From a doctor who chronicled his sometimes unusual payments for his services, to an early woman entrepreneur and a man whose gravestone marks not where his body lies, but tells the story of his graverobbing, New England is full of stories.
Alan Rumrill told a few of those stories in his talk at the Jaffrey Meetinghouse on Friday. In the first Amos Fortune Forum of the season, Rumrill kicked off the annual lecture series with his talk, “Monadnock Originals: Colorful Characters from New Hampshire’s Quiet Corner.”
The title is pulled from Rumrill’s book of the same name, and some of the stories he told Friday are also pulled from its pages, along with some new ones.
Rumrill, a Stoddard native and resident, has a family history stretching in the town back to 1770 and is the former executive director of the Historical Society of Cheshire County, a position he held for 41 years. He now serves as senior historian, and is an author of 10 books on local history.
Rumrill told snippets of stories — sometimes just pulled from a diary entry or newspaper ad — in rapid fire throughout his talk, going through dozens of small moments of history and brief biographies that he collected in his time at the historical society.
Some of his stories had a Jaffrey connection. He talked about Hannah Davis, a Jaffrey resident who, at the age of 34, began to make storage boxes to support herself. She made the boxes out of spruce trees, slicing the trees with a foot-powered machine she invented. She created boxes decorated with wallpaper on the outside, suitable for storing things like hats. Rather than limit herself to the local market, Davis brought her boxes to mills in Manchester and Lowell, where female mill workers would eagerly purchase them for a cost of about 50 cents.
Rumrill said Davis is notable for being one of the first successful businesswomen “who provided a product for women, made by a woman.”
Another local story was about a Mr. Pool, who apocryphally lived on the southern slope of Mount Monadnock in a wooden house, which he often complained was infested with witches. Pool eventually built a new house, made of stone to better keep out witches, on Gap Mountain. The walls of a stone house still stand on Gap Mountain.
Rumrill also shared some accounts of early doctors, including Obadiah Blake, one of the earliest settlers of Keene and its doctor. Blake often traveled to his patients on house calls, by horseback, carrying his medical tools in saddlebags. He kept a ledger of his work and payment accounts, which were often in trade — paid back in the form of a clock, chopping wood or with food. Some of his accounts show an unprofitable visit for him, with debts “canceled in full by poverty,” “settled by death” or, on one notable occasion, because the debtor had “gone to Hell.”
Another story about a different doctor, Amos Twitchell, showed that he was ahead of his time when it came to the dangers of tobacco. Shared in his biography, a story tells that Twitchell met with a farmer from whom he routinely purchased grain, who appeared in ill health. The farmer told the doctor that he was dying of consumption and would soon be gone.
Twitchell made a bet with the man, with a wager of 50 bushels of corn or the equivalent paid in cash to the man’s family, that he could cure him if the man strictly followed his instructions. When the farmer agreed, Twitchell instructed him to take the tobacco from his mouth, and never touch it again in any form. Six months later, the two met again, and the man was in good health. However, as he told the doctor, his wife had disagreed that the man’s life was worth 50 bushels of corn, so they settled on three or four bushels, with an added bushel of white beans.
“We have found that the thing people like the most about what we do at the historical society is the stories we tell,” said Rumrill. “Stories such as these, to help people connect to a place and feel comfortable in the place that they live. This can give us a sense of place, a sense of connection, and the more we know about a place, the more at ease we are.”
The next Amos Fortune Forum is on July 18, and will feature Sam Evans Brown, talking on “The Energy Transition and Why It’s Inevitable.” All Amos Fortune Forums are held on Friday evening at 8 p.m. at the Jaffrey Meetinghouse, and are recorded and available on YouTube, on the channel amosfortuneforum7345.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on X @AshleySaariMLT.