Nashua River Watershed Association - Home

Positioning Styles

2019-02-06T20:05:00-05:00

This is an article showing how the various positioning styles work.

The names that are in the "Styles" dropdown box in the editor are actually aliases for the styles as they appear in the HTML code. For example, the "Image: align left" style is the alias for "floatImageLeft" in the HTML code.

The ordering in the HTML in all the examples is:

The red paragraph
The square(s)
The green paragraph

IMPORTANT NOTE: The positioning from these styles is really only seen in full-width displays. For small/mobile displays, there are other positioning styles that will automatically override these so that there is no wrapping of text around images.

EXAMPLE 1 - No styles applied

There are no styles applied here.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse rutrum egestas feugiat. Mauris suscipit quam sit amet hendrerit convallis. Suspendisse pretium ligula ac nisi dictum consequat. Etiam ut purus dictum, accumsan purus et, auctor risus. Nunc sed odio non ipsum viverra maximus.

Nullam cursus consectetur hendrerit. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Sed a feugiat erat. Nullam ultricies metus eu dui ornare auctor

EXAMPLE 2 - "Image: align left"

We've added the "Image: align left" style to the square.
It aligns ("floats") the square to the left.
It will allow text to wrap around to the square's right side.

Nullam cursus consectetur hendrerit. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Sed a feugiat erat. Nullam ultricies metus eu dui ornare auctor

EXAMPLE 3a - "Image: align left" and "Text: clear left side"

This is the same as Example 2, but we've added the "Text: clear left side" style to the green paragraph.
This will not allow any content to appear to the left of the green paragraph (i.e., this "clears" any content from appearing to the left of the paragraph).

"Text: clear left side": Nullam cursus consectetur hendrerit. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Sed a feugiat erat. Nullam ultricies metus eu dui ornare auctor

EXAMPLE 3b - "Image: align left" and "Text: clear left side"

(The red text is in paragraph #1. It has no styles applied to it) Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse rutrum egestas feugiat. Mauris suscipit quam sit amet hendrerit convallis. Suspendisse pretium ligula ac nisi dictum consequat. Etiam ut purus dictum, accumsan purus et, auctor risus. Nunc sed odio non ipsum viverra maximus.

(The square is in paragraph #2, and has the "Image: align left" style applied to it)
(The green text is in paragraph #3, and has no styles applied to it) Cras ac metus mattis, imperdiet mauris in, imperdiet diam. Phasellus lacinia nisl nec ligula fermentum molestie. Sed vulputate, erat sed scelerisque pharetra

(The purple text is in paragraph #4, and has no styles applied to it) Curabitur gravida pulvinar eros, vel porttitor sapien pretium eleifend. Vivamus ultrices in magna at aliquet.

(The orange text is in paragraph #5, and has the "Text: clear left side" style applied to it) Praesent dapibus tellus nibh, nec tincidunt est porta nec. Praesent id arcu nec ante facilisis tempus.

EXAMPLE 4 - "Image: align right"

The square's style is now "Image: align right".
It aligns ("floats") the square to the right.
It will allow text to wrap around to the square's left side.
The red and green text have no styles applied.

Nullam cursus consectetur hendrerit. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Sed a feugiat erat. Nullam ultricies metus eu dui ornare auctor

EXAMPLE 5 - "Image: align right" and "Text: clear right side"

This is the same as Example 4, but we've added the "Text: clear right side" style to the green paragraph.
This will not allow any content to appear to the right of the green paragraph (i.e., this "clears" any content from appearing to the right of the paragraph).

"Text: clear right side": Nullam cursus consectetur hendrerit. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Sed a feugiat erat. Nullam ultricies metus eu dui ornare auctor

EXAMPLE 6 - "Image: center"

The square's style is now "Image: center".
There is no "float" property assigned to it.
The red and green text have no styles applied.

Nullam cursus consectetur hendrerit. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Sed a feugiat erat. Nullam ultricies metus eu dui ornare auctor

EXAMPLE 7 - "Image: align top"

The style for both squares is "Image: align top".
There is no "float" property assigned to them.
This style is usually used in photo gallery articles, where images are in a row and you want to align their top edges.
Both images are contained within one paragraph.
The red and green text have no styles applied.

Nullam cursus consectetur hendrerit. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Sed a feugiat erat. Nullam ultricies metus eu dui ornare auctor

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2019-02-04T21:42:20-05:00

Farms, Fields, and Forests - Mickola

2015-09-18T18:15:00-04:00

Farms, Fields, and Forests in the Nashua River Watershed: Stories from the Land

Change and Continuity
John Mickola of Ashby, Massachusetts

Interviewed on August 27, 2014 by Al Futterman,
NRWA Land Programs Director

Most summer days, John Mickola can be found in one of a few possible places. He’s either mowing his own hayfields or those of his neighbors in Ashby, or perhaps he is at the town library where he is a long-time member of the Friends of the Library. John lives on a “century farm,” one that has been in his family for more than 100 years.

At the time of this interview, John, a retired teacher, is still farming part-time. He cuts and sells about 1,000 bales of hay per year on 35 acres in eight fields: four his own and four belonging to others. He also uses 12 cord of wood a year that he cuts himself, some of which is used in an outdoor wood boiler on the farm.

In the following short video clips, John speak about his Finnish heritage and connection with the land, on dealing with the inevitability of change, and of his desire to see others have a sense of permanence. Each clip is less than three minutes long. A complete video recording of the Mickola oral history interview is available from the NRWA upon request.

A Finnish Farming Enclave (video 1 of 3)

John speaks about the history of his family and of Ashby's close-knit Finnish community. "Everybody helped each other around the neighborhood."

How Things Have Changed (video 2 of 3)

John describes the changes he has seen. "When I was a kid, every house on this road was a farm." With fewer and fewer farms remaining, John and his family decided on a conservation restriction to preserve their property as open land.

Hopes for the Future (video 3 of 3)

John acknowledges that change is the natural way of things, yet he looks for permanence. "My hope would be that people would look upon this as their home."

Roots in the Finnish Community

John’s Finnish heritage defines his connection with his land, beginning with his grandfather’s immigration from Finland to work in the mines of Minnesota, to the migration of the Finns from Minnesota to the farms in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. John explains:

“There was a movement to the East coast to the Fitchburg, Gardner, Hubbardston area. There’s a great tradition here in this area. They all migrated this way. And my grandfather was living in New Ipswich at the time, as I understand it, which is just over the line [in New Hampshire], and his aunt and her husband bought a little house on Jones Hill Road, on the bottom of Jones Hill Road, and he, my grandfather, had the desire to be near his aunt. So he was looking for land and this farm was up for sale. And so he bought it for $1,300 in 1907. It wasn’t unusual in the sense that every farm on this hill eventually became owned by a Finnish family. It was again a Finnish enclave. So, when I was a kid growing up, all the neighbors were of Finnish heritage.”

The house and land—30 acres of woods and 20 acres of open fields—where John and his family live today is the same, with several modifications and renovations, that his Finnish grandfather bought in 1907. John has added a sauna on the property, an iconic feature of the area’s Finnish farms.

Those who had come before the first Mickola arrived in Ashby were what one would call “Yankees” and they found making a living on these hilly farms to be tough. When, at the turn of the last century, the “Yankees” sold out to immigrants—the Finns in this case—they thought they were taking advantage of the new arrivals. But according to John, “The Finns jumped at the chance, as they had knowledge of farming tough homesteads and brought with them traditional ways to 'enliven’ the land again.”

Originally, the Mickola Farm had ten cows, 500 chickens, and lots of blueberries. The approach to picking of blueberries is an example of the strong support in the Finnish community. The many paper mill workers in Fitchburg would be unemployed during the summer when the factories became too hot. These workers and their families were brought out to pick high-bush blueberries at ten cents a quart for extra money (and to enjoy the out-of-doors) in nearby rural towns like Ashby and Ashburnham. Edwin Chapman, who in 1901 donated the funds to build the Ashby Free Public Library, started his business career and fortune by being a broker for farmers in the area selling their produce and farm goods—including John’s grandfather’s blueberries–in Boston.

The berry fields were managed communally in the fall, when they were burned, and there was a communal approach to haying as well. John recounts, “Everybody helped each other around the neighborhood. So when it came time for haying, the farmers would move from one farm to the other, all helping each other get their hay in.” In the old days, Finnish women and men worked as a team, with the women tending the livestock, and the men managing the haying and cutting of wood. In fact, cooperation was so integral to successful farming that the Finns started the “Fitchburg United Cooperative Farmers” to pool resources. John remembers that his family shopped only at the coop grocery store when he was a kid: “You saved the slips and turned them in at end of year when the profits were divided.”

John Mickola with one of his historic photographs the farm his Finnish grandfather bought in 1907.

Change is Inevitable

There are some things that have not changed on the farm in one hundred years. The house still gets its water from a well fed by a spring at the top of hill. It’s gravity fed, and no electricity or pump is needed. But much has changed.

John was a member of the Ashby Grange for 49 years, from the time he was a teenager until it closed its door for the last time a few years back. He served as Grange Master (as well as Chair of the town’s recently formed Agricultural Commission). Interestingly, Joel Hayward, the first Master of the Ashby Grange, had also lived on this same farm. The Grange, once an active part of the farming community, was closed by local members because they felt that the national organization no longer supported local agriculture as it did before the predominance of agri-business.

In the past decade, where there used to be undeveloped forest and fields, houses have been built on all sides of the Mickola Farm. When John was a child, all the nearby homes were farms, but presently not even one is a full-time farm. Nowadays, the trend is to micro-farms or what John calls "guerilla" farming: people who want two acres, a suburban house, and a job in the city to which they commute. Once John knew all his neighbors: “If I heard the rattle of a car, I would know who it was.”

At the same time, change can be good. John showed a photo of his grandfather at 65 years old on the tractor that eventually killed him in 1940 when he was pulling out stones and the tractor flipped over and crushed him. A few years ago John himself was haying a field with a bailer on his tractor on a steep side of hill when it slipped sideways. His wife convinced him to plant Christmas trees on that hillside, and now, as a “concession to modernism,” he has a four-wheel drive tractor with a roll-bar.

There is other evidence of appropriate changes through the years: a portion of one field was an apple orchard, now it’s a garden; his grandfather’s blacksmith became his father’s mechanical repair shop, and is now their garage. John recently installed a solar array in the area of the farm where the blueberry crates used to be stored. And John points across the still quiet road to where beavers moved in and created a thirty-acre pond in what was once a field. Who knows when the beavers will move on and what will take their place.

“You can’t get stuck in the past but need to learn from that,” John shares. He always enjoyed the ritual of the Grange, and part of the advice in that ritual was, “Take notes, understand what is going on—that change is the ongoing natural way of things—and be able to ride with that and not hold it back.”

The old and the new: A historic photo of John's grandfather at 65 years old; John on the farm that has been in his family for more than 100 years.

A Desire for More Permanence

When asked about his hopes for the future, John responds, “My hope would be that people would become a little more permanent. That they would look at this as more of their home rather than a transition spot so they can move on to something bigger.”

John and his wife prefer open spaces and the woods that are home to moose, deer, and other wildlife. Because they want to keep the earth sustainable and be sure their property is not split up, they made the decision to preserve the family land in perpetuity through a conservation restriction.

In putting the restriction on the property, John hopes “...that it stays in that kind of mixed use situation, where there’s open land, where there’s people who understand farming.”

With their five children grown and owning their own places, John reflects that he “...may be the last generation to live on the place. Perhaps not. But regardless, it’s going to stay the way it is, intact, the way my grandfather bought it.”

In the end, John’s own story may be analogous to one he tells of the big old sugar maple still growing in his front yard. In 1941, a distant relative serving as a hired man on the farm found that the pear tree growing in that same location was dying. He went out to the field and pulled up a sugar maple sapling, and placed it alongside the dying pear tree. “And he told my parents,” John states simply, “it was time to plant a new tree.”

For John, the story is that while there is always change, there will always be a need to encourage continuity in our lives.

Read the full transcript of the John Mickola interview (PDF).

Farms, Fields, and Forests in the Nashua River Watershed: Stories from the Land

2015-09-18T18:15:00-04:00

Farms, Fields, and Forests in the Nashua River Watershed: Voices from the Land

A collaborative project of the Nashua River Watershed Association and Freedom's Way Natural Heritage

As our region is slowly transformed by sprawl and urbanization, the special places in nature and the current working lands may no longer be visible and may disappear from our collective consciousness. The new norm or baseline of what our home landscape looks like becomes one that is more literally concretized or hardscaped and less “open” or containing greenspace. We forget that what we have today in working lands is extraordinarily precious. We forget that some of our lands were rather different not long ago, why they were important to the generations before us, and why knowing about them is so important to the future.

The overarching goal of this oral history project, a collaboration between Freedom’s Way Heritage Association and the Nashua River Watershed Association, is to preserve, enhance, and interpret the historic, cultural and natural resources of the Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area within the Nashua River watershed. These interviews with our area’s residents will preserve their knowledge and stories before the residents and the particular places they speak of -- be they farms, fields, or forests -- vanish. We hope to inspire others to value working lands and to conserve lands understood to be important from a variety of perspectives, whether these be lands that they personally own or lands in their communities that could be protected through municipal efforts.

"When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

---Aldo Leopold, Foreward to A Sand County Almanac

Oral History Interviewees

Click on any selection below for video clips from the interview, a narrative article, historic and recent images, and a link to the full transcript. Full videos are available upon request.

Ashby, Massachusetts
John Mickola

Groton, Massachusetts
John and Laurie Smigelski

Shirley, Massachusetts
Betsy Colburn-Mirkovic and Lee Mirkovic

Sterling, Massachusetts
Jim French

Sterling, Massachusetts
Mike Pineo

Still River, Massachusetts
Paul Willard

Townsend, Massachusetts
Mary, Sue, and Carrie West

Nashua River Watershed Association - Home

Positioning Styles

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Farms, Fields, and Forests - Mickola

Farms, Fields, and Forests in the Nashua River Watershed: Stories from the Land

Change and ContinuityJohn Mickola of Ashby, Massachusetts

Roots in the Finnish Community

Change is Inevitable

A Desire for More Permanence

Farms, Fields, and Forests in the Nashua River Watershed: Stories from the Land

Farms, Fields, and Forests in the Nashua River Watershed: Voices from the Land

A collaborative project of the Nashua River Watershed Association and Freedom's Way Natural Heritage

Oral History Interviewees

Change and Continuity
John Mickola of Ashby, Massachusetts