Metuchen Edison History Features

Recollections of

Boyhood Days

In Old Metuchen

By

David Trumbull Marshall

Published by The Case Publishing Co., Flushing NY 1930

(Second Edition)- (c) 1930

Taking a Bath.

There used to be a couple who lived on the outskirts of Metuchen, way down on the road to Bonhamtown.

I don't just rightly remember their names. It might have been Sunday or Tuesday or maybe some other day of the week.

Dr. Hunt once told an amusing story of how he got Mr. Weekday to take a bath. The Doctor said he believed that Mr. Weekday had not had a bath in forty years.

The Doctor gave him very precise directions how he was to get some soft soap and paint his body all over with the soap.

The Doctor said nothing about washing the soap off but he said he reckoned that his patient would attend to that without being told.

Old Man Weekday and his wife attended every funeral and every auction held in Raritan Township for nearly fifty years.

Mrs. Weekday's invariable comment after every funeral ran in this wise: "Yes I seen her, she looked just like wax."

It was customary at all funerals in those days to place the open coffin in front of the pulpit at a church funeral and have the whole congregation file up and rubber at the corpse.

I, as a boy, attended a good many auctions, or more politely, "vendues."

I never had any money to buy anything, to be sure, but it was always a lot of fun to go and listen to Luther Tappen, the auctioneer, jolly the bidders and with the usual craft of the auctioneer, egg the bidders to bid against each other.

It used to interest me to see Mrs. Dimity and Mrs. Murphy and the whole female population of "Dublin" file through the sacred houses of the rich people who had died or gone broke and whose property was being sold at auction.

These poor women, and some who were not so poor, were famous bidders at these country auctions.

Tappen knew every one of them and would delay the sale of some article until the arrival of one of his old-time clients.

I never remember Old Man Weekday's buying anything but once.

At the auctioning of the property of Wright Robins, Weekday bought a bunch of old iron barrel hoops for about a nickel. I suppose he was going to hoop up the old family cider barrel.

When Wright Robins' property was sold the sale was advertised all over Middlesex County. The day was fine and the country people came from the whole country for miles around.

There was an enormous amount of stuff to be sold, the accumulation of years of running a rich gentleman's place.

Household furniture, stable furniture and horses, carriages, cattle and farm tools.

I always observed that at these auctions the inexpensive junk sold for more than it was worth, while pianos and expensive furniture and carpets often brought but little.

There were certain individuals in Metuchen who had a mania for buying things at auction.

One bachelor in particular would go to an auction and buy household furniture and household utensils and when he got them he didn't know what to do with them or where to store them.

Before my time there was said to have been a man whose barn and house were literally packed from top to bottom with furniture and farm machinery for which he had no use whatever.