The Return To S'cunnet
He came back to his farm in Little Compton and schemes as vasty as his house swam in his brain. He platted the farm with wide avenues, and lots to sell to summer people. He built a French-style chateau on a knoll, and Round Pond, close by his house he renamed Lake Josephine after his second wife. This was long before autos came in; the "avenues" were built but the lots didn't sell.
He renovated the stone house that his father, David had built for a hotel. Designs in gold and bronze emblazoned the ceilings. In the room just below the cupola he mounted a stuffed eagle, had another eagle painted on the ceiling. He kept this room well stocked with liquor and when visitors were invited to "hear the eagle scream" they knew what that meant.
Early of a morning he would drive over to the boat landing with a letter addressed to Jacob Wirth, Providence. "don't ferget to mail it," he would say to Hubert Cook, the Queen City's purser. "Need some more inside varnish up to the house."
He had plenty of "inside varnish" when the veterans of the 44th Massachusetts Regiment came for his clambake. These men were grateful for being relieved from the rebel trap in North Carolina. They marched in good order up from the landing with a fife and drum corps ahead of them and sat at two long tables on the lawn west of the house. After the clambake and speeches, the Colonel hollered, "Come up to my sanctum sanctorum, all of ye, and hear the eagle scream."
The cannonade on the Pimlico couldn't have been louder then the tumult under the cupola. When it ended, the 44th retired in disorders and many of its sorely wounded had to be helped down the stairs. They sprawled at the tables in a shapes and almost everyone made some sort of speech. They h'istend one man to a chair atop a table. After he fought the battle over and over again, he swung the chair around his head, hollered "Three chairs for the hero of little Washington," then fell prone to the ground.
"Twas a rout, a disorderly straggle back to the steamboat and when the fife and the drum corps dragged itself together on deck and played "Tenting Tonight" the sounds it emitted were said to be the most nerve-shattering ever heard in the town.
The Colonel interested himself a graphite mine up the road but all his schemes came to nothing. He did not live to see the Lizzies flooding the town, and the summer houses growing like mushrooms in the fields and pasture he had platted out.
He grew old and died in his vasty stone house, becoming so deaf near the end that he could not hear the thump of the waves the lonely cries of the gulls. He was an old soldier who had seen his day, and 'tis a pity so for pay heed to his statue.
Written by David Patten for The Providence Journal