There are six words painted on a rock along a highway in New Hampshire. It’s on the right-hand side of the road if you’re going north toward Newbury, just a few miles before town. How those words got there — and why just one of them was added later — is still a mystery.
Gretchen Hamel lived in a farmhouse with her parents on the other side of the road from the rock – in the 1970s. She was a high schooler back then. Her parents raised chickens, sheep and geese — pretty common for the area.
“So one morning, I woke up and looked at my bedroom window across the street," she said. "And on the rock ledge that was there was painted, ‘Chicken Farmer, I Love You.'”
Gretchen didn’t think much about it.
"And then I went away to college," she said. "At some point, I was home on a school vacation. And I looked at my bedroom window and I saw ‘Chicken Farmer, I Still Love You.’”
Repainted — with that new word — ‘still.’
“And I thought, wow, that's really nice," she said. "I can pretend that it's for me, even if it isn't, and it feels good to think that somebody loves me.”
Meanwhile, the talk did not die down. The rock became a landmark. Local shops sold rock paperweights inscribed with “Chicken Farmer I Still Love You.”
Heather Chvala moved here in 2011 and bought an auto garage with her husband — Rainbow Garage, on Route 103, just before you get to the rock heading north.
“Especially during the summer, I get, you know, four or five people every day coming, ‘Do you know where that rock is?’" she said. "And for just being a rock, it's kind of a big tourist attraction that a lot of people want to see.”
Heather said she's a romantic, so she loves the rock.
"I mean, who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want someone that is so in love with you, and is so proud of the fact that they want everybody to know? ... I kind of hope that people would still do that. They don't, but it would be nice if they did.”
But not everyone’s a romantic — as the town learned in 1997.
“There was an anonymous complaint to [Department of Transportation]," said Dennis Pavlicek, Newbury’s town administrator. “And they, instead of notifying the town, they automatically sent their crew over and they redmarked over the offensive words or whatever.”
In other words, covered up the so-called ‘graffiti’ with red paint.
“And that's what started everyone getting all riled up," he said.
Dennis remembers the complaints at town board meetings. People were heartbroken — and angry. An anonymous someone repainted the message — maybe the original author, no one knows. But locals all agreed, they had to do something to protect Chicken Farmer for the future. They came up with the idea of a petition to the state Department of Transportation.
The state agreed — and the message became officially protected. The whole affair got written up in Yankee Magazine. They named it the ‘love story of the year.’ Local shops have a copy of the article on hand for visitors. And the author of that article claimed to have identified the recipient of the message: Gretchen Rule, now Gretchen Hamel, who lived across the street from the rock.
Nearly two decades after the Yankee Magazine article, a new theory emerged. And we’ll dive into that one, too — on the next episode of Off the Path.
