1873 — Off to Castine

After bidding farewell to my parents, siblings and a few score of relatives, Aunt Sophia and I sailed to Belfast. From there we boarded a packet boat[1] and sailed across Penobscot Bay with the mail. It was a bright, chilly morning, and I fought to keep the salt wind from undoing the work I’d done on my hair. Sophia sat beside me with her shawl wrapped tight against the spray. She smiled when I teased her about seasickness, though at times her eyes strayed far out to sea, as if watching something only she could see.

Seventy miles northeast of South Thomaston, Castine perched at the tip of a peninsula pinching the bay. The Normal School had been founded in 1867 and I was proud to join its students—especially now that the school had a building of its own.

Spring of 1873 brought excitement. We began our term inside the new facility. Students, instructors and townspeople gathered outside to mark the occasion with a photograph.

The school year ran in three terms of fourteen weeks. In summer, students were urged to take teaching posts—paid practice for those of us pledged to give back to Maine’s schools. Tuition cost nothing, aside from $1.50 each term in “incidental expenses.” We boarded with local families for about $3.50 a week, though a shared room might be had for $1.00. Meals, laundry and firewood added a few dollars more. It was a modest life—but full of promise.

Sophia, Arthur Butler and I landed together in Class F—beginners, not failures. We studied Arithmetic, Grammar, Geography, Drawing and Reading, taking turns teaching model lessons while the instructor critiqued us. It was hard work and often humbling.

Eloise Butler, always a step ahead, had studied high school in Lynn, Massachusetts and entered Class A. Her lessons included Mental Philosophy, Didactics, Astronomy and a general review. No matter our class letters, we all drilled in Spelling, Writing, Composition and Music.

The profession was changing. Free High Schools and a state institution devoted to training teachers were still new ideas. Teachers earned better wages and the public spoke of education with more respect. Demand was growing.

We rose early, kept the Sabbath and took our daily exercise in the salt air. On weekends we walked the lanes and the shore. Eloise scoured the ground for wildflowers, muttering Latin names for them. Arthur skipped stones. Sophia walked beside me. She had a light step, her shawl streaming in the wind and could turn a shell or driftwood into a jest that set us laughing. She had a merry streak, unlike most women I knew, who kept their humor close. Then, just as suddenly, her face might grow quiet. I had learned not to ask questions when a fit of melancholy came over her.

One windy afternoon we walked the bluff when John Brown’s name surfaced. His raid on Harpers Ferry was still something of headlines, even if Brown had long been hung. I thought I knew enough to understand it had split the country. Sophia slowed, leaned close and told me in that low, confiding way of hers, a fuller story about “the odd fellow.”

“Did you know him?” I asked.

She laughed, shook her head and said that she hadn’t—then whispered, “But I knew someone who had.” Then she grew thoughtful and asked me if John Brown had won, or had he lost?

I said nothing. The tide rushed below us and her question seemed to settle into its roar. We walked on and though she found her merry mood again, the riddle never left me.

When the term ended, our paths scattered. The Butlers moved west to Indiana so Aunt Margaretta could be near her sister Louisa. Adventurous Arthur went first. Eloise graduated in May and followed her parents west. Sophia chose to live with relatives in Massachusetts. As for me, I did not return to Castine, though I carried the lessons forward. Teaching was the one profession open to a studious girl and I embraced it.

Winter came early that year, sharp with sleet and wind off the bay. A girl in town claimed her cousin had invented fur-lined hoops for the ears—“earmuffs,” she called them. We laughed, though I would have traded my looks for a pair when the nor’easter struck in November, covering our region with ice and snow before tearing down the coast leaving floods as far south as the Carolinas.

Any hope of lighthearted holiday ended when sorrow came. On December ninth, my grandmother—and namesake—Rosanna Crie died. We all grieved but my grandfather Ebenezer took it hardest. He left his home in Victory and returned alone to Matinicus Island.

I wasn’t eager to marry, though I had plenty of suitors. There were barn dances enough to keep a girl dreaming. At home Mama was still busy bringing new life into the world—Jennie Fogarty born two days after Christmas in 1874, and Rodney Graves thirteen months later. By then my middle-aged mother managed a household of ten children, from a newborn to two teenagers.

I had stepped onto my own path—one foot in books, the other in heady dreams—hoping the ground would hold.

Notes

[1] A packet boat was a medium-sized sailing vessel used to carry mail, freight, and passengers on a regular schedule. Operating along coasts, bays, and rivers, packet lines formed an essential part of 19th-century transportation before railroads became dominant. Their name came from the “packet” of letters and dispatches they were contracted to deliver.