Manuscript essays, written as a schoolgirl in Henniker, New Hampshire.
Fisher, E(llen) E. Manuscript Essays, Written As A Schoolgirl In Henniker, New Hampshire, 1848-1853.
Twenty-nine titled compositions, each legibly written in ink on one or more separate sheets of letter-size paper;
some dated, others not but clearly of the same period.
Exercises in composition by a young New England school girl accomplished over a period of five years
starting at the age of ten or twelve, judging from the steadily maturing handwriting. By 1860 Ellen E. Fisher
was teaching school in Henniker, New Hampshire, a small town just west of Concord. (Annual Reports ... of
the Town of Henniker for the year ending 1860, Concord, N.H., 1860, p. 14.)
These form a quintessential expression of Ante-Bellum New England idealism, religiosity, and sectional pride,
filtered through the genteel sensibility of a young well-educated school girl. Written not in journal or diary
form but as self-contained “perfected” expressions of a particular topic or mood, gathered together as a body of
work to be carefully preserved, they bespeak a seriousness of purpose--something more than school exercises,
they are a record of spiritual engagement with life and, no less, with mortality. They range from introspection
and devotional praise of nature and God, to observations on human society and its foibles; often sentimental
and moralizing, they can also occasionally be wry and amusing. Among the titles are: The Seasons; Play; The
Contoocook Valley Railroad; The Rose; Hope; Slavery; The Close of School; Passing Away; Our Country;
The Indian Worshipping the Rainbow; Indecision; Card Playing, History of a Sheet of Paper; & The days of
our youth. A very few sample passages: The Indian Worshipping the Rainbow: “The poor Indian as he saw the
rainbow stretched across the yawning chasm of Niagara, from a towering rock bowed down in humble
adoration ... that glorious rainbow poised between heaven and earth called forth the devout emotions of his
soul. The Supreme Being had not been revealed to him on tablets of stone but all over the universe he was
visible in living characters.” The Contoocook Valley Railroad: “True to Yankee enterprise and cunning, the
inhabitants in the valley of the Contoocook River proposed to have a railroad to arouse their ideas of the
ingenuity of man and the power of steam. The road had some of the most devoted advocates. On the contrary
some of the most violent opponents. Notwithstanding this it was rapidly pushed along ... the road is running
and has been for the past six months. It comes clashing along the banks of the river, a distance of fourteen
miles. Goes whistling through our formerly quiet village, to the great annoyance of the people. Although this
(sic), there are many conveniences ... They look very pretty as they move along with their long train of smoke
...” Summer: “Summer in our northern clime is warm and delightful. The earth is filled with sweet odor. The
trees are overladen with fruits and berrys of all kinds are seen. Every little bud is displaying its beauties to the
passer by. It seems that nature has put on her prettiest dress. Mary Howitt says the flowers are made ‘to
comfort man, to whisper hope whenever his faith is dim that He who careth for the flowers much more would
care for him.’“
Sectional division is one of the themes found in The History of a Sheet of Paper, a freely reworked popular
allegory: “Being on a cotton plantation in a southern state is the first of which I have any recollection. I had the
pleasure of thinking that I was full as nice as any in the neighboring plantations; but I had scarcely thought it
before a gang of negroes came along and gathered me. I being of little value to ‘massa’ was exchanged for
something his purse wanted more; but as the southerners were all too indolent for manufacturing, I was sent
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north among the energetic and enterprising yankees. After a long twisting and turning I was converted into
what they called b
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