Olive Leaves; Or, Sketches of Character

by L. H. Sigourney

About the year 1713, Oxford was resettled by a stronger body of colonists, able to command more military aid; and thither, in process of time, a few of the Huguenot families resorted, and made their abode in those lovely and retired vales.

A visit to this fair scenery many years since, was rendered doubly interesting, by the conversation of an ancient lady of Huguenot extraction. Though she had numbered more than fourscore winters, her memory was particularly retentive, while her clear, black eye, dark complexion, and serenely expressive countenance, displayed some of the striking characteristics of her ancestral clime, mingled with that beauty of the soul which is confined to no nation, and which age cannot destroy. This was the same Mrs. Butler, formerly Mary Sigourney, whose reminiscences, the late Rev. Dr. Holmes, the learned and persevering annalist, has quoted in his "Memoir of the French Protestants."

With her family, and some other relatives, she had removed from Boston to Oxford, after the revolutionary war, and supposed that her brother, Mr. Andrew Sigourney, then occupied very nearly, if not the same precise locality, which had been purchased by their ancestor, nearly 150 years before. During the voyage to this foreign clime, her grandmother was deprived by death of an affectionate mother, while an infant only six months old. From this grandmother, who lived to be more than eighty, and from a sister six years older, who attained the unusual age of ninety-six, Mrs. Butler had derived many legends which she treasured with fidelity, and related with simple eloquence. Truly, the voice of buried ages, spake through her venerated lips. The building of the fort; the naturalization of French vines and fruit-trees in a stranger soil; the consecrated spot where their dead were buried, now without the remaining vestige of a stone; the hopes of the rising settlement; the massacre that dispersed it; the hearth-stone, empurpled with the blood of the beautiful babes of Jeanson; the frantic wife and mother snatched from the scene of slaughter by her brother, and borne through the waters of French River, to the garrison at Woodstock; all these traces seemed as vivid in her mind, as if her eye had witnessed them. The traditions connected with the massacre, were doubtless more strongly deepened in her memory, from the circumstance that the champion who rescued his desolated sister from the merciless barbarians, was her own ancestor, Mr. Andrew Sigourney, and the original settler of Oxford.

Other narrations she had also preserved, of the troubles that preceded the flight of the exiles from France, and of the obstacles to be surmounted, ere that flight could be accomplished. The interruptions from the soldiery to which they were subject, after having been shut out from their own churches, induced them to meet for Divine worship in the most remote places, and to use books of psalms and devotion, printed in so minute a form, that they might be concealed in their bosoms, or in their head-dresses. One of these antique volumes, is still in the possession of the descendants of Gabriel Bernon, a most excellent and influential man, who made his permanent residence at Providence, though he was originally in the settlement at Oxford.

Mrs. Butler mentioned the haste and discomfort in which the flight of their own family was made. Her grandfather told them imperatively, that they must go, and without delay. The whole family gathered together, and with such preparation as might be made in a few moments, took their departure from the house of their birth, "leaving the pot boiling over the fire!" This last simple item reminds of one, with which the poet Southey deepens the description of the flight of a household, and a village, at the approach of the foe.

"The chestnut loaf lay broken on the shelf."

Another Huguenot, Henry Francisco, who lived to the age of more than one hundred, relates a somewhat similar trait of his own departure from his native land. He was a boy of five years old, and his father led him by the hand from their pleasant door. It was winter, and the snow fell, with a bleak, cold wind. They descended the hill in silence. With the intuition of childhood, he knew there was trouble, without being able to comprehend the full cause. At length, fixing his eyes on his father, he begged, in a tremulous voice, to be permitted "just to go back, and get his little sled," his favourite, and most valued possession.

A letter from the young wife of Gabriel Manigault, one of the many refugees who settled in the Carolinas, is singularly graphic. "During eight months we had suffered from the quartering of the soldiers among us, with many other inconveniences. We therefore resolved on quitting France by Night. We left the soldiers in their beds, and abandoned our house with its furniture. We contrived to hide ourselves in Dauphiny for ten days, search being continually made for us; but our hostess, though much questioned, was faithful and did not betray us."

These simple delineations, more forcibly than the dignified style of the historian, seem to bring to our ears the haughty voice of Ludovico Magno, in his instrument revoking the edict of Henry IV.: "We do most strictly repeat our prohibition, unto all our subjects of the pretended reformed religion, that neither they, nor their wives, nor children, do depart our kingdom, countries, or lands of our dominion, nor transport their goods and effects, on pain, for men so offending, of their being sent to the gallies, and of confiscation of bodies and goods, for the women."

The information derived from this ancient lady, who, in all the virtues of domestic life, was a worthy descendant of the Huguenots, added new interest to their relics, still visible, among the rural scenery of Oxford. On the summit of a high hill, commanding an extensive prospect, are the ruins of the Fort. It was regularly constructed with bastions, though most of the stones have been removed for the purposes of agriculture. Within its enclosure are the vestiges of a well. There the grape vine still lifts its purple clusters, the currant its crimson berries, the rose its rich blossoms, the asparagus its bulbous head and feathery banner.