Old Days at Beverly Farms

by Mary Larcom Dow

Miss Culbert showed me the other day, a great find, the remnant of the "Third Social Library of Beverly." I had never heard of such a library and was greatly interested. It is now in our beautiful branch library, in a neat book case made by one of the Obers, in whose house the Library was placed. I mean the old Joseph Ober house which stood where Mrs. Charles M. Cabot's house is.

Elsie did not live opposite that house then, but she was going to live there. I dare say she wouldn't read any one of those books, any more than I would. The books date back to 1810, and many of the honored names I have been mentioning are there, all written down in beautiful handwriting, and with a tax of ten cents opposite their names, for the carrying on of this little library. There are two sermons of the beloved Joseph Emerson, who preached at Beverly before there was any church here, a funeral sermon preached on the occasion of Dr. Perry's grandfather's death, loads of sermons by Jonathan Edwards, great bundles of religious magazines, and other interesting antiquities. Not one story, no fiction of any sort. Those forefathers of ours fed on strong meat. Among the curiosities are several letters from anxious fathers in Boston, making the most vigorous and pathetic protest against a proposed second theatre in Boston on Common Street.

A second theatre in Boston! The souls of young people in peril! One sighs to think what these good fathers would have said if they could have pulled aside the curtain of the future and seen little Beverly with crowds of children accompanied by their fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts and cousins, all pouring into the "movies!" (One of these movies named for Lucy Larcom!) One must go on, and now we are trying to hope that some good may come out of the "movies!" If our little religious library was the "Third Social" there must have been two more in old Beverly.

I want you to go back in your mind to a Sunday of that time when even a walk to the woods or to the beach was wicked, when the only books that were proper to read were religious books, when there were three religious services every Sunday and pretty awfully long services. My cousin and my sister and I crawled up a long ladder to the third floor of our barn, among the pigeons' nests, and, nestling down in the hay, produced a novel, a real novel, a wishy washy thing, that no money could hire me to read today, and with quiet whisperings read that wicked book. We were in mortal terror lest "Aunt Phebe" should suspect our deep degradation, and "Aunt Phebe" was not a foe either. She was a beautiful, big, kindly woman, as Mrs. Crowell, her step-daughter, would gladly attest.

One whose memory goes back like Elsie Doane's and mine must remember the old brick meeting house. My memories of it are pretty hazy and I fancy Elsie will have to go farther back than her mother, for information about that fine specimen of architecture. It had neither cupola nor spire and must have been pretty ugly. It must have been the second meeting house, in which I recall the beautiful alto Mrs. Otis Davis's mother used to sing. I shall never forget how affected my childish ears were when she sang "Oh, when thou city of my God shall I thy Courts ascend" as the choir rendered the anthem "Jerusalem."

Speaking of meeting houses, our third and present, one of the most beautiful and "resting" buildings one could worship God in, is a lasting memorial of the taste and genius of our beloved Mrs. Whitman. To her and to Mr. Eben Day, we owe its beauty; and to the generous old church members we owe its existence at all, for they gave freely to its construction.

The first minister I have much recollection of was Mr. Hale, who lived with his family in the house now owned by Miss Lizzie Hull. My step-father bought a horse from him, and named him "Sumner." That was Mr. Hale's Christian name. I have often wondered how Mr. Hale felt to have a horse named for him, but I am sure Uncle David meant it as a compliment.

In those far away days we had a hermit of our own. It would be more damaging to a claim of youthfulness, on the part of my readers to remember "Johnny Widgin," than to remember the saw-mill.

One late afternoon, coming out with my playmates from Mr. Gordon Dexter's avenue, then my grandfather's lane, we saw a most grotesque figure, standing by "Rattlesnake Rock," just across the railroad—a tall man, of perhaps fifty years, to us, of course, "an old man." His trousers, which, thro' all the years I perfectly remember, were of some kind of once white material, with little bows of red ribbon and silk sewed all over them. He spoke to us gently but we were all terrified and ran home as fast as our legs could carry us. This singular being afterwards came and went in the village for several years, cooking his own little vile smelling messes on kindly disposed women's stoves, sleeping in barns, repeating chapter after chapter of the Old Testament for the edification of his hearers, and always gentle and kindly. I recall his recitation of the last chapter of Malachi beginning "And they shall all burn like an oven." He was, no doubt, mildly insane and of Scandinavian descent, but nobody ever knew anything definite about him. He lived a part of his time, in warm weather, in a hole or cave of rocks, on the beach formerly owned by Mr. Samuel T. Morse, below Colonel Lee's. He had a similar retreat at York Beach. He finally faded out of our lives, no one knew how. He may have been taken up in a chariot of fire like his beloved prophet Elijah, for all that any of us ever knew of his departure from these earthly scenes. He was supposed to be Norwegian, hence his name "Johnny Widgin." My grandfather said that if he could not pronounce "the thick of my thumb" in any way but the "tick of my tumb" he was Norwegian. That settled it in my mind, for my grandfather was my oracle. (Andrew Larcom, Grandfather Ober had died, Ed.)