Low’s almanac, November 1807:

The spangled frost now glitters in the ray,
And fire supplies the impotence of day:
Around the social hearth each jocund swain
Quaffs sober joy, bless’d product of his pain;
While round his cot innoxious tempests beat,
He smiles contented in his snug retreat.

One of the early residents of Portland Street, Dr. Nathanael Low was a physician and an astronomer. From 1762 until his death in 1808, Low produced one of the almanacs upon which travelers depended for listing the taverns and stagecoach schedules. During Low’s years in this house, stagecoaches running on schedules published in his almanacs rode right past his door on the Boston to Portland Turnpike.

Born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1740, Low built his South Berwick home about 1787, just over a decade after that of John Haggens, later the Sarah Orne Jewett House. A Haggens establishment is among the stagecoach stops publicized in Low’s almanacs just before and after the turn of the century.

Much like Poor Richard’s Almanac, penned by Benjamin Franklin at about the same time, and the Farmer’s Almanac, which continues to this day, Low’s almanacs combined astrological information with verse, lore, homilies, recipes and stagecoach schedules, guiding not only farmers but also turnpike travelers and people waiting for the mail.

Click here to enlarge

As explained by Marion Barber Stowell in Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible , an almanac of Low’s day was “a miscellany: it was clock, calendar, weatherman, reporter, textbook, preacher, guidebook, atlas, navigational aid, doctor, bulletin board, agricultural advisor, and entertainer. The entire colonial family consulted its almanacs freely and regularly; these served the various family members not only as their general handy helper but even as their diary, memorandum book, and early-day Reader's Digest."

In 1998 a collection of Low almanacs were displayed in an exhibit at UCLA. As the curators explained, "Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almanacs were the principal practical guides for farmers, tradesmen, navigators, fishermen, physicians, lawyers, educators, clergymen, and anybody else who simply wanted to know what day it was, how to get rid of rats, how to cure a corn, or how to get from Boston to New York.”

South Berwick’s Nathanael Low offered advice to his American readers: The art of holding one’s tongue is both a rare and excellent quality, and what contributes greatly to our eafe and profperity. It is as dangerous to fall in love with one’s own voice as one’s own face...

Click here to enlarge

His 1807 almanac contains instructions on resuscitating a victim of drowning. Rub the body with flannel “fprinkled with spirits and flour of mustard,” advised Dr. Low. “To restore breathing,” a fireplace bellows comes in handy, “introduced…into one noftril” while closing the other, with a puff of tobacco smoke for good measure. Warm bricks applied to the soles of the feet are beneficial, and for a high tech remedy, electricity can be employed by “judicious practitioners.”

Finally, readers are warned ominously: In cases of drowning, salt is never to be used.

There was even an occasional tasteless ethnic turnpike joke:

“Two Irifhmen riding to New-York, one of them asked a man on the road how many miles it was there; to which he replied twenty:

“Arrah,” faid one of them, “we fhall not reach it to-night;”

“Pho,” fays the other, “come along, it is but ten miles apiece.”

Nathanael Low died September 6, 1808, at the age of 46, leaving his wife, Sally, whom he had married two years after building his house on Portland Street. She had been Sally Carr of Somersworth (possibly present-day Rollinsford), NH. It seems likely there were at least two Low children. One may have been Sarah C. Low, who in 1819 married cabinetmaker Joseph Murphy whose shop was next to Nason’s in the Odd Fellows Block.

The other child seems to have become a doctor like his father. A Dr. Nathaniel Low of South Berwick married Mary Anna Hale in 1818, as recorded in Vital Records of Berwick, South Berwick and North Berwick, Maine, Eventually the family moved to Dover, Mary’s home town.

They had two more children named Nathaniel and Sarah— grandchildren of Nathanael and Sally Low of Portland Street. Sarah Low, born in 1830 in South Berwick, later became a nurse and devoted three years in Army hospitals in and around Washington during the Civil War. Her letters and photograph have been preserved at the Woodman Institute and documented by Robert Whitehouse. They mention her brother “Nat,” Nathaniel Low, serving as a Union Army captain in 1863.

Portland Street Walking Tour
Main Street Walking Tour
Old Berwick Historical Society Homepage