Some Memories of the Blair Pond District in the Seventies and Beginning of the Eighties From Wallace R. Heady to the Blandford Historical Society Blandford, Massachusetts
November, 1940
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Society:
Wallace R. Heady
I send to you under separate cover an ancient book, published in 1825, which I think you may care to add to your old time records.
It was bound in black leather, which I think was common binding in the twenties of the 19th Century, and perhaps somewhat later. It has turned yellow in spots in the 116 years since its publication.
Uncle Franklin Bartlett had a large Bible with very large print and also an "English Book of Prayer," both old when I came to the house in the beginning of the seventies, and each bound in black leather.
Two large books which he had acquired more recently, "Underground or Life Below the Surface," describing mining and the lives and ways of miners in all parts of the world, and Headley's large volume of "The Great Rebellion," were bound in ordinary cloth.
The book first referred to in this letter has near its end the poem by Cowper, which sometimes, in the presence only of members of the household, Uncle Franklin and Aunt Hannah sang in ballad fashion.
Another very old book in the house, of the school reader type had, besides this same poem of Cowper, Byron's Sennacherib of his Hebrew melodies and other verses of a more distinctly ballad character, each of which they knew by heart and occasionally sang. In this latter book a poem by Scott entitled Highland Nora I have known by heart through all these years, and also the unforgettable first stanza of a poem entitled The Seminole's Defiance. They also knew by heart and sometimes sang some other verses of the ballad type which I have never seen in print.
Uncle Franklin, with probably very little school education, was a bookish man.
He knew his Bible from cover to cover, and prided himself a great deal on his knowledge of it.
He took the Springfield Weekly Union and the Boston Cultivator, the latter partly agricultural and partly stories and we all read them.
There was a great deal of reading aloud in that house.
When James Brooks became a member of the household in 1872, he brought a new printing of that ancient book Robinson Crusoe, and we read it aloud. Also a book "Nurse and Spy in the Civil War," published in 1865, which I still have.
In 1875, when I was living in the other part of the house with my people, the two families sitting together read aloud St. Elmo and Pride and Prejudice, an English novel.
My people also at that time took the New York Ledger, a story paper of wild and strange adventures, probably crudely written, of about the type of the present day so-called pulp magazines.
Those stories we read aloud. It was a weekly, the stories were serial and we were much thrilled with the climax of the stories as they broke
off at the end of each installment. That paper gave us a great deal of reading.
The mention of that paper reminds me of an incident. My mother was employed as an attendant in Dr. Knight's institution until the first of April, 1875; in the last two or three years of that period James Brooks and Ella Bartlett were employed there in the same capacity.
During the time when all three were away a wave of condemnation of "dime novels" struck at least the Bartlett house in the person of Aunt Hannah.
I never saw a book or a paper in the Babb house. But Bertie Babb, who was not a reader, having been given by a Westfield hunter who resorted there a small, thin, four by five dime novel called Trapper Ben, either gave it or loaned it to me.
I had heard Aunt Hannah condemn that kind of reading and read it in my bedroom by myself, but before I could offer to return it Aunt Hannah discovered it and destroyed it.
A little later, from source possibly the same, I received the classic ocean novel Miles Wallingford by James Fenimore Cooper, published by the Seaside Library in paper covers. It was much larger, I endeavored to conceal it; but just at the most thrillingly adventurous point in the story, Aunt Hannah discovered it and destroyed it, its paper cover being enough to put it in the condemned class.
It was many years after, when I possessed all the books of that author, that I was able to finish the story.
I take occasion to say that Hannah Bartlett was my mother's aunt, being sister to my grandmother Sylvia Rogers, who was born in East Otis in 1807 as Sylvia Buttles, daughter of Elihu Buttles.
Hannah Buttles, Sylvia's sister, was born in East Otis in 1810.
I think it probable that Elihu Buttles was a tavern keeper at that time, though the genealogy that I have does not make statement on that point.
His father, Captain Jonathan Buttles, was a farmer and inn keeper. He served as captain in the Revolutionary War around Boston and New York. His military record was confirmed and made explicit to me by letter from the adjutant general's office in the Capitol in Hartford, Conn.
My interest in it was as my mother's maternal line.
The name was Buttolph, a Welsh name, beginning in this country with Thomas Buttolph, a dresser of skins for gloves, in 1635. The name of Captain Jonathan, who had been christened Jonathan III, stands as Buttolph in the Conn. records. After the war he simplified the name to Buttles and so it has stood ever since. After the war he moved to Hartland, Conn., which I believe was on the stage route then from Hartford to Albany.
East Otis would have been the next stage stop on that route.
Franklin Bartlett was not related to me in any way except by that marriage.
The adjutant general's office in Hartford gave me record of my great-great-grandfather, Peter Heady, killed in Arnold's assault on Quebec, December 31, 1775, and my great-grandfather, Daniel Heady, who enlisted in 1780 and was pensioned in 1818, and whose death occurred in 1840, sixty years after the date of enlistment.
I referred in some rather disconnected remarks before your Society in November of last year to the reprehensible dismantling of the interesting old French flintlock musket, with its flint in the hammer and the hinged cover for the primed firing pan, so that the train of firing powder in the pan was kept dry and the gun was always ready for firing its single charge.
If the powder flashed under the flint of the hammer, an intended victim might see the flash and dodge. If the pin hole from the powder pan to the charge in the barrel ever got stopped, the first flash might be all, and from that came the expression, "A flash in the pan."
Two other acts of vandalism in the house are even more deplorable.
Flush in east wall of the kitchen, with the main structures built out into the adjoining woodhouse, were a very large fireplace and a commodious Dutch brick oven. The fireplace had swinging cranes, and pothooks, set in each sidewall, and here and in the brick oven, in their early married life Aunt Hannah had done the family cooking, before in more recent years the wood range had been bought and set in the kitchen opposite the northerly end of the fireplace, its pipe connecting into the fireplace chimney.
The iron door of the Dutch oven was set and hinged in its iron frame flush with the kitchen east wall near the corner north from the fireplace. The baking floor inside was quite large. The heating arch was under the brick structure in the woodhouse.
Both those interesting relics of sub-colonial times and conditions have been entirely swept away without a vestige remaining. There was a smaller but good fireplace in the living room adjoining the kitchen on the west.
I do not know whether that has been removed or closed up or not.
The story and a half ell part had its separate cellar and was the original frame building habitation of the family; the larger two story structure, with its separate cellar having been built later, joining upon the first structure.
The ell part was the third Bartlett habitation on the farm. Ebenezer Bartlett, who I assume to have been the father, rather than grandfather of Franklin Bartlett, according to histories of that great literary benefactory of Blandford, the Rev. S. G. Wood, enlisted from Blandford in the Continental forces in June 1780, described as "33; 6 ft.; ruddy."
Not far from that time, according to the same histories, he bought extensively in the eastern part of the two 500 acre surveyor's lots which lay next to Louden or Otis. This he finally brought down to the farm as I knew it, which was apparently surveyed, having square corners and parallel lines containing, I believe, about two hundred acres.
He built the first log house in what was to the road in what was always known as the "Old House Lot," north of the road along the lower part of Babb's hill. A remnant of the foundations was shown to me.
He cleared a very long field across the road opposite the lower part of Babb's hill and erected there, a considerable distance from the road, a good sized barn, which in the seventies was used for storage and the keeping of young stock. That haying field we knew as the long meadow.
He later built a log house across the road and diagonally south east from the present house. The foundations of this house were plain to be seen in my time. Slightly south of it was a deep loosely stoned well, the water of which we did not use, resorting to a bubbling, or as we called it, a boiling spring of very clear water near the foot of the orchard lot.
Two barns of good size were erected at some time, quite near together, a little west of this second house location.
The finest outside feature of the place was a row of very immense pine trees, two of which stood opposite the two-story part of the house, one opposite each front corner. The other three, about in line, reached nearly to the woods, which then curved around to the road not far west of the house. A tamarack tree of medium size stood near the woodhouse door.
All trees that had any lumber value were long ago stripped away from the land. Within the past year I made a superficial search for stumps of the old pine trees, but found only slight surface evidence in one place. The stumps of the trees either were cut down below the surface or dragged out.
The "Black Lot," a fenced area of about ten acres, occupied the northeast corner of the farm. A man by the name of Black had lived there. He is placed in that locality in one of the Rev. Wood's histories. The foundations of his cabin were conspicuous objects in the seventies. The field, about a quarter of a mile back from the road, was a mowing lot of the farm.
It would too much prolong the paper to say anything in much of any detail about life and activities on the farm, typical of farms in general at that time and in that locality.
The maple sugar making was a time of excitement and labor in March, extending a little into early April. The buckets were such as were displayed to you a year ago by Lester Lloyd, and taken into your collection. The sap having been gathered in the large cask which was drawn on the pung in the woods, and transferred to the large pan on the arch, the boiling to syrup was as he described. Sometimes some of us ate lunch in the woods and boiled eggs in the the pan, fishing for them in the dark liquid with the use, skimmer. That picnic lunching especially appealed out to children and the younger people.
The sugaring down of the syrup in the house in the evening, in a miniature of the woods' pan on the stove was most interesting of all, with wax on the snow, very amber and delicious, another kind of wax stirred in a small dish with a spoon until it was a grainless putty gray; syrup taken out at the right time (before it was ready for wax) for bottling or canning; and finally the syrup boiled to the right extent for sugar, put into milk pans and stirred hard to lighten its color and then poured or dipped into the moulds to harden for house or market.
The quills set in the trees for the sap were homemade, being short straight pieces of sumac from which in some previous year or years the pith had been burned out with a red hot iron.
In the first spring, 1872, having reached 7 years of age in the previous December, I became the unmounted cowboy and every night in the pasturing season had to search out the cows, usually far away, and drive them home. I didn't mind the south pasture which was open to view from the house, but I was afraid of the north pasture, where the woods came close to the house and the grazing ground was quite far back, because, looking for thrills, I had quizzed Uncle Franklin about wild animals and he had told me about catamounts.
When I had to go to the north pasture I bargained with my sister Belle to wipe the supper dishes for her if she would go after the cows with me. She was a little older than I. With her company I felt quite safe. Our mother paid a small amount each week for board and care on account of each of us, but, though treated with great kindness, we were made useful.
The ordinary planting and harvesting were too commonplace to require mentioning.
Uncle Franklin raised a small field of grain each year and the threshing it on the barn floor by two men skilled in the use of flails, with the short pounding piece of the flail loosely thonged to the long handle and flying gracefully and with precision through the air and down upon the grain, was an interesting sight. Then the winnowing, aided by some kind of a hand-operated machine.
Prior to that, the reaping of the grain with the cradle scythes, with their long slightly curved fingers of light wood extending upward from the back of the scythe blade, on which the grain, maintaining its upright position, was carried around by the skill of the reaper and deposited with all the grain ends together in a straight row, was one of the sights of the year. Drawn into bundles, or sheaves, and tied with grain ends together, it was ready for the threshing floor.
Corn had place with potatoes as a staple crop. When the corn had been husked, sometimes with the aid of a husking bee, and shelled, with aid of a small shelling machine, it was taken to the grist mill of Ephraim Perkins in the district and Indian meal and hominy, more delicious than can be bought in the world today, were produced. As swine slaughtering occurred at this time, in November, it became the feast time of the year.
Often, and I think annually, there was slaughtering in the district of something of the cattle kind and there was opportunity to buy some part of the meat. Then we had delicious pork and beef sausages.
There was one such slaughtering in my time on the Bartlett farm, with the larger part of the meat sold.
There was a large field of blueberries on the farm.
There were apples for winter use, especially a very large tree of Nonesuch apples in the Old House Lot.
There was a larger quantity of apples of poor degree, which were gathered for cider and taken to the cider mill with cask for the cider, and the cask, well supplied, was put in the cellar of the two-story structure, which had an outside hatchway.
Referring again to crops and to a single venture in that direction, in or about the year 1876 Uncle Franklin and James Brooks raised a small field, I think less than an acre, of tobacco in the Old House Lot. I have occasion to remember it for it was my task to hunt and destroy the loathsome tobacco worms. How they found it the first and only year that the crop was raised in that remote spot is a puzzle to me.
Father Brooks hauled the crop to Westfield in the hay wagon in more than one trip, driving the big gray horse and probably sold it to some wholesaler.
In that same year Virgil Lloyd raised tobacco quite extensively on his father's farm. He entered into some sort of a cigar making arrangement with Lewis Bradford of Dalton who was then raising tobacco in that town. He complained through many years that Lewis Bradford owed him $300. Lewis Bradford finally became his brother-in-law, and it was forgotten.
The stock on the farm, aside from poultry and some young stock for sale and replenishment, consisted of six or seven cows and a large and powerful gray horse which I believe, did all the heavy work on the farm, the heavy work being especially plowing and hay- hauling. I do not remember that there were oxen.
Franklin Bartlett had no son to help with the work and from spring to late fall he had to hire help. He was often much troubled to get the cash to pay the help.
The marriage of Ella Bartlett to Seymour Babb entirely failed in the advantages that had been hoped for from it, and bore throughout her life a heavy burden of disadvantages.
The Blair Pond schoolhouse was the scholastic center, and as I shall desire to mention later, the social and religious center of the district.
Conveniently and naturally it was located in approximately the district's geographical center.
I believe that I may best maintain continuity by speaking of the teachers during the years before, in 1877, I temporarily left the district.
We had a succession of excellently nice lady
school teachers. Miss Haskell to the summer of ’73; Mrs. Spiller, sister of Rebecca Boise, to the summer of ’74; Miss Brown to the summer of '75; Emma Osborn to the summer of '76; Miss Florence Foote to the summer of ’77.
Mrs. Spiller had been widowed, as I recall it, in Louisiana. She had with her at the Rebecca Boise home and in the school her two children, Boise, about my age, and Ruby, about the age of my sister.
She was a good disciplinarian, but was as strict with her own children as with any of us. She gave me once a not extremely hard slap on the side of the face with the small Webster's spelling book which she happened to have in her hand, because I gave some undoubtedly saucy answer to her suggestion, in form of a question, as to what my mother would think if she knew that I was a rowdy; she having come upon me studying book on my desk but with my hands in my pants pockets.
The incident was the occasion of angry comment by my sister and one
or two sympathisers who went up our way, on the way home from school that night. It was all right both ways.
Because of a criticism that my people made of Miss Brown, which is not worth mentioning, my sister and I were sent the winter and spring term of ’74-’75 to the Gibbs district school, near Long Pond about the same distance from our home as the Blair Pond school. The teacher was Miss Higgins, sister of Ira Higgins. She was cross-eyed, which was very confusing.
Emma Osborn, who took the school in the summer of 1875, had attended that same school with me and perhaps most of the others. Her two youngest brothers, George and Albert, were among her pupils. Toward the end of a noontime recess in the spring term in 1876, Emma's older brother Norman, who was employed on the close by Watson farm, came to the schoolhouse and Emma asked me to walk with them up toward the Watson house. On the way, Emma asked me what Frank. had said and what Norman had said when I was over at their place earlier in the morning of the unfortunate assault. I told them. They asked me no question except the first general question. They gave no suggestion or hint of a desire that my statement should be other than it was. It was all very honorable and proper. They desired to tell lawyer Henry Ely what my testimony would be.
Frank was under bail on the criminal complaint and the Osborn family had cause to be much worried.
Miss Florence Foote was, I believe, an unusually attractive blond. She was young. She was gay and lively of disposition, easy of conversation and with a sense of humor that made her easy to laughter. She boarded around through the district, as was the custom. She talked with the woman. She talked with the men as well, if not better. Some of the very best women came to dislike her. She was perfectly all right.
In the warm seasons there were recreations in the noontime recess period. In the road running by the end of the schoolhouse, or in a field of the Watson farm diagonally across from the school, three or four of the bigger boys played a ball game by the strange name of one-old-cat. John Perkins, who lingered long in the school, was a leader in that game.
The younger children, boys and girls, played a game of tag and goal in the Watson pasture directly back of the school. The land sloped up as high as the eaves of the school. At the foot of the slope was a hollow or low place as wide as the hill. Back of that was something in way of a ridge of rocks. "It" stood in the hollow. We all ran down and tried to outrun and dodge "It" and get to the goal. Anyone tagged became “It." Children like to run, so the game was popular. How long either the ball game or the running game survived after the summer of 1877, I do not know.
At the beginning of the spring term there were frozen and thawed apples of choice varieties at the old Scott place by Blair Pond. The pulp was not fit to swallow; but the juice squozen into the first bite, wholly unfermented, was delicious wine.
In the summer of 1874, being now between nine and ten years of age, I became footloose for farther traveling than to the three houses that were near my home.
In June, after school was out, I went to visit Fred McClear, who lived with his mother Jane McClear with Uncle Jimmie Watson near the schoolhouse. Uncle Jimmie was Fred's expression and I think was generally used by the children of the school. I am not sure of the relationship, but I have an impression that Jane McClear was Uncle Jimmie's daughter.
Uncle Jimmie was held entirely in respect, in word and act, by the children of the school. There is something weird about a man walking around with most of the lights of his mind out. What light remained to him was not continuous in its operation. Norman Osborn worked on the farm and Rose Hunt in the house. They were afterward married. In pleasant evenings in the warm part of the year Norman ordinarily, when work was done, got out the horse and buggy to take Rose for a ride. Invariably Uncle Jimmie asked, "Where are you going?” Norman said, "I'm going to
take Rosie for a ride.” Uncle Jimmie said, "I vum! I'll go with you.” They lingered a few minutes, Uncle Jimmie forgot all about it, and they went away. So Norman told it.
Uncle Jimmie ate in a perfectly mannerly way at the table, Jane supplying his plate with food. Once when I ate there Fred said to him at the table, "It's funny Uncle Jimmie, every time your elbow bends your mouth flies open." Uncle Jimmie paused a moment, looking at Fred as if trying to comprehend what Fred was talking about, and then resumed his eating.
Having been invited on the occasion of my June visit, I spent the 4th of July 1874 with Fred. A lady from Collinsville, Connecticut, was there visiting, I think some sort of relation, though I am not sure. She was large and active, quite the opposite of Jane.
Fred had a lot of firecrackers. Somehow we got on the roof of the shed which was attached to the schoolhouse. I think that we may have been attacking the schoolhouse as a fort. Suddenly we were much frightened to see smoke coming from the point where the shingles of the roof joined the clapboards of the schoolhouse. We ran with all speed to the house;
four pails were hastily collected, milk pails, water pails, pails of all sorts to get the four. We ran with all speed, Jane and the large lady running an equal race, to a quite deep pool that there was then just below the road, where the small stream from the swamps crosses under the road and flows off toward Blair Pond. We carried the four pails to the schoolhouse. There was a key near the door. In the entry there was a trapdoor to the loft. This being pushed open with a ladder that was in entry or woodhouse for such access, disclosed smoke in the loft, and that determined. the point of attack. I, being a little larger than Fred, stood on the ladder and threw the water over to the line of shed and building. As each pail was emptied it was carried on the run back to the pool. Finally the smoke ceased entirely and a great burden of alarm was lifted from the minds of four people. Fred and I were not even scolded. The scar of the carpenter's patching remained permanently on the building.
The lady from Collinsville was a disciplinarian, which Jane was not.
She was the nemesis of Fred. Fred was sly and lively. That afternoon Fred ran away from me into the pantry. I was not invited and followed slowly. Just as I got to the pantry door, without having entered, the heavy sound of the shoes of the lady from Collinsville was heard approaching fast. Fred darted out of the pantry with his mouth too full of something to speak, and darted. past the rather ponderous person of the lady, She turned on me and demanded to know what Fred had in his mouth. I said that I didn't know. It was only later that I learned that it was, what the lady might have guessed, sugar. On a later visit Fred, to whom it was all a great joke, told me that the lady from Collinsville said that she would have offered to adopt
me if I had told her the truth about the sugar. I was not for adoption and she did me an injustice.
Before I left that afternoon, Jane, thinking, I believe, that the other lady had pursued Fred and me a little overmuch, out of her hearing invited me to visit Fred on Saturday of the following week and to stay over night.
On the Saturday appointed, I again visited Fred. Jane did everything possible to help us to enjoy ourselves in our own way.
She had prepared pastries containing plenty of the sugar that Fred had
coveted.
In the evening, when Norman and Rosie had gone and Uncle Jimmie was in bed, she entered into little games in the house with us, such as the hidden small article with tips of hot and cold given by the hider.
Fred was anxious to show me a captive firefly, which he had somehow caught in low damp ground close by and had under an inverted water glass on a table. With the lamps turned low in the evening, it gave us a display exploring the sides of its strange prison. Jane told Fred that he should let it go in the morning and try to catch another if he wanted to. Fred thought that they were too hard to catch. Jane told me, when Fred was out of hearing, that it would accidentally escape, that she wasn't going to let it starve to death under that glass. Jane sang for us a very simple song, which began:
"There was an old man who lived in the woods,
As you will plainly see;
He said he could do more work in a day
Than his wife could do in three."
It went on for several stanzas, in which the challenge was accepted, the work changed around, and the discomfiture of the old man was very complete.
I returned home the next forenoon, registering a very pleasant visit.
In a Christmas vacation in the early eighties, I saw Fred doing very fancy skating on Blair Pond, and spoke with him briefly. In a summer vacation rather later, I think, in the eighties I came upon him in Blandford Center, when he was living with Miss Electa Watson, Dr. Deane being a member of the household and having his small office building close by in the yard. Fred took me into the house. He showed me a very nice small library, but spoke contemptuously of the writers, saying they were all crazy men. Many years later I heard that he had been accidentally drowned in
a lake in Maine; but I am not sure whether it was authentic. I doubt whether he ever had to work.
In that same summer of 1874 I visited Boise Spiller. He showed me over the splendid old colonial house of Rebecca Boise. It was undoubtedly the finest colonial house in the district. It was approached, though I think not at all closely, by the Shepard house, which had also served as a tavern.
More than making up for the matter of the spelling book, Mrs. Spiller gave me a pamphlet copy, in paper covers, of the Life of Dr. David Livingstone. I was proud to take it home, certain that Aunt Hannah would not destroy it on account of its paper covers, because he had been much in our weekly paper and in conversation during the year or two before this.
His refusal in 1872 to leave with Stanley his people to whom he was doctor and missionary in Central Africa; his death in 1873; the difficult and perilous conveyance of his body by his people to the coast, through superstitious tribes; the conveyance of the body to London by a special British ship and the burial in Westminster Abbey, were all matters of keen interest at the time. It was welcomed at the house, as I expected it would be.
For some reason Mrs. Spiller did not teach the school a second year. I have no knowledge how long she continued to live in the district.
I visited that summer George Lloyd, in the home of his father Lester Lloyd. This took me into a very lovely family, of whom I was to see much in
the next few years and through many years.
Elizabeth, or Lizzie, Lloyd was one of the most remarkable instances of triumph over physical difficulties that I have known. Afflicted with a congenital hip lameness that compelled her to use a crutch, she developed strength mentally and physically, became, as a large girl and young woman, very attractive, learned telegraphy on a small instrument at home, was telegraph operator for a time in the office at Blandford Center and for many years in Ware. She earned and saved money and achieved considerable prosperity.
The older twin sisters, Maria and Martha were very interesting., Martha was of a more quiet and retiring nature, tending toward what is nowadays called the introvert. Maria was enough of an extrovert to get into society in Blandford Center and into politics as an ardent democrat, as I found in 1876.
Ella Bartlett had brought to the Bartlett home a glowing account of the scholarly qualities of two of her schoolmates. These were Hiram Blair and
Marian Miller. This gave them considerable fame in the Bartlett house.
In all the years, I spoke with Hiram Blair only three times.
In my first year at the Bartlett home, he was evening visitor at the house. I hung around, and finally, in order to speak to the scholar, I asked him why he used such big words. He very aptly replied, "To puzzle you”Among a number of sayings of Aunt Hannah's a favorite one was, "Little people should be seen and not heard.” I have no doubt that I went
very shortly to bed.
In an afternoon school exhibition which Hiram attended, I think in 1874 or 1875, I spoke the speech of Spartacus to the gladiators whom he was leading into revolt. Hiram waited for me outside the school and asked me if I knew what became of Spartacus. I said that I did not. He told me of the defeat of a number of Roman armies by the gladiators and slaves led by Spartacus, but that finally they were defeated and Spartacus was slain.
In a summer vacation time, probably in the early eighties, walking along the loop road toward or from Blair Pond, I saw Hiram and his father haying in their field south of the road, where a barn then stood. I went into the field to speak with Hiram. I had heard that he had attended Williston Academy for a short period before this time.
In the course of a conversation, I asked Hiram what he intended to do.
He replied: "I intend to work summers and travel winters. I've made up my mind that I can't make my living with my brains. I believe that I quote him precisely. I did not see him again.
In the early summer of 1875 the death of Myra Osborn occurred.
She was an attractive young girl of about my age. Her death was the occasion of a great deal of grief. She had been considerably ill for nearly a year. She was of a very gentle and lovely nature, a little of the type of Alice in Ben Bolt. For a long time she had not taken part in the more active out-of-door sports. Her only medical service was by a doctor from Center Otis.
Her playmates were given chairs nearest to the casket. Charlie Shepard sat by me and cried a little. I do not remember whether I cried or not.
There was general sympathy. We her playmates felt the grief as deeply and heavily as nature allows to burden the minds of children of that age.
At the cemetery there was loud grief from her older sister and brothers.
Her parents silently may have felt the grief even more deeply.
It has been said, in substance, by Dr. Holmes that we are long term clocks; that the Angel of Life winds us up once for all, closes the case and gives the key into the hands of the Angel of the Resurrection. The ancients had an expression intended to be comforting, "Whom the Gods love die young.” Our expression is pious and austere, "The Lord gave, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Joseph Shepard was said to have made a remark which is often made about a person who is ill and on some occasion shows some nervousness or irritability. No one could have shown more sympathy when the tragedy happened than the members of the Shepard family.
I said enough a year ago about the shock that came to our peaceful neighborhood when Joseph Shepard was assaulted by Frank Osborn, who though only 16 had the stature and strength of a man. This was in the summer of 1875.
In May 1876 summonses to appear as witnesses on a day stated in June, to testify in the superior court in case of Joseph Shepard against Selden Osborn were served by a deputy sheriff on mother, Father Brooks, Uncle Franklin and me.
We waited in the courtroom more than a day before our case was called and I was much impressed by the glamor of the trials as conducted by the great advocate George M. Stearns, who was in every trial and when one case was finished moved across the courtroom where another jury was waiting. That, together with the fact that he laid a friendly hand on me with the words, "Come to my office some day and I'll make a lawyer of you," settled my mind that I would be a lawyer and from that I never deviated.
The Osborns were a very fine family. Mrs. Osborn, who had been Elizabeth Smithies, was a tall strongly built woman of the best English middle class stock. Selden was of slight build. All the
children, with the exception of Myra, matured early in size and strength.
When the large strong boys, Edwin, Norman and Frank, with the aid of a carpenter, in 1873, took the material from the old barn at east end of the south meadow and made the country grocery store, connected with the front veranda of the house, it was a new era in the life of Selden Osborn, and one for which he was especially fitted. It was an exciting addition to
the neighborhood and a great convenience.
As is usual in a country store, many people came to meet each other and to talk. Some young people walked over from East Otis and stopped at Uncle Franklin's on the way back. In particular Clarkie Deering called and played for us the Jews-harp, which I never saw or heard in any other place. It was lively and sweet music.
The Shepard case broke Selden Osborn down. The total cost was probably $1,000. and perhaps more and he was probably running on a slender margin.
A day or two later I was in the Osborn house when they were all at the dining table. Not for my benefit so much as for those to whom I would carry it, Mr. Osborn said with great bitterness, "I've got such good neighbors that I'm going to sell my farm for…” a small animal whose name has an undeservably unpleasant sound..."and kill the animal." Other than it
was a small quadruped in the domesticated order, I do not identify the animal.
Soon conditions became on the old friendly basis. It was all very unfortunate.
Joseph Shepard was a very social man. He liked to drop in at the neighbors' houses and talk with the adult members of the family. He and his wife Rhoda celebrated the silver anniversary of their marriage about the year 1875 or 1876. There was catering for a large party at the house.
It seems that the three grandsons of Jonathan Shepard, who bought the Pixley land and tavern after they were moved above the new road, Joseph, Nathan, and William, all went west to Missouri and Illinois.
Nathan and William stayed west, except for a visit by William (I am quite sure of the first name) of some months with his brother Joseph, when Achsah, the orphan daughter of Nathan was brought to have a permanent home with Joseph and Mrs. Shepard in about the year 1873 or 1874. Achsah was born in or about 1871. She became a fine member of the family.
We saw a good deal of William Shepard (first name subject to correction if necessary) during the months while he remained visiting and helping with the work at his brother's.
Like all who have been touched with the atmosphere of the west, he was very social and, I think, visited a good deal at the houses.
He was an enthusiast about backgammon. Whether he had brought the game, occupying the inside of a box checker board, with its dice and dice boxes and markings for the game, with him from the west or found it in the Joseph Shepard house, at least he brought it on all his visits to the Bartlett house and tried to teach my sister, who was some two or three years older than I, the game. It seemed that on every occasion she either wilfully or accidentally misplayed, or made erroneous claims and he took his
board and went away angry. Within a few days he returned and resumed the game. My sister and I were the only young people in the Bartlett house in 1873 and 1874.
Joseph Shepard at some time in Rock Island, Ill., knew Dr. Curtis, who was then practicing there, and whom I knew well in the eighties as a long established physician in New Hartford, Conn. His account of the language of Dr. Curtis in Rock Island was unmistakable and he also knew that it was the same Dr. Curtis in both places.
His social qualities gave him close friendships.
He was friendly with Dr. Warren of Winsted, who sent to him Dwight Warren, when Dwight was a little too rapid for Winsted. He was very friendly with the Twinings in Tolland.
In the early part of April, 1875, I passed from the Bartlett household to my family in the two- story part of the house, though the relations of the families were very close and our evenings were spent largely together.
Early in September 1875 my sister went to live in the home of Arthur Brooks in Unionville, Conn., and attended school in Unionville during that school year. Before that Virgil Lloyd, having noticed her at Sunday school, began paying her attentions so far as he could. His evening calls at the house invariably ended with Virgil playing checkers with father Brooks after my mother and sister had gone to bed, I watching the games and finally going to bed myself.
When school was out in June 1876 Virgil obtained permission to meet my sister at the railroad train and bring her home;
For two years he had a rival in Chan (for Channing) Lewis, a young man of Unionville, who kept coming to the house uninvited and staying days at a time. It was my duty to keep them company, which I did faithfully.
Finally, in the fall of 1878, at our home in Tolland, my sister showed him her engagement ring from Virgil and he departed and did not
return.
In the summer of 1875, the Lake family of New York became boarders with Mother. Mrs. Lake, having a daughter in the institution who was among those of whom Mother had charge, had come to have a very warm friendship for Mother.
Mrs. Lake, bringing with her a young relative of near my own age, Fannie Mattocks, spent all summer with us every summer, in Blandford and in Tolland, to and including the summer of 1879, the last summer that my people lived on the hills, before going to Unionville, Conn., to give me a chance to continue my education.
Sometime in 1875, from the lower region of the valley, the theory and even the practice of the bustle in feminine attire infected for a while our orderly neighborhood. It was affected by the younger women.
It was short lived. Uncle Frank strongly denounced it. He applied to it the alphabet of the Bible, saying that if God had intended to have women look that way, He would have made them so.
About that time I heard feminine talk of the Grecian bend. I have no idea what it referred to, unless possibly the feminine posture when wearing the bustle. I know the expression was used. Perhaps some antiquarian may recall it.
In the summer of 1875, Mrs. Lake gave me a ten cent "shinplaster, " paper money possibly two by three inches in size, still current from the greenback money of Civil War days, specie payments being on the way in. I thought it was great wealth as I had never had any money before, except a dollar bill that Miss Haskell had given me, either for sympathy or merit in my first or second year in the Blair Pond school. That had disappeared as soon as I reached home, probably reappearing in stockings or something
of the sort.
Harry Lake, who in 1875 had finished high school and had obtained employment in New York, in that summer and each succeeding summer spent his two weeks' vacation with us. In the summer of 1875 he brought to me a Horatio Alger book, "Ragged Dick," a school algebra and a school reader, "The Oxford Senior Speaker," which I still have. This latter book is an extraordinary collection of literary gems in prose and poetry, and some of the poems in it, notably The Raven, The Bells, Trowbridge's The Vagabonds, How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix, a few years later furnished that very talented elocutionist Dwight Warren with material for the entertainment and artistic surprise of his young students.
The algebra interested me greatly in discovering what could be done in a mathematical way with letters that could not be done with figures. I used to talk about my school studies. Barnes' school history of the United States I knew pretty well from cover to cover, and used to pit that with Uncle Franklin against his fifty odd years of observation and the traditions about public men and events of the even remote past that seep into country places and are retained in memory.
One day I attempted to explain to Father Brooks, of course not lucidly, about algebra. He seemed bewildered, but finally said with conviction in
his voice that I should have an education.
Charles Lake, a New York business man, of fine appearance and very sociable nature and disposition, spent some weekends with us in each of the years.
There was much farm labor from March until the end of fall.
What were our divertisements in the years of the seventies?
The gentle game of croquet came early in the seventies and by the middle of that decade and on through was quite the rage. There was a croquet ground, such as it was, at our house, the Osborn house, the Shepard and the Lester Lloyd houses. There were croquet parties.
A number of times in each season there were picnics by the attractive and beautiful shore of Big Pond. Sometimes only our own people with the summer boarders, sometimes taking in a neighborhood as far from us as the Lester Lloyd Place. There were no cottages then and only one building by the shore, which looked like a club house and was known by us as the Chicopee house, its occupants being said to come from that place. There was boating, quoit pitching with flat stones, croquet playing on a good hard earth ground, naturally or artificially made, set in among the trees; and the general hilarity of a picnic day.
Sometimes we found close by the shore the tent of a troubadour fisherman, with concertina, who was not averse to giving us a little entertainment of music and song.
In the evenings there were card games of the simple sort which people were willing to play in those days. With the children there were, of course, running and racing games.
In the winter there was reading aloud at our house. Beginning with 1875, there were checkers and chess, in which James Brooks had become quite proficient in the off hours from his work in Lakeville, and which he taught to me.
There was parlor croquet on the dining room table.
There was coasting down Babb's Hill and under good conditions one trip down the long hills to the schoolhouse. Uncle Franklin's steelshod pung was often drafted for party coasting. There was no team traffic in winter evenings and the road was clear.
Of the four strong young men, Bennie, and Seymour Babb, Henry Foster and James Brooks, two lay on each outer edge and steered by dragging a foot. Great discarded boots of Charles Gibbs were pulled over the regular
boots of each steerer. All who could crowd in between rode as passengers.
With the children, in little parties, there were "Post Office," "The Needle's Eye that Doth Supply," in both which games Bertie Babb fared badly; jack straws, tiddledy winks, a game of cards featuring authors, and other little games which Selden Osborn had brought from "Down below."
The great event of each winter was a gay and lively dance at Mordecai Babb's. A Bible reading parent had noticed the name of the Jewish hero in the Book of Esther, had thought that it looked good, and had bestowed it on this son. Of course he was always known as Mord.
He had natural talent as player of the fiddle and played by ear. He knew a good many dances and dance tunes. He always both played and prompted and sometimes danced at the same time, in which latter case feet of others were endangered and sometimes suffered. It ran from edge of the evening until about midnight. There were refreshments. Mord, though topping the line of middle age, was always the gayest of the company. He was in his element.
Those dances continued through the century and, I think, considerably later. In the nineties and on, when there were summer boarders at my sister's and elsewhere, they occurred one or more times in the summer. Mord and his second wife Harriet were both from Otis and there was considerable attendance from that town.
How many remember the dances at Mord's?
I know, of course, the names of the eight children by the second marriage, but it is useless to enumerate them.
Wealth, as measured in the country, was growing day and night for Mord.
Later in the century a concern from down Winsted way paid him $4500. cash for the timber, mostly spruce, in the great swamp southwest from his house, cleverly taking grant of the right to cut and remove for a period of twenty years. The timber deed is recorded in Springfield.
Bennie and Seymour, all that remained of the children of the first marriage, dropped out of the Blair Pond school at the end of my first winter. The school automatically graduated its students at a certain age and size, the age, I think, being around sixteen. Few went farther.
Henry Lloyd, my runaway pupil in 1883, went on and became a physician. Harvey Blair had done the same, I believe, a little before my time. Emma and Frank Osborn went, I think, for a short time to a school in Westfield, which I understood to be the Normal School. Marian Miller went through the Normal School.
The two most brilliant persons whom I encountered in the district were Marian Miller and Dwight Warren. Of the latter I shall say something a little later in connection with the school.
Marian Miller, aside from being mentally brilliant, was beautiful. She had beautiful features with rich natural coloring of the face, beautiful eyes, dark in color like her mother's, figure and manner to correspond. I was a good deal at the Miller house, because my half-brother Eugene Heady worked and lived there. I had good observation of Marian Miller, especially when on one occasion in 1876 she catechized me for some time in history and geography, to figure, as I thought, whether I was or might be material for the Westfield Normal School.
She had suitors from Westfield who sought her out in vacation times at her home. I remember once seeing the worshipful attentions paid to her by a smartly dressed and smart young man from Westfield. Her beauty was much commented on at the Bartlett home. In 1872 Ella Bartlett called my attention to a story written by this Marian Miller and published in the Boston Cultivator.
At Christmas time in 1872 James Brooks had the temerity to ask Marian Miller to go with him to a dance at the home of Bedette and Kate Cook. She accepted and they went. The snow was deep. It is my recollection that he wore boots and carried along in the sleigh the shoes for dancing. He gave us an interesting account of the dance.
I have always been anxious to know the later career of Marian Miller. I heard that she married a professor by name of Dickinson, considerably older than herself, and that they were both engaged in newspaper and magazine literary work.
I first saw the Miller home, without seeing the family, in the spring of 1872; when Uncle Frank, wanting to see Francis Blair about something, took me with him to the Blair house, across from the Miller house.
Francis was not at home. His wife Lucy Blair said that Francis was "probable" in such and such place. Uncle Frank left word for him. When we had started for home, Uncle Frank said to me, "She always says 'probable." I do not remember ever having seen her on any other occasion.
When I began going to the Miller house in 1875, she was living in the same house, but had become Lucy Brown.
Lyman Miller was an unsuccessful farmer. He was of medium height, stockily built, of florid complexion, easy going. He was below par in energy
and in initiative, which is a by product of that quality. He lacked the little dynamo that lies in the glands.
Mrs. Miller was in strong contrast. She was tall, with dark eyes, dark complexion, of the high brunette type, good looking, perhaps rather extra- ordinarily so when a girl. She had energy enough for two, but could not impart it to him.
In the summer of 1877 she was willing that the world, or at least the neighborhood, should know her disappointment. On an occasion when we were all at the dining table, I being there by invitation, she gave Mr. Miller a verbal going over, greatly to the embarrassment of Eugene and me. She told him how her uncle had once paid all his debts and given him a new as start, and now they were as badly in debt as ever.
Mr. Miller over and over again, when he could get in a word, said the identical words, "My heart and hands are full, Mrs. Miller."
In the spring of 1878, Eugene married and came with his wife to live with us on the large farm in Tolland, where there was always work enough for two or three men.
In the winter of 1880, Virgil Lloyd, with the help of his father for whom he had worked many years, bought the Miller farm.
Little as I know about the later career of Marian Miller, I know less as to what became of her parents.
The Sunday school and Sunday evening religious services that flourished in the Blair Pond schoolhouse in the seventies had their highest development, so far as my knowledge goes, in the years 1875, ’76 and ’77.
Only one preacher and one sermon remain in my memory, and that because of the lurid character of the latter. This I am sure was not by a settled minister of the town, but by a traveling preacher of the evangelist type.
The services in general were excellent. Bible questions were given us to take home, to encourage familiarity with the book. These were greatly
enjoyed by Uncle Frank.
There was much lusty congregational singing. The hymns were marked L. M. for long meter and S. M. for short meter, and these markings were clue enough. Long meter was where the lines were in straight four metrical feet to the line:
"Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him all creatures here below.”
Short meter was where the lines were alternately four feet and three feet to the line, the lines of equal length rhyming together:
"All hail the power of Jesus' name,
Let angels prostrate fall;
Bring forth the royal diadem
And crown Him Lord of all."
It came to us that Joseph Shepard said that James Brooks sang out of key and put him (J. S.) out. I have suspicion that Mr. Shepard may have been right. It made no difference with the continued vigorous singing of James Brooks.
There was a flourishing Sunday school. James Brooks, naturally a very pious man, took a prominent part in it.
In the summer of 1876 he went as a delegate from our Sunday school to a Sunday school convention in Lowell. The following Sunday he read a paper making report of the convention. I do not remember anything in the paper, of course, but I remember the shiny blackness of his shoes as he stood on the platform.
In 1890 and the two following years, when I was a bachelor lawyer in Springfield and a lonesome stranger in the city, I went home often weekends in the warm part of the year walking by preference from the railroad station. Father Brooks carried me back to the railroad station for an early train Monday morning. Whenever John Perkins was outside and saw us going by he always sang out, "There goes law and gospel."
My people had then bought and were occupying the former Blair-Brown farm, opposite the home of my sister, the former Miller farm.
In 1872, when an elegant man, driving in an elegant top carriage, with an elegant lady beside him, came upon me, walking beside the road with a crossbow gun on my shoulder, stopped the carriage and asked me whether I was fighting for Grant or Greeley, I was bewildered. I had not yet arrived to an interest in politics.
In 1876 my interest in the campaign between Hayes and Tilden was more intense than it has been in any campaign since, though it has always been keen. The Babb family of that time was never, I believe, touched in the remotest way with questions of politics.
Of the other fifteen families in the district, two to my knowledge were democratic; the Lester Lloyd family and the Henry Blair family. The district, like the town, was predominantly republican.
I read the Springfield Weekly Union, quite especially its editorial page as it appeared each week. News pages are good, but for arguments go to an editorial page. I argued at school with Eddie Pierce, who had a foster home with Henry Blair. Eddie finally told me what Henry Blair said ought to be done to me.
In the years 1875, ’76 and ’77, Maria Lloyd was much at our house, and we sometimes at her home. She liked the Lakes and my mother. My mother was a comparatively young woman, still in the early thirties of age.
Maria Lloyd told us in 1876 of an occasion when a young woman in Blandford Center said to her, "I hate democrats," and Maria replied, "I reciprocate your feelings," very icily we judged as Maria repeated
it to us.
Bert Gibbs, a very young man, neat and natty, from family in upper Gibbs Street across from the schoolhouse, came riding horseback into our district that summer; the special attraction being Hattie Shepard, then a big girl, quite a little older than my sister.
He was a strong democrat. He stopped at our place. He threw at us Grant and Belknap and perhaps some other scandals of the Grant regime, as reasons why we should not stand for Hayes. He had a slight stutter or stammer in his speech.
That summer Fred Newbury, of Windsor, Conn., appeared on the scene. He had met Maria Lloyd in Blandford Center and had become her ardent suitor, leading to their marriage some two years later.
He was prematurely gray in his thirties, but of ruddy complexion and vigorous health. He was of slender figure, good height, dressed excellently, not to say dandily. He was a very intelligent, suave and genial person. He had been married at least once, perhaps twice, before. He was a good republican.
Once, when he and I happened to be the only ones in the living room at my home, I gave him my opinion of the campaign, ending with the boyish statement that Tilden was "just no man at all.’ The Springfield Union editorials had not said that, but they had said derogatory things joined with praises heaped on Hayes.
Mr. Newbury said very quietly, but pointedly, "I don't believe in personalities."
I was surprised at this coming from a good republican; but it sank in. Never again in my life did I say anything so personally derogatory of a man whom one of the great parties had nominated as its candidate for president of the United States.
In the early part of September, 1877, my people moved to the large stocked farm owned by Homer Twining, located at the head of Noyes Pond, in the adjoining town of Tolland; where I spent two happy and profitable years.
Those two years are not pertinent to this paper, except in the barest mention.
In a school building smaller than the Blair Pond school, located about a mile and a half from our home, I had during those two years a teacher whom I always shall hold in grateful memory.
She was Miss Mary Spring of West Granville, a graduate of the Westfield Normal School; later Mrs. Erastus Larkin, wife of a farmer and one time legislator who owned a farm in south part of her town.
With my algebra, in which I had already made some progress, and her geometry and other text books from the Normal School, in those two years she took me over a considerable part of a high school course. She seemed to enjoy the task, which made it pleasant for both of us.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1878 there was a double wedding in the afternoon in the home of Lester Lloyd in Blandford. My sister was married to Virgil Lloyd and Maria Lloyd was married to Fred Newbury.
It was a very gala occasion. My people and I of course were over for the day and night, Eugene and his wife remaining in charge of the Tolland farm.
In the edge of the evening, Dr. Deane, recently settled as physician in the town, played the organ which had been so much used by Martha and Maria, and sang "Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight?"
A little later in the evening, the married couples were conveyed to the train which they were to take at Russell for Albany.
About the first of September 1879, word came to us that there was to be a man teacher in the Blair Pond school that year. My people thought that it would be great for me to go to school to a man teacher.
They were preparing to move to Unionville and it was arranged for me to go to the Bartlett home and attend the Blair Pond school until Virgil should complete his plans for purchase of the Miller farm, then work for him a few months, going to Unionville the first of September, 1880, to enter the high school.
Dwight Warren was, I believe, about 20 years of age. He was a young man of rather brilliant qualities. His father thought that a period in the country might do him good. He was so facetious as a school teacher that when we encountered pronunciation of a big word he ordered us always to call it Moses and go right on. We did as directed always, of course,
with ridiculous effect.
Once when I was doing algebra equation on the board, for the amusement of himself and the school he slapped me lightly on the back with a book that he had in his hand and said, "You can't be a lawyer, you are too slow."
His brilliant qualities were in face, eyes, voice, manner, not easily describable.
His most brilliant talent was as an elocutionist. He told us that he and his young Winsted friend John F. Wynne, whom I afterward knew as a practicing lawyer in Unionville and New Haven, had gone to halls from town to town in Litchfield County giving elocutionary readings, for small admission charges. He took pleasure in reading, with remarkably fine effect, the poems before referred to from my Oxford Senior Speaker.
His moral anchors were in some respects lightly set. When with some of us older boys (and we were very young) he sometimes told stories which he ought not to have told to anyone anywhere.
He was what is called a mixer and enjoyed boarding around, which to some teachers was so nearly unbearable.
He boarded to a considerable extent at the Babb's.
Their regular quota may have been large because of the number who went to school from that house.
He had come to the country to see country people and was prepared to observe and enjoy them. His favorite diversion was poker, played
with kernels of corn. This he taught to me and others at the Babb house and at the Osborn house. What his conduct was at the Shepard house, where he was supposed to be especially under observation, I have no knowledge.
I knew some thing of eucher before this, but he taught me to play as his partner and, I regret to say, to cheat with certain signs of the hands.
We played an evening of games of eucher at Mord Babb's against Mord and Frank Barnes as partners. Barnes was perhaps thirty years old or so at the time; he had been around; and was much more sophisticated in sporting ways than Dwight was. I think that Barnes was from Otis way and that he had at some previous time married a Stannard girl. In spite of our disgraceful little cheatings Dwight and I were beaten. He told me as soon as we were alone that he had seen Barnes dealing from the bottom of the pack. I very naively said, "Why didn't you speak about it?"
He said he didn’t want to get hurt. He had previously impressed us with his boxing ability; but as I looked at Frank Barnes I thought that perhaps he was right.
I mention these things as sidelights on our imported man teacher.
On the first of March 1880, Virgil having completed his purchase of the Miller farm, I left school and worked for him until the first of September, at rate of six dollars a month.
In the latter part of his school year, Dwight Warren boarded almost entirely at the home of Lester Lloyd.
After school was out he continued to live there and work on the farm at least a great part of the summer.
It was my understanding that a strong sentimental attachment developed between Dwight Warren and Lizzie Lloyd. She was at the height of her attractiveness. He being the son of a doctor, with some smattering of medical knowledge, believed that her lameness was curable.
It was my understanding that there was talk of marriage; that the parents of Lizzie Lloyd finally entered into the talk and objected on the ground of the youthfulness of the couple. That was a valid and unavoidable objection to Dwight Warren as of that present time, for he was entirely unsettled. He would not stay in the country as a farmer.
Finally Dwight Warren went away and never returned. If all was as I understood it to have been, it can be imagined what a crushing disappointment it was to Lizzie Lloyd during the remainder of her life.
With Virgil Lloyd on the new farm there were six months of hard work. He was a tireless worker when fishing or hunting did not distract him from it, and we worked early and often late.
John Perkins had married Kate Cook and they were living in the former Brown house across from our place. We changed work in haying time.
John shocked me by his frequent references to his father as "Old Ephraim.” Respect where due was not one of his attributes.
I always shall remember with gratitude the kindness to me in July and August of that summer of Myron Lloyd, principal of a grammar school in Westfield, who with his family passed those summer months at the home of Jarvis Lloyd. On more than one occasion he sought me out when I was working alone, picking up stones or cutting brush that Lyman Miller had allowed to overrun good land, and talked to me in the most encouraging way. His kindness touched me deeply and unforgettably.
On the first of September, 1880, I went to Unionville with thirty-six dollars in my pocket.
For two years and a half, except for occasional visits to my sister, I was away from the Blair Pond district.
That period is not relevant to this paper, except in certain circumstances at its end which again brought me in contact with the Blair Pond school, this time as its teacher.
In June, 1882, State Senator Upson, the great manufacturing mogul of the village of Unionville, in common probably with a few other captains of industry, and thereby exponents of applied science, was given the right by Sheffield Scientific School at Yale to nominate a student to four years' free tuition.
He offered the appointment to me.
After consideration, I declined it with sincere thanks. It was not the line of study I desired. Also it is easier for a student to work his way for board and room in a regular college, with its dining rooms and various special services, than in one of the auxiliary schools. Without intention to solicit or suggest, I mentioned to Mr. Upson that it was my intention to study law.
He offered to loan me the money to pay my tuition in the Yale Law School. I accepted, though I had no means to pay my board and room. My people could help me very little. I worked that July and August and saved a little money and entered the law school in September, getting the first installment of tuition from Senator Upson.
I got from him the second installment of tuition in December, with a little more money as a loan, but not enough to allow me to live in comfort.
I was not able to get employment in the hours available to me. The second tuition installment carried to the latter part of March. I then talked with the president of the law school, Simeon Baldwin, and with the dean, telling them that I felt that I must withdraw for the balance of the year. They talked very kindly to me. The dean told me to take my books and continue my studies and if I could return later consideration would be given to allowing me credit for this first year. It was a two years' course.
I informed Senator Upson that I could not get along with tuition without a good deal more for other expenses, that I would repay his loans and would not ask to borrow more at that time. He soon sent me a receipt
in full for all that he had loaned me and as he was a
very wealthy man, I accepted it.
And so it happened in the latter part of March, 1883, that I visited my sister in Blandford.
Someone broached the possibility of my teaching the Blair Pond school in the spring term, no teacher being at that time engaged.
I applied to Jarvis Lloyd, then as for many years prominent in town affairs and school committeeman of that district. He employed me. In the home of Deacon Hinsdale, below Blandford Center, I was given perfunctory examination by him and Howard Robinson, examining committeemen for the town schools. They assured me that it was all right for me to take the school.
The greatest part of my scholars had attended the same school with me, a little more than three years before.
From the Babb house there were Fred and Frank, six years old or so, who came to school to learn the alphabet, preparatory to the possibly distant adventure of reading, Harriet or Hattie considerably older and, I think, one or two others. There were George and Albert Osborn, Albert some thirteen or fourteen, and George around fifteen years of age; I was eighteen. There were Achsah Shepard; James and Burton Lloyd, and for a brief glimpse one day their small brother Henry, I think about five years of age. There was a girl from the Watson house. There were Laura and Sadie
Culver, and a small boy, who I believe was James Culver, brother of Laura and Sadie.
That, so far as I recall it, was the roster of my little school. James Lloyd, a tall, bright boy, perhaps fourteen or so years of age, was my brightest and most advanced pupil. Saying that is no reflection on the others.
There were no dull pupils in the school except Fred and Frank Babb. I do not know where I found the grouped alphabet letters for them. I have no recollection of getting them farther than the seventh letter. I said, "What do you say when you want the oxen to move over the other way?" They said, "Gee." Afterward whenever I pointed to that letter, they said in chorus, “Gee!" I am afraid that their education was neglected.
Of the girls, Hattie Babb and Achsah Shepard were good looking, Laura and Sadie Culver rather remarkably so. I was greatly grieved, not many years later to read of the premature death of Laura Culver; as was also the case with reference to James Lloyd and his brother Arthur.
The boarding around through the district was extremely disagreeable to me.
I boarded in the Culver house, where I found conditions pleasant; in the Shepard house; and to a considerable extent in the Osborn house, where the boys were so near my own age; and most of all in the Jarvis Lloyd house, where Julia Lloyd, one of the kindest and most motherly of women, finding my reluctance to distribute my boarding from house to house, made me welcome to an extent far exceeding the quota belonging to that family.
One Sunday at the Osborn house, George and Albert and I went for a long walk, with eggs, sandwiches and lemons for noontime refreshment.
It was a very hot day. George and Albert piloted me to the home of
Leroy Warfield on the Woronoco road, a half mile or so below the Center. Leroy Warfield, a rather old man, I believe, was a seller of small bottled liquids, in the less than three per cent. class.
We were thirsty, we needed some of his supplies with our luncheon, we had sufficient money. Not for love or money would he give or sell a single bottle of his soda or other small stuff. We used every persuasion possible, to no avail. His reason was that it was Sunday. I do not believe that the law forbade sales on Sunday of such innocuous beverages. I think that religion held his hand and made him adamant to our entreaties. The gift of one of his ten cent bottles would have been the act of a good Samaritan.
We had nothing but the harsh juice of the lemon, of which we each had one, for moisture with our luncheon.
The school closed so some time in June.
The memories here written begin seventy years ago.
I am in the latter seventies of age.
As the French say, I am approaching twenty for the fourth time. The French pleasantry is nice.
The memories in this paper are small in bulk and detail compared with those that come to my mind when I turn my thoughts to those old days and years of the seventies and edge of the eighties of the Nineteenth Century.
Wallace R. Heady
I send to you under separate cover an ancient book, published in 1825, which I think you may care to add to your old time records.
It was bound in black leather, which I think was common binding in the twenties of the 19th Century, and perhaps somewhat later. It has turned yellow in spots in the 116 years since its publication.
Uncle Franklin Bartlett had a large Bible with very large print and also an "English Book of Prayer," both old when I came to the house in the beginning of the seventies, and each bound in black leather.
Two large books which he had acquired more recently, "Underground or Life Below the Surface," describing mining and the lives and ways of miners in all parts of the world, and Headley's large volume of "The Great Rebellion," were bound in ordinary cloth.
The book first referred to in this letter has near its end the poem by Cowper, which sometimes, in the presence only of members of the household, Uncle Franklin and Aunt Hannah sang in ballad fashion.
Another very old book in the house, of the school reader type had, besides this same poem of Cowper, Byron's Sennacherib of his Hebrew melodies and other verses of a more distinctly ballad character, each of which they knew by heart and occasionally sang. In this latter book a poem by Scott entitled Highland Nora I have known by heart through all these years, and also the unforgettable first stanza of a poem entitled The Seminole's Defiance. They also knew by heart and sometimes sang some other verses of the ballad type which I have never seen in print.
Uncle Franklin, with probably very little school education, was a bookish man.
He knew his Bible from cover to cover, and prided himself a great deal on his knowledge of it.
He took the Springfield Weekly Union and the Boston Cultivator, the latter partly agricultural and partly stories and we all read them.
There was a great deal of reading aloud in that house.
When James Brooks became a member of the household in 1872, he brought a new printing of that ancient book Robinson Crusoe, and we read it aloud. Also a book "Nurse and Spy in the Civil War," published in 1865, which I still have.
In 1875, when I was living in the other part of the house with my people, the two families sitting together read aloud St. Elmo and Pride and Prejudice, an English novel.
My people also at that time took the New York Ledger, a story paper of wild and strange adventures, probably crudely written, of about the type of the present day so-called pulp magazines.
Those stories we read aloud. It was a weekly, the stories were serial and we were much thrilled with the climax of the stories as they broke
off at the end of each installment. That paper gave us a great deal of reading.
The mention of that paper reminds me of an incident. My mother was employed as an attendant in Dr. Knight's institution until the first of April, 1875; in the last two or three years of that period James Brooks and Ella Bartlett were employed there in the same capacity.
During the time when all three were away a wave of condemnation of "dime novels" struck at least the Bartlett house in the person of Aunt Hannah.
I never saw a book or a paper in the Babb house. But Bertie Babb, who was not a reader, having been given by a Westfield hunter who resorted there a small, thin, four by five dime novel called Trapper Ben, either gave it or loaned it to me.
I had heard Aunt Hannah condemn that kind of reading and read it in my bedroom by myself, but before I could offer to return it Aunt Hannah discovered it and destroyed it.
A little later, from source possibly the same, I received the classic ocean novel Miles Wallingford by James Fenimore Cooper, published by the Seaside Library in paper covers. It was much larger, I endeavored to conceal it; but just at the most thrillingly adventurous point in the story, Aunt Hannah discovered it and destroyed it, its paper cover being enough to put it in the condemned class.
It was many years after, when I possessed all the books of that author, that I was able to finish the story.
I take occasion to say that Hannah Bartlett was my mother's aunt, being sister to my grandmother Sylvia Rogers, who was born in East Otis in 1807 as Sylvia Buttles, daughter of Elihu Buttles.
Hannah Buttles, Sylvia's sister, was born in East Otis in 1810.
I think it probable that Elihu Buttles was a tavern keeper at that time, though the genealogy that I have does not make statement on that point.
His father, Captain Jonathan Buttles, was a farmer and inn keeper. He served as captain in the Revolutionary War around Boston and New York. His military record was confirmed and made explicit to me by letter from the adjutant general's office in the Capitol in Hartford, Conn.
My interest in it was as my mother's maternal line.
The name was Buttolph, a Welsh name, beginning in this country with Thomas Buttolph, a dresser of skins for gloves, in 1635. The name of Captain Jonathan, who had been christened Jonathan III, stands as Buttolph in the Conn. records. After the war he simplified the name to Buttles and so it has stood ever since. After the war he moved to Hartland, Conn., which I believe was on the stage route then from Hartford to Albany.
East Otis would have been the next stage stop on that route.
Franklin Bartlett was not related to me in any way except by that marriage.
The adjutant general's office in Hartford gave me record of my great-great-grandfather, Peter Heady, killed in Arnold's assault on Quebec, December 31, 1775, and my great-grandfather, Daniel Heady, who enlisted in 1780 and was pensioned in 1818, and whose death occurred in 1840, sixty years after the date of enlistment.
I referred in some rather disconnected remarks before your Society in November of last year to the reprehensible dismantling of the interesting old French flintlock musket, with its flint in the hammer and the hinged cover for the primed firing pan, so that the train of firing powder in the pan was kept dry and the gun was always ready for firing its single charge.
If the powder flashed under the flint of the hammer, an intended victim might see the flash and dodge. If the pin hole from the powder pan to the charge in the barrel ever got stopped, the first flash might be all, and from that came the expression, "A flash in the pan."
Two other acts of vandalism in the house are even more deplorable.
Flush in east wall of the kitchen, with the main structures built out into the adjoining woodhouse, were a very large fireplace and a commodious Dutch brick oven. The fireplace had swinging cranes, and pothooks, set in each sidewall, and here and in the brick oven, in their early married life Aunt Hannah had done the family cooking, before in more recent years the wood range had been bought and set in the kitchen opposite the northerly end of the fireplace, its pipe connecting into the fireplace chimney.
The iron door of the Dutch oven was set and hinged in its iron frame flush with the kitchen east wall near the corner north from the fireplace. The baking floor inside was quite large. The heating arch was under the brick structure in the woodhouse.
Both those interesting relics of sub-colonial times and conditions have been entirely swept away without a vestige remaining. There was a smaller but good fireplace in the living room adjoining the kitchen on the west.
I do not know whether that has been removed or closed up or not.
The story and a half ell part had its separate cellar and was the original frame building habitation of the family; the larger two story structure, with its separate cellar having been built later, joining upon the first structure.
The ell part was the third Bartlett habitation on the farm. Ebenezer Bartlett, who I assume to have been the father, rather than grandfather of Franklin Bartlett, according to histories of that great literary benefactory of Blandford, the Rev. S. G. Wood, enlisted from Blandford in the Continental forces in June 1780, described as "33; 6 ft.; ruddy."
Not far from that time, according to the same histories, he bought extensively in the eastern part of the two 500 acre surveyor's lots which lay next to Louden or Otis. This he finally brought down to the farm as I knew it, which was apparently surveyed, having square corners and parallel lines containing, I believe, about two hundred acres.
He built the first log house in what was to the road in what was always known as the "Old House Lot," north of the road along the lower part of Babb's hill. A remnant of the foundations was shown to me.
He cleared a very long field across the road opposite the lower part of Babb's hill and erected there, a considerable distance from the road, a good sized barn, which in the seventies was used for storage and the keeping of young stock. That haying field we knew as the long meadow.
He later built a log house across the road and diagonally south east from the present house. The foundations of this house were plain to be seen in my time. Slightly south of it was a deep loosely stoned well, the water of which we did not use, resorting to a bubbling, or as we called it, a boiling spring of very clear water near the foot of the orchard lot.
Two barns of good size were erected at some time, quite near together, a little west of this second house location.
The finest outside feature of the place was a row of very immense pine trees, two of which stood opposite the two-story part of the house, one opposite each front corner. The other three, about in line, reached nearly to the woods, which then curved around to the road not far west of the house. A tamarack tree of medium size stood near the woodhouse door.
All trees that had any lumber value were long ago stripped away from the land. Within the past year I made a superficial search for stumps of the old pine trees, but found only slight surface evidence in one place. The stumps of the trees either were cut down below the surface or dragged out.
The "Black Lot," a fenced area of about ten acres, occupied the northeast corner of the farm. A man by the name of Black had lived there. He is placed in that locality in one of the Rev. Wood's histories. The foundations of his cabin were conspicuous objects in the seventies. The field, about a quarter of a mile back from the road, was a mowing lot of the farm.
It would too much prolong the paper to say anything in much of any detail about life and activities on the farm, typical of farms in general at that time and in that locality.
The maple sugar making was a time of excitement and labor in March, extending a little into early April. The buckets were such as were displayed to you a year ago by Lester Lloyd, and taken into your collection. The sap having been gathered in the large cask which was drawn on the pung in the woods, and transferred to the large pan on the arch, the boiling to syrup was as he described. Sometimes some of us ate lunch in the woods and boiled eggs in the the pan, fishing for them in the dark liquid with the use, skimmer. That picnic lunching especially appealed out to children and the younger people.
The sugaring down of the syrup in the house in the evening, in a miniature of the woods' pan on the stove was most interesting of all, with wax on the snow, very amber and delicious, another kind of wax stirred in a small dish with a spoon until it was a grainless putty gray; syrup taken out at the right time (before it was ready for wax) for bottling or canning; and finally the syrup boiled to the right extent for sugar, put into milk pans and stirred hard to lighten its color and then poured or dipped into the moulds to harden for house or market.
The quills set in the trees for the sap were homemade, being short straight pieces of sumac from which in some previous year or years the pith had been burned out with a red hot iron.
In the first spring, 1872, having reached 7 years of age in the previous December, I became the unmounted cowboy and every night in the pasturing season had to search out the cows, usually far away, and drive them home. I didn't mind the south pasture which was open to view from the house, but I was afraid of the north pasture, where the woods came close to the house and the grazing ground was quite far back, because, looking for thrills, I had quizzed Uncle Franklin about wild animals and he had told me about catamounts.
When I had to go to the north pasture I bargained with my sister Belle to wipe the supper dishes for her if she would go after the cows with me. She was a little older than I. With her company I felt quite safe. Our mother paid a small amount each week for board and care on account of each of us, but, though treated with great kindness, we were made useful.
The ordinary planting and harvesting were too commonplace to require mentioning.
Uncle Franklin raised a small field of grain each year and the threshing it on the barn floor by two men skilled in the use of flails, with the short pounding piece of the flail loosely thonged to the long handle and flying gracefully and with precision through the air and down upon the grain, was an interesting sight. Then the winnowing, aided by some kind of a hand-operated machine.
Prior to that, the reaping of the grain with the cradle scythes, with their long slightly curved fingers of light wood extending upward from the back of the scythe blade, on which the grain, maintaining its upright position, was carried around by the skill of the reaper and deposited with all the grain ends together in a straight row, was one of the sights of the year. Drawn into bundles, or sheaves, and tied with grain ends together, it was ready for the threshing floor.
Corn had place with potatoes as a staple crop. When the corn had been husked, sometimes with the aid of a husking bee, and shelled, with aid of a small shelling machine, it was taken to the grist mill of Ephraim Perkins in the district and Indian meal and hominy, more delicious than can be bought in the world today, were produced. As swine slaughtering occurred at this time, in November, it became the feast time of the year.
Often, and I think annually, there was slaughtering in the district of something of the cattle kind and there was opportunity to buy some part of the meat. Then we had delicious pork and beef sausages.
There was one such slaughtering in my time on the Bartlett farm, with the larger part of the meat sold.
There was a large field of blueberries on the farm.
There were apples for winter use, especially a very large tree of Nonesuch apples in the Old House Lot.
There was a larger quantity of apples of poor degree, which were gathered for cider and taken to the cider mill with cask for the cider, and the cask, well supplied, was put in the cellar of the two-story structure, which had an outside hatchway.
Referring again to crops and to a single venture in that direction, in or about the year 1876 Uncle Franklin and James Brooks raised a small field, I think less than an acre, of tobacco in the Old House Lot. I have occasion to remember it for it was my task to hunt and destroy the loathsome tobacco worms. How they found it the first and only year that the crop was raised in that remote spot is a puzzle to me.
Father Brooks hauled the crop to Westfield in the hay wagon in more than one trip, driving the big gray horse and probably sold it to some wholesaler.
In that same year Virgil Lloyd raised tobacco quite extensively on his father's farm. He entered into some sort of a cigar making arrangement with Lewis Bradford of Dalton who was then raising tobacco in that town. He complained through many years that Lewis Bradford owed him $300. Lewis Bradford finally became his brother-in-law, and it was forgotten.
The stock on the farm, aside from poultry and some young stock for sale and replenishment, consisted of six or seven cows and a large and powerful gray horse which I believe, did all the heavy work on the farm, the heavy work being especially plowing and hay- hauling. I do not remember that there were oxen.
Franklin Bartlett had no son to help with the work and from spring to late fall he had to hire help. He was often much troubled to get the cash to pay the help.
The marriage of Ella Bartlett to Seymour Babb entirely failed in the advantages that had been hoped for from it, and bore throughout her life a heavy burden of disadvantages.
The Blair Pond schoolhouse was the scholastic center, and as I shall desire to mention later, the social and religious center of the district.
Conveniently and naturally it was located in approximately the district's geographical center.
I believe that I may best maintain continuity by speaking of the teachers during the years before, in 1877, I temporarily left the district.
We had a succession of excellently nice lady
school teachers. Miss Haskell to the summer of ’73; Mrs. Spiller, sister of Rebecca Boise, to the summer of ’74; Miss Brown to the summer of '75; Emma Osborn to the summer of '76; Miss Florence Foote to the summer of ’77.
Mrs. Spiller had been widowed, as I recall it, in Louisiana. She had with her at the Rebecca Boise home and in the school her two children, Boise, about my age, and Ruby, about the age of my sister.
She was a good disciplinarian, but was as strict with her own children as with any of us. She gave me once a not extremely hard slap on the side of the face with the small Webster's spelling book which she happened to have in her hand, because I gave some undoubtedly saucy answer to her suggestion, in form of a question, as to what my mother would think if she knew that I was a rowdy; she having come upon me studying book on my desk but with my hands in my pants pockets.
The incident was the occasion of angry comment by my sister and one
or two sympathisers who went up our way, on the way home from school that night. It was all right both ways.
Because of a criticism that my people made of Miss Brown, which is not worth mentioning, my sister and I were sent the winter and spring term of ’74-’75 to the Gibbs district school, near Long Pond about the same distance from our home as the Blair Pond school. The teacher was Miss Higgins, sister of Ira Higgins. She was cross-eyed, which was very confusing.
Emma Osborn, who took the school in the summer of 1875, had attended that same school with me and perhaps most of the others. Her two youngest brothers, George and Albert, were among her pupils. Toward the end of a noontime recess in the spring term in 1876, Emma's older brother Norman, who was employed on the close by Watson farm, came to the schoolhouse and Emma asked me to walk with them up toward the Watson house. On the way, Emma asked me what Frank. had said and what Norman had said when I was over at their place earlier in the morning of the unfortunate assault. I told them. They asked me no question except the first general question. They gave no suggestion or hint of a desire that my statement should be other than it was. It was all very honorable and proper. They desired to tell lawyer Henry Ely what my testimony would be.
Frank was under bail on the criminal complaint and the Osborn family had cause to be much worried.
Miss Florence Foote was, I believe, an unusually attractive blond. She was young. She was gay and lively of disposition, easy of conversation and with a sense of humor that made her easy to laughter. She boarded around through the district, as was the custom. She talked with the woman. She talked with the men as well, if not better. Some of the very best women came to dislike her. She was perfectly all right.
In the warm seasons there were recreations in the noontime recess period. In the road running by the end of the schoolhouse, or in a field of the Watson farm diagonally across from the school, three or four of the bigger boys played a ball game by the strange name of one-old-cat. John Perkins, who lingered long in the school, was a leader in that game.
The younger children, boys and girls, played a game of tag and goal in the Watson pasture directly back of the school. The land sloped up as high as the eaves of the school. At the foot of the slope was a hollow or low place as wide as the hill. Back of that was something in way of a ridge of rocks. "It" stood in the hollow. We all ran down and tried to outrun and dodge "It" and get to the goal. Anyone tagged became “It." Children like to run, so the game was popular. How long either the ball game or the running game survived after the summer of 1877, I do not know.
At the beginning of the spring term there were frozen and thawed apples of choice varieties at the old Scott place by Blair Pond. The pulp was not fit to swallow; but the juice squozen into the first bite, wholly unfermented, was delicious wine.
In the summer of 1874, being now between nine and ten years of age, I became footloose for farther traveling than to the three houses that were near my home.
In June, after school was out, I went to visit Fred McClear, who lived with his mother Jane McClear with Uncle Jimmie Watson near the schoolhouse. Uncle Jimmie was Fred's expression and I think was generally used by the children of the school. I am not sure of the relationship, but I have an impression that Jane McClear was Uncle Jimmie's daughter.
Uncle Jimmie was held entirely in respect, in word and act, by the children of the school. There is something weird about a man walking around with most of the lights of his mind out. What light remained to him was not continuous in its operation. Norman Osborn worked on the farm and Rose Hunt in the house. They were afterward married. In pleasant evenings in the warm part of the year Norman ordinarily, when work was done, got out the horse and buggy to take Rose for a ride. Invariably Uncle Jimmie asked, "Where are you going?” Norman said, "I'm going to
take Rosie for a ride.” Uncle Jimmie said, "I vum! I'll go with you.” They lingered a few minutes, Uncle Jimmie forgot all about it, and they went away. So Norman told it.
Uncle Jimmie ate in a perfectly mannerly way at the table, Jane supplying his plate with food. Once when I ate there Fred said to him at the table, "It's funny Uncle Jimmie, every time your elbow bends your mouth flies open." Uncle Jimmie paused a moment, looking at Fred as if trying to comprehend what Fred was talking about, and then resumed his eating.
Having been invited on the occasion of my June visit, I spent the 4th of July 1874 with Fred. A lady from Collinsville, Connecticut, was there visiting, I think some sort of relation, though I am not sure. She was large and active, quite the opposite of Jane.
Fred had a lot of firecrackers. Somehow we got on the roof of the shed which was attached to the schoolhouse. I think that we may have been attacking the schoolhouse as a fort. Suddenly we were much frightened to see smoke coming from the point where the shingles of the roof joined the clapboards of the schoolhouse. We ran with all speed to the house;
four pails were hastily collected, milk pails, water pails, pails of all sorts to get the four. We ran with all speed, Jane and the large lady running an equal race, to a quite deep pool that there was then just below the road, where the small stream from the swamps crosses under the road and flows off toward Blair Pond. We carried the four pails to the schoolhouse. There was a key near the door. In the entry there was a trapdoor to the loft. This being pushed open with a ladder that was in entry or woodhouse for such access, disclosed smoke in the loft, and that determined. the point of attack. I, being a little larger than Fred, stood on the ladder and threw the water over to the line of shed and building. As each pail was emptied it was carried on the run back to the pool. Finally the smoke ceased entirely and a great burden of alarm was lifted from the minds of four people. Fred and I were not even scolded. The scar of the carpenter's patching remained permanently on the building.
The lady from Collinsville was a disciplinarian, which Jane was not.
She was the nemesis of Fred. Fred was sly and lively. That afternoon Fred ran away from me into the pantry. I was not invited and followed slowly. Just as I got to the pantry door, without having entered, the heavy sound of the shoes of the lady from Collinsville was heard approaching fast. Fred darted out of the pantry with his mouth too full of something to speak, and darted. past the rather ponderous person of the lady, She turned on me and demanded to know what Fred had in his mouth. I said that I didn't know. It was only later that I learned that it was, what the lady might have guessed, sugar. On a later visit Fred, to whom it was all a great joke, told me that the lady from Collinsville said that she would have offered to adopt
me if I had told her the truth about the sugar. I was not for adoption and she did me an injustice.
Before I left that afternoon, Jane, thinking, I believe, that the other lady had pursued Fred and me a little overmuch, out of her hearing invited me to visit Fred on Saturday of the following week and to stay over night.
On the Saturday appointed, I again visited Fred. Jane did everything possible to help us to enjoy ourselves in our own way.
She had prepared pastries containing plenty of the sugar that Fred had
coveted.
In the evening, when Norman and Rosie had gone and Uncle Jimmie was in bed, she entered into little games in the house with us, such as the hidden small article with tips of hot and cold given by the hider.
Fred was anxious to show me a captive firefly, which he had somehow caught in low damp ground close by and had under an inverted water glass on a table. With the lamps turned low in the evening, it gave us a display exploring the sides of its strange prison. Jane told Fred that he should let it go in the morning and try to catch another if he wanted to. Fred thought that they were too hard to catch. Jane told me, when Fred was out of hearing, that it would accidentally escape, that she wasn't going to let it starve to death under that glass. Jane sang for us a very simple song, which began:
"There was an old man who lived in the woods,
As you will plainly see;
He said he could do more work in a day
Than his wife could do in three."
It went on for several stanzas, in which the challenge was accepted, the work changed around, and the discomfiture of the old man was very complete.
I returned home the next forenoon, registering a very pleasant visit.
In a Christmas vacation in the early eighties, I saw Fred doing very fancy skating on Blair Pond, and spoke with him briefly. In a summer vacation rather later, I think, in the eighties I came upon him in Blandford Center, when he was living with Miss Electa Watson, Dr. Deane being a member of the household and having his small office building close by in the yard. Fred took me into the house. He showed me a very nice small library, but spoke contemptuously of the writers, saying they were all crazy men. Many years later I heard that he had been accidentally drowned in
a lake in Maine; but I am not sure whether it was authentic. I doubt whether he ever had to work.
In that same summer of 1874 I visited Boise Spiller. He showed me over the splendid old colonial house of Rebecca Boise. It was undoubtedly the finest colonial house in the district. It was approached, though I think not at all closely, by the Shepard house, which had also served as a tavern.
More than making up for the matter of the spelling book, Mrs. Spiller gave me a pamphlet copy, in paper covers, of the Life of Dr. David Livingstone. I was proud to take it home, certain that Aunt Hannah would not destroy it on account of its paper covers, because he had been much in our weekly paper and in conversation during the year or two before this.
His refusal in 1872 to leave with Stanley his people to whom he was doctor and missionary in Central Africa; his death in 1873; the difficult and perilous conveyance of his body by his people to the coast, through superstitious tribes; the conveyance of the body to London by a special British ship and the burial in Westminster Abbey, were all matters of keen interest at the time. It was welcomed at the house, as I expected it would be.
For some reason Mrs. Spiller did not teach the school a second year. I have no knowledge how long she continued to live in the district.
I visited that summer George Lloyd, in the home of his father Lester Lloyd. This took me into a very lovely family, of whom I was to see much in
the next few years and through many years.
Elizabeth, or Lizzie, Lloyd was one of the most remarkable instances of triumph over physical difficulties that I have known. Afflicted with a congenital hip lameness that compelled her to use a crutch, she developed strength mentally and physically, became, as a large girl and young woman, very attractive, learned telegraphy on a small instrument at home, was telegraph operator for a time in the office at Blandford Center and for many years in Ware. She earned and saved money and achieved considerable prosperity.
The older twin sisters, Maria and Martha were very interesting., Martha was of a more quiet and retiring nature, tending toward what is nowadays called the introvert. Maria was enough of an extrovert to get into society in Blandford Center and into politics as an ardent democrat, as I found in 1876.
Ella Bartlett had brought to the Bartlett home a glowing account of the scholarly qualities of two of her schoolmates. These were Hiram Blair and
Marian Miller. This gave them considerable fame in the Bartlett house.
In all the years, I spoke with Hiram Blair only three times.
In my first year at the Bartlett home, he was evening visitor at the house. I hung around, and finally, in order to speak to the scholar, I asked him why he used such big words. He very aptly replied, "To puzzle you”Among a number of sayings of Aunt Hannah's a favorite one was, "Little people should be seen and not heard.” I have no doubt that I went
very shortly to bed.
In an afternoon school exhibition which Hiram attended, I think in 1874 or 1875, I spoke the speech of Spartacus to the gladiators whom he was leading into revolt. Hiram waited for me outside the school and asked me if I knew what became of Spartacus. I said that I did not. He told me of the defeat of a number of Roman armies by the gladiators and slaves led by Spartacus, but that finally they were defeated and Spartacus was slain.
In a summer vacation time, probably in the early eighties, walking along the loop road toward or from Blair Pond, I saw Hiram and his father haying in their field south of the road, where a barn then stood. I went into the field to speak with Hiram. I had heard that he had attended Williston Academy for a short period before this time.
In the course of a conversation, I asked Hiram what he intended to do.
He replied: "I intend to work summers and travel winters. I've made up my mind that I can't make my living with my brains. I believe that I quote him precisely. I did not see him again.
In the early summer of 1875 the death of Myra Osborn occurred.
She was an attractive young girl of about my age. Her death was the occasion of a great deal of grief. She had been considerably ill for nearly a year. She was of a very gentle and lovely nature, a little of the type of Alice in Ben Bolt. For a long time she had not taken part in the more active out-of-door sports. Her only medical service was by a doctor from Center Otis.
Her playmates were given chairs nearest to the casket. Charlie Shepard sat by me and cried a little. I do not remember whether I cried or not.
There was general sympathy. We her playmates felt the grief as deeply and heavily as nature allows to burden the minds of children of that age.
At the cemetery there was loud grief from her older sister and brothers.
Her parents silently may have felt the grief even more deeply.
It has been said, in substance, by Dr. Holmes that we are long term clocks; that the Angel of Life winds us up once for all, closes the case and gives the key into the hands of the Angel of the Resurrection. The ancients had an expression intended to be comforting, "Whom the Gods love die young.” Our expression is pious and austere, "The Lord gave, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Joseph Shepard was said to have made a remark which is often made about a person who is ill and on some occasion shows some nervousness or irritability. No one could have shown more sympathy when the tragedy happened than the members of the Shepard family.
I said enough a year ago about the shock that came to our peaceful neighborhood when Joseph Shepard was assaulted by Frank Osborn, who though only 16 had the stature and strength of a man. This was in the summer of 1875.
In May 1876 summonses to appear as witnesses on a day stated in June, to testify in the superior court in case of Joseph Shepard against Selden Osborn were served by a deputy sheriff on mother, Father Brooks, Uncle Franklin and me.
We waited in the courtroom more than a day before our case was called and I was much impressed by the glamor of the trials as conducted by the great advocate George M. Stearns, who was in every trial and when one case was finished moved across the courtroom where another jury was waiting. That, together with the fact that he laid a friendly hand on me with the words, "Come to my office some day and I'll make a lawyer of you," settled my mind that I would be a lawyer and from that I never deviated.
The Osborns were a very fine family. Mrs. Osborn, who had been Elizabeth Smithies, was a tall strongly built woman of the best English middle class stock. Selden was of slight build. All the
children, with the exception of Myra, matured early in size and strength.
When the large strong boys, Edwin, Norman and Frank, with the aid of a carpenter, in 1873, took the material from the old barn at east end of the south meadow and made the country grocery store, connected with the front veranda of the house, it was a new era in the life of Selden Osborn, and one for which he was especially fitted. It was an exciting addition to
the neighborhood and a great convenience.
As is usual in a country store, many people came to meet each other and to talk. Some young people walked over from East Otis and stopped at Uncle Franklin's on the way back. In particular Clarkie Deering called and played for us the Jews-harp, which I never saw or heard in any other place. It was lively and sweet music.
The Shepard case broke Selden Osborn down. The total cost was probably $1,000. and perhaps more and he was probably running on a slender margin.
A day or two later I was in the Osborn house when they were all at the dining table. Not for my benefit so much as for those to whom I would carry it, Mr. Osborn said with great bitterness, "I've got such good neighbors that I'm going to sell my farm for…” a small animal whose name has an undeservably unpleasant sound..."and kill the animal." Other than it
was a small quadruped in the domesticated order, I do not identify the animal.
Soon conditions became on the old friendly basis. It was all very unfortunate.
Joseph Shepard was a very social man. He liked to drop in at the neighbors' houses and talk with the adult members of the family. He and his wife Rhoda celebrated the silver anniversary of their marriage about the year 1875 or 1876. There was catering for a large party at the house.
It seems that the three grandsons of Jonathan Shepard, who bought the Pixley land and tavern after they were moved above the new road, Joseph, Nathan, and William, all went west to Missouri and Illinois.
Nathan and William stayed west, except for a visit by William (I am quite sure of the first name) of some months with his brother Joseph, when Achsah, the orphan daughter of Nathan was brought to have a permanent home with Joseph and Mrs. Shepard in about the year 1873 or 1874. Achsah was born in or about 1871. She became a fine member of the family.
We saw a good deal of William Shepard (first name subject to correction if necessary) during the months while he remained visiting and helping with the work at his brother's.
Like all who have been touched with the atmosphere of the west, he was very social and, I think, visited a good deal at the houses.
He was an enthusiast about backgammon. Whether he had brought the game, occupying the inside of a box checker board, with its dice and dice boxes and markings for the game, with him from the west or found it in the Joseph Shepard house, at least he brought it on all his visits to the Bartlett house and tried to teach my sister, who was some two or three years older than I, the game. It seemed that on every occasion she either wilfully or accidentally misplayed, or made erroneous claims and he took his
board and went away angry. Within a few days he returned and resumed the game. My sister and I were the only young people in the Bartlett house in 1873 and 1874.
Joseph Shepard at some time in Rock Island, Ill., knew Dr. Curtis, who was then practicing there, and whom I knew well in the eighties as a long established physician in New Hartford, Conn. His account of the language of Dr. Curtis in Rock Island was unmistakable and he also knew that it was the same Dr. Curtis in both places.
His social qualities gave him close friendships.
He was friendly with Dr. Warren of Winsted, who sent to him Dwight Warren, when Dwight was a little too rapid for Winsted. He was very friendly with the Twinings in Tolland.
In the early part of April, 1875, I passed from the Bartlett household to my family in the two- story part of the house, though the relations of the families were very close and our evenings were spent largely together.
Early in September 1875 my sister went to live in the home of Arthur Brooks in Unionville, Conn., and attended school in Unionville during that school year. Before that Virgil Lloyd, having noticed her at Sunday school, began paying her attentions so far as he could. His evening calls at the house invariably ended with Virgil playing checkers with father Brooks after my mother and sister had gone to bed, I watching the games and finally going to bed myself.
When school was out in June 1876 Virgil obtained permission to meet my sister at the railroad train and bring her home;
For two years he had a rival in Chan (for Channing) Lewis, a young man of Unionville, who kept coming to the house uninvited and staying days at a time. It was my duty to keep them company, which I did faithfully.
Finally, in the fall of 1878, at our home in Tolland, my sister showed him her engagement ring from Virgil and he departed and did not
return.
In the summer of 1875, the Lake family of New York became boarders with Mother. Mrs. Lake, having a daughter in the institution who was among those of whom Mother had charge, had come to have a very warm friendship for Mother.
Mrs. Lake, bringing with her a young relative of near my own age, Fannie Mattocks, spent all summer with us every summer, in Blandford and in Tolland, to and including the summer of 1879, the last summer that my people lived on the hills, before going to Unionville, Conn., to give me a chance to continue my education.
Sometime in 1875, from the lower region of the valley, the theory and even the practice of the bustle in feminine attire infected for a while our orderly neighborhood. It was affected by the younger women.
It was short lived. Uncle Frank strongly denounced it. He applied to it the alphabet of the Bible, saying that if God had intended to have women look that way, He would have made them so.
About that time I heard feminine talk of the Grecian bend. I have no idea what it referred to, unless possibly the feminine posture when wearing the bustle. I know the expression was used. Perhaps some antiquarian may recall it.
In the summer of 1875, Mrs. Lake gave me a ten cent "shinplaster, " paper money possibly two by three inches in size, still current from the greenback money of Civil War days, specie payments being on the way in. I thought it was great wealth as I had never had any money before, except a dollar bill that Miss Haskell had given me, either for sympathy or merit in my first or second year in the Blair Pond school. That had disappeared as soon as I reached home, probably reappearing in stockings or something
of the sort.
Harry Lake, who in 1875 had finished high school and had obtained employment in New York, in that summer and each succeeding summer spent his two weeks' vacation with us. In the summer of 1875 he brought to me a Horatio Alger book, "Ragged Dick," a school algebra and a school reader, "The Oxford Senior Speaker," which I still have. This latter book is an extraordinary collection of literary gems in prose and poetry, and some of the poems in it, notably The Raven, The Bells, Trowbridge's The Vagabonds, How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix, a few years later furnished that very talented elocutionist Dwight Warren with material for the entertainment and artistic surprise of his young students.
The algebra interested me greatly in discovering what could be done in a mathematical way with letters that could not be done with figures. I used to talk about my school studies. Barnes' school history of the United States I knew pretty well from cover to cover, and used to pit that with Uncle Franklin against his fifty odd years of observation and the traditions about public men and events of the even remote past that seep into country places and are retained in memory.
One day I attempted to explain to Father Brooks, of course not lucidly, about algebra. He seemed bewildered, but finally said with conviction in
his voice that I should have an education.
Charles Lake, a New York business man, of fine appearance and very sociable nature and disposition, spent some weekends with us in each of the years.
There was much farm labor from March until the end of fall.
What were our divertisements in the years of the seventies?
The gentle game of croquet came early in the seventies and by the middle of that decade and on through was quite the rage. There was a croquet ground, such as it was, at our house, the Osborn house, the Shepard and the Lester Lloyd houses. There were croquet parties.
A number of times in each season there were picnics by the attractive and beautiful shore of Big Pond. Sometimes only our own people with the summer boarders, sometimes taking in a neighborhood as far from us as the Lester Lloyd Place. There were no cottages then and only one building by the shore, which looked like a club house and was known by us as the Chicopee house, its occupants being said to come from that place. There was boating, quoit pitching with flat stones, croquet playing on a good hard earth ground, naturally or artificially made, set in among the trees; and the general hilarity of a picnic day.
Sometimes we found close by the shore the tent of a troubadour fisherman, with concertina, who was not averse to giving us a little entertainment of music and song.
In the evenings there were card games of the simple sort which people were willing to play in those days. With the children there were, of course, running and racing games.
In the winter there was reading aloud at our house. Beginning with 1875, there were checkers and chess, in which James Brooks had become quite proficient in the off hours from his work in Lakeville, and which he taught to me.
There was parlor croquet on the dining room table.
There was coasting down Babb's Hill and under good conditions one trip down the long hills to the schoolhouse. Uncle Franklin's steelshod pung was often drafted for party coasting. There was no team traffic in winter evenings and the road was clear.
Of the four strong young men, Bennie, and Seymour Babb, Henry Foster and James Brooks, two lay on each outer edge and steered by dragging a foot. Great discarded boots of Charles Gibbs were pulled over the regular
boots of each steerer. All who could crowd in between rode as passengers.
With the children, in little parties, there were "Post Office," "The Needle's Eye that Doth Supply," in both which games Bertie Babb fared badly; jack straws, tiddledy winks, a game of cards featuring authors, and other little games which Selden Osborn had brought from "Down below."
The great event of each winter was a gay and lively dance at Mordecai Babb's. A Bible reading parent had noticed the name of the Jewish hero in the Book of Esther, had thought that it looked good, and had bestowed it on this son. Of course he was always known as Mord.
He had natural talent as player of the fiddle and played by ear. He knew a good many dances and dance tunes. He always both played and prompted and sometimes danced at the same time, in which latter case feet of others were endangered and sometimes suffered. It ran from edge of the evening until about midnight. There were refreshments. Mord, though topping the line of middle age, was always the gayest of the company. He was in his element.
Those dances continued through the century and, I think, considerably later. In the nineties and on, when there were summer boarders at my sister's and elsewhere, they occurred one or more times in the summer. Mord and his second wife Harriet were both from Otis and there was considerable attendance from that town.
How many remember the dances at Mord's?
I know, of course, the names of the eight children by the second marriage, but it is useless to enumerate them.
Wealth, as measured in the country, was growing day and night for Mord.
Later in the century a concern from down Winsted way paid him $4500. cash for the timber, mostly spruce, in the great swamp southwest from his house, cleverly taking grant of the right to cut and remove for a period of twenty years. The timber deed is recorded in Springfield.
Bennie and Seymour, all that remained of the children of the first marriage, dropped out of the Blair Pond school at the end of my first winter. The school automatically graduated its students at a certain age and size, the age, I think, being around sixteen. Few went farther.
Henry Lloyd, my runaway pupil in 1883, went on and became a physician. Harvey Blair had done the same, I believe, a little before my time. Emma and Frank Osborn went, I think, for a short time to a school in Westfield, which I understood to be the Normal School. Marian Miller went through the Normal School.
The two most brilliant persons whom I encountered in the district were Marian Miller and Dwight Warren. Of the latter I shall say something a little later in connection with the school.
Marian Miller, aside from being mentally brilliant, was beautiful. She had beautiful features with rich natural coloring of the face, beautiful eyes, dark in color like her mother's, figure and manner to correspond. I was a good deal at the Miller house, because my half-brother Eugene Heady worked and lived there. I had good observation of Marian Miller, especially when on one occasion in 1876 she catechized me for some time in history and geography, to figure, as I thought, whether I was or might be material for the Westfield Normal School.
She had suitors from Westfield who sought her out in vacation times at her home. I remember once seeing the worshipful attentions paid to her by a smartly dressed and smart young man from Westfield. Her beauty was much commented on at the Bartlett home. In 1872 Ella Bartlett called my attention to a story written by this Marian Miller and published in the Boston Cultivator.
At Christmas time in 1872 James Brooks had the temerity to ask Marian Miller to go with him to a dance at the home of Bedette and Kate Cook. She accepted and they went. The snow was deep. It is my recollection that he wore boots and carried along in the sleigh the shoes for dancing. He gave us an interesting account of the dance.
I have always been anxious to know the later career of Marian Miller. I heard that she married a professor by name of Dickinson, considerably older than herself, and that they were both engaged in newspaper and magazine literary work.
I first saw the Miller home, without seeing the family, in the spring of 1872; when Uncle Frank, wanting to see Francis Blair about something, took me with him to the Blair house, across from the Miller house.
Francis was not at home. His wife Lucy Blair said that Francis was "probable" in such and such place. Uncle Frank left word for him. When we had started for home, Uncle Frank said to me, "She always says 'probable." I do not remember ever having seen her on any other occasion.
When I began going to the Miller house in 1875, she was living in the same house, but had become Lucy Brown.
Lyman Miller was an unsuccessful farmer. He was of medium height, stockily built, of florid complexion, easy going. He was below par in energy
and in initiative, which is a by product of that quality. He lacked the little dynamo that lies in the glands.
Mrs. Miller was in strong contrast. She was tall, with dark eyes, dark complexion, of the high brunette type, good looking, perhaps rather extra- ordinarily so when a girl. She had energy enough for two, but could not impart it to him.
In the summer of 1877 she was willing that the world, or at least the neighborhood, should know her disappointment. On an occasion when we were all at the dining table, I being there by invitation, she gave Mr. Miller a verbal going over, greatly to the embarrassment of Eugene and me. She told him how her uncle had once paid all his debts and given him a new as start, and now they were as badly in debt as ever.
Mr. Miller over and over again, when he could get in a word, said the identical words, "My heart and hands are full, Mrs. Miller."
In the spring of 1878, Eugene married and came with his wife to live with us on the large farm in Tolland, where there was always work enough for two or three men.
In the winter of 1880, Virgil Lloyd, with the help of his father for whom he had worked many years, bought the Miller farm.
Little as I know about the later career of Marian Miller, I know less as to what became of her parents.
The Sunday school and Sunday evening religious services that flourished in the Blair Pond schoolhouse in the seventies had their highest development, so far as my knowledge goes, in the years 1875, ’76 and ’77.
Only one preacher and one sermon remain in my memory, and that because of the lurid character of the latter. This I am sure was not by a settled minister of the town, but by a traveling preacher of the evangelist type.
The services in general were excellent. Bible questions were given us to take home, to encourage familiarity with the book. These were greatly
enjoyed by Uncle Frank.
There was much lusty congregational singing. The hymns were marked L. M. for long meter and S. M. for short meter, and these markings were clue enough. Long meter was where the lines were in straight four metrical feet to the line:
"Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him all creatures here below.”
Short meter was where the lines were alternately four feet and three feet to the line, the lines of equal length rhyming together:
"All hail the power of Jesus' name,
Let angels prostrate fall;
Bring forth the royal diadem
And crown Him Lord of all."
It came to us that Joseph Shepard said that James Brooks sang out of key and put him (J. S.) out. I have suspicion that Mr. Shepard may have been right. It made no difference with the continued vigorous singing of James Brooks.
There was a flourishing Sunday school. James Brooks, naturally a very pious man, took a prominent part in it.
In the summer of 1876 he went as a delegate from our Sunday school to a Sunday school convention in Lowell. The following Sunday he read a paper making report of the convention. I do not remember anything in the paper, of course, but I remember the shiny blackness of his shoes as he stood on the platform.
In 1890 and the two following years, when I was a bachelor lawyer in Springfield and a lonesome stranger in the city, I went home often weekends in the warm part of the year walking by preference from the railroad station. Father Brooks carried me back to the railroad station for an early train Monday morning. Whenever John Perkins was outside and saw us going by he always sang out, "There goes law and gospel."
My people had then bought and were occupying the former Blair-Brown farm, opposite the home of my sister, the former Miller farm.
In 1872, when an elegant man, driving in an elegant top carriage, with an elegant lady beside him, came upon me, walking beside the road with a crossbow gun on my shoulder, stopped the carriage and asked me whether I was fighting for Grant or Greeley, I was bewildered. I had not yet arrived to an interest in politics.
In 1876 my interest in the campaign between Hayes and Tilden was more intense than it has been in any campaign since, though it has always been keen. The Babb family of that time was never, I believe, touched in the remotest way with questions of politics.
Of the other fifteen families in the district, two to my knowledge were democratic; the Lester Lloyd family and the Henry Blair family. The district, like the town, was predominantly republican.
I read the Springfield Weekly Union, quite especially its editorial page as it appeared each week. News pages are good, but for arguments go to an editorial page. I argued at school with Eddie Pierce, who had a foster home with Henry Blair. Eddie finally told me what Henry Blair said ought to be done to me.
In the years 1875, ’76 and ’77, Maria Lloyd was much at our house, and we sometimes at her home. She liked the Lakes and my mother. My mother was a comparatively young woman, still in the early thirties of age.
Maria Lloyd told us in 1876 of an occasion when a young woman in Blandford Center said to her, "I hate democrats," and Maria replied, "I reciprocate your feelings," very icily we judged as Maria repeated
it to us.
Bert Gibbs, a very young man, neat and natty, from family in upper Gibbs Street across from the schoolhouse, came riding horseback into our district that summer; the special attraction being Hattie Shepard, then a big girl, quite a little older than my sister.
He was a strong democrat. He stopped at our place. He threw at us Grant and Belknap and perhaps some other scandals of the Grant regime, as reasons why we should not stand for Hayes. He had a slight stutter or stammer in his speech.
That summer Fred Newbury, of Windsor, Conn., appeared on the scene. He had met Maria Lloyd in Blandford Center and had become her ardent suitor, leading to their marriage some two years later.
He was prematurely gray in his thirties, but of ruddy complexion and vigorous health. He was of slender figure, good height, dressed excellently, not to say dandily. He was a very intelligent, suave and genial person. He had been married at least once, perhaps twice, before. He was a good republican.
Once, when he and I happened to be the only ones in the living room at my home, I gave him my opinion of the campaign, ending with the boyish statement that Tilden was "just no man at all.’ The Springfield Union editorials had not said that, but they had said derogatory things joined with praises heaped on Hayes.
Mr. Newbury said very quietly, but pointedly, "I don't believe in personalities."
I was surprised at this coming from a good republican; but it sank in. Never again in my life did I say anything so personally derogatory of a man whom one of the great parties had nominated as its candidate for president of the United States.
In the early part of September, 1877, my people moved to the large stocked farm owned by Homer Twining, located at the head of Noyes Pond, in the adjoining town of Tolland; where I spent two happy and profitable years.
Those two years are not pertinent to this paper, except in the barest mention.
In a school building smaller than the Blair Pond school, located about a mile and a half from our home, I had during those two years a teacher whom I always shall hold in grateful memory.
She was Miss Mary Spring of West Granville, a graduate of the Westfield Normal School; later Mrs. Erastus Larkin, wife of a farmer and one time legislator who owned a farm in south part of her town.
With my algebra, in which I had already made some progress, and her geometry and other text books from the Normal School, in those two years she took me over a considerable part of a high school course. She seemed to enjoy the task, which made it pleasant for both of us.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1878 there was a double wedding in the afternoon in the home of Lester Lloyd in Blandford. My sister was married to Virgil Lloyd and Maria Lloyd was married to Fred Newbury.
It was a very gala occasion. My people and I of course were over for the day and night, Eugene and his wife remaining in charge of the Tolland farm.
In the edge of the evening, Dr. Deane, recently settled as physician in the town, played the organ which had been so much used by Martha and Maria, and sang "Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight?"
A little later in the evening, the married couples were conveyed to the train which they were to take at Russell for Albany.
About the first of September 1879, word came to us that there was to be a man teacher in the Blair Pond school that year. My people thought that it would be great for me to go to school to a man teacher.
They were preparing to move to Unionville and it was arranged for me to go to the Bartlett home and attend the Blair Pond school until Virgil should complete his plans for purchase of the Miller farm, then work for him a few months, going to Unionville the first of September, 1880, to enter the high school.
Dwight Warren was, I believe, about 20 years of age. He was a young man of rather brilliant qualities. His father thought that a period in the country might do him good. He was so facetious as a school teacher that when we encountered pronunciation of a big word he ordered us always to call it Moses and go right on. We did as directed always, of course,
with ridiculous effect.
Once when I was doing algebra equation on the board, for the amusement of himself and the school he slapped me lightly on the back with a book that he had in his hand and said, "You can't be a lawyer, you are too slow."
His brilliant qualities were in face, eyes, voice, manner, not easily describable.
His most brilliant talent was as an elocutionist. He told us that he and his young Winsted friend John F. Wynne, whom I afterward knew as a practicing lawyer in Unionville and New Haven, had gone to halls from town to town in Litchfield County giving elocutionary readings, for small admission charges. He took pleasure in reading, with remarkably fine effect, the poems before referred to from my Oxford Senior Speaker.
His moral anchors were in some respects lightly set. When with some of us older boys (and we were very young) he sometimes told stories which he ought not to have told to anyone anywhere.
He was what is called a mixer and enjoyed boarding around, which to some teachers was so nearly unbearable.
He boarded to a considerable extent at the Babb's.
Their regular quota may have been large because of the number who went to school from that house.
He had come to the country to see country people and was prepared to observe and enjoy them. His favorite diversion was poker, played
with kernels of corn. This he taught to me and others at the Babb house and at the Osborn house. What his conduct was at the Shepard house, where he was supposed to be especially under observation, I have no knowledge.
I knew some thing of eucher before this, but he taught me to play as his partner and, I regret to say, to cheat with certain signs of the hands.
We played an evening of games of eucher at Mord Babb's against Mord and Frank Barnes as partners. Barnes was perhaps thirty years old or so at the time; he had been around; and was much more sophisticated in sporting ways than Dwight was. I think that Barnes was from Otis way and that he had at some previous time married a Stannard girl. In spite of our disgraceful little cheatings Dwight and I were beaten. He told me as soon as we were alone that he had seen Barnes dealing from the bottom of the pack. I very naively said, "Why didn't you speak about it?"
He said he didn’t want to get hurt. He had previously impressed us with his boxing ability; but as I looked at Frank Barnes I thought that perhaps he was right.
I mention these things as sidelights on our imported man teacher.
On the first of March 1880, Virgil having completed his purchase of the Miller farm, I left school and worked for him until the first of September, at rate of six dollars a month.
In the latter part of his school year, Dwight Warren boarded almost entirely at the home of Lester Lloyd.
After school was out he continued to live there and work on the farm at least a great part of the summer.
It was my understanding that a strong sentimental attachment developed between Dwight Warren and Lizzie Lloyd. She was at the height of her attractiveness. He being the son of a doctor, with some smattering of medical knowledge, believed that her lameness was curable.
It was my understanding that there was talk of marriage; that the parents of Lizzie Lloyd finally entered into the talk and objected on the ground of the youthfulness of the couple. That was a valid and unavoidable objection to Dwight Warren as of that present time, for he was entirely unsettled. He would not stay in the country as a farmer.
Finally Dwight Warren went away and never returned. If all was as I understood it to have been, it can be imagined what a crushing disappointment it was to Lizzie Lloyd during the remainder of her life.
With Virgil Lloyd on the new farm there were six months of hard work. He was a tireless worker when fishing or hunting did not distract him from it, and we worked early and often late.
John Perkins had married Kate Cook and they were living in the former Brown house across from our place. We changed work in haying time.
John shocked me by his frequent references to his father as "Old Ephraim.” Respect where due was not one of his attributes.
I always shall remember with gratitude the kindness to me in July and August of that summer of Myron Lloyd, principal of a grammar school in Westfield, who with his family passed those summer months at the home of Jarvis Lloyd. On more than one occasion he sought me out when I was working alone, picking up stones or cutting brush that Lyman Miller had allowed to overrun good land, and talked to me in the most encouraging way. His kindness touched me deeply and unforgettably.
On the first of September, 1880, I went to Unionville with thirty-six dollars in my pocket.
For two years and a half, except for occasional visits to my sister, I was away from the Blair Pond district.
That period is not relevant to this paper, except in certain circumstances at its end which again brought me in contact with the Blair Pond school, this time as its teacher.
In June, 1882, State Senator Upson, the great manufacturing mogul of the village of Unionville, in common probably with a few other captains of industry, and thereby exponents of applied science, was given the right by Sheffield Scientific School at Yale to nominate a student to four years' free tuition.
He offered the appointment to me.
After consideration, I declined it with sincere thanks. It was not the line of study I desired. Also it is easier for a student to work his way for board and room in a regular college, with its dining rooms and various special services, than in one of the auxiliary schools. Without intention to solicit or suggest, I mentioned to Mr. Upson that it was my intention to study law.
He offered to loan me the money to pay my tuition in the Yale Law School. I accepted, though I had no means to pay my board and room. My people could help me very little. I worked that July and August and saved a little money and entered the law school in September, getting the first installment of tuition from Senator Upson.
I got from him the second installment of tuition in December, with a little more money as a loan, but not enough to allow me to live in comfort.
I was not able to get employment in the hours available to me. The second tuition installment carried to the latter part of March. I then talked with the president of the law school, Simeon Baldwin, and with the dean, telling them that I felt that I must withdraw for the balance of the year. They talked very kindly to me. The dean told me to take my books and continue my studies and if I could return later consideration would be given to allowing me credit for this first year. It was a two years' course.
I informed Senator Upson that I could not get along with tuition without a good deal more for other expenses, that I would repay his loans and would not ask to borrow more at that time. He soon sent me a receipt
in full for all that he had loaned me and as he was a
very wealthy man, I accepted it.
And so it happened in the latter part of March, 1883, that I visited my sister in Blandford.
Someone broached the possibility of my teaching the Blair Pond school in the spring term, no teacher being at that time engaged.
I applied to Jarvis Lloyd, then as for many years prominent in town affairs and school committeeman of that district. He employed me. In the home of Deacon Hinsdale, below Blandford Center, I was given perfunctory examination by him and Howard Robinson, examining committeemen for the town schools. They assured me that it was all right for me to take the school.
The greatest part of my scholars had attended the same school with me, a little more than three years before.
From the Babb house there were Fred and Frank, six years old or so, who came to school to learn the alphabet, preparatory to the possibly distant adventure of reading, Harriet or Hattie considerably older and, I think, one or two others. There were George and Albert Osborn, Albert some thirteen or fourteen, and George around fifteen years of age; I was eighteen. There were Achsah Shepard; James and Burton Lloyd, and for a brief glimpse one day their small brother Henry, I think about five years of age. There was a girl from the Watson house. There were Laura and Sadie
Culver, and a small boy, who I believe was James Culver, brother of Laura and Sadie.
That, so far as I recall it, was the roster of my little school. James Lloyd, a tall, bright boy, perhaps fourteen or so years of age, was my brightest and most advanced pupil. Saying that is no reflection on the others.
There were no dull pupils in the school except Fred and Frank Babb. I do not know where I found the grouped alphabet letters for them. I have no recollection of getting them farther than the seventh letter. I said, "What do you say when you want the oxen to move over the other way?" They said, "Gee." Afterward whenever I pointed to that letter, they said in chorus, “Gee!" I am afraid that their education was neglected.
Of the girls, Hattie Babb and Achsah Shepard were good looking, Laura and Sadie Culver rather remarkably so. I was greatly grieved, not many years later to read of the premature death of Laura Culver; as was also the case with reference to James Lloyd and his brother Arthur.
The boarding around through the district was extremely disagreeable to me.
I boarded in the Culver house, where I found conditions pleasant; in the Shepard house; and to a considerable extent in the Osborn house, where the boys were so near my own age; and most of all in the Jarvis Lloyd house, where Julia Lloyd, one of the kindest and most motherly of women, finding my reluctance to distribute my boarding from house to house, made me welcome to an extent far exceeding the quota belonging to that family.
One Sunday at the Osborn house, George and Albert and I went for a long walk, with eggs, sandwiches and lemons for noontime refreshment.
It was a very hot day. George and Albert piloted me to the home of
Leroy Warfield on the Woronoco road, a half mile or so below the Center. Leroy Warfield, a rather old man, I believe, was a seller of small bottled liquids, in the less than three per cent. class.
We were thirsty, we needed some of his supplies with our luncheon, we had sufficient money. Not for love or money would he give or sell a single bottle of his soda or other small stuff. We used every persuasion possible, to no avail. His reason was that it was Sunday. I do not believe that the law forbade sales on Sunday of such innocuous beverages. I think that religion held his hand and made him adamant to our entreaties. The gift of one of his ten cent bottles would have been the act of a good Samaritan.
We had nothing but the harsh juice of the lemon, of which we each had one, for moisture with our luncheon.
The school closed so some time in June.
The memories here written begin seventy years ago.
I am in the latter seventies of age.
As the French say, I am approaching twenty for the fourth time. The French pleasantry is nice.
The memories in this paper are small in bulk and detail compared with those that come to my mind when I turn my thoughts to those old days and years of the seventies and edge of the eighties of the Nineteenth Century.