Flags
New Ipswich Historical Society
Flag Raising Ceremony at Smithville, New Ipswich
Flags of the Nations
On this day - May 12, 1908
James Roger diary entry
12th May (Tuesday)
Muggy day wind W and variable. Thunderstorms in afternoon. David lifting rocks in Davis field and took settees to Baptist church also sowed some seeds. Mother and I went to club house and cleaned up part of house. Home at 4:30 pm
On this day - May 12, 1897
William Jurian Kaula diary - the peasants
Living among the peasants will be a new life and one full of interest. Madam Travet is a pleasant old lady and knows how to manage to accomade [accommodate?] the students. Monsieur Travet is a good old man but occupies a secondary position in the household. His life is like that of the other peasants who toil all day working in the fields. We fare exceedingly well and the madam is a good cook. She has the enviable reputation of having lived in Paris, Dieppe, and Rouen* which has enlarged her knowledge and intellect. Judging from these two the peasants would be a class of intelligent people, but the neighbors and the ones we meet around the town are very ignorant. Some of them, so M. Travet says, still believe the earth is flat. The population seems to be made up of old men and women who are so homely that I cannot look them straight in the face. They drag around two pieces of cord-wood called sabots,** have ill-shaped figures with a bent back, awful teeth and occasionaly [sic] one with misplaced eyes. A woman toils in the fields like a man, digging and hoeing all day long. I have since discovered many children around the heaps of dirt in the yards. One quarter are pleasant though very plain and simple. It is above all quite clean. The houses contain no spare room and all the space is utilized. The kitchen and dining room is apt to be the same place but Madam Travet's general room is certainly a cosy place. There is the large fireplace and oven, the walls covered with brilliant and shining copper and pewter utensils, the tall clock that strikes the hour twice in sucession [succession], the water tank, and a few chromoes*** besides a couple of oil portraits executed by some of the students of last season. I never was in such a country for birds, they sign [sing] in the trees in the yard all day long and at night we have a treat in the form of a continual concert from a nightingale who has a nest with her young but a few rods**** from the house. This "rissignol" as the French call it is the sweetest songbird that I have ever heard. It begins before nine o'clock and seems just as fresh and enthusiastic at day-break.
Diary Footnote: Our house faces a small courtyard with the outlook on two stone barns, two wells, piles of faggots,***** and a few trees. The view from the dining room is into a barnyard and hardly appetizing. The back of the houses face the street behind with no windows. The aspect on this side consists of a curious mixture of sheds, roofs, gables, and chimneys that are extremely puzzling in the confusion as the economy of space utilized when there is as much room on the other side. This is the general character of the peasants houses all over the town. They are huddled in bunches and blocks with very cramped quarters while outside of the village there are miles and miles without a single house until the next village.
* Dieppe and Rouen are northwest of Paris, with Dieppe being a fishing village on the coast looking toward England.
** Sabots = wooden shoe or clog
*** Chromoes = possibly decorative metal or tin item
**** Rod = 16.5 feet
***** Faggots = a bundle of sticks or branches
Great pictures. I was at that parade. I knew most of the 'flag' ladies, many were friends of my mother.
Where in Smithville would they have had such a large flag pole? At the cemetary?