● ● ● months more, but their days there were clearly numbered. On October 26 Cyrus Blood noted in his diary, “Dr. Patterson sold out today,” but this may have had reference to the sawmill or his timber holdings.88 Through another season of snow and ice and darkness they lingered on in the house, and towards the end of February a strange scene took place, a scene described three weeks later in the Nashua Gazette of March 15:
Female Bravery. A North Groton (N. H.) correspondent of the Concord Patriot writes that on the 20th ult., Dr. Patterson, a dentist in that place, while employed in splitting wood before his door, was assaulted by two men, father and son, named Wheet. The elder Wheet rushed upon him with a shovel, which the Doctor knocked from his hands with his axe, at the same time losing hold of the axe. The elder assailant then attempted to get him by the throat, but the Doctor knocked him down, when young Wheet rushed upon the Doctor with the axe, and striking him upon the head, stunned and felled him to the ground. The father then seized him by the neck, and called upon his son to strike. The son was about to comply with the murderous request, when the wife of Dr. Patterson, almost helpless by long disease, rushed from her bed to the rescue of her husband, and throwing herself before their intended victim, seized, with unwonted strength, the son who held the axe and prevented him from dealing the intended blow. Help soon came, the assailants fled, and the feeble but brave wife was carried back to her bed.89
It has often been supposed that Patterson, weary of the difficulties and responsibilities of his life at home, was engaging in flirtations on his dental jaunts, and perhaps nearer at home, and that the murderous attack by the Wheets, père et fils, was caused by their discovery of impropriety between him and the elder Wheet’s wife. This sounds plausible enough; but Myra Smith, who was there at the time, declared in her ● ● ●
88 [“From Cyrus Blood’s ‘diary,’” n.d., Subject File, Mary Baker Eddy - Residences - North Groton, NH, MBEL.]
89 [“Female Bravery,” clipped in Mary Baker Patterson, scrapbook, n.d., SB001, p. 78, MBEL.]