The Old Hired Girl

Myrt Somers, early 1900s, with her cat.

With her white hair piled neatly in a bun, Myrt Somers was waiting patiently in the wicker rocker while Mary Russell unwrapped another gift.

In the photo taken that Christmas Eve back in 1969, I can be seen on the left, bending towards Myrt to tell her something. She was going deaf so I had to speak up. Mary was picking out Myrt’s gifts amidst the empty boxes and wrapping paper covering the oak table. Grandparents, children and grandkids had already opened theirs.

The author, Myrt, and Mary Jane (Cogswell) Russell, 1969.

Myrt’s presents were saved for last, perhaps because she needed help due to her failing eyesight. Or perhaps the wait was yet another habit she had obtained from her past.

Even when she was almost 90, Myrt was referred to by some of the older generation as the old hired girl, although she had not been a girl for many decades. I grew up accepting her title, and it was not used in a cruel way. It was her vocation back when hired girls were numerous and necessary.

A hired girl was a gal in her teens to early 20s who was hired to assist a farmer’s wife with household chores or lighter farm work when everything was so labor intensive in the 1800s and early 1900s. Usually there was a multitude of children and the hired help did the grunge work, helping with everything from kids to cooking for hired men with tremendous appetites who had to be fed, along with the rest of the family, three times a day. The family would provide the girl with a room and board, and a small weekly wage.

The Noyes Road in Limestone.

Myrt, I later learned, grew up in a poor family on the Noyes Road in Limestone. About the time Myrt completed fifth grade, her father, Michael Somers, died and her mother, Jane, was left with five children. A few months later, Jane married her dead husband’s brother. Perhaps the quick marriage was for love, but most likely also a necessity for the family’s survival.

We don’t know when Myrt, the eldest, left home, but she could have done so during that uncertain time. She may have sent some of her earnings to her mother, or maybe she didn’t have to. But with her out of the house and living with another family, her mother had one less dependent to feed.

Myrt went to work for a family who lived just down the road from the Somers. Fred and Helen (Noyes) Spear were married in the late 1880s and their first child, Forest, was born in 1890. According to the 1900 federal census, “Myrtie,” age 18, was living with the Spears and worked as a “hired girl.” 

The Fred and Helen (Noyes) Spear farm, circa 1905.

A photograph of the white farm buildings, with most of the family members in front—plus three hired hands and their work horses—shows Myrt, left, with her straw blond hair, standing tall next to Helen and her son, Forest. Fred, in a light-colored shirt, stands behind his three daughters and youngest son, Donald, who may have been about two. Sitting to the left of Donald was Amy. Behind the two youngest were daughters Ruby and Willa. Another son, Waldo, was elsewhere when this photo was taken, and young William McKinley can be seen on a horse in back.

Just a few years after this photograph was taken, Helen, in her 40s, became ill with cancer. After at least two years of on and off suffering, with some weeks spent in bed, she died in 1914 when Amy was 12, and Donald, 10.

Helen may have been the central character in her large, prosperous family. For one thing, her sewing skills were flawless. Her daughter, Amy, kept for years a large pink doll’s dress that her mother had made with the seam edges on the inside just as neatly done as the darts on the outside. With pink ribbons threaded through thin lace trim, the dress still held its creases in the pleated skirt just as it did in the early 1900s when Helen pressed them down in an exact pattern. Judging from Helen’s image in a few remaining photographs, she most likely designed and sewed her own dresses. Perhaps she also did the same for her three daughters.

She was known for her singing voice. An older lady once told me that after all those years, she still remembered Helen and Fred’s duets in church. “It was amazing,” she said. According to another family member, the Spear house included a pump organ and a standing harp, and at least Amy took violin lessons. Cousins remember the family gathering around the organ to sing hymns and Christmas carols.

Helen was chosen as one of the three graces (or ladies of the court) who sat in places of honor during the local Grange meetings. She was also a teacher prior to her marriage, as was common with the more educated girls. Later, even with her large family, she made time to travel by train with her sister-in-law, Nettie (Spear) Noyes, to the more populated southern parts of the state, visiting relatives and shopping in the larger stores.

Myrt, left, Helen, and Helen’s son, Forest.

After Helen’s death, Myrt continued housekeeping for the Spears. Judging how close she stood next to Helen in the 1905 photograph, we can only guess that Helen had taken Myrt at a young age under her wing and instructed her in how to manage the household, how to cook and clean the way Helen was accustom to, and possibly how to use her treadle sewing machine. Having such a competent worker trained by the former mistress of the house must have been a blessing to the grieving family.

Although Myrt could not fill Helen’s shoes, she became, nevertheless, like a second mother to young Amy. She combed out Amy’s long and difficult curls. She cried when Amy’s scalp was filled with lice acquired from a book borrowed from an infected schoolmate. She accompanied the teenager on shopping outings to nearby Caribou.

Myrt most likely did not have the dressmaking skills of her former employer, but she still created knitted articles of clothing and sewed—by both hand and machine—patchwork quilts from colorful flour sacks that every rural household bought and used in the early 1900s.

A block from one of Myrt’s flour sack quilts in which both hand and machine stitches can be seen.

How often she visited her own family during those early years is unknown. In the 1920s, the local newspaper reported her visiting her widowed mother, who had moved, and for a time she was an active member of the Limestone Grange.

Granges back then were social hubs for farming families with potluck meals and educational and entertaining programs. The Limestone Grange was well attended by teens and adults from both Limestone and neighboring Fort Fairfield.

At the local Grange, Myrt was an assistant steward during the meetings that were patterned somewhat after the Masonic Lodge. She also found time to socialize with young people her age, including double dating with a Fort Fairfield farmer.

A few Limestone Grange members in the early 1900s. Third man in top row, from left, was the young farmer, Otis Ames, who at one time dated Myrt. She can be seen in the second row, fourth from left.

But the handsome farmer eventually married someone else, and for whatever reasons, Myrt defied a common fate of hired girls in those days: marriage. She remained single, perhaps feeling an obligation to the Spears who may have been the sort of secure family she had lacked as a young teen.

Several years after Helen’s death, Fred Spear sold the thriving farm to two of his sons and moved to a fashionable house in town. Although retired from farming, he continued with his varied social obligations and as president of the local bank. 

Myrt went, too, as the housekeeper—a title given to older hired girls still in domestic service. Several adult Spear children and a granddaughter also lived there through the 1920s.

The “in town” Spear place.

Daughter Amy married farmer Orin Russell of Fort Fairfield in 1923. They lived upstairs in the farmhouse of Orin’s parents on the Russell Road and eventually had three sons.

No one today knows why, but Amy’s second son, Garth, who was born in 1926, went to live for awhile with his Grandfather Spear. His older brother Fred (my father) stayed on the Russell farm with his parents. Amy later explained that Garth was raised during that period by Myrt.

By 1930, Garth was back in Fort Fairfield with his parents and brother, and the following year Fred Spear died.

Amy told me that Myrt ran a boarding house in Limestone for awhile. But by 1935, she had moved to Fort Fairfield and was living with Amy and her family. The Russell grandfather had also died and Nettie, his widow, became bedridden and was cared for by Amy until her death in 1939. Perhaps Myrt was needed to help run the household. I remember seeing some recipes written in Myrt’s large, neat hand, lodged inside Amy’s 1920s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book that was kept in the Russell pantry.

Myrt remained with the Russells through her retirement years and slept in a corner back room upstairs. She had her own sink, bed, dresser with a mirror, and trunk, and a free standing rack of dresses, many of which were given to her. Her furniture was painted purple, and her wall paper consisted of purple violets on a white background.

One door led to the second floor hallway and toilet area. Another door led to an attic storage room over the attached shed which contained boxes of assorted family keepsakes and two iron beds, most likely used back when the farm needed seasonal workers. The door to that room was kept closed on Myrt’s side by a small block nailed to the door.

In the spring of 1947, my father bought his Uncle Forest Spear’s farm in Fort Fairfield. By that summer, he had come down with scarlet fever. Myrt took care of him on his farm until the fever subsided. From the way my father described it, he was not treated with antibiotics, as scarlet fever would be today. He had to stay in bed, and the illness was considered potentially dangerous.

Portion of a Myrt Somers crazy quilt.

The following year Dad married my mother. All four bedrooms in their farmhouse contained at least one or two of Myrt’s quilts. She most likely made others for Amy’s household and for her own bed. Some had specific designs and some were “crazy” with no design intended. I grew up assuming that this was normal. I had a summer Myrt quilt and a winter, heavier Myrt quilt. My parent’s double bed had a larger quilt with a basket design. My brother’s bed also had one of her quilts, and more were used on the guest room bed.

Myrt began at a very young age creating things. When she was about six, she had to stay in bed due to a childhood illness. She was bored, so her mother taught her how to knit mittens. From that day forward, she never stopped knitting. She usually knitted every day but Sunday, as Sunday was considered a day of rest. In her retirement years, she knitted socks, mittens and scarves for me and my cousins who came along in the 1950s, afghans for special occasions, and dish washcloths my mother claimed cleaned better than anything from the store.

Myrt was like a great-grandmother to us kids, but she still maintained some hired girl habits. If we were eating at my grandparents’ kitchen table, Myrt set up her placemat in the dining room and ate there. If we, as a larger group, ate at the dining room table, Myrt set her placemat at the kitchen table.

She had a habit, too, of sitting and knitting in her own rocker in a corner of the dining room while everyone else was in the kitchen or the living room. Myrt could hear the tv programs through the double doorway to the living room, and when Art Linkletter came on interviewing children who said “the darnedest things,” she ventured in and sat close to the tv to see the smiling faces.

Dominoes on the oak table Myrt sat next to.

She loved children. She took the time to teach us how to play a simple domino game and offered us pink or white Canada mints. When visiting, we’d rock in the wicker chair opposite her’s and chat about anything and everything.

She taught us nursery rhymes and their natural rhythms. We learned how to knit—even the boys. She’d recite everyone’s birth date and initials, and if the initials spelled a word. Cousin Tom’s initials spelled TAR frontwards and RAT backwards.

Marigolds.

On sunny days Myrt sat in the enclosed farmhouse veranda and counted how many cars drove to the golf course, which was just around the corner from Canada. She’d also count the crows. A red and white wooden parrot attached to a beam inside the glassed-in porch sometimes would talk, in Myrt’s voice, and a bucket of golden marigolds, her favorite flower, bloomed profusely nearby.

She’d tell stories about the Spear farm but she hardly ever went further back than that. I discovered, years later, that she had made it through some difficult times for a poor girl with little education, in an era when servitude, marriage, or destitution were the most common options.

She never lectured me to continue with my education and go to college, as my grandmother did, nor was she concerned if I was the best-dressed girl in school. But she had other ideas.

The wrap-around porch where Myrt watched, years before, traffic and birds.

One afternoon when the sun warmed the porch and we were counting cars, Myrt suddenly got serious.

“There’s two things in life that I’d like you to consider,” she said.

I sat up in the iron lounge chair and listened. Finally, the wisdom hidden in the old hired girl was coming out.

“Learn how to tat from your grandmother,” she began. “Hardly anyone knows how these days and it’s a dying art. You need to carry it on.

“And start a diary and record things.” Her eyes took on a far away look. “I should have started one years ago—what stories there’d be in it now! But I never did and I’ve lived long enough to regret it.”

I did learn to tat, but it was harder to achieve than I had thought and I didn’t master the lace stitch until sometime after Myrt’s death. I also kept childish diaries until I grew up and threw them away.

A tatting shuttle and thread.

Later I kept journals, at times, and at times I only wrote for publication. But now I see the wisdom in jotting down short sentences and phrases on a daily or weekly basis. The days go so much faster than they did decades ago. Myrt was trying to convey that to me at a young age.

It’s been years now, but the nursery rhymes she recited still chatter inside my head, and the pounding sounds of her shoes keeping time with the poetry. 

Wool afghan detail, knitted by Myrt when she was partially blind, 1960s.

Recently, I passed on those rhythms and ditties to a young grandson. I didn’t know before why that would be so important. But somehow the rhymes, the needlecraft, the oral stories—the love wrapped in a crazy quilt or wool afghan— need to continue on, even if the job of a hired girl has ended.