Greenacre on the Piscataqua (Paperback) | Released: 30 Oct 2013

Greenacre on the Piscataqua
By Anna J. Ingersoll

Excerpt

TO the traveler speeding through New England on the Eastern Division of the Boston & Maine Railroad there is no hint of any special attraction at the plain little station of Eliot. A drive of three miles takes you past thrifty homes, with meadows reaching to the broad, swift Piscataqua, and through stretches of dense woods down to the river bank, where almost at the entrance to Long Reach Bay stands the Greenacre Inn. It is a quiet spot, with gently sloping banks, and off to the west lies a long meadow with its fringe of apple trees and birches reflected in the waters of the bay. There is a sense of space and distance, a limitless expanse of sky, a broad sweep of river and bay with the distant low-lying banks, and far beyond, ever changing in hue against the sunset sky, range the foothills of the White Mountains. With the going down of the sun a golden bridge spans the waters glowing and radiant at our feet.

Once there was a desperate struggle here; men fought for their lives, while women and children hurried for shelter over the fields to the garrison house with its high stockade. There are yet signs to be seen of this old house, and in the fields about the plough has turned up many an arrowhead. As late as 1747 the men of this district carried firearms to church.

Down in the hollow below the Inn where the apple trees and locusts bloom, there was a large shipyard in the fifties, where the keel of many a good ship was laid. The fleetest sailing vessel of her day. The Nightingale, built to carry Jenny Lind Goldsmith back to Sweden, floated out on the tide from these cool, green shores. She never fulfilled her purpose, and years after was captured by the government with a cargo of wretched human beings bound for the slave market.

The Eliot of today is a quiet farming town of 1,500 inhabitants, lying for six miles along the banks of the beautiful Piscataqua, just over the Maine border line, four miles from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There are three or four churches, a grocery store or two, and one hotel. Greenacre Inn, built ten years ago by a company of enterprising Eliot people. The Inn, a small house holding about one hundred people, was for a few years a resort for Bostonians. Here John Greenleaf Whittier came, drawing about him a circle of friends.

In 1893, that wonderful year, when, through the World's Parliament of Religions, men were brought to a recognition of the fundamental points of contact in the religions of the world, Miss Sarah J. Farmer, only daughter of Moses G. Farmer, the inventor, conceived the idea of continuing at Eliot, Maine, her birthplace, the movement inaugurated at Chicago . She determined to form a centre at...

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