USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 10
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totaling. 84
And what books were these, withdrawn with so much ceremony and pored over in candle or firelight so avidly after fourteen hours' wrestling with trees, boulders, and rocky earth? Beginning with Josephus' History of the Jews in six volumes, there was Burlamaqui on Law; Hume's History of England; Gordon's American Revolution, three volumes of great con- temporary interest; Millot's General History, four volumes; The Laws of the United States; John Locke's Essay on the Humane Understanding; many volumes of sermons.
For relaxation there was The Oeconomy of Human Life, The Farmer's Friend, biographies such as Franklin's, or Gen- eral Putnam's, and lives of various divines. Fiction consisted of The Vicar of Wakefield, a translation of Gil Blas (in one place written "Gil Blast" as no doubt pronounced), one of Paul and Virginia, Don Quixote (written "don quicksett"),
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and Zeluco by John Moore, a Scotch novelist, in four volumes (this read again and again) ; not much else. Poetry was ad- mitted, if it were Paradise Lost, Cowper's The Task ("cups that cheer but not inebriate"), or Young's Night Thoughts ("Procrastination is the thief of time," "Blessings brighten as they take their flight"). There were Moral Amusements, Memoirs of Pious Women, indeed also Women's Rights, as early as this. Very popular numbers were Viaudi's Shipwreck, and Romance of the Forest. A book called View of Religion suffered mishandling, "the whole of the preface tore out" (John Folsom saw punishment for this!) ; the sixth volume of Josephus was returned with "three pages greased," but the fine was paid on the barrelhead. After one volume (Hume), Nathan Beede sold his share to Abigail. "Widow Lydia Fol- som" held out through three books, but she seems to have been the only woman who had the temerity to subscribe. Reading was emphatically a masculine pursuit. Dr. Joseph Boyden and William P. Hidden (Samuel's son the deacon) and Timothy Medar, town clerk for indefinite years, and various Gilmans read everything year after year, often twice or three times over. As all perforce were nourished by the same book, how their reading must have been discussed when they met! No wonder the community acquired a reputation as "interlec- tural." We thank Charles Dow for this accidentally apt word. Even the Carroll County History could testify: "Many emi- nent professional men have acquired or laid the foundations of their education in Tamworth, and a deep reverence for scholarship and higher culture has ever been manifest." In any case the Social Library did foster men who could make speeches and write excellent letters, so that in 1895 when the new Cook Library was dedicated, Larkin Mason could state in his speech on that occasion: "There is not a town on the face of the earth, of the same number of inhabitants [1000] and no larger inventory of property [$250,000] that can show such a record for intelligence and good morals." (Best not examine the truth of this sixty years later.) But, Larkin did
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not fail to remind us, "in order to maintain this leadership, we have got to make some efforts." Of Reverend Alonzo Nickerson, much remembered in Chocorua, who had already made a speech that day referring to the new library as a "bank of wisdom," Larkin said, "He came from Burton, but took it into his head to become a reading man, a man of information, and now he can tell not only about little old Burton, but about ancient cities like great Babylon, Egypt, Nineveh and other parts of the ancient world. (Laughter)." But did Alonzo Nickerson laugh?
The library signers easily wrote "forever." A hundred years later the book of their constitution and records is bid in for fifty cents at an auction.
The new Cook Library was donated by Mrs. Charles P. Cook in 1895 in memory of her husband, in the small building with tower and clock that she erected opposite her house. The deed was presented to the town with appropriate ceremonies and orations, and large gifts of books came from summer residents and others. The town now provides for the library with an annual subsidy which the Tamworth Founda- tion augments. At first Mrs. Susan Cook herself, sister-in-law of Larkin Mason, acted as librarian, and after her, her daugh- ter-in-law and granddaughter. Helen Hidden took over in 1932 and has given devoted service since. The library now contains between six and seven thousand books.
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Five Communities Growing
Tamworth Village - The Growth of the Center
TAMWORTH DID NOT begin with the village that is now the center on the map. Firstcomers pitched their farms on the hills. A hill road did not need bridges, and the farms would be above early and late frosts. It was on a hill that a man saved the life of all the other settlers in the cold year of 1827. It snowed every month of that year and all crops were frozen save his. By parceling out a little wheat to everyone, he en- abled them to escape starvation. On a hill was also put the first town building, the meetinghouse. Only when water power became important for rising prosperity, and Swift River gush- ing down from the mountain wall to the north was at hand for the taking, it was asked why travel an extra mile and a half to get corn ground? Houses sprang up in the valley by the stream where the mills were, and the meetinghouse and burying ground found themselves left high and dry. It took much deliberation by selectmen and much discussion at Town Meeting before the fateful step was resolved upon in 1852, to move the meetinghouse down the hill after the inhabitants, to turn it into a Town House, and to build a new and more imposing church in the new neighborhood. Incidentally in its new location the more imposing church has attracted the light- ning to its spire apparently three times in its one hundred and five years of life, a record among spires, high trees, and hilltop houses that have been struck. Lightning rods have been sus- pected of uselessness, but late invention seems now to have changed this, and future storms are awaited by the church with less anxiety.
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The township possessed more and better mill sites than any other in the county, says Carroll County's history, and by county it meant Strafford, of which Carroll was then only a part. When mills came to be needed, there were not only Swift River and Chocorua River, Mill Brook and Cold Brook (this Cold Brook in South Tamworth is not to be confused with Sandwich's Cold River), but all four of these streams joined to swell the Bearcamp River. When all waters were counted, they passed under about twenty-five bridges. Nor were rivers all; ponds were mill sites, and a mill of sorts could be put on almost any downhill flow.
New settlers were driving their cattle up this way in sur- prising numbers. In 1790 there were 47 heads of families. By 1800 the number had jumped to 126, and the population was 732. By the middle of the nineteenth century this popu- lation had reached its all-time high of 1766 (the same figure as the date of the Charter). All these immigrants had to have houses, though many are today represented only by lost cellar holes. A sawmill made a man a good living, and there would be several on one river within short reach of one another, all doing a roaring or more exactly a screeching business. Grist- mills were equally important since every man grew the staple corn, usually wheat and rye besides, the rye to "sweeten the corn" when mixed. The miller would take toll for his thresh- ing in kind, one bushel in eleven of wheat, one in ten of corn. The gristmills then made three grades of flour, white, middling, and dark; and two of corn meal, one coarse with the hulls in, the other "bolted." The poorer grades were for hogs and cattle.
With the swollen waters of spring all saws would start up at once along the length of the streams, turning the winter's stacked-up logging into boards, and when the logs were finally all converted, autumn rains would heap the waters up again, and revolve all the heavy grinding stones to receive the sum- mer's grain harvest against the winter's need of flour and
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corn meal. A saw and grist mill therefore dovetailed operations the year round and could give full employment. Later a full- ing mill could be added to the same plant, as in Benjamin Gilman's at Tamworth bridge during the Revolution. By scouring in hot suds and fuller's earth, and pressing heavily with rollers or beaters run by the water power, the yardage from home looms was turned into real cloth with a good firm texture. And where fulling mills were available, cloth factories could operate. Asa Fowler who came from Sandwich in 1824 had a cloth-dressing machine at Fowlers Mills; the probable abutment stones are still just south of the Sam Berry Bridge near the corner. The first mill at the village itself for fulling and clothmaking has been dated 1807, and as late as 1876 a woolen mill was built at Moore's Pond by Route 16, run by one Blackburn.
Woodworking plants were the most common; shingle and clapboard mills, peg mills, and spool mills would spring up, run for years, be sold, start once again, and then usually burn up, the fate that so easily writes the end of wooden build- ings. The biggest industry the village ever had was the spool mill that flourished in the eighties, employing many men all the year. Arthur Wiggin, its owner in this era of prosperity, had thirty teams constantly hauling his poplar spools to the station. A shingle and clapboard mill of Joseph Gilman's, following one at Fowlers Mills, had been burned, but at the village this Joseph had produced a successful machine for shingles, and was selling these machines to all parts of the country. According to an account from 1861 there had been at one time eight sawmills, fourteen shingle mills, three ma- chine shops, and one shoe-peg factory, most shoes being still made on the farmer's own workbench. There may have been even a bedstead factory at Butler's Bridge, and Morrill had another in South Tamworth. Mr. Weygandt writes: "In the full and rich civilization there was here from 1790 to 1860, all the professions and arts and crafts and all kinds of farming actively functioned."
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As well as at Tamworth Iron Works, ironware was made more or less in every smithy, of which there must have been more than a score first and last. Nail-making machines were set up by several. The genus hardware store being then un- known, some blacksmith made every iron pot, kettle, pan, hinge, latch, farm tool, wheel rim, and sled runner for the whole community. Among daily sounds no longer heard is that of the smithy, the tap-tapping ring of hammer on steel all day long. Along with it is gone the smell of heated horn that came from the open door.
Tamworth's industrial heyday, the day of mills, is a period from which participants are still living. Tamworth village had a milldam of pretty formidable proportions. It stretched full across the river at the bridge, blotting out any little islands of today. Melvin Kimball, now eighty-five, born within sound of it, recalls every mill in sequence around the entire town- ship. He has been a sawyer all his life "pretty nigh all over New Hampshire" and has never lost a finger. His testimony is reinforced by other equally active oldest memories such as James Welch, Charlie Bennett, Edgar Page, and Miss Lucy Elwell, for these citizens have themselves seen the mill epoch ebb away and give place to a very different business system.
Begining farthest north there were Dicey's Mills, up on Wonalancet Brook. Today's climbers can find the place on the Passaconaway Trail, perhaps two miles up; part of the dam was there till lately. Dicey's sawmill was steam driven. Melvin Kimball when young worked on the mountain cutting timber for Dicey, and boarded down at the base at Sanford Gilman's, later the Winkley house, now Dr. Putnam's. The lumber that came down from Dicey's was piled in the Gilman field in front of the house and reloaded there.
At the age of eleven James Welch drove eight oxen the twenty-four miles from Dicey's down to the railroad, starting at half-past nine and getting back to his home at midnight. He would climb on an ox and be asleep, and when it stopped he would wake falling off. "When this mill began up there they
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had a time getting the boiler up," he remembers. "They were one week making the second turn even with twelve cattle pulling." Coming down with a heavy load of lumber there, a fine yoke of oxen once crashed to their death. "They were carrying some sawed lumber and the bridle came off and they were sluiced. Dicey had them butchered, but the men com- plained about the beef. You couldn't eat it any more than you could eat a leather apron."
Charlie Bennett was one who worked at Dicey's. He says they would cut spruces on seven feet of snow, leaving a waste- ful stump ten feet high. There were some fifteen camps up in there for loggers; even not too long ago he was up there again and found everything still in place - beds, dishes, lamps, and all.
Another memorable lumber operation was at Paugus Mills up Paugus Brook. As late as into the 1920's great re- serves of virgin forest were giving employment to all able- bodied men: loggers, millwrights, teamsters. Piling (called "spiling"), chiefly oak, to ship for coastwise piers and the newly made ground in East Boston, was one of the main prod- ucts from Paugus. Ralph Smith says it took fourteen horses to get the great boiler up to Paugus Mills; he participated in the handling. Roland Currier remembers a "log hauler" they had up there for mast poles. "It had a steam boiler and a kind of caterpillar tread and could haul five sets of sleds down from Paugus. They had an indignation meeting in Chocorua to get it off the road. It frightened horses and the sparks set fire to things." Paugus Mill had first been Frank Lord's - he was a lumberman and landholder from Ossipee - then Bert Mudgett's, then the Kennetts' from Conway; then Stebbins had it until the Government "decided to save the watershed and said they couldn't cut any more lumber."
The spectacular feature at Paugus Mills, where tragedy was by no means unknown, was the "snubbing down" from the heights of the great trees to be delivered to the sawmill. It was so spectacular that it brought occasional winter visitors
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on the all-day trip from Wonalancet on snowshoes with dog team to watch it. Let Elmer Cummings describe it.
I drove a four-horse team up at Paugus Mills for Steb- bins. That was in 1917, '18, '19. I drove the two-sled road from the landing to the mill. It took an hour and a half to two hours to go up, and fifteen minutes to come down.
If the road from landing to mill was steep, the high sidehill where they had to snub the logs down to the landing was a declivity.
The last of the snubbing was with wire cables and a winch. As the load went down it pulled the empty sled up. But before that they used to use a rope maybe five hundred feet long, and cut a notch in a tree and wrap the rope around it, and had a stick for a lever. There was a ring in the back of the sled and they hitched a chain to that, and when we were loaded they hit the chain with an axe to loosen it. I remember the first day I came off the moun- tain. God, was I scared! I could look right down at my lead horse.
He says now he'd sooner come off the mountain than ride in an airplane.
Of horses at Paugus Mills the same authority says :
They had to work terrible hard. I remember one night at Paugus a man got hurt. Logs came off the landing and came down over him. The boss came over and asked me if I wanted to take a ride. I said I didn't, but I would. I guess he couldn't get anyone else fool enough to go. It was snowing like the devil. They had some small horses and we hitched four to a sled and put some canvas over the man and took oil lanterns and started for Laconia Hospital. We met the ambulance at the Weirs. I stood all the way over and back. I had on a fur coat and was just like a white bear. The fellow lived and came back next winter. He wasn't up to much and the boss let him work in the office. He came out and said, "Where's the fellow took me to the hospital?" He was pretty pleased to see me. I guess I saved
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his life all right. That was somewhere in the early twenties. I was lucky that none of the horses I drove got killed, but a lot did get hurt, and had to be shot. They'd get down, and then the load would hit them. We started work at four A.M. winter, summer, sleet, rain, snow, anything, because we had to take care of our horses.
Ralph Smith puts the rising hour earlier. He had a black colt that grew up to be one of his leaders, and "that colt wanted his hay at 3:30 and would paw till I got up and gave it to him. You can shut off an alarm clock." Ralph drove out of Paugus Mills ten winters; his father had the contract to haul the sawed lumber to West Ossipee. With six horses, a load would range from four thousand up to ten thousand board feet. "I hauled the second largest load ever brought out of Paugus," he says. "One man there had five horses; he wasn't a heavy loader. I said to the foreman that I'd like to haul one good load, and he sent me to the back of the mill and I put on ten thousand board feet. The other fellow loaded in the afternoon. He put on a few more feet than I." In this way Ralph lost the record, which he scrupulously gives the other man.
Over the town border in Albany, but in practice a part of Tamworth, were the mills at the bottom of the Old Mast Road, behind the burying ground near Ferncroft. Here two brooks join. Their little flow today would never suggest two or three mills operating there at once, together with a board- inghouse and settlement known as Slab City, with shacks for fifteen or twenty families, but it was a large mill crew there. Several durable citizens describe the Hill & Waddell overshot wheel, still standing as late as thirty years ago. The wheel was a simple mechanism: a flume to feed the buckets that hung all around the great wooden wheel, which as fast as they were filled would spill, and spilling turn the wheel. Edgar Page in his eighties remembers riding in those buckets as a child. "When the old mill would start up in the morning, it would make an awful noise," he deposes.
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Hill & Waddell seem to have been the first big lumber operators when lumber became the main business throughout this section. Dicey and the others followed them. A second mill near Waddell's was Sweet & Chilson's. Up behind the water mills was a steam mill. One was for long timber and another for dowel or finish work. Hi Currier himself, the landowner who sold the timber off, long had a mill for fram- ing-lumber. There were several logging crews; they lumbered through the whole section, and they would find the King's broad arrow mark on an occasional tree which the King had never collected. Edgar Page as a boy witnessed the whole process, his father Moses Page having his family up at the mill with him. Once Edgar's chief crony had a "good pad- dling" from his mother and was crying when the boys met Mr. Waddell. He was a kindly man and asked what was the matter. The boys told him and he said, "Well now, we'll have to see about that." "Mr. Waddell," said the boy earn- estly, "you'd better stay away from my mother. She's a damn bad man to fool with."
To trace the mills on south: the old Locke homestead, now a cellar hole, was high above the brook at the end of Locke Falls Road, the first road from Tamworth up to old Birch Intervale. Benjamin Locke from Exeter who married Julia, sister of Hiram and Frank Currier, pitched here. When he needed three hundred dollars to put up his mill, the local moneylender was going to ask him an outrageous rate of in- terest. Whereupon Benjamin left his Julia and two children in the wilderness clearing with no neighbors, went down- country and earned the three hundred at his trade as painter, then came back and built his mill. He got out bobbins and shingles. His stone abutments were afterward used for the powerhouse of the Wonalancet Electric Company. The big overshot water wheel, twenty-four feet in diameter, was still there into recent memory where the river makes a drop of about forty-five feet. Is it of Benjamin Locke or another that the story is told that when he built his barn he laid it all out,
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carefully measured and pegged together on the ground, all four sides, then had his barn-raising. When it was all stood up it fitted exactly, except for one corner post which was two feet too long, and he never got over the mortification. "There's no man living could do that now," said Sam Tilton who re- membered the story.
On the Wonalancet stream at the Albany bridge the farm of Ira Tilton and his father Daniel before him had a water mill and a millpond where he washed the logs. The small pond remained up to a few years ago smothered in alders, christened Lake Majestic by Nell McKey's camp chil- dren whom she took there in the twenties to swim. Fowlers Mills, at the junction of the Fowlers Mills Road with Chinook Trail, was also a group of water-power mills, beginning with Thomas Danforth's gristmill as far back as 1778. This Dan- forth was early elected surveyor of highways and was possibly the father of Elkanah Danforth of the town's first Revolution- ary soldiers. Besides the mill at the Sam Berry Bridge there seems to have been one above and one below the river as it turns at the new bridge, the vestiges mostly now obliterated by road construction. Tom Wiggin had one of these; he lived at Locke Falls Cottage, now the Read farm; it was he who cut the breakneck Tom Wiggin Trail on Whiteface Mountain. Tom Wiggin is always spoken of as very tall and handsome with a remarkably fine singing voice. Ralph Smith recalls the great experience he had as a boy hearing him at some outdoor gathering gloriously sing the rousing new song called "March- ing through Georgia." One of the first Hayfords had a mill also at Fowlers Mills. He was Edgar Page's grandfather. He took his spool stock to West Ossipee at night with oxen, sleep- ing all the way. John Chick was another whose mill was there. Was he the original Chick sea captain who went around the world three times?
Coming down to Tamworth center, mill history multi- plies. We have spoken of the wooden dam that made a near- Niagara across from one bank of Swift River to the other; on
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both banks were mills, mills on the street and mills upstream behind them. The accounts are punctuated with fires, and with moving of buildings or parts of buildings from one place to another - this was thought nothing of - and with sales and trades and changes in ownership which make a sequence not easy to unravel by a latecomer.
Benjamin Gilman was probably the first miller at the center. Hardress Wiggin (or Hardy), Thomas Jones, Samuel Beede, Baker & Shaw, were others who had succeeded to the mills at the bridge. Ed Gilman was a miller there, brother to that very good postmistress Mary Jane Gilman. Edward Pol- lard's gristmill seems to have been in conjunction with his store where the Post Office now is. Elwell rented it to him.
The last large operator at Tamworth bridge as the new century approached was John Elwell who had mills for every purpose - grist, flour, "cob" for cattle, boards, shingles, spools, and threshing. In this connection Albert Boyden should be quoted. He writes of the ride he took as a boy, "borne aloft on a great load of oats to Durgin's mill for thrashing. When the water power was turned on, the whole mill quivered, rattled, and shook until it seemed as if the mill, the machinery, the oats and ourselves were all about to plunge into the river together. .. There were sometimes ten or a dozen loads such as ours at Durgin's waiting their turn."
And of course Elwell had the inevitable blacksmith shop; this one was later turned into the first Christian Science Church. He had bought the water privilege in 1865 when he came here, and worked it till 1900. He then leased it to Ste- phen Anthony from Center Harbor, and finally sold lock, stock, and barrel to Hardress Wiggin. The property seems to have included all the land from the river up to the Banks land on the corner (comprising the present Arling, Sutherland, Aspinall houses, and Gertrude Behr's).
Elwell was nothing if not enterprising. He had hardly got all his machinery going full blast and was doing a boom- ing business when in 1869 one of the most destructive floods
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in New Hampshire history took the dam out and the whole bridge along with it. Emma Cogswell writes of the night be- fore in her diary; all Tamworth bridges but two were swept away, and great amounts of hay and corn washed down. She thought Mr. Elwell's loss greater than anybody's. In a later storm he removed two windows out of a storehouse that seemed likely to go, put a rope into one window and out the other, and so lashed the building to a tree in front of Gilman's next door. Freshets furnish an exciting constant in all Tamworth's annals. Undoubtedly bridges are stronger now, and no longer are all but two swept away. But freshets have also degenerated; they do not have the fight they once had. The evidence is that rivers roll a third of the water they formerly did. The senior citizen Alva Davis testifies that the water from the Bearcamp behind his house once rose twelve feet in the field as measured by him against an old maple. Mrs. Codman in Chocorua has a record of Chocorua Lake rising fifteen feet in one storm. Once in the present writer's memory Cold River was so swollen that Perley Knox the Sandwich mail carrier on reaching it lashed his car to a tree and carried the mail on foot across the bridge barely out of the flood. On his return his car had disappeared down the waters and was never recovered.
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