Bi-Weekly Newsletter December 21, 2024

CAPTAIN FISHER
“He was a man of considerable intelligence and would rather starve than beg. He made the most of everything.”
Hermit, a recluse, a person living in seclusion. Captain Edward Fisher of Easton lived the last part of his life as a hermit according to an article published in the Boston Daily Globe June 29, 1886.
I picture him, as described in the Globe article, huddled in the cold on his bed of old rags and coats infested with mice, reading the magazines and papers he subscribed to, or writing one of the several poetry manuscripts he left behind. While his visible space was filled with ashes, garbage, and small animals such as squirrels simmering in a pot over the fire, his inner life appeared to be rich. Fisher kept to his Jewish faith and “was respected by all who knew him, and always did his duty in his way of life with a willing hand, a quiet tongue and a gentle heart.”

Headlines, Globe article.

Central Cemetery on a wet December day.

Captain Fisher's Headstone

Captain Fisher was not always isolated. He lived the first 50 years of his life in Mattapan where he commanded a military company and worked in the paper mills. Tragically, all the fingers and part of the thumb on his right hand were cut off in an accident there, crippling him. Married twice, his second wife died in Easton about 1878 leaving him a solitary figure. He chose to remain alone though he had several children, along with friends and relatives who would have taken him in. He lived poorly, keeping a few hens, on one occasion selling grease he fried from a dead hog to the soap man. In his old age he was not bothered by the norms of housekeeping and lived in squalor with hatchets, guns, skins of woodchucks and skunks, papers, root vegetables, dirty dishes, and broken plates scattered about. It's interesting, the lives people live by conscious choice or by default. After his second wife died, Fisher lived as an “eccentric old hermit” until he passed at the age of 82. Fisher lived in his dilapidated house on Center Street near the graveyard. In the end he was found in his home, very ill, by a neighbor and was taken to live with a nephew in Haverhill where he survived another ten days. He was buried in the Central Cemetery near his old home. I hope he found some comfort in his memories and reading in those years, which though his choice, must have been lonely and uncomfortable, as "he made the most of" even this.

 
Link to Boston Globe Article - June 29, 1886
 
 
Anne Wooster Drury

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