USA > New Hampshire > Grafton County > Hanover > Hanover, New Hampshire, a bicentennial book : essays in celebration of the town's 200th anniversary > Part 15
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Once a traveling salesman came to the stable in great haste to catch a train for Boston and demanded immediate transportation to the West Lebanon station. In spite of his wife's protest at his unsteady state at the moment, Ira called for his fastest mare and drove at a speed that frightened the poor drummer nearly out of his wits. He made the trip to West Lebanon and back to his stable in exactly forty minutes. A few weeks later the same man came again looking for a conveyance but announced that he would rather walk than ride with Allen, for, he explained, "All he would say when I complained of his speed was 'Hang on to your hat!' "
Allen was the first regular driver of the stage from the Lewiston station to the village, and used always to stop the coach as soon as it crossed the bridge and collect the fares, in order to prevent students from jumping off the vehicle before it reached the hotel, thus winning a free ride. Many anecdotes have been told about Ira; the one most often quoted preserves his remark when the authorities proposed putting up a sign forbidding persons to drive on the newly laid asphalt sidewalks: "It won't do no good; horses can't read and asses won't."
Jason Dudley drove for many years on the Burlington to Boston route. His stretch was at first from Randolph, Vt., to Hanover; later for five years between Hanover and Wilmot, N. H. After this route was given up, he drove from Hanover to Woodstock until that too became unprofitable. Thereafter he succeeded Ira
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Allen as the stage driver between the village and the Lewiston station until old age forced him to surrender that position to "Hamp" Howe. Crotchety and sharp-tongued, but witty and kindly as well, he was well liked and called "Jason" and "Uncle Dud" by townspeople and students alike. He delivered express about the village, but his greatest pride was his status as official driver of the town hearse. He felt that he owned horse, hearse, and cemetery, and gave free advice to everyone on the conduct of funerals and proper modes of burial. Bartlett's Dartmouth Book of Remembrance preserves many of his odd remarks, including the oft-told one of his comment to Mildred Crosby, the liveliest and most popular young lady in the village in the 1880's, when he had offered her a ride in his express wagon behind his large black funeral horse. He touched the horse with his whip, where- upon it broke into a swift trot. "Why, Jason," protested Mildred, "if your horse acts like this, how can you trust him to draw the hearse?" "Huh," came the reply, "don't you suppose this old horse knows the difference between Mildred Crosby and a corpse?"
In the old part of the Dartmouth Cemetery a plain white mar- ble slab bears this strange inscription, so weathered by the storms of a century that it is now barely legible: "Here lies the mortal wreck of / SALLY DUGET / In the midst of society / she lived alone / beneath the mockery of cheerfulness / she hid deep woes / in the ruins of her intellect / the kindness of her hart survived / She perished in the snow / on the night of Feb. 26, 1854 / AE 69."
Those lines, composed by the Rev. John Richards, sum up the life of a woman who was a familiar figure in the village for over forty years. The daughter of Michael Duguet, Eleazar Wheelock's "baker, cook, and brewer," and his wife Hannah Roberts, over- seer of the first college commons, Sally is reported to have been in her youth a tall, graceful, pleasing young lady who worked as a seamstress and household helper in various homes on the Plain. In 1810, when she was twenty-five, an unfortunate love experience brought on a mild and intermittent mental derangement. She lived in different families from time to time and occasionally was cared for by the overseers of the poor. About 1824, however, her insanity worsened, she forsook the village, and for the remaining thirty years of her life led a hermit's existence in a lonely spot near the top of Balch (then called Corey) Hill. She laid slabs of wood from the south side of the road to the adjacent stone wall, and dug a small pit beneath in which she lived. After a few years
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this burned, and a kind gentleman in whose house she had worked built her a more substantial hut. This too burned, probably from her carelessness, and a group of citizens replaced it with one twelve feet square, with four brick walls, a brick floor, and a fire- place. Here she thenceforth made her home, with no companion but a tailless cat. She came to the village only to sell berries or nuts she had gathered and to collect the bits of food which were readily given her at the doors of most households, for all who knew her liked and pitied "Crazy Sally." She talked and laughed continually, often exhibiting humor and shrewdness in her re- marks; she improvised simple verses of thanks in return for the gifts made her, and she told fortunes-always good ones-for the young girls. After dark on the night of February 26, 1854, she left the village for her home in a blinding snowstorm, strayed from the road, became confused and lost, and circled about until she fell into a snowbank, where her nearest neighbors found her frozen body the next morning. Sympathetic friends in the village erected the marble over her grave.
Another person of unbalanced mind was looked upon as a village character in the nineteenth century. Increase Kimball (1777-1856), always something of a religious fanatic, was a tin- smith by trade, and early in the century invented the first machine for making cut nails for horseshoes, which he patented. He was offered a large sum for it but refused, only to find soon after that another had produced a greatly improved machine that rendered his invention worthless. His consequent disappointment together with his excitement over religious controversies unsettled his mind, and he was considered a harmlessly insane individual ever after.
As the result of a vision he had about 1820 telling him that Professor Roswell Shurtleff would be made president of Dart- mouth College, the devoutly religious Kimball took a solemn vow never to shave until that event came about. Consequently he wore a luxuriant beard for the rest of his days. Once some students looking for fun caught Increase and cut off half the beard, but his strict conscience made him let it grow again. He belonged for a time to an odd sect called "Rolling Pilgrims" which held its meetings in Beaver Meadow, Norwich, Vermont, and every Sun- day morning he put on a long white robe and walked to the meet- ing place. His full white beard and flowing garments must have given him the appearance of an Old Testament prophet.
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In later years he lived in comparative poverty in a house that stood in what is now the College Park at the corner of Park and College Streets. This house was destroyed by fire one forenoon in 1852, as the result of Kimball's carelessness in allowing sparks from his fireplace to ignite the straw mattress on which he slept. During the conflagration he paced the road, repeating "An enemy hath done this, an enemy hath done this." He spent his few re- maining years in his barn, which had escaped the flames.
In every New England town there have been men and women who long after they have passed from their scenes of action are remembered for a single remark. So it has been in Hanover.
There was Sarah Demman, a patient spinster who for forty years before her death in 1899 kept a millinery shop in the large old yellow house that stood on the corner of Main and Lebanon streets, now the site of the Dartmouth National Bank, and pro- vided most of the ladies of the village with all their hats and bonnets. A middle-aged pompous faculty wife, well known for her fussy tastes and disagreeable manners, once spent a couple of hours in Miss Demman's shop, trying on one after another every hat in the store. Putting down the last one with a gesture of dis- gust, she said, "I can't see, Miss Demman, why you never have a bonnet that looks well on me!"
"Well, madam," replied the imperturbable Sarah, "you must remember you have your face to contend with."
Mrs. Alexander Grasse came to Hanover in 1904 and lived for thirty years with her husband, son, and grandchildren on a farm halfway down the road from the top of Balch Hill to the outlet of the reservoir. A large, red-faced woman, with an imposing false front of bright brown hair, she dressed always in a shiny black gown of an earlier vintage, the full skirt of which she frequently raised to extract a red bandanna handkerchief from a pocket in her equally voluminous gay petticoat. Friendly and garrulous, talking loudly to acquaintance and stranger alike, she was a sub- ject of much amusement to all the villagers and a thorn in the flesh to Perry Fairfield, manager of the Hanover Inn. For on every pleasant summer afternoon she walked from her farm to the vil- lage, seated herself in a rocking chair on the Inn porch and for a couple of hours fanned and talked, to the astonishment of the regular guests. Fairfield felt that she detracted from the elegance and dignity of his establishment and tried by all possible means to discourage her visits, but to no avail.
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One very hot afternoon in early September of 1909 she had made her accustomed trip to the Inn and was returning to her home. As she trudged wearily up the steepest part of the dusty hill road, she was overtaken by a surrey drawn by a fine span of horses and driven by President-elect Ernest Fox Nichols, with Mrs. Nichols on the back seat. They had but recently arrived in town. Stopping his horses, Dr. Nichols asked Mrs. Grasse if she would like a ride. "Indeed I would," said she, and heaved herself into the seat beside Mrs. Nichols. As the horses started up, she opened the conversation with a question: "Have you seen the new president?"
"Yes," replied Mrs. Nichols, indicating her husband on the seat in front; "that is he."
"Do you mean to tell me that that is the president of Dart- mouth College?"
"It certainly is."
"My land," sighed the old lady, "but I'm having a better time than I thought I was!"
Mrs. Sam Phelps, wife of a remarkably ingenious mechanic in the village, had her own way with the King's English. Meeting Professor John K. Lord at the corner of the campus on that after- noon in March 1903 when two reckless students had been drowned while canoeing on the swollen waters of the Connecticut and learning from him some details of the accident, she burst forth, "Why, Mr. Lord, I shouldn't of thought if they couldn't of swum they wouldn't of went!"
Turn about has always been fair play in Hanover, however. Quaint remarks and distorted language were not confined to the unlettered, and professors often seemed eccentric to the towns- people. The tradesmen on Main Street used to repeat with glee an anecdote about Dr. Daniel Noyes, the precise and timid pro- fessor of theology in the mid-nineteenth century. A bolt in his carriage having broken, he entered the local hardware store to purchase a replacement. "What size is the bolt?" inquired the clerk. Professor Noyes thought a moment, then as he started to leave the shop solemnly announced, "I will ascertain the dimen- sions of the orifice and return."
It takes all kinds of people to make a world-or a town.
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I3 Laura Bridgman
by Stearns Morse
F EW Europeans, in the thirties and forties of the last century, had probably heard of Hanover, New Hampshire; and those few who had heard of the town, it is safe to say, associated its name, not with Dartmouth College or the Senator from Massa- chusetts, but with a fragile child, a narrow green cloth across her eyes, named Laura Bridgman. By 1842 Charles Dickens had made her name a household word throughout the English-speaking world. A decade or so later the famous Swedish writer, Fredrika Bremer, had spread her fame throughout Northern Europe. Even before that the annual reports of her equally famous teacher had made her name known to educators and philanthropists in the Western World. She is still a landmark in the history of modern education and psychology-the first deaf, dumb, and blind person to be taught to read and write and to communicate freely with others.
Laura Dewey Bridgman, to give her her full name-Deweys and Bridgmans have figured prominently in Hanover's history-was born on a farm on the Ruddsboro road, on December 21, 1829. Shortly thereafter her family moved to Etna, to the house in front of which a granite boulder with its bronze tablet perpetuates her memory. Her father, Daniel Bridgman, was a substantial farmer, whose voice was listened to in town affairs and who later served two sessions in the state legislature. His wife, Harmony Bridg- man, seems to have been well named: she presided with calm efficiency over her household of several children, cooking, wash- ing, spinning, weaving, churning, making soap and candles, and tending the bees, poultry and lambs. The Bridgman house was the typical story and a half house such as settles snugly into the New England landscape against the rigors of the northern climate, with its large fireplace in the kitchen, its parlor, seldom used, and its attic where the children were tucked away at night.
Laura was not born blind, but she was a frail child-puny, rickety, and subject to "fits" during the first year and a half of her life. Then, for four months, her health was normal. But at two
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years old she was stricken with a savage case of scarlet fever, con- fined in a darkened room for five months, ill and feeble for the next two years: entirely bereft of sight, speech and hearing, even her sense of smell obliterated.
Bleak indeed would have been the scarcely sentient child's existence in the busy household but for her friend and first teacher. "Uncle Asa" Tenney, a bachelor in his early fifties, seems to have been one of those "characters" every New Hamp- shire village makes fun of but tolerates: he was a rough, unlet- tered individual, shabby in dress, wearing-indoors and out, one guesses-a unique hat; with an impediment in his speech which made him scarcely understandable to the neighbors, but which was no barrier between him and the speechless child. When the weather was mild he took her by the hand and led her down to Mink Brook, where she learned the difference between land and water; there he taught her to throw stones into the stream and to feel the waves as the water splashed. She learned to know his step and to distinguish him from her family; once in a fit of tem- per she snatched off his spectacles and crushed them, but he did not complain. So the child's life passed from day to day: playing with Uncle Asa; following her busy mother about the kitchen; kissing her 'boot,' which served as a doll; sitting by the fire in the little cane chair her Grandfather Bridgman had made for her; alternately petting and abusing the long-suffering family cat.
Then one day in May of 1837 when Laura was eight years old, James Barrett, a Dartmouth junior, who had been called in by the Hanover selectmen to help with the tax bills, saw her sitting blind and dumb before the fire and spoke about her to Dr. Reu- ben D. Mussey, head of the medical department at the College. Dr. Mussey came to see her and wrote an account of her, which was read by Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe of Boston.
The year Laura was born Samuel Gridley Howe was already famous in two hemispheres. A graduate of Brown in the Class of 1821 and of the Harvard Medical School in 1824, idealistic and restless, he had sailed in the year of Byron's death at Missolonghi to aid the Greeks in their struggle against the Turks for independ- ence. Returning to Boston after six years, he was instrumental in persuading the Massachusetts legislature to incorporate a school for the blind: his concern for the maimed and unfortunate of this world knew no limits. Asked to open the school, he went to Europe in 1831 to inspect schools established there for the blind;
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was arrested in Berlin while engaged in aiding Polish refugees in Prussia and held incommunicado in prison for six weeks before he was released. Just turned thirty when he came back to Boston in 1832, he was handsome, slender, and erect, with a soldierly presence like the flash of a sword: when he rode down Beacon Street upon his black horse, with an embroidered crimson saddle- cloth, all the girls ran to the window.
At first the school for the blind, which he set up in his father's house, languished. Then, in 1833, Thomas Handysyd Perkins, the China merchant, now in his sixties, turned over to Dr. Howe his mansion on Pearl Street, from which he was moving to Temple Place, with the proviso that the citizens of Boston would raise $50,000 for the support of the school. The money was quickly subscribed; the legislature appropriated $6,000 annually and the school was firmly established. In 1839 the school was moved to the Mount Washington House, a large summer hotel with many piazzas, standing alone on the high ground of the South Boston Peninsula. Shortly thereafter its name was changed to Perkins Institution for its principal benefactor. But before this Laura Bridgman had come down from Etna to become an inmate.
For Dr. Howe, after reading Dr. Mussey's account, had wasted no time. With Longfellow, Rufus Choate, and two other friends he had attended a Dartmouth commencement and the next day gone out to Etna. There in the parlor Laura met him. He held out to her a silver pencil case as a gift but, terrified of the stranger, she dropped it and it was never found again. Instead, she had found her dearest friend. For the doctor persuaded her parents to surrender her to his tutelage. Though Asa Tenney, doubtless suspicious of "book-larnin'," especially for such a child as Laura, looked on the transaction with a jaundiced eye, she departed for Boston in October 1837, to remain there, with short vacations home, for the rest of her life. She was not quite eight years old.
Then began the long, arduous process by means of which Laura Bridgman was initiated into the world of sentient human beings. Even to so intrepid a person as Dr. Howe the obstacles must have seemed insurmountable-except that his watchword was: "ob- stacles are things to be overcome." Though the loss of her eyeballs was a deformity, he afterwards wrote, "she was a comely child"; and she was sensitive, active, and clearly endowed with a capacity for learning. She had come to know and be fond of every mem- ber of her family and they were fond of her. But endearments
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"The Haunted House" on the River Road (Luther Wood Inn)
The home of Laura Bridgman at Etna
The "Big Main Street Fire" Jan. 4, 1887
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Laura Bridgman
and caresses were not enough. Her mother was so occupied with household affairs, of course, as to be unable to give her special attention. Her father treated her with a firm hand. And a firm hand, Dr. Howe was sure, was essential for the development of her mental and moral capacities, to prevent her, indeed, from the possibility of "becoming a ferocious and unmanageable" woman- for the child had a will of her own. Dr. Howe, like his good friend Horace Mann, had advanced ideas as to education. He knew that he must reach the child through her one remaining sense. (And after all this was the primal sense, the foetal sense, the sense of touch.)
Already the doctor had developed an alphabet legible to the touch. By a motion of her fingers down her cheek she could signify that she was thinking of her bewhiskered father; a scratching mo- tion signified a cat; but to go beyond these rudimentary methods of communication, it was necessary that she be taught words. This the doctor did by pasting raised labels on keys, spoons, knives and the like. Then the labels were removed and scrambled and she was led to master the skill of attaching each label to its appro- priate object. Then the separate letters were learned. All this was a long slow process which she followed by patient imitation of everything her teacher did. After weeks and weeks the supreme moment in Laura Bridgman's history came: the moment when it flashed upon her that she could in this way communicate her thoughts to others; "at once her countenance lighted up with a human expression; it was no longer a dog or a parrot,-it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits!"
I have not space to relate the slow process by which the child learned the abstract qualities of hardness, softness, sickness; the perception of space relationships; the use of active verbs; the measurement of time; the distinctions between tastes; the further sharpening of her already acute sense of touch; the day, when after two years, she wrote for the first time her own name.
There were other problems to be solved. For she was, not un- naturally, what we should call today a "problem child." She was nervous and high-strung-hardly a docile child. She could be de- ceitful. She had a sly sense of fun, playing jokes on her fellow-in- mates. She had fits of temper, could bite and scratch like a cat when thwarted. When she was ten years old or so, she began to keep a journal and one day she recorded: "Ladies came to see
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girls Saturday and I bit Sumner [Charles Sumner, no less] be- cause he squeezed my arm yesterday, he was very wrong." And she had, as she faithfully recorded, many "wrong days" herself.
The reference to Sumner suggests another problem Dr. Howe met and faced-the problem of keeping her from being spoiled by visitors. For by this time she was famous-hundreds of people would have come to see her if Dr. Howe had allowed. Her por- trait was painted and, in September 1842, Sophia Peabody, then engaged to Hawthorne, began a bust of her which is still to be seen at the Perkins Institution. The next January she had perhaps her most famous visitor. Charles Dickens, in American Notes, thus described her:
Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about a head whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline and its broad, open brow. ... Like the other inmates of that house she had a green ribbon bound around her eyelids. A doll she had dressed lay near upon the ground. I took it up, and saw that she had made a green fillet such as she wore herself, and fastened it about its mimic eyes.
Some years later, when Fredrika Bremer dined with her at Dr. Howe's, she still wore the green bandage. The Swedish authoress noted that the twenty-year-old girl had a "well-developed figure, and a countenance which may be called pretty." Miss Bremer was amused by the girl's Yankee question: "How much money I got for my books?"
In the summer of 1841 she had a visitor whose call was momen- tous both for her and her teacher. Julia Ward of New York, ac- companied by Longfellow and Charles Sumner, came over to see her and met for the first time the 'Chevalier.' The blind child's fingers discovered a gold locket which Miss Howe was wearing. The visitor impulsively offered it to the child, but Dr. Howe for- bade the gift. Julia Ward was at this time a lovely New York society belle of twenty-two, Dr. Howe was forty. Two years later, after a tempestuous courtship, she had married the stern and dedicated New England reformer and, after the honeymoon abroad, came to live in the Doctor's Wing of the Institution, where Howe's sister, Miss Jeanette, had long been installed as his housekeeper and where Laura Bridgman now lived. Some years
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later the Howes moved into a nearby house of their own and Laura seems to have returned to the Institution.
Her references to Mrs. Howe in her letters are always correct; she loved the 'Doctor's' wife very much, but she was a little puz- zled why 'Doctor' did not love her best, when she loved him "best of any." But it is scarcely to be wondered that the interposition of a third person between her and her beloved teacher should have been disturbing. As Dr. Howe became increasingly concerned with his causes, his family, and other pupils, Laura's instruction was turned over to women. Dr. Howe chose her future teachers with great care and she became devoted to all of them: to Miss Drew, Miss Swift, and especially to her "best teacher," Miss Sarah Wight, who taught her for five years, from 1845, until marriage ended Miss Wight's career at the Perkins Institution in 1850. After that Laura was the special charge of Miss Mary Paddock, who came to Boston from the Cape in the mid-forties to be Dr. Howe's faithful assistant until his death. But none of these, of course, could take the place of the one who had rescued her from oblivion. When he died in 1876, thirteen years before her own death, it must have seemed to her as if the light of her life had gone out-this man to whom she owed (it is his wife speaking) "the revelation of her own humanity."
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