Note 8 — Chapter I · AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1810-1843.

Moses Gray was a man of great activity and energy. He soon added a shoe-shop to his tannery, where he hired a few hands to make shoes from the hides he tanned, taking these again by wagon to Albany, a journey of many days, where he bought his skins and some necessary supplies. Money was scarce in the newly settled country, and the things needed were mostly got by exchange. Meantime, as the chance came, he was buying land on the hills around. Clayville is where the valley narrows towards the source of the Sauquoit Creek, as “rivers” are called in that neighborhood in old Dutch fashion, and the hills are sharper and rougher. The scenery, however, is still beautiful, and the house which Moses Gray built two or three years later yet stands, with a lovely near view of stream and hill and wood. Asa Gray remembered his father building it. Busy as the father was out of doors, the mother was perhaps busier still. Asa, the younger brother by the first wife, was dying of consumption; he was moved on a bed from Sauquoit to Paris Furnace, and died very soon after, in May, 1811, aged twenty-three. When the child was born, November 18, 1810, it was carried to him to see, and he said he wished they would call it Asa, if it had had no name as yet decided on. He was of a singularly sweet and gentle character. The step-brothers were taken in turn to be taught and trained. The hands employed on farm or in trade were generally lodged and boarded. Often their clothes were mended or made. The wheat and grain were home-raised, as were all the vegetables. There was little fresh meat, except when a sheep or beef was killed, and that meant salting and curing. Butter and cheese were all homemade, and could be taken to Albany for sale, as was also grain; as the farm grew, more cows were added. Then the clothing was homemade. The wool for flannel sheets and underclothing and for the men’s clothes was home-spun, the nicer portions taken off and carded separately, and spun as worsted for the children’s and women’s dresses; also the yarn for socks for the whole family. A spinning-girl was hired for part of the year, for flax was also spun for the house linen and for wearing-apparel. The weaving was hired out. The tailor came by the week to make up the clothing with the mother’s help, and after the tannery was given up, the shoe-maker came at intervals to make the shoes. As the girls grew older they took their share at the wool and flax wheels. It is said that the first spinning of flax on the small wheel was introduced by the party of Scotch-Irish emigrants of 1718; that the women gave lessons to the women of Boston on Boston Common, and the fashion was so set for that spinning. It is also said that the Irish potato was first introduced into New England by these same colonists.

A widowed sister came with her children to make her home under the same roof when the Grays moved later to a larger farm, and there seemed always some boy to be housed and taught and trained. Though his aid might tell out of doors, the home care came upon the mother. But Mrs. Gray was a woman of singularly quiet and gentle character, with great strength and decision, and possessed a wonderful power of accomplishing and turning off work; a woman of thoughtful, earnest ways, conscientious and self-forgetting.

The father was quick, decided, and an immense worker; from him the son took his lively movements and his quick eagerness of character, perhaps also his ready appreciation of fun.