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 Ronald Jager received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and taught and wrote philosophy at Yale University until 1977. Since then he and his wife have lived in Washington, N. H., where they have jointly authored three books on New Hampshire history. He has also been a Humanities consultant to the New Hampshire Legislature and, as a free-lance writer, he is the author of Eighty Acres: Elegy for a Family Farm (Beacon Press, 1990) and a New Hampshire memoir, Last House on the Road: Excursions into a Rural Past (Beacon Press, 1994).
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She spent no money on fine clothes nor ornaments .... We younger ones were awed by her silence and reserve. But later ... came to recognize her character as that of one studious, gentle, and self-sacrificing. (Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 1898)
IN 1883 A WASHINGTON PRINTER turned out a slim volume of homegrown poetry, whose title page reads: Poems of Sarah Shedd, Founder of the Shedd Free Library, Washington, N.H. The book was gathered and edited by Ashbury Howe, friend of the poet, and printed by his son Herman Howe. The occasion was the dedication of the new Shedd Free Library building in Washington, New Hampshire. The volume is handsomely put together, but it did not make a big splash in the history of American literature and, so far as I know, only two copies of it now exist, both in the Shedd Free Library, and not generally circulating. The person, the poetry, the local printing, the flowery preface, the occasion, the library -- these are all elements in a simple heartwarming New England nineteenth-century story. Is it more than just a a simple local story?
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Sarah Shedd
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It certainly resonates with other versions of other stories, many with plots and protagonists so recurrent that they bear a representative, almost mythic, quality. This is the general plot: the local boy or girl, invariably of "sturdy peasant stock," self-sacrificing, devoted to family, goes off and does well in the world, maybe doesn't marry, ever mindful of humble origins, believes firmly in education, possibly writes sentimental verse, finally leaves a major bequest to the hometown. It is a lofty, inspirational, fictional sort of plot. We New Englanders have heard of these folks. But we also know something more: these representative people are sometimes real flesh-and-blood persons, part of the very history and fabric of our own towns. Miss Sarah Shedd (1813-1867) is the town of Washington's real-life entry for this venerable mythic plot.
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