Colman P. Dr. Father of the Man

Archeologists and other purveyors of historical artifacts and buried data tell us how fascinating it is to discover that ancient relics are strangely familiar, almost predictably recognizable. I found this to be true as I scrutinized the articles found in King Tut’s and his family’s tombs. The engravings were beautiful and intricate, but crude. Some seemed to resemble childlike drawings. The metalwork was ornate, but reflected the simple signature of a common craftsman.

The more we study the past, the closer we begin to see the present more clearly. Perhaps our roots are not as far removed from the trunk and the branches, or even the buds and the new leaves and seasonal fruit, as we may believe. As I delve deeper into the leaves and layers of the Colman family archives, I find the old dry lifeless pages beginning to reabsorb light and texture. Like Ezekiel’s experience in the valley of dry bones, old records and buried memories begin to take on a new life of their own. Forgotten faces and suppressed secrets, lost conversations, victories and shameful defeats, are unearthed and exposed to the rejuvenating influence of light, insight and reflection. My own journey into the past is not unlike Hawthorne’s description in The Scarlet Letter (1840 c.) of the author’s discovery of a dry, yellowed, forgotten parchment scroll, and the infamous remnant of the scarlet letter “A” with finely embroidered edges, which contained the cold embers of a once white-hot scandalous affair concerning a certain Hester Prynne (Synne + Pryde=Prynne). It is, indeed, a matter of historical fact that one of Hawthorne’s own ancestral Quaker stock, a certain John Hawthorne, was one of the judges presiding over the witch trials in Old Salem two centuries earlier in 1692. Curiously, one of the celebrated New England fireside poets, himself a Quaker, John Greenleaf Whittier, was also a contemporary of Hawthorne and resident of Boston (and later Danvers). Coincidentally or not, he also wrote copious volumes of poetry describing his forays into the New Hampshire wilderness, including the Lakes Region, the region of Merrimack and the Amoskeag Falls (of my native home of Manchester), and regions east, to his beloved Hampton, where he also lived, and in honor of which he dedicated a significant portion of his verse. Could this be simple coincidence? Is it also mere coincidence that a few short years ago, on a brief flea market expedition in the old town of Hudson, I happened upon a framed and forgotten hand-written page of stationery with inked, cursive stanzas from the poem entitled Hazel blossoms (1874), an excerpt which had been penned in loving memory of Whittier’s sister, Elizabeth H. Whittier? The page, adorned with a pastel watercolor of yellow Witch Hazel flowers and verdant stems, and imprinted with the inscription “Danvers, Mass.,” is also signed “John G Whittier,” and dated, “4th Mo 26 1882.”






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