[8] Moses Gray was a man of great activity and energy. He soon added a shoe-shop to his tannery, where he hired a few hands to make shoes from the hides he tanned, taking these again by wagon to Albany, a journey of many days, where he bought his skins and some necessary supplies. Money was scarce in the newly settled country, and the things needed were mostly got by exchange. Meantime, as the chance came, he was buying land on the hills around. Clayville is where the valley narrows towards the source of the Sauquoit Creek, as “rivers” are called in that neighborhood in old Dutch fashion, and the hills are sharper and rougher. The scenery, however, is still beautiful, and the house which Moses Gray built two or three years later yet stands, with a lovely near view of stream and hill and wood. Asa Gray remembered his father building it. Busy as the father was out of doors, the mother was perhaps busier still. Asa, the younger brother by the first wife, was dying of consumption; he was moved on a bed from Sauquoit to Paris Furnace, and died very soon after, in May, 1811, aged twenty-three. When the child was born, November 18, 1810, it was carried to him to see, and he said he wished they would call it Asa, if it had had no name as yet decided on. He was of a singularly sweet and gentle character. The step-brothers were taken in turn to be taught and trained. The hands employed on farm or in trade were generally lodged and boarded. Often their clothes were mended or made. The wheat and grain were home-raised, as were all the vegetables. There was little fresh meat, except when a sheep or beef was killed, and that meant salting and curing. Butter and cheese were all homemade, and could be taken to Albany for sale, as was also grain; as the farm grew, more cows were added. Then the clothing was homemade. The wool for flannel sheets and underclothing and for the men’s clothes was home-spun, the nicer portions taken off and carded separately, and spun as worsted for the children’s and women’s dresses; also the yarn for socks for the whole family. A spinning-girl was hired for part of the year, for flax was also spun for the house linen and for wearing-apparel. The weaving was hired out. The tailor came by the week to make up the clothing with the mother’s help, and after the tannery was given up, the shoe-maker came at intervals to make the shoes. As the girls grew older they took their share at the wool and flax wheels. It is said that the first spinning of flax on the small wheel was introduced by the party of Scotch-Irish emigrants of 1718; that the women gave lessons to the women of Boston on Boston Common, and the fashion was so set for that spinning. It is also said that the Irish potato was first introduced into New England by these same colonists.
A widowed sister came with her children to make her home under the same roof when the Grays moved later to a larger farm, and there seemed always some boy to be housed and taught and trained. Though his aid might tell out of doors, the home care came upon the mother. But Mrs. Gray was a woman of singularly quiet and gentle character, with great strength and decision, and possessed a wonderful power of accomplishing and turning off work; a woman of thoughtful, earnest ways, conscientious and self-forgetting.
The father was quick, decided, and an immense worker; from him the son took his lively movements and his quick eagerness of character, perhaps also his ready appreciation of fun.
[9] His mother, having another child, was probably glad to have the active boy safe for a few hours. Her young sisters lived not far away, and the youngest aunt, a girl of ten, was proud to take him to school; she had already taught him his letters. His father promised him a spelling-book of his own as soon as he reached baker, which was a marked spot of advance in the spelling-book. A few weeks saw him far enough on, and the coveted prize was given. He went proudly to school the next day, and as he could not speak to the teacher to proclaim his triumph, he walked in front of her desk to his seat, waving the book with a great flourish before her! It was just before he was three years old.
[10] Of one of these, his friend, now over eighty years old, gives an account in the succeeding letter:—
Sauquoit, February 19, 1888.
Dear A.—I would like to give you some information of your uncle’s early life if I were well informed, but, I have only one little incident, and perhaps that would be of small account at the present era, though at the time it took place it was of great moment to us both as children. Asa lived with his parents at Paris Furnace, now Clayville. I lived where Mr. Bragg afterward built his new house. Well, we had a lovely teacher that summer by the name of Sally Stickney, living at Colonel Avery’s. She ruled by gentleness. For our class she had an old-fashioned two-shilling piece, with a hole through to insert a yard of blue ribbon. She put this over the head of the one that stood first in our class. So it traveled every night, all that summer, with some one of us, until the ribbon was worn and faded. But more than all that, the one that stood at the head on the last day of school was to be the owner of that two-shilling piece that we had watched with jealous eyes so many weeks, and studied Webster’s old spelling-book so hard to gain. I think our eyes must have magnified it, for I have never seen a coin since that seemed so large. I think it was the same in Asa’s eyes. Well, with hearts beating fast, and eyes on the coveted prize, we were called on the last day of school to spell; we took our places; I was at the head, Asa next. I missed and he went above me; my all was gone, but it was worse to have him point his finger at me and say out loud “kee-e-e.” I braved it without a tear; a few more words would end the strife. It came around to him, and he missed; how quick I went above him; but in an instant he dropped his head on the desk before him and wept as though his heart would break. School was dismissed, scholars were leaving; still he did not move, until our kind teacher came to him, whispered to him, soothed and petted him; then he jumped up and ran, I suppose wishing me in Halifax. I felt sorry for him and would have been willing to divide with him if he had not crowed over me so. I ran nearly all the way home—a good mile—with my treasure, in great haste to have some one tell me the best way to invest my money. I was told to go another three quarters of a mile to Stephen Savage’s store, spend it for calico, piece it up, to keep forever. I could get only one yard for my two-shilling piece, not nearly as good as can be bought now for three cents a yard. Not a trace of the quilt is left, nor of the old schoolhouse, or of those merry children; perhaps a few have wandered on to fourscore years. So it is little I can relate of his childhood, as the next year we moved from that district, but as years passed on I often heard of his rising fame with pleasure. If Eli Avery were living he would have been his best biographer in this place.
The time has flown so fast since all this transpired, it seems as if his tears had hardly dried before my grandchildren were studying his Botanies.
Two years ago the 9th day of September, when the doctor was visiting in Sauquoit, he called here and remarked, in his smiling way, “that he had got all over feeling badly about that.” I said, “And well you may when you have received so many honors since then.”
Your loving friend,
Harriet Rogers.