THE WEIRS TIMES, Thursday, July 22, 2010
19
A NEW HAMPSHIRE GOVERNOR’S DINNER Reprinted from
The Granite Monthly December - 1913
Mrs. Stowe begins her
story of “The Minister’s Wooing” with the an- nouncement that “Mrs. Kate Scudder had invit- ed Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Jones and Deacon Twitch- el’s wife to take tea with her on the afternoon of June 2, A. D. 17-.” I might begin this short sketch of an entertainment of one hundred and eighty years ago by saying that Madame Cutts, some- time in the third decade of the nineteenth century, when the first John Went- worth was ruling over New Hampshire and His Excel- lency Samuel Shute was the royal governor, made a great dinner to which were invited all the colonial magnates of Kittery and Portsmouth. In fact this is just what I should have done only that another has given a better account of the old-time entertain- ment than I could possibly do. My great-grandmother, who was a young lady at that time just entering upon her belledom, was present at that dinner, and in her old age she wrote from memory a description of it, which, as a picture of the olden time, has no little value. It is written on dark-
colored crown paper in a small cramped hand, and is considerably over a hundred years old, for Great-grandmother Ger- rish died soon after the close of the Revolution. The memorandum with numberless other relics - old silver with the Cutts arms upon it, samplers, books and wearing apparel among which are the high- heeled shoes of Madame
Cutts, a satin waistcoat embroidered with silver of old Governor Cutts, the first of the royal governors of New Hampshire-are kept in an antique trunk in the library which is opened only occasionally for the purpose of seeing that all is well with the contents. The last time we looked the relics over I made a copy of the memorandum, and if one wishes to know exactly how they did at a big dinner in the colo- nies in the days of George the First, and when Pope was writing the “Essay on Man,” here it is as re- corded by an eye-witness. My great-grandmother’s journal says: “At the Island, July 16,1753. “Today while the house
and all the land was still, and the men with the lads and lasses were away at the harvesting, and I sat alone (Prudence and Doro-
thy being in the kitch- en) I chanced to look up from my spinning wheel through the open door, across the creek towards Portsmouth. And some- thing, I scarce knew what, carried me back through the years to the old time and the old scenes and the old faces when I was a girl. Was it the soporific of the hot, sluggish air, or the shining of the smooth water, or the gleam of the roofs and spires of the city, or was it the smell of the hay, wafted in from the new-mown fields? Most likely the last, for I re- member it was the same season of the year-haying time-that the event hap- pened which stands out the clearest in my mind, the day of the big dinner, the Governor’s dinner as we have always called it since. “Sitting here now I can See HISTORYon 44
Governor John Wentworth
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539-6120
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Rt. 16 & 25 • West Ossipee
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