BACK TO AMESBURY  (continued)

After weeks of cherished privacy in his New Hampshire hideaway, Whittier’s funeral was a highly public affair. At least 5,000 guests passed through the entrance of the poet’s home in Amesbury, now a museum. Stepping into a small central room, mourners turned sharply to the right where Whittier’s tall lanky body lay in state in the small parlor, stretched below portraits of his mother and sister Elizabth. A photograph taken from the second floor shows at least a thousand visitors crammed into the back yard during a funeral oration. Many mourners, including Celia Thaxter, can be seen wiping away tears.

Despite rumors that the poet was buried in New Hampshire, Whittier rests in the Quaker section of Union Cemetery in Amesbury. As many as 2,000 pilgrims a day came looking for his grave following the funeral. The simple rounded gravestone reads "Here Whittier Lies". His is the tallest in a row of stones of family members. His sister and mother are buried to the right of the poet’s headstone. Niece Elizabeth and biographer Samuel Pickard are buried to the left. For decades a high neatly trimmed hedge surrounded the family plot. A series of signs were erected directing visitors down the "Whittier Path" to his grave. Another sign on a metal pipe hovers at least 12-feet in the air so that it could be seen over the great hedge. But the hedge was recently torn down after it became infested with poison ivy leaving the Whittier plot open and exposed.

Elmfield, like Whittier, has left New Hampshire. Despite efforts to preserve the historic colonial house, it was sold in 1996. The new owners disassembled the building and moved it to Greenwich, Connecticut. That still leaves us with two Whittier house museums intact. The poet’s birthplace in Haverhill and his long-time home in Amesbury are open to the public. The Amesbury house, lovingly preserved down to the smallest details, still looks like Whittier left if the day he departed for that final New Hampshire vacation in 1892.

KEY SOURCES: Whittier-Land by Samuel T. Pickard (1904) and John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography by Roland H. Woodwell (1985).

Copyright © 2005 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.