Old Days at Beverly Farms

by Mary Larcom Dow

Our amusements in those days were primitive enough. On Old Election Day, which came the last Wednesday in May, there was just one thing to do. We youngsters had an election cake all shining with molasses on top, and raisins in the middle, and we went down to the beach and dug wells in the sand. Now and then we hunted Mayflowers (saxifrage) and played about the old fort left from the Revolution and now owned by Mr. F. L. Higginson. Evenings we had parties and played Copenhagen and hunt the slipper or knit the family stockings by our dim oil lamps. Winters, there were singing schools. Those were great larks if we came at the money to buy a copy of the "Carmina Sacra," or the "Shawm." I still think they were fine collections of tunes, comprising all the old standbys. Mrs. Lee's father, Mr. John Knowlton, was a wonderful singing master, and a great disciplinarian, with a beautiful bass voice. He would stand a good deal of fun at the recess, but when Mr. Knowlton struck his bell and took up his violin, we all knew it meant singing and no nonsense. I think my grandfather, Benjamin Ober, and Elsie's great-grandfather, Deacon David Larcom, were also singing masters in the old days, but neither Elsie nor I remember them,—old as we are.

From a Daguerreotype taken about 1859

Over "t'other side," as we called it, in the house now owned by Mr. J. S. Curtis, lived Uncle "Jimmy" Woodbury. He must have been a "character." He was once very much troubled by rats in his barn. So he conceived a plan for getting rid of them at his neighbor's expense. Uncle David Preston's estate, where Miss Susan Amory's house now stands, was diagonally opposite.

Uncle "Jimmy" wrote a letter to the rats, in which he told them that in Uncle David's barn was more corn and better corn than they were getting in his barn, and he strongly recommended that they move. Then Uncle Jimmy kept watch and on a beautiful moonlight night he had the satisfaction of beholding a long line of rodents with an old gray fellow as leader, crossing the road on their way to Uncle David's. (I tell the story as it was told to me). Uncle Jimmy's daughter, Mary, married Dr. Wyatt C. Boyden, for many years the skilful family physician of half the town. The fine public spirited Boydens of Beverly are her descendants.

By the way, the old vernacular of the village ought not to perish from the earth. It was unique. Our ancestors just hated to pronounce any word correctly, even when they were fairly good scholars and spellers. They called a marsh a "mash." Capt. Timothy Marshall, the rich man of the place, was called Capt. "Mashall"; Mr. Osborne was Mr. "Osman"; the Obers were "Overs", a lilac was a "laylock" a blue jay was a blue "gee," etc.

In closing these rambling papers of the old days at Beverly Farms, my conscience accuses me a little of not sufficiently emphasizing the virtues of the villagers. Truly, they were a good, interesting, law-abiding, religious people. Everybody went to church; a tramp was unknown; a drunken person was nearly as much an astonishment as a circus would have been. It would be unfair to class them as rude fishermen and shoemakers for they came of the old Puritan ancestry, who built their churches and schoolhouses on a convenient spot, before they attended to anything else, and they paid their debts so promptly that Mr. William Endicott, the good merchant of Beverly, said that he never had any hesitation in selling on credit to "Farms" people. As one got on to middle life, almost every householder had his horse, his cows and often a yoke of oxen. Our favorite conveyance to school, in deep snows, was an ox team with poles on the sides of the sled, where we held on with shouts and screams of laughter.

Nobody thought of hiring a nurse in cases of serious illness. The neighbors came with willing hands and helped out. It was a peaceful little hamlet, with kind, straightforward, honest inhabitants, and the small remnant of us who are left have reason to be proud of our ancestry.

Elsie repeated to us, the other day, the epitaph on her great-grandfather's grave stone, the Deacon David Larcom, who built my old house, who asked the town for a cemetery for this village and was laid to rest there in 1840, the first one to be buried in its peaceful shadows: "His life exhibited in rare combination and in an uncommon degree all the excellencies of the husband, the father, the citizen and the Christian."

The epitaph was written by Lucy Larcom, whose home here was on West Street. After she left Beverly for Lowell, and was a factory girl, she wrote for the "Lowell Offering," a little magazine published by the nice New England working girls. Copies of this little magazine were in the wonderful attic of my house when I came here. They were probably scented with Aunt Betsey's simples that hung from the roof.