whatever improvements he should make on that which he
had taken instead. He was disappointed every way; his
health failed, and he was for nearly a year unable to work ;
his brother did not prosper on our place ; while the promises
which had lured us to the larger sphere of effort were not
made good. To us children ā by this time, four in number
ā the larger house and broader acti^dties of tlie hired farm
were a welcome exchange ; but our fortunes, manifestly, waned
there ; and I think we were all soberly glad to return to our
own snugger house and smaller farm, in the Spring of 1820.
As we were trying to work off a lee-shore, I believe neither
of us boys went to school at all that Summer, though I was
but nine years old, and my brother not eight till Jmie.
All in vain. The times were what is termed " hard," ā that
is, almost eveiy one owed, and scarcely any one could pay.
The rapid strides of British manufactures, impelled by the
steam-engine, spinning-jenny, and power-loom, had utterly
undermined the homely household fabrications whereof Lon-
donderry was a prominent American focus ; my mother stiU
ADIEU TO NEW HAMPSHIRE. 49
carded her wool and flax, spun her yarn, and wove her woollen,
linen, and tow cloth ; but they found no market at living
prices ; our hops sold for little more than the cost of bagging ;
and, in short, we were bankrupt. I presume my father had
never been quite out of debt since he bought his place ; but
sickness, rash indorsements (a family failing), and bad luck
generally, had swelled his indebtedness to something like
$ 1,000, ā which all we had in the world would not, at current
prices, pay. In fact, I do not know how much property would
have paid $ 1,000 in New Hampshire in 1820, when almost
every one was hopelessly involved, every third farm was in
the sheriff's hands, and every poor man leaving for "the
West " who could raise the money requisite for getting
away. Everything was cheap, ā dog-cheap, ā British goods
especially so ; yet the comparatively rich were embarrassed,
and the poor were often compulsorily idle, and on the brink
of famine. I have not been much of a Free-Trader ever
since.
We had finished our Summer tillage and our haying, when
a very heavy rain set in, near the end of August. I think its
second day was a Saturday ; and still the rain poured till far
into the night. Father was absent on business ; but our mother
gathered her little ones around her, and delighted us with
stories and prospects of good things she purposed to do for us
in the better days she hoped to see. Father did not return
tiU after we children were fast asleep ; and, when he did, it
was with tidings that our ill-fortune was about to culminate.
I guess that he was scarcely surprised, though we young ones
ruefully were, when, about sunrise on Monday morning, the
sheriff and sundry other officials, with two or three of our
principal creditors, appeared, and ā first formally demanding
payment of their claims ā proceeded to levy on farm, stock,
implements, household stuff, and nearly all our worldly pos-
sessions but the clothes we stood in. There had been no writ
issued till then, ā of course, no trial, no judgment, ā but it
was a word and a blow in those days, and the blow first, in
the matter of debt-collecting by legal process. Father left
50 RECOLLECTIONS OF A BUSY LIFE.
the premises directly, apprehending arrest and imprisonment,
and was invisible all day ; the rest of us repaii-ed to a friendly
neighbor's, and the work of levying went on in our absence.
It were needless to add that all we had was swallowed up,
and our debts not much lessened. Our farm, which had cost
us $ 1,350, and which had been considerably improved in our
hands, was appraised and set off to creditors at $ 500, out of
which the legal costs were first deducted. A barn-full of rye,
grown by us on another's land, whereof we owned an undivided
half, was attached by a doctor, threshed out by his poorer
customers by days' work on account, and sold ; the net result
being an enlargement of our debt, ā the grain failing to meet
all the costs. Thus, when night fell, we were as bankrupt a
family as well could be.
We returned to our devastated house ; and the rest of us
stayed there while father took a journey on foot westward, in
quest of a new home. He stopped in the township of Hamp-
ton, Washington County, N. Y., and worked there two or three
months with a Colonel Parker French, who tilled a noble farm,
and kept tavern on the main road from Troy into western
Vermont. He returned to us in due time, and, on the 1st of
January, 1821, we all started in a hired two-horse sleigh, with
the little worldly gear that was left us, for the township of
Westhaven, Vermont, where father had hired, for $16 per
annum, a small house, in which, after an intensely cold jour-
ney, we were installed three days later.
Let me revert for a little to our New Hampshu'e life, ere I
bid it a final adieu.
I have already said that Amherst and Bedford are in the
main poor towns, whose hard, rocky soil yields grudgingly,
save of wood. Except in the villages, if even there, ther'e
were very few who could be called forehanded in my early
boyhood. Poor as we were, no richer family lived within
sight of our humble homestead, though our western prospect
was only bounded by the " Chestnut Hills," two or three miles
ADIEU TO NEW HAMPSHIRE. 51
away. On the east, our range of vision was barred by the
hill on the side of which we lived. The leading man of our
neighborhood was Captain Nathan Barnes, a Calvinist deacon,
after whom my brother was named, and who was a farmer of
decided probity and sound judgment, ā worth, perhaps, S 3,000.
Though an ardent Federalist, as were a majority of his towns-
men, he commanded a company of " exempts," raised to defend
the country in case of British invasion, during the isvar of
1812. (
The Eevolutionary War was not yet thirty years bygone
when I was born, and its passions, its prejudices, and its
ballads were stiU current throughout that intensely Wliig
region. Wlien neighbors and neighbors' wives drew together
at the house of one of their number for an evening visit, there
were often interspersed with " Cruel Barbara Allen," and other
love-lorn ditties then in vogue, such reminiscences of the pre-
ceding age as "American Taxation," a screed of some fifty
prosaic verses, opening thus : ā
" While I relate my story,
Americans, give ear;
Of Britain's fading gloiy
You presently shall hear.
I '11 give a true relation,
(Attend to what I say,)
Concerning the taxation
Of North America."
The last throes of expiring loyalty are visible in this long-
drawn ballad, ā Bute and North, and even Fox, being soundly
berated for acts of tyranny whereof their royal master,
George III., was sole author, and they but reluctant, hesitat-
ing, apprehensive instruments.
The ballads of the late war with Great Britain were not so
popular in our immediate neighborhood, though my mother
had good store of these also, and sang them with spirit and
effect, along with " Boyne AVater," " The Taking of Quebec," by
Wolfe, and even "Wearing of the Green," which, though
dating from Ireland's '98, has been revived and adopted in
our day, with so vast and deserved an Irish popularity.
52 RECOLLECTIONS OF A BUSY LIFE.
We were, in the truest sense, democrats, we Scotch-Irish
Federalists from Londonderry, where Jefferson received but
two votes in the memorable struggle of 1800. When, for a
single year at the " Beard Farm," our house echoed to the tread
of a female " help," whose natural abilities were humble, and
whose literary acquirements were inferior even to ours, that
servant always ate with the family, even when we had the
neighbors as " company " ; and, though her wages were but
fifty cents a week, she had her party, and invited the girls of
the neighborhood to be her guests at tea, precisely as if she
had been a daughter of the house. Nowhere were manners
ever simpler, or society freer from pretension or exclusiveness,
than in those farmers' homes.
Hospitality was less bounteous, and kinship less prized,
than in the days of the Scotch-Irish pioneers ; but there was
still much visiting of relatives and social enjoyment, especially
in Winter, when hundreds returned to the old Londonderry
hive from the younger swarms scattered all over the East :
some of them beginning to stretch away even to the far " Hol-
land Purchase," in Western New York ; then practically as
distant as Oregon or Alaska now is. I remember when the
Doles left the " Chestnut Hills " to pitch their tent in Illinois,
ā then a far bolder venture than migration to Sitka would
now be. I have often seen my grandfather Woodburn's house
crammed for days with cousins and nephews from Vermont
and other 'Derry settlements, who could not be so many as
to miss a hearty welcome. Our house was far smaller, and
less frequented ; but its latch-string was always out ; and a
free liver, with twelve brothers and sisters, to say nothing of
their partners by marriage and their children, is not apt to
be persistently shunned. In fact, we lived better than we
could afford to (as poor folks are too apt to do), and this was
one cause of our downfall. ]\Iy father, as proud as he was
poor, spared nothing when friends and relatives, especially
those of higher social standing, favored him with their com-
pany, and was rarely found unable to fulfil their most sanguine
expectations. Wlien too many dropped in upon us at once.
ADIEU TO NEW HAMPSHIRE. 53
or we were found deficient in the luxuries they might fairly
expect, he had a habit of telling them this anecdote : ā
" When I was a boy of fifteen," said he, " I worked two
summers in the great brick-yards of Medford, Mass. My
employer, Mr. Marshall, was at first a new man m the com-
miuiity, whose wife deemed it incumbent on her to give her
neighbors a tea-party, as a prelude to better acquaintance.
In those ante-canal days, wheaten flour was a luxury, though
nearly aU had it for ' company ' occasions ; ordinarily, our
bread was made of ' rye and Indian ' exclusively. Mrs. Mar-
shall, on the great occasion, had the inevitable ' short-cake '
for tea, ā of rye flour, as all could perceive : still, it was not
imperative on common folks to proffer cake of wheaten flour ;
and all would have passed off without remark, and been soon
forgotten, but for a maladroit explanation by the hostess.
' Ladies,' said she to her guests, ' I beg you not to infer that
we have no wheat flour, from the fact that I give you rye
short-cake. We have wheat flour in the house : but I thought
I would save that for Mr. Marshall, when he comes to work
hard in haying-time.' " The astonished guests tittered ; the
glee broadened into a loud laugh as the explanation galloped
through the neighborhood ; and it readily passed into a proverb,
that anything deficient on a kindred occasion was saved for
Mr. Marshall in haying-time. "Friends," added my father,
in conclusion, "if you note anji^hing deficient in our fare,
consider that it is saved for Mr. Marshall in haying-time."
VII.
WESTHAVEN.
THE township of Westhaven, Vermont, comprises that
irregular corner of the State which is bounded by Lake
Champlain on the west, and by Hampton and Whitehall,
N. Y., on the south and southeast, and may be roughly com-
pared to a very blunt wedge driven into the State of New
York ; its point being formed by the rather sharp angle which
the little Poultney river, which here divides the two States,
makes with the Lake, in which it is finally lost. The general
plain or level, widening from south to north, which separates
the Green Mountains from that lake, is here repeatedly broken
by gentle upheavals of limestone, and, less frequently, by
higher and more precipitous ridges of gneiss or of trap, which
increase in number and height as you approach the chain of
verdant hills which have given the State her name.
This whole region was thickly covered by heavy timber, ā
in good part, white pine, ā when its devastation by our race
commenced ; and its proximity to navigable water, with the
abundance of mill-streams everywhere pervading it, incited
its rapid monopoly for " lumbering " purposes. A Dr. Smith,
from Connecticut, ā brother of one and uncle of another
Governor of that State, ā pitched his tent in Westhaven (then
a part of Fairhaven) some seventy to eighty years ago, and
did great execution upon the pines ; rapidly amassing wealth,
and becoming an extensive landholder. Death stopped him
in mid-career, paralyzing his activity, and dividing his prop-
erty, whereof part was inherited by his brother, and the
residue by his widow ; who soon married Christopher Minot,
WESTHAVEN. 65
a Boston banker, who thenceforth made his home in West-
haven ; inhabiting the spacious mansion which his predecessor
had barely lived to complete. Our first home in Vermont
was on his estate, and within a few rods of his mansion ; and
we mainly worked for him, or on his land, while we lived in
that town.
Westhaven might have been, and should be to-day, a rich
grazing towmship ; but for its original wealth of pines, it pro-
bably would have been. But its pioneers, high and low, were
lumbermen ; and it has never yet liberated itself from their
baleful sway. As Moore says, ā
" The traQ of the serpent is over it all."
As the pines had begun to fail, I presume its population was
declining when we settled there, or a house that might be
lived in with frugal comfort could not have been hired for
$ 16 per annum ; but it had then a considerably larger popu-
lation than it has to-day, ā our school-district at least twice
as much. " Going West " has ever since been the general
proclivity ; though I believe any one who understands and
likes dairy farming can buy land and buildings there cheaper
than anywhere beyond the Ohio. By and by some one will
settle there who knows how to apply the superabundant lime
to the strong but stubborn clay ; making farms richly worth
$ 100 per acre which now go begging at $ 30. Until then, let
Westhaven sleep ; for / lack power or time to wake her. I
can heartily commend her remaining people ā all farmers,
after a sort ā as too honest to need a la^vyer, and too wise to
support a grog-shop, even though the law had not forbidden
any one to open it.
When we first set our stakes there, father was thirty-eight
and mother was thirty-three years old. I was not quite ten ;
my brother and 'two sisters, eight, six, and four, respectively,
A third sister ā the youngling of the flock ā was born two
years later ; and all five of us children have been sj)ared
through the intervening forty-seven years.
We now made the acquaintance of genuine poverty, ā not
56 RECOLLECTIONS OF A BUSY LIFE.
beggaiy, nor dependence, but the manly American sort. Our
sum total of worldly goods, including furniture, bedding, and
the clothes we stood in, may have been worth $ 200 ; but, as
we had afterward to pay that amount on old New Hampshire
debts, our material possessions may be fairly represented by 0,
with a credit for $ 200 worth of clothing and household stuff.
Yet, we never needed nor ran into debt for anything ; never
were without meal, meat, and wood, and very rarely without
money. Father went to chopping at fifty cents per day, with-
out repining or apprehension ; and we children all went to
school tiU Spring, though there were no school-funds in those
days, and rate-bills for four children made quite a hole in a
gross income of $ 3 per week. Hitherto, we had never lived
within a mile of a school-house ; now, we were within fifty
rods of one, ā in fact, of two ; for a quarrel had split the dis-
trict, and two schools were in full blast on our arrival, ā one
on either side of us. The Vermont schools were rather better
than the New Hampshire, ā better, at least, in this : their
terms were longer. I never tried them in Summer, ā except
during one very rainy day ; but I had a full opportunity in
Winter ; and I deeply regret that such homely sciences as
Chemistry, Geology, and Botany were never taught, ā were
not even named therein. Had our range of studies included
these, I had ample time to learn something of them ; and this
would have proved of inestimable value to me evermore. Yet,
I am thankful that Algebra had not yet been thrust into our
rural common schools, to knot the brains and squander the
time of those who should be learning something of positive
and practical utility.
Before the Spring of 1821 opened, father had taken a job of
clearing fifty acres of wild land, a mile north of our cot ; and
here he and his sons were employed, save in Winter, for the
next two years.
The work was rugged and grimy, but healthful. The land
had been timbered with Yellow Pine, a thousand years before,
ā as a hundred giant trunks, long since prostrated, but not
yet wholly mouldered back to dust, attested. This was fol-
WESTHAVEN. 57
lowed by a forest of White Pines, of whicli hundreds were
still standing, mostly lifeless ; while a large number lay prone
and dead, though the trunks were mainly sound. Black Ash
in abundance formed a later and generally living growth ;
though a fierce conflagration, which swept over this whole
region, during a great drouth, four years before we saw it, had
devoured much, and killed more of the forest, but increased
the undergrowth of Beech, Alder, Poplar, etc., which we were
required to dispose of. When we first attacked it, the snow
was just gomg, and the water and slush were knee-deep. We
were all indifferent choppers, when compared with those who
usually grapple with great forests ; and the job looked so for-
midable that travellers along the turnpike which skirted our
task were accustomed to halt and comfort us with predictions
that we boys would be grown men before we saw the end of
it. But, cutting trees and bushes ; chopping up great trunks
into manageable lengths, drawing them together, rolling up
and burning great heaps of logs ; saving out here and there a
log that would do to saw ; digging out rotten pines from the
soil wherein they had embedded themselves, so that they
might dry sufficiently to burn ; pihng and burning brush and
rotten or worthless sticks, and carting home such wood as
served for fuel, we persevered until the job was done ; when I
could have begun another just like it and managed so as not
to require more than two thirds of the labor we expended on
this. And now, if any one has a great tract of land to clear
of trees, decaying logs, and bushes, I fancy that I might give
him hints worth considering. N. B. ā I work for pay.
We had been farmers of the poorer class in New Hamp-
shire ; we took rank with day-laborers in Vermont. We had
lived freely, though not lavishly, much less sumptuously, in
our earlier home ; here, we were compelled to observe a sterner
frugality. The bread of our class in this section was almost
exclusively made of rye, ā Indian corn being little grown on
the clay soil of Western Vermont, ā and, though there are
always about six women alive who know how to make of rye
the best bread ever tasted, our mother was not one of these,
58 RECOLLECTIONS OF A BUSY LIFE.
and never learned tlieir admirable art. Then the clay itself,
alternating with the weather from mire to rock, is not well
adapted to bare feet; while the detestable Canada thistles,
which infest every road and almost every field in Westhaven,
are not conducive to placidity of temper or propriety of speech.
Having the sharp lances of these thistles dug out of my fes-
tered feet with needles was long my daily terror and my
nightly torture ; the tough, horny integument with which
their rough experiences had covered our naked feet rendering
the dislodgement of the thistle-beards more laborious and
painful than any soft-footed person can realize. I have never
since been able to appraise stiff clay soils at their full value.
A precipitous ledge, eighty rods east of the turnpike from
which we worked westward, afforded us good spring water,
and supplied us also with rattlesnakes, whereof we killed
some, which might have proved annoying to us barefoot boys,
as we worked among the brush and weeds, had they caught
the idea. Still, clearing land is pleasant work, especially
when you have a hundred heaps of logs and brush burning at
once of a dark, windy night ; while ten or twenty acres of
fallen, leafy timber, on fire at once, affords a magnificent spec-
tacle. We were to have had $ 7 per acre, with the use of a
team, and half the wood suitable for timber and fuel ; and,
tliough $ 350, even in those days, was not large pay for two
years' work of a man and two boys, we were well satisfied.
In the event, however, Mr. Minot died before we had effected
a settlement; when his estate was declared insolvent, and we
were juggled out of a part of our pay.
Our third year in Vermont was spent two miles farther
west, where we inhabited and worked a little place known as
Flea Knoll, while father ran a neighboring saw-mill on shares.
As he sawed twelve hours on and twelve off, with a partner,
I insisted on being his Jielper ; but I think once working from
noon till midnight satiated my ambition, and I never fully
learned the art and mystery of sawing boards by water-power.
My brother, though younger, was more persistent, and made
greater progress. I gave that Summer pretty diligently to
WESTHAVEN. j5^
farming, with very meagre results. First, the season was wet
till the 1st of June ; and our corn, planted in mortar, encoun-
tered a brick-like crust when it undertook to come up ; and,
unable to pierce or break it, pushed laterally under it for two
inches or so, imtil we dug off the crust, and introduced the
pale, imprisoned shoots to sunshine. Next came a long Sum-
mer of intense drouth, baking and cracking our fields, so that
the hoe made no serious impression on their rock-like masses,
causing the corn to stand still and turn yeUow, while the
thistles came up thick, rank, and vigorous, covering the fields
with a verdure most deceitful to the eye at a distance. We
had failed in an attempt to make maple sugar that Spring : the
season being bad, the trees distant, and our knowledge of the
art very meagre ; our crops amovmted to little ; while the
water we drank here was so bad that the fever and ague struck
down our parents in the Fall, and all of us children next
Spring, when we beat a precipitate retreat from " Flea Knoll,"
ā where it was said that no family ever remained more than
a year, ā and returned to the Minot estate ; living in a larger
house just west of our former tenement, cultivating the adja-
cent land on shares, and clearing off some twenty acres more
of young AVliite Pine, for which we were to be paid by two
years' crops ; which proved, in the main, a failm^e : our wheat
being destroyed by the midge.
Thus ended my boyish experiences of farming, which may
be said to have commenced in my sixth, and closed with my
fifteenth year. During the whole period, though an eager
and omnivorous reader, I never saw a book that treated of
Agriculture and the natural sciences auxiliary thereto. I think
I never saw even one copy of a periodical devoted mainly to
farming ; and I doubt that we ever harvested one boimteous
crop. A good field of rye, or corn, or grass, or potatoes, we
sometimes had ; but we had more half crops than whole ones ;
and a good yield of any one product was generally balanced
by two or three poor ones. I know I had the stuff in me for
an efficient and successful farmer ; but such training as I
received at home would never have brought it out. And the
60 RECOLLECTIONS OF A BUSY LIFE.
moral I would deduce from my experience is simply this :
Our farmers' sons escape from their fathers' calling whenever
they can, hccause it is m,ade a mindless, monotonous drudgery,
instead of an ennobling, liberalizing, intellectual pursuit. Could
I have known in my youth what a business farming some-
times is, always may be, and yet generally shall be, I would
never have sought nor chosen any other. In the farmer's
calling, as I saw it followed, there was neither scope for ex-
panding faculties, incitement to constant growth in knowl-
edge, nor a spur to generous ambition. To preserve existence
was its ordinary impulse ; to get rich, its exceptional and
most exalted aim. So I turned from it in dissatisfaction, if
not in disgust, and sought a different sphere and vocation.
Fairhaven, lying southeast of Westhaven, was the poorer