Knowlton Biography, Chapters 7 and 8
Seven: Buckets to Boston
In the summer of 1822, instead of regularly pursuing my studies, I procured a little pine timber of my father—of which he kept a regular account, as well as of my board, and that of my wife—borrowed a few tools, and, for the first time in my life, went to making buckets. Having made a one-horse load, I carried them to Boston; and that was the first time I was ever in any city.
Although he had committed himself to becoming a doctor, Charles had a wife to support. And he was impatient. After a winter of watching Dr. Wilder work and dismantling the corpse hidden in his bedroom, Charles probably concluded he had learned all he could from the timid village doctor.
Charles also had debts. He had agreed to pay Dr. Wilder two dollars a month for his medical training, but rather than collecting fifty cents a week the doctor had been giving Charles credit in his account book. By late spring Charles had accumulated a substantial debt. And Stephen Knowlton was charging his son and Tabitha rent. The Knowltons lived much closer to the Wilders than Tabitha’s family did, and Charles walked home to see his new bride every weekend. Adding seven miles each way to his weekend walks would have made the visits impractical, especially during the unpredictable New England winter.
So Charles took advantage of his skill with an axe. He’d heard that barrels and buckets were in great demand in Boston, where the merchants used them to store everything from butter to beer. Charles bought some pine logs from his father and built buckets. Although he’d never made the precise cuts required to fit straight slats together into a round, water-tight vessel, there were plenty of people in the neighborhood who had the skills. Charles learned quickly, and inspired by his neighbors’ reports of the high prices they’d received for their own buckets, he decided to take his load to Boston.
In 1822, Boston was a city of about forty-five thousand people. It was the fourth largest city in the United States, after New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Since its establishment in 1630, Boston had been one of the leading seaports on the Atlantic coast, and the city was focused on its famous harbor. The docks and waterfront were crowded and busy with merchants and bankers. Although it would be several years before familiar landmarks such as the Quincy Market and the Custom House were built, shops and open markets flourished around the Long Wharf and Faneuil Hall.
Charles Knowlton’s journey to the city began on a private road called the Fifth Massachusetts Turnpike, which passed through Templeton. The sixty-mile trip probably took three days. Charles was leading an old horse pulling a wagon-load of buckets, and he was caught in a rainstorm that turned the unpaved turnpike into mud. Tolls were five cents for a man and a single horse, with turnstiles every ten miles.
The Fifth Turnpike connected with the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike, which carried its travelers by Fresh Pond, passed the Cambridge Common the walls of Harvard College, and ended at the West Boston Bridge. There were over sixty private toll roads operating in Massachusetts in the first half of the nineteenth century. Built to accommodate not only travelers but also herds of sheep and cattle on their way to Boston markets, turnpikes cut through the countryside with roadbeds up to a hundred feet wide. The wide road Charles took from Templeton became narrower and more crowded, until it entered the city across the Charles River a few blocks north of the Boston Common.
The original town of Boston had been built on the Shawmut Peninsula, which was connected to the mainland only by a narrow causeway of land to the south and surrounded by salt marshes. Boston was still nearly an island when Charles first visited the city in 1822, although landfill projects had begun and dams had been built to harness the tides for powering mills. Approaching Boston from the west, Charles would have seen the Back Bay, a wide expanse of shallow water, and beyond it the hills and church steeples of the city. He would not have seen the legendary forest of masts in Boston Harbor immediately, because this was on the other side of the city behind Boston’s hills. The peninsula was much higher in 1822 than it is today. Beacon hill was cut down in the 1820s to fill the Mill Pond and Pemberton Hill was leveled a decade later to connect Boston’s North End with the rest of the city.
Charles arrived on a Saturday afternoon, following a rainstorm that slowed him down on the road. Entering Boston, Charles found himself walking in crowded, muddy streets. Traffic regulations were not developed until motor vehicles appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century, so Charles was surrounded by a confusion of pedestrians, horses, private carriages, and huge wagons pulled by teams of draft horses. Lining the streets in the commercial district were new, four story brick and stone buildings that were beginning to replace the wooden structures of Boston’s colonial past. The effect must have been slightly overwhelming for a country boy accustomed to towns of a thousand people, where he knew everyone by name.
Although he was wet and tired, Charles decided not to look for an inn. He wanted to get right to work selling his buckets and then get back on the road before dark. After the cost and delay of the trip, Charles was anxious to save the expense of a room in the city and to get home as quickly as possible. He stopped at the first store that looked like it might have a use for his buckets, and offered them for sale.
The storekeeper glanced briefly at Charles’s wagon-load of buckets and made him a surprisingly low offer. Charles was dismayed to hear that buckets were not fetching the high prices in Boston that his neighbors had boasted about. Even worse, the merchant offered him only a little cash, and suggested they barter for most of the buckets. The storekeeper said he would give Charles their value in loaf sugar, which he claimed was worth fifteen cents a pound.
Charles said he was surprised and disappointed by the low price the merchant offered for his buckets. He’d been told their value would be much higher, so Charles thanked the storekeeper and said he would try somewhere else. The merchant explained that the reason for his low offer was that Boston was currently flooded with more buckets than anyone could use, and the surplus had driven down prices. “Not supposing the man would tell me a falsehood,” Charles said, he accepted the explanation but told the storekeeper he’d still prefer cash.
But the young man from the countryside was no match for a Boston merchant negotiating a deal. The storekeeper reminded Charles he’d be returning home with his horse and an empty wagon, so why not load it up with sugar and take advantage of what amounted to free freight? Sugar was better than money, the merchant assured Charles, because he could sell it back home for a profit. Since Charles had been disappointed by the low price he’d gotten for the buckets, his profit on the sugar would help make up the difference. Sold on the apparent logic of the merchant’s pitch, Charles loaded his wagon with sugar and started for home.
Charles arrived back in Templeton after a nearly week on the road and learned how thoroughly he’d been taken in. If he’d gone farther than the first store he saw, his neighbors told him, Charles would have discovered that buckets were worth much more in Boston than the merchant had offered. The market was not glutted as the storekeeper had claimed, and the Templeton coopers couldn’t believe Charles had given his buckets away so cheaply when they were still getting the high prices they had boasted of. Worse, the Templeton merchants didn’t want Charles’s return cargo. It was poor quality sugar, they told him, and overpriced. They could buy a better product in Boston for fourteen cents a pound.
By now it was clear that Charles had chosen his career in medicine well—he would never be a businessman. Lacking the cash he’d built the buckets and taken them to Boston to raise, and unable to interest anyone in his load of second-rate sugar, Charles had no way to pay his debt to Dr. Wilder. But although he wasn’t the teacher Charles had hoped he’d be, Wilder wasn’t the old fool Charles took him for. The doctor added one final humiliation to Knowlton’s disastrous foray into business, when he took pity on Charles and agreed to take sugar in lieu of cash. Dr. Wilder allowed Charles to pay his debt with loaves of sugar—at a price of twelve cents per pound.
Eight: More Bodies Snatched
As we approached the village in Keene, many people were stirring, and several overtook us, some on horse-back, and some in carriages. At length Partridge says to me, "we are discovered." I then found that he was more apprehensive of trouble than myself, for I had no difficulty in accounting for all the movements without supposing we were "discovered" or even suspected.
Charles had already concluded that his time with Dr. Wilder was over, before the doctor took advantage of him with the sugar. But as the summer of 1822 came to an end, he had to decide what to do next. Should Charles find another preceptor and continue to work as an apprentice for a country doctor? Or would his time and money be better spent at one of the new schools offering medical lectures? Dr. Charles Adams in Keene had taken the course of lectures at Harvard, and had later taught anatomy there. Adams also spoke highly of the new program attached to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The Hanover Medical Lectures were less exclusive and cheaper than Harvard’s, and after his experience in Boston, a small town in central New Hampshire may have seemed less intimidating to Charles than a return to the big city.
The Medical Lectures at Hanover ran for fourteen weeks every fall and winter. They attracted young men from all over north-western New England, who wanted a more thorough medical education than they could get by watching older physicians and reading their books. These men were usually the sons of farmers, “mechanics,” or small businessmen. The sons of wealthy merchants and professional men attended the colleges, but not the new medical programs loosely attached to them. Only very rarely did a “college man” decide to study medicine.
After his failure with the buckets, Charles had only part of the fifty dollars he needed for tuition at Hanover. But he had heard a rumor that the Dr. Mussey, the school’s professor of anatomy and surgery, would pay fifty dollars for a “subject.” Charles convinced another young Templeton man named Partridge, who also planned to attend the medical lectures, that it would be easy enough to deliver a fresh corpse and split the bounty. After all, Charles had already snatched a body and gotten away with it.
Partridge agreed to the plan, and promised to supply an old wagon to transport the corpse. Charles pleaded with his father, and Stephen loaned him a broken-down old horse. Hanover was about eighty miles from Templeton, a two-day trip in good weather. But when the term began the two men were still at home, waiting for a chance to steal a corpse. The lectures were already under way before Knowlton and Partridge heard of a burial, and when they got into the grave they found the body was badly decomposed. “The weather had been warm when it was buried,” Charles said, “and it was too slippery for our purpose.” But they’d already gone to all the trouble of digging the body up. Thinking the bones might be worth something, the men took the corpse anyway.
Charles and his partner refilled the grave, hauled the body four miles into the woods, and left it hidden. The next night they returned, “buried all the soft parts,” and Charles “brought off the bones.” Knowlton and Partridge were still hoping to find a better corpse, and a few days later their luck changed. They heard a rumor of a burial ten miles south. It was in the wrong direction, but it was their only opportunity so it would have to do.
Charles and Partridge hitched up their old horse and wagon, and set out in search of their body. The only problem was, they had no idea which graveyard it had been buried in. They wandered around the countryside, visiting cemeteries looking for newly dug graves. In the middle of the night they found their fresh corpse. Wasting no time, Charles and Partridge hid the body in their wagon. They stopped at their homes only long enough to load their trunks, and left Templeton for Hanover.
The two men stopped in Winchendon, where they got a few hours of sleep and a quick breakfast at Richard Stuart’s. Charles did not say whether his father-in-law knew what they were carrying hidden in the wagon, but as a freethinker the stolen corpse would probably not have shocked Stuart, and may have amused him. They set out for Hanover in the morning, but their wagon was slow and heavy. Stephen Knowlton’s horse could barely pull it. Charles and Partridge walked up the hills, leading the old horse, but they still made very slow progress. And the fall day was unseasonably warm.
Knowlton and Partridge drove their horse through the outskirts of Keene in the early evening, and Partridge nearly panicked with fear of being caught. Rather than taking the wide main street into Keene and visiting Dr. Adams, Charles chose the long way around the town. The men drove their exhausted horse until nine o’clock that night, so they could stay with a friend who had lived in Templeton. Their friend lived on a remote farm, far from the heavily traveled town roads. Charles and Partridge avoided the risk of having their cargo discovered at an inn or tavern. And, equally important to Charles, they got a free meal.
Charles and his partner pushed themselves and their old horse hard the next day, and arrived in Hanover by evening. It was another warm day, and by the time they delivered the corpse to Professor Mussey, it was a slimy, decomposing mess. Worse, the professor was not buying corpses. Mussey wouldn’t be starting dissections for several weeks, he said, because it was just too difficult to keep bodies fresh in the warm fall weather.
Out of sympathy for the two penniless students, and probably also to keep the corpse from turning up somewhere embarrassing for the school, Mussey said he’d give Charles and Partridge twenty dollars if they would dispose of it according to his instructions. They took the professor’s money and followed his directions carefully. Charles and Partridge stuffed the rotting remains into a barrel, and then covered it with powdered charcoal. The job was time consuming and dirty. The men bought a load of coal from a blacksmith, burned it thoroughly, and then pounded the ash between stones to pulverize it. After a couple days of hard work, they had filled the barrel, disposed of the body, and were free begin their studies. “I cannot say we spoilt our fine clothes,” Charles said, “for we did not wear fine cloth.”