It is the grandchildren’s favorite story.

As 97-year-old Arnold Helfand tells it, he was only five years old, but knew it was a bad idea for big brother Barney to tie the bull so close to the well.

“Don’t do that,” Arnold remembers saying.

The well on the family’s Chase Road dairy farm was an uncovered hole, flush with the ground. Sure enough, the bull fell in the well. Tail first.

Arnold told the story on December 3, seated with two of his sisters, in a corner of the jam-packed Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust headquarters – also known as the old Helfand farm, where all three were born and raised.

The occasion was the conservation group’s annual Holiday Open House – part get-together, part fund-raiser, and very much a coming out party for the renovated and expanded Helfand farmhouse.

For decades, the DNRT’s offices were located in the old Southworth Library in Padanaram. In September, at the conclusion of a $1 million Helfand Farm renovation project, the group moved its headquarters to the farm.

Hundreds of DNRT members and supporters packed the building for the event. With mulled cider and snacks in hand, they walked through meeting rooms and offices and even into the basement, remarking on everything from the quality of the work to the value of having the DRNT located closer to the geographic center of town.

The fundraising aspect came in the form of a raffle – with $10 tickets earning each purchaser a chance to win items ranging from a day at the spa to “soup for 12.”

And the Helfands visited the family homestead. Sisters Sophie and Edith didn’t have far to come. Both Dartmouth residents, they are old hands at telling local historians about the property. Arnold Helfand traveled from his West Hartford, Connecticut home, escorted by his son and granddaughter.

Together, Arnold, Edith and Sophie are three of the six still-surviving, 13 siblings who were raised on the farm.

The women remember spinning tops, and playing baseball and touch football with their brothers. And everyone remembers the day the bull fell in the well.

“The whole town turned out!” laughed Sophie. Arnold said he heard the news while harvesting turnips in the orchard – and hastened back to the house to join the crowd.

The story has a happy ending.

As it turns out, a nearby neighbor ran a gravel pit and was a bit of an engineer. Rigging up a pulley and rope system, he was able to extricate the wet livestock from the well with no major harm done.

And Barney never again tied the bull that close to the well.