The log cabin where father was
born, a few miles outside
Of
Portsmouth, was still there when I left home about 1900. Father said
he
often woke up on a winter’s morning with a his blanket covered with
snow,
where it had sifted through the chinks between the logs. He also
told
of going barefooted through the snow to a neighbor’s for some hot
coals
when their own fire had gone out.
The only thing remarkable about all
this is that these
things
could have happened to the father of one who has electric lights,
inside
toilet, running water (hot and cold), central heat and thermo_
static
control, telephone, horseless carriage, radio, TV, has flown the
Atlantic
and witnessed the fission of the atom.
About the only thing
that
could make that list more dramatic would be to top it with the
Second
Coming.
The Samuel Gunn house, also, still
stands (which is quite
remarkable,
as you will presently see) or at least it did the last time
I
drove around the town. It is very
forlorn and lonesome looking because,
besides
being hoary and dilapidated with age (it is said to be the first
house
built in Portsmouth), it stands by itself outside Portsmouth’s
famous
flood wall, so that it is inundated every time there is high water.
however,
it must have been founded on a rock (no doubt the Episcopal lay
roader
remembered the fate of the house that was built on sand) because
it
has withstood many a flood. I wouldn’t
want to see it during one of
the
great deluges we have nowadays --- with the town snug and dry within
its
high walls and this venerable little house wrestling, alone, with the
waves
--- utterly abandoned.
We had in our house at Portsmouth a
light and graceful and
very
comfortable rocking chair (handmade, of
course) that had come over
the
mountains with our ancestor, the first Phillip. When the old home
was
broken up, Lucy with her great loyalty to the past, provided a
refuge
for the family relics, including, of course, this chair. Thanks
to
her, it is now one of Margot’s prize possessions in Johnstown, Pa.,
where
it is still rocking restless babies to sleep.
Brownie, her husband,
says
it is now on its way back across the mountains.
Lucy also has some of the old
Steamer Hope china. If
any
of the connection would like a souvenir I recommend that they
address
themselves to her. I hope, though, that she will reserve at
least
an egg cup, each, for Margot and Atwell.
In Uncle William's library was a first
edition of
Audubon,
which must be at least a hundred years old by now and with
Audubon
societies all over the place, it should be worth quite a bit
---
as first editions go. When Uncle William was something over eighty
years
old, he sold all of his books to the Carnegie Library of Ports-
mouth,
with the exception of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which he held
out
just to have something to read. He started in with the A' s and
planned
to go straight through, if time permitted. There was a real
lover
of books and of knowledge! One cannot do justice to Uncle William
in
a paragraph so more about him later.
I have often heard father tell of the ravages
of yellow
fever
in the South --- before Walter Reed
contributed the script for
"The
Yellow Jacket". He was in St. Louis when the death rate was so
high
that they could not bury the dead in the ordinary way.
Wagons went
through
the streets and bodies were carried out of the houses and piled
onto
them. Probably the contagion, also, made this
method of disposal
necessary.
One time we had an epidemic of one of the
milder contagions
in
Portsmouth and the paper reported that there had been seventeen new
cases
that day, which we thought was terrific. Having his St. Louis
experience
in mind and always liking to deflate excitement anyway, father
remarked
that when the deaths from yellow fever got down to seventeen a
day
in St. Louis, they thought the epidemic was over.
Another experience with the yellow peril
happened on a
steamboat.
Father occupied a stateroom with another man who got the
fever
and died about midnight. Father took
another room and his
companion
in
that one also was stricken and died about three o'clock. Father said
he
sat up the rest of the night. It is evident that
he had the great
luck,
in those days in the South, to be an immune.
About Uncle Sam's taste for engravings. In his
day they
did
not have the fine reproductions in color that are so common and so
inexpensive
now. Steel engravings were the best copies that were available
and
thru them Uncle Sam was not only familiar with all of the old masters,
but
he knew in what galleries their pictures were. He talked
as familiarly
of
the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris as I, who had
visited
them many times, could. He also knew the works of the great Italian
painters
in the Vatican and the museums of Florence. His love of the arts
was
so great that he named his first son Raphael, his second Arthur Rembrandt
and
his first daughter Beatrice, It was only the fourth child that was
called
by a mere family name, Samuel, and I imagine that Aunt Mary, his wife,
took a hand in that.
Some
ten years ago, when Margo and I were I were in Portsmouth,
Cousin Arthur Moore took us to the first family
burying ground, on a
country hillside, a few hundred yards from the old
stone house. It was
the first that I knew of the spot, though the
original Moores of the
region – Phillip I and Phillip II, are buried
there. It seems a bit
scandalous that such an intimate piece of earth
should be so soon lost
to mind.
There are no Moores left in Portsmouth to guide one there and
I doubt if Margot could find it again, so it seems
doubly appropriate,
in the account of the family’s beginnings, to at
least record the fact
of its existence – neglected though it be.