Pitt Clarke and “an unjust pecuniary punishment”

Among the students punished by the Harvard College faculty for damaging the dining hall during a Thanksgiving banquet on 29 Nov 1787 was a sophomore designated as “Clarke 2d.”

That was Pitt Clarke (1763-1835) of Medfield. (“Clarke 1st” would have been Edward, class of 1788, a senior.) His college diary survives, was published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and can be read here. This picture of Clarke much later in life, when he was a Unitarian minister in Norton, comes from that article.

Clarke was unusual in coming to Harvard when he was his mid-twenties, his education having been delayed by the war and family financial troubles. Most college students of this time were in their mid-to-late teens—the age of high-school students today. But every class had one or two older men without a lot of money who were really dedicated to starting a clerical career.

Clarke’s description of the Thanksgiving banquet was quite different from what appeared in the Harvard faculty records. His diary said:

Thanksgiving, very pleasant. Went to meeting. Mr. Hilliard preached from Psalms 107, verses 31, 32. After meeting had an elegant dinner in the hall; each one carried in a bottle of wine, & all joined in drinking toasts, & singing songs in praise of the day, & with thankful hearts.

Curiously, the four lines about the dinner are in a smaller handwriting than everything else on that page, as this image shows.

Did Clarke cram those lines in later? Did he have a strong reason to go into such innocuous detail?

As discussed yesterday, on 8 December the Harvard faculty decided after much discussion to fine every student who was at that dinner and couldn’t prove that he had left early. That upset Clarke, who wrote in his diary that day:

Very unexpectedly received from the President & the rest of the government, an unjust pecuniary punishment, together with a number of my classmates, for being in the Hall at Thanksgiving day a little while after Supper.

Two days later Clarke wrote:

I together with those who were punished, went to the President to know the justness of it, & to desire him to take it off. He promised us another hearing.

The Colonial Society edition of Clarke’s diary suggests the fine stuck, but the Harvard faculty minutes show otherwise.

On 14 December the college faculty met again to consider the petition from Clarke and his classmates, “Sophimores who were punished…ten shillings each for the disorders which took place on the Thanksgiving day, praying to have the punishments remitted.” The immediate decision was:

Voted, that as various disorders & irregularities have taken place since the last meeting of the Government, they cannot with propriety take into consideration the said petition at present, but that as soon as the Students in general shall manifest a proper disposition to discountenance such conduct as is inconsistent with decorum and the respect due to the Government of the Society, the said petition & any other that may be received on the same subject shall be considered.

That of course gave students who wanted to get out of the fine an incentive not to just stand by but to push their classmates to behave better.

The official record of that 14 December meeting suggests that tactic worked. A note states:

The Government took so much notice of their [the sophomores’] petition as to suspend the entering of their punishments in the second Quarter Bill which went to the Steward, while the punishments of those Seniors & Juniors who were in like manner consined at the same meetings, and who did not shew so submissive a temper, were entered in the Bill.

Clarke wrote no more about the fine in his diary, which presumably means he never had to pay it. On 2 Jan 1788, furthermore, the faculty appointed Clarke to be one of the waiters in the hall, a way for him to earn money and a position of trust.

For Charles Adams and his fellow juniors, however, the ten-shilling punishment remained.

TOMORROW: Another source of trouble.

Medfield’s Peak House at 302

Every New England town has its own historic landmarks, and in Medfield, Massachusetts, one of the most recognized is the Peak House—a small three-story building with a very sharp roof.

A couple of years ago Richard DeSorgher wrote in the Medfield Patch about the disagreement over its date:

The sign, installed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1930 and located in front of the Main Street house, proclaims its construction date to be 1680; rebuilt after it was burned in the attack on Medfield during the King Philip War in 1676. [That information also appears, as of today, on Wikipedia.]

Their supporting evidence comes from state records showing owner Benjamin Clark receiving payment in relief of taxes in 1680, due to the hardships suffered with the burning of his home. With that, he was able to rebuild. This 17th-century date has the support of famed architectural historian Abbott Lowell Cummings, director of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), who studied the house a number of years ago ... not so fast.

William Tilden, famed Medfield Town Historian and author of the History of Medfield says in his publication: “The house was burned out by the Indians in 1676, but rebuilt upon the same spot. What is called the Peak House is an addition subsequently made to Benjamin Clark’s second house, in or about 1762. After the decay of the old part, “the Peak House section” was moved about 100 yards forward towards Main Street to its present location.”

Eighty years is a lot of room for error when it comes to New World properties. I suspect that one of the reasons the Peak House was so hard to date is its curious architecture—it doesn’t really fit into any style. Tilden’s theory that it wasn’t actually built to stand on its own at first might explain that odd shape.

The Medfield Historical Society hired Dan Miles, a dendrochronologist from Oxford, and announced his findings:

Six of the Peak House’s main frame timbers were sampled and analyzed. All six timbers were found to have been felled in the winter of 1710/11 with three of the timbers being from the same tree. These test results lead us to believe that the current Peak House was built during the summer of 1711.

This date jibes nicely with the coming of age of Benjamin’s youngest son, Seth, who would have been about 24 years of age that summer. Most likely part of Benjamin’s plan to give his son his inheritance included building a separate structure for Seth in front of his own dwelling (today’s Peak House). Indeed, Benjamin did give his property to Seth upon his death in 1724.

Thus, we can feel confident the Peak House is just over 300 years old.

The Medfield Historical Society is hosting tours of its house every Sunday from 2:00 to 5:00 P.M. through 15 September. They promise, “Even in the heat of summer, the Peak House is really cool—literally!” That’s what a very high roof does for you, I guess.

Upcoming Events Off the Beaten Path

In addition to the annual commemorations grouped around Patriots’ Day that I linked to here, a few more talks caught my eye because they’re one-off events in unusual venues.

On Monday, 16 April (which is legally Patriots’ Day), at 10:00 A.M., Dr. Sam Forman will sign copies of Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty, at the Vine Lake Cemetery, 625 Main Street in Medfield. Why a cemetery in Medfield? Because that’s the burial place of Mercy Scollay, Dr. Warren’s fiancée when he died. Forman will “read from her newly attributed works and unveil her portrait.”

That same day at 7:00 P.M., Seamus Heffernan will do a book-signing and chat about his alternative-history comic Freedom in the Modern Myths shop at 34 Bridge Street in Northampton. Check out our conversation about that reworking of the Revolution starting here.

On Tuesday, 17 April, the Nichols House Museum will present a lecture by Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, on ”The Real Liberty Bell: Boston Abolitionists, 1700-1863.” This will take place the American Meteorological Society at 45 Beacon Street in Boston starting at 6:00 P.M. Admission is $20, or $15 for members of the museum. For reservations, call the museum at 617-227-6993, preferably by 13 April.

Finally, on the actual anniversary of the outbreak of the war—Thursday, 19 April—Prof. William Fowler will speak at the National Archives in Waltham about his latest book, American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two years After Yorktown, 1781-1783. Fowler is, among many other things, the Gay Hart Gaines Distinguished Fellow in American History at Mount Vernon. That free program begins at 6:00 P.M. Reservations are recommended; email or call toll-free 866-406-2379.

How Hannah Adams Spent the Revolutionary War

Hannah Adams was born in Medfield in 1755, daughter of a bookish farmer with little money. She had a big intellect, a nervous disposition, and even less money, but she made herself into a respected author in the new republic.

In her memoir, this is what Adams had to say about her war years.

During the American revolutionary war, I learned to weave bobbin lace, which was then saleable, and much more profitable to me than spinning, sewing or knitting, which had previously been my employment. At this period I found but little time for literary pursuits. But at the termination of the American war, this resource failed, and I was again left in a destitute situation.

With European goods once again coming into North America in quantity, the price for lace must have dropped, and Adams could no longer support herself by making it.

The photo above of a bobbin lace border in progress comes from the Chesapeake Region Lace Guild. Here are more action photos from Jill Hall at Plimoth Plantation.

Meeting Hannah Adams at the Library

I just noticed that the Boston Athenaeum’s featured author for November and December was Hannah Adams (1755-1831). Noah Sheola’s essay says:

Afflicted by chronic ill health, Adams spent her childhood [in Medfield] reading the contents of her father’s ample library. Living on the brink of poverty, the Adamses took in boarders, from whom Hannah learned the rudiments of Greek and Latin. Before long she was doing her part to support the family by tutoring the young men of Medfield who aspired to the college education she could not obtain. Drawing on her expansive reading, Adams began work on an exhaustive survey of Christian denominations, with the aim of publishing a kind of dictionary that would eschew the judgmental tone which, in Adams’s view, marred similar works then in print.

Adams’s liberal religious views became an issue when she set out to prepare a history textbook for schools, and complained about competition from another author, who also happened to be the very orthodox Congregationalist minister at Charlestown.

Her subsequent work, A Summary History of New England (1799), became the basis for a bitter dispute with Jedidiah Morse [1761-1826], author of the hugely successful Universal Geography, when in 1805 Adams wished to publish an abridgment of her history for school use. Morse was preparing a similar work and Adams felt that he was impinging on a market to which she had staked claim. Morse, a Calvinist pastor, countered that he had every right to publish whatever he pleased and accused Adams’s Unitarian backers of instigating the affair to bruise his reputation in the context of an ongoing interdenominational spat. While arbiters eventually determined that Morse owed her nothing, the moral victory belonged to Adams, for the public largely resented the pastor’s perceived indifference to the welfare of an aged woman of modest means.

The Athenaeum became a circulating library in 1827, and two years later gave Adams free borrowing privileges. As a poor author she probably couldn’t afford a full membership, and as a woman she probably wasn’t offered it.

(Wikipedia being as it is, I see that about half of its entry on Jedidiah Morse is about his part in the Illuminati scare of 1798. More on that here if you’re interested.)