Some Interesting History Connected with
The Life and Death of Mary Maria Sprague
July 28, 1861, the fifth and last child was born at Edmeston, to William Lawton Elsworth and her who before her marriage to William on Sept. 5, 1849, had been Lucina Miranda Dye. The child was named by her aunt Lucinda and called Mary Maria. Before Mary was old enough to know her father well, he, to save being drafted with no remuneration, volunteered in the Union army and drew his incentive bounty money of $300 or $500. Hard-headed Lucina, getting word of a farm for sale in Smyrna, took that money and bought the fifty-acre farm now known as the Harvey place for about $30 an acre and moved there while William was still with the soldiers. In 1865 she was tying hops in her little yard across the road from the Bartlett schoolhouse, having Mary with her while the four older children were in school. She looked up and saw William walking over the Cleveland hill from the war. In a hustle she grabbed Mary by the hand and snatched her over the stone wall, yelling the news to a girl who was just going into the schoolhouse. The girl gave the news at the doorway and the other four Elsworths piled out without asking permission. All hurried down to the house to meet the returning veteran and three-year-old Mary always remembered her father's picking her up and carrying her into the house.
Mary was a lively youngster, climbing trees, skipping the rope or picking wild strawberries to trade with an old, first settler neighbor for maple sugar while developing in herself the family passion for hard work. She was young when her brother and a cousin were getting out ties for building the Auburn branch railroad, when the first trains ran through Smyrna and the home guard trained on Gardner's flat between the railroad and the dugway, when she saw boats plying on the Chenango canal and when her father had to pay toll on the road when taking butter by horses and wagon from Smyrna Hill to Norwich. She was young when she picked ideas from her ingenious father and learned to spin and knit and weave. She went to bed by the light of a tallow candle, a thing which was used even after she had children. She wove cloth after marriage and rag carpets in the nineties and made soft soap in those later days.
When she was sixteen she worked for Mrs. Morley, a pioneer woman of seventy, and she was wont to tell how two other pioneer women visited Mrs. Morley and the three old ladies sat and talked about early days when the neighbors gathered to skid logs for clearing the land and the Morley's could look across the valley at eventide and see lights glowing where the Bartletts and Boyntons were carving homesteads out of the wilderness. Another favorite topic was how the Morley's got an aged man to come and shave shingles to reroof the barn.
As a girl Mary went away hop-picking, took in a sociable on Faulkner hill, now Lynn Campbell's back lot, where Leonard Enos had been born in 1845, and joined loads of young people on spelling down parties between the Jones and Bartlett districts.
But Mary grew up and became an attractive young lady, so attractive in fact that a certain young native of Smyrna, William Peter Sprague who lived from July 15, 1858 to Feb. 17, 1929, got his eyes so filled that he begged off from his engagement to Gertie Messenger to bestow his attentions upon Mary. On Feb. --, 1880 came their wedding in the home where she had been prepared a Baptist by a fond mother and father, who was so pious that he had been dubbed by Gib Wedge as "The preacher."
To be continued
From the Follett Family Scrapbook, original source and date unknown.
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