People thought they were poisoned. Then the farmer hanged himself from a rafter in the barn. It was a curse, the locals said. No one would touch the property with a ten-foot pole—until Fanny Klingenschoen bought it and let it rot.”
“Was there never an investigation?”
“Could be they didn’t know what the word meant in those days. The good folk of Pickax concluded it was a 쑽쑽쑽
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Short & Tall Tales curse! That was a handy way of dismissing the whole incident. But you can’t help wondering. Did someone have a grudge against the family? Were they too prosperous? Was someone jealous? Had the farmer done some awful thing that had to be avenged?”
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24.
Matilda,
a Family Heroine
Why Was There No Surname
on Her Gravestone?
Lisa Compton, whose maiden name was Campbell, was one of the volunteers who tidied the historic Campbell burial ground this spring, and she called me with an answer to a question that has puzzled her family in the past. This is the whole story, as related by Lisa.
—JMQ
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Do you know the Campbell graveyard south of Purple Point, Qwill? It goes back to 1850 and was long ago outgrown. The family keeps it up as a place of solace in troubled times. There was one stone that puzzled me:
“Matilda, age 14”. Was she not a Campbell? If not, why was she there? Usually the stones are chiseled with all kinds of information: cause of death, names of heirs, even the names of family pets! There was only the date—1897, I think. Was there a scandal?
I’m like you, Qwill. I can’t stand to be in the dark. So I called Thornton Haggis to see if the Monument Works had any record, and he delved in the archives. No answer. So I went to the bank where my grandmother’s diaries are kept in a large lockbox. That dear woman! I found out that Matilda was a cat! The relatives wouldn’t object to burying 쑽쑽쑽
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Lilian Jackson Braun an animal in the private cemetery, but they wouldn’t want her to be called Matilda Campbell.
Anyway, here’s the story, Qwill. Matilda was a gray mouser who went out every night and was always pregnant.
That was normal.
But on one occasion she had catfits all day and all night. It was the night the little green lights appeared in the sky. We call them UFOs, but they called them “visi-tors”. They weren’t unfriendly—just interesting. They visited every seven years.
Sure enough, seven years later, Matilda went through the same performance! . . . But four years later, when she was fourteen—and pregnant again—she made another great fuss. My grandfather said, “I smell a tornado! We’re going to a safe place!” He loaded the family and their valuables and the hunting dogs in the wagon, but Matilda was under the floor of the barn and wouldn’t come out; they could hear her mewing. She was giving birth—again. The sky was turning black; they had to leave.
Good choice!—as they say nowadays. They returned to find the house wrecked. But the barn and Matilda and her four kittens were safe. When she died the next year, of natural causes, Grandmother insisted on burying her in the Campbell plot, among all the intrepid, illustrious Campbells.
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25.
How Pleasant Street
Got Its Name
Does the Name of a Street
Affect Its Quality of Life?
Probably not, but pleasant people have been living in Carpenter Gothic houses on this very pleasant street for a century. Burgess Campbell, descendant of the original builder, tells the story behind the short cul-de-sac in Pickax.
—JMQ
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In the nineteenth century my ancestors were ship-builders in Scotland—in the famous river Clyde at Glasgow. When opportunity beckoned from the New World, my great-grandfather, Angus, came here with a team of ships’ carpenters considered the best anywhere.
They started a shipyard at Purple Point, where they built four-masted wooden schooners, using Moose County’s hundred-and-twenty-foot pine trees as masts. These were the “tall ships” that brought goods and supplies to the settlers and shipped out cargoes of coal, lumber, and stone.
Then came the New Technology! The wireless telegraph was in; the Pony Express was out. Railroads and steamboats were in; four-masted schooners were out. In his diary Angus said it was like a knife in the heart to see a tall ship stripped down to make a barge for towing coal. There was no work for his carpenters to do, and their fine skills were wasted.
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Lilian Jackson Braun Then a “still small voice” told him to build houses! It was the voice of his wife, Anne, a canny Scotswoman. She said, “John, build houses as romantic as the tall ships—and as fine!”
She was right! The New Technology had produced a class of young upwardly mobile achievers who wanted the good life. Not for them the stodgy stone mansions built by conspicuously rich mining tycoons and lumber barons! They wanted something romantic!
So Angus bought acreage at the south edge of Pickax and built ten fine houses, each on one-acre plots. Although no two were alike, their massing followed the elongated vertical architecture called Gothic Revival, and the abun-dance of scroll trim was the last word in Carpenter Gothic.
And here is something not generally known: The vertical board-and-batten siding was painted in the colors that delighted young Victorians: honey, cocoa, rust, jade, or periwinkle; against this background, the white scroll trim had a lacy look.
Today we paint them all white, giving rise to the “wedding cake” sobriquet.
When the time came to put up signboards, Angus was at a loss for a street name. He said, “I don’t want anything personal like Campbell or Glasgow . . . or anything sober-sided or high-sounding . . . just something pleasant.”
And Great-Grandma Anne said with sweet feminine logic, “Call it Pleasant Street.”
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