accepting her Quaker lover.
The previous summer Daniel had helped his father prepare the lumber and build a large two-story addition to his house, and in return he gave to his son the lumber for a new home, on a beautiful tract of ground presented to the young couple by Father Read adjoining his own. While this was being built they lived at the Read homestead, and the loom was kept busy preparing the housekeeping outfit. In those days this was made of linen, bleached and spun and woven by the women of the household. Cotton was just coming into use, and Lucy Anthony was considered very fortunate because she could have a few sheets and pillow-cases which were half cotton.
The manufacture of cotton becoming a prominent industry in New England at this time, the alert mind of Daniel Anthony conceived the idea of building a factory and using the waters of Tophet brook and of a rapid little stream which flowed through the Read farm. This was done, and proved a success from the beginning. A document is still in existence by which "D. Read agrees to let D. Anthony have as much water from the brook on his farm as will run through a hole six inches in diameter." This was conveyed by an aqueduct, made from hollow logs, to the factory where it turned the over-shot wheel and furnished power to the twenty-six looms. The factory hands for the most part came down from the Green mountain regions, glad of an opportunity never before enjoyed of earning wages and supporting themselves. They were girls of respectability, and, as was the custom then, boarded with the families of the mill-owners. Those of the Anthony factory were divided between the wife and Hannah Anthony Hoxie, a married sister. Lucy Anthony soon became acquainted with the stern realities of life. Her third baby was born when the first was three years and two months old. That summer she boarded eleven factory hands, who roomed in her house, and she did all the cooking, washing and ironing, with no help except that of a thirteen-year-old girl, who went to school and did "chores" night and morning. The cooking for the family of sixteen was done on the hearth in front of the fire-place and in a big brick oven at the side. Daniel Anthony was a generous man, loved his wife and was well able to hire help, but such a thing was not thought of at that time. No matter how heavy the work, the woman of the household was expected to do it, and probably would have been the first to resent the idea that assistance was needed.
During the first seventeen years of this marriage eight children were born. One died at birth and one at the age of two years. The eldest, born July 1, 1818, was named for the wife of William Penn, who married a member of the Anthony family, Gulielma Penn, which was contracted to Guelma. Susan was the second child, born February 15, 1820, and named for an aunt, Susan Anthony Brownell. She herself adopted the initial "B" when older, but never claimed or liked the full name.3
Lucy Read Anthony was of a very timid and reticent disposition and painfully modest and shrinking. Before the birth of every child she was overwhelmed with embarrassment and humiliation, secluded herself from the outside world and would not speak of the expected little one even to her mother. That mother would assist her overburdened daughter by making the necessary garments, take them to her home and lay them carefully away in a drawer, but no word of acknowledgment ever passed between them. This was characteristic of those olden times, when there were seldom any confidences between mothers and daughters in regard to the deepest and most sacred concerns of life, which were looked upon as subjects to be rigidly tabooed. Susan came into the world in a cold, dreary season. The event was looked forward to with dread by the mother, but when the little one arrived she received a warm and loving welcome. She was born into a staid and quiet but very comfortable home, where great respect and affection existed between father and mother.
William Cullen Bryant, whose birth-place was but twenty miles distant, wrote of this immediate locality:
I stand upon my native hills again,
Broad, round and green, that in the summer sky,
With garniture of waving grass and grain,
Orchards and beechen forests, basking lie;
While deep the sunless glens are scooped between,
Where brawl o'er shallow beds the streams unseen.
Each night in early childhood she watched the sun set behind the great dome of "Old Greylock," that noble mountain-peak so famed in the literature of Berkshire, from whose lofty summit one looks across four States. "It lifts its head like a glorified martyr," said Beecher, and Julia Taft Bayne wrote:
Come here where Greylock rolls
Itself toward heaven; in these deep silences,
World-worn and fretted souls,
Bathe and be clean.
To the child's idea its top was very close against the sky, and its memory and inspiration remained with her through life.
Susan was very intelligent and precocious. At the age of three she was sent to the grandmother's to remain during the advent of the fourth baby at home, and while there was taught to spell and read. Her memory was phenomenal, and she had an insatiable ambition, especially for learning the things considered beyond a girl's capacity.
The mother was most charitable, always finding time amidst her own family cares to go among the sick and poor of the neighborhood. One of Susan's childish grievances, which she always remembered, was that the "Sunday-go-to-meeting" dresses of the three little Anthony girls were lent to the children of a poor family to wear at the funeral of their mother, while she and her sisters had to wear their old ones. She thought these were good enough to lend. She had no toys or dolls except of home manufacture, but her rag baby and set of broken dishes afforded just as much happiness as children nowadays get from a roomful of imported playthings.
To go to school the children had to pass Grandmother Read's, and they were always careful to start early enough to stop there for a fresh cheese curd and a drink of "coffee," made by browning crusts of rye and Indian bread, pouring hot water over them and sweetening with maple sugar. Then in the evening they would stop again for some of the left-over, cold boiled dinner, which was served on a great pewter platter, a big piece of pork or beef in the center and, piled all round, potatoes, cabbage, turnips, beets, carrots, etc. The story runs that, when the mother remonstrated with the children for bothering the grandmother for what they could have at home, Susan replied, "Why, grandma's potato peelings are better than your boiled dinners." The Anthonys and Reads used white flour and real coffee on state occasions, but very few families could afford such luxuries.
One of the recollections of Grandmother Anthony's house is of the little closet under the parlor stairs, where was set the tub of maple sugar, and, while the elders were chatting over neighborhood affairs, the children would gather like bees around this tub and have a feast. Always when they left, they were loaded down with apples, doughnuts, caraway cakes and other toothsome things which little ones love. Along the edges of the pantry shelves hung rows of shining pewter porringers, and the pride of the children's lives was to eat "cider toast" out of them. This was made by toasting a big loaf of brown bread before the fire, peeling off the outside, toasting it again, and finally pouring over these crusts hot sweetened water and cider. The dish, however, which was relished above all others was "hasty pudding," cooked slowly for hours, then heaped upon a platter in a great cone, the center scooped out and filled with sweet, fresh butter and honey or maple syrup.
In those days every sideboard was liberally supplied with rum, brandy and gin, and every man drank more or less, even the elders and preachers. When the farmers came down the mountain road with their loads of wood or lumber, they always stopped at Grandfather Read's for a slice of bread and cheese and a drink of hard cider, but the elders and preachers were regaled with something stronger. This was the custom, and criticism would have been considered fanatical.
The little factory nourished and produced many yards of excellent cotton
