Literary Pilgrimages of a NaturalistPackard, Winthrop
History
Literary Pilgrimages of a Naturalist
Packard, Winthrop
Natural history -- Outdoor books; New England -- Description and travel
Governor Bradford, writing of Plymouth Colony, early regretted
that his Pilgrims were little content to stay within easy reach of
Plymouth Rock but remained Pilgrims still, migrating through the
woods and along shore to seek new and better farms. This was but
the further expression of that wanderlust which had brought so many
of the followers of the Pilgrims over seas. The spirit of adventure
manned many a ship that followed the Mayflower to Massachusetts
Bay, and the descendants of these adventurous migrants have since
explored and settled the country to the very tip of Alaska.
One of the first of these early impulses to move on took Pilgrims
to Scituate, and here in 1636 an ancestor of Woodworth dug and
stoned a well, thirty-six feet deep, in that little corner of the
present town now known as Greenbush. The Pilgrim settlers and
farmers marked their trails behind them with stones that stand
as their most lasting physical memorial to this day. One can but
fancy that the glaciers which built the land the Pilgrims were to
occupy, grinding, mixing, sifting soil from a thousand miles of
back country and dropping it in southeastern Massachusetts, moved
on ball-bearings, so numerous are the rounded boulders they dropped
behind them in this fertile mixture. The stronger and richer the
soil the more of these boulders are to be found in it, and the
Pilgrim farmers had a double task in the clearing of their farms.
They must not only fell the trees and remove the stumps, but they
must go deeper and get out the rocks before their plows could
furrow it. How well they set their stubborn wills to the grubbing
of these rocks we know as we look upon their fields, to this day
bound in neat parallelograms of gray granite, each round stone set
upon two others, as the Pilgrims taught their sons to place them,
little disturbed by stormy centuries that have merely served to
garland them with ivy, clematis and woodbine.
Wild things of the woods have come to know and love these old stone
walls. Chipmunks, woodchucks, foxes even, find refuge and make
their homes in the artificial galleries thus enduringly placed,
and the wild flowers of the field snuggle up to them to escape the
farmer’s scythe, paying for their shelter in beauty and fragrance.
Close to the walls, however well shorn the field, the winds of this
first day of October toss yellow curls of goldenrod blooms, while
the asters, children of the year’s late prime, open wide, roguish
blue eyes among them. Particularly do these wayside children love
to ramble along one of the old stone-walled lanes leading from the
pasture to the cow barn, as if they came up with the cows night
after night, and lingered outside only because the barn is closed
on them before they managed to loiter in.
“The cot of my father, the dairy house nigh it,
And e’en the rude bucket that hung in the well”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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