Hillsboro People

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

IN NEW NEW ENGLAND

I.

This is a true story, for I have heard it ever so many times from my grandmother. She heard it from her grandmother, who told it about her own mother; and it began and ended right here in our village of Hillsboro, Vermont, in 1762.

Probably you think at once of the particular New England old town you know, and imagine Hillsboro of that date as an elm-shaded, well-kept street, with big, white, green-shuttered houses, full of shining mahogany furniture and quaint old silver. But my grandmother gives an entirely different picture of old times in this corner of Vermont. Conditions here, at that time, were more as they had been in Connecticut and Massachusetts a hundred and forty years before. Indeed, the Pilgrim Fathers endured no more hardships as pioneers in a wild, new country than did the first Vermonters.

Hillsboro had been settled only about fifteen years before this story begins, and the people had had to make for themselves whatever they possessed, since there was no way to reach our dark, narrow valley except by horseback over the ridge of the Green Mountains. There were no fine houses, because there was no sawmill. There were little, low log cabins of two rooms each, and the furniture, such as it was, was rough-hewn out of native woods. Our great-grandfathers were too busy clearing the forest and planting their crops to spend much time designing or polishing table-legs.

And the number of things they did not have! No stoves, no matches, no books, no lamps, and very few candles; no doctors, no schools, no clocks, and so nearly no money that what they had is not worth mentioning But the fact that there were no schools did not mean that life was one long vacation for the children.

"No, indeedy!" as grandmother always says emphatically.

In the urgent bustle of pioneer life, the children could not be spared from work for long school-hours. They picked up what they could from the elders of their families, and worked, as grandmother puts it, "as tight as they could leg it" from morning to night. Everybody else worked that same way, so the children did not know that they were being abused. Indeed, grandmother seemed to doubt if they were.

At any rate, they all ran about as fast as ants in an ant-hill, and the busiest of all was sixteen-year-old Hannah Sherwin. Since she was my grandmother's grand mother's mother, at last the story is really begun.

Hannah had been a baby of eighteen months when the Sherwins came over the mountains from the old home in Connecticut, so she knew nothing about any other way of living than what she saw in rough little Hillsboro. But her elder sister, Ann Mary, who was a tall girl of nineteen, remembered—or thought she remembered—big houses that were made all over of sawn planks, and chairs that were so shiny you could see your face in them or else stuffed and cushioned in brocade as soft—"as soft as a feather tick!" she told Hannah.

Her listener, having no idea of what brocade might be, and taking the feather-tick simile literally, must have imagined a very queer kind of chair.

Hannah was a short, fair, rosy-cheeked child, who passed for good-looking enough; but Ann Mary was slender and dark and a real beauty, although Hillsboro people did not realize it. She looked fragile, as if she could not do much hard work and that is always a serious blemish in feminine beauty to the eyes of pioneers.

So far in her life she had not been forced to do any hard work, because Hannah had done it all for her. Their mother had died when they were both little girls, and their father was so busy outdoors, every minute he was awake, that, for all his affection for them, he did not know or care which of his daughters cooked and washed, and swept and spun, so long as these things were done. And Hannah delighted to do them, because she adored Ann Mary, and could not bear to have her sister troubled with any of the coarse tasks which made up her own happy, busy day.

Now, all that grandmother ever tells me about the beginning of this story is that when the lovely Ann Mary was nineteen years old she "fell into a decline," as they called it. She grew pale and thin, never smiled, could not eat or sleep, and lay listlessly on the bed all day, looking sadly at Hannah as she bustled about.

A great many girls in those days fell into declines and died. Of course, nobody knows the reason for most of the cases, but it seems as plain as the nose on my face that Ann Mary's sickness was entirely Hannah's fault for not letting her sister do her share of the household work. There she was—pretty and ignorant and idle—with nothing to interest her, and nothing to look forward to, for in those days marriage was the only thing a girl could look forward to, and in the workaday little world of pioneer Hillsboro nobody would dare to think of marrying a girl who looked like a tea-rose and did not know how to make soft soap. No wonder she lost her appetite!

It might not have gone any further, however, if Hannah, distracted with anxiety, had not run to all the old women in town about her sick sister. Every one of them had had a niece, or a daughter—or at least a granddaughter—who had died in a decline; so, of course, they knew just what to do for Ann Mary, and they came and did it.

Then poor Ann Mary was sick, indeed, I promise you! They shut her up in the inner room of the little log house, although it was the end of May, and the weather was fit for the angels. They darkened the one window, and kept the door closed, and put the sick girl to bed between two mountains of feathers. They gave her "sut" (soot) tea and "herb-drink" and steeped butternut bark, and goodness knows what else; and they tiptoed in and out, and stared at her mournfully, and shook their heads and pursed up their lips, until it is a wonder to me that Ann Mary did not die at once.