<\/p>\n
As we start today the 27th year of Little Talks on Common Things, I want briefly to return to a favorite subject of mine – the origin of certain common words and expressions. Today I want to tell you about plumbers. How did workers on domestic water systems ever get the name plumbers? I make no reference to those investigators of political leaks, the notorious White House plumbers. They got their name, of course, because a common job of plumbers is to stop leaks. But where did the name plumber come from in the first place?<\/p>\n
The word plumb comes from the Latin word plumbum, meaning lead. As every carpenter and mason well knows, a plumb or plumb line is a string at the end of which is tied a piece of lead, and the line is used to establish a straight, vertical line. The lead used was the kind known as graphite, the same kind used for lead pencils. In fact, the most modern edition of Webster’s Dictionary gives as a first definition of plumb – a lead weight.<\/p>\n
That graphite lead was itself called plumbago, a word more commonly applied to a moody, tropical plant. However, the dictionary is again helpful. Its first definition of plumbago is graphite.<\/p>\n
Workers in lead were, as early as the 17th century, called plumbers because they worked on plumb. When, here in Maine in the mid-nineteenth century, people stopped routing water through logs with a hole bored lengthwise, thus making wooden pipes, and turned to the use of lead, they called in the lead workers or plumbers.<\/p>\n
Then it was discovered that pernicious lead poisoning was caused by drinking water that flowed through lead pipe, and pipes began to be made of cast iron, copper, brass, and later even of rubber and plastic. So the workers in lead, turning to use of all the new piping and tubing kept their old lead-associated name of plumbers. They got a monopoly on the business and came to control every kind of job that involved domestic or commercial use of water. I suppose the moral of this is that, if you want to start a new business, find one that will skyrocket, as did that of the old-time workers in lead.<\/p>\n
Now let’s take a look at a favorite magazine of 125 years ago.<\/p>\n
Everyone has heard of the famous Godey’s Lady’s Book, but I suspect few of you ever saw a copy. Not long ago I had opportunity to examine a bound volume, containing the six monthly issues from January through June in the year 1849. It was actually Vol. 38, showing that the magazine had started in 1830.<\/p>\n
In that first issue of 1849, the magazine started a series called “Heroines of the Revolution”. The author, Mrs. E. F. Ellery, offered an explanation of the series. She wrote, “Mr. Godey asked me to write a short series on Heroines of the Revolution. My first inquiry concerned South Carolina, where I lived. I wrote to historian Jared Sparks, author of the Life of Washington. He replied, “As my investigations spread over the U.S., I learned that Mrs. Roger Sherman was credited with giving Connecticut troops the first American flag ever used, a flag made from several pieces of dress. I found that not to be true. She did make a flag, but it was not given to the troops. It was first displayed when the peace was celebrated in New Haven.”<\/p>\n
Mrs. Ellery’s account continued – “I am greatly indebted to women still living who were old enough to know much that happened in their towns between 1775 and 1781. I am also pleased to note that Henry Clay wrote me, detailing his mother, a splendid tribute to a patriotic lady.”<\/p>\n
One heroine described in an Ellery sketch was Mrs. Henry Knox, well known in Maine as the hostess of the mansion Montpelier in Thomaston, built by her husband who had served as President Washington’s Secretary of War, and earlier as chief artillery officer in the Revolution. About Mrs. Knox, the sketch said:”Lucy Flucker was daughter of Thomas Flucker, Secretary of the Province of Massachusetts Bay under the royal government in 1770. Henry Knox was a Boston bookseller of humble origin and no wealth. He was a major in a local militia regiment when he caught the eye of young Lucy Flucker as he paraded his men on Boston Common. Lucy began to frequent the bookstore. When Knox asked her to marry him, she was unable to obtain her father’s consent. Not only was her Henry a poor struggling bookseller. He ran with the wrong crowd, those crazy radicals led by Sam Adams to protest the actions of their true sovereign, King George III.”<\/p>\n
But after the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, things got too hot in Boston for many of the loyalists. With others, like Sylvester Gardiner and Florentius Vassall,who were large owners in Kennebec lands, Thomas Flucker returned to England, leaving his wife and family in Boston until he could reestablish business activity in the Mother country.<\/p>\n
Lucy took advantage of her father’s absence, and perhaps with her mother’s connivance, to marry Henry Knox. With her husband, Lucy went to Cambridge, where Knox became Washington’s artillery commander, and almost as his first exploit, brought overland through winter snows from Ticonderoga the guns that enabled Washington to lift the siege of Boston in 1776. Lucy Knox became a close friend of Martha Washington and stayed as a guest at Mount Vernon during the siege of Yorktown until Cornwallis’ surrender in 1781.<\/p>\n
After the war, General and Mrs. Knox returned to Boston. Knox’s appointment as Secretary of War in the first presidential administration took Lucy to New York and Philadelphia for long stays, because not until the presidency of John Adams was the national capital established on a new site on the Potomac called Washington City. In Philadelphia Lucy was hostess to many prominent visitors, including the famous French prime minister Talleyrand and future king of France, Louis Philippe.<\/p>\n
In 1795, General and Mrs. Knox left Philadelphia to start a new life in Maine. Lucy’s grandfather had been General Waldo, proprietor of vast acreage on Muscongus Bay that included what are now the towns of Waldoboro, Warren, Union, Thomaston, Rockland, and the St. George peninsula. The tract was called the Waldo patent, and by 1795 Lucy Knox, one of the Waldo heirs, owned one-fifth of it. To Lucy’s own holdings, her husband added by purchase a large adjoining tract. On it, at the little port of Thomaston, they built a magnificent home, to which they gave, in honor of their French connections in the American Revolution the name Montpelier. Knox furnished the mansion, as Mrs. Ellery expressed it, “with all the taste of modern luxury”. He also built ships and set in motion various industries for his Waldo lands.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Knox’s desire for quiet retirement was not realized. Her husband’s reputation was too widely spread and visitors were always turning up. They included not only government leaders, but people the Knox’s had never seen before. Word got around that Knox fed anyone who called, even Indians. In fact at one time a band of more than 50 Indians camped near the mansion and demanded food. It took a week for the General to get rid of them.<\/p>\n
Visitors were so numerous that it was not unusual for Knox to have an ox and 20 sheep killed nearly every Monday, in the hope that the meat would last through the week, which it seldom did. Every day the servants made up 100 beds in the big house. In the stables were 20 saddle horses always ready for use.<\/p>\n
Among the distinguished visitors within a year of the mansion’s opening were Mr. and Mrs. William Bingham of Philadelphia and their two daughters. With them came the older daughter’s fiance, William Baring of London, the man who would later be Lord Ashburton and would negotiate with Daniel Webster the treaty that settled the dispute over Maine’s boundary with Canada.<\/p>\n
Knox had already had business dealings with Bingham, and it was this visit to Thomaston that persuaded Bingham to purchase the remaining tract known as Bingham’s Million Acres, a purchase that could not have been made without the active interest of his daughter’s fiance because he was a member of one of Europe’s wealthiest banking families, Baring Brothers of London. Mrs. Ellery ended her account thus: “Lucy Knox survived her husband by 18 years. To the end she retained perfect eyesight and read without glasses. She died in 1824 at the age of 68.”<\/p>\n
Mrs. Ellery, we should be reminded, was writing about Heroines of the Revolution. That is probably why she left out of her story what she must have known very well – that Lucy Knox died almost in poverty. General Knox had badly overextended his land investments and other business interests. When he died, his debts emptied out most of his estate, and what
\nwas left was dissipated by his improvident children.<\/p>\n
There can be no question, however, that in the tumultuous years from 1775 to 1781 Lucy Knox, the Waldo heiress, was truly a heroine of the Revolution.<\/p>\n
The year 1849 saw the depth of miseries caused by the potato famine in Ireland. During the preceding year more than 30,000 Irish families had sought refuge in the U.S. The Home Rule Movement that would disturb the British Empire for more than 3\/4 of a century had reached such a height that the British government decided to exile some of its leaders. That explains the following item in the 1849 volume of Godey’s Lady’s Book.<\/p>\n
“The rebel patriots of Ireland – O’Brien, Meaghan, McMahon and O’Donahue, have been sent into exile out f this island. They form a spectacle of sympathetic interest. They seem so much the incarnation of Irish freedom that we fear their exile will banish from Ireland freedom itself. Let England beware. Patriotism is an immortal first, heroism an eternal truth. The sacrificed life of a patriot is never thrown away.”<\/p>\n
That was the beginning of the important Irish influence in the United States.<\/p>\n
Year: 1974<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1018, Broadcast on September 22, 1974<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1203,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}