Editor’s Note: Ruby Hemenway, who was born in Franklin County in 1884, wrote for the Greenfield Recorder for many years at the end of the 20th century. She launched her writing career in her 90s and lived to be more than 100 years old. This memoir originally ran in the Greenfield Recorder in a special publication honoring Hemenway on Jan 28, 1984.
When I was a child, July 4 was always observed in some special way, depending on the size of the village. If it was large enough to have a common and a bandstand and a local band, there usually was a speaker. Sometimes it was a minister or an old soldier, if there was a local one who was gifted enough and, of course, the band played. If there was a good organizer, they might get the school children, old soldiers and local town officers to make up a parade and then have a band concert in the early evening.
Everybody looked forward to July 4 as being one of the best holidays of the year.
In the small villages, all who had them, displayed flags. If the first mess of peas was ready, they were a treat for dinner. More than likely, they would be part of a salt pork and milk gravy dinner, rather than one of salmon, unless it was canned. I don’t know when or where that legend of eating peas and salmon on July 4 originated.
My Aunt Flavilla used to say she “must have a blueberry pie on the Fourth of July,” even though in Shutesbury it was hard to find enough ripe berries on that date.
The boys didn’t need to have any organized celebration to have a good time. The local storekeepers got in a stock of firecrackers, ranging in size from little ones that had to be set off several at a time to make a satisfactory noise, to the really big ones that were supposed to make a “roar” like a cannon. They were very dangerous and took their toll of blown-off fingers, and even of eyesight.
It was a traditional stunt for the boys to remove the gates from the old-time picket fences in the front dooryards and to take all the old farm wagons they could find and somehow hoist them up onto the roofs of the horse sheds near the church. If they succeeded in getting a privy up there also, that made the night before the Fourth really fun. It wasn’t vandalism as we think of it today, because they did no real harm. The night after the Fourth, they had about as much fun returning the things as they did taking them. If they pestered a person enough to get him aroused so he would swear and yell at them and threaten to “get the law on them,” that added to the excitement.
There was one woman they always annoyed by setting off firecrackers on her lawn, and doing lots of yelling and noise-making, so she would come out and shout, “I know who you are! You get off my property! I’ll have the police after you,” and so on. Just what they wanted.
One year they found an old blacksmith’s anvil of solid iron and hatched up a plan of drilling enough of a hole so they could put in some powder and a fuse, set it on the old lady’s front walk, and just when it was ready to go off with a loud bang, yell and get her out to her front door. It all worked as planned, except that she was a little late coming out. The anvil blew up, with the most awful noise, and big chunks of solid iron were strewn over the lawn and on the veranda.
The boys were scared stiff, for they had no idea one anvil could be blown so hard in such large chunks. They huddled together and whispered, “Is the old lady hurt?” Then, when they found she wasn’t, they made tracks for home as fast as they could go. That was all the celebrating they did that year. Long after, one of those boys told me that even then he shivered to think that they could easily have killed that old lady.
The first year my mother lived in Montague Center, across from the E.L. Bartlett place, the boys took away the wooden front steps going down from in front of the veranda the night before the Fourth. When we discovered it, we were wondering where they were, and if we would ever get them back. Two little girls who lived down the street told us, “We know where they are, and we can get them and bring them up to you. They are in the mill pond of the Dyke Mill across from where we live. We can pull them out of the water and load them onto our little wagon and bring them here.”
They were so young, we wondered if they could manage, but they did, and we paid them.
We had some friends staying with us. One had brought some large firecrackers and a few set pieces for firecrackers to set off that evening. We invited the little girls to come and had something for refreshments, so they had a good time.
The steps were securely fastened to the piazza the next day.