Old Plymouth Trails

by Winthrop Packard

The morning sun shines in at the opening, setting golden motes dancing, and caressing rafters that have not felt its touch for a hundred and fifty years, and you feel a little sob of sorrow swell in your heart, for the old house is dead, beyond hope of resurrection. With your crowbar you have knocked it in the head.

Other boards follow more easily, for now you may use a rafter for the fulcrum of your iron lever and pry where the long nails grip the oak too tenaciously, and it is not long before you have the roof unboarded. And here you may have a surprise and be taught a lesson in wariness which you will need if you would survive your unbuilding. The bare rafters, solid oak, six inches square, hewn from the tree, as adze-marks prove, are halved together at the top and pinned with an oak pin. At the lower end, where they stand upon the plates, they are not fastened, but rest simply on a V-shaped cut, and when the last board is off they tumble over like a row of ninepins and you may be bowled out with them if you are not clever enough to foresee this.

As with the roof-boards, so with the floors and walls. Blows with the great bar, or its patient use as a lever, separate part from part, board from joist, and joist from timber, and do the work, and you learn much of the wisdom and foolishness of the old-time builder as you go on. Here he dovetailed and pinned the framework so firmly and cleverly that nothing but human patience and ingenuity could ever get it apart; there he cut under the ends of splendid strong floor joists and dropped them into shallow mortises, so that but an inch or two of the wood really took the strain, and the joist seemed likely to split and drop out, of its own weight. You see the work of the man who knew his business and used only necessary nails, and those in the right places; and the work of that other, who was five times as good a carpenter because he used five times as many nails!

You learn, too, how the old house grew from a very humble beginning to an eleven-room structure that covered a surprising amount of ground, as one generation after another passed and one owner succeeded another. In this the counsel of the local historian helps you much, for he comes daily and sits by as you work, and daily tells you the story of the old place, usually beginning in the middle and working both ways; for the unbuilding of a building is a great promoter of sociability. Fellow townsmen whom you feel that you hardly know beyond a rather stiff bowing acquaintance hold up their horses and hail you jovially, even getting out to chat a while or lend a hand, each having opinions according to his lights. Strickland, whose prosperity lies in swine, sees but one use for the old timbers. "My!" he says, "what a hog-pen this would make!" Downes is divided in his mind between hen-houses and green-houses, and thinks there will be enough lumber and sashes for both. Lynde suspects that you are going to establish gypsy camps wholesale, while Estey, carpenter and builder, and wise in the working of wood, knows that you are lucky if the remains are good enough for fire-wood.

Little for these material aspects cares the historian, however, as he skips gayly from one past generation to another, waving his phantoms off the stage of memory with a sweep of his cane, and poking others on to make their bow to the man with the crowbar, who thus, piecing the narrative out with his own detective work in wood, rebuilds the story. It was but a little house which began with two rooms on the ground floor and two attic chambers, built for Stoddard who married the daughter of the pioneer landowner of the vicinity, and it nestled up within a stone's throw of the big house, sharing its prosperity and its history. No doubt the Stoddards were present at the funeral in the big house, when stern old Parson Dunbar stood above the deceased, in the presence of the assembled relatives, and said with Puritanical severity, "My friends, there lies the body, but the soul is in hell!"

The dead man had failed to attend the parson's sermons at the old First Congregational Church, near by, a church that with successive pastors has slipped from the Orthodoxy of Parson Dunbar to the most modern type of present-day Unitarianism.

A later dweller in the old house lives in local tradition as publishing on the bulletin board in the church vestibule his intention of marriage with a fair lady of the parish, as was the custom of the day. Another fair lady entering the church on Sunday morning pointed dramatically at the notice, saying to the sexton, "Take that notice down, and don't you dare to put it up again till I give the word."

The sexton, seeming to know who was in charge of things, took it down and it was not again posted for two years. The marriage then took place. A few years later the wife died, and after a brief period of mourning another notice was posted announcing the marriage of the widower and the lady who had forbidden the banns of his first marriage. The second marriage took place without interference, and they lived happily ever after, leaving posterity in doubt whether the incident in the church vestibule was the climax in a battle royal between the two ladies for the hand of the man who dwelt in the old house, or whether the man himself had loved not wisely but too many.

Another dweller in the old house was a locally celebrated singer who for years led the choir and the music in the old church, having one son whom a wealthy Bostonian educated abroad, "becoming," said the historian sagely, "a great tenor singer, but very little of a man." These were days of growing importance for the old house.

Two new rooms were added to the ground-floor back by the simple expedient of tacking long spruce rafters to the roof, making a second roof over the old one, leaving the old roof with boards and shingles still on it. Thus there grew a roof above a roof,-a shapeless void of a dark attic,-and below, the two rooms.