Duplex Tree

Wallace’s book is titled History of Canaan NH. It does contain quite a bit of history. But it contains something else, as well, a memoir of ordinary people in extraordinary times written by a man with an interesting past.

William Allen Wallace arrived with his family in Canaan in 1817. He was two. The Wallace family followed Canaan’s first settler of European descent, John Scofield, by only 60 years. Canaan was new and the country was new.

Early European arrivals took the unbroken expanse of towering forest as evidence that the soil must be promising for crops. They had not yet contended with the granite boulders the state eventually took as an emblem. As it began, so it continued. From it’s establishment as a settlement until today, New Hampshire has steadfastly refused every attempt to wrest money from her ground.

Untitled by Gary Hamel

When the soil proved too rocky to farm profitably, people turned their hopes towards sheep. Very special Marino sheep that produced wool of the finest quality. Riches beckoned. In their pursuit, sheep ranchers cut down nearly 80% of all the trees in New Hampshire. This was just in time for the explosion of interest in cotton that overwhelmed the now-outmoded wool industry.

The sheep thing fizzled because cotton supplanted wool as the fabric of choice. There are a host of reasons for this ranging from the ease of printing colorful patterns on cotton to the length of the cotton fibers being better suited to mechanical weaving. Cotton was a world-changing commodity. Men everywhere were getting rich off cotton. Everywhere except, of course, New Hampshire and her many sheep.

Wallace’s father was in the potash business and the family ran a general store, which made the family one of prominence in a community of subsistence farmers. William left home when he was 15, lured away by the excitement of the printing press.

The printing press combined with the railroad was the Internet of the 1800s. Conversation exploded. People with something to say used to go from town to town proclaiming it. Wallace’s book references several traveling speakers on the subject of slavery that stirred passions around Noyes Academy in 1834.

Innovations in printing presses made them more affordable and there was an explosion of interest in writing and reading the thoughts of the moment. Just like today. The addition of linking up the country with a rail network meant that what someone was saying in Boston could be sent by train so that someone in South Carolina could read the insult reasonably close to when it was issued.

And they did hit reply. Newspapers of the day were full of back and forth as various thinkers had their say. The writing was animated and combative. Again, just like today.

untitled, Gary Hamel

This is the world William Allen Wallace lived in. He was a newspaper man. He established at least one, co-owned at least two and wrote for many more. His early years were based in the rough and tumble press of New England. But Wallace was restless and made his way to California when making your way to California was the journey of a lifetime.

He was deeply involved with the politics of his day. He also survived harrowing adventures traveling around the western U.S. reporting for this or that paper. He was Alta California’s correspondent in Washington, D.C. during the early years of the Civil War. Oh, and if that weren’t enough, he was an amateur botanist, credited with discovering several previously unrecorded species of plant.

When he returned to Canaan, married and had a son, he was a man in his 50s with an exciting life behind him. This was the man who began and never finished his history of Canaan New Hampshire.

James tells us that as his father committed himself to the history project around 1870. Wallace would have been near 60. Son James says that as his father aged, he began to do more than record facts.

page 575

He had kept a diary nearly all his life. His habit was to write it up at the end of the week. In later years it did not record events so much as his own thoughts upon them, the event serving as a text.

This wisdom and graceful reflection shaped the narrative he began. In his preface, William Wallace explains the intended scope of his work.   

page vii

All history should be the history of the people. It is what the people are doing in villages, communities and families, that lie at the foundation of national character, and sentiment, and consequently of national events. […].

The village dis­putes, religious quarrels, and political discussions of past times, are analogous to those to which the present generation is exposed. […]

We are living over the same lines with some variations, but subject to the same general laws of action, inas­much as we possess the same natures and are governed by the same passions and motives, which lead to similar results.

If his intention was for us to see the world in a grain of sand, he succeeded.

So familiar are his characters, that Wallace might as well have been writing about today. Everyone is recognizable once you get through the barrier of archaic language and ignorance of political and literary references of the 1800s.

In this blog, I will try to reassemble various narratives in Wallace’s History. By reassemble, I mean introduce the main players with their context as they assume their roles in the narrative, not 50 pages before or 300 pages after.

I will also try to interpret the perplexing references to political events and social mores.

This post is called Duplex Tree because that is one of the very early references in the book that I have never been able to track down, but its meaning has become clear through context.

In son James Wallace’s introduction to his father’s book, he quotes his father as having said:

page iii

…I grew up to strong youth on the shores of the beautiful pond that fronts our street. It was a pleasant resort for thoughtful people. Old and young used to linger about there, and many confidences were imparted, some of which I shall never reveal. I was very near, and was con­scious of much that was said and done in society, in politics, and in religion. Opinions were freely expressed before me, because, being merely a duplex tree, no one supposed my ears might ever give tongue to my voice. I made note of many things and treasured them up. Some of these events occurred so long ago that it is safe to write of them. They had an interest for those who took part in them as similar events have today, and formed epochs in men’s lives.”

Wallace’s father ran a general store in a town where the general store was one of the only places that was public. Wallace's general store was lisenced to sell rum. The Wallace family was prominent in town and their store was a social hub. I imagine young Wallace half-hidden in the shadows, paying close attention as his father’s friends and neighbors drank and shared their stories. I believe in referring to himself as a duplex tree he is likening himself to a graft of new growth on an established tree, something Wallace would have been very familiar with.

Apple trees will not grow true from seed. If you plant a seed from an apple, it is unlikely that the resulting tree will produce apples similar to the original. Apple trees are “promiscuous,” which means they prefer pollen from apple trees different from themselves.

Because no one can afford to wait years to find out whether their apple tree produces tasty apples, farmers don’t grow apples from seed. They grow apples from grafts. Instead of letting the rootstock grow a trunk, a piece of an apple tree with a  proven apple is grafted onto the would-be trunk. That graft is the apple the tree will produce. Apples are always “duplex trees” having, as they all do, both a root stock and a fruiting stock grafted together.

Wallace had to know this. Apples were so important to town life that Wallace chronicled the results of many years’ apple harvests in his book. And this isn’t because our forebears baked a lot of pie. The apple harvest of each year was recorded in gallons of cider produced. This was the measure of local wellbeing.

The Internet holds few references to “duplex tree” outside of Wallace’s book. The most common usage (outside something technical in pipes) is the botanical one. Wallace is alone in his use of the term as metaphor, likening his boyhood self as a mere graft of new stock on an old tree.*

The book returns often to Wallace’s boyhood. Huge swaths of the History are about things that took place either in the Wallace household or in the Wallace store. Many of these events were attended by a young William.

This is why the book can so easily be seen as a memoir. Wallace slips into the voice of his childhood now and then, something that was perplexing at first. It happens more than once in the book that, when giving a quick character sketch, Wallace will remark on whether or not boys were fond of some adult. Why on earth was Wallace keeping track of how children viewed the adults around them? I entertained and rejected the notion that in the late 1800s, somehow, adults gave a crap about what boys were thinking. Eventually, I decided it was simply sweet on Wallace’s part to give such credence to the impressions of children. It didn’t occur to me until much later that Wallace was relating his own impressions when he did this.

When he provided information about this or that person, he inserted comments on how he felt about them, when he knew them as a child. The impressions he formed as a child cast shadows over the story he told as an old man. The major narrative propulsion of Wallace’s history is the establishment and destruction of Noyes Academy. Wallace was not in Canaan when that happened. He was already launched into his career as a journalist. But he knew all the players from his childhood, and how Wallace felt about someone as a child might play something of a role in how the events around Noyes Academy are presented by him as a man in his 70s.

When I would recount the story of Noyes to anyone, I would always say that while Jacob Trussell is the villain of the story, the real asshole was his henchman Elijah Blaisdell. Wallace goes out of his way more than a few times in the book to disparage Elijah.

I think I know why, besides the fact that Elijah likely was an asshole.

Elijah Blaisdell was a schoolmaster. And not a beloved one. When writing about the school masters who came and went from Canaan, Wallace includes this paragraph.

Page 250

Their [school masters] laws like Draco’s had penalties, and could only be appeased by corporal suffering. There was Edward Olcott, a rusticated student; and Elijah Blaisdell, who spared nobody somebody was being punished all the time; and the Rev. Joseph L. Richardson, who afterwards became notorious as one of the leaders of the mob that destroyed the academy; he used to believe that children could endure cold and thirst as well as bodily tortures. He would tell us that these things, although they appeared to be severe judgments, were intended as blessings, and if we profited by them we should receive a crown of righteousness at some future time; but I never seemed to appreciate his prophetic promises in our behalf.

Wallace had animus built up since childhood and I imagine it gave him great pleasure to hang Elijah Blaisdell out to dry. Rev. Joseph L. Richardson also wasn’t spared in the telling of Noyes Academy.

This isn’t to discredit Wallace’s telling by saying that his presentation is slanted. His son James goes to great lengths to explain that his father was a stickler for the truth. It is to argue that Wallace’s History of Canaan is as much memoir as history and is very much informed by the intention he stated himself in the preface.

Wallace’s larger mission in writing his History was to show us the world in a grain of sand. Or perhaps better said, to pay close enough attention to a grain of sand that he can show us the whole world within it.

*edited on 8-8-24 to remove notion that Wallace "coined" the term duplex tree and in light of material pointed out by a good friend.