There were bean hole beans, kids games, hot dogs and hamburgers from the Boy Scouts and a square dance! All held at the Old Meeting House, built in 1804. This used to be the center of town—but now it’s not. So it’s a few miles of riding on dirt roads, pull to the side to let oncoming traffic pass, watch out for the geese. To prepare to tell stories, I read the most excellent book, A Bicentennial History of Bridgewater NH 1788-1988 by Thomas Curren. It was great fun and a challenge to weave stories of historic Bridgewater with stories I’ve collected in other towns—some true, some true-ish, some, well, some make us smile whatever their origins.
Here are some of the stories I told the folks of Bridgewater on Saturday.
This photo is of the inside the Bridgewater Town House—while some folks think the ceiling should be replaced, others like the look of the old beams.
From Thomas Curren’s book: Huge hemlocks were chopped down and hewn into massive beams for sills, plates, and second-floor beams. . . . This was the occasion for a great gathering of persons from throughout the foothills of the White Mountains. . . . “Among the number were those who erected booths for the sale of spiritous liquors. The selectmen were troubled at this, and decided it would be a disgrace for men to be obliged to buy liquors on such an occasion, and they therefore purchased all the liquors on the ground and offered them to the crowd gratis. Thus was our beloved Town House born and duly baptized on that good day.”
When I recited this story, one of the listeners, called out: “Rum.” I guess the spiritous liquors were rum. No rum was served gratis or otherwise on this Old Home Day. Though perhaps the organizers will take it under consideration for future events, being historically accurate—the drinking of the rum—and all.
Which reminded me of the story out of Unity—why the town house floor was straight and even in places, crooked and uneven in others. The selectman told me the floor was installed by volunteers and it was a five kegger. The more the volunteers kegged, the crookeder the floor got. Rum again? Or perhaps hard cider.
From Thomas Curren’s book: There was, during these years, an expanding amount of trade and commerce among the farmers in town, including the common practice of taking mortgages on crops, livestock or other items in exchange for loans of cash. Including a mortgage from Jacob Huckins to A.P. Hoit for $18.81 securing a note on “one four-year-old red cow . . . all my potatoes growing near the house where I now live and one ton of hay in the shed chamber.”
Which reminded me of the story of Augustus “Gus” Cheney of Hebron, who took a mortgage out on a heifer for $10 from his neighbor Joel Gray, who lived up on the hill. One day, old Joel came down by Gus’s farm, said “Gus, you owe me $10 on that mortgage on that white-faced heifer. Gus said: “Ha, I done fooled you. I et that heifer.”
Undeterred, Joel reached his big dairy farmer hand into his front overall pocked and pulled out a folded paper: ”Ha!,” he said, “but you didn’t et the mortgage.”
And finally, a story that reminded me of the time the ceiling fell in the back bedroom of my inlaw’s house on the Bog Road in West Concord. The Bridgewater story goes like this:
Depression years: The man and woman were not enterprising sorts and had let their old place run down for some time with the disrepair getting quite a ways along. One day the husband was reading in the kitchen as his wife prepared a meal. A loud crash was heard to come from an adjoining room. The wife investigated.
“What was that?” her husband inquired.
“Oh dear,” she said, “that was the piano, it just fell into the basement.”
“The whole floor’s rotten; we’d better be moving out,” concluded her husband, and so they did. In a short while the roof joined the piano in the cellar hole, where fifty yeas later they nourish a variety of forest growth, including a good-sized birch tree.
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