Cows Outnumber People in Massachusetts Hamlet : Town Takes on State in Long Prison Fight

The marks of battle cover trees and telephone poles in this small town--signs of cows with prison stripes on them, stickers that say only “Never.”

It is all part of New Braintree’s 5-year fight to keep a medium-security state prison from being located among its dairy farms, a fight that now includes a federal investigation of how the Administration of Gov. Michael S. Dukakis chose the site.

In this rural hamlet, where the 2,000-head dairy herd is more than double the population, the cow dictates the pace of life. Patrons fill the small general store for breakfast after the morning milking; people avoid the road in front of Town Hall when the cows cross from the fields in mid-afternoon.

The residents’ protest, which confronted Dukakis at a campaign stop in Iowa last year, gained momentum around the end of June with revelations of an FBI investigation.

However, Dukakis, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, is not a subject of the investigation, the FBI stressed.

The town meeting in May narrowly approved $100,000, nearly one-fifth of the town’s annual budget, to fight the prison plan.

“Now it’s much more of a horse race,” said Dorothea Thomas-Vitrac, a town selectman and a leader of Conserve Our Small Town. “They outweigh us in raw power, but we balance them in people power. I think our horse is a little ahead now.”

Nearing the fifth year of their fight, COST members and supporters claim that the proposal to transform the former Pioneer Valley Academy campus into a 500-bed, medium-security prison would irreversibly alter life in New Braintree, which has no municipal water system and a part-time police chief.

COST, relying on donations and profits from bake sales, has hired an attorney to seek a court injunction against the prison and press for release of all related state documents.

COST has questioned links between the owners of the school site and Dukakis. The state has appraised the 784-acre school site at $8.7 million, although a development firm owned by Daniel Striar and Gary Jacobson purchased the land from the Seventh-day Adventist Church for about $3 million in December, 1985. Jacobson is a boyhood friend of Dukakis and gave $1,000 to his presidential campaign.

Dukakis Administration officials maintain that there are no improprieties and claim New Braintree would be the most appropriate location for a prison in Massachusetts, which has one of the nation’s most overcrowded penal systems.

But the disclosure of the FBI investigation has elevated hopes here that Dukakis may abandon the prison plan to avoid campaign controversy.

“It’s not a political fight,” said Thomas-Vitrac, who followed Dukakis to a campaign stop in Osceola, Iowa, in February, 1987. She said she also spoke with FBI agents last year and recently sent information to the Massachusetts Republican Committee.

“It’s a fight for our way of life,” said Thomas-Vitrac, 44, who moved here 11 years ago.

New Braintree was founded 237 years ago as farm and recreation land for the residents of Braintree, a suburb south of Boston. Little has changed.

Cows sometimes wander into the schoolyard. The tree-shaded crossroads at the village center is marked only by an old brick post office and a Congregational church. There are no stop lights and no pay phones.

Town Clerk Carolyn Glidden, 54, said the “influx” of non-farming families has increased New Braintree’s population from about 500 in the 1960s to nearly 800 today.

“We’re still a little farming community, but things are slowly changing,” said Glidden, whose husband dons the police chief uniform after finishing his full-time landscaping job. “We just want this prison thing to end so we can get on with our lives.”

Cecelia Imbier said she recently rejected a $1-million offer for part of the family dairy farm, which her great-grandfather started more than 150 years ago.

“The developers are already speculating that the prison will go through,” said Imbier, 66. “They underestimate us.”