The list of the coach-drivers employed by the Eastern Stage Company still exists, and has been printed by Mr. Rantoul. From it we learn that coach-driving went by families – it was an hereditary calling. Many families had two sons in this work, there were four Potter brothers, three Ackermans, and three Annables, all coachmen. Their names were often curious, Moses Caney, John Foss, Perley Annable, Eppes Potter, Ben Savory, Fortune Tozzer.
Mr. Miner writes thus of stage-terms and stage-horses: —
“Every horse had a name. It was ‘Git up, Jo; gwan, boys or gals; you are shirky, Bill; you want touching up, Ben; if you don’t do better, Ben, I’ll swap you for a mule.’ All kinds of expressions. Some drivers would fret a team to death, while others would get over the road and you would never hear hardly a loud word to the team. It was just as drivers themselves were constituted. All kinds of horses were used in a stage team, runaways, kickers, biters, and all kinds of tricksters. If the owners could not manage them they went on stage teams, and did good work, and never died. They were seldom sick, as they were well-fed and groomed, and had quick time and short trips. We had some fine teams of matched horses, especially on the Connecticut River roads, which would have sold for seven hundred to a thousand dollars a pair. The horses were usually what were termed native horses, large, full of muscle and gimp, of English descent.”
It was the testimony of John Lambert, an English gentleman who travelled here in the early years of this century, that the horses used on coaches in all settled parts of the United States were as good as English coach-horses.
It serves to show with force the pride and vanity of coach owners and drivers to be told that on the Boston and Salem line the coachmen sometimes attached false sweeping tails to the horses, to dress them up as it were and put on a good appearance – this is ante- if not anti-docking days.
Elaborate rules for coach-driving are given in old-time and modern manuals of coaching. Mr. Fairman Rogers’s descriptions are the plainest. Mr. Miner tells very simply of the old modes of driving in his day: —
“On four-horse teams were four reins. The near wheel-horse rein came under the little finger of left hand, the leader over the next finger. The off wheel-horse rein over third finger, right hand, leader over first finger. Six horses would require two more reins, and one more finger on each hand. Some drivers would wear mittens, and have one rein over and one under the fingers. These among good reinsmen were called Dummies or old Farmers. The whip was carried in the right hand, horizontally pointing to the left, toward the ground, not as pictured at the present day. A good driver who was interested in his team always sat up straight, and kept his reins and whip in a stylish manner. He talked to his horses as he would to a person. Every horse knew him; they knew him by his voice whether they were late for cars or early, and just where to make up time if late. A driver of this kind always had a good team, able to respond under all conditions.”
Even the whip of good drivers was of regulation size. The rule of perfection was that it should be five feet one and one-half inches from butt to holder and twelve feet five inches long from holder to end of point of lash – so it was an imposing machine.
On summer routes in the mountains of New Hampshire the stage-driver lingered long. Over the backbone of Vermont he guides in our own day a few rusty coaches.
Among the popular stage-drivers of the New Hampshire mountains before the advent of frequent railroads, were Charles Sanborn, of Pittsfield, who drove between Centre Harbor and West Ossipee; and H. P. Marden, who drove between Plymouth and the Profile House, White Mountains, during the summer months; and James F. Langdon, of Plymouth, – the three being among the last to give up the reins and the whip, when called to that far-away country “from whence no traveller returns.” In 1861, Mr. Sanborn drove between Centre Harbor and North Conway, a distance of thirty-five miles. He drove over that route eleven years, at first requiring but forty horses, while in 1872 no less than one hundred and twenty were in constant use, besides a large number of coaches, wagons, and sleighs. On one of his round trips, Mr. Sanborn took three hundred and fifty dollars in passenger fares alone, while the express business was proportionately large. Of course all this seems small to those who know little of the days before railroads ran by every man’s dooryard, but those who have “staged it” in the old times will understand what a busy time the driver on such a route must have had. Mr. Sanborn was over six feet in height and of Herculean frame, his broad shoulders and sturdy gait betokening a strength which gave his passengers the greatest confidence in his ability to carry them safely through any accident. He seldom lost his temper, even under the most trying circumstances, and was a jolly man withal. Major Lewis Downing of Concord tells me that on his route Sanborn had the good-will of every one, and in Pittsfield, where was his home, he was highly esteemed for his sterling character and strict integrity.
In England the coachmen and coaches had an Annual Parade, a coaching-day, upon the Royal Birthday, when coach-horses, coachmen, and guards all were in gala attire. In America similar annual meetings were held in many vicinities. In Concord, New Hampshire, which was a great coaching centre, an annual coaching parade was given in the afternoon and a “Stagemen’s Ball” in the evening. “Knights of the whip” from New Hampshire and neighboring states attended this festival. The ball was held in the celebrated Grecian Hall – celebrated for its spring floor – which was built over the open carriage-houses and woodsheds attached to the Eagle Coffee-house, called now the Eagle Hotel. This dancing hall, built in 1827, took its name from the style of its architecture. At one end was a great painting of the battle of New Orleans, with Jackson on horseback. It was the rallying-point for all great occasions, – caucuses, conventions, concerts, even a six weeks’ theatrical season.
Political economists solve the problem of a sudden loss of one trade by saying that others can easily be found. But it is difficult for a man learned in one handicraft to become proficient in others; and it is most difficult for the old or even middle-aged to learn a new trade.
No more melancholy example of an entire class of workmen deprived of work and subsistence through no fault of their own can be found than in these old coachmen, especially in England. Their work left them with astonishing rapidity, and they refused to realize the fact that their occupation was going out of existence, and that railroads would supersede coaches. In England the employment of the drivers of coaches on the railroads was almost unknown; they ended their days as humble workers in stables or as omnibus drivers, or, worse still, upon carts working on the road; sorry lives compared to the cheery work on a coach. A few took to farming, and made pretty poor work of it.
In America, especially in New England if they were young and strong and quick-witted enough to read coming events and adjust themselves early in the day to altered conditions, they obtained positions on the railroads, as brakemen, conductors, ticket-sellers, express-agents, depot-masters, never as engineers – driving horses does not fit a man to drive an engine. Often these brakemen and conductors advanced in position as the railroads grew. It was not unusual a decade ago in the obituary notices of men who had acquired wealth through the railways, to read that these men had in early life been stage-drivers; but they were usually men who had amassed some capital before the era of the railroad, or very young stage-drivers when steam carriage came.
Benjamin Pierce Cheney, one of the wealthiest men of Boston, an owner of vast railroad properties, founder of the rich Cheney Express Company, chief owner of the American Express Company, one of the Wells-Fargo Company, one of the builders of the Northern Pacific and other great Western railroads, began his business life a strong boy of seventeen driving the coach from Exeter, New Hampshire, to Nashua. For six years he drove fifty miles every day; then he became stage agent, and agent for the Lowell and Nashua Railroad, then railroad owner. Chester W. Chapin (afterwards president of the Boston and Albany Railroad) ran a stage line between Springfield and Hartford. The early members of the firm which formed Harnden’s Express were nearly all connected with stage-coach lines.
Certainly much consideration was shown the old employees of the stage roads.
It was said by an old coachman of the Eastern Stage Company that all its men were given positions on the railroads if so desired; “All who wished had something to do,” and facilities were given them also to benefit by the new railroads. For instance, after the steam cars were running between Salem and Boston the stage-drivers from Portsmouth and other towns were given free passes on the railroad. They could thus go to Boston and transact their old “errand-business,” from which they had so much profit. The fast-growing express companies of Harnden and Adams also employed many of the old workers on the stage-coach lines. Some resisted the new mode of travel. Major Shaw of Salem threatened to ruin the railroad with a new opposition stage line, but Americans in general have been ever quicker to accept changes and innovations than the English. They were more “uptaking,” as the Scotch say, – that is, quicker to perceive, accept, and adopt; we breathe in that trait with the air of the new world; so American coach employees accepted the railroad and profited by it.
CHAPTER XVI
THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD
The traveller in the old stage-coach was not tantalized by the fleeting half-glimpse of places which we gain in railroad travel to-day. He had ample time to view any unusual or beautiful spot as he passed, he had leisure to make inquiry did he so desire, he had also many minutes, nay hours, to hear any traveller’s tale that could be told him by a fellow-journeyer or by the driver. This last-named companion, going over the stage road day after day, talking constantly, querying frequently, grew deeply versed in its lore, its history. He knew the gossip, too, of each house he passed, he knew the traditions and tales of each locality; hence in his company every mile of the road had some point of deep interest.
Roger Mowry’s Tavern was the first one established in the town of Providence. It escaped destruction in King Philip’s War, when nearly all the town was burned, and stood till the present day. When a coach started out from that old tavern, it passed the burying ground and a dense growth of barberry bushes which grew along the roadside. There seems to have been, in many places, a suspicion of uncanny reputation connected with barberry bushes. In one spot a dense group of bushes was said to harbor a vast snake; in another it shaded an Indian’s grave; a third concealed a ghost. The barberry was not a native of America; it is an immigrant, and has the further ill name of blasting any wheat near which it is planted. The grewsome growth of barberry bushes near Mowry’s Tavern was the scene of the first serious crime of the settlement of Providence Plantations. The town carpenter, a thrifty and much respected young man named Clauson, much beloved by Roger Williams, was found dying one winter morning in 1660 near “a clump of barberry bushes” at the parting of the paths “near Roger Mowry’s Tavern.” His head was cloven open with an axe, and the dying man accused a neighbor named Herndon of being the instigator of the crime; and with a spirit never learned from his old master, the gentle Williams, he left a terrible curse upon the children and children’s children of John Herndon, that they should ever “be marked with split chins and be haunted by barberry bushes.” An Indian named Wanmanitt was arrested for having done this terrible deed, and was locked up in the Mowry Tavern. He was probably executed for it, though the town records only contain a preliminary story of his trial. With bills for interpreters and for a boat and guard and powder and shot and liquor, all to go with the prisoner to Newport jail, the Indian murderer vanishes down the bay out of history. John Herndon lived on peacefully for many years, branded, doubtless, in the minds of many; but there is no record that the futile imprecation of the dying man ever was fulfilled.
As the stage-coach runs along through old Narragansett, it comes to another scene of crime, of horrible crime and horrible punishment – that of hanging in chains. This demoralizing sight was almost unknown in America. You can scarcely read a tale, a history of old English life, without hearing of men “hanging in chains.” That most popular of children’s books, The Fairchild Family, has a typical English scene, wherein the solemn English father, in order to make his children love each other the more, takes them through a lonely wood to see the body of a man hanging in chains on a gibbet, a horrible and revolting sight. Travellers on the Portsmouth Road in England, after the year 1786, passed at Hind Head a gibbet with three men swinging in chains, three barbarous murderers of an unknown sailor – not a pleasant outlook for tired riders on the coach. By the old South Ferry in Narragansett, a man was murdered by a fellow-traveller. At the inn where they had rested the last night one of them spent on this earth, a woman had dressed his hair, and she noted a curious white lock which grew like our artist Whistler’s in a thick head of black hair. On this single identification was built a chain of evidence which ended in that unusual and terrible sight in the new world, the body of a criminal hanging in chains. It swung there till the poor bones dropped to the earth, and finally the great chains rusted apart. Then schoolboys took the heavy links which had bound a sight they had not seen, and with equal bravado and apprehension cracked open their winter store of hickory nuts and butternuts with the last emblem of an obsolete law.
Not far from this scene is a crossroads which could be viewed from the stage-coach, but I trust no traveller saw there the execution of a law as obsolete and as barbaric as hanging in chains.
For on this crossroads took place several of those eccentric, ridiculous performances known as “shift-marriages.” Any widow, about to be married again, could be free from all debts of her dead husband’s contracting by being married at the crossroads, “clad only in her shift.” Sometimes she was enjoined to cross the King’s Highway four times thus scantily clad.
George Hazard, Justice, made entry in the town book of South Kingston, Rhode Island, that Abigail Calverwell on the 22d of February, 1719, was taken in marriage “after she had gone four times across the highway in only her shift and hair low and no other clothing.” Think of this poor creature, on this winter’s night, going through such an ordeal. Another Narragansett widow, Jemima Hill, was married at midnight “where four roads meet,” clad only in her shift. Another entry in a town record-book specifies that the bride had “no other clothing but shifting or smock.” Let me hasten to add that these marriages were not peculiar to Rhode Island; they took place in many of the colonies, certainly in Pennsylvania and in all the New England states.
As the old Narragansett coach sped on through Connecticut, it passed lonely spots which were noted for other sad tales and traditions, but were ever of keen interest to all passers-by. For at the crossroads “where four roads meet,” were buried suicides, with a stake thrust through the heart. This was a cruel old English and Dutch law. We learn from Judge Sewall all of the public obloquy and hatred of a suicide in Massachusetts. One poor fellow found dead was buried in disgrace under a pile of stones at a Connecticut crossroads, but the brand of self-destruction was taken from him at a later date, when much evidence was secured that he was murdered.
If our Narragansett coach went over the Ridge Hill, the driver surely pointed out the spot where a lover once hid his coach and horses till there rode up from a bridle-path near by the beauty of Narragansett, “Unhappy Hannah Robinson,” who jumped from her horse into the coach and drove off headlong to Providence to be married. An elopement should end happily, but the adjective ever attached to her name tells the tale of disappointment, and it was not many years ere she was borne back, deserted and dying, lying on a horse-litter, to the spacious old home of her childhood, which is still standing. And one day down this road there came hotly lashing his horses a gay young fellow driving tandem a pair of Narragansett pacers, and he scarcely halted at the tavern as he asked for the home and whereabouts of the parson. But the tavern loungers peeped under the chariot-hood and saw a beautiful blushing girl, and they stared at a vast, yawning, empty portmanteau, strapped by a single handle to the chariot’s back. And soon two angry young men, the bride’s brothers, rode up after the elopers, who had been tracked by the articles of the bride’s hastily gathered outfit which had been strewn from the open portmanteau along the road in the lovers’ hasty flight. Who that rides on a railway car ever hears anything about elopements or such romances! Parson Flagg, of Chester, Vermont, made his home a sort of Yankee Gretna Green; the old stage-drivers could tell plenty of stories of elopers on saddle and pillion who rode to his door.
The traveller by the coach learned constant lessons from that great teacher, Nature. Even if he were city bred he grew to know, as he saw them, the various duties of country life, the round of work on the farm, the succession of crops, the names of grains, and he knew each grain and grass when he saw it, which few of city life do now. He saw the timid flight of wild creatures, rabbits, woodchucks, squirrels, sometimes a wily fox. My father once, riding on a stage-coach in Vermont, chased down a mountain road a young deer that ran, bewildered, before its terrible pursuer. At night the traveller heard strange sounds, owls and a smothered snarl as the coach entered the woods – a catamount perhaps. He heard the singing birds of spring and noted the game-birds of autumn; and in winter they could watch the broad and beautiful flight of the crows, free in snowy woods and fields from the rivalry of all fellow feathered creatures. He saw the procession of wild flowers, though he, perhaps, did not consciously heed them, and he knew the trees by name. The stage-driver showed his passengers “the biggest ellum in the county,” and “the best grove of sugar-maples in the state.” He pointed out a lovely vista of white birches as “the purtiest grove o’ birch on the road,” and there was a dense grove of mulberry trees, the sole survivors of silk-worm culture in which were buried so many hours and years of hard labor, so much hard-earned capital, so many feverish hopes. And towering a giant among lesser brothers, a glorious pine tree still showing the mark of the broad arrow of the King, chosen to be a mast for his great ships, but living long after he was dead and his ships were sunken and rotten, living to be a king itself in a republican land.
The foot-farer, trudging along the outskirts of the village, is often shut out by close stone or board barriers from any sight of the flowering country gardens, the luxuriance of whose blossoming is promised by the heads of the tall hollyhocks that bend over and nod pleasantly to him; but the traveller on the coach could see into these old gardens, could feast his eyes on all the glorious tangle of larkspur and phlox, of tiger lilies and candytuft, of snowballs and lilacs, of marigolds and asters, each season outdoing the other in brilliant bloom.
And what odors were wafted out from those gardens! What sweetness came from the lilacs and deutzias and syringas; from clove-pinks and spice bush and honeysuckles; how weird was the anise-like scent of the fraxinella or dittany; and how often all were stifled by the box, breathing, says Holmes, the fragrance of eternity! The great botanist Linnæus grouped the odors of plants and flowers into classes, of which three were pleasing perfumes. To these he gave the titles the aromatic, the fragrant, the ambrosial – our stage-coach traveller had them all three.
From the fields came the scent of flowering buckwheat and mellifluous clover, and later of new-mown hay, sometimes varied by the tonic breath of the salt hay on the sea marshes. The orchards wafted the perfumes from apple blossoms, and from the pure blooms of cherry and plum and pear; in the woods the beautiful wild cherries equalled their domestic sisters.
How sweet, how healthful, were the cool depths of the pine woods, how clean the hemlock, spruce, fir, pine, and juniper, and how sweet and balsamic their united perfume. And from the woods and roadsides such varied sweetness! The faint hint of perfume from the hidden arbutus in early spring, and the violet; the azalea truly ambrosial with its pure honey-smell; the intense cloying clethra with the strange odor of its bruised foliage; the meadowsweet; the strong perfume of the barberry; and freshest, purest, best of all, the bayberry throwing off balm from every leaf and berry. Even in the late autumn the scent of the dying brakes and ferns were as beloved by the country-lover as the fresh smell of the upturned earth in the spring after the farmer’s plough, or the scent of burning brush.
Fruit odors came too to the happy traveller, the faint scent of strawberries, the wild strawberry the most spicy of all, and later of the dying strawberry leaves; even the strong and pungent onions are far from offensive in the open air; while the rich fruity smell of great heaps of ripe apples in the orchards is carried farther by the acid vapors from the cider mills, which tempt the driver to stop and let all taste new apple-juice.
In the days of the stage-coach we had on our summer journeys all these delights, the scents of the wood, the field, the garden; we had the genial sunlight, the fresh air of mountain, plain, and sea; and all the wild and beautiful sights which made the proper time for travel – the summer – truly joyful. Now we may enjoy a place when we get there, but we have a poor substitute for the coach for the actual travelling – a dirty railway car heated almost to tinder by the sun, with close foul air (and the better the car the fouler and closer the air) filled, if we try to have fresh air, with black smoke and cinders; clattering and noisy ever, with occasional louder-shrieking whistles and bells, and sometimes a horrible tunnel – it has but one redeeming quality, its speed, for thereby the journey is shortened.
Cheerful friends on the old roads were the milestones and guideposts. Milestones had an assured position in social life, a dignified standing. It would be told of a road as a great honor and distinction, and told fitly in capitalized sentences thus, “This Elegant road is fully Set with well-cut Milestones.” A few of the old provincial milestones remain, and put us closely in touch with the past. In Governor Hutchinson’s day milestones were set on all the post-roads throughout Massachusetts. Several of these are still standing; one is in Worcester, in the heart of the city, marked “42 Mls. to Boston, 50 Mls. to Springfield, 1771.” Another is in Sutton. It is five feet high and nearly three feet wide. It is marked “48 mls. to Boston. B. W.” The letters B. W. stand for Bartholomew Woodbury, a genial tavern-keeper of Sutton. It shows a custom which obtained at that date. It was deemed most advantageous to a tavern to have a milestone in front of it. Possibly the tale of the stone shown in its lettering urged wayworn travellers to halt and rest within the welcoming door. Bartholomew Woodbury’s Tavern was a few rods from the spot marked for the stone, but the government permitted him to set this stone by his doorside, at his own expense, beside the great horse-block. Tavern-keeper and tavern are gone, and the old road sees few travellers. Occasionally some passer-by, inquisitive like myself of the presence of the old stone, will halt as did the traveller of old, and pull away the curtain of vines, and read the lettering of this gravestone of the old Woodbury Tavern.
Another landlord who appreciated that the milestone served as a magnet to draw customers to the tavern taproom was Landlord Taylor, who kept the old tavern known as “Taylor’s,” in Danbury, Connecticut. The house with the milestone is shown on page 350 and the milestone alone on page 351.
Judge Peleg Arnold was one of the most active patriots in northern Rhode Island during the Revolution; for many years he carried on a tavern at Union Village, a suburb of Woonsocket, and his house was noted for its excellence and hospitality. Not far from his tavern to the northward the “Great Road” from Smithfield into Mendon wound through woods and meadows and over the northern hills of Rhode Island.
In 1666 this great road was a small foot-path through the woods, and was indicated by marked trees leading from cabin to cabin; but in 1733 it had taken upon itself the dignity of a cart-path and then became the subject of discussions on town-meeting days. Peleg Arnold had been one of the men to re-lay the old road, and it was near the northern boundary of his farm that he set up the old milestone shown here. For more than a hundred and twenty-five years this stone has served to brighten the hearts of travellers, for they have learned to know that this silent and inanimate guide can be relied upon as to distances with much more certainty than can the words of residents in the neighborhood.
When Benjamin Franklin was Postmaster-general, he set an indelible postmark in many ways on the history of our country; and many mementos of him still exist. Among them are the old milestones set under his supervision. He transacted this apparently prosaic business with that picturesque originality which he brought to all his doings and which renders to every detail of his life an interest which cannot be exceeded and scarcely equalled by the events recorded of any other figure in history.
He drove over the roads which were to be marked by milestones, seated in a comfortable chaise, of his own planning, and followed by a gang of men, and heavy carts laden with the milestones. Attached to the chaise was a machine of his invention which registered by the revolution of the wheels the number of miles the chaise passed over. At each mile he halted, and a stone was dropped which was afterward set. The King’s Highway, the old Pequot Trail, was thus marked and set. A few of these milestones between Boston and Philadelphia are still standing, one in New London, another at Stratford, and are glanced at carelessly by the hundreds of thousands who glide swiftly past on wheels bearing more accurate cyclometers than that of Franklin.
Guide-boards always stood at the crossings of all travelled roads; indeed, they stood where the roads were scarce more than lines among the grass and low shrubs. Since our day of many railroads, and above all, since the interlacing network of trolley lines has spread over all our Eastern lands where once the stage-coach ran, many guide-boards have disappeared and have not been replaced. You find them often at the angles of the road lying flat in grass and bushes; or standing split, one-sided, askew, pointing the road to the skies, or nowhere. When in trim and good repair in the days of their utility and helpfulness, they were friendly things, and the pointing hand gave them a half-human semblance of cheerful aid. Where the road led through woods or rarely frequented ways, they were friends indeed, for all ways looked alike, and one might readily go far astray. The mile of the guide-board was an elastic one, and sometimes a weary one.
Guide-boards, even poor ones, are still most welcome. No one in the country ever has any correct estimate of distances; a distance “a little better than three miles” before you usually increases by an extraordinary law instead of decreases after you have driven nearly a mile to “about four mile.” The next road-jogger says “nigh on to a mile”; and then you may be sure a few hundred feet farther on to jump back to a slow and wise rejoinder of the original distance, “hard on to four mile.”
Another wayside friend of the traveller in coaching days was the watering trough. It was frequently a log of wood hollowed out, Indian fashion, like a dug-out, filled with the lavish bounty of untrammelled Nature by a cool pure rill from a hillside spring. One of these watering troughs is shown on this page. In the days of the glory of the stage-coach and turnpike, fine stone troughs chiselled like an Egyptian sarcophagus took the place of the log dug-out. They had their supply from a handled pump, which was a more prosaic vehicle than the pipe made of hollowed tree-trunks which brought the spring-water; but it had also a certain interest as the water spouted out in response to the vigorous pumping, and it has been immortalized by Hawthorne. Our artesian wells, and sunken pipes, and vast reservoir systems are infinitely better than the old-time modes of water supply, but we miss the pleasure that came from the sight of the water, whether it was borne to us on the picturesque well-sweep by wheel and bucket, or old chain pump; it was good to look at as well as to taste, and it refreshed man even to see cattle and horses drinking from the primitive trough.
There is always something picturesque and pleasant in an old bridge, and of historic associations as well. The great logs such as form a wooden bridge over a narrow stream are the most natural waterspans, those of the primitive savages. By fallen tree-trunks placed or utilized by the Indians, the colonists first crossed the inland streams, adding parallel trunks as years passed on and helping hands multiplied; and finally placing heavy, flat cross-timbers and boards when hand-saws and sawmills shaped the forests’ wealth for domestic use.