Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast Part 15

A second parish was formed in York about 1730. Rev. Joseph Moody, the son of Samuel, was ordained its first pastor, in 1732. At the death of his wife he fell into a settled melancholy, and constantly appeared with his face covered with a handkerchief. From this circ.u.mstance he was called "Handkerchief Moody." He was possessed of wit, and some dreary anecdotes are related of him. Mr. Hawthorne has made the incident of the handkerchief the frame-work of one of his gloomiest tales. I know of no authority other than tradition to support the statement made in a note accompanying the tale, that "in early life he (Moody) had accidentally killed a beloved friend."[79]

It is only a short distance from the church to the old burying-ground, and I was soon busy among the inscriptions, though I did not find them as interesting as I had antic.i.p.ated. The place seemed wholly uncared for. The gra.s.s grew rank and tangled, making the examination difficult, and at every step I sank to the knee in some hollow. The yard is ridged with graves, and must have received the dust of many generations, "going back even to those who acknowledged the first James for their dread lord and sovereign." As usual, the older stones, when I had found them, were too much defaced to be deciphered, and I remarked that the slate grave-stone of Parson Moody preserved but few of its original lines.

Beside him lay the remains of his wife. The following is his own epitaph:

"Here lies the body of the REV'D SAMUEL MOODY, A.M.

The zealous, faithful, and successful pastor of the First Church of Christ in York.

Was born in Newbury, January 4th, 1675.

Graduated 1697. Came hither May 16th, Died here November 13th, 1747.

For his farther character read the 2d Corinthians, 3d chapter and first six verses."

In the corner of the ground next the main street is the monumental tablet of Hon. David Sewall. A plain slab of slate at his side marks the resting-place of his wife. On this are enumerated some of the public offices held by her husband, and the two monuments might furnish the reader with materials for a biography.

Mr. Adams, in his "Diary," notes meeting his "old friend and cla.s.smate"

at York, when he was going the circuit in 1770. Sewall had just returned from a party of pleasure at Agamenticus, and the talk was of erecting a beacon upon it. At this time he was looked upon as a Tory, but became a zealous Whig before hostilities with the mother country began.

In 1640, says Lechford, nothing was read nor any funeral sermon made at a burial, but at the tolling of the bell all the neighborhood came together, and after bearing the dead solemnly to the grave, stood by until it was closed. The ministers were commonly, but not always, present. In these few and simple rites our fathers testified

"The emptiness of human pride, The nothingness of man."

[Ill.u.s.tration: JAIL AT OLD YORK.]

On a rising ground opposite the town-house is the old jail of York. I have deemed it worthy a pa.s.sing notice. It is a quaint old structure, and has held many culprits in former times, when York was the seat of justice for the county, though it would not keep your modern burglar an hour. It is perched, like a bird of ill omen, on a rocky ledge, where all might see it in pa.s.sing over the high-road. Thus, in the early day, the traveler on entering the county town encountered, first, the stocks and whipping-post; continuing his route, he in due time came to the gallows, at the town's end. The exterior of the jail is not especially repulsive, now that it is no longer a prison; but the inside is a relic of barbarism--just such a place as I have often imagined the miserable witchcraft prisoners might have been confined in. The back wall is of stone. The doors are six inches of solid oak, studded with heavy nails; the gratings secured with the blades of mill saws, having the jagged teeth upward; the sills, locks, and bolts are ponderous, and unlike any thing the present century has produced.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PILLORY.]

The dungeons, of which there are two, admitted no ray of light except when the doors were opened; and these doors were of two thicknesses of oaken planks banded between with plates of iron, and on the outside with rusty blades of mill saws, as were also the crevices through which the jailer pa.s.sed bread and water to the wretched criminals. The gloom and squalor of these _cachots_ oppressed the spirits of even the casual visitor, free to come and go at pleasure; what must it, then, have been to the wretches condemned to inhabit them? Above these dungeons were two or three cells, secured by precautions similar to those below; while other apartments were reserved for the jailer's use. The house was inhabited, and children were playing about the floor. I fancied their merry laughter issuing from solitary dungeons where nothing but groans and imprecations had once been heard. Perchance there have been Hester Prynnes and Ca.s.sandra Southwicks immured within these walls.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STOCKS.]

As I never feel quite at home within a prison, I made haste to get into the open air again. I noticed, what is common in the country, that an underpinning of boards had been placed around the foundation at the distance of a foot, the s.p.a.ce within being filled with earth. "That,"

said a whimsical fellow, "is to keep the coa.r.s.est of the cold out."

They have a jail at Alfred hardly more secure than the old. I was told of a prisoner who coolly informed the jailer one morning that if he did not supply him with better victuals he would not stay another day. He was as good as his word, making his escape soon after. Wagner, the Isles of Shoals murderer, also broke jail at Alfred, but was recaptured.

I should have liked to devote a few moments to the old court-house, its eminent and distinguished judges and barristers of the provincial courts, not forgetting its crier and constables. I should, I repeat, like to open the court, and marshal the jurors, witnesses, and even the idlers to their places in the king's name. I should like to hear some of those now antiquated, but then oft-quoted, sc.r.a.ps of law from the statutes of Richard II. or Sixth Edward. But it is all past. Bag-wigs, black gowns, and silver buckles are no more seen, except in family portraits of the time, and the learned counsel of to-day no more address each other as "Brother A----" or "B----." There do remain, however, in front of the old court-house four beautifully spreading elms, planted by David Sewall in 1773. To look at them now, it is not easy to fancy they could be grasped with the hand when the battle of Lexington was fought.

I pa.s.sed on by the old tavern-stand where Woodbridge, in 1770, swung his sign of "Billy Pitt," and underneath, the words "Entertainment for the Sons of Liberty"--a hint to Tories to take their custom elsewhere. I should have enjoyed a pipe with that landlord, as John Adams says he did.

In Old York they have a precinct known as Scotland, said to have been first settled by some of the prisoners of Cromwell's victory at Dunbar, and shipped over seas to be sold as apprentices for a term of years. I was bound thither to see the garrison houses that had withstood the onset of the Indians in King William's war.

It is four miles from the village to Scotland parish, the road pa.s.sing through broad acres of cleared land or ancient orchards, with now and then a by-way of green turf leading to a farm-house on the river, or a gleam of the stream itself winding through the meadows as you mount the rocky hills in your route.

Cider Hill is a cla.s.sic locality, which the traveler must pa.s.s through.

It is well named, I should say, the trees, though old, being laden with apples, fit only for the cider-press. I was struck with the age of the orchards, and indeed with the evidences on all sides of the long occupancy of the land. In going up and down the traveled roads of York the impression is everywhere gained of an old settled country.

By the side of the road is the withered trunk of an ancient tree, said to have been brought from England in a tub more than two hundred years ago. Nothing remains but the hollow sh.e.l.l, which still puts forth a few green shoots. Next to the rocks, it is the oldest object on the road. At a little distance it has sent up an offshoot, now a tree bearing fruit, and has thus risen again, as it were, from its own ashes. This tree deserves to be remembered along with the Stuyvesant and Endicott pear-trees. There is, or was another apple-tree of equal age with this in Bristol.

"You have a good many apples this year," I said to a farmer.

"Oh, a marster sight on 'em, sir, marster sight; but they don't fetch nothing."

"Is the cool summer injuring your corn?" I pursued.

"Snouted it, sir; snouted it."

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD GARRISON-HOUSE.]

The Junkins's garrison is the first reached. It is on the brow of a high hill overlooking the river meadows, where, if good watch were kept, a foe could hardly have approached unseen. It can not survive much longer.

It is dilapidated inside and out to a degree that every blast searches it through and through. The doors stood ajar; the floors were littered with corn-fodder, and a hen was brooding in a corner of the best room.

Having served as dwelling and castle, it embodies the economy of the one with the security of the other. The chimney is of itself a tower; the floor timbers of the upper story project on all sides, so as to allow it to overhang the lower. This was a type of building imported from England by the early settlers, common enough in their day, and of which specimens are still extant in such of our older towns as Boston, Salem, and Marblehead. Its form admitted, however, of a good defense. The walls are of hewn timber about six inches thick, and bullet-proof. On the north-east, and where the timbers were ten inches thick, they have rotted away under their long exposure to the weather. I observed a loop-hole or two that had not been closed up, and that the roof frame was of oak, with the bark adhering to it.[80]

In one room was an old hand-loom; in another a spinning-wheel lay overturned; and in the fire-place the iron crane, blackened with soot, was still fixed as it might have been when the garrison was beset in '92. Between the house and the road is the Junkins's family burying-ground. The house attracts many curious visitors, though it lacks its ancient warlike accessories, its lookouts, palisades, and flankarts.

A few rods farther on, in descending the hill, is the M'Intire garrison.

It is on the opposite side of the Berwick road from the house through which I have just hurried the reader; and, except that a newer addition has been joined to the garrison part, does not materially differ from it. Mr. M'Intire, now the owner of both houses, showed me an opening in the floor of the projection through which, according to the family tradition, boiling water was poured upon the heads of any who might try to force an entrance.

It has been supposed that these two garrisons were erected as early as 1640 or 1650. As no motive existed for building such houses at that time, the tradition is not ent.i.tled to credit. Few of the Indians were possessed of fire-arms, as the sale to them was strictly prohibited in the English colonies. The digging up of the hatchet by the eastern Indians, in 1676, during Philip's war, probably first led to the building of fortified houses in all the sea-coast towns. During the attack of 1692, the four garrisons in York saved the lives of those they sheltered, while fifty of the defenseless inhabitants were killed outright, and one hundred and fifty were led prisoners to Canada.

It is not my purpose to pursue farther the history of ancient Agamenticus. The state of the settlement five years after its destruction by the Indians appears in a memorial to the French minister, prepared in order to show the feasibility of a thorough wiping out of the English settlements from Boston to Pemaquid:

"From Wells Bay to York is a distance of five leagues. There is a fort within a river. All the houses having been destroyed five years ago by the Indians, the English have re-a.s.sembled at this place, in order to cultivate their lands. The fort is worthless, and may have a garrison of forty men."

As a memorial of the dark days when settler fought with savage, the Junkins's garrison-house appeals for protection in its decrepit old age.

Its frame is still strong. A few boards and a kindly hand should not be wanting to stay its ruin. I left it as for nearly two hundred years it has stood,

"On its windy site uplifting gabled roof and palisade, And rough walls of unhewn timber with the moonlight overlaid."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

FOOTNOTES:

[68] "Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Collections," 1792, vol. i.

[69] An Irishman, Darby Field by name.

[70] Purchas, vol. iv., 1647.

[71] In England there is a c.o.c.kle called the purple, from the coloring matter it contains, believed to be one of the sources from which the celebrated Tyrian dye was obtained. The discovery is attributed in mythical story to a dog. The Tyrian Hercules was one day walking with his sweetheart by the sh.o.r.e, followed by her lap-dog, when the animal seized a sh.e.l.l just cast upon the beach. Its lips were stained with the beautiful purple flowing from the sh.e.l.l, and its mistress, charmed with the color, demanded a dress dyed with it of her lover.

[72] Situated on Stage Neck, a rocky peninsula connected with the main sh.o.r.e by a narrow isthmus, on which is a beach. There was formerly a fort on the north-east point of the Neck.

[73] Sir F. Gorges's own relation.

[74] About 1647 the settlements at Agamenticus were made a town by the name of York, probably from English York.

[75] Confederation of the colonies for mutual protection.

[76] Elizabeth died while Martin Pring was preparing to sail for America; and Ess.e.x and Raleigh both went to the block.