Читать книгу Frog Hollow - Susan Campbell - Страница 11

1. The Difficult Dream

THE BABCOCKS DIG A WELL AND LAUNCH A NEWSPAPER

The Babcock family’s colonial saltbox house—its steep-pitched roof sloping from a high front to a low back—sat near what is now the intersection of Capitol Avenue and Lafayette Street in Hartford. The wooden house had a central brick chimney, and its front door opened to an entryway, with rooms branching off a central hall.¹ The architecture was simple, sturdy, and fortified with oak timbers that measured sixteen to eighteen inches.²

As houses went, it was pretty standard, but the marvel of the property was outdoors. Just after the American Revolution, no one could explain the well on Dolly Welles Babcock’s one-hundred-acre farm, but even people passing through town knew about it. Dolly Babcock’s well is one of the first recorded stories from the neighborhood’s European history, and it illustrates the combination of luck and hard work that built Frog Hollow.

A 1781 visitor described the Babcock well as preternaturally plentiful. When the well was dug, near today’s intersection of Park and Washington streets, “the water sprouted up with such amazing velocity” that workers could barely set the stones.³

In fact, the gusher came so fast that the men digging the well had to scramble to avoid drowning. Only after they made it out did they realize they had lost more than a few tools in the gushing water. After the water was tamed, logs were cut and hollowed out to fit into one another, end to end. The person who cut and fit the pine logs—perhaps it was Nahum Carter, a Vermont sawyer—did an excellent job.⁴ In 1896 excavators unearthed some of the original wooden pipes and found the legend “1796?” carved into them. A law that was passed in May 1797 created a corporation “for the purpose of water into the city of Hartford, by means of subterraneous pipes, and their successors be, and they are hereby incorporated for said purpose, and made a body politic, by the name of The Proprietors of the Hartford Aqueduct,” which provided drinking water to Hartford residents who could afford twelve dollars a year per share.⁵ The proprietors included one Elisha Babcock, Dolly’s husband.

The well was so famous that in 1847 the Courant reported that it frequently overflowed from its “perennial springs.”⁶ When more pipes were dug up in 1908, according to the Courant, they were said to have carried water so sweet that it was like the “drops of the morning.”

The water company eventually dissolved, but not before it made the Babcocks wealthy.⁷ The family did not have to worry—as did fellow Hartford residents—about the source and quality of their water.

While Dolly Babcock and her five children ran the farm, her husband, Elisha, ran a successful newspaper, the American Mercury.⁸ The first edition appeared on July 12, 1784, a Monday, and ran just four pages, with a half dozen columns per page printed in blisteringly small type. As was the custom for newspapers of that era, scant local news graced the paper and the national and international news that did exist was often days old. Traveling at the speed of horse and boat, news of an event in Washington easily took five days to reach the pages of the Mercury.

The Mercury prospectus promised to “furnish a useful and elegant entertainment for the different classes” of customers.”⁹ In fact, early American newspapers weren’t news so much as reprinted gossip, letters from afar, and overheard tavern conversations. Most were, journalistically, little more than the throwaway, ad-heavy publications available at supermarket checkouts today, according to Older Than the Nation: The Story of the Hartford Courant, a 1964 book by John Bard McNulty. News wasn’t a publisher’s bread and butter anyway. The bills were paid by other print jobs taken on, or by selling notions at the publisher’s print shop. The idea of news judgment—or placing news in a newspaper according to its importance—was light-years away. The Courant ran the Declaration of Independence on page two, “in keeping with the printing custom of the times that arranged the news approximately in the order in which it arrived at the printing office,” wrote McNulty.¹⁰

The Mercury and the Courant were two of the 180 newspapers that dotted the early American landscape. All told, the papers had a combined circulation of roughly twelve million and were vital to forming a sense of community.¹¹ Newspapers were the connective tissue between colonists and among the early Americans. Then as today they created a sense of place. They provided information, succor, and a sense of belonging. James Parker, of the eighteenth-century New Haven–based newspaper the Connecticut Gazette, wrote: “It is no wonder that a darling so carefully guarded and powerfully supported, should sometimes grow wanton and luxurious, and misuse an indulgence granted it, merely to preserve its just freedom inviolate: It has been tho’t safer to suffer it to go beyond the bounds that might strictly be justified by reason.”¹²

But early American newspapers did not have long shelf lives, even in a city as hyperliterate and news-hungry as Hartford. Of the eight newspapers started in the capital city in the 1780s, only two, including the Mercury, were still publishing twenty years later.

The Mercury did not survive by being tepid. Babcock’s paper was outspoken enough to offend a Federalist member of the clergy in Litchfield, Conn. In 1806 the Reverend Dan Huntington sued Babcock for “willful falsehood.” Despite multiple witnesses who testified in his favor, Babcock was found guilty and fined one thousand dollars. He pouted in the Mercury, “We live in a conquered country.”

Furthermore, Babcock wrote, anxious to guard the freedom of the press (all spellings are his): “It does not hurt character nor feelings nor the Law to declare of certain republican clergy-men that they are ideots and apastates, nor to charge other republicans with swingling, forger, burglary, murder. So far from it law and religion are glorified by the very slanders. But turn the tables and a federal court and jury will discover that society is on the precipice of anarchy.”¹³

Boldfaced names from American history frequently graced the Mercury’s pages. On May 10, 1790, Benjamin Franklin wrote in its pages to Noah Webster that he was surprised to find several new words had been introduced into “our parliamentary language.” Franklin was not amused. He wrote: “For example, I find a verb formed from the substantive notice: ‘I should not have noticed this, were it not,’ etc … If you should happen to be of my opinion with respect to these innovations, you will use your authority in reprobating them. The Latin language, long they have used in distributing knowledge among the different nations of Europe, is daily more and more neglected.”¹⁴

Thomas Paine wrote Babcock in 1805, asking him to print a letter he’d sent earlier: “My last letter (the 8th) is the most important of any I have published. I have been disappointed in not seeing it in your paper. I have reason to believe the matters therein stated will be taken up at the next meeting of Congress, and the inquiry at that time, will not be sufficiently understood by those who had not an opportunity of seeing that letter. I know the feds want to keep that letter out of sight.”

The Mercury also published a January 1, 1795, essay, “A News-Boy’s Address to the Readers of the Mercury,” which included:

For this, I tript it, o’er the Town

And fpread the Mercury, up and down.¹⁵

The newspaper particularly opposed what Babcock thought was a growing theocracy in the new country. To one writer’s suggestion that the preamble of the Constitution include a mention of the country’s belief in “the one living and true God,” a letter signed simply “Elihu,” he responded: “A low-minded man may imagine that God, like a foolish old man, will think Himself slighted and dishonored if not complimented.”¹⁶

In addition, the Mercury was home to two-fisted political satire. The newspaper published works such as “The Echo,” pugnacious couplet poetry written mostly by Richard Alsop, a member of the Connecticut Wits, a group of mostly Yale graduates that included Babcock’s early business partner, Joel Barlow.¹⁷ Over pints at the downtown Black Horse Tavern, the men helped form the myth that would be America—though as a body of work, their poetry was too infused with optimism to survive subsequent ages.¹⁸ (Maybe they would have been perfectly at home reading, or writing, the hopeful Epic of America.) The Wits were mostly Federalists, Calvinists, and neoclassicists for whom poetry was an “elegant avocation.”¹⁹

The Mercury was not the first Babcock newspaper. Before moving to the Hartford area, Elisha published a paper in Massachusetts. The family came to Connecticut so Elisha could run a paper mill that sat at what is now near the border of East Hartford and Manchester, Conn., along the Hockanum River.²⁰

At first it looked as if the family had made a huge mistake leaving their Massachusetts home. In 1778 their mill burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances, at a loss of more than five thousand pounds. Even worse, reams of paper and rags were destroyed in the fire. Mills could be rebuilt, but rags, which were used to make paper, were in short supply. A paper mill could not run without a rag delivery system.²¹ The publisher of the Courant, the widow Hannah Bunce Watson, petitioned the state assembly for a lottery to raise money to rebuild the mill. The assembly approved it, the lottery was a success, the mill was rebuilt, and—rag collection system back in place—the mill came under the management of Babcock.²² The family then moved to the capital city at the urging of Barlow, an acerbic writer who on his graduation from Yale College wrote a friend, “We are not the first men in the world to have broke loose from college without fortune to puff us into public notice, [but] if ever virtue [and merit] are to be rewarded, it is in America.”²³

Hannah Bunce Watson.

Both the Courant and the Mercury surged ahead in 1792, when Congress passed the Post Office Act. The law not only transformed the postal service into what was arguably the “central administrative apparatus of an independent state,” but it helped transform newspapers into something viable and influential.²⁴ Before the act, postal carriers were not required to deliver newspapers. Carriers were happy to deliver newspapers from one printer to the other, but home delivery was rare. Readers of newspapers mostly purchased them on the street, or they went to the newspaper offices to buy a copy.

Once people could enjoy home delivery by mail, readership exploded.²⁵ No one could have predicted the effect that would have on newspaper circulation, and newspapers’ influence.²⁶ Suddenly, printers could ship newspapers for pennies, and they did. By 1830 the postal service was delivering two million more newspapers than letters.²⁷

But even that boost wasn’t enough to make newspapers lucrative. One historian estimates that just 5 percent of families subscribed to newspapers. So in addition to bookselling, to supplement their income Babcock and Barlow sold an almanac whose content was lifted from a similar publication by Isaac Bickerstaff, a London astrologer. With no copyright laws to dissuade them, the duo largely plagiarized Bickerstaff, and for that they were chided in the pages of their competitor, the Courant.

Printed admonishments between newspaper publishers were common in the early American press. In one 1817 brief, the Courant called a story that ran earlier that week in the Mercury a “base and malignant falsehood.”²⁸ The Mercury gave as good as it got, but most of the carping was for show. Each newspaper tended to reprint the other’s stories, and a letter to the editor in the Courant might just as often take to task something that had run in the Mercury.

Babcock continued to expand his printing empire. He printed the almanac, poetry, and hymnals, including a popular revamping of hymns from Isaac Watts. He printed work by his friend Noah Webster.²⁹ He sold books wholesale from New York to buyers in Louisiana, South Carolina, and the West Indies.

Babcock also participated in civic goings-on, as would any self-respecting newspaper publisher. He served on a committee to improve the town’s schools. He gave speeches. He hawked his paper. Between the farm, the well, the newspapers, and the bookselling, the family thrived.

The Babcock family had six children, five of whom survived to adulthood. That was about the average family size at the time.³⁰ For the most part, colonial and early American (white) women believed their duty was to bear as many children as possible—preferably sons, who could help with the family business, which was often farming. Only as the new country gave birth to itself, (white) women began to push for a kind of equal footing with their menfolk that included a say in family size.³¹ In early Hartford, this option was not available to most African American women, 90 percent of whom lived in slavery.³²

The Babcocks are listed in the country’s first census in 1790 as free and white. They owned no slaves, though slavery was present in the state (more on that later). When Elisha Babcock died of pneumonia at age sixty-eight on April 7, 1821, he was buried in the Old South Cemetery of Hartford’s Second Congregational Church, now known as South Church. The Mercury continued publishing, though it is unclear who conducted the actual business. Some speculate the Babcock family—Dolly among them, until her death in 1832—kept the press rolling until the paper’s demise in 1833.

The family saltbox became home for an unmarried son and daughter, Col. James and Dolly, named for her mother. James Babcock was a sales agent for a man named Ira Todd, who sold among other goods French burr millstones, considered the best stones for milling flour and grain.³³ Col. Babcock also served on a committee to raise money to aid people injured in a fire in Virginia. His business was frequently mentioned in Courant ads selling Sicily lemons and wax calf-skins of the highest quality, and asking for donations of long hair that would be used to stuff mattresses.³⁴ (Hair mattresses were considered a step up from a stack of hemlock boughs.) When Miss Dolly Babcock, the daughter, joined her parents in death in 1871, the Courant erroneously trumpeted that she was, at age ninety, the oldest Hartford resident to die that year. In fact, that honor fell to Mrs. Tabitha Camp, who bested Dolly Babcock’s time on earth by a year and a half.³⁵

An 1877 real estate notice offered—“for sale cheap”—“the property known as the Dolly Babcock homestead,” situated south of the home of a professor on a lot that was roughly two hundred by three hundred feet.³⁶ The simple, high-pitched roofs of Hartford (the center-chimney Cape Cods and saltboxes still popular in New England) had given way to more ornate styles of architecture such as double-homes (or townhomes).³⁷ To enable construction of the newly styled homes to go quickly, state legislators passed a law that shingles shipped from New York no longer required inspection.³⁸

In 1890 the Babcock saltbox was nearly one hundred years old and deep into a slide into disrepair. Despite its historical significance there was not much discussion about preserving it. It was, simply, an old house in a neighborhood that was making way for newer, fancier homes, including a yellow mansion that had sat at the northeast corner of the Babcock plot since the 1820s. That mansion was home to several generations of Trinity (first called Washington College) presidents and faculty members.

In 1896, with little fanfare, the Babcock house was torn down to make room for a gracious new house for the widow of a state Republican Party scion.³⁹ What had been the Babcock’s one-hundred-acre farm was carved up for yards, and the name of Babcock was consigned to the history books—and to a street in the Frog Hollow neighborhood.