USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Wayland > Old-time Wayland > Part 2
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As we follow the dates on the stones down the centuries, we find a great change. The use of the indigenous rock ceases, and is supplanted by the familiar fine-grained blue slate. The let- tering and carving grow from the ruder forms, with the grinning death's head and irregular lettering, to the richly ornamented designs of angels' heads, urns, weeping willows, and borders of conventionalized flowers, fruit, and foliage.
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THE OLD GRAVEYARD
Perhaps the finest examples are those of the Maynard family, which is now extinct in the town, but whose blood runs in the veins of many of us; whose stately row of stones stands on the crest of the rise. Two of these com- memorate officers of the Revolution, Captains Nathaniel and Micah, while three are of daugh- ters of the latter, Eunice, Dorcas, and Lois, who died, according to the inscriptions, in the fairest bloom of youth, aged twenty-three, sixteen, and nineteen. On Miss Dorcas Maynard's stone are inscribed the following lines :
" Alas, when least we tho't of her decay, This pleasing Maid by Death was snatch away To join in praises with the lovely train Of spotless Doves for whom the Lamb was slain, On heavenly Harps with Rapture and Surprize While ours neglected on the Willows lies."
A number of fine stones, of approximately the date of the Revolution, are of great size, bearing highly eulogistic biographies of their subjects. Such are those of Colonel John Noyes, who lies with his slave at his feet, Dr. Eben- ezer Roby, Joseph and Ephraim Curtis, Joshua
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
Haynes, William Baldwin, Revs. Josiah Bridge and Joel Foster, and Captain Isaac and Deacon Robert Cutting. Forty-seven graves are marked by the crosses of the Sons of the American Revolution. Twenty-four of these soldiers fought at Concord and Lexington, and six at Bunker Hill. There are but few of the old Wayland families not thus represented, and many of them by several members. Thus of the name of Damon are five; Heard, four; Maynard, four; Cutting, three; Rutter, three. These all have existing stones. Hundreds of other graves are unmarked, however, of men who were equally entitled to this, and to other distinction.
HERE are now in Wayland, in 1926, comparatively few homesteads in which the same people live who lived in them fifty years ago. "Time and change are busy ever," as we used to sing in the old church, and one and two generations have already supplanted the old, of whom there are now few I can mention, but lie
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
on the quiet hillside, where the old slate head- stones rise amid the tall grasses and trailing blackberry vines, and where the pines stand guard around, with outstretched hands over them, say- ing, "Hush."
In the Wayland of 1875, and earlier, nearly every one was related. It was practically one family. The older people were all Uncle This and Aunt That, while the younger ones were all known familiarly by their first names. Now throughout the length and breadth of the town the old homesteads have passed into new hands, or into those of another generation, and the old- time life and peculiarities of fifty to seventy-five years ago seem so strange to us, in our modern life, as to make them appear as fiction. Is it not, therefore, the duty, as it certainly is the pleasure, of one whose life goes back to, and was a part of those days, to record some of their features, that they may be preserved in more permanent form than that of rapidly fading memories?
I remember the last appearance of the old stagecoach. It was the day the new railroad opened in 1881, and the event was being cele-
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
brated by all the town. The street was filled with teams and carriages of all descriptions; the flag was flying from the staff on the green; and Captain Pousland's cannon, from the ship in which he had sailed around the world and fought Malay pirates, was in place, loaded to the muzzle, and attended by all the boys in town, to be fired when the first train should come into sight.
Soon it was heard coming. A cheer was raised; the bells rang; Bang! went the cannon; and with a deafening shriek of its whistle, the first engine, followed by its train of cars, filled to suffocation with invited guests and free riders, for no fares were collected that day, dashed into the town and across the road.
At this moment the old stage came up the middle of the street, its accustomed, hitherto un- disputed route, and was obliged to stop among the throng of vehicles, towering among them like old Lear on the heath, to await the pleasure of this puffing, snorting, hissing upstart, the epit- ome and representative of the new age.
Mournful and humiliated, it accepted the in- evitable. Its three horses, for it no longer boasted of its noble four, as in the days of its prime,
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
standing with hanging dejected heads; it meekly awaited its turn, its opportunity to pass on into oblivion, into the past, with only phantoms and memories for its future fares.
LMOST opposite the new railroad station was the home of Miss Caro- line Reeves. It stood near the road, as it does today, but was then sur- rounded by a picket fence, over and through which the syringa and rose bushes thrust their faces, and where, in the long grass about the stone doorstep and before the house, the yellow jonquils grew in the spring.
She was one of the last of my childhood's memories to stay in tangible, visible form among us. She never changed or grew old. The last time I saw her, she was just the same little body that I remember years before, coming into the Orthodox meeting-house as regularly as Sunday came, and sitting in the second seat from the front, the next pew to the minister's, with Aunt Cherry Roby.
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
The meeting-house was very different in those days from what it is now. In the old days I describe, its only pride was in the people who filled it every Sunday. I wish I could describe a Sunday morning there! The plain white walls, the pulpit, with its red velvet rosette in front, and the two high fences of matched pine boards painted brown, on either side, with the ther- mometer appropriately hanging on one of them. The pine seats, and the open windows, through which I could see Captain Pousland's calf tied under the apple trees nearby. Our pew just in front of Uncle Abel Gleason's; how he would pass peppermints now and then over the back to us children, never taking his eyes from the preacher !
On the meeting-house steps, "watching the folks come in," would stand the big boys, with smoothly combed hair, their red faces perspiring from the warmth of their "Sunday clothes." In the buttonhole of each would be a white pond lily with a very long stem, evidence of the Sun- day morning swim in Baldwin's Pond. When the bell stopped ringing and the last churchgoer had disappeared within, leaving the street empty
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
and silent, save perhaps for an oriole answering the bobolinks over in the whiteweed of the field, the boys would enter, and sit decorously in the last seats, by the woodbox, near the stove. From this stove two long smoke-pipes ran the whole length of the church, suspended by wires from the ceiling, hopefully constructed as a means of heating. How my grave, wondering, baby eyes have studied these, Sunday after Sunday!
It was said that Mr. Bullard, the minister, could not write a sermon unless his cat lay upon his study table. His theology was not always approved by the two grim old deacons, who I never remember being absent from meeting, one of whom, it was known, could see no hope for infants or heathen.
Then the back of Mr. Lee's pew in front of us, with its impressions of boot heels of all sizes (are such nails made now?), and the men's faces scratched with a pin, and the cow (an artist drew that!), and the three little slits that father used to put his fingernail into as he sat listening- just above the racks with the "Watts and Select."
Then the choir, with pretty 'Genie Moore and Eunice Morse in front, with their pink and
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
white hats; and the men behind, with Edward Rice braying the tenor. But especially I remem- ber Miss Caroline here. She always wore little curls down each side of her face, and black lace mitts, and she always untied her bonnet strings and let them hang loose on each side, during service, so as not to crease them unnecessarily, and had a folded handkerchief and fan and sprig of Southernwood in her lap. At the closing of the sermon she would tie up her bonnet strings (the sign to me that the end was at hand), and be ready to stand up with the rest at the last hymn, when we turned around, and stood facing the gallery to see who was in the "Singers' Seats."
I remember one dreadful day Aunt Cherry came into church and right up the aisle with her green silk parasol, with the ivory handle that folded up, open !
Miss Caroline lived with her brother Sylves- ter, as Uncle Billy Grout lived with his sister, Aunt Susan, a little farther up the street.
Sylvester was a very terrible man. He always wore his trousers tucked into the tops of his boots, or at least one of them. He had a high, hooked nose and a fearful eye. He was always
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
followed by a little rough, yellow terrier, which nothing but death could part from him. The little dog was always slyly laughing to himself, as if to say, "Me and him know things!"
He was a Justice of the Peace, and so had to be everywhere ; and although no one ever knew of his using the terrible power with which he was clothed, he was vaguely recognized as being in some way connected with the Law, which really did just as well. He always seemed to be on the point of doing something decisive, but no one ever knew of its being done. He was really a very kind-hearted man, and in case of sickness, no one could excel him in gentleness, patience, or efficiency as a nurse.
Uncle .Billy Grout, although unquestionably a good man, "went to the other church," and was therefore to be regarded with some reserve. The Unitarians were "free thinkers." Aunt Susan was as strong an Orthodox as Uncle Billy was the other way round, but as no one could make him quarrel any more than they could make him change his mind, there was no household rupture here.
Aunt Susan went to "our" church and sat in
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
the corner of Mr. Otis Loker's pew, two seats in front of us, just in front of Cyrus Lee, whose sister wrote poetry. Mr. Loker was the fattest man that ever lived. He lived where Mr. Lovell does now, and was a teamster. He used to drive great loads of hay, and sat in a little throne, boxed in back, top, and sides, up in under the hay, behind the horses, which was all one could ever ask for distinction. I always intended to have a seat like that when I grew up.
He and Aunt Susan always went to sleep in the sermon. She was a fat old woman, and I used to wonder if her nose and chin would ever really meet as her head nodded behind her palm- leaf fan, lower and lower. Her fan was very unlike Miss Caroline's, which opened, and had a little picture on it of boys and girls dancing around a pole all garlanded with flowers. Aunt Susan also wore mitts, but very different from Miss Caroline's. They were more closely woven, plain and strong, and rolled back a little from her strong, old fingers.
But I want to tell you about Mr. Grout, who, after Benjamin Franklin, was one of the most wonderful men that ever lived. I can remember
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his speaking to me, a child, and recall his gentle, homely face, with its big nose and its kind eyes. "Gentle" is a word which will have to be often used in describing Uncle Billy Grout.
He lived with his sister in the white house, before described, which stood where the New Town Hall now is, with an apple tree in front and a well under it, with a rope and bucket. On the west side of the house was a garden, where there were famous blue larkspur and holly- hocks; and behind this, a little barn for his two cows, for Uncle Billy sold milk to his neighbors. I can remember him, as I have often seen him, driving his cows along the shady road at night from his pasture up beyond Grandma Roby's. He never hurried. With one hand under his coat tails, in the other hand he held his stick, or maybe a rake with which he had been rolling up a little hay on his piece, and would gently touch one cow or the other as she loitered to bite the grass by the roadside; not hurrying them, for he loved to see them enjoy these last nips. So he would walk along, always with a quiet smile on his face.
Uncle Billy Grout was an old bachelor. I
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
have heard that in his youth he loved Miss Caroline, who was very beautiful and the belle of the town. But his suit was not favored by her, nor, indeed, were any of the many she re- ceived, and Uncle Billy and Miss Caroline re- mained bachelor and maid all their days. He was Town Clerk, and the Miller of the village, grinding his neighbors' corn in the little old gray mill under the willows over by the mill pond. Connected with his mill, he had a turning lathe, on which he made many curious things, includ- ing a telescope, with which he assured us he could see the rings of Saturn. He was a surveyor, and no sale of wood lot or meadow could be made without the lines being "run," and the old "stake- and-stones" at the corners located by William Grout, and shown on a neatly drawn plan.
Uncle Billy was also a musician, and played the organ at the Unitarian Church, whose min- ister was the sainted Dr. Sears, the author of the hymn beginning,
" It came upon the midnight clear, That glorious song of old."
a hymn since sung throughout Christendom, and which was written in Wayland. Perhaps Uncle
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
Billy Grout was the first of the millions of or- ganists who have played the music to which it has been sung. He had a small organ in his house, and would play upon it evenings, after his day's work was done. His inseparable com- panion at home and afield was a little grand- niece. Sitting at his organ of a summer's eve- ning, with the child on his knee, he would guide her fingers among the keys, teaching her the simple airs he loved. And in the woods and fields no one could teach her better where the first violets grew, or where the birds built their nests, than Uncle Billy.
Driving his cows to pasture one day, he found a ground-bird's nest directly in the path, and from that day, until the birds were grown and the nest deserted, the kind old man never drove the cows over that path.
One may fancy the hours he passed in the little secluded mill with no company but his own busy thoughts! The sun would shine in through the dusty panes on his bench, flecking it with the dancing shadows of the willow leaves outside; or in the open door, through which he could see the birds fluttering down to pick up the scattered
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
grain on the ground; or perhaps in the square of sunshine on the floor, from which he would not willingly frighten them. There would be no sound but the sleepy rumble of the wheel and the dancing of the water over the stones in the brook below.
Thus as farmer, miller, town clerk, surveyor, astronomer, and musician, this useful, busy life was spent, and notwithstanding its many duties and interests, with as happy leisure and serene moderation as those of Nature itself.
There was Mr. Hapgood, the "marketer," who came through the town every two weeks from some unknown region "up country" with a great, white, canvas-covered wagon with four horses, carrying farm products to Boston. I have a faint memory of many such market wagons which used to pass our house, but Mr. Hapgood's was the last-a relic of the old times before the railroads, when this was Boston's only means of supply. Perhaps Mr. Hapgood's caravan made a stronger impression on my memory on account of his re- markable dog which accompanied him-never under the wagon, where a dog might be looked for, but in the midst of the sixteen legs of the
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
four horses, where he was never known to be struck or stepped upon by the many hoofs about him.
Then there was old Wheeler Haynes, the milk- man, with his blue spectacles; only secondary in importance, and the equal in regularity, of the stagecoach, who for twenty years drove every day, summer and winter, from Sudbury to Som- erville and back, and accumulated a fortune. Mr. Moore, the stage driver, it was said, never wore socks.
Then Colonel David Heard, who was a real Justice of the Peace, before whom transgressors were haled, in his office behind the parlor, in his dignified house on the Island. His wife was, as I remember her, the grandest old lady I ever saw. In her long life of nearly a hundred years she never was known to touch her back against a chair-back, as she sat.
Uncle Richard Heard, dark and swarthy, with his thick white hair and terrible, grim chin and lips, was one of the "Black Heards," who were said to have had Indian ancestors. I have seen him in his shirt sleeves, with high stock and dickey, and a tall silk hat, driving a load of hay.
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
100
His wife was always known as "Aunt Richard." Uncle Joe Bullard, who lived into the nineties, was the last to wear the old-fashioned farmer's blue frock, buttoned at the neck and falling to the knees, which I can remember as commonly worn. He did not cut his hair, while his face was always smooth-shaven, and his curling white locks fell to his shoulders. I remember him once in his hayfield, getting in a load of hay with his yoke of oxen. "Pretty old fellows, aren't they?" I said. "Yes," replied Uncle Joe, "they be. But I guess they will last as long as I do." Mr. Bul- lard had been Town Sexton for over forty years. One of his duties was to toll the church bell the morning after a death, sounding the bell once for every year of the age of the deceased. I can re- member standing by our gate, on an early summer morning, counting the bells.
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
UT of all my childhood memories, what is dearer to me than that of our old neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Child? Theirs was the little brown cottage under a tall elm, with the lovely garden, and two great cherry trees in front, which stood, and still stands, overlooking the far- reaching meadows through which the river winds to the Sudbury hills in the west. "Looking toward sunset." "Yes," might be Mrs. Child's charac- teristic reply, "but remember what Jean Paul Richter says, 'The long shadows of evening point toward the morning!' " Here the gentle old couple lived, with the love of their youth stronger and more beautiful than ever; the joys and sorrows of humanity their constant interest; and although in this retired nook of the world, always in touch with its life and thought.
What Mrs. Child was in literature, what her efforts and sacrifices were in the abolition of slavery, and in the Woman's Relief Corps of the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, are matters of history. I knew her only as "Mitty Child," a short little body in quaint Quaker-like
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
dress, with a face as bright and fresh and sweet as one of her own roses.
Mr. Child was a man of highest education, a reader in seven languages, and a close student of life and every branch of knowledge. When traveling in Spain, he had been impressed into the service of a cavalry regiment of the army, his fluency in the Spanish language contradicting his assertion of American citizenship.
He was a born theorizer, and nothing was too great or too small to be the subject of due con- sideration and criticism, from European politics to the raising of dandelion roots as a substitute for tobacco. With the books of his well-stocked library, the tools of his carpenter's bench, or the garden implements of his "Pent house," he was equally familiar, and proficient. He could dis- cuss German philosophy or cement a cistern; or, as is more probable, do both at once.
Speaking of mason work reminds me of a story told of Mr. Child. He had Old Man Moulton, the village drunkard, who Mrs. Child reformed, at his house one day to make some repairs on his chimney. When the work was announced as done, Mr. Child mounted the ladder
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
to the eaves and proceeded to inspect it. "Yes, Tom," said he, "it looks very well, but I see you have left an orifice between the bricks near the top." "Ah, well, sir," said Tom, "I will go fetch it right down !"
No memories of Wayland at this time would be complete without mention of Quivus. He was a dreadful little old man, who lived with his large family in a hut up in the back part of the town, and who always drove about on a packing box mounted on two wheels. The box was be- lieved to contain a gun, besides other horrors. It was said he read the Bible backward, so as to make the word "God" read "dog." Our minds could imagine no more fearful warning than that of "Be careful, or Quivus will get you!" There was a man who said "Quivus" was Latin, and I always intended to ask Mr. Child about it, but I never did.
The north part of the town possessed other terrors. On a lonely road, far from neighbors, lived David Moore, who was said to sleep with a gun over the head of his bed. This was bad enough, but he was also said to keep "blood- hounds," whose baying could be heard in the distant woods.
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
It is true some called them foxhounds, but this was discredited, as any one, once having heard bloodhounds bay, could not be deceived.
At the end of the causeway across the meadows, so near the water that he could tie his boat to his woodshed (which always seemed to me very ex- citing), was the red house among the willows of Old Man Garfield, who, if I remember correctly, had been a soldier. His life, like that of his neighbors, the minks and muskrats, whose habi- tations surrounded his own, was spent on the river, where his weather-beaten figure, sitting motion- less and silent in his flat-bottomed boat among the lilypads, was as familiar a feature of the river as the sedge and blue-joint which lined its banks. He aspired to no higher game than horned pouts, which he neatly dressed, and, with their clean, pink bodies in a tin pail, would peddle them along the road to the village, when he went hither to get the one necessity of his life-tobacco. Selling the fish always seemed a very incidental part of these visits to town, the price being of slight account as against the favor conferred by him on the purchaser. And weren't the pouts good, fried in Indian meal!
-
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
If proper diplomacy were used in the ask- ing, without which he probably would "not have time," he would put neat rush bottoms in chairs, made out of the tall green flags which bordered the river. He was the last one in the neighbor- hood to possess this now lost art of our grand- . parents. I remember the last one he did for us -how it held the green of the rushes for years.
Another expert fisherman, and a familiar . figure about the streets of the town, was "Blind Charley" Russell, with his tapping cane and his fine bearded face, whose blue eyes showed no sign of their uselessness. He lived with his mother in the little brick schoolhouse on the foot of the Common. His face might have served the old painters for that of a saint, such calm and peace glorified it. As with all blind persons, he pos- sessed extraordinary power in his remaining senses, could recognize any one in Wayland by voice or touch, and was at home anywhere. He was a skillful fisherman, and many were the times we children found him by the old willow by Baldwin's pond or at the bridge, quietly fishing.
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
O return to Mr. Child from this long digression. He terraced the slope of his garden, as he explained to me, that he might cut the grass on the vertical sides, while having practically the same horizontal surface for his vegetables and fruit. He laid the pipes and made a little fountain in his garden, with many a dissertation on the laws of hydraulics, and de- scriptions of famous fountains and aqueducts, to his friends who might come to watch his work. When all this was done, he placed pretty colored sea shells in the basin, by which he and his wife would sit watching the ripple of the tiny shower, with the sunbeams playing on the sand and shells; and great was Mrs. Child's delight when the birds discovered it, and made it their bath, spraying the flower beds with their little wings as they fluttered about in the water.
From the coming of the first bluebird in the spring, to the frost crystals of winter, every event and phase of Nature was noted with wise theo- ries and studies by one, with love and delight by the other.
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
But as I have said, public events were fol- lowed and studied with as much interest as were these quiet features of their life. I have a faint memory of an incident of the war time which will show this. I think it was when the news came of Gettysburg. Mr. Child came down to my father's house, wild with excitement, and asked for our great flag. Tying this over his shoulders, he climbed to the top of one of the great ash trees in front of the house-an incred- ible feat even for a young man-and there, sixty feet in the air, he lashed the staff to the tree, and with the flag blowing over him, and with his white hair streaming to the wind, he sang the "Star Spangled Banner," as loudly as his strong lungs could sing it.
While Mr. Child was strong in theory, Mrs. Child was active in practice of joyous love and sympathy. While he would express a theory as to the reason of a honeysuckle having five petals and a lily six, she would thrust them into the hand of a child. "Opy door, Mitty Chile! I want a fower!" I would cry, pounding my baby fists on her door; not realizing then that with it would come the beauty and joy and fragrance of her presence, which would be the real "fower."
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
Sometimes when we children were visiting her, when in the sunny little room we had been shown her stereoscopic photographs, and seen the wonderful colors of the prism hung in the sun- shine; when Mr. Child had shown us his spurs worn in Spain, and the Emperor Napoleon's boot- jack, and had terrified us by his imitation of a donkey's braying, and we had stayed as long as we should, Mrs. Child would place a bit of maple sugar or a bunch of grapes on the mantel and say, "There, children, when you go home you may have this." And how she would laugh and show her beautiful even teeth when we would very quickly say that we "must go now."
And when I, a little six-year-old youngster, fell off a haymow in the barn and broke my leg, how she came every day to read to me or play with me, or bring funny verses she had written for me! And when the winter came, and my little sister and I must go away to town, her bright, sunny letters would follow us, telling all about our pets and friends; enclosing, maybe, a pressed "ladies delight" which had braved the winter in her garden.
Once when we were going away, she begged
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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
our little torn straw hats which we had worn all summer, that she might hang them in her room to remind her of the blue eyes which used to look from under them, and the yellow hair which used to come out through the hole in the crown of one.
But not alone to her friends and acquaintances were her sympathy and championship and love confined. The town, the nation, the world, have all known them. No wrong or injustice was too far away for her not to denounce it. But of this I need not write. As a child, all I knew was that she had the most beautiful garden of flowers in the world, and that there were no friends I loved more than Mr. and Mrs. Child.
*
But, " The sun comes up, and the sun goes down,
The earth grows green, and the earth grows brown,"
as the years flit by, and over these old familiar fields,
" Like shadows passing o'er the grass, Or clouds which roll successive on ; Man's countless generations pass, And as we gaze, their forms are gone !"
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OLD-TIME WAYLAND
"Fleeing to fables, cannot be moored." The serene brow of old Nobscot still rises across the valley; the river winds its blue ribbon through the meadows, green with the bending grasses of summer, or brown in the smoky haze of autumn; in the spring the bluebirds warble among the apple trees our forefathers planted on the hill- sides, and from the fields where they labored, the field lark's sweet, plaintive note comes; but the forms which we associated with these we see not.
" New children play upon the green, New weary sleep below ; But still returns the punctual spring And still the faithful snow."
The old familiar tones of our neighbors' voices have died into silence. Mr. Child's tall form, muffled in his long cloak, has passed our door for the last time. On the old ash tree in our dooryard still hangs the ring where Uncle Abel Gleason used to tie his horse; but the grass this many a year has grown long and undisturbed under it, where no horse is tied now. And as at this homestead, so throughout the town. The old life has silently passed, and the familiar
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features of hill, valley, meadow, and homestead, so intimately associated with it, remain in a strange, new era. But still, about the old homes, the lilacs breathe their memories in the May; and still, in many a neglected garden, or maybe by a lonely grass-grown cellar, lying open to the sky, the roses or lilacs loyally bloom on the tan- gled bushes, or the tulips and jonquils push up through the grass, in memory, perhaps, of some sweet Lois Maynard, who planted them and loved them, years and years ago.
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