Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Overview

he scene is a large, roomy, clean New England kitchen of some sixty years ago. There was the great wide fire-place, with its crane and array of pot-hooks; there was the tall black clock in the corner, ticking in response to the chirp of the crickets around the broad, flat stone hearth. The scoured tin and pewter on the dresser caught flickering gleams of brightness from the western sunbeams that shone through the network of elm-boughs, rattling and tapping as the wind blew them against the window. It was not quite half-past four o'clock, yet the December sun hung low and red in the western horizon, telling that the time of the shortest winter days was come. Every-thing in the ample room shone with whiteness and neatness; everything was ranged, put up, and in order, as if work were some past and bygone affair, hardly to be remembered. The only living figure in this picture of still life was that of a strapping, buxom Yankee maiden, with plump arms stripped to the elbow and hands plunged deep in the white, elastic cushion of puffy dough, which rose under them as she kneaded.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781023345965
Publisher:	Anson Street Press
Publication date:	03/29/2025
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Date of Birth:

June 14, 1811

Date of Death:

July 1, 1896

Place of Birth:

Litchfield, Connecticut

Place of Death:

Hartford, Connecticut

Education:

Homeschooled

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER III. THE ILLUMINATION. JEFORE going farther in our story we pause to give a brief answer to ihe queries that have risen in the minds o some who remember the old times ir New England: How came there to be any Epis copalians or Episcopal church in a small Purita: town like Poganuc? The Episcopal Church in New England in thf early days was emphatically a root out of dry ground, with as little foothold in popular sym pathy as one of those storm-driven junipers, tha' the east wind blows all aslant, has in the rocky ledges of Cape Cod. The soil, the climate, the atmosphere, the genius, and the history of the people were all against it. Its forms and ceremonies were all associated with the persecution which drove the Puritans out of England and left 'them no refuge but the rock-bound shores of America. It is true that in the time of Governor Winthrop the colony of Massachusetts appealed with affectionate professions to their Mother, the Church of England, and sought her sympathy and her prayers; but it is also unfortunately true that the forms of the Church of England were cultivated and maintained in New England by the very party whose intolerance and tyranny brought on the Revolutionary war. All the oppressive governors of the colonies were Episcopalians, and in the Revolutionary struggle the Episcopal Church was very generally on the Tory side ; hence, the New Englanders came to have an aversion to its graceful and beautiful ritual and forms for the same reason that the free party in Spain and Italy now loathe the beauties of the Romish Church, as signs and symbols of tyranny and oppression. Congregationalism—or, as it was then called by the common people,Presbyterianism—was the religion established by law in New England. It was the State Church. Even i...