WHITEFIELD'S CHURCH AND BIRTHPLACE OF GARRISON
A visit to Whittier-Land is incomplete if Old Newbury and Newburyport (originally one town) are left out of the itinerary. At the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the settlement of Newbury, in 1885, a letter from Whittier was read in which he recites some of the reasons for his interest in the town. He says: "Although I can hardly call myself a son of the ancient town, my grandmother, Sarah Greenleaf of blessed memory, was its daughter, and I may therefore claim to be its grandson. Its genial and learned historian, Joshua Coffin, was my first school-teacher, and all my life I have lived in sight of its green hills, and in hearing of its Sabbath bells. Its history and legends are familiar to me.... The town took no part in the witchcraft horror, and got none of its old women and town charges hanged for witches. 'Goody' Morse had the spirit rappings in her house two hundred years earlier than the Fox girls did, and somewhat later a Newbury minister in wig and knee-buckles rode, Bible in hand, over to Hampton to lay a ghost who had materialized himself and was stamping up and down stairs in his military boots.... Whitefield set the example since followed by the Salvation Army, of preaching in its streets, and now lies buried under one of the churches with almost the honor of sainthood. William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newbury. The town must be regarded as the Alpha and Omega of the anti-slavery agitation."
The grandmother to whom he refers was born in that part of the town nearest to his own birthplace. The outlet to Country Brook is nearly opposite the Greenleaf place, and Whittier's poem "The Home-Coming of the Bride" describes the crossing of the river and the bridal procession up the valley of the lesser stream, a part of which is known as Millvale because of the mills alluded to in the poem.
The house in which Garrison was born is on School Street next to the Old South meeting-house, in which Whitefield preached, and under the pulpit of which his bones are deposited. Whitefield died in the house next to Garrison's birthplace. The ancient Coffin house, built in 1645, the home of Joshua Coffin, to whom Whittier addressed his poem "To My Old Schoolmaster," is on High Street, about half a mile below State Street. Whittier's cousins, Joseph and Gertrude Cartland, with whom he spent a large part of the last year of his life, lived at No. 244 High Street, at the corner of Broad.