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Our Family Dreams
The Fletchers' Adventures in Nineteenth-Century America
By Daniel Blake Smith St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Daniel Blake Smith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7938-6
CHAPTER 1
BEGINNINGS
The Fletcher family's American experience stretches back to the very beginning of the European presence in New England. The family descends from Robert Fletcher, who settled in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1630. Jesse Fletcher, the patriarch of our story, was among the sixth generation of Fletchers in America. That generation made its mark not as founders, but as patriots, for it was the American Revolution that shaped and gave meaning to Jesse and his family. Born to Timothy and Bridget Fletcher in 1762 in Westford, Massachusetts, a small farming and cattle-raising village about twenty miles west of Boston, Jesse was the youngest of four children. His eldest brother, Elijah, became an ordained Congregationalist minister in nearby Hopkinton, Massachusetts, in 1773. But it was his brother Josiah to whom Jesse remained most attached, especially with the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord in 1775. Josiah was among the Minutemen who answered the call at Bunker Hill. Although he was only thirteen at the time, Jesse acted as an aide to Josiah during the very battle at which blood was first spilled in the American Revolution. Josiah went on to serve as a private in the Massachusetts militia at Ticonderoga, White Plains, and Saratoga.
After the war dozens of Revolutionary soldiers from the Boston area — many of them men who had served in the same militia company — made their way northwest into Vermont for fresh land. Some nineteen war veterans from Westford alone migrated with their families to Cavendish and Ludlow, Vermont, in the mid-1780s. They chose the rolling alluvial hills and valleys at the foot of the Green Mountains in part because the area had been well known to soldiers as far back as the end of the French and Indian War in the 1760s, when British general Lord Jeffrey Amherst carved out the Crown Point Road through the northeast corner of Ludlow. The road opened a flow of intelligence, arms, and men between Massachusetts to the east and New York to the west that helped counter French and Indian raiding parties coming out of Canada. So the northwest migration into southeast Vermont was itself an artifact of war, and Josiah and his friend Simeon Read were the very first settlers who moved into the area and began clearing virgin soil on the flats bordering the Black River, on the east side of the present-day town of Ludlow.
With Josiah's example before him, Jesse was a good candidate for a migrant out of Westford. Growing up in a humble family on a small farm with little access to any sort of advanced education, Jesse matured quickly, especially in wartime. He courted a local Westford girl, Lucy Keyes, and on August 8, 1782, they were married. He was nineteen; she was sixteen. The next year, now with an infant girl, Jesse and Lucy ventured up to Ludlow to visit Josiah and his family. They liked what they saw. Jesse found an especially alluring fresh spring along the banks of the Black River and, with the help of his brother — who, as town clerk, was able to cheaply snatch up various properties in Ludlow that were being auctioned off for delinquent taxes — decided to make the move to Ludlow too. In 1784 Jesse built his log cabin along the little stream that ran near the base of the Green Mountains. It was a very simple move for a young family with few skills and almost no resources. "They came in an ox cart to the place over the most rugged road," his son Calvin recalled.
Early settlers like the Fletchers built log houses with roofs made from tree bark, which meant felling a lot of trees to make clearings. Fellow settlers came together as neighbors for "logging bees" to do the clearing, rolling all the logs into huge piles and burning them. One old resident in the mid-nineteenth century recalled standing at his father's house as a small boy and counting the fires of some seventy-five different chopping areas where land had been cleared.
Like many other young men and women of the Revolutionary generation, Jesse and Lucy began their life together as migrants "quite young & inexperienced," as one of their children later remembered. A short, stout, sandy-complexioned man, Jesse had to make the best of things as he struggled to till the unforgiving soil, rugged rocks, and unimproved forestland of his one hundred acres in Ludlow. "My father had no money," one of Jesse's sons recalled, and "had to rely on his own energy" rather than any skills as a trader or experienced farmer. He and Lucy labored hard and lived poor. Grass and hay were cut by hand using thick, clumsy scythes fastened to large, heavy iron bands — not a task for old men or weak boys. As parents, Jesse and Lucy had to endure their share of personal tragedies. Their eldest daughter, Charlotte, died at age twelve; their son Stephen was run over by a horse and killed when he was only six. Given their large and growing family — fifteen children over the years — Jesse built a larger frame house in 1805 to accommodate their growing household.
Despite their relatively primitive rural setting — or perhaps because of it — both Jesse and Lucy worked hard to instill the importance of education in their children. A small, shrewd woman, Lucy reportedly had unbounded confidence in her children, provided they were willing, if need be, to leave home and go out and compete for their own independent fortune and place of honor. Family lore claims that when Lucy stamped her foot like a rabbit, all arguments ended and she got her way. It was a trait that only grew stronger with time. Many years later, in 1831, when Elijah, one of her older sons, ordered the youngest, twenty-two-year-old Stoughton, to "go cut that field of rye," Lucy reportedly stamped her foot. "No, you will never touch that scythe again," she told Stoughton. "You are going out into the world to make your way." She gave the boy a horse — just a nag — and a few dollars and sent him off. What she lacked in literacy and education — she could write her name and read a bit, but could do no more — Lucy made up with faith and hard work. A Baptist her entire adult life, she held fast to the word of God and busied herself sewing clothes and laboring on the farm both for her family and for the poor. She carded, spun, and wove the woolen cloth for the winter clothes of some fifteen children. When her son Calvin became wealthy later in life, he wrote his mother asking her to make him a suit, since her cloth, he insisted, was better than any he could buy, and she was clearly the best tailor he'd ever known.
But both Jesse and Lucy fully grasped that hard work was not nearly enough to guarantee a happy and successful future, especially for their children. Becoming educated — or at least acquiring basic schooling — was a central tenet not only in their childrearing but also in their view of what made a person truly useful in the world. So despite their meager circumstances and the pioneer world of rural Vermont into which they had moved, they were determined to find schooling for their children. And here they relied again on Jesse's brother Josiah. Besides being a working farmer with a thriving real estate business, Josiah Fletcher also taught school, initially out of his own home. In the village, Jesse followed his brother's lead, taking on the responsibility of arranging schooling for the settlers' children. But progress came slowly. The settlers were thinly spread out over the township, and many of them were very poor, resulting in too few students and too little personal capital available to support a local school. As one of the town's selectmen, Jesse urged the raising of money from individual families. On April 10, 1801 — some eighteen years after initial settlement — the town voted to raise $66 from contributing families to build a modest, one-story frame schoolhouse, twenty by twenty-four feet. Each student had to furnish two feet of wood for the school. In its first year some fifty-seven students were enrolled, most likely including Jesse's youngest children: Stephen, seven; Lucy, nine; Timothy, ten; and Elijah, twelve.
In such a primitive setting only the basics were taught — reading, spelling, writing, and elementary math. Penmanship was difficult to teach, as it required making and mending the quill pens that the students used — steel pens didn't come into use until the 1830s. Girls were taught the art of needlework, which, once completed, created a "sampler," a square of canvas on which the alphabet was displayed in various colors and forms. The girls' parents often proudly framed and hung these samplers up in the best room of the house.
What mattered most to Jesse was that his children work hard and become "useful" adults with strong moral and religious principles. Although he never formally joined a church, Jesse attended Congregationalist services and was deeply imbued with religious feeling. According to his son Calvin, Jesse drew his whole worldview from the Bible, believing in "a direct superintending Providence, punishments & rewards." He never went anywhere without his Bible and a newspaper and regularly read aloud from the Scriptures with his family. Despite this strong moral grounding, Jesse led a somewhat timid and fearful life — always struggling to stay out of debt and, with such a large family, often worrying that he was failing at his responsibility of taking the best possible care of them. Indeed, he suffered frequent bouts of "depression of spirits," as one son called it, a condition that may well have prompted him to indulge in excessive drinking in his middle age. Despite these financial worries, he made himself a very "useful" figure in Ludlow politics. In addition to serving as a town selectman, Jesse was elected the first town clerk and recorder of all deeds and birth, marriage, and death records. From 1798 to 1799, he followed in the footsteps of his brother Josiah, representing Ludlow in the Vermont legislature and also serving as justice of the peace for nearly thirty years.
Given their relatively impoverished agrarian circumstances, Jesse and Lucy understandably wanted to make sure their own children could imagine a future beyond becoming poor plowboys in rural New England. This desire underscored for Jesse the necessity of providing his children a serious education beyond the simple elementary training available after 1801 in Ludlow. In fact, according to his sons, he didn't think much of people who had not pursued a liberal education. His brother Elijah had attended college, and Josiah had begun college, though he was unable to finish. At minimum, Jesse wanted to make sure that all of his own children had at least a rudimentary formal schooling. And, as in many farm families with limited resources, he privileged the eldest children (especially sons) with the most elaborate educational plans. "The first children received more personal attention in their education from my father than the middle & last," one of his youngest sons, Calvin, remembered.
So it was not surprising that when Elijah, one of Jesse's older sons, showed promise in his studies, he became the focal point for his family's hopes for a college education and a future that would send him away from home, a home he loved but that offered mostly poor and hopeless prospects. Clearly a young man with scholarly potential, Elijah was sent out as a boy of fifteen to live with his grandmother in Westford and attend the Westford Academy to prepare for college. The cost of going to college in the early nineteenth century — paying for tuition, room and board, and tutors, and suffering the loss of able-bodied labor back home — proved prohibitively expensive for most families. Only the truly gifted, the well-to-do, and the most determined made the choice of pursuing a college education. Elijah was one such young man. He attended college at Dartmouth and Middlebury, and then, in the spring of 1810, he transferred to the University of Vermont, where he finished his liberal arts degree.
He was about to embark on what would become a signature theme among the Fletchers, especially its young men: leaving home at an early age to find a better future. It was a departure fueled by equal parts hope and desperation.
* * *
At eight in the morning of July 4, 1810, a slender, twenty-year-old Elijah Fletcher mounted his bay mare outside his family's modest frame house in Ludlow, Vermont. Fresh from his college education at Middlebury and the University of Vermont, and wearing clothes spun and woven by his mother and sisters, Elijah bade farewell to his impoverished farm family. He had a teaching offer at an academy in Raleigh, North Carolina, that paid well and so was an alluring prospect. A few months before he left, Elijah admitted that "the thoughts of six hundred dollars per year has such influence upon my mind that I am employed in contriving a plan for affecting the object." Teaching school in the "distant country" of the American South offered a powerful alternative to the drudgery and dead-end farmwork that lay before him if he stayed behind to help his father and brothers. In fact, life in Ludlow working Jesse's farm conjured up thoughts of nothing but hardship and debt. "My inability and dependence made me miserable while with you," Elijah later confessed to his father. "Such was my determination when I left home that nothing but death or a total deprivation of corporeal strength would prohibit me paying my distrusted and at best fast-bound debt of gratitude. I would rather [have] labored in the field with the negro slave and so earned a recompense for your kindness than have involved you in difficulty." Leaving behind his often-depressed and struggling father — even with several other sons and daughters to help out on the farm — Elijah rode off that day under a cloud of presumed self-centered motives, a suspicion that continued to gnaw at him months later. Even his friends in Ludlow, he confessed, "doubted my affection for the family and said my motives were all selfish, I had a care for nothing but to aggrandize myself."
Part of Elijah's "selfish" agenda surfaced in his effort to coax the University of Vermont into granting him his diploma "without I tarried till Commencement." When that was granted, all he needed was $50 to cover the diploma and a means of travel: "Trust me for a horse," he wrote his father from college, "[and] I shall be ready for the expedition." A final task was to secure some key letters of recommendation to take with him. The first day of his journey was a thirty-two-mile ride to Manchester, Vermont, followed by eight more miles to Arlington, where he had to wait on a letter from Governor Isaac Tichenor. He was told to go to Bennington, where the governor, out fishing, prompted "another disappointment." Instead, two hours later, he managed to obtain a letter from Vermont U.S. senator Jonathan Robinson.
Armed with a diploma, a letter of introduction, and a few dollars, Elijah finally grasped how daunting his "long and strange journey" would be. Calculating that he could ride forty miles per day, he figured he would arrive in Virginia in a little over two weeks. Confident that his "expedition" was necessary, Elijah nonetheless keenly felt the potential danger and uncertainty of the path before him. As he was about to head south from Albany, New York, he admitted to his older brother, twenty-three-year-old Jesse Jr., that he had fallen into a "hypochondriacal or melancholy reflection when I consider I have seven hundred miles to travel, with nineteen or twenty dollars to bear my expenses. However, I will do the best I can. I am in no fear of starving, although I must live prudently."
Living prudently meant finding cheap taverns for meals and lodging along the way. To conserve his meager funds, Elijah subsisted on bread and cheese and, when "the gnawings of hunger compelled me," a cup of milk. When he stayed at a Dutch tavern in New York, he asked the female proprietor for a little milk. Her response was prophetic in terms of the cultural shift he was in for as he moved south: "The good woman wanted to know if I chose sweet milk? No, I told her, I did not want my milk sweetened. She says: you don't understand me, do you want sweet milk or sour? I laughed at my mistake, and told her I was a Yankee; I preferred sweet milk." During his journey he mostly tried to appear "a liberal gentleman" among strangers, when in fact he "was as poor as Job's Cats ... thus did pride struggle against poverty." Sometimes, though, meeting and staying with suspicious strangers prompted fear and anxiety. At one tavern in New Jersey, Elijah noted, "I went to bed, and slept but very little, for the house was full of swearing, drinking, Irish gamblers. They tried to get me into their company before I went to bed. I told them mildly I was unacquainted with their game and thus excused myself." The landlord worried him nearly as much as the dubious lodgers. Before going to bed, he asked the owner for his luggage, "telling him I should want to change my clothes, when in fact I was afraid to trust them with him. I spent a restless night, with many fears, and apprehensions of robbery, murder, and the like, but was so fortunate as to find myself alive the next morning."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Our Family Dreams by Daniel Blake Smith. Copyright © 2016 Daniel Blake Smith. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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