HKB
Ballou preached regularly from that pine pulpit. Among the regular auditors, possibly the most thoughtful of them all, his little legs dangling from the rough benches, sat his little son--Hosea.
"On the morning of Sunday, our friend and host, Mr. L. Martin, says to his pastor of many years, the Rev. E. Davis: 'Take my horse and carriage, and show these people where Hosea Ballou was born.' 'These people' include Dr. Miner, Rev. Mr. Stone, of Canton, Rev. Q. Whitney, and the editor of the 'Christian Leader.' Mr. Davis knows the way, but in Mr. Bowen, who owns the farm contiguous to the once Ballou territory, he finds and calls a pilot and village antiquarian. Perhaps a mile east of the Keene and Richmond road, a mile and a half from the Universalist church on the hill, right at the foot of 'Grassy Hill,' we find a strictly modern house, and a very old barn, and a much older corn-house,--less now by a good sample than it was before we saw it. It is a one-story house, with modern windows, and three small chimneys. Mr. Bowen explains: 'That house contains the frame within which Hosea Ballou was born, and the form of the interior is substantially the same.' He was confident that the three chimneys were the same in material as the one big chimney of the old structure. Of the corn-house near by, Mr. Bowen says: 'That is just the same, only it is older and is now going to decay.' Knoll, stream, valley, plain, and high hill to the east,--in the woods of which run the fence or wall that bounded the Ballou farm: upon these time can have wrought but little change. We saw them upon that Sunday morning as Hosea Ballou saw them,--as child, as boy, as youth, as man. From that quiet spot, so rural, so out of the way, so completely in the backwoods, almost hidden by precipice and hill, came the acorn, the oak whereof is now strong and vigorous,--we trust with healing in its leaves. The little boy entering that corn-barn to get fodder for his father's horse, cows, and oxen,--is that the same whose stalwart form first rose before us in the School Street pulpit forty years ago; whose eloquent tongue set the blood thrilling in our youthful veins; whose majestic bearing seemed to us--what it was--that of an Apostle? "It has been our good fortune to look upon the Forum where Cicero declaimed in orations that yet thrill; to traverse the Colosseum where Trajan had a private box; to walk the streets of Pompeii whose pavements were trodden by resident Greeks and strangers centuries before the advent of Jesus.
"But there is an ample niche in our memory left. We place therein, to recall reverently, gratefully, and with weird association, our visit, on the morning of August 20, 1882, to the birthplace of Hosea Ballou, Richmond, N. H., 'twelve miles from Keene, due south.' The town of hill, vale, and forest is largely deserted by man. Farms that once waved with corn are now covered with forests of pine. The locomotive has never been seen--hardly heard--within its borders. But its history is precious. For what it was, for what it bequeathed, it shall live in history and in song."
[49] "Our Woman Workers," p. 353.
[50] The first Universalist woman who appeared in the pulpit as a preacher of the Gospel was Miss Maria Cook, who preached before the Western Association in Bainbridge, N. Y., in June, 1811. She is spoken of by Rev. Stephen R. Smith, in his "Historical Sketches" (Vol. I. pp. 31, 32). Notwithstanding the good impressions made by her as a speaker, there were those who deemed "so extraordinary an undertaking as an evidence of mental alienation!" A more enlightened and candid judgment in reference to this subject has since prevailed.
[51] Rev. Thomas G. Farnsworth of Waltham, Mass., ordained in 1822, and Rev. Alvin Dinsmore of Woodland, Cal., ordained in 1823.