Echoes of Enoch Underwood

I have heard my father William J. Underwood say he was always a little in awe of his father: any request was usually made through the mother. He told of driving, sitting between his father and mother, with his hand conveniently open if by chance his father should forget and drop the reins! He was, my father said, the strongest man he ever saw, although of a spare and wiry frame. That he had seen him pick up the tongue of a wagon loaded with lumber and start it.[1]

He was wise in the ways of young people. Dennis Warren once told me he allowed the boys to have a bowl in the basement of the church.[2] Once when my father was a lad, he intimated to his father that he had a great curiosity to know how beer tasted. His father, although an ardent prohibitionist, did not make the mistake of opposing the boy.

William J. Underwood was always a little in awe of his father.

He merely said, “My son, here is some money, the next saloon we pass you can go in and find out.” They did so, the father waiting outside while the boy made his experiment. 

My father also told of trying conclusions with his father in a wrestling match when he was almost eighteen and feeling pretty cocky, and how his father laid down his hoe–they were hoeing the beans–and threw him in less time than it takes to tell of it.[3]

When my father and his older brother were young they owned twin filly colts. One was gentle and the other somewhat intractable. The boys were told to saddle up for their father one day, and by accident or design put the saddle on the intractable one. Then snickering and perhaps a bit scared, watched their father ride off. Uncle Fred says he was a splendid horseman. Back he came in disarray and disgust. “You boys have spoiled this mare,” he exclaimed. The great granddaughter of the gentle filly is still at Westwood Farm–a living link with the past.[4]

He wrote in his diary: “My sons are both irreligious men, but I notice they have the confidence of their employers.”

My father said he was always a bit ashamed and fearful of his father’s abolitionist activities and always dreaded that he might wake and find that his father had been taken to jail. There was a room off the roof, opening off what is called the dark closet (I lived in the house three months without discovering it) where the fugitives were hidden. It is said–I have heard my father say–that his father tolled his church bell when John Brown was executed.[5]

Their life was primitive. I have heard my father say the bulk of their purchases were a bolt of linsey-woolsey and a barrel of salt–and great was the dismay when one time the salt barrel fell into the river on the way home.