USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 15
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goodbye to Tamworth and proceeded, Justin to Chicago, Henry to Nashville, Tennessee, and Charles and Clinton to the town of Boone in Iowa. The last daughter, Miss Mary Mason, held the stronghold here while she lived. It is now occupied by a great-grandson Edson Bartlett.
Larkin Mason was one of those invaluable people who throw their talents into any sphere of usefulness at hand, and easily assume the chief responsibilities in their community. For- tunately he expressed himself comfortably on paper and as a speaker. This was due to no special schooling, but solely to the prodigious reading that ambitious men in those unprivileged times used as their bootstraps. He must have had a strong, pungent personality. The Sandwich Edmund Vittum, who could also write, says of him that he could be both serious and humorous without changing a line in his face-what we now call "dead pan"-a faculty that came naturally to many old-timers. With his known "ability, eloquence and wit," Lar- kin Mason's powers were sought all through the last half of the nineteenth century.
When the important question came up of a new meeting- house down in what had become the center of Tamworth near Swift River, mills, and stores, the equal question of a Town House was next discussed. Town meetings had for years been held at Enoch Remick's tavern. In 1852 the great step was voted: a Town House would be built, providing a suitable lot of land for it was deeded to the town free of expense. The records would seem to indicate that it was the Congregational Church Society that gave a small piece of its land across the street for the purpose. The following year it was Larkin Mason who was entrusted with providing the Town House at the village, while the brand-new meetinghouse opposite it was to be an even greater glory. Mason was elected to examine, with the selectmen, into the titles of the old meetinghouse and "if they think proper, take it down and remove it to the village for a town-house." This was the ticklish undertaking brought off successfully through his energy and experience. The church
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LARKIN D. MASON South Tamworth
SOUTH TAMWORTH METHODIST CHURCH
HENRY KELLEY (Pat) with his two most ancient possessions, beard and tree
South Tamworth
was hauled the mile and a quarter in one unit by forty yoke of oxen, the actual operator being the John Remick whose farm became President Cleveland's later, bought from the descendant Frank Remick. The moving job cost $550, and the contract is in the town vault. The present Town House is the result.
Such a man, this competent citizen Mason, would natur- ally be elected to Concord, and was in turn representative and senator. When the Civil War came he received a federal appointment, with the rank of Colonel, as one of three state agents for the Army from the whole North. His duties were to rescue stranded New Hampshire soldiers and get them home. He describes this in a letter from Washington, as a report to his Brigadier-General Natt Head; the letter follows:
It is the duty of the State Agent when a battle is pend- ing to gather in quantity such stores as are required for the relief of wounded soldiers; to have several assistants at hand to move at the earliest moment to the scene of suffering and administer relief; to see that the bodies of deceased soldiers from his state are properly buried and secured against depredations, and that such bodies as are called for by friends are properly prepared and forwarded to their homes; to visit hospitals or cause them to be visited, and such luxuries supplied as are necessary to the soldiers' com- fort; to keep an exact registry of all men in hospitals, with their company, regiment, and residence. Soldiers are mus- tered for pay every two months; but it is a very common thing for a soldier to be in transit on muster day and fail to get mustered, or, if mustered, he is liable to leave his place before the arrival of his paymaster, and hence lose one or more musters; so that several months may elapse before his accounts are corrected. The State Agent has ready access to the rolls, and it is his duty to follow from office to office until he gets the accounts adjusted, when he receives an order for payment. . . .
In three months:
I have made applications for the transfer of several hundreds of New Hampshire soldiers to the Webster Gen-
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eral Hospital at Manchester, N. H. Men who are absent on furloughs frequently fail to return in season, supposing they are properly reported by their attending physician, and ere they are aware, find themselves in some military prison or prison hospital with the charge of desertion against them. It is the duty of the State Agent to collect all facts in their favor and present them for their benefit, and if there appears no evidence of fraudulent intention on their part, he can generally get informalities overlooked and the delinquent ordered to duty without censure. The correspondence attending my duties requires the writing of more than twenty letters per day, several of which are official and have to be copied [necessarily in longhand].
I am prepared at all times to give the name, company, regiment, and town of every New Hampshire soldier in this department, and can give much information concern- ing our soldiers in other departments . .. I receive such articles of comfort as the people at home see fit to supply for the soldier, and distribute these goods to such as I think need them most. . .. I frequently find a New Hampshire soldier sick with some disease that requires the tender treat- ment and pure air of home in order for his recovery. At present he is entirely out of money. As State Agent I supply all such sums as are necessary to enable him to accomplish his object. The rooms of the Agency are open day and night for the benefit of the New Hampshire soldier, and when he applies for anything in my power to afford, he is never turned empty away. Soldiers can always find refreshments and sometimes rude lodgings at the rooms of the agency. I at present employ one male assistant in canvassing hospitals, and one lady assistant in preparing records and giving in- formation to applicants during my absence from the rooms, and I employ assistants transiently, as exigencies arrive.
This colossal task of Colonel Mason is today divided between the Red Cross and two or three Army departments.
After the war Colonel Mason was Probate Judge for the county until retired by age, when he allowed his name to stand for governor on the Prohibition ticket, Prohibition hav-
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ing become the live and popular issue. Tamworth was proud to turn to him for wisdom, and when in his eighty-third year, being Chairman of the Centenary Celebration of Ordination Rock, he introduced the speakers, "with vigorous manner and ringing voice," his talk would have been admirable anywhere. He referred justly to Samuel Hidden as "a central influence from which emanated the best civilization known in the eight- eenth century," meaning the school system inaugurated by Hidden who was always its head. "I never knew any other town where so large a percentage of its population became public educators," he stated, fifty having gone out from the old School District No. 2. In a prophetic peroration he spoke of
the good men of the past, in whose great souls originated the reforms, amidst the splendors of whose rising day we revel. ... Could we be assured of such progress during the next century, we might almost expect our people to assemble in air ships with communication from Mars. But without indulging in extravagant theories, we may reasonably expect when our people shall meet at this place one hundred years hence to renew the memories of our landmarks, our popula- tion will be much larger than today, that our wealth will be many times our present inventory, that our educational facilities will be such that our people can be educated at home sufficiently to fit them for all the duties of life, that the enchanting scenery around us will continue to attract the best elements of human society till the last shock of time shall bury the empires of this world in undistinguished ruin.
A touch of the Websterian oratory which was highest reach in his day and aligned him with the immortals.
Three years later it was the same beloved citizen who was making the speech of dedication for the new Cook Library up in Tamworth. Mrs. Cook who gave it was his sister-in- law. One other glimpse we have of him is in an old rescued clipping where he writes to the Governor a strong letter urging the pardon of a convicted murderer. According to Colonel
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Mason this Sylvester Cone had shot in self-defense trespassers who had come to manhandle him; the Court was wrong in thinking it a fit of temper, as concluded by the jury. Such was the Governor's opinion of Mason's judgment that he complied, and the man was released.
All his life Larkin Mason worked to make prosperous the small church opposite his store, supported it every way he could, and left it a bequest. During his care for it, it was all rebuilt above the sills, acquired steeple and bell, better pews and pulpit, carpet and steel ceiling, outside painting and in- side graining. And who but Larkin Mason was financial agent in the matter, and as usual set up a notebook containing in full all minutes of the committee's meetings, all measurements for the job, costs, personnel, and progress, together with the contract all laid down, every contingency thought of, and signed by the contractor David Hidden (the same who built the school shed) and whose cagey bid (anticipating a possi- ble competing bid at $600) was now $599.99. The final entry is the acceptance of the completed meetinghouse, after which the small record book ends, shut up with a snap, you may be sure, and something else undertaken. Whatever this man did had to be thorough and explicit.
All the while, along with ardent services to his "dear old town so long noted for its morality and its intelligence," and constant laying away in his deep memory much stiff reading on history, politics, and national affairs, Larkin Mason kept store, like other first citizens before and after him. In this he was at the crossroads in more than one sense, his finger on the pulse of the little and the great. His noted humor and "quaint taking way of bringing it out" gave wide circulation to his remarks. When the mail coach drew up at the store, he could appraise with a glance the human nature aboard it, and give salty retorts, much relished by the bystanders for whom it was their daily drama. His sons Tom and John L. succeeded him in business. Such a father is hard to succeed,
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and John L. was not very good at it. But together they all supplied South Tamworth's needs for some seventy years.
In the phrase of Sumner Runnells making his own speech at the Centenary exercises, "Entrusted with many offices of responsibility and always worthily filling them, always found in the vanguard of reform, brave of opinion and defiant of criticism," Larkin Mason's record might not be excelled in a much more imposing society.
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The Western Hill
IT SHOULD BE made clear in Tamworth's annals that the first real impetus toward settlement was made on Stevenson Hill by the Jewell brothers. Of the four other men who had pitched in the same year in other parts of the township, only William Eastman stayed. For the first years Eastman had lived in what is now the Porter house on the Hollow Hill Road, then the only road up into town from the south. Eastman made himself at once a valuable citizen, became selectman, deacon, and constable, and later built higher and farther west, the house where the Henderson family have since lived. But East- man's progeny died out, whereas the Jewells remained.
Mark Jewell had come over the line from Sandwich in 1772, found the likely hill which came to be Stevenson Hill, and on it built him a place to live.
Bradbury Jewell had come by spotted trees some years earlier than Mark, exploring and establishing lines for Jona- than Moulton, who was to all intents the Proprietor. One account says Bradbury was accompanied by Hezekiah Hackett to whom Hackett Hill was attributed. "Hez" was that best shot released from farming that he might supply meat to all the others. It was at Ephraim Hackett's place that the first town meeting was summoned, at which the two brothers were elected highway surveyors, "Present and sworn."
Bradbury claimed a large tract on his hill and began to clear. Within four years he had planted twenty acres of corn
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on it. When he built, like other younger brothers he outdid his elder, bringing imported bricks from England (probably ship's ballast) for his chimney, four thousand of them, says the story, at a dollar apiece Continental money. This first two-story house in the township had the penknife carving now so much prized, and it was plastered and papered. If an early settler took time for all that, it meant a strong pride. But Bradbury was considered wealthy; he had indentured servants. And he later had a business in Durham which took him back and forth. When the first town meeting was summoned, the two candidates Jewell and Mason sat apart on stumps in the open. When a name was called the person voted by going to stand beside his man. Bradbury had buckskin breeches and brass buttons and "never looked around." The pregnant quality of this occasion is produced in Cannon's Look to the Mountain.
The second first selectman was William Eastman, the third was John Fowler from the South Road. Eastman was also made constable, Mark Jewell was field driver and tithing- man. They, and their sons after them, all held these and other offices repeatedly as time went on.
Then there was the great event when Bradbury and Hez, hunting one day, came out upon a far hilltop north, where they looked down upon an extraordinary expanse of immense white birches with a few giant pines and hemlock among them. Thrilled, Bradbury wrote in his diary that he had viewed "my birch intervale." Birch Intervale he claimed, and eventually removed thither, his brother John before him, Mark also joining them, starting the colony now Wonalancet. Three original Jewell houses are a part of present Ferncroft Inn. Jewells made Birch Intervale and Wonalancet history until recent times; Stevenson Hill remained for others to de- velop.
The two-story house with the four thousand bricks, only recently gone to pieces, was exchanged by Bradbury Jewell for a farm down in Durham belonging to "Thomas Stevenson
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Gentleman." Thomas started the Stevenson settlement. He is Captain Thomas on his gravestone on the Pine Ground Hill, veteran of Indian wars. The Stevenson-Boyden families enjoy a book to themselves, put together by that able and witty member the Boston lawyer Albert Boyden, which is called Here and There in the Family Tree, and in which are some robust sketches of the tree's sturdier branches. It did in fact extend to some rare personalities. Stevenson Hill became in time a small universe of its own, high and apart from either Tamworth or Sandwich, with each of which it was associated. The first outstanding Stevenson was Thomas' son James, father of John M., who united the Stevensons with the Boydens by marrying Martha of that name. John M. was born in the "new" house built in 1798, now the property of Mrs. Walter Boyden, in the room of the "old part" where he died.
This Uncle John was a character of the first magnitude in the century of the town's prime, big, hearty, genial, the best of companions even for a little boy, and so enjoyed by his great-nephew Albert Boyden. "He used to offer to give me a colt if I would stay in Tamworth with him during the win- ter, and every year I innocently accepted the offer," but when the time came to go home, Albert forgot all about the colt. John M. was an unexampled trader and made a comfortable living out of it. He scoured the country behind good horses, talking delightfully, forging deals with everybody; he repre- sented his town at Concord, supported the church as deacon, and loaned it his fine tenor voice.
During John M. Stevenson's lifetime and that of his daughter Augusta, twenty-eight boys and girls mostly from orphanages were welcomed, brought up by them, and sent out into the world well equipped to make a living. This number is stated by Sarah Frances Kimball, Augusta's near friend. One of these children was Leopold Morse, a name afterward made familiar to very many people. The Stevenson house was also forever at the disposal of the troops of relatives and friends who constantly swarmed over it and filled every bed, at least
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all summer of every year. They did the farflung picnicking, the mountain climbing, the sensational fishing and the prodi- gies of berry picking of the time, and ate fabulously of the immense supplies of country succulence turned out daily by the cook. It was the last of the era of full farming before life was changed by the decline in soil fertility, the call of the west, the rising pressure of the summer boarder influx, and the dawn of the summer home cult.
Martha Boyden, wife to this John M. Stevenson, sprang also from one of the first settlements in Tamworth's forest. Dr. Joseph Boyden, her father, left Massachusetts for Tamworth in the New Hampshire wilds for the stated reason that the minister in his home town Gardner had taken to acting as amateur doctor himself, thus filching the practice of the genu- ine one. The fame of Parson Hidden was such that he could be counted on not to offend in the same way. Dr. Joseph's, the first Boyden house, was not on Stevenson Hill but on Hen- derson Hill, its cellar hole now a part of Harry Henderson's garden.
One of Dr. Boyden's first acts on settling was to subscribe to the Social Library. This had just been started by the Rev- erend Samuel Hidden, and the pages devoted to Dr. Joseph Boyden's withdrawals of books, sometimes the same ones several times over, would mean today a high degree of educa- tion-law, politics, history, sermons, and biography, written down by quill pen in the now brown ink of the Social Library's daybook. He was the first doctor among the scattered settle- ments, but of course farmer beside. Riding his medical rounds he fell from his horse crossing the Bearcamp River on a small bridge (Jeffers) leading to a patient's house, and was killed. His epitaph states the facts succinctly :
As a physician he was highly est eemed, and by his humane attention to the sick and indigent his de ath is lamented by all.
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Likewise a doctor was Joseph's son Wyatt Boyden. This youth, having tutored under Parson Hidden, was the first sprout of the Tamworth wilderness to graduate from Dart- mouth, always walking both ways with his possessions in a bundle on a stick. "The stage is for women and invalids, not for stout fellows like you," said a contemporary father. At the age of eleven this boy had planted, hoed, dug, and carried into the cellar one hundred bushels of potatoes. His room rent at Hanover for one and one-third years was $11.69.
These doctors, and the next of the line, William C. Boy- den, father of the generation just past, had a stout progeny which intermarried with "all the neighbors right and left," Frys, Hoags, Folsoms, Beedes, Remicks, Hiddens, the Quaker strain adding its charm and strength. As interlocking families they made a world to themselves, apart on their distant crest of hill. The strain seems to have run to schoolteachers, and some of these to have been of conspicuous talent. They kept diaries and wrote voluminous letters which have not been lost. Many went to callings elsewhere, but a large detachment of all generations were always in residence at the big house where down through Augusta Stevenson's time there was always open house and hospitality, an institution of rich and legendary proportions occasioning a wealth of anecdote.
Augusta Stevenson was the last of her family. Of "Cousin Augusta" more could be said than this history can cope with. She was the old order itself and its highest expression. Her domestic energy ran to fabulous achievement. Someone made 1,052 pounds of butter in the year 1883; if it wasn't Augusta Stevenson it could have been. "She had a certain granitic quality in her character," said John Finley Sr., "with all her affability." Her affability was a thing of beauty, was kindness as well as keen interest; it was her nature to be a friend to all, especially all who needed friendship. The schoolteacher of the moment was invariably adopted and mothered by her. Her social talents were proverbial, dominating the Tamworth life of her swarming relatives. "It is a mystery how she ever
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managed, with her limited equipment, but her silent speed and dexterity were more than equal to it. . . . Her fine features, the flash of her dark eyes, her voice clear as a bell, and her whole countenance alight with interest in everybody and every- thing, telling her joys and enthusiasms, were irresistible." Out in Chicago at the University Club, William Boyden, her cousin, held two separate conversations on one day with two men who had never met each other, and each of them chanced to say that he regarded Augusta Stevenson of Tamworth as the most remarkable woman he knew. One of these was William J. Locke the English novelist, and the other Sumner Runnells, president of the Pullman Company.
When Augusta was gone, John Boyden, a cousin, in- herited the house, and lived there till his own death. His was another unusual personality, full of talent and originality, but so contradictory that people often did not know how to take him. His fine mind was built upon extensive reading and though he had come back to the hills to be a farmer with farm- ers, he could furnish a wry Latin quotation for any emer- gency. He was a perfect companion for a boy on the mountains or beside fishing brooks, supplying wonderful talk, but he had a difficult temper with occasional irrational results. His mother was an Amherst Dickinson, cousin to Emily of that name, which may shed light on the otherwise unaccountable. He was proud of his strawberries, and on one occasion got up from table in anger declaring that the strawberries weren't ripe and shouldn't have been picked, went out into the garden and dug up the whole bed. When he was gone, an interval of silence followed in the old house, until Walter Boyden, second brother in the most recent generation, took over. His family still carry on the tradition.
Of the remarkable teachers generated in this family, we have already met that Martha Boyden who received such encomiums from her school superintendent in 1865. Amy Hoag, afterward mother to Roland, Walter, Albert, and Au- gustus, and their sister Mary Boyden, was another notable
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instance. When her son asked if it hadn't been a pretty rough life, to be always "boarded out" to the lowest bidder, she said that it was in all families a matter of pride to do the very best they could by the teacher, but she had felt that one family she stayed with in a mountain district served woodchuck rather too often. (A much later teacher in this same school who boarded at Ed Clark's was Edna Cummings Mason, in charge of the Post Office at Tamworth these many years. )
An outstanding instance where the primitive school sys- tem could not stifle a teaching genius was that of Amy Hoag's sister Anna Hoag Hall, who has been called an easy natural captain in any department of life. When she was twenty-one and taught in Sandwich she had sixty-eight pupils between three and eighteen, and (in one room) taught them reading, writing, spelling, geography, history, arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. All maintained for her a lifelong affection.
A Boyden whose influence went further afield was Roland Boyden who died in 1931, known among the neighbors as "the Great Boyden." His greatness seems to have consisted fundamentally in the balance of his mind and the clear- sighted ease with which it operated, creating a reputation for almost unnatural wisdom. With this "it will be found that the proportion of his life work which had no direct reference to the well-being of his fellow man was surprisingly small." Sound and quick decisions, the result of his experience in law practice, made him the revered counsellor in any body of men. A committee of the Boston Bar Association held a memorial gathering before the Supreme Court after his death, and such things as this were said of him: "To an unusual degree he was free from vanity and self-interest, the two most com- mon causes of such mistakes as are made by men of ability. And he had neither the timidity as to large affairs nor the un- due respect for people of importance which so often lead the judgment astray." After the First War during the three years he was with the Reparations Commission in Europe, it was said of him, "Boyden is doing more to advance the prestige and
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