Recollections of Winters Past

Memories of Winter in 19th Century Plymouth and New England

[12/24/24. Dear Readers,

I first published this essay last year (2023) at this time, and I’m republishing it again this year for the Holidays.

Thank you as always for your interest and support, and a very Happy Holiday Season to all!
— Ben Cronin.]

Last year we looked at what Christmas was like two centuries ago in Plymouth — not in the distant 17th century, but decades into the life of the American republic as an independent nation. In New England, at least, with its Puritan religious, socio-cultural, and intellectual tradition, celebration of Christmas was rare, as we heard from 19th century Plymouth Selectman William T. Davis (1822-1907). In his 1906 Plymouth Memories Of An Octogenarian, Davis wrote that the traditional Puritan distaste for Christmas still reigned in his youth:

“Christmas during my day came and went without observance or notice. It was not a holiday, presents were not exchanged, schools were kept, and the wish for a ‘Merry Christmas’ was never heard. Puritan soil was not a favorable one for its observance. In 1659 any observance of Christmas ‘either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way’ was forbidden under a penalty of five shillings for each offence. Though this law was repealed in 1681 the leaders of the Massachusetts Colony, including Judge Samuel Sewall, still looked on Christmas revels as offensive to the Holy Son of God…. With regard to Christmas I am inclined to think that its observance has found its way through its appeal to the aesthetic rather than the religious sense of the people.”¹

(An American Holly, Ilex opaca, near the northern end of its range; lit by my Father, Robert Emmett Cronin, on the northern shore of Kingston Bay, in Duxbury, December 2022. Photo Credit — J. Benjamin Cronin.)

Nevertheless, seasonality was as much a part of early New England life as in other northern-temperate climes, according to Davis, and that’s what I will to focus on in this article. Here is Davis describing the preparations for winter which occurred in the Fall.

“In the autumn in my youth there was a solicitude concerning the articles to be laid in for the winter. First good potatoes must be found, twenty bushels of which with a barrel of sweet German turnips, and a bushel of carrots and onions must be put in brick bins in the cellar, where exposed to as little light as possible, they would in the days before furnaces keep well till spring. Then in a cool part of the cellar, places must be found for five barrels of apples, one each of Rhode Island Greenings, Baldwins, Russets, Holmes apples and sweet apples. Of course a firkin of good butter must be laid in, a jar of tamarinds, a jar of malaga grapes, and fifty pounds of well selected codfish, the last to be broad and thick, and not more than eighteen inches long including the tail. The fish must be kept in a close box, and placed in the garret. Never buy stripped codfish, for if you do you will probably get hake, polluck, skate and catfish, and other cheap denisons of the sea.”²

At the same time, the counterpoint to the homey snugness of a full larder was a comparatively diminished — not to say stultified — public life, wrote Selectman Davis.

“During my youth, public entertainments were rare in Plymouth, especially in the winter. During that season, with unlighted streets and the houses lighted for the most part with oil lamps, the town, more particularly in a storm of rain or snow was gloomy, indeed. Families gathered around their wood fires and here and there groups of men would sit on the counters and boxes in the stores until the nine o'clock bell called them home.”³

The reference to public lighting, and other changes in life which occurred a little over a hundred years ago, recalls a passage in Edith Wharton’s masterful novel Ethan Frome, a love story, and a winter story, set in the Berkshires at the end of the 19th century. The narrator, sent to the area for his job (presumably, an electrical power company), is delayed by a strike, and spends the winter in the hills, and becomes acquainted with a local figure, a man named Ethan Frome:

“….I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story [of Ethan Frome] was in the gaps. But one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the nucleus about which I grouped my subsequent inferences: ‘Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters.’

Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what that meant. Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as Bettsbridge and Shadd's Falls, had libraries, theatres and Y. M. C. A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend for recreation. But when winter shut down on Starkfield, and the village lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see what life there — or rather its negation — must have been in Ethan Frame's young manhood.”⁴

Wharton gives a wonderfully evocative description of the harshness of New England winters of yesteryear (and I might say, having passed four winters in the Berkshires, she gets that region of New England particularly correct):

“Day by day, after the December snows were over, a blazing blue sky poured down torrents of light and air on the white landscape, which gave them back in an intenser glitter. One would have supposed that such an atmosphere must quicken the emotions as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce no change except that of retarding still more the sluggish pulse of Starkfield. When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village, and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter. Twenty years earlier the means of resistance must have been far fewer, and the enemy in command of almost all the lines of access between the beleaguered villages….”⁵

(The Duxbury Town Forest above Round Pond, Winter, 2022; credit — J. Benjamin Cronin.)

In response to this ferocity, winter games, familiar even to the winters of a decade ago — but increasingly and sadly rare today in the age of anthropogenic climate change — were the regular activity of the youthful across New England, including in Plymouth in the 1820s and 1830s, Davis recalled:

“With the coming of the first cool nights we hunted in the morning for strips of ice in the gutter, and spent the hour before school in sliding, boys and girls together, the girls, I never knew the reason why, giving a little hop at the beginning of their slide. And then came our sliding down hill, the larger boys with George P. Hayward and William Rider Drew and Jesse Turner at their head. Mr. Hayward's Constitution, painted green, and having round steel spring runners, taking the lead, would slide from the top of Burial Hill down through a wide open gate between the high schoolhouse and the Unitarian church, along Leyden street, down Turner's hill to the end of Barnes' wharf. The smaller boys would spend the afternoons of Saturday perfectly happy on the short slide from the bottom of the Middle street steps to Water street. All our sleds were made to order, scorning as we would if they had been purchasable, the toy sleds which can now be bought for a song, and are high at the price. There was a sled of domestic manufacture in my day which, considering its cheapness and simplicity, was a quite satisfactory sled in the minds of those who could afford no better. It was made of six white oak cask staves, three above and three below, with the convex on the outside, and a cleat at each end between the staves, to which it was nailed. With a little less speed, perhaps, than other sleds, yet in humpy dagger and belly hacker in wearing out boot toes, and heels, they were as efficient as any. With skating and its accompaniment hocky, the winter passed away, and the year came to an end.”⁶

It’s true that we don’t have much skating these days on naturally-formed ice; and it’s true as well that the United States Department of Agriculture recently changed our hardiness zone for plants to reflect changing conditions.⁷ Indeed, it strikes me that our climate here in southeastern Massachusetts increasingly resembles a maritime climate as seen in Northwestern Europe, in Britain and Ireland, and the littoral of the North Sea, from Dunkirk through the Netherlands, to Denmark and southern Norway; and this is, for me at least, a cause of sadness (though it could be far worse for us than to have a climate like Britain’s). I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Yet I’m also reminded of Lord Tennyson wrote in his famous poem, Ulysses:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.⁸

Much does still abide, the loss of our accustomed winters notwithstanding. As difficult as that may be, we still have a startlingly beautiful part of the world in which we live, a singular place where land and waters meet, a place, whatever the weather and whatever the climate, which remains worthy still of reverence and defense.

On this note, I wish all very happy, safe, restful, and healthy Holidays!

1. William T. Davis, Plymouth Memories Of An Octogenarian (Plymouth, Mass.: Bittinger Brothers, 1906), p. 491.

2. Davis, Plymouth Memories, p. 486.

3. Ibid., p. 330.

4. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922 edition; original copyright, 1911), pp. 7-8.

5. Wharton, Ethan Frome, pp. 8-9

6. Davis, Plymouth Memories, pp. 205-206.

7. See, e.g., https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/.

8. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”; https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses.