Historic Shrines of America Part 5

"I Desire to be thankful that I was born in a Land of Light & Baptized when I was young and had a good education by my Father, tho' I took but little notice of it in the time of it--I am Thankful for my Captivity, 'twas the Comfortablest time that ever I had. In my Affliction G.o.d made his Word Comfortable to me. I remember ye 43 ps. ult. [probably meaning last part] and those words came to my mind--ps.

118:17--I have had a great Desire to Come to the Ordinance of the Lord's Supper a Great while, but fearing I should give offense and fearing my own Unworthiness has kept me back.

Reading a Book concerning X's Sufferings Did much awaken me.

In the 55th of Isa. beg [beginning] We are invited to come: Hearing Mr. Moody preach out of ye 3rd of Mal. 3 last verses it put me upon Consideration. Ye 11th of Matt., ending, has been encouraging to me--I have been resolving to offer my Self from time to time ever since the Settlement of the present Ministry. I was awakened by the first Sacraml Sermon [Luke 14:17]. But Delays and fears prevailed upon me: But I desire to Delay no longer, being Sensible it is my Duty--I desire the Church to receive me tho' it be the Eleventh hour; and pray for me that I may honer G.o.d and receive the Salvation of My Soul.

"Hannah Duston, wife of Thomas. aetat 67."

Mrs. Duston lived in the old house at Haverhill for many years after her remarkable escape.

XI

THE OLD MANSE AND THE WAYSIDE, CONCORD, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS

TWO HOUSES MADE FAMOUS BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Nathaniel Hawthorne was thirty-eight years old before he was able to begin the ideal life of Adam with his Eve, to which he had looked forward for many years.

"I want a little piece of land that I can call my own, big enough to stand upon, big enough to be buried in," he said to a friend when he was thirty-four years old. Lack of money delayed the realization, but it is a curious fact that the marriage to Sophia Peabody took place just after he had made up his mind that the thousand dollars he had invested in the Emerson Brook Farm experiment was gone forever.

The marriage took place July 9, 1842, and housekeeping was at once begun in the Old Manse at Concord, which was built in 1765 by Emerson's grandfather. But he was merely a renter; his dream of owners.h.i.+p was to be delayed ten years longer. The great rooms of the curious gambrel-roofed house were rather bare, and there was a scarcity of everything except love, yet the author and his bride found nothing but joy in the retired garden and the dormer-windowed house.

Hawthorne's own charming description of the house and grounds is so attractive that the reader wishes to visit them:

"Between two tall gateposts of rough-hewn stone (the gate itself having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch), we beheld the grey front of the old parsonage terminating the vista of an avenue of black ash trees. It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral procession of the venerable clergyman, the last inhabitant, had turned from that gateway toward the village burying ground....

"Nor, in truth, had the old manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly owners from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in the chambers had grown up to a.s.sume the priestly character. It was awful to recollect how many sermons must have been written there. The latest inhabitant there--he by whose translation to paradise the dwelling was left vacant--had penned nearly three thousand discourses....

How often, no doubt, had he paced along the avenue, attuning his meditations to sighs and gentle murmurs, and deep and solemn peals of the wind among the leafy tops of the trees!... I took shame to myself for having been so long a writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom would descend upon me with the falling leaves of the autumn, and that I should light upon an intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well worth those h.o.a.rds of long-hidden gold which people seek for in moss-grown houses."

Two years after their marriage, Mrs. Hawthorne wrote to her mother:

"I have no time, as you may imagine. I am baby's tire-woman, hand-maiden, and tender, as well as nursing mother. My husband relieves me with her constantly, and gets her to sleep beautifully.... The other day, when my husband saw me contemplating an appalling vacuum in his dressing-gown, he said he was a man of the largest rents in the country, and it was strange he had not more ready money.... But, somehow or other, I do not care much, because we are so happy."

Hawthorne did much of his work in the rear room where Emerson wrote.

In the introduction to "Mosses from an Old Manse" he said of this apartment:

"When I first saw the room, the walls were blackened with the smoke of unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan ministers, that hung around.... The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through the dirty garret windows while I burrowed among the venerable books in search of any living thought."

From his writing Hawthorne turned easily to wandering in the garden or rowing on the river or helping his wife about the house. "We had a most enchanting time during Mary the cook's holiday sojourn in Boston," Mrs. Hawthorne wrote at one time. "We remained in our bower undisturbed by mortal creature. Mr. Hawthorne took the new phases of housekeeper, and, with that marvellous power of adaptation to circ.u.mstances that he possesses, made everything go easily and well.

He rose betimes in the mornings and kindled fires in the kitchen and breakfast room, and by the time I came down the tea-kettle boiled and potatoes were baked and rice cooked, and my lord sat with a book superintending."

Poverty put an untimely end to life at the Old Manse. The years from 1846 to 1852 were spent in Boston and Salem. In 1852 Hawthorne was able to buy a dilapidated old house at Concord, which he called The Wayside. Here he remained until his appointment in 1853 as American Consul at Liverpool, and to it he returned after long wandering.

The Wayside had been the home of Bronson Alcott. Here Mr. and Mrs.

Hawthorne made their second real home. They rejoiced as, a little at a time, they were able to improve the property, and they showed always that they knew the secret of finding happiness in the midst of privations.

Hawthorne described his new abode for his friend, George William Curtis:

"As for my old house, you will understand it better after spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables; no suggestion about it and no venerableness, although from the style of its architecture it seems to have survived beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with the situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few minutes after pa.s.sing it....

"The house stands within ten or fifteen feet of the old Boston road (along which the British marched and retreated), divided from it by a fence, and some trees and shrubbery of Mr. Alcott's setting out. Wherefore I have called it 'The Wayside,' which I think a better name and more morally suggestive than that which, as Mr. Alcott has since told me, he bestowed on it, 'The Hillside.' In front of the house, on the opposite side of the road, I have eight acres of land,--the only valuable portion of the place in a farmer's eye, and which are capable of being made very fertile. On the hither side, my territory extends some little distance over the brow of the hill, and is absolutely good for nothing, in a productive point of view, though very good for many other purposes.

"I know nothing of the history of the house, except Th.o.r.eau's telling me that it was inhabited a generation or two ago by a man who believed he should never die. I believe, however, he is dead; at least, I hope so; else he may probably appear and dispute my t.i.tle to his residence."

In furnis.h.i.+ng the house Mrs. Hawthorne took keen pleasure in putting the best of everything in her husband's study. She called it "the best room, the temple of the Muses and the Delphic shrine."

In these surroundings, supported by a wife who wors.h.i.+pped him, Hawthorne wrote until the call came to go to England. It was 1860 before he returned to The Wayside. There he hoped to end his life, but death overtook him at Plymouth, New Hamps.h.i.+re, while he was making a tour of New England with Franklin Pierce. Mrs. Hawthorne survived him seven years.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROYALL HOUSE, MEDFORD, Ma.s.s.

_Photo by Ph. B. Wallace_ See page 66]

XII

THE ROYALL HOUSE, MEDFORD, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS

FROM WHOSE ROOF MOLLY STARK SIGNALLED TO HER HUSBAND

One who is familiar with the old plantation houses of Virginia is tempted to rub his eyes when he first sees the Royall House at Medford, Ma.s.sachusetts, for this relic of Colonial days has the outbuildings, the slave-quarters, and other characteristics of so many Virginia houses. True, it has not the low wings and the stately columns at the entrance, but the doorway is so chaste and dignified that this is not felt to be a lack. Those who enter the doorway and walk reverently through the rooms of what has been called the finest specimen of colonial architecture in the vicinity of Boston, are filled anew with admiration for the builders of another day who chose the finest white pine for their work, and would not dream of scamping anywhere. Evidently there was little need in those days of the services of an inspector to see that the terms of a contract were carried out.

The history of the property goes back to 1631, when Governor John Winthrop, the first governor of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony, who served for nineteen years, secured a grant to the farm on which, within six or seven years, the original dormer-windowed Royall House was built. This was smaller than the present house, but it was later incorporated in the present stately mansion; one story was added, and the outer wall was moved a few feet. Thus it is really a house within a house.

At the time of Governor Winthrop's owners.h.i.+p it was called the Ten-Hill Farmhouse, because ten hills could be seen from its windows.

John Winthrop, Jr., sold the place to Mrs. Elizabeth Lidgett.

Lieutenant Governor Usher married a Lidgett, and owned the estate until he lost it through business reverses. The name was not changed until 1732, when the house was bought by Isaac Royall, a planter from Antigua, in the Leeward Islands, a descendant of William Royall of Salem. He paid 10,350 for the estate, which then consisted of five hundred and four acres. It was he who enlarged the house. For five years the neighbors watched the transformation of the comfortable Ten-Hill Farmhouse to the great Royall House, with its enclosing wall, elm-bordered driveway, pleasing garden, summerhouse, great barn, and rambling slave-quarters.

Two generations of Royalls entertained lavishly here. Among the guests were the most celebrated men of the time, as well as many who were not so well known, for all were welcome there. Many of these guests drove up the driveway to the paved courtyard in their own grand equipages.

Some were brought in the four-horse Royall chariot. But those who came on foot were welcomed as heartily.

Isaac Royall, II, was a Tory, and in 1775 he was compelled to abandon the property. Thereupon Colonel, later General, John Stark made it his headquarters. The regiment which he had himself raised, and whose wages he paid for a time from his own pocket, was encamped near by.

From the Royall house these men and their intrepid leader went out to the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Under the direction of Molly Stark the house maintained its reputation for hospitality, and she did her best to make the place the abode of patriotism. On the day when the British evacuated Boston she promised her husband to signal to him from the roof the movements of the enemy.

Pa.s.sing on with his soldiers to Dorchester Heights, he anxiously awaited the news sent to him by his faithful Molly.

The Royall family regained possession of the property in 1805. To-day it is owned by the Royall House a.s.sociation, which keeps it open to the visitors. These come in large numbers to see relics of former days, including what is said to be the only chest that survived the Boston Tea Party, the sign of the Royall Oak Tavern in Medford, which bears the marks of the bullets of the soldiers who were on their way to the Battle of Bunker Hill, the old furniture, the first fork used in the Colony, and the furnis.h.i.+ngs of the quaint kitchen fireplace, which dates from 1732.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BROADHEARTH, SAUGUS, Ma.s.s.

_Photo by Wallace Nutting, Inc., Framingham Center, Ma.s.s_ See page 69]

XIII

BROADHEARTH AND THE BENNET-BOARDMAN HOUSE, SAUGUS, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS

TWO REMARKABLE SPECIMENS OF THE OVERHANG HOUSE

"Thomas Dexter of Lyn, yeoman," was the first owner of much of the land on which Lynn, Ma.s.sachusetts, is built. Evidently he was land poor, for on October 22, 1639, he "mortgaged his fearme in Lyn ... for two oxen & 2 bulls upon condition of payment to Simon Broadstreet of Ipswich 90 the first day of August, the next following with a reservation upon the sale of the said fearme to give the said Dexter the overflow above the debt and damages of the said 90."