In writing these hap-hazard memories of the old days at Beverly Farms, I did not mean that they should be egotistical, but in spite of my good intentions I am afraid they are. You see it is almost impossible to separate yourself from your own memories! I throw myself upon the mercy of the Court! Summer of 1916. We have a little Reading Club here at Beverly Farms. We read whatever happens to come up, from Chesterton's Dickens to "The Woman who was Tired to Death," interspersed with real poems from "North of Boston." I belong to the Club. I am the oldest member of it, in fact, I am the oldest person in New England—on stormy days! When the weather is fine and the wind south-west, I am young enough to have infantile paralysis! One day, in my enforced absence from the Club, my colleagues conspired against me, It doesn't smell that way now, for Mr. Little has made the school-house of that day a pretty summer home for whomsoever will live in it. Elsie promises to set me right whenever I go astray as to what happened at old Beverly Farms, how it looked, what legends it had—how its people lived and behaved, and so forth, and so forth. She is a foxy little thing, and I suspect that when she is floored on my reminiscences, she will appeal to her mother, who, she says is older than she is! We do not I often wish I could catch and fix, by the kodak of memory, some of the celebrities of my childhood, in this little village. What a character, for instance, was Uncle David Larcom! Among the old Puritans who were his ancestors, and among whom he was raised, what a constant surprise he must have been! Certainly no hero of a dime novel could have done more startling and audacious things. He ran off to sea in his youth and stayed away from the village for three years. During that time, he had seen and experienced enough to satisfy Tom Sawyer; he had messed with Indian Lascars and acquired a taste for curry and red pepper which he never lost. And with the love for stimulating diet he gained a love for stimulating stories, and could draw the very longest kind of an innocent bow, that carried far and never hurt anybody. Who could forget his yarns of the sea serpent and his life on the old English Brig? "Has he got to the old English brig?" his waggish son would inquire, as he listened from an adjoining room. He gave away a wonderful old mirror, beautifully carved, with a lion's head at the bottom, and a boy astride a goose at the top, with leaves and bunches of grapes at the sides, and glass, as it seems to me, almost an inch thick. It hangs now in the drawing room of its possessor restored to pristine beauty and bearing an inscription setting forth that it came from the wreck of the "Schooner Hesperus." Uncle David told this yarn when he gave away the beautiful mirror. Nobody had ever before heard of this connection with the Schooner Hesperus. My own impression is that the mirror was brought to the old house, which I now own, by Aunt Betsey Larcom, the great grandmother of Elsie Doane. Dear old Uncle David! Sometimes his language was not choice, but how big his heart was! After he uncoiled his sea legs and settled People often cheated him, in fact, he almost seemed to like being cheated. His patient wife once remarked that he always wanted to give his own things away, and buy things for more than people asked for them. He would match Uncle Toby's army in Flanders for profanity, but he would go miles to help a sick friend, or, (and this is to my mind, the last test of friendship in a horse owner) turn out his old "Bun" on the stormiest night that ever raged, to help a brother teamster up a hill. And when were ever his own rakes and plows and forks at home? Weren't they always lent out somewhere? What a reverence for all things sacred, way down in the bottom of his large heart he always had! How deferential to ministers he was! How angry he would be at any unnecessary breaking of the "Sah-bath" as he called it. How steadily he read, (though he wouldn't go to church) all day and all the evening of the Lord's Day—taking up "The Lord into his garden comes The spices yield their rich "Perfooms" The lillies grow and thrive" was one of his special favorites. His kindly handsome face, his enormous size, his laugh, which was ten laughs in one, are among the clear remembrances of my childhood. And I can hardly close this sketch better than by quoting his old family doctor's words: "Swear, yes, but his swearing was better than some folks' praying." I should like to "summon from the vasty deep" some of the other old people, both white and black, who lived here in the old days. Just back of where Mr. Flick's stable now stands at Pride's Crossing lived Jacob Brower, a little old man of Dutch descent, with his wife and family. She was a sister of Mrs. Peter Pride, who lived in the first house west of the Pride's Crossing station. I remember Aunt Pride as an extremely handsome, tall, dark, dignified woman. She belonged to the Thissell family. Lucy and Frank Eldredge came of this family, and Willis Pride, and I suppose "Thissell's Market" claims relation too! The next house east of the station, on the other side of the road was a tumble down old house innocent of paint, and black with age, inhabited by three old African women—named Chloe Turner, Phillis Cave and Nancy Milan, all widows. The house, after the railroad cut it off from the main road, was so near the track that one could almost step from the rock doorstep to the rails, and the old crazy structure shook every time an infrequent train passed, we had four trains to Boston daily then. I remember how the old house smelt and how the rickety stairs creaked under one's feet. When my great great-grandfather, David Larcom, married the widow of John West and brought her to his home (now the Gordon Dexter place) she brought with her as part of her dower, a negro woman, a remarkable character, named Juno Freeman. This woman was the mother of a large family. Mary Herrick West's father was a Captain Herrick and he brought Juno, a slave from North Carolina in his ship. Juno's children took the Larcom name and remained as slave property in the Larcom family, till, in my great-grandfather's time they were sold. My uncle Rufus told me that this ancestor, Jonathan Larcom, was sharp, and, hearing that all slaves in Massachusetts were to be freed, sold his. The old house I have mentioned was given to Juno Larcom, it being on the land known as the "gate pasture" and in after years, when Mr. Franklin Haven wanted to open an avenue there, he took a land rent from my stepfather, David Larcom, had the old house torn down, and put a little house for Nancy Milan (who was then the only survivor of the three old widows) right by my piazza, on the east side, and there Aunt Milan died peacefully in the spring of 1869. Aunt Milan's mother, Phillis Cave, was brought to Danvers in the boot of Judge Cave's chaise, and afterwards somehow drifted to Beverly. Judge Cave's daughter, Maria Cummins, wrote the "Lamplighter," a book of great popularity in this region, in her day. Phillis worked in the best Beverly families, the Rantouls, Endicotts, and others, and used to walk to Beverly, work all day, and walk home at night. I remember wondering if all the washing she did had made the palms of her hands so much whiter than the rest of her. Aunt Chloe and Aunt Milan were pretty lazy old things, but everybody liked them The old brick meeting house had a wooden bench built upstairs near the choir, and there these three black persons sat, every Sunday, thro' their peaceful lives. I think that was a pretty low down trick of those old Baptists, particularly as the ladies in question always sat at our tables. We old dwellers at Beverly Farms,—Obers and Haskells and Woodberrys and Williamses and Larcoms, are pretty well snarled up as to For instance, Miss Haven gave me the other day the appraisal of my great grandfather's estate, that same David Larcom of slave times. He died in 1779 possessed of £899 sterling, all in real estate. I found in the appraisal and settlement among his children, that my old friend Mrs. Lee and I have probably a common ancestor, Jonathan Larcom. It amuses us, because we have never before found any trace of commingling blood. I fancy it would be pretty difficult to find any two old Beverly Farmites, who are not related. My principal pride in the old paper is that it sets forth, over the signature of the Judge of Probate in Ipswich, that a Larcom once was worth about $5,000! (His brother's estate was appraised at £219 15s. 6d. Ed.) My good neighbor, Mrs. Goddard, came in last evening and brought me a fragrant bouquet of thyme and rosemary and marjoram and sage, which makes me remember that I have not yet tried to describe Aunt Betsey Larcom's garden in those ancient days. The striped grass is still growing in one corner of my garden—the very same roots that were there in my childhood, and up to a year or so ago, the old lilac bush that Uncle Ed. Larcom picked blossoms from when he was a small boy, was there too. Aunt Betsey's garden was a beautiful combination of use and loveliness. All along the stone wall grew red-blossomed barm and in the long beds were hyssop (she called it isop) and rue and marigolds and catnip and camomile and sage and sweet marjoram and martinoes. Martinoes were funny things with a beautiful, ill-smelling bloom which looked like an orchid, and when the blossoms dropped there succeeded an odd shaped fruit, with spines and a long tail, which was used for pickles. Then there were king cups, a glorified buttercup, and a lovely little blue flower called "Star of Bethlehem" and four o'clocks. Right here I want to say that Frank Gaudreau has more varieties of four o'clocks than I ever supposed were known to lovers of flowers and I think he deserves the thanks of the village for his pretty garden. All the different herbs were carefully gathered by Aunt Betsey, and tied in bundles, and hung up to the rafters of the old attic. Sometimes I fancy I can smell them now on a damp day, and I like to recall the dear old lady in her tyer and cap, busy with her simples. I like to think of her as my tutelar divinity for I came to love her dearly, though I am sure that when I was first landed in her house, I was a big trial. Elsie Doane remembered another garden of that time, where, she says, they never picked a flower. I remember it too, but I had forgotten that they didn't pick the flowers. It flourished right where the engine house and those other buildings stand, and Elsie thinks the garden reached way out to the sign post. Uncle Asa Ober owned that garden—the ancestor of Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Hooper and Helen Campbell, and many others of our fast fading away villagers. His two stepdaughters were cousins to my mother, and they had a little shop in an ell that ran from the house to the street, where they did dressmaking and millinery. Right in front of the shop was the garden There were cucumbers in the garden extension and artichokes by the old walls. But my regrets are not for the gardens. We have gardens now, but nobody can bring back the beautiful fields, stretching from the woods to the sea, where cows and oxen grazed. Nobody can bring back the brooks, now polluted and turned into ditches. Nobody can bring back the roadsides bordered with wild roses, now tunneled and bean-poled out of all beauty. I do love some of our summer people, particularly those who have kept their hands off and have not removed the old landmarks, but I find it hard to forgive the bean-poling and the cementing. Look at the lovely old Sandy Hill Road (West Street). Over these happy summer fields of the olden days walked James Russell Lowell and his beautiful betrothed, Maria White. Later he came again,—but without her. Among those Diagonally opposite my house lived Mr. Nathaniel Haskell, a little old gentleman, who wore a cut away blue coat, with buttons on the tail, over which, in cool weather, he put a green baize jacket. How funny he looked. He was interested in what he called the tar-iff, and he was awfully afraid of lightning. I remember the whole family filing into our dining room whenever a specially dark cloud appeared. I do not think a single descendant of "Uncle Nat" is left here, tho' there was a large family. There was a cheese press in our back yard and "changing milk" was a great scheme. One week all the milk from four or five farms would be sent to us and my mother would make delicious sage cheese. Then, the next week all the milk would go to "Uncle Nat's," and so on, till all the cow owners were supplied with cheeses, which were duly greased with butter and put on shelves to dry, a sight to make the prophet smile. I wish I could get a picture of Beverly Farms as it looked to my child's eyes. I came over to "the Road," as it was called by my There was then no railroad and the main road ran by Mr. Bradley's greenhouses, and along where the railroad now is, coming out To the house where I now live my happy life, I was brought at five years. I could then read about as well as I can now. I found in this old house a garret, a beautiful garret, where bundles of herbs hung from the rafters, and where books, books galore had collected in old sea chests. Fancy my delight, at finding, There were other books not so well fitted for the education of a child, but it was all fish that came to my net, and I calmly read up to my tenth year, "The Criminal Calendar," "Tales of Shipwrecks," Barber's "Historical Massachusetts," Paley's "Moral Philosophy," Pollock's "Course of Time," Alleine's "Alarm to the Unconverted," Richardson's "Pamela" and the "Spectator!" Some years afterwards, when I had read the covers off this miscellaneous collection of books, some of the earlier summer people, the elder Lorings and Kings, I think, put a small library into Uncle Pride's house and gave us Jacob Abbott's Rollo Stories and a few other delights. Please picture to yourself the "light of other days" by which the reading and sewing and knitting of old Beverly Farms used to go on at night. Luckily, there was as much daylight then, as now. The lamp that illuminated my childish evenings was a glass lamp, that held about a cup full of whale oil, "sperm oil," it was called. There were two metal tubes at the In hunting about among ancestors, I am sometimes reminded of the story of Dr. Samuel Johnson's marriage. The lady to whom he proposed, demurred a little. She said she had an uncle who was hanged. Dr. Johnson assured her that that need make no difficulty, for he had no doubt that he had several who ought to have been hanged. I remember my disgust at finding that I was related thro' my maternal grandmother, Molly Standley, to The two districts I have mentioned, (East and West Farms) were divided by "Saw Mill Brook," the little half choked stream that now filters under the road between Mr. Hardy's and Mr. Simpkins' places. It was a beautiful brook in those old days, clear water running through fields, with trout in it. The saw mill must have stood about where that collection of tenement houses now is. The "child in the mill pond" belongs to the legendary history of Beverly Farms. Coming down the hill towards Beverly, the most terrible shrieks would often be heard, but if one crossed the brook to West Farms, all was silent. I never heard these shrieks, I took good care never to be caught over there after dark. I should have liked to see the little screech owl, who, no doubt, had his quiet home up back of the mill, and sang his evening song, after the miller had closed his gates. We villagers have a question to propose to all our friends of uncertain age,—"Do you remember the saw-mill?" If, inadvertently, they confess to its acquaintance, it settles the question of age. It is as good as a Family Bible. Miss Culbert showed me the other day, a great find, the remnant of the "Third Social Library of Beverly." I had never heard of such a library and was greatly interested. It is now in our beautiful branch library, in a neat book case made by one of the Obers, in whose house the Library was placed. I mean the old Joseph Ober house which stood where Mrs. Charles M. Cabot's house is. Elsie did not live opposite that house then, but she was going to live there. I dare say A second theatre in Boston! The souls of young people in peril! One sighs to think what these good fathers would have said if they could have pulled aside the curtain of the future and seen little Beverly with crowds of I want you to go back in your mind to a Sunday of that time when even a walk to the woods or to the beach was wicked, when the only books that were proper to read were religious books, when there were three religious services every Sunday and pretty awfully long services. My cousin and my sister and I crawled up a long ladder to the third floor of our barn, among the pigeons' nests, and, nestling down in the hay, produced a novel, a real novel, a wishy washy thing, that no money could hire me to read today, and with quiet whisperings read that wicked book. We were in mortal terror lest "Aunt Phebe" should suspect our deep degradation, and "Aunt Phebe" was not a foe either. She was a beautiful, big, kindly woman, as Mrs. One whose memory goes back like Elsie Doane's and mine must remember the old brick meeting house. My memories of it are pretty hazy and I fancy Elsie will have to go farther back than her mother, for information about that fine specimen of architecture. It had neither cupola nor spire and must have been pretty ugly. It must have been the second meeting house, in which I recall the beautiful alto Mrs. Otis Davis's mother used to sing. I shall never forget how affected my childish ears were when she sang "Oh, when thou city of my God shall I thy Courts ascend" as the choir rendered the anthem "Jerusalem." Speaking of meeting houses, our third and present, one of the most beautiful and "resting" buildings one could worship God in, is a lasting memorial of the taste and genius of our beloved Mrs. Whitman. To her and to Mr. Eben Day, we owe its beauty; and to the generous old church members we owe its existence at all, for they gave freely to its construction. The first minister I have much recollection of was Mr. Hale, who lived with his family in the house now owned by Miss Lizzie Hull. My step-father bought a horse from him, and named him "Sumner." That was Mr. Hale's Christian name. I have often wondered how Mr. Hale felt to have a horse named for him, but I am sure Uncle David meant it as a compliment. In those far away days we had a hermit of our own. It would be more damaging to a claim of youthfulness, on the part of my readers to remember "Johnny Widgin," than to remember the saw-mill. One late afternoon, coming out with my playmates from Mr. Gordon Dexter's avenue, then my grandfather's lane, we saw a most grotesque figure, standing by "Rattlesnake Rock," just across the railroad—a tall man, of perhaps fifty years, to us, of course, "an old man." His trousers, which, thro' all the years I perfectly remember, were of some kind of once white material, with little bows of red ribbon and silk sewed all over them. He spoke to us gently but we were all terrified and My grandfather did not go much to church but he loved his Bible and Psalm book and from several things that I remember about him, I think he was Unitarian in belief, though in those days I did not know a Unitarian from a black cat, and whenever I heard of one, I supposed he must be a terrible kind of being. I was a grown woman, when one day, speaking of Starr King and his love for the White Hills and his loyalty in keeping California in the Union during the Civil War, the woman to whom I was speaking said "Well, he wasn't a good man." "Not a good man," I said. "Why" said she, "You know he was a Universalist." We have got on a little since that time in toleration, but we need to get on a little more. My uncles on my mother's side were great hunters. Foxes and minks and woodchucks were plentiful in those days and a good many of them fell into my uncles' traps. I remember Some years ago, I was invited to join the Daughters of the Revolution, and to this end to look up my ancestry. To my surprise I could not find a single forbear of mine who was connected in any way with wars or rumors of wars, and I reported that I hadn't been able to find any of my kin who ever wanted to kill anything but a woodchuck. Since this writing, my cousin, Dr. Abbott, still living, at the age of ninety-five in Illinois, has informed me that my remote ancestor, Elsie Doane seems to think that these scraps of antiquity would not be quite satisfactory without mention of "Jim" Perry's grocery store, though she never bought a pound of coffee in it, and, if she says she did, she thinks she is her mother. It was our only store and so was quite a feature. It was presided over by Mr. James Perry, a tall dignified man, whom his wife in her various offices as helpmate, always called "Mr. Perry." Mr. Perry was color blind and whenever my mother sent me for blue silk or blue yarn, he always selected green or purple. You may wonder how blue silk comes to be a grocery product, but this was really a department store. When we had a half cent coming to us, Mrs. Perry always produced a needle, for the exact change. You see how honest we were! This honest department store stood, in fact it was Pump Cottage, for I think Pump Cottage is the same old jackknife with different blades and handles. Farther up, on the Wenham Road, lived Deacon Joseph Deacon Williams had a dog, a little black fellow named Carlo, who always followed the good man about except on Sundays. On Sundays, Carlo took a look at his master and then went and lay down dejectedly. But, as I have intimated before, when you remember the Sundays of those days, a sensible dog really had the best of it. In a former page of these odds and ends of memory I have mentioned Uncle Ed Larcom and his fondness for hunting. A good many of us aborigines of old Beverly Farms will remember his talks of his dog Tyler, a mongrel dog, half bull dog and half Newfoundland, as Uncle Ed pronounced it. Tyler, according to his master (and his master was the most accurate teller of stories that ever lived, always telling his yarns in He must have been named for John Tyler. It was hard on a good dog to be named for John Tyler, one of the poorest presidents we ever had. There seems to be a great deal of interest among our summer people in the old houses still left at Beverly Farms. I have mentioned the James Woodbury house now owned by Mr. J. S. Curtis; another very old house is the William Haskell house, owned by Mr. Gordon Dexter. I have a little doubt as to whether the date on the house is right. I have a very strong impression that Aunt Betsey Larcom, born Haskell, told me in my childhood that her father built the house in which Aunt Betsey I wonder how many people are now left in Beverly Farms who ever tasted food cooked in a brick oven. I am sure there are not many. But those of us who ate of an Indian pudding or a pot of baked beans from that ancient source of supply will never forget the deliciousness of that kind of cookery. The pudding would stand straight up in its earthen pan, a quivering red, honey-combed mass, surrounded with a sea of juice to be eaten with rich real cream in clots of loveliness. The beans would be brown and whole, with the crisp home cured pork on top. That old New England cookery, it seems to me, filled a big bill for health and physical nourishment. Our amusements in those days were primitive enough. On Old Election Day, which came the last Wednesday in May, there was just one thing to do. We youngsters had an election cake all shining with molasses on top, and raisins in the middle, and we went down to the beach and dug wells in the sand. Now and then we hunted Mayflowers (saxifrage) and played about the old fort left from the Revolution and now owned by Mr. F. L. Higginson. Evenings we had parties and played Copenhagen and hunt the slipper or knit the family stockings by our dim oil lamps. Winters, there were singing schools. Those were great larks if we came at the money to buy a copy of the "Carmina Sacra," or the "Shawm." I still think they were From a Daguerreotype taken about 1859 Over "t'other side," as we called it, in the house now owned by Mr. J. S. Curtis, lived Uncle "Jimmy" Woodbury. He must have been a "character." He was once very much troubled by rats in his barn. So he conceived a plan for getting rid of them at his neighbor's expense. Uncle David Preston's estate, where Miss Susan Amory's house now stands, was diagonally opposite. Uncle "Jimmy" wrote a letter to the rats, in which he told them that in Uncle David's barn was more corn and better corn than they By the way, the old vernacular of the village ought not to perish from the earth. It was unique. Our ancestors just hated to pronounce any word correctly, even when they were fairly good scholars and spellers. They called a marsh a "mash." Capt. Timothy Marshall, the rich man of the place, was called Capt. "Mashall"; Mr. Osborne was Mr. "Osman"; the Obers were "Overs", a lilac was a "laylock" a blue jay was a blue "gee," etc. In closing these rambling papers of the old days at Beverly Farms, my conscience accuses me a little of not sufficiently emphasizing Nobody thought of hiring a nurse in cases of serious illness. The neighbors came with willing hands and helped out. It was a peaceful little hamlet, with kind, straightforward, honest inhabitants, and the small Elsie repeated to us, the other day, the epitaph on her great-grandfather's grave stone, the Deacon David Larcom, who built my old house, who asked the town for a cemetery for this village and was laid to rest there in 1840, the first one to be buried in its peaceful shadows: "His life exhibited in rare combination and in an uncommon degree all the excellencies of the husband, the father, the citizen and the Christian." The epitaph was written by Lucy Larcom, whose home here was on West Street. After she left Beverly for Lowell, and was a factory girl, she wrote for the "Lowell Offering," a little magazine published by the nice New England working girls. Copies of this little magazine were in the wonderful attic of my house when I came here. They were probably scented with Aunt Betsey's simples that hung from the roof. How I wish I could have foreseen how very precious they would be to me now. Head enlarged from a group taken about 1899 Head enlarged from a group taken about 1899 |