USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 11
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The mills at Tamworth bridge were not all. Back of the village, Wiggin & Haley had a dam and mill on the stream opposite the Evanses'-the wooden water wheel was right at the bend. Haley was High Sheriff of Carroll County, a very big man and very tall. His mill had previously been run by Stephen Philbrick, then by Frank Evans and Frank Lord. Before that a spool mill on the same site had burned. It was here that Newton Kimball was sawyer. His wife made him mealbag mittens. What in the world were mealbag mittens? Well, those mealbags were made of very thick soft cloth. She would make a sawyer's mitten loose at the wrist so if it caught it would drop off and save the hand. Newton was proud of them. It was here that his boy Melvin learned to run the big saws, both band and circular. He was brought right up in
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sawmills, set up on the carriage as a little shaver, and let ride back and forth as it worked. Lastly, one Cy Cushing had an- other mill a little lower down, opposite the Blackeys'.
When mills were in their prime one of the features was the "lovely skating" on the big millpond that stretched way back as far as the Helmes'. It developed some fancy skaters on those irons with curl-up tips made by blacksmiths. Girls did not skate. Elmer Kimball's graceful figure skating is especially remembered. He was younger brother of Melvin, Clara Black, and Florence Hamm.
Elwell the miller had a small daughter Lucy who says she always tagged after her father; she was a sharp-eyed child who hid away all she saw in a most durable memory and is one of this history's best authorities. John, commonly bare- foot, was a redoubtable citizen. After the floods he rebuilt his buildings; he introduced the circular saw in place of the old up-and-down saw, and still not having enough to do, added a lively teaming business. Without much schooling behind him he could figure right in his head how many board feet went in any load. The children were born to the mills. Lucy packed shingles; her oldest sister measured up grain. Even when Lucy was little her father would set her up on the cylinder while he worked, where she could watch the grain go down into the hopper, also acquiring a mill-sense once and for all. Below, a spout delivered the grain to the great granite stones to be ground. Below those was a drawer where you scooped the meal out. The bolter was up overhead; there were openings like louvers with silk back of them for the flour coming up on the conveyor to pass through. The fine flour made the johnny- cakes such as the Hendersons' father had to have every day at noon. No wonder Clarence Hoag remembers the miller as always covered with flour.
When the new century completed the change in industry and country mills became obsolete, men fell back on their teaming. Elwell would bring a whole load of salt fish, tied in kentals (fifty pounds) from the depot where they were thrown
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off the freight car, and at Cook's store (now the Barnstorm- ers Theatre) they would be stacked up and make a whole tier across one side. The men around the stove bought crackers out of the big cracker-barrel and ate salt fish with them. (No chocolate bars, no cokes, no cigarettes-salt fish.) It was the social center. On Saturday nights Elwell would dance clogs to someone's harmonica. At home after supper he would suddenly say, "Well, I've got to go up to the store and get the fashions," and be off. At seventy-five he could kick six inches higher than his head.
This incomplete account of milling leaves aside the large subject of linen. A hundred years ago when there were no boughten shirts or towels or sheets, flax was grown on nearly every farm and spun at home for linen yarn to be woven on the loom. The intricate flax process took nearly a year before any weaving could start. Two of the steps, breaking and swing- ling, could be done at a mill if it had the machinery. Other- wise it took all day for one man to swingle forty pounds. Hatcheling, the term for pulling the fibres through a high wire comb, was work for daughters and grandmothers. The expert in the family sat at the small spinning wheel.
None of us are familiar with the whirr of the little flax wheel, nor the "sad moan" of the large woolwheel, universal in the ears of all New Englanders up to eighty or a hundred years ago. The complex procedures that resulted in the men's and women's clothing are described in fifty accounts. Clothing alone could have been a full occupation for all the women of the house all at once-spinning, reeling, carding, combing flax, one always at the big loom weaving-all before cutting and sewing. A carding mill relieved this somewhat; there are attractive pictures of a young woman on her horse returning from the carding mill with the white fluffy rolls piled high around her. There is a charming one of a housewife walking back and forth beside her wheel spinning; it was as much as twenty miles a day to achieve a stint of five skeins of yarn. As spun, the yarn was then wound on the clock reel.
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The weaving, both wool and linen, went on every day from dawn to dark; families to be clothed were large, and there were all the blankets and coverlets to make, and all the carpet besides. Colonel Stephen Mason, the first Mason to settle in South Tamworth, where the cemetery now is, had a wife who wove the sail for the boat that brought the family up Lake Winnepesaukee from Hampton in 1768. A later prodigy was Lucy Page, wife of Jabez Page and forebear of Edgar Page, Howard Page, and the Marshalls, Amanda Cogs- well, and others. Lucy the remarkable craft worker in the one year of 1882, at the age of seventy-three, spun two hundred skeins of wool yarn, forty-five skeins of tow and linen yarn, wove ninety yards of rag carpeting, sixty-nine yards of flannel and twenty-one yards of toweling, and in addition single- handedly cut and made her husband's and son's clothes, cared for the milk of two cows, and did all the work for the family. Other household specialties, such as the masterful baking en- terprises in the brick oven by the hearth, the soapmaking, and the candles that were the only light to be had after dark-it takes a book to describe them. And who but the housewife made the featherbeds which figured as warmth and mattress both?
The essential blacksmiths have not seemed to leave their names writ indelibly on the memories of later generations. But Clarence Perkins, "Blacksmith and Wheelwright," placed his ad sixty years ago in an Old Home Week "souvenir," as did Irving C. Cole.
All menfolk, whether millers or loggers or blacksmiths, had to be basically farmers. Nearly all owned their own home- steads as now. Parson Hidden and his son are said to have had twenty-two hundred sheep on the fields behind their houses. Sheep were universal almost till 1900. Sheep shears are one of the commonest tools found in any old barn, mis- taken for grass-cutters by the new owner, like as not. Shearing was a great annual event. All worked for one another: you help me shear, I'll be on hand when you are butchering or
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mowing. The same in building a house: three neighbors help a fourth. Then he goes the rounds with his oxen, helping them build walls or do their lumbering or sapping. It is all put down in the early barter books where you can find it today, item by item, in longhand with a spattering quill pen, the prices in shillings and pence, though final amounts are usually in dollars and cents :
To one lamb 9/6 $1.58
By two day howing [hoeing] 6/ $1.00
[six shillings then worth .50]
They knew all their values to a penny, and could nimbly translate current figures into the older or newer currency. The pay earned in the first half of the last century is hardly to be believed now:
by one Day thrashing, one Day diggin celler $0.92
by yourself and 3 boys one day planting 1.25
by one Day Braking Flacks .50
by Spinning 11 Skains yern .37
by one Day Making Wall .67
It cost only twenty-five cents to have Josiah's pantaloons made, and a horse would bring twenty-five cents for grinding apples, though it would be up to seventy cents to hire a horse and chaise for a "weding."
Besides his self-sustaining homestead, nearly every man had his specialty in the community, or his wife had, as midwife or herb doctor perhaps. Furniture was always in demand including spinning wheels. One man would be a cabinetmaker and go to build pieces in another's house. One would be a shoemaker (cordwainer is the word) dated ahead to make all the shoes for a family once a year, perhaps with their own leather. The boot pattern was simple; there were no rights and lefts until about 1850. The wooden pegs were whittled by boys. Forrest Ayer, the town clerk, found half a barrel of wooden pegs in his attic. Shoe machinery did not really take over till the nineties, when the innumerable shoemaking
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benches in old houses and all the little tools finally went up into the attics.
A man might do surveying for all his neighbors. On Tam- worth's Depot Road in the seventies was a man who dealt in featherbeds and had in the front yard a featherbed laundry, described by Lucy Elwell as a cylinder rotated by a horse on a treadmill. In this curious industry its inventor, named Shaw, must have dunked the featherbeds in soapy hot water and left it to the horse to shake them about. So far, research turns up no parallel service elsewhere. No wonder this sight in a man's front yard remains in the memory of the child who lived opposite.
Of course there was always a store. In tracing stores, again we have little more than oldest memories as sources. There always had to be somewhere for a man to draw up, tie his team, go in, and get those essentials the family couldn't produce at home: a little tea, a jug of whale oil for the new- fangled glass lamps that followed candles, a precious pound of white sugar, maybe some of the old-fashioned round crackers, and the universal quart of rum before the Prohibition Act of 1855. Probably he had in his wagon certain items to be traded in, eggs, salt pork, or a hide. In the store he discovered a fellow man or two on the same errands, their teams also waiting out- side. All could find out things from one another, fix things up, get the news. A country store is a country store, no matter when or where, whether it has sacks of meal open on the floor, a barrel of dill pickles, and a tier of loose salt fish, or whether everything is ranged in sanitary packages, bottles, and tins.
Out of the mists emerge a few facts. Enoch Remick, an important man and the first sheriff of Carroll County, had a store on the Great Hill Road opposite his house which is now his descendant Dr. Edwin C. Remick's office. His son Levi carried on the store, which was later moved to the bridge. Levi was grandfather as well to the present Remick Brothers. The present Remicks' store is only about a hundred years old, their father Charles having handled it after Levi. Then for a
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long interval it was rented by Edward Pollard and then by his widow. She moved next door finally and had her store in the Varney house, followed by her second husband Howard Page, while the Remick store reverted to use by the family. For the present Remick Brothers, Earle and Wadsworth, home from school at Hanover, had decided to begin afresh in the business of their forefathers, the fourth generation in the one family.
The Barnstormers Theatre was remodeled from Charles P. Cook's store on the street edge of his own property below his house. After Cook, Orrin and Osborn Kimball had that store, and lastly Edwin Clough. This must have been the original store in Tamworth, the one Lieutenant William Gilman had, mentioned in a road return of 1810. Another early road re- turn would imply that Moses Titcomb was the first owner, called "Mr. Titcomb" by the Carroll County History.
The store at the bridge seems to have been rented by Charles Robertson when he was marrying Emma Cogswell the diarist, and they went to housekeeping in the upper story. The last occupant was "a foreigner," a Portuguese barber named E. J. Silvan whose Tamworth wife encouraged him to go fishing all he would, a remarkable phenomenon remem- bered by Clarence Hoag. This store had been "Pollard's."
"Sale work" figures in all stories. It was a demanding labor which the women undertook in addition to their enor- mous household enterprises and it ceased only with the last century. It introduced the sewing machine, and consisted in making up men's clothing already cut out at factories in Massachusetts. The work was deposited at central places in the villages, or around at the farms, and collected later re- morselessly on the date stipulated. The women could in this way come by a little cash. Emma Cogswell often puts down items such as: "Working on coats today, made $2.80 this week." One year she made $45. There would also be shops in town where work was cut, and finally again finished. One was in the house now Beulah Gray's, one was over Cook's store where a deaf and dumb Blaisdell with a villainous temper
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was a highly successful cutter, and the tailor's goose went by foot power. Women would become expert at some simple process, buttonholes, or sewing on buttons. It must have been a bonanza for the employers in Massachusetts who thus had a host of women operatives with no overhead whatever. At least clothing was becoming available for purchase in stores, instead of every farmhouse being its only garment factory. General ready-made clothing is only some fifty years old in this country.
From the beginning every man had a gun and took game only secondarily as sport. A few generations back he needed skins, both for fur and for leather; and the animal supple- mented the "critter" killed on the home place. No game laws, no closed seasons, no ban on wholesale slaughter. Yard up the deer, and then "dog" them. Snare and sell whole flocks of partridges at once. Especially net the passenger pigeons to the point of their total extermination, why not? The clouds of passenger pigeons is no imagined tale. All accounts agree that the pigeons came over in masses that darkened the sky, and settled on the trees so thickly as to break down the branches. Where they bred, stated the first observer Josselyn, they chose the thickest part of the forest, joined nest to nest, and tree to tree, many miles together in the pine woods. Clearing woods diminished their volume somewhat, but even the grandfathers of men now living made a business of selling pigeons. James Welch explains how in his father's time big nets were spread and baited, then lowered a little each day. At sunset when the nets were heaviest, a man in a blind dropped the net com- pletely. The contents were then killed, and shipped in large barrels to the city. The birds brought twelve and a half cents a dozen; in colonial times they had been one penny a dozen. Farms had permanent pigeon stands, with logs to support the nets.
Bears would deplete the commonly owned sheep. Some good trapper could take fourteen bear per season, mainly in
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great traps turned out by the blacksmith (or by himself), finishing off with the club. Except for spring pelts bearskin sold well. The meat could be left in the woods. Together with fish in such enormous quantities as fishermen today do not like to credit, from streams of two or three times today's mag- nitude, the profuse families had plenty of protein to develop the children into brawny workers early. A frail child had no place in the economy; indeed it did not live. The burying grounds are full of frail children easily swept off by epidemic, medicine then being a wild guesswork full of the doctor's in- ventive imagination.
Speaking of gunning, Tamworth's lore includes the unique Siege of Wolves. Here was man's out-and-out enemy. Even the hide was of little use, and the howling was enough to make murderers of all who heard. Back early there was always a bounty on the corpse, twenty shillings at first, ten pounds by 1766 when Tamworth was born. A wolf seemingly could not be harmless. Ida Mahoney's grandfather Henderson at the age of eleven was chased by wolves down the Taterboro Road while carrying corn meal home from the gristmill, and only by throwing meal, a little at a time, did he get home in one piece. But it took nearly all the meal. On the other hand, we have "Uncle Paul Ross" who worked for the James family, a giant in stature, shrewd and intelligent, with a hump on his back from a tree falling on him in youth, who stated that wolves were cowardly. He had carried one alive in a trap, in his arms, from the Jameses' roadside spring (then Savage) to the barn where he killed him. (This is the same Uncle Paul whose wife is recorded as being a victim of "spells." Professor William James, professionally interested, asked, "When they come, does she bite her tongue?" "No," was Uncle Paul's answer, "She don't sleep in her teeth.")
The Siege of Wolves in 1830 had been at night. Messen- gers rode fast through the town proclaiming that immense packs had come down from the mountains and were in the forest on Marston Hill (Great Hill). The men formed "a
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thin line of circumvallation" around the hill, and as fresh par- ties arrived the lines were strengthened, while the unearthly howling went on inside them. Six hundred men, some accounts say eight hundred, assembled from all the region around. They bivouacked, some say two days and nights. Women kept coffee going. General Quinby from Sandwich was elected to command. He finally sent a squad of picked riflemen into the midst of the woods, and a "sharp fusillade" followed. The pack was boiling wild-it took twenty shots to bring down one animal. Great numbers broke through the picket lines and escaped between legs of men or horses, or by leaping over their heads. When it was over, all dead wolves were carted into the village, and the heroes celebrated with a great feast. The last wolf rounded up in this town was said to be one killed behind Hiram Mason's farm in 1847.
Another sight now long gone, part of the later prosperity of the eighties and nineties, was turkeys, driven over the road in great flocks like beef cattle or sheep. James Welch describes how when darkness overtook the drive, the turkeys would go into the trees and roost for the night. There was no way to prevent them; drivers would have to camp down until morn- ing. Great flocks of these turkeys from the Turkey Street farms used to choke the old Dover bridge against all traffic. They were on their way to Portsmouth to be loaded in coops for fresh meat on coastwise vessels. Tamworth to Dover round- trip was a week with oxen. All around Dover Square teams from the north country would be parked laden with every kind of produce. The return loads would be molasses and rum, sugar, tea, cotton goods, and such store rarities as paper and ink.
The New England rum made from molasses in South Boston and bought by the barrel was as much a part of the early life as the church-raising or corn-husking where the barrel was emptied. A diarist writes in 1877 of his father's day, "We gave all our hired men New England rum daily, about a pint a day to keep them from freezing in the woodlot, and the same
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in haying to keep them from melting." The town was about twenty-five years old before selling was licensed to special individuals. The first license on the town books was in 1796 to Tufton Mason, son of the original Colonel Stephen Mason. The next year Oliver Fowler was added; two years later David Gilman. These were all senior citizens and officeholders. Grad- ually a few more licenses were added, the form on the record being, "This certifies that Mr. Jeremiah Mason has our appro- bation to retail spirituous liquors," with date and selectmen's signatures. Before long there was one in each part of town, trying to take care of the demand legitimately. As taverns came into existence with more people traveling the roads, liquor would be part of the taverner's license: "To sell Spiritu- ous Liquors and to keep House of Entertainment or Tavern," reads the Approbation. A licensed retailer would not be ex- pected to sell by the drink, but a tavernkeeper had "full power to execute the business of taverner ... and to sell rum or other spirits by retail ... and to sell mixed liquors." "To keep open Tavern" was the instruction to William Gilman, the same who had the earliest storeroom quoted above. Ensign Edward Hayford who had the mill at Fowlers Mills ran such a place. Job Chapman, Daniel Hayford, Samuel Gilman, were others by 1812, and by '22 Japheth Gilman was licensed to "sell by retail at his store" and so was Benjamin Gilman. The Gil- mans were not only always numerous, but up to everything. Their stores seem to have become the first saloons.
As the nineteenth century got older, rum became a greater problem. There were cases where a man mortgaged his farm for liquor and died a pauper. Citizens came to believe it urgent to vote rum out of existence. This took stern measures; mod- erate ones were ineffectual. The town enactment of 1819 that "any person that shall presume to sell spirituous liquors on the public lands around the meeting-house shall be fined one dollar for each offense," apparently had no great effect. Thirteen years later constables were instructed to remove all tents where "they are selling rum, away from the vicinity of
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the meeting-house." The meetinghouse, we recall, was minus heat during the six hours or so of services on winter Sundays, and attendance was obligatory. It evidently took more than instructions to constables to prevent those chilled in church from repairing to the tents. The women were not supposed to be cold; they had their little foot-stoves which they carried by hand, replenishing the coals at the minister's in the intermis- sion. Three years later the selectmen had another try: "Voted that all the ardent spirits near the meeting-house be removed or destroyed by the constables, and the town to save them harmless." Harm to the constables was without a doubt a real hazard, as the struggle meant fights.
The issue became fiery when preachers took it up. Pulpits had resounded to the theme throughout the state for years when the first Temperance Society was formed at Concord in 1830. A Total Abstinence Society followed, and advocates multiplied. Abstinence became a condition of joining the church; the offender could be excluded from membership, which meant social ostracism. There was a deep split, for rum had become big business-a large lumber operator in Dover, for example, owned three molasses ships running continuously between the West Indies and northern distilleries. A state referendum on Prohibition was taken, with twelve thousand votes for to five thousand against, and the final law went over amid great excitement in 1855.
But Tamworth eleven years before that had voted to cut retail licenses to one man, then to two, and had elected at the same time a special prosecuting officer for offenses. Now, con- sonant with the new state law, Tamworth set up a dispensing agent for the permitted sale for medicinal purposes. This officer, one T. B. Hodgkins, must have had to stay at home continually; the path beaten to his door was more regular than for the best possible mousetraps. His account book shows every least sale, to whom, how much, for what purpose, and at what price; the remarkable book is in town archives today. This accounting lasts for a year and a half only, during which
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$527 worth had been given out. The book abruptly closes with a pint of rum and three gills of alcohol for Hodgkins himself, totaling twenty-three cents.
This short book affords posterity a revealing view. Patrons included all the familiar family names. The sole legal excuse being for medicinal purposes, sickness or "med" was usually put down, but sometimes more specifically rheumatism or just "Rhew" or "Neuralagy":
Paul Welch, 2 qts. of Rum, Erysipelas .40
Gideon Gilman 11/2 pt. of Rum for Felon .14
Frank Durgin 1 qt. of Gin for Father .54
Reuben Varney 1 qt. of Rum for Harriett .18
Daniel Berry 1 pt. of Rum for mumps .10
Robert Nickerson 1 pt. of Brandy .75
Both gin and brandy came higher than rum and were requested chiefly for wife or sick child. Before anesthetics, the only way to have an amputation was to make the victim dead drunk. One half rum and one half molasses for a cold was usual, guaranteed to kill or cure. A common reason for rum was measles. A lame arm, leg, foot, a sore hand, "spraint ancle," toothache, "agure," fever, tumor, even "canser," all needed rum. Also for death, probably to fortify the survivors. A cow or horse sick would have the same; it is again obscure whether the cheer was for the animal or the suffering bystand- ers. James Hidden is down for a pint of wine which he frankly stated was "for Christmas." Not many were as candid or moderate.
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