USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 9
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ORDINATION ROCK
Samuel Hidden was ordained in 1792 on the rock in the forest by a council of six ministers standing with him, the population and all their livestock grouped about the base.
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CHARLIE BENNETT knows all the old square-dance tunes. He's "played all his life-played all over."
JOHN ELWELL, miller and clog artist, had brought a small photographic studio by team from Wolfe- boro to Tamworth. When he had set it up the photographer said, "Come in and I'll take your picture for payment."
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their husbands. Every woman had on a checkered linen apron and carried a clean linen handkerchief." Finally toward the close of day the theological altercation going on in Captain Dodge's orchard near by ended in victory for the more liberal view of Mr. Hidden. The Council ascended the rock with the candidate and performed the ceremony. A Mr. Williams of Meredith made the concluding prayer, and the Memoir states cryptically, "It is little remarkable that that part of the rock on which Mr. Williams stood fell off, since the foundation on which he built his hopes for heaven soon after proved like the rock, insecure." What the delinquent did is not recorded.
There were twenty-nine church members within a month or two, and soon the numbers soared. The monument erected to the memory of the ordination on the rock has these in- scriptions: on the south side, "Memorial of the Ordination on this Rock, Sept. 12, 1792, of the Rev. Samuel Hidden as Pas- tor of the Congregational Church Instituted on that day"; east side, "Born in Rowley, Mass., Feb. 22, 1760. Served in the War of the Revolution, by four enlistments, 1777-1781. Graduated at Dartmouth, 1791. Minister of Tamworth 46 years. Died Feb. 13, 1837. Aet 77"; north side, "He came into the Wilderness and left it a Fruitful Field"; west side, "To perpetuate the memory of his Virtues and Public Services, a Grandson, bearing his honored name, provided for the erection of this Cenotaph 1862." On the four bases: "Town chartered 1765 [error, 1766]; Settled 1771; 40 Families, 1792; Census of 1860, 1717."
Mr. Hidden was married to Betsy Price of Gilmanton. The town had built his house for him across the road from where the meetinghouse came to be. The house was to be clapboarded, glazed, and shingled, with "a stack of chimnies with four smoaks, a cellar under one end of the house." In 1955 the present house of Mrs. Myrick Crane was built over the long-deserted site above Ordination Rock; the iron crane found in the cellar hole as well as bricks and a bit of pottery of the period were built into the new fireplace. A remarkable
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well of water is said to have supplied originally as many as ten neighboring households. The house was on high ground dipping at the back to a brook but commanding no very ex- tensive view.
When ordained Mr. Hidden was still preaching in Cap- tain George Dodge's barn or somebody's house. To raise the meetinghouse great plans were made; that certain barrel of rum that must accompany all raisings was seen to, together with the "2 Kentals of Salt Fish," presumably to raise a thirst for the rum. At that, the town fathers were parsimonious in Tamworth-two barrels of rum were usual at a raising. (The town of Amherst had supplied eight.) When the job was finished the "dinner was dresst at the expense of the town." Location for the meetinghouse was finally established on the upper corner, opposite the burying ground and above Ordi- nation Rock, facing north and east. A bronze plaque now marks the stone. The center of town was there until many years later.
This may be the best place to look at one of the old-time raisings. The custom seemed general to build the meeting- house cooperatively, many giving their time, but common laborers receiving three shillings a day and carpenters four. So big an undertaking, with all able-bodied men in the com- munity assembling to join in, is unknown in the present time. Quite apart from the rum, there was immense stimulus and excitement in a raising, including plenty of danger, as there were inevitably accidents and an occasional life lost. Details of the typical process we have from a careful description by Eva A. Speare in Colonial Meeting Houses of America.
First there had to be located and felled five very long straight trees for sills, plates, and ridgepoles, which were "'snaked out" by oxen and squared with an adze. Also some fifty other trees, around eighteen inches in diameter probably, for posts, tie beams, and sleepers. Besides all this, several hundred beams for braces and roof timbers must be got ready. Next, housewrights set to work cutting mortises and tenons
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and boring holes (no doubt with the new Tamworth invention, the screw auger) for the wooden pins to fasten the joints to- gether. Hundreds of these pins had been whittled in prepara- tion and scores of wide planks sawn with pit saws. To saw by hand a plank thirty inches wide with a uniform thickness of an inch and a half was the difficult feat of two men, one in and one above the pit over which the log was rolled.
The frame was then laid out on the ground, wall by wall, and pinned. All men were called for the day set, and the ex- pert master carpenter took over. He had to be a superior en- gineer and to have planned the whole building. He had measured everything with utmost exactness and was able to direct firmly the muscular manpower. He was expected to risk his life by riding up on each wall to do the joint-pinning. The average weight at a raising appears to be sixty-five pounds per cubic foot. The ridgepole might weigh five thousand pounds alone. The men stood in a line shoulder to shoulder with long poles iron-spiked at the tip, and with these as levers gradually pushed one wall upright and held it there till another could come up to be fastened to it. Boys then swarmed to the ridgepole to try who would be first to name the building with a bottle of rum, while the steadiest head drove the pegs to fix the trusses to the pole. Followed the great feast at noon out of the baking ovens of the town, which made a carnival of the day.
The interior of the meetinghouse took more years. Wood finishers made by hand all the mouldings and fluted pillars, and carved the capitals and every dentil or corbel with round chisel and hand planes. Work would stop for a time to raise money for more materials. It has been noted that the pews were auctioned off before they were built. The hardware probably came from Tamworth Iron Works. No outside paint was thought necessary on early buildings; no painter figures on any early payrolls. Inside stains made in the home kitchen often preserved interior woodwork. Larkin Mason, South Tam- worth's distinguished citizen, writing reminiscences for an ad-
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dress in '88, says: "The [meeting] house then [1816] had a very high roof. It was lathed inside, but no lime had as yet been applied. It was filled above and below with square pews, two seats in each pew. Some of the pews had three seats. There were no arrangements for heating except the foot-stoves of the women." He goes on to say of Parson Hidden:
At half-past ten o'clock A.M., the minister came in, conduct- ing a small aged lady, who I learned was his mother. He conducted her to a pew immediately near the pulpit, and taking leave of her he bowed as though he was to be long absent from her. He walked up the pulpit stairs followed by Colonel David Gilman, who always sat in the pulpit on account of deafness. There was a box in front of the pulpit to which was attached the communion table, and in the box sat Deacon Jacob Eastman. When prayer was an- nounced every person in the house, not excused for disa- bility, rose. To have failed to do so would have been a breach of the rule and might have called out the tithing- man. The pews were square pens, with plain board seats on three sides, so that a part of the congregation sat with their backs to the minister. The seats were hinged so as to turn up and give people a chance to lean back while they stood during prayer. This was rather necessary as Par- son Hidden made very long prayers. The congregation got so tired that at the word Amen the seats went down with such a rattle as made the old building tremble.
This was written in 1913 by an old man who remembered it from boyhood. "After the service the minister came down and walked the entire length of the broad aisle, bowing right and left at every pew, leaving no one unnoticed."
The immense vitality of this church and the saturation of the people in its fervid doctrines is something that a different day has trouble grasping. During revivals "prayer meetings were held in different parts of the town, and wherever two or three met, there was a prayer meeting." A parishioner found the pastor praying on his knees in the woods and sociably joined him for an hour. "The people came from all parts of
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the town through the woods in deep snows, on sleds drawn by oxen, every Sabbath. The snow was often so deep that the paths were impassable for horses. Mr. Hidden preached with great zeal; often every day in the week." Tears of gladness were recorded as flowing copiously from everybody. Tears of gladness wholesale are a rare sight nowadays. Mr. Hidden preaching in tears reduced the congregation to the same state: "There was not a man, woman or child who was not affected to tears," he himself writes of the first Communion Service. "The fountains of our souls were broken up," said another.
It must be remembered that the belief of the day was in a hell that eagerly awaited all souls unless they took constant measures to be saved from their natural fate. Every Christian must deal with his "sense of sin." Said Samuel Hidden to one of his deacons: "Sir, what is to be done? Here are hundreds in this town going to hell if not saved soon !" And soon, reads the record, a mighty wave of salvation duly rolled over the town. This revival lasted continuously for some months. "Whole nights were spent in supplication and singing praises to God. They went from house to house, telling what God had done for their souls." Conway, Eaton, Ossipee, Moulton- borough, and Sandwich joined extensively. "This revival was characterized by great depth of feeling without any unnatural excitement. The people were calm and resolved," a bystander said. The total for that occasion came to three hundred con- versions, two hundred of which were in this one church. Mr. Hidden scarcely felt the need of food or rest. But he writes : "Amidst all these labors I think I am growing fleshy. It does me good to preach." And again, "The Christian warfare is delightful!" It must have been exhilarating to find himself so contagious. There was no limit to eloquence save that of rhetorical invention: "We shall then be clothed in garments washed in Jesus' blood. We shall tune our harps of gold-we are clothed with rags, but there the richest crowns and gar- ments of pure white are laid up for us. We shall drink of the stream that flows fast by the throne," etc. The phenomenon
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of a revival was reported to have changed the aspect of the whole town. "The morals were improved." Industry was en- couraged, education advanced, and the Devil temporarily disarmed.
The Devil was a constant presence to these otherwise hardheaded Christians. He was a convenient scapegoat, and many stories relate his activities. On the road beyond the farthest settlement north above Dr. Putnam's is a rock with the imprint of his talons, where he stood and called one night to the citizen who lived just below by the stream. In the morn- ing the house was found just as the occupant left it on being summoned, never to be heard from again. Such a fate appar- ently awaited anyone who lent an ear to the Prince of Dark- ness. If in doubt one could visit the rock and be convinced.
The remarkable state of grace continued for some years before there was any lapse. Then Mr. Hidden wrote a com- plaint that his salary was not being paid, that he was often in need of food. This was serious, for the town constable would receive definite instructions from the State of New Hampshire for the tax levy like this: "Agreement for the purpose of pay- ing Mr. Saml Hidden his Sallery the present year which you are to collect and pay unto the Selectmen on or before the last day of February next, amounting in the whole unto 168 dollars and 50 cents," etc. Aside from "sallery," prayer meetings were also being neglected. In fact, "Many ceased to tread Zion's courts." Mr. Hidden was away for two months on a missionary tour among the Indians, but on his return he began at once upon another revival. He set up the fear that God's spirit might forsake the town for good. So when he called "Come, Sinner, are you ready to repent?" sinners came, and a lively interest in religion was recovered. Then came the impact of the "spotted fever" in 1813 with its enormous number of quick fatalities. The spotted fever was followed by the "cold years" of 1815, 1816, and 1817, when famine visited all the towns, and the Tamworth selectmen had to get corn from a distance and dole it out to the most needy. During these scourges the
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church suffered, so that by 1822 it was time for another revival. There was another in 1827, and a third in 1829 caused thirty or forty more converts to join the church. "Never did they wrestle harder at the throne of grace than at this time." In 1831 there was what was known as a "protracted meeting," at which "the people crowded the meetings and not less than fifty were the subject of hope." The historian re- marks ingenuously: "His church was a church of revivals. We doubt if any other enjoyed more in the same period of time." At this point five hundred converts testified, in addition to hundreds who joined up in surrounding towns where they had as yet no minister. Hidden rode from town to town, preaching in houses or barns, and founding churches which he would then ultimately see settled with a minister of their own. The churches in Ossipee, in Sandwich Center, and in North Sandwich were all begun by him.
It was a staggering quantity of preaching: three sermons per Sunday must have made about 11,700 in all, then add six or seven hundred more for funerals and one thousand marriages with a short lecture "to set up house-keeping with." In one of these talks he said, "When God took the woman from the man he did not take her from his feet to be trampled on by him; he did not take her from his head to rule over him; but from nearest his heart, to be loved by him; from his side, to stand by him, his equal."
But besides all the speaking, Samuel Hidden led a cam- paign against illiteracy, and himself held classes to prepare the teachers needed for schools. Quoting again from Larkin Mason :
The cause of education received more assistance from his personal efforts than from any other person I ever knew or read of. Every school was visited by him frequently (mostly without remuneration) ; every scholar encouraged and stimulated by his visits. I have never met a person who could educate people as rapidly as he could. It might be a child, or it might be a person advanced in years, he knew
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exactly what to say to them. This extraordinary gift of teaching was not confined to literary teaching; as a teacher of sacred music he could make everything so plain on the blackboard that none could fail to understand, but he dis- played his great gift as a teacher best when pursuing his sacred calling. He could explain to the whole assembly, young and old, saint or sinner, how God could be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus, and no other minister I ever knew could make this point so plain. In his Sabbath-school his custom was to read a few verses and have the school ask questions on the lesson for him to an- swer; and the more questions he could raise, the better he liked it, as it indicated study ... I remember some seventy years ago Tristram Mason [Larkin's uncle] taught the school in the old district No. 2 with about eighty scholars. He was somewhat of a military man, and used to occasionally form the school into lines. One day a scholar came in and told the teacher Mr. Hidden was coming. We were ordered out and formed into two lines in front of the schoolhouse. A young man acted as orderly, and held Mr. Hidden's horse while he passed between the lines, bowing right and left. The school closed up around him, and in his smiling, lov- ing way he gave us good advice. A visit from George Wash- ington would not have cheered us more.
Praise by his pupils is boundless. He prepared students for college, for law school, and for medicine. Some would come as much as sixty miles to study with him. Even a "female," Mehitabel Beede, would ride her horse ten miles from Sandwich to recite Virgil to him, and before she was fifteen she had memorized for him the whole of Paradise Lost. He was President of the Trustees of Fryeburg Academy.
In his church he "raised the tune" with a tuning fork, standing in the pulpit, for he never sat from one end of the service to the other. His performance on the bass viol was excellent. He was Chaplain to the 19th Regiment of Militia for thirty years, and used to pray in the middle of a hollow square, with the soldiers around him responding enthusiasti-
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cally. "His people confided in him because they were per- suaded he knew what was for their interest." They were never, at any rate, left in doubt as to his opinions. He was said to express himself always in strong language, with bold figures and striking metaphors. Some of the figures are too bold to be quite appreciated today: "The Spirit is knocking at the door of your heart, saying, 'Open to me: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.'" And he would always let the children ride his horse. The cause of Temperance had been agitated but a few years before his death. The moment there was dawn on that subject, he had become zealous for full Prohibition.
Born into any environment this man would have been a distinguished figure. Accident located him in a remote outpost of the New England wilderness, in strenuous and Puritanical times. He had all the stimulation of being first in his field, able to formulate things his way. His power probably lay more in his personality, truly unselfish, kind and forceful, than in the theology which he had to keep oxygenated by revivals. Always such a man has more effect than the doctrines he repre- sents. But there is no doubt that the beliefs which pressed the forefathers to these lands in the first place, vigorously upheld and preached throughout all the formative years of our north- ern states, created the bases of expected behavior in this coun- try, and steered it toward whatever soundness it possesses.
When the hundredth anniversary of Hidden's ordination on the Rock was celebrated, there was strong reason for emo- tional appeal. Two hundred and fifty people assembled about the Rock provided with a canvas roof, scaffolding for visiting speakers, and box seats. The town had voted eight hundred dollars for this. A chorus sang the Ordination Rock poem that had been written by a descendant and set to music. The only surviving ex-President of the country, Grover Cleveland, was present. The orator of the day was Mr. J. Sumner Run- nells of Chicago, born in Tamworth. And after him the venerable son of Samuel Hidden, ninety-four-year-old William
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P. Hidden, stood up on the platform with his little great- grandson Samuel the younger, who lived to be ninety-one himself, to great applause. Illumination and fireworks!
In the general jubilation let us quote one stanza of the poem of the occasion.
Old rock, old rock, from thy mountain throne In the silent air, in the upper zone, Of the ancient flood didst thou feel the shock, As it hurled thee hither? Old rock, old rock, Is that thy brother on Plymouth shore, Forever still, though the mad waves roar, As thou art still when the thunders knock At thy granite sides, old rock, old rock?
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THAT ELDER HISTORIAN Belknap, whose History of New Hampshire ends with the year 1791, in his closing remarks urged the educational value of "social libraries." This seems to have been the name for the first type of library, formed by an association of members buying individual shares and pro- mising to keep the use of books to themselves. There were no public libraries in the modern sense until 1849 when New Hampshire passed an act granting towns opportunity to es- tablish "free public libraries," leading the entire country in this innovation.
Samuel Hidden must have read Belknap and taken the admonition to heart, for the Social Library that he founded was one of the first three in the entire state: Dover's in 1792, Portsmouth's and Tamworth's both in 1796. We may well pause over the honor this conferred on Tamworth. Portsmouth and Dover had had a hundred years start of this village, and were cities at this time while Tamworth was far north wilder- ness. Had it not been put forward by so farsighted a man as Samuel Hidden, such an alien idea as a circulating library would never have had a foothold. Most villages waited some part of another century for their libraries.
By a great stroke of luck when this present history of Tamworth was in preparation the modern Tamworth Library received as a gift from Mr. Cornelius Weygandt, writer on Sandwich antiquities, and since dead, Samuel Hidden's own daybook of the original library, which he kept for thirty-nine years from its founding in 1796 until the time when a less cumbersome arrangement for lending books was legally en- dorsed.
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For this library record-book the Reverend Samuel used one of the long narrow blank books intended for barter accounts. He proudly starts it in his own regular hand with "Form of an Agreement," and a long constitution annexed thereto, as settled on January 4, 1796. The rules cover seven closely written pages and wind up with the names of nineteen town patriarchs who were to have this remarkable privilege of reading (including Orlando and "Henery" Weed and Asa Crosby, all from outside Tamworth), another seventeen sig- natures being added soon after. These clearly represent the upper stratum of the community. Eight Gilmans were among them, George Dodge, Dr. Boyden, Samuel Hidden himself and his son William the deacon, Timothy Medar, Jacob Blaisdell, John M. Page, all the leaders of opinion. The delight of these pioneers, getting together by pine torch or tallow dip in the depth of their wilderness winter, to elaborate rules for that unprecedented pastime the reading of books, arises eloquently out of these bylaws. Every detail of the awesome subject is warily considered, every nut and bolt tightened. For instance, the shares to be bought could not be owned by two people in common. No, this library was for serious readers only. Each man - they could have been only the well-to-do - must give up important money, three dollars, to enter the sacred group. They spoke of "forever," they said "posterity." They bound themselves to further moneys if necessary; meetings had to be posted two weeks in advance, and in neighboring towns as well as Tamworth. The clerk was to be "swor'd" in, in a book kept for the purpose; the librarian (Mr. Hidden himself) to keep a fair catalogue "alphabettically" arranged, with prices; to enter title, name of person, time of delivery, and return, in a ledger for that purpose (our book is it), and to note damages and assess fines, to obligate himself under hand and seal to follow the rules, although the committee above him is to "judge of and finally determine the abuse of books." Specially popular books were to be taken out "according to Lott" and no member could have more than two "vollums" at once, and
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"of the largest size but one." Every book to be back on the shelves before Annual Meeting, or penalty incurred, and no one to lend a book out of his house to any person whatever, and if one "looses a book out of a Sett" he must pay for the remainder of the set. Among the fire-breathing threats, if any "sell or embezle any of said Books, he shall be liable to an Action for full damages." Upon dying a member may assign his right to "whoom he pleases," with a careful stipulation about the division among heirs.
A book was thus a treasure, not to be breathed upon lightly. A whole collection of these jewels, running to 150 at first, later to 600, was locked away in the fast keeping of the most trusted man of the town, who was voted by Town Meet- ing the use of a closet under the church stairs for the purpose. Costs of maintenance were heavy:
Pd. Rollins for shortening the book case draws and making the lower part of case narrower .17
Pd. Capt. B. Gilman for 2 sheepskins .42 Pd. Wm. Hidden for a sheepskin .25
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