USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 12
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Instead of being chiefly for dispensing drinks, taverns now came into their own as hotels. As the "summer boarder" was introduced and began to flourish, all the taverns and most of the private houses qualified, and tried to run things for the guests' interest. One of the oldest of these was Captain Enoch Remick's in the house now Dr. Remick's office. The dumb- waiter is still in place, where the bottles came up from the cellar. Horses were changed here on the stage route from Cen- ter Harbor to Conway, and for years town meetings were held
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here before there was a Town House. The walls of the front hall and upper room are painted as a realistic dark green forest with widely spaced trees, a design now rare in this region. There was an even more elaborate mural with a most lifelike coach and four that still shows behind the shelves of bottles in the doctor's dispensary. This work would all be done by an itinerant painter, probably to pay board after he had drunk up his funds.
The Gilman house in the center of the village was the veteran tavern in the place. Joseph Gilman was most things to Tamworth: Justice of the Peace, Postmaster, representa- tive at Concord, and throughout his career town clerk, as well as manufacturer of shingle and clapboard machines, and tavernkeeper. The Grange building, moved back in the field, was a part of his house in its prime. It was here that the Chris- tian Scientists, who had started in 1898, had their meetings for many years, gradually working up to their own small attrac- tive church building in 1946, removed after fifteen years of use to Plymouth. Gilman's daughter Mary Jane operated as Post- master in one room of his house for forty years. Thoreau's Journal of a hundred years ago says, "Stop at Tamworth vil- lage for the night. We are now on the edge of a wild and unsettleable mountain region [he little knew]. . . . The landlord said that bears were plenty in it, that there was a little interval on Swift River that might be occupied, and that was all." Thoreau expressed his astonishment at the scenery and was one of the first tourists to find Chocorua in some respects the most imposing of all the White Mountain peaks. He notes that the inhabitants pronounce it "Shercorway" or "Corway."
Joseph Gilman's son George Ed Gilman followed his father with an inn of his own next door, which he named Willow Inn. The register survives and gives striking pictures of the seventies and eighties which were so much livelier than Tamworth today. Here are a few excerpts at random:
July 4, 1882, about 100 guests
Professor Jonathan Harrington, Ventriloquist, and
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Dixon & Watson Comic Vocalists, performed at the Town Hall
4 men from Exeter caught 300 trout in 2 days
Van Amburgh Menagerie 44 people in about every
room and house in village, 5 in one room, 6 in another
Ducellos's family entertained Town Hall
Grand Oppera at Town Hall
Panorama of American Battlefields at Town Hall. Very hot.
E. W. Stonington, 3 servants & wife, N.Y. City
E. C. Mansfield arrived drunk
C. F. Carter arrived sober
About 50, mostly doctors, quartered everywhere
2 Sandwich people with 16 horses
Granite State Baseball Club 10 players, umpire and 2 scorers
Effingham Falls Cornet Band, 19 men and ladies
Centennial Jubilee Singers from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
Shooting match. Capt. A. E. Wiggin's team of 19 de- feated by Peter Mitchell's team of 17
These gunning matches were quite common at the time. Steir Winslow, with quadruped
3 women from Baltimore each with maid
Whittier Minstrel and Variety Show. ... etc.
Little boredom in Tamworth of the eighties.
Tamworth Inn began as late as 1888, when Arthur Wig- gin, known as "El," he whose shooting team was defeated, added a wing to each end of his house, "introduced electric annunciator and modern improvements," and entered the summer boarder business. There had been a previous pro- prietor Charles Purrington whose advertising leaflet shows him with a waxed mustache and the inn with red stripes running around the roof. As Joseph Gilman went out of his business at about the same time, Wiggin should have prospered, but he seems to have overexpanded for his day. He lived away from
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the premises which may have had something to do with it. Sweetser's White Mountain guidebook from the period lists several more village houses with fancy names as inns, Wood- bine Cottage (the store which now houses the soda fountain), Eagle Cliff now the Neilsons', Fair View where the Damons are, Rest Cottage, Sunset Cottage, etc. Even more decorative as to name, Troutdale seems to have taken thirty guests at five dollars a week where Dr. Remick now lives. We sometimes think Tamworth village gets crowded in midsummer today; what must it have been in 1874 when it was estimated by the New Hampshire Gazetteer that "500 tourists spend $10,000 in a few weeks or months, in the warm season of the year, in this pleasant town." Tourists minus cars, at that.
Included with hostelries should be the Peak House on Chocorua, a very popular resort in the nineties. This erec- tion was the enterprise of one David Knowles, but James Lib- erty originated the idea and collected money in 1888 for the path that bears his name. It was the first trail of the six up Chocorua Mountain. This Jim Liberty was a Frenchman -- no native had yet thought of Chocorua as something to go up as a pastime. He built a special narrow cart for hauling, charged a toll, and the great adventure of reaching the sum- mit was open to all. The first dinner served in the Peak House honored a Professor Southwick on his hundredth trip up. Pro- fessors did odd things, of course. The Peak House was quite below the peak, but though remarkably chained to the crags by cables it "blew off the mountain" in what was called a high wind. A spy glass was found intact a couple of miles below, but the cottage organ was never seen again. "Beds were strewed all over the mountain." The Peak House was built twice, and there was even a Half-Way House. But none of it achieved permanence, and nowadays the thousands of climbers generally favor a more interesting trail.
The woods have always shown much evidence of hurri- canes. To be on the way home in one's vehicle and caught on
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the road by blowdowns fore and aft is within the experience of many living. To hear the biggest trees about the house crash one after another all night, and find them in the morn- ing uprooted with ten feet of earth and roots erect, is to believe fully in hurricanes. Each modern calamity appears as the worst yet because of annihilated telephone and electric cables. The storm is brought right into home and family life-no refrig- erator, deepfreeze, toaster, or baths. Today whether the 1938 or the 1954 blow was the greater disaster in Tamworth is still a moot subject.
Jim Liberty's house on the Fowlers Mills Road has been demolished now, but a summer resident bought it for four hundred dollars from his daughter Clara Moody. Clara of the housewifely instinct thought her house should be clean when another woman came in. Before giving possession, she got wallpapers from her attic and repapered the kitchen. The new owner found eight different designs matched together on the walls.
Another case of differing tastes was where the buyers of an old house removed the plaster from their living-room ceiling to expose the fine hand-adzed beams. The former owner came to call and was inconsolable. "Why, I worked ten years a savin' up money to get them beams plastered over and out o' sight," she wept. "And now you've gone and tore it all out."
Enumeration of the industries by which our former in- habitants lived should not leave out the peddler. The high imposing peddler's cart approaching slowly into the yard with the eagle-eyed driver on top ceased with the automobile which took people quickly to the nearest store. There were some notable peddlers in Tamworth. Practically the only survivor of the broom-peddling business now is the Fuller Brush Co. of Hartford, but great wagons loaded with every variety of brush and broom used to ply in all the country districts. In our neighbor Eaton's history is a high remote farmhouse named by summer owners Peddlers End, not because the peddler turned around at the end of the road, but because his own end is said
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to have come to him there. The story is that his wares were so tempting to the farmer's daughters starved for something pretty, that they made away with him to lay hold of his goods. "The tin peddlers were the ones worth seeing," says the young- ster who speaks out of some old man today. "They had over- size wagons loaded with buckets and mops and ladders. And they'd have bags of rags hanging all along the sides. They'd get a bag of rags and the woman would get a tin dipper." Be it remembered that paper was made only of rags. One of the Tamworth Jewell family was a peddler in the eighties or nine- ties. His was a big cart, "a regular country store on four wheels; it had a wooden body, very ornate, and he always had nice horses." To see it come up the road was almost as good as a circus. There were drawers and cupboards on the shiny outside with little doors lettered "Corsets, Hosiery, Flavoring Extracts, Boots & Shoes, Stationery," all very enticing; and there was a rack on top for what couldn't be carried inside. The peddlers were traveling directories; they knew all the households and everything about them. And as for under- standing weak human nature -! Our own Rogy Elias the Syrian came to Tamworth as a peddler, known for outstand- ing honesty.
In the old winter road-breaking there was something besides cider that was warming to the heart. All the reminisc- ing old folks speak affectionately of those times. Steel road machines will never make up for it. Cider and oxen were the motive power and everybody had both, and everybody took part in the road-clearing. The top farmer on the mountain (South Tamworth, for instance) would start down with his oxen. They dragged a logging sled with a log or a thick board chained crosswise between the runners. At the next neighbor's below, his cattle would be put on too, and some cider seal the operation. The process was repeated all down the road, with men, cider, and oxen added at each stop. Any steers they were breaking in could come too-put in with the rest they
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had to go-and by the time they all got down to the bottom, the men could pretty nearly pull the sledge alone. The drivers had goad-sticks and wore snowshoes. So it is described now. In Tamworth Edwin Henderson was road agent and directed matters. His oxen took blue ribbons at the fairs. They were always beautifully matched, and a yoke of young ones always coming on to take their place. Ansel Cummings broke the road from Tamworth to Hayford's turn. "Between Trasks and Whitneys [Fay] drifts were up to the horses' backs. We don't have such storms now. We'd get some awful ones, eighteen or twenty inches a week," says Ansel's son.
This system gave place to the town-owned road rollers with six horses to them. The great unwieldy cylinders of wood had a board on behind where boys and girls could perch to ride and help weigh down. This packed snow so it would hold light runners, but all drivers would have to get out and shovel drifts by hand. Regular turning-out places were made, and horses wore bells so that the team nearest could wait till the other had passed. Even after automobiles, no one could give up his horse, for winter still meant sleighs only. The first snowplow, a towering monster with a swaying house on it that could hardly dodge the branches, nevertheless proved its efficacy, and more modern versions followed it, until now all enjoy the spectacle of the red or yellow tractor neatly carving away the roadside snow, abetted by the great up-and-over jaw-shovel that eats and spews drifts as directed, finishing fast.
Another institution loved and lost is Old Home Week, of lively concern all through the twenties, with its races, sports, ball games, speechifying, band concerts, evening bonfires, and even a "grand ball" or so. The custom was first proclaimed by Governor Frank Rollins at the turn of the century. It dates from the pre-Civil War musters of militia "between hay and harvest," when young men drilled and all came to celebrate. An old poster advertises a Rolling Pin Contest for Women as a chief attraction for Old Home Week sports, surely as much to the women as to the men who watched. It is a by-product
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of the motor era that the town no longer takes its pleasures like this all together. The Old Home Week booklet: "Getting it out, every business man and every woman threw their whole life into it, the ministers and everybody," mourned a former participant. "Will Whiting used to drive six horses on a Concord coach in every parade. Davis and I," said Ralph Smith, "put eight horses to a twenty-one foot hayrack. The parade gathered in the field back of where Steve Damon lives now. There was a gap in the stone wall where you were sup- posed to go through. I didn't know whether we'd make it, but we did. You had to cramp your wheels just right." Elmer Cummings too: "I drove the coach in one of the parades, a coach with strap hinges, six horses. I had four of Ed Currier's and two of my own. Ed kept twelve or fourteen at one time. Yes, I drove a four-horse team when I was ten or twelve. Guess I was born with reins. I had six horses on the snow-roller."
The 1921 Old Home Week parade seems to be a big one in memory. It had everything: a float with a blacksmith shop with a handsome wooden horse, one with a great anchor, for the Iron Works, one with a weaving demonstration, the fire engine, the four-horse coach of course, many horses and riders, and, leading all, the Clarkes' coachman O'Shaughnessy with his top hat-the Clarkes' beautiful horses were always a feature. The event in 1925 was another smashing one, with bicycle race, footrace, trotting race, fireworks, and a band dance. The last Old Home Week was as late as 1949.
Every fair had a merry-go-round, a midway, a cattle-show ("up to four hundred head, come from everywhere") and pulling-matches-how they shouted !- and vegetables and canning and fancywork, but the parade was the highlight. In 22 it was a Winter Carnival. Hazel Evans was Queen riding in the parade in the dog sled behind the famous Chinook team. Ed Currier had his remarkable Chalmers with skiers hanging to ropes behind it. Ed Currier, son of Hi of equal fame, unsurpassed with animals or machinery, master of trans- portation for an era, kindly, humorous, sound and quick on
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"UNCLE" PAUL ROSS AND WILLIAM JAMES SR.
Uncle Paul discusses philosophy with Professor James whose place he takes care of. Picture taken about 1890.
SHOES.
CORSETS
MADISON. N. H.
HOSIERY
GOODS.
FLAVORING EXTRACTS.
In spring ROSCOE GREENE's peddler's cart was repainted and ready for the road. Roscoe was Tax Collector of Madison. Two of his daugh- ters married in Tamworth (John Sanborn and Ed Currier).
ED CURRIER'S RACING CUTTER
"We don't play tennis here, and like that. We've got horses anyway, and we race 'em."
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the reflex, figures in all the recollections of his time, not long gone.
Back when amusements had to be devised without going afield for them, the traveling circus supplied a thrill that no one who was then young has forgotten. Lucy Elwell says the elephants refused to cross the bridge and had to be led down to the river and over. The circus would put up its tents in the field back of the Gilman house, or below where today's chil- dren have been having their ski lessons; the raised ring can still be seen. Van Amburgh's Menagerie would have exciting posters up. A small Van Amburgh flyer still exists promoting "Two Wild Australian Children, Evidently of a Cannibal Race!" The wild children, hand in hand, look very mild and harmless dressed in something like kilts.
Every year the Glass Blowers would come to the Town Hall. They had a bunsen burner and a tube of glass, and made birds, deer, pipes, etc. And all the children now in their seventies saw Uncle Tom's Cabin in a tent over and over again. One has only to review the register of guests at Willow Inn to be struck with the variegated entertainment to be had in the Town House in 1882: Ventriloquist, Vocalists, "Grand Oppera," Panorama of American Battlefields, Norfolk Jubilee Singers, Whittier Minstrel and Variety Show, Cornet Bands, North Conway Dramatic Club, even Christine Nilsson the great Swedish singer came to little Tamworth. So did Dan Ducello's Texan Show, and the proprietor wrote a memo against the name: "Dan Ducello and Wife, They are Bastards, No more."
In more recent times the great feature of the fairs was the trotting races. A small purse was enough for keen excitement. The race track and ball park was set up with a grandstand and anyone could enter his own driving hoss to compete with the real racing horses. All the men had been brought up on this pastime. Even before the race track they used to race Saturdays and holidays on the village roads, roughness no
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obstacle. The Depot Road has seen many a contest, two horses wide, with two or three hundred people out to watch. An impromptu purse might be had by passing the hat. In winter the ice on White Lake would support light sleighs racing.
Entertainment could have a large female and domestic element in it too. "Levees" seem to have been social occasions coupled with sales, "donations" a variation of the same where wonderful cooking figured. Apple-bees were where everybody pared and quartered apples and strung them for drying, when they were used for barter at the store or down country. Husk- ing-bees were as old as the pioneers; they could be uproarious affairs in the barn-anyone who found a red ear could kiss the girls. Dancing might follow-dancing needed only a fiddle any time and a few kerosene lanterns. Quilting-bees, like the barn-raisings, were on the I-help-you, you-help-me principle, but every labor was lightened by being all together for the glory of the result. The seventies were no doubt fabu- lous years, before the latter-day hosts of problems had invaded even the remotest villages.
Readin,' Writin,' Cipherin'
Said a school superintendent in 1852, "Gentlemen, we live in a day when everything goes with lightning speed." He was thinking of the "iron horse" and the then new telegraph.
There had been four schools in Tamworth before Samuel Hidden arrived to give his remarkable impetus to education. Noting the lack of teachers, he established his own normal course to train a few. He got more schoolhouses voted, and at his instigation more money was allowed than the very little required by law. He was sole overseer of the schools and their constant familiar visitor. The only high school studies were given by him at the parson's house to boys who came to be tutored in Latin and Greek, especially the Greek which he
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read so fluently. He put into the boys' minds that it was a good idea to go to Dartmouth or some advanced school. In Dartmouth they could study not only Greek and Latin, but "Astronomy, Mineralogy, Rhetoric and Oratory, with lectures on Anti-Slavery and the dramatic arts." Two of the six sons of Dr. Crosby, the parishioner from Sandwich, were Dart- mouth products, and one taught there. In 1838 a boy could go for twenty-seven dollars tuition, eight dollars room, and fifty-seven, board, much more expensive of course than when Samuel Hidden and friend had lived on the milk of the cow they drove there.
After 1829 every school district had by law its Prudential Committee, and after Hidden's death three citizens were ap- pointed as Superintending Committee of Schools. Over the years there came to be twenty schools so managed, though all twenty did not always function at once. The Superintending Committee drafted comprehensive annual reports that show in themselves what education could do, when taken with suffi- cient solemnity. Along in the fifties and sixties these reports in shaded Spencerian writing on letter paper sewed into a pam- phlet with a thread reveal the serious standards of the period.
Taking as a random specimen the report of 1865: the committee then consisted of the Congregational minister Rid- del, Elder Runnells of the Chocorua Church and Eleazar Young. To Mr. Riddel probably belonged the perfection of penmanship and spelling of this document. In a preamble he takes his time explaining a system we suspect he is proud of originating, whereby certain sparsely settled districts that have but one short school term receive it in the period between the summer and winter terms of other districts. This was to en- courage ambitious children to add a term in another district than their own, if only for a week or two. At the same time they would be bringing a little money to the less flourishing school. The picture is of very scant funds giving out too soon with everybody disappointed, and a school board squeezing out every drop of teaching benefit from the existing institutions.
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Follows a statement of each school by number:
No. 1 was the Butler's Bridge District which had been hav- ing Miss Ann Chesley-"her first experiment as teacher." The record is "Government fair. Improvement fair." Poor Ann, "the house is small, old, and every way unfit for accom- modation of so large a number of scholars." It was here that the children carried their own chairs to school.
No. 2 was the Hubbard District, presumably at Bennetts' Corner. Here "a little trouble had been occasioned by the insubordination of a bad boy" and "corporeal punishment" by female teachers! (What did he do?), "but good order was restored and good progress made by most of the scholars."
No. 3 was the Stevenson Hill District, taught this year by Miss Martha Boyden from Beverly, Mass. "The intellec- tual and acquired qualifications of the teacher were excellent; which, aided by a strong desire to do well in this her first attempt, and by a hearty interest in her work, ensured all the success which the brevity of the term would allow." Her school- house is the present John Finley's study.
No. 4 was the Old Meeting-House Hill district; No. 5, the Hackett Hill District, soon after discontinued.
No. 6, the Iron Works District, did not rate high commenda- tion. After "progress moderate,"
It may be added that rare qualifications are required in a female teacher, who can take a Winter School of 40 schol- ars with an average daily attendance of 33, including lads from fifteen to eighteen years of age, in a crowded and ill- constructed schoolroom, through a term of eight weeks, with any very marked success, either in the order or progress of the school.
Quite so. A new schoolhouse here "had long been a desidira- tum." It is probably the one later used as the Veterans' Post (Moore).
No. 7 was Nealley District. The schoolhouse still stands, used as a cottage at the Junction of the Washington Hill Road with
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Route 16 at Pequaket. Miss Emma Sweet here had "dis- creet" management; the scholars recited thoroughly and learned lessons "with accuracy and propriety." All Nickersons, Nealleys, Heads, and Browns, as well as Weeds, Rangers, and Meads from just over the Albany line, went there.
No. 8 was the Pease District. The building here is also still used as a small cottage. "Commendable attention given to the manners of the scholars," and when Miss Susan Kingsbury had the school, "the scholars were required to be thorough, minute and exact, and enabled to understand and explain their operations." Speaking and composition had been intro- duced here for the first time, "with good success."
No.9, the Marston Hill District (Great Hill) schoolhouse, was at the corner where the Great Hill Road forks, opposite the wood road to the Hemenway Reservation. Here "arithmetic was taught with great tact" by Miss Laura Pettengill. "The teacher was also uncommonly successful in starting little schol- ars, a most desirable qualification, and generally accompanied with genius, and facility of execution, in every sphere of in- struction." The teacher must have been of the Pettengills whose farm was over back of the present Flaccus place.
By an earlier numbering, District No. 9 had been South Tamworth, and its book of records, written by School Director Larkin D. Mason, was presented to the district when he retired in 1885 at the age of seventy-five with seventeen more years of life to go. He began the record when the new schoolhouse was only a project that had been given him to do. It sets down in an easy hand the life of the school and all his interest and concern for it for thirty-four years. He drew up the plans for the building and then built it entirely himself, ending with money left over. Whereupon it was "voted to lay out the sur- plus money to paint the inside of the schoolhouse, build a good picket fence from the southwest corner of the schoolhouse to the road, and a good substantial fence from the southeast corner to the road [why this difference between fences?] and
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