"It seems as if the spirit had dropped out of Beverly Farms since Molly Ober died."

One of her friends said this and the others feel it. For sixty years or more she was the leader in the real life of the place. And speaking of friends, there is no limit of them, for her genial kindly nature allowed us all to claim that prized relationship.

Mary Larcom Ober was the daughter of Mary Larcom and Benjamin Ober. Mrs. Ober's parents were Andrew and Molly, (Standley) Larcom. Andrew's father and mother were Jonathan and Abigail (Ober) Larcom; they had eight children, the three youngest of whom are connected with this story. The oldest of these three was David who married Elizabeth Haskell known as "Aunt Betsey"; they had a son David. The next brother was Benjamin whose first wife was Charlotte Ives, and his second, Lois Barrett. Of this second marriage, one of the daughters was Lucy Larcom, the poetess and the editor also of the "Lowell Offering." Andrew Larcom was the youngest of these brothers. Thus it is that his granddaughter, our Mary, was a cousin in the next generation of Lucy Larcom; although she was older than Mary they were always great friends and what Lucy tells us in "A New England Girlhood" of her experience is as true of one as of the other little girl.

"Our parents considered it a duty that they owed to the youngest of us to teach us doctrines. And we believed in our instructors, if we could not always digest their instructions."

"We learned to reverence truth as they received it and lived it, and to feel that the search for truth was the one chief end of our being. It was a pity that we were expected to begin thinking upon hard subjects so soon, and it is also a pity that we were set to hard work while so young. Yet these were both the inevitable results of circumstances then existing, and perhaps the two belonged together. Perhaps habits of conscientious work induce thought and habits of right thinking. Certainly right thinking naturally impels people to work."

Mr. Andrew Larcom lived on the farm where Mr. Gordon Dexter now lives; here our Mary's mother was born and passed her childhood. It was a delightful farm with much less woodland than now and its boundaries were much larger; salt hay was cut on the marsh land that stretched toward the sea, and where it ended above the beach there were thickets of wild plum, whose purple fruit made delicious preserves. This marsh was not drained as it is now, little rivers of water ran through it at high tide reflecting the sunlight.

When Benjamin Ober, who was first mate of an East Indiaman, married Mary Larcom they went to live in the house on the north side of Mingo Beach Hill. It was a smaller house then, and close to the road, with a lovely outlook over the sea. A page of Lucy Larcom's gives so charming an account of "the Farms" it must be quoted here, as Mary Ober was fond of it. The old homestead was where Andrew and Mary Larcom lived, while "Uncle David" and "Aunt Betsey" lived in the house which we know as Mary Ober's house in the middle of the village.

"Sometimes this same brother would get permission to take me on a longer excursion, to visit the old homestead at the "Farms." Three or four miles was not thought too long a walk for a healthy child of five years, and that road in the old time, led through a rural Paradise beautiful at every season,—whether it was the time of song sparrows and violets, or wild roses, or coral-hung barberry bushes, or of fallen leaves and snow drifts. We stopped at the Cove Brook to hear the cat birds sing, and at Mingo Beach to revel in the sudden surprise of the open sea and to listen to the chant of the waves always stronger and grander there than any where along the shore. We passed under dark wooded cliffs out into sunny openings, the last of which held under its skirting pines the secret of the prettiest wood path to us, in all the world, the path to the ancestral farm-house."

"Farther down the road where the cousins were all grown up men and women, Aunt Betsey's cordial old-fashioned hospitality sometimes detained us a day or two. We watched the milking, fed the chickens and fared gloriously. Aunt Betsey could not have done more to entertain us had we been the President's children."

"We took in a home-feeling with the words 'Aunt Betsey' then and always. She had just the husband that belonged to her in my Uncle David, an upright man, frank-faced, large of heart and spiritually-minded. He was my father's favorite brother, and to our branch of the family, 'the Farms' meant Uncle David and Aunt Betsey."

The Farms was of greater relative importance in those days. The farms were fairly fertile and were carefully tilled. Their owners, former sea captains, were well-to-do, there were two good schools and the Third Social Library was founded in 1806. The first catalogue, written in 1811, is still preserved, there are some books marked "Read at Sea," among them "The Saint's Everlasting Rest," "Edwards on Affliction" and the first volume of Josephus, cheerful reading for the young captains.

Toward the middle of the century summer fishing took the place of merchant voyages, so the sea-men turned to shoe making in the winter. Almost every house had its little 10 x 10 shoe shop, in which was room for one man on a low stool, a chair for a visitor, an iron stove, a bench with tools, the oval lap-stone to peg shoes on, with rolls and scraps of leather, withal a pungent smell.

In the house on Mingo Beach Hill our Mary Larcom Ober was born in 1835 and here her father died in the same year. There was an older sister Abigail, who died when she was a young woman.

After a while, the widow returned to her father's home; in 1840 she was married to her cousin David Larcom the younger, and they lived in the Larcom House at the Farms. As his father, the first "Uncle David" died, in the same year, his widow, "Aunt Betsey", moved upstairs. David and his wife with her children Abby and Mary lived below; four children were born to them David, Lydia, Joseph and Theodore.

From Mingo Beach Hill and the homestead the West Farms school was nearer, so Mary must first have gone to school in the little square building which was later for one year the High School, now since many years a dwelling house near Pride's Crossing. After the family moved to the Farms she probably went to the East Farms school, which was nearly opposite the church. She spent some time at the Francestown Academy, Hillsboro County, New Hampshire, and finished her education at the State Normal School in Salem where she was graduated with the second class after its foundation. She with her sister Abby worked their way through this school by binding shoes. This was the women's share of the hand-made shoe described in Lucy Larcom's "Hannah binding shoes."

Soon after graduation, Mary was appointed teacher in a grammar school at Brewster on Cape Cod. The next year she was engaged for a school in Castine, Maine. Here she found the pupils were big boys, almost men grown, and she feared she would not be able to manage them. However, when they found that she was a good teacher who could give them what they wanted to learn, there was no trouble.

Then in 1858 and 1859 our Miss Ober began to teach the Farms School (the two schools being united) on Indian Hill just above Pride's Crossing station; the building was remodelled later and is now the house of Mrs. James F. Curtis. Grades were unknown, she had some twenty to thirty pupils of all ages, but she managed to keep them in order and to teach them so well that they always remembered what they learned. She stimulated the bright children to greater effort and she encouraged the dull ones so that they were surprised into understanding. One of her old girls told me how they loved her but feared her in school, and enjoyed her when out. She especially liked boiled lobster and dandelion greens served together; whenever these viands were for dinner the child was told by her mother to bring the teacher home to share them, and "then what a good time we had." She smiled as she said it, but there was a tear in her eye.

At about this time Miss Ober was engaged to an attractive young man, a teacher in the Beverly Farms school. There was every promise of a happy life, but unfortunately he died. Miss Ober went on with her school until 1870, except during 1862 and 1865, but she was not strong and her health was impaired.

In a much loved and worn volume of Whittier's poems, given to Mary Ober in 1858-1859 is written in her own hand, "the happiest winter of my life." Pinned to a leaf is a cutting, with the following epitaph from an old English burial ground:

The poems she marked are: "The Kansas Emigrants," "Question of Life," and "Gone," in this last poem she underscored the verse:

These are keys to her thoughts, she believed in abolition, in the saving of the Union, she was absorbed in the Civil War, in the going away of relatives and friends, and she took great interest in the work of the Sanitary Commission. My grandmother, Mrs. Charles G. Loring, worked in the commission rooms in Boston by day, in the evening she would bring materials and drive about in her buggy to distribute them among the neighbors, collecting the finished garments to be carried back to Boston by an early train. Mary Ober often went with her, helping in all ways, and they became great friends; it was partly through her influence that Mary went to Florida for the benefit of her health in the winter of 1871. The next winter she took a school in Georgia under the "Freedman's Bureau" where she taught the little darkies, who adored her. In 1872 and 1873 she taught the children of the poor whites in the school at Wilmington, North Carolina, and it was here that she met Sarah E. Miller who was to be her devoted, life-long friend. This was the Tileston School founded by Mrs. Mary Hemenway, its principal was Miss Amy Bradley; it was perhaps the best known school carried on by the northerners in the South.

For two years longer she taught half terms in Beverly Farms and then as she regained health and strength, from 1875 to 1899 Miss Ober was head of the Farms School, then in Haskell Street, beginning with a salary of $180. She never had a large salary. It was considered the best school in the town. The building was the wooden one, now a house, on the next lot to the brick school. She kept up with the times, introduced grades and had several assistants as the years went on. She continued her career as a most successful teacher, she was strict but just and kind, always interested in her children whether in school or afterward, keeping in touch with them and following their careers with sympathy. When Mr. Charles H. Trowt was elected Mayor of the City she wrote: "And you were my curly-headed, fair-haired little boy in school."

She had a happy home with her mother and stepfather; "Uncle David" she always called him, though she maintained the relation of a loving daughter. Her mother died in the spring of 1876 and Mr. Larcom died in 1883.

Miss Ober was always a great reader, she chose the best books and kept in touch with the topics of the day. We all remember her long walks in the woods and fields, her delight in the first spring flowers and the song of the birds; she shared Bryant's regret in the autumn, but her winters were made cheerful by her hospitality at home. Friends were always dropping in to read, to sew or to have a good game of whist in the afternoon or evening.

Another quotation from "A New England Girlhood" seems appropriate here.

"The period of my growing up had peculiarities which our future history can never repeat, although something far better is undoubtedly already resulting thence. Those peculiarities were the natural development of the seed sown by our sturdy Puritan ancestry. The religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked up in wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half revealed the sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so that perhaps we began to see a little more of the sky than our elders; but the tree was sound at its heart. There was life in it that can never be lost to the world."

In reading this charming biography one is impressed with the strict doctrine under which Lucy Larcom was brought up. Miss Ober's theology was more liberal. The church at the Farms was established in 1829 under the auspices of the First Parish in Beverly, (Unitarian) it was called simply the "Christian Church" and it was some years before it became Baptist. Miss Ober was an active and devoted member of the church and a good helper in parish work.

It seems as if their common interest in the church and love for flowers must have first attracted her to Mr. James Beatty Dow, to whom she was married in 1889. Mr. Dow was a Scotchman with the virtues of that race. Of course he had a good education, he was a gardener by profession and a successful one. Beside his work for the church and the Sunday school he was interested in civic affairs; at one time he was representative at The Great and General Court and he was a member of the School Committee of Beverly.

Mrs. Dow did not give up her school until ten years after her marriage but she paid more attention in equally successful manner to housekeeping and social duties. Miss Miller, her friend from the days of the Wilmington School, was a constant and welcome guest. They loved books, they read and played together, they formed reading clubs to discuss works of importance and enjoyed poetry and good fiction. There were flashes of wit and a lightness of touch in Mrs. Dow's approach which were quite un-English, they may be attributed to her Larcom ancestry. The Larcoms were the La Combes of Languedoc, Huguenots who escaped to Wales, later moved to the Isle of Wight, and thence came to New England in the ship Hercules in 1640. The Obers came from Abbotsbury in England in early days, there is every reason to believe that they were also of Huguenot descent, by name "Auber," but this is not proved.

The years passed rapidly, the quiet life at the Farms broken by little excursions to the theatre, concerts and visits to friends in Boston, with occasional trips to the White Mountains, New York and other places. There were endless interests and accomplishments and enjoyments. The World War brought grief and tragedy and abounding opportunity for sympathy and action; by no one was a saner interest taken in all its phases than by Mary Dow.

As time passed and strength failed, Mrs. Dow never grew old; she joked about her "infirmities" but we did not see them. She mastered them and kept on in her lively active interests and duties to the end.

During the winter of 1919-20 Mr. Dow was very ill. His wife nursed him with too great devotion and her strength gave out. Mercifully, she was spared a long illness, she died on the eleventh of June, 1920. Mr. Dow lingered until the sixteenth of September.

This is the end of the story, or is it the beginning?