USA > Vermont > Orange County > Bradford > Stories of old Bradford > Part 13
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for days. Finally the hungry men decided that something must be done about it. 'She just leaves that pie uncut because she knows that until she cuts it no one will eat any of it. She is so lazy and so stingy that she is trying to save herself the expense and trouble of making another pie. We must teach her a lesson!' said one of the hired men.
"Next day when the same uncut pie circled the table, Mr. Wilson suddenly grabbed and ate the whole pie. No one said anything. His hostss gasped with astonishment. After that, she cut her pies before serving them."
"Grandfather," reproved Grandmother coming in from shopping, "You don't mean to say you've been telling those terrible stories of yours all this time! You'll have that child's head stuffed so full of nonsense, there won't be any more room left for the teacher to put his arithmetic in !"
"You tell us some stories then, Grandma," begged Patsy.
"Well, speaking of interesting people," said Grandma, "my mother used to tell about a nice old man whom the children used to call Father Rogers.' This Captain Rogers was much against slavery and fought in the Civil War. He drew the stone in his stone drag to build the stone house on the South Goshen Road which is now Postmaster Allen's house. Mrs. Fred Doe remembers him. She said all the children knew when 'Father Rogers' was coming because he urged his horse on by shouting, 'Hip, hip! Conataway!' The old horse seemed to understand what his master meant, and the' children went about shouting, 'Hip! Hip! Conataway!' at each other.
Henniker Winship also used to draw stone from the Saddle- back Road in his dumpcart. Another person who helped draw stone was Mrs. Fred Doe's older brother Arthur. Arthur was only eleven years old and so small that he had to stand on a stone or a box to drive 'Hen's' span of horses. Arthur drew all the stones which were used to build the retaining wall be- hind where the Stevens Block now stands. In those days, ac- cording to Mrs. Doe, instead of Bradford Academy trying to find places in the village to board out-of-town boys, as it does now, the village boys were put onto farms to work for their board while they attended school. But one day when 'Hen',
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himself, was driving his team instead of Arthur, his horse got away and went, sleigh and all, up the railroad track to South Newbury running over two dangerous wooden over-passes, one of which was double, on his way.
"Another story that I used to hear my mother tell," con- tinued Grandmother, "was about Captain Rogers' son, Will Rogers. Will went to school with Admiral Clark. One time, ac- cording to the story, Admiral Clark, then just plain Charles Clark, met Will Rogers on the street. Boy-fashion, he asked, "Where are you going Will?"
'I'm taking the cow to pasture,' the other boy answered.
'The cow? I don't see any cow. Where is she?' asked his friend.
'Wal now, if that ain't jes' like me,' gasped Will. 'Darned if I didn't plumb forgit the cow!'
"That reminds me," put in Grandfather, "of a story I heard once about Mr. Fred Doe when he was a little shaver.
"Where Dr. Munson now has his office, there used to stand a hotel known as 'The Vermont House.' This hotel burn- ed so long ago that only two or three people now living can even remember it. One day Father Doe went to the hotel to see the owner on business. He took his little son Fred with him. They were gone a long time, and when they returned home little Fred was hungry.
'Mama,' he said, 'Papa and the other man were offered luncheon out of a tumbler, but they didn't offer me any' !"
"My," said Mother, coming in to draw the shades, "There's a terrible wind tonight! I hope we are not going to have another hurricane."
"Why do you always say 'another' hurricane?" asked Patsy.
"Because we had a hurricane in 1937," answered mother. "It blew down so many big elms and maples that next morn- ing, all the way up and down the street, men had to cut their way through with axes. One family became so frightened that
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they sought shelter with neighbors. Hardly had they arrived when a piece of their roof followed them over and lodged on the roof of the house where they had fled for safety !"
"The hurricane of 1937 was just 125 years after Bradford's first hurricane," mused Grandfather. "Before that first hurri- cane my father said that there was quite a little settlement out in Brushwood. I remember noticing the cellar holes when I used to ride out that road with your great-grandfather.
"But speaking of funny characters, not the least was one who lived in Bradford in more recent times. This was a ten- year-old parrot named Freddy that was owned by Mrs. Albert Bailey's Aunt Min who used to live in the house where the Baileys now live. A man named Mr. Bert Hooker, who then lived in Dr. Hooker's house, wanted to buy the bank between his house and the Welton house so that he could cut down the trees and bushes and have a better view. Aunt Min didn't want to sell this land so she put a price so high on it that she thought Mr. Hooker wouldn't pay it. One day soon after that, Mr. Hooker was walking down the street past Aunt Min's house. Suddenly he was much startled to hear a hoarse voice call after him 'Goldarn you, Hooker! Goldarn you, Hooker !' Very angry that any one should speak so disrespectfully to him, he turned to see who it was and discovered Aunt Min's parrot in its cage in the open window.
"Another time this same parrot caused a great commotion by getting away and flying down onto the meadow. Nearly the whole town turned out and went down onto the meadow to help capture the parrot.
Race Track At Old Fair Grounds
FUN IN GREAT GRANDFATHER'S DAY
Junior walked crossly to the window and looked out sulki- ly at the snowy street. He barely returned Great Grandfather's cheery greeting.
"What's wrong?" the old gentleman asked kindly. "Some- thing go wrong at school today?"
Junior glanced at Grandfather's snowy hair. "No," he answered briefly.
"Don't want to tell your gran'pop about it?" the old gentleman waited.
Junior looked at Grandfather with a question in his mind. He'd been told many times that he must never try to wheedle money out of Grandfather, but, after all, if Grandfather wanted to know ---
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He sighed. "There's a swell western on tonight, but Mom won't give me fifty cents. She says I been going too much, any- how. And I'm broke. All the other guys are going."
"Cost fifty cents, does it? That's a lot of money !"
"No. Movies doesn't cost that much, but the kids all buy pop." He waited hopefully.
"Hum! And so you think your mother is stingy and just plain mean, eh?"
"Well, gosh, when all the other guys-"
"You go quite a bit for a young fellow in the sixth grade, don't you? Movies, basketball games, school dance, parties, skating, skiing-Could be Mom's right about your getting more rest. Not that I'm saying she is right, understand. Just trying to show you how your ma feels, even though she could be wrong, of course." He chuckled. "I mind me the time your Ma was going to high school. She was going pretty steady with your dad. Your Grandma and I decided she was going too much, so we called a halt and kept her home awhile. Mad as blazes she was. Reckon she felt 'most as abused as you do now."
Junior scowled. He wasn't very interested in mom's long ago problems. His trouble was right now.
"My dad, now, was stricter still about us young folks going out," the old man continued. "Course we didn't have such things as movies in my day."
"What did you do for excitement, Grandad? Didn't you have any fun at all?" Junior asked.
Grandfather chuckled. "Yes, I reckon we had plenty of fun, but it was a different kind of fun. That was back in the horse and buggy days before cars were invented, you know. One thing we boys got a lot of laughs out of were the revival meetings."
"What were revival meetings?" asked Patsy, Junior's little sister, who had just entered the room.
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"Well, certain people used to feel called upon in those days to go around from town to town and hold exciting reli- gious meetings so's to sort of wake folks up to their church duties. Some of these fellows were all right. There were a couple of them named Moody and Sankey whom most folks were pleased to see coming and took into their homes. Then there were others who tried to imitate them that seemed funny, leastwise to us boys. There were a couple of Bradford men who felt called upon to imitate Moody and Sankey. One of these was named Loud. Guess his wife didn't like to do washing very well because there was a story told of him that one time his companion was waiting for him to get dressed to go to a meeting. Suddenly Loud called down the stairs and asked his wife which shirt was his clean shirt !
"Mrs. Loud was well named for she had a very loud voice. Well, Loud would get up in his none-too-clean shirt and tell us to repent of our sins or we would all go to the bad place. He'd ask all those who repented to get up and say so. Then Mrs. Loud would lead the singing. She kept singing off key and shouting 'Glory to God. Amen.' and 'Halleluiah!' in between the hymns. Sometimes the people would start off singing one hymn and get so off the tune they'd end up sing- ing another !" Grandfather slapped his knee at the memory. "We boys thought it was what you young folks would call a riot !"
Junior's hearty laugh was interrupted by Grandmother. "Grandfather, you ought to be ashamed of yourself talking to Junior like this !"
She turned indignantly to Junior. "Those revival meetings were splendid things and were led by good and sincere people. Bradford would be a better place if it had more people like them today. I'm surprised at you, Grandfather !"
When Grandmother's shocked face had disappeared through the closing door, Grandfather's sheepish face relaxed into smiles. "Yes, your grandma always took those meetings very seriously. She never could see anything funny about
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them. They were a kind of a church to her. She says my friends and I were a disgrace to the town, sitting in the corner, snick- ering all evening. She says she never dreamed that some- day she would marry one of those terrible boys."
"How old were you then, Grandfather?"
"Oh, about twelve, I guess.
"Didn't you ever get put out for laughing?" Junior de- manded.
"No. We didn't make any noise, and we were mighty care- ful to keep our faces straight whenever Mr. Loud looked in our direction. Anyway, he and his friends were anxious to save our souls, and the older folks all seemed to think these meetings were good for us.
"One time one of those meetings happened to come on a night when there was awful good skating. We had a nice skating rink on John Norcross' field where he had damned up Roaring Brook to get water power to run his mill. There hadn't been any good skating before that winter, and we young folks were anxious to take advantage of it. Mr. Norcross suspected that we might cut the meeting to go skating, so he let the water out of his dam and flooded the field. We young folks didn't go skating that night, but neither did we attend the revival meet- ing."
"Another thing that gave us pleasure were the danc- ing bears. Shows were few and far between in those days, but every once in a while a fellow travelling from town to town would come along with a bear trained to do tricks. If he didn't have a harmonica, he would sing
"Daddy, daddy, dum, Daddy, daddy, dum, Daddy, daddy, dum, Daddy, daddy dum da day. Daddy, dum da day, Daddy, dum da day,
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and the bear would dance. Next day at school recess, we boys would imitate him. One boy would be the bear. we would tie a rope to him and he would dance while we sang, "Daddy, dad- dy, dum, da, day, etc !
"One time before the brick blocks were built in the Square along came a man with a dancing bear. A crowd immediately gathered.
The Dancing Bear Drinking Soda Pop
"In front of the old hardware store, which looked about as it does now except that it had an upstairs porch across the front and was painted a dingy brown, stood a big elm tree to which the owner of the store was accustomed to tie his horse. The man began to sing and the bear began to dance. Then someone in the crowd hired the man to make the bear climb the elm tree. When the bear went up the tree, horse, buggy, and everything disappeared! The horse's master was so mad that he rolled a barrell of horseshoes out into the piazza and pelted the bear until he got down.
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"We used to have fairs in the fall of the year. Some of the fair buildings stood up behind Peters barn on the Upper Plain. A race track circled the flat where the State Garage and the Food Bank now stand. There were sheds for animals in the center and a grandstand on the bank. There is a story told about a trained bear who was taken to one of these fairs. Mr. Horace Eastman and also Mrs. Albert Bailey's mother, Carrie Welton, witnessed this event.
"An Italian came to the fair with a big brown bear. The bear was also trained to wrestle. A tall, one-armed man named Charlie Robb, who wasn't afraid to try anything, agreed to wrestle with it. The bear hopped around nimbly for a time on the end of his rope. Then Charlie Robb put out his foot and tripped the bear, which fell onto its back. The bear got up, but it was mad at being treated so unfairly and refused to wrestle any more. There was a whaling big tree on the Peters' bank, overhanging the race-track. The bear climbed this tree. He had got just so far up when the one-armed man, who could reach higher than anyone else, reached up and cut the rope for a joke. Well, sir, that fairground was clear as a whistle of folks in about five minutes. The Italian sat at the foot of the tree all night cursing in Italian. In the morning he was still there."
"What did you do for fun in between the fairs and danc- ing bears?" asked Junior when he could stop laughing.
"Well one thing the children like to hear coming were the peddlers who went about from town to town and from door to door selling things. We didn't have a chance to see many folks from out of town in those days, you see. It was a treat when one of those fellows came along with his cart. He had a little bell to ring, but we children always heard the clang and rattle of his washtubs, pails, and tins a long way off. His cart was like a baker's cart with doors. In one corner near the back, he always carried a mess of brooms. He had everything to sell in that cart from stockings to needles and pins. Money was scarce in those days, so he usually took his pay in sheep pelts, skins, and old rags. He liked the colored rags kept separated from the white rags because he could sell the white ones for making paper. He paid two cents a pound for white rags which he kept in bags on top of his cart. :
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"There were other peddlers who came walking with packs strapped to their backs. When night came, a peddler would stay the night with anyone who was kind enough to take him in.
"When I was about ten years old, there was a peddler by the name of Warren Gove. In his younger days he had taught school. He carried a little trunk about twenty inches long and twelve inches wide with three trays inside. He would enter a house without rapping, sit down in the kitchen, and begin displaying his wares without a word. If no one wanted to buy anything, he would go out, still without saying a word.
"There was a spectacle merchant named Al Chase who came once a year to fit people's eyes. He carried a large num- ber of iron-bound 'specs.' If a person needed glasses, Al Chase would pretend to fit him by letting his patient try on every pair of spectacles in his case. The customer would then tell Al Chase which pair he could see the best in, and Al Chase would call it that he had fitted him to glasses! That was a common way to fit glasses in those days.
"From Piermont, travelling from door to door, came 'Snuf- fy'. We never knew his real name. He brought with him a half bushel of unslaked lime and some whitewash brushes. If one wished a ceiling whitened, Snuffy would start in and slake the lime. Then, while we children watched, fascinated, he would whiten a whole ceiling without ever spilling a drop.
"Then there was a watch tinker from West Newbury named Robert MacAllister. He called along at the farmhouses and cleaned clocks and repaired tinware. He stayed the night at the last farmhouse he reached before dark. But there was one farmhouse that he left after dark. He used to tell this story :
" 'I called at this farmhouse, and they asked me to re- pair a big grandfather clock. I wasn't used to that style and had no idea how to go about it. I got the works all out of the case and set to work. Suddenly the clip that held the main- spring gave way, letting the mainspring straighten. The works flew all over the floor ! I worked for some time. Hours passed. It grew dark. The kerosene lamp didn't give me much light. I
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had no idea what to do next or where to put the rest of the pieces. I was left alone in the room for a moment. Leaving the works on the floor, I shoved up the nearest window and stepped out into the dark.'
"I guess that grandfather clock never did get fixed." Grandfather," Junior asked, thinking of his team's recent vic- tory at baseball.
"What games did you used to play when you were a boy,
"We used to play a game called 'Cudgel' a lot," answered Grandfather. "One boy had to guard a stick on the goal. The rest of us tried with another stick to knock it off without be- ing tagged by the guard. Each one the guard succeeded in tag- ging had to go over to his side. Everytime anyone knocked the stick off the goal, all these tagged prisoners went free. The game continued until everyone was tagged."
Grandfather chuckled. "We were playing this game one day near a barnyard where geese were kept. A large board had been placed beneath the barnyard gate so that the geese couldn't get through. It had rained hard recently, and there was a deep hole full of mud and water and - well, that mud hole was rich, simply rich! A boy named Charlie Muzzey was running fast and didn't pick his feet up. The first thing we knew, he went wham bang through the barnyard board and stretched his length in the hole! When we boys could stop laughing, we pulled him out. Then we spent several hours try- ing to scrape off his clothes with chips to make him re- spectable enough to go home to his mother. My, that boy was a sight.
"We boys like to play with a lad called Billy Lightfoot. He was the first colored boy we had ever seen. Captain Preston Chamberlain, who later lived on the Cox farm, had brought Billy Lightfoot home with him when he returned from fighting in the Civil War. Billy stayed with him until he was twenty- one. He was given plenty of food and plenty of work. Once in a while Billy liked to earn a few cents by working extra at crad- ling wheat for Goshen farmers. Sometimes he would stay over- night at a farm, and then we Goshen boys would have a chance to play with him.
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"One evening when we were playing 'I Spy', we played a trick on him. While he was blinding, we went off to the Fulton orchard to get some sweet apples that were lying on the ground. When we returned, poor Billy was still blinding his eyes.
"One cold winter's evening, we were playing checkers. Suddenly we saw Billy's black face at the window. We asked him if he knew how to play. Billy wanted to get into the warm house so he said 'Yas Suh! Ah sho loves to play wid dem li'l checkers, ah does !' So we invited him in, but he had no notion at all what to do with the men on the checker board.
"When Billy Lightfoot grew up he went to work at a hotel in the White Mountains. Here he became sick and died.
"On Hallowe'en night, we boys liked to dress up in sheets like ghosts, with pumpkin jack-o'-lanterns pulled down over our faces for masks and go about the neighborhood trying to scare folks. Sometimes we tried to scare folks when it wasn't Hallowe'en and one time we really succeeded.
"In the old days there were several men by the name of John Wilson. To tell these Johns apart when speaking of them, people began to nickname them. One was called 'Apple John' because he made such good apple cider; another was called 'Pun'kin John'. Thias is how Pun'kin John received his name.
One dark night after nearly everyone had gone to bed, we dressed up in sheets and went to this particular John's house. We began to make noises such as we imagined ghosts would make, and one of the boys put his false head, which was a large pumpkin up to the bedroom window. The terrified John jump- ed out of bed and landed in the middle of the floor in a prayer- ful position.
'Pray, Abigail, pray,' he shouted to his wife. 'The Day of Judgment has come. Pray, Abigail, Pray !'
The story went the rounds by Goshen grapevine. Ever after that this particular John was known to everyone far and wide as 'Pun'kin John'.
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"When we went skating, we used to pass the Fulton place. Robert Fulton was in the habit of leaving his farm tools scattered all over his yard and sometimes even in the road. One night, for a joke, we thought we would take along some wheels we found sitting in the road. Mr. Fulton heard us take them and followed us angrily to our skating rink. He chased us all over the ice. We would let him almost catch us, then dodge out of his reach, and skim over the ice on our skates. There was quite a large hole burned in the ice from a recent bonfire. We would skate up to this hole as he followed close behind. Then we would leap and go flying through the air over the hole. We hoped he would fall into the hole. Finally he had enough of it. Then he tried something else. 'Boys!' said he, 'let's take the wheels back now and have some sweet cider and apples.' That suited us boys. When we got there he asked us to get the apples from the cellar. There were no cellar stairs, just a trap door in the floor. One of the boys turned to four- teen-year-old Horace Eastman, 'Let Horace get them.'
"So we let Horace down through the trap door. When he had enough apples, we took hold of his arms and pulled him up. The man's wife was quite a substantial woman whom everyone called 'Boose Ann' because her name was Lucy Ann and her husband nicknamed her 'Boose Ann.' She had taught school before she married Mr. Fulton. Although she sometimes made us laugh, she was tempery and we were glad we had never had to have her for a teacher. We didn't stay long after we had had our sweet cider and apples because Boose Ann seemed pretty mad about our tracking up her clean kitchen floor.
"We boys also like to roller skate. After the big fire of 1883 which wiped out all the old wooden buildings on the west side of the Square, the people decided to erect brick blocks that wouldn't burn so easily. So between 1883 and 1891 the present brick blocks were built. Before they built the Union Block, we fellows liked to roller skate on the big basement floor they
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had just laid. Robert Fulton wanted to skate, but he had no skates, so he asked John Hay if he might borrow his skates. John Hay said, 'Robert, I wouldn't advise you to put them on. They're treacherous things.' Robert, however, disregarded his advice and began to skate. He got to going fast. Suddenly the skates went in different directions, and his feet went out from under him, and we boys didn't know but what he was killed. We went and picked him up. He never wanted to skate again."
A NEIGHBORHOOD SQUABBLE
Grownups often quarrel about very foolish things. This seemed to be especially true in great grandfather's day when there were no cars or radios and people did not know as much about the important happenings in the world as they do today. Different parts of districts of the same town or neigh- borhood liked to get ahead of each other in a friendly way, just as today they like to beat each other at softball. One thing that they often quarrelled about then, just as they still do to- day, was the building of new school houses. Such was a neigh-
District School No. 10
borhood squabble of eighty years ago which took place in the hill country of Goshen, a rural part of Bradford. Many more people lived there then they do today. After much discussion,
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much of which took place in the barns and kitchens or along the roadside, it had been agreed to unite Districts No. 4 and No. 10. Both Goshen neighborhoods were anxious to "get together" on this, but there were certain persons in each group who could not agree and who opposed each plan to cooperate, or work together. Hearing the story of this neighborhood squabble eighy years after from the lips of Mr. Horace East- man, who was but six years old at the time, it is not quite clear as to what caused so much disagreement and trouble, unless it was that each family wanted the new schoolhouse built in its own neighborhood or district. No one wants "his toes stepped on" or "his fur rubbed the wrong way" and this is par- ticularly true, it seems, of Vermonters.
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