CHAPTER XIV.

LIFE AT THE PARSONAGE.

Pages 121-130

[Page 121]    

     By 1800 the parsonage was full of children, and some of them grown to young manhood had left the home nest, and were writing back of the events of the outside world.  The eldest son Jacob, lately admitted to the bar, wrote from Philadelphia in 1795 relative to the Connecticut claims on Susquehannah Lands, boundaries and titles and land claims occupying a large amount of legal attention in those days.  In this case the charge of District Judge Patterson, formerly Governor of New Jersey, "was considered one of the most eminent ever delivered in this city," the young man wrote.  "Titles, and Charter, and the Indian deed upon which the Connecticut claim rested, were esteemed as nothing"--Mulenburgh, the Speaker in Congress, told the young man that "there was little hope of Jay's return till the following October, the expected treaty to be sent over, not having arrived [page 122] before the rising of Congress."

     Matters of public interest were laid aside to speak of a prescription sent to Claverack by the celebrated Dr. Rush.  The writer says he was told that it was a simple medicine, but it would be well to let Dr. Monell, the family physician, see it.  Dr. Rush had written with the prescription, that "he felt himself very much honored by the application from so great at distance."  Those were evidently days in which the home practioner sat in judgment on the city physician's advice, rather than followed with open admiration the specialist's skill.  There were family remembrances to old and young, in which the Philadelphia relatives were each represented, ending with the word from the child in the Philadelphia family to the little girl in the parsonage.  "Polly Seitz wants to see Charlotte down very much," and ending with the respect of the period.

                                                           "Your son and humble servant,

                                                                                             "JACOB GEBHARD."

     For many years only one little girl had made merry in the old parsonage, with seven brothers.  It is small wonder that she was a great favorite with her parents [page 123] and the older children.  The congregation named her affectionately "the Dominie's laughing daughter," and the chronicles of the time speak of her as "very active and sprightly with a vein of mischief in her composition."  It had been customary occasionally to name a baby in some of the families of the church after the Dominie or his wife, for whom they were sponsors, and as Charlotte grew up she was admitted into this form of spiritual friendship.  The name of Charlotte became a favorite among the mothers, and the Dominie's daughter stood as god-mother to many little girls named after her.

     On his long rides to the outlying churches, her father delighted to take her with him, and we can imagine the dignified clergyman of the old school, and his sunny-faced daughter as they rode through the spring sunshine, over the wagon-roads and through the woods, that led to the churches of the tiny settlements.  We know that she sometimes wore a white-corded dimity, sprinkled over with purple tulips, short waisted and low-necked, and it is not difficult to believe that the Dominie on his country rounds was doubly welcome when he brought his fair young [page 124] daughter with him.  A busy and useful daughter she needed to be also, with so many boys in the family, and within a year a new baby had come to gladden the home.  After eighteen years, there was a second girl in the parsonage, who proved to be the last of the Dominie's children.

     Deft of finger and quick of motion, Charlotte was her mother's right hand in all household matters.  Spinning and weaving were a constant part of the day's work in such a home, or how would so many boys have obtained their homespun suits of pepper and salt.  Knitting long stockings, too, was among the day's tasks, but that could be done in the firelight, while the boys were studying their lessons after supper, it front of the brightly blazing pine knots.

     There had been long patient hours in the chimney corner, or out on the porch when she was a thirteen year old girl, at which time she made her sampler as all children did at that day.  She learned in this way to make perfect marking letters, with which the family linen had been marked ever since.  Such a sampler had woven into it a hundred experiences, and some tears.  It as not easy to sit still and work her stint [page 125] when the sun shone, and the birds sang, and all the sweet voices and odors of spring and summer invited her out of doors, nor yet when the boys teased as boys always will at time.  But when her mother was making olekoeks in the kitchen, and the delicious smell was wafted in to her, with the promise of a large round doughnut when her stint was done, or when she and a neighbor's little girl sat on the porch steps together, and ran a race making a letter, even a sampler had its charms.  There was also the end to look forward to, when the alphabet large and small was finished, and the numerals beside, and even her own name and age, and the year the sampler was completed, and one might fill out the remaining space with an imaginary house, with chimney and doors, bedsteads and chairs, and even trees in the door yard in front.  This was the reward at the end of hundreds of painstaking stitches.

     But at eighteen Charlotte could assist at the Saturday's baking, helping her mother and their slave girl Nan make pies and cake and bread, a feast for an army, it seemed, for the boys had great appetites, and the parsonage kept open doors for its many visitors, [page 126] Katee, the slave boy, was called in from the garden on Saturday mornings to turn the spit before the great oven, and lay the logs in the fire place in the parlor, for the best room at the parsonage was sure to be used on Sunday, no matter how carefully it was kept closed on week days.  This also was one of Charlotte's duties, to dust the Chippendale chairs, and set everything in the room very straight and orderly.  Many ships came and went from the near by town of Hudson, which had grown out of the hamlet at Claverack Landing, since the Quaker settlers came from Nantucket, and nearly every home was adorned with beautiful pink-lined shells, and curios brought form distant ports by the sailors.

     The heavy wooden bookcase, with its double doors, and long narrow hinges, and wooden buttons top and bottom, shut in the Dominie's hoarded treasures of books,-many of them brought form Holland, and Germany, and France,-away from any contaminating contact.  Charlotte sometimes opened the doors and took a peep at some of the unreadable volumes, part of them already one and two hundred years old, relics of her German grandfather's library, but she soon [page 127] tired of so uninteresting an occupation, and closed the doors again on the odor of print and leather.

     The large German mirror, with its rich gilt frame and heavy glass, was much more interesting to the young girl as she saw reflected there her own hazel-gray eyes and flaxen head of hair,-home spun dress and home-made shoes to be sure,-but beneath them both the rounded grace of girlhood.  The dust-cloth was accustomed to many flirts at the girl in the mirror, and even a dust-cloth may feel in some occult way, the difference between musty books, and a pink-cheeked, laughing girl.

     The German piano, on which their father played when their mother sang German chorals, was also in the room, but dearer to the hearts of the children was the piano which their father had constructed with his own hands, which was kept in the living room, and upon which they were allowed to try their own budding musical genius.  There were but few houses of this date which did not boast some patriotic colored print, "Washington with His Family," Washington's Reception in New York," or "Washington's Triumphal Progress Through Trenton."  The girls of Trenton [page 128 scattering flowers before the hero's feet, adorned the parsonage walls.

      The boys, too, had their Saturday work weeding the bean and vegetable gardens, churning, drawing water from the well with the bucket hung to the long well-sweep, milking, getting vegetables from cellar or garden, bringing down hams from the garret, and perhaps, when all other duties were faithfully accomplished, there might be an opportunity for a Saturday half-holiday, to take a tramp into the woods with the sons of some neighbor to shoot wild turkeys or duck which were plentiful, and considered a luxury fit to set before the most honored guest.  At night there would still be a trip to the stage-house, two boys on the old horse's back, to see if any mail had come, or guests expected, or unlooked for, had arrived.

     One can imagine the long line of the Dominie's children walking up the wagon-path to the church after the Sunday Morin gin breakfast of suppawn and milk, and quieted to a becomingly reverential behavior for the sanctuary.  The Dominie is said to have reviewed his sermon as he walked up and down the living room on Sunday morning, the room being also filled by a [page 129] half dozen children, with as many occupations, and the natural hilarity of a group of young people under such circumstances.  The mother was the governing force among her lively group of boys and girls, and when the noise broke through the Dominie's meditations on the eighth or tenth head of his discourse, his attention being violently drawn from theology to the rising generation, his disturbance is said to have found vent in the forceful disciplinary remark, that "if they didn't behave and make less noise, he would call their mother and she would punish them all around," at which they settled down for a short time into comparative quiet, with half audible, though smothered chuckles of laughter, knowing well that their mother would not be called.

     Among the Sunday morning baptisms particularly pleasing to the parsonage children and their young friends, were those of the tiny little colored babies, the children of the slaves held throughout the congregation.  There were many of these babies, often named for their masters and mistresses, and their sponsors some Pompey or Flora of a neighboring farm, or occasionally their owners acted in this capacity for the [page 130] little "niger," nigra," or "nigri," as the records read, according to the number, or sex of the children.

     These slaves were also the loving caretakers of the white children in the Claverack homes, carrying them about tenderly in their dark arms, or crooning lullabies to them in the twilight.  Occasionally the well-beloved "mammy" was an Indian squaw, and the baby was tied to her back instead of carried in her arms, as she was accustomed to do with her own pappoose.  With their mistresses' babies on the backs, these squaws often scrubbed the floors in the houses, with long-handled brushes, and in a hundred ways were indispensable to the life of the times.

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