Simeon Goes to Washington

By the time Simeon had been married for five years, he had paid for his business and owned a house worth $2,000, built by his brother William. In one of his diaries, he observes that, “For nearly 30 years, my family consisted of between 10 and 15 people, including children. Simeon had ten children, and his wife's mother Charity Goddard lived with them, as well as his wife's four siblings, Edward, Nathan, Harriet and Charlotte Goddard. His children were Harriet, born in 1819; George, born in 1821; Mary, born in 1823; Lemuel, born in 1825; Sarah, born in 1827; Frances, born in 1828; Ellen, born in 1831; Agnes, born in 1833, Julia, born in 1835; and Charlotte, born in 1837. Sarah married A.B. Flanders, and it was her son and daughter who wrote “Simeon Ide, Yeoman, Freedman, and Pioneer Printer”.

In 1820, Simeon moved his print shop to the second floor of West's Tavern. West's Tavern was where Vermont's founders signed the Constitution of Vermont in 1777. In 1825, Simeon became a bookbinder and publisher as well as a printer, and moved to even bigger quarters. He had begun printing for both the Vermont government and the federal government. He began printing the laws of Vermont, and he got a printing contract for the U.S. Post Office.

Simeon went all the way to Washington, D.C. to apply in person for the Post Office contract.

His trip began when he left Windsor by stagecoach at 1:00 p.m, and arrived in Boston at 8:00 pm. The next day, he took a stagecoach to Providence, Rhode Island. On the afternoon of the third day, he took a steamboat to New York. He didn't like the steamboat ride, but he wasn't seasick. He didn't like the sound of the water in the bilge because he couldn't sleep. Late on the fourth day, he left New York for New Jersey, headed for Philadelphia. On this leg of the trip he alternated between riding watercraft and stagecoach. On the morning of the fifth day he left Philadelphia on a steamship bound for Baltimore. On this ship, he made friends with a Quaker gentleman.

This man was also headed for Washington, D.C. and he was on the same stagecoach train, a train of eight four-horse coaches. They weren't in the same coach, though. Simeon was in Coach Four and the other man was in Coach Two. When they got to Baltimore, Simeon switched with someone else so that he could ride in coach two with his new friend.

Soon they were on their way again. Simeon was irritated at the long breaks the drivers took. It seems that the drivers liked to stop for a while and  “take a drop to lay the dust”. After a fairly long interval of steady driving they had to stop because there had been a terrible accident. Coach Four had overturned and landed at the bottom of a ravine. Many people were hurt and several died. Apparently after the last stop, when they got going again, Coach Four had headed out ahead of Coach Three and the driver of Coach Three tried to pass Coach Four and ended up running Coach Four off the road. Simeon says that “Rum was the cause of the accident, or I should perhaps say, the recklessness of the drivers produced by the rum.”

Luckily, because he had switched coaches, Simeon arrived in Washington without mishap, and personally submitted his bid for the Post Office contract. When he was in Washington, a newspaper reporter someone from Windsor knew showed him around the town and he actually got to meet President John Quincy Adams. He had to repeat the whole process of his trip in reverse, to make it back to Windsor. A few weeks after he got back to Vermont, he was notified that he had won the bid. His expenses for the whole trip “footed up to about $70”.