Memory prompts me to go down the village street as it was
some 50 years ago. Following the old Indian trail, likely the early settlers
placed their houses along the winding way that they called the main street. All
the early houses, salt-box style, faced the south. The next generation built
their house close to the street, many of the porches coming out even with the
sidewalk. The street was wide and line on both sides by massive trees, many of
them spreading elms. The trail was deep with dust in the summer, almost
impassable with mud in the springtime, and in the winter rough with ruts.
The railroad came through about the time I was born, linking
the villages with New York, about ninety miles to the west. Before that, most
commercial and cultural connections were with New England; trading vessels
plying between Boston and New London, Stonington, and our Island. At the north
end of our Main Street there was a Scotch immigrant familiarly called Josh Ellison;
he had four boys and six girls. Five of the latter, as I remember, succumbed in
a diphtheria epidemic that swept through the village long before the time of
anti-toxins. The oldest boy became a very skilled cabinet maker and wood
carver. The second boy, John, went to work for the village painter. My older
sisters were painting their bedroom and wanted some cream colored paint for
wood work. They sent me, a boy of five or six, to the other end of the village
where the paint-shop was located. I delivered my order and came home with a
quart of the paint that John had mixed. When the girls applied it they found it
was a brilliant colonial yellow. My older brother commented at the supper table
that night, “The cream from John Ellison’s cows must be a deeper color than
from ours.” (I told this story to John Ellison last summer. He still owns the
paint business and half the local bank, but he did not seem to appreciate my
story.)
Next down the street came “Uncle” Sam Bishop. I remember one
day as a boy coming home from Camp’s Pond with a big load of wood. Mud was
deep; the horses had all they could pull. As we came by Uncle Sam’s house he
called out to me, “Choose a good rut, boy, you’ll be in it for a long time.”
Back of the present circumstances there may have been a subtle philosophy.
Next door lived Walter Jagger whose buildings were always
freshly painted, his whole farmstead meticulously kept and his farm work was
always a week ahead of anyone else’s. He took the latest agriculture journals
and was in many ways the most progressive man in the community. Naturally at
the time when the little red school houses gave place to a union school and
later added a high school, Mr. Walter was the president of the school board.
The first graduating class of the new high school put on a “banquet” at the one
hotel that catered to the summer visitors. The first course was bouillon served
in double-handled cups. Mr. Walter, who presided led off by adding cream and
sugar to his cup and saying so all could hear, “The sailors always start the
day with coffee, but I suppose New Yorkers who don’t get up until noon have it
for dinner. Just why they have to have two handles on the cup I do not know,
but here goes.” “Strange tasting coffee,” he remarked, “but one has to keep up
with the times.”
His brother [Charles A. Jagger (1862-1914)], living nextdoor, was the editor of the local paper. He had a Ph.D. from a Germanuniversity and had real literary skill. Having some financial resources (his
father had been a 49-er in California) it is doubtful if he ever made his
newspaper pay. In cold weather it was scarcely legible because the ink stayed
sticky in the cold pressroom. Dr. Jay had political opinions and maybe
ambitions. He was always in controversy with someone in the village, the
President, or the Congressman. He could lay it on thick and his editorials were
the talk of the village, and I imagine of the whole county. He was killed when
his primitive automobile, likely . . .
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