Red House: Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England's Oldest Continuously Lived-in House - Hardcover

Messer, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670033154 ISBN 13: 9780670033157

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2004

Synopsis

The author of the poetry collection, Bandit Letters, recounts her upbringing in a three-hundred-year-old New England colonial home, a childhood marked by the legacies of the house's original family as recorded in journals, letters, daguerreotypes, and other family documents that were left behind. 17,500 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Sarah Messer teaches poetry and creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her poetry has been published in the Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Story, and many other journals. She is the author of a book of poetry, Bandit Letters. She has received a Mary Roberts Rinehart award for Emerging Writers, and grants and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the American Antiquarian Society, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Reviews

Red House, built by Walter Hatch circa 1647, was one of the first houses in Marshfield, Mass., a coastal community some 30 miles south of Boston. Although it had been stipulated that the house would stay in the Hatch family, descendant Richard Hatch sold it to Messer's father in 1965, impressed with his respect for the property. While Messer didn't obsess over restoring the house to its "original" state, he approached all changes mindful of Red House history. And so the author (now a poet and teacher at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington) grew up in an oddly anachronistic household—with rag rugs instead of shag, Dutch ovens instead of electric ranges, wood instead of Formica. Daguerreotypes of 19th-century and photographs of 20th-century Hatches were carefully preserved; Hatch's original will was displayed on the wall. Although Messer felt like she was "growing up with someone else's history," this dual identity may have suggested her book's unusual form, which weaves Messer's story of growing up in Red House with the Hatch family's story. Her research into New England history unexpectedly fascinates (e.g., how 17th-century settlers would wear masks when carousing drunk to avoid identification; how they earmarked their communally grazing cattle). Beyond giving readers a sense of the liveliness of early New England life and explaining what it was like to grow up in a historic house, Messer gives readers a great sense of the power of a house to pull and shape its inhabitants.
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Messer brings a poet's ear, an architect's eye, a historian's attention to detail, and her own firsthand experiences as a resident in this account of "New England's Oldest Continuously Lived-In House." Alternating chapters tell of two family histories, that of Walter Hatch, who built the Red House in 1647 in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and that of Ronald Messer, who purchased the house from Hatch's great-great-great-great-great-grandson and thus broke the string of Hatches who occupied the residence for more than 300 years. By themselves, the family histories are not particularly distinguished; yet, in the slow uncovering and sharing of quotidian events and their historical contexts--Walter Hatch, for example, was born just two years after the pilgrims celebrated their first Thanksgiving in Plymouth--Messer renders these stories unique, indelible, and mysteriously interactive with one another. This book stands as an important historical document, yet it also gives informed insights into the eternal dynamics of family life, the nature of happenstance and fate, and the sadly detached circumstances in which so many Americans now find themselves. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670033154
• ISBN 13: 9780670033157
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400