Down East Latch Strings/Chapter 3

by Ernest Ingersoll

Chapter III.

The Nashua Valley.

Not unconcerned, Wachusett rears his head Above the field, so late from nature won,With patient brow reversed, as one who read New annals in the history of man.—Thoreau.

he first person we saw on the station platform, at Rochester, was our own Baily—light over coat across his arm, rose in his button-hole, every inch a New York broker, from his high white hat to his low white gaiters.

"Now give an account of yourself," Prue demanded, when the greetings were over and our confrère had seated himself beside us.

"Why, there isn’t much to tell. I left New York yesterday morning and spent the afternoon and night at Worcester, Mass., in visiting an old chum of mine in Wall Street who was settled down there."

"Tell us something about Worcester?"

"Well, Worcester's an interesting city, both for its antiquity and its modernity. It was settled, they told me, as long ago as 1669, and it was one of the hot-beds of political free-thinking before and throughout the Revolution. Now it has some 70,000 inhabitants, which makes it second only to Boston among Massachusetts towns. My friend drove me all over the place, and I thought it one of the finest towns I was ever in. The main street is a fine wide avenue two miles long, with the business blocks in its centre shading off into elegant residences: 'shading off' is a happy expression, too, since the elms and maples along the sidewalks are continuous. And the number of public institutions and schools pointed out to me is amazing—it’s a great town for education, and libraries, museums and that sort of thing. I don’t know when I've been more entertained than I was in the rooms of the Antiquarian Society. Worcester is a manufacturing town—makes all sorts of things. My friend thought it must be its central situation in relation to lines of transportation (half a dozen railroads converge there) which made it prosper so well. The wealth of its old families and energy of its new ones is a better reason—one which lies behind the other in my opinion. Anyhow, Worcester is one of the most prosperous and most agreeable towns in New England to spend a day in, and I should say it would be a fine place to live.

"This morning I took a Boston and Maine train on the Worcester, Nashua and Portland Division, for Rochester, via Nashua, and here I am."

"Gracious!" Prue cried, "how did you remember the way?"

"I wrote it down."

"That was wise of you—but tell us some more. What did you see along the road? That is an interesting country, isn't it?"

"Decidedly so. The railroad leads down the Nashua River valley, at first through a lot of manufacturing villages like West Boylston, Sterling Junction and Clinton. Sterling Junction they told me, is an important place in the eyes of the Methodist Church, which sustains an annual camp-meeting there. Close by is a more worldly, and, I fear, more popular, resort in the picnic grounds at Washacum lake. At Clinton, Madame, carpets,—Prussels and Wilton—and also wire netting for window screens, etc., are prominent articles of manufacture; then comes a string of lovely old villages, like Lancaster, Harvard, Groton and Pepperell. There was something to interest me all the way."

The valley of the Nashua was one of the earliest reclaimed by the Puritans; and its devious roads and ancient homesteads, surrounded by spacious meadows or sheltered under the verdant hills, are shaded by aged elms—sonic of extraordinary girth.

Mt. Wachusett is rather too far away to be counted as belonging to Lancaster (it and the village of Princeton may be reached from Oakdale) but it is conspicuous and beautiful from there, and for a long distance along the railway northward, presiding over wide-rolling uplands. "The roving eye still rests inevitably on her hills, and she still holds up the skirts of the sky on that side."

Since Thoreau went there, described the view from its bold summit, and wrote his poem, Wachusett has become one of the literary shrines. But the view itself is noteworthy as something quite different from "the sublimity and grandeur which belong to mountain scenery" in general—a fact due to the isolation and height (1,900 feet) above the plain. It is a picture of civilization and industry. "On every side," Thoreau writes, "the eye ranged over successive circles of towns rising one above another, like the terraces of a vineyard, till they were lost in the horizon."

The historical incidents of the region are those connected with savage warfare. The earliest explorers were Indian traders, and in 1657 the trade of "Nashnway river" was sold for £8. The region was thickly populated by red men, divided into many small bands, each under its own leader, but all, from the Merrimac to the Connecticut, acknowledging the general supremacy of Passaconaway, sachem of the Pennacook confederacy. This man owed his power not only to his exploits as a warrior, and his skill as a sorcerer, hut to his strong native sagacity. He died in 1670, at the reputed age of 120, and his name is preserved not only by the noble mountain north of Lake Winnipesaukee, but in many a tradition. Nasawock (Lancaster) was repeatedly attacked by King Phillip previous to that frightful February day in 1676 marked by Mrs. Rowlandson's capture.

"She herself wrote a most pathetic account of it, and of her captivity." Prue reminds us. "I remember how she speaks of it as 'the dolefullest day that mine eyes ever saw.' It must have been, poor thing."

But that was not all the "doleful" history of this vale. A few miles further north is Groton, where old Monoco's band destroyed everything except the blockhouses. "This same sachem boasted to the besieged that he was marching on Concord and Boston, to destroy those towns. Within a year he was indeed in Boston, but as a captive, led through the streets with a rope round his neck, and afterwards hung on the Common." Pepperell is a dear old fashioned town, distinguished as the home of the Prescotts, whose antiquated mansion-house is near the village. Here Win. Hickling Prescott, the father of the present owner, wrote many of his splendid histories. His father was a circuit judge; and his grandfather that hero of Bunker Hill—Col. Wm. Prescott, who led the Cambridge Minute-men.

These settlements, and Dunstable (now Nashua) at the mouth of the Nashua river, were on the extreme frontier at that time, and remained so through many years, always harassed by Indian raids, of which every town can tell its traditions, and give a hero’s name. No name, however, is so notorious as that of John Lovewell, of Dunstable, who, after the uprisings of 1724, raised a company of Indian fighters under an offer of the government to pay £10 for every scalp. Lovewell was a hunter and Indian scout, and the son of one of Cromwell's old Roundheads. His band were men of the same stamp and experience. They trailed the redskins to their retreats, around and beyond Winnipesaukee, and fought them in darkness and ambush, by surprise and strategy, after their own style; and they cleared away from the whole frontier the dread of the ferocious Pequawkets, who had been a menace by day and a terror by night to every farmer and fisherman along the Merrimac; but finally Lovewell lost his life in a fight near Fryeburg, Me., where Paugus, chief of the Pequawkets, was also killed.

With footsteps slow shall travellers go Where Lovewell's pond shines clear and brightAnd mark the place where those are laid Who fell in Lovewell's bloody fight.

Old men shall shake their heads and say, 'Sad was the hour and terrible,When Lovewell brave against Paugus went, With fifty men from Dunstable.'

As the men of the Nashua valley had defended their homes against the Indians so were they ready to defend them against the French, one company of the famous New Hampshire Rangers going into Queen Anne’s war from here. When the Revolution began, Dunstable names were common in the volunteers under Stark who hastened to Bunker Hill, or, later, followed Washington's lead; and here General Blanchard is buried. In 1800 the little settlement "Indian Head," at the mouth of the river, became Nashua Village, and began to flourish as a mercantile point in the boating on the river, for locks had just been built around the Pawtucket falls, where Lowell now stands, so that sloops and barges could come up. In 1823 a dam, canal and factory were erected, whereupon the manufacturing industry, which has made Nashua so prosperous, began, and twenty years later the town had railway connection with Boston.

The city now embraces about 16,000 inhabitants, and is of attractive appearance. The largest manufacturing concerns are the cotton mills, which employ between two and three thousand persons. Cards and glazed paper, locks, cotton-milling machines, edged tools and sundry fancy articles, besides an immense quantity of iron and steel, and 30,000 yards a year of ingrain carpets, form other sources of wealth to her citizens. Several railways concentrate here, and the Merrimac is handsomely bridged.

Nearly 50 miles remained to Baily between Nashua and Rochester, and he found himself with less notes in his big Russia note book of this half of the journey than of the earlier part, The first twenty-five miles traverse the level farming districts of Hudson and Windham—a region venerable with traditions of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who were the first to clear away its primeval forest. Not much of interest attaches to the region beyond, except in the towns of Epping and Lee (the former noted for its Methodist camp-meetings) whose history goes back 250 years and is filled with Indian warfare and Revolutionary incidents. Then some mountains and ponds in Nottingham and Barrington arouse curiosity, and Rochester is reached—a town of eight or ten thousand people, set on the hanks of the Cocheco river in the midst of the Norway plains, surrounded by a large agricultural region, and devoted to making blankets, bricks, boots and shoes. It is connected with Portland by two lines of railroad, one of which offers two routes. Thus you may go by the Boston and Maine to Dover, and its Western Division to Portland; or to Great Falls and onward by either Western or Eastern divisions; or by the Portland and Rochester R.R., which runs through the historically interesting villages of Springvale, Alfred and Buxton, (one of those towns granted to the victorious soldiers of King Phillip's war, who by their settlement there

formed a bulwark defending the neighboring coast-villages); Gorham (named after a hero of the fight at the Narragansett fort, in 1675, and settled by the veterans of that sore campaign); lumber and paper making Sacarappa; and finally Westbrook, a suburb of Portland. Fine views are caught from the train of the hills and ponds in the northward, lying on the outskirts of the White Mountains.

You must understand that while my book has made this side-trip the author and his friends were rolling swiftly on into the heaven of our expectation. Just beyond Rochester we entered the town of Farmington, a shoe-manufacturing village near the Blue hills, or Frost mountains, from the loftiest of which, we are told, the ocean, Monadnock and the White Mountains, are all visible.

"Do you remember?" I ask my companion, "the one great shoe-maker who belonged here half a century ago?"

"Oh, yes," says Baily. "Vice-president Henry Wilson; but it was after he had earned money enough to get some education, and had gone to Natick, Massachusetts, that he began to become famous."

A low pyramid—in shape,—but far taller than any hill we have yet seen, comes into view at intervals on the right, which we know to be Copple Crown; certain rugged heights fire our eager interest on the left, and presently we slow up at Alton Bay, on the southern extremity of Lake Winnipesaukee,—the "pleasant water in a high place" which ends the first stage of our vacation pilgrimage.