USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 24
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The Second World War came almost at once after the birth of the cooperative. War pressures for wood products were intense, and all the lumber mills had more orders than they could handle. At the same time there was manpower shortage, gas shortage, shortage of trucks and of parts. Loads broke down in the woods by zero temperature at night. Con- tinuous days of sixteen to eighteen hours of labor were usual for those dedicated to seeing the organization survive. Diverse war regulations by no means universally enforced, and no office or office workers as distinct from mill hands and truckers, all did what was possible to put the cooperative out of busi- ness. In short, a nonprofit organization in the timber field needed a more favorable period than wartime to be launched. In the face of extreme operating conditions, however, the management put a diesel engine into a disused sawmill, had from thirty to forty men, four trucks, and three teams of horses at work, and sold for its members in Sandwich, Tam- worth, Jackson, and the Conways about five million board feet of both hard and soft wood, until the war ended.
After the cooperative closed down, two organizations from outside, the New England Forestry Foundation, and the New England Forest Products Co., came into the area and have done well, using the same principles. State timber tax reform had been achieved at about the same time. Though the first movement toward correct handling of timber is but a few years old, the quality of standing woodlots is already improved. Commercial lumber companies now bid com- petitively for logs from selectively operated stands, and owners of such timber lots receive handsomer stumpage prices and
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sell oftener. Moreover, where formerly any marking of trees was an offense to a timber operator, consulting foresters now not only find employment but are in demand. Sometimes education infiltrates as successfully as subversion is said to do.
Societies
Chocorua Grange
Close to the pulse of Tamworth throughout some sixty- five years has been the Grange. As it is part of a nationwide organization, Tamworth's Grange does not claim originality, but claims to have supplied a stream of beneficence as well as of entertainment and brotherhood, as no other organization was in a position to do.
It started in 1891, chartered with thirty-one members as the Chocorua Grange, a farmers' organization dedicated to the goal of mental development more than of mere enjoyment. All the original paraphernalia was made by hand; the "liter- ary" programs were planned and discussed ahead. The meet- ings were held in Kimball Hall, officers having memorized their part in the ritual. There was an annual picnic, and a yearly project was the Grange Fair, after which in 1902 Old Home Week was established, the Grange taking an important part in management and in the parades.
When the Kimball building was sold in 1935 to become the Barnstormers Theatre, a wing of the Kimball house in the village which had been moved into the field behind it some years before was taken for the new Grange Hall. This gave fresh impetus to the association; its gain in membership was highest in the state. By '39 it could boast of 112 members. Its undertakings have been in great variety: during the war a great deal of Red Cross work, a service flag dedication and a candlelight service for the war dead, a fund to help educate a promising boy, a reception for Edward Moody on his re- turn from the Byrd Antarctic Expedition of 1933-35, at which he was awarded honorary membership, burial of a "Century
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Box" to be opened in a hundred years, an open meeting with a demonstration by the State Police, are all highlights in Grange memory. Benefit card parties have always been a feature, and dart baseball had its strong following.
In 1941 the Grange celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a mortgage-burning and two hundred guests. But the coming of the automobile inevitably affected the life of the Grange, as it had all forms of local association. Attendance fell off, meetings were fewer, there were many deaths, and an important feature, the Juvenile Grange, disbanded. A Grange had also functioned in Chocorua village, with some lapses and reorganizations. Its remaining members were finally absorbed by the Tamworth group. In 1950 with a loyal effort the Grange got off to a new start, with programs on soil conserva- tion and similar themes. Its attendance then rose to sixty per cent, the highest in New Hampshire.
Tamworth Woman's Club
Though not the oldest general organization still function- ing in Tamworth, the Woman's Club can claim a high meas- ure of dignity and achievement. The Woman's Club is also a unit of a nationwide organization, the General Federation of Women's Clubs.
The first impetus for a club of women came in 1915 from Sarah F. Kimball, a notable citizen and daughter of Joseph Gilman of Tamworth village. It seems that the Conway Woman's Club of older status was making an occasion of a visit from the state federation president, and Mrs. Florentine Carle, then of Chocorua, was invited to be a guest. Mrs. Carle secured permission to bring Mrs. Kimball, and these two ladies were driven by Mr. Kimball in a sleigh to Madison where they took the train to Conway! After this famous meet- ing in Conway, the state president "wrote them several inter- esting as well as instructive letters on how to form a club." The eleven charter members were:
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Miss Elizabeth Allen
Miss Susan A. Bodge Mrs. Florentine Carle
Mrs. Emma F. W. Davidson
Mrs. Mary C. Fall Mrs. Sarah F. Kimball
Mrs. Fannie A. Silvan Mrs. Alice R. Taylor
Mrs. Elizabeth L. Whitney
Mrs. Margaret H. Wiggin
With women's clubs of all shapes and sizes so redundant and so potent on the American scene today, it is hard to realize the pioneering it took, even as late as 1915, for women in a country village to come out of their homes. Refreshments they understood, but to meet as a corporate body, to observe parliamentary procedure, to discuss on their feet, to vote as in town meeting - now all standard behavior - had to be learned. This club has always been conscientious; it has pre- pared papers, had worthwhile speakers, made an effort to keep in touch with current events, and backed the town Christmas tree; it has seen to the observance of anniversaries and deaths, arranged small exhibitions, purchased war bonds, and main- tained the triangle where the war monument stands. It pub- lished a full account, with pictures, of Tamworth's part in the Second World War, in pamphlet form. The records reveal constant giving from a narrow treasury to benefit many needy causes, and services of unnumbered kinds performed by mem- bers for the town. In addition has been the interest and pleasure of sociability.
Of the charter members only one is now living, but the club has greatly advanced in stature, and in 1957 membership rose to fifty-nine.
Tamworth Garden Club
A third and more recent Tamworth association which is
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part of a nationwide structure is the Tamworth Garden Club, an affiliate of the National Council of State Garden Clubs comprising some three hundred thousand members. For this the initiative was taken in 1938 by Mrs. Herbert Farnum, then living at Mount Mexico Farm, who gathered together seven others, both men and women. These were the minister of the period, Reverend Timothy Paddon and his wife, Mrs. Sarah F. Kimball, Mrs. Laura Robinson, Mrs. Gaston David- son, Mrs. Catherine Goodson, and John Thayer. Of the few now living, none are now resident in Tamworth, but their little company has grown to include nearly a hundred mem- bers (1957), and the program has stabilized into monthly meetings with speaker. Twelve committees divide the de- partment work. An important feature has been a distinguished annual flower show. Out of seventeen of these shows, sixteen have won the State Award for Flower Show Achievement known as the Lilac Ribbon, and twice the National Award or Purple Ribbon. Several members have become officers in the state organization, and Mrs. Myrick Crane has also figured in national offices.
The character of the work accomplished by this organi- zation is quite out of proportion to the size of the town in which it operates. This is because its guidance has been in the hands of women whose knowledge has been matured else- where and now placed at the disposal of the community of their adoption. Of recent years the urgent subject of conser- vation has attracted the Club's attention, and this construc- tive interest will no doubt increase in strengh.
Benevolent Associations
Tamworth Foundation
In quite another classification, without the element of meetings and association, is the Tamworth Foundation, wholly altruistic in purpose. The Articles of Incorporation express this as: "to receive, hold, invest ... manage and dispose of
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properties, real, personal or mixed ... for the benefit of the physical properties and the spiritual, intellectual, social and physical wellbeing of the inhabitants of the Town of Tam- worth."
The organization originated in 1937 by the raising of funds to purchase from the Tamworth Turf and Fair Asso- ciation a large tract of land south of the village which had been used for fairs and for a trotting park, and where there had been some talk of introducing a pari-mutuel feature. Some years later the property thus acquired was in turn sold to Harry F. Damon, and the Foundation has not since held real estate.
As the intention was an organization to help preserve Tamworth's values, it was hoped that incorporated it would inspire the confidence of those who cared to do something for the town, and would attract gifts and bequests on the model of the successful Quimby Fund of Sandwich. The first trustees were chiefly the more Olympian figures among sum- mer owners of the period, whose interest was accompanied by substantial gifts. At first the capital increased very gradually, but from the beginning the income has been applied to local public needs. Various causes which would not have had suffi- cient support from taxes have been awarded funds, such as the Visiting Nurse Association, the libraries of Tamworth village and Chocorua, the school children's ski instruction, and the Red Cross swimming school. And as the income has grown, with the completion of the new elementary school, the entire development of grounds and playgrounds was assumed by the Foundation. A recent legal decision has arranged that all distribution of funds shall pass through the town treasury. Therefore no causes to which the town could not properly contribute may be served by the Foundation.
At the time of the Foundation's birth Albert Boyden an- nounced the fact in the Carroll County Independent with the hope that it "would inaugurate a current of funds toward the Foundation which will flow as freely and regularly as Tam-
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worth's own rivers - with perhaps an occasional freshet." The funds flowed, but without any abnormal rapidity, for nineteen years. The first freshet then occurred when the will of Ruth Mary Wilson, a teacher whose home had been a re- modeled schoolhouse on Chinook Trail, revealed a bequest to Tamworth Foundation that will come in time to about $100,- 000. The greater part of her fortune was bequeathed to Wellesley College, and the remainder divided between Tam- worth Foundation and the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont. This has at once changed the immediate outlook for Tam- worth's growing concerns and this present book about Tam- worth is one of the first fruits from it. Of the twenty-three incorporators, about half survive at this date. Of these the guiding enthusiasm for many years has been given by John Finley Jr., the current president.
Tamworth Visiting Nurse Association
Also in the category of undiluted altruism should be put the enterprise supporting the Visiting Nurse. This was started in the early twenties from her summer home in Chocorua by Mrs. J. K. Whittemore from New Haven where she was al- ready acquainted with the procedures. She gathered a small Chocorua committee, raised money, and began the experi- ment by persuading a New Haven nurse to come up here for one month. Next she found a remarkable Miss Curran who seems to have set a standard of zeal which has been upheld ever since. For three years this worker reached her patients by walking, or borrowed or hired a buggy or sleigh. By 1925 the town was ready to vote three hundred dollars toward her salary, now increased to fifteen hundred dollars.
From this beginning has evolved a signal institution. At present the committee has fourteen summer members largely concerned with raising funds, plus nine permanent residents.
Each year the total expense of thirty-five hundred to four thousand dollars, including the nurse's car and its upkeep,
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are met in part by the town as seen, in part by the Tamworth Foundation, by memorial gifts, and by a large rummage sale in the fall. The nurse receives a month's vacation with pay. She has social security and is covered by insurance.
Her duties have become very extensive. She is required to have the degree of R. N., but bedside nursing is no longer more than a fraction of her service, as serious illness is now usually hospitalized. Once every year the town physician Dr. Edwin C. Remick gives a complete physical examination to school children, and thereafter the nurse works on whatever defects have come to light: curvatures, eye difficulty, flat feet and such, perhaps helping or persuading the family to secure a specialist. Every year a cancer test and a tuberculosis test are given in the school. These call for the nurse's handling and result in checking troubles at the start. This precaution in the schools has helped to see one tuberculosis sanitarium in the state entirely closed down; only one remains. Every expected baby brings prenatal attention; connecting the mother with a doctor often follows. After care is often equally necessary. Polio inoculations are also a constant every year, and children who need polio therapy are taken to the clinic, four at a time. These early cases are almost always full cures. In general the nurse uses her car in cases where no transportation to doctor or clinic exists. She takes elderly people for eye tests, and likewise children to the dentist, in groups so as to get the group discount. Children learn early to act on professional advice, and parents as a rule cooperate gladly.
There are also regular attentions to the sick in their homes. One patient has the nurse perhaps three times a week, is helped to get out of bed, receives the necessary care, and is put back. Another is visited every day to get her walking. Another, for years in a wheel chair, has been aided by several operations. A child's crooked legs were straightened, and she is now in high school. A multiple sclerosis patient has done so well through aid in exercising as to astonish his doctors. The nurse secures much of the money for these projects through visiting
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and talking to such organizations as the State Welfare Division, the Crippled Children's Association, etc.
The nurse's headquarters in the new elementary school building were designed for the purpose, and provided with all appropriate equipment. Each day she checks all schoolrooms and takes home any child with a cold or other doubtful symp- tom. She collects and distributes clothing and bedding. Much equipment has been given her department for loan; the Nurs- ing Association now disposes of two surgical beds, two wheel chairs, a walker, crutches, etc. No treatment or convalescence need now be retarded for lack of funds.
Sports Associations
Tamworth Outing Club
When skiing became a primary sport and a business in the North Country, and ski slopes and ski trails were being carved upon many hills, Tamworth inns and resident skiers began asking for attention to their needs. Four men, Milton Seeley, Lincoln Steele, Richard (Buzz) Read, and Lawrence Hayford, operator of a winter inn, got together to see what could be done, and in 1935 the Tamworth Outing Club was formed. An open field sloping in varying degrees was the first requisite. This was located on Page Hill, leased from its owner, and cleared of brush. Before long a rope tow was added, still operating now after many years, and a hut with stove.
As a second resource Quimby Hill not far above Fern- croft Inn was made skiable, and for a third a trail broken out from the top of Great Hill on the east side. Neither of these has endured as has Page Hill. A more ambitious under- taking for which financial help was given by the town, was Mount Whittier Trail on the Ossipee side of Butler's Bridge. This was a very fast descent suitable for experts, but it has not been continuously maintained or a tow provided because of the expense. The help of the Civilian Conservation Corps,
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encamped in Tamworth during this period, was available for all of these at the start.
The most durable project to come out of the war years was Huckins Barn. The Hemenway Reservation is a tract of nearly two thousand acres of woodland in the Great Hill section of Tamworth, left to the state by Augustus Hemenway of Boston, with provision for its use in summer by the Boston Boy Scouts. The State Forestry Department manages the tract according to approved methods, and save for its tax- exempt status the reservation would be an unmitigated benefit to the town. Though mostly woodland, on it are two farm- houses. There was a fine old-fashioned barn with one of these, and this the Forestry Department, using C.C.C. labor, converted at a nominal rental into a recreation center for the Outing Club. One of the Conservation Corps had been a stone-cutter in Italy; therefore Huckins Barn possesses a dis- tinguished fireplace and chimney, besides a dance floor and spectators' gallery. Here the famous square dancing has taken place year in and year out, which next to the Page Hill Ski Slope is the most popular and rewarding of the Outing Club's established features.
The Tamworth Outing Club also generated the chil- dren's ski school, providing the instruction for which the school releases the necessary hours; the club lends skis and bindings, and the parents supply ski boots. In this way Tam- worth's children come into their own heritage of the snow country which city people by thousands travel distances to reach. The boys can exchange ski meets with other schools, and feel advantage rather than inferiority in their mountain background. On the same principle of developing native- given resources is the fishing derby now a feature of the chil- dren's year, in which sound sportsmanship and obedience to game laws is taught by careful organization and strict observ- ances. Correct procedure in shooting is also included by means of trap shoots.
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Chocorua Tennis Association
In the athletic division must be recorded the annual Ten- nis Tournament, that cherished institution of Chocorua, now in its fifty-fifth year or thereabouts. Extremely good amateur tennis is rightfully played here. The New Hampshire Women's Champion Katherine Hubbell was brought up on Chocorua courts. During the Labor Day weekend every year a devoted gallery from around the lake follows the matches from court to court as a kind of family affair. Now the Outing Club has added children's events to the tennis calendar, and sponsors the singles matches and women's doubles. This tournament, while avoiding publicity, quietly continues in the highest amateur tradition.
An extant curiosity typifying the spirit of the tennis event is the original "cup," a tin drinking cup of the backdoor pump variety, inscribed with a penknife:
Chocorua Tennis Association
Permanent Trophy for Championship in Singles.
Won by J. K. Whittemore, 1903.
The "permanence" of the trophy was of short duration. A new one is now offered whenever its predecessor has been won the requisite number of times to remain with the winner. In 1909 the first silver trophy made its appearance. Entrance fees go toward the support of the Visiting Nurse. The tourna- ment is usually large with visiting players contesting the finals played off on Labor Day.
Organizations formed less than twenty years ago do not properly belong in this chapter. The Parent-Teachers Asso- ciation, the Boy Scouts, the Historical Society and its interest- ing offshoot the Historical Museum, besides still others not mentioned, are all hardy current growths which will have a larger place in any history to be recorded fifty years from now.
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Author's Statement
SOME YOUNG PEOPLE built a cabin in the woods. When friends came to see them, wads of oakum were handed out and all fell to and pushed oakum into the chinks between the logs. The friends named the cabin "Oakum Pokum."
This account of Tamworth may be said to have been put together by the Oakum Pokum method. The framework could be fairly established, but the filling was a constantly changing and accruing mass. While chink-filling is not claimed as an elevated form of composition, it may in practice be un- avoidable, and if in this book continuity has suffered, it is because of this necessarily piecemeal procedure. No matter how many unexpected sources would be found and turned over, items would be brought out like those crickets from under the fieldstones which enabled Jim Welch to show bass fishing to Mr. Cleveland, and there would always be more crickets, some of them lively. To wait for all such possible reinforcements would be to wait dangerously, while facts faded farther into limbo and memories withered still more. Revision must halt at some point.
The sources to be turned over have been of various sorts and variable usefulness. There is no long and imposing bibli- ography, this small corner of New England having drawn but scant professional attention. The first search was of course among general histories, beginning with six histories of New Hampshire: Belknap the earliest and best, but wholly prior to 1791; an unimportant one by George Barstow of 1842; Edwin A. Charlton's of 1856 with Gazetteer which calls Tamworth one of the best grazing towns in the state;
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John A. McClintock's of 1888; Ernest S. Stackpole's of 1916 and Hobart Pillsbury's of 1927; besides Frank R. Sanborn's of 1904, short but an exception in quality. All but this last and the classic Belknap are commercial in their nature, and now thirty to a hundred years old. The tendency of this type of history is to degenerate into eulogies, with pictures, of citi- zens who have paid something to be included. There is a new and elaborate history of the state put out by Professor James D. Squires issued too late to figure in these researches.
Also in this classification, of greater use was our own cumbersome but invaluable History of Carroll County pub- lished in 1889, not so late but that memories therein could derive from memories that recalled earliest times. It has a conscientious section devoted to Tamworth itself, also prelimi- nary chapters of a general nature on military affairs, the Revolution, roads, etc. The uncertainty in much of early history makes thorny going in selecting among what are sup- posed to be facts. When familiarity with local documents increased, it was almost a pleasure to find this famous source- book also erring occasionally in its statements. The local recollection of how its editors had taken comfortable rooms in the village inn and questioned without effort a few of the citizens tended to invalidate the volume as the gospel that some have always thought it.
The most important primary reference works were of course the State Papers in which the state government has had published the original documents preserved in the archives at the State Capitol. The town of Tamworth possesses a number of these formidable black volumes; the full series was con- sulted in the Laconia Library. The most valuable for our pur- pose proved to be Volume XXVIII, a copy of which was on constant loan during this work, from ex-Sheriff Welch. Even these primary sources cannot always be regarded as irrefutable fact, such as the strict code of the modern school of historians requires, since many were handwritten by individuals peti- tioning or preferring complaints, and human beings in the
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eighteenth century were no less fallible than those in the twentieth.
Added to these were some other historical helps: Joseph Dow's History of Hampton (Salem, Mass., 1893) for Jona- than Moulton; the biography of the Provincial Governor John Wentworth, by Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Harvard University Press ), and scattered material on Benning Wentworth as well; an old Butterfield History of New Hampshire for Schools; John Fiske on The American Revolution (Houghton Mifflin, 1899) ; History of The First New Hampshire Regiment, by Joel Kidder; and Harold R. Shurtleff's The Log-Cabin Myth, all instructive from one angle or another. The Encyclopedia Brittanica would even come to the rescue occasionally. Also various guidebooks: Sweetser's, Eastman's, Osgood's, the Writers' Project Guide to New Hampshire of 1938, the Appalachian Guide to the White Mountains and the Wona- lancet Outdoor Club's Guide to the Sandwich Range, besides smaller guides in pamphlet form.
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