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Whither Zither
by Peter Berryman

November 2000

Holiday Song Headquarters

You know how it is when you're driving around in unfamiliar urban areas these days: they seem familiar. The uniqueness of the area has to do with whether the Wendy's has stopped carrying Pitas yet, and how many blocks the Home Depot is from the Office Depot. My music partner Lou and I, on an early October tour of the Boston area, were relieved to hear rumors of a nearby location whose history stretches back to a time even before Frostys, stud finders, and Sharpies.

It was autumn, so we had dragged along our peculiar new Thanksgiving song. When introducing it at our first gig, near the Burlington Mall just past I-95, I mentioned that I doubted the song would have quite the success of "Over the River and Through the Woods." Someone explained excitedly to Lou after the show that "Over the River..." had been written in or near nearby Sudbury, MA, and that the river in question was the Sudbury River. As Lou drove us back to our motel in Southborough, I took out my book light and had a peek at the Atlas. Sudbury MA is only about 10 miles from Southborough, and I thought it would be cool to have a look at the spot, maybe on the way back to our motel after our last gig. Toss a cranberry in the river for luck.

Five days later we talked about our plan to the audience at our last gig, in Somerville, MA. When I mentioned the song having been written near Sudbury, someone called out, "Don't they wish." These folks insisted that Medford, MA, was the home of the song. Somerville is just northwest of downtown Boston, and Medford is about four miles north of Somerville, on the Mystic River. We didn't know whom to believe, so that night when we got back to the motel I did what I should have done in the first place, and looked it up on the Web. Sure enough, it was written in Medford.

By this time It was too late to pull together a visit to the place, so we never did get to see the river and woods over and through which the horse knew the way. But subsequently I have read a little bit about the song and its astonishing author.

"Over the River and Through the Wood(s)", by Lydia Maria Francis Child, originally appeared as a poem in 1845 under the name "A Boy's Thanksgiving Day" in the second of a three volume set of books called Flowers For Children. I haven't been able to find out how the melody came about, or who was responsible for turning it into a song. But I did find out a whole lot of interesting things about the poem's author. She was much more than a lyricist.

Ms. Child, born in Medford in 1802, grew to be a passionate advocate for equal human rights for all no matter their sex, race, or religion. She many times greatly endangered her own livelihood by writing controversial books both fiction and non-fiction which argued for her causes. Her first book, Hobomok, published when she was 22 years old, was a tale of interracial marriage, which wasn't exactly a common subject in 1824. She was so thoroughly abolitionist that she went so far as to raise sugar beets on a farm in Wayland, MA, in an attempt to wean the North from the slave-dependent Southern business of raising sugar cane. She wrote many other notable works (58 books in all) including An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans which created a storm of controversy in 1833 and cost her the editorship of her own periodical, Juvenile Miscellany, in its eighth year of publication. She published the History of the Condition of Women in 1835, An Appeal for the Indians in 1868, and at about that time, another book about interracial marriage called A Romance of the Republic, a copy of which is in the Madison Public Library (or will be when I return it). Back to the song. According to the Medford MA web site, when she wrote the lyric, Maria (as she preferred to be called) lived in an 1828 house which still stands today on the corner of Salem and Ashland Streets. Her grandfather lived on South Street. If you have a look at a Medford Map, you can see that her house was only a block or so north of the Mystic River, and South Street, which runs east and west, is just south of and runs parallel to the river for about half a mile. The trip to Grampa's looks only about as long as the song.

Now, the only other mention I remember hearing about Medford, MA, was as the home of the "Medford Cracker," also known as "hardtack." [Wrong. See the following italic paragraph.] Searching the web for "Medford Cracker," I found it was invented by one Convers Francis. In one of the short biographies I read of Ms. Child, who was born Lydia Maria Francis, it said she was the daughter of a baker. I don't know her father's name, but her brother's name was Convers Francis, though I don't think he was a baker. But maybe the brother was Converse Francis Jr. Do you suppose the father of the woman who wrote "Over The River and Through The Woods" invented hardtack? No wonder she rode to grandfather's house to eat.

[Update, November 4, 2002: Thanks to research by and an email from Andy Moore, reference librarian for the Wayland, MA Public Library, it has been confirmed that Convers Francis was indeed Lyida Maria's father! Andy also suggested that the Medford Cracker apparently was NOT "hardtack," which preceeded the cracker by hundreds -- and maybe thousands -- of years. I did a few searches for "hardtack history" and found Andy to be correct indeed. See, for example http://www.kenanderson.net/hardtack/history.html Thank you Andy! I can't find just where I got this piece of misinformation in the first place, but I stand corrected!]

In another interesting twist, the song "Jingle Bells" was also written in Medford, in 1850, five short years after Child's lyric. The author, James Pierpont, a native of Savannah, GA, wrote the song while in Medford, inspired by sleigh races in front of an establishment called the Medford House. The Medford House was on the corner of Main Street and South Street, just over the river from Maria's house, about a block away! To get to Grandfather's house, Maria had to go over the river on Main Street, and turn right on South Street, through the drifting snow in front of the Medford House. You don't suppose it was Maria's one horse open sleigh, on one of her trips to Grandfather's house, that inspired "Jingle Bells?" The mind boggles. I'm tempted to find someplace in that neighborhood to sit and write my National Hat Day song. Wonder if there's a Wendy's?

--WZ #37, PB

Bib- and Web-liography

 

  • A Romance of the Republic, L. M. Child, edited and with a GREAT introduction by Dana D. Nelson, U. Press of KY, 1997.
  • http://www.medford.org This link takes you to the Medford MA web site; follow the history links and you will come upon info about Lydia Maria Child, James Pierpont, and other Medfordians.
  • http://world.std.com/~ljk/companion.htm Lori Kenschaft: Lydia Maria Child, an essay for the 1992-93 for A Companion to American Thought (edited by Richard Wightman Fox and James Kloppenberg, Blackwell, 1995).
  • http://mapquest.com Mapquest is an online map service. Here you can type in the intersections mentioned in Whither Zither and see a map of Medford.

The following are a few sources I have seen mentioned, but didn't use in writing this Whither Zither:

  • Deborah Pickman Clifford, Crusader for Freedom: A Life of Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
  • Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians (1824; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986).
  • Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds., Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982).
  • Karcher, Carolyn L. (1994). The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child.</> Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Whither Zither #38©2000 PBerryman
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