Republican news item. [volume] (Laport, Pa.) 1896-19??, 1910-04-08
Burning the
Mortgage

mony at the old Edwards place" III
Maine. The word ceremony, in fact,
but family describes what happened.
1t was more like a jubilee, with the
semblance of a barbaric rite added.
All the Edwards kith and kin were
there, with a goodly number of, their
friends and neighbors.
At the farther end of the garden in
| front of the farmhouse, there is a
| knoll, at the top of which a mossy
ledge crops out On this ledge there
was pyre erected of dry wood, pitch
and rolls of curvey birch bark-a
| fine pile of it. At the centre stood an
iron rod, set in hole, drilled in the
ledge, and here an old oppressor of
the Edwards homesteam was burned
at the stake!
This sounds so savage that make
haste to say that the old oppressor
was not an animate form of flesh and
blood, but merely an edigy.
The eftigy was masterpiece in its
way, the very simulacrum of rapacity,
with face like the tabled Harpies
and hands like talons, hugging to its
breast a folded, yelowed paper
That yellowed paper was a mort
gage, which had rested on the nCme
! farm for one entire generation.
The history of that mortgage is so
much like thousands of others that
it would hardly be worth relating if,
at the last moment, a noble effort to
| lift it had not been crowned by sue
| cess.
| The Edwards farm adtoins the one
where | lived when boy. There
were three hundred acres of tillage,
pasture and woodland, with a we'll
built two-story house and two large
barns. The Edwards children-Ches-
ter. Thomas, Catherine, Eunice-were
my youthful neighbors.
In those days the farm was we'll
titled, unencumbered and prosperous;
but in an evil hour a travelling agent
caioed Jonas Edwards, the father,
into buying the State right to make
and sell a certain newly patented au-
tomato farm gate, for the sum of two
thousand dollars. Edwards had a
| thousand dollars in the savings bank;
he drew out this and raised the other
| thousand by mortgaging the home
| stead
1t was the old story. The much
vaunted gate proved a gate to trouble
| for Edwards. He was never able to
sell it. But if the gate proved illusory,
the mortgage was tangible. The farm
er spent the remaining fifteen years of
his life paying interest on it.
After his fathers death Chester Ed
wards went home to live" as peo-
pie say in Maine. The family then
cor sisted of his mother, his sister
Eunice, who was an invalid from
spinal curvature, and his mothers
| brother, Uncle Horace, who had lost
leg in the Civil War, but for some
reason did not draw a pension Ches-
ter began by selling off the wood and
timber on the old farm thereby pay
ing the accumulated interest. He
then embarked in the dairy business,
but did not prove successful farmer,
and during the fifth season lost almost
! his entire herd of COWS from tubercu-
losis. Becoming discouraged, he gave
up and set off suddenly for the Klon-
dixie gold region.
nephew then carried on the farm
for year, but did not remain.
Meanwhile Thomas, the younger
son, had become Methodist minister.
He was unable to do anything toward
reducing the mortgage.
The mortgage will get the old
place now, and no help for it," the
neighbors said.
But there was still another mem
Der of the family to be heard from
Catherine, the younger daughter.
Largely by her own efforts, Cath
crime Edwards had graduated from
the State normal school, and obtained
position as instructor in another
normal school at good salary. We
imagined that Catherine would aid
her mother and sister, but never sup
posed that she would come home to
care for them there.
But after Chester left, Catherine
never hesitated for moment. She
resigned her position, bade farewell
to all prospects of advancement as a
teacher, and came home.
lars. With this she paid years in
terest, had the leaky roofs repaired,
and hired such help as was necessary,
indoors and out. Yet what could she
do with that old farm and it's mort
gage?
That season, howeyer-1903 the
old place quietly put forward one of
its natural assets.
Our county is in what is known as
"the apple belt" of New England. kp-
pie trees spring up everywhere here,
and if grated and trimmed, soon bear
well. Although a cripple, Uncle Hor-
ace Flint had been in the habit
every spring of hobbling about frcm
one young apple tree to another, set
ting Baldwin scions and trimming the
trees He had not thought his work