Concord Oral History Program -- Sarah "Sally" Chapin interview.

Interviewer: Michael N. Kline
Also Present: Carrie N. Kline
Date: 8-03-09
Place of Interview: Concord Free Public Library
Transcriptionist: Samuel Bollier

Michael Kline: Okay, so here we are in the Concord Free Public Library, and it’s an overcast but beautiful day. And we’re happy to see you here. Would you start out by saying, “My name is,” and tell us your name.

MK: My name is Michael Kline. But you could just say , “My name is,” and tell us your name.

MK: And we never ask people their date of birth – I mean age, but maybe you could tell us your date of birth.

MK: Perhaps you’d like to start out tell us a little about your people and where you were raised.

SC: I was raised on a dairy farm in Hadley, Massachusetts, a family farm that has been in the family since the beginning of time. It was part of the Huntington family estate and was acquired by my grandmother in the early 1900s. Her father bought it from the Phelps family, and the farm is known as Phelps farm. It still exists. It’s owned by my sister, and she rents the farmland, and it’s still on the property. It was a dairy farm. There are no cows now. And we grew up helping to take care of the cows and to work in the fields. And we went to school in Northampton which was five miles away, and took a bus home and walked two miles from the center of Hadley. We have mixed memories of that, because it didn’t matter what the weather was; we still had to walk from the center of Hadley. Amherst was in the other direction, and I had friends there and rode my bicycle over the hills to get to Amherst and then back over the hills to go home. My sister is older than I am, and she went to Mount Holyoke College when she was 16. But I wasn’t as advanced as she was, and I was still in school when I was 16. And I went to Smith College and graduated in 1953. Then I went to Cambridge and became an apprentice at the Shady Hill School teaching lower school music. And music is important in our family. My uncle Roger was not a popular composer but a composer of American music for the early part of the 20th century, and not the 21st. His music is difficult and rarely played now.

SC: Sessions. S-e-s-s-i-o-n-s. My father was the farmer. He died of tubercular meningitis when he was 47. My mother continued the farm and died when she was 86 of Alzheimer’s disease. So the farm lasted a long time. My mother was not as efficient as my father as the boss of the farm. But she did her best, and I think she came to value it as a source of interest and a source of money. She got interested in the family and did a fair amount of research in the genealogical side of the Phelps-Huntington family. Across the street from the farm is the Huntington family estate. It’s kind of funny to call it an estate, but it’s a big house with a lot of land; I don’t know what you call it except that. And it is now a museum for old times. It was the first house that was built outside of the center of Hadley and it’s filled with some quite nice old articles. And some ones aren’t quite as old as they’re purported to be, which I know because they were taken from our house, and they weren’t old when they were in our house, so they probably aren’t old where they are. But they look good. Some of the other things of our house are at the Deerfield museums, and I think one room is full of the furniture that came from my mother’s house. The house is empty now; the barns are empty and caving in, and I do not know because I didn’t inherit anything there, what my sister plans to do with the land. But by that time I was married and not living there anyway.

SC: [chuckles] The lucky man was a painter. He was an abstract – or I should say at the moment, he is – an abstract painter.

SC: His name is Charles. He is now 84, seriously ill, and he lives in Florida. He and I did not have a long marriage, but we did have a child named Sam who lives in Hawaii. Charlie painted – I can’t say his entire life, because it’s not quite over – but he is not well, and he has many abstract paintings, some of which are quite interesting and important. After our marriage dissolved he married again twice, and each time the marriage was dissolved. He told me this spring when I went to visit that he thought he never should have married, a thought that I concurred with. Sam I raised by myself, first in North Carolina and then here in Concord. He lives in Hawaii and has a son, and he makes boats, preferably kayaks. His son Dylan had leukemia when he was four, but he had the right kind at the right age at the right time, meaning that the illness hadn’t progressed beyond all hope. He has survived and is now 16. That’s that marriage.

When Sam was 10 I married again, a gentleman whose wife had left him with four children. And in my innocence I thought that Sam would benefit from being in a family of four more children. It was not a very good piece of judgment on any side, but I did survive. And the children survived and have grown up, and they are not friendly to me, but I did give them 13 years of a fairly normal existence, which they hadn’t had before. And I don’t regret what I’ve done, but if I had to choose that route again I wouldn’t take it. When I finally had seen them through adolescence, I went to live by myself and had the difficulty of making a living. So I looked around to see what I could do, because I had majored in music and I had taught at Shady Hill. I felt that I had some skills to set out as a piano teacher. And I supported myself in Concord, in Lincoln, by giving piano lessons to the children of Concord and Lincoln. They’re all grown up now, with children of their own, but I have retired from giving piano lessons. It was a great deal of fun, and I enjoyed it and was able to manage. As it seemed to wane a little, I began to look for interests elsewhere and found that it was convenient to come to the library and to do things that weren’t particularly difficult but that could be helpful in the archival part of the library. The curator of the Special Collections in those years was Marsha Moss, and she was interested in giving me work to do, and so I enjoyed that. At the same time, my sister discovered in the attic of the old house in Hadley a box of letter that were written by Uncle Roger when he was a student at Harvard when he was 14.

These letters had never been seen by his children, and I decided to publish them. This brought difficulties with his daughter, who was the Executor of his estate, because she had given permission to somebody else to write a book about him. It was settled on the grounds that I could publish them if I made only 15 copies and gave the book to members of the family. The book was made; I made a few extras, and they are in the collegiate libraries in their Special Collections. The letters were very interesting as they reflected the early thoughts and work of a composer. That, I think, was the first book that I did. It’s called A Tin Box Collection. At the same time – or I guess earlier, I can’t remember – I did a job for Harvard in the Harvard woods in Concord studying the flora (not the fauna, but the flora) in the Harvard part of the Concord woods, and was given the job to identify everything that appeared on five acres of the woods, particularly the mosses. And I did it, and mosses were collected and identified, and they are now in the library of the garden in the woods. And they look kind of scrunched up, but they are there. But that led to more study of the flora, and after I did the five acres I did a study called The Eleven Weeks at a pond just on the edge of the Harvard woods. And I went regularly and reported what was there. What was there were a lot of snakes, and they liked to sit in the bushes around the pond. And I know that because as I bent over to look at moss one of them decided to land on the back of my neck. And I was able to identify him at those close quarters, but I wasn’t awfully happy about it. [laughs] Nevertheless, that went on, and those reports for all that work in the woods is in the Concord Special Collections.

MK: So here you are, someone with a background in music and a piano teacher, and you’re doing these inventories of plant biology. That’s amazing. You would think they would want to hire a biologist.

SC: Ah, but I was free, and they might have had to pay somebody who knew what they were doing. I was never …

MK: So what was your methodology for identifying these things? Did you have a good plant book?

SC: I had a very good plant book, and I had some friends who were better biologists. You’re quite right; I was groping around. But they were good biologists, and they were not only good, they were kind, and they helped me. And it was a good thing to do. It wasn’t something that supported me, but it took my mind off living alone and worrying about not having a great big paying job. And as I think about it, I don’t know why I didn’t settle down at a real paying job and live a very different life, but I lived a life with very little money and a lot of intellectual stimulation from the things I tried to do.

MK: Could you back up just a little bit and tell us your path to Concord, how you came to be here?

SC: I came from Chapel Hill, in North Carolina, where I’d gone hoping that my marriage would survive longer if I was in Charles’s family territory. He grew up in Greensboro and I thought that –. Chapel Hill was nearest to Greensboro, and he had gone to Chapel Hill, to college. And I thought because he had connections [someone sneezes] – God bless you – in the Art Department there that he would have something to do that was convenient for him, and I could find something to do and learn what it was like to live in the South. His family was extremely rich, and they were helpful to me after he left. And before he left we lived quite comfortably on the assets of his grandfather, I believe it was. His mother was still alive; his father had died. And she was [chuckles] a very Southern lady who took it upon herself to teach me the rules of being a Southern woman. And she found it rather difficult if I went barefoot, so she would buy me shoes. And she didn’t like blue jeans, so she would buy me dresses. And I never did quite grow up to her standards, but in spite of everything I liked her. And until she found that the marriage was going to break up, she liked me. After that she didn’t like me very well.

They also had a house in the mountains and of course a full staff to take care of everybody, including a nurse for Sam. And it was a very cushy life, and I had to learn how to deal with all of that. And it was not very easy for a lot of reasons, but it was an education in that respect as well as in other respects.

When I moved north, I missed the South, but I’d come north to get away from the problems of segregation. I’d had a nursemaid and become great friends with her and her friends. They weren’t used to a white woman being their friend and they discussed it, she told me. And she said, “We knew that you weren’t a Southern woman, but were you American? We didn’t know. We knew you weren’t black. So we decided you were Chinese.” And that was okay. So I was friends as their Chinese friend. And it was fine with me. I learned a great deal about the blacks. I visited them at their house, and I knew them as my friends. And it has been a great help to me as I’ve continued on to understand the black mentality better, I think, than people who never had that very fortunate experience. Anyway, in the end I came north, and why Concord? Because my first cousin was the minister of the Episcopal Church, and not being terribly religious, I did know a tiny bit about Bible things. And there was the phrase, “My father’s house has many mansions.” And it dawned on me that as the minister of the Episcopal Church, he would know whose family had many mansions and therefore would have a place where I could live. He was not amused by this, but I was. And -

SC: The Reverend, indeed. Oh, my goodness, yes, very definitely the Reverend. And he did find a place for me to spend the summer. And by that time I was able to find a house for Sam and me and did so. Nigel was –. That was another category along with musical things in my family. Every generation had a minister and starting – oh dear – I’ll be struck down dead for not being sure –. My great-grandfather was a Bishop, and then there was a minister in the next generation. And the next generation was Nigel and he was the minister of that generation. And there was one in the generation succeeding him.

SC: Yep. And in the generation that the Bishop was—. That’s not very good [grammar]. But he had a son who was a priest and who started the Order of the Holy Cross, which is the order that operates the Kent School in Connecticut. I don’t know how it works, but that was the way it began, anyhow. So it was a serious business in the family, that there were nothing but Episcopalians, very much like in Charles’s family, who were Presbyterians. And so it didn’t suit Charles’s mother that I was an Episcopalian and baptized by the Priest during the total eclipse in August 1932. My mother always said what was wrong with me was that that is what happened, and people were too busy watching the eclipse to pray for me, and that’s why I was such a difficult child. I don’t know if that’s true. Anyhow, there we all were, being very serious Episcopalians. And Nigel, of course, expected that I would be part of the Episcopal family in Concord. He was wrong. I went to listen to him preach once and decided I wouldn’t go back. But we were friends, and he was very nice about the divorce of Charles. I didn’t expect him to be, and he was, and we became good friends before he died.

SC: ’63. And I’ve been here ever since. I’ve lived in seven different places in Concord, and I don’t expect to move again. I’m well-positioned for an old lady; I can walk to the library, and all the things that are necessary I can walk to. Some people wisely say, “And I can push my walker that far when the time comes.” So I figured it’s a good spot. Mainly now I do work in the library and it’s convenient. It’s challenging to find things to do here, and because I’m not an expense to the library or to the town, they are tolerant of my being here. I am learning to mend books; I have done jobs of sorting books; I have learned to organize them. These are old books, primarily, that I’m interested in. And I’m tolerated because I guess I don’t cause trouble until somebody wants to throw away a book that I disapprove of getting rid of. But I’ve served on the Library Committee, which is the liaison between the library and the town. And I’ve been a Trustee, but I resigned from being a Trustee partly because I developed colon cancer and wasn’t certain that I would survive and decided that they were interested in people to help them with the big renovation, and I disapproved of it. And I didn’t know what my health would be, so I resigned. And they were, I think, relieved to be rid of me, because I really didn’t like the plans for the renovation. And that brings me pretty much up to the present. Lately I’ve done more for the library, and the mending of the books has been great fun, and treacherous in that it’s a very particular kind of work. And it takes the skills of somebody who is particular that pages should be at right angles to one another and things like that. Not always easy, but fun.

SC: No, I haven’t graduated from end pages yet; I don’t do the hard things, I do the sewing and the gluing. I’m very good at glue. But I’m only given one technique at a time, and it takes me quite a long time to master those small things. But I value my teacher and her patience and her skills, which are numerous.

SC: Louisa. And she’s very kind and very patient. I don’t know how long she’s been with the library, but her skills are ones that I wish I had, and I don’t.

SC: She is wonderfully meticulous. She does exquisite calligraphy. And I don’t know what more to say except she tolerates me and never, never makes me feel that I’m a nuisance. And how she manages not thinking I’m a nuisance I don’t know, because I fear I am a great nuisance.

SC: I think that’s true. I spill things. And I have to pull out my sewing and start again, and I feel like a fifth-grader in 4H, but that’s all right.

MK: Well with these long associations with the library, some of the local history must have rubbed off on you, didn’t it?

SC: Well that’s true, and I brought a list of the things that I’d done, and I thought I ought to, because some of them I’ve forgotten over the time. They’re not all published, but they’re downstairs in the Special Collections. And in the old days I knew where things were in the Special Collections, but now I don’t. After the building was changed I withdrew from doing those kinds of jobs of helping out in Special Collections. It got too complicated.

MK: How do the changes sit with you now that you’ve got a chance to be around them?

SC: Oh, I still think the building could’ve been made more representative of the 20th century as the first building was in the 18th century or 19th century. And my feelings were that a building should represent time changes too. But I think I was the only person who thought that. I wanted it – not necessarily Frank Lloyd Wright – but something modern, and exciting, and thrilling for books. Anyhow, there –.

SC: And I didn’t know enough about architecture. I knew what I liked, but I wasn’t –. God knows I wasn’t trained. But I had the feeling of wanting to be of the time for a library. I’ve never seen the Getty. I’ve always wanted to see the Getty; I’m not sure I want to know what’s inside, because they keep having to give things back. But I’d love to see the building. I’d love to see the San Francisco building. The new museum’s in New York. But people say, “But of course that isn’t Concord.” Concord is the old stuff and people want the old stuff. So I –. Over the years I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut better than I did when I was younger.

MK: What are some of the things on this list that you have accomplished for the library?

MK: Without rattling the paper, because the microphone will pick it up. Can you read it, right down here, read it?

SC: I’ve copied the journal of Alfred Hosmer, who was quite a Thoreauvian. That job has never been completed. It’s a very interesting journal, because he was an early Thoureauvian and he was a good Concordian. He owned a store downtown and dropped dead in front of the girdles one May Day. I transposed his –. I don’t know if that’s the right word. His journal was very hard to read, and so I copied it. And actually that job is not finished.

SC: Well, he was pals with people who were also Thoureauvians. And they talked, and they investigated things that Thoreau had said. And he corresponded with friends of Thoreau. It was sort of the beginning of the Thoreau society, and he –

SC: Yes. Yes. No. Toward the end of the 19th. Hosmer was born in 1851, so his labors were 19th century. One of the first jobs I did for the Town of Concord was on a program that they had set up for senior citizens to do tasks for the town for pay. Not much, but some. And these were little jobs, of course, for the senior citizens. And my job was to type a paper that a young girl had written about the gravestones of the cemeteries. And I typed them all one summer. And that got me into the Public Works Department, and I wrote a short booklet of the history of the public works. And that inspired the Town Manager to say he wished there were similar little books for all the departments of the Town of Concord. And so I set forth and decided that I could make them into one big book rather than little books. And it took me nearly five years to do that, one department after another, the police, and the fire, and –

SC: And the other departments. The book was over 400 pages long and exists; it was done a couple of years ago. There are picture books done by the Arcadia Publishing Company that are pleasant.

CK: I’m hearing your –. It’s fine to touch, but just don’t talk while you’re holding the paper.

SC: There are two of those books out of print. Arcadia doesn’t continue printing their books, and I see here that I did a directory of preschool and daycare facilities, because at one point when I was raising all those children, I got interested in what one would do with a handicapped child in the nursery schools in the area. And I visited all the nursery schools in the area with the intention of learning what they would do if they were given a blind child to teach. And I didn’t have any background, but I was curious to know this. So I pretended that I had a blind child, and went from place to place to see what would happen if a blind child showed up the door.

SC: And what kind of physical setup they had for this kind of a thing. And this impressed a Harvard program that they had, and they used my book in their class. It still exists. It’s of course now way out of date. I don’t know what has become of it, but it was a good and interesting project that I enjoyed very much. The Department of the Blind was interested in what I was doing and provided me with a social worker who came to visit me as if I really and truly did have a handicapped child. And in my case it seemed as if I had five handicapped children at the time, because they ranged in age from two to 15. And it was the ’60s, and I certainly developed a sense of the smell of marijuana in those years, and [chuckles] I suppose that the idea of learning about a deaf child – I mean a blind child – was my way of coping with all the various problems that I had, and it was perhaps a psychological effort wishing I were blind. I don’t know. But I’ll tell you, it was a tough business being a -

SC: Yeah, I’d come up and I’m sure with the intention of looking for a family. I’d raised my son for myself for 10 years and I –. Not unconsciously, perfectly clearly in my head, I thought it would be nice to have a husband to help me be a mother. I did not have any children with my second husband. He had those four and I thought four plus one was sufficient business. Edward Jarvis was a well-known name in the history of Concord, and he had written a book called Traditions and Reminiscences of Concord. I transcribed it, and it was published by the University of Massachusetts. [chuckles] I think it has been turned into a paperback, but I’m not entirely sure. I got a royalty check for 10 cents, and I think that’s what it was for, but I’ve never been entirely clear about that. Edward Jarvis also took a trip from Louisville, Kentucky to New Orleans in the 1800s, before Mark Twain did, and he wrote a diary of the trip down the Mississippi - perfectly wonderful story - which I transcribed. And it was published by the Filson Club in Louisville in their quarterly. I think it took up most of the edition, but I don’t remember when it was. It was great fun, and so that one was done. [paper rustles] That’s all. Those were all the things that I’ve done.

SC: Well, one wants to keep going. And even when the children were being bad, and life was fairly tough, I thought, “Well, they’ll have something to remember when they look back on their lives.” And I’ve certainly got things to look back on with the life I led. It wasn’t always –. Well, I’ve never been in jail, and I’ve had a lot of fun.

SC: I understood your question. I don’t suppose he would have had much to do with me, because I wasn’t as good a cook as his mother. And I think he would have –. I hope he would have let me accompany him in the woods to study the flora and the fauna. I had the pleasure most of the time of going into the woods with a man who has been, I think, the Curator of the Botanical Club at Harvard. His name was Ray Angelo – is Ray Angelo. He lived here, and he wasn’t able to drive a car. But he would get me to drive him various places and accompany him into the woods. And he became very skilled in the flora of Concord, and because I drove him to the different places, I went too. And one bitter winter day we stood in one of the andromeda swamps on the ice and he said, “Sally, you are the first woman to set foot on all the bogs of Concord.” And I was supposed to be terribly impressed and grateful. And all I wanted to do was go home and get warm. So I’ve thought of it since. And I’ve thought how nice it was to have that privilege, but [laughs] on the other hand, did I really need that particular thing to check off on my life experiences? He did teach me a lot. And he got disgusted with me when I did a bad job on knowing the things that we’d seen. But he did open doors for me to more of the flora than I had done by myself. He was much more skilled and particular than I was. And I had better luck than I knew. He was very careful and did become the Curator at the Botanical –. I haven’t seen him for years, but I believe he’s still alive. He’s unable to walk now I think, but I’m not sure. But I did go on all the bogs of Concord.

SC: Oh, well it was a long – the andromeda ones. The Gowing Swamp, which is under danger as we speak –

SC: - which was the most exciting one. It had wonderful swamp plants in it, which will probably be destroyed.

SC: I don’t know what they’re going to do, because I don’t take part in things like that. They’re going to build above the Gowing Swamp, and their runoff from houses and fertilizer and those kinds of things that destroy delicate and wonderful plants that have been there for God knows how long – thousands of years, I don’t know. I don’t take part in things like that because I’m shy in public, is the honest answer. And I get embarrassed when people fight about things they don’t know very much about. And I get discouraged when the way of the world turns against the care of nature.

SC: Gowing Swamp. I don’t know what’s become of the andromada swamp, but you know –

SC: A-n-d-r-o-m-e-d-a. Andromeda. The Walden Pond itself has turned into a dreadful place. It is Coney Island down there instead of a nice, woodsy pond. There was a woman named Mary Sherwood who I wish was still alive so you could interview her. You wouldn’t be the same if you did. She was determined. She wasn’t stupid. She was determined to save, in her terms, Walden Pond. And she was 90, I guess, by the time she got around to dying. She would come up here from Connecticut where she lived, and she would go through stop signs and stop on green lights. So it wasn’t anybody’s treat to get in the car with her. But she wasn’t a fool, and she tried hard to get Walden Pond protected. She failed. She had a little organization, and people used to send five dollars. And I took care of the money for her and got into her black books, because I tried to save her money for her when there was someone who wanted to take over the running of Walden Forever Wild. And I knew he would spend her money unwisely, and I protected her money. And she didn’t understand what I was doing, and there was a very nasty argument that took place with a lawyer and, I thought, “It’s not worth getting into legal problems with this poor woman. So I gave up, and the man got the job, and all her money was taken, which was very sad and very stupid, but that’s what happened. And Walden Forever Wild no longer exists, of course. And her name was Mary Sherwood, like Robin Hood.

SC: Because there were the swamps, the trees, there were the bushes. There were the things that had been lost and never found again. And Ray Angelo would hunt until he found the Labrador Tea, and that was very exciting. I was taken to see this bush that hadn’t been seen in years and years and years. And there suddenly was the Labrador Tea. And I should remember where it was, which I do. There was -

SC: There was the most important one called the Climbing Fern, and as my Christmas treat where I didn’t have any money, so a treat for Christmas was to be taken to see the Climbing Fern, and to swear that I would never tell where it is. It is still in existence.

SC: Trees. And the ground. And it’s not incredibly impressive. It isn’t rare and special in [chuckles] Connecticut, but it’s rare in special in Concord, because Thoreau said it was. And he found it, and it was special for him. Therefore it’s special for the few of us who know where it is. And I’m not telling.

MK: Did you witness during this time the rise of invasive species of various kinds?

SC: Mustard – yeah. But I’m not the person to talk to about those kinds of things. When it becomes a group job or a concern, I don’t deny that it’s important to go on a trip and pull them up, but I don’t. I am more of a lone person, and I think the reason is that so many years I spent alone. And Concord is no place for a single woman. It’s a family town; it’s a couples town; it’s not a place for a single woman. I knew that, and it was a mistake in my life. I should have gone somewhere like New York or something like that, because I was alone. I was a threat in some ways, but certainly not somebody who could become a family member, because they belonged in groups, in couples, and things like that. And so I got in the habit of not doing couples things, because I wasn’t a couple. And I didn’t have much chance to become a couple. And even after I married, it was kind of suspect. This is Concord, and that’s the way it was. It wasn’t big enough to be absorbed. I was absorbed somewhat because I went to the right schools and I had the right name. But by and large this isn’t the right place. And the kinds of things that I did, I could do by myself.

SC: No. I’ve said things that came into my mind, and I don’t know if what’s you wanted or not, or what. I don’t know what you’re going to do with all of that, but maybe you’ll tell me.

MK: - carrying this project out for the Special Collections. So it will, along with the other interviews, be lodged there.

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Sarah “Sally” Chapin Author, Book Mender, and Concord Free Public Library Volunteer

Sarah “Sally” Chapin
Author, Book Mender, and Concord Free Public Library Volunteer