USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 6
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the Liberty Trail. Richard Jackman who pitched by Cho- corua Lake moved over to Silver Lake. (The same or another Jackman with a squaw wife lived very early near Jackman Pond, by Bennett's Corner.)
It is clear, however, that James Head must have been present here somewhere as early as 1764 or '65. We have his name on the affidavit of the surveyor John Bradley in 1809 as one of those assisting him with some Concord men "forty-four or five years ago" in the very first running of the lines of a "Town since cal'd Tamworth." The Head homestead was where the present Theodore Brown place is, in the Pe- quaket section of Washington Hill. Alonzo Nickerson was very positive that this farm was the first one around the upper end of town, pitched by Aaron Head in 1796. This is Lot No. 1 in Tamworth. Perhaps Aaron was James's son.
Mark Jewell's is also called the very first house (1772), on the top of Cleveland Hill. He and his younger brother Bradbury Jewell were leading citizens within the town's bor- ders for many of its formative years. It was Bradbury who built, up on the corner beyond the old Stevenson home, the first two-story house, using fourteen thousand bricks which are stated to have cost him one dollar apiece Old Tenor. It was Bradbury Jewell who discovered Wonalancet, "my Birch Intervale," and appropriated it for his own, ultimately build- ing a house at its farthest end, and founding his family there. Bradbury had a son Mark who became a preacher.
One of the fortunate circumstances for Tamworth and Sandwich was their location away to the north of the original New Hampshire settlements. Not only had they wholly es- caped the harrowing Indian wars, but the people were not as fanatically religious as the first Puritans in the Massachus- etts Bay Colony. Emigration up this way being mostly of a secondary nature, the arrivals were already New Englanders by habit. They had knowledge of what they would be coping with, and not so many misapprehensions to unlearn as had their first English forerunners. This made for quicker adjust-
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ment and more stability and common sense, qualities for which the Tamworth forefathers were very notable.
One of the parent towns for many of our early settlers seems to have been Gilmanton. Israel Gilman and Samuel Gilman, both grantees in the Charter, came from there, like- wise the important landholding Cogswells on Great Hill, formerly called Hubbard Hill, and the original Samuel Hid- den. Late in the last century Arthur Page migrated here from Gilmanton and became the leading and the last of the black- smiths. His smithy on Turkey Street off Route 16 is being preserved intact by his family and the Tamworth Historical Society as a memorial to him.
The first Hayford, the first Gannett, and the first Wash- burn all came from East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Alden Washburn's child Sally was the first born in the settlement.
Stephen Mason who founded the main line of Masons in South Tamworth moved here from no farther away than Moultonborough. The Hatch family were early on Washing- ton Hill, as well as at Chocorua Village. The first Walter Bryant, surveyor of state lines, and his son, who were two of the grantees, established themselves on the banks of the Bear- camp among the very first; two of their homesteads are still held in the family. On Hackett Hill were Ebenezer Hackett and his brother Hezekiah who was such a good shot that others took care of his farming while he supplied game for all.
Jeremy Belknap studied New Hampshire history for twenty years. He writes with certainty of its great future mis- sion as a land of prosperous farms. How far wrong the most informed observer can be is illustrated when Belknap says amid his long s's:
Agriculture is, and always will be, the chief business of the people of New Hampshire, if they attend to their true in- terest. Every tree which is cut down in the forest, opens to the sun a new spot of earth, which, with cultivation, will produce food for man and beast. It is impossible to con- ceive what quantities may be produced of beef, pork,
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mutton, poultry, wheat, rye, Indian Corn, barley, pulse, butter and cheese, articles which will always find a market. Flax and hemp may also be cultivated to great advantage, especially on the intervale lands on the large rivers. ... Hops will grow on almost any soil; and the labor attending them is so inconsiderable, that there can be no excuse for neglecting the universal cultivation of them. . . . In the early part of life, every day's labor employed in subduing the wilderness lays a foundation for future profit.
Belknap did not know about Nebraska beef, not to speak of Argentine beef, nor Wisconsin cheese nor Minnesota wheat nor Kansas corn, nor what effect these would have on the great agricultural future of New Hampshire. Nor did he know that after his time large prosperous-looking flocks of sheep, when spinning was the order of the day in every home and wool brought high prices, were to overgraze and strip riches from our soil for all time. So far from every tree felled letting in the sun on productivity, today's technology teaches that trees are the best crop on soil that naturally produces them, and New Hampshire's genuine wealth lay in the very primeval forest that she was in a rage to destroy in favor of a small spotty agriculture.
All the pioneers, having to get their living at once, were perforce of the Belknap school of thinking, and were busy letting in the appreciated sun. The best man was he who cleared the most acreage in the least time. The first method was to girdle and burn, as the Indians did. When there were enough settlers to help one another, chopping was substituted for girdling, and when the trees were down and the tops had been burned, the logs would be rolled together and an im- mense fire made. Since a man would give his labor in return to any who had rolled logs for him, "logrolling" became a word from the north frontier for interchanging of favors of any kind, particularly in politics. A system that had danger and many deaths in it was that of "undercutting" or chopping part way into the trunks of all trees to be brought down, and then
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toppling a single spreading giant at the edge which started a sequence of falls for all the others to make one mighty crash. After the burning, the earth thus enriched with unlimited wood ashes would yield fabulously at first, supporting Bel- knap's theory, and corn planted about the stumps and in among the rocks would produce a fantastic crop the first year. No one thought that the soil could wear out. They knew noth- ing of the humus which they were destroying forever. Even today burning the pasture or burning for blueberries is per- sistent. That the loss of humus, which has taken since the glacial age to accumulate, makes deserts is slow in being real- ized. In burning, stumps were left to rot, or more ambitiously pulled out by oxen to make a cattle-containing stump fence, their roots sticking out at all angles. A few bits of the stump fences still survive, as seen near the garage of a house on Chi- nook Trail.
The next step was rock removal, blasting or burying the biggest and hauling off the smaller ones by ox team. Beauti- fully laid walls are a characteristic of all of rocky New Hamp- shire, and stone walls became an art. The best were double, two laid parallel with a filling of small stones between, some- times with two feet of rock-filled trench below. All hands, old men and boys, rocked fields and made bounds therefrom in a continuous process. Such walls were a man's lines for his descendants no matter if they should not survey correctly when in after years lot boundaries came into question. Those who know can interpret the when and how of stonewall build- ing, as of other antiques. Only oxen could work such rocks, their strong delicate feet picking their way over the roughest ground. They pulled a chain from the other side of the fence, which rolled a boulder up a "stone-ladder" (made of two felled trees with slats between) till manpower caught it at the top and placed it to "break a joint." Some of these walls of the mighty ancestors and their oxen are now in deepest woods near long-abandoned cellar holes. Built supposedly for all time they lie unhonored in the dense second growth that
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has willy-nilly returned. Some say that the waste of these hard-built walls accounts for the lopsided tombstones in the burying grounds - the forefathers all turning in their graves.
The part that oxen had in the life and development of our region for much over a hundred years is a bigger story than can be written here. Horses were for travel, but through- out the farms and in the woods oxen were for work. It was the middle of the 1800's before work horses appeared. During the entire century of the ox team, handling and procedure were fixed customs taught from father to son, with never any reason for change. James Welch of Tamworth, now ex-sheriff of Carroll County, and an appreciated source of information, gives an account of his father's cattle which would have de- scribed equally well those of his remoter ancestors.
Father kept a large stock of cattle, ten to twelve work- ing oxen besides a lot of other cattle, and a hundred sheep or more. While we boys were small, Father hired a number of men to help him, but as we grew up we had to learn to do everything around the farm and in the woods. Everybody worked and we started in young, too. On the fourth of July when I was four years old my father and half-brother George went out to plow. Father had on six oxen and George had four. I wanted to do what they were doing, and I started to fuss. George was patient with me - a good ox driver most always is patient. He handed me a "goad- stick" and said, "You hold this now. Don't touch 'em. Just talk to 'em easy." A year later I was really driving oxen. Of course I couldn't yoke them, but I could drive for a man plowing or when the teams were breaking out the roads in winter. The creatures were large, some of them weighing fifteen hundred to eighteen hundrd pounds, Durhams and shorthorns. Those were the earliest breeds in the county.
Driving oxen is like raising children. Slow and steady does it. A nervous man can't drive oxen, and a nervous man should never raise a family. He may drive the creatures, but he'll never get out of them all he should. Oxen are slow and steady beasts, and they are mighty sensitive. If you
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snap out at them they remember it all day long. I wonder sometimes if they don't feel ashamed of their neuterdom. Nowadays, city folks stop and take a picture of a driver and his oxen, but when I was a boy they far outnumbered the horses in the county. Certain sets of names were to- gether, and were used all through the county. If a man had Star he had Berry to yoke up with him; and there was Bright and Broad; Turk and Line; Buck and Swan; Brown and Brindle.
Yokes were made of elm or yellow birch. An elm yoke, leaded, was the best. Linseed oil was rubbed on the necks of the beasts to prevent sores from chafing yokes. We had a short yoke, or winter yoke, for the oxen to follow the sled runner and to prevent crowding. There is nothing more aggravating than an ox team that crowds. And we had a longer yoke for the summer, so the team wouldn't hang off. In the old days there were plenty of good blacksmiths, and each had an oxsling to hold the creature while he was being shod. Sometimes there were makeshift slings at the logging camps so a thrown shoe could be nailed on in an emergency. We learned too, as we grew older that when an ox sweats he will not work as efficiently and when the weather was hot we had to watch the beasts very closely. It was gospel to us that if one started lolling (that means putting out his tongue), you had to get him into the shade at once or he would melt, and never be useful again.
Years ago up here drovers traveled the roads with horses and wagon, bought cattle, exchanged, traded and sold. One of the oldtime drovers - "droviers" they were called then - had four sons, Charles, William, Oscar, and Ed. Charles and Oscar drove cattle here when I was a boy. Each year about the first of September they started with their droves of cattle and they would come through about every two weeks until the first of November. They traveled north as far as Jefferson and Randolph and then down to Brighton and Watertown, Mass. They would buy, trade and sell along the way. It was said that Charles was the best seller and Oscar was the best buyer.
Fields could be hired along the route where the cattle
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TAMWORTH AS YET ONLY IMAGINED
The first survey, made by James Hersey (1775), included the area from Maine west to the Sandwich boundary where dotted lines indicate the direction of Tamworth's future six miles square.
[ Plan of Tamworth, 1575.]
+ Col Moultona farm
Plan of vacant Land Within Masons Patent linc
James Hersey -
Province of Main.
Sandwich
SeMer my " River
Part of ossipee Mountains
Loveut's Town
Moultonborough
To Ceway Mountains
Conway
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Beech Fiery"S. E Corner
JAMES WELCH AND OXEN The High Sheriff of Carroll County with oxen from over Sandwich way, the biggest any- where around, girt 71/2 foot, weight two ton. A good yoke might weigh thirty-three hundred.
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were pastured. The old fellows called it shacking the cattle. There were regular places where they stopped and traded. When they traded in any other place along the line they had to trade with the cattle on the move. A man would pick out what he wanted, trade with the drover, turn his cattle in, and at the next cowyard the drove reached, they would cut out the cattle he had traded for. At the regular stopping- places we could yoke up the steers and oxen and try them. My father did most of his trading with Oscar. He told me to look out for Charles's steers. Handy cattle, Charles called them, but that meant, to us who knew Charles, they were either runaways or had never been yoked. I found that to be right. Charles would say, "Now, Sonny, there is an awful neat little pair of steers. Just what you want. Oscar has had his eye on them for a long time for you. Just think of all the fun you can have with them. Next year we will buy or trade with you and you will get a good grift on them." He was a persuasive seller all right.
In these droves there would be from one to three hun- dred head. They would follow the roads where the most farmers lived. About three men and one collie dog were hired to drive the cattle. The horse that was used had to be a trusted one so the driver could jump out of the wagon and leave him. Then as the cattle came along the horse would follow. I have seen the little bay mare that Oscar had bite some of the cattle to drive them along and if any got back of her she would stop and stay there until someone brought them along. The men received a dollar a day and expenses. In those days it was called a dollar a day and found. Ezra Dodge and Jacob Smith of Tamworth were oldtimer drovers. The roads were filled with cattle in the fall and lots of trading was done. But such sights and the language that was used in trading days are now a thing of the past.
But before reaching the affluent period when three hun- dred cattle could be for sale at once we should look at the very earliest industry, that one where ox teams figured indis- pensably - masting. As far back as 1721 in the first grants
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made to adventurers by the Crown and afterward in every town charter there was the picturesque condition that all the tallest white pine trees in all the vague new territories should be saved as the King's own property, masts for his Royal Navy. No other wood was both light and strong enough for masts. As the Navy ships were in great numbers and all were driven by sail, a limitless source of masts appeared to the King's ad- visors as the most valuable resource of the new lands. As the great who handed the wilderness around so freely had not the faintest idea of its real character, let alone its extent, they thought in terms of hundreds of masts, when thousands or even millions was nearer right. Twenty-four inches in diameter a foot above the ground was big enough for his Majesty's ships. The surveyor of the King's woods was enjoined to mark with the King's broad arrow every tree suitable for the pur- pose throughout the domain, and to enforce their being held for the King's will. Mast ships were built especially for this freight, each carrying some forty-five to fifty masts.
Settlers could use a tall pine tree as well as the King, as it was the best for house construction. And they did; the King's mast-master could not be in a hundred townships at once. The mast-master's role, though the office paid the most of any in the colonies, was therefore in practice almost impos- sible from the beginning. An immense tree, more than five feet in diameter at the butt end, standing on a man's own land would have had severe temptation in it. The pine laws in New Hampshire were as senseless and obnoxious as the tea tax or the stamp act in Massachusetts. The fact is that ship- ping of masts to England from so far inland as Tamworth was never actually done. There were but few years and scanty settlers until the Declaration of Independence had ended all masting for royalty. For our own American shipping, however, masts were a constant part of the business of early lumberers. Tamworth possesses the Old Mast Road, which starts down from the Ridge between Chocorua and Paugus, and comes out at the farther end of Wonalancet, close to Ferncroft Inn.
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It is now integral to the system of mountain trails maintained by the Wonalancet Outdoor Club. Part of Wonalancet's tra- dition is that up to twenty yoke of oxen hitched together used to drag great logs from the Old Mast Road across the intervale to be floated into Lake Winnepesaukee and so by water to Portsmouth. Pine is the best "floating" timber; but twenty yoke of oxen is a small matter compared to existing mast records from farther down state. It took fifty-two to bring a mast from Northfield, and one in Hopkinton required fifty- five. One such monster and perfect tree, however, is in the story of the Old Mast Road. Edgar Rich preserved it for us. Forty oxen brought the mast over the ridge and carefully down on its way to tidewater. In turning a corner at Sandwich the great stick swung out and demolished a little blacksmith shop. Angry words had not been enough. Next morning there was a great V-shaped gash in the middle of the mast, a fatal stab. The murder of a man would not have so horrified the whole region as did the murder of the mast. (A pair of the giant wheels used for masting may be seen in front of the Highway Hotel in Concord.)
By the 1850's the great stands of virgin white pine were gone. Few men living can ever see one now. They constituted the true gold that Mason's adventurers were to look for, un- recognized when they saw it. The tree that had dominated the forests since the beginning of the Ice Age here grew to 150 feet or more - 250 has been recorded - while other kinds of trees from the same soil were sixty or eighty. An old saying is "No man ever cut down a pine and lived to see the stump rotten." The immense epic of the white pine now gone is nowhere more feelingly set forth than in Donald Culross Peattie's Natural History of Trees, where the lord of the wil- derness is given the proud first place in the annals of all America's tree life.
The new states after the Revolution were plagued with so mixed a system of money that it took a talented mathema-
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tician to know the proper price of anything. The paper money in circulation was badly depreciated. The pounds and shillings which had been legal tender before the War were reverting to England in trade, and Congress had as yet no power to issue currency. The New Hampshire Legislature passed some ineffectual laws but the new "Tender Act" seemed only to aggravate conditions, and debtors demanded both paper money, though there were no funds to back it, and freedom from their debts as well. Other states were in a similar plight, and following the Constitutional Convention in 1787 Congress alone was empowered to coin money, levy taxes, and settle the national debts, after which the national credit was estab- lished. Before that, sums of money were designated (by initials) Old Tenor, Middle Tenor, or New Tenor, referring to issues of paper currency in Massachusetts and Rhode Island which passed in other states as well. The actual values of these fluctuated, and when the new national system of dollars and cents was established, its value was equally erratic and it was hard to know the equivalent in O. T. "They paid me 14 dol- lars which was 4/ [4 shillings] over what I charged, but I could not give them the change" is the first appearance in the Patten Diary of the word dollar (1780). "14 gills of Rum from Lieut. Orr for which I paid him 28 dollars." Another time a quart was 16 dollars, and "4 pounds of Tobacco 30 dollars."
The value of the dollar shook down before too long and incredibly low prices are found from the early 1800's on. A memoir describes the prosperous Crosby farm in Sandwich in those years, when farm hands got fifty cents a day with two meals, and a hired man had eight to ten dollars a month by the year. A midwife's fee was fifty cents. But barter remained the safest and usual system. Men would come three miles for a day's work toward payment of a doctor's bill. Country stores sold dry goods and groceries, taking butter, cheese, grain, pork, or dried apples in exchange. These would then be sent to Portsmouth or Salem by team, with a return load of molasses, rum, sugar, salt, and dry goods. Families who raised nearly
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everything they used did not need to have cash. Mr. Nathan Crosby records that his neighboring storekeeper, Daniel Little (near Little's Pond), would call upon all his debtors to bring in cattle and sheep on a given day, and receive credit for their value. Then Doctor Asa Crosby would notify his debtors to take their produce to Mr. Little, who would then give Dr. Crosby proper credit, and he in turn would send receipted bills. A barter account-book of the day shows the intricate day-to-day entries between two men: on one page the items sold by the farmer - "To 4 bushels corn, to 1 sheep," to this or that; on the opposite page what the same man had done for the other: "By 2 days labor, by making a gate, by 1 leather coat," etc. At the end of the page the amounts were added and set off against each other and a small sum of money passed, with the word settled scrawled in the margin. In most of them the items themselves were noted in pounds and shil- lings, while the final settlement took place in dollars and cents, showing that the new coinage was still not the easier kind to use. Among the Bryant family papers, tucked away in an ancient and battered daybook carried in a hip-pocket in the eighteenth century and now kept in a deposit box at Lakeport, is a loose sheet carefully drawn up for ready reference, a rule of thumb for the currency problems.
"to Cast Interest of Lawful Money in Dollars & Cents the Interest of 37£ 16.0 for Six months only add a Sypher or nought to ye 37£ - thus 370 and Call the 16 half so many Cents viz 8 Cents thus 378 then Strik of your 2 Right hand figures thus 3/78 Call ye Left hand Dolars & the Right hand Cents viz 3 Dolars & 78 Cents but If for a year then - Double your pounds thus twice 37 - 74. then ad your Syper & Shillings thus 740 and then it Stands 7 Dolars & 56 Cents 16
756 for a year. [If wrestled with, this is quite clear. ]
our money now Stands thus 10 mills one Cent 10 Cents one Dime 10 Dimes one Dolar 10 Dolars one Egil.
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This daybook of Walter Bryant in the 1790's is one of the earliest extant. Like many a pioneer, he helped himself out by making shoes for his neighbors, as also now and then a felt hat. He would rent his "hors to Rogster [Rochester]" or to Portsmouth, and must have had a small store, since he noted: "To a bandanna hankie, To 1 quart of Brandy, To broadcloth, To thirty Nails Lent" (what hope had he of getting nails back?), "To a bushell of pertatoes," and "To 1 day's work choping Whood," or "haling" it. One of his customers was giddion scrigion, with no capitals.
In the new spurt of progress after the Revolution, a daz- zling innovation was established for young New Hampshire. A postmaster general was created by the legislature, who besides planning for post offices to be set on rural roads, was to em- ploy " a proper number of Riders, so that News-Papers, Letters and Mails may be transported in the most easy, safe and expeditious manner, to the various parts of the State." Three circular routes from Portsmouth were laid out in the first enactment, the one up to the north to be ridden weekly. This route came up through Rochester and Ossipee as far as Con- way, and returned through Tamworth, Meredith, and Gil- manton. A hundred pounds was to be paid to these riders.
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