According To The Record Of An Old Inhabitant Of Tyngsborough, Now
Dead, Whose Farm We Were Now Gliding Past, One Of The Greatest
Freshets On This River Took Place In October, 1785, And Its
Height Was Marked By A Nail Driven Into An Apple-Tree Behind His
House.
One of his descendants has shown this to me, and I judged
it to be at least seventeen or eighteen feet above the level of
the river at the time.
According to Barber, the river rose
twenty-one feet above the common high-water mark, at Bradford in
the year 1818. Before the Lowell and Nashua railroad was built,
the engineer made inquiries of the inhabitants along the banks as
to how high they had known the river to rise. When he came to
this house he was conducted to the apple-tree, and as the nail
was not then visible, the lady of the house placed her hand on
the trunk where she said that she remembered the nail to have
been from her childhood. In the mean while the old man put his
arm inside the tree, which was hollow, and felt the point of the
nail sticking through, and it was exactly opposite to her hand.
The spot is now plainly marked by a notch in the bark. But as no
one else remembered the river to have risen so high as this, the
engineer disregarded this statement, and I learn that there has
since been a freshet which rose within nine inches of the rails
at Biscuit Brook, and such a freshet as that of 1785 would have
covered the railroad two feet deep.
The revolutions of nature tell as fine tales, and make as
interesting revelations, on this river's banks, as on the
Euphrates or the Nile. This apple-tree, which stands within a
few rods of the river, is called "Elisha's apple-tree," from a
friendly Indian, who was anciently in the service of Jonathan
Tyng, and, with one other man, was killed here by his own race in
one of the Indian wars, - the particulars of which affair were
told us on the spot. He was buried close by, no one knew exactly
where, but in the flood of 1785, so great a weight of water
standing over the grave, caused the earth to settle where it had
once been disturbed, and when the flood went down, a sunken spot,
exactly of the form and size of the grave, revealed its locality;
but this was now lost again, and no future flood can detect it;
yet, no doubt, Nature will know how to point it out in due time,
if it be necessary, by methods yet more searching and unexpected.
Thus there is not only the crisis when the spirit ceases to
inspire and expand the body, marked by a fresh mound in the
churchyard, but there is also a crisis when the body ceases to
take up room as such in nature, marked by a fainter depression in
the earth.
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