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Recollections of a Busy Life: v. 1 & 2 in 1v (American History & Culture)
Recollections of a Busy Life v 1 2 in 1v - American History & Culture Author:Horace Greeley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. RURAL NEW ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. THREE brothers named Greeley (spelled five different ways) migrated to America in 1640. One settled in Maine, where ... more »he has many living descendants; another. in Rhode Island, where he soon died ; a third in Salisbury, Mass., near the south line of New Hampshire, into which his descendants soon migrated, if he did not. One large family of them hail from Gilmanton; another, to whom I am less remotely related, from Wilton; my own great-grandfather (named Zaccheus, as was his son my grandfather, and his son my father) lived in or on the verge of Londonderry, in what was in my youth Nottingham-West, and is now Hudson, across the Merrimac from Nashua (which was then Dunstable or nothing). I never heard of a Woodburn of our stock who was not a farmer; but the Greeleys of our clan, while mainly farmers, are in part blacksmiths. Some of them have in this century engaged in trade, and are presumed to have acquired considerable property; but these are not of the tribe of Zaccheus. My grandfather Greeley was a most excellent, though never a thrifty citizen. Kind, mild, easy-going, honest, and unambitious, he married young, and reared a family of thirteen,— nine sons and four daughters,— of whom he who died youngest was thirty years old; while a majority lived to be seventy, and three are yet living, — at least two of them having seen more than eighty summers. So many children in the house of a poor and by no means driving farmer, in an age when food and cloth cost twice thelabor they now do, made economy rather a necessity than a virtue; but I presume none of those children ever suffered protractedly from hunger, while all of them obtained such education as was afforded by the common schools of sixty to eighty years ago; or, if not, the fault ...« less