Simeon Ide was a prominent printer in
Windsor. He printed the “New England Farmer's Almanac” and also
printed the newspaper “The Vermont Republican” from 1809 –
1818. There is plenty of information on Simeon Ide online. He wrote
a book called “The Franklinsonian”, an autobiography. Simeon
firmly believed that children were brought up better when he was a
kid than his grandchildren were being brought up, and wrote the book
to tell his grandkids what it was like when he was their age. He
also kept a diary for his whole life. One of his descendants, Louis
Flanders, used the diaries and book to write a biography called
“Simeon Ide, Freeman, Yeoman and Pioneer Printer.”
Simeon's parents were Lemuel and Sarah
Ide of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Simeon was their first child, born
in 1794. When they were first married, they started life with a
“modest patrimony”. Lemuel was a carpenter by trade. If he had
stuck to carpentry, he would have been fine, but he lost all of his
money investing in real estate.
Things weren't going too well for
Lemuel in Massachusetts, so he moved to Vermont with his wife and two
young sons. The family moved around Vermont quite a bit for several
years. Lemuel started a small house in Clarendon, but moved to
Reading before it was finished. As his family grew to include twin
daughters, he had a harder time making ends meet than ever. He
decided that maybe he could earn back his losses by becoming a
sailor, so he left his family and went to sea.
While Lemuel was at sea, he left his
family in the care of his brother-in-law, Zenas Stone. Simeon's
mother earned money teaching school, sewing, and doing housework for
neighbors, but she just couldn't earn enough money to support her
children. When Simeon was 5, his uncle took him to live with his
grandparents in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. This trip was a two day
ride in an open lumber sleigh in the dead of winter. Ide says, in
“The Franklinsonian”, “It was a tedious, cold ride, especially
since his clothing wasn't very abundant.” You have to wonder how
bad things were, that Uncle Zenas thought it was necessary to make
that long, cold trip.
Simeon's grandparents thought the
world of him. There were two cousins in Shrewsbury, but not old
enough for Simeon to really play with, or to go to school with. He
went to church with his grandparents, and went to school there for
two months in the summer and two months in the winter. At seven
years old, he drove the horse plow and drove his grandmother and
great-grandmother in the family carriage to do their shopping in a
nearby village of Worcester.
Lemuel returned from his stint at sea
none the richer. In his book, Simeon says that his father “most
likely decided to find his fortune was on dry land, where he had lost
it.” Lemuel returned to carpentry, built up a business, and the
family's fortunes improved. When Simeon was seven, his uncle
returned to Shrewsbury and brought him home to Vermont.
The family settled down in Reading.
Simeon adored his mother. He says, “She was one of the best of
women. She was the mother of eight
children. She labored early and late for their welfare. She had a
winning way of enforcing her precepts and encouraging her children in
the practice of industry and economy. She lived to the great age of
ninety-one years.” He tells about her spinning flax and carding
wool by the light of the fireplace, while telling the children
stories about Washington, Lafayette and Franklin. When Simeon became
a printer as an adult, he printed a memoir of a Revolutionary War
Hero for free. I bet he was thinking of his mother's stories by the
fire when he was a young boy.
When
you read “The Franklinsonian”, you get the impression that Simeon
didn't think as much of his father, which is understandable, in light
of the fact that his father's inability to earn a living made it
necessary for his son to leave his mother and siblings for two years.
Flanders, in his book “Simeon Ide”, describes a passage in one
of Simeon's diaries when Simeon does mention his father, when he
describes how his father built a fire in the fireplace. “ He first
cleared away a bushel or so of ashes, reserving in a two pail iron
kettle the live embers, then he rolled in a “backlog” about three
and a half feet long by two feet in diameter, then on top of it he
placed a sub- backlog, same length and about half the size, then
placed the large kitchen andirons in due order, and on them another
log, called the “forestick”, about the same size as the sub. Thus
the foundation of the
Christmas fire was laid.” His father then used the embers, some
small kindling and some split wood to build the Christmas fire.
If you can get
past the moralizing, “The Young Franklinsonian” is a pretty
interesting, readable account of life for a young boy in Vermont in the early
1800's.It is pretty rare that you find a firsthand account of a kid's life from that era. It's obvious that Simeon is using this book as a way to let people know how much better he was raised, how hard he worked, and so on, but there is plenty of story there to enjoy. You can read the whole book online at
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