Home Life in Colonial Days | Page 8

of wrought iron or polished brass,
a cheerful ornament that ever seems to resound a welcome to the visitor
as well as a notification to the visited.
The knocker from the John Hancock House in Boston and that from the
Winslow House in Marshfield are here shown; both are now in the
custody of the Bostonian Society, and may be seen at the Old State
House in Boston. The latter was given to the society by Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes.
The "King-Hooper" House, still standing in Danvers, Massachusetts,
closely resembled the Hancock House. This house, built by Robert
Hooper in 1754, was for a time the refuge of the royal governor of
Massachusetts--Governor Gage; and hence is sometimes called General
Gage's Headquarters. When the minute-men marched past the house to
Lexington on April 18, 1775, they stripped the lead from the gate-posts.
"King Hooper" angrily denounced them, and a minute-man fired at him
as he entered the house. The bullet passed through the panel of the door,
and the rent may still be seen. Hence the house has been often called
The House of the Front Door with the Bullet-Hole. The present owner
and occupier of the house, Francis Peabody, Esq., has appropriately
named it The Lindens, from the stately linden trees that grace its
gardens and lawns.
In riding through those portions of our states that were the early settled
colonies, it is pleasant to note where any old houses are still standing,
or where the sites of early colonial houses are known, the good taste
usually shown by the colonists in the places chosen to build their
houses. They dearly loved a "sightly location." An old writer said: "My
consayte is such; I had rather not to builde a mansyon or a house than
to builde one without a good prospect in it, to it, and from it." In
Virginia the houses were set on the river slope, where every passing
boat might see them. The New England colonists painfully climbed
long, tedious hills, that they might have homes from whence could be
had a beautiful view, and this was for the double reason, as the old
writer said, that in their new homes they might both see and be seen.

CHAPTER II
THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS
The first and most natural way of lighting the houses of the American
colonists, both in the North and South, was by the pine-knots of the fat
pitch-pine, which, of course, were found everywhere in the greatest
plenty in the forests. Governor John Winthrop the younger, in his
communication to the English Royal Society in 1662, said this
candle-wood was much used for domestic illumination in Virginia,
New York, and New England. It was doubtless gathered everywhere in
new settlements, as it has been in pioneer homes till our own day. In
Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont it was used till this century. In
the Southern states the pine-knots are still burned in humble households
for lighting purposes, and a very good light they furnish.
The historian Wood wrote in 1642, in his New England's Prospect:--
"Out of these Pines is gotten the Candlewood that is much spoke of,
which may serve as a shift among poore folks, but I cannot commend it
for singular good, because it droppeth a pitchy kind of substance where
it stands."
That pitchy kind of substance was tar, which was one of the most
valuable trade products of the colonists. So much tar was made by
burning the pines on the banks of the Connecticut, that as early as 1650
the towns had to prohibit the using of candle-wood for tar-making if
gathered within six miles of the Connecticut River, though it could be
gathered by families for illumination and fuel.
Rev. Mr. Higginson, writing in 1633, said of these pine-knots:--
"They are such candles as the Indians commonly use, having no other,
and they are nothing else but the wood of the pine tree, cloven in two
little slices, something thin, which are so full of the moysture of
turpentine and pitch that they burne as cleere as a torch."
To avoid having smoke in the room, and on account of the pitchy

droppings, the candle-wood was usually burned in a corner of the
fireplace, on a flat stone. The knots were sometimes called pine-torches.
One old Massachusetts minister boasted at the end of his life that every
sermon of the hundreds he had written, had been copied by the light of
these torches. Rev. Mr. Newman, of Rehoboth, is said to have compiled
his vast concordance of the Bible wholly by the dancing light of this
candle-wood. Lighting was an important item of expense in any
household of so small an income as that of a Puritan minister; and the
single candle was often