The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty YearsHarper, Ida Husted
History
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years
Harper, Ida Husted
Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906
In March, 1839, the family moved to Hardscrabble, a small village two
miles further down the Battenkill. They went on a cold, blustering day,
and one may imagine the feelings of Daniel and Lucy Anthony and their
older children as they turned away from their big factory, their
handsome home and the friends they had learned to love. Mrs. Anthony's
heart was overflowing with sorrow, for in less than five years she had
lost by death her little daughter, her father and mother, and now was
swept away her home hallowed by their beloved memories.
In his prosperous days Daniel Anthony had built a satinet factory and a
grist-mill at Hardscrabble and, although these were mortgaged heavily,
he hoped to weather the financial storm and through them to build up
again his fallen fortunes. The family were soon comfortably established
in a large house which had been a hotel or tavern in the days when
lumber was cut in the Green mountains and floated down the river, an
immense building, sixty feet square, with wide hall and broad piazza.
They did not keep a hotel, but people were in the habit of stopping
here, as it was a half-way house to Troy, and they found themselves
obliged to entertain a number of travelers.
Those were busy days for the family. Susan's journal contains many
entries such as, "Did a large washing to-day.... Spent to-day at the
spinning-wheel.... Baked 21 loaves of bread.... Wove three yards of
carpet yesterday.... Got my quilt out of the frame last 5th day.... The
new saw-mill has just been raised; we had 20 men to supper on 6th day,
and 12 on 7th day." But there were quilting-bees and apple-parings and
sleighing parties and many good times, for the elastic temperament of
youth rallies quickly from grief and misfortune. Susan went to
Presbyterian church one Sunday, and the gray-robed Quaker thus writes:
To see them partake of the Lord's supper, as they call it, was
indeed a solemn sight, but the dress of the communicants bespeaks
nothing but vanity of heart--curls, bows and artificials displayed
in profusion about most of them. They say they can dress in the
fashion without fixing their hearts on their costume, but surely if
their hearts were not vain and worldly, their dress would not be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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