Cover    The Whipple House

Ipswich Books    Thomas Franklin Waters       

Publications of the Ipswich Historical Society

PUBLICATIONS OF THE IPSWICH

HISTORICAL SOCIETY,

VI.

AT THE

Within, the partitions that divided the great rooms into two and even three apartments had been removed; the great fire-places had been restored; the modern ceilings had been torn away disclosing the original oak floor joists, and the original plastering; the great beams had been scraped and oiled, and the stately rooms had been brought back. so far as possible, to their original dignity.

In the west room on the lower floor the library of the Society and its cabinet of china and heirlooms have been permanently established. A fine oak chest loaned by Mr. D. F. Appleton, an ancient piano loaned by Mrs. Charles S. Tuckerman, antique chairs. pictures. and two great bronze candelabra contributed to make a very pleasing appearance.

The east room has been furnished as a kitchen. Its capacious fire-place was equipped with ancient cooking utensils and made bright and cheery with a roaring fire. Pewter platters and ancient fire-arms adorned the walls. The spinning wheels and cheese press and churn were in place, and the fine old hundred-Iegged table occupied the center.

The west chamber was becomingly arranged as a bed room. with a canopy bed made up with ancient bed furnishings, old family chests, cradle and lightstand. A collection of water color pictures of the old houses of the town loaned by the artist. Mr. Walter Paris, of Washington, attracted much attention here.

The great east chamber was reserved for the dedicatory exercises, and despite pouring rain. a notable gathering assembled there. The Essex Institute. of Salem, sent a goodly delegation including the President. Hon. R. S. Rantoul, the

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secretary and Prof. E. S. Morse. The Danvers, Beverly, Methuen, El and Gloucester Historical Societies were represented. Conspicuous among townsfolk were Mrs. Elizabeth K. Gray, who wore her grandmother's wedding dress in honor of the occasion, and Mr. Aaron Kinsman, hale and hearty ninety-four, who trained in the Ipswich troop wheen it escorted La Fayette to Ipswich August 31, 1824.

The President called to order and spoke as follows :

Members of the Ipswich Historical Society, representatives of other Historical Societies:

Ladies and Gentlemen: We are met here today to dedicate to the use of Historical Society this ancient house. As President Lincoln said at Gettysburg, we may well feel that we can bring no honor to it by anything that we can say or do here. The old home that has sheltered seven generations of men has won for itself peculiar sanctity. Within these walls the great events in the drama of life have been enacted; There have been births and deaths, weddings and funerals, the sorrows of parting, the joys of home coming, the manifold toil of multitudes. The hopes and fears and disappointments of the dwellers within these rooms have filled them with tender memories. The whirr of Polly Crafts' loom seems to sound again in this very room, where she gained a slender livelihood by weaving towels and coarse fabrics, symbolic of the wearing and patient industry which was the most conspicuous feature of the home life of the past.

It is a link that binds us to the remote Past and to a solemn and earnest manner of living, quite in contrast with much in our modern life. How long it is since those who planned to build this mansion went up and down the forests to select grand old oaks and stately pines which should be felled to make these beams! .How much of loving toil was spent before they were shaped and carved and fitted! How long the smith forged at his anvil before the nails and hinges were finished! The open panel yonder shows how thoroughly they built, filling every space between the studs with bricks and clay. Whether it was because they feared Indian assault --for fear of Indian assault was never wholly absent for many years after these stout walls were reared,--and built thus securely, or because they sought to keep out the biting cold of winter, I cannot affirm, but we must admire the solidity their work.

I am often asked how old the house is. I cannot reply definitely. We are sure John Whipple was living on this spot in 1642 and probably in 1638, whether any portion of this building could have been erected within nine years

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from the wilderness period is open to serious doubt. It seems probable that the oldest portion was built not far from the middle of the seventeenth century.

How many men of fine quality have come here! John Norton, the great light of the Ipswich church who went from here in 1655, to become the famous pastor of the Old South church in Boston, may have come often. We may feel almost sure that William Hubbard, Pastor, and Historian of the Indian wars, Thos. Cobbett, and the.famous Rogerses, and every other of the old time ministers found pleasant greeting, for the Whipples and Crockers were a godly race, and remembrance still survives of prayer meetings in good Deacon Crocker's time.

Gen. Denison in his young manhood dwelt on the adjoining lot; and in his maturer years no doubt came to see the old neighbors and friends; and Major Samuel Appleton, the hero of King Philip's War played here in his boyhood, for his father's lands touched these on the west. Symonds and Saltonstall, John Appleton and his famous co-patriots of 1687, and many another warmed themselves before the great fires, and made themselves comfortable. In later days the revolutionary soldier Col. Hodgkins lived here and died in the parlor below, in a press bed, as his granddaughter remembers.

We have done our best to restore the house to its ancient style. We have adhered slavishly to the original. These doors and hinges and wooden latches, these great fire-places are all of the olden kind. Later hands, had rebuilt the fire-places, and constructed ovens, within their original bounds; but because they were built subsequently, we have removed them and gone back to the primitive shape. These new windows we are sure are of the same size and in the very place occupied by the original; and two old people, who came often to the house in their childhood, remember windows, which had the diamond panes.

Of relicts we have as you see, not a few. Chief among them we reckon, on this 19th day of October, the anniversary of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, which is being observed as LaFayette Day up and down our land, the horse pistol and sabre, worn by a member of the Ipswich troop in escorting LaFayette to town on the 31st of August, 1824, and the tumbler from which the Marquis drank at the banquet; and better than that, we have with us in good health and strength, the old soldier himself, who wore these accoutrements on that day, now in his ninety-fourth year, Mr. Aaron Kinsman. I want to ask Mr. Kinsman to rise that all may see him, and will all arise to receive him with due honor .

I will not weary you, however, for I wish to call upon the Pastor of the Old First Church, the successor of Norton and Hubbard and all the rest, Rev. Mr. Constant, to offer prayer, in this room where prayer has been wont to be made so many times in the past.

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Prayer was then offered by Rev. Mr. Constant.

The following lines by Mr. Samuel R. Bond of Washington, who lived in the old house in his boyhood, were read by Mr. John H. Cogswell:

"This ancient house to dedicate we meet,

As our new home, In this unique retreat ;

Firm has it stood, two hundred years and more,

So staunchly built those ancestors of yore.

What visions rise, what thoughts our minds lnvade,

Of stalwart men, who Its foundations laid!

Laid the foundations of our nation, too,-

Brave men, who ."builded better than they knew."

Our purpose is in keeping with this thought;

To learn, preserve and treasure what they wrought.

To keep alive the spirit of their deeds,

And hold in lasting memory their meeds.

If built by Whipple or by Saltonstall.

Can make but little difference after all :

The type for which it stands Is still the same,

And character survives without a name.

The dedicatory address was then delivered by Rev. John C. Kimbal1, of Hartford, Conn., who was introduced as "another boy of the neighborhood." He spoke as follows:-

What constitutes the value of an old house like this that we have met here today to dedicate to a continued existence, and why should the people of Ipswich and elsewhere be asked to contribute their money and their sympathy to its restoration and preservation? Why not let it go on to completed ruin, and use our money to put up anew , modern, stylish building which would be architecturally an ornament to the town and have spacious and convenient rooms for the uses of our Historical Society? Is not a return of dust to dust the law of nature with regard to all old things,-old plants, old animals, old men, old institutions, and even old religions? And is not what we are doing to this old building something which is counter alike to nature and to plain business common sense? In one of Scott's novels is an antiquarian, a clergyman, if I remember correctly, who spends a good deal of time and research in the recovery of an old drinking song not over moral in its tone, which belonged to a past age, and is greatly delighted with his success. Whereupon a friend of his in the plainer walks of life, seeing his delight in such things, offers to procure for him at a very slight cost half a dozen- fresh drinking songs that rollicking young blades of his own time were then singing at the village ale-house, and is greatly surprised at his apparent inconsistency when with a good deal of disgust and horror he declines the offer. So if the parishioners and friends of our brother Waters or of anyone else among us, should offer to build here a

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brand new house to live in of exactly the same pattern as this old one, low studded, big beamed, narrow stairwayed, open fire-placed, huge chimneyed, lacking in uprightness of walls, and, judged by the modern standard, in various ways architecturally immoral. I doubt not he would shrink from the offer with equal dismay. And such being the case, where is the consistency of our delight with this one that is not new? What the merit of oldness in a building, when what we want in ourselves and in so many other things is youth.-young ministers, young chickens, young wives and the like? These are questions, as I understand the matter, that the people of Ipswich wish answered as the condition of their giving their sympathy and support to the work in which our Historical Society has here been engaged. What is the answer?

The answer is first of all that such old things help to that which is the great end of all buildings, all food, all clothing, all toil, all money-spending, -help us the more largely to live. To live at all, at least in this world, we have got to live in time, and to live largely have got to have something more to live on that what we eat and drink. Time, however, is threefold, not the present alone, but the future and the past, and needs for living in all of it three different sets of faculties and kinds of nutriment. We live in the present with our senses and our immediate perceptions and affections; and the whole existing world as it is around us today supplies its objects. We live in the future with our hopes, aspirations, plans; and that promising of something better than that which we have now, which all nature is full of, yea, is in the very meaning of the word nature, our own imaginations "bodying forth the form of things unknown." and beyond all these, our religion reaching out into the vast eternal years. they afford its food.

But even these are not all of life. To have its utmost fullness we must likewise live in the past. And to live this part of life we have memory, the memory of ourselves and the memory of our race. In some respects it is one of

the most important faculties of the human soul. the one on which psychologically a whole group of other faculties depend, the one without which it is doubtful whether we could be rational, moral, self-conscious human beings. But even apart from the deeper mental uses of memory, how much it adds to the richness and amount of our actual living. It reaches back into our youth, and in spite of wrinkles and years keeps a part of us forever young. It reaches back among our friends, and in spite of death and the grave keeps something about them forever alive. It reaches back with our race through the ages, and in spite of distance and decay gives us the fellowship of its heroes and saints and sages and the accumulating treasures of its wisdom and knowledge. Campbell has sung for us. "The Pleasures of Hope;" Rogers with equal grace "The Pleasures of Memory." The pleasures of memory

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are not so brilliant and free from pain as those of hope. But they have this advantage, they are more solid and real, and are of a kind in which their inner mental source can be assisted and strengthened by actual outward things, by books, pictures, monuments and relics of the past.

It is this fact that suggests the value of this old house and of all that our Historical Society is doing. It vivifies and strengthens memory, enables us to live more richly in past time, stretches our existence from seventy and eighty to over two hundred years, brings us into touch again with our ancestors and the fathers of the town, and Without asking us to desert with our bodily senses our nice modern dwellings, opens to us a door through which to live with our minds among the furniture, within the walls and under the customs of our country's far off youth.

My sister, whose dwelling is the next house East of this, tells me that a servant of hers, a queer old lady endowed apparently with the faculty of seeing per sons and things invisible to common eyes, though uneducated and entirely ignorant of the controversy about the building's original ownership, would say sometimes as she looked over here, that she saw sitting at the window a stately dame "very different in quality from common folks," arrayed in a cap and style of dress, which, as she described them, correspond very nearly with those of our Puritan age. If her second-sight can be relied upon, it is not without its bearing on the Saltonstall ownership, and it may be well for those who have taken that side and want an evidence which will offset wills and deeds to interview the old lady.

But whether her vision was real or not, our historic memory looking in through the windows of the place with eyes equally wonderful and helped by its actual walls, can see it filled with the stately men and women of other days, can live with them their lives, think with them their thoughts, feel with them their aspirations. And there is nothing in such visions to make our hair rise and our flesh creep, nothing which is not as sweet and pleasant as it is' to meet the good elderly people yet in their flesh who are here today.

Oh marvellous power of association! Oh strange gift of material things, dead, speechless, mindless themselves, to call out of its grave the Lazarus of the past, to unbar the gates of the years and the ages for us to walk again their re-illuminated aisles, to press afresh to our inner lips the wine of joys that time has dried up, and out of spirit worlds to bring for communion with us once more our loved and lost, their touch, their words, their looks, their love. Do not accuse me of indulging in mere fancy to give this house an unreal value or such, as only sentimentalists can feel. There is not one of you here, not the most prosaic fact worshipper, who does not have some relic of the past which unlocks for him treasures that banks cannot hold or figures express; not a childless mother who has not a ribbon or trinket or with

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little shoe, which a form seen of no outward eye comes back again and again to wear; not a widowed lover who has not a ring or coin or lock of hair, which, Sunday eves or week-day holy hour, does not rekindle all the old affection; not a scholar in whose library there are not books on whose pages are pictures no pencil ever drew, andbetween whose lines records no type ever made. What would Rome be without its ruins? What Greece, without its tombs? What Palestine, without its Nazareth? What America, without its Bunker Hill and Gettysburg? Who shall say it is mere fancy which gives them their value? It is their power o making for us the past alive and making us live in the past. In every soul is a Witch of Endor; in every land places from which its Samuels obey her summons. And it is out of what is so precious in our individual experience, and out of what everywhere gives the world so large a part of its wealth, that comes to Ipswich the value of this ancient house.

As regards the objection against its preservation. that it is the law of nature that all things shall decay and that to keep it from doing so is going counter thereto, it is to be answered that such is only a part of nature's law. Even outward nature with all its destructiveness is likewise very largely a preserver. What is our whole earth beneath its surface but a grand old house? What are its coal mines, its minerals, its rocks, its fossil animals and plants ,but the relics stored in it by a historical society ages older than any human one? And without such stores what would our manufactures, our agriculture, our travel, our science be?

More wonderful still our own living bodies and souls, those not only of decrepit men, but of every new-born babe, are now known under the revelations of heredity to be old houses filled with relics of the immeasurable past-physical organs and traits of mind and soul which have come down from ages older than history, and, according to Darwin, from ages older than man. As Holmes has expressed it, "Live folks are only dead folks warmed over" -only ancestral homes with the ancient mould and plaster scraped off and the original oak beams retouched with today's fresh varnish. So that after all in preserving this old building we are only following Nature's own example that Nature which through Emerson has sung,

"No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,

My oldest force is good as new,

And the fresh rose on yonder thorn

Gives back the bended heavens in dew.

Ipswich is fortunate in having so many relics of the past, especially so many old houses. Rightly viewed they are the most precious of all its outward possessions. Any town which has money can build new houses, in new styles, and

with all the modern conveniences. The country is full of them. But no money

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no skill, no enthusiasm can build antiquity ,-put up new edifices that are two hundred years old. They are the dowry to us of time. And as such what worse spendthrifts should we be to hand them over to decay-worse than the old medieval monks who erased the precious poetry of classic Greece and Rome to write on parchments beneath it their own trivial subtleties?

There is no inconsistency between regard for ancient things, and prosperity in the treasures of our modern life. Rather, the two things naturally go together. Savages have no interest in the past. It is only civilized human beings who write history and preserve ancient memorials. Society is like a tree. It cannot flourish with its trunk resting only on the present's surface. It must, to bear fruit, have large roots which go down into the soil of the past, and limbs which lift themselves into the airs of the far off future. Out in Oregon I knew of a man who tried to clear up his farm by burning up all its dead trees and accumulated mould. When he had done so, he found he had only a gravel bed left. I knew of another man there who in clearing up his farm preserved its mould and decayed trees; and of new products he had not only thirty and sixty, but a hundred and two hundred fold. Which farmer, even in the pursuit of material prosperity, had Ipswich better follow?

Along with its old buildings there is one other thing in which our town is especially fortunate, and that is in having among its citizens a man endowed, as Mr. Waters is, with the knowledge, the enthusiasm, the good taste and the immeasurable patience which qualify him to be a leader in their preservation, a man who is not a mere Dr. Dryasdust picking up alike pebbles and pearls that are old, but one with the insight which has been quick to discern the original values to which the years have added their interest.

I know a little in my own experience how difficult it is to enlist the sympa thy even of one's friends in such an enterprise as the restoration of this building has been. I have an oldish ancestral house of my own in town that I have a tenderness for and which I like to keep clothed in such a garb as is needed to give age respectability. But there is a most excellent lady in my family who finds it hard to share in such a tenderness. She thinks it is my most expensive vice, says laughingly that so far as ribbons and new bonnets are concerned she would be better off with a husband who had half a dozen ordinary marital iniquities such as cigar smoking in her room, muddy boots on the parlor floor, praising his mother's bread above hers, admiring other women and even staying out late at night, than one whose sinfulness takes the form of a wayward passion for old houses.

I do not know whether the better half of Brother Waters has the same opinion of her husband's antiquity morals, or the same suffering as its result in the line of

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ribbons and bonnets. But I do know there are some excellent members of our town's municipal family who, seeing what he has been engaged in, have had their doubts raised about his intellectual uprightness, and who would hardly be more perplexed and more parsimonious in their contributions to it of money, had he been engaged in building a nice dancing hall, or a spacious race course, or even an elegant drinking saloon.

Nevertheless in the face of all this indifference and coldness he has gone straight ahead putting into it his time, his money, his faculty, his good nature, his unrivalled taste, and his own personal hand-work. I do not forget the aid he has received from his genial fellow members of the Historical Society and from a few large minded friends at home and abroad. But all will testify that without his leadership the work would never have been done or even started. The tribute of the lady, a stranger, visiting the place awhile ago, and finding him hard at work. yet ready politely to answer all her questions. "I met there a very intelligent painter." was how well deserved. And whatever other names the place may bear as to its original builders and occupants. we are glad to think that it will stand, if not at once, yet in the long coming years, as the memorial also of the man who has so self-sacrificingly and so modestly given himself to its preservation.

Recognizing thus the value of this old house and of the work which has been put into it, we dedicate it to the memories of the past, to the uses of our Historical Society and to such mementoes of ancient Ipswich life as shall from time to me be gathered within its rooms. In doing so, we feel that we place it along side of the town's venerable hills and river and ocean shore as one its ornaments; alongside its schools and its public library as one of its educational institutions: alongside its markets and workshops and factories as adding to it a wealth finer than gold; and alongside its churches and homes as co-operating fitly with him who compared the kingdom of Heaven to a man who out of his treasury brought forth new and old and who himself came to mankind that they might have life and have it more abundantly. May the Interest and support of the town' s citizens be gathered into it more and more; and as they, too, shall grow old, may it be to them an emblem of the beauty, the dignity and of the treasures out of the past that our human old age may have. and a reminder of that other house, older than all time, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, within which we all at last hope to be gathered.

Hon. Robert S. RantouI. of Salem, President of the Essex Institute, made a few congratulatory remarks, and was followed by Prof Edward S. Morse, with a bright address, full of wit and wisdom. Mr. James Appleton Morgan of Westfield, N. J.. author of the well-known poem. "I love to think of old Ipswich town"

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spoke with much feeling of his Appleton ancestry .and predicted wide-spreading and enduring fame for the ancient house in its new role as the home of the Historical Society. The company then adjourned to the great kitchen. where tea was served by the ladies and great good cheer prevailed.

Beside the liberal delegation from the Essex Institute which had arranged a field meeting in town for the earlier portion of the day. Col. David Low. president of the Gloucester Historical Society. Chas. Woodberry .vice-president of the Beverly Historical Society, John Prince, president of the Essex Historical Society, and Mr. Rufus Choate of the same Society, Andrew Nichols of the Danvers Historical Society and representative of the Methuen Historical Society were also present.

Cover    The Whipple House

Ipswich Books    Thomas Franklin Waters       

Publications of the Ipswich Historical Society