So far as the houses on the lower half of North street are concerned, several changes have occurred since 1830. In my boyhood the double house now partly occupied by Miss Catherine Kendall, was a single house, occupied by the widow of Edward Taylor, who was then the wife of John Blaney Bates, whom she married in 1807. After the death of Mrs. Bates and her husband, whom I well remember, Jacob and Abner Sylvester Taylor, sons of Mrs. Bates, remodelled the house and divided it into two tenements. John Blaney Bates, the second husband of Mrs. Taylor, was one of the most skilful masons and master builders in southeastern Massachusetts, and was largely engaged in enterprises in other towns. He built the Plymouth Court House in 1820, the Barnstable Court House, and as many as eight or ten brick or stone dwelling houses on Summer street and Winthrop Place in Boston. A contract to build a house of hammered stone for George Bond in Winthrop Place, proved a disastrous one, and terminated his business career. After the failure of Whitwell and Bond, the house referred to was sold to Henry Cabot, the grandfather of Henry Cabot Lodge, and occupied by him until Winthrop Place was extended to Franklin street, and made a part of the present Devonshire street. Mr. Bates, as I remember him, was in his later days an inveterate sportsman, and would often spend hours behind an ice hummock, when the harbor was partially frozen, waiting for a possible shot at ducks in a sheet of open water near by. He died in 1831.
His stepsons, the Taylor brothers, who learned their mason’s trade with him, also became skilful workmen and contractors in Plymouth and neighboring towns. In 1824 they built Pilgrim Hall for the Pilgrim Society, and Mr. Taylor told me that when they signed the contract in July, the stone was lying undisturbed in a virgin rock on the easterly side of Queen Ann’s turnpike in Weymouth, and the timber stood uncut in the forests of Maine. So expeditiously, however, was the work performed that the hall was occupied by the Society at the anniversary celebration in the following December.
The house next east of the Taylor house was built in 1829 by the Messrs. Taylor on land of the Taylor estate. The Taylors had completed in that year their contract to build Long wharf and, having considerable material left, they put it into this house. I remember hearing it said that the partitions, and perhaps the walls, were constructed of some of the plank used in covering the wharf, and were consequently unusually solid and firm. The story was told that when Deacon Wm. P. Ripley, who bought the house, went to inspect it, he was told by one of the brothers that the partitions were so impervious to sound that conversation could not be heard from room to room. To confirm his statement he invited the Deacon to test it. After the doors were closed, the Deacon in one room and Mr. Taylor in another, the former called out loudly—“Do you hear?” and the answer “No,” came promptly back. The Deacon evidently was willing to take Mr. Taylor’s word, thus confirmed, and bought the house. Deacon Ripley, son of Nathaniel and Elizabeth (Bartlett) Ripley, was born in Plymouth in 1775, and after his first marriage in 1805, owned and occupied the house on Summer street, which after 1845 was owned and occupied by Benjamin Hathaway. He kept a dry goods store in that house many years, and after the sale of the house in 1833 to the heirs of Robert Dunham, the store was occupied by the millinery establishment of Mrs. Thomas Long, one of the heirs. After giving up the store, Deacon Ripley entered into a partnership with his son-in-law, Andrew S. March, in Boston, under the firm name of Ripley & March, 21 Central street, but finally returned to Plymouth and took the store afterwards occupied by Southworth Barnes, on the site of the present Sherman block. He died November 10, 1842, and in the next year the house on North street was sold to Phineas Wells, to whom reference will be hereafter made.
Within my recollection no persons have been universally called Deacons, irrespective of their church connections, besides Deacon Ripley and Deacon John Hall. The latter was many years Deacon of the Baptist church, and was a farmer living at the corner of Court and Hall streets, where he raised a family of sons, well known by the last generations as industrious, useful and worthy citizens.
In his church he was the supervisor of every act. I remember that on one occasion the minister announced from the pulpit that on the next Thursday evening “the Lord willing, there will be a prayer meeting in this house, the weather permitting, if Deacon Hall has no objections, and on Friday evening, whether or no.”
In middle life the Deacon bought a sloop and employed her in fishing, and in taking fishing parties into the bay. He scorned the fishing ledges generally resorted to, such as the Offer ledge, the House ledge, Faunce’s ledge and the Thrum Caps, and fished on ledges of his own, the bearings of which he kept to himself. I was with him once, one of a party of ten, and before ten o’clock, the party caught one hundred and sixty cod and one hundred and forty haddock. In those days haddock were thought an inferior fish, and were difficult to dispose of in the Plymouth market at one cent a pound. In fact, they were not even dignified by the name of “fish,” and I remember hearing a servant ordered to get a fish at the fish market, and if he could not get a fish, to get a haddock.
But some critical person found worms between the flakes of a codfish, and then another discovered that a haddock made a superior fry, and still another that in a chowder the flesh of a haddock was firmer than that of a codfish, and finally both came to be held in equal estimation. In my early days no lover of salt cod would eat anything but dunfish, and Deacon Hall was the only person in Plymouth, who cured them, Swampscott being generally looked to for a supply. They received their name from their dun color, which was of a reddish brown. They were caught in the spring, slack salted, and when partially dry, piled in a dark room covered with seaweed. After several weeks they were repiled, and after several weeks more, they were ready to be eaten.
In my mother’s day short, thick fish were selected for the table, and every Saturday three were served with a napkin above and below, the upper one being removed to the kitchen, and the middle one eaten, while the other two supplied minced fish for Sunday’s breakfast, and the Monday washing day dinner. A slice of dunfish cut up with potatoes, beets, carrots and onions, well covered with pork scraps and sweet oil, judiciously peppered, makes a dinner, which, with the white salt fish of today, it is impossible to prepare. Fish balls were not in vogue in my early days, but gradually took the place of mince fish, especially Sunday morning. Baked beans, now improperly called distinctively a New England dish, were according to my recollection, unknown in Plymouth, and were associated exclusively with Beverly, whose people were called Beverly beaners. A story was told of a vessel at sea running down to a schooner in distress, and finding that she was from Beverly, and out of beans. The first dish of baked beans I ever saw, was on a club dining table in Cambridge, after I entered college in 1838.
Deacon Hall understood the art of making a chowder as well as that of curing dunfish, or if his fishing party preferred a muddle, that is, a chowder with no potatoes and less liquor, he was equally skilful. Real lovers of fish and seafaring men I have generally found liked the muddle, as perhaps the following incident will attest. Capt. Ignatius Pierce, a man of dry humor, spent a number of years in California, never intimating in his letters any intention of an immediate return home. His wife, about nine o’clock one morning, received a telegram from him in Boston, merely saying, “have a muddle for dinner.”
The good Deacon would have been amused at the following description of the ingredients of a genuine New England chowder by a professor of modern languages in the University of Virginia, in a work published by him in 1872, “A many sided dish of pork and fish, potatoes and bread, onions and turnips all mixed up with fresh chequits and seabass, black fish and long clams, pumpkinseed, and an accidental eel, well peppered and salted, piled up in layers, and stewed together.” If such a dish as that had been placed before the Deacon he would in a changed form have followed the directions for cooking a coot—to wit, shoot your coot, pick it, parboil it, stuff it, roast it, baste it, and then throw it away.