York in American History: The York visits of Samuel Adams Drake

Note: In this essay, James Kences, paints a picture of York in the late 19th century through the eyes of a popular regional historian and author Samuel Adams Drake. 

"Old York, be it remembered, is one of those places toward which the history of a country or section converges. Thus, when you are in Maine all roads, historically speaking, lead to York."

Samuel Adams Drake, a prolific popular regional historian of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the son of the equally prolific Samuel Gardner Drake, visited this town at the dawn of the tourist era shortly after the end of the Civil War, and wrote of his experience in the book, “Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast,” published in 1875.

"It was not my first visit to Old York," Drake acknowledged, "but I found the place strangely altered from its usual quiet and dullness." Interspersed with historical digressions, can be found intriguing contemporary glimpses into the town- Long Sands Beach, the Marshall House on Stage Neck, the First Parish Church and the Village, Cider Hill, the Scotland section.

The chapter of Drake's book devoted to York, "Agamenticus, the Ancient City," opened with his reminiscence of an ascent to the summit of the mountain. "The climb is only fatiguing; it is not at all difficult,' and of what he saw, the vantage point toward the ocean, "large ships resembled toys," and in the opposite direction, Mount Washington, and the sprawling landscape of neighboring towns, "the busy towns of Dover and Great Falls, with the newer villages of Eliot and Berwick grouped about in picturesque confusion."

During the years prior to his visit, Drake had been in Kansas, and was an officer in that state's militia during the war. His background was as a journalist. He had arrived in Kansas in the late 1850s, employed by different newspapers as a reporter and even an editor. His father, the proprietor of a renowned Boston antiquarian book shop, had arrived in the city during the 1820s, having left the New Hampshire farm town of his birth. Together, the two men produced an enormous number of books related to New England history.

“Nooks and Corners,” one of the 23 books authored during his career, starts at Mount Desert Island, and concludes at the Connecticut shore. A map of the length of coast was included, accompanied with the declaration, "On this line if it takes all summer. . . June 1875 ... S.A.D." His journey had occurred early in the tourist era, and the coast was not yet dominated by a continuous chain of seaside resorts, and the many hotels. The transformative change would not happen until the onset of the electric rail which permitted much cheaper travel from the urban centers.

York in American HistoryThe arrival of the Scottish prisoners

The Marshall House was only a few years old when Drake came to town. It was the first of the great hotels- a multistory building endowed with a viewing tower on the roof and a broad porch. He speaks of "the frolic of the juveniles going on in the parlor," and of the smoking-room, and of "conversation coming out between puffs, as void of warmth as the vapor that rises from ice."

Long Sands Beach, on the "fine afternoon" he was there, was compared to a highway, where "all manner of [horse drawn] vehicles were being driven, from the old-fashioned gig of the village doctor to the aristocratic landau, fresh from town." He also observed large stacks of seaweed, "ready to be hauled away" and "fishers in varnished boots, boatmen in tight-fitting trousers, and enough young Americans in navy blue to man a fleet by-and-by."

Drake continued on to the village, and to the First Parish Church, and upon entering the building he noticed "that the bell-ringer or his assistants had indulged a passion for scribbling on the walls, though not as might be inferred from Scripture texts." Of the church he wrote, "the interior is as severe as the exterior. Besides its rows of straight-backed pews, it was furnished at one end with a mahogany pulpit, communion table, and sofa covered with black hair-cloth." On the walls behind the pulpit were framed copies of documents related to the early history.

He crossed the road to the old burial ground and found the site overgrown and neglected. "The grass grew rank and tangled, making the examination [of the gravestones] difficult, and at every step [he] sank to the knee in some hollow." He encountered the gravestone of Reverend Samuel Moody, and the tomb of Judge David Sewall. Next, he walked to the jail, "perched, like a bird of ill omen, on a rocky ledge, where all might see it in passing over the high-road."

York in American History:Famed author Louisa May Alcott visits York

Four miles west of the village were the old garrison houses, and to reach them he traversed "the road passing through broad acres of cleared land or ancient orchards." At Cider Hill, Drake "was struck with the age of the orchards, and indeed with the evidences on all sides with the occupancy of the land." He described a brief conversation with a local farmer, "you have a good many apples this year." The farmer agreed with him, but admitted, "they don't fetch nothing."

When the author made a later visit to the town, recounted in a chapter of his book “The Pine Tree Coast,” published in 1891, tourism and the resort's popularity had already exerted a perceptible influence. "Old York, the country village, stretches itself out along the river banks, while modern York, a new plant in a strange soil, skirts the bluffs and beaches of the seashore ... Two constituents have come in contact, so completely antagonistic in their outward and inward aspects ..."

The railroad was not to be introduced until 1887, and the electric rail in 1897, and the contrasts of the old and the new would only increase with time. "There are few spots of ground in New England," Drake wrote, "in which the old traditions have been suffered to die out as they have here in York." He observed how the houses were being altered and modernized to resemble the cottages of the tourists more closely, and how, "by this means some of the oldest mansions have been so metamorphosed with paint and filigree work that their builders would never know them again."

Thus, two decades prior to the town division crisis of the first decade of the twentieth century, the social tensions and the conflict of values which underlay that episode were evident. The depictions of York in the two books Drake published in 1875 and 1891 reveal how rapid and dramatic these changes must have seemed to the majority of the people who had lived here throughout their lives and were accustomed to a very different rhythm of town life.

James Kences is the town historian for the town of York. 

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: York in American History: The York visits of Samuel Adams Drake