Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James

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on + February '.*/ in a beautifully proportioned Federalist Greek Revival home on King Oak Hill in Weymouth , Massachusetts. She was the first of Eliza Webb Gibbens and Dr. Daniel Lewis Gibbens’s three daughters. Her mother came from a long, respectable line of Weymouth Whites and Webbs, her father from a Boston Irish Protestant family. In '.*/ Weymouth, formerly called Wessaguscus, was a patriarchal New England village thirteen miles southeast of Boston that was slowly being transformed by the shoe-manufacturing industry.1 The community prided itself on having invented the town meeting, a particular form of New England local governance that has been viewed as the purest form of democracy. Alice’s maternal ancestors played responsible roles in the town. One ancestor helped make the rules for managing swine running at large and for protecting the alewives, the small fish that swarmed the town’s Back and Fore rivers, important matters in an economy based on farming and fishing. Her maternal grandfather, lawyer Christopher Webb, had been a fence viewer (making sure neighbors took care of their sides of a fence), a state senator, a representative to the Massachusetts General Court, and a selectman. Also, as overseer of the town almshouse he ensured that the poor had their daily ration of ale and cider. ' Stirrings (

ij_hh_d]i Living and dying in the same Congregational parish, Alice’s ancestors led narrow lives of service, piety, and rectitude. The faded tombstone in North Weymouth Cemetery to Alice’s great-great-grandfather testifies to the beliefs that ruled the community: In Memory of Capt. `Wc[i
m^_j[ Who departed this life March the 'st '-/): As corn maturely ripe is gather’d home So his remains are brought into the tomb To sleep in silence till that glorious day, When Christ his light shall roll the front away. Eliza Putnam Webb, Alice’s mother, was a quiet, devout young woman who shunned public gatherings, attending only church functions and funerals . Somehow she met Bostonian Daniel Lewis Gibbens Jr., perhaps in neighboring Braintree, where Daniel’s father had clerked in a retail store before moving to Boston to open his own establishment. Daniel Lewis Gibbens Sr. became a successful merchant, a pillar of Boston’s First Congregational Church, a colonel in the Boston militia, and a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. His son Daniel Gibbens graduated from Harvard Medical School in '.*-. On (. October of that same year Old North Congregational Church minister Joshua Emery married Daniel Gibbens and Eliza Putnam Webb. It was a union of polar opposites. A boisterous extrovert, Daniel was reputed to have been a wild, hard-drinking youth; he and his brothers caused their respectable parents considerable worry. Eliza, on the other hand, was grave and gentle, a woman ill suited to live with such a burly, excitable man. In '.*. Gibbens was admitted to the Massachusetts Medical Board. He became Weymouth’s physician, and the couple established residence in North Weymouth in the home traditionally occupied by the town’s doctor. The large, comfortable, post-and-beam house had an imposing front porch bordered by four two-story-high columns. It boasted many shuttered windows and four fireplaces, two up and two down. A white ij_hh_d]i

) marble mantel decorated with an ornate bow topped the parlor fireplace, and a narrow, steep, curving staircase led from the parlor to the upstairs bedrooms. At an elevation of ',) feet the house commanded an impressive view of the Fore River and Boston Harbor. The King Oak and Queen Oak, both hundreds of years old, dominated the property. The Weymouth of Alice’s childhood was densely wooded with oak, red cedar, hemlock, beech, wild cherry, buttonwood, and tupelo. Berry bushes and vines grew everywhere, and flowers bloomed through the mild springs and summers: orchid, lady’s slipper, violet, saxifrage, aster, arbutus, and hepatica. Even the rocky ledges were colorful, painted with spreading lichen. When she was old enough, Alice rode with her father in the doctor’s coupé, a horse-drawn buggy, when he called on his patients. Nineteenthcentury small-town doctors were an integral part of the community: there were no medical specialists. Dr. Gibbens was a diagnostician, internist, surgeon, gynecologist, obstetrician, oncologist, psychiatrist—the list was nearly endless. Mid-nineteenth-century doctors often prescribed bloodletting , cupping, purging, and herbal remedies, depending in part on the community’s beliefs. Gibbens’s success in treating...