Category: Article

There is an intersection in Hartland of the roads Weed and Flower. Now this is a bit different than Maple and Oak as there really were families with the surname of Weed and of Flower. It is the Flower family that we plan to visit today.

“The Flowers came from Hartford, Conn. at the early settlement of the town, in exactly what year is not known. They made their first pitch on what was afterward the Parson Breck farm. (This house is gone but was on the Center of Town Road), subsequently exchanging with someone who desired “improved” land, for the land now (published in 1914) occupied by W.E. Davis .  (This house is standing on the left side of Rte 12 as you head west).

Elisha Flower was in Captain Benjamin Wait’s Windsor company of rangers. He was the first settler and built the large two-story house now the home of W.E.Davis.

William Flower, a cousin of Elisha, served in the Revolutionary War as a
Captain’s waiter. He never was regularly enlisted but it is said that Judge Elihu Luce was on the point of securing a pension for him when he died.” ( From “Hartland in the Revolutionary War – with Associated History, written by Dennis Flower and printed on the Solitarian Press ,Hartland, Vermont on December 2, 1914 – price 50c)

“Elisha Flower – Rev. War soldier died in 1812 at the age of 55. His daughter,
Elizabeth was 3 when she died in 1796.

“Rest here sweet child among the dust
Til Christ shall come and raise the just”

Susanna Flower who was 30 when she dies gets this, less than comforting epitaph:

“A heap of dust alone remains of thee’
Tis all thou art and proud shall be”

I find that one of the best ways to get a feel for a person and the times through reading news clips. These are the real stuff, the every day coming and and so I would like to share a few that appeared in our local newspapers. They give you a feel for this ordinary and at the same time, extraordinary family.

1901″ D. Flower and W.E. Jenne built a chimney for J.H. Emerson at the Three Corners Saturday.”

“Florence Flower, who has been working at Dr. Harlows in Windsor since the New Years, is at home with her mother.”

“The Y.P.C.U. will be held next Sunday evening by Lucy M. Flower. This being Prison Sunday, the topic for discussion is “The Social Ideal”

“Mrs. Nellie Flower, one of many who in 1899 were “The committee from the Universalist Society to take entire charge of the food supplies and management of the tables for Memorial Day at the Town Hall ” [This would be the large white building on the left after crossing the intersection in 4 Corners, heading west.]

“Miss Viola Flower of Vershire is visiting her mother, Mrs Nellie Flower.”

1906 “Revs Howard and Don Flower have gone to Indiana and Illinois”
“Frank Miller and Ahira Flower are in Lexington, Mass.”

“Our masons, D.Flower and W.E.Jenne, their helpers and assistants, have commenced their spring journeyings to Windsor and Cornish, N.H.. They go and return each day, but have found “Jordon a hard road to travel.”

“Hartlands Revolutionary Soldiers, Dennis Flower and J.F. Colston
recently revisited Hartland’s cemeteries to get the names and dates of the death of the soldiers of the Revolutionary War. The following list was secured.” [From this came Dennis’s publication . What a huge contribution this was to the history of Hartland.]

1900 “Don M. Flower, who during the vacation weeks of St. Lawrence University, Canton, N.Y. has been preaching successfully in that state, is home with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. D (Dennis) Flower. He returns in a couple of weeks to the University.”

“Don M. Flower, accompanied by his brother Howard, returned to St. Lawrence University, Canton, N.Y.”

1900 “The brothers, Don M. and Howard J. Flower, reached here by way of White River Jct. Sunday from Canton, N.Y. to attend their sister’s funeral Monday.” [This would be Lucy who died at the young age of 25.]

“D.Flower, who was at work on a sugar arch at Old Watson’s last week Thursday, on going to the barn for his team was met by Mr. Watson’s dog, who decidedly objected to his taking it, giving him a severe bite in the calf of the leg. Dr. Morris, whose heroic treatment in such cases is well known, cauterized the wound, and it is doing as well as is possible. The incident created quite a discussion here, it is said, as to which is the best meat for dogs, mutton or veal. Mr. Marcy, who owns a fine cosset, would rather have a dog bite him than his sheep. “Dan” however, thinks he would rather supply them with mutton, especially if the veal has to be furnished from the calf of his own leg. The opinions of Messrs. Williams and Bagley, who have recently paid a fabulous sum for mutton for their dogs, haven’t been secured at this writing.”

Speaking of dogs, this is from Analdo and Ernest English, written by Howland Atwood.

Ahira Flower and John Barrell were great cronies – also great fox hunters. They had been hunting somewhere and their jug was empty. They came home late at night and having a thirst got Murphy or Durphy ( who lived with them) out to come down to the 4 Corners and get the jugs filled up at the hotel. There was some grumbling from the hotel people at being disturbed at such an hour but he got his 2 jugs filled and headed back up the turnpike. He got up to where there were 2 or 3 trees standing on a hillock near the road and something in one of the trees jumped back and forth and screamed and scared him terribly, but he didn’t drop the jugs and ran home as fast as he could. Flower and Barrell got the dogs and came back and the thing jumped out into the meadow and the dogs took after it. One dog never came back and the other was pretty chewed up.

 

                          Across Rte. 12 from the Ladies Aid building is the Flowers brick cape.

Perhaps the most colorful member of the Flower family would be Howard. I am quoting from “ In Sight of Ye Great River”.

The Flower family was eccentric. J. Howard, the patriarch, wore sandals, his hair and beard hanging long and white over a flowing red tie. He prohibited the family from cutting their hair, even the boys wore it long, which caused consternation when the boys had to travel outside Hartland. On the kitchen wall a poem exclaimed:

The men on this mundane sod
That hack the hair all off the head
And call it pretty ‘Oh my God’

The Flowers were vegetarians. The eight boys and girls were educated at home until the 5th grade. Fellow children in the village always had to wait until he had read to the children in the evening before they could come out to play.

J. Howard made his living as a poet. He sold his poems and journals door to door. He operated a foot-press, which was hand fed and published “The Free Soul: A Pioneer of Personal Liberation and Eternal Youth, Printed in Our Corner of the Universe at Erratic Intervals of Eternity”  —The Flowers were Democrats. — When Cleveland won the Presidency of the Union in 1892, the Flowers fired crackers, sang campaign songs and marched along a few village streets. At that time Hartland as a whole was as Republican as the state of Vermont. However, the Four Corners was a little pocket of Democratic activity.”

The children were all highly intelligent, highly educated and went beyond Four Corners to make their marks in the world.

A Poem by J. Howard Flower

ASCUTNEY over vales that shut
Looks down a few miles yonder;
At east, the blue Connecticut
Draws down Lull Brook to wander
And wind, fulfilled by crystal rills,
Thru Hartland shrined among the hills.Above our heads a high blue dome
Bends round our hills from Heaven;
From wooded banks about our home
We hear at moonlit even
A vesper plaint of whippoorwills
At summer Hartland shrined in hills.When whetstone, scythe, and mower clink
Thru open doors of morning’
The matin of the Bobolink
Hails dandelions adorning
The meadows of the morn and trills
At summer Hartland shrined in hills.

Midst Christmas snows, tho mercury goes
Below to ten or twenty,
Still in our households summer glows;
And homelike hearts wish plenty
Of cheer and all the good you want
From winter Hartland in Vermont.

 

Reprinted from the June 2007 Hartland Historical Society Newsletter.

Maple season is here. Give this a try. I made a bowl full and have found it to be especially good when more maple syrup is poured over it and some nuts are sprinkled on top.

Della M. Dunsmoor Merritt (1883-1982) was Henry Merritt’s mother. This recipe was found in an autograph book. The owner of the book and the date are unknown but the owner chose to have her friends write recipes instead of the usual poem or other sentiment.

In case you have difficulty reading the original:

Maple Parfait

4 eggs
1 cup maple syrup
1 pint sweet cream
Beat eggs slightly. Pour on slowly the hot syrup. Cook in double boiler until very thick, stirring constantly.

Strain, cool and add the cream, beaten stiff. Would pack in ice with salt. Let stand 3 hours.                            Della M. D. Merritt

Undated News Clipping

It is safe to say that our western friends, who for many years have depended on this town for their maple sugar, will look in vain for it this year. A large number of the maple orchards have been ruined by the forest caterpillars, and been cut into stove wood. Farmers, who have had in years gone by from one to two tons of sugar, or its equivalent in syrup, for New England and western friends, will have little, if any, for their own use. More than this, the season for sugar making is getting late, and still the snow’s reported from 3 to 4 feet deep in the woods. We doubt very much if there will be honest syrup made to run the usual number of church socials. The truth is, sugar-making has become a lost art, where, a few years ago, it furnished our farmers with a source of no inconsiderable income.

Reprinted from the March 2007 Hartland Historical Society Newsletter

“The poem about Bine referred to a blacksmith named Bine Spaulding, who lived and had a shop where the first house in Martinsville now stands. [The brick house on the corner is the old Lamb school. The next house is newer and the one referred to here is the next, red house, right next to Lull Brook where Ruth and Roger Flanagan lived for so many years. C.Y.M.]. He and his wife occupied an upper room reached by a ladder, and when he came home in a rather unsteady condition she would say sternly, “Right up the ladder, Mr. Spaulding”.  Enjoy!

Did you know about Bine, with the speckled dog?
Used to lead him by the for’ard paw;
Was a portly man with a baldish head,
And the bluest eye you ever saw.

Way under the hill he had a shop,
With a trip hammer and it’s paddle wheel,
And its whack, whack, whack, and the stooping smith-
I can see him yet; I can hear it still.

He came to the village every night.
There were kindred spirits always there.
The journey up was a tiresome walk;
The going back was another affair.

One night we sat around the fire;
The smaller ones were snug in bed;
Aunt Rosaline rushed in through the door,
And”Bine’s in the brook ” was all she said.

My! What a rumpus was abroad!
Sure, in the brook was where we found him,
Straight as a gun rod sitting up,
With the rushing waters all around him.

“The water’s risin’! Lower a rope!”
That was the cry, more agonizing
With every breath of the summer air.
“Lower a rope! The water’s risin’”

The action of that pretty brook
Took out the sand beneath his quarter,
And every wave that kissed his side
Left him a-struggling in the water.

Next morning in that little shop-
Since many years the grasses cover-
The anvil rang, the bellows breathed,
The mill-wheel flew; The farce was over.

Wilbur Sturtevant

Reprinted from the March 2007 Hartland Historical Society Newsletter.

Remember the last newsletter when we visited Snail Swamp and learned about the muck found there? Of course, muck would be a wonderful compost and Mr. Ruggles, whom I consider to be a genius , mixed it with manure to reduce the acidity, spreading it to bring back his poor farmland. Here is an excerpt from Farm Journal Dec. 1896.

” I bought my farm in the fall and had the next winter to get together my tools and stock; all of which I bought cheap at auctions. The tools were second – hand , of course, some of them requiring repairs that I made myself. I bought an old wagon that I repaired so that it lasted until I was better able to buy a new one. I borrowed a cultivator two years, then bought a set of teeth and made the rest of it. I hired a mowing machine four seasons, then I bought one , that with good care, has run twenty one seasons, and does good work yet, and so of all my farming tools, I got along at first with the least possible expense and turned the greatest amount of money I could toward paying for the farm. I began with one horse that did all of my team work except plowing and mowing when I hired another horse of a neighbor.”

 

This is a Byron Ruggles “trick photo” showing Mr. Ruggles doing 2 jobs at one time.

” I was decided on being a dairy farmer and bent all my energy in that direction. My plan was to keep the best of cows, that they should have plenty of good feed and good care, that I would make the best of butter, if possible, and get as high a price for it as I could , and all other branches of my farming should be subordinate.

I began with three cows for the farm had less than one hundred acres, and was so run down it would not well keep more. I hired the use of thoroughbred Jersey bulls, raised my heifer calves, named them, made pets of them, kept them pets as cows, and always call them by their names. In a few years I had some first rate high grade Jersey cows. I mowed weeds in the pasture so as to have more and better feed there. I set water tubs there so the cows would have better water to drink than the stagnant puddles that the springs really were . . .

I dug muck in the driest part of the summer from a swamp in the sheep pasture and drew it in the winter to the amount of two or three cords a year to mix with manure and have found the mixture equal to all manure. A pond formed in the swamp where I had dug muck and I found it a convenient place to get ice in the winter for my ice house; some of my neighbors saw the advantage of getting their ice there. I sawed out ice for them, more and more as the pond grew larger from digging muck. I have sawed as many as forty four cords of ice there in one winter, at seventy cents a cord.”

Reprinted from the Hartland Historical Society Newsletter, Spring 2005.

Spring means new starts on the farm, new starts for the Town and perhaps a new start for your heart. I think this is the real New Year . Here is a portion of a much longer poem by J. Howard Flower, Four Corners, Hartland, Vt.

The Free Soul  – April 1917
Spring is Coming
That’s One Good Thing Nobody Can Prevent

The Duel Natures now begin
To rime with passing sweetness
The God without, the God within
Are teeming with completeness!!

All night premonitory throes
Of change came perseverant
And this chaotic dawn o’erflows
With voices incoherent.

In lofty solitudes afar,
Where hilltop snows are thawing’
I know the fir-shut hollows are
Now full of crows and cawing

I mark thine advent, hailing Spring’
As blithest of assurance:
It comes to pass, a heavenly thing
Above mankind’s concurrence.

The social powers that bear the purse
May thwart, and mete denial
To many things,- but not reverse
The tide upon the dial!!!

Reprinted from the Hartland Historical Society Newsletter, Spring 2005

Last March we talked about Benjamin Livermore, inventor among other things, of the so called “Permutation Typograph” or “Pocket Printing Machine”. Benjamin was the brother of Emily Livermore English who was married to Nathan Frederick English 1822-1902. Nathan is the star of the show for this newsletter.

The photo above was taken by Nathan English around 1854-55. It shows his wife Emily (Livermore) and the four oldest of their ten children.

Nathan English was a remarkable man with a remarkable family. He was an inventor (we have many of his patents, CYM) as were his sons, Euler, Analdo and Ernest. He also had some inventions with his brother-in-law, Benjamin Livermore.

A kindly man who carried raisins in his pockets to give to the children, N.F. spent countless hours in his shop on Lull brook inventing such things as a machine to bind or wrap horse whips and he made a drill that would drill cast iron. The Foundry people wanted to buy it but he wouldn’t sell. Told them to come over when they wanted anything bored and he would do it for them. [Good businessman !!]

The following is from Analdo and Ernest’s reminiscence recorded by Howland Atwood in 1938.

“Back in 1847 or1848 Nathan and his brother-in law got up a line of shoe machinery -press and dinking machines, etc. They went to Milford, Mass. and hired a loft with power and he was the pioneer in introducing shoe machinery. Formerly a shoe factory was merely a warehouse. The materials were accumulated and dealt out to men who cut out shoes – though in those days, boots were mostly made. The people used to come there and they were given so many pegs and various shoe parts, which they took home. They lived on little farms and had a room or two in their homes which was used as a shop where they worked on or made the shoes. The people did not all do the same thing. There would be a team of stitchers who would go and get their materials and take them home and stitch them. The bottomers pegged or sewed on the bottoms-did lasting. The news leaked out that English and Livermore were making shoes by machinery. English used to hire teams of men to work for him and the people, being jealous, would mob the men and disable them so they couldn’t work for a few days. Of course, when the men weren’t able to work, English and Livermore used to work in their places and Mr. English got very tired. Milford was sort of a malaria city and Mr. English became sick and he and Livermore gave up the business as things didn’t go right. Mr. English came home, poorer than when he left, when Analdo was a baby. Mr. English was sick for 2 or 3 years and wasn’t able to do much. A partner in their business had absorbed what was left.

A daguerreotype had not been out a great while and along in 1850 Mr. English made them. After awhile he dropped that and began experimenting with machinery. Along in the 1850’s he and Lysander Billings became partners and made machinery. Mr. English’s first shop was in the barn and then he had a shop around 1854 or 5 with a round top roof which was a rather long and narrow building. This stood at the back of the house cut in unison with the turning of the last. He carried on the last business for a few years (last- a wooden or metal block on which shoes were shaped). He wouldn’t make a fashionable last so that is probably why he lost the business. He made several of these turning machines. Hammond and Merritt had one in their factory on the mill gorge. There was a gristmill with several runs of stone and below that a sawmill with machinery for making other things out of wood in this establishment. There was one of Mr. English’s turning machines over in the foundry where they turned out wagon wheel spokes, etc.

Along in 1858 – 59 Mr. English got up a sort of photographic apparatus, so that he took pictures around in the area. He had a room downstairs in the house for working with daguerreotypes and later a room upstairs for sensitizing and developing ‘amber types’. By the time the Civil War broke out he had completed a daguerreotype machine and used it for a year or so.

In 1862, Nathan English made up a portable ‘amber type’ machine. It was a box 10 inches square and 20 inches long. This was the wet process. Mr. English made quite a few of these apparatus’s and he used to fit out men with them. He outfitted and man named Hart and H.B. Cross, a boy studying to be a doctor who put himself through college by taking pictures during vacations – at the seashore and elsewhere. Mr. Milliken, editor of the Brattleboro Reporter bought the patent right. Mr. English took hundreds of
pictures, many of them portraits.

Ed Bagley … sold Nathan English a piece of land near the Lull Brook and he built a dam and put up a shop there. For 6 or 7 years Analdo worked in his father’s shop. His father did some but mostly liked to be up in the front room of the house mostly – making models, etc.

In the square shop Nathan built a 40 horsepower engine for John Labaree as Labaree had gotten the idea that he could run a flouring mill along in the 1850s. This mill, in the Ladies Aid Hall in Four Corners was discontinued before 1861.

N.F.’s last years were spent making microscopes, telescopes, etc. He ground thousands of lenses and had rather a craze for making them. He spent months making powerful microscopes. He had one with such a wonderful lens that doctors used to come from all over to use his microscope, as it was so much better than theirs.

His son Euler did a lot of work in the shop after Analdo went away in 1872. Euler got up a machine for sawing marble in the quarry. It had a rectilinear frame which went

Mr. English once invented a flying machine and his son Euler tried it out. Mr. English always said the flying machine was practical if they had an engine to run it. The only engine he could have was steam. Mr. E once told some farmers that it would be only a few years before motorized vehicles came and they would sometime be everywhere.

Reprinted from the Hartland Historical Society Newsletter, Winter 2007.