History of the Endicott Pear Tree. 26? 



tree, often filled our boyish stomach towards the beginning 

 of this century ; and our boyish ears, too, were often filled 

 with delight as we listened with rapture to our great-grand- 

 mother, who entered the family in 1738, as she conversed of 

 the days of '' auld lang sytie,^^ and told over the story of this 

 tree, which she ever uniformly stated to be one of the orig- 

 inal trees of the governor's orchard, imported with his dial in 

 1630. Our great-great-grandfather, Samuel Endicott, born 

 in 1687, only 22 years after the death of his great-grand- 

 father, the governor, and who must have remembered it as 

 early as 1695, always made the same statement, as we have 

 repeatedly heard from the elder members of the family, and 

 particularly from his grandson, our grandfather, who was a 

 married man, with children, in 1766, the year of the old gen- 

 tleman's death. The last time the writer conversed with him 

 upon the subject, was just after the equinoctial gale of 1815, 

 in which it weis sadly shattered, and its recovery was fof 

 some time considered doubtful. Standing with him beside 

 it, and looking on the ruins before us, he related, for perhaps 

 the twentieth time, the tradition which he had as repeatedly 

 heard from his grandfather, born, as before stated, only 22 

 years after the death of the governor. In fact, we have been 

 so accustomed, the last 50 years, to hear it spoken of in the 

 family as the " governor's pear tree," that it never occurred 

 to us its identity could be doubted any more than the farm 

 itself on which it stands. 



The Rev. Doct. Bentley, of Salem, than whom no one 

 took a deeper interest in this venerable tree, was accustomed 

 to make it an annual visit for many years of his life, never 

 failing at the same time to pay his respects to the original 

 portrait of the governor,— -standing before it, uncovered^ with 

 all the awe and reverence which a good catholic would man- 

 ifest before a picture of the virgin. After one of these visits, 

 in 1796, he thus describes it in a letter to the elder Adams: — - 

 " It now bears the name of the Endicott Pear, but in the 

 family the Sugar Pear. This is the tree which stood not 

 far behind the dial, and has its age reported from it. It is in 

 front of the site of the house, and rises in three trunks from 

 the ground and is considerably high. It is much decayed 

 VOL. XIX. — NO. yi. 33 



