During my boyhood there was an article which had been for many years
in the cookery department of our house, but which had recently gone
out of use. It was called a roasting Jack, and preceded the tin
kitchen in roasting meats and poultry. I remember it well, but I have
little doubt that like many another relic of the past, it found its
way into the junk heap of William Nye on the approach of some muster
or election day, when we boys wanted money for lobsters and lemonade
and other promoters of a stomachache which, perhaps, in these days
of fads would have been called appendicitis. It was an iron cylinder
about four inches in diameter and six inches long, attached at the
top with an intermediate swivel to the chimney crane, and at the
bottom to a hook or some other contrivance which held the meat.
Inside of the cylinder there was a clock work machinery, which when
wound up would keep the hook constantly turning before the fire. It
probably went out of use between 1800 and 1820.
There was another kind of roasting Jack, consisting of a spit resting
on hooks attached to the andirons to which a wheel was affixed, which
was kept turning by a chain band running from a larger wheel moved
by clock work attached to the under side of the mantel piece. I have
no doubt that many of my readers have seen the hooks on old andirons
without knowing the purpose for which they were intended. These hooks
may be seen on a pair of andirons in the Pilgrim Hall Library.
There was another article closely associated with my childhood, which
I have thus far omitted to mention. How often have I sat in a high
chair with a bib under my chin, and a pap spoon in hand, feeding
myself out of a porringer. I supposed that the porringer was the sole
prerogative of children; that it was designed expressly for their
use, but I had not then learned the fictions of legendary lore, and
that the world is all a fleeting show for a child’s illusion given.
I learned the true origin and use of the porringer some years ago. A
lady wrote to me that an elderly lady in Roxbury in somewhat reduced
circumstances owned a china soup tureen which was once used in the
household of Queen Anne, and would be glad to sell it. I went to see
it, and found a very handsome tureen, but I saw at once on its cover
a knob representing a rabbit’s ear, the exclusive mark of Wedgewood,
who flourished during the time of Queen Charlotte, and made a very
beautiful cream colored ware, of which this tureen was a specimen,
and in honor of Queen Charlotte called it “queen’s ware.” The story
accompanying the tureen was that an ancestor of its present owner was
at one time attached to Queen Anne’s Court, as one of the ladies in
waiting, and afterwards becoming reduced, emigrated to New Brunswick,
carrying with her the tureen, which she received as a present during
her service in the household of the Queen. It is easy to account for
the legend of its origin by the supposition of some later owner,
knowing it was called queen’s ware, that it was a part of the ware
of the queen of whose household an ancestor was a member. Not being
satisfied with the result of my examination I began a further
investigation of the origin of soup tureens as articles of table
ware, and found that in the reign of Queen Anne, they were neither
used or known. The custom was to have soup brought to the table by
the servants in porringers, one of which was placed before each
guest. This was the design and purpose of the porringer, and this was
its use until the appearance of the tureen about the middle of the
eighteenth century, when it was relegated to the use of children.
In my day the porringer was made of either silver or pewter, but as
the fashion of its use has gradually gone out the silver porringer
has found its way to the melting pot, and the pewter one to the
bric-a-brac store.
There are doubtless many genuine relics of the Queen Anne period in
existence. I have a hammered brass wine cooler of that period, which
came down in my mother’s family from John White, son of Peregrine
White, born in Marshfield about 1660. It is about the size and shape
of an ordinary soup tureen, with solid brass handles and slots
around its edge, in which wine glasses were hung with their bowls
in the water. It was called a “Monteth,” and took its name from the
inventor. The poet William King, who was born in 1663, and died in
1712, alluded to the article in the following lines:
“New names produce new words, and thus Monteth
Has by a vessel saved his name from death.”
Among the books which I have examined with reference to the articles
above mentioned, is a very interesting one entitled “Social life in
the reign of Queen Anne,” to which I refer the student of habits and
customs in the early part of the 18th century.
In the flowers and fruits and trees of Plymouth the changes in my day
have not been striking. The garden flora are the same as in my youth,
except that new flowers have been introduced, and new and improved
varieties of the old ones. Fashion has occasionally relegated some
flowers to temporary obscurity, but in many instances has restored
them to their old rank or to a higher one. In my youth the tulip
filled every border in yard and garden, but in time fashion called it
vulgar, and it retired from the floral social life. But it returned
in due season, like a girl from a fashionable school with the flush
of beauty and with cultivated taste, and became instead of the wall
flower, one of the belles of the ball. The hollyhock once banished
to the back yard, is now the guardian of our doorway, and nods a
graceful welcome to every guest, while the sunflower, once the
occupant of the poultry yard, now stands in splendid defiance under
our windows, and hourly challenges the sun to do his best.
The most remarkable change in our gardens has been in connection
with the tomato introduced from Mexico, and there called tomatl. In
1831 Dr. Jas. Thacher of Plymouth, who was fond of introducing new
things, secured some seed and gave my mother some, which she planted.
I remember the plant well, with its burdens of gorgeous fruit, which
was looked upon rather as a garden ornament than food for the table.
It was not long, however, before it came into general use as a summer
vegetable, and finally as a preserve in cans for winter use, until
it may now be said that in the extent of its use it stands next to
the potato. Though long supposed to have been of Mexican origin, it
has been recently found that nations in Africa had long used it, and
esteemed it a valuable article of food. I have an impression that in
the summer of 1831 it ripened much earlier than it does now. It is a
serious objection that as a crop it ripens so late that practically
the whole crop ripens at the same time, and as a perishable vegetable
is rushed into the market at prices too low to make its cultivation
profitable. The canning, however, of large quantities, has served in
recent years to help prices by increasing the demand. A writer in
Blackwood says, “the tomato is a noble fruit, as sweet in smell as
the odors of Araby, and makes an illustrious salad. Its medicinal
virtue is as great as its gastronomical goodness. It is the friend of
the well to keep them well, and the friend of the sick to bring them
back into the lost sheepfolds of Hygeia. The Englishman’s travelling
companion, the blue pill, would never be needed if he would pay
proper court to the tomato.”
Among the fruits brought into use in Plymouth from foreign fields,
the banana has had the most striking history. I remember the first
one I ever saw, and the first brought to Plymouth. It was about
the year 1833 that Capt. Samuel Rogers in command of the schooner
Capitol, belonging to Daniel and Abraham Jackson, brought to Plymouth
several bunches of bananas, one of which he gave to Mr. Abraham
Jackson, in whose yard I saw it hanging on a tree. The bunch was
of the yellow variety, and Capt. Rogers called it plantain. As the
demand for this fruit has increased, the banana fields of Porto Rico,
Jamaica and Costa Rica have been immensely enlarged until regular
lines of steamers from those places now bring into the United States
twenty-five millions of bunches annually, or twenty-five hundred
millions of bananas, enough to supply annually thirty bananas to
every man, woman and child, including negroes. The fruit is now sold
at so low a price, and is so universally used that I think it safe to
say that no fruit, not excepting apples, has so large a consumption.
The most striking change in fruits during my time has been in the
cultivation of cranberries. They have always been known as a native
of New England, and John Smith found them in a visit here in 1614.
They have always found their best natural growth in grassy meadows
or swamps, where decay of vegetable matter has supplied the soil
with organic acids. I know some patches of such meadows today where
the cranberry has borne fruit hundreds of years. These natural
berries are better than the cultivated ones, probably because the
sand with which the made bog is covered has diminished the supply
of organic acids. The general consumer has not yet discovered that
the native berry weighs a number of pounds more to the bushel than
the cultivated one, and has a richer flavor. In 1855 the statistics
of Plymouth showed an acre and a half of cranberry bog valued at
$15—while at the present time there are 984 acres valued at $393,600.
Some fruits which were abundant in our gardens during my youth, have
entirely disappeared. I knew then scarcely a garden without its
plums, gages and damsons, the latter of which were especially prized
for preserving. When it is asked what has become of these trees,
it is often answered that they have run out. But such an answer is
absurd, because if they had run out in one place, they would have
run out everywhere. But the plum and gage are raised in California
and sold in Boston and Plymouth at a profit to the producer after a
travel of three thousand miles across the continent. The trouble is
that the soil has run out after nearly three centuries of cultivation
without renewal of those properties and ingredients which successive
crops have exhausted. If the virgin soils of California were
analyzed, and their fertilizing constituents when discovered were
applied to our worn out gardens, they would doubtless be rejuvenated.
Our people have not even been content with robbing the ground of its
crops without adding to and restoring its vitality, but they have
year after year raked out every stone, great and small, leaving the
ground a mere black paste, instead of a vigorous loam. They have
yet to learn that the feldspar in granite contains potash enough
if we knew how to extract it to fertilize the fields in which the
farmer looks on stones as nuisances to be rid of. I have seen some
evidence in the rank growth of grass around stone heaps and under
stone walls that nature may have found some method by chemical action
of eliminating the feldspar potash which the rocks contain. The
condition of the trees on Boston Common, of which in late years we
have heard much complaint illustrates in my opinion the necessity
of restoring to the soil precisely those qualities which year after
year the trees have been using up. Mr. Doogue, the superintendent,
last season, or the season before, ploughed the ground and planted
grain as if the surface needed loosening and enriching to permit the
access of rain to the roots of the trees, but I do not believe that
he has reached or remedied the trouble. If he would come to Plymouth
I could show him by an object lesson what the trees need. Let him
make a visit to our woods, where with no more than two inches of
soil on a substratum of sand and gravel, a thick growth of oaks and
pines sends up every season a foot or more of upward growth, and
preserves through the dryest summers a rich foliage. They simply live
on the leaves which they shed in the autumn for their own use, and
which they find in the spring that no robber has carried away. If
Mr. Doogue, instead of raking the common and carting off the leaves
will deposit them in trenches around the trees covered with a little
earth, his trees will doubtless revive.
Among the trees which have practically disappeared in my day are the
Buttonwood and Balm of Gilead. The Buttonwood or Sycamore or Plane
tree, grew in various localities within the town, and until about the
year 1845, a row of Buttonwoods stood on the front of the lot which
now includes Cushman street and the lots on both sides. Jas. Russell
Lowell was undoubtedly familiar with it when he wrote in his “Beaver
Brook.”
“Beneath a bony buttonwood
The mill’s red door swings open wide;
The whitened miller, dust imbued,
Flits past the square of dark inside.”
The Buttonwood bush is an entirely distinct plant deriving its name
from the globules it bears resembling buttons in shape.
There was during my youth a row of Balm of Gileads or Balsam poplars
five or six in number, standing below the stone wall opposite the
North side of the Plymouth Rock House. The buds of the trees covered
with a resinous matter, were much sought after as cures for cuts and
wounds. Only a very few of these trees are now standing in Plymouth.
There is the hornbeam tree often spoken of in the division of lands
in the early days of Plymouth Colony, of which very few specimens
are now found in our woods. Wood in “New England’s Prospect,” under
date of 1639 says, “the horn bound tree is a tough kind of wood that
requires so much pains in riving as is almost incredible; being the
best to make bowls and dishes, not being subject to crack or leak.”
He says:
“The horn-bound tree that to be cloven scorns;
Which from the tender vine oft takes his spouse
Who twines embracing arms about his boughs.”
The trees of New England seem to have been the same as those which
were natives of England. The English poet Spencer in the first book
of the first canto of “The Færie Queen” enumerates the latter in the
following lines:
“Much can they praise the trees so straight and hy,
The sayling Pine; the Cedar proud and tall;
The vine-propt Elme; the Popplar never dry;
The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all;
The Aspine, good for staves; the Cypresse funerall;
The Laurell, meed of mightie conquerors
And poets sage; the Firre that weepeth still;
The Willow, worne of forlorne paramours;
The Eugh, obedient to the bender’s will;
The Birch for shaftes; the Sallow for the mill;
The Mirrhe, sweete-bleeding in the bitter wound;
The warlike Beech; the Ash for nothing ill;
The fruitful Olive, and the Platane round;
The corner Holme; the Maple seldom inward sound.”
The sapling pine was the tree of which staffs were made; the
builders’ oak was the white oak; the sallow was a kind of willow; the
platane was the plane, and the holm was the holly. The olive may have
been some tree now known by another name.
The beech tree at one time within my recollection was almost extinct
in Plymouth woods, and was rarely found except on islands in the
woodland ponds. I have heard that the same was true of the beech in
the Middlesex Fells, which suggests that woods fires which could not
reach the islands may have thinned the beeches out. The fact that in
recent years the beech is again making its appearance in the Plymouth
Park and other protected localities, adds force to the suggestion.
Elm trees have always abounded in New England, doubtless including
Plymouth, and are much handsomer than the English elms, though the
latter retaining the custom of their habitat, leave out earlier in
the spring than the American, and hold their leaves longer in the
autumn. As far as I know there is no positive record of an elm tree
from the natural forests in New England. The ages of the old elm
on the Common in Boston, and of the Brookline and Pittsfield elms,
is not known. There are contemporary records of an elm in New York
city, standing on the corner of Wall and Broad streets as late as
1670, which measured more than thirty feet in circumference, and
was called by the Dutch, “der Groot Tree.” The trees now standing
in Town Square, three of the five planted by my great-grandfather,
Thomas Davis, in 1784, are young compared with the New York tree, and
ought not to be in the languishing condition they now exhibit. With
the ground in the square packed solid, it is impossible for rains to
reach their roots. If a fence were built around each tree, and the
ground within it dug up and kept loose, there can be no doubt that
water would find its way to the roots and along them to the most
distant rootlets. There is the same trouble with all the ornamental
trees along our concreted sidewalks. We are spending hundreds of
dollars each year in spraying their foliage to check the ravages of
the beetle and miller, and at the same time by grass and concrete and
macadamizing sentencing them to certain death. I commend the subject
to the Plymouth Natural History Society, who on examination of the
beautiful tree in the front of the new fire station, a central jewel
in our coronet of trees, will find that we have been pursuing the
policy of a physician who would treat a patient for loss of hair, who
is dying of hunger and thirst.
Among other adopted trees are the European Linden, and the English
Birch. Mr. George B. Emerson, the eminent naturalist, told me once he
thought the latter the most beautiful tree in America. It undoubtedly
has the merit of putting out its leaves earlier than our trees, and
holding them longer, but I have never seen one standing erect if
alone, or if more than forty years old retaining life and vigor in
its upper branches. On the other hand I think the European Linden,
of which we have noble specimens in Plymouth, is on the whole the
most satisfactory ornamental tree for a bleak sea exposure like that
of Plymouth. I have found in Holland, the country of Lindens, none
to compare with the Lindens on North street, which grow straight and
regular, under blasting winds, and I have seen them as late as the
6th of October without a yellow leaf.
Of the animals and birds and their changes within my day, I can say
little. They are very much the same as in the days of the Pilgrims.
The wild turkey disappeared before my time, and I think that they are
only to be found in Massachusetts today in the Berkshire hills. All
through my youth the wild pigeons were abundant in our grain fields
and huckleberry woods, but they are now rare. Martins also were
flying about our houses, and nearly every householder had a martin
box under the eaves of his dwelling, or on a staff standing in his
yard. The English sparrow stole their nests, and they fled like the
aborigines before the English immigrant.
The fish are the same as those described by Wood and Josselyn,
writers in Pilgrim days, some, however having disappeared for a time
and returned. I remember being at Holmes Hole during the Civil War,
and being told that the weak fish or squeteague had returned after an
absence of twenty-five years. In Josselyn’s New England’s rareties a
fish called Gurnard is spoken of, and is also mentioned in a poem by
Steendamn, a Dutchman, written, perhaps, about 1640 or 1650, in the
following lines, descriptive of fish in New York waters:
“The bream and sturgeon, drum fish and gurnard
The sea-bass which a prince would not discard;
The cod and salmon cooked with due regard
Most palatable.”
I am anxious to know what fish under its American name the gurnard
is. The Gurnet, at the entrance of Plymouth harbor, was named after a
headland in the English Channel, which in shape resembled the Gurnet,
a fish in English waters. On the coast of Wales there is another
headland named Gurnard, after the fish gurnard, the French name of
the fish called in English, gurnet. The gurnard has lost its French
name with us, and I was not aware until I saw the name in Wood and
Josselyn, that the gurnet fish was found in our waters under the name
of gurnard.
There was a piece of household furniture in my youth which I believe
has gone out of use. The trundle bed was introduced by the Dutch, by
whom it was called “een slaapbauck op rollen.” The bedsteads were
universally four posted and high enough from the floor to permit
the trundle bed to be kept under it, and to be rolled out at night
when the younger children were sent to bed. When the baby grew to
be too large for the cradle, or was deposed by a new comer, it was
promoted to the trundle bed, and when a newer comer appeared the
trundle bed held two until the bedstead, with its chintz curtains,
became the court of last resort. In old Colonial days the bedsteads
were made of sassafras wood, which was believed to be an effectual
protection against vermin. For hundreds of years the curative
properties of sassafras were highly esteemed by the Indians, and when
Champlain first sailed up the St. Lawrence he carried back to France
large quantities of it to be used especially as a cure for venereal
diseases. Within my day sassafras poles have been used as roosts in
hen houses as a protection against hen lice.
The treatment of whiskers has changed almost as often as each
generation came on the stage. The use of the razor is as old as the
history of man. In the book of Isaiah it is written in the twentieth
verse of the seventh chapter, “In the same day shall the Lord shave
with a razor.” Ezekiel, in the first verse of chapter five says,
“Take thee a sharp knife, take thee a barber’s razor and cause it to
pass upon thy head and upon thy beard.” Pliny states that barbers
were common in his time, though only a short time before beards were
allowed to grow. He also speaks of spider webs, applied with oil and
vinegar to cuts received in barber shops, and also speaks of hones
and whetstones for sharpening razors. In the time of Adrian beards
were again allowed to grow, and so the changes and fashions went on.
In the time of Queen Elizabeth the wearing of beards was controlled
by law, and it was ordered that no fellow of Lincoln’s Inn should
wear a beard of more than two weeks’ growth. The barber’s brush was
introduced in modern times. A writer named Stubb, in a work entitled
“Anatomy of Abuses,” published about 1550, in speaking of barbers,
wrote, “When they came to washing, oh, how gingerly they behave
themselves therein. For then shall your mouths be bossed with the
lather or some that runneth off the balls, your eyes closed must be
anointed therewith also.” In the very beginning of the last century a
poetical wag wrote the following lines showing that at that time the
face was clean shaved by barbers.
“Strap that razor so keen! strap that razor again!
And Smallpiece will shave em, if he can come at em;
From his stool clad in aprons, he springs up amain
Like a barber refreshed by the smell of pomatum.
From the place where he lay,
He leaps in array
To lather and shave in the face of the day,
He has sworn from pollution our faces to clean
Our cheeks, necks and upper lips, whiskers and chin.”
In 1829 a public meeting was held in New York against whiskers,
and about the same time there was a movement in Plymouth against
them. Barbers and surgeons were incorporated as one company in the
fifteenth century, and were called barber surgeons. Henry the Eighth
dissolved the union and gave a new charter in 1540, in which it was
provided “That no person using any shaving or barbery in London,
shall occupy any surgery, letting of blood or other matter, excepting
only the drawing of teeth.” Under the law barbers and surgeons were
each to use a pole, that of the barber’s, blue and white striped, and
that of the surgeon’s, the same, with the addition of a galipot and a
red rag. As near as I can learn the use of a pole began as early as
the 13th century, when “a staff bound by a riband was held by persons
being bled, and the pole was intended to denote the practice of blood
letting.” The staff was about three feet long, with a ball on the
top and a fillet or tape attached, which when not in use was wound
around it. So that the present barber’s pole represents a part of the
barber’s business, that of blood letting, which long since passed to
the prerogative of the surgeon.
During my youth beards were unknown among Americans, and until 1852
I do not think that a person of any nationality had in my time ever
worn a moustache in Plymouth. In the summer of 1854, while occupying
for a time the house now occupied by Col. Wm. P. Stoddard, I was
confined to the house by illness about three weeks, and during that
time permitted my moustache to grow, intending to shave it off before
going into the street. When I had recovered sufficiently to go out
I took an airing in the carriage of the late Ephraim Finney, having
failed to carry out my intention, and my appendage was so roundly
condemned by all my friends that I permitted it to grow, and I have
never parted with it since. During the next summer a meeting of the
descendants of Elder Thomas Cushman, was held in Plymouth, and Rev.
Dr. Robert W. Cushman, the orator of the occasion was a guest with
his wife at my house. I heard of his saying after he returned home,
that he stayed with me while in Plymouth, and then adding—what a pity
that a man like Mr. Davis should wear a moustache. I doubt whether
there are many older moustaches in Massachusetts than mine.