CREEK ROAD GANG
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Autobiography of
Nathaniel Watson Ladd
(1848-1932)
Part 4
Editor's note: This is the fourth excerpt from the autobiographical manuscript left by Nathaniel Watson Ladd. See the October issue for the first installment , the November issue for the second installment and December issue for the third installment of his autobiography.
Born in 1848 in Derry, New Hampshire, the second child and first son of Daniel and Lucy Ladd, Nathaniel Watson Ladd went on to graduate from Dartmouth College and to study law at Boston University. He became a Boston lawyer and political figure, serving on the Boston Common Council, and later in the State Legislature. He was also a founder of the Boston Athletic Association. He died in 1932.
In this passage, Ladd tells of his boyhood in Epping Corner and of living for some time with his grandparents.
While our family life at North River was in many respects hard, it proved to be rather a good place for a growing family of young children.
I had a bad habit of wiping my dirty hands on my trousers and I remember one day my mother, taking me on her knee, said, "Your mother has to work very hard to keep your clothes clean and in order, and I wish you would not wipe your hands on your trousers." I promised I would not. The next time they got dirty, the temptation was very strong to wipe them on my trousers, but I remembered my promise to Mother and took some other method. The next time it was not quite so hard, and the third time easier still, and I never wiped my hands on my trousers again. Thus my mother taught me my first lesson of self-constraint and self-denial. My second [lesson] was when my thoughts of her and love for her saved me from being drowned.
One time, when alone, she had to walk to Epping Corner to make some necessary purchases. She put me under the Elm tree and told me not to move from there until she came back. When she returned, after walking three miles over and three back, she said it looked as if I had not moved at all.
My father kept at least one horse, and often two or three, but I often heard Mother say that she wished she had a horse and wagon. One day I started on the way toward Epping Corner and got as far as the house of the fourth neighbor, when Mr. Dow stopped me and asked where I was going. I said I was going to Epping Corner to get a horse and wagon for my mother. He succeeded in turning me back. When I got home, I was severely punished by Father, and in my opinion, he did perfectly right. My parents were hard-working people and could not allow a child to be running away for any reason whatever.
One day my sister and I were sent to the woods to gather Colts foot, sometimes called cow slips or marsh marigolds. Instead of picking them, we used up the time playing and got only a few. My sister said we could fill the pan with grasses and leaves and put the greens on top. I was never able to carry off a deception, and when my Father saw my face, he said he knew something was wrong. He examined the pan, and we were both severely punished. My sister was quite angry with me, because I had given the whole thing away. She was a year and a half older than I and always bossed me.
The pasture on this farm was very poor, so we used to have to watch the cows in the orchard and on the lane in order that they might feed there. One of our hardships was going out frosty mornings with bare feet to watch the cows. Life was hard in many ways. Pigs had a way of rooting out of the fence on rainy nights, and everybody had to get up and chase them.
One neighbor, who had the adjoining land, had there two apple trees in a valley, one of them August Sweet and the other Sopsevines or red astrican, and we used to creep up that valley. He once said that it was worth the loss of the apples to see my sister run. It did not seem as if her feet touched the ground at all.
Visitors were always very pleasant to have. I remember my Aunt Phoebe coming on from New York with her two children, Horace and Persia. How nice they looked with all their fine clothes, and they brought us presents. I remember my cousin Alonzo Eastman visited us there at one time. His health was rather poor. He had inherited consumption from his father. My father evidently thought that he ought to be married. My red-headed old maid had a younger sister, who taught at the district school where I attended, and my father introduced them. I can remember they had quite a frolic chasing each other about, but nothing ever came of it.
When I was ten years old, my grandfather and grandmother wanted me to live with them for a while. One of the first things they taught me was that I must not take anything, not even the value of a pin, from anybody without the owner's consent. My grandfather also explained to me that it would be wise to keep my own counsel. My Aunt Mary and her son Alonzo were living in the same house, but in separate rooms, although the cooking and much of the life was together. My grandfather was then supposed to be a wealthy man, and my coming to live there did not seem altogether agreeable to Aunt Mary.
At one time, I was accused of doing something which rumpled up the upper crust to a pie kept in a cold storage room. A determined effort was made to compel me to confess that I did it, but I had never touched the pie, and no amount of pressure could compel me to say that I did.
My Aunt Mary's husband was a very thrifty Vermont man who died at a very early age of consumption, which even a residence in Florida did not succeed in curing. He left what was at that time a rather handsome property. Their son, my cousin Alonzo, had the reputation of being a fine scholar and a good man in every respect, but he was a spender of money, rather than an earner of it, and never seemed to deny himself anything he wanted in that way. I think he was never able to accumulate much for himself.
My grandfather had some plains land about three miles from the village where he lived, and he had what he called his dingle cart in which we went back and forth. He raised there most of the produce that was required for his own family.
At the age of ten, in 1858, while I was riding with grandfather in his dingle cart from Tilton to the plains lands, he said, "They are killing each other today on the other side of the world." At that time, we could only hear from Europe when a vessel came in, bringing the news, which sometimes [took] a week or more. Yet my grandfather had kept himself so well informed as to what was going on there, including the Military Maneuvers, that he could say truthfully, "They are killing each on the other side of the world." This was the Crimean War.
He once said that he had discovered that I could do the best work when I got mad.
Grandfather was allowed by some friend of his to cut firewood on Bean Hill. One day we went there together, and worked hard all day. When we returned, my grandmother reproached him for having visited a certain woman there whom we had not seen. Grandmother always controlled Grandfather, and if she could not succeed in any other way, she went into a fit that made him almost crazy. One day she was in one of those fits, and Alonzo, being in the room, noticed that her lips were actually quivering with amusement. He smiled and went upstairs to his own room. She apparently was amused by her success in putting it over on grandfather.
I went to the district school there [while living with Grandfather], and the schoolmaster was rather severe with me. He and my father were the only two people in the world that I ever really feared. And there I met another red-haired girl to whom I took a fancy, but her older sister told me that Captain Soper was preferred. He was attending the Academy. However, he did not marry her, but I heard she married a doctor.
[Back in Epping,] Our moving from North River to Derry was very trying to my parents. My father bought an old horse for that purpose and took everything up in one-horse loads, making many trips. My mother packed everything so well that nothing was broken. The last load had to be taken up in the night because my father feared a snow storm coming was coming on, at Thanksgiving time, and he had no means of going except on wheels. We travelled all night, my mother following the horse and buggy. In driving up Clement's Hill near our new home, the load tipped over. Colonel Clement came to our rescue with his ox team and righted the load without unloading it.
The following fall, my father's mother died, and my father's health began to fail. He experienced great pain in his side. He supposed there was pus there which needed to come out and wanted the doctor to lance it, but the doctor would not, because he said he did not know what it was. My father finally persuaded him to use the knife under father's directions. That was done without his taking gas or anything to dull the pain, but it began to separate, and, as my mother said, run his life away. My sister, who afterward studied medicine and graduated in 1876 at the Boston University Medical School, and knowing all about the circumstances, said there could be no doubt but that it was cancer. He died in February 1862 at the age of 37. My sister herself died of cancer at the age of 44.
Cousin Alonzo was a very fastidious man, always careful about his own appearance, and very cleanly in his habits. It was the later part of March or early April when he drove me, in what had been Father's team, to Tilton [Editor's note: where Grandfather Ladd had arranged for Nathaniel to live, work helping a farmer, and go to school]. Alonzo thought my bare hands were rather compromising in appearance. He stopped at a furnishing goods store to buy me a pair of gloves. When I attempted to put the gloves on, it was quite impossible to get them over my rather large and chubby hands, and he remarked to the dealer that I evidently was not accustomed to fashionable gloves, and gave it up. We stopped overnight at the home of a distant relative of my grandmother, named Gordon, in Suncook. We had to sleep in the same bed. When I took off my shoes and stockings, my feet were not as clean as he thought they ought to be and remarked about it. I was very careful when he got into bed that my feet never went over near his side.
My cousin finally died at the age of twenty-five from consumption.
Born in 1848 in Derry, New Hampshire, the second child and first son of Daniel and Lucy Ladd, Nathaniel Watson Ladd went on to graduate from Dartmouth College and to study law at Boston University. He became a Boston lawyer and political figure, serving on the Boston Common Council, and later in the State Legislature. He was also a founder of the Boston Athletic Association. He died in 1932.
In this passage, Ladd tells of his boyhood in Epping Corner and of living for some time with his grandparents.
While our family life at North River was in many respects hard, it proved to be rather a good place for a growing family of young children.
I had a bad habit of wiping my dirty hands on my trousers and I remember one day my mother, taking me on her knee, said, "Your mother has to work very hard to keep your clothes clean and in order, and I wish you would not wipe your hands on your trousers." I promised I would not. The next time they got dirty, the temptation was very strong to wipe them on my trousers, but I remembered my promise to Mother and took some other method. The next time it was not quite so hard, and the third time easier still, and I never wiped my hands on my trousers again. Thus my mother taught me my first lesson of self-constraint and self-denial. My second [lesson] was when my thoughts of her and love for her saved me from being drowned.
One time, when alone, she had to walk to Epping Corner to make some necessary purchases. She put me under the Elm tree and told me not to move from there until she came back. When she returned, after walking three miles over and three back, she said it looked as if I had not moved at all.
My father kept at least one horse, and often two or three, but I often heard Mother say that she wished she had a horse and wagon. One day I started on the way toward Epping Corner and got as far as the house of the fourth neighbor, when Mr. Dow stopped me and asked where I was going. I said I was going to Epping Corner to get a horse and wagon for my mother. He succeeded in turning me back. When I got home, I was severely punished by Father, and in my opinion, he did perfectly right. My parents were hard-working people and could not allow a child to be running away for any reason whatever.
One day my sister and I were sent to the woods to gather Colts foot, sometimes called cow slips or marsh marigolds. Instead of picking them, we used up the time playing and got only a few. My sister said we could fill the pan with grasses and leaves and put the greens on top. I was never able to carry off a deception, and when my Father saw my face, he said he knew something was wrong. He examined the pan, and we were both severely punished. My sister was quite angry with me, because I had given the whole thing away. She was a year and a half older than I and always bossed me.
The pasture on this farm was very poor, so we used to have to watch the cows in the orchard and on the lane in order that they might feed there. One of our hardships was going out frosty mornings with bare feet to watch the cows. Life was hard in many ways. Pigs had a way of rooting out of the fence on rainy nights, and everybody had to get up and chase them.
One neighbor, who had the adjoining land, had there two apple trees in a valley, one of them August Sweet and the other Sopsevines or red astrican, and we used to creep up that valley. He once said that it was worth the loss of the apples to see my sister run. It did not seem as if her feet touched the ground at all.
Visitors were always very pleasant to have. I remember my Aunt Phoebe coming on from New York with her two children, Horace and Persia. How nice they looked with all their fine clothes, and they brought us presents. I remember my cousin Alonzo Eastman visited us there at one time. His health was rather poor. He had inherited consumption from his father. My father evidently thought that he ought to be married. My red-headed old maid had a younger sister, who taught at the district school where I attended, and my father introduced them. I can remember they had quite a frolic chasing each other about, but nothing ever came of it.
When I was ten years old, my grandfather and grandmother wanted me to live with them for a while. One of the first things they taught me was that I must not take anything, not even the value of a pin, from anybody without the owner's consent. My grandfather also explained to me that it would be wise to keep my own counsel. My Aunt Mary and her son Alonzo were living in the same house, but in separate rooms, although the cooking and much of the life was together. My grandfather was then supposed to be a wealthy man, and my coming to live there did not seem altogether agreeable to Aunt Mary.
At one time, I was accused of doing something which rumpled up the upper crust to a pie kept in a cold storage room. A determined effort was made to compel me to confess that I did it, but I had never touched the pie, and no amount of pressure could compel me to say that I did.
My Aunt Mary's husband was a very thrifty Vermont man who died at a very early age of consumption, which even a residence in Florida did not succeed in curing. He left what was at that time a rather handsome property. Their son, my cousin Alonzo, had the reputation of being a fine scholar and a good man in every respect, but he was a spender of money, rather than an earner of it, and never seemed to deny himself anything he wanted in that way. I think he was never able to accumulate much for himself.
My grandfather had some plains land about three miles from the village where he lived, and he had what he called his dingle cart in which we went back and forth. He raised there most of the produce that was required for his own family.
At the age of ten, in 1858, while I was riding with grandfather in his dingle cart from Tilton to the plains lands, he said, "They are killing each other today on the other side of the world." At that time, we could only hear from Europe when a vessel came in, bringing the news, which sometimes [took] a week or more. Yet my grandfather had kept himself so well informed as to what was going on there, including the Military Maneuvers, that he could say truthfully, "They are killing each on the other side of the world." This was the Crimean War.
He once said that he had discovered that I could do the best work when I got mad.
Grandfather was allowed by some friend of his to cut firewood on Bean Hill. One day we went there together, and worked hard all day. When we returned, my grandmother reproached him for having visited a certain woman there whom we had not seen. Grandmother always controlled Grandfather, and if she could not succeed in any other way, she went into a fit that made him almost crazy. One day she was in one of those fits, and Alonzo, being in the room, noticed that her lips were actually quivering with amusement. He smiled and went upstairs to his own room. She apparently was amused by her success in putting it over on grandfather.
I went to the district school there [while living with Grandfather], and the schoolmaster was rather severe with me. He and my father were the only two people in the world that I ever really feared. And there I met another red-haired girl to whom I took a fancy, but her older sister told me that Captain Soper was preferred. He was attending the Academy. However, he did not marry her, but I heard she married a doctor.
[Back in Epping,] Our moving from North River to Derry was very trying to my parents. My father bought an old horse for that purpose and took everything up in one-horse loads, making many trips. My mother packed everything so well that nothing was broken. The last load had to be taken up in the night because my father feared a snow storm coming was coming on, at Thanksgiving time, and he had no means of going except on wheels. We travelled all night, my mother following the horse and buggy. In driving up Clement's Hill near our new home, the load tipped over. Colonel Clement came to our rescue with his ox team and righted the load without unloading it.
The following fall, my father's mother died, and my father's health began to fail. He experienced great pain in his side. He supposed there was pus there which needed to come out and wanted the doctor to lance it, but the doctor would not, because he said he did not know what it was. My father finally persuaded him to use the knife under father's directions. That was done without his taking gas or anything to dull the pain, but it began to separate, and, as my mother said, run his life away. My sister, who afterward studied medicine and graduated in 1876 at the Boston University Medical School, and knowing all about the circumstances, said there could be no doubt but that it was cancer. He died in February 1862 at the age of 37. My sister herself died of cancer at the age of 44.
Cousin Alonzo was a very fastidious man, always careful about his own appearance, and very cleanly in his habits. It was the later part of March or early April when he drove me, in what had been Father's team, to Tilton [Editor's note: where Grandfather Ladd had arranged for Nathaniel to live, work helping a farmer, and go to school]. Alonzo thought my bare hands were rather compromising in appearance. He stopped at a furnishing goods store to buy me a pair of gloves. When I attempted to put the gloves on, it was quite impossible to get them over my rather large and chubby hands, and he remarked to the dealer that I evidently was not accustomed to fashionable gloves, and gave it up. We stopped overnight at the home of a distant relative of my grandmother, named Gordon, in Suncook. We had to sleep in the same bed. When I took off my shoes and stockings, my feet were not as clean as he thought they ought to be and remarked about it. I was very careful when he got into bed that my feet never went over near his side.
My cousin finally died at the age of twenty-five from consumption.
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