INCHOATE THOUGHTS
Hi,
Hi,
Here, on Cape Cod, Orleans historian Bonnie Snow leads a
cemetery walk under the aegis of the Orleans Historical
Society.
A spry woman in her seventies, she introduces us to eighteenth- through early
twentieth-century inhabitants of the town beside their gravestones. She
connects them by referring to the writings of two townswomen: the 1857 diary of
Susan Maria Sparrow (1833-1910) and the letters to her aunt by Mary Eldridge
(1796-1875). Sparrow taught in a local school. Her husband, Joseph K. Mayo,
Jr., formerly a mariner, farmed land in South Orleans owned by Sparrow. Her
diary was recently discovered behind an attic wall. Eldridge was married to
John Doane, who served as a member of the Massachusetts legislature and of the
Governor’s Council, and was elected state senator in 1838. So what? Well, apart
from the curious fact that neither Sparrow nor Eldridge so much as mentions her
husband in her writings, the stories Snow has compiled from what historians now
term ego documents form an incremental microcosm of recent American history.
John Doane and Mary Eldridge’s son Thomas Doane introduced
nitroglycerin to tunneling, using it in the construction of the infamous Hoosac
Railroad Tunnel in northwest Massachusetts as its chief engineer between 1863
and 1867. Subsequently chief engineer of the Burlington and Missouri River
Railroad, he named one of the towns in its course for his hometown. With Doane,
we follow white colonial expansion westward from Orleans, Massachusetts to
Orleans, Nebraska. Susan Sparrow’s relatives also affected national affairs.
Her maternal grandfather Joshua Crosby was a gun captain on board the USS Constitution. He is reputed to have
fired the shot that brought down the mizzenmast of the HMS Guerriere leading to her capture in 1812. Her younger brother
Benjamin Sparrow was prominent in the nativist, anti-Catholic Know Nothing
Party, which achieved electoral success in Massachusetts in 1854. In 1871, the
US Life-Saving Service was formed in succession to the various volunteer
organizations that had sought to aid mariners in distress. Sparrow’s standing
was sufficient for him to be appointed the first superintendent on the Cape
when that position was created in 1873, a post he retained through various
changes of administration until 1904. He died in 1906. Four years later, his
elder sister, the school teacher and author of the diary recently discovered
behind an attic wall, died at the age of seventy-seven.
Headstones in a cemetery, letters to an aunt, and a succinct
daily diary are strands of a thread from Orleans, Massachusetts that can be
twisted to form the cordage of local, regional, and national history. I honor
local history. Yes, a fair proportion of practitioners are untrained as
historians, and many come to their enthusiasm through a fascination with the
past of their own families, then their hometowns, seldom further. Yet local
need not be parochial. When Bonnie Snow wrote an article for the Orleans
Historical Society Newsletter about
two World War II servicemen from Orleans stationed on Tinian (base of the Enola Gay, of Hiroshima A-bomb fame) in which she discussed senninbari (Japanese
soldiers’ apotropaic belts, each sewn with a thousand stitches), some locals
felt she had strayed too far from Orleans affairs. On the contrary. She
demonstrated that following local threads leads you ever outward, helping the
curious discover the world and the large-scale weavings of its history.
Ever,
Ivan