THE BIRTHPLACE, FROM THE ROAD
Showing eastern porch, gate, bridle-post, and large boulder used as horse-block
Thomas Whittier, the pioneer, did not happen upon this valley upon his first arrival from England, in 1638. Indeed, at that time the settlements had not reached into this then primeval wilderness. He settled first in that part of Salisbury which is now named Amesbury, and while a very young man represented that town in the General Court. The Whittier Hill which overlooks the poet's Amesbury home was named for the pioneer, and not for his great-great-grandson. It is to this day called by Amesbury people Whitcher Hill—as that appears to have been the pronunciation of the name in the olden time. For some reason he removed across the river to Newbury. As a town official of Salisbury, he had occasion to lay out a highway towards Haverhill—a road still in use. He came upon a location that pleased his fancy, and in 1647, at the age of twenty-seven, he returned to the northern side of the river and built a log house on the left bank of Country Brook, about a mile from the location he selected in 1688 for his permanent residence. He lived forty-one years in this log house, and here raised a family of ten children, five of them stalwart boys, each over six feet in height. He was sixty-eight years old when he undertook to build the house now the shrine visited yearly by thousands. In raising its massive oaken frame he needed little help outside his own family. As to the location of the log house, the writer of these pages visited the spot with Mr. Whittier in search of it in 1882. He said that when a boy he used to see traces of its foundation, and hoped to find them again; but more than half a century had passed in the mean time, and our search was unsuccessful. It was on the ridge to the left of the road, quite near the old Country Bridge.
THE HAUNTED BRIDGE OF COUNTRY BROOK
Country Bridge had the reputation of being haunted, when Whittier was a boy, and several of his early uncollected poems refer to this fact. No one who could avoid it ventured over it after dark. He told me that once he determined to swallow his fears and brave the danger. He approached whistling to keep his courage up, but a panic seized him, and he turned and ran home without daring to look behind. It was in this vicinity that Thomas Whittier built his first house in Haverhill. Further down the stream was Millvale, where were three mills, one a gristmill. This mill and the evil reputation of the bridge are both referred to in these lines from "The Home-Coming of the Bride," a fragment first printed in "Life and Letters:"—
"They passed the dam and the gray gristmill,
Whose walls with the jar of grinding shook,
And crossed, for the moment awed and still,
The haunted bridge of the Country Brook."
It was the custom of the pioneers, when they had the choice, to select the sites of their homes near the small water powers of the brooks; the large rivers they had not then the power to harness. There were good mill sites on Country Brook below the log house, but probably some other settler had secured them, and Thomas Whittier found in the smaller stream on his own estate a fairly good water power. Fernside Brook is a tributary of Country Brook. Probably this decided the selection of the site for a house which was to be a home for generation after generation of his descendants. The dam recently restored is at the same spot where stood the Whittier mill, and in making repairs some of the timbers of the ancient mill were found. Parts of the original walls of the dam are now to be seen on each side of the brook, but the mill had disappeared long before Whittier was born. Further up the brook were two other dams, used as reservoirs. The lower dam when perfect was high enough to enable the family to bring water to house and barn in pipes.