Plymouth memories of an octogenarian

by William T. Davis

CHAPTER XXXXV.

Of funerals and their management, in early times, I have not much to say. Most of the funeral customs of ancient days had passed away before I was born. Funeral feasts and the gifts of gloves and scarfs and rings, a serious tax on the mourners, and a substantial profit to the officiating clergymen and pall bearers, who received them, were no longer in vogue. Until about the middle of the eighteenth century, prayers formed no part of a funeral ceremony, and it is said that the first prayer at a funeral in Boston was offered by Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncey at the interment of Rev. Dr. Jonathan Mayhew, pastor of the First Church, July 9, 1766. The sermon, which introduced the custom, which prevailed later of preaching funeral sermons, was preached by Dr. John Clarke in the Brattle street meeting house at the interment of Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, who died September 29, 1783. The rings given at funerals were of black enamel, edged with gold, inscribed with the name, age and date of the death of the deceased. The only one I ever saw was found a few years ago in the garden of the house which stood on the site of the Plymouth Savings Bank, and given to me. Recognizing the initials on the ring, and the date of death as those of one whose descendant at one time lived in the house referred to, I gave it to one of the family. It is said that Rev. Andrew Eliot, pastor of what was called the new North Church in Boston, received twenty-nine hundred and forty gloves at funerals, weddings and baptisms, a large number of which he sold, receiving therefor a very considerable addition to his salary. It was a custom which has not been abolished many years, on the Sunday after the death of a relative, to have a note read to the congregation asking prayers for the loss of a parent or wife or husband or friend. I have heard on some occasions as many as a dozen of these notes read before the announcement of the text of the sermon. An amusing story is told of a note, asking prayers for an inconsolable husband for the loss of a beloved wife, being found in a pulpit bible by a clergyman supplying the pulpit for the day only, who supposing it a new one, read it to the congregation, who had listened to it a year before, much to the consternation of the inconsolable husband, who was present in the church with a new bride. Though the custom of a funeral dinner, at which the pall bearers were guests, which has been described as

“Containing lots of fun,

Like mourning coaches, when the funeral’s done,”

had disappeared, I remember when it was the invariable custom for the pall bearers to return with the mourners to the house of the deceased and indulge in such wine or liquor as best suited their tastes. This custom continued until the temperance agitation about 1833, and has never been resumed. Funeral customs were different in different places, some inherited from the Dutch, and some from the English. In New York there were as in Massachusetts before the introduction of the hearse, six bearers who relieved each other in carrying the coffin on a bier to the grave, and six others who walked beside the bier, each holding a tassel of the pall or funeral cloth. At Mrs. Catalina de Peyster’s funeral, six young ladies attended as pall bearers dressed in white sarcinet jackets and petticoats with their heads uncovered, and their hair powdered and done up with white ribbon. The first hearse was used in Boston in 1796, and the first in Plymouth was used at the funeral of Thomas Pope, the father of the late Capt. Richard Pope, who died July 6, 1820. The first funeral which I remember, was that of Henry Warren, which I saw forming in front of his late residence on the corner of North street, but the first one I attended, was that of my great uncle, Samuel Davis, at Mrs. Nicolson’s boarding house on Court Square, where he died July 10, 1829. I can point out the very spot where, holding my mother’s hand, I listened to the passing bell, and waited impatiently for the procession to start. I thought then that the passing bell merely announced the march of the procession, and did not realize that it was really the celebration of the passage of a human soul through the gates of heaven.

The funeral hearse has a varied history, and in its present use has been diverted from its original design and purpose. At various early times the hearse and the catafalque were the same, and neither was ever used as a vehicle. It was a temporary structure set up in a chapel or house or place of burial, sometimes constructed at great cost, where the body lay for a time in state. In Strype’s Memorials the funeral ceremonies of the bishop of Winchester are described, after which, as he says, the body “was put into a wagon with four horses all covered with black.” Strype also describes the funeral of Henry the Eighth at which “in the chapel was ordained a goodly formal hearse with four score square tapers; every light containing two foot in length poising in the whole eighteen hundred weight of wax garnished about with pensils and escutcheons banners and bannerols of descents, and at the four corners four banners of saints beaten in fine gold upon damask.” He further says, that “on the 14th of February the chariot was brought to the Court hall door and the corpse with great reverence brought from the hearse to the same.” These extracts show conclusively that the hearse was a temporary structure erected in a chapel, or elsewhere, and that since the abandonment of its use, its name has been transferred to the vehicle carrying the body to the grave.

In early chapters I have alluded to various habits and customs prevailing during my boyhood, but have left untouched many associated with every day life. A reference to these, like charity, must begin at home, and as I recall my boyhood days and everything associated with them, I realize,

“How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start,

When memory plays an old tune on the heart.”

How well I remember the room, in which the family spent their evenings around the square centre table, lighted perhaps by two brass lamps, or by what was called an astral lamp, which was the first step in that series of illuminating contrivances, which included afterwards first the solar and then the carcel lamp, finally culminating in gas, which was introduced into Plymouth in 1855. For special occasions spermaceti candles were added, which were made at home in candle moulds with spermaceti bought at the Plymouth oil factory. Tallow candles and bayberry candles were used by many less well to do people, and to them kerosene oil, which came into use about the time of the introduction of gas at a price lower than whale oil, was a welcome boon. In the material world I know no greater civilizer than this oil has been among our people. The houses of those in the smaller towns, and in the suburbs of our own town, in which the sputtering oil lamp was extinguished at what was called early candle light, sending the occupants to bed, now display a cheerful sitting room, in which a centre table with books and magazines, and a parlor organ, or perhaps a piano, afford means of education and amusement, and promote a higher and a longer life. Some years ago statistics showed that insanity was especially prevalent among farmers with their days of constant and anxious work, unrelieved by seasons of amusement and good cheer. But kerosene oil has changed all this, and has lifted the curtain which once shut out the light of a cheerful life, and has immeasurably broadened the horizon within which farmers live.

What evenings those were at our home, the mother with her children, unattracted by clubs and societies away from the grand functions of a mother’s life; the children, out of the street, supplementing the instruction of school with that which only a parent could furnish. I know no greater change within my lifetime than that exhibited by the lessening influence of home. It has been brought about, partly by the disintegrating effect of civilized life, which with new means of heating and lighting, has scattered the members of a family, leaving no fireside to gather around, and has drawn them for intellectual and moral instructions beyond the limits of home; and partly, I am sorry to say, by the inculcation in some quarters of the idea that the management of a family and home is a drudgery, which should be avoided in the search for what is called a higher life. It seems useless to ask why the management of an institution incorporated by the acts of God, than which nothing can be nobler, is any more drudgery than the management of a railroad or steamboat or factory, incorporated by the legislature of the state. I halt, however, on the threshold of a subject too broad for discussion here, and only alluded to because I believe it to be one touching the best and truest life of society.

Until about 1832 no attempt was made to heat our houses with any other fuel than wood. In nearly every room there was a fireplace, that in the living room in some houses supplemented by a Franklin or Pierpont stove, which stood on the outer verge of the hearth, and with flaring sides, threw all the heat into the room without the loss of any by escape into the chimney. When coal was introduced, perhaps a grate was set in the living room, and into some of the chambers a spitfire stove, and finally as the last step in methods of heating, came the furnace. Fires in chambers were in my day far from being universal. I do not think that at home I ever slept in a heated chamber, except when sick, until I was sixteen years of age. How well I remember lying in bed looking at the peacocks and other figures on the chintz curtain of my four post bedstead, dreading to get up and wash my face and hands with water frozen in the pitcher. Warming pans, now obsolete, were invaluable in those days. In making fires in the different fireplaces, instead of using shavings or newspapers and matches, a fire pan, a very important article in every house, was used to carry a brand, or a parcel of coals from the kitchen fire, which placed under the wood, with the aid of a bellows soon kindled into a cheerful blaze. The fire pan made of iron, had a wooden handle, a cover punched with holes, and its under side sloped up in front. The kitchen fire, like the chanukkah light of the Jews, which was intended to be perpetual, was supposed to never go out, and being covered up at night, was rekindled in the morning. If a neighbor lost his fire he would come to our house with a fire pan and borrow a brand. In connection with fires the foot stove must be mentioned, an article indispensable in those times when houses were insufficiently heated. It was also an indispensable article in the meeting house, where the heat from a box stove, with a long funnel running overhead the full length of the house, was supplemented by the foot stoves in the pews to a degree, which alone made the atmosphere tolerable. I recall the relief from the Sabbath imprisonment at home in those days, when it seemed to me,

“That congregations ne’er break up,

And Sabbaths never end.”

when I was permitted to go to the meeting house with the foot stove and place it in the pew. The use of the foot stove in church was almost as ancient as the New England meeting house itself. On the fourth of March, 1744, it was voted by the town “that each person leaving his or her stove in any of the meeting houses in said town, after the people are all gone out (but the sexton) shall forfeit and pay the sum of five shillings to be improved as the law directs; and the stove so left to be forfeited to the sexton finding the same, and the sexton of each meeting house in the town is required carefully to inspect the pews and seats in each meeting house he or they have the care of, and to take into his possession all such stoves as may be so left in either or any of said meeting houses, and them keep in his possession until the owners thereof pay him the value of said stove or stoves so taken; and also each sexton is required and impowered to prosecute each person leaving his or her stove as aforesaid, and to recover the penalty set on such offender by this act.”

The kitchen in our house was almost a baronial hall, nearly thirty feet long, with an open fireplace wide enough to take a four foot stick for a forestick, and deep enough to take an iron back log six inches square, bearing up a back stick with sticks between making a roaring fire capable of performing the multiplicity of duties assigned to it. On the left side was a fire hole by which a wash boiler set in brick in the sink room was heated. Over the fire was a long iron crane with its pot hooks and tramells from which a teakettle always hung, never permitting any usurpation of its place by pots and kettles of less royal station. By its side hung the boiling kettle from whose recesses came at times those wonders of culinery art, the hard boiled puddings tied in a bag, of which the present generation knows nothing, and with which nothing has ever been seen since to furnish any comparison. They were the hard boiled rice, plum rice, apple, Indian, Indian suet, batter, bread and huckleberry, sure proofs to all who remember them that the world has retrograded. The hasty pudding was exempted from confinement in a bag, a pudding older than New England, and a favorite food of the Indians. Joel Barlow described its preparation in the following lines:

“She learnt with stones to crack the well dried maize,

Thro’ the rough sieve to shake the golden shower,

In boiling water stir the yellow flour;

The yellow flour bestrewed and stirred with haste,

Swells in the flood, and thickens to a paste,

Then puffs and wallops, rises to the brim,

Drinks the dry knobs that on the surface swim;

The knobs at last the busy ladle breaks,

And the whole mass its true consistence takes.”

On the right hand side of the fireplace was a brick oven with an opening into the ash pit in front of the door to receive the coals and ashes when the oven was sufficiently heated. This kind of oven is often called the “Dutch Oven,” but it lacks that distinctive feature of the Dutch oven, a door on the outside of the house opening into a small lean-to under which the baking was done. In front of the fireplace was the tin kitchen, in which all the roasting was done, having a long spit running through it to hold the meat or turkey, the basting being done through a door on its back. The baking of bread, if not done in the oven when it happened to be heated, was done either in a creeper or in a tin Yankee baker before the fire. Inside the jams hung the indispensable bellows, and the waffle irons, which were often called into use. I supposed as others did, that when waffle irons were first used they were a new discovery in the culinary art. But bless you, my young admirers of waffles, they were older than the country, and were brought from Holland by the Dutch. The irons were called by the Dutch “Izers.” In New York the waffles were called “Izer cookies,” in New Jersey “split cakes,” and in Philadelphia “squeeze cakes,” and finally became known as waffles, a name which seems to have been an abbreviation of “wafers.” As some of my readers may never have seen these irons, I will describe them as two iron handles, joined and worked like a pair of scissors, each having at its end a square or round plate five or six inches in diameter, fitting into each other and holding the dough, which is pressed, receiving the design cast in the inside of the plates. There is an old song remembered by Dutch descendants partly Dutch and partly English, which in its allusion to waffles shows the antiquity of the cakes, and which I submit to our high school scholars for translation:

“Ter roorches, ter roorches,

She mameche bucleche, borche

Ter roorches, ter roorches,

As me mither le waffles she boxes,

De butter la door de groches,

Ter roorches, terroorches

She mameche backle che boo.”

There are other articles of food which have come from the Dutch. The cooky from the Dutch word kockje, the cruller from the Dutch kruller, and noodles for soup from the Dutch noodlegees are well known. Our doughnut called in England in old times donnuts, are the same as the old Dutch oly-coecks, which originally had a raisin embedded in their centre.

In describing the old kitchen, I must not forget the coffee grinder, which hung on the wall, in which our grandmothers knew enough not to grind more than sufficient for a day’s use. Coffee was coffee in those days, and not the mixture of chicory and pease now imposed on those who buy what is called ground coffee. I say to my readers, pay no attention to the advertisers of postum and other substitutes for coffee, who magnify the ill effects of the genuine article. Always buy your coffee in the bean, roast and grind it yourself, and preserve its full flavor in an air tight box until used. I know that in Paris sixty years ago, coffee roasters were to be seen every morning along the sidewalks or in the court yards of the houses, showing the general importance attached to the morning beverage, and that everywhere in hotel and restaurant delicious coffee was always served. In 1895 no such scenes on the sidewalks came under my observation, and poor coffee had become the rule. No doubt the change is due to the use of ground coffee, which has either lost its flavour, or is an adulterated article.

In the autumn in my youth there was a solicitude concerning the articles to be laid in for the winter. First good potatoes must be found, twenty bushels of which with a barrel of sweet German turnips, and a bushel of carrots and onions must be put in brick bins in the cellar, where exposed to as little light as possible, they would in the days before furnaces keep well till spring. Then in a cool part of the cellar, places must be found for five barrels of apples, one each of Rhode Island Greenings, Baldwins, Russets, Holmes apples and sweet apples. Of course a firkin of good butter must be laid in, a jar of tamarinds, a jar of malaga grapes, and fifty pounds of well selected codfish, the last to be broad and thick, and not more than eighteen inches long including the tail. The fish must be kept in a close box, and placed in the garret. Never buy stripped codfish, for if you do you will probably get hake, polluck, skate and catfish, and other cheap denisons of the sea. In speaking of articles of food, in which there have been changes, there are other articles besides coffee and codfish not altogether creditable to those who provide them for public use. The sweet oil that you buy may be lard or cotton seed, the horseradish, which you wish for your veal in the spring, is largely flat turnip; some of the canned tomatoes are green and colored red, and much of your vinegar and whiskey is manufactured. The Philadelphia capons, Rhode Island turkeys and Vermont geese displayed on your hotel menus were raised in Plympton, Carver and Halifax. Our traders are honest, but they sell what they buy without analysis, leaving their protection to the law. Many of these misrepresentations are innocent enough, and cannot be classed with that which daily stares us in the face on the first page of a newspaper which is delivered at the hotels and newstands at half past twelve and dated 4.05. The worst feature of such misrepresentations as this is that it teaches the newsboys to make the false claim after 4.05, that the paper so dated is the last edition. One of the occasional domestic functions of our home was a quilting bee, in which friends and neighbors joined for the purpose of quilting a counterpane or bed quilt, made of patchwork. We had a set of quilting bars, four strips of wood about eight feet long, with holes a few inches apart, which when resting on the tops of chairs, could be put together by means of pegs at the corners, and enlarged as the quilt required more space between the side bars. As there were not many of these bars in town ours were constantly in demand, and loaned from one to another. I suppose these patchwork quilts are still in use, but the last one I ever saw was given to me by Mrs. Taylor, a daughter of Uncle Branch Pierce, in acknowledgment of service rendered her in securing the return of the body of her son, David A. Taylor, who was killed during the civil war. A part of my occupation at school in early boyhood was sewing patchwork squares together, to be used in quilts when needed.

Invariably on Saturday night my brother and I were given the weekly bath, which was not especially welcome in winter, but as cleanliness was next to Godliness, it was esteemed a proper preparation for Sunday. A countryman visiting New York for the first time must have been accustomed to the same habit, for he wrote home to his wife that “agin my room in the hotel is another room, with a bath tub and hot and cold water, and a lot of towels, and when I see them things I almost wished, begosh, that it was Saturday night.” Notwithstanding the bath tub preparation for the Sabbath, I am sorry to say that the hours of that day were those of my youth which I recall with the least pleasure. A strict observance of the Sabbath was the custom of the time, and the day was devoted until late in the afternoon to Scripture reading and Sunday-school lessons in the morning, and attendance twice at church, with Sunday-school at noon. Parents in those days did not permit their children to loiter at home and on the street until the morning service was finished, and then send them to Sunday-school, for they believed that the religious and moral instruction received from the pulpit was as important as that received through catechisms from teachers in the pew.

After the second service my brother and I were sometimes permitted to take hold of hands and make a call at the house of my uncle Mr. Nathaniel Morton Davis, or at the house of my great aunt, Hannah White, then ninety years of age, a descendant of Peregrine White, who had talked with those who well knew the first born son of New England. Occasionally, also, I went with my mother to visit Miss Molly Jackson, an aunt of my grandmother Davis, who at the age of nearly one hundred occupied a second story room in the southwest corner of the house in Hobbs Hole, next south of that of Thos. E. Cornish. My visits to her connected me with an earlier date than any other incidents in my life, giving me an opportunity to see and talk with a person born one hundred and seventy-six years ago, or only twenty-five years after the death of Peregrine White. The lax observance of the Sabbath now prevailing in marked contrast with its observance in earlier times, believing as I do in the beneficent and conservative influence of stated days of rest for man and beast, aside from all religious considerations, should be considerately and wisely reformed.