The greatest pleasure that comes from the study of old times is the putting asideof confusion about certain traditional beliefs. This is not to say that all old beliefs are good just because they’re old; the mind picks through prejudices and injustices for what is timelessly right. One of our richest inheritances comes from the time known as the Enlightenment, a time that takes in the years leading up to and including the American Revolution.

   It’s a wonderful thing that there are places we can go to where we can “tank up” on this frame of mind and take a break from all the cynicism that today’s world forces on our consciousness. One of these places is Castle Ward, the old General Andrew Ward house in Nut Plains, two miles north of Guilford. This house is in a neighborhood of 18th century private homes.  In 1792,Andrew Ward was a General in George Washington’s army.  His only daughter was suddenly widowed, leaving her penniless with ten children. The General took her nine daughters into his home and adopted them all, including Roxanna Foote, the future mother of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

   If you drive down the short side road past Castle Ward today, it looks exactly as it did in 1816 when Harriet Beecher, age five, was sent to live for a year after her mother died. Her bedroom, she wrote, was the first on the right upstairs, and she could walk, just as you can today, over the little bridge across East River and up the hill to the family cemetery. All of this country has been preserved just as it was in General Ward’s time. Throughout her girlhood years, Harriet Beecher would visit her grandparents and aunts at Castle Ward for weeks at a time where they would spin, sew, do crafts, and read together.

   General Ward was a state legislator. The story is told that he would take all his state pay and buy the latest in books and periodicals. Coming home, he would have two stuffed saddlebags of new reading material and be mobbed by his joyous granddaughters. Driving by, you can almostsee them today.

                                                                                                                Max H. Peters
                                                                                                                Publisher and Editor