Plymouth memories of an octogenarian

by William T. Davis

In 1829 a public meeting was held in New York against whiskers, and about the same time there was a movement in Plymouth against them. Barbers and surgeons were incorporated as one company in the fifteenth century, and were called barber surgeons. Henry the Eighth dissolved the union and gave a new charter in 1540, in which it was provided “That no person using any shaving or barbery in London, shall occupy any surgery, letting of blood or other matter, excepting only the drawing of teeth.” Under the law barbers and surgeons were each to use a pole, that of the barber’s, blue and white striped, and that of the surgeon’s, the same, with the addition of a galipot and a red rag. As near as I can learn the use of a pole began as early as the 13th century, when “a staff bound by a riband was held by persons being bled, and the pole was intended to denote the practice of blood letting.” The staff was about three feet long, with a ball on the top and a fillet or tape attached, which when not in use was wound around it. So that the present barber’s pole represents a part of the barber’s business, that of blood letting, which long since passed to the prerogative of the surgeon.

During my youth beards were unknown among Americans, and until 1852 I do not think that a person of any nationality had in my time ever worn a moustache in Plymouth. In the summer of 1854, while occupying for a time the house now occupied by Col. Wm. P. Stoddard, I was confined to the house by illness about three weeks, and during that time permitted my moustache to grow, intending to shave it off before going into the street. When I had recovered sufficiently to go out I took an airing in the carriage of the late Ephraim Finney, having failed to carry out my intention, and my appendage was so roundly condemned by all my friends that I permitted it to grow, and I have never parted with it since. During the next summer a meeting of the descendants of Elder Thomas Cushman, was held in Plymouth, and Rev. Dr. Robert W. Cushman, the orator of the occasion was a guest with his wife at my house. I heard of his saying after he returned home, that he stayed with me while in Plymouth, and then adding—what a pity that a man like Mr. Davis should wear a moustache. I doubt whether there are many older moustaches in Massachusetts than mine.

CHAPTER XXXXIX.

The habits of our people in the use of tobacco have been somewhat changeable. The use outside of medicine and surgery has been confined to smoking, chewing, snuffing and dipping. The last is practiced by applying moistened snuff with a brush to the gums, and has never been resorted to in New England to any considerable extent. I am inclined to think that it has been chiefly confined to the poor whites in the South. Snuff taking is a habit introduced into New England at a comparatively recent period, and of course was unknown to the aborigines. Its use had, however, a rapid growth, when once introduced, and in my youth was common among our people of both sexes, though I am inclined to think more so among women than men. In every grocery store there always stood on the counter two jars of snuff, and this fact alone shows its extensive use. I cannot recall more than thirty persons who were in the habit of carrying snuff boxes, and these did not belong to any special class or occupation. I remember that during the sessions of the Supreme and Common Pleas Courts an open box of snuff always lay on the clerk’s desk, and was frequently visited by the members of the bar, as well as by the judges on the bench.

It is said that of all the tobacco habits that of snuff taking is the most difficult to abandon. The story is told of Charles Lamb and Thomas Hone, both inveterate snuffers, walking one day on Hamstead Heath, and coming to the resolution to give up the habit, threw their snuff boxes away. The next morning Lamb visited the Heath to recover his box, and there encountered Hone hunting in the shrubbery for his.

The practice of smoking is ancient. While the use of cigars in England and the United States cannot be traced to a period earlier than 1700, pipes were used by the aborigines, and have been found in the ancient mounds of the West. Whether tobacco was smoked before the days of the Pilgrims, so far as New England was concerned, is doubtful, while at an earlier period the natives of the South and West undoubtedly both used and cultivated it. It is certain that as late as King Phillip’s War in 1676, the New England Indian, while smoking tobacco when he could get it, used various substitutes. On this point we have the testimony of Mrs. Rowlandson, the wife of the minister of Lancaster, Mass., who was captured by the Indians and confined in the Camp of King Phillip. When a messenger was sent to King Phillip to negotiate for her release, she sent back word asking her husband to send her some tobacco for Phillip. She stated in a later narrative that when she saw Phillip, “he bade me come in and sit down, and asked me whether I would smoke it, but this no way suited me. For though I had formerly used tobacco, yet I had left it ever since I was first taken. It seems to be a bait the devil lays to make men loose their precious time. I remember with shame how formerly when I had taken two or three pipes I was presently ready for another, such a bewitching ‘thing’ it is, but I thank God he has now given me power over it; surely there are many who may be better employed than to lie sucking a stinking ‘tobacco pipe.’” She further said that the Indians for want of tobacco smoked hemlock and ground ivy. From the above statement it will be seen that smoking was common to both sexes. The laws, however, from a very early period, were rigid in their provisions against smoking in public places. In 1638 the General Court ordered “that no man shall take any tobacco within twenty poles of any house, or so near as may endanger the same.” One of the latest statutes on the subject was passed in 1798, which “forbade carrying fire through the streets, except in a covered vessel, as well as smoking or having in one’s possession any lighted pipe or cigar in the streets or on the wharves.” This law remained in force many years. In 1835 a by-law was adopted by the town of Plymouth, which I believe has never been repealed, forbidding smoking in any street, lane, public square or wharf within the town. I do not remember to have seen in all my boyhood any person smoking about the streets, or at his work. No ship carpenter in his yard, no rigger on the mast, no blacksmith at the forge, no digger in the garden or street, ever held a pipe in his mouth, wasting the time of his employer, in cutting tobacco, and filling his pipe. It was not because the practice was an expensive one, but because the fashion of the day was opposed to it. The mechanic and the farmer smoked in a leisure hour, or after his meal, but no woman was seen at home or in the field, or anywhere else smoking at all. Doctors and lawyers smoked occasionally in their offices, business men rarely behind their counters, while a minister who used tobacco in any form was unknown. In later years, however, smoking has become a frequent practice among the clergy, but so far as my observation has gone, chiefly among those of the Episcopalian and Unitarian denominations. I once detected in the cheek of an eminent divine a suspicious swelling, and when I spoke of it, he said that it was his invariable habit to preach with a cud of tobacco in his mouth. Since the early days of which I speak, pipe smoking has largely taken the place of cigar smoking, and the use of both cigars and pipes has found its way into times and places where forty years ago it would not have been tolerated. Several causes have contributed to this change. In the first place cigars were much cheaper in 1840 and 1850, and their higher cost has led to the more economical use of the pipe. When I began to smoke in 1838, Havana cigars sold at retail at five dollars a quarter box of two hundred and fifty. The same cigars today would cost twenty dollars. In the second place the coming in of foreigners largely increased the use of the pipe, and lastly the Civil War taught the use of the pipe to soldiers in the camp, who under normal conditions would not have taken it up. Now we are seeing, to say nothing of smelling, either the cigar or the pipe everywhere, in the street, in the office, in court houses, in the state house, between the lips of the mechanic at his work, the provision dealer on his cart, and indeed almost in every place except the pulpit and school, from which it is a matter of congratulation that they are yet excluded. Being a smoker myself, I cannot be charged with prejudice when I express the opinion that this excessive and ill-timed use of tobacco not only violates rules of good taste and propriety, but is well nigh a nuisance.

The habit of using tooth picks is of recent origin. In Boston on any day between twelve and two o’clock, nearly every third woman met in the vicinity of Winter and West streets, has a tooth pick between her lips. This practice is made more vulgar when at table the hand is held over the mouth, for thus its vulgarity is acknowledged by those who persist in it.

The changing fashions in dress have been so constant that it is futile to attempt to trace them. The greatest change in the United States occurred at the close of the revolution, when what was called republican simplicity took the place of the dress which characterized the first three-quarters of the 18th century of which such fine illustrations may be found in the works of Smybert, Blackburn and Copley. There is something absurd about this so-called republican simplicity, which compels a representative of our government to appear at foreign courts in the garb of an American citizen, while he has his residence in one of the most lordly houses in London, and makes it the vogue for a bridegroom to appear at his wedding with nothing but the color of his skin to distinguish him from the colored waiter, while he sets up a livery and hunts through Herald’s college for a coat of arms to have painted on the door of his carriage. I am inclined to think that a false pride in the supposed possession of aristocratic blood has more to do with the formation of so-called patriotic societies than a true patriotic spirit.

In speaking of dress let me begin with the young. In my school days I wore a blue jacket with brass buttons and a stiff linen collar buttoned to it on the inside, and turned over the collar of the jacket. I never wore an overcoat, or even owned one, and when I entered college, the first thing I did was to go to John Earle, the tailor, and get measured for a long tail broadcloth coat, and buy a camlet cloak. The frock coat was unknown, and the cloak was indispensable in attending prayers when hastily jumping out of bed I hurried to chapel often with nothing under it but a night gown and trousers and boots. During the summer months many boys went barefooted, not on account of poverty, but simply for economy. A writer in the Old Colony Memorial in 1837 misrepresented this custom in the statement that “old men had a great coat and a pair of boots, the boots generally lasting for life. Shoes and stockings were not worn by the young men, and by but few men in farming business, and young women in their ordinary work did not wear stockings and shoes.” I suppose that during the school season there are fewer barefooted boys then formerly, but at other times I do not think that there has been any change as to footwear. As to overcoats I have known many persons who went without them from preference in the coldest weather. Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch of Boston never wore one, and my old schoolmate, George Sampson, the late proprietor of the Boston directory, never did. I met the latter one afternoon in Boston when the thermometer was about zero, and I said, “George, I suspect that on such a day as this you wear a thicker undershirt?” To my surprise he said that he had never worn an undershirt in his life. I propose in speaking of dress to confine myself to those articles worn at various times which would strike the present generation as strange. About the year 1840, gentlemen’s boots were two inches longer than the foot, and turned up like the dasher of a sleigh. At about the same time, or a little earlier, trousers skin tight, put on necessarily with the boots already in them, were worn, and then immediately after loose trousers with plaits. For many years after the revolution, and continuing into my own days, the woolen cloths, of which dresses were made, were often spun and woven at home. During the 18th century in the small towns and country districts, nearly every family made a coarse cloth called lindsy-woolsy, with the warp of linen and the woof of wool. It is a mistake to suppose that in the earliest colonial times spinning wheels were much used until fulling mills were built in the last half of the 17th century, and it is not probable that Priscilla Alden ever used one until she was forty years of age. The small wheels known as flax wheels were first brought to Boston by the Scotch Irish in the first quarter of the 18th century. Of all articles of dress there is none in my opinion which so unerringly stamps the lady as a neat, tidy footgear. I say it with fear and trembling, but here goes, there must also be a white stocking. The contour of the foot is destroyed by a shoe, especially one without a heel, and the outlines of the ankle and limb are lost on any other color than white. The hat comes next, not set on the head like a liberty cap on a pole, but one whether large or small, as much belonging to the figure as the lily to its stem. Then comes the glove, never white in the street, a well fitting dress, not necessarily of expensive material, and withall as few ornaments as possible, and you have so far as flesh and blood are concerned, a faultless woman. A eulogist of the late Susan B. Anthony, herself a noble woman, said that she never was afraid to see her friend mount a table or platform to speak, because she knew that her boots and stockings were immaculate.

Ear-rings, concerning which I find many interesting items in the work of Alice Morse Earle on costumes, have come down to us from a period as early as the 16th century. They were, however, in their early days, worn by men more than by women, and in many cases only in one ear. Charles the First, on going to execution, wore a pearl pear shaped ear-ring, about five-eighths of an inch long, which is now owned by the Duke of Portland; and Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh wore them. In my youth their use among women was almost universal, and I can recall many men who wore plain gold rings, and every young lady on leaving school had her ears bored as a matter of course.