USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > Andover: symbol of New England; the evolution of a town > Part 4
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
and it had already its own printing press for the spreading of ideas. In short, it was a society remarkable for its complexity and vigor, its power for both good and evil.
It is true that the literature of Massachusetts Bay was largely theological and the fine arts did not flourish. Not for more than a century did any theater open its doors, and the music was con- fined to rather dismal hymn tunes. But Andover, although un- questionably rural, was on the periphery of a culture not to be despised. Simon Bradstreet and John Osgood, when they attend- ed the General Court, participated in discussions reminiscent of those in the Parliament of which Hampden and Pym were mem- bers. No group headed by such leaders as Winthrop, Dudley, Endicott, and Bradstreet could be regarded as negligible.
To the original twenty-three proprietors of the town other names were added almost from year to year, and by 1681 the number recorded was thirty-nine. Most of them appear to have been, like the other settlers of the Colony, "sober, well-to-do men of middle age." Out of the scanty records still preserved we can detect a community surviving with an identity all its own. On November 11, 1647, it was voted, "the Towne Mark of An- diver is to be a big A." Three centuries later, the same big "A" adorns the blue sweaters of the athletes of a famous school for boys located in Andover. Soon the townspeople, although Puri- tans, had their place of refreshment, for on May 10, 1648, Ed- ward Faulkner was granted a license to sell wine, "paying to the treasury for what he draws, as others do." The citizens wished to open better communications with their neighbors. On May 26, 1647, the General Court appointed a man named Hoult to "lay out ye way from Reading to Andiver," and at the same time John Osgood and Thomas Hale were to mark out a similar road from Andover to Haverhill. On October 18, 1688, there is men- tion of a bridge over the Ipswich River, between Andover and Reading, at the point where Route 28 crosses it today. At the same meeting a committee was designated to "set out the high wayes, from Andover to Newberry, from Andover to Rowly, &
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LIFE IN THE EARLY SETTLEMENT
from Andover to Ipswich." Nicholas Holt built a bridge over the Shawsheen for the convenience of himself and his neighbors.
The settlers were prolific, obeying without protest the scrip- tural injunction to increase and multiply. The wives, worn out with domestic cares and the rearing of families, often died young, but the lusty males soon found new and willing mates. Within a quarter of a century the population of Andover had increased to perhaps three hundred men, women, and children, scattered over a considerable area. The community was as lively and self- conscious as any Old World township in the vicinity of Cam- bridge, England. Only the menace of the Indians warned the inhabitants that their hard-won civilization was neither com- plete nor secure.
In that theocracy the clergyman was always one of the first citizens, and social life centered largely around the church. The Reverend John Woodbridge, the town's first ordained minister, was in 1647 persuaded by friends to return to England. His place was taken by the Reverend Francis Dane, a man in his early thirties, who remained as pastor for over forty-eight years, exert- ing a powerful influence on his parishioners. It was his function to weld them into a spiritual unity, watching over them as their moral and religious adviser. In 1681, some of the members wished a younger assistant to Dane, but were unwilling to pay the elderly clergyman his "wonted maintenance." The dispute had to be settled by the General Court, which authorized the church to engage a helper, the Reverend Thomas Barnard. Dur- ing the witchcraft delusion of the 1690's Mr. Dane was one of the few local leaders whose common sense remained unshaken and who refused to participate in the widespread hysteria. He continued as pastor until his death in 1697, at the age of eighty- one.
The old burying ground on what is called Academy Road is just as lovely as Stoke Poges, and it is, like Gray's English church- yard, a place where "the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." It is a peaceful and fortunately still secluded spot, surrounded
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
by a low stone wall, within the borders of which rise many an- cient spruces, whose branches often sweep the ground. The ever- greens cast shadows on the tombstones all day long and keep them, even on sunny mornings, in a subdued half darkness. Moss has accumulated on many of the stones, and the inscriptions over the years have been chipped off and even obliterated. The old- est is that on a stone in the northeast corner, commemorating John Stevens, who died April 11, 1662, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. In carving the inscription for Dr. John Kittredge, the stonecutter had no room on the line for the final "e" and there- fore inserted it on the space above, a fascinating demonstration of Yankee frugality. The motto on his stone is Mors Feliciter Finit Sanctuam Vitam-A Happy Death Terminates a Dedicated Life -showing that the Latin classics had been transmitted faith- fully to the wilderness of North America. On another tablet two simple words Fuit Homo pay a fine and probably deserved tribute to a Man of Parts.
Some of the oldest stones have undoubtedly disappeared with the passage of time. But this and the additional fact that many of them are crumbling and tottering on their bases do not disturb the visitor. The scene itself is romantic. In this cemetery is all that is left on earth of men and women who underwent sacri- fices and sufferings, of "hearts once pregnant with celestial fire." Here is the "silent dust" of forgotten people who never dreamed of an age as complicated and competitive as ours. Here are the bones of those who started and carried on Andover history. They were themselves too busy with the present to care much what any future historian might say.
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CHAPTER V
Andover's Anne Bradstreet, Puritan Poet
M OST of the early Andover proprietors were stalwart yeo- men, practical individualists of the type which usually forms the working nucleus of any Anglo-Saxon community. If Nathaniel Ward had migrated from Ipswich to Andover, as he once planned to do, he would have lent some literary prestige to the inland township. As matters turned out, its cultural tone was set at once by two exceptionally able university graduates, John Woodbridge and Simon Bradstreet, who married sisters, the daughters of the scholarly Governor Dudley. Woodbridge was at Andover hardly long enough to leave any impression on his congregation, and it was Bradstreet who stepped into the shoes of "first citizen." Unquestionably the town's wealthiest and most influential resident of his generation, he brought with him across the sea not only family portraits and heirlooms but also some furniture and a library of eight hundred volumes, many of them rare and precious. His house built in the 1650's was traditionally the show place of all the countryside.
Bradstreet, as we have noted, was a fine specimen of the en- lightened administrator and public servant. But the most ex- traordinary figure in the frontier settlement of Andover was not the statesman but his wife, Anne Dudley. Born on the estate of the Earl of Lincoln, where her father was steward, she was brought up in comfortable if not luxurious surroundings, and somehow secured a sound education. From her writing we de- duce that she was a delicate and meditative girl, sensitive to
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
aesthetic and spiritual influences; but she was also, like a true Puritan, much troubled by "vanity and the follys of youth." In her formative years she sat in the Lincolnshire congregation of the grim and dogmatic John Cotton, who must have warned her that the love of beauty needed the restricting curb of conscience. Books were around her in her childhood home, and she read with some thoroughness Spenser's Faerie Queene, Sidney's Ar- cadia, and North's Plutarch. She preferred, however, the works of the French poet, Du Bartas, whose interminable artificial epic, La Semaine (1578), describing the creation of the world, had been translated into English by Sylvester in 1605. I venture the opinion that nobody now dwelling within the limits of An- dover has read this poem in its entirety, but Anne Dudley knew passages from it by heart.
In her background and experience a cultivated aristocrat, Anne had mysterious emotional depths which even her inti- mates rarely probed and only her beloved husband understood. A psychoanalyst would have found her a profitable subject for clinical diagnosis. Like some puzzling Andoverians of a later period, particularly Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, she had a soul in which expression and repression were constantly at odds.
This introspective maiden was married at sixteen to Simon Bradstreet, nine years older than she, and with him sailed in 1630, in the Arbella, for what was then called quite accurately "the wilderness of North America." The frail, emotional girl brought up in England's "green and pleasant land" was sudden- ly shifted to a primitive settlement where even the necessities of decent living were not at first available. For a while she felt herself in rebellion against the "new world and new manners" around her. But eventually her innate Puritanism led her to conclude that this was the will of God. From then on, she sub- mitted to her fate, confronting tribulation with the courage in- herent in her religious faith.
After a brief sojourn in Cambridge, which they found too much crowded, the Bradstreets moved to Ipswich, where Anne
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ANDOVER'S ANNE BRADSTREET
must have known the witty and saturnine Nathaniel Ward. Al- though the two were different in outlook, each had the urge for self-expression and the ideas to express. In Ipswich Anne began to write verses, and her earliest extant poem, entitled "Upon a Fit of Sickness," was composed when she was only nineteen. The opening couplet is a sufficient revelation of its confessional tone:
Twice ten years old not fully told since nature gave me breath, My race is run, my thread is spun, lo! here is fatal Death.
From this prematurely morbid mood she was rescued by the demands of family life. In a too brief autobiographical passage she wrote, "It pleased God to keep me a long time without a child, which was a great grief to me, and cost me many prayers and tears before I obtained one, and after him gave me many more." This first child, named Simon after his father, was fol- lowed by others in quick succession, until, looking backward, she could make this quaint metaphorical record of her offspring:
I had eight birds hatcht in one nest, Four cocks there were, and hens the rest; I nurst them up with paine and care, Nor cost nor labour did I spare, Till at the last they felt their wing, Mounted the trees and learn'd to sing.
While it is dangerous and perhaps unjust to generalize too freely about the New England Puritans as a group, it is safe to say that most of them were not lyrical by disposition. So far as we know, not one copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare, printed in 1623, was brought to these shores by the passengers in the Great Migration; and while some of the immigrants must have been proud of their fellow nonconformist, John Milton, for his Comus and Lycidas, they probably regarded him as an accidental genius. Their emotional force, strong enough under provoca- tion, vented itself frequently in actions but seldom, outside of sermons and proclamations, in printed words. The earliest vol-
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
ume issued from a colonial press was The Whole Book of Psalms, commonly known as the Bay Psalm Book, containing metrical versions of the Psalms for use in church singing. This was pub- lished in 1640, before Andover had emerged as a township. De- spite its defiance of the ordinary rules of grammar and metrics, it ran through twenty-seven printings in a century. Joining in the singing with the other members of her congregation, Mrs. Bradstreet must have shuddered at its verbal ineptitudes.
The Bradstreets spent ten years in Ipswich before moving permanently to Andover in 1644. The historian of Ipswich as- serts that Anne's "active intellectual labor" was carried on in that town, and this is indisputable if quantity alone is considered. How she managed to compose so much while carrying out her household duties is a mystery. Her most formidable production of this period was a series of poems headed respectively "The Four Elements," "The Four Humours in Man's Composition," "The Four Ages of Man," and "The Four Seasons of the Year," all imitative, ponderous, and commonplace. To rephrase Dr. Johnson, they are not done well, but one is surprised to find them done at all! With the expenditure of considerable patience I have read every verse she published, skipping judiciously here and there, and it has been a dull assignment. She is incredibly long-winded and repetitious, and the reader is almost anesthe- tized by the steady flow of allegorical and philosophical verbi- age. Speaking of her efforts, Anne wrote, quite truthfully:
And for the same I hours not few did spend
And weary lines, though lank, I many penn'd.
At another time, with characteristic humility, she described her verses as "the ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain." She is doubtless too hard on herself. But it is true that at this stage in her development she was too much influenced by the ridicu- lous conceits and stilted language of the so-called Metaphysical Poets, especially Quarles and Wither and Donne. Her best po- em in this vein is "Contemplations," with its seven-lined stan-
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ANDOVER'S ANNE BRADSTREET
zas and intricate rhyme scheme. Although marred by didacticism and farfetched flights of fancy, it is the least artificial of her longer, more ambitious poems. On the other hand, it is fre- quently absurd, as in the following stanza:
Ye fish which in this liquid region bide, That for each season have your habitation, Now salt, now fresh, where you think best to glide, To unknown coasts to give a visitation, In lakes and ponds you leave your numerous fry, By nature taught, and yet you know not why, You watry folk that know not your felicity.
In her less consciously literary moods, however, Anne could write simply and directly, with the result that she seemed to fluctuate between imitation and spontaneity. Once, when her husband was "absent on public employment," she burst out:
If two be one, as surely you and I,
How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie?
Professor Morison has pointed out that although her literary output was not so great after she moved to Andover, its quality was vastly improved. Instead of laboring over tedious, didactic poems, she expressed herself in homely but sincere personal lyrics. When she deals with her family affairs, she creates an at- mosphere which we can feel and understand. When she looks into her heart and writes, she becomes a very genuine poet.
In 1666, when the Andover house in which she found so much comfort and happiness burned to the ground, she told of her grief in some of her sincerest stanzas:
Here stood that trunk and there that chest; There lay the store I counted best; My pleasant things in ashes lie, And them no more behold shall I. Under thy roof no guest shall sit, Nor at thy table eat a bit
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
No pleasant tale shall e'er be told, Nor things recounted done of old; No candle e'er shall shine in thee, Nor bridegroom's voice e'er heard shall be. In silence ever shalt thou lie,- Adieu, adieu; all's vanity.
Long before she had written out these couplets, which were found after her death "copied out of a loose paper," her verses had appeared in book form, and she was more than just a local celebrity. Anne's brother-in-law, the Reverend Mr. Wood- bridge, apparently without her cognizance, took back with him to England many of her manuscripts and had them published in 1650, under the extravagant title, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up In America, in which eulogy defied common sense and of which the modest Anne certainly could not have approved. The volume was prefaced by several rhymed tributes to the author. One of these was by the clever Nathaniel Ward, who, with a thoroughly modern touch, said that the poet was "a right Du Bartas girl" and made Apollo declare:
It half revives my chill frost-bitten blood To see a woman once do aught that's good.
The volume really deserved some commendation, for no other woman contemporary, either in England or America, was writ- ing verse at all. Unfortunately this first edition contained so many errors and misprints that the unresponsible author felt dismayed, and even ashamed.
Nobody in her time recorded whether Anne Bradstreet was short or tall, blonde or brunette, handsome or plain. But what she said gives the impression of a woman rather shy and retiring by nature, voluble only with her quill pen in her hand; a lady, dignified, studious, and home-loving; a model mother, devoted to her children. In a different environment she might have blos- somed like a rose brought from the shade into the sunlight, might even have matched in her feminine way the Cavalier po-
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ets, Herrick and Carew, Suckling and Lovelace. But she seems always to have been a slave to duty, cramped by the austerity of her Puritan background and inheritance. She never protested or complained. Yet there is something both significant and mov- ing about her last poem, composed in 1669, when she was lying on her sickbed:
A pilgrim I, on earth perplext,
With sinns, with cares and sorrows vext, By age and paines brought to decay, And my clay house mouldring away. Oh, how I long to be at rest
And soar on high among the blest. This body shall in silence sleep,
Mine eyes no more shall ever weep, No fainting fits shall me assail, Nor grinding paines my body fraile, With cares and fears ne'er cumbred be Nor losses know, nor sorrows see.
For several years an invalid, Mrs. Bradstreet was harassed by what she called her "distemper of weakness and fainting." On May 11, 1669, she confessed, "From the middle of January until May, I have been by fits very ill and weak." Eventually she was worn out by her ailments, which must have been hard to bear in isolated Andover. Her son, Simon, wrote in his Diary, Sep- tember 16, 1672, "My ever honoured & most dear mother was translated to Heaven. Her death was occasioned by a consump- tion being wasted to skin & bone, & she had an issue made in her arm; she was much troubled with rheum, & one of ye women yt. tended her dressing her arm s'd shee never saw such an arm in her life. I s'd my most dear mother but yt. shall be a glorious arm."
In 1678, six years after Anne Bradstreet's death, a second and presumably complete edition of her poems was edited by John Norton, then in his twenty-second year, who had graduated from Harvard only a few months before. This was prefaced by Nor-
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ton's "Funeral Elegy upon that Pattern and Patron of Virtue, the truly pious, peerless, and matchless Gentlewoman, Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, Right Panaretes, Mirror of Her Age, Glory of Her Sex, whose Heaven Born Soul, leaving its Earthly Shrine, Chose its Native Home and was taken to its Rest upon 16th Sep- tember, 1672." As a climax Norton declared that if Vergil could hear Anne's verses he would consign his Aeneid to the flames. Later Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, hardly more restrained, crowned her with the laurel and the bays.
Posterity has thought of Anne Bradstreet chiefly as a poet. But her prose was at least as good as her verse, and her Medita- tions, Divine and Morall, dedicated in 1664 to her son, Simon, have a wit, a skill in condensation, and a pungent phrasing remi- niscent of Sir Francis Bacon. Based on a practical philosophy distilled from experience, they include such aphorisms as "Sore laborers have hard hands, and old sinners have brawnie con- sciences," and "Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge-better to bruise than to polish." Much of this seems to us now like what Henry James called "the reitera- tion of the obvious." Few would disagree with her when she de- clares, "If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." On the other hand, platitudes need rephrasing for each generation, and many of these maxims were handed down to Poor Richard and his moralizing successors. Anne ap- parently jotted down these thoughts as they occurred to her in the midst of her daily activities, and her son commented, "My honoured mother intended to have filled up this book with like observations, but was prevented by death."
The Poems, together with the Prose Remains, were edited in 1867, by John Harvard Ellis, and again in 1897, for the Duo- decimos, by Charles Eliot Norton, with the spelling modernized. Here they may be examined, if not read, in their entirety. They constitute what must be regarded as, under the circumstances, a remarkable achievement. In this necessarily brief account of her
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The Parson Barnard House, in North Andover, dating from 1715
The James Frye House, Chestnut Street, North Andover
THE TENTH MUSE Lately fprung up in AMERICA. OR
Severall Poems, compiled with great variety of VVit and Learning, full of delight. Wherein efpecially is contained a com- pleat difdourfe and defcription of
Elements, The Four Conftitutions, Ages of Man, " Scafons of the Year. Together with an Exact Epitomie of the Four Monarchies, vis. ABrian, The Perfian, Grecian, K'aman. Alfo a Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning the lare troubles. With divers other pleziant and ferions Poems.
Gentlewoman in thofe parte,
Printed anton for Stephen Bowtell at the figne of the bible in Popes Head-Alley.
The title page of Anne (Dudley) Bradstreet's Tenth Muse 1650
ANDOVER'S ANNE BRADSTREET
and her work, I have perhaps overemphasized her frustrations. She did express herself in her poetry, not with the uninhibited freedom of Elinor Wylie or Edna St. Vincent Millay but suffi- ciently to make clear her emotions and desires. The analogy between her and Emily Dickinson must not be pressed too far, for she displayed little of the mysticism and sensitiveness of the nineteenth-century writer. But Mrs. Bradstreet did show abounding energy and originality, and when we consider her restrictions and her unstimulating environment, her product is amazing in quality. It is not enough to dismiss her as "a win- some personality in an unlovely age." She represents the earli- est significant attempt at literary accomplishment on the North American continent. Her position in literary history is secure; and her spirit has been carried on through such distinguished descendants as William Ellery Channing, Richard Henry Dana, Wendell Phillips, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
No one knows where she was buried, although it must have been in a secluded cemetery at North Andover. Whatever tomb- stone once marked her grave has long since vanished. For many years it was assumed that the house on Osgood Street called tra- ditionally the Bradstreet house was built by her husband fol- lowing the conflagration of 1666 and lived in by her until her death. In 1956, however, a Bradstreet House Restoration Com- mittee, formed by the North Andover Historical Society, dis- covered, in the process of making repairs, evidence that the dwelling was probably built about 1715 by or for the Reverend Thomas Barnard. No one can be sure in what house Mrs. Brad- street lived after the earlier residence was burned, although it may have stood on the twenty-four-acre lot west of Osgood Street. At any rate, what was long called the Bradstreet house is still sufficiently old to make it of interest to the antiquarian, and in its restored state it is still a picturesque part of the charm of North Andover.
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CHAPTER VI
Maturing of a Township
TMMIGRANTS, especially pioneers, tend to reproduce in their customs and procedures the conditions of environment in which they were brought up. Nostalgia unquestionably accounts for such New England names as Boston, Cambridge, Lynn, Groton, Wakefield, Reading, and Andover. The Puritans, how- ever, did not transport with them the manorial system, and Mas- sachusetts Bay did not become, like most of the Southern "plan- tations," a land of country squires and baronial estates. Only four of the original Andover settlers-Bradstreet, Osgood, Faulkner, and Woodbridge-were designated in the Records as "mr." Most of the others were officially called "goodman," which seems to have been the equivalent of "citizen." At this distance in time it is difficult to identify the qualifications which placed this quartet in a higher category than their neighbors, but it may well have been wealth or education or both. Similar distinctions are drawn today on the basis of even more dubious merits.
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