by
Allen R. Merrill
Not everyone can tell you how his or her great grandfather spent the day 140 years ago today.
For example, on this date in 1860 I know that my great grandfather did his chores that morning, then he cut a little wood down on his meadow. After that he went over to Nathan Coppings’. Later he went up to Cap’t. Turner’s after cranberries for Nancy, my great grandmother. He observed that evening that Nancy was “very slim”. (Nancy Manwell Merrill was to die four months later - of consumption.)
I am fortunate in having inherited eleven years of my great grandfather’s diaries. His name was John Young Merrill, and he was born in Leeds, Maine in 1823. He died there, in 1898, in the farmhouse that housed three generations of Merrills after him. His diaries cover the years from 1855 to 1865. They are small books, about 4 ¾ x 3 inches, with only about an inch-and-a-half of space provided for each day’s entry, thus they contain terse notations. Even so, they provide an excellent insight into the daily happenings in the life of a poor farmer on a small New England farm in the 19th century.
As you can imagine, reading the diaries creates almost a personal relationship between my great grand parents and me. Furthermore, because I can remember the old house from visits there in the 1930’s, the images that are generated by reading the diaries are enhanced even more. The kitchen was large. It had a low ceiling, a big black stove, and a hand pump over a tin-lined sink. It probably had not changed much since they lived there. When John writes that he goes off on an errand - perhaps to Nathan Coppings’ again - I can almost see him walking out the kitchen door into the woodshed, then through the carriage room down into the stable to harness the horse. And then when he hitches up to the wagon (or to the pung) I know that the puffs of steam are there as man and horse exhale into that frigid February Maine air.
From his 4,000 days’ pencilled comments, I have chosen about 60 to be shown here. These are entries that I believe will be of interest to today’s readers. They are grouped by subject matter into nine topics and then arranged chronologically within each. They are copied exactly as he wrote them - except for the addition of an occasional punctuation mark to help clarity. The topics are:
I. His Family
II. Nancy’s Sickness
III. His Spiritualism
IV. Nature Observations
V. Skills He Practiced
VI. Medicine In The 1800's
VII. Civil War Comments
VIII Travels
IX. Year-end Philosophy
A Selection Of Diary Entries
I - His Family
28 October 1855 - "Went to Winthrop, N. Monmouth. Nancy came home to live. Married by Dr. Prescott paid Dr. Prescott $2.00."
(My great grandparents’ wedding day.)
26 April 1856 - "Helped take care of Nancy had Drs. Loving and Cochran here each all day missed just at night paid Cochran $5.00."
(Apparently Nancy suffered a miscarriage.)
4 September 1857 - "Staid at home Nancy sick had boy born weight 9¼ Paid Dr. Cochran $3.00 hot day."
(This was the birth of Freeman, their first child, named for John’s Mother’s family, the Freemans. Although John paid Dr. Cochran only $3.00, other records indicate that the total bill for delivery of the baby was $7.00.)
27 October 1857 - "Staid at home. My little Freeman died 10 minutes past 12 o'clock last night."
29 October 1857 - "Buried my little Freeman."
20 November 1859 - "Nancy sick had boy weighed 8½ lbs. born 1 o'clock pm Name Edwin K.”
(This baby was my grandfather, Edwin9 Kimball Merrill. Nancy and John Merrill were to have no other children.)
II. Nancy's Sickness
Nancy was plagued with illness throughout their married life, a victim of tuberculosis. The following are a few of the entries concerning her illness and her death.
15 September 1858 - "Nancy had fit just at night - bad one. (A fit of coughing just after dark.)
6 January 1860 - "Out to Dr. Cochran's after him to come and see Nancy."
10 January 1860 - "Dr. Cochran here to see Nancy he has been out here twenty-four times this fall so far."
18 January 1860 - "Threshed wheat. Liz and Mrs. Bodge up here to see Nancy. Fetched her some herbs."
8 February 1860 - "Dr. Cochran here. Solomon Lothrup here. Brot box from Edwin* with some wine, coffee, tea, sugar, crackers, borax, alum paid 13 cts express borrowed 6 cts Sylvanus 7 cts out seed money."
*Edwin Kimball lived in Livermore Falls. My grandfather was his namesake. Edwin is mentioned frequently in the diaries for his gifts and kindness' to Nancy. He was Nancy's sister Phoebe’s husband.
18 March 1860 - "Went down to John Turner's to carry Nancy out to ride."
21 March 1860 - "L. L. Lothrup gave me a pickrel for Nancy."
12 April 1860 - "Got letter from C. M. Joward, Stoughton. Asked how
Nancy is, and prescribed: 2 oz. Queen meadow root
10 oz. Golden Seal
1 oz. Comfrey
2 oz. Wintergreen
1 oz. Columba root13 June 1860 - "Got box from Edwin Kimball 1 qt. brandy, l qt. wine, farina, chocolate, oranges, figs, lemons.''
In spite of John Y's temperance activities and his position as Revenue Agent, the use of spirits to help ease the suffering and try to stay the deteriorating physical effects of consumption was an accepted treatment then.
19 June 1860 - "Nancy, my dear loved wife, the mother of my sweet little Edwin died this morning about 6 o'clock which has left me alone with my babe in the world. She was 33 years the 22 day of last January."
John was 37 years old at the time of Nancy's death. Edwin was 7 months old. John's feelings of grief and his concern about his ability to raise an infant are obvious in the previous entry. John did not marry again.
One final diary entry concerning Nancy's death was written on the day following her burial. It illustrates the gathering of friends around one who had suffered a loss in the rural 19th century.
22 June 1860 - "Chored round some. Wm., John Turner, P. Budge, A.G. Mason, A. Mann, Jordan Howe, E.P. Ramsdell, V. Lothrup, Boll Jennings, C. White, Rockley's boy came and hoed my corn and potatoes over this P.M."
III. His Spiritualism
We now skip backward one day, and find an interesting entry concerning Nancy's Funeral:
21 June 1860 - "Funeral addressed by or through Charles Hayden in a clear and easy manner, the first spiritual speaker at a funeral in town - caused a great talk."
Were they addressed 'by' a medium, or 'through' a medium? John Y. apparently didn't know how to define the funeral address; and it certainly must have "...caused a great talk" in a small Maine town in 1860 when a spiritualist spoke the funeral oration! This is the first clear statement I had of John Y. Merrill's belief in spiritualism. A review of his diaries reveals eight occasions when he attended seances or dealt with clairvoyants.
About spiritualism, Sidney Ahlstrom, in his A Religious History Of
The American People said, "It was a religious force - for some
it was a religion - and this was true long before the Hydesville rappings.
There were always the bereaved and the remorseful who desperately needed
and wanted to make contact with the departed...
"In the pre-Civil War period the actual denominational possibilities
of the movement went unrealized, even though an increasing number of clergymen
became interested.
"Because the mediums almost invariably stressed the general immortality
of man, Universalists were especially attracted."
All of this seems to fit John Y's situation precisely. He was newly bereaved and probably sought contact with his just-departed Nancy. He had been raised in the Universalist influence, his grandfather having been a petitioner for the founding of the First Universalist Parish in Turner, District of Maine, in 1803. Finally, the Civil War was imminent, and the strange new movement was assuming the proportions of a separate new denomination.
IV His Observations Of Nature
Then, as now, farmers were intensely aware of nature. In his diaries, John Y. Merrill recorded the weather almost every day, particularly noting heavy snows, rains, cold days, and all of the signs of spring after the long, hard Maine winter. He noted the dates on which the ice went out, when he heard the first frogs (the "spring peepers" as they are now called), saw the first swallow, the first robin, the first bobolink, apple trees in full bloom, heard the first night hawk, and others. Living in Maine, one's appreciation of spring omens is enhanced by winters that can last up to six months. Awareness is heightened even more, because in Maine, not only the coming of spring, but also the season itself is often made up of little more than a fleeting series of short-lived natural signs and events. The dates of the first sightings of three harbingers of spring as recorded by John Y. Merrill are listed below. The uniformity of these omens is surprising; not only do their arrivals vary by little more than 3 weeks, they always show up in the same order - the robins first, then the frogs, and the swallows last.
As Recorded by John Y. Merrill
| 1855 | 1856 | 1857 | 1858 | 1859 | 1860 | 1861 | 1862 | 1863 | 1864 | 1865 | |
| 1st Robin | - | 4/8 | 3/28 | 4/6 | 3/24 | 4/3 | 3/30 | 4/13 | 4/11 | - | 3/18 |
| 1st Frogs | 4/15 | 4/15 | 4/11 | 4/6 | 4/17 | 4/10 | 4/20 | 4/27 | - | - | 4/7 |
| 1st Swallow | 4/22 | - | - | 5/1 | 5/5 | 4/19 | 4/26 | 5/4 | 4/28 | - | 4/24 |
V His Skills
During the 19th century in Maine the small farmer eked out a meager living. To exist, he became a jack-of-all-trades, and John Y. was no exception. John Y's diaries were primarily account books, kept to record transactions of the small amounts of cash with which he dealt. (The reader may have noted that, on 8 February 1860, when Edwin Kimball's package for Nancy arrived with 13 cents express money due, John had to borrow 6 cents from his brother Sylvanus, and the 7 cents balance out of the seed money. These New Englanders were frugal - by necessity.) Cottage industry, as it has come to be called, was prevalent then. John made boots and shoes at home, from shoe parts shipped to him on consignment. As he hand-stitched the parts together and shipped them back, he was paid for the quantity produced.
The number and the variety of the skills he practiced is impressive. I have listed below the tasks he mentions during the 11 years that he kept his diaries:
Cut and hauled knees to depot (naturally formed wood knees, probably
tamarack, were used in shipbuilding, as braces).
Fixed bobsled
Hooped barrels
Split stone
Jacked house
Killed hog
Worked in woods getting out sleepers (heavy beams for foundations)
In woods after bobsled runners
Worked on sled shoeing it
Cut timber
Killed ox
Plastering, lathing, smoothing
Shingling
Moved houses and barns in Maine and Massachusetts
Went blueberrying, cranberrying, and raspberrying
Cradled rye and wheat
Mowed, hayed
Hewed timber
Made coffin for Wm. Foster's child
Dug grave
Fixed clock
Dug in well
Stoned well, fitted curbstone
Split out stone posts
Flagged cellar bottom
Killed, skinned old mare
Bottomed 3 chairs
Built Shellings bridge
Built houses
Prohibition agent - Constable of Leeds (1854)
Kennebec County Deputy Sheriff (1854)
Tax Collector (1852, 1853)
VI. Medicine
In addition to the medicines mentioned during Nancy's illness, John mentions
other medical practices. These were apparently cures that were communicated
by word-of-mouth. It was John's custom to write these on the flyleaf of
the diary he was writing that year. This gave him a sort of "library"
of medical lore whenever the need arose.
1856 - "Cure for hickups - stretch the arms up over the head."
- "For pinworm take pumpkin seed steep sweeten with molasses take as any potion and drink."
1857 - "For worms horse lily root dried and grated taken in molasses tablespoonful."
1859 - "Sulphur and molasses:
2½ oz. sulphur
1 oz. seneca
1 oz. cream tartar
½ oz. anis seeds
2 spoonfulls molasses
Grown person once a day, at night."
Date unknown - "Rheumatism"
"2 oz. Kidney wort
2 oz. Senna
2 oz. Thorough wort
2 oz. Golden seal
2 oz. Yellow dock root
1 oz. Guaiacum chips
"Steep 4 pts. to 3 pts. strain add cup white sugar when cold add ½ pt. Jamaica rum. Take 3 tablespoons ½ hour before eating."
Date unknown - "A poultice on S _______." ?
Teaspoon Ginger, Mustard, Flour, All spice
"Mix in warm water spread thin 3 nights in success wear piece black silk across chest all time."
Medical services caused financial problems back then, too - as the next two entries show:
14 October 1861 - "Dr. Cochran here to look over account his bill against due is $115.94."
This bill must have been accumulating for a considerable length of time, because Dr. Cochran's normal house call was only $1.00. If a medicine was also dispensed, another dollar was added. This large bill certainly included some visits to Nancy during her last days more than a year earlier. In any event, an agreement for settling the bill was reached on 25 October 1861. (I still have that agreement, written in Dr Cochran’s hand.) It looks something like this:
$115.94 Monmouth, October 25, 1861
Whereas, John Y. Merrill is owing a balance on Acct. of one hundred and fifteen dollars & 94/100. I agree that if he will drive and deliver me at Monmouth one yoke of two year old steers and one yearling steer, and one cow, with calf, the same steers which I have seen, and the same cow, he has described to me, I will receipt his bill, and discharge all demands against him in full. - Said steers and cow to be
delivered by or before Monday night Oct. 28th 1861.
James Cochran
Three days after the agreement was written, John made the following entry in his diary:
28 October 1861 - "Drove pr. 2 year old steers 1 year old steer and Owens cow out to Dr. Cochran got receipt for $115.94 in full."
(I also have that receipt - which Dr. Cochran wrote, settling the account.)
6 September 1862 - "Went to Winthrop had tooth pulled one filled paid 75 cts."
Although both ether and nitrous oxide had been used as general anesthetics starting in the 1840's, local anesthesia had not been invented by 1862. It is probable that John Y's extraction was done without benefit of any form of anesthesia.
John Merrill also tried healing his fellow man - but in a small way, (and primarily to earn money, I'm sure). In any event, among his papers, copies of the following small printed notice were found:
BALSAMIC SALVE
~~~~~~~~~
A perfect and safe remedy for poisons, burns,
scalds, cuts, bruises, chaped hands, chafes, all
humorous sores, salt rheum, scaled head, cold
and fever sores, any eruption of the skin, &c.
Prepared and put up by J. Y. MERRILL,
Leeds, Maine.
Price, 15 cents per box.
and, in his diary, the following entries:
27 July 1855 - "Went in woods after balsam. Home at night. Getting ready to make salve."
28 July 1855 - "Went to Mrs. Dean's bought 8 lbs lard 12 cts per lb. 4 lbs bees wax 2 shilings lb."
6 August 1855 - "P.M. went to Buckley's after kettle fixing to make salve."
7 August 1855 - "First time made salve. Fifty-four pounds."
Fifty-four pounds! We know only of the 8 pounds of lard and 4 pounds of bees' wax, plus some balsam for fragrance. What the other 40-odd pounds consisted of can only be guessed at.
The small New England farmer also acted as his own veterinarian, as the following entries show:
20 February 1856 - "Got tobacco for mare; she sick all day and night."
15 October 1861 - "Killed old lame cow found great tumor in where her kidneys should have been."
Some statements portray other medical difficulties of those days:
4 August 1863 - "A.M. round house. Edwin got breach had Dr. Loring help put it back. Paid 55 cts." (A ‘breach’ was a hernia.)
6 August 1863 - "Went to Lewiston got truss for Edwin. Paid $2.25."
VII. The Civil War
A number of John Y. Merrill's diary entries mentioned the War Between the States.
14 January 1855 - "Read Uncle Tom's Cabin."
2 December 1859 - "John Brown hung in Virginia for trying to help liberate the poor slaves."
16 December 1859 - "Cook couple with two negroes were hung in Virginia for helping liberate the slaves."
6 November 1860 - "Went down to Town House to vote for President
and vice. Lincoln and Hamlin."
(Hannibal Hamlin was from Paris, Maine.)
12 April 1861 - "Hauled load of shingle stuff over to Coffin's. Bunched up 4 thousand shingles. Fort Sumpter attacked by South Carolinians and destroyed."
19 April 1861 - "Come home (from Livermore) with old cow. Stop to Charles Knapp's dinner. Sold 33 eggs 33 cts. Mass soldiers attacked in Baltimore on their way to Washington."
27 April 1861 - "Hauled out manure on garden A.M. went raising John L. Jenning's barn. Charles Bodge and Wesley Libby enlisted in army."
4 May 1861 - "Helped Sylvanus plow. Went down to corner helped raise the flag staff opposite Gid Lane's."
4 July 1861 - "Went up to Livermore Falls carried Rosina, Louisa, Edwin - celebration."
23 August 1861 - "See Allen Plummer in Maine 7 regiment going to war."
14 January 1862 - "Went down to Benj. Conant's after calves. See soldier from the war going home to Aroostook County."
1 June 1862 - "O. O. & Charles Howard both got wounded in battle near Richmond."
15 June 1862 - "David Freeman got wounded in battle near Richmond in face and cheek."
Note: In the spring of 1862 principal Civil War activity near Richmond was in the Peninsular Campaign. In view of the state of communications at the time, O. O. and Charles Howard may have been wounded at Williamsburg on May 5 when a vicious rear guard fight occurred as Longstreet and Hill delayed McClellan’s advance into Yorktown. David Freeman’s wounds, which John Y. Merrill learned of on June 15 may have occurred as late as the battle Of Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks) on May 31st and June 1st, but probably did not happen much after that.
4 July 1862 - "Went up to Livermore Falls to celebration. O. O. Howard delivered address. Paid 25 cts soldiers aid."
17 July 1862 - "Went down to Greene to military election."
10 September 1862 - "Went to North Leeds to draft soldiers for war. There was enough enlisted."
21 November 1862 - "Sylvanus and Rosina went up to Mr. Hussey's had funeral service preach for George their son who died in the army in Virginia."
17 January 1863 - "Henry Kimball died near Washington with fever."
18 January 1863 - "Edwin Kimball started for Washington."
-------
John Y. Merrill's sister, Louisa, married Charles Lamy. They moved to New York. Their son, Charles F. Lamy, while still in his teens, worked as a telegraph operator for the American Telegraph Company. Charles worked at the Wall House Hotel in Williamsburg (Brooklyn), New York and later at the Astor House in New York City. On March 20, 1863 Charles, who often corresponded with his uncle, wrote to John Y. Merrill on Wall House stationery, as follows:
"The President talks about drafting for soldiers under the conscription act. I hear there is an organization being raised to resist this in New York. They say they will not go and will fight here sooner than fight down South. I do not want them to fight here as they will be apt to raise a big muss."
(Resistance against the draft is not new.)
16 July 1864 - "Dexter Howard came home wounded in neck.
8 November 1864 - "Went to Presidential election. Lincoln votes 157 McLellan 139."
15 April 1865 - "President Abraham Lincoln shot last night died this morning at 20 minutes past 7 by John Wilks Booth in Ford's Theatre Washington, D. C."
VIII Travels
Two of John’s brothers moved to Massachusetts. John visited them and stayed with them sometimes when he was working there. After one such visit to Abington, his brother George accompanied John back to Leeds. John noted some details of that trip in his diary:
22 May 1861 - "Came in to Boston paid $1.20 George's my fare. Dinner, supper, 82 cts Sugar 1 lb. 12 cts. Paper 1 ct. Fare on boat $2.00. For luggage wagon 30 cts."
23 May 1861 - "Came to Portland on boat. Bot bbl. pickled fish $3.25 bbl. mackrel $5.75. Our fare up to Lewiston $2.40. For baggage up to Monmouth 25 cts. Brot up to Greene."
24 May 1861 - "A.M. come home. M.M. Pratt come with us he had half bushel potatoes, hay and greens. Went to Monmouth Center. Sold $1.32 worth fish for freight on fish - 2 bbls. 72 cts."
Apparently they traveled from Abington to Boston by rail, then to Portland by the overnight steamer, and by train again, to Lewiston, sending John’s two barrels of fish on to Monmouth. They spent the night in Greene, went on home to Leeds the next morning, then rode over to Monmouth that afternoon where John sold some fish to pay the freight bill.
IX. Year-End Philosophy
Sometimes, on the last evening of the year, John would forego his usual terse report on the day's happenings and pause to reflect on the year that was ending. He did this four times:
31 December 1855 - "Thus dies the year. There has been many changes
since this year came in."
(John and Nancy had been married in 1855)
31 December 1856 - "Thus dies the year with two more friends to be numbered with the dead; my dear old Grandmother and dearest sister Olive, gone where we are all going, fast as time can carry us."
(Grandmother Freeman died 8 June 1856, Olive died 23 December 1856.)
31 December 1859 - "So dies another year. This has been a hard one for me but the next may be worse though I do hope for the best for me and mine with the whole human kind. This has been the last with some who were helping their fellows to freedom."
(John had been seriously ill for about 6 weeks during 1859 - from the symptoms, possibly encephalitis - and he probably now knew that Nancy was dying, since she lived less than 6 months after this.)
31 December 1860 - "Thus ends the year with all its changes."
(Nancy had died in June)
Finally, among the other documents written by John Y. are a couple of small notes that he wrote, apparently during adolescence - probably in the mid-1830’s:
VIRTUE
“A Greek girl being asked what fortune she would bring her husband
replied: ‘ I will bring that which gold cannot purchase a heart unspotted
and virtue without a staine which is all that descended to me from my parents’”.
On another piece of paper John wrote down his earliest memory:
“As I sit myself down to muse on the past, I cannot help thinking of my past life from my earliest recollections up to the present time. I was born in the North Part of Turner in 1823 and lived there until 1825, then my father moved to Leeds and in 1827 my brother Silvanus fell into the fire which is the earliest circumstance that I can recollect.”
John is recalling something that occurred when he was four, and his little brother, Silvanus, was only one year old. We can imagine the commotion and the fright when the infant fell into the fireplace before his brother’s eyes. Little wonder that the scene was etched in John Y.’s memory!
John8 Young Merrill died at his home in Leeds on November 1, 1898 at 75 years of age. He is buried in the Merrill plot in the West Leeds Cemetery.
About Allen R. Merrill
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Allen Merrill’s first twelve years were spent in the cities in and around Cambridge during the midst of the Depression. Then the Merrills moved to a small farm near Lowell. After high school he enlisted in the United States Navy, and served for two years, including a stint on the aircraft carrier USS Randolph. Upon discharge in ‘46, he entered Lowell Textile Institute. That next spring his fraternity sponsored a dance and invited nursing cadets from a local hospital. Claire Cooley, from Peabody, Mass. was one of the nurses who accepted the invitation. Claire and Allen were married in November of 1947.
After graduating from LTI (now U. Mass. - Lowell) in 1950, with a BS in Textile Engineering degree, Allen and family spent 6 years in Northern New Jersey, before following the textile industry southward. During the next 14 years they lived in 6 different locations in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, finally “settling” in Williamsburg, Virginia for 16 years, until they were transferred to Asheville, N. C. in 1986. Allen retired there two years later. Asheville is still their home.
They spend summers in a 2-bedroom cottage on the Maine coast that they purchased in 1981 and which Allen remodeled after he retired. The cottage, and the small workshop that he built for woodworking and woodcarving, are poised 50 feet above the rocky shore, located near a small “Down East” fishing village. Allen is convinced that the site creates in him the same sensations that FDR experienced when he termed Campobello Island (50 miles northeast): “This blessed place”.
The Merrills have six children - four boys, followed by two girls, and six grandchildren, plus Charlie, a three year old fawn Pug. None, (except for Allen - and Charlie, to a lesser degree) are spoiled.
A.R.M.
Editor's Note: Allen has now contributed three articles to The Merrill Newsletter; "John Y. Merrill's Diaries," and previously in Volume 5, Number 1 - "Wherstead, Suffolk, England" and in Volume 6, Number 1 - "Early Origins." He has written and self-published a monograph about his strain of the family, "Merrill - A Family History" with limited distribution among his family members and at least one library that we know of.
In spite of the above accomplishments, Allen steadfastly denies being either an author or a genealogist.
