Notes on Old Southampton

"Please make nor request any business calls on Sunday." –Daniel Wells, architect and builder

Wm R Post whale baron moved to North End and transformed [an] old salt box house into a castle with spiral stairway, full front porch, three-and-a-half stories, hipped tin roof, cupola with bell and much grandeur. Formerly the property of Capt Parker, the master of one of Mr Post’s ships. He was [an] elder in the church and as supt. for forty years (likely), notary public and local surveyor. His chains for that purpose were lying around our shop when I was a boy. My father had helped him survey Bib Fresh Pond–eighty acres as I remember. When LE Terry bought the big house (long unoccupied) there was a vendue or auction and a shop full of gadgets and everything else on the place was sold. I had asked my father to buy the bell in the cupola (the mornings of July 4^th I had shinned up the lightning rod and rung it). It was struck off to John Fournier for eighty cents, who sold it to Bill Enoch, who sold it to Mr Salem H Wales, and for years it hung under the wide eaves of his house on the NW corner. It was a ships bell, bronze off one of Mr Post’s whalers and likely weighed twelve pounds or twenty.

SH Wales was one of the first ‘yorkers’ to adopt SHampton; he had a large house on the hill at the NE end of the town pond, looking toward the beach. His son-in-law was Elihu Root whose house stood next door to the south, each place had a considerable acreage surrounding.

Next to the north of Mr Wales lived Pyrhus Concer, [sic] a coal black African who had engaged in whaling and now owned a sail boat which plyed the length of the lake (a mile) taking passengers to the beach at five cents a trip. Everyone respected Pyhrus; he had been the shipmate of many in the village and had sailed with the crew to California in ’49 with the ‘old Sabina.’ He had a pew in the church (rented in those days) about a third of the way up on the north side. A Scotch nurse name[d] Jean Taylor and her neice kept house for him after his wife Rachel died. On his gravestone Mr Root had carved the following text (from Tacitus, I think): “Though born a slave he had those virtues without which all men are but slaves.”

-- Reverend Jesse Halsey c1920