USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 22
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Wesley Tewksbury was another important factor in in- tervale life. His farm was on the road to Whiteface Intervale, but he drove his oxen to every woods job and every construc- tion job there was. His was a notable talent with "cattle," and he inherited the judgment of his pioneer ancestors as to practice in matters of rocks, streams, and timber: his word was attended to with respect. He had the innate shy courtesy of the bedrock strain, and his blue eye was full of kindliness. "Wes Tewk" was an indispensable pillar of the economy, no matter what. It was said that his oxen could take the loaded hayrack home unaided in pitch darkness; once the game warden met them and seeing no driver called up, "Hey there! You'd orter be lit up!" A voice came from the hay: "That's just what I be!"
For masterful contriving John Sanborn was a man of great parts. Roland Currier's Aunt Addie was his wife, and their farm is now Edgehill Inn. Says Roland, "John would do a man and a half's work," and many of us can testify to it. "He took three or four bear every year. He figured out that the bear make a circuit of the ridge once every five days, all around the mountains the length of Sandwich Range, then cross over and do the Ossipee Range. John knew the grove where the acorns were, and he would be there at six in the
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morning, and stay two or three days. Then he'd get his bear." When the Seeleys were closing their settlement with the Wal- dens, the signatures to the deed were not dry when John Sanborn plucked Milton by the sleeve and motioned to his car. He took the Seeleys down to their new land and pointed out to them unerringly the location of their future buildings: here the house would be, there the road would come in, there the big corrals would spread out. Out of the ground Walter Walker joined the symposium. He and John planned the entire kennels layout then and there. The cellar hole by the road had been the old farmhouse, "deep enough to rush the women down when the wolves came." It would be fine to put the puppy-house on (and is). "Young boy," said John Sanborn - Milton was forty-one - "young boy, you'll live to see quite a place here."
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III
Under Multiple Aspects
Off the Highways
TAMWORTH'S CIRCLING NETWORK of old dirt roads are full of the foretime to any whose recollection can interpret them. When the farms were taken up and the houses raised, none knew if their own or another road would become a main thoroughfare, much less which ones would come to be awarded blacktop and steel bridges. In many instances the most note- worthy families of a century ago lived in houses that are the least attractive survivors down today's back roads. The history of houses makes a pursuit unfortunately too extensive to be in- cluded in a volume of this size. Some few, however, have had occupants not as yet mentioned, who should be noted.
Where the Philbrick Neighborhood Road begins stands Hayfords'-in-the-Fields spreading under the elms on its knoll. Two Hayford brothers were among earliest builders near the Iron Works, their houses now Theodore Johnson's and Sydney Mather's. "Hayford's" being outside the village made a better farm for an inn; John Hayford opened it in 1896 and handed it down to his son Lawrence. Faithful patrons, many of pro- fessional standing, have returned to it year after year, made comfortable in simple surroundings.
The Hayford family gave a part of their land for the Catholic Church; Lawrence Hayford opened subscriptions and worked to achieve the building. Being open in the sum- mer months it can have only mission status.
A unique institution is Juniper Lodge high on Washing- ton Hill with superb views of the mountain ranges and Choco- rua Lake glistening below. This clever and beautiful house the color of juniper berries was designed and built about 1915
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by Mr. and Mrs. James B. Reynolds as a summer home, and bequeathed by them to Smith College as a place where gradu- ate students or women faculty members to the number of fifteen or twenty might spend vacation periods in work or rest. In deference to Mr. Reynolds' alma mater, Yale graduate students (women) are also welcomed. Louville Martin fol- lowing his father Lyman has been invaluable superintendent and caretaker for some forty years. The distinction of this property, in buildings, setting, and prospect, is unsurpassed in Tamworth's entire area.
On another eminent location allied to Chocorua Moun- tain, with a charming hidden pond to the property, Dr. Charles Putnam from Boston built a rough house in the nineties on an old Knox cellar hole for Dr. Edward Twitchell's family. This place afterward became Arthur Comey's and then Law- rence Scudder from Chicago bought it. Enlarged and im- proved, it is at present one of the more interesting summer homes in the area. The four Twitchell children, brought up there summers, became addicts of mountain and stream, as did the two sons of Frederick Lincoln Steele, who acquired the "Yellow House" on the Great Hill Road during the same period. When Lincoln Steele and Margaret Twitchell mar- ried, the yellow house was their wedding present, and now claims four generations of Steeles and Twitchells. The first Mr. Steele reserved a small piece of his land farther up the road for a cottage for himself, which has been his son Dana Steele's summer base since.
At the end of the same road is Mrs. Tozzer's property. This was the tract marked off for himself by Jonathan Moul- ton when the Tamworth map was created. In the 1880's it came into the hands of Dr. Rollins from Boston who was quite the first example of summer owner in the Great Hill section. He built a plain small house and experimented with several scientific interests. He hybridized iris, he was a highly successful early photographer, one of the best in the country, and an X-Ray authority when the subject was new. Studying
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pigeons he worked out the principles of aviation before the Wright brothers flew. Why he set up a stone post at every mile of road from the station at West Ossipee is not so clear. Afterward Professor Alfred Tozzer (Anthropology, Harvard) with the aid of the architect Walter Kilham moved all the Rollins buildings together into a single three-winged house landscaped with a subtle charm, which was then furnished wholly with Chinese antiques, making a particularly notable summer abode.
Through Mrs. Rollins came their neighbor Dr. Francis Williams who became an X-Ray authority, having studied the subject with his brother-in-law Dr. Rollins. The Williams house was some years later transferred to President Compton of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then to Pro- fessor Louis Flaccus of Haverford College; his family still foregathers there. Mrs. Rollins also introduced the Clarke family, now in its fourth generation on their property. James Freeman Clarke, grandfather of Major Clarke of the same name, was the distinguished Unitarian writer and minister who founded the Church of the Disciples in Boston and preached there until his death. He took over the very old Bennett farmstead near Dr. Rollins, and his son Eliot Clarke afterward added to it several others as the old owners wanted to sell. Dr. Rollins and Mr. Clarke got the town to move the road away from their houses for more privacy. Another of the same group was the first Gertrude Ellis whose old farm, formerly of Levi Wallace, is still used by her family. Au- gustus Hemenway of Boston should be mentioned with these. He acquired some two thousand acres in the same section, including two or three farms as well as the crest of Great Hill, and subsequently willed it to the state; it is now known as the Hemenway Reservation. A grandson is John T. Hemen- way, at present guiding hand of the New England Forestry Foundation whose permanent representative in this part of New Hampshire is Stanley Coville on Chinook Trail.
Nearer town on the same Great Hill Road is the old Cogs-
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well place, never out of the family until bought by the Rev- erend Herbert Prince who migrated from Chicago some years ago. The original Cogswell was from Gilmanton, buying into Tamworth because he foresaw a future for it. He it was who drew the selectmen's attention to young Samuel Hidden in 1792, in whose hands the town's development largely lay for nearly fifty years. The biography of the great character was written by a later Cogswell, Reverend Eliot C. The descend- ant who kept the homestead was well-loved Joseph Cogswell, he who would allow no one on his place to strike an animal. ("You can milk any of the cows you want to, but don't strike 'em!") His wife Amanda Page was equally beloved, in the last period of self-sustaining farms when the labors of that profi- cient executive the housewife were by modern standards almost unbelievable.
One more homestead on this road is still occupied by descendants. The Hidden family is six generations from their progenitor, the house built, not by him - he was given his house by the town, across from the meetinghouse where he officiated - but by his son Deacon William P. Hidden who lived to be ninety-four and established the clan on a firm foundation. Many interesting Hidden relics remain in the house, carefully cherished by the descendants. Among other treasures is the map canvasser's notebook set up by John Hid- den in 1859, perhaps worth a short digression.
This small three by five-inch notebook with leather back and ruled blue pages was set up by John D. Hidden for his tour of canvassing for subscribers to the new Carroll County map. This is the large colored wall map with names of house owners (several of which are still owned in the town as curi- osities) the first and only map of its kind ever issued here. Though the population was then at its greatest, the map shows sparsely sprinkled homesteads, indicating the large families that would shortly be decimated when Horace Greeley began to thunder his slogan "Go west, young man!"
This John Hidden was the grandson of the first Samuel.
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AMANDA COGSWELL was the daughter of Jabez Page and Lucy the record spinner and weaver. Her husband Joseph was the son of Dr. Cogswell who built the homestead now Dr. Prince's. "They got the land out of the forest. The rye was so high you couldn't see a man in it from the road." On this farm no one might ever strike an animal.
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GEORGE WASHINGTON BROWN
The hound with foot raised is Carlo, "the envy of all men."
Off the Highways
John and his family lived with his old father Deacon William P., whom he had helped when he had cleared the land for the Hidden homestead, now occupied by a later John's fam- ily. To John of the old notebook it must have been a pleasant change from farming to set out on the road, be cordially re- ceived and kept to dinner by friends and strangers through towns where his family was remembered, staying the night usually at the last house of call. For the first two weeks he writes a page of diary a day in high spirits. "The sun was shining most magnificently and the Birds all seemed to be sing- ing praises to their Creator and everything seemed to be praising God." On the first Sunday, at Gilmanton Iron Works, he went to meeting three times. Though sermons were excel- lent, the singing was not up to his standards. He took an occasional walk with some young lady, and once stopped to plough with one! and so got a subscriber. After that, the next hill was quite a sightly place. He was a young man out seeing the world and it was good for him. Now and then he met someone who had known his illustrious grandfather.
Apr. 12. Went up on what is called the Sandown Road passed over Grant Hill into the pulsifer neighborhood. It commenced snowing at 10 & continued to do so during the day. I spend the night at Mr. Oliver Lamprey's - wife Jona Moultons daughter - I named the hill back of his house Lamprey Hill.
April 14. I called this pm. at Hon Thos Cogswells where I took tea & had a fine chat with his daughter, arrived at Mr. Joseph Coffin's at 7 pm. where I stop for the night. [All this around Gilmanton, source of many Tamworthies. ]
April 15. Cloudy this morning. Went on my way at 61/2 called on Mr. Zenos [?] the miller first - from there went down to Mr. Isaac Smith's. it commenced snowing and I put up for the night. A very fine family this. - in the evening had a sing & good time generally.
April 16. Went over through the Potter District Took dinner at Widow Edgerlys Saw some fine houses and farms. People are all in good circumstances. Came to Mr. Price's
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[his cousin] by the way of Cogswells ... Got 11 subscribers today.
Next day he went to a school meeting, and "kind Josh Gale" was "to take the horse back to Strafford." "This has been a very dreary day." Evidently his trip had been on a borrowed horse.
He made one of these canvassing tours in April and an- other in May and then either ceased map-selling or ceased diary writing. But at the end of the little book is a list of numbers of subscribers by towns, "obtained by J. D. Hidden, Tamworth." Moultonboro, Sandwich, Tuftonboro, Wolfe- boro, Albany, Conway, and Madison tot up to 568 subscrib- ers. That does not include the Gilmanton area where he could get eleven in one day.
The little book has other jottings, expense accounts, a poem, a recipe for hair restorer, some horse-trading items; and several times there are full measurements for a house or barn or mill. Costs of paints, too. Was he a builder? He may have been good at many things. The little worn book was always in his pocket to be whisked out for any small computations or notes.
George Washington Brown was considered one of Na- ture's curiosities, but his renown is indisputable. He lived in no community but out on the Fowlers Mills Road at large, where behind him stretched the uninhabited wild territory over the mountains Paugus, Passaconaway, Whiteface, and the others. This wilderness was his real home. He knew the Indian devil who lived under Paugus and might roam the woods at night "scritching something fearful." "The only time I was out of the U.S. I went down to Maine diggin' taters," he said.
George was part Indian. "He was a good one to work, but he never had no money." He owned his own house, though. It was a one-room shack built of old boards that had done duty in a lumber camp. It had an iron stovepipe
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Off the Highways
rising through the tin roof and a skirt of tar paper round the base. As the height of affluence, there was at one time a shed for a buggy and a very small old grey horse. When the horse went lame it was cured by working onto its hind legs a pair of old woolen trousers. Someone gave George a cot-bed but he threw it out, preferring the floor.
George welcomed a visitor as royalty might have, and would gladly offer him half the hedgehog in his skillet to take home. He had the finest edge on axe or knife ever touch- ed by man, and a secret formula for the tempering, to which rattlesnake oil was necessary. His hound Carlo, of unheard- of intelligence, whose every whimper he could interpret ("That's frogs!" for example), lived to be twenty-four and was considered by George to be the envy of all men. George practised healing methods by punishing the offending object. For a knee cut by a tin can, drive a part of the can into the bark of the nearest tree; if a rusty nail gets into a foot, embed the nail in a poplar tree, with suitable magic words. For step- ping into a hornets' nest, rub certain kinds of leaves together and apply the juice. A magic formula for everything, and many can testify to the surprising results.
Singing had a momentous part in George's reputation, both for himself and for the groups of men who would make pilgrimage year after year to listen to his ballads. The proper way was to compete: a barn door laid on the ground and a jug of hard cider in the middle and two contestants to sing each other down, or one to dance while the other sang. His brother Dan'l was the best dancer he ever sang to. George has been a tempting subject for writers: Jessie Whitehead, the Widener Library worker in Arabic texts, who lives nearest to him, published an account of him in Appalachia, and Le- Grand Cannon Jr. wrote a sketch New Hampshire Blackout which appeared in the New Yorker during the last War. The accompanying picture was taken in 1935 by an Italian photo- grapher from New York brought to see George by the author of this history. Scacheri had been commissioned to get some
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pictures of old men with beards. George proved to be without beard at the time, but learning our errand excused himself and bolted into his shack. We waited a considerable time un- certain if we were meant to depart, or if courtesy required us to stay and see whether he came out. When he did reappear, he posed readily; he had curled his mustache.
Nearer on the Fowlers Mills Road was old Nat Berry's farm. Nat Berry's last daughter sold it in 1936 to Floyd Voris' daughter. He had been a teacher of science and mathematics in the west. Coming to live on the farm, he spent one of his first winters in Concord, and there visited the State Herb Project at Pembroke.
The state asked for volunteers to try out their localities for herb growing. Forty or fifty enrolled, of whom Mr. Voris believes himself to be the only commercial grower left in New Hampshire. The New England season is too short, and whole- sale buyers will consider no shipment less than one hundred pounds, and for digitalis, the most remunerative crop, one thousand pounds. On a sample of digitalis submitted by him to a wholesale firm, he was offered a contract on ten tons of leaves.
He began his own herb farming in a small way with the Government seeds and plants. The Voris Herb Farm now grows forty varieties in a show garden, of which ten are widely marketed. They come in lightweight plastic containers and have a loyal retail following and mail-order customers of many years' standing. Herb vinegars and certain specialties have been added, as a mintleaf candy and a basil jelly which have a continuously growing patronage. It is a snug one-man busi- ness and a pleasant one.
Also along the Fowlers Mills Road the C.C.C.Camp had its barracks on land belonging to the state. The Civilian Conservation Corps was the federal project during the De- pression which enrolled for public works young men who need- ed employment. From 1933 to September 1937 when it disbanded, the 117th Company was integrated into the Tam-
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worth scene to its benefit and theirs. In these four years over one thousand men joined the Camp for varying periods. The conservation measures they were supposed to further consisted in cutting fire trails and tree thinning, under the State Forestry Department, improving White Lake Beach and so forth, and when these efforts were not sizable enough, the project of rebuilding the Huckins farm on the Hemenway Reservation was launched. The attractively situated farmhouse with its high view from Great Hill was completely modernized through the aid of a good architect, to be rented as a year-round home. The large old barn, save for garage space for the house, was turned into a recreation center for the town, to be managed by the Outing Club as will be seen, and has been abundantly appreciated since. These building operations on Great Hill could not have been achieved without a better road to them. This resulted in C.C.C. labor being channeled into rebuilding the road up from Chinook Trail which, once reopened, has become a used thoroughfare.
On the western side of Tamworth adjoining Sandwich, the Friends' Meeting-House just beyond the line extends its influence and tradition back over Brown Hill and along the road to Pease Hill. If not all the old farms on these roads have housed Quakers exactly, general allegiance is of that persuasion among families of Hoags, Felches, and Spauldings. There were additional homesteads now denoted only by cellar holes in woodland or pasture well off the road.
On unobstrusive roads like these are tucked away old burying grounds, near to the families which in some cases still make use of them. Two or three of the enclosures have careful lasting walls of cut granite, duly completed with iron gates. In the Marston Hill area (now Great Hill) is one ancient graveyard now reverted to deep woods, where are only uninscribed stones from a period when there was neither skill nor time to do more. The three main town cemeteries are: the first (1791) in South Tamworth, called Riverside; the second established two years later near the old meeting-
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house on the hill opposite Ordination Rock (this one has Parson Hidden's flat slab raised on its four stone supports like a table) ; and the third (1801) on the Chocorua hill to- ward Madison. These are on thoroughfares accessible in all weathers. Cemetery welfare is controlled by a Board of three Trustees for Trust Funds elected by the town, one each year. The funds include any private trust money bequeathed to the town. The capital amounts today to some thirty-four thousand dollars, which the town augments customarily by five hundred dollars income each year. Nine cemeteries are thus cared for, the remaining few being privately maintained.
It was by means of the monuments in the cemeteries that a professional geologist identified Tamworth as the apparent epicenter of the 1940 earthquakes. These were two strong quakes, Friday, December 20, and the following Tuesday. Of sixteen monuments in the burying ground opposite Ordi- nation Rock, all but one were twisted off base counterclock- wise; save for the parallel effect in the Chocorua cemetery, no others in Carroll County had been as much shaken. The cause was laid to a local fracture of rock several miles deep in the earth which had not reached as far as the surface except here and there in cracks or gashes soon closed again by gravity. Insurance agents sold earthquake policies fast for a while thereafter, but in seventeen years there has been no recurrence. The area appears to have greater "seismicity" or earthquake tendency than other New England regions. Tamworth had a chimney mortality numbering sixty-five, with an estimated further hundred needing repairs. Pine Top Poultry Farm in Tamworth and Ridgehaven Turkey Farm in Chocorua re- ported ruin among hatching eggs to have been up in the thousands. Those who claimed close acquaintance with the crest of Chocorua insisted that a new rock formation appeared on the design of its surface. Minor casualties and strange freaks of dislocating and smashing were recounted in every family. Had the event occurred in a crowded city, it would have meant a serious calamity.
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War Echoes
THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR years were those when Tamworth had just begun to exist, when clearing land, taking up his claim, and keeping his family alive used the whole of every isolated pioneer's mind and strength. He heard of the distant disaffections only as bits of strange news by word of mouth. Though southern towns in the state, nearer to the thrilling events in Massachusetts, could be ablaze over the Boston Tea Party and the iniquities of George III, up in these woods there was no special quarrel with remote England, or with New Hampshire's Provincial Governor, then John Wentworth, who gave everybody a better deal than had his uncle Ben- ning. The Proprietors who had offered the settler his land and cow, or sold them to him for little, were the only Govern- ment officials he knew. The young man in LeGrand Cannon's story left his cabin and family to join the war only because the rumor was heard that the British were using Indians, intending to plunder what is now Vermont and then New Hampshire. He went to protect his home.
Wherever fighting occurred, the farmers could be counted on to swarm in from the countryside and take irregular part in the engagement, but it was extremely difficult to secure men to enlist, even with the offer of high bounties in cash. Not only was there no military tradition, but the scarcity of labor, the anxiety over the women and children left on the farms, the poor pay in rapidly depreciating paper money, the lack of all sorts of supplies in the Army, all made the service extremely unpopular. Nevertheless it was the country people
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ready to rise for a few days anywhere who proved the undoing of the British, at such crucial places as Saratoga, for instance.
The first muster rolls of the War of Independence show only four men from Tamworth: Phinehas Stevens, John Glines, Moses Head, and Elkener or Elkanah Danforth. These are listed in 1775 under Captain Clough's Company which numbered sixty-three of Colonel Poor's Regiment. Elkanah Danforth from Tamworth was with the troops under Colonel Benedict Arnold in the attempt to capture Quebec in 1775. Another war roll shows an Ebenezer Keniston as from Tam- worth, a "Cha Hackett deserted 1780" and a Samuel Yeaton. Six Revolutionary soldiers only are inscribed on the Tam- worth War Memorial stone, the three in the first list (omitting John Glines), none of the second three, but Joseph Ames, Joseph E. Kennestone, and Abial Stevens added. The Carroll County history cites a further few: two more Kennison variants (Nicholas Kinestone and David Kinerson) and Isaac Head. In one place it names twelve. The name of Ames is a familiar one in South Tamworth; Kennisons were also form- erly numerous there. Another genuine enlistment seems to be a man who supported the name of Obadiah Dudy, who also appears on the Ossipee lists. Having been to war once, Oba- diah reappears in the records as paying twenty dollars not to go again. It was not unusual to go as a recruit from another town; this was the case with Richard Jackman "for 6 mo," originally of Tamworth, enlisting from Eaton. One investi- gator got the Tamworth enlistments up to twenty-seven, but the threads are now beyond unraveling.
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