Part 4 (1/2)
The second of the Quincy line was a leader in the town. At one time he was its representative in the General Court, and as colonel of the Suffolk Regiment, he was the first of a long list of colonels in the family. But the day came when it was written of him, ”Unkel Quincy grows exceeding crazy,” and in 1698 the second Edmund yielded the house to Edmund the third.
This Edmund also became a colonel and a representative and, later, a judge of the Supreme Court. His pastor said of him, ”This great man was of a manly Stature and Aspect, of a Strong Const.i.tution and of Good Courage, fitted for any Business of Life, to serve G.o.d, his King and Country.” Not only did he enlarge the glory of the family, but, in 1706, he enlarged the house, yet in such a way that the original Coddington house could be clearly traced after the improvements were finished. Judge Sewell, the cousin of the builder, was one of the welcome occupants of the improved house. On his way to Plymouth he stopped at ”Braintry.” ”I turned in to Cousin Quinsey,” he said, ”where I had the pleasure to see G.o.d in his Providence s.h.i.+ning again upon the Persons and Affairs of the Family after long distressing Sickness and Losses. Lodged in the chamber next the Brooke.” Later on another chamber near the brook was provided for Mrs. Quincy's brother, Tutor Flynt of Harvard, when he came that way for rest and change.
The oldest child of this generation was Edmund, whose daughter, Dorothy Quincy, married John Hanc.o.c.k, while the fourth child was Dorothy Quincy, the great-grandmother of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The continuity of life at the mansion was sadly broken when, within a year, the grandmother, the mother, and the father died. The death of the latter occurred in England, where he had gone on business for the colony. When news came of the ending of his life, the General Court of Ma.s.sachusetts declared that ”he departed the delight of his own people, but of none more than the Senate, who, as a testimony of their love and grat.i.tude, have ordered this epitaph to be inscribed on his tomb in Bunhill Fields, London.”
For a year Dorothy Quincy remained in the house; but on her marriage the place ceased for a time to be the chief residence of a Quincy.
Edmund was in business in Boston. He resorted to the house for a season now and then, but his Boston home remained his permanent abiding place until after the birth of his daughter Dorothy. Then failing fortune sent him back to the ancestral home.
During the next few years John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hanc.o.c.k were favored visitors at the mansion. John Hanc.o.c.k won Dorothy Quincy for his bride, and family tradition says that preparations were made for the wedding in the old home. ”The large north parlor was adorned with a new wall paper, express from Paris, and appropriately figured with the forms of Venus and Cupid in blue, and pendant wreaths of flowers in red,” writes the author of ”Where American Independence Began.” But the approaching Revolution interfered. The bridegroom hurried away to Boston and then to Lexington. Dorothy, under the care of Mrs. Hanc.o.c.k, the mother of John Hanc.o.c.k, also went to Lexington on April 18, 1775, the very day when Paul Revere aroused the patriots, and Hanc.o.c.k was once more compelled to flee for his life. Four months later, at Fairfield, Connecticut, the lovers were married.
The old mansion was never again the home of the Quincys. Josiah, brother of Edmund the fourth, built for himself in 1770 a beautiful home not far from the family headquarters. Here he lived through the war. Visitors to the house are shown on one of the windows the record he made of the departure of the British from Boston Harbor, scratched there when he saw the welcome sight, on October 17, 1775.
For much more than a century the house was in the hands of other families, but, fortunately, it has come under the control of the Colonial Dames of Ma.s.sachusetts. They have made it the historic monument it deserves to be. The visitors who are privileged to wander through the rooms hallowed by the presence of men and women who helped to pave the way for American independence read with hearty appreciation the lines which Holmes addressed to the portrait of his ancestress, ”My Dorothy Q,” as he called her:
”Grandmother's mother: her age, I guess Thirteen summers, or something less; Girlish bust, but womanly air; Smooth, square forehead, with uprolled hair; Lips that lover has never kissed, Taper fingers and slender wrist; Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade; So they painted the little maid.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: FERNSIDE FARM, HAVERHILL, Ma.s.s.
_Photo by Halliday Historic Photograph Company_ See page 54]
IX
FERNSIDE FARM, HAVERHILL, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS
THE BIRTHPLACE AND BOYHOOD HOME OF JOHN G. WHITTIER
The first house built by Thomas Whittier, the three-hundred-pound ancestor of the poet Whittier, and first representative of the family in America, was a little log cabin. There he took his wife, Ruth Flint, and there ten children were born. Five of them were boys, and each of them was more than six feet tall.
No wonder the log house grew too small for the family. So, probably in 1688, he built a house whose ma.s.sive hewn beams were fifteen inches square, whose kitchen was thirty feet long, with a fireplace eight feet wide. The rooms cl.u.s.tered about a central chimney.
In this house the poet was born December 17, 1807, and here he spent the formative years of his life. When he was twenty-seven years old he wrote for _The Little Pilgrim_ of Philadelphia a paper on ”The Fish I Didn't Catch.” In this he described the home of his boyhood:
”Our old homestead nestled under a long range of hills which stretched off to the west. It was surrounded by woods in all directions save to the southeast, where a break in the leafy wall revealed a vista of low, green meadows, picturesque with wooded islands and jutting capes of upland. Through these, a small brook, noisy enough as it foamed, rippled and laughed down its rocky falls by our garden-side, wound, silently and scarcely visible, to a still larger stream, known as the Country Brook. This brook in its time, after doing duty at two or three saw and grist mills, the clack of which we could hear across the intervening woodlands, found its way to the great river, and the river took it up and bore it down to the great sea.”
Whittier's poems are full of references to the life on the farm; many of his best verses had their inspiration in memories of the past. For instance, the description of the building of the fire in ”Snow-Bound,”
a poem which describes the life at the farm when he was twelve years old, is a faithful picture of what took place in the old kitchen every night of the long New England winter, when
”We piled, with care, our nightly stack Of wood against the chimney back-- The oaken log, green, huge and thick, And on its top the thick back-stick; The knotty fore-stick laid apart, And filled between with curious art.
The ragged brush; then, hovering near, We watched the first red blaze appear, Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam On whitewashed wall and sagging beam, Until the old, rude-fas.h.i.+oned room Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom.”
Young Whittier was a faithful worker on the farm. One day, when he was nineteen years old, William Lloyd Garrison, the young editor of a Newburyport newspaper, to which Whittier had contributed a poem, found him a.s.sisting in repairing a stone wall. The visitor urged the father of the young poet to send him to school. As a result of this visit Whittier entered the Academy in Haverhill, with the understanding that he was to earn his way.
At intervals during the succeeding ten years the poet returned to the old farm, but when he was thirty years old the place was sold, the family went to Amesbury, and he left soon afterward for Philadelphia, where he was to edit an anti-slavery paper.
All through life Whittier dreamed of buying back the homestead. When he received a check for $1,000 as the first proceeds from ”Snow-Bound,” he set the sum aside as the beginning of a redemption fund.
But the citizens of Haverhill, led by Alfred A. Ordway, asked the privilege of buying the property themselves, and making it a memorial to the poet. Whittier died before the purchase was completed, but soon afterward Fernside Farm, as the poet called it, was taken over by Mr.