Connary interacts with books are the subject of detailed examination in this study. What can it mean to be inside one’s books, to participate in them, and to be shaped by them? The following chapters focus on the writings of an eccentric reader and book collector in order to investigate the passion and fervent piety that he pours into his books. Connary’s library allows us to explore the opportunities provided by the material book for structuring the practical, spiritual, and moral life of readers. His annotations offer ample evidence of how a book’s physical properties can participate in the imaginative and spiritual life of a reader: more than anything else, they show how books can become the material conduits for a deeply felt relationship to one’s neighbor as well as to the divinity. As this farmer-bibliophile works in his private room, he puts his books to many and varied uses, but the cumulative effect of his labors is to convert his library into a comprehensive proclamation of faith. In it, we find elaborate records of religious reading as an ingrained habit of everyday life, one existing alongside the routines of agricultural labor and the domestic duties of a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic living in New Hampshire.
Occasionally, when reading Julian of Norwich and many other books, Connary writes in the margins a brief yet pregnant comment: “I am here.” This, I will argue, is particularly ripe with significance. More than merely marking a specific juncture in his reading, it is the assertion of someone determined to inscribe himself into the experiences recounted in the book, to testify to their veracity, and, finally, to convert the printed book into a signed testimony of a particular intensity of religious devotion. For Connary, noting that “I am here” means to assert affinity and proximity with past authors and their writings in a way that is concrete and aesthetic as much as it is existential and ethical.
Connary provides us with some details of his early life in a note he inserts into his book The Council of the Vatican and the Events of the Time, printed in Boston in 1872:
March 25, in the year 1833, I left Castlemarket, my native home in Old Ireland, in the Province of Leinster, Kilkenny County, near Ballinakill in the Queen’s County, expecting to return to my native home in three months of time: when on the way I met a few people who were on the way to America, I accompanied them, and worked for Mr Josiah Bellows 2nd, and his family, in Lancaster, Coos County, New Hampshire in June that year, my home from that time to this day has been in the United States of America.2
Born in 1814, Connary was only nineteen years of age when he left Ireland. He was part of the early wave of Irish immigrants who came to the United States before the trauma of the Great Irish Famine and who brought with them overwhelmingly positive memories of Old Ireland. Intriguingly, the above record provides no further explanation of motives, no details about the trials of crossing, no impression of the thoughts running through the mind of a nineteen-year-old finding himself in an unfamiliar land.
An obituary for Thomas Connary in the Coös County Democrat from the year 1899 provides some further details about this early phase in his American experience:
When about nineteen years old he left his home for America, and came to the town of Lancaster, N.H., in the early part of June. He had but fifteen cents in his possession at this time. He hired himself to Mr. Josiah Bellows for the small sum of seven dollars a month, and after having served his time with this gentleman he went about ditching for the farmers. During the winters he threshed wherever he could get employment. At that time, as is well known, threshing was done by hand. He seldom or ever got his pay in money but accepted the tenth bushel as compensation for his hard labor. He kept up this mode of livelihood for several years, then he purchased a small farm in Northumberland, on which he had a log cabin for a dwelling. While here his beloved mother, one sister and two brothers, John and Simon, came from Ireland to sweeten his life and labors. He now seemed happier, having his mother for housekeeper. At the age of thirty he married a worthy lady whose name was Lucinda Stone. The following year he demolished the log cabin and erected in its stead a homesome frame building, the first of this nature ever erected in the town. He lived in this town for five years, working chiefly for the neighboring farmers. He was always very intimate with his old employee, Mr. Bellows, speaking of him ever after in the highest terms and praise. There were born to them in Northumberland one daughter and a son. He sold his farm here and purchased the old Partridge homestead in No. Stratford, on which he spent the remainder of his life.
In 1846, Connary settled in the town of Stratford, Coös County, then a town of some 550 people located on the Connecticut River on New Hampshire’s northwestern border with Vermont.3 Comprising the two settlements of North Stratford and Stratford Hollow, the town was granted its charter in 1762 under the name of Woodbury; this charter was regranted in 1773 with the name of Stratford in memory of Stratford-on-Avon, probably via Stratford, Connecticut, from where some of its earliest settlers had come. In Jeannette R. Thompson’s impressive History of the Town of Stratford, New Hampshire, 1773–1925, published in 1925, we read the following about Thomas Connary, who was deeply involved in communal affairs: “Thomas Connary, one of Stratford’s most worthy citizens, came here in the ’40s, and held many important offices during the fifty years of his residence in Stratford. He was selectman and treasurer during the Civil War, and furnished much of the material for the town history of that period.”4
In this rural New Hampshire setting, which prospered as a farming and logging center, especially with the coming of the Grand Trunk Railway in 1853, Connary lived in his family farmstead with his wife, Lucinda, and their five children, Simon, Mary, John, Joseph, and Anne, until his death in 1899. Connary played a central role in establishing the Catholic mission in Stratford, according to Thompson:
T. Connary was the first resident Roman Catholic, and to his ardent zeal and fervent piety the present prosperous church owes much for its maintenance through its pioneer days. “Of Mr Connary it may be said with the utmost truthfulness that he has ever borne an irreproachable Christian character as citizen, neighbour, friend; and in business he has maintained the highest type, and no one has been more trusted and honored by his townspeople. Indeed the entire family are numbered among our best citizens.” . . . Through Mr. Connary’s efforts a Roman Catholic priest from Montpelier, Vt., came to care for the spiritual needs of the men of that faith who were employed in building the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, in construction here during the late ’40s and early ’50s; and Mass was first celebrated in a little building a few rods east of the station. . . . Mr. Connary bought the land on which the present church stands in 1866; but, as a church had been built in Bloomfield, building here was deferred until 1887, when a church was erected at a cost of $3,000.5
We know that after starting out with nothing and accepting “the tenth bushel as compensation for his hard labor,” Connary, once established, did well and managed his finances deftly. The census record of 1870 for the town of Stratford estimates the value of the Connary real estate at a full $6,000, one of the town’s higher valuations. In January 1899 the obituary in the Coös County Democrat characterized him as a “deeply religious man” whose “confidence in God was unlimited,” while noting that “he was very industrious and of good financial abilities. . . . His generosity to the church of his heart is well known often indeed depriving himself for this end.” Connary’s contribution to the Catholic mission in the area came not only in the form of donations for the foundation of the Catholic church in Stratford but also in the purchase of the land for the cemetery and church (established in 1879) in Bloomfield, Vermont, across the Connecticut River, a stone’s throw from North Stratford. Today, the stained glass window in the Sacred Heart Church in Stratford carries the name Thomas Connary, in memory of the benefactor and the town’s first resident Roman Catholic.6
Connary’s adherence to the Catholic faith was deep and fervent, fueled during his adult life by the diligent reading of Catholic devotional literature. While he collected books throughout most of his life, in later years his identity as a devout Irish American Catholic revolved around, and even gained meaning from, the purchasing, reading, annotating, and sharing of religious books. Records show that Connary was a member of the Stratford Hollow Library Association and that he
