AMESBURY: THE HOME OF WHITTIER.
By Frances C. Sparhawk.
Amesbury is only a town. It has defects that would strike a stranger, and beauties that one who has learned to love them never forgets; they linger in glimpses of wood and hill and river and lake, and often rise unbidden before the mind's eye. The poet Whittier says that those who are born under the shadow of Powow Hill always return sometime, no matter how far they may have wandered. He himself, though not Amesbury born, has found it impossible to desert the old home, full of associations and surrounded by old friends. He always votes in Amesbury, and he often spends weeks at a time in his old home. The river that he has sung, the lake that he has re-christened, the walks and drives with which he is so familiar, all exercise their spell upon him; he loves them, just as he loves the warm hearts that he has found there and helped to make warm and true.
But what a stranger would first notice in coming into town is, that the houses, instead of being on land regularly laid out for building, seem to have grown up here and there and everywhere, a good deal in accordance with their own sweet wills, and without the smallest regard to surroundings.
But there are handsome houses in Amesbury, and these are growing more numerous every year. The people themselves would assert that the walks and drives about the village, the hills and the river are the things to be longest remembered about the place. If they were inclined to boasting, they might say also that they had as good a right as any people in America to be considered of ancient stock, for some of the names of the earliest settlers are the familiar names in the town to-day, and few towns in America are older than Amesbury. The names Barnard, Challis, Weed, Jones, and Hoyt, appear on the first board of "Prudenshall," and that of Richard Currier as town clerk. This was in April, 1668, the year after the new town was named.
Early in 1735 the settlement of Newbury (then spelled Newberry) was begun. In a little over three years a colony was sent out across the Merrimac. The plantation was at first called merely from the name of the river. In 1639 it was named Colchester by the General Court; but October 7, 1640, this name was changed to Salisbury, so that in 1638, almost two hundred and fifty years ago, Salisbury began to be settled. It seemed as if there was need of new settlements at that time to counteract the depletions in the Old World, for the Thirty Years' War was still impoverishing Germany; Richelieu was living to rule France in the name of his royal master, Louis XIII; England was gathering up those forces of good and evil which from resisting tyranny at last grew intoxicated with power, and so came to play the tyrant and regicide. For it was about that time that Charles I had disbanded his army, trusting to the divinity that, in the eyes of the Stuarts, did ever hedge a king, and at the same time thrown away his honor by pledging himself to what he never meant to perform. While this farce, which preceded the tragedy, was being set upon the stage of history, here, three thousand miles away, nature had begun to build up the waste, and to prophesy growth.
Salisbury, and afterwards Amesbury, were named from the two towns so famous in England, the Salisbury Plain of Druidical memory, on which is the celebrated Stonehenge, and near by, the Amesbury where was one of the oldest monasteries in England. It is supposed that the towns were so named because many of the new settlers came from those old English towns. The latter name used to be spelled Ambresbury, and Tennyson in his "Idylls of the King" spells Almesbury. After the discovery by Modred of the guilt of King Arthur's fair and false wife, he says:—
"Queen Guinevere had fled the court and sat
There in the holyhouse at Almesbury
Weeping."
Describing her flight, he tells us that she sent Lancelot
"Back to his land, but she to Almesbury
Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald."
There Arthur sees her for the last time and mourns over her before he goes forth to his last battle with Modred.
On the whole, it is not strange, considering its associations, and moreover the fact that this town in Massachusetts is the only Amesbury in America while so many other names are duplicated, that the people of Amesbury are not willing to merge the name of their town into that of the elder sister, even when those parts called in each "the Mills" are so closely united in interests and in appearance that no stranger could recognize them as two towns. It is only the Powow that makes the dividing line here. Blocks of offices and stores on both sides of the street, among them the post-office, common to both towns, hide the narrow stream at that point, and further up and down the towering walls of the factories make it unobserved. It is not here that one sees the Powow. But there is, or a little time ago there was, a place not far off from this main street where the river is still harassed, yet as it slips past in its silent toil with a few trees hanging low on the right, it has a fascination in spite of its prosaic surroundings; it takes naturally to picturesqueness and freedom.
One of Whittier's early poems speaks of an Indian re-visiting the stream that his forefathers loved, and standing on Powow Hill, where the chiefs of the Naumkeaks, and of the other tribes held their powows. Here for a moment, says the poem, a gleam of gladness came to him as he stooped to drink of the fountain and seated himself under an oak.
"Far behind was Ocean striving
With his chains of sand;
Southward, sunny glimpses giving
'Twixt the swells of land,
Of its calm and silvery track
Rolled the tranquil Merrimack."
The Indian's feeling about "These bare hills, this conquered river," was not strange. But to us it naturally occurs that we are more likely to wake up with our scalps on our heads, instead of sleeping our last sleep, while they dangle at a red man's girdle. Yet the very state of warfare that at that time existed between the races showed that in the settlers themselves was an element of savagery not yet eliminated. For in all this fierce strife of the tomahawk and the gun, the Quaker ancestors of the poet Whittier who met the Indians, armed only with kindness and the high courage of their peaceful convictions, were treated by the red men as friends and superiors. In the raids of general devastation they were unmolested. Their descendant has a natural right to express the pathos of the Indian's lot.
There is a fine exhibition of human nature in the records of the first settlement of Amesbury. The place was called "Salisbury new-town" until 1669, and was merely an offshoot of the latter, though much larger in extent than it is today, for now it is only about six miles by three. Then it reached up into what is now Newton, N.H. But why should not the people of those days have been generous as to the size of townships, for as to land, they had the continent before them where to choose?
But in regard to the human nature. The settlers of Salisbury went at first only beyond the salt marshes, their town being what is now East Salisbury. The forests beyond had a threatening look, and were much too near. It was determined, therefore, to drive them back by having clearings and settlements across the Powow. So, December 26, 1642, about three years after this little colony had crossed the Merrimack, a town meeting was held in which it was voted:—"Yere shall thirtie families remove to the west side of ye Powowas river." This motion was very easy to carry. But it had not been voted what families were to move on beyond the immediate protection of the small colony at East Salisbury. Who was to go? Every man sat still in his place and nodded to his neighbor with a "Thou art the man," in manner if not in words. It seems to us a very little thing to give or take the advice, "Go West young man,—or woman." But it was very different then. To do it meant, besides living encircled by forests, to be obliged to go on Sunday through these forests, worse than lonely, to the meeting-house at East Salisbury, and always with the possibility of being at any moment obliged to flee all the distance to that town for comparative safety, perhaps of being obliged to flee in the night. Signals of alarm were arranged by the General Court. Alarm was to be given "by distinctly discharging three muskets, or by continual beat of the drum, or firing the beacon, or discharging a pesse of ordnance, and every trained soldier is to take the alarm immediately on paine of five pound." It was also ordered, "That every town provide a sufficient place for retreat for their wives and children to repaire to, as likewise to keepe safe the ammunition thereof." And also, "That all watches throughout this country bee set at sunset at the beat of the drums, & not bee discharged till the beate of the drum at sunne rising."
But those old Puritans were not men to be bundled by any of the weaknesses of human nature. In ten days, when it was found that nobody had started "westward, ho!" another town-meeting was held, in which, in spite of the dangers to be encountered by the new colony, the first vote was re-affirmed, and it was decided that "the thirtie families be chosen by ye seven men," probably the selectmen. And to ensure the matter, it was determined that this vote should not be repealed except by the consent of every freeman in the town. So, in the spring, this tiny colony went out to Salisbury new-town.
In 1647, a law was passed requiring every township of fifty families to maintain a school. This is the way that the preamble reads:—
"It being one chiefe pr'ject of y't ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from ye knowledge of ye Scriptures, as in former times by keeping ym in an unknown tongue, so in these latt'r times by pr'suading from ye use of tongues yt so at least ye true sense & meaning of ye original might be clouded by false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers, yt learning may not be buried in ye grave of o'r fath'rs in ye church & commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavor. It is therefore resolved," &c.
It seems overturning the cornerstone of our forefathers' intentions to banish from our schools the Scriptures, those finest examples of the strength and beauty of the English language, to say nothing of their lessons in individual self-government, which is the only foundation that a republic can be built upon.
From this old law have grown up all the public schools of Amesbury. There is now a high school, and there are, of course, the required number of small schools; some of these in the outlying districts having very few scholars.
Several years ago Mr. Whittier, who has the keenest sense of humor, told a friend that in one of these the whole number of pupils was three, average attendance one and a half! He was deeply interested in that half child.
Amesbury has among its attractions a Lion's Mouth! In the old days of Indian ambushes it must have earned its right to the name. But now the only existing danger is lest one should be eaten up—with kindness. It is a short mile from the mills, and a pleasant walk in spite of its ending! At last there comes a little hollow with a large farm-house on the left, and a grass road winding past it at right angles with the main road and leading into beautiful woods. These woods are the very jaws of the lion; and it is very hard, on a hot summer's day, for those who go into them to come out again. A few rods up the road from the hollow are other houses. People bearing some of the earliest recorded names in Amesbury, descendants of the brave pioneers, are to be found here, or having departed this life, have left good records behind them. One of these latter lived here in the pleasantest way. He and his wife carried on their large farm in an ideal manner; everything was upon a generous scale. There was money enough not to wear out life in petty economies, and largeness of soul enough not to put the length of a bank account against the beauties and refinements of life. The loss of their only child, and a few years afterward of their grand-daughter, one of the loveliest children earth ever held, was—not compensated for, that can never be, but made much less dreary by a friendship of many years' standing between them and their summer neighbors. In this case, too, the gentleman is a native of Amesbury, proud and fond of his birthplace. Every summer he comes to the cottage of this friend, a charming little house only a few rods from the larger one, and spends the summer here with his family and servants. He has made a great deal of money in New York, but fortunately, not too much, for it has not built up a Chinese wall around his heart; his new friends are dear, but his early friends are still the dearest.
Between the Mills and this formidable Mouth of the Lion, is the Quaker Meeting House, a modest, sober-hued building on a triangular green, on which, before it was fenced in, the boys delighted to play ball on the days and at the hours (for the Quakers have meeting Thursday also) on which the grave worshippers were not filing into what cannot fairly be called the house of silence, because it has been known to echo to exhortations as earnest, if not as vehement as one may hear from any pulpit. Still, there are sometimes long intervals of silence, and then the consciousness that silent self-examination is one purpose of the coming together, gives an impressiveness to the simple surroundings. It must have been here that Mr. Whittier learned to interpret so wonderfully that silent prayer of Agassiz for guidance when he opened his famous school from which he was so soon called to a higher life.
"Then the Master in his place
Bowed his head a little space
And the leaves by soft airs stirred
Lapse of wave and cry of bird
Left the solemn hush unbroken
Of that wordless prayer unspoken
While its wish, on earth unsaid,
Rose to Heaven interpreted.
As in life's best hours we hear
By the spirit's finer ear
His low voice within us, thus
The All-Father heareth us:
And his holy ear we pain
With our noisy words and vain.
Not for him our violence
Storming at the gates of sense,
His the primal language, his
The eternal silences."
Mr. Whittier always goes to this meeting when he is well enough. The May Quarterly Meetings of the Society of Friends are held at Amesbury. There are a good many members of this Society in the town, and there is among them a hospitality, a kindness, and a cordiality that added to their quiet ways and the refined dress of the women makes them interesting.
It goes without saying that Amesbury has also the allotment of churches of other denominations usual to New England towns.
Thirty years ago and more, the Amesbury and Salisbury Mills were two distinct companies. The agent of the former mills, Mr. Joshua Aubin, was a gentleman of fine presence. After he left Amesbury, he sent to the town as a gift the nucleus of its present Public Library, which, although not absolutely free has only a nominal subscription to pay the services of the librarian, and for keeping the books in order.
Mr. James Horton, agent of the Salisbury mills, was more of the rough-and-ready type of man, a little bluff, but frank and kind-hearted. Both gentlemen as it happened, lived in Amesbury and were of one mind in regard to the character of their operatives. It was before the influx of foreign labor, and the men and women in the mills belonged to respectable, often well-to-do American families. Rowdyism was a thing unknown to them, and as to drunkenness, if that fault was found once in an operative, he was reprimanded; if it occurred again, he was at once discharged. And so Amesbury, though a manufacturing town, was in its neatness and orderliness an exquisite little village with the Powow Hill at its back and the hem of its robe laved by two beautiful rivers. After Mr. Aubin's ill health had made him resign his place, the father of Prof. Langley, well-known to science, was agent for a time, and carried on matters in the spirit of his predecessors. But there came a change, the mills were united under one control, and an agent was sent to Amesbury for the purpose of forcibly illustrating the fact that corporations have no souls. He did it admirably. Work was started at high pressure, there came a rush of foreigners into the place, many of the old towns people moved away in disgust, and the new took the place of the old as suddenly as if an evil magician had waved his wand and cried: "Presto!" But this agent soon gave evidence that great unscrupulousness doesn't pay, even as a financial investment. After several other short regimes the present agent, Mr. Steere, came to Amesbury, and the corporation has found it worth while to keep him. The effect of the sudden influx of foreign population into Amesbury has never done away with; it has its "Dublin" in a valley where the corporation built houses for its operatives. And with what indifference to cleanliness, or health these were built! The poor operatives were crowded together in a way that would make neatness difficult to the most fastidious. A physician in Amesbury who considered the poor, presented this state of things so strongly and so persistently to the agent, spoke so forcibly of the moral degradation that such herding increased, or induced, that when it became necessary to build new tenements they were much better arranged. Every manufacturing town in New England has now its unwholesome because untaught population, a danger signal on the line of progress of the republic. It is only popular education that can remove this obstruction of ignorance. The foreign population of Amesbury today is large, and although it gives hands to the mills, it adds neither to the beauty nor the interest of the town. But it gives a mission to those who believe in the possibilities of human nature, and the right of every man to have a chance at life, even if the way he takes it be not agreeable to his cultivated neighbor.
The mills in the days of their greatest prosperity were all woolen mills: now a part of them are cotton mills. They are all running, and, although not with the remarkable success of a score of years ago, have a future before them.
The making of felt hats, now so important a business, was started here a number of years ago by a gentleman who built a hat factory near his house at the Ferry. He was a gentleman in that true sense in which, added to his nerve and will (and he had abundance of both) were those knightly qualities of generosity and kindliness that have made his memory dear, while the Bayley Hat Company, called after him as its founder, bears witness to his business ability.
The great, oblong, many-windowed carriage manufactories meet one at every turn, and often the smithy stands near with its clangor. This business used to be confined to West Amesbury, now Merrimac. At the beginning of the century it was started on an humble scale by two young men, one a wood-worker, the other a plater, while another young man was trimmer for them. One of the firm lived in West Amesbury, the other in South Amesbury, now Merrimac Port, and after each had built his share of the carriage, it was found a little difficult to bring the different parts together. This was the beginning, and now Amesbury ships its carriages over the world. One of the first to bring this business from what was then West Amesbury to the Mills was a young man who in the beginning of the war had been unfortunate in business. He gave his creditors all he had, and went to the front. After serving his time there he came home, went into the carriage business, made money this time instead of losing it, and paid up his old creditors one hundred cents on the dollar. He deserves a big factory and success. And he has both. And he is not the only one of whom good things could be said.
They have a Wallace G.A.R. Post in Amesbury, not in commemoration of the Wallace of old Scottish fame, but of a man no less patriotic and brave who lived among themselves, an Englishman, a shoemaker. He was lame, but so anxious during the Rebellion to have his share in the struggle for the Union that he tried to get a place on board a gunboat, saying that he could "sit and shoot." As this was impossible, the town sent him to Boston as its representative, and he was in the Legislature when the members voted themselves an increase of pay. Mr. Wallace believed the thing illegal. He took the money in trust. One day after his return to Amesbury he limped up to his physician (the same one who had brought about the better construction of the new corporation houses) and handed him fifty dollars of this over pay, to be used at his discretion among the poor, explaining as he did so where the money came from, that he felt that it belonged to Amesbury, and that he returned a part through this channel.
Half way between the Mills and the Ferry stands an old well that a native of Amesbury dug by the roadside for the benefit of travellers because he had once been a captive in Arabian deserts, and had known the torments of thirst. Here was a man to whom the uses of adversity had been sweet, for they had taught him humanity. Mrs. Spofford has written an appropriate poem upon this incident.
The elms in Amesbury are very beautiful, and they are found everywhere; but on the ferry road there are magnificent ones not far from the river. They are growing on each side of the road, arching it over with their graceful boughs.
The Ferry proper near which was born Josiah Bartlett, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, is at the foot of the street that runs from the Mills down to the river. In old times there was a veritable ferry here a few rods above where the Powow empties into the Merrimack. This ferry is mentioned in the records, two years after the town had been set upon its feet. In a book written about Amesbury by Mr. Joseph Merrill, a native of the town, it is stated that the town petitioned the general Court for leave to keep a Ferry over the river at this place. This is the record from the same source:—
"The County Court held at Hampton, ye 13th of ye 8th month 1668, Mr. Edward Goodwin being presented by ye Selectmen of ye town of Amesbury to Court to keep ye Ferry over Merrimac river about ye mouth of ye Powow river where ye said Goodwin now dwelleth, the Court do allow and approve of ye sd person for one year next following and until ye Court shall take further orders therein, and ye prices to be as followeth so, for every single passenger two pence, for a horse and man six pence, and for all great cattle four pence, for sheep and other small cattle under two years old two pence per head."
In 1791 there came up a question of a bridge being built across the Merrimac. A town meeting was called to oppose the measure, and in this it was argued that a bridge would throw into disuse the ferry with which much pains had been taken. Precious old fogies! In those days, too, they lived, for they were as old as the centuries. Nothing of the mushroom about them. There is a tradition that once in Revolutionary days, Washington was carried across this ferry. But it is impossible to say what the tradition is founded upon, and how much it is worth.
As to the river, there are rivers and rivers, as the saying is; at some we marvel, some we fear and to some we make pilgrimages as to the Mecca of the faithful. But the Merrimac is a river to be loved, and to be loved the better the more familiar it is. What its poet, Whittier, says about it must be literally true:
"Our river by its valley born
Was never yet forgotten."
It is worth while to try to imagine it as he writes it in "Cobbler Keezer's Vision" two hundred and more years ago, when that old fellow was so amazed at the prospect of mirth and pleasure among the descendants of the stern Puritans that he dropped his lapstone into the water in bewilderment.
This was the time when
"Woodsy and wild and lonesome,
The swift stream wound away,
Through birches and scarlet maples
Flashing in foam and spray."
"Down on the sharp-horned ledges
Plunging in steep cascade,
Tossing its white-maned waters
Against the hemlock's shade."
"Woodsy and wild and lonesome,
East and west and north and south;
Only the village of fishers
Down at the river's mouth;"
"Only here and there a clearing,
With its farm-house rude and new,
And tree-stumps, swart as Indians,
Where the scanty harvest grew."
What a picture that is! And then behind these tree-stumps, the great forest with its possibilities of comfort and even of competence in its giant timbers,—when they were fairly floored, but; as it stood, a threatening foe with a worse enemy in its depths than the darkness of its shadows, or the wild beasts.
Several of Mr. Whittier's songs of the Merrimac were written for picnics, given at the Laurels on the Newbury side of the river by a gentlemen and his wife from Newburyport. They were early abolitionists, friends and hosts of Garrison, of George Thompson and others of that brave band, and of course friends of the poet. This hospitable couple gave a picnic here every June for twenty years. The first was a little party of perhaps half-a-dozen people, the twenty-first was a large assembly. Mr. Whittier was present at these picnics whenever able, and, as has been said, sometimes wrote a poem to be read there. He never reads in public himself.
Although the Powow river has been made so emphatically a stream of use, there are glimpses of a native beauty in it that its hard fate has never obliterated; these are still there, as one stands upon the little bridge that spans its last few rods of individual life and looks up the stream upon a wintry landscape, or upon summer fields, and longingly toward the bend.
Whether the Powow has any power to set in motion the wheels of fancy as it does the wheels of the factories it is impossible to say, but this much is certain; on its banks was born an artist who has made his name known on the banks of the Seine. The father of Mr. Charles Davis, our young artist of great promise and of no mean performance, was for years a teacher in Amesbury, and the garden of the house where this son was born bordered upon the Powow.
At Pond Hills, between Amesbury and Merrimac, is lake Attitash, which, before Mr. Whittier took pity upon it, rejoiced in the name of Kimball's Pond. There is a slight suspicion that it is still occasionally called by its old name. In dry seasons the water is used by the mills. But the blue lake is as beautiful as if it were never useful. On its shore enough grand old pines are left to dream under of forests primeval, of Indian wigwams, and of canoes on the bright water; for the red men knew very well the hiding places of the perch and of the pickerel. So did the white men who chose the region of the Merrimac for their new home. In the "Maids of Attitash" is described the lake where
"In sky and wave the white clouds swam,
And the blue hills of Nottingham
Through gaps of leafy green
Across the lake were seen."
All these are still here, but one misses the maidens who ought to be sitting there
"In the shadow of the ash
That dreams its dream in Attitash."
No doubt they are about here somewhere, only it takes a poet's eye to find them. And yet it was not very far from here that there lived a few years ago a young girl, a descendant of one of the early settlers of Amesbury, who on her engagement said to a friend proudly:—"I am going to marry a poor man, and I am going to help him." And so she always nobly did, in ways different from tawdry ambition. The courage of the old Puritans has not died out here any more than the old beauty has deserted the land.