USA > Vermont > Windham County > Rockingham > History of the town of Rockingham, Vermont, including the villages of Bellows Falls, Saxtons River, Rockingham, Cambridgeport and Bartonsville, 1907-1957 with family genealogies > Part 38
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FREEMAN TILDEN: AUTHOR. Although not a native of Rockingham, Freeman Tilden lived in Bellows Falls and worked for the Vermont Farm Machine Company for a number of years, being editor of the Dairy Bulletin published by that company. While there he met and married Mable Martin, a fellow employee and later became a contributor to the Saturday Evening Post and many other magazines. He also did some work for the movies including The Garments of Truth. He became a successful magazine writer.
BLANCHE A. WEBB: HISTORIAN. Blanche Adaline Webb is a member of one of the old Rockingham families and still resides in her old home on Atkinson Street. She graduated from B.F.H.S. in 1897 and is a faithful member of Immanuel Episcopal Church being president of the Chancel Committee of the Altar Guild for many years besides other church offices. She has also been secretary and vice regent of the William French Chapter of the D.A.R. Always interested in writing and in the history of her town and church, she is best known for her
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book A History of Immanuel Church of Bellows Falls, published in 1953.
ROBERT C. WHITMAN: INVENTOR. Robert Whit- man, now a civilian engineer at Portsmouth Navy Yard, lives in Kittery, Maine. At the beginning of W. W. II he spear- headed the government's attempts to develop a snorkel, that device which enables submarines to submerge indefinitely. Selected by the Navy for one of its most important research jobs, Whitman attended the University of New Hampshire where an intensive course in air conditioning was arranged by Uncle Sam for a selected group of draftsmen and engineers work- ing on submarines at the Portsmouth, N. H. Naval Installation. It all became very secret as it was Whitman's job to invent a device similar to one which the Germans used on their submarines called a Snorkel which means a breathing device. By this means, no submarine would need to come to the surface to take on fresh air and recharge its batteries which had caused the loss of so many lives. It was an extremely hush-hush assignment and no one, not even Whitman's wife and family-he has three daughters-nor his fellow workers knew the important task on which he was engaged while he studied at Durham. He con- tinued with his evening courses at the school for four months then kept right on studying and working on plans for an Ameri- can Snorkel. Finally it was tried out on a submarine tied up at the navy yard dock. It went down the Piscataqua River to the sea with Whitman aboard. It worked but not perfectly so he perfected it. Some captured German Snorkel plans showed him that the American device was now far ahead of the enemy's. And finally his Snorkel allowed subs to stay under water for a month which the Germans could not do. After the war, the Civil Service gave him long due praise. He was born in Bellows Falls and is remembered for his activities in football, baseball and track. He graduated in 1914 and went to Mt. Hermon to prepare for the University of Vermont but went to New Hampshire instead. He found summer work at Ports- mouth Navy Yards and never returned to college. Quiet and unassuming, perhaps you could say about Bob Whitman that "a prophet is not without honor save in his own country."
DR. RICHARD G. WOOD: HISTORIAN. On Novem- ber 1, 1956, Dr. Richard Wood resigned from the staff of the National Archives in Washington, D. C., a position which he had held since 1942, to become the new director of the Vermont State Historical Society in Montpelier, following the death of Dr. Arthur Wallace Peach. Dr. Wood came to Bellows Falls as a child to live with relatives and graduated from B.F.H.S. in 1918. He was born on Patriot's Day, April 19, 1900 in Ran- dolph, N. H. and seemed predestined to a career in American history from the start. He specialized in history at Dartmouth, receiving his A.B. in 1922. After briefly teaching and working
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in a lumber camp, he took up the study of history at Harvard where he received his M.A. in 1924, continuing to teach and study there and received the Harvard Ph.D. for a History of Lumbering in Maine, 1820-1861. For two years he was a mem- ber of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and for seven years served as a member of the Historical Depart- ment of the University of Maine. In 1935 he joined the His- torical Records Survey of New Hampshire, his work including an inventory and check list of the towns, cities and counties of that state and a history, Town Government in New Hampshire. Between 1940 and 1942, he served as State Supervisor of all WPA research and records projects in New Hampshire. While with the National Archives in Washington, he was connected with the General Reference Section, Navy and Army Sections of the War Records Branch and Section Chief of Army Records. Since 1933 his historical scholarship has been widely recognized with a continuous record of scholarly publications in many learned and popular journals. He has been a member of the American Association for State and Local History since 1941; charter member of the Society of American Archivists and long a member of the Vermont State Historical Society. A quiet, unassuming man, he has the zeal of a scholar and the enthusiasm of a native returned home at last (Vermont History, January, 1957).
Other artists in Rockingham who do recognized work in- clude Lester Sheehan of Saxtons River who studied commercial art at Pratt Institute, who was born in Springfield and who has painted since he was fifteen years old; Stewart Eldridge who lives just over the line in Springfield on Parker Hill and who with his wife and four daughters, are all artists and Mrs. Mollie Bancroft of Bellows Falls.
In 1938, realizing that a number of local people were in- terested in the art of creative writing, a group was formed at the home of Lillian Stickney in Charlestown, N. H. It later met at the homes of its various members where unpublished manu- scripts were read and criticized, consisting mostly of poetry. Lacking an adviser to criticize constructively and because death and the difficulty of holding meetings had made serious inroads on the membership, this group was disbanded after a few years. Officers voted in at the first meeting were President, Lillian Stick- ney; Vice President, Nellie Richardson of Springfield; Secretary, Jessie Dowlin of Bellows Falls and Press, Frances Lovell of Bellows Falls. Other members included Mrs. Bertha Collins of Westminster, Mrs. Mary Nims Bolles and Dr. W. C. T. Adams of Bellows Falls. Of this group, all became published poets. Mrs. Collins is the author of the book of verse, Around my House, published in 1939 and Nellie Richardson has pub- lished a number of books of verse. Mrs. Stickney has, for many years, written a column for the Vermont Newspaper
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Corporation called Nature Notes. Miss Dowlin died in 1942 at the age of 53, well-known for her children's and adult poetry in many magazines and papers including the Christian Science Monitor, Driftwind, and Etude and was a constant contributor to The Vermonter, the state magazine for half a century.
Following is a list of residents of Rockingham of the past century who have achieved an unusual measure of success dur- ing their lifetime but have never been recorded as such in the annuals of the town:
1811. Jonathan Blanchard: president of Knox and Whea- ton Colleges, founder of The Christian Era, author, famous abolitionist.
1814. Royal Earl House: inventor of electrical devices, author, contractor.
1817. Warren Felt Evans: author of works on medical cures and publisher of similar magazines, an able fore-runner of the Christian Science faith.
1818. Horace Henry Baxter: adjutant general of Vermont 1860-1861, banker, president of the New York Central Railroad, builder of the New York Elevated Railway.
1818. George Sumner Weaver: author.
1829. Selim Hobart Peabody: president of the University of Illinois 1880-1891, author of numerous text books.
1835. Henry Franklin Severns: U. S. Judge of Circuit Court of Appeals 1900-1914, U. S. District Judge in Michigan 1886-1900.
1838. John Butler Smith: manufacturer, Governor of New Hampshire 1893-1895.
1842. Franklin George Butterfield: officer through the Civil War, chief examiner in the Bureau of Pensions.
1843. Amzi Lorenzo Barber: capitalist, founder and presi- dent of the Barber Asphalt Co. and the Trinidad Asphalt Co. 1853. Timothy Edward Byrnes: vice president of the New York, New Haven and Hartford and the Boston & Maine Railroads, president of the Montpelier & Wells River Railroad.
1873. Edward Eliott Richardson: professor of anatomy at George Washington University, leading clergyman in Washington, D. C.
1877. Phoebe E. Spaulding: author.
1879. Ray Osgood Hughes: educator, author of many books on civics and economics.
1882. Herbert Robbe Pierce: secretary of National Life Insurance Co.
(From VERMONTERS by Dorman B. E. Kent, 1937 in archives of Vermont Historical Society.)
THE MARJERY GREY LEGEND
For many years a legend has persisted in this locality con- cerning the tragedy of a young woman and her child, Marjery
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Grey of Rockingham who, lost in the woods for many weeks, ended up in Charlestown, N. H., her child having died and been buried by herself in the woods. This legend derived from the poem by Julia Dorr, at one time of Rutland, Vt. and which appeared under the title, "Marjery Grey, a Legend of Vermont" in her book POEMS, published by Lippincott's in 1872. This. tragic tale took great hold on the imaginations of people and has been accepted by fact by many. However, when L. S. Hayes wrote his HISTORY OF ROCKINGHAM, he queried Mrs. Dorr, who was then alive, concerning the authenticity of the story. Her letter to Mr. Hayes is as follows:
Brooklyn, March 31, 1904
Mr. L. S. Hayes: Dear Sir:
Yours of the 20th has been forwarded to me here. I know nothing whatever of the real history of "Marjery Grey." The poem was written for OUR YOUNG FOLKS, published in Boston and was printed, as well as I can remember, somewhere between 1865 and 1870. I did not even know that the inci- dent had anything to do with the town of Rockingham. The poem was founded on half a dozen lines that caught my eye in some newspaper, simply stating the fact that a woman of the pioneers, being lost in the woods and unable to cross the Con- necticut River, had wandered northward around its source and came down on the other side. The paragraph appealed to my imagination and the verses were written. I cannot remember if the dead baby was or was not, a creation of my own fancy.
This is positively all I know of the matter. To tell the truth, I was always inclined to regard the story in somewhat the nature of a myth.
Very cordially yours, Julia C. R. Dorr
But many people have accepted the tale at its face value and in a newspaper article, found in an old scrapbook and with- out doubt the same on which gave Mrs. Dorr her inspiration as it antedates her poem by some ten years, one Julia Gile presented a vivid account of the same story and added that "This singular legend has descended to the writer from an ancestor of hers who was the third child born in the town of Rockingham, Vt. and is an undoubted fact." While the article was dateless, the accompanying remark places it between the years of 1861 and 1865. "Woman Lost!" What telegram in these exciting days of battle ever fell more thrillingly on human nerves than these words, going from mouth to mouth among the home nests of the new country!" Perhaps, however, the words "mouth to mouth" may explain a great deal for what tale has not been enlarged and embellished in the re-telling! Long interested in tracking this strange tale to its source and knowing intimately the north woods around the Connecti-
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cut and their imperviousness to travel even today, Mrs. Mary Nims Bolles of Bellows Falls did extensive research on the sub- ject and presented a paper on it to the Vermont Historical Society of which this account is a digest. Mrs. Bolles, incredu- lous of the wandering Marjery Grey around the entire Connecti- cut and back again on the other side, made a comprehensive search of old records and histories. The "third white child born in the new township of Rockingham" (Hayes History) was found to be Edward Richards who was born October 4, 1763, who married and moved to Charlestown, N. H. and died in Perry, N. Y., aged nearly 90. This family was among the earliest in town and prominent in its affairs but evidently left early, with none of the family remaining as they are not men- tioned again although there were many descendants. And in neither Rockingham nor Charlestown is there a record of such a happening as occured to the unfortunate Marjery Grey. However, the Walpole History seems to have what may be the original occurrence, changed and twisted as it passed from mouth to mouth, from year to year. It tells of a Mrs. Prechard who was lost in the woods "and subsisted, like beasts, on berries and bark of trees for twenty-one days." Evidently frightened during a thunder storm, alone in her cabin, the young mother took her two-year-old child and started through the woods to stay with a neighbor. On the trail, marked only by blazed trees, she came upon a large snake and took a wide berth around it into the woods. She never found the trail again. It was three weeks later that she was discovered at the mouth of Cold River, naked and half demented. The account does not say but had she actually traveled around the source of this small river, now Crescent Lake in Acworth, N. H. she would have been on the north bank. Perhaps Rockingham men, as neigh- bors always will in an emergency, crossed the Connecticut to help in the search. Perhaps Charles Edwards, father of Edward, may have been with them and carried the tale home to his town and family. Adding what probably happened to what is known DID happen, Mrs. Bolles feels that the whole episode may easily have concerned this woman from the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut, who wandered around Cold River, which river eventually, in the long telling over the years, became the Connecticut; three weeks became three months and so was born the legend. The original tale was recorded by Helen Hartness Flanders and George Brown in Mrs. Flanders' book, VERMONT FOLK SONGS AND BALLADS, Stephen Daye Press, Brattle- boro, 1931, as sung by Mr. Orlon Merrill of Charlestown, formerly of Pittsburg, N. H. Mr. George Abbott, a blind singer, learned the tune but not the full text from Mrs. Bern Watts also of Pittsburg. Latter Mr. Abbott learned all the words from Miss Alice Woods of Beecher Falls, Vt. As a boy of eight, Mr. Merrill persisted in memorizing the unusual words until,
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after those many years, they stayed with him. The ballad appeared in The Northern Gazette about one hundred years after the event is supposed to have happened. In later life Mr. Merrill lived around the Connecticut Lakes as trapper, guide, lumberman and carpenter. The words describing the wander- ing woman came poignantly to him who occasionally himself missed the blazed trail in the woods and had thrown a stick in a stream to determine its direction. Mrs. Bolles suggests that probably Mr. Merrill came down the Connecticut to Charles- town with the logs in the spring in the great annual log drives on the river.
But since women were seldom called "pioneers" during the Civil War, the source of it all may very well be in a story in an old Springfield Reporter of 1886 and discovered by a Chester man recently. This claims the woman was lost in 1766, from her long cabin situated near the Springfield-Rockingham line, once known as the John Fairbanks farm and now the Robert Jones home on the Connecticut. The woman, name unkown (and probably supplied by Mrs. Dorr) went visiting, carrying her linen yarn in her apron and her baby on her arm. Her husband, hoeing his April wheat among the stumps of the cleared-off forest, was to meet her on the trail before dark when his work was done. He and his neighbor, whose house she had already left when he arrived, spent all night hunting and shouting forher." With iron muscles and determination the warm-hearted settlers turned out," building fires, blowing horns and shouting. After many days they had to give up the search. The story goes that the woman paid more heed to her child than to the axe marks on the trees and became lost as darkness came on. She heard the horns and shouting but they were always gone when she struggled toward them, only the dead embers of their fires remained. She could not feed her baby which died and she carried it day after day until forced to bury it beneath an uprooted tree. She walked all through the summer days, sub- sisting on berries and bark, her clothes in tatters. Each time that she came to a large stream, she walked to its source until she could wade across. In this manner the tale assures us that she crossed many tributaries of the Connecticut. In an idiotic state, she appeared in Charlestown one October day, naked, emaciated and still insisting that she had never crossed any river. Did she, indeed, follow the Connecticut into Canada and down the New Hampshire side? You may believe what you will but doubtless this woman, like many others, was lost in the wilderness of those pioneer days. It is an interesting legend which will doubtless never be solved.
CHAPTER XIV
AGRICULTURE
The agricultural picture for Rockingham over the past 50 years, with its ups and downs, its changes and vicissitudes, is also a picture of Vermont as a whole so that this chapter on Ver- mont farming may be taken as largely representative of our own town. Vermont's farm life has undergone a greater change in this last half century than in any other phase of its existence. And this change, in spite of inflation and other economic pressures, has been, says Senator Aiken, for the better, socially and eco- nomically. While Vermont stood in the foreground, agricul- turally, 50 years ago, few farmers were what might be called prosperous. In 1924 a quarter of the farms in America were said to be bankrupt. Few had money in the bank or sent their children to college. Most of them had mortgages on their farms and never quite caught up with their local bills. Their children worked their way through college-not, however, a bad idea at any time. Most farms were small, one-family affairs. The exception was the large family employing a lot of help. A farmer expected his growing family to take care of the farm chores, year in and year out. To some of them, this became an accepted way of life and they stayed on, either on the home farm or another like it, nearby. Others rebelled at the long hours, the grueling labor and shook the dust of the farm from their feet as soon as possible, changing the milk pail for a factory machine. Today such youth groups as the 4-H Clubs and Green Pastures are persuading farm children that "theirs is the life." In 1790, 94.1% of people lived in rural areas; in 1890, it was 64.95%; in 1950, only 41.0%. (Hammond's Pictorial Atlas, 1954.)
Once there was no such thing as an eight-hour day. Farmers toiled from before sun-up to late at night if there was hay out or a sick calf or if there was ploughing to be finished. No one punched a clock. Some farmers saved their evening chores until after supper so there would be a good ten hours in which to get the work done. Some "worked out" so that taxes, at least, would be paid, a sacred obligation. A man's wife might lack a washing machine and his children clothes but the taxes were always paid on time. Today many small farmers carry a double duty job with both farm and factory work. Most farms had small dairies, family affairs, with from one or two to ten or twelve COWS. They had their own herd sire or used a neighbor's. To-
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day artificial insemination, using a blooded bull, is practiced by many farmers, eliminating the need to keep a herd sire and insuring blooded offspring. The creamery was not. a place where farmers sent their whole milk; the creamery made butter and only when the big 40-quart can was full, maybe once a week, did the farmer hitch up and take his cream to town. Before the advent of the local co-operative creamery, many farmers sent their cream to Amherst or Springfield, Mass. or to West- minster Vt. Senator Aiken has said that it was always a nine day's wonder to him how good butter could be made from "such terribly rancid" cream but the fact was that Vermont creamery butter sold in Boston stores at five cents a pound above the market price. Oleomargarine was made in the United States as early as 1879 with sixteen factories producing it that year but thirteen of them closed down because of the low price of butter! For years the oleo war was carried on in. Ver- mont with users having to color their own, a messy process which infuriated the housewife. Farmers fought the bill until 1952 when the legislature passed it, allowing oleo to be sold, colored yellow, in the state. It had been easy for many Vermonters to purchase it, along with other commodities, in surrounding states.
Every farm had its laying hens years ago and the egg and farm made butter money belonged to the farmer's wife, her "pin money" which she seldon squandered on pins. It meant a new hat or shoes for the baby or drapes for the front room. Turkeys were another matter as they wandered far and wide and fell prey to foxes if they were lucky enough to grow up which was problematical as turkeys are as delicate as babies about getting their feet wet and catching cold. But they are not very smart and one Rockingham woman kept her flock of White Hollands out of the road by the simple expedient of setting a stuffed fox in front of the house. Every farm, too, had a few fruit trees; extra apples, pears, plums or peaches went to market along with the berries and a few surplus vegetables. Apples were shipped in empty flour barrels and grading was an uncertain affair. Sometimes these barrels of Bottled Greenings, Blue Pearmains, Sheep Noses, Pound Sweets, Baldwins and Russets, maybe all in one barrel and mostly species unknown today, brought only a dollar or two to the farmer. Senator Aiken remembers that a neighbor of his used to sell his apples labeled "One hole, No. 1; Two holes, No. 2," depending on the number of worm holes in the fruit. Not until 1910 did farmers begin to spray and those who did, scooped the marked with their slogan of apples "being safe to eat in the dark." In 1915 a meeting was held in Montpelier to consider an apple grading bill which eventually led to the law in force today. But no longer does a man have a few fruit trees in his back yard. Too many bugs and diseases have appeared over the years to make
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it worth while and we leave them to the big orchardists with their expensive equipment for spraying. Even the gardens are hot beds of pests today unknown to our grandfathers. Mexican beetles are newcomers and the Japanese beetle arrived in New Jersey in 1916-but didn't remain there long.
More families produced their own food and living than today. They canned and jellied and dried. Today they buy store-canned and frozen foods. There were no electric refrigera- tors and if a family had an icebox, they cut their own ice in the winter on the pond or river and stacked it in the icehouse in sawdust from the woodpile. They did their own butchering or had the neighborhood butcher, who was busier for a few weeks than the community dressmaker, arrive after the first hard freeze in November, to kill and cut up a pig, veal or a whole beef. The meat was stashed away in the icehouse, too, where it remained frozen until the first warm days in March when the housewife had to start canning fast. Lard was made in the farm kitchen, cut up on the big table as well as salt pork; bacon and hams which were cured in the smokehouse over a corncob smudge. Sausage was often stirred up in the bread mixer and stuffed into long tubes stitched up from old bed sheets and stacked in the shed like cordwood. Farms didn't need a deep- freeze; almost any unoccupied room would do in the winter. Bedrooms were unheated and every child carried a hot freestone to bed with him. The kitchen was the living room with its iron or soapstone sink, its kerosene lamps and the great black stove which, together with chunk stoves and base burners in the seldom used front room, consumed vast quantities of split wood. Today 90% of all farms have electric power with all its accessories. While some farm work let up during the winter months, there was always work in the woods on fine days, with horse and sled as the next year's supply of wood must be gotten up, drawn home in four-foot lengths ready for the gasoline saw which replaced horses and oxen for power. Many, like the Lewis Lovell farm, once used a dog on the turn table to do the churning and sheep were often used. While you hear some- one remark that "we never had all these diseases of men and animals fifty years ago," Senator Aiken insists that we did and with none of the modern medicines and facilities for curing them which accounts for so many youthful graves in old cemeteries.
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