You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Or maybe a large outhouse, as one map indicates.
I keep wondering if the Pine Hill school, at the fringe of the city cemetery, was originally one of Dover Friends early schoolhouses.
The Meeting apparently had a second one in Maine.
But horse sheds were also common around Quaker meetinghouses.
Not that I’ve found any evidence of these now.
Or more accurately, the bastard son of a Frenchman in Haiti.
Yet, despite the iconic honor given his name, few have seen his legendary work in its full glory.
I’m speaking, of course, of John James Audubon, in the anglicized version of his name.
While I had viewed his work behind glass framing in art museums, nothing prepared me for my hands-on encounter with the four folio print volumes. That happened in Indiana University’s rare book Lilly Library when a librarian interrupted to ask if I would help her return two of the volumes to the cart so she could take them by elevator back to the stacks.
Yes, they really did need two people to move. As I’m seeing now, the books measured about 29½ inches by 39½, otherwise known as double elephant paper, the 435 prints being the same size as the original drawings.
We decided to take a peek and were both blown away. It was as if the birds had been pressed full-size onto the plate. You could actually see the veins in each feather. And that was, it turns out, a copy of the original. Oh, yes, and each species was presented full size, with some favored vegetation.
As for the color? Unbelievable. You have no idea how much is lost through any glass.
We both admitted it was too much for a single viewing.
Now, for ten more facts.
As a parent, you really try to keep your kids from a lot of painful encounters but they never listen to your advice, as far as you can tell, which seems to be futile no matter how hard you try, and then the next thing you hear is crying.
Maybe that’s a good thing, if from their experience they learn more than you knew.
There are several books that fall into that model. Had I read them before completing Quaker Dover, I might have overlooked some fresh insights. But now that my book’s out, I really appreciate what else I’m finding.
Donald R. Bryant’s History of the First Parish Church is one of them. The 160-page volume, first published in 1970 and enlarged in 2002, offers another side of my argument of the Quaker invasion in town, for one thing, while relating other parts of the early years with, well, perhaps more discretion. And, my, I do admire his resources and tenacity.
One of my favorite sections is the profile of John Williams that Bryant works into the narrative. Williams, a member of the parish, was, as he says “a visionary, a leader in bringing textile manufacturing to America,” and a cofounder of what became the big millworks in today’s downtown.
But he also became part of the faction of 26 male members who announced in 1828 they were leaving the church to join the Unitarian Society in establishing a new congregation. The split among the heirs of the Puritans into Unitarian or Trinitarian Congregational at the time paralleled a similar one among American Quakers into Orthodox and Hicksite. New England somehow remained Orthodox, as far as Friends went.
The plot within First Parish further thickens over the kind of minister it needed along with the construction of a new, and present, house of worship. What follows in the parish history is a turmoil that includes the changing economics of the town I haven’t yet found in the Quaker Meeting.
Bryant’s history then turns largely to the successive ministers rather than the congregation’s members and their influence in the community.
Still, I appreciate the comments by David Slater at the end of the book. He was First Parish pastor when I first came to Dover and quite engaging. He offered a checklist on how church life was changing that remains relevant, though nothing hit me more than this:
“Christianity is becoming more and more counter-cultural.”
That takes me back to the Quaker invasion into Dover, back in the mid-1600s.
As for the city’s other congregations? I’m anxious to hear more.
The popular image, shiver me timbers, comes straight out of Disney.
To set the record straight:
Well, Eastport’s annual pirate weekend festival’s coming up. We’re bracing for the invasion.
Dover’s public library has been quite proactive in developing an online presentation of the city’s historical profiles and images. I’ve found those resources to be very useful for fast checks when drafting these posts and related material, for certain.
Its dark-hued historical room upstairs is a treasure chest of local lore, as I discovered decades ago chancing upon Dover’s Quaker family records serialized in the fat volumes of the New Hampshire Genealogical Record, 1903-1909. They’ve since been keyboarded and made available online, if you Google, though I’m still relying on my photocopies.
In time, as a library cardholder, I even had online access to U.S. Census records from home in the wee hours. What a privilege!
If it weren’t for the Covid restrictions and my relocation to far eastern Maine, I’d like still be digging around on the top floor there. I certainly encourage others to do so.
The American Can Company factory, now a hulk out over the water, had a daily output of more than a half-million cans for sardines. It employed 300 people. It was at the end of the line for the railroad, too.
In the adjacent canneries, sardine-packing women had hands moving so fast in cold water you saw only a blur, according to a friend who was a teen at the time and couldn’t begin to keep pace when he worked there.
I still have no desire to eat a sardine, though. Consider that the statement is coming from someone who’s learned to appreciate anchovies in his old age.
The Salmon Festival always takes place over the Labor Day weekend.
In all of today’s media upheaval, many younger users are puzzled by the term AM radio, while automakers are even considering eliminating the bandwidth from new vehicles altogether.
When I was a teen, this would have been entirely inconceivable. AM was king, period.
Dominated by clear-channel 50,000-watt stations that covered half of the country at night – and many having staffs of several hundred – they ranged down to much smaller voices that aired only during daytime hours, and even those frequencies were highly coveted by investors or niche nerds.
In contrast, FM was more limited in range and quite fringe. Many of the stations simulcast the AM sister’s programming. Others specialized in classical or jazz or “elevator music” for medical offices and retail store backgrounds.
Flash forward to today, when FM is where the audiences are. Not just for music, either, though much of the classic rock was crafted around the sound of AM top-40 formats. The shift of talk radio to FM sealed the deal.
I’m still surprised when traveling to find how little is available on AM, at least in English. More surprised, actually, to hear of station licenses being laid down and going idle, even in rural areas like the one where I’m living.
Gee, we might even begin wondering about the era of radio drama and comedy. Those really were something.
What are you listening to today?
While Quakers were active in the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves, the practice wasn’t universally embraced within the Society of Friends. In fact, much of the illegal action across the North was undertaken by evangelical Protestants who even created the altar call at revivals to enlist fellow workers.
Yes, it’s one more story in the American experience that needs to be better known, in all of its gritty reality.
As I describe in Quaking Dover, the Cartland family farm in Lee is believed to have been a stop on one of those lines to freedom. While documentation of such participation is rare, escaped slaved turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass was a frequent visitor to the farm, and like also its small Quaker meetinghouse and school.
The bigger question would be how did the fugitives get that far and where did the route head from there? Not everyone along the way was sympathetic, after all. Newburyport, Massachusetts, for one, was downright hostile and thus an unlikely place to jump ship. As for Portsmouth or Dover?
Establishing reliable yet invisible connections every ten or 20 miles would have been quite an accomplishment. What prompted households to risk everything to the moral cause? They were, after all, a threat to a vast economic system and its wealth.
It’s one more another interesting twist to develop in future research through New Hampshire.
One of the more baffling things I’m finding in living here is the reluctance of folks in one town to participate in something in a neighboring town, as if they were worlds away.
It’s not just a matter of coming in to the Eastport Arts Center, either, or watching a movie in a little theater in Calais.
Pembroke’s renovated library has been hosting a series of free chantey sings by maritime historian Stephen Sanfilippo, and those would welcome (and do deserve) more participants. His well-researched programs usually include much than work songs, despite the title. A recent one that dug into clams and oysters would be a fine eye-opening example.
The most recent event included an illustrated talk by Susan Sanfilippo, drawing on the town’s historical society’s archives. She discussed ships built along the local tidal banks and then showed images of the resulting vessels as they sat in faraway places like Cuba, China, San Francisco, or Hawaii.
Stephen then used the varied destinations of the Pembroke ships as the basis for songs we all joined in singing later, often including nonsense verses while we looked at slides of the vessels. A calypso, anyone?
I should say it was all delightful and enlightening.
Besides, it was a sampling of what happened all along our Quoddy coast. I could image launchings from Shackford Cove in Eastport that then made similar extraordinary voyages.
Who says there’s nothing to do around here? Please look again and expand your horizon.
The home Isaac Wendell built by 1827 sits across Central Avenue from the Quaker meetinghouse.
I often parked next to it on the side street and admired the bird boxes and woodworking details on the ample barn and house additions.
He’s most noted as the cofounder with John Williams of the Dover Cotton Factory, the forerunner of the big mills downtown, but of interest to my story, he had married Anna Whittier, a close cousin of the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier.
We can assume Greenleaf was a welcome guest there on his many visits to Dover.
Let me add, the relatively humane working conditions in the mills deteriorated drastically after Williams and Wendell lost control to new investors, leading to the first labor strike by women in America in 1828.
Wendell also shows up in the founding of the Sawyer Mills, which I discussed a week ago, as well as a foundry.
Jnana's Red Barn 