USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume I > Part 39
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However it was with adults, child life was full of amusements. Children were numerous in every neighborhood, and though they were each required to be useful, they were in early years left much to themselves and were at home in every house, barn, or shed, within a mile, or more. There was of course coasting, skating, swimming, gool, fox and hounds, and snow-balling, with choosing of sides, lasting for a whole school term, with elaborate forts ; cart wheel and men o' morn's in the snow; collar and elbow, or square hold
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wrestling, with its many different trips, locks and play-ups-side and back hold being unscientific ; round ball, two and four old cat, with soft yarn balls thrown at the runner. The older girls and boys spent the hour's nooning in the school-house and either paired off for small games or talks, or played "Here we stand all round this ring," "Needle's eye," "Kitty corners" or "Who's got the button." As in the age of Shakespeare the queen's maids of honor played tag, so here all children, and even adults often played childs' games with gusto.
In the family, as they gathered about the stove, or sometimes about the grand old fireplace in the back kitchen, with its back-log, crane, pot hooks and trammels, there were stories of the old fort, of bears, wildcats, Indians and Bloody Brook, and other probably unprinted tales perhaps many generations old. There were some who could sing old English ballads that had come down by tradition and which had never been in print in America, and more who could sing a comic song or pathetic negro melody. Lord Lovel, Irving, Bunyan, The Youth's Companion and many Sunday-school books were read aloud. A pair of skates was earned by a boy friend one winter by reading the entire Bible through, and another bought an accordian with money earned by braiding the plain sides of palm-leaf hats where no splicing was needed, for the women at a cent per side. All families allowed the game of fox and geese, a few permitted checkers, and one, backgammon, which was generally thought to be almost gambling. Dominoes were barely tolerated, but riddles, rebuses and charades were in high favor by old and young and were published in all the local weekly papers. It was here that I learned that card playing, which I had often seen before but did not much understand nor care for, was very wrong, and a boy friend was taught old sledge, and euchre, up over the horse sheds on Sundays between services, by an older son of the officiating minister. There were hull-gull; cats-cradle with two series of changes, string and knot puzzles, odd and even, and most of the games, and many more than those in Mr. Newel's charming, and largely original, book entitled, The Plays and Games of American Children, con- necting many of them conclusively with the sports and pastimes of the Eng- lish people in the merry olden time of Brandt. One maiden lady, whom we all loved, could spell "The Abominable Bumble Bee with his Head Cut Off," in an inverse House-that-Jack-built fashion, with a most side-splitting effect.
There were beech and chestnutting parties; raisings; and days set apart for all the men in the district being warned out by the surveyor to gather and work on the roads with teams. Work was easy, as it was for the town, and stories were plenty. There were huskings, with cider and pumpkin pie, and games on the barn floor, when it was cleared of corn; paring bees, with
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bobbing, swinging a whole paring thrice around the head, thence to fall on the floor in the form of the fancied initial of some person of the other sex, and counting seeds to the familiar doggerel-one I love, two I love, three I love and say, four I love with all my heart, and five I cast away, etc. Here the apples were quartered and strung, and hung in festoons to dry, all over the kitchen. There were quilting bees for girls about to marry, where the men came in the evening and partook of the new species of rice pop-corn, served in two large milk pans, with perhaps the most delicious home made spruce and wintergreen beer. Spelling schools in which the parents took part, and where the champion spellers of rural disricts, after exhausting several spelling books, agreed to spell each other down on an abridged Worcester's dictionary. There were weekly evening singing schools in winter, and sev- eral of us taught ourselves or each other to play the accordion and fiddle by rote, to dance single and double shuffle on a board, and the steps of waltz, polka, and schottish. Even square dances were attempted to our own music, if we could get a caller-off. This latter was here a stolen sweet, as was the furtive reading of the thrilling tales of Sylvanus Cobb in the New York Ledger-sets of which were smuggled around among the boys and read after retiring, or in sheep shed, hay mow, or attic, on rainy days. I must not for- get the rage for trapping and hunting, by which we learned much of the habits of crows, hawks, muskrats, woodchucks, squirrels, partridges and even foxes, and which made us acquainted with wide areas of territory. In a regular squirrel hunt organized by choosing sides, and a dinner to the victors paid for by the vanquished party, as determined by counting tails, boys of my age were not old enough to participate. We made collections however for whole seasons, of heads, legs, wings, and tails, as well as of woods, leaves, flowers, stones, bugs, butterflies, etc.
The dull days in haying time brought another sort of education. The men of the vicinity strolled together in a shed, and sitting on tool bench, grind- stone, manger, wagons, chopping blocks, and hog spouts, discussed crop prices, ditching, walling, salting cattle, finding springs with witch-hazel, taxes, the preaching, the next selectmen, fence-viewer, constable, and, I suppose a little earlier, wardens, leather-sealers, deer reeves, surveyors of shingles and clapboards and of wheat, field drivers, tithing men, clerk of the market, and pound-keepers. And they discussed as well the good brooks and ponds for trouting, or snaring pickerel with brass wire loops and a white-birch- bark light at night, and every sort of gossip. The old uncles who came to be the heroes of current stories, and who were in a sense ideal men, were shrewd and sharp, of exceeding few words, but these oracular, of most unpromising exteriors and mode of speech, with quaint and eccentric ways which made their quintessential wisdom very surprising by the contrast ; while
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in weather signs and in drugs the old Indian was sometimes the sage. At the opposite extreme was the unseasoned fellow who can be fooled and not get the best of it if he was "run" or played some practical joke. Absurd exaggerations told with a serious air, to test the hearer's knowledge or credulity, were the chief ingredients of this lowery-day wit. Thus the ass's head was not unfrequently clapped on some poor rich fellow, green from the city, or some larger town, suspected of the unpardonable sin of being "stuck up."
In this air a good "nag" has great viability. As a boy here, e. g., I often played hunt, snapping a disabled old flint-lock musket at every live thing in field and forest, for which an adult neighbor used to "run" me unmercifully before the whole shed. Years after, when I was at home on a college outing, he had not forgotten it, and for perhaps a dozen summers since, I have met it. On a recent evening, when walking wth a dignified city friend, he met me with the same old grind, "Hello, huntin' much this summer with Philan- der's old gun?" as he slapped his thighs and laughed till the hills rang, and, though I did not hear him, I am no less certain that he said to the neighbor with him, when they had ridden well by, that I was always a pretty middlin' good sort of a fellow after all, and wasn't stuck up. The joke will no doubt keep fresh another quarter of a century if my friend lives, and there are many more of the same kind. Another grind at my expense illustrates the inven- tive cleverness of this old Yankee type. As one of the speakers at an annual dinner in honor of the old town Academy, I had been several times intro- duced as a specimen of the former students of the Academy. One night at the crowded post office this shrewd old farmer told, in my presence and for my benefit, the story of old Joe W., who went on the road as a drummer for the old tannery. He said Joe had just experienced religion, and was just then so all-fired honest that he selected, as the samples he was to sell from, pieces of sole leather a trifle below the average quality, instead of above, as an honest drummer should do. He was afraid to hope that Professor N., who presided at the dinner, had experienced religion, but leastways he was so all-fired honest that he leaned over backwards worse than old Joe in call- ing me out as a sample Academy boy, for although I was middling smart there was not a boy of them who wasn't a plaguey sight smarter than I was. Another of his stories was of Stephen and Ann. They were courting, and she had sat in his lap in the kitchen one Sunday evening for some hours, when she suddenly asked if he was not tired. He gallantly replied, "Not a mite, Ann, keep right on settin'. I was awful tired an hour ago, but now I am numb." "That is the way I believe with Rev. P-'s hearers when his long sermons end."
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Then there was the story of old Deacon S., who sold home-made cider brandy or twisted cider, at the rate of twenty-five cents per gallon, but who always used to get his big thumb into the quart measure, which had lost its handle, displacing its cubic contents of brandy. There was another tale of Capt. A., who being cheated in a horse trade by Mr. B., called all his sons and grandsons together solemnly, as if for family prayers, told them the circumstances, and enjoined them to cheat B. back to the amount of six dollars, and if they did not live to do it to teach their children and grand- children to cheat his descendants to the end of time; but a few months later, after another trade with B., the captain convened his family again to say that the score had been paid with interest, and to release them from the covenant. There was the story of Uncle G., who began his courtship by "creepin' in, all unbeknown," behind his best girl, stealing up close behind her as she was washing dishes, hat on and chair in hand, with the salute, "Well, Sal, feel kind'er sparky to-night ?" to which she coquettishly but encouragingly replied, "Well, I reckon p'raps a leetle more sorter than sorter not"; and how at last, the minister being away, they rode together on one horse twenty miles alone, and were married. There was the legend of old Squire V., who used to be a great favorite with the girls. Driving up to the town clerk's door one day he told him to have him "published" the next Sunday with Miss B., and drove off. Soon he returned and desired the name changed to Miss C., and finally, after several changes and some minutes of profound deliberation, settled on Miss H., whom he married. There was the tale of the turning of the Deerfield River by the two great but mystic ancestors of one family in town. It once flowed down the gap in Mr. P.'s pasture, through the pond and over the plain of the village, and was stipulated as the northern boundary of the possessions of these pioneers. They were ambitious and had noticed that new settlers and their depredations followed rivers, so they hired hun- dreds of Indians to dig with sharpened sticks, day and night, one entire sum- mer, till the stream at length washed over down a more northerly valley so suddenly as to sweep away the dusky maiden beloved by one of the pioneers ; with many other romantic incidents. There was the story of the old horse jockey G., who in his travels found a negro of great strength but so simple as to agree to work for him a hundred years, on the expiration of which time the old jockey was to give him all the property and serve him a century ; and who cured him of the inveterate habit of sucking eggs by showing him a dozen, apparently freshly laid, in his bed one morning just after he had risen, and frightening him out of the practice by convincing him that he had laid the eggs while he slept. There was the story of the old cat ground up in the mill with dreadful caterwaulings, and the two bushels of good rye required
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to grind the mill-stones clean again. Another, was of the case, famous in history, of the non-conforming Baptist deacon who would not pay his town tax to support the Congregational preaching, and whose apple trees were dug up by the constable and sold for payment ; of the deacon's going to Boston to the General Court, and of his return with a barrel of cider brandy drawn on two poles strapped together, one end of each in the hold-backs and the other end dragging on the ground. There were stories of a noted lady pioneer in the cause of female education, who solicited domestic utensils and produce of every kind for a young ladies' seminary, following the men into stable and around hay mow in her quest; of old Heeber, suspected of witchcraft, who lived apart and was buried outside the cemetery; of old Sloper, who had no friends, and vanished so mysteriously that gradually a detailed story of his murder by a prominent, but not beloved citizen, was evolved; of the old church, stone-cold in winter, with two services and sermons from ten to four, and in summer with the rocks black at nooning with people, mostly members in close communion, eating their Sunday dinner and picking cara- way or meetin-seed; of the waste of timber, or the greed of individuals in shacking hogs on the then extensive undivided land or common, and even of the secular variations of the compass to account for the disparity between the old surveys of boundary lines and new ones.
Evenings in the kitchen were spent with light work and gossip, unremit- ting. Candles, in olden times before cotton, it is said were made by loosely spinning tow-wicking. Candle rods were then whittled out or cut from cat- tails, on which wicking for a dozen candles was put, and they were hung over the back of an old, high, straight-backed chair tipped down, and dipped every few minutes in beef, or better, mutton tallow melted in the tin boiler. Of course candles grew faster on cold days, but were more likely to crack. Good iron candlesticks were rare, and at balls and parties potatoes were used, and wooden blocks. The evolution, I have heard, was first a "slut" or linen rag in fat, or a bowl of woodchuck's oil with a floating wick through a wooden button. Later came a square strip of fat pork with a thin sliver of wood thrust through to stiffen it and serve as a wick. Fire could still be made by friction of wood in an emergency. The best-raked fire would sometimes go out, and then fire must be borrowed from a neighbor. Those who wished to be independent obtained tinder-boxes with flint and iron, smudged tow and punk. Home-made matches, with brimstone and saltpetre, would catch read- ily, but friction matches were a great novelty. One of these friction matches, also home-made, of spruce lumber, by the boys, was "drawed" by their incredulous father who, when he found it would really go, put it carefully in his pocket for future use.
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The ideal hearth and fireplace of olden times was indeed the centre about which the whole family system revolved. On the swinging crane, evolved from the earlier wooden lug-pole, hung from pot-hooks, chains and trammels, several species of iron pots and brass kettles, in front of a green back-log, so big and long that it was sometimes snaked in by a horse. Below, attached to the upright part of the andirons, was the turnspit dog, revolved by hand, and sometimes, at a later date, by clock-work, for fancy roasts. There were roasters and dripping pans, and the three-legged spider, in which bread was baked, first on the bottom, and then, tipped up to the coals, or else the top was done by a heavy red-hot iron cover. Here rye used to be roasted and mortared for coffee, which was later boiled in water and maple molasses.
On the shelf or beam above the fire stood the foot stove; a horn of long, and another of short paper lamplighters; a sausage stuffer; tin lanthorn; mortar ; chafing dish ; runlet ; noggin ; flatirons, perhaps of new fashion, hol- lowed for hot iron chunks; tinder box; tankard ; and coffee pots; and high above all a bayoneted flint gun or two, with belt, bayonet sheath, brush and primer. Overhead on the pole hung always a hat or cap on the end, and perhaps a haunch of dried beef, with possibly a ham, a calf's rennet stretched with a springy willow stick inside ; pumpkins cut into long ringlets ; bundles of red peppers; braided seed corn and dried apples, the latter also perhaps half covering the roof and south side of the house.
About the fireplace stood, or hung the bed-warmer, the tongs, and long "slice," a hollow gourd or crook-necked squash; candle holders with long tin reflectors ; bellows; woolen holders; toasting irons; smoking tongs; pewter porringer ; spoon moulds; trivet; skillet and piggin; a tin kitchen; a tin baker and steamer ; a flip iron ; the big dye tub always in the corner, and the high-backed settle in front. Near by stood the cupboard, displaying the best blue crockery, and the pewter, kept bright by scouring with horsetails (equicetae) ; sealed measures, and a few liquids, and perhaps near by a pumpkin Jack-o'-lantern, with an expression when it was lighted in the dark as hideous as that of the head of an Alaskan totem-post.
The grandma was both nurse and doctor, and the children had to gather for her each year a supply of herbs. Chief among these, were pennyroyal, tansy, spearmint, peppermint, catnip, thoroughwort, motherwort, liverwort, mugwort, elecampane, opodeldal, burdock, mayweed, dogweed, fireweed, rag- weed, pokeweed, aconite, arnica, scratch-grass, valerian, lobelia, larkspur, mullein, mallow, plantain, foxglove or nightshade, osier, fennel, sorrel, com- frey, rue, saffron, flag, anise, snakeroot, yarrow, balmony, tag alder, witch- hazel, and bloodroot. Each of these, and many more, had specific medicinal
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properties, and hung in rows of dried bunches in the attic, and all grew in Worcester County towns. In Mr. Cockayne's Leechdom, Wort-cunning and Starcraft, a remarkable collection of Anglo-Saxon medical prescriptions, I have identified the same symptoms for which the same herb was the specific, showing how this unwritten medical lore survives and persists unchanged.
The attic floor was covered a foot deep with corn on the ear, to be shelled winter evenings by scraping across the back of a knife driven into a board ; the cobs being fed out to stock, or used for baking and smoking fires. Here, too, were tins and boxes, and barrels of rye and barley, and, later, oats, wheat and buckwheat. In the corner stood, or hung, perhaps, a hand- winnower, a tub of frozen cider apple sauce, an old hat and wig block, a few woodchucks' skins to be made into whiplashes, a coon skin for a cap, a hand still for making cider brandy or twisted cider. So, too, the cellar, shed, hog-house, barn, sheep and horse barn, sugar-house and corn-house, were stored with objects of perennial interest to boys.
The "sense of progress," which a recent psychologist writer calls a spe- cial, though lately evolved, sense, was by no means undeveloped. Men loved to tell of old times, when maple sap was caught in rough troughs made with an axe, and stored by being simply turned in their places; to show the marks on old maple trees, where their grandfathers tapped by chipping with a hatchet and driving in a bass-wood spout made at a blow with the same iron gouge that prepared for its insertion ; and to describe how, later, the rough unpainted tubs with unbarked hoops, and, because smaller at the top, so hard to store and carry, and so liable to burst by the expansion of the ice on freez- ing, were superseded by the Shaker pails. The old days when sap was gath- ered by hand with a sap yoke, and stored in long troughs and boiled out of doors in a row of kettles on a pole or crotches, were talked over, with com- placent pity, perhaps, while modern pans on a new arch and in a new sugar- house were kept going all night during a big run which had filled every tun and hogshead, while the best trees were running over.
Hour-glasses, especially to spin by, and dials, were sometimes used, and there were many noon-marks at intervals over the farm. In many families, even where coal and kerosene stoves are used, along with wood, oven-wood is still cut for the old brick oven, which Christmas time, at least, if not once every week or two through the winter, is heated, and then swept out with a wet birch broom. First, the rye and Indian bread is made up in a bread trough and then put on the broad, meal-sprinkled peel, with hands dipped in water to avoid sticking, and very dexterously thrown in haycock and windrow shapes, perhaps on cabbage leaves, on to the bottom of the oven. When this was done it was still so hot that pies could be baked, and, last of all, a bushel
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of apples was thrown in and the week's baking was over. Many could then tell of the time when, with pudding or mashed potatoes and milk for the meal, no table was set, but each took a bowl of milk and helped himself from the kettle on the stone; or again, the family gathered about the well-scoured table, with no individual plates or butter knives, or waiting on the table, but each took a slice of bread and helped himself from the meat dish, or dipped the brown bread into the pork fat with forks. Wooden, pewter, then earthen plates, was the order of evolution. So, in the dairy, milk used to be set in wooden trays, then in thick, brown earthen bowls, before the modern milk- pans came into vogue.
The evolution of the skimmer from the clam shell, through a rough wooden skimmer ; of churning, from a bowl and paddle on to the old dasher churn; of straining milk, from the linen rag strainer, up; of bails, from the ear and peg fashion, on; the history of the artistic forms of butter balls, and the stamps used; the very gradual development of the scythe-snath, which no artist ever represents correctly, to the present highly physiological and very sharply discriminated forms, as well as of the hoe and pitchfork; why are not these and the growth of the corn-sheller, hen-coop, plough, mop, the story of the penstock, the broomn, from a bush or bundle of twigs, up through the birch broom with fibres stripped both up and down; of window trans- parencies, from the hole and oiled paper, etc., as scientific anthropological themes, as the evolution of the fish-hook, arrow-head and spear? Why is not the old soap-making process, with the lye, strong enough to support an egg, dripping from the ash barrel on the circularly grooved board or stone, and the out-of-doors boiling and basket straining, etc .? Why is not the old- fashioned, semi-annual geese-picking day, with the big apron, great vase- shaped goose basket, and the baby's stocking drawn over the goose's head to keep it from biting? Why is not cheese-making, when the milk from three families was gathered in a big tub, coagulated with a calf's rennet, broken up into curds and whey by the fingers, scalded, chopped, salted, per- haps saged, hooped, turned, and pared of those delicious curds, and daily greased all summer? Why is not the high festivity of road breaking in win- ter, when all the men and oxen in the neighborhood, often twenty yokes of oxen in one team, turned out after a long storm and blow to break out the roads which the town had not discontinued for the winter, to church, stores, doctor and school, when steers were broken in, sandwiched between the yokes of old cattle, where often up to their backs in a drift, with a sled to which ploughs were chained to each side and a dozen men and boys on it, they could only wait, frightened and with lolling tongue, to be shoveled out? Why are not the antique ceremonies and sequelae of butchering day, and the
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fun and games with plùck and lights and sausages, which city-bred boys were told, and said to believe, are caught like fish? Why are not the process of making pearlash and birch vinegar; cider-making; the manifold summer beers and other domestic drinks, etc., quite as worthy of investigation, of illustration in museums, as the no more rapidly vanishing customs of savage tribes ?
At the time of which I write many domestic industries were more or less specialized. Farmers' sons often went away to learn trades. Broom making was the evening occupation of one member of the family I knew, and I saw the process of planting, breaking, tabling, hatchelling, for the seed was worth about the price of oats ; bleaching with brimstone in a big bin down cellar, etc. Tying was the most interesting process. It included arranging the hurls, braiding down the stalks on the handle with wire, pressing in the great vise, and sewing with a six-inch needle, thimbled through by leather palms. I was allowed to sandpaper the handles, and once in a time of stress, when a man was making forty plain Shaker brooms per day, even to put on the gold leaf.
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