Radio Script #89
Little Talks On Common Things
December 24, 1950
Information keeps springing up about Ten Lots. Mrs. Charles Heald of North Fairfield has loaned me a copy of the Waterville Mail for September 30, 1881, Which contains an account of the golden wedding anniversary of Asa and Azuba Bates. In 1831 Asa Bates had married Azuba Sturtevant, and the newspaper reporter pointed out that the couple had been known in Waterville longer than the venerable Waterville Mail itself. A poem, written for the occasion by one of Mr. Bates’ five sons-in-law, fills nearly a column in the old newspaper. The reporter entered into the jovial spirit of the occasion, closing his story with these words: “I will give the names of the couple’ s children. It is customary, I believe, When doing so, to give also their ages. But your correspondent might get his scalp into difficulty if he meddled with the ages of seven women in one family.
So he must ask the reader to be content with the names and present residence of the Bates children, of Whom nine are now living. They are Ellen, wife of G. A. Mower of Dexter; Erastus of West Waterville; Lizzie, wife of W. A. Farr of Melrose, Mass.; Martha, wife of S. T. Hersom of New London, N. H.; Mabel, wife of W. H. Fersenden of Boston; Mary, wife of C. E. Whiting of Norridgewock; Henry of West Waterville; Julia of Boston; Lillian of West Waterville.”
Mrs. Heald has an old-time photograph taken at that golden wedding anniversary, showing Mr. and Mrs. Bates and all nine of the children, in the costumes in which all well-dressed folks appeared in 1881.
My neighbor, Jerry Bridges, an executive of the Lockwood Mills, quite rightly calls me to task for putting Ten Lots in Somerset County. He quite rightly points out that the county line runs right through Ten Lots, and that most of the original homes, as well as the beautiful Williams Chapel, are and always have been in Kennebec County. Since that is true, I am more puzzled than ever to know Why Rufus Jones mentions no Ten Lots Quakers in his chapter on the Friends in Kingsbury’s History of Kennebec County.
Christmas did not receive much attention here in the Kennebec Valley a hundred years ago. Let us see how William Bryant of Fairfield, who kept a diary from 1836 to 1865, recorded the annual events of Christmas Day.
On December 25, 1836 Bryant wrote: “Rain and warm. High freshet. Ice started down between 9 and 10 o’clock.” Other entries were as follows. December 25, 1837: “Went to Waterville with Gideon Wells on business. The first thawey day for a week past.” December 25, 1838: “Killed two small-boned hogs, very fat, weighed about 300 pounds each.” Mr. Bryant tells us that on December 25, 1839 William Connor started for the woods, taking Bryant’s oxen among the many teams.
The next year the only comment on Christmas Day is: “Very tough, northeast snow storm”.
On the next Christmas, 1841, Bryant evidently worked hard all day. He says: “We have had a hard time breaking a wood road in my swail to get alders for wood.” There is no entry for December 25 in either 1842 or 1843. But when Christmas came in 1844 Sanmel Haley Bryant, the son who later went away to far-off Australia, never to return, had then “started with William Connor’s two six-ox teams, to go 10 or 12 miles above The Forks on 10,000 acres”. On December 25, 1845 Bryant noted a “terrible southeast rain storm”. In 1846 there is no record for Christmas Day, but five days earlier Cyrus and Olive, the oldest son and his wife, had gone to Vassalboro, where Olive was to spend the winter. On December 25, 1847 the record states: “Cyrus started for the woods for D. Chase and L. Webster on wheels.”
In 1848 the day got this item: “Very little snow on the level, but slick sleighing.” On December 25,1851 Bryant wrote: “Very high northwester and cold. I returned from Norridgewock with a bad cold.” On Christmas Day, 1852 William Connor’s ox teams were again on the way to the woods, on a day of light rain and sloshy traveling. Three days after that uncelebrated Christmas, Samuel Haley Bryant left home for Australia.
There was no wheeling and no slush on Christmas Day of 1853, for Bryant tells us that “It began to snow last evening between five and six o’clock and snowed all night and all the forenoon until twelve o’clock; the snow fell in heaps.” Five days later he wrote: “Roads still drifted and full of snow.”
On December 25, 1855 it commenced snowing at 10 A.M. No mention of any Christmas observance, but a solemn announcement that “Charles Bradbury was killed last Saturday by running foul of another wagon.”
On Christmas Day in 1857 there was, according to Bryant, the first good sleighing of the year, so good that William Connor could start for the woods on runners. That was apparently noteworthy, for Connors’ start for the Moosehead woods had for several previous seasons been on wheels.
Not until 1865, after the Civil War was over, does William Bryant’s diary make any mention of Christmas. On December 25, 1865 he wrote: “Christmas. Fair and cold. I am very feeble, was taken bleeding at the nose for the third time in one week.”
Now how could a man keep such a journal for thirty years and tell us nothing of Christmas trees and Christmas gifts, and most of all of Christmas home-comings?
The answer is hard for young folks of our time to understand. For all the years between 1835 and the Civil War, neither William Bryant nor anyone else in the Kennebec Valley put up a Christmas tree or gave a Christmas present. In other words, Christmas was not celebrated at all.
How do we account for this? The answer is found in the long domination of Puritan thought and customs over New England life. In 1664, soon after the Puritan influence obtained control of the British government, an Act of Parliament made the celebration of Christmas illegal. Even earlier the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had frowned upon all festivals. The May Pole at Merrymount had met their stern disapproval. Only two special days did they recognize, Thanksgiving and Fast Day, and both of these were solemn occasions. Games and sports were strictly forbidden on those days, just as they were on Sunday. Such things as Christmas trees and Christmas presents were regarded as devices of the Devil to lure tempted souls to perdition.
Although the Puritan influence was less strong in parts of the rural province of Maine than it was on the shores of Boston Bay, it was strong enough for the opposition to festivals to last well into the nineteenth century. Hence we are not surprised to find William Bryant’s diary utterly without even the word Christmas until 1865.
Now let us see· how Americans of olden times knew the Christmas story. That beautiful story, as Luke tells it with the shepherds and the manger, and as Matthew gives it with the wise men and their precious gifts, was first brought to America in Bibles printed in foreign lands. The Pilgrims brought copies of the so-called Breeches Bible, which got its name because the verse in Genesis that now uses the word “aprons” was translated: “Adam and Eve made for themselves breeches. ” The Boston Puritans, at least those who came later than Winthrop ‘s first little band in 1630, had copies of the King James Bible, which to this day remains the most famous and the most commonly used of all English Bibles. It was the great accomplishment of seventy scholarly translators, working under the sponsorship of King James I, the earliest of the Tudor kings. It was finished in 1611, which makes that date one of the most important in history. So it was not long before the colonists in America knew the Christmas story in the words that are familiar to·1 ills’ today.
Strangely enough, when the Bible was first printed in America, it was not printed in English. The first Bible printed in the colonies was in the language of the Massachusetts Indians. Product of the little print shop of Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson of Cambridge in 1663, it was the famous translation by Rev. John Eliot. His was a prodigious undertaking, for he not only had to make the translation into a new and difficult language, but he had actually to create a written form for that language which, like most of the Indian tongues, had never before been reduced to writing. In spite of the fact that Eliot converted 11,000 Indians, organized 24 congregations, trained twenty Indian preachers, and saw one of them receive a B. A. degree from Harvard in 1665, today no person living can read the language of Eliot’s Bible.
Not even the second Bible printed in America was in English. The German Bible, the memorable work of Martin Luther, was reprinted by Christopher Saur of Pennsylvania in 1743, in the original German because, said the preface, “so many poor Germans come to this country who do not bring Bibles with them”. It was the Luther Bible, either brought from Germany or purchased in Philadelphia, that the German colonists of our own Maine town of Waldoboro so devoutly used.
Another Bible printed in America came from the shop of Robert Aitken of Philadelphia in 1782. In the midst of the Revolution the Continental Congress took time to pass a resolution commending “the pious and laudable plan of Mr. Aitken to publish the Bible.” Aitken’s Bible of 1782 seems to have been the only one ever sponsored by the Congress of the United States.
There are many interesting facts concerning Christmas carols. A very old carol, not one of those most familiar today, beginning in its English version with “Now sing we, now rejoice; now raise to heaven our voice”, was originally associated verbally with macaroni, for in its early form it was what is called a macaronic, a mixture of two languages, in this case Latin and German.
In the 18th century there were two distinct meanings of the word macaroni the common meaning we retain today, a paste of Italian origin prepared from Wheat flour in the form of dried hollow tubes ~ and another meaning, an English dandy Who affected foreign ways, the meaning given it in one line of Yankee Doddle.
Whether the two meanings ever had anything in common, no one knows. From the latter meaning, however, we (Jet the word macaronic, Which means a mixture of languages, though it was first used solely to mean a mixture of some other language with Latin.
“Come hither ye faithful, truumphantly sing”, is one of the most translated of all the carols. Originally in Latin, it is now sung in 119 languages and dialects.
A much more familiar carol, “Joy to the world, the Lord is come”, as we sing it today in Waterville, is the combined work of four different nationalities: David, or some other Hebrew psalmist ~ Isaac Watts, the English hymnologist; Handel, the German composer ~ and Lowell Mason, the American hymn writer. The beautiful carol, “It came upon a midnight clear”, is one of the few distinctly American carols that have won wide fame in other lands. Its words are by Dr. Edmund Sears and its music is by Richard Storrs Willis.
In thousands of churches today congregations have listened to the words of Luke’s gospel, “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, -, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men’ “. How ironical those words sound in this hour of a great world crisis. Peace on earth. Anything but assured peace is the lot of all the earth tonight. The threat of the hammer and the sickle stands in the way of peoples who would have all men free.
It is not new in world history, this crisis of 1950. I have just been reading Will Durant’s gigantic book, “Age of Faith”. In it he shows us What happened again and again to nations: to the once mighty power of Rome, to the sweeping might of the Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan, to the once dominant might of the Arabic world. Nations died, nations _were born, the tides of conquest ebbed and flowed, but through it all the faith was triumphant. The angel voices on the hills of Bethlehem could not be silenced.
A better transl.ation of the Greek text of Luke’s gospel gives us not “peace on earth, good will toward men”, but “peace on earth toward men of good will”.
That is our supreme need in this hour of trial — men of good will in Tokyo_ and Peiping, in Downing Street and-the Elysee, in the White House and the Kremlin.
Give us, we pray, 0 Lord, in this awful hour, in all the world’s nations, men of good will.
And so, to all our listeners, up and down this old valley of the Kennebec, we can and do sincerely wish you not so much a merry Christmas as a Christmas of Christian Good Will.
Year: 1950