The fishbasket papers : the dairies, 1768-1823 of Bradbury Jewell, Esquire, of Tamworth, Durham and Sandwich New Hampshire
(Book, Regional History Material)

Map on endpapers.

"The strange fishbasket Mrs. Harkness found on her kitchen chair one Sunday morning was not a fisherman's creel but 'a coarse splint container associated with the late itinerant fishcart.' Poking out of it were the lost diaries and papers of Captain Bradbury Jewell, pioneer settler of the New Hampshire north country. With their appearance began a three-year labor: deciphering the faded and dog's-eared sheets and extracting their significance; and the gradual disclosure that some of the journals were missing -- they had been burned by a scandalized Victorian grandson. In the course of many months of research and winnowing, the facts behind the destruction of the papers became clear, and the editor was finally able to reconstruct and present the life of the pioneer Jewell in its full fabric. Bradbury Jewell is revealed as a man of his times, an eighteenth century product -- rugged, practical, God-fearing, yet not immune to the urge to versify, nor to the attractions of the other sex. What may have alarmed a Victorian descendent was taken for granted in the robust and plain-spoken society of the diarist's own day. The book offers a lively picture of pioneer life in the forest wilderness of northern New England. Beginning in 1768 when young Bradbury at sixteen trekked north and made his first 'pitch' in Tamworth, the narrative show the settlement of 'the wild,' the cares and hardships, the bartering, and the daily habits and attitudes of the back country. Here also is Bradbury Jewell the Revolutionary War Militia Captain, Justice of the Peace, farmer, and the shrewd trader who swapped his Tamworth farm for one of the seacoast in Durham. There he remained for over fifteen years before returning north, his daybooks bringing to life that prosperous tidewater community at the close of the eighteenth century. The Jewell papers, covering nearly six decades, are not presented as a searchlight on the times but, in the words of their editor, 'as a flashlamp, perhaps, from a part of the northern wilderness where no such flickering has been sighted before.'" -- Dust jacket flap.