USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 13
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also to level off the dooryard, all to be done in a workmanlike manner." It was also commanded "that the School Director [himself] be instructed to request the Teacher to report to him every damage done to the house by the schollers." It was "voted to employ a male to keep winter school, for fifteen dol- lars per month and find wood and bord," and "to raise money for a shed building with two roofs [size specified] shingled with first quality shingles, the front and trimmings to be painted red, and to have a cleet Door and a 12-squared window." The west end to be done off for "a Necessary" with full specifica- tions, and to let the building of said shed to the lowest bidder [who was David S. Hidden] for the sum of seventeen dollars and seventy-five cents.
Survivors report a vivid assortment of teachers in this school that Larkin Mason ran. One from Sandwich, though a frail-seeming person, "could leave a black-and-blue mark on you by just taking hold of you," and gave one boy the worst licking he ever had. But another teacher "took an interest in us, used to take me on her knee-you could go to school when you were two or three years old in those days." One man who taught at the school that was moved from down near Butler's Bridge to Whittier "was a happy-go-lucky. If none of the girls came to school we would go hunting or scouting in the woods. Once we went off hunting hedge-hogs and didn't get back till two o'clock, and there waiting were some people who had come to visit the school."
Returning to our 1865 report:
No. 10, Jackson District, was in the small triangular plot sur- rounded by stone wall at the corner where the old Wonalancet (upper) road leaves the Catholic Church road. Here the teacher had been constrained to mark two older boys with a zero sign in the column of "moral deportment," which had apparently pretty well disrupted the school. But a Miss Albinia Wentworth kept a "whispering list," with prizes for those who had not whispered once during the term, and thirteen out of seventeen won prizes.
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There seemed to be no number 11 or 13, but No. 12 was the Plains District, where a teacher otherwise of dim capacity received praise for getting the smaller scholars to speak loud and distinctly. This school was probably the one on the White Lake Road opposite where the Charles Smith farm burned. Its cellar hole can be seen in the woods. Ralph Smith's mother kept school there at one time.
No. 14 was the Village District. Here we have the Brick School formerly at the crossroads corner, probably covering the site of the monument and the present cut-off. Miss Anna Blaisdell with thirty-nine scholars was giving "instruction in every branch of study pursued, thorough and exact." Reading she "taught with uncommon success," especially with younger pupils, and "order and stillness were secured in an unusual degree." When the large frame building that now stands was erected about 1905, the Brick School was moved down on the Depot Road.
In the winter term of seven and a half weeks, the Brick School boasted J. Sumner Runnells as teacher. He did this during the long winter recesses of all the years of his attendance at Amherst College, having "the confidence of the District and the love of the scholars in advance." He walked the three miles each way from his home in Chocorua and had what was consistently the best school in town, "and the good results are manifest." Of this particular Runnells more later.
No. 15 was the Downs District, known as Turkey St., where the school still stands. It had the distinction that all hands in the district turned out and built it. Said an old man remem- bering, "The beams were all hand hewed, and everything in it was handmade. Gracie Shannon teached the longest. Then there was Emma Chesley, Mabel Kingsbury, Etta Blake, that taught."
No. 16 was the Cold River, or Mountain District, in the Ossipees above South Tamworth, where used to be mills on the steep stream. Here "relation between teacher and scholars
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was very pleasant, Miss Beacham being beloved by the whole school."
No. 17, the Philbrick School, stood at the farther end of the Philbrick Neighborhood road on what is now the Forrester Clark property. Its foundation is still visible in the woods. It drew from both directions; some scholars walked over from Fowlers Mills, some from anywhere west of the lake. There would be forty or more children - hard to believe now of this area of a few summer homes.
No. 18 was the Cook District, now vague as to location; but the mountaineers in Ossipee attended this school.
No. 19 was the Fowlers Mills District. Here Miss Anna Blaisdell appears again and the scholars are pronounced "re- spectful, subordinate, intelligent and studious." They "sung beautifully." Some of the boys and one of the girls performed creditable exercises in declamation. "Two of the older Misses read short but well-written compositions, in which the thoughts and sentiments expressed did honor to the intelligence, moral discrimination and patriotic spirit of the young ladies."
Parsing and analysis were sometimes commended; if they were but required now! The following charming tribute to Hannah Chick by her teacher Sarah Hidden, in a handwriting of unexampled perfection and exquisite flourishes is preserved by Hannah's descendants in the Bryant family:
Hannah Chick, for her assiduous attention to study, and respectful conduct, has the hearty thanks of her teacher, and her best wishes that her future life may be one of virtue and usefulness, and she at last receive an unfading crown of glory.
Aug. 10th 1844 Sarah Hidden Pretess [preceptress?]
Such a picture, mainly of happiness, attained in the schools in the sixties is at variance with earlier accounts, where the first duty of boys was to show their supremacy by throw- ing the master through the window into the snow drift. The master himself knew no better than to whale the life out of a
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boy with a strap, or to stand him on the stove as a punishment. Said the contemporary Sam Hidden at ninety, "I swore when I grew up I'd get even with him." The surprising fact emerged after some years that a female teacher was more effectual with boys, especially if she were well-favored, young and gentle, than a male with the rod. A female was also cheaper. The Historical Museum has been given an old browned slip of paper as follows:
Town of Tamworth Dr. to David Hill To my Daughter Mary U. Hill to teaching School eight weeks in Capt Levi Folsoms District at 50 cents per week four dollars in the year 1821 $4.00 Recd payment David Hill
-
A child had no right to his own wages; they belonged to the father. A son of the period had worked very hard to accumu- late one hundred dollars, and when he had done so and had it in the bank, the father went to the bank and got it. "Some- how that fellow never amounted to much afterwards," said the man who knew him.
More and more women were employed to teach, until the schoolmarm gradually became the rule and the school- master the exception, when he would usually be gifted enough to be worth having. A few of the teachers whose memories have come down to us will be noted later.
A remarkable male teacher, probably the most notable in the history of the town though today he would be utterly cast out, was Henry Hodgkins of Chocorua. His schoolhouse was either the Veterans' Post or else its rickety predecessor, and later the Brick School in Tamworth village witnessed his teaching methods. The girl child Lucy Elwell who sat right up in front here says he would stand with one foot on her desk, and if something went wrong in the back of the room, he would close his book and throw it. He "was a good teacher, but he would hit children over the head with a ferule," deposes
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an older man. "Now he was stern," explains another, "but he was a good man to get along with." (This pupil was probably bright.) "You could get up from your seat and walk right down to his chair and he would show you. No teacher will do that now. You might get punished right there, yes, get your hand whipped, yes, with a ruler. But those who behaved learned. The scholars could never tell where he was looking - he could see behind him. There was a tough school up in the Ossipee mountains. They had thrown out the teacher after they beat him. Henry Hodgkins was asked if he would go down there and teach. He said, 'If I go down there, I will teach.' And he did."
The Town Register calls him an important figure in edu- cation, who made teaching his life work, and when he became Superintendent threw into that work the same enthusiasm. Of his first fifty years he lost but one day. He began at twenty-one and was teaching his sixty-fourth term in 1889. "People would pack up and go to live where his school was, to get his superior teaching," said his daughter-in-law. "Great on mental arith- metic," she added, turning over to the Historical Museum his arithmetic book and his school bell.
While Hodgkins was called a stern old cuss, Miss Emma Drew at the same Chocorua school a little later and the last of her family in the Thaddeus Rich house is affectionately re- membered. "She was a wonderful teacher," according to Ralph Chamberlain, "took a lot of pains. She said she knew a lot of us would never go any farther than this school, and she taught us things that would be useful, like figuring boards, shingles, cordwood, and so forth. No grading in schools then. Twenty or thirty in one room. As I remember it no teacher had much trouble with discipline."
Chocorua at some time seems also to have had a school on the Washington Hill Road, known as Edgerlys'. Mrs. Lowell Ham (Hoadley farm now) wanted education; she boarded the schoolteacher and once kept her during vacation if she would teach the family. Maria Page also could handle boys.
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Once when New Hampton Institute needed a disciplinarian, Maria Page went over and straightened them out. She was a Blaisdell on her mother's side. They were all more or less Blaisdells up there on what was not Washington Hill but the North Road (or Ridge Road or Corway Ridge).
The eagerness toward teaching for Tamworth younger people is strikingly evident in the list of those attending the Teachers' Institute in 1854. A teachers' institute seems to be a short refresher course for teachers in one county. At this one in Carroll County there were "sixty-seven Gentlemen" to "eighty Ladies." Of these Tamworth itself accounted for twenty-five Gentlemen and forty-two Ladies, a high propor- tion, sixty-seven out of one hundred forty-eight in the county. Sandwich came next with a total of twenty-four; Ossipee and Moultonboro had ten each. It seems worth while to list some of these hardy Tamworth practitioners of the art of pedagogy in 1854. A student of the town's past recognizes the nerve and sinew in these names: among men there were two Hid- dens, three Gilmans, two Jewells, three Kingsburys, Charles Weeks, Harlan Page: among women three Blaisdells, two Per- kinses, two Hoags, two Hiddens, two Nickersons, two Beedes, Susan Kingsbury, Augusta Stevenson, Mary Page, Maria Gan- nett, Martha Dorman, and Susan Cogswell. Their like would be the strongest on the teaching staff of any school today.
The town's most talented sons and daughters would seem to teach as a matter of course, though it meant "boarding around." In early days six bushels of rye, sounder than specie or paper money, would pay a girl teacher for six months. By 1827 pay had risen to four dollars and even six dollars and board. Change was "at lightning speed." The ones who never married seemed to have taught all their lives. Terms were short, a few weeks winter and summer each. It was a race against calendar, weather, and an overcrowded schoolhouse "that libeled sty or stable," pupils ranging from four years to twenty, and other hindrances. It was teaching by primer and memorizing from catechism and Bible. An old lady in Massa-
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chusetts remembered a question taught in her day: "Duty performed makes what, young ladies?" to which the class chanted: "A rainbow in the soul!" Copybooks had an adage at the top of each page. By the time the child had painfully written twenty times "Fear not in meritorious undertakings" he was to be imbued with the precept.
All children perforce learned what the other classes were reciting at the moment. The shrill slate pencils of those doing arithmetic must not enter the consciousness of those who were spelling down. The boys cut the desks deep with jack knives and took turns at woodpile and stove. The stove could be the pot-bellied kind with a long stove-pipe traveling around the ceiling, a concession on the part of the School Committee that learning required a certain amount of comfort. Either the children froze or the pitch pine fried out of the ceiling knots. A new teacher could be tested by putting a stick of wood in the pipe. The children didn't mind smoke and coughing in such a worthy cause. Punishments were expected: sitting with the girls, standing in a corner, holding a book straight out, and much worse. Flogging had been the order of the day in the parents' youth - they thought nothing of it.
The girls weren't always required to have arithmetic or geography. Arithmetic was "by rote," aloud. Spelling was by syllables, each syllable spelled, then pronounced, then all pro- nounced together : "Con-stan-ti-no-ple, Constantinople." "We read four times each day, standing in a line. The long hard words we had to spell and divide into syllables were good training," wrote an elder man. One teacher would excel in teaching geography, one in science and deportment, one in the art of penmanship. Another would be gently advised by the visiting Prudential Committee toward "a little less display of the rod and a little more sympathy between teacher, parent and scholar." Not all members of the School Board were foun- tains of wisdom, however. The granddaughter of one remem- bers how he came once a term to visit and always asked the same thing, pulling his beard: "Well, children, who discovered
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Americky? Where is Africky?" and found the school perfect. The children came by horseback, by pung or sleigh, by buggy or buckboard, but mostly on foot. For schools were located in out-of-the-way places so that they would be equidistant from all the farms in the district. There was no hookey. If a boy wasn't at school, he was plowing or driving oxen.
By and large, concern for education in decent surround- ings was genuine and advancing, and has continued so. In 1944 the school children were buying $1,225.00 in bonds and war stamps, which purchased a $1,165.00 jeep. By 1956 the school hot-lunch program in Tamworth's large new school was being awarded first place in New Hampshire. The ambition was to have more and more schools until the number of twenty was reached. But as transportation became less of a problem, and maintenance of many schools more of one, to consolidate two districts here or three districts there became recommended policy, leading slowly toward the entire consolidation of a later day. Eventually it became customary in the villages for those resolved on the best to journey by train to New Hampton, where the Biblical and Literary Institute topped the category. It had opened in 1821, the first Baptist seminary in New Eng- land. Many individuals now living and some who have re- cently died went there: Alta Abbott, Edna Mason, Lucy Weeks, Alice Moore, Haven Knowlton, Abner Blaisdell, Serena Remick, Herbert Ross, and before them Mark and Jesse Rob- ertson, and Sumner Runnells, all profited by the New Hamp- ton school. It was coeducational ahead of its time, had three hundred students, and some of its departments were the best in the state.
In Tamworth's own evolution, the Brick School had the most distinguished career until the village corner was chosen as site for the consolidated school of fifty years ago. Not alone the stage for such outstanding teachers as Henry Hodgkins and John Sumner Runnells, the only brick schoolhouse gave a special prestige to those who attended. When they wanted the corner for the bigger school, Frank Remick next door offered
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to move the brick house off if they would give it to him. It became Whittier Lodge, with the bricks over the siding taken off and used for the chimneys. In exchange, Remick gave the school a piece of field for a playground.
When the Brick School overflowed, the first step was to hold the seventh and eighth grades in the Town House. There was even a private school in the Town House kept by one Gus Richards from Exeter. Charles Chick in Chocorua says that he and his older sister had a little horse to get them back and forth to it. He put the horse up where Mrs. Garland has had her store. Others now living remember this Gus Richards' school: Roy Arling, Arthur Bennett, Harry Roberts, all re- ceived this education. The school term was for twelve weeks at $2.50 total.
It was the new two-story schoolhouse that saw the begin- nings of a high school in 1924, in one room on the ground floor of the building. Mary Fall, Hazel Currier, and Gladys Evans all taught there. The high school gave first two terms and then four, until the pupils began to be sent daily by bus to the Conway High School.
"When I went to the Corner School," said Florence Chamberlain, formerly Goodwin, "on what used to be called the Goodwin Circuit," (she meant Goodwin Corner up near Huckins Barn now used by the Tamworth Outing Club), "Laura Huckins from the Huckins farm taught it and she had eyes in the back of her head. You couldn't talk or move around as they do today." Obviously a different type from Anna Blaisdell. A much later teacher Ethel Gilman Berry, also excellent, walked up to this outlying school too.
South Tamworth came into its own consolidated school when the Bemis family turned over a commodious building which had been the Bartlett house by the rake mill. Five fami- lies had contracted arthritis living over the milldam, but for the children there were bright sunny modern schoolrooms, and when further progress called for one school with bus service to it from all parts of Tamworth, parents here were under-
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standably slow to give up their nearer schoolhouse for one more distant, however great an improvement. The newer building was outgrown in a few years, and the final move for everybody to the new general elementary school was accom- plished in 1956.
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South Tamworth _ From Indian Trail to Through Route
THE DIFFERING HISTORY of each of the separate districts within Tamworth township can be clearly related to its natural char- acteristics. The location of the central village four miles from the railroad at West Ossipee kept it from much industry pointed toward outside markets, while insuring activity of its domestic mills along Swift River. Chocorua's unsurpassed beauties of lakes and mountains were sure to bring the dis- criminating from the cities, and so directed its natural destiny as a summer colony.
South Tamworth is necessarily different from either. A community strung along a former industrial river and flanking a state highway, South Tamworth is and always has served primarily as a thoroughfare, part of the main east and west artery of travel. It follows the southern rim of the valley for some eight miles, from East Sandwich at the west to West Ossipee at the east end, and its present community life has cohesion only where its roadside population is knotted into hamlets. The settlements on Hackett Hill and especially up in the Bemises' beautiful hidden uplands are tributary to this highway.
South Tamworth was begun possibly by the pioneers Wentworth Lord and his brother Jim climbing over the Ossi- pee Mountains from the south to find better land. One can imagine them when they got to the top, amazed by the long undulating farther chain of the Sandwich Range lifting still higher across the northern sky.
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ROGY ELIAS played HERB GILMAN most afternoons in winter in his store at Butler's Bridge. Rogy had the honor of being the only foreigner in Tamworth for about a generation.
SNOW-PLOWING today on the Ferncroft Road, Mt. Wonalancet behind.
P
--
THE BRICK SCHOOL, ABOUT 1893
The school stood where the present cut-off to the Depot Road passes south of the War Monu- ment. It was moved away when the consolidated school was built on the field behind it.
South Tamworth
Upon their peak in Darien they made their pitch, just over the ridge on the northern side, nominally in Ossipee. How long they had been there is not clear, but in 1836 Tam- worth voted to receive Wentworth Lord as a citizen if he could "get set from Ossipee, said Lord to bring with him his land, stock etc., the taxes on the land to help pay for a bridge." This enabled these high farmers to come down to Tamworth on voting days. Lord had spotted the Cold Brook with its im- pressive fifty-foot fall and is thought to have been the first to have a sawmill there, though Morrill was the name afterward chiefly connected with the site. After Wentworth Lord "died in midwinter and was carried out on a hand-sled for burial," his land was set back again to Ossipee. The setting-off pro- cedure seems to have applied to another settlement from Ossi- pee, up the Gilman Road. The remains of the first Gilman house may still be seen up in there. The old footpath between Ossipee and Moultonboro came that way. Part of the area was set back to Ossipee in 1859. Another instance was Sanford Gilman beyond the extreme northern line of Tamworth who was "sot over into Sandwich" so that he need no longer go to Waterville to vote, thirty miles over Whiteface and Tripy- ramid Mountains on snowshoes in March. After that he merely walked over what is now the McCrillis Trail to White- face intervale and so into Sandwich, which would seem to have been plenty.
The Bearcamp must be thought of as a raging torrent. One of Larkin Mason's sons, Justin, who went to Chicago and became a leader in establishing Christian Science there, returned to Center Ossipee in his later years, and wrote oc- casional Tamworth reminiscences for the Carroll County In- dependent. "The incessant roar of the two rivers, Bearcamp and Cold River [meaning Brook], seemed a diapason accom- paniment to the piercing sounds from the circular saws at the mills below," said he. And further, "Periodically a thundering rumbling was heard, like a huge bass solo obligato, as one,
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two, three, and sometimes more stage coaches summoned everybody to the doors and windows."
Harry Smart of Center Ossipee, when a boy visiting his uncle Will Mason at the Post Office, remembers that two or three million feet of timber came down the Bearcamp every year. Harry Berry who worked logs on the stream for years calls it more. "In the lumber drives the crews scattered all along both banks to keep the logs headed down - there'd be head men and tail men. You had to wade in breast high in icy water; sacking logs, it was called, getting them loose from the side. You had to understand your business. Sometimes you had to lug the logs - big logs, it took four men." Timber- men had to be acrobats to control the great monsters in their headlong bouncing and plummeting. Once three men went out on the logs to break up a jam at Butler's Bridge. "They worked all day till nearly four o'clock without success, then the log suddenly gave way, and in an instant with a noise like thunder, the whole drive started with men on it. They ran over the logs for the shore, but could not reach it, and I saw them go over the dam with the logs." Two of them were washed ashore, but William O. Weed of South Tamworth went onto the rocks, the logs that piled up on him probably killing him instantly. He was found next day a quarter mile below, his clothes stripped off and his bones broken.
When the first Bartlett in 1845 put in the dam for the rake mill down back of the Post Office, the oldsters shook their heads - not nearly enough timber available to warrant such a water power, they were sure. But the mill never lacked either timber or water for the eighty years of its life. During all those years this three-story plant of Bartlett & Son for lawn and hay rakes was "the largest rake-mill in the world," and the best of its kind; it was the great industry of this district. The rake was a nearly faultless handmade product. "A really good wooden rake must be produced largely in the old- fashioned way," states a folder of the time. "Every stick of ash has its own grain, and must be sawed and turned, steamed
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and fitted as an individual piece of work in order to obtain a perfect handle. The heads must be selected according to grain, and the holes bored and teeth driven with the greatest individual care. The finished rake must be assembled by hand to be well balanced, light, and strong at every point." "They have a machine in this mill that is a curiosity," says the History of Carroll County in 1889. "It drives 140,000 teeth in nine hours." Women were given employment, as they could fit the teeth deftly. There was a system of colored grading marks on the handles, red, purple, black, identifying the Tamworth rake all over the world. A surviving picture of a great wagon loaded with what must have been many thousands of baled rakes startles the imagination with the change that has taken place in this now quiet hamlet.
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