USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 14
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The great dam for rake and sawmill was by no means the only one on the Bearcamp. The very first saw and gristmill is claimed for Colonel Stephen Mason, the first settler by the stream, who gave part of his farm for the present cemetery. There has been a grist and shingle mill behind Perley Ryder's place, a shingle mill at Jeffers' Bridge, another (was it Ephraim Hidden's?) halfway from there to Butler's Bridge, and a fac- tory at the bridge where a man named Webster is said to have made coffins. Another coffin factory, probably the first, was where Arthur Thompson lives, out toward Bennett's Corner. This is where one should have traded, for a coffin could be had there for fifty cents, and for seventy-five it would be painted black.
At Butler's Bridge the canal can still be seen following the river, where logs were detoured to enter the millrace. A considerable group of buildings must be built in the imagina- tion here, where now are none: the mill itself on the north bank, the blacksmith shop, probably Albion Hayford's, east of the bridge's southern end; a store, probably Irving Gray's, in the house now owned by Walter Bookholz west of the north end. Research reels at the mills discovered to have existed on both riverbanks up to as late as fifty years ago, mills owned
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by such as Larkin Mason, James Welch, George Bryant, Will Mason, and others besides, including Harry Mason's father who was killed by a flying bolt in one of them. There was also a Sanger who lived where John Nutter does; all that is avail- able about him is that he had a wooden leg and kept hens in his house. There seems to have been even a marble worker at Butler's Bridge, named Weeks. In the largest two-story structure, a Mason grandfather built an organ that has re- mained as a wonder in more than one memory. Perhaps it was the same who made the "big long clocks," of which Mabel Evans' survives. A William Butler in that corner of town must have given the bridge its name. Or was it Ivory Butter, licensed as taverner in 1818? Justin Mason says the name was Buttles and the bridge properly Buttles' Bridge.
Growing out of the famous rake mill was a later and more extensive industry. Will Mason's steam sawmill (Will was no relation to Larkin) on the present site of Saunders Brothers, after a long and honorable life seemed about to end. But Mr. Farwell Bemis from Boston had bought in 1911 for summer use an old farm high above the village and was in- terested to make practical his belief in woodworking for people who lived among forests. Mr. Bemis purchased both rake mill and Will Mason's sawmill, with one or two other smaller ones, and developed them all into one model industry, at first mak- ing toys and then small furniture, under the name of South Tamworth Industries. Prefabricated houses were the ultimate purpose for the large factory he built, which in 1943 ended, like others, in fire.
This interesting undertaking was designed on high prin- ciples to give employment during wars (sixty people at its peak), to use forest products wisely, and to prove the value of cooperative enterprise. Mr. Bemis' influence did not cease with his death. His family has engaged in many services and benevolences for the region. Allied with the Thompsons by marriage, together they preserve some thousands of farm land acreage. William Thompson, a Boston lawyer of much dis-
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tinction, had bought a house that had been built high and forward on the mountainside by Mrs. A.C.B. Wells of Massa- chusetts. Mrs. Wells opened her house, about 1912, for a Christmas party and invited all of South Tamworth, an event recorded in the Sandwich Reporter of the day. As the com- pany wound up the road, said Mr. Tilton of the Reporter in his social column, welcome from a thousand lights shone out on the snow from the house above; and after minutiae as to the decorations and refreshments, came the immortal tribute, "Mrs. Wells and her daughter Miss Catherine entertained as naturally as the Aeolian lyre."
Besides the rake mill were Morrill's Mills up on tumultu- ous Cold Brook at the fifty-foot drop. One was a steam mill, one a "getting-out shop" which seems to mean interior finish, and a card mill, not carding for wool, but small wooden cards for winding elastic or ribbons. (Clara Mason remembers past- ing the final papers on these at a dollar a hundred.) Morrill had also a spoolbed factory a bit downstream where the fall was still plenty for his need. At this writing it is still standing, part of the Claude Ames farm which was Morrill's home. The little store in the back of the barn, formerly kept by Morrill for the community, is recalled by the Ames children as where they used to play storekeeping among the empty shelves and counters in our time. Seven or eight houses related to the mills formed a group about the bridge, where now all are gone, and twelve more homesteads extended on above. The other small community down on the highway around the Post Office was commonly known as Fort Jackson or the Fort; why, no one seems to know.
While South Tamworth received no Van Amburgh's Menagerie nor Comic Vocalists, which its citizens no doubt drove up to Tamworth to sample, there were band-concerts in its own bit of woods back of Henry Tappan's by Cold Brook which was dignified by the name of The Park. And it had its separate share of stores. A road return of 1818 refers to Whit- man's store but doesn't give the location. Another speaks of
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Isaac Parker's store in connection with the Bryant Road. And there was the well-known store opposite the South Tamworth Post Office owned by Larkin Mason in which his sons followed him. This is now moved farther back as Emmons Heald's house. There were of course three of four blacksmiths: Hall Ballard first, next the Post Office, followed by Phon Mason ("Blacksmith and Carriage Painter") who was the great roadbuilder of the region, then by John Hayford, in the shop now the Bucks' garage.
The River Road by the boiling Bearcamp, now our Route 25, natural line of way that it is, must have seen the foot- soldiers of General Lovewell, as recited in his Journal, when he marched his company from Cusumpe Pond in Sandwich to Ossipee Lake, on the way to the last defeat of the Abenakis at Lovewell's Pond in 1725. When stagecoaches took the field, this road became as it still is in the motor age today, the direct route from Center Harbor to Conway. It was also the mail route; the stage would pluck the bag hanging from the post and throw out another as it went by. Boston passengers came up by train to the Weirs or Meredith; thence by steam- boat over Lake Winnepesaukee. The wharf at Center Harbor in summer was packed with spectators to see the boat come in, all the native population plus all the summer boarders greeting the big event of the day with cheers and singing as the "Lady of the Lake," and after her time the "Mount Wash- ington," made her moorings. As multicolored as modern cars, Concord coaches from all the hotels were lined up in waiting, along with a great quantity of smaller rigs from boarding- houses.
The Concord coach merits a dissertation in any New Hampshire narrative but may not be lingered over. Without benefit of assembly line, Abbot and Downing of Concord de- veloped from 1827 a handmade vehicle as near to perfection as it could come, and shipped it in thousands over the world. An old print shows thirty elegant coaches crossing the western plains, on flatcars behind a belching engine, to figure in the
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dangerous Wells-Fargo route. The Deadwood Coach made famous by Buffalo Bill was one of these. There would be space for nine people inside on three seats, twelve "outsides" on two seats, and a great rack for trunks at the back on top. A trunk was a necessary adjunct of the early traveler. On a truck at Center Harbor wharf William Dearborn of Sandwich once counted sixteen trunks tagged for one family alone.
When the important coaches for the White Mountains would get under way, the great roughness of the mountain roads was eased by the coach-body being swung on leather straps; a dozen oxhides had gone into the leather of each. To withstand the greatest punishment the wheels were made of three different forest woods. Paint was of the most brilliant, with pictures on the doors, and the horses' harnesses had silver and brass trim, tassels, plumes, and bells. With eight horses the driver controlled reins with his feet as well as his hands. He wore a big hat, with messages often in it, and with a long black whip could flick an ear of the leader though there were six or eight in his team. He never abused those horses - they were part of himself. In The Vittum Folks by Edmund Vittum of Sandwich it is told how four or five of these large coaches in succession would pass the Vittum schoolhouse, still standing by Route 25, loaded with tourists for the Glen House. As many as fifteen people would be on the top of each, besides the "insides." All the school children would rush out to cheer them, and every boy had the ambition to become a stage driver. Living horses were an adventure that machines may never equal. Nostalgia for his "hosses" permeates every older man's backward-turning memory.
Stages had to change horses every ten miles or so; hence the "taverns" along the route. The animals would be stripped and off again in ten minutes. In South Tamworth Ray Larra- bee's house (formerly Frank Whiting's) was a tavern, the house next it its annex. Another inn was Mabel Evans' house. But the most famous was the Bearcamp River House that burned to the ground in 1880, at the junction where White's
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Garage now is. It had been the old Ames Tavern in Starr King's time, also called Twing's, "the key to the White Moun- tains," known to all early travelers. Whittier's Among the Hills (1868) referred to it as "Wayside," though in his time it was "Plummer's," with a noted landlord named Henry Banks, active in securing the railroad through West Ossipee, who ultimately retired into Tamworth where his widow long lived in the house now occupied by Mrs. Joseph Cartland. Mrs. Banks used to recall her husband's pleasure when he could announce that "John G." was coming. In that small idyllic inn by the river the poet Whittier summer after summer made his headquarters. The success of Snow-Bound had given him financial independence; he could stay long seasons among his seductive hills. Many of his best-known poems were evolved here, not to mention the considerable output of Lucy Larcom of his company. The coach with Bearcamp River House on it which used to meet the trains at Union was seen by Charles Remick in the Wayside Inn Museum at South Sudbury, Massachusetts.
Justin Mason says that by tacit local agreement stage- coach travelers were always told that the neighboring moun- tain was "Mount Whittier named for the poet Longfellow." Besides Mount Whittier there is Whittier itself, the small com- munity at Butler's Bridge; the Whittier Ski Trail (odd con- tradiction in terms!) ; the railroad station Mount Whittier; the two lesser hills of the Ossipee, Little Larcom and Big Larcom; and after the burning of the favorite inn, when the Whittiers moved over to the Sturtevant farm near Center Harbor, the great Whittier Pine overlooking Squam Lake, which the poet had made his own in the poem "The Wood Giant," was a landmark until a very recent storm.
It is a measure of the veneration in which Whittier was held that in the local legend is the great event of his having once attended a service at the Congregational Church in Tam- worth. No one knew his identity till he had slipped out and gone. Whittier and Lucy Larcom, George Inness the painter,
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and others of their circle in their inspired devotion to this region no doubt gave it its first cachet in the minds of literate New England. The mountain valleys seemed to merge into the poems naturally, as the Lakes Region into Wordsworth's. Incidentally, Miss Larcom conferred final names upon the mountains Wonalancet and Paugus.
South Tamworth could not have lived on a stagecoach artery without abundant liquor licenses. The Town Records for the entire period are sprinkled with the names of citizens receiving the selectmen's "Approbations," or renewals, "to retail spiritous liquors and keep open Tavern," or to sell in stores such as Parker's at Butler's Bridge in 1808. The Prohi- bition Law in '55 had the effect of gradually increasing the licensing until the town became practically open again. The Amendment of 1875 was to remove the "medicinal" abuse and otherwise tighten sales, and one agent only was again appointed distributor. In this period it was Samuel E. Remick, in the house now Charles E. Behr's.
The stagecoaches and the stagecoach era only gave up the ghost when the railroad had blasted its way through Craw- ford Notch in 1875. People left their entertaining good-natured coaching, the open air, the horses, and the dust, for the clatter and soot of "the cars," primitive as to roadbed, engine, and comfort, but the changeover to five and three-quarter hours from Boston to West Ossipee by train (generally late) was celebrated here as a stupendous advance. We have since lived through another transportation advance more stupendous yet, which seems almost to have brought more problems than it has solved. But since none knows the problems in advance, each change is the millennium.
South Tamworth had some teeming farmlands. Many were large hop producers. The present Bemis uplands were a collection of separate farms and the soil yielded handsome crops. Even now, Edward Bookholz, chief operator for the Bemises, took first prize for his farm exhibit at the Sandwich Fair for twenty straight years. Tamworth had a prodigious
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career in fruit, first in the county, hard though that is now to believe. The quality as well: "Such pears and cherries and apples and strawberries as never you saw," says Ernest Mason. "After old Man Lord died up on the mountain, we boys used to go up there and eat our stomachs full." Spraying never so much as heard of, fertilizers seldom needed. The remarkable number of carloads of apples shipped yearly from some "Grandfather's farm" figures largely in several elder minds. Twelve barrels from one tree, Standley Young recalls.
In the fall everybody dried apples. "Tonight had an apple-bee," says the Cogswell diary. "There were 25 here besides ourselves, did 175 strings." The strings were hung in the attic. Some were for applesauce and pies, some to be traded for groceries for five or six cents a pound. Applesauce would be made in cider, as a side dish for ham cured in maple syrup. (James Welch's mother used four pounds of maple syrup for a hundred pounds of meat. ) The total apple harvest is probably nowhere recorded. But lumber and apples gave this county its name as a rich country. In the Town Report of 1899, thirty thousand pounds of butter and two thousand of wool were recorded.
The maple sugar product hereabouts was also enormous for so small a population. In 1871 the sugar season at the Cogswell farm wound up with 1,237 pounds, besides molasses enough to make about thirteen hundredweight. "A ton of maple sugar from our own trees in one season," wrote a farmer on Vittum Hill. All who date back testify that sap would be boiling by town-meeting day - the oxen would go right in on the crust. But that was "when winters were colder" and the March sap flow greater. They would boil all night. It took a barrel of sap to make one gallon of syrup, or eight pounds. Clint Mason and Herb Vittum once counted up the sugar yield from all Tamworth, with Sandwich and Moulton- boro together, to have been about twenty tons. In New Eng- land of the eighties granulated sugar was a luxury, beet sugar unknown.
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Another product from the native trees were spruce gum. Gathering it was an enterprise for the month of September. Pike Perkins, grandfather of the present Pike, would take several men into the mountains with him. They could get a dollar a pound at the store for new gum, and could pick per- haps two pounds a day each man, then very good money. Spruce gum has medicinal uses, beside the so-called pleasure produced, which the present-day chewing-gum industry has rendered obsolete.
South Tamworth added the Methodist Society to the region. Its meetinghouse appeared at "the Fort" in 1832, first as part of the Dover circuit, then the Sandwich, later Moulton- boro. The records of the church show very hard work and very gradual gains. In 1883 there is a cryptic entry: "Taking into account the adverse circumstances in which [the church] is placed and the influence with which she is surrounded, the wiley and powerful foe she has to contend against, she has reason to praise God and take courage." In spite of the "wiley" foe, membership rose to seventy-five a few years there- after. Life was infused into the church by Larkin Mason who was one of its two Disciplinarians. David Morrill labored for it, also that fine character Will Mason the miller who kept the church going for some thirty years with his interest and his funds. By 1897 they were saying "Gloriously we advance": new furnace, new members, good attendance, choir always present. It may have been in this hearty period that Justin Mason played the organ and afterward called it impetuous: "No sooner had the pumphandle supplied sufficient breath to the bellows than a plaintive cry was heard from the upper octave or a solemn moan from the lower, announcing that it was ready to begin, whether the player was or not. . . . The bellows was subject to valvular leakage and the remedy had always been to put another brick on the top of it."
Deaths and removals then began inevitably to impair prosperity. Justin Mason put it that South Tamworth "was prominent for two unused factories, a vacant store with tene-
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ment above and an abandoned tomb." Church interest like- wise waned until there were not enough members left to carry on continuously.
The new Episcopal church down the same Route 25 is but some thirty years old. The Rev. Frederick L. Cowper, a collateral descendant of the English poet, had been coming from Sanbornville to hold Episcopal services in the Whittier schoolhouse, when Mrs. Ida Berry, a bedridden invalid, offered land for a church for him. The building project was launched by Mrs. Ella Moulton at a strawberry festival, supported by the Bemises, Thompsons, Kilhams and Marjorie Gregg. A Boston architect Walter Kilham, with a summer home on Stevenson Hill, made the design; large clear-glass windows were to bring in abundant light and the mountains. The contractor was Charles Smart, the stonemason Ernest Mason. In 1927 Bishop Dallas consecrated the structure, named St. Andrews-in-the-Valley by Mr. Cowper. After his death the church relied upon neighboring Episcopal clergy until 1946 when the Rev. Herbert W. Prince moved here from Illinois, to bring St. Andrews to greater community usefulness.
Standing up from South Tamworth annals like elms on an intervale are persons we have mentioned and a few more. If Larkin Mason was the most notable of his numerous tribe, before him was the figure of Colonel David Gilman, first of the equally numerous Gilmans. Gilmans are like a mist infil- trating every cranny of the town history. They all seemed to have ability and substance. In early Town Records they are carefully labeled Esquire, in addition to their inevitable mili- tary rank. For long years a Gilman was always a representa- tive, for more long years another would be town clerk, and they drift continually through all offices. In the town boundary settlements all four of the delegates sent to one four-day session were Gilmans. One Gilman had remarkable skill at drafting documents. But it must be recorded that this one died a drunk- ard.
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Colonel David the founder was a man six and a half feet tall. We have seen that he always followed Reverend Hidden up the pulpit stairs and sat in the pulpit on account of deafness. His house is still standing though covered with a shell of modern composition, almost directly opposite Butler's Bridge on the south side. He was an officer of the Revolution and one of Washington's most efficient soldiers when an accident disabled him. Accepting his resignation, Washington signified his unusual estimate of this colonel by presenting him with his own sword. Besides holding the top town offices, he was also the first Justice of the Peace, 1789; in those days this meant the local judge who held court and conducted trial of minor cases of all kinds. His son, Captain David, was not quite of the same stuff. As a child Ed Bookholz earned five cents an hour picking potato bugs for him, and remembers him as always horse trading, buying and selling with the gypsies going through.
Colonel Levi Folsom and his son John - the Folsoms have only lately died out - figured as postmasters for incredi- bly long periods. The Post Office was in John Folsom's house for all of a hundred years, and again is. John was a Democrat, but when the Republicans were in, the appointment could be easily shifted to his wife; thus by having both political parties in the family the office remained where it belonged year in and year out. When the last of them died, the Post Office had been there longer than anywhere else in New England, so the story runs. Colonel Levi built and ran the well-known store afterward Larkin Mason's. He also built one of the first up-and-down sawmills, owned in the family for a century or so, finally sold with other business properties to Mr. Bemis. There was evidently for some time a post office also at Whit- tier. As late as 1900 this was in the present Wilkinson house and Etta Carr Bryant the postmaster. Later it was in Rogy Elias' store, one that burned down between his present store and Colonel Gilman's house. John Bryant from hard by was
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postmaster too; his framed certificate is in the Historical Mu- seum.
Among conspicuous men Walter Bryant, who may be claimed as ancestor by the Bryants down the Bryant Road, who are still actively there as Smiths, was in 1741 the original Royal Surveyor of the New Hampshire-Maine boundary line for about thirty miles of its length. Some of his journal during that wilderness mission is extant, tersely suggestive of the hard- ships, and of the man's character. The surveying party was stopped several times by Indians who could not believe the white men's mission to be peaceable. Finally the fears of the party prevailed, and they turned back after completing only the thirty miles.
It was Bryant who first named the hills on the Saco the Pigwacket Hills. His descendants have the proud record of continuously holding land of their ancestors for nine genera- tions. Their battle cry is the remark of "Ruthey," wife of the first Bryant to build his one-room house on the land re- ceived by his forebears as grantees in the original charter. Ruthey stood at the window watching a blizzard pile the snow high above the window ledge and said, "What a beautiful evening for all sorts of amusements!"
Another in this galaxy is perhaps the most widely known Tamworthy of all, the still vigorous James Welch, High Sheriff of the county for twenty years, he of the long experience and full knowledge which has been so freely quoted in this history. Any older official in all our towns will say, "Carroll County has never been the same since Jim Welch's time. He was afraid of nothing!" Stories to illustrate are many, and fortu- nately some are recorded. Mr. Welch's early life was spent working for a large private timber operator. He was then appointed timber cruiser for the State Tax Commission, and appraised the important tracts of untouched woods throughout the state. Episodes in his career as sheriff became known far and wide and would make good reading if this were a history of contemporary personages.
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Larkin D. Mason
Mason is one of the earliest English names to be connected with the northern New England territory. Whether Captain John Mason who is called the founder of New Hampshire was any kin to the Masons who became numerous in this region two centuries later is doubtful. A survivor of the clan in South Tamworth told interviewers that his ancestor was supposed to be one of three brothers who arrived on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee when still used by the Ossipee tribe for their villages, and took to themselves three squaws for wives. In any case the descendants of all three Masons have lost track of the kinships.
The brightest figure in South Tamworth's firmament is midway in its history. This was Colonel Larkin D. Mason, who became a high administrative officer in Washington in the Civil War. His grandfather, Stephen Mason, was sent as surveyor to Tamworth by Jonathan Moulton its overlord. He took up a large acreage when he was attracted to pitch here in 1773. Stephen's wife's is said to be the first burial in River- side Cemetery, which was taken off from a part of the Mason farm. This pioneer Stephen put the first mill, both saw and grist, on the Bearcamp River alongside his farm. The mill passed one hundred years later to the Bryant family across the stream. The grandson Larkin, son of Deacon Tufton Mason who was set down in Town Records as "truly a Right- eous Man whose long life was devoted to usefulness," was in turn grandfather to Masons now living (Mrs. Mabel Evans). Larkin's family were all born in a smaller house up on a high tract of two hundred acres, but he built an admirable home- stead for them in his prime, with a multiple sweep of mountain view. It had a room for every child in it. Still it did not hold four of his sons against the allurements of the west. These bade
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