Plymouth memories of an octogenarian

by William T. Davis

CHAPTER XXXXVIII.

During my boyhood there was an article which had been for many years in the cookery department of our house, but which had recently gone out of use. It was called a roasting Jack, and preceded the tin kitchen in roasting meats and poultry. I remember it well, but I have little doubt that like many another relic of the past, it found its way into the junk heap of William Nye on the approach of some muster or election day, when we boys wanted money for lobsters and lemonade and other promoters of a stomachache which, perhaps, in these days of fads would have been called appendicitis. It was an iron cylinder about four inches in diameter and six inches long, attached at the top with an intermediate swivel to the chimney crane, and at the bottom to a hook or some other contrivance which held the meat. Inside of the cylinder there was a clock work machinery, which when wound up would keep the hook constantly turning before the fire. It probably went out of use between 1800 and 1820.

There was another kind of roasting Jack, consisting of a spit resting on hooks attached to the andirons to which a wheel was affixed, which was kept turning by a chain band running from a larger wheel moved by clock work attached to the under side of the mantel piece. I have no doubt that many of my readers have seen the hooks on old andirons without knowing the purpose for which they were intended. These hooks may be seen on a pair of andirons in the Pilgrim Hall Library.

There was another article closely associated with my childhood, which I have thus far omitted to mention. How often have I sat in a high chair with a bib under my chin, and a pap spoon in hand, feeding myself out of a porringer. I supposed that the porringer was the sole prerogative of children; that it was designed expressly for their use, but I had not then learned the fictions of legendary lore, and that the world is all a fleeting show for a child’s illusion given. I learned the true origin and use of the porringer some years ago. A lady wrote to me that an elderly lady in Roxbury in somewhat reduced circumstances owned a china soup tureen which was once used in the household of Queen Anne, and would be glad to sell it. I went to see it, and found a very handsome tureen, but I saw at once on its cover a knob representing a rabbit’s ear, the exclusive mark of Wedgewood, who flourished during the time of Queen Charlotte, and made a very beautiful cream colored ware, of which this tureen was a specimen, and in honor of Queen Charlotte called it “queen’s ware.” The story accompanying the tureen was that an ancestor of its present owner was at one time attached to Queen Anne’s Court, as one of the ladies in waiting, and afterwards becoming reduced, emigrated to New Brunswick, carrying with her the tureen, which she received as a present during her service in the household of the Queen. It is easy to account for the legend of its origin by the supposition of some later owner, knowing it was called queen’s ware, that it was a part of the ware of the queen of whose household an ancestor was a member. Not being satisfied with the result of my examination I began a further investigation of the origin of soup tureens as articles of table ware, and found that in the reign of Queen Anne, they were neither used or known. The custom was to have soup brought to the table by the servants in porringers, one of which was placed before each guest. This was the design and purpose of the porringer, and this was its use until the appearance of the tureen about the middle of the eighteenth century, when it was relegated to the use of children. In my day the porringer was made of either silver or pewter, but as the fashion of its use has gradually gone out the silver porringer has found its way to the melting pot, and the pewter one to the bric-a-brac store.

There are doubtless many genuine relics of the Queen Anne period in existence. I have a hammered brass wine cooler of that period, which came down in my mother’s family from John White, son of Peregrine White, born in Marshfield about 1660. It is about the size and shape of an ordinary soup tureen, with solid brass handles and slots around its edge, in which wine glasses were hung with their bowls in the water. It was called a “Monteth,” and took its name from the inventor. The poet William King, who was born in 1663, and died in 1712, alluded to the article in the following lines:

“New names produce new words, and thus Monteth

Has by a vessel saved his name from death.”

Among the books which I have examined with reference to the articles above mentioned, is a very interesting one entitled “Social life in the reign of Queen Anne,” to which I refer the student of habits and customs in the early part of the 18th century.

In the flowers and fruits and trees of Plymouth the changes in my day have not been striking. The garden flora are the same as in my youth, except that new flowers have been introduced, and new and improved varieties of the old ones. Fashion has occasionally relegated some flowers to temporary obscurity, but in many instances has restored them to their old rank or to a higher one. In my youth the tulip filled every border in yard and garden, but in time fashion called it vulgar, and it retired from the floral social life. But it returned in due season, like a girl from a fashionable school with the flush of beauty and with cultivated taste, and became instead of the wall flower, one of the belles of the ball. The hollyhock once banished to the back yard, is now the guardian of our doorway, and nods a graceful welcome to every guest, while the sunflower, once the occupant of the poultry yard, now stands in splendid defiance under our windows, and hourly challenges the sun to do his best.

The most remarkable change in our gardens has been in connection with the tomato introduced from Mexico, and there called tomatl. In 1831 Dr. Jas. Thacher of Plymouth, who was fond of introducing new things, secured some seed and gave my mother some, which she planted. I remember the plant well, with its burdens of gorgeous fruit, which was looked upon rather as a garden ornament than food for the table. It was not long, however, before it came into general use as a summer vegetable, and finally as a preserve in cans for winter use, until it may now be said that in the extent of its use it stands next to the potato. Though long supposed to have been of Mexican origin, it has been recently found that nations in Africa had long used it, and esteemed it a valuable article of food. I have an impression that in the summer of 1831 it ripened much earlier than it does now. It is a serious objection that as a crop it ripens so late that practically the whole crop ripens at the same time, and as a perishable vegetable is rushed into the market at prices too low to make its cultivation profitable. The canning, however, of large quantities, has served in recent years to help prices by increasing the demand. A writer in Blackwood says, “the tomato is a noble fruit, as sweet in smell as the odors of Araby, and makes an illustrious salad. Its medicinal virtue is as great as its gastronomical goodness. It is the friend of the well to keep them well, and the friend of the sick to bring them back into the lost sheepfolds of Hygeia. The Englishman’s travelling companion, the blue pill, would never be needed if he would pay proper court to the tomato.”

Among the fruits brought into use in Plymouth from foreign fields, the banana has had the most striking history. I remember the first one I ever saw, and the first brought to Plymouth. It was about the year 1833 that Capt. Samuel Rogers in command of the schooner Capitol, belonging to Daniel and Abraham Jackson, brought to Plymouth several bunches of bananas, one of which he gave to Mr. Abraham Jackson, in whose yard I saw it hanging on a tree. The bunch was of the yellow variety, and Capt. Rogers called it plantain. As the demand for this fruit has increased, the banana fields of Porto Rico, Jamaica and Costa Rica have been immensely enlarged until regular lines of steamers from those places now bring into the United States twenty-five millions of bunches annually, or twenty-five hundred millions of bananas, enough to supply annually thirty bananas to every man, woman and child, including negroes. The fruit is now sold at so low a price, and is so universally used that I think it safe to say that no fruit, not excepting apples, has so large a consumption.

The most striking change in fruits during my time has been in the cultivation of cranberries. They have always been known as a native of New England, and John Smith found them in a visit here in 1614. They have always found their best natural growth in grassy meadows or swamps, where decay of vegetable matter has supplied the soil with organic acids. I know some patches of such meadows today where the cranberry has borne fruit hundreds of years. These natural berries are better than the cultivated ones, probably because the sand with which the made bog is covered has diminished the supply of organic acids. The general consumer has not yet discovered that the native berry weighs a number of pounds more to the bushel than the cultivated one, and has a richer flavor. In 1855 the statistics of Plymouth showed an acre and a half of cranberry bog valued at $15—while at the present time there are 984 acres valued at $393,600.

Some fruits which were abundant in our gardens during my youth, have entirely disappeared. I knew then scarcely a garden without its plums, gages and damsons, the latter of which were especially prized for preserving. When it is asked what has become of these trees, it is often answered that they have run out. But such an answer is absurd, because if they had run out in one place, they would have run out everywhere. But the plum and gage are raised in California and sold in Boston and Plymouth at a profit to the producer after a travel of three thousand miles across the continent. The trouble is that the soil has run out after nearly three centuries of cultivation without renewal of those properties and ingredients which successive crops have exhausted. If the virgin soils of California were analyzed, and their fertilizing constituents when discovered were applied to our worn out gardens, they would doubtless be rejuvenated. Our people have not even been content with robbing the ground of its crops without adding to and restoring its vitality, but they have year after year raked out every stone, great and small, leaving the ground a mere black paste, instead of a vigorous loam. They have yet to learn that the feldspar in granite contains potash enough if we knew how to extract it to fertilize the fields in which the farmer looks on stones as nuisances to be rid of. I have seen some evidence in the rank growth of grass around stone heaps and under stone walls that nature may have found some method by chemical action of eliminating the feldspar potash which the rocks contain. The condition of the trees on Boston Common, of which in late years we have heard much complaint illustrates in my opinion the necessity of restoring to the soil precisely those qualities which year after year the trees have been using up. Mr. Doogue, the superintendent, last season, or the season before, ploughed the ground and planted grain as if the surface needed loosening and enriching to permit the access of rain to the roots of the trees, but I do not believe that he has reached or remedied the trouble. If he would come to Plymouth I could show him by an object lesson what the trees need. Let him make a visit to our woods, where with no more than two inches of soil on a substratum of sand and gravel, a thick growth of oaks and pines sends up every season a foot or more of upward growth, and preserves through the dryest summers a rich foliage. They simply live on the leaves which they shed in the autumn for their own use, and which they find in the spring that no robber has carried away. If Mr. Doogue, instead of raking the common and carting off the leaves will deposit them in trenches around the trees covered with a little earth, his trees will doubtless revive.

Among the trees which have practically disappeared in my day are the Buttonwood and Balm of Gilead. The Buttonwood or Sycamore or Plane tree, grew in various localities within the town, and until about the year 1845, a row of Buttonwoods stood on the front of the lot which now includes Cushman street and the lots on both sides. Jas. Russell Lowell was undoubtedly familiar with it when he wrote in his “Beaver Brook.”

“Beneath a bony buttonwood

The mill’s red door swings open wide;

The whitened miller, dust imbued,

Flits past the square of dark inside.”

The Buttonwood bush is an entirely distinct plant deriving its name from the globules it bears resembling buttons in shape.

There was during my youth a row of Balm of Gileads or Balsam poplars five or six in number, standing below the stone wall opposite the North side of the Plymouth Rock House. The buds of the trees covered with a resinous matter, were much sought after as cures for cuts and wounds. Only a very few of these trees are now standing in Plymouth.

There is the hornbeam tree often spoken of in the division of lands in the early days of Plymouth Colony, of which very few specimens are now found in our woods. Wood in “New England’s Prospect,” under date of 1639 says, “the horn bound tree is a tough kind of wood that requires so much pains in riving as is almost incredible; being the best to make bowls and dishes, not being subject to crack or leak.” He says:

“The horn-bound tree that to be cloven scorns;

Which from the tender vine oft takes his spouse

Who twines embracing arms about his boughs.”

The trees of New England seem to have been the same as those which were natives of England. The English poet Spencer in the first book of the first canto of “The Færie Queen” enumerates the latter in the following lines:

“Much can they praise the trees so straight and hy,

The sayling Pine; the Cedar proud and tall;

The vine-propt Elme; the Popplar never dry;

The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all;

The Aspine, good for staves; the Cypresse funerall;

The Laurell, meed of mightie conquerors

And poets sage; the Firre that weepeth still;

The Willow, worne of forlorne paramours;

The Eugh, obedient to the bender’s will;

The Birch for shaftes; the Sallow for the mill;

The Mirrhe, sweete-bleeding in the bitter wound;

The warlike Beech; the Ash for nothing ill;

The fruitful Olive, and the Platane round;

The corner Holme; the Maple seldom inward sound.”

The sapling pine was the tree of which staffs were made; the builders’ oak was the white oak; the sallow was a kind of willow; the platane was the plane, and the holm was the holly. The olive may have been some tree now known by another name.

The beech tree at one time within my recollection was almost extinct in Plymouth woods, and was rarely found except on islands in the woodland ponds. I have heard that the same was true of the beech in the Middlesex Fells, which suggests that woods fires which could not reach the islands may have thinned the beeches out. The fact that in recent years the beech is again making its appearance in the Plymouth Park and other protected localities, adds force to the suggestion.

Elm trees have always abounded in New England, doubtless including Plymouth, and are much handsomer than the English elms, though the latter retaining the custom of their habitat, leave out earlier in the spring than the American, and hold their leaves longer in the autumn. As far as I know there is no positive record of an elm tree from the natural forests in New England. The ages of the old elm on the Common in Boston, and of the Brookline and Pittsfield elms, is not known. There are contemporary records of an elm in New York city, standing on the corner of Wall and Broad streets as late as 1670, which measured more than thirty feet in circumference, and was called by the Dutch, “der Groot Tree.” The trees now standing in Town Square, three of the five planted by my great-grandfather, Thomas Davis, in 1784, are young compared with the New York tree, and ought not to be in the languishing condition they now exhibit. With the ground in the square packed solid, it is impossible for rains to reach their roots. If a fence were built around each tree, and the ground within it dug up and kept loose, there can be no doubt that water would find its way to the roots and along them to the most distant rootlets. There is the same trouble with all the ornamental trees along our concreted sidewalks. We are spending hundreds of dollars each year in spraying their foliage to check the ravages of the beetle and miller, and at the same time by grass and concrete and macadamizing sentencing them to certain death. I commend the subject to the Plymouth Natural History Society, who on examination of the beautiful tree in the front of the new fire station, a central jewel in our coronet of trees, will find that we have been pursuing the policy of a physician who would treat a patient for loss of hair, who is dying of hunger and thirst.

Among other adopted trees are the European Linden, and the English Birch. Mr. George B. Emerson, the eminent naturalist, told me once he thought the latter the most beautiful tree in America. It undoubtedly has the merit of putting out its leaves earlier than our trees, and holding them longer, but I have never seen one standing erect if alone, or if more than forty years old retaining life and vigor in its upper branches. On the other hand I think the European Linden, of which we have noble specimens in Plymouth, is on the whole the most satisfactory ornamental tree for a bleak sea exposure like that of Plymouth. I have found in Holland, the country of Lindens, none to compare with the Lindens on North street, which grow straight and regular, under blasting winds, and I have seen them as late as the 6th of October without a yellow leaf.

Of the animals and birds and their changes within my day, I can say little. They are very much the same as in the days of the Pilgrims. The wild turkey disappeared before my time, and I think that they are only to be found in Massachusetts today in the Berkshire hills. All through my youth the wild pigeons were abundant in our grain fields and huckleberry woods, but they are now rare. Martins also were flying about our houses, and nearly every householder had a martin box under the eaves of his dwelling, or on a staff standing in his yard. The English sparrow stole their nests, and they fled like the aborigines before the English immigrant.

The fish are the same as those described by Wood and Josselyn, writers in Pilgrim days, some, however having disappeared for a time and returned. I remember being at Holmes Hole during the Civil War, and being told that the weak fish or squeteague had returned after an absence of twenty-five years. In Josselyn’s New England’s rareties a fish called Gurnard is spoken of, and is also mentioned in a poem by Steendamn, a Dutchman, written, perhaps, about 1640 or 1650, in the following lines, descriptive of fish in New York waters:

“The bream and sturgeon, drum fish and gurnard

The sea-bass which a prince would not discard;

The cod and salmon cooked with due regard

Most palatable.”

I am anxious to know what fish under its American name the gurnard is. The Gurnet, at the entrance of Plymouth harbor, was named after a headland in the English Channel, which in shape resembled the Gurnet, a fish in English waters. On the coast of Wales there is another headland named Gurnard, after the fish gurnard, the French name of the fish called in English, gurnet. The gurnard has lost its French name with us, and I was not aware until I saw the name in Wood and Josselyn, that the gurnet fish was found in our waters under the name of gurnard.

There was a piece of household furniture in my youth which I believe has gone out of use. The trundle bed was introduced by the Dutch, by whom it was called “een slaapbauck op rollen.” The bedsteads were universally four posted and high enough from the floor to permit the trundle bed to be kept under it, and to be rolled out at night when the younger children were sent to bed. When the baby grew to be too large for the cradle, or was deposed by a new comer, it was promoted to the trundle bed, and when a newer comer appeared the trundle bed held two until the bedstead, with its chintz curtains, became the court of last resort. In old Colonial days the bedsteads were made of sassafras wood, which was believed to be an effectual protection against vermin. For hundreds of years the curative properties of sassafras were highly esteemed by the Indians, and when Champlain first sailed up the St. Lawrence he carried back to France large quantities of it to be used especially as a cure for venereal diseases. Within my day sassafras poles have been used as roosts in hen houses as a protection against hen lice.

The treatment of whiskers has changed almost as often as each generation came on the stage. The use of the razor is as old as the history of man. In the book of Isaiah it is written in the twentieth verse of the seventh chapter, “In the same day shall the Lord shave with a razor.” Ezekiel, in the first verse of chapter five says, “Take thee a sharp knife, take thee a barber’s razor and cause it to pass upon thy head and upon thy beard.” Pliny states that barbers were common in his time, though only a short time before beards were allowed to grow. He also speaks of spider webs, applied with oil and vinegar to cuts received in barber shops, and also speaks of hones and whetstones for sharpening razors. In the time of Adrian beards were again allowed to grow, and so the changes and fashions went on. In the time of Queen Elizabeth the wearing of beards was controlled by law, and it was ordered that no fellow of Lincoln’s Inn should wear a beard of more than two weeks’ growth. The barber’s brush was introduced in modern times. A writer named Stubb, in a work entitled “Anatomy of Abuses,” published about 1550, in speaking of barbers, wrote, “When they came to washing, oh, how gingerly they behave themselves therein. For then shall your mouths be bossed with the lather or some that runneth off the balls, your eyes closed must be anointed therewith also.” In the very beginning of the last century a poetical wag wrote the following lines showing that at that time the face was clean shaved by barbers.

“Strap that razor so keen! strap that razor again!

And Smallpiece will shave em, if he can come at em;

From his stool clad in aprons, he springs up amain

Like a barber refreshed by the smell of pomatum.

From the place where he lay,

He leaps in array

To lather and shave in the face of the day,

He has sworn from pollution our faces to clean

Our cheeks, necks and upper lips, whiskers and chin.”

In 1829 a public meeting was held in New York against whiskers, and about the same time there was a movement in Plymouth against them. Barbers and surgeons were incorporated as one company in the fifteenth century, and were called barber surgeons. Henry the Eighth dissolved the union and gave a new charter in 1540, in which it was provided “That no person using any shaving or barbery in London, shall occupy any surgery, letting of blood or other matter, excepting only the drawing of teeth.” Under the law barbers and surgeons were each to use a pole, that of the barber’s, blue and white striped, and that of the surgeon’s, the same, with the addition of a galipot and a red rag. As near as I can learn the use of a pole began as early as the 13th century, when “a staff bound by a riband was held by persons being bled, and the pole was intended to denote the practice of blood letting.” The staff was about three feet long, with a ball on the top and a fillet or tape attached, which when not in use was wound around it. So that the present barber’s pole represents a part of the barber’s business, that of blood letting, which long since passed to the prerogative of the surgeon.

During my youth beards were unknown among Americans, and until 1852 I do not think that a person of any nationality had in my time ever worn a moustache in Plymouth. In the summer of 1854, while occupying for a time the house now occupied by Col. Wm. P. Stoddard, I was confined to the house by illness about three weeks, and during that time permitted my moustache to grow, intending to shave it off before going into the street. When I had recovered sufficiently to go out I took an airing in the carriage of the late Ephraim Finney, having failed to carry out my intention, and my appendage was so roundly condemned by all my friends that I permitted it to grow, and I have never parted with it since. During the next summer a meeting of the descendants of Elder Thomas Cushman, was held in Plymouth, and Rev. Dr. Robert W. Cushman, the orator of the occasion was a guest with his wife at my house. I heard of his saying after he returned home, that he stayed with me while in Plymouth, and then adding—what a pity that a man like Mr. Davis should wear a moustache. I doubt whether there are many older moustaches in Massachusetts than mine.