USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 16
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influence of the United States in Europe than any other Ameri- can over here." A natural-born public man of the highest standards and abilities, he was appointed to one important post after another, especially where the American position was to be explained abroad. Though a preternatural modesty prevented his shining greatly in the newspapers, his colleagues gave him at all times the highest tribute in their power. He had just been named to succeed Charles Evans Hughes on the Hague Tribunal when he died. F.P.A. the New York humorist described him aptly when he said he never saw anyone who could play as good a tennis game standing still as Roland Boyden.
Some remarks in L'Europe Nouvelle are tempting to add. Translated they run:
The American observer, M. Boyden, so pink under his hair so white, maintains under all circumstances an absolute impassivity. In his upraised right hand an enormous cigar smoulders eternally. Sometimes, if the discussion reaches a really crucial stage, his eyes move slightly in their orbit. ... His aspect is designed by nature for the role of an arbitrator; justice seems to have fixed her dwelling in his venerable person. ... M. Boyden has two passions, justice and golf, but it should be added that he succeeds better in the first than in the second.
It was said that he was never so happy as when bringing twelve or fifteen friends to the Red House in Tamworth, which faced the view in front of the Spaulding farm, exhibit- ing to his guests the fishing and the mountains. His calm, humorous, handsome aspect made friends of everyone. It was his habit to drop bright new dimes into the sand of the road between the two red houses where the little Spaulding girls would come to play. His brother Augustus succeeded to the place on the Spaulding Road, which his children have in turn made their summer habitat.
It was only after retirement from the White House that President Cleveland became associated with Stevenson Hill,
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its name thereafter gradually changing by natural process into Cleveland Hill. He had returned from Washington to Prince- ton to live and there the Clevelands came to enjoy the Finleys, John Finley then being Professor of Politics. At about that time the Clevelands had lost their small daughter Ruth, and had turned away from their old summer life on Buzzard's Bay. Mrs. Finley being a Boyden and cousin of Roland, Albert, and the others, therefore had one foot already in Tamworth, and she was urgent that the Clevelands should come there too. Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland rented from the Boyden's mother for a couple of summers the Fry House, the old seat of the Fry-Boyden clan which carries the inscription 1779 though rebuilt in replica after a fire. Francis Cleveland says that among the local Boydens there was some advance discussion as to whether his family would be just the right sort to add to Stevenson Hill. At this time the Finleys came to the Wheel- wright house on Brown Hill (now the Schmidts') and the Clevelands' friend Howard McClanahan, Dean at Princeton, was added to the Princeton group, at the Meader house near the entrance to Fry House. These McClanahans later came to other houses on the Hill.
It was the Clevelands who bought first (1904), the large Downs farm with the unparalleled view; then the large Francis Remick farm opposite. Together this land covered most of the east and north slopes of Stevenson Hill. (The Remicks' son Sumner departed for Boston, took the medical degree, and became Massachusetts Commissioner of Tubercu- lar Diseases, known for distinguished work toward eliminating deaths from this source.) The Clevelands then sold the Downs part of the land to the Finleys, and the close association of the two families for the next fifty and more years was assured. The Finley house was built by that legendary builder Hacker Hall "with an ax and a saw," in the generous style of the 1900's, and was none too big for the mammoth house parties, nor was the Cleveland house, expanded from farm to country house, for the troops of young people always based there. The old
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Downs house was moved near it for the overflow, later used by Richard Cleveland, and then by his son Tom. Francis remodeled another hard by, and later still moved a very old structure from Gilmanton, board by numbered board, to a location on the road near his mother's house and became a year-round resident.
John Finley was another of the natural great, with more abilities than could be used in a lifetime. Three after-dinner speeches a night were said to be as easy for him as ripping off a Times editorial. His career had begun as president of Knox College in Illinois where he met his wife, or perhaps he began it when he tied his Latin book to his plow. At any rate he was "the most popular man on the faculty" at Princeton when he filled the chair vacated by Woodrow Wilson ("and not rattling around in it either"), and was transposed along with the Cleveland family to Tamworth. He became presi- dent of the College of the City of New York and built its majestic buildings on Washington Heights; later he became New York State Commissioner of Education and lastly editor of the Times. He held distinguished lectureships at the Sor- bonne and at Edinburgh, managed to function in innumer- able offices in public welfare or learned societies both abroad and at home, and was known as "the most decorated man in America." Furthermore he was a writer and editor of books, one crowned by the Académie Française, and was president of the League of Walkers.
In Tamworth he was felt to be the charmingest as well as walkingest man ever heard of. He scorned transportation, wore no overcoat in any weather. It was his habit in New York to walk once around Manhattan Island every year on his birthday. In Tamworth if he left his stick on a mountaintop he turned at once and went back to get it. Given an honorary degree at Dartmouth, he went on foot the distance from Tam- worth to Hanover, as Wyatt Boyden had done a hundred years before. On arriving at West Ossipee he would remark to Currier the stage driver loading trunks, "Ed, I'll start along,
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you pick me up," and cover the four miles to Tamworth before Ed could get there with the team. Francis Cleveland remem- bers once coming upon Mr. Finley over in Madison sitting at the roadside with a sprained ankle. He then consented to ride, but so unacquainted with a car was he that he seemed out of his element, didn't know how you opened a door or just what to do.
He bought an old farmstead on top of Lunt Ledge, called it his Tusculum after Horace, and climbed there to meditate and drink distances. Although he was never free to stay long, his posterity still make their exceptional contribution to the community from their three places on Stevenson Hill, that is, if John Finley Jr. is not on loan to Oxford from his professor- ship in the classics at Harvard.
The beloved ex-President had but four summers on the Hill before his death. The world does not need to be told that his prime delight was fishing. If Finley was the walkingest man, Cleveland was the fishingest. James Welch when young went fishing once on Duncan Lake; he had turned over some rocks and caught crickets for bait.
I got three black bass right off. A man and a boy were fishing a short ways from me and rowed over. The man was all afire when he saw what I had. He asked if he could get in my boat and try my bait. So in he came, and caught two good ones. He said just call him Cleve. Before sunset he said we better go as he could see his team waiting. It was driven by Jo Sias and Jo said 'Well, you been fishing with the President!' I said 'My Lord!' The President had a good laugh. He said it was some time since anyone had called him Cleve.
It was more than twenty horse-drawn miles before Cleve could get home that night, with plenty of time for a wife to imagine catastrophes, had she been that kind. Encouraged by the bass, he built a cottage at Duncan Lake solely for fishing purposes; it is there yet; building was sound in those days. The present volume may not deal with President Cleveland's place
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GROVER CLEVELAND (left) and JOHN FINLEY SR. talking it over.
AUGUSTA STEVENSON, LAST OF HER LINE
ST. ANDREWS-IN-THE-VALLEY, Episcopal Church
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in history other than Tamworth's. But beside his fishing we may reveal that he regularly played fiery cribbage with John Boyden. The cribbage board, presumably handmade by John, is preserved at Fry House, with a brass plate on it.
Both the ex-President and the Times editor obliged by speechifying at Old Home Week celebrations or the like when distinguished citizens were the attraction advertised. There is a picture of Mr. Finley pleasantly talking from the front steps of the Cook house while Mrs. Cleveland discernibly sits on a step at the side, the audience on the steep lawn in hats of the twenties, trying to keep their chairs from falling over backward. Several of the elderly recall the "awful crowd," probably in 1906, to hear Cleveland speak. It was an Old Home Day in the fine old pine-stand called The Grove which used to flank the Depot Road below the corner schoolhouse; part of this was handsome maple growth; all was cut off to the last stick by a subsequent owner. In the midst of the ex- President's oration on this occasion a sudden downpour scat- tered the crowd like chaff; the Elwell barn opposite was packed full of refugees. Affectionately remembered still are the Clevelands' handsome pair of black horses and coachman for driving them into Tamworth village. Mrs. Cleveland kept those horses alive as long as she possibly could. They were out at pasture opposite Jim Bickford's on the Depot Road, "and one got sick and I had to be the one to shoot him," mourned Jim's son.
The origin of the Memorial Wall is often wrongly under- stood. Mr. Cleveland wanted his very steep and wandering road improved and set farther from his house. The letter he wrote to the selectmen hangs in the Historical Museum. The wall flanking his new straight road up the hill, perhaps a quarter of a mile long, was built after his death on the initia- tive of John Finley. The town gave some funds and Mr. Finley collected more. At the lower end on the wall is a bronze plaque. made by Tiffany: "The Grover Cleveland Memorial Wall," with date 1910. It had taken a long time to build, using the
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best technique of the best stonemasons, chief of whom was Hi Mason. It took oxen with block and tackle and tripod, and men on top straining to capture the great boulders and fit them closely to "break a joint." "Many of the stones were taken from our hill," says Francis, "leaving great holes that would fill with water and we could sail boats on them."
Mrs. Cleveland and after her Mrs. Finley long outlived their famous husbands. Both of these exceptional women became deeply identified with the community life, and left their attachment to it to their faithful families. Francis Cleve- land's special achievement in Tamworth will be noted else- where.
Accident or not, exceptional people seem to have been a rule on Cleveland Hill. Entirely unconnected with the interre- lated families already noted, the beauty-loving Kilhams wan- dered down a woods lane forty or fifty years ago and came out on a clearing choked with wild raspberries from which they took a far view of surpassing loveliness. Of course there was an almost-crumbling house and barn. But Walter Kilham was of a Park Street firm of Boston architects, his wife a paint- er, and they put into the world six highly-endowed children to whom all the arts would seem to have been second nature. Parents and children took the place to their hearts, hammered and sawed, painted and decorated together, dug, planted, and trained, and then spent riotous summers entertaining the world and becoming a vital part of the mechanism of the whole environment.
The children had uncounted dancing parties by lamp- light in their low-studded rooms. One remains in the writer's memory where guests arrived from miles away and all quarters of the compass, behind tarpaulins in carriages slipping, slopping through a relentless rainstorm. But they came and had a won- derful time. As the Kilham children got older, all precocious artists, they held shows in the barn, and these were unique in quality. Perhaps the last one was when all eight Kilhams, mostly by then successful professionals in their various fields,
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united in an exhibition that would have been remarkable anywhere. In the Episcopal church of St. Andrews-in-the- Valley, sparked by Kilham enterprise and designed by Walter Kilham Sr., is a charming memorial altar to Mrs. Kilham. She died too soon. The eightfold Kilham imprint on Tam- worth has never been erased.
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Chocorua _From Tamworth Iron Works to Chocorua Village
Portsmouth Jany 19th-1785 Mr. Abraham Morrill and Jacob Blazdell of Brentwood Desires the Priveledge of the Iron Oar that is in Ossipee Pond of Such a Number of Years as the proprietors shall think propper as the Said Morrill and Blazdell upon Propper Incouragement by Granting them Priveledge of the Oar will go and Set up Iron Works for Barr Iron in that part of the Country for Twenty or Thirty Years. .
A first glance would not show this brief petition to the Pro- prietors of Tamworth to be the beginning of Chocorua as a personality of its own, differing from the rest of Tamworth of which it was a part. But from it arose the present Chocorua. This "Blazdell" from Brentwood down between Portsmouth and Manchester, ancestor of many subsequent Blaisdells, al- ready had his land grant in Tamworth, four hundred acres east and west from the lake to Washington Hill, obtained a couple of years before. He speaks of twenty or thirty years for his ironworks, probably because he already knew the ore did not lie thick on the pond bottom. Perhaps he was an experienced foundry man down in Brentwood. The Mr. Morrill who applied with him may have supplied the money or the pull, and probably wrote out the request from his own desk in Portsmouth. After getting the "priveledge," Morrill drops out, for Blaisdell had Henry Weed with him in the first years of the enterprise. David Howard joined them presum- ably in 1799 or 1800, coming from Bridgewater, Massachu-
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setts (some say England) with four thousand pounds in gold (six or ten, according to differing accounts). He built the first house on the old Roberts homestead, at the right as one starts up Page Hill, just a step from the Iron Works. Four wives repose beside him in the burying ground, and his five daughters married a Hatch, a Gannett, a Remick, a Chap- man, and a Whitman respectively, and began five families.
Jacob Blaisdell figures as an important man early. Dur- ing the boundary question he was seen as one of the three who represented those who feared they were on the Eaton side of the line. Twelve years after the Iron Works started, both he and Henry Weed were of the party who accompanied the official surveyor Gerrish, beginning at the historical pitch pine with the six notches, Tamworth's southeast corner, at the time when the line was being determined for the Government Committee. By 1792 Blaisdell was Tamworth representative at the General Court; he was re-elected many years. The Henry Blaisdell was probably a son or brother of his who in the cold year of 1817 is said to have walked the sixty miles to Kingston, and brought to his hungry family a bag of meal over his shoulder. Prosperity was still very fluctuating.
The Blaisdells and Henry Weed, and Howard later, all centered on Tamworth Iron Works, were stout, enterprising, and inventive men. They were elected to town offices, as highway and bridge surveyors, moderator, and selectmen. Blaisdell and Weed must have been early in the Baptist fold, as their minister's tax for Tamworth was abated. This part of New Hampshire had certainly seen no heavy industry before them. The foundry was on the east bank of the Chocorua River, just south of today's bridge that takes Route 113 into Route 16, close to the falls then there. The present bridge is a late comer, the former one being a bit farther south, where the cut-off now joins Route 16. The modern roads and bridges are so high above original ground level that old landmarks are obliterated. In addition to the forge itself the Iron Works must have had a blast furnace, for which the steep banks of
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the stream were made to order, and water wheels. It must also have made charcoal, the supply of timber being a great advantage. In England ironworks had been forbidden in places because of the accompanying timber destruction. We can happily recover the appearance of our ironworks through the restoration recently made at Saugus near Boston of iron- works dating from 1650, and the earliest in America. The Iron & Steel Institute has there made an authentic historical replica of the plant complete, using modern ingenuity, schol- arly research, a million and a half in money, and actual parts dug up out of a mound covered with brambles.
Here on the Chocorua River the chief feature was the big iron crane that used to handle the ore, remembered as swinging out over the river and back, ponderous and impres- sive. After the great freshet that swept away the Works one Kennison whose farm was bounded by the river a stretch below, saw the crane embedded in the sand back of where Brett's garage now is. Ralph Chamberlain saw it as a boy; most likely it is still there. The Iron Ore Road leading over the plains from Ossipee Lake and out on the main highway near Moore's Pond was well defined until recent years. Reach- ing the Iron Works the ore was piled in the field near by. It is a type called limonite, brown and yellow in streaks, a deposit in marshy places and under water in general. At Ossipee Lake they probably fished it up by means of oxen dragging long wooden tongs like a spike tooth harrow. In the furnace it became bars out of which tools could be wrought. Cast iron did not develop until later.
The Blaisdells and their associates made nails, iron fix- tures, and anchors which were sent by sledge to Portsmouth to be sold. A pair of their hinges has been located on the barn doors of the old Lord place on the mountain road in Center Ossipee, and many unidentified pieces must lurk on other ancient buildings. The shop on the "north road" where these things were worked seems to have been opposite the James Perkins farm now General Bliss's, James himself being a Blais-
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dell by descent, as both grandfathers before him there. The nails are thought to be the first made by machinery in Amer- ica, here in Chocorua as early as 1770 by a man named David Folsom. Such nails were kept in families and mentioned in wills. Every blacksmith made hinges, latches, kitchen pots, and a quantity of other items; the Iron Works stamp was not thought of much importance. Over the years the demand for 'scrap,' including the great drive in the interest of Japan before Pearl Harbor, helped to clean out the country of now valued pieces. A flatiron recently bought from Charles Chick by a passing collector may be the last instance of the TIW stamp known.
The Iron Works has had two claims to something like fame. Not Blaisdell nor Howard-Howard left the Iron Works for tavern keeping in 1804-but Henry Weed at the same forge has the credit of making the first screw auger or worm auger in America, which applied the gimlet principle to a larger tool. Hitherto the pod auger was all that was known, its groove passing straight down the shank, whereas Weed twisted the end while red hot and got a boring tool of inesti- mable value in a wood country. Sweetser says Weed had seen one on a British prize frigate at Portsmouth. Someone else has called it stealing the British pattern. "When the Pascataqua bridge was built (1794), Weed with his screw auger was the most useful person there; the old-fashioned pod auger was dispensed with, and relays of hands kept the Weed auger in perpetual motion." The Carroll County History calls him Nathaniel Weed, but Nathaniel must have been a youth at the time; the careful Town Reports of the period make no mention of Nathaniel as yet, whereas Henry Weed is a well-known figure.
A still more cherished story must be scrutinized more narrowly. It is firmly grounded in Chocorua family traditions that a part of the mammoth chain that was stretched across the Hudson River at West Point (not Stony Point as printed in some accounts, an error in transcribing; there never was a
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chain at Stony Point) was forged at this primitive Tamworth foundry, and hauled by oxen on snow to the Hudson. A hundred or more links supposedly of this chain intended to stop British ships from going up the river are now scattered about the United States among at least fourteen museums, libraries, historical societies, and private collections.
Some of these links are on exhibition in the lobby of the Education Building at Albany, New York, and have proved to be labeled in accordance with an article on "River Ob- structions in the Revolutionary War" by the leading authority on metal construction in American history. This authority was Charles Rufus Harte, honorary member of the Connecti- cut Society of Civil Engineers, writing in the 62nd Annual Report of that body. His article contains probably the best illumination obtainable on our Hudson River chain claims. A facsimile is included in the article of the actual contract for the West Point chain. In the scrivener's longhand of the day, the contract entire was being awarded as of February 2, 1778, to an ironworks, Noble Townsend & Co., at Sterling, New York. The links were there forged, than welded together at New Windsor on the river by April 16 of the same year, floated down the six and a half miles to West Point, and fastened in place on April 30.
Our local legend that some of this chain was made here at Tamworth was strengthened when Sarah Frances Kimball, Tamworth "historian" a generation ago, printed this as fact told her by Martin Luther Schenck, well-known Tamworth citizen and representative at Concord. She wrote that Mr. Schenck had got his information through "men from New York and the records at West Point," which was thought to make it correct. But the year 1778 as the date of the chain makes rough going for the Schenck story. Jacob Blaisdell's petition for the iron ore privilege was not till 1785, seven years after the chain was manufactured and placed, and the War over.
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Of course nothing prevented some blacksmith in 1778 from scooping up bog iron from Lake Ossipee on his own, before Blaisdell ever thought of asking for the "priveledge," and it is quite possible that there was enough eagerness to work at something needed for the distant war. Such a man as David Folsom the nail-maker, who had been at it since 1770, can have been a moving spirit. Certainly the long trek with oxen on the snow over the route described in detail by Martin Schenck-to the Connecticut River, to Rutland, to Lake Champlain, and down the Hudson River to New Windsor- was not unthinkable to men of this north country who went often to Portland, Maine, for supplies; nor would the short period between February 2 and April 30 preclude it either. Mr. Harte takes up Tamworth's claims, and as regards a share in the making of the links feels obliged to dismiss them, the whole contract having been given to the firm in New York State which engaged to "keep seven Fires at Forging and ten at Welding" to cope with it.
But Mr. Harte makes a suggestion which may well hit the truth when he says:
It is the writer's belief, however, that [the Tamworth story] has a basis in facts ... that one or more forges at Chocorua Village, Effingham, or in that vicinity, antedating the Tam- worth Ironworks ... and like it using Lake Ossipee bog ore, did supply an appreciable amount of the smaller but very necessary iron items for one or more of the chain obstruc- tions [two chains were tried in the Hudson River] and that the Tamworth legend ... is the result of 'misremembered' facts! ... There was ... beyond any question, a very large amount of special iron work required for each chain or boom obstruction, and it is this lighter material, the total tonnage of which in each case was materially greater than that of the chain itself, which is responsible for so many stories told of so many forges incapable [actually] of producing the great links. The legend probably began with the factual
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statement that a local forge 'made parts for' a great chain, but in the course of retellings was changed to the incorrect statement that it 'made parts of' the chain, the latter version attaching to practically all the Revolutionary forges in the Hudson River valley, and for many miles either side of it.
Harte, further, says it is almost a certainty that forges in Connecticut furnished a substantial part of the auxiliary chains, anchors, and other small ironwork for the Hudson River ob- structions. If Tamworth was the farthest away in mileage of any of the participating forges, perhaps it may claim the hottest patriotism, and settle for parts for, instead of parts of, the West Point chain. We do not see the pioneers inventing out of the air a claim with no foundation whatever. They were too busy. Obviously whatever was done for the Revolution was before Tamworth Iron Works started. Though on a smaller scale, some necessary clips, bolts, auxiliary chains, swivels, cables, anchors, and so on will serve as well for our contribution, and for can take the place of of without injury to our self-respect. This may indeed have been what Martin Schenck was told. It is evident now that it is much nearer the actual case.
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