Three Maple Trees (part 1)

Last week, two old maples trees were cut down, down the road from me here in Pleasant Valley. Until this winter there had been three, but a storm partially destroyed one and the town completed that business a day later. Last week someone finished off the whole damned thing. Now there remains three great stumps.

These trees were exceptionally old with diameters at the base of four to five feet. I haven’t counted the rings but I’d guess they were more than 200 years old, if not more. The house whose property they had lined was built in 1793, for Josiah Worthen, a shipwright. It’s my guess they were planted around that time, if not before.

They would have been there when John Greenleaf Whittier came rambling down the road visiting the home of Moses Huntington (an old map I have of Amesbury indicates the Huntingtons lived approximately where I now live) to attend Quaker meetings and discuss topics such as God, the abomination of slavery, and underground railways. Not only was this a pleasant valley it was a civilized one as well.

In "Mabel Martin", Whittier tells a story in verse about an Amesbury girl whose mother was hung during the Salem witch scares, the only woman from north of the Merrimack to meet such a fate. In an introductory note, he writes “Sussanna Martin, an aged woman of Amesbury, Mass., was tried and executed for the alleged crime of witchcraft. Her home was in what is now known as Pleasant Valley on the Merrimac.”

In the poem, Whittier first describes that valley:

And, through the shadow looking west,
You see the wavering river flow
Along a vale, that far below

Holds to the sun, the sheltering hills
And glimmering water-line between,
Broad fields of corn and meadows green,

And fruit-bent orchards grouped around
The low brown roofs and painted eaves,
And chimney-tops half hid in leaves.

No warmer valley hides behind
Yon wind-scourged sand-dunes, cold and bleak ;
No fairer river comes to seek

The wave-sung welcome of the sea,
Or mark the northmost border line
Of sun-loved growths of nut and vine.

Here, ground-fast in their native fields,
Untempted by the city's gain,
The quiet farmer folk remain

Who bear the pleasant name of Friends,
And keep their fathers' gentle ways
And simple speech of Bible days;