William T. Davis

“ Born and bred on Clark’s Island at the entrance of Plymouth harbor about four miles from town, and eighty acres in extent, he there spent his life a sailor and fisherman when occasion demanded, always a farmer familiar with the secrets which nature is ready to disclose to her lovers, a poet of no mean acquirements, and above all a student of the events of the world, a philosopher who acted his philosophy without preaching it, and who as much deserves the title of sage as some who in a broader field won a more notorious name. ”

“ Living as I did on Cole’s Hill through my youth, I have a distinct recollection of Water street and its business as far back as 1832. During the summer I spent much of my time out of school hours sculling a boat, or climbing vessels’ rigging. At those times my special playmate was Winslow Whiting, who during the last years of his seafaring life commanded the bark Volant, and when the brig Hannah was in her berth on the north side of Hedge’s wharf we laughed at the boys crawling through the lubber hole, while we proudly mounted the futtock shrouds. ”

“ Surely every true son of New England should hold the old church of Southwark, the parent of Congregationalism in England, only less dear to his heart than the old Plymouth church, the child of the Pilgrim church at Scrooby. ”

“ I know no family with more marked physical traits than the family of which he and Mrs. Goddard and Lemuel Simmons were conspicuous members. I have noticed these traits in other families in Plymouth, not always the same, sometimes in figure, sometimes in walk, and again in voice, in mould of features, and in ways of doing things. They are such that neither time nor marriage can extinguish, and any close observer may have seen them in the Jackson, Kendall, Warren, Russell, Spooner and Simmons families, and in the Perkins family of Newfields street. ”

“ In 1835 a by-law was adopted by the town of Plymouth, which I believe has never been repealed, forbidding smoking in any street, lane, public square or wharf within the town. I do not remember to have seen in all my boyhood any person smoking about the streets, or at his work. No ship carpenter in his yard, no rigger on the mast, no blacksmith at the forge, no digger in the garden or street, ever held a pipe in his mouth, wasting the time of his employer, in cutting tobacco, and filling his pipe. ”

“ The new law, passed by a Puritan Commons, contributed in no small degree to swelling the flood of oppression, which was destined to sweep Separatism out of England. The Puritans could not tolerate any opposition to the old idea of ecclesiastical unity, and were willing to go as far as the farthest in suppressing it. They held that the National Church, though perhaps in some respects corrupt and unscripturally organized, contained within itself a true Church of Christ, and therefore they abhorred separation from its worship and communion as a sinful schism. ”

“ A ship is now rarely seen, brigs have disappeared altogether, topsail schooners from Nova Scotia occasionally visit Boston, and the old packet sloops have lost the rosewood and bird’s eye maple of their cabins, and been degraded to uses of which they seem to be ashamed. Now and then I read on the stern of a weather beaten coal barge the name of a ship I knew in her prime, which seems to me like a wing clipped eagle no longer able to soar, or a disembodied spirit suffering for sins done in the body. ”

“ To-day the death of Mary was demanded to protect a Protestant throne from the insidious attacks of Philip of Spain, and to-morrow Thomas Settle and Peter Wentworth were sent to prison to quench the spirit of Protestant liberty, which threatened the foundations of ecclesiastical power.
It is not necessary to describe in detail the oppression and persecution of the Puritans under Elizabeth. The great body of them, however, remained in the Church, simply protesting against its objectionable features, but tolerating them as long as they were prescribed by law. The result was a natural one. ”

“ Simmons was an energetic man, taking advantage of every opportunity, running perhaps at times some risk, and making a trip to Boston and back, while the vessels of his prudent rivals lay in their berths. I remember seeing him leave the wharf one afternoon at sunset with a full load of hollow ware from the Federal furnace, and finding her the next morning but one, when I looked out of my window at Cole’s Hill, lying in her berth with a full load of hemp for the Plymouth Cordage Company. ”

“ I went to Boston, and, knowing that it would be useless to apply at any bank, went to see Mr. Ebenezer Francis, living in Pemberton Square, who with Abbot Lawrence, Robert G. Shaw and Peter C. Brooks, were the only persons in Boston rated at a million, while now you can’t turn a corner without running against a millionaire. “No, Mr. Davis, I cannot loan the money to the county,” Mr. Francis said in answer to my application. “I am a poor man. I have one hundred thousand dollars lying in the old Boston bank, drawing no interest.” ”

“ In recalling that summer afternoon at East Boston, I have thought that the voices of the past, not the voice of this man or that, performing his part in the drama of life, but the voices of all good and great men who have lived and died need time and distance to be blended as a harmonious whole in the grand symphony of civilization. ”

“ Unlike France, where no man can cut down the forests on his own land without a government permit, we of the present generation in the United States are absolutely skinning the earth, as if future generations have no rights which we are bound to respect. If seventy years ago a law had been enacted requiring an acre of black walnut to be planted with so many trees to the acre, for every acre cut down, that wood would have continued in reasonably abundant supply. Unless some restraining laws be soon enacted to control the robbers of our forests, a lumber famine must sooner or later ensue. ”

“ If an X ray could penetrate the sub-surface of the Back Bay, it would disclose thousands of piles with a composite between, of old hats, bonnets, shoes, hoop skirts and tomato cans on which stand the domiciles of wealth and fashion. Perhaps, however, such a foundation is as genuine and real as that on which stands fashion itself. In my youth the South Bay, east of Washington street, was open to the harbor through Fort Point channel, only obstructed by the Dover street, and the old South Boston bridges. ”

“ Without gas or kerosene oil, and with wood for fuel, we could have still enjoyed life, though it be without present conveniences, comforts and luxury. Without railroads it is not too much to say that it would have been impossible to dispose of, and assimilate that vast immigration which during the last seventy years has sought a resting place in our land. It may also be said that the railroad system, which broke through the wall that separated the old Union from California, prevented the establishment of a new and distinct empire on the Pacific coast. ”

“ On the south side of Court square on the corner of School street, there lived until 1839 a worthy old man, who for some years was stone blind. He was Joseph Barnes, the great-grandfather of our townsman, bearing the same name. He carried, extended out in front of him, a staff about eight feet long, with which he tapped the sidewalk constantly, and directed his steps without any other guide or support. It was his privilege to live in days when bicycles, automobiles and trolley cars had not been invented to endanger the lives of even the far-seeing and wary. ”

“ There is something absurd about this so-called republican simplicity, which compels a representative of our government to appear at foreign courts in the garb of an American citizen, while he has his residence in one of the most lordly houses in London, and makes it the vogue for a bridegroom to appear at his wedding with nothing but the color of his skin to distinguish him from the colored waiter, while he sets up a livery and hunts through Herald’s college for a coat of arms to have painted on the door of his carriage. ”

“ An account of the chief incidents in his career I had from his own lips. He was a native of Maine, and came to Plymouth in 1845, and established himself in the practice of medicine. He was a man six feet in height and large in proportion, frank and honest in speech, hearty, but rough in manner, possessing great will and energy, and calculated in every way to win the confidence of the people. He was a bachelor, and at first had an office on Main street, in the Bartlett building, where Loring’s watchmaker’s shop now is. ”

“ Some such motive, we doubt not, moved one or two of our natural and experimental philosophers to get up the project of a railroad from Boston to Albany; a project which every one knows, who knows the simplest rules in arithmetic to be impracticable but at an expense a little less than the market value of the whole territory of Massachusetts, and which if practicable, every person of common sense knows would be as useless as a railroad from Boston to the moon. ”

“ The whaling and fishing industries were active and prosperous and Boston had not yet drawn away from Plymouth any considerable portion of its foreign trade. Molasses and sugar from the West India Islands, salt from Turks Island and Cadiz, and iron from Gothenberg, continued to come in, the last free of that burdensome duty, which has destroyed the iron industries of the old colony. I can hear today the rattling of the bars which Stephen Thomas and others carted through our streets to the various manufactories established in Plymouth, Carver, Wareham, Plympton and Kingston. ”

“ In a modest house a little beyond the North end grocery on the east side of the street there lived for many years one of the uncles of the town. Every town has its uncles, and wherever you find them they are sterling, upright men, who have a kindly and affectionate word for and from everybody. Peter Holmes was the man known only as Uncle Peter, a shipmaster in his early days who sailed for my grandfather, and whose letters written from foreign ports, which I have read, show him to have been skilful and trusted in his profession. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I remember him in the front east room on a chilly day sitting by a Franklin stove, and often in the garden, which he tended with loving and faithful care. There was a vein of humor in his composition, which, unlike that I have often seen repressed on the Sabbath by ministers of the olden time, was too much the overflow of a contented and joyful spirit to be concealed on a day to him the happiest of the week. As long as I can remember he always carried a cane, which had descended to him through James, his father, James, his grandfather, and Samuel, his great-grandfather ”

“ All the while the cost of lumber is increasing. Within seventy years black walnut, before unknown as a furniture wood, has been so nearly exhausted as to bring in the Boston market one hundred dollars a thousand. Our legislators in Washington in their fear of the lumber barons of Michigan and Maine, who have even sent their invading axes into the mountains of New Hampshire and the forests of the Adirondacks, refuse to bring about even the slight amelioration of present conditions, which by the abolition of a duty on lumber, might be afforded by giving us access to the forests of the Dominion. ”

“ 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. ”