner space for a forklift to deliver materials from one end of the building to the other. A small machine shop sits in one corner of the building to custom-make any new part needed for a particular job. Of the two production lines, one takes recycled plastic pellets and fashions them into perforated pipes called extrusion tubes. The second line manufactures giant rolls of green-fibered mats that are custom-made to fit around the pipes. At the assembly end of the building, where feeders grab the mats, machines sew them around the moving pipes. There, they are cut into ten-foot lengths and stacked for shipping, all within a matter of minutes!

Michelle Crawford, office manager, explains that the raw recycled plastic is routed through North Stratford by railcar and reaches Whitefield via tractor-trailer. The plastic, which resembles “tapioca or styrofoam beads in bean bags,” is stored in six silos on the property and piped into the building to manufacture the tubes and mats. The entire system is completely enclosed with all waste-streams recycled internally.

Michelle describes Presby Environmental as “a company where employees work together as a family, making a product that everyone believes in.” Everyone loves working for Dave and admires his unique ability to have turned a small, grass-roots operation into a successful, nation-wide business that is already changing sewage treatment in this country.

So, just how does the Enviro-Septic System work? Why is it so user and ecologically friendly?

In any septic system the first stop outside of the home is the septic tank. In the tank, solid waste settles to the bottom where anaerobic bacteria break them down. The fluid (effluent) heads for the leaching field where it meets oxygen-loving bacteria. Eventually, after flowing through the system, it is released into the ground (at this point the water is known as leachate).

In Enviro-Septic System the effluent is filtered through fibered-mats, which trap 99% of any hazardous contaminants, such as coliform bacteria, that might reach groundwater and threaten drinking-water. There, the bacteria proliferate and decompose any remaining solids that were captured by the fibers. The leachate needs only six inches of sand around the pipes to insure its safe release into the environment. This new system requires no pumps, filters, or electricity, no additives or special maintenance. Since it needs no stone and less fill and has pipes that can be bent to ninety degree-angles, the system takes up less land and can be used on sloping, hard-to-reach areas. The parts are easy to install, maintenance free, and hence less expensive to a homeowner. The owner need only to hire a designer who will look at the soil, slope, and number of bedrooms to propose a design.

In addition to the environmental and economic benefits of the system, it is far less likely to fail than conventional systems. Statistically one to two percent of conventional septic systems experience failure during their first year. Of all the Enviro-Septic Systems now in the ground in NH, fewer than one tenth of one percent of those systems have experienced problems. To make an apples-to-apples comparison: in a pool of 95,000 systems over a fourteen-year period, 13,330 conventional systems would statistically fail while Presby has documented only 85 system failures. Further, a failed conventional system would require complete replacement, while a Presby system can simply be renewed on site – at considerably less cost.

With a system like this, one might expect it to be sweeping through the nation and beyond. But in-point-of fact the world is a bit slow on the uptake. Dave is understandably reluctant to be critical of bureaucrats - after all this is highly regulated field - but the bare- knuckled truth is that change often comes slowly to government systems, particularly when entrenched interests are involved.

There’s also the “Hick Factor” to deal with. Dave laughs, but you can cut the irony in the air with a knife as he says “some of these folks hear that we’re from New Hampshire and their first reaction is that we are still disposing of our septage in a VW microbus buried in the backyard! They don’t know that we were environmentalists before anyone even coined the term.”

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Nonetheless, forward-thinking regulators have jumped on-board the Enviro-Septic System bandwagon. Today nearly 95% of new septic systems in NH employ the Presby system.  Dave beams when he describes the fact that the system is approved in five states including NH and the province of Quebec.

In a five-hour certification class for designers and installers, often taught by Dave himself,  Presby Environmental provides engineers and septic installers with training in designing, installing, trouble-shooting, venting, sanding and sloping. Since one system can be placed atop another, the design can increase the amount of bacterial surface in a small area, and thus handle the high-strength wastewater of businesses and restaurants. Dave explains that 75% of the McDonalds chains in the six approved areas are using the system successfully, and he is now speaking at various colleges to promote this eco-friendly, homeowner-friendly approach to waste management.

What’s in the future for Dave? While Presby Plastics is adding another production line to the Whitefield plant, Presby Environmental is seeking design approval in other states. Dave strives to keep the business a family-owned company that designs, manufactures, distributes and trains the people who install the product to ensure that quality is maintained.

Dave Presby has all the qualities of the iconic American inventor: creativity, motivation, determination, passion and mentors who supported him. And then, finally, there is that rare blend of patience and persistence – what Yankee old timers called stick-to-it-ive-ness - that bodes well for all of us and for our beloved planet.




You can learn more at www.PresbyEco.com or by calling 603-837-3826.

Ed's note: This article was produced for Heart of New Hampshire Magazine and HeartofNH.com and transferred to this website to assure that the stories and articles written for the magazine would never be lost to the public.