From time to time, I pull a book from the shelves in the library where my great grandfather's treasures gather dust, their pages faded and their leather backs crinkled with age.

Lured by a good-looking binding or an interesting title, I gingerly open the book to check its durability. I read it if it feels durable in my hands.

Recently's discovery was called "Memories of A Hundred Years." It was released, in two substantial volumes, in 1902. My fantastic grandpa had actually penciled his signature on the inside cover of Volume No. 1.

The author, Edward Everett Hale, was a direct descendent of Nathan Hale, the Revolutionary War hero.

A journalist and magazine editor, the younger Hale collected what he called living history. Autographs, letters and journals (these were popular in his time) of well-known personages were stuffed into every nook and cranny of his own library and they overflowed into other rooms of his old house too.

Hale was in his 90s when he composed his "memories." They ramble through the previous century like a creek through a forest, conversational and calm.

His reflections on stars like George Washington have an intimacy that is missing from biographies. He knew individuals who understood people, consisting of Washington. He heard the stories a thousand times.

None warmed my heart more than his own firsthand memories of what Boston resembled when his dad, Nathan Hale Jr., was a young boy. That Boston was primarily gone by 1820.

Hales waxes sentimental without shedding any tears. He is as much a forward-thinking capitalist as he is a fortunate aristocrat.

His memories commemorate the cotton gin and the steam engine, commercial marvels destined to remake the world. He advises us that their creators already wielded significantly more affect even than Washington, much less those Southern deplorables-- the more agrarian-minded Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.

" Be mindful what you long for" kept running through my mind as I discovered how the Boston of 1802 "invited my father after his two-day trip from Northampton as a town of gardens."

Hale can't completely hide his sense of loss when he tells how "the personal homes in Washington Street had little backyards or gardens, as we would state, on one or both sides, and on the street only windows, the front door opening on the garden.

" And in a lot of cases, there were orchards of significant size right away adjacent your homes."

A classic of this type belonged to Governor James Bowdoin, "who had a big home and substantial great deal of land on Beacon Street. This large garden abounded in the finest fruits, pears peaches, apples, and grapes."

Another such garden "was spread out around today side of the Revere House. "Fruit trees and vines and foreign grapes and other tender fruits which now succeed only under glass grew in the open air.

In some instances, these gardens covered two, three or even more acres.

" No such high-end exists now."

People consumed local back then. And contrary to what I always presumed about popular males in days passed, everybody participated in the high-end of cooking.

Hale remembers "the prince of Boston merchants … … trudging home for his eight o'clock breakfast from old Faneuil Hall with the market basket containing his one o'clock dinner."

" The wealthiest guys in New England, including the creator of the Agricultural School of Harvard College, might be seen every morning in the exact same business of gentlemen who had purchased their dinners personally at Faneuil Hall market."

Hale's combined emotions fairly ooze from the page in this passage:

" It is a little queer that when one goes into the historic Faneuil Hall, which we Boston people call 'the Cradle of Liberty,' he (still) passes upstairs between the stalls of a market where he sees beef and pork, cabbages and lettuce for sale.

" These memoranda of old uninhabited areas in Boston will have a particular interest for people who purchase their thread and needles, perhaps, where I have chosen and consumed pears."

Does he actually want all that to go away as soon as his cherished railroads and steamships make it possible to carry food in mass quantities from one part of the country to the other, and eventually to the world?

Even he admits that he isn't totally sure. Back in 1902 particular facts were held to be self-evident. Development was unstoppable, and it was bound to make the world healthier, better, more flourishing and, above all, more just.

Contact Bonnie at bonnieblodgett@gmail.com.

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