Home Life in Colonial Days

by Alice Morse Earle

Six years later he married and prospered. In eleven years he was worth two thousand dollars; he filled, during his long life, many, positions of trust and of profit, and did many and varied good deeds; he continued in active life till he was ninety years old. At his death he left a considerable fortune. It is an interesting picture of the value of honorable economy and thrift; a typical New England picture, with a certain vigor and stimulus about it that makes it pleasing.

A "raising" might be of a church or a school-house, or of a house or barn for a neighbor. All the strong men far and near turned out to help, tools were lent, and many strong hands and arms made quick work. Often the frame of a whole side of a house—the broadside—was fastened together on the ground. After it was laid out and pinned together, shores of long poles were attached to the plates with ox-chains, and it was literally lifted into place by the united strength of the entire band of men and boys. Sometimes women pulled on the rope to express their good will and helpfulness. Then the other sides were put up, and the cross-beams, braces, and studding all pinned and nailed into place. Afterwards the huge rafters were raised for the roof. Each man was assigned in the beginning to his place and work, and worked faithfully when his turn came. When the ridge-pole was put in place, the building was christened, as it was called, by breaking over it a bottle of rum. Often the house was literally given a name. Sitting astride the ridge-pole, one poet sang:—

"Here's a mighty fine frame
Which desarves a good name,
Say what shall we call it?
The timbers all straight,
And was hewed fust rate,
The frame is well put together.
It is a good frame
That desarves a good name,
Say! what shall we name it?"

Another, a Rochester, New Hampshire, frame was celebrated in verse which closed thus:—

"The Flower of the Plain is the name of this Frame,
We've had exceeding good Luck in raising the Same."

It was not luck that made these raisings a success, it was skill and strength; skill and powers of endurance which could overcome and surmount even the quantity of vile New England rum with which the workmen were plied throughout the day. Accidents were frequent, and often fatal. A great frame of a meeting-house, or a vast barn with forty or fifty men at work on it, could not collapse without loss of life and much injury of limb.

In the work of these raisings the highest as well as the humblest citizens took part. Truly a man could glow with the warmth of home even in a bare and scantily furnished house, at the thought that the walls and rafters were held in place by the kind wishes and deeds of all his friends and neighbors.

There is nothing in nature so unnatural, so singular in quality, as the glittering artificiality of the early morning in the country the day after a heavy, drifting, New England snowstorm. For a day and a night the wildly whirling snow that "driving o'er the fields seems nowhere to alight" has restrained the outlook, and every one has turned depressed from that outside life of loneliness and gloom. The following morning always opens with an excessively bright and dazzling sunshine which is not like any other sunshine in any place or season, but is wholly artificial, like the lime-light of a theatre. We always run eagerly to the window to greet once more the signs of life and cheerfulness; but the landscape is more devoid of life and reality than during any storm of wind and snow and sleet, no matter how dark and lowering. There is a changed aspect in everything; it is metallic, and everything is made of the same horrible white metal. Nothing seems familiar; not only are the wonted forms and outlines vanished, and all their varied textures and materials and beautiful diversity of color gone also, but there is a steely immobility restraining everything which is so complete that it seems as if it were a shell that could never be broken.

"We look upon a world unknown,
On nothing we can call our own."

It is no longer a real landscape but an artificial encircling diorama of meaningless objects made of vast unshaded sheets of white glazed Bristol-board, painted with white enamel, warranted not to crack; with the garish high-lights put in crystallized alum or possibly powdered glass. It is without life, or atmosphere, or reality; it has nothing but the million reflections of that artificial and repellent sunshine. In a quarter of an hour, even in a few minutes, it is agonizingly monotonous to the spirit as it is painful to the eye; then, like a veritable oasis of color and motion in an unmovable glittering white desert, a sound and sight of beautiful and active life appears. Around the bend of the road comes slow and straining down the hill, as has come through the glaring artificial sunlight after every heavy snowstorm for over a century past, a long train of oxen with a snow-plough "breaking out" the old post-road. Beautiful emblems of patient and docile strength, these splendid creatures are never so grateful to the sight as now. Their slow progress down the hill has many elements to make it interesting; it is historic. Ever since the township was thickly settled enough for families to have any winter communication with each other, whether for school, church, mail, or doctor, this road has been broken out in precisely this same way.