There was a lot of nostalgia for childhood days during the 19th century, and it was often expressed in well-known poems. For example, Samuel Woodworth’s “The Old Oaken Bucket” first appeared in 1817, and it declares at the outset, “How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood,/ When fond recollection presents them to view!” It became immensely popular. Many other such poems came along, including John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Barefoot Boy” (1855), which views youth as a time of innocence and joyful experience with nature, and James Whitcomb Riley’s “The Old Swimmin’ Hole” (1883), which also recalls “the merry days of youth.” There were many positive prose recollections, too, but none became quite so famous.
A memoir that I ran across in the March 23, 1881, “Macomb Journal” reminded me of that literary tradition of childhood memories—but it ultimately challenges that nostalgic view, which was so popular throughout the 1800s. It was written by a well-known, much-liked resident named Isaac Montfort, who was born in frontier Ohio during 1819, spent his later childhood in frontier Indiana, and then moved to McDonough County in the early 1850s. He became the town’s first optician, peddling glasses to the local public—for $2.50 a pair. And he often shared his travel experiences in the region by writing articles for the “Macomb Journal.”
His short memoir, titled “Air Castles,” begins by admitting that naturally, as we get older, there are many things we like to recall about our early years, back when boys like him “ran foot-races, wrestled, turned the wagon-wheel, did hand-springs and summersaults, played hide-and-seek, blind man’s bluff, leap-frog, corner-ball . . . and various games of marbles. . . .” And like many older folks, he remembered his mother’s “good pumpkin, mince, and custard pies; cookies, doughnuts, ginger-bread, light biscuits, buckwheat cakes, and waffles”—as well as “the fried chicken and pot-pies in the summers, and the sausages, spare-ribs, backbones, and souse [i.e., the pickled feet, ears, and other parts from pigs] eaten in the winter.”
But Montfort emphasizes that focusing only on such enjoyable things of youth makes our memories of early days into “air castles”—one-sided idealizations that fail to reflect difficult realities. The rest of his memoir centers on a host of challenges and hard times that so many young people also encountered.
One was the hard work that boys learned to do on the frontier, beginning with “preparing fire-wood, and feeding the chickens, pigs, and cows,” and which led to “clearing up the wild forest, rolling logs, burning brush, and breaking the ground with a barshear plow that had a wooden mould-board—which was capable of hitting the plow-boy in the stomach and ribs.”
And he recalled his school days, too, which lasted only three months a year, in a building that was not very comfortable—“an old log schoolhouse, with a puncheon floor, greased paper windows, and a long bench so high that we could not reach our feet to the floor, and was so narrow that careful balancing was necessary.” And of course, the demanding schoolmaster “had a birch rod in his hand, ready to enforce order.”
But beyond all of that were the health risks that every family faced back then, when there were many diseases and no doctors or very helpful medicines. As he puts it, “Who would like to go back to childhood and risk living over those days, and months, and years . . . of colic, toothaches, earaches, headaches, mumps, measles, whooping cough, chicken-pox, scarlet fever, stone-bruises, worms, and itch, and have to suffer the remedies often used—bleeding, blisters, castor oil, salts, wormseed oil, quinine, calomel, blue mass, rhubarb, Epsom salts, sulphur, and bathing with vinegar and copperas. . . .”
And Montfort also recalls making it into young adulthood, when he “got a sweet wife,” but they had “to live in a log cabin,” and they “had to work hard and earn our own living, or else starve.” Among other things, he remembers “the old-fashioned, crooked-bed, wide-track wagon, with a linch-pin,” which he used, “driving from 40 to 100 miles, to market, and being absent from home for five to ten days,” just to sell some wheat, pork, and other farm products. And while he and his young wife were struggling, “sickness came” for them, too.
It is not surprising that Montfort praises the new world of the 1880s (when he was in his sixties), which was characterized by “the many great improvements of the present time—modern dwellings, schoolhouses, churches, implements, railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, etc.” So, he does not join the many writers in his century who look back and say, “The former days were better than these.” In his view, we shouldn’t build “air castles” (or idealized memories) about our personal past by recalling only the more pleasant things that we have experienced.
Montfort remained in Macomb for the rest of his life, and he was a socially popular figure until his death in 1898. In a sense, he was not trying to be critical of others with his 1881 memoir and commentary, just wanting to help people appreciate the cultural changes that had taken place since their early days so they could be positive about the experience they were having in their own later years and be grateful for what they had struggled through. And from what I’ve learned about Isaac Montfort, he had a very good time during his senior years. As we mark Older Americans Month, this May, he is an early Macomb resident worth remembering.
Writer and speaker John Hallwas is a columnist for the “McDonough County Voice.”