Powder House Rock
My name is Lydia Fuller, or to be more accurate, Lydia Fuller Leverett Griggs. I married a guy named William, and had six children, and then he died, and I married Mr. Joshua Griggs and had two more. But all of that later. First I want to tell about growing up.
I grew up in Needham, west of Boston, and Needham is right near Dedham; in fact the boundaries shifted over the years, so I’m really talking about the same place. You could say I grew up in both. My father was Lieutenant William Fuller, and his father was Captain Robert Fuller. Everyone knew them. My father was on the Lexington Alarm Rolls, and helped to fortify Dorchester Heights against the British. By the time I was born, 1777, the Revolution was in full swing but my dad and grandpa had already done plenty of fighting already. Lexington, Concord, and all those places are not that far from Needham and Dedham.
I had this young friend, Eben Turner. He was five years older than me, but he got to Dedham about the time I was born, when he was five. We were young together, or rather, we were part of a group of kids that went everywhere together. We would go up to Powder House Rock, for example, in Dedham. The Powder House on that rock was built by my grandpa in 1766. Well, really, the whole town decided it needed to put its munitions up on that rock, right around that time, and my grandpa, being good at building and all, organized the building of that little house. It’s not so big, or fancy, but it has a great view, of the Charles, of Dedham, of the valley, of everything for miles around.
Back then people were sure that the British were coming and that they were going to destroy everything. They occupied Boston for all those years, and they took what they wanted, and caused a lot of trouble. By the time of Lexington and Concord, they’d already been around for years.
Lots of people went off to fight in the revolution. My dad, like I said, was on the Lexington Alarm Rolls, and served at the time of Burgoyne. Eben’s dad wasn’t so lucky. He was at Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, but died of smallpox in 1777, in Half Moon Bay, near Albany. That’s why Eben was sent to live with his Uncle Joseph in Dedham. His mom had been left with seven kids and no one to help her.
So we kids would go up to Powder House Rock and look around. We’d look at the Charles, way below, where there was a footbridge that my relatives had helped to make, and we’d climb up and down those rocks. We’d tell stories of things we’d heard from people around the area. We had a lot of stories. Our summers were really nice, and a lot of them, we’d be climbing all over those rocks.
Eben like I said was five years older than I was, so he graduated and felt like he had to move on right while I was still in school. It was not like we were romantically attached or anything, he was just a friend, but older than me. And when he was about twenty-five he married and moved off to Maine. His wife was Polly Sumner, but I didn’t really know her so well. The reason he could go to Maine was that he had another uncle, Uncle Reuben, who was already up there. Maine was still part of Massachusetts then, but it was frontier – all woods, and very cold in winter. He told me about it once. He was excited about going and he wanted to start all over.
So I didn’t hear from him for a long time, in fact we lost contact altogether. I married this guy, William Leverett, who grew up in Needham. We moved to Brookline, which is really closer to the center of Boston. He was trying to be a farmer on old land that belonged to the family. Times were tough. I had six children, as I said, and then he died of alcoholism, basically.
I remarried Joshua Griggs, but he already had children and we soon had two other boys. I could see that my six were in tough straits. We were farmers but they were always hungry and would soon get into trouble.
Now William, who I had married, had had a couple of sisters who had also ended up in Maine. I didn’t really know that this place they had gone was anywhere near where Eben was. One was his older sister Catherine, who married a farmer and was childless. Another was Rebeckah, who went up there and married, but then moved to some other part of Maine.
So Catherine, who was childless, kept after me about my young boys. The oldest
one was very attached to his great aunt, my sister’s mother-in-law; she was
Baptist and wanted him to be a Reverend, which he was. But his younger brother
Joseph was the one who I knew would really love Maine. So I sent him up there
to live with his Aunt Catherine. She and her husband brought him up up there,
in the woods, cutting trees and all, until he grew up, joined the service, and
got married.
I didn’t think much of it that he’d married a Turner, as there were Turners all over the place. And he told me that they were coming down through Brookline to see us on their way through to Illinois in a wagon. Sure enough, in they came one day, in a party of four or five wagons and lots of horses and everything they owned. Most of the wagons found some other place to park, but Joseph and his family stopped for a good long visit. They were moving to Illinois.
He introduced me to his wife, Mary Turner, and she was nice enough, but there was something familiar about her. They were both about the same age, born around 1803, and they’d already been married a few years, and had three young boys with them. There was William, named after my first husband, and then James Walker, named after the stepfather or rather uncle who had brought him up. But the youngest one was Eben. Oh, he’s named after Mary’s father, Joseph said. Her father’s on this trip, but he’s on one of the other wagons.
Turns out it was my old friend Eben Turner from Dedham. He was giving up on Maine and moving out to Illinois to start all over. Along with his daughter Mary and her husband, my son, he also had a few sons along on the trip. He was about sixty now, as I was about fifty-five, and I felt a little embarrassed. He looked at our crowded house in Brookline. I’d raised seven other children, and a couple of Joshua’s from his first wife. But I’d sent Joseph up there, and it turns out it was up to Maine to be in the hands of Eben, though I didn’t know it at the time. That’s because he’d grown up with the Walkers, but as soon as he was old enough to marry, he’d married right into Eben’s family. And now here they were, all on the same wagon train.
It was good to see Eben again, and remember all those times in our childhood, up at Powder House Rock and all, looking out over the valley. We were family now; his daughter had married my son. Way back at that time when I’d sent Joseph off into the woods, I’d been so worried about him. But it was the same woods that Eben himself had gone off into, and Joseph in some way was kind of like me; he’d just found that family as his most natural companions.
Little Eben was the cutest little boy. I’d kind of deprived myself of being their grandmother, since Joseph had been gone all those years, but I could see all of us in those little children, and I gave them all big hugs as they took their wagons out and started off on the 1600-mile trip out west. You can bet Eben and I told those little children the stories of Powder House Rock, first, though.
