A pilgrim maid : the self-told story of Frances E. Townsley

Dedication

To the children in homes were I am never counted a childless woman, I dedicate this book.

F. E. T.

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Introduction

This book is not so much an autobiography as a biographical romance. It posesses the virtue of being more than a record of a life. It is a story of an every day life woven into the career of an exceptional woman who has wrought well her work in the highest sphere of human effort.

Many quaint incidents in connection with the denominational history of this generation are set with crispness and originality that give freshness and tonic to the story.

The recital is a fascinating one and is set with peculiar charm in a practical, rounded, wholesome ministry of flesh and blood, and will secure the recognition to which the writers abilities and Christian devotion entitle her.

R. N. VAN DOREN, D. D., Editor The Standard,

Chicago, Illinois.

Foreword

Sitting under the fragrant pines on the heights overlooking Little Traverse Bay near Bay View Assembly Grounds, I first listened to a part of the life story of Rev. Frances E. Townsley. It stirred my soul as perhaps no other life story has ever done.

Miss Townsley's life has been as fragrant of good as the breeze wafted from sweet balsam and pines, and as deep has been its pathos of sorrow as the unsounded depths of lake or sea.

I rejoice that her clear and trenchant pen has given her self-told history to the world, and that it will uplift every soul that reads it I know, since her personal touch on my life has done so much for me.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frances E. Townsley - - Frontice Piece

Frances E. Townsley at 20 - - Page 124

When I Was Ordained - 277

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

1. The Long Ago - 9

3. Precious Memories 27

CHAPTER I. The Long Ago

' 'My lost, my own and I —

Shall have so much to see together by and by 1 am quite sure we will be very glad

That for a little while we were so sad,"

I have just found it — the beginning of the story I have often been asked to write. Here is my starting point, this tiny bead bag of divers colors, carefully wrought, and as I dig with no longer childish fingers into its one little pocket where I once kept "my very own pennies ," I find a broken fragment of a baby's coral neck-lace. Don't offer me a string of pearls today. Diamonds could not purchase this. Rubies could not compare with it. For this little trinket brings most holy memories of a mother's devotion, a father's protection, a brother's playfulness and all childhood's unreturning joys. As I look upon it there pass before me those of long ago; and if I am to tell you my story, I must tell you of those without whom I should never have been — just I.

Dear little coral beads. Let me place this fragment of a neck-lace — no, you won't go around my neck, but against my cheek where salt tears will suggest your own lost home on the coral reefs, where so slowly you were builded in your long ago, for to each of us is allotted his portion as a builder for those who shall come after. So this tiny bag and baby necklace bring to me MY FIRST MEMORIES.

These are of a very tall, well-formed man, with curly, brown hair and beard, who was wont to carry my little brother, Frank, and my own fidgety little person on his broad shoulders. 0, those far away mornings! Then the nurse-maid relinquished her charge to father who took us out into the grapery before breakfast, after which joyous morning meal he went down the street to business waving goodbyes to three children, nine, four and two years of age and the little woman who for twenty years rested peacefully in his love.

Of that mother there are no first memories. She was always there. She always will be! my precious, blessed, heroic little mother, my saint!

My father, Gad Townsley, was from the hills of Franklin County, Massachusetts. His parents, Dan and Rachel (Bullard) Townsley, were the father and mother of a good sized family bearing such solid old Bible names as Sarah, Persis, Bathsheba, Dan, Abner, Enoch and the no less worthy name of Nuel, the uncle who was, with uncle Enoch, my great and special comforter in many an hour of heart-ache and childish disappointment.

Grandfather, Dan Townsley, was born 1763. He enlisted against King George in 1780, and at seventeen years of age was fighting the British and served till the close of the Revolutionary War. His brothers,

THE LONG AGO

Adam and Gad were at Lexington, 1775,

" Where once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.' '

Mother was the daughter of Captain Joseph Davis of Billerica, Massachusetts, and Eleanor Cobb, the daughter of General David Cobb, of Maine. Captain Davis probably found this fragile little wife in some coast-cruise, for mother's tiny note book asserts that her own birth place was Goldsborough, Maine, but that her mother "died at Billerica, Massachusetts, 1819, being twenty-three years of age."

Eleanor Cobb was too frail a lily to long bloom in the atmosphere of so stern, arbitrary and domineering a nature as that of Captain Davis, who might dominate the actions of a crew of men on shipboard more imperiously than those of so delicate a mortal as his young wife, who, (her contemporaries have recorded) "was the embodiment of delicacy, refinement and purity."

Shall I fill these pages with the virtues and relate none of the failings of those who were before me? No.

As a child, mother developed conscientiousness to a remarkable degree. Doubtless having read the "woe" pronounced on him who should put the bottle to his neighbor's lips, and often commanded in days when everybody took something, to carry her father's rumjug to the neighboring village for refilling, or take a whipping, — it must have required a martyr's courage to face, as often she did, the irate Captain her father, and refuse "because it seemed a sin" to her, to carry his jug to the store and bring it back filled with what brought misery to the home; but she took the alternative, the heavy chastisings her principles cost her, and showed me the marks of her loyalty years after.

My mother's grandfather was General David Cobb whom Massachusetts has tried to claim because he figured at one time so largely in the history of Taunton, but removing to Goldsborough, Maine, he became so identified with the interests of that state that I find in Maine's historic records in the Newberry Library, Chicago, opposite General Cobb's picture, — that of a strong face and noble head, — these words. "For more than a quarter of a century from 1796, General Cobb was the most conspicuous and influential citizen of Maine. He was judge, a senator, a general in the Continental Army, serving all through the Revolutionary War, being engaged in many of its most important battles with great credit. He was one of the founders of Cincinnati, a society established by and consisting of the officers of the Revolution, Washington being its president and General Cobb, for a long time its vice-president." The latter is spoken of as a man of broad sympathies, and great hospitality, "entertaining Washington, General Knox, Alexander Hamilton, and other noted men of his time, as well as scores of those of less renown under his roof." His wife, Eleanor Bradish, was the daughter of the proprietor of the Bradish Tavern so famous in the early history of Maine.

If there are belligerent traits in my character, remember the Townsley lads who fought the British at Lexington, and on the other side of the house, the record of General David Cobb, and acknowledge that I came of genuine fighting stock; and that there is

THE LONG AGO

much for loyal, freedom-loving souls to fight today, as these pages may declare.

One of my very few heir-looms, now the text of my lecture entitled "What an Ancient Sampler says to a Modern Woman," is a fine bit of old canvass adorned with embroidered roses, now somewhat faded, and alphabetical characters in every sort of lettering, said sampler containing in the lower right hand corner, the curiously wrought inscription,

" Eleanor Cobb marked this sampler in the year of our Lord 1804, aged ten years." In the center of this sampler is inscribed in black lettering (imagine a ten years old youngster of today embroidering such black historic facts so patiently!) the lines which I, one hundred and two years later so often quote:

"Plain as this canvass was, so plain we find Unlettered, unadorned the female mind. No fine ideas fill the vacant soul, No graceful coloring animates the whole; With close precision carefully inwrought, Fair education paints the pleasing thought, Inserts the curious lines on proper ground, Completes the work and scatters roses round." A row of dove-cots and one of trees worked around the edge of this heir-loom and its entire general appearance declare but too surely that little Eleanor Cobb lived in the days of the Dame School, the only opportunity previous to the 19th century, afforded American girls for schooling.

The Dame was a woman usually past middle life, who taught the alphabet, the church catechism, and "how to make your manners" but especially embroidenng on canvass, and sometimes plain sewing. Often the Dame knew little of literature besides the English alphabet; and "how to drop a courtesy" was often the extent of her teaching on manners. Chas. Francis Adams says that during the first one hundred and fifty years of our colonial history the subject of what was once called " female education" was one of utter indifference. Abigail Adams, in one of her now highly historical letters, says of her time, "It is almost the custom to ridicule female learning." In Northampton, Massachusetts, now the seat of Smith College for women, as late as 1788 the Village Fathers voted "not to be at the expense of schooling girls."

In 1792 the selectmen of Newburyport, Massachusetts, voted to let the girls attend school in the summer months, "when the boys had diminished in numbers" and ordered, (I copy from old records) "that the master shall receive these girls for instruction in reading and grammar one and one half hours after the boys are dismissed in the afternoons."

In 1803 progressive Newburyport voted to open four girls' schools, THE FIRST ON RECORD, to be kept open six months in the year. But mark the hours "Only from six to eight o'clock in the morning and on Thursday afternoons, so as not to interfere with the lessons and studies of the boys."

A suggestive incident occurred in Hatfield from whence came later, the woman founder of Smith College for women, when a father of six daughters but no sons, asked in town meeting that those daughters be permitted to attend the public schools, as he was a heavy school-tax-payer. A committee-man rose ve-

THE LONG AGO

hemently to quench the awful suggestion, saying with forceful though inelegant language "What! Schools for she's in Hatfield? NEVER!" and his word then prevailed.

In 1789 Boston voted to establish three reading and writing schools open all the year round for boys, from April to October for girls. The first free schools for the boys' sisters in the United States.

In 1828 Rhode Island opened wide the gateway of free education for girls and during the first quarter of the 19th century girls were permitted to attend the public schools the year round in New England. Other states fell into line later. Newburyport, the third time, comes up for honor in 1842, opening her High Schools to girls. In 1845 Salem turned her attention from persecuting witches and Quakers, to open her High Schools to her daughters; but cultivated, historic Boston, waited until 1852, two hundred years after she had opened her Latin school for boys, and two hundred years after Harvard was founded for young men, before she gave High School privileges to girls.

"Swing outward ye gates of the future! Swing inward ye doors of the past!

A giant is rousing from slumber, The people are waking at last!"

By the middle of the 19th century High Schools were open to girls all over New England, but collegiate education came harder. Oberlin, Ohio, in 1833 became the pioneer in this college movement, and Holyoke, Massachusetts, calling itself a female college, made immortal the precious name of its founder, Mary Lyon, in 1836. I am so glad it is known today as a

Woman's College. For the blessed term, woman, distinguishes our sex in the human family, from faithful tabby-cats, mild-eyed, cud-chewing cows, and the never-to-be-ignored, industrious, utilitarian hen, all females but not women.

It was when barely nine years old that my mother was taken from her father and a stern but excellent second mother, by her father's sisters to their pleasant, and for those days, well-to-do homes in Belfast, Bangor, Winthrop, Hallowell and Calais, Maine, for tenderer care, broader culture, and more peaceful surroundings than the stern captain's home offered her, but her filial thought ever followed him, and loving letters were often written him expressing the assurance of her prayers that he might know the light of the divine favor in surrendering his powerful, selfish and arbitrary will to the one only Potentate and Lord. She carried many sad memories of her few short years in her father's abode, and I, too have suffered in that the laws of heredity are as inexorable as any others linked fast to the Eternal Throne; and a fiery disposition, a strong selfish will, and a domineering spirit are my heritage from him whom we here leave with his wisest and kindest Judge.

Mother spent some time with her aunts in Maine making herself generally useful and growing into a graceful, bright-eyed, affectionate young woman.

CHAPTER II. How I Came to be I

"What if those many years ago,

Those close -shut lips had answered no

When forth the tremulous question came

That cost the maiden her Norman name ;

Should I be I? or, would it be

Nine -tenths another to one -tenth me?"

I find in mother's little leather note book, this item: "December 20th, 1828, I leave home again to pass the winter in Boston with my father's sister, Mrs. Jacob Sleeper/' who was the wife of Honorable Jacob Sleeper, the well known Methodist layman of Boston for whom, as its donor, Sleeper Hall of Boston University is named.

From there mother went to Winthrop, Maine, to another sister of her father, Mrs. Catherine Davis Lee, and there, "November 6th, 1831," says the tiny note book, "made a public profession of religion uniting with the Congregational church under the pastoral care of Rev. David Thurston." To us of a later time, some little circumstances attendant upon this, to her most sacred hour, may be of interest. At that early period of Congregational church history in Maine, no woman was expected to "give her own experience" before the church when asking for admission. But it might be presented by a male relative for her, if properly written out.

So mother, carefully studying the church's "Articles of Faith" began the writing of what I doubt not was an interesting document. But one day she went to her aunt Lee saying tearfully, "I am so wicked, I can't ask for admission to the church." The astonished aunt demanded at once the reason of such a confession, and the little maiden burst forth with sobs, "It isn't what I've done or havn't done Aunt Catherine, but its what I cannot believe! At any rate I can't find it proven in the Bible." "What is that, child?" cried aunt Lee. "O" sobbed the timid Charlotte, "O — I know it's because I'm so very wicked! All the rest of you find it, but though I find all the other articles proven quite easily I can't — O, I am so sorry — and Aunt Lee what will Deacon Lee think of me — for — being so wicked? — but I can't find the sprinkling of infant children taught in the Bible, and I've been studying it to find it, day and night for weeks."

"Is that why you've delayed so long?" queried her staunch auntie. "I'll turn you over to your uncle Lee this evening and he'll make it clear as daylight to you."

With growing dread of the evening hour, mother awaited uncle Lee's home coming. Then the heresy of the little lady having been duly set forth by his wife, Deacon Lee sought to explain to trembling Charlotte, the "Abrahamic Covenant."

"But" said Charlotte, "that circumcision you talk of was only for boys, and Vm — a — girl"

Today we all know the arguments uncle Lee set 18 forth, the story of the baptism of the Phillippian jailor's household, and all the rest, but so persistent was his wife's incorrigible neice and her earnest tearful demand that the Bible must not have read into it what God had not put there, that finally the good deacon said he would bring the matter before the pastor and deacons for decision, but "Charlotte must join the church and finish, on all other points, her statement as to Christian belief and experience. " This she did, and the Board was so well pleased with the paper, that they received her, coming in on protest against infant baptism, and voted that she (not her uncle) should read before the church her own experience and her protest. She was received, little dreaming that her daughter would so closely follow her steps forty years later. November 6th, 1831, her aunt handed her a booklet plainly bound, which my mother handed to me the day I joined a church for the first time, called PIOUS RESOLUTIONS.

Shades of Rev. David Thurston and Deacon Lee! I know no one under one hundred years of age who could be induced to carefully read its dry-as-dust words today, though mother kept it with her Bible for daily study, and I also read from it for many months after it was handed me. But can our young people of today realize a tenth that has been done for them in the preparation of helpful, readable, Christian literature? If they would only try to imbibe the precious truths so daintily and agreeably put within their reach on every hand! Magazines, weeklies, libraries, leaflets and booklets! How I should like to set my mother's youth in this glad day and give her a chance.

In the old home at Billerica she had studied by moonlight because she was not allowed a candle to light her to bed; her place at the head of the spelling class in the country school was retained for a long time through sheer grit, perseverance and Christian endeavor, and as I recall some of her stories of self-denial and conscientious struggles to know and to do the right thing, I fear the term "endeavor" and even the "Christian" appellations are too often today, a misnomer.

My father a young merchant from a Massachusetts village, on visiting one of Charlotte C. Davis' Maine relatives heard so much in favor of the young lady now in Calais, that he asked a few questions about her.

One of her Maine aunties intrusted to him one day, a package for her, to be delivered at Dea. Lee's door in Calais on his going to that place. As he lifted the old-fashioned brass door-knocker, my little motherto-be (she was tiny and not yet seventeen) was dusting the hall and opened the front door. As she looked up into the face of the man six feet and four inches in height and said, "Good morning" cheerily, he took her hand and said, "Charlotte Clark Davis, how do you do today?" And thus they met. Am I glad? Well, I can say that it came to mean pretty much everything to me that they did meet. And sitting here in what was then an unknown part of the world, with hair turning grey, I devoutly thank God that they met.

I really would rather they thus had met than any other couple I ever knew. No others could have given me cleaner morals, higher hopes, or a holier faith. There's so much in O. W. Holmes' lines "to Dorathy

Q's picture, — a family portrait."

"Soft is the breath of a maiden's yes,

Not the light gossamer stirs with less, But not a cable that holds so fast,

Thro' all battles of wave and blast, And never an echo of speech or song;

That lives in the babbling air so long!

Lady and Lover! How faint and far Your images hover! — and here we are

Solid and stirring in flesh and bone, My far away ancestors, all your own, —

A goodly record for time to show Of a syllable spoken so long ago!

Shall I bless you, Dorothy, or forgive

For the tender whisper that bade me live?"

1 recall the tender, modest grace with which my mother used to rehearse to me in my childhood, the story of her lonely life in other people's homes, before my father came to meet her; the restful peace that possessed her when she felt herself abiding in his manly love; the first year of marriage, and boarding; the desire for their own home-nest; the entering into that; the coming, after three years, of the first baby who stayed so short a time, and for whom I, years later, was named, Frances Eleanor; the pure and helpful consecration of my mother to the holy cause then known as "Moral Reform," the forerunner of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Its organ was "The Advocate and Family Guardian," when my little bride-mother, from a sense of duty, accepted the presidency of the Moral Reform Association of their village, Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, where father conducted what now would be called a department store, and was for a time Post Master and always a leader in municipal affairs.

He was a strong Abolitionist. Many a runaway from southern slavery was aided by his cool courage and efficient hands, to the New England branch of the Underground Railway, and many a meal my mother prepared at night for women and children "going on to Canady, Whar' collud men is free."

No Arabian Nights could have thrilled my romanceloving soul as did these tales of knight-errantry on the part of the young, rising business man whom all men honored, and if they differed with him as to his politics, men found it prudent to keep close friends with the man who never failed to prove a helper to widow, orphan, fugitive, or wanderer, and for this I bless him over and over again.

I have seen the articles mother's girlish fingers penned for The Advocate and Family Guardian, I have listened to the facinating accounts of her first baking, her culinary blunders, her triumphs which in later years made her name a synonym for cooking skill. The tale of the first tears she shed after marriage was a funny story to my eager ears. Having come from Boston to a country village, her garments were modern and stylish enough to cause her husband's plainer relatives to make some silly remarks which soon reached her ears. One afternoon when several young married people had been invited to a country home to tea, mother fearing that even the simple white lawn she had selected to wear would prove obnoxious to the plainer folk who had invited my father and herself among others, and regretting that whatever she put on made her seem "so stylish/' she flung herself on her bed in a paroxysm of perplexity and griet recalling a village gossip's recently expressed "fear that Charlotte would certainly ruin Gad." At this inopportune moment the young husband drove up to take her to the tea party, and at once demanded the cause of her distress. "I can't tell you" she sobbed, "I never meant you should see me cry." "I never did before," he answered. "But you must explain at once, and if I'm at fault, I'll atone and we'll make up." After urgings that became commands, she finally explained to the astonished bridegroom that she had nothing suitable to wear. Astounded at the declaration, he who had been only proud of her appearance in public and at home, heard the sobbed-out confession that "Aunt 'Cindy B was afraid she was going

to ruin her husband by her extravagant dress." I can almost see my father's flashing eyes and hear him say "Fools! I'll teach them to meddle with your affairs!" as, going to the wardrobe he brought forth an elaborate silk gown trimmed with dainty lace and cried, "Put that on! If it isn't nice enough, try your wedding dress! Pins and pincers couldn't exceed the torture this low talk has given you!" This was true; but he finally consented that Charlotte should wear her simpler white lawn, which caused their hostess to explain "Laws! Ain't she the sweetest thing that ever drew breath! Gad, you must be drefful proud of that tiny little creetur!"

During the first ten years of their married life my 23 father was frequently asked to give store jobs, office work, board and moral discipline thrown in, to wild lads needing careful oversight. Often, not always, was the applicant a relative whose mother would appeal in terms like these: "Gad, can't you take my Samuel into your store? I've talked to him and licked him till I've gin up in sheer despair of ever makin' anything out of him. But if you could train him and teach him figgers, and Charlotte would feed him, I'd have a little hope of him." And very often Gad trained and taught and Charlotte fed a fatherless lad or a street waif for months, who sometimes proved grateful and sometimes — didn't.

I was holding a meeting in Vermont one evening in the early seventies when a man of fine appearance, with white hair and a gold headed cane, and dignity to match, said to me "Can it be possible that you are Gad Townsley's daughter?" I assured him I was, when he seized my hand and said "Your father was a noble man, Miss Townsley! he took me when a boy into his office and made a man of me!"

During these eight years and eight months residence at Shelburne Falls, I find in mother's note book proof that five different young people found a home with my parents during these first years of their life together, one, her stepsister, Clara, a beautiful girl who died at their home of typhus fever in 1840.

It was at Shelburne Falls that my father, a man of few words, extreme reserve as to his personal relations to his God, reticent almost to a fault, submitted to the ordinance of baptism in the Deerfield River, never talking with even his wife about it, previously, and united with the Baptist Church of the village.

A few years ago in answer to my request, Rev. Geo Benton, of the Big Horn Basin, Wyoming, in old age, wrote me these words, in memory of my mother, at this period of her life: "Your mother came to my father's house one lovely morning and inquired for the blackberry boy and I was called. She made known her errand and desired to be shown the berry patch. I told her it was more than a mile up the hills, and she would tire. On her assurance to the contrary we started. Some forty rods brought us to a brook. When we had crossed the brook and climbed the hill and were on the up-grade beyond, she had gained on me ten or fifteen rods. Suddenly she wheeled and with an indescribably winsome laugh, and a flash from her beautiful eyes, boasted of her superior speed. "Don't you see, I've beat you, walking?" she cried. I can't describe her features to you. What impressed me most was her great, noble, joyous hopefulness. She awoke in my boyish heart a feeling that has never ceased to be, and I look for her soulfulness in vain in others. Her fresh and sunlit face I can never forget. I was too young to know of love, but if ever a goddess captivated a barefooted boy she did me; and she became to me the most glorious of mortal beings. I never in all my life have known one who seemed to have so little to do with mortality. No heart of mere mortal could possibly stand the intense throbs of such mighty, benevolent joy, and love, and in later years, such intense anguish, and not break. To me she was ever a noble, grand, angelic creature." Are these words indicative of an old man's second childhood? Maybe so, but he was a child of God, and tenderly I cherish this once bare-foot lad's memories of my mother's happy years.

CHAPTER III. Precious Memories

' 'Lif e is not an idle ore But iron dug from central gloom ;

And heated hot in burning years And dipped in hissing baths of tears

And battered with the shocks of doom."

Thrown for the first time among Baptist people, it was but natural that one of my mother's thoughtful and conscientious spirit, should examine for herself the reasons for the existence of Baptists, then those "heretics of the baser sort." As I recall how, about her heavy household duties long after, she taught me the fundamentals of the Baptist faith, and the broadest Catholic spirit of love for those differing, and impressed upon me the scripturalness of Baptist views, and the truly democratic policy of their position, I rise up today to bless her for her forethought and faithfulness.