Home Sweet Home

This morning while I was reading last Thursdays Home section in the New York Times and drinking my second cup of tea Danae poked her head around the corner and said, "there's a tour group standing in front of the house go look." Sure enough the Saturday morning Florence History Trail tour given by one of our local historians Steve Strimer has paused his group on our sidewalk and they're learning about the houses' history. We live, I've recently found out, in the Joshia White Cottage built in 1811 and moved to it's current location in 1879 (yes, they did that sort of thing all the time). The site where it had been before then became the very large brick mill building that sits on the edge of the Mill River just down the hill and around the corner from us. They saved our house and moved it probably a little more than half a mile (depending on the route they took). Thanks.

I've known it was an old house, but I was thinking Civil War era, not that much earlier. Joshia White ran a grist mill on the Mill River and built a large dam there to harness the water power for the mill. So it turns out our house was one of the earlier buildings in Florence. That's fun.

Florence has a proud and old tradition of abolitionists and workers industrial communes in the early nineteenth century. The communes were based on the concept of "free labor" or in other words, non-slave labor. They tried raising silk worms to compete with cotton cloth – a slave crop, but the New England weather didn't work out. Sojourner Truth lived around the corner from my house, just across the graveyard that's our quiet neighbor.

So it's fun to actually live in a part of local history and feel that connection of ideas and time, even while I mow the lawn. I've started to read Lydia Maria Child books to get a sense of what they though and how they lived. She was a active abolitionists who lived in our house for a few years around 1820 after Joshia White moved out and then rented it. Lydia was the Martha Stewart of her time, but switched to more impassioned anti-slaver topics. It's quite impressive. I'll have to learn more just to feel that I fit in to the responsibilities of the house.

gunther