USA > Massachusetts > Hampshire County > Amherst > Around a village green; sketches of life in Amherst > Part 7
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A knowledge of the vegetable kingdom ennobles the cultivation of Flowers, gives a superior charm to the garden and the green- house, the walk by the wayside and the ramble in the woods. Flowers have also been termed " the stars that glow in the green firmament of earth," and one of our own poets has written a passage on this subject, which will form my conclusion.
In all places then and in all seasons
Flowers expand their light and soul-like wings
Teaching us by most persuasive reasons
How akin they are to human things,
And with child-like credulous affection
We behold their tender buds expand,
Emblems of our own great resurrection, Emblems of the bright and better land.
Amherst Feb. 28th 1854.
Written by Mary Adela James at the age of fourteen.
The greenhouse of the Massachusetts Agricultural College was very generous in sharing its treasures with the townsfolk. Professor Jesup, later of Dartmouth, to whom reference has been made in a previous sketch, often brought us from the greenhouse camellias, jas- mine, La Marque roses, harebells, mahernia, heliotrope, and a tiny
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brownish flower with a red center that was sometimes copied in wax for a bouquet on the marble-topped table in the parlor. Such rare blooms as these, brought in a brown wicker basket with a cover and double handles, through Amherst's winter streets, snow-drifted and ploughed deep! Mahernia (an anagram of Hermania) was Dr. Goess- man's favorite flower. He always had a vase of it on his desk at the Agricultural College.
There were special vases with slender stems, not intended to hold water, for wax flowers. Ours was of sky-blue glass with little gold stars all over it. Pink moss-roses in wax were favorites. Never were these dainty creations put under glass globes. When they lost their freshness, they were replaced by others. Perhaps it was Amherst's love of flowers that decreed that there should never be a faded blos- som in the house, not even of wax.
In the early seventies Amherst began to be adorned with Japanese trees and shrubs imported by Peter Henderson's and other nurseries. The Japanese influence came partly from Joseph Neesima and partly from Professor Julius Seelye. President Clark, also, when he went to Japan to establish an agricultural college, brought home many exotic trees and shrubs which he planted around his grounds. The President's House at the Agricultural College stood on a ridge which commanded a superb view of the valley. It was included in every sight-seeing drive around Amherst. Today, after more than half a century, you may still see some of the trees that President Clark set out as you drive up the road from the greenhouse to the house of the President of the State College.
Even before Japanese plants became common, a few people had climbing on their piazzas the honeysuckle brought from Japan by Fran- cis Hall of Elmira, N. Y., one of the first to visit in 1859 that long closed land. When Professor Julius Seelye went to Washington as a member of Congress, he sent back many flowering shrubs to beautify the lawns of his friends. He was mainly responsible for introducing into Amherst the forsythia and the several kinds of deutzia and spirea. His brother, Professor Clark Seelye, delighted in the forsythia, which he always pronounced with a long y in honor of William Forsythe for whom it was named. Later, when he went to Smith College, he planted great banks of the early yellow blooms about his home.
There were a number of small private conservatories in town, and always plants in sunny windows, and here and there a blue hyacinth glass bearing flowers in late winter. Mrs. Marsh, who lived in the General Stoddard house at the corner of Amity and North Prospect Streets (now " The Perrys "), had a large conservatory on the west
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side of the house. This we often visited when we went to buy stamps from her son, Robbie, who ran a foreign stamp exchange.
There were parties to watch the rare night-blooming cereus unfold. It was not so uncommon in Amherst as in other places because of the Agricultural College. I recall one such occasion when a night-bloom- ing cereus was sent us by Miss Greeley from Professor Crowell's home. We filled a large white china salad bowl with ice and put the flower in it at nine o'clock. The neighbors came in, a party of twelve, and at ten the flower began to open. For three hours it showed in all its glory. The next morning it was withered and dead. The following Sunday the college pastor preached on this parable of nature. He chose as his text the Lord's words to Nicodemus: " If I have told you earthly things and you believed not, how shall you believe if I tell you of heavenly things? "
Miss Mary Cooper had a fragrant, old-fashioned garden. The Japan lily, a rarity then, was her great pride, a single perfect bloom often going to her friends. Her balsams would today be sought for flower exhibits. When she went away for the summer, she invited me to walk in her garden and to pick all the flowers I wished. I used to select choice blooms from the long stalk of the balsam plant and put them, as she did, in a standard glass dish that had a large, shallow, green receptacle. They were as varied and gay as tufts of bright-hued satin sailing on an emerald sea. Lemon verbena, and white and purple candy-tuft, and sweet alyssum, ageratum, and wealths of pansies, caught the morning dew in Miss Cooper's garden. There were pink fairy lilies, too, and mignonette.
Mrs. Abbie Cooper took me for many drives in the carryall drawn by a staid horse. Her favorite excursion was toward Belchertown, for there we found " all the roadside filled with delight," as Walter Prich- ard Eaton has happily phrased it. On one drive she introduced me to the fringed polygala, a whole patch of rose-purple blooms like tiny butterflies. She showed me the petals outspread as though the flower were about to flutter from its stem, and quoted Keats's description of sweet-peas " on tiptoe for a flight." In autumn we sought and found the pitcher-plant in swampy places.
Mrs. Cooper taught me observation by playing " traveler's whist " as we drove along behind the sedate horse. The flash of a scarlet tan- ager was our chief quest, but we counted the white birches, “ glisten- ing brides of the forest," and the hawk swooping down over the chicken- yard. It must be confessed that my greatest delight was to be allowed to count every black cat along the route, for then our scores were high.
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Mrs. Edward P. Crowell, wife of the revered professor of Latin, sent her friends notable bouquets of lilies-of-the-valley. Her yard and garden on Amity Street had paths bordered with box and were among the loviest in Amherst. Mrs. Henry Hills, when she went calling, was apt to bring most fragrant bunches of jockey club as a visiting card. A calla lily holding in its hollow a cascade of purple fuchsias was another enchanting token of a neighbor's visit.
Indoors, brilliant red geraniums grew in sunny windows, and many homes had English ivy trained to grow entirely around the room, the two vines meeting in the center. Sometimes a small spray would grow downwards and droop over Thorwaldsen's "Night and Morning," which hung in many Amherst sitting rooms.
Rattlesnake Gutter, a place of formidable name, though none of us had ever seen a rattlesnake there, was the only place to my knowledge where we could find the spectral Indian pipe. It was a much fre- quented spot for picnics. Gaily we explored the ravine and clambered over the stones in the brook. When we came upon the Indian pipe on the brow of the hill, standing up in stately cluster from the carpet of pine needles, we felt the thrill that accompanied the discovery of the first arbutus. Like that shy flower, too, the Indian pipe possessed a charm when espied in its native haunt that it lost when we carried it home, its pure white blooms and leaves beginning to be edged with black.
Plumtrees, the scene of sugaring-off parties, was not far away to the north, and beyond was Sunderland, from which we climbed Mount Toby, or crossed the Connecticut to scale Sugar Loaf. Another much traveled road led northeastward to Leverett and Shutesbury, where in late September, when the sumach showed brilliant from the early frosts and chestnuts opened their burrs, we sought the high pasture plateaus to broil steak and roast sweet potatoes in the open. Along many of these roads could be seen the little woodsy paths, leading no- where.
I must not fail to speak of the joys of Mount Holyoke. A span of horses, in themselves an excitement, drew us and our guests to the Half Way House. From there we had our choice of walking up the road encircling the mountain to the summit, or of being pulled up the incline of the wooden funicular, or even of climbing the 522 steps of the long stairway that paralleled the track. The floor of the old Pros- pect House, at the top, was smooth for dancing, and between dances we might have the rare privilege of taking the Claude Lorraine glass from its locked security and looking into it to see the meadows' patch- work of colors, below, like a pattern in a real kaleidoscope - evenly
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cut fields of wheat, rye, and barley, and peaceful farmhouses, and the river winding to the Ox-Bow, the ferry to Hockanum and the covered bridge over the Fort River, where the handsomest bitter-sweet grew. There too were Shepard's Island and Clay Island, which we had visited to hunt for clay-stones, and to watch the bank-swallows and the summer clouds crossing the blue sky overhead. Islands of romance, indeed! Or in another mood we might hunt through the hotel regis- ters for autographs of people we had heard about. Jenny Lind wrote her name in 1852, after riding on horseback up the trail to the summit. Abraham Lincoln left his signature when he visited the region at the time of his Cooper Union speech. Then there were the autographs of Charles Sumner and Henry W. Longfellow and John Quincy Adams, and we had learned about them at school. Finally we bought lemonade at ten cents a glass and drank it through a straw, realizing then for the first time that cider was not the only drink to be consumed in this way. Only the glass of lemonade did not seem as inexhaustible as the barrel of sweet cider that we tapped in the cellar at home.
My brother, when he was in the Amherst High School, used often to tramp over the Holyoke Range with his schoolmate, Winthrop E. Stone, later the president of Purdue University. They were especially interested in the witch hazel, which was a glory in early November by Castleborough Brook on the South Hadley side of the Range. They brought home bunches to place in the house, and the seeds in the little pods, as the interior warmth reached them, snapped merrily around, eclipsing a watermelon party. At a later time the boys made divining rods of witch hazel and, under the direction of a professor, experi- mented with its alleged power to indicate the presence of water. Win- throp Stone became an enthusiastic climber of the Rocky Mountains, and during his summer vacations at Isle au Haute, Maine, marked the trails up Mount Champlain with stone cairns that are still there. His brother, now Justice Harlan Fiske Stone of the United States Supreme Court, was too young to join in the Amherst schoolday climbs.
There were large fields of the fringed gentian on the south side of the Holyoke Range. Near Amherst the only variety that grew abun- dantly was the closed gentian. So rare was the fringed gentian that we were early taught to leave it where we found it growing.
The Amherst Ornamental Tree Association was organized in 1857 for the purpose of laying out and planting the town common and adorn- ing the public walks by lining them with trees where there were any deficiencies. It was reorganized as the Amherst Village Improvement Society in 1875, when at the request of Mr. Austin Dickinson a plan
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for the beautifying of Amherst was formulated by Frederick Law Olmsted. The work of these two men gave Amherst its beautiful common, its well-shaded streets, and its handsome college campus. The hurricane of 1938 blew down many of the trees they had planted, but the vision that they brought to the town remains imperishable, a loveliness to be achieved again for future dwellers in Amherst.
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AN EVENING OF RELICS AND RECIPES
N OT long ago a few friends came to my home by invitation, and after cake and coffee in the dining room at early candle- light, we gathered around the open fire blazing on the old Amherst andirons for an evening of memories. These are some of my reminiscences, written down as informally as they were given then.
I wore my mother's wedding gown for the occasion. It was of white taffeta, seven yards around, with low neck and no sleeves, only little caps edged with lace on the shoulders. The two young ladies in the dining-room also wore dresses of my mother's - one of them a sky-blue silk poplin with shell trimming, very fashionable for ladies in the early sixties; the other a dress of white muslin with a pink stripe, " not too prudish at the neck," which was the style in vogue for afternoon festivities in Miss Emily's day. These dresses were made by the famous dressmakers of Northampton, Mmes. Ferry and Dickinson, whom many in Amherst patronized. It may be of interest to know that the standard price for making a dress was fifty dollars, aside from linings and furnishings. The bill for extras was always headed by the item : " Sewing silk, two dollars." Would that industry might be so served today !
The coffee we drank was served from the urn which was a part of my mother's wedding silver, and one from which Miss Emily Dickinson had a cup of coffee in our Amherst home. Miss Emily was the first person to call on my mother after her marriage in 1858. She came with her big dog, who usually accompanied her. As she wrote to a friend who asked of her companions : " Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog as large as myself . . . They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell." She left her visiting card, which read "Miss Emily E. Dickinson," engraved in script on glazed cardboard after the fashion of that day. Miss Emily was still using the initial of her middle name at that time.
The cake we had was called " Aunt Emily's cake " in our family. It was the sort that my mother always sent to her friends as an " atten- tion." That was the local word for a neighborly gift. Whatever the ambrosial offering, a loaf of cake, a goblet of jelly (always broken with a fork), a bouquet, or a single perfect rose, it was known as an attention. Such gifts were not to be passed over lightly. “I hope that you received my notice of your lovely attention on that dis- tinguished day," wrote Miss Lavinia Dickinson to my mother. " The
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cake was a luxury and the cookies the first ideal cookies of my experi- ence. If you were the manufacturer, please lend me your art." That was how an attention should be acknowledged in form. Now this cake was winy and spicy and fruity, and had the distinction that the raisins in it never went to the bottom, but took their places decorously at intervals that were worthy of admiration. My mother was taught how to make it by " Aunt Emily," the skilful cook employed at the old Amherst House in the late fifties. I give her recipe :
AUNT EMILY'S CAKE (Amherst, 1858)
1 cup butter
2 teaspoonfuls cream of tartar
3 eggs
4 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoonful lemon extract
1 teaspoonful soda
2 cups raisins
1 cup milk 1/2 nutmeg
A particularly fine flavor is given by the addition of 2 table- spoonfuls of whiskey or brandy.
To put together : Pour hot water into an earthen mixing bowl. When well heated, pour out the water and put butter and sugar into the bowl, and beat together until light and creamy, add the yolks unbeaten, and stir till smooth ; then the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth, add gradually the milk in which the soda has been dissolved; the lemon; then the spirit, if you use it ; then the flour, into which the cream of tartar has been sifted and the nutmeg grated and lastly the stoned raisins, cut in small pieces over which a little flour has been sifted as they were cut to keep them from sticking together.
Bake in 2 round tins, in a good oven, about 55 minutes. Brush the pans with butter and line with buttered paper. Frost top and sides while warm, not hot, and when cold put away in cov- ered dishes.
For the frosting: Whites of 2 eggs, one large cup of confec- tioner's sugar. Put eggs and sugar together in a large bowl and beat as you would eggs for 10 or 15 minutes.
People used spirit freely for flavoring in those days, but, when this recipe was published in a booklet for the hospital fair held in Holyoke in 1907, the words "then add the spirit " were qualified, at the re- quest of the ladies, by "if you use it." The march of progress in temperance was more evident at that time than now.
My mother often sent a loaf of this cake as an attention to our beloved minister, Reverend Jonathan L. Jenkins. On such occasions my father would add a bottle of claret. Everyone drank claret at
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dinner, if the dinner was a little more festive than usual. One college professor, who lived near the minister, was the only member of the faculty who could, or did, afford champagne, and he sometimes sent a bottle to Mr. Jenkins. In time a modest stock of these attentions accumulated in the cellar of the parsonage. When Mr. Jenkins was called to another parish, his household goods were placed in storage until his new house should be ready. There was one case of claret and champagne to go. The young son of the minister wanted to help in the moving, and his father told him that he might paste labels on the boxes, mostly boxes of books. By mistake the boy pasted the label, " Commentaries," on the one modest case of wine. In due time the minister returned with a truckman to reclaim his family belongings. As the truckman lifted the box marked " Commentaries," he saw a red stream issuing from it, and exclaimed, " Yer Riverence, yer Com- mentaries is laking." This story has been widespread through the years.
Amherst cake recalls another favorite viand of those days, which we called Connecticut doughnuts. Just to read the recipe for them is good for a leisure hour, even if one has no idea of making them. To make them in perfection demanded the combined efforts of the whole family. The dough was set by the register, where the heat was just right and would be uniform during the night. At midnight, some member of the family must rise and cut it down. By three o'clock the cover would be off again, and so another member of the family must be on hand to cut it down again. At six, the process was repeated a third time. At the finish, mace and orange peel added a delectable flavor.
One of the joys of my childhood was to see " grown-ups " at play. Once on Christmas night we had as our guests for supper Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins and Mr. and Mrs. Austin Dickinson. On the table were two large plates filled with Connecticut doughnuts. During the meal Mr. Jenkins made some excuse to leave the room, and with him went one of the plates of doughnuts. When he returned, Mr. Dick- inson likewise excused himself and the other plate of doughnuts dis- appeared. Now in our upstairs parlor chamber was a closet where we used to keep fruit cake. Probably other families did the same. Hence when the time to go home came, Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Dickinson met at the door of the upstairs parlor where each had squirreled away a store of doughnuts. The treasure was recovered with much laughter.
That night after supper Mrs. Dickinson mysteriously vanished. Soon there was a rap on the door. I opened it, and there stood Mrs. Dickinson in a beautiful red cloak and hood, like Little Red Riding Hood right out of a picture book. She had brought gifts for all. The book of fairy stories, illustrated by Gustave Doré, that she gave me is still a valued possession.
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Many of the familiar sights and sounds of Amherst in those bygone days and the ways of the village people are brought back to me when I read the " Poems " of Miss Emily Dickinson. She once sent a bou- quet from her garden to my mother with the message, " Look in the left hand corner." A flower had been bent back and in its cup, folded, was a tiny note. The note has long been lost, but I wonder if it might have been the poem in which she hides herself within her flower. I was startled a few years ago to receive a Christmas card in the form of a painted bouquet, every blossom in which, when lifted, revealed a line of poetry or a cordial greeting. It would have appealed to Miss Emily.
When I read her lines about bees and butterflies, I am reminded of the lovely meadow that lay just across the dusty thoroughfare in front of her home and continued down to the dell where the brook ran. It was unbroken then by houses. I passed this spot many times when I walked to Orient Springs in summer. The long grass was filled with clover and buttercups and Queen Anne's lace, all swaying in the breeze, a favorite haunt of bees and butterflies and bobolinks. It was easy for one who had played in the Dickinson haymow to under- stand why she could wish, in playful mood, to be a hay. When a load of hay had come into the barn and had been pitched up into the loft, we children who were playing in the yard would often climb the lad- der and revel in the fragrance of drying clover. I remember one occasion when Miss Vinnie came into the barn and called to us to come down before another load was brought in. We were somewhat reluctant to leave our retreat. Miss Vinnie spread wide her full black bombazine skirt and sat down on a pile of hay on the barn floor, a little red shawl over her shoulders, and as we came slowly down the ladder, she told us exactly what she thought of every one of us, prefac- ing her vigorous thrusts by expressions of the high regard in which she held our families and bringing home to us the frightful gulf that lay between our parents' manners and our own. We never forgot her soul-searing reprimand.
There was the lovely arbutus that grew at Orient Springs in the moss beneath the tall pine trees. It was small, but its buds were very pink. The arbutus from Whately Glen and Hatfield was larger and grew in magnificent clusters, but to my heart it could never compare with its modest sister from the Orient. I feel sure it was this arbutus which filled Miss Emily's mind that May morning long ago.
Orient Springs far down the winding path under the lofty, sighing pines had the glamour of romance for us. Our elders had told us of the fashionable folk from New York, Philadelphia, and other cities
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who came in the early fifties during the summer to the Orient House in Pelham, then a well-known watering place. Guests drank of the several springs that bubbled up in the deep ravine-a cure for many ills. Sometimes the people drove up in equipage style from their city homes. In my day, the resort was less sought than formerly, but I once saw a lady riding in a real turnout. She wore a pink muslin and had a lace parasol raised in the open carriage. She alighted at the wide path of pine needles leading down to the springs and I caught a glimpse of her, slipping along in dressy, pink boots under the tall pines. She was the lady in Godey's Lady's Book come true to us who gazed en- chanted from our seat on the high bank.
Another delight of Orient Springs was Amethyst Brook, so called with reason. Many a lady today wears an inherited ring made from the large amethysts found there. The brook wandered along down tiny waterfalls and sometimes disappeared beneath the moss and pine needles, only to come rippling forth again. It seemed a companionable thing, yet Miss Alice Woods, who owns the grove there, tells me that last year in the heavy rains the little brook rose in wild tumult and car- ried away its bridge. In flood or completely dry, was it not this brook which symbolized for Miss Emily the tragic instability of all mortal things ?
The word " amethyst " was a favorite with the poet. She kept the memory of an early friend as " an amethyst remembrance." When she looked eastward for the first traces of dawn, she saw the steeple of the church at East Street in amethyst and beyond that the Pelham Hills.
Amherst was not built up in those days, and from Miss Emily's windows there was a wide vista to the west. How often she must have scanned the evening sky to paint the glorious sunset pictures for us !
In her poem on the Indian summer so characteristic of New Eng- land's fickle climate, her mingling of blue and gold aptly catches the color of the intensely blue autumn sky and the long line of yellow maples in front of her home. I do not recall any red-leafed maples in the Dickinson yard, but the point is now past verification, for since the hurricane the glory of those trees will never be seen again.
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