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"A great while ago it all began." (Shakespeare: "Twelfth Night")
Mr. Coleman had first come to Little Diamond Pond as a boy, with his Sunday School teacher from Norristown, Mrs.
Chester Smith, and her husband and their three sons who were all more or less near his age. Mr. Smith was manager
(or founder?) of what afterwards became the Tyson Shirt Company of Norristown. They were neighbors of the Coleman
home, across Sandy Hill Road, in the house now enlarged and occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Dehon. They were not well
off financially and had little, if any, domestic he]p, but Mrs. Smith was the kind of mother who would drop her
dish-washing or house-cleaning to sit down under the old tree in the side garden and read aloud with the boys,--while
my husband's own mother, although she had an accomplished housekeeper and other help, was over-occupied with her
large household of seven children and rather awe-inspiring Victorian husband, with her meticulous neatness and
more elaborate routine. Mrs. Coleman was a charming person, witty, devout, and respected; and she looked like a
little French countess, with exquisite figure and patrician face, but it was Mrs. Smith who found time to hunt
up a line of poetry or suggest a good biography, to launch into a picnic or an informal dissertation on some passage
in the Bible. She made life a thing of vivid interest and even gaiety. The informal union Sunday School, to which
she took the boys, involved a lovely stroll across the fields; the "Grange" (or Farmers' Association),
in which she developed their interest, again meant a heightening of the love of country living; I imagine she always
had news of birds and bees and butterflies and brooks,--as well as books and Bible; she awakened the boys' minds
to the resources of good books; and it was under her inspiration, I am sure, that my husband eventually joined,
at about eighteen, the First Presbyterian Church in Norristown, which gave him a more real and joyful experience
of religion than the Episcopal Church (St. John's) to which his mother and sisters belonged, and in which he had
been confirmed. No one knows why these things are so. But everyone knows that a woman like that can be a true teacher
in a boy's or girl's life, and that to be such an influence is one of the keenest and most lasting joys of this
world, and one which angels might envy human life in spite of all its mutations.
Mrs. Smith, therefore, was the real "foundtess" of Camp Diamond as we know it, and as such we honor her.
Her picture is on my bureau at the Chalet, a little old lady, as she was when I knew her, in black mourning dress,
with white collars and cuffs, sitting on the steps of the house in Redlands, California, where she went to live
with one of her sons after she became a widow. I knew her for one short season, when she was old and almost entirely
deaf. She had lived in California for eleven years and came back East to visit. She had "missed the dampness"
of our Eastern States; and even then she travelled alone, and ran around Camp Diamond nimbly in the mist, without
a hat and with less warm clothing than I wore, who ~vas some forty or forty-five years younger. I had the privilege
of thanking her for what she had done for my husband, and I sincerely feel that I owe her more than any other one
person, for helping to make him the large-minded citizen of all the world, and of its great needs and best interests,
that he became. I took her out to Sandy Hill near .Norristown that fall, to get a piece of wood from the old tree
where she had brought up her boys,--she was too deaf to make her way sociably among strangers,--she took it back
to California with her to make a footstool for her older age. But her life had been lived then, and it was not
long
before she died. We went to find her grave in Redlands in May, 1916, on the only trip I ever took to California
with my husband; (Mrs. George Buchanan, whom we were visiting in Altadena, drove us to Redlands. She had been an
early citizen of the Camp herself, as Gertrude Swartz).
How the Smiths ever discovered the Diamond Pond country,--or Coos County,--or even New Hampshire,--I have never
known. But their love of "roughing it" is a sure tradition well attested. They lived in some kind of
cabin on the far side of the Little Pond, near the entrance of what we later knew as the Big Pond Trail. "When
they could catch fish, they lived on fish and potatoes. When they could not, they lived on potatoes." (H.
C. C.) She washed their clothing at the side of the lake, as the Indian women did in primitive America or the Greeks
in Ulysses' day. I think they drank the lake water, for the site though lost in obscurity was said not to be beside
the "Fish-hawk's Spring" at "Fisherman's Landing."
If my husband first went to New Hampshire when he was about fourteen, as I suppose, that wou!d have been in 1876.
The latter part of the road from Colebrook was only a rough and narrow trail. I believe there was then no trail
of any kind around the edge of the Little Pond to the Big Pond, and no camp there; and that the "wilderness
of virgin forest extending for two hundred miles North and West (or Northeast?), of which we heard so much when
I first went to Camp, began at that time at the edge of our small pond. The region, however, had been famous fishing
country for more than a century. I have always understood that the land which now forms the Camp was originally
part of, or at least contiguous to, one of the Forest Grants made to Dartmouth College by King George III.
Dr. Prime has written of that countryside in his quaint and companionable little book "I Go A Fishing,"
which is quoted at length by Dr. Speer in his "Owen Crimmins Stories." The origin of the name "Little
Diamond" is uncertain. It may have been named for some early discoverer, but more likely from the sudden view
as one comes out from "Sunset Hill" and looks down at a flashing glimpse of the water "like a little
diamond." The old route to the Big Pond, and no doubt also to Nathan's Pond and to the Swift and Dead Diamond
Streams, seems definitely to have approached our Little Pond by the steep ascent and sudden descent now called
Sunset Hill; apparently they crossed the Little Pond by boat from somewhere near the marshes at "Jack's Landing",
and then crossed the short "carry" over the height-of-land known to us more recently as "the Big
Pond Trail" to be distinguished from the Big Pond Road. At all events the present culmination of the road
from Colebrook by way of Klebe's Hill did not exist.
My husband liked the life, and the country, so much that he went back there, I think, every summer of his life.
Even when he went several times to Europe and once around the world, he managed to get back to Camp before the
leaves turned scarlet in the fall. The three summers that our family spent away (at Ventnor, N. J., in 1918; at
Estes Park, Colorado, in 1920; and at Ogunquit, Maine, in 1925), he made long visits at the Camp.
I do not know when he built his first "own cabin", the central part of Balsam Lodge, with its fireplace.
There had been for many years a sort of central Camp and eating place operated by various proprietors on about
the site of the present dining-room. To what extent, if any, this existed during the Smiths' habitation of their
far-side cabin I do not know. And I am not sure from whom he eventually bought the land for the Camp. I think it
was from Mr. "Al" Peters. No doubt the old deed at Camp shows the facts. We heard a good deal of one
early proprietor (or manager), Mark Noyes and his wife Aurelia, or "Orill"; they were apparently not
communicative folk, for there is a story that when the summer people came to sympathize with him the next year
after his wife's death, he replied laconically, "She wan't no blood relation." I think my husband bought
first a small plot of land on which to build his cabin, Balsam Lodge,--but he may have rented both the house and
land at first. At all events the Smiths joined in the Central Camp, on the site of our present Camp, with the larger
group that formed gradually as regular summer visitors. My husband continued to go, after the Smiths fade out of
the story, and persuaded various friends, chiefly from the Eastern end of Pennsylvania to go also at first on short
trips for fishing or hunting or travel, like the one on which Mr. Louis Childs went; (father of the present Louis
in the Montgomery Trust Company), and Mr. Strassburger, (father of Ralph, who owns the Norristown Times Herald).
"Jack" Hillegas was one of the first to go to Camp Diamond from Norristown. EventualIy there was a summer
colony centered around a regular group: Dr. and Mrs. Thomas R. Beeber of the First Presbyterian Church at Norristown;
Judge and Mrs. Aaron Swartz and their children, Gertrude (Mrs. George Buchanan); Edna (Mrs. Victor Roberrs); Anne
(Mrs. Stanley Anders), and Aaron Junior; Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson Snyder of Reading and their children, Mary, Jaeger,
and John, and later Dr. Brister, whose courtship of Mary Snyder is said to have occurred at Diamond Pond, the first
of a line of romances; Judge Swartz and Mr. Snyder had been friends since their boyhood at Lafayette College);
Mr. and Mrs. Louis Childs and their children, Marjorie, Alice (Mrs. John Gordon), and Louis, Junior. Many other
people from Norristown have visited the Camp at various times. (See Chapter IX).
The old buildings and tents of the early period are shown in the photographs which were long treasured in Mrs.
Snyder's cabin, Camp Comfort. The Bee Hive and Fisherman's Lodge are relics of the pre-1900 days still in use.
Transient fishermen continued to come to the Central Camp and there was naturally an element of "roughing
it", and perhaps even a certain amount of occasional "roughness" among the sportsmen, (later characterized
as "throwing potatoes in the dining-room"); but the little community of summer residents lived a settled,
peaceful and contented life. Judge Swartz, who was superintendent of our Sunday School for years, conducted a Sunday
Service every week, and I believe there was never any Sunday fishing by these regulars. The guests visited back
and forth in the evenings, much as they do today, playing euchre, or cribbage, or casino, instead of bridge, five
hundred, Chinese checkers, or monopoly. (Anagrams are of uncertain date.) No doubt they all went early to bed as
oil lamps persisted way into the next generation, and the custom of fishermen was early rising. There are pictures
in the bench-closet in the "Den" at 1326 showing the Swartz, Snyder and Childs "children" wading
in the Lake, with large hats, taken in "the nineties."
Chapter III. The Coming of the Missionaries, 1901 - Page 11
