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One spirit he would like to meet is that of Elisha Payne, whom Hamel called the “founding father of Orange.” A well-to-do, Yale-trained lawyer from Connecticut who purchased some 5,000 acres in Orange and surrounding towns, Payne first established roots in Orange during the summer of 1773, when his house was built.
If there are pockmarked spirits on Cardigan, Hamel thinks Payne’s house would be their haunt. For a few years in the 1780s, when a smallpox epidemic tore through the Upper Valley, some of those infected with the virus were quarantined in the shadow of the mountain, in a house that Hamel believes was Payne’s.
People called it the pest house, and nobody knows quite where it was. But if anyone finds it, it will likely be Hamel. He’s been piecing together clues since he was 11 years old, and now, at 58, he spends much of his free time in the Orange Town House. There, in a corner he’s made into his research space, he pores through stacks and binders of yellowed documents, old deeds and centuries-old town reports for a book he’s working on, a history of the town slated for publication in 2019.
Hamel conducts his research amidst relics of what he calls his own “former life” as a skilled and prolific artist: Collages, which layer Hamel’s intricate paintings of indigenous wildlife against ephemera from Orange’s history, line the Town House walls in a permanent exhibit. His eyesight isn’t so good anymore, which is why he’s stopped painting; he sometimes uses a magnifying glass to make out the fine print of a document that, to his historian’s eye, is part of a larger story of a place and its people.
When he’s not holed up in the Town House, he’s combing through Cardigan State Park, like one warm night last week when we trekked through, and occasionally off, an overgrown carriage road. He’s hoping to find a very particular cellar hole, which after nearly 250 years is the most that would remain of the pest house.
Orange’s Early History
Its dark, disease-ridden past aside, Payne’s house offers a window into the earliest days of Orange, which was known as Cardigan until 1790.
The first Town Meetings would have been held within its walls; so would early religious gatherings, proprietor’s meetings and the first schoolhouse, Hamel said.
But even if he does manage to find the cellar hole, certain questions will remain. For example: Why would a wealthy, Ivy League-educated lawyer want to make his home in a place as utterly remote as Orange?
Part of the answer, Hamel believes, is that Payne was a deist. It was a fashionable school of thought at the time — several founding fathers, such as Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, were deists — and one that diverged slightly from Payne’s Congregationalist upbringing. But, since his father was a minister who advocated, quite brazenly, for freedom of religion, Payne had a free pass.
Deism, which is really more of a philosophy than an organized religion, posits that a genderless god created the world but does not interfere with its goings-on. Deists also believe that humans can hope to know this god only through rational observation of the natural world, which Orange had — and still has — in spades.
“This was some 70 years or so before Thoreau went to Walden Pond,” Hamel said. “Of course, the transcendentalists are credited with the back-to-nature movement. But the deists really jumped on it first.”
Payne remained in Orange for about 10 years, during which time he became a prominent local figure. Payne Road, in Lebanon’s Mascoma Village is named after him. Mill Road, across from the intersection of Routes 4 and 4A, also honors his influence; Payne was the first person who was given the right to build a dam at the mouth of the Mascoma River. He served as a treasurer of Dartmouth, and would later become one of its trustees.
He moved to Lebanon in the early 1780s.
The smallpox struck soon after.
A Farthing for a Pest House
William Allen Wallace’s 1910 The History of Canaan refers to the “demoralized condition of the people” as they watched the epidemic take its toll.
They were also terrified, and had good reason to be.
The virus, called variola, would enter the body through the airways and creep, very quietly, into the lymph nodes, bone marrow or spleen. There, it would incubate for a week or two, multiplying without fanfare. Then it would hit the bloodstream.
It tended to attack skin cells, causing a rash primarily on the face and neck. This rash would then give rise to the disease’s telltale lesions, painful pus-filled blisters. Around 30 percent of smallpox victims died; survivors were often left weakened and scarred.
The smallpox epidemic was a great and terrible equalizer, in that it did not differentiate among gender, ethnicity or class. And so the founder of Dartmouth College, Eleazar Wheelock, was not immune to the widespread panic. His students and faculty were starting to come down with the virus, and he knew something had to be done to protect those who had not yet fallen ill.
Dartmouth College trustees, which by this time included Payne, discussed game plans. They decided that Payne’s house, nestled as it was in the woods around Cardigan Mountain, was a perfect place to quarantine smallpox victims. It was isolated enough to prevent the virus from spreading, but accessible enough that patients could be carried there, and have food and provisions delivered during their treatment.
Not that there was much that could be done, even in terms of prevention. The first successful smallpox vaccine would not be invented for a few more years, in 1796, and was not widely available for some time after that. The World Health Organization finally declared it eradicated in 1980.
In 1780s Orange, doctors had begun performing “inoculations” on town residents, using a crude and painful method of exposing them to small amounts of the virus, in the hope that this would boost immunity.
“The doctor would make a cut in your arm, and take the smallpox germs and just rub it right into your cut. It was very controversial,” Hamel said. “The town was in a position of declaring that everyone was going to get this, you have no personal choice. And so, if your immunity wasn’t strong enough, you got smallpox.”
In light of this grim situation, Payne leased the property to Dartmouth College in December 1784. Hamel has seen this lease with his own eyes, and he noted that by far the largest words on the document, written in all capital letters, was the amount Payne had decided to charge the college: “ONE FARTHING.” Hamel estimated that a single farthing would be worth around one-quarter of a penny today.
“It was essentially a gift,” he said. “(Payne) had no intention of moving back to Orange. And he had all this land, anyway, so what did he care?”
The Pest House was open to students and faculty of Dartmouth, but also to surrounding citizens. It probably peaked at around 30 patients at once, Hamel said. They stayed for six weeks under the care of a Connecticut doctor named Gideon Tiffany.
There was to be no contact with the outside world for the patients. Even Daniel Blaisdell, the Canaan man who’d agreed to deliver the food, made sure to keep a distance. The History of Canaan describes Blaisdell’s method: He would stop his ox and cart once he was within earshot of the pest house, and give a holler. “Then, unloading, he would depart as he came, having little intercourse with the inmates,” Wallace writes.
The dead were buried discreetly in the woods. No stones mark their graves.
A Long Search
That The History of Canaan refers to the patients as “inmates” rings true to the testimony of survivors. Among these was Nathaniel Briggs.
Wallace writes that “(Briggs) was constantly reminded of the sickening danger by the strong antiseptic remedies used to purify the air. The old man used to tell of the homesickness and feeling of loneliness which seized upon the young persons confined there, and seemed to be almost as bad as the disease they were forced to face day to day.”
Briggs died shortly after he was released from the pest house. Hamel guessed that he was weakened by the virus, and his body simply shut down.
As it turns out, Briggs is a distant ancestor of Hamel’s.
“So that’s my own personal connection to that history,” he said. “When I found that out, I got really excited.”
But really, Hamel has been trying to solve the pest house puzzle for the majority of his life. It all started in 1969, when the town commissioned his mother, Alice Hamel, and their neighbor, Joanne Moulton, to research and write A History of Orange, New Hampshire.
“They were given four months and no money to do this, but what they put together was really quite remarkable,” Hamel said. “I did a lot of tagging along with her. I remember spending what felt like days in Baker Library (at Dartmouth) helping my mother photocopy just any little thing that she found about the town of Orange.”
As he helped his mother conduct her research, 11-year-old Hamel was struck by the mystery of the pest house.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he said. “I was so intrigued. How could everybody forget about it?”
Hamel is carrying on his mother’s legacy by writing his own history of the town, which he has been working on for the past eight years or so. He plans on finishing it by 2019, which is 250th anniversary of Orange’s charter.
“I’m the unpaid, unofficial town historian,” he said, standing amidst stacks of folders, each one thick with documents he’s meticulously collected and organized. They cover every available surface of his corner of the Town House: the desk, the heater, untrafficked parts of the floor.
Some of the folders contain drafts of Hamel’s manuscript, which he is writing out painstakingly by hand. Payne may have been a deist, but Hamel is somewhat of a Luddite.
If Stones Could Talk
By 1790, the worst of the epidemic had passed. On Dec. 18 of that year, Orange residents “voted that the inoculation for the small pox (sic) shall not be continued in said town any longer under the direction of Dr. Gideon Tiffany,” according to a town report from that day. Nathan Waldo, a brother-in-law of Payne’s, purchased the pest house property from Dartmouth; the college no longer needed it.
After that, though, the details become foggy. Part of the trouble seems to be that there are conflicting records of the pest house’s size and location.
The History of Canaan suggests that it was not in Payne’s house at all, but that in another house, which Payne also owned, built over a 36-by-30-foot cellar hole farther up the mountain, away from the center of the town. But Hamel believes the pest house was, in fact, in Payne’s former residence, whose cellar hole measured 28-by-20 feet.
For years, Hamel has scoured the forests around Cardigan Mountain for cellar holes that fit these dimensions. So far, he’s come up dry.
“I’ve walked these woods, almost gridlike, looking for something,” he said. “This is like looking for the holy grail for me.”
He suspects, as some sources have suggested, that something has happened to the cellar hole. It may have been filled in with dirt after a carriage road was built in 1867. One oral history reports that the building was burned after the smallpox epidemic had passed, which Hamel said was probably to eradicate any lingering traces of the virus.
Once Nathan Waldo purchased the building, it may also have been dismantled, piece by piece, and moved closer to town. Hamel thinks it might be possible that it was moved to the site where the Orange Town House now sits; the dimensions seem to fit.
But if this is the case, Hamel wonders, where are the stones from the cellar hole? Flung aside to make room for the carriage road? Cleared away after the fire?
While walking along what remains of that old carriage road last week, Hamel stopped at a pile of moss-covered rocks on the mountainside. He wondered aloud if they were natural formations, or the cast-offs of Orange’s beginnings.
“I just wish I could make these stones talk,” he said. He pointed a finger toward one at random, “Talk, you rock!”
But the rock was silent, and the persistent whine of mosquitoes in twilight was the only audible sound. Hamel sighed.
“Sometimes I think there’s some things that want to just be mysteries, and they don’t want to be found,” he said.
Until then, Hamel will continue to wander the woods, in search of the spirits on Cardigan Mountain.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.