He was also during the revolution commander of the privateer sloop America, carrying six swivels and seventy men, owned by William Watson, Ephraim Spooner and others. Capt. Nicolson had by his first wife Sarah Mayhew, nine children: Sarah, 1771; Hannah, 1773; Polly, 1775; Elizabeth, 1777; Lucy Mayhew, 1778; Nancy, 1780; Thomas, 1782; James, 1784, and Anna. Of these Hannah married John Morong; Polly married John Allen of Salem, and Anna married John D. Wilson of Salem. Lucy Mayhew died in Boston, January 21, 1858. By his second wife, Hannah Otis, he had Samuel, 1791, who married Sarah Brinley, and died in Boston, January 6, 1866; Hannah Otis, 1793, who married William Spooner; Daniel, 1796, who died March 6, 1815; Caroline, 1798, who married Edward Miller of Quincy.
The estate when Capt. Nicolson died extended from the present yard of Mr. Hedge to the line of Mr. Bittinger, and consisted of the main house and a range of outbuildings which included a woodshed, chaise house, ice house and barn, with a large garden in the rear. After Capt. Nicolson’s death, but precisely when I do not know, Mrs. Nicolson fitted up her house as an inn, and called it the Old Colony House. The Pilgrim House was the stage house, and Mrs. Nicolson’s house was the lawyer’s house. The judges, however, sought private lodgings, and I remember that Chief Justice Shaw always occupied a front parlor in the house opposite Court square, which was the residence of Ichabod Shaw, where the Methodist church now stands. Among the regular boarders in the Old Colony House whom I remember were Samuel Davis, Ebenezer G. Parker, cashier of the Old Colony Bank, Gustavus Gilbert, attorney, Eliab Ward, student at law, Isaac N. Stoddard and Hiram Fuller, teachers. During the sessions of the court it was the gathering place of the lawyers who, without railroad conveniences, made a week of it under Mrs. Nicolson’s roof. There might be found Charles J. Holmes of Rochester, Seth Miller of Wareham, Zachariah Eddy of Middleboro, Williams Latham of Bridgewater, William Baylies and Austin Packard of West Bridgewater, Welcome Young of East Bridgewater, Kilborn Whitman of Pembroke, and Ebenezer Gay of Hingham. To these were sometimes added James T. Austin, Attorney General, Franklin Dexter and Rufus Choate. Timothy Coffin of New Bedford generally attended the Plymouth court, and was sought for in many cases on one side or the other to make the argument to the jury. If he could find anybody to play a game of cards he would play nearly all night, and come into court in the morning looking as fresh as a rose. The house was a rambling one with sleeping rooms arranged in such a way that it was difficult to find them. There was one in particular through which it was necessary for the occupants of the other rooms to pass. This room was assigned on one occasion to Mr. Choate, whose habit it was to retire early. In the morning when he appeared at the breakfast table and was asked how he had slept, he answered, “Very well, I thank you, considering I slept in the highway.” As the lawyers sat by the fire in the evening, Mr. Eddy in a dressing gown, and Mr. Latham securing a seat near the spittoon, occasionally some one would say, “Packard, are we there?” To understand this question, a story must be told. In the early days of the Old Colony Railroad, just after what was called the Abington branch was built, the lawyers I have named met at Bridgewater to take the train for Abington to meet the last train to Plymouth to attend the usual session of the court. When the branch train reached East Bridgewater, Packard, who thought he knew all about the road, jumped up and said, “Warl guntlemen, here we ar,” and they all got out to find the train going on, and themselves in a dreary station, on a cold and dark November night, seventeen miles from Plymouth. There was only one thing to do, to hire an omnibus, which they promptly did, and they reached their destination about half past ten, cold, hungry and cross. Hence the inquiry, “Packard, are we there?” All the gentlemen named are dead, and were doubtless met by Packard on the further shore with “Warl gentlemen, here we ar.” I hope he has not landed them at the wrong station.
In 1836 Mrs. Nicolson gave up the public house, and moved to Boston to live with her daughter, Mrs. Miller, and died in that city, June 22, 1844. The Old Colony House was kept afterwards by Zaben Olney and William Randall, and after a further occupation as a private residence by Moses Bates and Theodore Drew, was sold in 1835 to Mary Howard Russell and taken down.
On the south side of Court square on the corner of School street, there lived until 1839 a worthy old man, who for some years was stone blind. He was Joseph Barnes, the great-grandfather of our townsman, bearing the same name. He carried, extended out in front of him, a staff about eight feet long, with which he tapped the sidewalk constantly, and directed his steps without any other guide or support. It was his privilege to live in days when bicycles, automobiles and trolley cars had not been invented to endanger the lives of even the far-seeing and wary. As I remember him he walked alone through the various streets of the town, and if occasional aid became necessary in avoiding some new obstruction, both old and young were ready to lend it. His wife kept a little candy shop, if so it may be called, in the front room on the east side of the front door, and there children who thought it too far to go to Nancy and Eliza’s shop on Market street, patronized her. It was a queer kind of a shop, showing as its only furniture a bed and chairs, and looking glass and table. Under the bed three or four spice boxes were placed in a row, containing in tempting neatness assortments of candy comprising the usual twisted parti-colored sticks, and kisses and Salem Gibraltars. How these last received their name, and why their manufacture should have been confined to Salem, I never knew, but there they were made, and there they are made today, and if any of my young readers never saw them, they had better induce their grocer to send for some and keep them in stock. Their makers are welcome to this gratuitous advertisement. Mr. Barnes died January 28, 1839, and the house in which he lived was occupied some years by Nathaniel Cobb Lanman, and finally removed to Lothrop street, when Court square was widened in 1857.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Through all my boyhood Nathaniel Morton Davis occupied the house on Court street, now owned by the Old Colony Club, except for a year, when, while repairing the house, he occupied for a year or more the house on Leyden street, which his mother had occupied before her removal to Boston. The house at that time had its front door on the southerly side where an arch may now be seen in the front hall. On the west side of the front door there was a good sized parlor, which reached within about three feet of the street. What is now the library, lapped far enough by the above parlor to admit of a door from one to the other, and was the law office of Mr. Davis, with an outside entrance north of the parlor above mentioned.
Mr. Davis was the son of William and Rebecca Morton Davis, and was born in Plymouth March 3, 1785. He graduated at Harvard in 1804, and after studying law with Judge Joshua Thomas, was admitted to the bar in Plymouth. He was appointed early in his career Judge Advocate, with the rank of Major, which title he bore through life. In 1821 he was appointed Chief Justice of the Court of Sessions, and served until the court was abolished in 1828. He was at various times representative and senator, and was a member of the executive council from 1841 to 1843. He was a director of the Plymouth Bank from 1826 to 1839, and from 1840 to 1848, and President from 1840 until his death. He was a man of commanding presence, an impressive speaker, and was selected on several public occasions to act as presiding officer. The first time I saw him in the President’s chair was at a whig county celebration on the Fourth of July, 1840, when the chief address of the day was made by Robert C. Winthrop. His speech and his toasts calling up the speakers were unusually happy. Martin Van Buren, who had succeeded Andrew Jackson as President, and was a candidate for re-election, had many times boasted of following in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor, and Mr. Davis gave as one of the sentiments, “Martin Van Buren, he has followed so fast in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor, that he has accomplished his journey in half the time.”
Mr. Davis married, July 8, 1817, Harriet Lazell, daughter of Judge Nahum Mitchell of East Bridgewater, and his children were William, born May 12, 1818, who married December 2, 1849, Helen, daughter of John Russell; Abby Mitchell, born November 9, 1821, who married in 1841 Robert B. Hall, and Elizabeth Bliss, born November 8, 1824, who married Henry G. Andrews. Mr. Davis died at the United States Hotel in Boston, July 29, 1848.
In 1849, William Davis, previous to his marriage, cut off the westerly end of the house in question, and it was moved to a lot on Court street, opposite the foot of Cushman street, where it now stands the property of Charles B. Bartlett. I have never known a more complete mutilation of a house than that caused by the alteration to which I have referred.
Before leaving Mr. Davis I must tell a story about his dog Ponto, which illustrates the intelligence often found in the canine race. He was an ordinary black and white cur, which, as is often the case with favorite dogs, was equally a delight to his master, and a nuisance to everybody else. He was in the habit of following the family to church, and after being kicked out by the sexton, he would slyly find his way in, and going up the broad aisle, scratch at the family pew door. In order to stop this habit, orders were given to keep him confined to the house on Sundays, to which Ponto demurred. After suffering confinement two Sundays he circumvented the orders and through the first door or window which happened to be opened, every Sunday morning at the earliest opportunity he left the house and fled to the house of Nathaniel Holmes, on School street, who did the family chores, and there passed the day, returning home in the evening. He knew when Sunday came by symptoms, which he easily discovered, and while never going to the Holmes house at any other time, he kept up his weekly visits for many months, until sickness or accident ended his career.