A TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY SCHOOLGIRL

Sometimes on our way home from school, John and I stopped at the Parsons Blacksmith Shop. We liked to take turns cranking the handle of the bellows and forcing air through the coals. . . .

ABIGAIL EDWARDS FIELD

My birth took place at Franklin Farm, a mile and a half on the outskirts of Springs village, April 15, 1898. In those days a new mother was kept in bed for two weeks. A week or so later, unbeknown to my mother, my father wrapped me in a little blanket and took me, horseback a mile to Duck Creek homestead, to show me to his Uncle Sam.

Father went at noon, to make sure Uncle Sam was home instead of up lot. Father did not go in, just waited until Uncle Sam came out, saw me, and said, "You better take that thing home before you drop it."

Before I was old enough to go to school, my mother taught me in the sitting room at Franklin Farm, a large double house which was later torn down. (A piece of the house was moved to Franklin Triangle. The property is today occupied by the Blue Bay Girl Scout Camp.) With my mother, I learned arithmetic, reading, writing, spelling, and nature study.

In the 1890s, when children usually walked to school, those living two or three miles away were not required to attend classes until they were 8 years old. I was 8 in 1906, when I first attended the red brick, two-room schoolhouse now called Ashawagh Hall. This was where my father, Daniel Edwards, also attended school and my grandfather, John Dudley Edwards (born Oct. 5, 1831), before that, although there was but one room in his time. Before my grandfather's school days, there was a little one-room structure in the corner of the home lot next to the dooryard of George Asa Miller.

When I started school, there were two-seater desks for us and we sat on benches for recitation, which lasted about 15 minutes each. The school room was plain; there were no pictures on the walls or other decorations. The school was heated by a furnace, but in my father's day there was a stove in each room, a pot-bellied heater the same as used in the front rooms of homes.

When I went to school, all books, pencils, pens, and writing pads were bought by the parents. No textbooks were provided.

I remember only a few children who were in school with me but I recall in the third and fourth grades there were Hila Foster, Roscoe Miller, Dan Miller from Three Mile Harbor, Dan Miller from the Springs and his sister Caroline, Helen and Belle Parsons, Isabel Hulse, Harry Steele, Irene Sherman, Fanny Bennett, Nat and Lena Petty, Kenneth Miller, Abby Miller, Bobby Payne, and Ollie Miller.

There were two old cart paths from in front of our house which ran through the woods. One came out by the barn and house of Mr. Cook Talmage and the other ran parallel though Mr. Julius Parsons's wood lot and came out where Fort Pond Boulevard is today. My brother John and I walked a mile and a half through the woods on these paths to school, often crossing two old fields of Mr. Parsons and going out through the dooryard of the Parsons home where [Mary Elizabeth] Dodge lives today.

We went to school unless we were sick in bed, come rain, snow, or sunshine. No path was dug through the snow. If the snow was halfway to our knees, my father walked ahead of us to break a path until we were out on Fireplace Road. Once on the Fireplace Road, there was usually a path through the snow, for one of the neighbors with his team of horses was hired to make a path with an A-shaped plow made of wide boards. When it rained, we wore our oilskin slickers.

I can recall the smell of wood smoke from the fireplaces, and in spring and summer there was the sweet scent of cecily, redbud maple, young sassafras leaves, the fruit trees in bloom, honeysuckle and the wild asters.

My teacher, Miss Rogers, had a way of dealing with infractions in the classroom, and when a student was troublesome, she would call him up to sit on the floor cross-legged near her desk. One day my brother John was called up but he could not sit cross-legged. Miss Rogers exclaimed, "You are as clumsy as an old cow," which sounded very funny to me.

During recesses at the old school, the little boys played toss ball. The big boys used to play Tally-Ho. They used a tennis ball, threw it over the roof of the schoolhouse. Someone would catch it and then run around to the other side after the boy who threw it, trying to tag him with the ball. Some of the older boys played baseball but there were no bats or gloves.

No one played around Pussy's Pond even though it was nearby. In winter, the big boys skated on the head of Accabonac Harbor but not on the pond as the ice was never very thick there because of the freshwater springs. When I was younger, it was called Miss Kitty's Pond.

Sometimes on our way home from school, John and I stopped at the Parsons Blacksmith Shop. This was a two-story building with a long ramp in the back on which a wagon could be pulled up into the large room by block and fall. Downstairs near the back was a small gasoline engine with a pulley wheel which connected endless leather straps to small round saws and drills used in woodworking. Mr. Parsons made anchors for local fishermen and parts for any farm machinery for the farmers. If he did not have a tool right for the job, he made it himself.

When we visited, Mr. Parsons used to stand near us when shaping horseshoes or any other ironwork he was doing while the iron was red hot. He had a forge, and real close, by its side, was a bellows. A tub of water stood near the forge. We liked to take turns cranking the handle of the bellows and forcing air through the coals, in which Mr. Parsons held a horseshoe with tongs. The iron tongs had handles about as long as his arm. When the horseshoe was red-hot, he dipped it in the water to cool it enough to nail on a horse's foot, or more rightly, a horse's toenail.

Any horse with summer shoes on in the winter might slip and fall, so as soon as freezing or icy weather came, people had their horses' shoes changed to those with cogs in them. Two close together were placed on the toe and one each on the end of the heels. Some simply pulled off the summer shoes and let the horse go barefoot. It was not good, except in an emergency and when the horse was slow but steady.

Most boys and girls had no way to go to high school in East Hampton. There was, of course, no bus. When I finished grade school, my brother and I were fortunate enough to attend high school in East Hampton along with Charlie Parsons, Stanley Talmage and his sister Mildred, Nat Smith, and George Finch. We went to East Hampton with horses and wagons in the winter and after the farm crops were in and spring and fall, we rode our bicycles. For John and me, it was a trip of six miles, as we always traveled on Fireplace Road.

Abigail Edwards Field, now a resident of Shelter Island, was 100 years old yesterday. Happy Birthday!