depart the limits thereof, with their children and others under their care, if such they have, within fifteen days." The constable makes returns that the warning was given by him in due form to the twenty-eight persons named, and such further legal proceedings were threatened as will save the town from becoming a paupers’ nest. The crime of being poor and shiftless was more severely punished in those days than now. No man was allowed to vote, unless he owned a freehold estate of the annual income of £3, or some estate to the value of £60.
The river and brooks were nobly stocked with trout at the first settlement here, and before the mills and factories had bewitched the water. The woods afforded considerable game — deer, squirrels, wild fowl, etc. Deer have been shot within the village limits. Bears ranged the mountains, foxes were more numerous than poultry yards and wolves were so troublesome that the town offered a bounty for their heads. Among the early residents there was so much destitution, and yet such a neighborly spirit, that Giles Barnes, who seems to have been a decided wag, said a family would make soup of beef bones one day, pass them to another family next day to be made a second soup of, and so they would go around until the whole settlement had participated.
Edited and adapted from the original by Laurel O’Donnell
© Laurel O’Donnell 1999-2006, all rights reserved,
Do not reproduce nor distribute without written permission.
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