LYME — At Town Meeting in March, Lyme voters approved spending $150,000 to “remove the materials,” which include two dozen unregistered vehicles, stored on two private properties owned by a working-class mother and son.

The paper ballot vote in one of New Hampshire’s wealthiest communities was fairly close, 80-51, which points to how divided residents are over what should be done — if anything — to make Martha and Jed Smith comply with the town’s zoning ordinance.

The Smiths have been at odds with town officials and some neighbors for more than a decade over the condition of their properties at 172 Goose Pond Road and 116 Dorchester Road. It’s hard to argue that the properties aren’t an eyesore.

“I need to clean up,” Jed Smith acknowledged in a recent interview, “but I shouldn’t have to throw away everything I own.”

“Jed sees the value and potential in things that other people write off as junk,” his mother told me. “Thanks to Jed, I’ve never bought a new tire in my life.”

The conflict between the Smiths and the town is about to come to a head.

After the Town Meeting vote, the three-member Selectboard, in consultation with the town’s attorney, gave the Smiths until Aug. 31 to complete the cleanup.

If the job isn’t finished, the Selectboard will “immediately engage a removal company and move forward with the cleanup,” the board wrote in an April 18 letter to the Smiths.

The board reiterated its position, or threat — depending on your point of view — in a July 25 letter, that was “intended to serve as a reminder” of the looming deadline.

A small group of community-minded residents are working with the Smiths to meet the deadline. They’ve rented dumpsters and rolled up their sleeves to help the Smith family get rid of everything from worn tires and rusted appliances to broken lawn furniture and stacks of rotting wood.

Progress is slow. In the front yard of the Goose Pond Road property, I counted nine push lawn mowers last week.

“There’s no way I can get all of this done by August 31st,” said Jed Smith, looking over piles of aut parts and debris. “I’m willing to clean up, just not on the town’s terms. It’s my decision what stays and goes.”

Ray Clark, a contractor and developer who has lived in Lyme for 40 years, is among the residents offering support to the Smiths while keeping in mind that after a decade of legal wrangling, some people in town have lost patience.

“I must admit to being conflicted about this challenge, as there are so many different lenses with which to view it,” Clark told me in an email. “It is a classic situation of rich vs. poor, of native vs. ‘flatlanders,’ of individual rights vs. community rights.”

Selectboard members — and residents pushing for town intervention — argue Lyme is merely enforcing a Grafton County Superior Court order that goes all the way back to November 2015.

The order required the Smiths to remove “all vehicles not registered and inspected, all tires, vehicle parts and other salvage, and all trash or refuse, including items rotting, decaying and decayed.”

But until recently, town officials have been slow to follow through. The reasons vary. The Selectboard’s makeup and priorities can change with Town Meeting elections. The Smiths have also made good faith efforts over the years to comply with the order.

“I don’t think Lyme is going to come out of this blameless,” Clark said.

The Smiths are “decent people,” he added. “Many of us are sympathetic to the predicament that they find themselves in.”

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In 2006, Jed Smith purchased the double-wide mobile home on a half-acre lot that sits just off Goose Pond Road for $80,000, town records show. Smith and his wife, Catherine, raised their two children, Cheyenne and Caleb, in the three-bedroom home.

On a night in late January 2014, tragedy struck the family. Catherine, who battled chronic health problems, died suddenly of heart failure inside the home, in spite of the best efforts of emergency medical workers to save her. She was 31.

After his wife’s death, Smith said that he and the children, ages 8 and 10 at the time, couldn’t bear to continue living in the home, which is a couple of miles from Route 10, between Lyme and Hanover. It’s been vacant for 10 years.

“I went on autopilot,” Smith said, referring to a lengthy stretch following his wife’s death. “I worked and took care of the kids. That’s all I could manage.”

Smith, 45, is a jack-of-all trades with a strong work ethic. He mows lawns, plows driveways, cuts firewood and does some carpentry. He works two days a week at the Norwich transfer and recycling center, which is where I met him a few years ago. (Full disclosure: I’ve hired Smith in the past to do chainsaw work and mow the field at my family’s camp in West Fairlee.)

Smith is mechanically inclined. “Jed is a smart kid who can fix just about anything,” said Ben Kilham, a longtime Lyme resident and current Selectboard member. (Kilham is best known for his work with bears. His family’s nonprofit refuge in Lyme cares for orphaned and abandoned cubs before releasing them back into the wild.)

At a Selectboard meeting in late July, the Smiths gave an update on where the cleanup stood. “We’ve had a great deal of support, not only from family and friends, but other members of the community,” Jed Smith told the board.

He credited Clark and Kym Williams, another Lyme resident, with spearheading the community cleanup effort. Jed’s dad, David, a former Orford selectman, and other family members are pitching in as well.

After the Smiths left the meeting, I talked with them outside Lyme’s town office building. This summer, Jed and his partner, Taylor Gray, are living at a campground in Bath, N.H., in a used camper that they purchased for $1,000. Their infant son, Colton, born on Father’s Day, and Gray’s 8-year-old son, Keegan, are with them.

Martha Smith, an executive assistant for a top administrator at Dartmouth’s medical school for 20 years, is retired. At 68, she lives with her daughter in Orford while recovering from knee surgery.

“Yes, we did let the places go, but we had a lot to deal with,” she said. “Our family’s first priority was making sure (Jed’s) kids were taken care of and were on solid footing.”

Both have graduated high school. Cheyenne, 20, is working at a restaurant in Fairlee and living on her own. Caleb, 18, has a job as a welder and is taking a course to earn his commercial driver’s license.

The Smiths agree the 50-year-old mobile home on Goose Pond Road has reached at point where it’s beyond repair.

A potential buyer for the property, which the town has assessed at $105,600 and has about $38,000 remaining on a mortgage, stepped forward last year. “Jed was made a good offer,” Kilham said.

The offer came from a wealthy Lyme resident whom Smith didn’t want to name. In a meeting at the law office of the resident’s attorney, Smith said he asked for time to go over the offer with his children before signing a sales agreement.

Smith came away from the meeting with a bad feeling. “It felt like a power play, and they thought I was ignorant,” he said.

The deal fell through.

While her name is listed on town records for the Goose Pond property, Martha Smith told me that if it’s sold, she wants the money to go to her son and Gray, who have been together for five years.

“I want them to find a place of their own (outside of Lyme) and not be bothered,” she said.

The house on Dorchester Road, which is on the way to the Dartmouth Skiway, has been in the Smith family for more than a century.

Like the mobile home on Goose Pond Road, the house hasn’t been lived in for years.

Martha Smith’s father, had a small farm on the 17-acre property, which features a large field and several apple trees. Lon Smith’s hay baler is among the pieces of machinery left in the field for years.

Many of the unregistered vehicles aren’t visible to anyone who passes by on Dorchester Road. A row of trees blocks the field from the road.

Behind the two-bedroom house, sits a mobile home with a sagging flat roof. It’s where Martha Smith and her two young children lived after her divorce.

Jed grew up swimming and fishing in Grant Brook, a stone’s throw from his family’s front yard. “Some of my best memories as a kid are catching brookies and then frying them up with a little butter,” he said.

When I stopped on a recent Sunday afternoon, he was sorting through construction materials, trying to decide what to toss into a dumpster. Smith showed me around the backyard. “To the untrained eye, it just looks like all junk and not worth saving,” he said. “I see value where nobody else does.”

In his Nov. 25, 2015 order, Judge Lawrence MacLeod wrote that he was “not unsympathetic to some of the (Smiths’) contentions and acknowledges that the (Smiths) have made some attempt to comply.”

But they have failed to “comply fully in a reasonable and timely fashion and are in fact continuing to maintain what amounts to illegal junk yards in violation of state law,” MacLeod ruled.

Smith maintains that he’s not in the junk yard business. Vehicles that he buys for a few hundred dollars he uses for parts or fixes up to run himself or use on jobs.

Each vehicle comes with a story. “This one I can’t lose,” Smith said, pointing to a 1989 Chevrolet Blazer that he and his late wife, Catherine, would use for off-road adventures. “It just needs a little cosmetic work and a fuel pump,” he said.

Smith stops at each vehicle, pushing through the tall grass that’s grown up around fenders and wheels. A 1978 Chevy C10 pickup needs a clutch. A 1986 GMC one-ton truck needs a clutch and brakes.

A 1999 Chevy Tahoe with 256,000 miles requires a new engine. “Catherine loved it,” Smith said. “I hate to part with it. We were running it when she died.”

Once he gets it running again, Smith plans to give it to his daughter. “It has sentimental value,” he said. “It was her mom’s favorite vehicle.”

Given enough time and body paint, Smith said he could make all of them “road worthy.”

Most are “square bodies” — pickups and SUVs with a box-like shape that General Motors built between 1973-1987. “To other people, these trucks are a lost cause,” Smith said. “They’re just rickety, rusty junks. I’m a gearhead. I look at fixing them up as a challenge.”

A few years ago, his son, Caleb, came up with an idea for a YouTube channel called “SquareBody Obsessed.” In one video, Caleb is behind the wheel of a Blazer with Smith in the passenger’s seat as they whip around the snow-covered field. It speaks to the “connection my son and I have developed by working on these trucks together,” Smith said.

Scott Veracka, who has had an auto repair shop in Lyme for 25 years, said square bodies are ideal for plowing snow. In recent years, they’ve become collector’s items. In good condition, a square body can sell for five figures.

Veracka isn’t sure of the condition that Smith’s square bodies are in, after years of being stored outdoors in the elements. They might not have much value to anyone but Smith.

As for the town forcing Smith to remove them from his family’s property or lose them? “It’s a tough call,” Veracka said.

In the Live Free or Die state, property rights are a big deal. Even in a largely gentrified community as Lyme, the old adage that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” still holds true.

But Lyme isn’t the town that many old-timers recall. Years ago, “a lot of people in Lyme lived like Jed,” said Kilham, 72, whose family moved to town when he was 9 years old.

Lyme’s median household income of almost $136,000 annually puts it among the top 10% of communities in the state, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Lyme, which has about 1,700 residents, is dominated by a “wealthy elite, who want to destroy my lifestyle,” Smith said.

When deciding whether to put the cleanup article up for a vote at Town Meeting, the Selectboard’s Judith Brotman and David Kahn, along with the town’s budget committee, were in favor of it. Kilham abstained from the board’s vote.

“I sympathize with Jed,” Kilham told me.

Still, the Smiths are “clearly in violation” of the town zoning ordinance, he said. “As a Selectboard, we’re caught in the middle. It’s not with any pleasure that we have to do this.”

According to Town Meeting minutes, the article was brought to voters “due to the large volume of calls and complaints received by the Selectboard,” Kahn told residents.

Some residents argue the Smiths are hurting the value of neighboring properties. Although the town hasn’t performed environmental tests, concerns have been voiced that gasoline and oil from unregistered vehicles stored on the Dorchester Road property could be leaking into Grant Brook.

Now, five months after Town Meeting, if the board doesn’t enforce its Aug. 31 deadline, “there will be people in here, demanding that we do our jobs,” Kilham said.

Town officials are talking with a private company about performing the cleanup, which is expected to take several months. It’s “not our intention” to take the properties from the Smiths, Brotman, the board’s chairwoman, told me.

If the town has to follow through with the plan to pay for the cleanup and isn’t reimbursed by the Smiths, it could place liens on the properties. Under one scenario, the town could wait until the Smiths sell the properties — if they decide to do so — before trying to recoup cleanup costs.

The town already has a lien on the Goose Pond road property for unpaid real estate taxes during the last three years. Smith said he has made partial payments. Town records show he’s about $7,000 in arrears. The property taxes are paid up to date on the Dorchester Road real estate.

Early on in the cleanup, Clark gave Jed Smith a book, “Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving and Hoarding.”

Smith read it, and could see parts of himself in the book. He takes exception, however, when people call him a hoarder. “I’m a pack rat,” he said. “I hate to throw stuff away.”

Kym Williams, who along with her husband, Mark, is involved in the cleanup effort, is an adjunct professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. She has master’s degree in public health.

The Smiths are “emblematic of families in many Upper Valley towns that over time, collect, store and hoard,” Williams told me via email. “From a public health perspective, this pattern is deeply rooted and deserves greater social and mental health support.”

Since starting in May, volunteers and the Smiths have filled two dumpsters with debris and are now working on a third. Two loads of scrap metal have also been hauled off. Last week, Jed Smith and Mark Williams hauled a second truckload of old tires to a company in West Lebanon for recycling.

“We wanted to help the Smiths so the properties would be in better shape, providing them with more control over their lives,” Kym Williams said. “It took years to get to this point and the task for the Smiths to get rid of all items by the end of August is daunting.”

“The roots of the Smith family go deep in the community and it is only fair we offer a helping hand through this hard and stressful time.”

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.