Not far from the house, at the foot of the western hill, is the small lot inclosed by a stone wall, to which reference has been made, that from the earliest settlement was the burying-place of the family. Here lie the remains of Thomas Whittier and those of his descendants who were the ancestors of the poet. A plain granite shaft in the centre of the lot is inscribed with the names of Thomas Whittier and of Ruth Green, his wife; Joseph Whittier and Mary Peaslee, his wife; Joseph Whittier, 2d, and Sarah Greenleaf, his wife. No headstones mark the several graves. Others of the family were buried here, including Mary Whittier, an aunt of the poet. His father and uncle Moses, originally buried here, were removed to the Amesbury cemetery, when his mother died, in 1857.
THE WHITTIER ELM
Across the road from the house of the nearest neighbors, the Ayers, in a field of the Whittier farm, is an old, immense, and symmetrical tree, labeled "The Whittier Elm," which the poet's schoolmate, Edmund Ayer, saved from the woodman's axe by paying an annual tribute, at a time when the farm had gone out of the possession of the Whittiers, and while the new proprietors were intent upon despoiling the place of its finest trees. This is the tree referred to in these lines, written in 1862, in the album of Lydia Amanda Ayer (now Mrs. Evans), his schoolmate Lydia's niece:—
"A dweller where my infant eyes
Looked out on Nature's sweet surprise,
Whose home is in the ample shade
Of the old Elm Tree where I played,
Asks for her book a word of mine:—
I give it in a single line:
Be true to Nature and to Heaven's design!"
Whittier took us that October day to neighbor Ayer's house, where the brother of little Lydia was still living, who also was a schoolmate of the poet, and they talked of the old times with the greatest relish. The Ayer house occupies the site of a garrison house, built of strong oaken timbers, and used as a house of refuge in the time of the Indian wars. The Whittiers, though close at hand, never availed themselves of its protection, even when Indian faces covered with war-paint peered through the kitchen windows upon the peaceful Quaker family. We were soon joined by another aged schoolmate, Aaron Chase, and with him we went to Corliss Hill, where Whittier showed us the two houses in which he first went to school. They are both now standing, and are dwelling-houses in each of which a room was given up for the district school—one before the house described in "In School Days" was built, and the other while it was being repaired. He had not yet arrived at school age when his sister Mary took him to his first school, kept by his life-long friend, Joshua Coffin, to whom he addressed the poem, "To My Old Schoolmaster." As I happened to be a nephew of Coffin, he told me stories of his first school. It was kept in an unfinished ell of a farmhouse; but the room had been transformed into a neatly furnished kitchen when we visited it. In the poem referred to he alludes to the quarrels of the good man and his tipsy wife heard through "the cracked and crazy wall." He told this story of the tipsy wife: She sent her son for brush to heat her oven. He brought such a nice load that she thought it too bad to waste it in the oven. So she sent her son with it to the grocery, and he brought back the liquor he received in payment. But this made her short of oven wood, and to eke out her supply of fuel she burned a loose board of the cellar stairs. The next time she had occasion to go to the cellar, she forgot the hiatus she had made and broke her leg. After Mr. Chase left us, Whittier told me that his old schoolmate was a nephew of the last person usually accounted a witch in this neighborhood. She was the wife of Moses Chase of Rocks Village. Her relatives believed her a witch, and one of her nieces knocked her down in the shape of a persistent bug that troubled her. At that moment it happened that the old woman fell and hurt her head. The old lady on one occasion went before Squire Ladd, the blacksmith and Justice of the Peace at the Rocks, and took her oath that she was not a witch.
JOSHUA COFFIN
"Olden teacher, present friend,
Wise with antiquarian search,
In the scrolls of State and Church;
Named on history's title-page,
Parish-clerk and justice sage."
To My Old Schoolmaster