USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > Marion > Lands of Sippican on Buzzards Bay > Part 23
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"Gentle and caressing" perhaps, yet the dark-eyed poet showed the stern face of the Pilgrim against oppression and tyranny. In the face of bought hostility and newspaper scorn, that nicknamed him "tender apple blossom", "quivering mouse", and "fluffy incubator chick" he fought with pen and words for tenement house reform in New York city, and old Trinity Church Corporation issued its first financial statement in 100 years, and began to improve its ghastly rabbit warrens of tenements.
It was no long-haired weakling that had come to Marion for a summer home, and the captains, although they didn't like the cut of his jib at first, soon became friendly. When Gilder came, some of the famous captains of Rochester-towne were living; Capt. Randall, who fired the last shot on the sink- ing Cumberland was showing his relics at the Parker House, New Bedford; Capt. Bryant of Mattapoisett village, first gov- ernor of Alaska, whose house F. Alexander Powell describes in the introduction to "Where Strange Trails go Down". Powell describes the house "White as an old time clipper ship, the doorway flanked on one hand by a great conch shell, on the other by an enormous specimen of branch coral thus intimating to passersby that the owner of the house had been in foreign parts."
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And like the boys of long ago Rochester-Towne, a boy listening to sea tales was thrilled and longed to go, too, to far distant lands.
"When I did set out on my long journey", writes Powell, "the old whaling captain had been sleeping for a quarter of a century in the Mattapoisett grave yard, but when our tiny vessel poked her tiny bowsprit up into the heart of the Borneo Jungle, I knew that invisible to human eyes he was standing on the bridge."
The "square riggers" still gathered in "Charles Henry's" store at the Old Landing, where they turned the cold shoulder to all the "Tea Kettle" captains like Capt. Ichabod Lewis, living just down the road. They felt what Conrad expressed when, in speaking of "deep water sailors" and "Great Horn seas", he says of steam ships "Such sea going has not the artistic quality of a single handed struggle with something greater than yourself" - "simply the skilled use of a captured force."
The scholarly minister of the white meeting house, Edward C. Pomeroy, living in Capt. Pitcher's house that had been left as a parsonage, watches the old seamen, living over their voyages in dreams.
He writes:
"His crews are those he shipped of old; They grumble still, and sing and swear Their bones are mixed with pearls and gold That brave the kraken's lair.
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His gaze fixt on the warning glass, The guiding stars, the needle's poise, He keeps all watches as they pass- 'Till dawn the dream destroys.
Think not the deeper self to know; His handshake thine, his smile, his bow;
But his companions long ago Are his companions now."
The captains sit on the wharf and watch the Nelson Harvey, Thomas Potter, Hattie Perry, William Burden, Argo come in
الله تلك الدورة للــ
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unloading coal, potatoes, grain and loading boxboards and cranberries.
In the town report of 1886 the children are urged to read Divina Commedia, Paradise Lost, the Iliad and the Odyssey, but modern poetry didn't amount to much.
"Lena Rivers", "St. Elmo", and "Barriers Burned Away", were the favorite novels of the village.
They spent $1,450. for schools, for highways and bridges $1,500., and were putting down concrete sidewalks. But there was not much money coming into the village, except from the piled up fortunes of the captains. Only two whalers going out for the short summer cruise, so when there was a chance to sell a piece of land or a little home on the road, it was done.
The Clark house on the road to the Old Landing this side of Bartlett's Hill had fallen into sad ways. A newspaper of the day described is as "an old unshingled house on the main road from the depot to the village as picturesque and romantic as it is dismal and gloomy. Its window panes are small and old fashioned and little patches where new shingles have been put on, or a piazza of recent construction, are the only evidence of its having been improved for years. An old picket fence with a row of lilac bushes partially hide it from the street. The interior is as old fashioned as the exterior for it is furnished with antique furniture which Mr. Gilder picked up in the village."
Yes! Mr. Gilder had bought the old Clark house, and so it becomes famous - Henry James describes it as "an old house, shingled all over, grey and slightly collapsing, which looked down at him from a steep bank, at the top of wooden steps."
Mr. Gilder found himself the owner of "the worst looking house in the village". From the Life and Letters of R. W. Gilder we find that Richard Gilder himself, and so all the train that followed him, came to Marion because of a boy's friendship with a beautiful soul.
The "old admiral" had a daughter Elizabeth. "Bessy Harwood" was a charming woman who, her friends said, had "a genius for friendships".
د تشيلا 2ـ
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Her grandfather was a well known English actor who had married a grand daughter of Benjamin Franklin. She was a bright, sparkling personality, with a voice like a bell never to be forgotten by one who heard it. She could have become an actress, but contented herself by giving the first and most famous presentations of "Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks" in America. Mr. Gilder had woven in verse Miss Bessy's romance of a love buried by the war.
"Great God, she stood there in the street
Living, yet dead in soul and mind and heart
While far away
His grave was deck't with flowers by stranger's hands today."
Long after her death he wrote "If there is a heaven, and I can get there, it will not take me long to find the Harwood house. Their house was always heaven to me."
So although it was partly because "its toneless air would administer to perfect rest", Gilder knew of Marion from "Miss Bessy", and he came principally because of her presence.
Everything was very simple in the village.
The cows lowed along the streets, and farm wagons, and buggies, and carry-alls, and the Gilder donkeys made the excitement of mail time.
The village still took its weekly bath in the washtub pulled in by the kitchen stove; and tired mothers heaved a sigh of relief as the last squirming youngster was scrubbed and sent off a clean brick red to bed. With bathtubs not known in Washington until 1850, they made their appearance not before 1875 in old Rochester, and then only in a rich captain's house.
There was much neighborly helping each other. When a captain's wife who had moved to town with her husband off on a voyage, sat discouraged among her household effects she was much cheered, she said by some of the old sailors coming in to ask if she had furniture to keep her comfortable, and she was amused later when $1700 from her husband arrived at the Post Office to have them come back to borrow. "But that was before Civil War days, long ago", she added.
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Neighbors came in to care for the sick, "watchers" who took turns, and when they weren't "watching" went home and made a batch of gingerbread, or doughnuts or a couple of pies for the family. When death came they "laid out" the body, and swept and dusted, and brought over chairs for the funeral, that the relatives from "away" might be duly impressed.
The lands of Sippican with the customs of 200 years still binding. Sunday, a gloomy, strict seventh day.
Only sacred music was played on the Sabbath, and secular reading on that day frowned upon in the best families. Sailing on the Lord's Day was wicked.
Of course one could saunter through the grave yard and decipher the old stones, and on sunny summer days one could get in quite a lively bit of gossip looking at grand father's monument.
What one must guard against to escape hell in the here- after still moulded the lives of the best people - the meeting house families in the 80ties.
Gilder said:
"Oh, I am not religious!" but he wrote in his "Passing of Christ"
"Who made the poor man's lowly Labor a service holy
And sweat of work more sweet Than incense at God's feet
Who turned the God of Fear
To a father bending near."
And to a friend he writes:
"I have been thinking of father recently. Would it not be a good arrangement if God could let those we have loved come back for just a little visit - say once a year? Now I would like to have a day with father; have him see the children, go through the office and see how things are going on - and then - vanish if he must for another year."
How astonishing his ideas! Even irreverent to the New England conscience! A bluff old sea captain, who was sharp at a trade, and known to swear as no land lubber could,
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would never think of speaking familiarly of death like that. They might petition the Lord God Jehovah in stern tones and tell him all about themselves in prayer meeting just before a voyage, and talk of the "scenes and unseens" they had been through, but they were really very humble before the Lord and never jested about Bible matters.
And the autocratic old lady who ruled Sippican like an empress of old, who had been brought up in the Calvinistic doctrine from an infant, was so "Orthodox" that at first she was a little uneasy at having any other church represented at the Academy.
But Richard Gilder walked bare headed on the roads on the Sabbath, and his friends came to tea on Sunday afternoons.
Those closed books, Sippican "parlors", with sometimes a funeral wreath or coffin plate hanging on the walls! Some of them got their "shades" pulled up and blinds opened, and the sunlight streamed in, because there was no "parlor" in the Gilder house - no closed best room!
Along the lane bordered with daisies and asters that led from the back door of the Gilder house to the "Cathedral Pines", went a gay procession, for Mr. Gilder had bought the old ruined "oil factory" and it was being made into a studio for Mrs. Gilder, who was an artist.
Capt. Henry Allen had built the stone building about 1860 for a petroleum oil refining plant, probably the first in this section. Mrs. Taber had bought a great tract of Capt. Allen's land for the Academy, and now the pines where the Sunday School picnics had been held, and the "oil factory" passed to the Gilders.
The lane (now Spring St.) through the "Bight" as it was called, was wet where the brook meandered across and through the fields down to the sea, and stepping stones helped one in the Spring to get into the woodland to find white violets and anemone.
All Mr. Gilder's friends helped in the building of the great chimney in the studio.
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Stanford White, famous architect, planned it, and Gilder writes in rhyme of the building to John Burroughs, "John of Birds" he calls him, who often sat by the great blaze.
"My chimney is builded On a hill by the sea At the edge of a wood That the sunset has gilded Since time was begun And the earth first was done:
For mine and for me And for you John Burroughs
My friend old and good At the edge of a wood On a hill by the sea My chimney is builded."
Of "red and grey granite" - the shelf a nine foot block, with "stone hammers clink" "the drill's sharp tinkle" and bird's songs sprinkled through the woods with pine odors scented. Birds
"On the swift way to drink At the spring cold and good That bubbled neath the stones Where the red chieftain tented In the days that are gone."
He comes from the "chaos and clamor" of New York where he stays only for the "human play" he says, to watch the great stones lifted on the chimney.
And he hears the story of the "Graduate" from the sailor who looked like Abraham Lincoln, who after that terrible blow never went to sea again but went to lifting rocks on wharves and chimneys.
"For my chimney was builded By a Plymouth county sailor An old North sea whaler. In the warm noon spell T'was good to hear him tell
The Gilder Studio - "In the woods that bring the sunset near"
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Of the great September blow A dozen years ago :- How at dawn of day The wind began to play
Till it cut the waves flat
Like the brim of your hat. There was no sea about, But it blew straight out
Till the ship lurched over;
But 'twas quick to recover When, all of a stroke The hurricane broke
On her beam ends she blew
In the sea, half the crew Struggling back through the wrack There to cling day and night.
Not a sail heaves in sight;
And the worst, one in thirst (Knows no better, the poor lad!)
Drinks salt water and goes mad.
Eighty hours blown and tost
Five good sailors drowned and lost, And the rest brought to shore, Some to sail as before."
A sailor from the Graduate tells of the hurricane as he heaves the great stones up in their places - a ton and a half boulder hoisted to make the lintel of the great door.
And the birds sang in the pines, and the spring bubbled near by.
A newspaper of the day gives a picture of the first fire.
"The other day Mrs. Gilder entertained a few of her immediate friends and neighbors at a five o'clock tea when the old fashioned crane was hung and the kettle made to boil for the first time.
Among the curiosities of this ingenious studio are some old style costumes which were appropriated by the ladies of the
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party and amid jollity, fun and laughter a most artistic and picturesque house warming was the result."
A long way from wild waves, hoarse voiced sailors, and reeking fo'ca'sles was the world that came in with the Gilders.
Authors, artists, musicians, all the great of the day of artistic Bohemian America followed the Gilders to Marion.
So many celebrities came that according to a story related by one of the Gilder family, a friend exclaimed to Mrs. Gilder one summer afternoon as they stood in the doorway of the Studio.
"Well, you seem to have every one here at one time or another, I should not be surprised to see the Emperor of China arrive!"
At that moment, the Marion stage, far off its appointed route; lumbered up the driveway to the Studio, and there des- cended from its musty depths, not indeed, the Emperor of China, but the distinguished Oriental Okakura Kakuzo, in full Japanese regalia!"
Artists, writers, philanthropists, musicians, the known great and the unknown great were in Gilder's world, and he brought this glorious company with him to the lands of Sippican.
Agassiz came and told the village, that the oldest thing next to the great rock where the chieftain lay, was the tall button-wood tree, that still stands near the lane to the Studio.
Augustus Saint Gaudens walked through the great pines "that bring the sunset near."
"The wind from out the west is blowing;
The homeward wandering cows are lowing;
Dark grow the pine woods, dark and drear The woods that bring the sunset near."
In the Studio all was light and laughter. Behind a large gilded frame covered with gauze pose the notables of the country in "living pictures".
Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensaalaer, so well known for her "English Cathedrals" held famous "Sunday afternoons" in the house (now Dexter Hall) on the Old Landing Road.
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Frank Stockton, had his "Merry Chanter" "grounded" off Charles Neck, and the old captains made the story for him in their pictures sketched by Charles Dana Gibson.
Thomas A. Janvier and his wife Kate wrote in "the Lodge", now Hiss Hall's candy shop.
Mary Hallock Foote, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, John G. Nicolay, Margaret Sutton Briscoe, Margaret Deland, Mar- guerite Merington! The famous "lady from Philadelphia," Mrs. Gillespie!
To meet Joe Jefferson, and then have tickets sent by him to see his Rip Van Winkle when he came to New Bedford! That was an excitement of Marion in the 80's.
There was a touch of something different, that made a great impression on the young people of the village.
Mr. Gilder helped with Mrs. Taber and her Academy teachers to turn the thoughts of the girls and boys to the books and magazines of the day. With famous writers and illustrators walking about the streets, came the desire to know something of what these men and women were saying and doing in the world.
And the visitors learned too of the old seamen and their families.
In a letter from Marion, Aug. 21, 1884, Mr. Gilder writes "It is curious how even in a little place like this, one meets with way farers who open up a new corner of the universe to one!"
They were all friends and neighbors together.
When Mrs. Taber built the new chapel, Mr. Gilder sent the hymn books for it, published by the Century Co.
In and out of the little Sippican houses went celebrated people laughing, talking, hobnobbing with the captains, fisher- men and school-children.
Rather shocking to hear of Modjeska dancing bare-footed down the lane to the Studio. But how everybody cried when she gave a recitation in Polish with magnificent fire and pathos, and how everybody laughed when she gave the trans-
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lation and it was only "A. B. C. D." and the rest of the alphabet.
Mr. Gilder, the original Capt. Kidd of the original "Mrs. Jarley's waxwork Show" in Hadley's Hall, acted the part of the horrible captain "with great ferocity." And how the "Buffalo Belles" from "the Hut", playing in "Mr. Brown the only man in Town," caused the Marion swains' hearts to flutter!
Such shocking young people! Dashing off to New Bed- ford in a tally-ho-coach with four horses, a storm coming up, and the horses terrified, and seven pairs of arms straining at the reins to keep the flying horses from leaping over the side of the Fairhaven bridge. At the Parker House the young ladies drying their frocks, and the young men coming in jauntily with real sailors' outfits bought from a Whaling outfitter's shop down near the wharves!
And the old ladies rocking on the piazza of the Bay View House with pursed lips and raised eye brows!
"Young people never acted so in my day!"
The children play marbles and buy twisted stick candy all red and sticky, and bulls eyes and lemon balls, out of glass jars at Hadley's & Handy's store and of Mr. Hall, the post master opposite, and jump the rope, and roll their hoops, and go to the Sunday School picnic in Holmes' grove on the Matta- poisett road.
Abraham Lincoln's secretary came, and eyes that saw the President looked out on the harbor. John Hay walked under the pines and the elm trees.
Some of the boys who wore the blue had caught glimpses of "the President".
Charles Ripley said "I looked up and he stood beside my bed in the hospital. He didn't speak at first, and then he said
'How old are you, son?'
You see I had said I was sixteen!"
John Nicolay and Hay had been collecting for a history of Lincoln for twelve years, and it was not until 1885 that they had accepted an offer for the work. The Century had offered $50,000 for the serial rights.
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In the life of John Hay we read of the "frequent consul- tations by letter or person with Mr. Gilder," "because the Century could not undertake to print more than a third of the life."
The editor often disagreed with the writers, and Hay is writing in 1887 that if they only want the Life to run three years they "must cut great chunks of topics out" - and goes on to say that "only the intelligent reader, if such a person exists, will miss them."
Mr. Gilder thought that "for the book might be reserved only those long dull documents, if any there be which add dignity and value to a literary volume, but which the ordinary reader skips".
So they write and talk of Lincoln in Sippican. Gilder could see "Lincoln looming up as an even greater and more important figure than he was hitherto supposed to be. No spot or blot on his character."
The mornings are quiet for literary work in the village. The cocks crow all over the little town.
Everybody kept a few hens, a pig, and perhaps a cow. One chore of the small boys and girls was to go after milk with a little scrap of blue or white pasteboard labelled 5c in the bottom of the tin pail.
Very quiet, except sometimes the ocean just outside crashes in again, and takes a sailor of Sippican.
Henry James in "The Bostonians" in 1886 gives a pic- ture of his stay in Sippican.
He has his hero come in the August dusk, on the evening train from Boston.
He writes of "the only vehicle in waiting outside of the small lonely, hut-like station, so distant from the village, that as far as one looked along the sandy, sketchy road which was supposed to lead to it, one saw only an empty land on either side. Six or eight men, in 'dusters', carrying parcels and hand bags, projected themselves upon the solitary, rickety carry-all, while the ruminating conductor of the vehicle, a lean sham- bling citizen, with a long neck and tuft on his chin, guessed
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that if he wanted to get to the hotel before dusk he would have to strike out. His valise was attached in a precarious manner to the rear of the carry-all. 'Well, I'll chance it' the driver remarked sadly, when Ransom protested against its unsecure position. He recognized the southern quality of the picturesque fatalism."
"His friends that were there must be pretty thoroughly relaxed if they had given themselves up to the genius of the place. This was what he hoped for and counted on, as he took his way, the sole pedestrian in the group that had quitted the train, in the wake of the overladen carry-all. It helped him to enjoy the first country walk he had had for many months, for more than months, for years."
James dwells on the "mild vague scenery, just beginning to be dim with twilight." "He liked the very smell of the soil as he wandered along; cool, soft whiffs of evening met him at bends of the road which disclosed very little more - unless it might be a band of straight stemmed woodland, keeping, a little the red glow from the west."
James is amused at the little hotel - the "Bay View House."
"He lit his cigar in the office of the hotel - a small room on the right of the door where a 'register' meagrely inscribed, led a terribly public life on the little bare desk, and got its pages dog-eared before they were covered.
Local worthies, of a vague identity, used to lounge there, by the hour. They tipped back their chairs against the wall, seldom spoke, and might have been supposed, with their con- verging vision, to be watching something out of the window, if there had been anything to watch. Sometimes one of them got up and went to the desk, on which he leaned his elbows, hunching up a pair of sloping shoulders, to an uncollared neck. For the fiftieth time he perused the fly-blown page of the recording volume, where the names followed each other with such jumps of dates. The others watched him while he did so - or con- templated in silence some 'guest' of the hostelry; when such personage entered the place with an air of appealing from the general irresponsibility of the establishment and found no
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one but the village-philosophers to address himself to. It was an establishment conducted by invisible, elusive agencies; they had a kind of stronghold in the dining room, which was locked at all but sacramental hours. There was a tradition that a 'boy' exercised some tutelary function as regards the crumpled register; but when he was inquired about, it was usually elicited from the impartial circle in the office that he was some where round or that he had gone a-fishing. Except the haughty wait- ress (already described as a pale, round backed young lady, with auburn ringlets, a fancy belt, and an expression of limited tolerance for a gentleman who could not choose quickly between fried fish, fried steak, and baked beans) who only emerged at meal-times from her mystic seclusion, this impalpable youth was the single person on the premises who represented domestic service. Anxious lady boarders, wrapped in shawls, were seen waiting for him, as if he had been the doctor, on horse-hair rocking chairs, in the little public parlour; others peered vaguely out of back doors and windows, thinking that if he were some- where round, they might see him. Sometimes people went to the door of the dining room and tried it, shaking it a little, timidly, to see if it would yield; then finding it fast, came away, looking, if they had been observed, shy and snubbed, at their fellows.
The hotel itself offered few resources; the inmates were not numerous; they moved about a little outside, on the small piazza and in the rough yard which interposed between the house and the road, and then dropped off into the unmitigated dusk. This element touched only in two or three places by a far-away glimmer, presented itself to Ransom as his sole en- tertainment. - It was pervaded by a curious, pure, earthly smell, which in New England, in summer, hangs in the noctur- nal air."
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