Rue Toland stood in a sheep barn as the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival came to an end, and she frantically called her husband to ask if they could buy two lambs.
“These sheep were born on our anniversary. There’s no service in the sheep barn. It’s closing. Speak now or forever hold your peace,” she remembered saying to her husband.
As soon as she heard his approval, she loaded her first two lambs into the back of her Subaru with her 4-year-old child riding in a car seat beside the sheep.
Eight years later, a flock of 16 sheep called the barn behind Toland’s house in Canterbury home. Most of them arrived in the back of her Subaru, and now, all of them have been moved to a new home in Maine, which Toland hopes will be a refuge from legislation targeting trans individuals.
The move is a change of scenery for Toland, her family and her flock, but she thinks fondly of Canterbury as the place where her love of sheep began.
Toland has knit and spun yarn for over 20 years, but it wasn’t until she moved to New Hampshire that she had a flock of her own sheep to shear and from which to make homemade yarn. In Canterbury, she learned to create and sell her own yarn with the help of the fiber arts and farming communities.
“It’s a really wonderful, welcoming community that I’ve made some really great friends through,” she said.
The sheep provide some reprieve from the business of being a mom of three and working as an in-house counsel for a manufacturing company.
“If I have a really stressful day, I’ll come out and just hang with the sheep for a little bit which is really nice,” she said.
‘Happy coincidence‘
Toland originally had no plans to farm or raise sheep, but by 2023, her farm, Heliosphere Farm, was harvesting enough wool to produce 39 pounds of yarn a year with over 150 skeins.
The name, “heliosphere,” references the outer atmospheric layer of the Sun. Almost all her farm animals have named inspired by Greek mythology and the Milky Way, including two pygmy goats named after the two small moons orbiting Mars as well as the gods of fear and terror: Phobos and Deimos.
“Everybody here was chosen for their fiber and their personality,” Toland said.
She said she prides herself on having a diverse flock of sheep, which allows her to create all different types of yarn.
Every year when she starts the process of shearing and spinning the wool to make yarn from the fine and medium wool, she can decide to blend the various fleeces together or individually. This makes unique yarn every time. Sometimes, Toland also uses the wildflowers growing in front of her house to add color.
With so much yarn in production, Toland started to sell the skeins of yarn online and at festivals around New England, the same festivals she attended as an avid customer for decades.
She never expected to be on the other side of the counter, but considers the switch from customer to vendor a “happy coincidence.”
Greener pastures
Despite their love for the Granite State and the farm they have built here, Toland and her husband have chosen to move their farm and family to Maine.
They’ve planned to move since the presidential election, and Toland said recent state legislation banning certain medical treatments for transgender minors further motivated them to move.
“We are well aware of the nasty stuff going on against trans kids,” Toland said. “That’s not an environment that we want our kids in.”
Toland said this week that her kids and her flock have already moved to a sheep farm on the coast of Maine that is almost 10 times larger than the current Heilosphere Farm.
After months of organization, Toland sees the move as a long time coming. “It is very exciting,” she said.
She said her dedication to her farm, her sheep and her yarn won’t change: Each morning, Toland will wake up bright and early to refill the water trough and lead the sheep to their breakfast, just like she did in Canterbury.
“It’s a fantastic way to start the day. It’s calming and centering and I’m never in the moment as much as I am with the animals,” she said.