Searching for a reputation on which to hang an opinion or a personality, one sometimes comes up against some funny records. One thing about those old families we can admire, at least; they did not cover up much of what took place. The portraits of the family, from generation to generation continued to be hung in the galleries, whether the aural color of the soul was white or purple; they stood for themselves, upon themselves, so secure in the fact that they were themselves that the rest did not matter much. They neither apologized nor excused; they took life as it came, and whether spendthrift, they stood the gaff; on miser, they bore the obloquy; whether gay of heart or sad of soul they bore their part, and in that they set the example which we can follow well.

Hunting out forbears is a delightful rastime as well as a wonderful explanation of life as we know it. It fascinates us even while we make light of it to others; we say, "We just thought we would see if we could, you know" if charged with seeking the exclusiveness of the ancestral society. Often times Often times we are honest in this; but more often we seek for something, something which will give us the assurance of that bigger thing we feel we have failed to obtain ourselves, for our children. We have been honest, most of us; we have been gentle, where we could; but we all have our dreams of that something which we fondly aimed to do and never brought about, and so we search about for that backing, from those gone before, which justifies, at least, the existence that in hours of discouragement we call our failure. Which is one reason for it all; but only one.

The Old Glass Factory at

Sandwich

A centennial is always an event of more than ordinary concern, and a centennial in Sandwich this summer will be of special interest to the Wing tribe, since whatever has happened in Sand

Wing history. A recent Sunday edition of the Boston Herald has the following:

"Thirty-seven years after the Sandwich, Mass., glass factory fires were drawn, never to be rekindled, Sandwich glass today is all the rage. Odd pieces of the famous old product which was known throughout the world are bringing high prices, and the collector goes far abroad to obtain them. July 4th, this year, will mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the BostonSandwich Glass Company, and the town of Sandwich on the Cape plans to celebrate the event with fitting ceremonies. For almost two-score years the furnaces have been out, yet the romance of the old glass industry still lives."

The ruins of the brick factory on the left as the train draws in to Sandwich station is a familiar sight. Bangs Burgess, formerly of Sandwich, tells its very interesting history in the Herald, a part of which is given here.

"On many visits as a child to my grandmother in Sandwich, where living and thought were centered in the Glass house, I unceasingly questioned my Uncle Tom, who was Thomas Heffernen of Sandwich, about glass making. He had worked all his life in the Boston-Sandwich glass factory. My father began working there when the factory was 18 years old and my grandfather had worked there before his marriage, which must have been in the infancy of the industry. It was, however, all novel and strange to me, for I went away from Sandwich when I was three.

As my Uncle Tom talked, my eyes turned from the pretty glass book, bell and bellows on the whatnot to the mantel with its glass vases, row of glass lamps, and the black bear which is now so much hunted that when you bag his head you cannot get his body to match. These glass bears of various colors were originally made for a bear ointment concern, I was told, and at that time one could be had for the asking. The best that mantel contained is now in my possession, a set of doll flatirons made of blue glass nearly 80 years ago for a little girl.

Uncle had a way of chaffing me, but

much that he told me I have since learned to have been the truth fashioned to fit my youthful understanding.

'Glass making,' he said, 'was a gentleman's job; in fact, in France at first only noblemen were allowed to make glass, for it was considered a high art.'

'Who made the first glass?' I asked. 'Why, glass making goes back beyond the beginning of history,' he answered. 'What did they first make it out of?' 'Elements of the earth, the same as they do now, only fewer were used. Before flint glass the product was dull and dark.'

'Why do they call it flint glass?"

'Because in England flints were calcined and pulverized to make silica, which is the principal constituent of glass. In France they ground up pure rock crystal; before that, it was translucent like glass that comes through a fire. You have heard of that fiddling fellow Nero? Well, he drank wine from the first clear glass.

'In our factory,' he continued, 'they used potash, nitre, sand, oxide of lead, and many other minerals. And let me tell you, we used the very best lead. Just listen,' he said, snapping his finger against the side of a goblet, 'I now know that the tone of a glass bell is clearer, more sonorous, and travels further than that of metallic bells.'

My next question was, 'Do they use the sand from the beach?'

Uncle Tom said, 'Shoo! People a good deal bigger than you think the factory was built in Sandwich on account of the sand, which isn't so. Our sand comes from Berkshire county. At one time it came from Plymouth beach, and after that a better grade from Morris river, New Jersey, and now the best sand in the world comes from Cheshire, Mass.'

'If it was not for the sand, what made them bulid the factory here, uncle?' I pursued.

'Make a guess,' he said.

"The sea,' was my ready answer, predicated on my previous knowledge that the company at one time owned the packet Polly and later built and operated the steamer Acorn.

"The pine woods,' he answered.

It seems that a man came down from

Boston and bought a huge tract of land covered with pine trees, after he had a consultation with the townspeople and told them how much money they could earn in the glass factory he proposed to build. As a result, a century ago, on the lower border of the most beautiful town I have ever seen, by the edge of the colorful marshes that stretch away to the golden and green dunes by the sea, Cape Cod witnessed, on a bright 19th of April, the tossing out of the first shovel of earth at the command of the Boston man, Deming Jarves, who then began the building of an industry whose products were destined to travel over the whole world."

Then follows the account of the building of the houses for the workmen, when, as related at page 2464, the cellar of the Rev. Richard Bourne's house was uncovered; the planting of the great elms that remain to-day; the beginning of work on the 4th of July, 1825; and the formation of a stock company, Feb. 22, 1826.

The furnaces were always in full blast, and the factory operated by two shifts of workmen. A watchman went through the town in the night and rapped on the houses of those who belonged to the night shift.

The workmen of the factory were the most prosperous of Sandwich citizens, and the glass makers' ball was an annual event in the social life of the town. Costumes for the wives and daughters were designed especially for it, many of the women dusted their hair with powdered glass.

and

In regard to the interior workings of the factory-several men and boys collaborated in the making of each article, and these together constituted a shop. The foreman of this shop was called a gaffer, and was the most skilled workman, putting the finishing touches on each piece of glassware.

The evolution of a lamp is entertainingly traced, from the time a ball of molten glass is taken from the whitehot furnace until it becomes a finished product, and is as the author very wittily relates-"packed and eventually sold to a farmer's wife for 15 or 20cents by a tin peddler or traded for rags

or bones, and afterwards relegated to a barn, cellar or attic. But these sad features," she continues, "were only stepping stones to its final repository years after in a safety vault in Tiffany's from which it was resurrected and offered to me in exchange for a king's ransom."

***

"Now that all the glass which ever was or could possibly have been made in Sandwich together with the output of contemporary factories, to say nothing of a quantity of imitations thrown in. has been sold and resold until no one but a profiteer or bootlegger can offord to buy it, we have arrived at the point where fragments are offered to the public to be worn as jewelry. Most of this is made from cullet, which is simply broken or imperfect glass which leaked from a broken pot or was scraped from a pot that was being prepared for melting a new batch.

Packard, the cutter; Dillaway, the moldmaker; Chapoul, the book-keeper of 60 years' service; and the long line of gaffers and blowers who were part and parcel of the institution in its days of greatness, have gone to their reward.

The town itself, largely the product of their lives and labors,has year by year receded from the industrial to the rural. Its charm of location, comfortably nestled in the palm of nature's hand, lulled by the rippling wavelets and the sound of singing sands, still makes it, as Joseph Jefferson said, "The most beautiul town in all the world except the town in England it was named for.'"

The Shepherds of Shepherd's
Plains

By William A. Wing

Many of the Wings of Dartmouth trace back to the Shepherds of Shepherd's Plains-and though the place has changed entirely in its appearance, being now a very modern-looking country locality-and as the name has "died out" in Dartmouth-and the ancient Shepherd Homestead, the "fold of the flock", has disappeared-it perhaps deserves re-locating in the minds of to-day descendants, who unknowingly, dash by in their autos.

To begin with, the family has a romance. It is said that Daniel Shepherd and Mary Bryce eloped from Englandsome say, from Virginia. The story is told that Mary Bryce was smuggled off on a ship to America that a wicked relative might benefit by her disappearance. At any rate, we know that Daniel Shepherd married Mary Bryce at Portsmouth Rhode Island, about 1686. This is the first fact that has come down to us in their true history. They began their wedded life in Rhode Island and lived there about twenty years.

Another romantic tale says that the heiress, Mary Bryce, on leaving England was "forehanded" enough to quilt into her blue satin petticoat many golden guineas. Be that as it may, she and her husband eventually became so poor that it was necessary to put out the son,

John Shepherd, to one Mr. Dankin of Portsmouth. The other children were named Virtue, Mary and Nathaniel. Around 1705 the family decided to try its fortunes in Dartmouth, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. In this town of their new venture lived many of the Portsmouth folk. The mother, Mary Bryce Shepherd, secured the release of her son, John, from Mr. Dankin, though not without some effort; then the family, entirely united again, set out for the new home.

Here they settled in what was afterwards known as "Shepherd's Plains", but then called "ye plaine that goes over to ye river by ye Meeting-house", but a stone's throw from the Friends Meeting House at Apponegansett.

The town needed a schoolmaster most of all, and our Daniel Shephed became the first, and the first school is said to have been held in the home of John Russell, near Apponegansett River.

The Shepherds were not Friends, but living so near the Meeting-House they gradually became "somewhat convinced of the truth", and later a famous Friend Minister was called to the home of Mary Bryce Shepherd who was gravely ill and died apaprently in the faith. Later on, her husband and family all joined the sect which worshipped so near to them, and where the neighbors gathered on First and Fifth days.

The son John Shepherd, the little boy, had grown to manhood. The nearest neighbor of the Shepherds was a member of the Earle family of Portsmouth. This family had early large holdings in Dartmouth, and were responsible for many from Portsmouth coming there to live. Neighbor Earle's wife Dorcas Dillingham of Sandwich. Her niece and namesake, Dorcas Wing of Sandwich, whose brother, Edward Wing had but lately come to live in Dartmouth, came also to see her aunt.

Now we have a young Quaker whose nearest neighbor has a young Quakeress niece visiting, both about the same age, and everything satisfactory. Naturally they were married and lived happily happily ever after, at Shepherd's Plains, where, till within a quarter of a century, stood

the Shepherd homestead, facing cornerwise to the road and toward the south, a goodly house of the long-leg short-leg roofed type-a house and a half, as the old description has it. To-day only a hollow in a field shows where the old cellar was dug of the ancient Shepherds.

John Shepherd and Dorcas Wing had a daughter Jemima Shepherd who married John Wing, the son of Joseph and Catherine Wing of Dartmouth; and there were other Shepherd-Wing marriages throughout the family.

Another attribute of the Family is that now and then red hair crops out and it is always spoken of as the "Shep-herd hair."

I wish, whenever I cross Shepherd's Plains, that there might rise before my eyes the Shepherd homestead, and that I might see it within as well-furnished and peopled as of the ancient days in Dartmouth.

Kith and Kin

In the annual report for 1924 of Mrs. Samuel Z. Shope, State President Penna. Daughters of 1812, occurs the following: "The most outstanding work ever achieved by a War of 1812 Daughter of Penna. is the Index of the list of Soldiers

and Sailors in the archives department in Ottawa, Canada, who participated in the War of 1812, that was compiled by our Honorary State President, Mrs. Henry James Carr, who is also immediate Past-President of the Association of Presidents, Past and Present, and Charter Members of the National Society U. S. Daughters of War of 1812. This Index is of great value, not only to us but to our posterity for generations to come, so we owe Mrs. Carr a most hearty vote of thanks and congratulations."

*

Mr. Jefferson T. Wing of Detroit, of J. T. Wing and Company, manufacturers and dealers in mill and factory supplies, and one of the directors of the Wing Family of America, Inc., came East in May as one of the delegates-at-large to the Congress of the Sons of the American Revolution, in Swampscott, Mass. During the days of the Congress Mr. Wing, with other delegates, was shown the historic places all about Boston, Concord and Lexington. Later, he came to Wareham, to inquire after the interests of The Owl, and then proceeded to New Bedford, to see the whaling museum of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, and from there was going to Philadelphia, by invitation of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, to view the noted Tiffany mosaicin in the building of the Curtis Publishing Co.

Mr. Wing has travelled extensively in Europe and Oriental countries, and his wife and son are now abroad. It will be remembered that he was appointed by our late president on a committee, with Mr. Wilson D. Wing of Bangor, Maine, and Capt. Henry Wing of Hull, England, in the interest of a memorial window, which the Wing Family have been invited to place in the church in the Parish of Wing, Rutland, England. Last sum

mer he sent his son-who, by the way, is the author of "Taliput Leaves", as noted in the Dec. 1922 Owl-from the Continent across to England, to look over this Wing Church in Rutland, and to study and report upon the situation.

** ** *

Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson C. Bynum are C., in one of the recent developments of building a new home at Chapel Hill, N. the village where there are plenty of short-leaf pine, oak and dogwood trees. Chapel Hill is the seat of the University of North Carolina, the mother university of the United States. It is splendidly located, on the direct trunk line of highways running north and south, and

nature has been most kind in the growth of beautiful trees of many species, some of which are undoubtedly those of the original forest which stood where now are the present University buildings.

Mr. Bynum is a graduate of the University and is now connected with the work of the Geologocal Department. Mrs. Bynum is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Rufus L. Sisson of Potsdam, N. Y. They have one young son, less than two years old, who is known as Buddy, Jr.