The poetic side of Dr. Thomas Rhoads
The poetic side of Dr. Thomas Jefferson Boyer Rhoads
The man who was a doctor, real estate investor and banker shows us another side: he wrote poetry.
Thomas J.B. Rhoads (18371919) of Boyertown was a very successful man who, in addition to his long career as a doctor, owned several businesses, invested in real estate, was active in civic affairs, sat on the boards of local companies, and founded two banks in Boyertown. As last month’s article illustrated, there is no question that his talent and drive helped his community grow and prosper.
His prominence ensured that Rhoads would be remembered in the Boyertown area long after his death. But now, slightly more than a century since his demise, people who knew the man have long passed from the scene, so his immediate contributions to Boyertown are long forgotten. Patients, businesses, and real estate are no more. The bank is there but his connection with it has long since faded from memory.
However, a small, seemingly trivial part of Rhoads’ legacy has increased in value with the passing of time. Much later in life, the person who was an overworked doctor, shrewd real estate investor, hard-headed business man, and founder of banks shows us another side: he wrote poetry.
Rhoads began writing poems in 1891 when he was 54 years old. Even with his life running at full throttle, the hours he spent as a busy country doctor traveling in his buggy freed his mind to think of subjects and then set them to paper as a “pleasurable occupation during the long winter evenings.” He eventually published about 200 of his works in “Onkel Jeff’s Reminiscences of Youth and Other Poems,” Volume 1 (published in 1904) and Volume 2 (published 1906).
The poetry won’t make anyone forget Robert Frost, but the works are invaluable for describing the ways of Pennsylvania German farm life and culture and also some of the people, places, and events of old-time Boyertown.
Reading just a few of his poems about farm life in the 1840s quickly drives home the point that this lifestyle required almost unremitting labor and self-sufficiency from everybody, children included.
In “Hay Making in Olden Times” (written July 20, 1894), Rhoads describes a day in June when the hay was cut and brought in. Before mechanical reapers, this was done by hand by a crew of laborers swinging heavy scythes. The day began at dawn with the men honing their scythe blades then partaking of the “Frei-Schtick,” a slice of well buttered bread, a glass of milk or cream, and a pull from the Black Mariah (a shot of whiskey) “to give them a zest for work” and “to keep up needed power.”
Then it began: seven “sturdy” men advancing around the hay field “under the broiling sun” rhythmically swinging their scythes over and over, cutting the hay so it lay in windrows. Rhoads puts himself in the scene: “To spread the grass for seven men and carry water to them as on they mowed with swinging strokes was all a boy could do.”
The mowers did pause in their work. They went into the house for breakfast and then it was more “toiling, mowing and sweating” until 9 a.m. when they retired to the shade under the trees at the farm’s springhouse for the “Nine uhr Schtick.” This was a “slice of bread and butter and a piece of pie or cake” and “ice cold milk or a pot of bonny clabber” (unpasteurized milk that has turned sour and thickened into curds. Today’s nutrition gurus tout this as a great source of healthy probiotics. This was followed by a tug at “Betz,” a bottle or a cup of lemonade.” Thus fortified, they resumed their mowing.
A lusty toot on the dinner horn by Rhoads’ mother brought everyone to the house for the main meal of the day. Then it was back to the field with “teams and wagons to gather in the hay.” But while the men were eating, “the women of the household” ventured into the hot sun with rakes in hand to turn the windrows and help the hay to dry.
There was another break at 4 p.m. and then the newly cut hay was in the barn and the day was over. Obviously, everyone was tired, except for the boys who climbed into the ox heart cherry tree then loaded with ripe fruit where, in the twilight, “one could satisfy himself before he went to bed.”
In addition to planting and harvesting, a farmer had to be a jack-of-all-trades, such as carpentry and blacksmithing. Rhoads wrote about his father, John, and how he would use the time when he couldn’t work outside to work in his blacksmith shop, repairing and sharpening tools, shoeing his horses and even making nails. He recalled seeing the sweat running down the man’s face as, wearing a leather apron, his rapid hammer strokes made sparks fly from the red-hot metal and the anvil ring. Dr. Rhoads, then but a “hatless urchin,” had to work the bellows, a chore that required him to jump up to grab its handle and use all his weight to pull it down while he tried to dodge the shower of hot sparks.
In “The Chimney Corner,” written on Jan. 4, 1892, Onkel Jeff turns back the clock half a century to the fireplace in the kitchen of his parents’ farmhouse. It was a “good old fashioned fire place, in size four feet by ten” (10 feet wide and 4 feet deep). It was many things: a source of heat and, at night, a source of light and brightness, where his mother cooked the family’s food.
In a farmhouse with no central heat, “young and old alike… stood upon the hearth to dry their dripping clothes” and “warm their livid fingers and thaw their frozen toes.” And it was large enough to accommodate a bench at one end
Rhoads began writing poems in 1891 when he was 54 years old. Even with his life running at full throttle, the hours he spent as a busy country doctor traveling in his buggy freed his mind to think of subjects and then set them to paper as a “pleasurable occupation during the long winter evenings.”
where “we sat cozy.”
Cooking was difficult, there was no temperature control and the utensils, made from heavy cast iron with long handles, had to have been an ergonomic nightmare. However, Rhoads’ mother, in his memory, was a master chef who routinely turned out delicious food under these conditions.
“The Chimney Corner” describes how she used the fireplace to cook and some of the foods she made. Funnel cakes required a frying pan with a “long thick handle” holding lard and resting on a “tripod on the hearth” into which, using a funnel, she poured batter “round and round” that formed “like a rope that’s being wound.” He “could see the batter swelling” and the “cake browning as the heated lard (bubbled).” The poet goes on to capture her making “tempting thick and square” waffles, fritters, scrapple, sausage, and yellow corn meal mush “fried upon the hearth with Mother’s usual care.”
Thomas Rhoads’ mother, Catherine Boyer Rhoads (1803-1883), was the perfect partner for the industrious John Rhoads. The fact that she was pregnant for 13 years during the first 21 years of her marriage and was still able to run the household proves her mettle. Not only was she an excellent mother capable of performing all the tasks that were her responsibility, a hair-raising sleigh riding adventure that left some of boys bruised and bleeding demonstrated what she was capable of doing in a crisis.
In “Old Time Coasting,” written March 16, 1893, Rhoads recounts what happened when his brother and some of their friends found an old dilapidated sleigh behind the barn, hauled it to the top of a long steep hill and “rode it down at break neck speed while hats and coats flew far behind.”
“The boisterous and happy band” got such a rush from their daring plunge that it was repeated again and again until the inevitable occurred. The speeding sleigh “hit a snag” that “scattered the occupants afar with feet in air and shoulders down.” Among the casualties was his brother, who “sustained a wound, which gapping wide exposed the ligaments close to the knee.” Their parents were soon on the scene and the intrepid Caroline Boyer, noting the seriousness of the injury, “with thread and needle round sewed well in place our brother’s wound. Then with adhesive plaster drew the parts in place…” She had obviously done this many times before.
As a lifelong Boyertown resident, Onkel Jeff described people and events of that place in his poems. The best one, “An Amusing Episode During a Fourth of July Oration at Boyerstedle 1818,” written June 27, 1892, describes the episode in the title.
The back story: Andrew Jackson’s spectacular defeat of an army of British Regulars at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 caused local volunteer militia companies to form in the United States. One of these was the “Colebrookdale Guards,” made up, as its name implies, of men from Colebrookdale Township.
In mid-June of 1818, the guards received their muskets and equipment from the state at no charge. That set the stage for a spectacular Independence Day celebration when the guardsmen would appear in uniform with their brand-new muskets.
Word quickly spread of this demonstration with the result that on that day “All the yeoman of country from many miles around with their wives, and sons, and daughters were early on the ground…as they were eager to behold the volunteers with ‘Flint-locks’ and accoutrements.”
After the men drilled and paraded for the throng, it was time for an oration by a famous (but unnamed) local speaker. The practical farmers of that time didn’t build an elaborate platform decked in red, white and blue bunting, but provided an empty hogshead for the orator’s stand. (A hogshead was a 4-foot-high wooden barrel with a head 30 inches in diameter.)
As the speaker’s oration progressed so did his excitement and soon he “stamped and raved and shouted in a tenor key.” The stamping proved to be his undoing as the head of the hogshead collapsed and the orator disappeared from sight as he sank into the 4- foot barrel. The crowd loved this and “The soldiers cheered, the ladies shrieked and laughter filled the air.”
The speaker reappeared covered in molasses from head to toe and couldn’t get out of the barrel. Henry Boyer, Rhoads’ maternal grandfather and the cofounder of Boyertown, was among those who went to the speaker’s aid. To free the man they had to turn the barrel on its side and then “dragged him out besmeared all over with the sweet and sticky stuff.”
The poor man’s dunking ended his “eloquence and speeches for the day,” and because of this “great mishap he hied himself away,” and “nevermore appeared again…until the day was ended and the folks had gone away.”