While rummaging in an old box of papers, I rediscovered a half-finished manuscript that the late Carol Brightman and I had intended – but failed – to publish some four decades past. It contained excerpts from the diary of Adelaide Butman, who had spent her early years in Round Pond between 1888-1902. Adelaide’s memoir, in addition to its literary merits, intimately captures with the eye of a close and affectionate observer the vitality of village life and the surprising diversity of its inhabitants.
Many of the family names of her friends and neighbors will be as familiar to contemporary ears as they were to Adelaide’s generation. Her profiles of those she knew well and encountered daily are almost photographic in their detail, and, while colored by empathy, are absolutely devoid of sentimentality. She reports the bad news as well as the good. There is no absence of local tragedy.
Diseases now conquered take many lives early, at times because there is no ambulance to take them for emergency treatment in distant Damariscotta or Wiscasset. Tales of local sailors lost at sea are almost commonplace. But the dominant tone as she recalls her world is celebratory of the ordinary, of ties that bind, and of the mysteries and magic of the natural world.
Adelaide’s Round Pond in the emerging 20th century possesses the resistant pull of earlier ways. It’s still the horse-and-buggy or ox and cart era. One still travels to Portland or Rockland from Round Pond by steamer, not by road, at least from the remote coastal settlements.
Some advances are met with skepticism. The first motor launch to ferry folks from the main to Laud’s Island – then a vibrant year-round community in its own right – Adelaide scores as unreliable. A dory propelled with oars by a sturdy old timer suited her just fine when there was occasion to go to the island for a picnic or a dance.
Resignation is a common coin the small town life of Adelaide’s day, mixed with eternal optimism, and her account in its quotidian fullness is every bit as compelling as the Grover’s Corners so memorably created in “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder.
Here are a few of Adelaide’s biographical details:
Adelaide Louise Butman was born Oct. 17, 1886 in East Harwich, Mass., the daughter of Aaron Hatch and Esther (Chase) Butman. Aaron has already buried two wives who had borne no children, and Esther had lost her husband and twin infant boys before the couple met and married.
Aaron was on a fishing crew at the time based in Cape Cod. They moved to Round Pond in 1888, Aaron’s hometown and where he had a house, and where he opened a general store. Esther was 40 years old when Adelaide was born, the couple’s only child.
Adelaide attended local schools, and later graduated from Westbrook Seminary, where she was deeply influenced by her preferences, another Round Pond native, Deborah Morton. Adelaide’s future husband, George Washington Irving, was 26 years her senior and had stayed often at the Morton House when he summered in Round Pond. He was a Maine senator born in Caribou where they then lived, spending the winters in Augusta when the Legislature was in session.
This is the first of a series of Adelaide’s Round Pond chronicles, which will appear in this column.
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One Christmas the men came home from sea bringing with them a friend they had met while away. He fell in love with my mother and they were married. She stayed on Cape Cod while her father lived. I was born in the family home in West Harwich. When I was 2 years old we moved to my father’s house in Round Pond, Maine. The blizzard of 1888 we rode out on board the old steamer, Tremont, between Boston and Portland. I had the mumps. A long bitter cold ride from Damariscotta to Round Pond nearly finished the family, but a neighbor, Mrs. Schroeder, took us in. Mr. Schroeder went into the barn chamber and brought down a cradle, more than a hundred years old and they made it up for me and put it by the fire in the kitchen. And there I stayed until my father and mother got our house heated and ready to live in. Later on my father made a cradle for my doll exactly like it.
Mr. Schroeder came from Saxony. His parents never learned English, but Mrs. Schroeder took good care of them. In the winter Mr. Schroeder made willow baskets, which were in great demand. The Schroeders had a melodeon with four octaves. Their son Otis would play and Mrs. Schroeder would sing in a sweet voice:
Last night a nightingale woke me
Last night when all was still
I opened my window quite gently
And gazed on the falling dew
And, oh! The bird, my darling
Was singing of you, of you!
Mr. Schroeder played the concertina. He was a good engineer, wore a black silk skull cap and made shavings with which to light his pipe. He was contented. Mrs. Schroeder was a wonderful cook.
Winter
You have to endure a New England winter in order to appreciate a New England spring. Not that the winter didn’t have its advantages. The boys had double runner sleds and we used to slide down Meeting House Hill. We skated in the old quarry hole. What echoes the rock walls gave back! We also skated on the brook, which flowed through the Prentice farm.
There were cozy days when we were snow bound. There were mornings when we wrote and drew pictures on the frosted windowpanes. The Harbor was frozen over and all night long the broken ice cakes crashed along the shore. The boys played dangerously, jumping from one slippery ice cake to another, armed only with a long pole. No one was drowned. There must have been guardian angels wintering in Round Pond, Maine.
My father had a sled which he made himself. It was painted blue and had a way all its own. Sometimes there was a crust on the snow and my father could slide from the Manchester yard almost to the store. Sometimes he would bring Gladys Prentice home with him. He thought I played alone too much.
I had a great desire to slide on that old blue sled and finally I persuaded mother to let Gladys and me try. We took the sled to the top of the hill behind what used to be Uncle San’s house and shoved off. There was no control. Down we went – faster and faster – across the road, through the Burns field and over the bank straight for the Atlantic Ocean. Fortunately, there was a bare rock between us and the briny deep and we came to a full and completely stop just in time. Very shaken and somewhat subdued, we went home.
Another joy of winter was digging spruce gum. After a light snow fall I would take my pocketknife and a tin dipper and head for the woods. All over the ground were the tracks of birds and small animals. It was as though they had written messages for all to read. In summer we never saw all these little creatures but they must have been there. The gum on the spruce was hard and brittle and easy to collect.
But my father was death on chewing gum. He would never let me chew gum in his presence. He had bought a little stove for my room and piped it into the chimney. And when an old schoolhouse was taken down, he brought one of the blackboards and added that to my room. In that sanctuary I did my lessons and chewed gum to my heart’s content.
There were not many places the youth could congregate on a cold winter’s night. One night we came early to the church vestry. We knew all about prayer meeting and the idiosyncrasies of the regulars, and each one of us played a part. “Mrs. Palmer” prayed to be delivered from men with evil intentions. “Mr. Crockett” said that of late he had noticed a great growth in grace. (Mr. Crockett’s daughter, Grace Humphrey, was expecting Albion). And all assembled said “Amen.”
If there was quilting to be done the sewing circle met sometimes in the church vestry as well. Often there was a secret session: only those who made little stitches were invited. We came from school and waited for our mothers one time when the ladies were talking about the Seventh Day Adventists.
They had a little chapel over to the right of the schoolhouse and once in a while a minister of the church, Elder Brewster, would come and hold a service. He used to stay all night at Mrs. Manchester’s, and while we were waiting, Mrs. Manchester said, “I know Elder Brewster is a very good man. Why he sleeps like a baby.” After a moment of silence Flo Burns spoke up and said, “Aunt Bett, how do you know?” Then there was silence indeed.
Flo was like that, but not intentionally. It was not that little query which excluded Flo from the blessings of the church. Fred Monroe came to church regularly as did Flo, and one Sunday morning Flo took off her kid gloves and placing one over her mouth, she blew; the glove waved and beckoned. Poor Fred burst into uncontrollable laughter and poor Flo by decision of the member of the church, especially Viola Hinds – who was thereafter called “Old Vile” by Flo – was told not to come to the church anymore. Mother said Flo electrified me.
(Michael Uhl is a writer living in Walpole. For more information, email michaeljohnx@gmail.com or go to shorturl.at/hsHN9.)
