● ● ● attend school all summer, while Abigail was teaching in another school, and all “the folks” were well. Of Mark he wrote:
Father is as happy as a clam and I dont think he will ever want to die, though he were sure of going to Heaven. I am glad it is so, and hope his joy will never end in sorrow. Indeed I see no reason why he may not be satisfied: He lives in the neighborhood of two sanctuaries—a matter of the greatest moment—two Academies, a very pleasant village, society agreeable, etc, etc. He has cut a grand crop of Hay, though corn and grain are miserable. No matter he likes it, and that is enough.6
All three girls have been described as strikingly beautiful.7 In a poem indited to the whole family a cousin saluted the “beauteous seraph sister band,” and the social success of such a trio was only to be expected.8 The new textile mills in Sanbornton Bridge had introduced into that simple democratic society a stratification which put the Bakers on the side of what in England would have been called the small landed gentry as opposed to the new village proletariat. “Only think,” Mary was to write in a letter almost thirty years later, “of Yankee castes in all our country villages. I thoroughly wish we were understood as a people, the true American idea.”9
Yet the rustic Yankee simplicities shine through many of these early letters, as when Martha wrote George:
Father and Mother have just retired and left Mr. Cutchins and us girls to amuse ourselves; so he and I are writing[,] Mary is reading and Abba sits and orders me what to say but I shall not regard her. . . . Sullivan they do act so bad it is imppossible for me to write and I wish you could make them behave for they keep shaking the table and making me laugh all the time, and now they have brought on a ● ● ●
6 Albert Baker to George Sullivan Baker, 23 August 1836, 1919.001.0023, LMC. An additional comment is of interest: “The girls are better off here than anywhere else at present.”
7 Georgine Milmine, “Mary Baker G. Eddy: The Story of Her Life and the History of Christian Science,” McClure’s, January 1907, p. 233.
8 Joseph Baker to George Sullivan Baker, 28 April 1832, 1920.015.0012, LMC.
9 Mary Baker Patterson to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, 10 April 1864, P. P. Quimby Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter LOC).