as late as November he and Juliette stayed for a few weeks in a hotel in Milford while they dealt with legal issues pertaining to the eviction of the Quicks, which finally took place on 18 December. Probably the Peirce’s had moved to Quicktown shortly after they purchased it and occupied the secondary house, or some portion of the Quick house until the difficulties with the Quick’s continuing occupancy became acute, but so far nothing conclusive has come to light. In any case, it was not until January 1889 that the Peirce’s finally moved fully into the main house and began rebuilding it to suit their purposes.
Wherever Peirce was residing during the second half of 1888, it is certain that his new estate was much on his mind. Except for the legal difficulties that arose concerning the Quick family, Quicktown was a place of promise for Peirce, a chance to make a good life for Juliette and himself. Together they must have spent many hours making plans and thinking about the hopeful future that now seemed within their grasp. Peirce tried to keep his Coast Survey work on track but without much success. He did manage on 10 August to send in a new paper on the mean figure of the earth, expanding on his previous paper of 1881 (W4:529–34), but Thorn, suspecting that it was somehow a ploy to ease the pressure he had been exerting on Peirce to complete his major gravity report, had it evaluated by Schott who returned an indecisive verdict. Schott made a vague insinuation that Peirce may have made some unattributed use of similar results of F. R. Helmert—“whose work came under the author’s notice while writing his report”—and recommended that work on the earths shape should be kept separate from “regular pendulum matter” in any case. Of course, for Peirce, determining the shape of the earth was the principal goal of his geodetic labors, and it was hardly beside the point to keep his gravity researches integrated with their ultimate purpose. But Peirce’s paper (which has not been located) was not published, although it was probably the source for the results that Peirce used in his definition of “Earth” for the Century Dictionary. Peirce’s work on the earth’s figure and on its compression would continue to be mentioned in his monthly reports.
The texture of Peirce’s life can only be painted in pale outline in an introduction such as this one in which the aim is to provide a context for and a sketch of the intellectual development that gave birth to the writings in this volume. A more complete account of 1888 would describe more fully Peirce’s family relations, especially concerning the settlement of his mother’s and aunt’s estates, and would say more about his and Juliette’s social and domestic lives. It would also say more about some of the correspondents who have been passed over in silence, and about some unmentioned incidents and flare-ups with the Survey’s Washington office and scientific activities that have been left out—and, of course, there would be more about Peirce’s friends and colleagues and external matters that affected his life and thought. Chapter three of Joseph Brent’s Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life should be consulted for a more complete account of these matters. Perhaps the main thing still to be said about the last half of 1888 is that Juliette’s health took a turn for the worse and she would sometimes stay in New York, perhaps to be near New York physicians or because of the unsettled living conditions in Quicktown. Her health had always been worrisome for Peirce, but beginning in the spring of 1889 it would become a major concern.
On Thanksgiving Day, 29 November, Peirce wrote a newsy letter to his brother Jem. He thanked Jem for a remittance toward his inheritance and for the explanation of “fleflexnode” which “went straight into the dictionary.” He said he had been “much occupied with small but pressing matters,” and mentioned in particular the lawsuit concerning the eviction of the Quicks. He told Jem he was taking Juliette to New York on the following day and would return to the farm by himself. He reported that “Mrs. Pinchot wants us to change the name Quicktown, but I dont know that I agree with her. It is the name we found & ’Tom Quick’ is rather a romantic figure in the history of the valley”—the following year a monument to Tom Quick was erected in Milford to mark the one hundred and fifty-sixth anniversary of its settlement. Peirce told Jem that if he was reading novels he should get Le Capitaine Fracasse by Gautier. “For my part I read little literature & I find serious novels dull. I am loitering through Pepys again, & have been reading Sidney’s Arcadia, Dr. Dee’s preface to Euclid, Thirion’s History of Arithmetic, Browning, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Montaigne (of which I have an old French copy), Mémoires de Casanova, Our Mutual Friend, some old Arithmetic & other old books.” He finished by remarking that the dictionary was coming along quickly. This letter gives a nice sense of the tone of Peirce’s life as the year was winding down. The final weeks of 1888 were dominated by the prospect of finally having full occupancy of the Quick house and plans for its renovation.
Peirce woke up at about 7:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day, 1889, at Quinn’s Halfway House, near Quicktown, from which he and Juliette would direct preparations for their move into their new house. He divided his day in a way that modeled how he would spend his time during the coming year. He devoted the morning to philosophy, in particular, to starting a new book, “Reflections on the Logic of Science” (sel. 31). After lunch he and Juliette drove to Port Jervis in their carriage to see a carpenter about an addition to the house. In later years, when Henry S. Leonard traveled from Harvard to interview elderly Milford residents about Peirce’s life, Mrs. Robert G. Barkley recalled that Peirce “drove a Phaeton with a white horse and gently waved a whip as he drove along.”35 Upon leaving Port Jervis, the Peirce’s crossed back into Pennsylvania to the village of Metamoras where they saw a second carpenter. After dinner that evening, Peirce and Juliette worked on accounts—Peirce noted in his diary that “there was some disagreement.” Later he turned to galley proofs for the Century Dictionary, which he noted had reached “game,” and to his overdue Coast Survey reports—at least he recorded these tasks in his diary for 1 January.
A few days later the reconstruction of the Quick house was underway and, although more or less completed stages would be reached, remodeling would continue with varying degrees of intensity and disruption for the rest of Peirce’s life, and even afterwards under Juliette’s direction. Their home would become their prison in the way that Peirce’s philosophical mansion would imprison him, catching him up in a vision he could not resist but causing him much suffering as he steadfastly struggled against insurmountable odds to achieve it. But as 1889 lay before him, there was good reason to suppose that his hopes for his estate, as well as for his philosophy, would be realized. He could not then know what a great struggle he would endure trying to build these parallel edifices. Leonard recorded some anecdotes that give an idea of how this process appeared from the outside. Miss May Westbrook remembered: “When the Peirce’s built their house they built around an original house on the property. Mr. and Mrs. Peirce sometimes quarreled. Once when I was at their house for dinner the quarrel was violent. I don’t know what it was about because they talked in French. Mrs. Peirce was an unreasonable person.” Miss Westbrook noted that whenever she visited, Peirce was always in his study except for meals, but she added that when Juliette was in Europe, Peirce “took one meal a day here with mother. He was very pleasant. Mrs. Peirce sometimes spoke well of him and sometimes not.” Gifford Pinchot also talked with Leonard about the Peirce’s’ reconstruction project: “The alterations were of an absurd character. The attempt was to make the house irresistible as an Inn or a Gentleman’s Estate. Mrs. Peirce had two passions: devotion to Peirce and interest in land. In the latter respect she showed a characteristic common among French peasants. Peirce was extremely impractical. He submitted to her plans for alterations in the house loyally and cheerfully, living in one room while all the others were in a turmoil with carpenters.” Pinchot remembered how in 1887 and 1888 he had discussed forestry with Peirce and that those discussions had been instrumental in his decision to study forestry in Germany. Pinchot went on to become Theodore Roosevelt’s Chief Forester and would play a large role in establishing the National Park System in the United States. He also recalled that it was Peirce who had calculated the settings for a sundial built into the stone front of Grey Towers, “so that it gave exact normal time for the longitude and latitude” and that he “calculated the true North and South that were marked in the sidewalk in front of the house.” These markings are still visible today.
The book Peirce started writing on 1 January (sel.
