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Last Updated
November 11, 2007
From History of the town of Richmond, Cheshire County, New Hampshire : from its first settlement, to 1882
by William Bassett, C.W. Calkins & Co., Boston, 1884
Page 199, et. seq.
HOW OLD GROUT BEAT THE TOWN, AND AFTERWARDS WENT TO RAISING POPPIES.
Nahum Grout, a well known citizen of the town of sixty years ago, was requted to be a Federalist, perhaps the only one at the time in town. The majority, in order to show either their disrespect for the man, or manifest their detestation for his political principles, chose him at the annual meeting, about 1912, hog reeve, the duties of which office was to ring all swine found running at large in the highway,
or else to put them into the town pound. Grout assumes the office with much complacency, and great dignity, withal, and at a proper and most favorable time began operations in earnest, as many of his political opponents soon found out, who had been accustomed to turn their hogs into the public way. By the aid of efficient help, which he seasonably secured, Grout gathered a respectable drove as to numbers, mostly belonging to such of his neighbors and townsmen as had been foremost in promoting him to the office, and lodged the animals securely, as he supposed, within the pound, and patiently waited the appointed time in expectancy of his fees; but as luck would have it, the enclosure was insufficient to hold this kind of cattle, and the pigs all escaped from their imprisonment, and most of them, led by a peculiar instinct, returned to their several homes during the succeeding night. Again, in this emergency, Grout was equal to the occaison; he sued the town for damage, as by their neglect he had lost his fees, and as compalinant, caused the town to be fined for neglect in not providing such enclosure as the "law directs." Grout recovered in his suit, as may be supposed, much to the disgust of such as would have gladly humiliated the man by the degrading nature of the office. The town was mulcted in the sum of nearly one thousand dollars, and ever after Mr. Grout was allowed to remain unburdened by office intended as a stigma to his character and an insult to his name. Grout, elated somewhat, no doubt, by his success in the law, and considering that he had the requisite ability to make a fortune by introducing a new industry, hit upon the idea of planting his farm (now the St. Clair place), with poppies, for the purpose of making opium. His purpose was so far consummated, as to seed the land with these plants, which made a fair growth, considering that the nature of the soil and the method of cultivation varied somewhat from other parts of the world where the soporific herb is successfully cultivated. All the spare women in the neighborhood were employed in picking the poppies at the time of harvest. The yield however of opium, was disproportionate to the expense incurred, and the sanguine expectations which had wonderfully braced him up during the season of growth, in the end faded out, leaving the man forlorn, without hope, and without faith in any attempt to gain a living by labor, in cultivating the soil that would not yield the cost in growing the poppies. After this he seemed to have lost his voice, and became a travelling merchant, stocked with a basket of bottles, selling essence.
In all the country here about,
No equal had this Nahum Grout,
To rake th ways, the hogs to ring,
Or to the pound the "critters" bring.
He taught the ones that showed a spite,
That now and then a Fed. was right.
Whate'er he lost in time or purse
In poppy fields, is naught to us.
To him it seemed a useless toil
To grub a living from the soil;
So in the end, perhaps from choice,
About the time he lost his voice,
He took a more congenial trade,
In selling essence, by him made.
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