Grandmother Kelly lived to be past eighty. She was a big woman—thrifty and domestic—big enough to take "Granther" up in her arms and walk off with him. She did more to bring up her family than he did; was a practical housewife, and prolific. She had ten children and made every one of them toe the mark. I don't know whether she ever took "Granther" across her knee or not, but he probably deserved it. She was quite uneducated. Her maiden name was Lavinia Minot. I don't know where her people came from, or whether she had any brothers and sisters. They lived in Red Kill mostly, in the eastern part of the town of Roxbury, and also over on the edge of Greene County. I remember, when Grandfather used to tell stories of cruelty in the army, and of the hardships of the soldiers, she would wriggle and get very angry. All her children were large. They were as follows: Sukie, Ezekiel, Charles, Martin, Edmund, William, Thomas, Hannah, Abby, and Amy (my mother). Aunt Sukie was a short, chubby woman, always laughing. Uncle Charles was a man of strong Irish features, like Grandfather. He was a farmer who lived in Genesee County. Uncle Martin was a farmer of fair intelligence; Ezekiel was lower in the scale than the others; was intemperate, and after losing his farm became a day-laborer. He would carry a gin-bottle into the fields, and would mow the stones as readily as he would the grass—and I had to turn the grindstone to sharpen his scythe. Uncle Edmund was a farmer and a pettifogger. Uncle William died comparatively young; he had nurseries near Rochester. Uncle Thomas was a farmer, slow and canny, with a quiet, dry humor. Aunt Hannah married Robert Avery, who drank a good deal; I can't remember anything about her. Aunt Abby was large and thrifty; she married John Jenkins, and had a large family.... Amy, my mother, was her mother's tenth child.
Mother was born in Rensselaer County near Albany, in 1808. Her father moved to Delaware County when she was a child, driving there with an ox-team. Mother "worked out" in her early teens. She was seventeen or eighteen when she married, February, 1827.
Father and Mother first went to keeping house on Grandfather Burroughs's old place—not in the log house, but in the frame house of which you saw the foundations. Brother Hiram was born there.
(Mr. Burroughs's last walk with his father was to the crumbling foundations of this house. I have heard him tell how his father stood and pointed out the location of the various rooms—the room where they slept the first night they went there; the one where the eldest child was born; that in which his mother died. I stood (one August day in 1902) with Mr. Burroughs on the still remaining joists of his grandfather's house—grass-grown, and with the debris of stones and beams mingling with weeds and bushes. He pointed out to me, as his father had done for him, the location of the various rooms, and mused upon the scenes enacted there; he showed where the paths led to the barn and to the spring, and seemed to take a melancholy interest in picturing the lives of his parents and grandparents. A sudden burst of gladness from a song sparrow, and his musings gave way to attentive pleasure, and the sunlit Present claimed him instead of the shadowy Past. He was soon rejoicing in the discovery of a junco's nest near the foundations of the old house.—C.B.)
My father, Chauncey Burroughs, was born December 20, 1803. He received a fair schooling for those times—the three R's—and taught school one or two winters. His reading was the Bible and hymn-book, his weekly secular paper, and a monthly religious paper.
He used to say that as a boy he was a very mean one, saucy, quarrelsome, and wicked, liked horse-racing and card-playing—both alike disreputable in those times. In early manhood he "experienced religion" and joined the Old-School Baptist Church, of which his parents were members, and then all his bad habits seem to have been discarded. He stopped swearing and Sabbath-breaking, and other forms of wickedness, and became an exemplary member of the community. He was a man of unimpeachable veracity; bigoted and intolerant in his religious and political views, but a good neighbor, a kind father, a worthy citizen, a fond husband, and a consistent member of his church. He improved his farm, paid his debts, and kept his faith. He had no sentiment about things and was quite unconscious of the beauties of nature over which we make such an ado. "The primrose by the river's brim" would not have been seen by him at all. This is true of most farmers; the plough and the hoe and the scythe do not develop their aesthetic sensibilities; then, too, in the old religious view the beauties of this world were vain and foolish.
I have said that my father had strong religious feeling. He took "The Signs of the Times" for over forty years, reading all those experiences with the deepest emotion. I remember when a mere lad hearing him pray in the hog-pen. It was a time of unusual religious excitement with him, no doubt; I heard, and ran away, knowing it was not for me to hear.
Father had red hair, and a ruddy, freckled face. He was tender-hearted and tearful, but with blustering ways and a harsh, strident voice. Easily moved to emotion, he was as transparent as a child, with a child's lack of self-consciousness. Unsophisticated, he had no art to conceal anything, no guile, and, as Mother used to say, no manners. "All I ever had," Father would rejoin, "for I've never used any of them." I doubt if he ever said "Thank you" in his life; I certainly never heard him. He had nothing to conceal, and could not understand that others might have. I have heard him ask people what certain things cost, men their politics, women their ages, with the utmost ingenuousness. One day when he and I were in Poughkeepsie, we met a strange lad on the street with very red hair, and Father said to him, "I can remember when my hair was as red as yours." The boy stared at him and passed on.
Although Father lacked delicacy, he did not lack candor or directness. He would tell a joke on himself with the same glee that he would on any one else.... I have heard him tell how, in 1844, at the time of the "anti-renters," when he saw the posse coming, he ran over the hill to Uncle Daniel's and crawled under the bed, but left his feet sticking out, and there they found him. He had not offended, or dressed as an Indian, but had sympathized with the offenders.
He made a great deal of noise about the farm, sending his voice over the hills (we could hear him calling us to dinner when we were working on the "Rundle Place," half a mile away), shouting at the cows, the pigs, the sheep, or calling the dog, with needless expenditure of vocal power at all times and seasons. The neighbors knew when Father was at home; so did the cattle in the remotest field. His bark was always to be dreaded more than his bite. His threats of punishment were loud and severe, but the punishment rarely came. Never but once did he take a gad to me, and then the sound was more than the substance. I deserved more than I got: I had let a cow run through the tall grass in the meadow when I might easily have "headed her off," as I was told to do. Father used to say "No," to our requests for favors (such as a day off to go fishing or hunting) with strong emphasis, and then yield to our persistent coaxing.