So they painted the little maid."
Photo by Halliday Historic Photograph Company
FERNSIDE FARM, HAVERHILL, MASS.
FERNSIDE FARM, HAVERHILL, MASSACHUSETTS
THE BIRTHPLACE AND BOYHOOD HOME OF
JOHN G. WHITTIER
The first house built by Thomas Whittier, the three-hundred-pound ancestor of the poet Whittier, and first representative of the family in America, was a little log cabin. There he took his wife, Ruth Flint, and there ten children were born. Five of them were boys, and each of them was more than six feet tall.
No wonder the log house grew too small for the family. So, probably in 1688, he built a house whose massive hewn beams were fifteen inches square, whose kitchen was thirty feet long, with a fireplace eight feet wide. The rooms clustered about a central chimney.
In this house the poet was born December 17, 1807, and here he spent the formative years of his life. When he was twenty-seven years old he wrote for The Little Pilgrim of Philadelphia a paper on "The Fish I Didn't Catch." In this he described the home of his boyhood: