2-11-07

Did A Walpole Visit Influence Abraham Lincoln’s Ending Slavery?

By Chuck and Sue Bingaman, Contributing Writers

On Abraham Lincoln’s 198th birthday, it’s appropriate to ask if Mr. Loncoln himself had a meal on a Walpole farm in 1848 and discussed ending slavery with a teenaged girl in the family, as local lore would have it? Or is it a fanciful flight of imagination?

          Long the stuff of family tradition in Walpole and Keene, the story was reported in the Bellows Falls Times’and later repeated in Yankee Magazine.  As related in the Times on November 11, 1954, Helen Wyman of Keene, who died in 1917, told the story.  It seems that Wyman’s mother, Harriet Emerson, grew up on Mapledell Farm in Walpole whose farmhouse still sits beside what is now Watkins Hill Road and was, in the 1840s, the most direct route from Boston to Montreal.  The farm’s been in the Jennison family of Walpole since around 1914.

          As described—and maybe embellished—by France Stockwell Lovell in the Times column, on a fall day in 1848, 16-year-old Harriet and a friend noticed two men pull into their farmyard on a horse-drawn rig.  “Weary and grey with the dust of country roads, the men doffed their tall hats and the tall one, stoop shouldered as though all the world rested on him, smiled shyly.  He must, Harriet thought, be all of six feet tall and about the homeliest man she had ever seen, with big hands and feet and nose, a knobby Adam’s apple and a wart on his cheek, but with eyes and mouth so beautiful you fair held your breath!  Was this the way to Vermont, he asked, and could they have a drink of water from the well?”

          While the men were drawing cold water for a drink, Harriet ran to the orchard where her father was working and had him come and meet the men.   Friendly greetings were exchanged and the men were invited to stay for dinner, the day's main meal at the time.

          A congenial meal followed, no doubt filled with news of the world that the men could share.  And when Lincoln and his friend left to go, Harriet is said to have gathered her courage and, according to the story, asked, “Are you going to free the slaves, Mr. Lincoln?” 

“That depends,” he replied, “if these people will give me a chance.”  The rest is history.

Did it really happen like that?  Could it have?

“Probably not,” said Dr. Cullom Davis of Springfield, Illinois, a renowned Lincoln scholar, and recently director The Lincoln Legals, a project to collect every paper associated with Lincoln’s 25-year law practice spanning Illinois and other states.  See http://adh.sc.edu/ll/ll-table.html.   “I remember only one trip Lincoln made to New England, and that was in 1860 to make a speech in Concord when he was running for President.  But you could check Lincoln Day by Day, the Internet based calendar that seeks to trace every day in Lincoln’s adult life.”

Well, guess what? Lincoln DID make another, little known, trip to New England.  And it was in the autumn of 1848!  See http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/lincoln/month.php?yyyy=1848&mm=9.   That year Lincoln was finishing his one term in Congress representing the Central District of Illinois, and he had been elected on a platform opposed to the Mexican War and to slavery.  He was invited to make a tour of New England to promote the Presidential campaign of Zachary Taylor.  It was a ten-day trip lasting from September 12 beginning in Worcester to September 22 in Boston.

According to the day-by-day calendar, Lincoln arrived in Worcester, Massachusetts on September 12 and made a speech at city hall.  After another talk in Worcester the next day, he traveled on to New Bedford on the 14th,  Boston on Friday the 15th, and Lowell on Saturday, the 16th, giving political speeches in each town.  But then the record is a blank until Monday evening, September 18, when he gave a speech in Dorchester, according to the Boston Atlas.  Hence Lincoln’s whereabouts are so far undocumented—we do not know where he was—from Saturday evening until Monday evening!

But could Lincoln, then an athletic man of 39, have made it all the way from Lowell to Walpole and back in that 48 hours?  A 200-mile round trip by horse over often-primitive roads.  Probably not!

Well, guess what?  Ed Jennison, of the Mapledell Farm, recently found that train service between Boston and Keene had begun in summer of 1848.  Taking a train from Boston to Keene and back would have been possible, as would have been the hiring of a rig and driver for a trip to Walpole or other nearby points of interest.

          Did he do it? Did Lincoln have dinner at the Mapledell Farm in Walpole?  Did Harriet Emerson prod him on ending slavery?

          Perhaps further research will eventually tell us!  Below is a shot of Ed Jennison's Mapledell Farm on Watkins Hill Road as it appears today! Photo by Sue Bingaman

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