OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS
BY WINTHROP PACKARD
Author of "White Mountain Trails," "Literary Pilgrimages of a
Naturalist," etc.
ILLUSTRATED
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
[Frontispiece: The Mayflower at Plymouth]
Copyright, 1920,
BY WINTHROP PACKARD
PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO., BOSTON
FOREWORD
The author wishes to express his thanks to the editors of the
Boston Evening Transcript and the Atlantic Monthly for permission
to reprint in this volume matter originally contributed to the
columns of that paper and magazine; and to A. S. Burbank of
Plymouth, I. Chester Horton, and Howard S. Adams for permission to
reproduce various illustrations.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS
II PLYMOUTH MAYFLOWERS
III UNBUILDING A BUILDING
IV FOREFATHERS' DAY
V THE SINGING PINES
VI NANTUCKET IN APRIL
VII FOOTING IT ACROSS THE CAPE
VIII WILD APPLE TREES
IX MIDSUMMER MOONLIGHT
X TURTLE-HEAD AND JEWEL-WEED
XI THE WAY OF A WOODCHUCK
XII ALONG THE SALT MARSHES
XIII FISHING "DOWN OUTSIDE"
XIV VOICES OF THE BROOKSIDE
XV GHOSTS OF THE NORTHEASTER
XVI JOTHAM STORIES
XVII GOOD-BYE TO SUMMER
XVIII MYSTICAL PASTURES
XIX WHITE PINE GROVES
XX THE PASTURE IN NOVEMBER
XXI RED CEDAR LORE
XXII AUNT SUE'S SNOWBANK
XXIII SPORTS OF THE WINTER WOODS
XXIV COASTING ON PONKAPOAG
XXV PICKEREL FISHING
XXVI YULE FIRES
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE MAYFLOWER AT PLYMOUTH
THE FIRST PILGRIM TRAIL
PLYMOUTH AS THE PILGRIMS MADE IT
LEYDEN STREET TO-DAY FROM BURIAL HILL
BIRDS OF THE PLYMOUTH WOODS, WISE AND OTHERWISE
BILLINGTON PATH ALONG THE BORDER OF "BILLINGTON SEA"
THE STERN AND ROCK-BOUND COAST WHICH GREETED THE PILGRIMS
BAYBERRY AND PITCH PINE ALONG A NANTUCKET TRAIL
A NANTUCKET LANE
ALONG A BYWAY OF THE CAPE
DUSTY MILLER BLOSSOMING AMONG THE CAPE DUNES
THE SUN SIFTING AND WINNOWING HIS GOLD FOR SUNSET
SUNRISE OVER THE POND
ROUNDING THE BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET WITHIN CALL OF THE OLD LISBON BELL
CAPTAIN'S HILL FROM MARSH MARGIN
ALONG THE SALT MARSHES
OUTWARD BOUND IN PLYMOUTH HARBOR
GEESE ON THE SAND SPIT AT PLYMOUTH
WILD GEESE IN FLIGHT OVER THE POND
THE FOX THAT SLIPS ALONG THE WINDING PATHS AT DAWN
A CAPE COD CEDAR CENTURIES OLD
THE PINES IN WINTER
DEER IN THE WINTER WOODS
PICKEREL FROM AN OLD COLONY POND
CHAPTER I
OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS
"The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed."
So sang Felicia D. Hemans in the early years of the last century
and she has been much derided by the thoughtless and irreverent
who have said that the landing of the Pilgrims was not on a stern
and rock-bound coast. Such scoffers evidently never sailed in by
White Horse beach and "Hither Manomet" when a winter northeaster
was shouldering the deep sea tides up against the cliff and a
surly gale snatched the foam from high-crested waves and sent it
singing and stinging inland. Could they have done this it would
have been easy to understand that the coast here is stern and
rock-bound in very truth. The rocks are not those of solid granite
ledges, continuous portions of the great earth's lithosphere of
which the coast is built farther north, at Scituate, Nahant,
Rockport and farther on; but it is rock-bound with massed granite
boulders, glacier rounded, water-worn, but inexpressibly stern.
All Plymouth is made up of the results of pilgrimage. How many
scores of fathoms deep the real Plymouth shore lies I do not know.
It is down there somewhere where it cooled into bathylithic crust
back in the gray dawn of time when the earth was made. There it is
part of the same ledge of which Scituate and Cohasset are built.
All above that is terminal moraine, rock detritus piled upon rock
foundation by the glacier. Plymouth Rock itself thus came joy
riding from some ledge up Boston way, alighting from this first
and greatest New England Transportation System only a few hundred
thousand years before Mary Chilton arrived to set foot upon it.
Tide and tempest grind pebbles to shifting sand and give and take
away beach and bar yearly, but they do not move the boulders very
fast. Manomet shore and even Plymouth beach are rock-bound with
these, large and small, today as they were when the Pilgrims
fought their desperate, sea-beset way by them through the dusk of
a winter northeaster and froze in safety under the lee of Clark's
Island.
He who would see Plymouth and the Pilgrim land about it as the
Pilgrims saw it may do so. Nature holds grimly onto her own and
sedulously heals the scars that man makes. Beat to windward in the
December twilight following that first trail of the Pilgrim
pinnace, listen to the sullen boom of the breakers on the cliff,
hear the growl of the surf-mauled pebbles on Plymouth beach, feel
the sting of the freezing spray and the bitter grip of the north
wind and you shall find this first Pilgrim trail the same today as
it was three hundred years ago.
Plymouth is a manufacturing city, a residence town, a resort and a
thriving business centre all in one. Except in its carefully
preserved shrines you shall find little suggestion of the Pilgrims
themselves, but you have only to step out of town to find their
very land all about you, traces of their occupancy, the very marks
of their feet, worn in the earth itself. A trail cuts easily into
the forest mould. Once well worn there centuries fail to remove
it. The paths the Pilgrims trod radiate from Plymouth to a score
of places far and near. They tramped to Sandwich and the canal
region, to Middleboro, Bridgewater and Duxbury as we know them
now, to Boston; sooner or later to all the world. Some of the
trails they trod may be forgotten, some of them are main-travelled
highways, others remain narrow footpath ways through a country
beautiful and often as unsophisticated as it was when the feet of
the first Pilgrims pressed them. Therein lies for all the world
the chief charm of the Old Colony region. Along the old Pilgrim
trails you may step from modern culture and its acme of
civilization through the pasture lands of the Pilgrims into
glimpses of the forest primeval. The Pilgrims' boulders, their
kettle-hole ponds, mossy swamps and ferny hillsides, here and
there their very forest trees, await you still. For Indian and
panther you need not look; wolf or bear you will hardly see; the
wild turkeys are gone; otherwise the wild life of the forest
remains.
The first Pilgrim land trail is today Leyden street, leading from
the water's edge to their fort on Burial Hill. You may follow it,
though the marks of Pilgrim feet are buried beneath city pavement,
save perhaps on the crest of the hill itself, and though bluebird
and robin flutter shyly to its upper end in spring as did their
pilgrim fathers before them, the arbutus, from earliest days to
this the Plymouth flower, no longer grows on its margin. He who
has not longed to pick a mayflower in Plymouth on Mayday is not a
New Englander. That is perhaps why the arbutus no longer grows
along byways of the old town as once it did. Instead you must seek
the Pilgrim paths out of town to find it.
One of these leads down along shore, over Manomet and on through
Plymouth woods toward the old trysting place with the Dutch
traders. The men of New Amsterdam, journeying in boats along Long
Island Sound and up Buzzards Bay met the Plymouth men yearly and
held a most decorous carnival of barter. Tradition has it that the
Plymouth men made the trip by sea to the nearest point on the Bay
shore. I do not know if the meeting place is known, but I know a
moss-grown and gnarled red cedar on the margin of Buttermilk Bay,
as we now call it, which I am sure was growing there when the
first swapping of commodities took place and in the shade of whose
branches the grave and sturdy traders may have sat.
Here and there in Pilgrim land you find a tree like that, one that
by some chance the axe of the woodman has spared as one generation
of wood cutters followed another, that still stands where the seed
fell, no man knows how many centuries ago. We have trees in
eastern Massachusetts to whom a thousand years is but as yesterday
when it is passed, many on which the centuries have rested
lightly. I think this Onset cedar one of these.
The road that leads from Plymouth to it is vexed daily by
innumerable wheels; of a summer holiday the wayside watcher may
count the motors by the thousand; yet you have but to step a rod
or two off its tarred, tire-beaten surface to find wild woodland
as primitive as it was three hundred years ago. The spring seeking
motorist finds his first mayflowers there as the grade leads up
Manomet heights and may expect them by the roadside anywhere,
after that. The old trail to Sandwich saunters along here, but
those who built for modern traffic took little heed of old-time
footpath ways. They gouged the hills, they filled the hollows and
drew their long black scar behind for mile after mile.
Like the deer and the wild fowl the old trails care little for
this. They wander on their own gentle, untrammelled way, hither
and yon, here beset by heavy forest growth, there a tangle of
greenbrier and scrub oaks, losing you often, picking you up again
when you least expect it, but always leading you off the humdrum
highway of today into the gentle wildernesses of old time romance.
You find them margined with marks of the pioneer. It may be just a
hollow which was once his tiny cellar-hole or a rectangular mound
where the logs of his cabin tumbled into the mould, perhaps a
moss-grown, weather-beaten house itself with its barberry bush or
its lilac still holding firmly where the pioneer householder set
it. These old trails of the Plymouth woods may be just of one
family's making, leading from house to pasture and woodlot, or
they may be bits of an old-time footpath way first worked out by
the Indians themselves no one knows how many centuries ago. Find
me an eskar in Plymouth county, a "hogback ridge" as our forbears
were wont to call it, and the chances are fair that along its
narrow summit edge I'll show you an Indian trail. Sometimes the
Pilgrim paths adopted these and later made them roadways.
As you go southward in this region you find traces of an ancient
type of fencing that I have not seen elsewhere. It may have been a
hedgemaker's trick, brought from the old country. The Cape
pioneers slashed young white oaks growing along the road margin,
bent them, say two feet above the ground, without severing, and
laid them level, the tops bound tight with withes to the next
trunk. Thus they had a fence that would restrain cattle and that
grew stouter as the years went by. You find these trees growing
thus today, their trunks a foot or two in diameter, bending at
right angles just above ground and stretching horizontally, while
what were once limbs now grow trunks from the grotesque butt. A
remnant of fence like this along an almost obliterated trail in an
ancient wood gives a hobgoblin character to the place.
The heath family, all the way from clethra which begins it to
cranberry which ends it, dwells in beauty and diversity all about
in the Plymouth woods, making them fragrant the year round. Some
of them help feed the world, notably the cranberries and the
huckleberries of a score of varieties from the pale, inch high,
earliest sweet blueberries growing on the dry hillsides to the
giants of the deep swamp, hanging out of reach above your head
sometimes and as big as a thumb end. These provide manna for all
who will gather it, from late June till early September, when the
checkerberries ripen, to hang on all winter. Others make the world
better for their beauty and fragrance and of these the ground
laurel, the trailing arbutus, the mayflower, is best known and
loved.
[Illustration: The First Pilgrim Trail]
It is easy to fancy some sombre Pilgrim, weary with the woes of
that first winter, his heart hungry for "the may" of English
hedgerows, stepping forth some raw April morning which as yet
showed no sign of opening spring buds, stopping as his feet
rustled in brown oak leaves up Town Brook way, puzzled by the
endearing, enticing fragrance on the wings of the raw wind. I
always think of him as stopping for a moment to dream of home,
looking about in a discouraged way for hawthorn which he knows is
not there, then spying the little cluster of evergreen leaves with
their pink and white blossoms nestling among the oak leaves at his
very feet and kneeling to pluck and sniff them in some thing like
adoration. It may not have been that way at all, but someone found
that first mayflower and loved and named it.
The world at large, hurtling through Plymouth in its high-powered
motor cars, stops along the road over Manomet and finds its
arbutus there each May. I like to look for mine along the path
that Billington took to his "sea," a way that leads out of Leyden
street and up along Town Brook. I think the second oldest of the
Plymouth land trails lies up that way. If the first was to and
from the fort the second surely lay up along the brook, and I have
an idea the Indians had preceded them in the making of this.
A great terminal moraine once blocked off Billington sea from the
ocean, but Town Brook released it. Long before the Pilgrims came
it had cut its valley through the great wall of gravel and
occupied it in peace till latter day highways and factories came
to vex it. In spite of these, unhampered bits of the original
brook show in Plymouth itself and you are not far out of town
before you see more of it.
It flows out of the "sea" unhindered now save by pickerel weed and
sagittaria, rush and meadow grasses, and in woodsy places by brook
alder, clethra, huckleberry and spice-bush that lean into it as
they wrestle with greenbrier and clematis. The mayflower snuggles
into the leaves along its drier upper margins, here and there, and
is to be found on the borders of the "sea" more plentifully.
Plymouth has done well in making of this region a park,
beautifying it mainly by letting it alone, merely cutting new
Pilgrim trails through it. Billington's path along the pond shore
is thus made easy for your feet and is marked with his name that
you may not miss it. But if you would see the real Billington
path, made for him by generations of Indians before his day but
the one that I believe he trod, you will look nearer the water's
edge. There, tangled amidst undergrowth now, buried deep in brown
autumn leaves, it is yet visible enough, cut into the soft sand of
the pond bank. In places it is cut deep. In places it is all but
obliterated or vanishes altogether for a little way, perhaps
divides into two or three as the local needs of moccasined
travellers called for, but all along the pond margin it goes. This
is an old Plymouth trail indeed, linking the Plymouth of today
with that of the time of the Pilgrims, and long before. There are
many such that lead out of Plymouth, glimpsing for us the world of
three hundred years ago mirrored in the eyes, the ideas, the
ideals of today. Let us search them out.
[Illustration: Plymouth as the Pilgrims made it]