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REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
3 1833 01115 2466
SOME MEMORIES OF OLD HAVERHILL
IN MASSACHUSETTS
BY ALBERT LEROY BARTLETT
Privately printed and limited to five hundred copies, of which this is No. 4/ 3 /
HAVERHILL, MASSACHUSETTS MCMXV
1781179
SOME MEMORIES OF with OLD HAVERHILL
the compliments of the author
Alberto Ny Brauchen
Ausgabe -1915
ஓசி
Copyright, 1915, by Albert Le Roy Bartlett.
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015
https://archive.org/details/somememoriesofol00bart 0
MRS PEGGY WHITE BARTLETT 1776 --- 1831
1
Bartlett, Albert LeRoy, 1852-
F 84435 .07 Some memories of old Haverhill in Massachusetts ... Haverhill. Mass., 1915. 0.
SHELF CARO
Author's autograph presentation сору. "Privately printed and limited to five hundred copies. of which this is no. 437."
297890 NL 16-467
SOME MEMORIES OF OLD HAVERHILL
I i HE door that opens into the room of the past is unlocked with the smallest of keys, and swings open to the gentlest of pressures. A faded silk purse, starred with silver beads and infolded at either end by a silver sliding ring to hold fast its treasures, lying before me brings back from the years that are gone the one from whose silken-mitted hand it swung. I
see her walking adown the fragrant, flowery road of a far-away yesterday, her leghorn bonnet with a wreath of flowers beneath its brim crowning her banded dusky-gold hair, while its broad ribbons are tied in an expansive bow beneath her dimpled chin. The white Cashmere shawl is draped to disclose at the throat the broad lace collar clasped with a cameo pin, and the shawl itself is held, where its folds meet just below the bosom, by an arabesqued bar of gold. The flounced dress swells over full petticoats, and touches the ground as she moves onward as the wing of the swallow the
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wave. Slipping from the folds of the shawl one hand supports the little silk parasol, brown or black or figured to match the dress, and from the wrist soft undersleeves of lace fall back. The other hand carries this little netted purse, its colors then as bright and fresh as the heart and the dreams of her who bore it. He who is at her side wears a bell- crowned tall hat. The high dickey beneath his strong, clear-cut, smooth-shaven face, is supported by a broad black satin stock. The swallow-tail coat of severe black rolls away to disclose a bit of the figured waistcoat beneath, but fits close over muscular shoulders and swells over sinewy arms.
And the fragrance and the flowers of that road of yesterday, its impressions and its memories, break upon my senses like waves from the expanse of time, rolling in upon the shores of the present and flood- ing them over.
II
The house wherein I write is full of memories, for to it my mother came as a bride to be greeted and welcomed by my grandmother and her family whose home it had been before, and who henceforth were to share it with the new household. One by one they all have followed the angel of death out-
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Of Old Haverhill
ward over the portal, and the first-born and the second-born, leaving in their places memories and visions,-
"-into the night are gone; But still the fire upon the hearth burns on, And I alone remain."
When the house was built it arose amid an or- chard of fruit trees. Forty acres of bloom and scent lay on the slope between it and the glinting, dimpling Merrimac. Peach and plum, pear and apple, apricot and quince, in season gave bloom and in season fruit. Between it and the town, along the river, stretched a short mile of pasture land where the violets bloomed and the luscious black- berry trailed and myriad swallows built their caverned homes in high sand banks. Little the builders dreamed that the factory and the tenement house would devastate this Arcady, and alien races dwell in crowded tenements where then the kine chewed the cud of content in sun-kissed but soli- tary· stretches.
III
There are heirlooms in the old house, precious to him, at least, who lives with them and loves them for association's sake. What romances they call up! What dreams and ambitions! Youth, look-
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ing forward; manhood and womanhood, weaving strong threads into the fabric of life; old age,-and memories! And the romance and the dreams reach back two hundred years. Here is china that graced my great-grandmother's grandmother's table; here some silver, quaintly marked J. C. S.,- wedding silver of my great-great-grandmother's, married in 1756,-the initials meaning that Sarah Longfellow, aged 17, blended her name and her fortunes with General Joseph Cilley's. Senator Jonathan Cilley, the classmate and friend of Haw- thorne and Longfellow, killed in the memorable duel with Senator Graves of Kentucky, was her grandson. Here are law books of my great-great- grandfather, Judge and General Israel Bartlett, and of my great-grandfather, Judge and Lieutenant- Colonel Thomas Bartlett, imported from London in 1745, and bearing their autographs, "Israel Bart- let, Esq., 1746," and "Thomas Bartlett's Book, 1782." Here is the bull's-eye watch which the latter of these carried. It may have noted tri- umphantly the time of Burgoyne's surrender at Sar- atoga, or have, marked the anxious hours at West Point at the time of Arnold's treachery, for Colonel Bartlett was in command of a regiment there.
Here is the huge old bible with the records of the family from 1712 written in it. Here is the tall
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clock that ticked solemnly in the house of the Greenleafs when Benjamin, the arithmetician, was born, and here another, older, that marked time in the home of my mother's father. Here is the ma- hogany bureau, delicately inlaid, with claw feet and swelling front and quaint brass pulls, each em- bossed with an American eagle, that held my grand- mother's wedding linen, and here the Sheraton mirror into which her blushing face looked as she arranged the ribbons and laces for her marriage in 1805.
Behind this latticed closet door are some three- volume novels of the early nineteenth century, The Children of the Abbey, Alonzo and Melissa, carefully kept from my boyhood range; Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Mrs. Hemans' Poems,-books deemed more suitable for youthful minds,-and old, old school books,-the English Reader, printed in Haverhill,- and the little girl who read its didactic pieces, its argumentative pieces, its selections from Milton and Thompson and Pope, was ten years old! -the Rhetorical Reader, the Historical Reader, Murray's Grammar, a Tacitus and other Latin books studied at Dartmouth a hundred and more years ago.
What papers have the pigeon holes of these old desks held! What potent documents have been
Some Memories
written here in the clearest of hands, the ink as it flowed from the quill sanded to dry its exuberance!
How often has this old brick oven yielded bounties of New England cooking! How many times has the old crane in the fireplace held its bur- den of steaming kettles! How often in the still hours of the evening have the family sat about the tiled hearth, dreaming of the promise of coming days or recalling the fortunes of the past, the glow of the logs giving light, and the housewife, whose hands could not be idle, evoking the music of the whirring spinning wheel. And the old Dutch motto set in the hearth is "Wo euer schaz ist, da ist auch euer Hertz,"-Where the treasure is, there is also the heart. Dear days of yore, whose argosies were moored in the safe harbor of home!
Sometimes sitting here alone, in memory I hear again the old stories and ballads told in the sweetest voice that ever fell upon my ears, or the melodies of the songs of long ago,-Lady Washington's La- ment, Mary o' the wild moor, Bonnie Dundee. Was it so long, so very long ago that the first gift of books was put into my hands, the stories of Fran- conia and of Beechnut, by Jacob Abbott? And is that day, that golden day, so very far in the past, when, O wonderful gift !- two little volumes in red, A Child's History of England, by Charles Dickens,
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first led me into the wonderful, entrancing world of history? Grateful beyond words am I for that quiet, gentle leading' that brought me into the kingdom of good literature and taught me to find enjoyment in the common things that lie within the reach of the humblest and the poorest,-
"-tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
So the past is to me like a meadow full of flowers varied in form and hue, sweetly odorous all,-and out of this abundant bloom I gather but a bou- quet.
IV
A brilliant woman of Washington who had long had a prominent place in the highest society there, was speaking of the heart burnings, the petty dis- tinctions, the quarrels over precedence, in which not only the ladies but the men took part. "Tell your mistress," said a distinguished jurist to the servant of the lady whose guest he was, indignant that another than himself had the chief honor of escorting her to dinner, "Tell your mistress that Justice Blank has been here and has gone." . "I have been visiting in the academic town of A-," she added, "where I lived some years ago; and I have
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been somewhat awed by the encroachments of style there. One had a single serving maid when I lived there, but now she must have a retinue, and the old neighborly freedom has been frozen by the icy conventions of modern society." Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. More dear than magnificence pur- chased by the sacrifice of friendly feeling is such a simple neighborhood tea as my mother used to give, whereat she was oftimes both cook and server, when the best china-the old Lowestoft or the blue-sprigged-was brought forth from the parlor cupboard, and the repast was as simple as it was delicious,-biscuits golden brown but white within and light as the heart of youth, butter the gift of kine that fed on flowery meads, honey distilled by the bees of Hymettus, cake with the permeating flavor of spices and fruits, to which time had added the bouquet, and tea that Hebe might have served to the gods. And in my Cranford the atmosphere was clean, and the talk on worthy subjects, and the English pure and undefiled, and the kettle on the hearth sang cheerily.
A dear aunt of mine, the youngest and last of her generation, used often to say as she recalled the Haverhill of her girlhood, "How sweet the birds sang, how fair the flowers were, how beautiful the
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world seemed when youth and hope and happiness dwelt in the heart." In her more than four-score years she had seen the old home, which is my home, successively heated by open fireplaces, by wood stoves, by furnace-heated air, by steam, and by hot water; she had seen it lighted by candles, by lamps for whale oil and for spirits and for kerosene, by gas and by electricity. She had seen the lumber- ing stage coach supplanted by the steam railway and its energetic rival, the electric tram. A host of modern inventions had multiplied the needs and increased the complexities of life. She had seen the transformation of a typical New England communi- ty into a city that retains few of its old character- istics and-alas !- remembers few of its old tradi- tions; she had seen the population change from one of almost unmingled English ancestry to one where- in are commingled many nationalities, and a Cafe degli Duca l' Abruzzi invite patronage where the degenerate descendants of the Indians last pitched their wigwams. And when she would ask me, laughing and knowing full well that it was all before my time, if I remembered the scare of the spectral sow who nightly emerged from beneath "witch bridge," and "lovers' rock with the drooping willow above" that was a trysting place sixty years ago, the Christian Chapel riot, the bars that opened
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from Emerson's field into Washington square and the quest for the buried chest of gold there, or her own great uncle, Israel Bartlett, who was the last to wear the queue, small clothes and silver buckles in the streets of Haverhill, I could only answer, "I remember them as twice-told tales that never lose their charm."
V
I live on the road leading "from Jonathan Shep- ard's past Simon Ayer's," or so the old deed of my farm, given in 1790, describes it, and on Silver Hill, for so another deed locates it; and the last of the Silvers was the occasional companion and the con- stant terror of my boyhood. He lived in a little, black, gambrel-roofed house, the cellar of which still exists on the hill opposite the site of the old Bowley school, now Silver Hill Terrace. Beside his house was a tree hung with all manner of iron fruit, chains, bars, huge anchors, the relics of a sea-faring life. He was spare, grizzly, and to my youthful eyes the personification of extreme old age. When the wind blew from the south he was mild and full of pleasant recollections; but when the penetrating east wind blew and stirred rheumatic pains, and his thin legs were wrapped outside his trousers with red flannel, he was a very gattling gun of profanity. But he
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told me many a tale of Indian times, tales that his father had told him and his father had told him, for he was of old Haverhill ancestry. Over old cellars, in some of which sturdy trees had grown to full size, he rebuilt-in imagination-the rude houses that once rose there, and summoned back the settlers whose homes they were. Across the road from my house there was one of these cellars. Some plum trees grew overhanging it, and by its almost buried walls rue and rosemary still survived. In the dread times of Indian warfare, so he told me, the dwellers there, looking out of the little windows of the house, saw in the murky darkness the stealthy approach of the savages. Justa flutter of light here and there disclosed their presence. The bold little garrison loaded their blunderbusses and fired away, only to discover when morning broke that they had riddled the goodwife's washing, which had been spread on some brush to dry, and which a gentle wind had made seem creatures of life and danger.
Ayer street and Varnum street mark the domain of another quaint and crotchety veteran of my boy- hood, Varnum Ayer, and Ford street turned into house-lots the gardens of my great uncle, Colonel Ebenezer Ford, whom I remember as always wear- ing the old-fashioned dress coat that well befitted hisstately and dignified presence. Opposite his home
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dwelt "Old Sloc," -- Rufus Slocumb, who earlier kept a tavern on Merrimack street, a short distance west of Main street, and who, before the coming of the railroad, was the freighter of goods to and from Bos- ton. He began this business in 1818, and in 1835 he kept forty horses and two yoke of oxen constant- ly employed in the business, and his large covered wagons almost literally lined the road from Haver- hill to Boston. In one day in 1836 he had full loads for forty-one horses and eight oxen. In his old age when I knew him he could dance like a cotillion master, he could swear like old Silver, and he had a shrill, raucous voice that, like that of Whitefield the apostle of Methodism, could be heard a mile. Small, thin, he was full of intensity and activity, and with a grim sense of humor and unfearing de- termination he played no trifling part in the history of the town.
In August, 1835, the Reverend Samuel J. May, having preached in the First Parish Church on Sunday morning, desired to give an anti-slavery address in the evening. For this purpose he found no hall open to him except the Christian Union Chapel, where the Hotel Webster now stands on the corner of Washington and Essex streets. The lecture room was in the second story of the building and was reached by two flights of stairs
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on the outside of the building. Mr. May was at- tended by Elizabeth Whittier, a sister of the poet, and Harriet Minot, both young ladies of great courage and high spirit. A mob assembled and tried to break up the meeting. Failing by lesser means to accomplish their purpose, they drew up before the building a loaded cannon. It was their intention to tear away the outside stairs, fire the cannon, and by a panic bring disaster to those within the Chapel. But into the midst of the mob, alone and unarmed there rushed "Old Sloc," blaz- ing with anger, and with mighty oaths flung forth by his stentorian voice he scattered the cowardly mob and frustrated their design.
VI
When I went to the old Washington street school, located just below Railroad square, the road leading from what is now the junction of Washing- ton and River streets to the top of the hill was mere- ly a cut bounded by sand banks on either side. We followed a path on the top of the southern bank, now entirely removed, and, like young barbarians, practiced our skill in shooting stones into the chim- neys of the houses below in the "Burrough." I do not think that it ever occurred to us that the rattl-
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ing of these missiles on the roof, the well sent stone that actually went down the chimney or the one, unskilfully shot, that merely broke a window, were really unpleasant to the dwellers. What we liked was the adventure; to see from our heights the men rush out like hornets, the swift retreat, the mad-very mad-pursuit; and the thrill of watch- ing from some secure hiding place the angry foe go by. The Burrough,-Frinksborough,-was a settle- ment lying along the river bank and under the hill where River street now begins. It had an unsavory reputation, although some worthy people dwelt there. Its manners were its own, and its code of morals was not strict. There dwelt-
"Chipbird, Tinker, Poker, Poopey-eye, Shag and Bum, Big Liz, Little Liz, Big Burrough, Little Burrough, and many a jug o'rum,"
as an old rhyme ran. A century and more ago a visitor spoke of the Burrough-ites as "being em- ployed on the river instead of farming, and having the distinguishing vices of looseness, intemperance, and want of punctuality in business." In the Carrier's Address, January 1, 1828, Whittier excepts this section from the vale of the Merrimack that he loves :-
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"-blent with every chord That in a heart of deepest feeling thrills, Is the green vale where Merrimack's stream is poured Through the wild vista of its neighboring hills. All's dear to me quite up and down the river With one exception,-Frinksborough,-however."
One death in the Burrough occasioned a tribute from Whittier. There was brought to Haverhill and exhibited in Frinksborough in 1832, an Ichneumon, an animal of the weasel family sometimes called Pharaoh's rat. This animal was domesticated in Egypt, and ranked among the divinities on account of its utility in destroying serpents, small vermin, and the eggs of the crocodile. Three young ladies, among them Harriet Minot, went under Whittier's escort to see the exhibited specimen, but it had died and been buried before their arrival. The facile pen of the poet, however, wrote its elegy :----
" Thou hast seen the desert steed, Mounted by his Arab chief, Passing like some dream of speed, Wonderful and brief!
And the mirage thou hast seen, Glittering in the sunny sheen, Like some lake in sunlight sleeping, Where the desert wind was sweeping, And the sandy column gliding Like some giant onward striding.
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Once the dwellers of thy home Blessed the path thy race had trod, Kneeling in a templed dome To a reptile god.
Thou, unhonored and unknown, Wand'rer o'er the mighty sea! None for thee have reverence shown, None have honored thee!
Here in vulgar Yankee land
Thou hast passed from hand to hand,
And in Frinksborough found a home,
Where no change can ever come!
What thy closing hours befell
None may ask, and none can tell."
It was westward of the Burrough and along by the river that the sunny stretches lay where the swallow built and the blackberry bloomed and fruit- ed and the earliest vernal flowers heralded the spring. There, a little lad of ten, I was wandering alone, gathering hepaticas and violets, singing, con- scious neither of care nor of fear, when from a shaded ambush there sprang suddenly upon me a boy ruffian who, with the most frightful language, tortured me, beat me on the head with a sharp stone-I still bear the scars-, and dragged me to the water's edge with the intention of throw- ing me into the deep river. Something, I know not what, made him turn and run, and I, drenched with blood, exhausted with pain and fright, dragged my-
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self to safety, narrowly escaping being a victim of that lust for cruelty that a few years later was mani- fested in the Bussey woods tragedy and the crimes of Jesse Pomeroy.
VII
The old Washington street school which I attend- ed was swept away in that growth of the city west- ward that transformed lower Washington street from a village road with dwelling houses on either side, into a wind-swept tunnel lying between rows of tall shoe factories. The building, a two-story brick one, was in a yard that extended from Wash- ington street to Wingate, its outer bounds a high, prison-like, brown board fence. When we had finished the primary work under some gentle woman teacher in the lower room, we were sent up- stairs to be instructed in the grammar branches by a master and his assistant. The desks in the mas- ter's room were double, and fortune placed me, when first I reached that room, as seat mate to the worst boy in school. The master was a man of might and muscle named "Jake" Smith, and daily, at least, he came with black and threatening frown down the aisle to sieze my seat mate by his shoul- ders, drag him across the desk, and over my shiver- ing form lay on resounding blows. Then, when
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Master Smith went up the aisle, the "worst boy" would threaten, in blood-curdling language, the most horrible revenge. No dime novel pirate ever had greater command of the things that horrify and the words that shock. A sense of humor, the play of sunshine on waters that else were leaden, that has always lightened life, relieved much the horror of those days, but the ache of the child's heart still reaches over the many years that lie be- tween then and now. The little white-headed boy who met the threat of the teacher to seat him with the girls by exclaiming, "Oh why not let me go now?" who tried to comfort the music master whose appeal to the scholars to sing so loud as to raise the roof had been met by the feeblest response, by pointing a little finger towards a weak place in the ceiling and saying, "I think I see a crack," has found, however, that the gentle humor that wounds not, that is so clean that it might be uttered in the white halls of Heaven, "bars," as the servant in the Taming of the Shrew says, " a thousand harms, and lengthens life."
When this school building was dedicated in Dec- cember, 1849, Dr. James R. Nichols, later the dis- tinguished scientist and the scholarly editor of the Journal of Chemistry, read a poem. Here is an ex- tract from it :-
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"The teacher asked, 'How many rods a mile?' And as the youngster paused a gentle smile Relaxed his boyish features, and with eye Fixed on the birch, he ventured to reply :
' How many rods a mile? I cannot tell; But this one feeling truth I know full well', -A truth we all must learn sooner or later-
'It takes but just one rod to make an acher.' "
The dread days of the Civil War went by while I was a grammar school boy, and the scenes of its pomp and pathos passed before my eyes. Up Wash- ington street marched the home troops on the way to the railway station. and down the street, worn, weary and broken, they passed on their return. What cheers we gave them! how reverently we followed them ! how we envied them ! Carl Messer, riding on the noble steed that his townsmen had given him; Colonel Jones Frankle, proudly bearing the sword inscribed "Be just and merciful," that his confident friends had entrusted to him. The martial spirit was in the school; the boys wore soldier caps; the girls with their own hands made the flag that swung before the school; from the button holes of our little jackets hung the emblems of our loyalty,-I still have mine, a little medal with the picture of Lincoln on one side and of Hamlin on the other, which my mother tied in with a little blue ribbon as she told me that I must be a loyal little Lincoln lad,
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-and woe to the one who was not enthusiastically and devotedly patriotic! There was a little lad in the primary department-Charles Oscar Wallace- with the usual grime and tousel of the small boy on his hands and face and hair. He went to the recruiting office to enlist. "Can you write?" asked the Captain. "No," was his reply, "but I can fight like h-ll." And when he came back to school-such is the hero-worship of youthful minds -we saw not the grime nor the tousel, but only a shining hero with the halo of daring over his head.
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