Plymouth memories of an octogenarian

by William T. Davis

Elm trees have always abounded in New England, doubtless including Plymouth, and are much handsomer than the English elms, though the latter retaining the custom of their habitat, leave out earlier in the spring than the American, and hold their leaves longer in the autumn. As far as I know there is no positive record of an elm tree from the natural forests in New England. The ages of the old elm on the Common in Boston, and of the Brookline and Pittsfield elms, is not known. There are contemporary records of an elm in New York city, standing on the corner of Wall and Broad streets as late as 1670, which measured more than thirty feet in circumference, and was called by the Dutch, “der Groot Tree.” The trees now standing in Town Square, three of the five planted by my great-grandfather, Thomas Davis, in 1784, are young compared with the New York tree, and ought not to be in the languishing condition they now exhibit. With the ground in the square packed solid, it is impossible for rains to reach their roots. If a fence were built around each tree, and the ground within it dug up and kept loose, there can be no doubt that water would find its way to the roots and along them to the most distant rootlets. There is the same trouble with all the ornamental trees along our concreted sidewalks. We are spending hundreds of dollars each year in spraying their foliage to check the ravages of the beetle and miller, and at the same time by grass and concrete and macadamizing sentencing them to certain death. I commend the subject to the Plymouth Natural History Society, who on examination of the beautiful tree in the front of the new fire station, a central jewel in our coronet of trees, will find that we have been pursuing the policy of a physician who would treat a patient for loss of hair, who is dying of hunger and thirst.

Among other adopted trees are the European Linden, and the English Birch. Mr. George B. Emerson, the eminent naturalist, told me once he thought the latter the most beautiful tree in America. It undoubtedly has the merit of putting out its leaves earlier than our trees, and holding them longer, but I have never seen one standing erect if alone, or if more than forty years old retaining life and vigor in its upper branches. On the other hand I think the European Linden, of which we have noble specimens in Plymouth, is on the whole the most satisfactory ornamental tree for a bleak sea exposure like that of Plymouth. I have found in Holland, the country of Lindens, none to compare with the Lindens on North street, which grow straight and regular, under blasting winds, and I have seen them as late as the 6th of October without a yellow leaf.

Of the animals and birds and their changes within my day, I can say little. They are very much the same as in the days of the Pilgrims. The wild turkey disappeared before my time, and I think that they are only to be found in Massachusetts today in the Berkshire hills. All through my youth the wild pigeons were abundant in our grain fields and huckleberry woods, but they are now rare. Martins also were flying about our houses, and nearly every householder had a martin box under the eaves of his dwelling, or on a staff standing in his yard. The English sparrow stole their nests, and they fled like the aborigines before the English immigrant.

The fish are the same as those described by Wood and Josselyn, writers in Pilgrim days, some, however having disappeared for a time and returned. I remember being at Holmes Hole during the Civil War, and being told that the weak fish or squeteague had returned after an absence of twenty-five years. In Josselyn’s New England’s rareties a fish called Gurnard is spoken of, and is also mentioned in a poem by Steendamn, a Dutchman, written, perhaps, about 1640 or 1650, in the following lines, descriptive of fish in New York waters:

“The bream and sturgeon, drum fish and gurnard

The sea-bass which a prince would not discard;

The cod and salmon cooked with due regard

Most palatable.”

I am anxious to know what fish under its American name the gurnard is. The Gurnet, at the entrance of Plymouth harbor, was named after a headland in the English Channel, which in shape resembled the Gurnet, a fish in English waters. On the coast of Wales there is another headland named Gurnard, after the fish gurnard, the French name of the fish called in English, gurnet. The gurnard has lost its French name with us, and I was not aware until I saw the name in Wood and Josselyn, that the gurnet fish was found in our waters under the name of gurnard.

There was a piece of household furniture in my youth which I believe has gone out of use. The trundle bed was introduced by the Dutch, by whom it was called “een slaapbauck op rollen.” The bedsteads were universally four posted and high enough from the floor to permit the trundle bed to be kept under it, and to be rolled out at night when the younger children were sent to bed. When the baby grew to be too large for the cradle, or was deposed by a new comer, it was promoted to the trundle bed, and when a newer comer appeared the trundle bed held two until the bedstead, with its chintz curtains, became the court of last resort. In old Colonial days the bedsteads were made of sassafras wood, which was believed to be an effectual protection against vermin. For hundreds of years the curative properties of sassafras were highly esteemed by the Indians, and when Champlain first sailed up the St. Lawrence he carried back to France large quantities of it to be used especially as a cure for venereal diseases. Within my day sassafras poles have been used as roosts in hen houses as a protection against hen lice.