USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 20
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In June of the same year 1816, before this October fire, there had been something else: an extraordinary freeze. Be- ginning June 2, a cold wind from the northwest blew for days on end until the ground was hard, and there was ice a half-inch thick killing all corn and beans. This cold gradually abated until the nineteenth when "there was a very dark spot on the sun." Sunspots that year troubled the inhabitants of many towns; they related them to the succession of "cold years," for 1815, '16, '17, were all cold. The settlers lived on a narrow margin of safety; nor could they buy corn any- where else when their own planting had been frozen. Famine throughout the country was inevitable. It is recorded of the year 1827 that it snowed every month. One man on a hilltop grew some wheat that did not freeze, and gave a little to every- body; this kept them alive.
Nevertheless the position of Whiteface to the northwest has always seemed to shield from Arctic winds the whole of the Wonalancet valley floor. The farmers hold that the mountain stops the thunderstorms, or detours them east and west. The three foothills that lie in association with Whiteface and Passaconaway above their heads are Wonalancet, Hib- bard, and Hedgehog. The middle one of the three is interest- ingly named. Not often enough told is the story: A lumber
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KATHERINE SLEEPER WALDEN
ARTHUR TREADWELL WALDEN wore a Stetson, and looked cross when embarrassed.
CHINOOK, leader and sire of a long line, disappeared in Antarctica on his twelfth birthday.
Wonalancet
company logging on the mountain had to haul out to the railroad over a long roundabout course and needed a good road, down the main valley along the brook. The only road up into Birch Intervale hitherto had been the Locke Falls road, too far west for their operations. There was a lawsuit about it. The lumber people took the judge up to the top of the mountain and showed him in person the lay of the coun- try. He saw; he decided in favor of a river road down through the intervale and out past Fowlers Mills. This act opened the entire Wonalancet region once for all. The judge's name was Hibbard.
Who were these farming men who took working time off from their haying, their orchards, their cattle, their lumbering and all, to build a chapel and provide such amenities as woods paths for boarders? In part their forebears had come from Portsmouth and coastal towns where they had been ship- wrights. Iron ships were supplanting handmade ones, and the shipyards had seen an exodus of skilled woodworkers who homed naturally toward the timber tracts where axe and saw skills could still establish a man. Judge Hibbard's decision had made of Birch Intervale a good goal for such as these. In a few years the intervale roads were lined with farmhouses as in Elbridge Tilton's enumeration; lumbering and its at- tendant sawmills could employ them all. The population was never so large.
Approaching the new century, however, the profuse farm families became too many per acre, and the ambitious young had pretty much gone away. In the same period two other developments put a natural end to large-scale lumbering. In 1883 a great hurricane destroyed whole stands of massive hemlock, and second, in 1913-14 the United States Govern- ment bought up the watershed, as a part of the White Moun- tain National Forest just beginning. As to this purchase, Wonalancet had a not inconsiderable share in the matter.
Only a crackpot's notion was conservation, of course, during the long period when lumber was livelihood to nearly
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all. American timber was a limitless mine; the land on which it grew was cheap, and fortunes were there for the making. But Senator Weeks of Massachusetts had begun the effort to arrest the wholesale tree slaughter by getting tracts of the Eastern Appalachians set off by the Government for perpetual care. It was the American Forestry Association and in our state the Society for Protection of New Hampshire Forests who were warriors together on the early conservation battle- field. Forestry was not then a word in any countryman's vocabulary. The first Federal legislation in this direction was the Weeks Act in 1911: in two or three years under this Act, some 1,104,000 acres in the southern highlands were acquired, though only 133,000 in New England. Senator Weeks had built himself a great summer home on the very top of a moun- tain in New Hampshire's town of Lancaster, and he knew pretty well what was needed. It is not surprising that the first White Mountain purchases under the Weeks Act were Mount Washington and the slopes north and west of it.
But Tamworth's special concern was for the ridge im- mediately behind it, more particularly that great tract known as "The Bowl," between Whiteface and Passaconaway where there were still fifty-six hundred acres unlogged. Some eight hundred acres of this Bowl directly back of Wonalancet were covered with virgin spruce on ledges too high for easy lumber operations. Guarded by the Whiteface-Passaconaway Ridge above it, it had been immune to hurricane. There was no trail to it, but the most knowing walkers and climbers had visited this wonderful growth. My mother climbed to it on her seventieth birthday and thence mostly without trail on up to the top of Whiteface.
A Mr. Tainter, president of the Publishers Paper Com- pany, came from Woodstock, buying up high timber tracts. His company already had much of the crest of the range and the watershed controlling all streams, and expected to begin the valuable logging shortly. Likely they were all working fast against the distant rumblings from Washington. Tainter called
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in at Wonalancet Farm on business with Arthur Walden. He already had his coat on to go, when Kate, by then Mrs. Wal- den, came out and intercepted him. What about giving her a sixty-day option at fifty thousand dollars on three thousand acres "up there," indicating Whiteface over her shoulder? She was an old hand now, knowing the feel of time, place, and persons. Mr. Tainter paused and looked at her. No one knows what passed in his mind. But a price like that was much better money than currently being given. The Govern- ment purchases eventually averaged about $4.70 an acre. He doubtless thought nothing could come of it. He signed a little paper.
Mrs. Walden telephoned the present writer and the committee of two rolled up its sleeves. A letter was sent to the Forestry Department at Washington stating that twenty- five thousand dollars could be raised here if they would allo- cate the same. Such a sum was not quite the trifle it would be today. We learned that the Department of Agriculture could not purchase as small a tract as three thousand acres; the minimum was twenty thousand. But the slingshot had at least rippled the waters. It was our good fortune that Senator Gallinger of New Hampshire happened to be on the Forest Reservation Commission. He probably heard of Wonalancet for the first time, but now he heard of it in every mail. Senator Weeks was reached, and correspondence started flowing to our Congressmen. Edgar Rich, Wonalancet neighbor then general counsel of the powerful Boston & Maine Railroad, threw himself into the campaign with ardor; certain Concord magnates bestirred themselves; all absentee summer owners were made acquainted with the hovering danger. Offers of help and money mounted rapidly. To record grass-roots feel- ing, a petition was circulated around as far as horse and buggy on bad roads would carry it. This alone took time; only men's signatures were useful at that period, which increased diffi- culties in seeking names. Passing a house or a barn being built
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was a stimulus, for then a dozen good carpenters would lengthen the list.
Senator Gallinger replied coldly at first that the timber- lands were being held at too high a figure to interest the Commission. But as pressure grew he gave more heed. He got to work to win over his fellow commissioners-it was one of the last important things he did. Meanwhile the Pub- lishers Paper Company, the Conway Lumber Company, and other owners moderated their views as to price. The option held by Mrs. Walden was eventually transferred to the De- partment of the Interior, and in the end no money of our raising was needed. A purchase of 85,000 acres was consum- mated including The Bowl, and our present White Mountain National Forest arose in fact with all its benefits, official recre- ational areas, care and forest handling in perpetuity, and the rest. By 1955, 661,000 acres were counted in the White Mountain Reservation.
The history of Wonalancet Chapel can never be complete because its earlier records were lost in Ira Tilton's fire, and much of later interest went in the Walden fire in '47. Ira's was a large farmhouse at the turn beyond the Chapel; Ira and Mrs. Ira could take forty summer boarders. The latter complained there were not enough windows, so when for the overflow an annex was built next door, it had long rows of windows standing to attention, and was dubbed Windowmere.
The revived Chapel was incorporated and received a charter, stating as its object simply the promotion of religion; it "shall be kept in suitable condition and repair" or the land would revert to the grantors. Miss Sleeper's interest gradually turned the bare little place into a meetinghouse with carpet, clock, bell, organ, and personality. The personality had al- ways been there: when one came into Wonalancet from across the intervale, the Chapel was the first object seen, white, square, and solitary against the piled-up backing of mountains. Or from any of the surrounding heights it marked out the Wonalancet intervale from the mass of the hills. The story
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is that after it was first restored in '91 one Sunday morning when Arthur Walden's clergyman father was making one of his early visits to the Farm, Kate Sleeper said to him "Will you hold service in the chapel tonight?" Astonished, he re- plied, "But where would you find a congregation?" "You'll see," she said with a twinkle. She stopped Hi Currier on his way to Tamworth and someone else who was driving to Sand- wich, and told them to give the word in all the dooryards. A congregation assembled and heard the rector of the Episco- pal Cathedral in Boston, whose fame included preaching in Westminster Abbey. Later Dr. Walden served the Chapel for twenty years from his summer home a few yards down the road.
Another name for long connected with the Chapel in later times was the Reverend Arthur N. Peaslee from St. George's School in Providence; his summer holidays could be devoted to the services from his cottage across the brook. An- other was Reverend Winfred Rhoades, retired minister and writer of much-read books, who spent some years of ill health in his "Brown Study" at Ferncroft; and another, the Rev- erend Allen Clark of Danvers, Massachusetts, whose children grew up here through most of their summers.
At first the Chapel had neither tower nor bell; these it acquired in '96. The mellow old bell was long a picturesque feature of daily life in Wonalancet. A boy (for years Chester Bickford) was hired to ring it four times a day, and never missed, at morning, noon, evening, and curfew; everyone loved it. In '37 repairs were necessary, and the community again raised money and provided the present steeple. The high window over the altar was added at this time, the whole renovation being done as a tribute to Katherine Sleeper Wal- den, with plaque to that effect. Several special gifts were made, and again labor was offered, by these thirteen men: Chester Weed, George Brown, Lewis Currier, Arthur Hayford, Elmer Moody, David Peaslee, Robert Peaslee, Roland Peaslee, Ros- coe Peaslee, Charles Shackford, Howard Stevenson, Harold
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Trask, and Ernest Walker. Visitors came to the dedication from many distances.
The little burying ground on the hillside by Ferncroft has no connection with the Chapel. It was laid out in earliest days by Ann Elizabeth Jewell, the lovely second wife of Brad- bury. Its stone wall is presumably her doing; there seems to have been a wrought-iron gate in the opening. Though title to the ground still lies with the Jewell heirs or assigns, the descendants welcome the use and care of it by others, and a number of latter-day devotees have been buried within the small hillside enclosure: Milton Seeley, Clarence and Eliza- beth Child, Seward and Dorothea Collins, Hugh McFadden. Bradbury, Ann Elizabeth, and Aunt Dolly Jewell the much loved, not to forget Captain John, the Currier ancestor of elephant fame, Hi the philosopher, and other early starters of the still rolling ball, keep vigil with them.
It is the Wonalancet Outdoor Club of long and honor- able history (organized in 1898), also initiated by Kate Sleeper among her first enterprises, that created and still main- tains the network of trails. A map was surveyed and made by the topographer of the Appalachian Club. Without this adjunct, Wonalancet would not have become the climbing center with filled inns that it was until the automobile took recreation over. These mountains are particularly rewarding for climbing (the word hiking developed afterward, climbing reserved for a more ambitious exercise). The trails were laid out for the most part by experts, the first one, to the summit of Passaconaway, directed by the Appalachians, who built a log camp near the top. Thomas S. Wiggin, of the handsome physique and tenor voice who was host to summer boarders at Locke Falls Cottage cut the first Whiteface Trail, little used because of its steepness. Dr. William H. Rollins of Boston, with an early summer home (now Tozzer) on Great Hill caused several of these to be opened at his own expense. Later Edgar Rich, benevolent to Wonalancet in many ways, headed the Outdoor Club and gave impetus to it. These trails are
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not too long for the inexpert, and they yield delightful sum- mit views, a few overnight shelters, many brooks, ledges, boulders, wild flowers, and forest richness generally. In 1925 the Outdoor Club boasted seventy-two miles of these trails exclusive of the eight paths on Chocorua Mountain kept up by the Forest Service or the Chocorua Mountain Club. Not all are still open or traveled by as great numbers as when not to climb was not to be sportsmanlike. Every fair day of sum- mer and fall, climbing parties would be organized at the inns as a matter of course; many a girl with no native taste for the exertion would find herself boosted up Whiteface and come home exhausted, in the interest of the proper activity of the day and its accompanying social advantages.
In this department Ferncroft Inn, established on the old Jewell premises by Mr. and Mrs. Elliot Fisher in 1908, figured largely. Its location at the very base of the main trails attrac- ted climbers of distinction from elsewhere. The later addition of cabins and a separate building for dining room and kitchen enabled the accommodation of over a hundred guests, at least in the Augusts of the thirties. For many years Ferncroft had its returning clientele of professional and university families like the smaller and older Wonalancet Farm. It was the automobile, luring people out to range the roads for their vacations instead of staying in any one favorite spot, which changed the habits at both inns, as at every other small hostelry in the mountains whose charm had been that it was off the beaten track.
The pivotal year 1898 also saw the telephone brought to the intervale, again Kate Sleeper's doing. At first it was long distance merely, the only other of the kind being down at Tamworth Inn. But this was in itself a tremendous innovation and change. The instrument was a formidable wall-fixture in the pantry at the Farm. Telegrams could now reach anyone in Wonalancet, through the Farm, delivered by hand. As re- ception was often poor and Kate's scrawls on the telegraph blank would painfully reveal her ignorance of the telegram's
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meaning, extraordinary messages could arrive. There had been a great fair and supper at Wonalancet Farm to help raise the money for this. Private telephones in houses did not come till some years later. In the Old Home Week booklet of 1906 the Telephone Company presents a picture of a pretty child holding a receiver with the caption "The telephone helps to make the home happy." It announces that you can now talk to your friends hundreds of miles away. But you still couldn't do that from a house phone. Mrs. Walden was across the road getting the overflow cottage ready for guests when she saw that a bull had got loose. She telephoned to "central" at Laconia and had them call Mr. Walden on the other side of the road to come and get her, which he did.
In the same fateful year an even greater innovation took place. Golf had struck America broadside on, and what better location for a golf course than Wonalancet intervale? Only six holes could be accommodated, but six-hole courses were not sneezed at by early golfers, and these were laid out. White Mountain Life, devoted to news of the fashionable resorts of the time, carried a detailed description of each hole; there seemed to be strange hazards like clumps of boulders, swamps, apple trees, and an outhouse, but the intervale was up-to-date.
The genus winter party was something new then too. Neither snowshoes nor skis were known to the city generation just preceding. Both sports now took on importance in Wona- lancet through the Walden's skill as hosts. Groups of young people, of course thoroughly chaperoned, would have their immensely romantic first experiences on the snow and around the fire at night, gathered in by the great dinner bell that clanged gloriously from the front porch. Games were devised, poems perpetrated, charades, monkey shines, and high spirits abounded (never a drink on the premises!), and marriages came of it, some in lofty Boston circles. Mrs. Walden treas- ured amusing tributes of cleverness and gratitude sent back to her afterward, as from one wit to another. The Waldens thought up everything themselves, and were the leaders of
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everything. They presided entertainingly from both ends of the long table at "a dinner-party every night." No chance of cele- brating something was overlooked. Anyone who was present in the summer of 1914 will never forget the "Pageant" on the 100th anniversary of the Wonalancet Farm House. The Pageant reviewed the history of the intervale in a procession that left nobody out, including a newly shot bear who dangled from a "pioneer's" hayrack. The day would have wound up with a great picnic and bonfire.
Dogs and Drivers
To have brought the story of Wonalancet this far without mention of sled dogs is an achievement, for to thousands of people the word Wonalancet is synonymous with nothing else. The dog invasion took place as follows.
Arthur Walden, always a living contradiction to his Bos- ton origin, had come on the quiet intervale scene as a rather flaming figure. His exploits and pranks were widely quoted. Practical jokes were a favorite pastime, and often had to do with horses. A horse, for instance, would be taken out and harnessed in the buggy wrong end to, while its owner was indoors courting in the kitchen. There was the tar-and-feather- ing administered to a farmer a few miles away who abused his wife. Several young men were quite willing to join this engagement, but it appears to have been not fully completed : something went wrong with the feathering. Of Wally Edgar Page reminisces :
Up to the time he went to the Klondike, he wouldn't walk from the house to the barn, he'd ride. He was a very good rider. I've seen a lot of riding all over the west, but I don't think I ever saw a better rider than he was. One time he had a vicious bull and the hired men asked if he could ride
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him, and he said, "Yes, if you put a saddle on him." They did and he got on, and the bull took off to the woods. It went on through a stream and on the other side some men were working, and here came Arthur on the bull. He stayed on too.
At the age of twenty-three he struck out for the greatest adventure of all, which was then Alaska. For the first year or two he knew Alaska as it was before the Gold Rush, the old frontier when "life and property were .. . safe, gambling-halls were strict and square," and the miners' meetings where justice was decreed and despatched were acknowledged by the United States Government. He had taken with him from Wonalan- cet his collie Shirley, and finding that dog freighting was a highly paid business where no other transportation existed, he broke Shirley to harness, added more dogs, and soon was a veteran in the sledge dog field. His book A Dog-Puncher on the Yukon is as good a picture as when first published of the stirring and terrible events he took part in during those six years of his youth. It has the startling facts of the Gold Rush, vigorously set forth in good understatement, and is full of the author's good nature and unquenchable high humor.
After two years he came home long enough to leave Shirley in good hands, and then went back to Alaska for three or four years more. On the final reversion to New England in 1902 the wedding with Kate took place at Wonalancet Farm with a great celebration, and thereafter Alaska lived only in the endlessly repeated stories which were a magnet to young people, older ones too, and a feature of Wonalancet as long as Wally lived.
But a dog man could not settle down without dogs, and the veteran of dog-driving saw in backwoods New Hamp- shire a perfect locale for this as a sport. He took four half- bred St. Bernard puppies, named them Rud, Yard, Kip, and Ling, and trained them in tandem hitch to a dog sled he made himself. This team was an utterly delightful innovation in the intervale at that time, and every girl or woman given a ride
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in the sled had the thrill of her life. Several learned to drive sooner or later and had sled dogs of their own. Several men were also taught by Wally. It is impossible to overstate the pleasure contributed by these dogs whose own delight was in their work. The marvel was always that no whip was ever thought of, only the four variants from the master's voice: "Yake," "Gee," "Haw," and "Whoa." Without benefit of roads the team could climb anywhere in deep woods, bring- ing picnic supplies or some less hardy passenger, or construc- tion materials where these would not otherwise go.
About that time the imagination of the whole American people was fired by the story of the dog-team relays that were rushing the diphtheria serum across Alaska to Nome. The public became aware of the Alaska Sweepstakes races and the Hudson Bay Dog Derby at La Pas in Manitoba. The Brown Company of Berlin, New Hampshire, put on a first race known as the Eastern International Dog Derby, which Walden won with a team of six led by Chinook, later to achieve fame. This is the same team he took to the top of Mount Washington, the first time this had ever been done. Against perishing high winds in a blizzard Chinook showed himself the remarkable dog he was.
The international races were then transferred to Quebec for a few years, three-day point-to-point, usually 123 miles. As teams and younger drivers multiplied, however, it seemed better to have the races at home, and Walden then organized with others the New England Sled Dog Club, Inc., which except for the War years has had scheduled races in various areas of the northern states every year since. All the fans enjoy the excitement of the dogs, their frantic quiver to be off, plumes in air, and the great skill of the drivers in handling them only by word of mouth. Walden enlarged his kennels, bred dogs, and sold many. The lead-dog Chinook, towering above others, smooth and tawny, with a black muzzle, chanced to be a genius among dogs. His mother Ningo, granddaughter of Peary's leader on the North Pole trip, found Wonalancet
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too tame for her taste. Though her puppies had winter care in a warm place at the house, she suspected the food they got and introduced forcefully into their home everything in advanced carrion that she could locate by scouring the woods. Chinook grew up to become "the most famous dog in Amer- ica." He and Wally were a unit, always side by side, lost unless together. They seemed hardly to need communication. The kennels were of course named for this super-dog and born leader who became an object of pilgrimage. For children he was a magnet. "What is your dog's name?" asked a visitor of a small boy with some undersized mongrel harnessed to his sled. "Chinook," was the answer with a glance of pride. "And your name?" The child straightened himself up and said scornfully, "What would it be but Mr. Walden?"
The dog team was by no means solely a plaything. With its aid electricity was brought to Wonalancet, Public Service as now known being far in the future. The Farm needed electricity, as did the substantial private houses being built about the intervale. Dogs hauled wire and poles and gear through woods and across brooks without a road for more than a mile which neither horse, oxen, nor tractor could do. By this means, a modern powerhouse appeared beside Wona- lancet Falls, hitherto the goal of scenery-seeking walkers, but now harnessed to make the first hydro-electric plant (self- governing) in Carroll County. Three workers made up the initial enterprise, Arthur Walden conceiving and planning, Richard McKey helping to execute, and Julia Lombard on the bookkeeping and financial end. When current had been brought not only to the houses of subscribers but to a sawmill set up in the woods to get out lumber for the small building boom, all three and several helpers worked a hard day in the deafening screech of the mill. With the end of the First War, the sawmill part of the undertaking stopped, but not before it had demonstrated its second value, selective cutting of timber in the Walden woods.
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