Mary Minds Her Business

Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Audrey Longhurst, Mary Meehan and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Author of Oh, Mary, Be Careful, The Apple-Tree Girl, and You Never Saw Such a Girl.
1920
To Karl Edwin Harriman One of the Noblest of them All G.W.
So that you may understand my heroine, I am going to write a preface and tell you about her forebears.
In the latter part of the seventeenth century, there was a young blacksmith in our part of the country named Josiah Spencer. He had a quick eye, a quick hand and a quicker temper.
Because of his quick eye he married a girl named Mary McMillan. Because of his quick hand, he was never in need of employment. And because of his quick temper, he left the place of his birth one day and travelled west until he came to a ford which crossed the Quinebaug River.
There, before the week was over, he had bought from Oeneko, the Indian chief, five hundred acres on each side of the river—land in those days being the cheapest known commodity. Hewing his own timber and making his own hardware, he soon built a shop of his own, and the ford being on the main road between Hartford and the Providence Plantations, it wasn't long before he had plenty of business.
Above the ford was a waterfall. Josiah put in a wheel, a grist mill and a saw mill.
By that time Mary, his wife, had presented him with one of the two greatest gifts that a woman can ever bestow, and presently a sign was painted over the shop:
JOSIAH SPENCER & SON