In later times, as one after another, new state and territory extended our limits in the west, he was among the first to discover beneath their surface the rich tribute they were ready to pay as they entered the gates of the union. I believe that science will find no step treading its paths more vigorous than his, and no keener eye exploring its mysteries. After a season’s work on the southern shore of Lake Superior he left Marquette in the steamer Colburn on the 12th of October, 1871, and on her passage to Detroit the steamer foundered in a gale and he with others was lost. He inherited from his grandfather the firmness of nerve which had distinguished, him in his surgical practice, and from his father, a fearlessness amounting at times to rashness. Mr. Hodge in preparing his reports was a careful writer, preferring a criticism for undue caution to a final discovery of extravagant statements leading unwary investors to failure and misfortune. Within the field of his literary efforts must be included some hundreds of articles on scientific subjects contributed to the American Cyclopædia.
Mr. Hodge married in 1846 Mary Spooner, daughter of John Russell of Plymouth, and had Elizabeth Thacher, who married George Gibbs of Riverside, Kentucky; John Russell, 1847, who married Harriet, daughter of Seth Evans of Cincinnati; James Michael, 1850, and Mary, 1854.
I cannot leave North street without a word in memory of the house in which I was born, March 3, 1822, now occupied as an Inn, known as the Plymouth Rock House. After my father’s death in 1824, my mother continued to occupy the house until 1845, when she moved to the house now occupied by the Misses Russell, near the head of the street. The succeeding occupants in their order were Rev. Henry Edes, who kept a young ladies’ boarding school; Mrs. Sarah Jenkins, Simon R. Burgess and Charles H. Snell. As long as it was occupied by our family it had a stable at the westerly end of the garden on Carver street, and a chaise house opening on Cole’s Hill, which long since gave way to an enlargement of the dwelling house.
There have been so many alterations and enlargements in the house since my mother left it in 1845, that there is little left as it was in my boyhood. The middle kitchen, as it was called, with its dresser containing articles in pewter, such as hot water plates, candle moulds, syphons, etc., and its sink with a pewter ewer and bowl where I washed my hands when coming from play, and the long buttery leading out of it where the flour and sugar barrels and common china and the last batch of pies were kept, is now an indistinguishable feature of the house. The large kitchen, too, with its box seat, the meal chest with compartments for Indian meal, white meal and rye meal, the coffee grinder on the wall, the mantel with its row of two wicked brass lamps always clean and bright, the fireplace with its high andirons, and a four foot stick for a forestick, a crane with pothooks and a tin kitchen before the fire, has gone with the rest. Only one room remains as it was of old, the northeast corner parlor, a room that is historic, for there the first grate in Plymouth was set in 1832 for burning anthracite coal for domestic use.
Dr. Thacher and my mother each had a grate set at the same time, but as his house was not yet finished the fire was kindled in ours first with coal bought by Capt. George Simmons in Boston, and brought to Plymouth in the packet sloop Splendid. Outside of the house the old garden is gone with its lilac tree announcing by its bloom the advancing step of summer.
How well I remember that old lilac tree,
Which stood in the garden near our back entry door;
No lily nor rose seemed ever to me
As sweet as the blossoms that lilac tree bore.
How gladly it welcomed the warm airs of spring,