Mary Minds Her Business

Mary Minds Her Business

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Title: Mary Minds Her Business
Author: George Weston
Release Date: July 27, 2004 [EBook #13034]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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MARY MINDS HER BUSINESS
BY GEORGE WESTON
Author of "Oh, Mary, Be Careful," "The Apple-Tree Girl," and "You
Never Saw Such a Girl."
1920

To Karl Edwin Harriman One of the Noblest of them All G.W.

MARY MINDS HER BUSINESS

So that you may understand my heroine, I am going to write a preface
and tell you about her forebears.
In the latter part of the seventeenth century, there was a young
blacksmith in our part of the country named Josiah Spencer. He had a
quick eye, a quick hand and a quicker temper.
Because of his quick eye he married a girl named Mary McMillan.
Because of his quick hand, he was never in need of employment. And
because of his quick temper, he left the place of his birth one day and
travelled west until he came to a ford which crossed the Quinebaug
River.
There, before the week was over, he had bought from Oeneko, the
Indian chief, five hundred acres on each side of the river--land in those
days being the cheapest known commodity. Hewing his own timber
and making his own hardware, he soon built a shop of his own, and the
ford being on the main road between Hartford and the Providence
Plantations, it wasn't long before he had plenty of business.
Above the ford was a waterfall. Josiah put in a wheel, a grist mill and a
saw mill.
By that time Mary, his wife, had presented him with one of the two
greatest gifts that a woman can ever bestow, and presently a sign was
painted over the shop:
JOSIAH SPENCER & SON
In course of time young Josiah made his first horse-shoe and old Josiah
made his last.
On a visit to New Amsterdam, the young man had already fallen in
love with a girl named Matilda Sturtevant. They were married in 1746
and had one of those round old-fashioned families when twelve
children seemed to be the minimum and anything less created
comment.
Two of the boys were later killed in the Revolution, another became
Supreme Court justice, but the likeliest one succeeded to the business
of Josiah Spencer & Son, which was then making a specialty of
building wagons--and building them so well that the shop had to be
increased in size again and again until it began to have the appearance
of quite a respectable looking factory.
The third Spencer to own the business married a Yankee--Patience
Babcock--but Patience's only son married a French-Canadian girl--for

even then the Canadians were drifting down into our part of the
country.
So by that time, as you can see--and this is an important part of my
preface--the Spencer stock was a thrifty mixture of Yankee, Irish,
Scotch, Dutch and French blood--although you would never have
guessed it if you had simply seen the name of one Josiah Spencer
following another as the owner of the Quinebaug Wagon Works.
In the same year that the fourth Josiah Spencer succeeded to the
business, a bridge was built to take the place of the ford and the
waterfall was fortified by a dam. By that time a regular little town had
formed around the factory.
The town was called New Bethel.
It was at this stage of their history that the Spencers grew proud,
making a hobby of their family tree and even possibly breathing a sigh
over vanished coats-of-arms.
The fifth of the line, for instance, married a Miss Copleigh of Boston.
He built a big house on Bradford Hill and brought her home in a
tally-ho. The number of her trunks and the size of her crinolines are
spoken of to this day in our part of the country--also her manner of
closing her eyes when she talked, and holding her little finger at an
angle when drinking her tea. She had only one child--fortunately a son.
This son was the grandfather of our heroine. So you see we are getting
warm at last.
The grandfather of our heroine was probably the greatest Spencer of
them all.
Under his ownership the factory was rebuilt of brick and stone. He
developed the town