Stage-coach and Tavern Days

by Alice Morse Earle

For on this crossroads took place several of those eccentric, ridiculous performances known as “shift-marriages.” Any widow, about to be married again, could be free from all debts of her dead husband’s contracting by being married at the crossroads, “clad only in her shift.” Sometimes she was enjoined to cross the King’s Highway four times thus scantily clad.

George Hazard, Justice, made entry in the town book of South Kingston, Rhode Island, that Abigail Calverwell on the 22d of February, 1719, was taken in marriage “after she had gone four times across the highway in only her shift and hair low and no other clothing.” Think of this poor creature, on this winter’s night, going through such an ordeal. Another Narragansett widow, Jemima Hill, was married at midnight “where four roads meet,” clad only in her shift. Another entry in a town record-book specifies that the bride had “no other clothing but shifting or smock.” Let me hasten to add that these marriages were not peculiar to Rhode Island; they took place in many of the colonies, certainly in Pennsylvania and in all the New England states.

As the old Narragansett coach sped on through Connecticut, it passed lonely spots which were noted for other sad tales and traditions, but were ever of keen interest to all passers-by. For at the crossroads “where four roads meet,” were buried suicides, with a stake thrust through the heart. This was a cruel old English and Dutch law. We learn from Judge Sewall all of the public obloquy and hatred of a suicide in Massachusetts. One poor fellow found dead was buried in disgrace under a pile of stones at a Connecticut crossroads, but the brand of self-destruction was taken from him at a later date, when much evidence was secured that he was murdered.

If our Narragansett coach went over the Ridge Hill, the driver surely pointed out the spot where a lover once hid his coach and horses till there rode up from a bridle-path near by the beauty of Narragansett, “Unhappy Hannah Robinson,” who jumped from her horse into the coach and drove off headlong to Providence to be married. An elopement should end happily, but the adjective ever attached to her name tells the tale of disappointment, and it was not many years ere she was borne back, deserted and dying, lying on a horse-litter, to the spacious old home of her childhood, which is still standing. And one day down this road there came hotly lashing his horses a gay young fellow driving tandem a pair of Narragansett pacers, and he scarcely halted at the tavern as he asked for the home and whereabouts of the parson. But the tavern loungers peeped under the chariot-hood and saw a beautiful blushing girl, and they stared at a vast, yawning, empty portmanteau, strapped by a single handle to the chariot’s back. And soon two angry young men, the bride’s brothers, rode up after the elopers, who had been tracked by the articles of the bride’s hastily gathered outfit which had been strewn from the open portmanteau along the road in the lovers’ hasty flight. Who that rides on a railway car ever hears anything about elopements or such romances! Parson Flagg, of Chester, Vermont, made his home a sort of Yankee Gretna Green; the old stage-drivers could tell plenty of stories of elopers on saddle and pillion who rode to his door.

Midsummer along the Pike.

The traveller by the coach learned constant lessons from that great teacher, Nature. Even if he were city bred he grew to know, as he saw them, the various duties of country life, the round of work on the farm, the succession of crops, the names of grains, and he knew each grain and grass when he saw it, which few of city life do now. He saw the timid flight of wild creatures, rabbits, woodchucks, squirrels, sometimes a wily fox. My father once, riding on a stage-coach in Vermont, chased down a mountain road a young deer that ran, bewildered, before its terrible pursuer. At night the traveller heard strange sounds, owls and a smothered snarl as the coach entered the woods—a catamount perhaps. He heard the singing birds of spring and noted the game-birds of autumn; and in winter they could watch the broad and beautiful flight of the crows, free in snowy woods and fields from the rivalry of all fellow feathered creatures. He saw the procession of wild flowers, though he, perhaps, did not consciously heed them, and he knew the trees by name. The stage-driver showed his passengers “the biggest ellum in the county,” and “the best grove of sugar-maples in the state.” He pointed out a lovely vista of white birches as “the purtiest grove o’ birch on the road,” and there was a dense grove of mulberry trees, the sole survivors of silk-worm culture in which were buried so many hours and years of hard labor, so much hard-earned capital, so many feverish hopes. And towering a giant among lesser brothers, a glorious pine tree still showing the mark of the broad arrow of the King, chosen to be a mast for his great ships, but living long after he was dead and his ships were sunken and rotten, living to be a king itself in a republican land.

A Vista of White Birches.

The foot-farer, trudging along the outskirts of the village, is often shut out by close stone or board barriers from any sight of the flowering country gardens, the luxuriance of whose blossoming is promised by the heads of the tall hollyhocks that bend over and nod pleasantly to him; but the traveller on the coach could see into these old gardens, could feast his eyes on all the glorious tangle of larkspur and phlox, of tiger lilies and candytuft, of snowballs and lilacs, of marigolds and asters, each season outdoing the other in brilliant bloom.