1889 History - Biography - Nathaniel R. Mason

Prominent in the history of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire from the earliest times has been the Mason name. John Mason, of Dorchester, Mass., 1630, was a captain in Cromwell's army. Captain John Mason, a London merchant, governor of Portsmouth in Hampshire county, England, and later governor of Newfoundland, has made the name and NewHampshire to be nearly synonymous. He was one of the grantees of Laconia, gave the name (New Hampshire) to the colony, and changed "Strawberry Bank" to Portsmouth. The part he bore in the settlement and the protracted litigation carried on by him and his heirs is treated at length in the county history. Nearly all of those bearing the name in New England are branches of the same ancestral tree, and it is most probable that Nathaniel Randall Mason was following ancestral traits in his labors to build and develop the pleasant mountain village of North Conway.

Nathaniel R. Mason, son of Joseph and Polly (Randall) Mason, was born June 2, 1814. His father, whose home was near that of his wife's people in the as yet undeveloped Kearsarge Village, died when Nathaniel, his youngest child, was but a lad of ten years, and the labor of bringing up the family of young children devolved upon the mother, a small-sized, quiet, hard-working woman of rare executive ability, who utilized to the utmost the means of subsistence produced on the new farm in the clearings, and brought up her children in a manner highly creditable to her care, diligence, and Christian training. She lived to an advanced age, and witnessed the satisfactory development and growth of the seed she had planted in their minds.

Nathaniel learned the cabinet trade of his brother William, and occupied a shop north of the location of the North Conway House. He married in 1839 Ruth, daughter of Dearborn Hutchins, of Fryeburg, Maine, and began housekeeping in the small one-story house of ten rooms, which, changed and much enlarged, is now the North Conway House. His keen foresight early saw the possibilities of future summer travel and the importance and desirability of drawing it to North Conway, and building up here a centre for the mountain region. Prior to 1850 he remodeled his dwelling and opened it as the North Conway House. Here for over thirty years, until 1881, he entertained guests with hospitality and courteousness, and became known to many as the pioneer landlord of the little village. This was but one of the spheres in which his active influence worked for the weal of the village. He bought and sold real estate of all kinds, laid out building lots and erected buildings in the village, and caused more houses to be built than any other person. He established a store with many departments that became a great distributing centre of supplies, and by honest fair-dealing acquired wealth. He made and gave employment to many, and assisted the poor in building homes of their own. As the village grew his interest in it increased, and every movement for public improvement met with quiet but substantial aid. Never prominent or conspicuous, he substituted deeds for words, and actions for promises. In him the poor had preeminently a friend. They would come to him as a wise counselor and certain help in time of trouble. One of his neighbors told Rev. Mr. Pratt, "If I had not a dollar in the world and my family was in need, I could go to Mr. Mason and state my case, knowing that he would help me whether I could ever pay him or not." This was the feeling of those who knew him best, and yet he would have honestly disclaimed the idea that he was specially benevolent. To him every townsman was a neighbor, and his gentle kindliness made no enemies. A man of few words, of courtly dignity and reserve, he commanded the confidence of others. He was of sterling integrity, energetic, diligent, and systematic in business; a reader of the Bible and a profound believer in its promises; a man of prayer, and one who never spoke evil of any one. After his death his well-worn prayer-book was found with a leaf turned down to mark a prayer he highly prized, that for the second Sunday in Lent. In every position of his life his duty was done with cheerfulness and alacrity. He was averse to holding public offices, but in the few he did accept he showed the same practical judgment and ability that characterized his private life.

Mr. Mason was especially fortunate in the marriage relation. His wife, Ruth (Hutchins) Mason, was descended from two prominent New England families. She was a sister of Hon. Henry Hutchins, of Fryeburg, Maine, and a granddaughter of Captain Nathaniel Hutchins, who won high fame in the French and Revolutionary wars. Her mother was an Eaton. This is a family of high repute in central New Hampshire and elsewhere. There was a remarkable intermarriage between the Eaton and Hutchins families, three children of an Eaton family marrying three children of a Hutchins family. In consequence of this, Mrs. Mason was a double cousin of General John Eaton, the head of the national educational bureau at Washington, D. C., and of Hon. Stilson Hutchins, of the Washington Post. Mrs. Mason was an active woman, of great practicality, energy, and endurance. She possessed sterling qualities of character, firm principles, undeviating honesty, and was bold and fearless in upholding beliefs and causes which she deemed right. She was a capable helpmeet to her husband, and her kindness and motherly solicitude for others' welfare endeared her to all. She loved her sons with a deep affection, and this frequent remark of hers is the key to her tuition of them: "I want my boys to do right." She died July 3, 1881. Mr. and Mrs. Mason had children: Freeman H. (dec.), Frank L., Mahlon L., Mangum E. (a young man of much promise, who died at the age of nineteen).

Mr. Mason's relations with his daughters-in-law were of a paternal and filial character, as much as if they had been his own children. After the death of his wife, he lived in the family of his son Frank, whose wife, Mrs. Katharine (Dame) Mason, a most estimable lady, kindly and lovingly ministered to him in his declining years. She has many friends in Conway. Mrs. Martha (Nutter) Mason, the widow of Freeman Mason, a very pleasant and worthy woman, lives in Jackson. Some time after the death of her husband, she went abroad, traveled in France and Germany, but returned, loving more than ever the mountains of her "native north."

Mrs. Ellen (McRoberts) Mason is the wife of Mahlon L. A friend of hers says: —

Mrs. Mason is of that type of New England women some of whom have lived in every generation from the Pilgrim days, and whose influence for good, as a class, becomes sooner or later as wide as the continent. Such women, from their opinions, from facts, from intuitive perception, and sometimes from severe logic and their expressions of opinion, are not merely echoes of what may be the current fashion of the hour, but are based on positive convictions, and, having such convictions, like Mrs. John Adams, they have always the courage to assert and maintain them, whether they relate to the beautiful colorings of a landscape, to a grand passage of oriental poetry, or to the policy of empires.

Mrs. Mason was born in Baldwin, Maine, in 1850; she is of Scotch-Irish ancestry, was well educated at the Normal School and at the academies of Maine, and after a short time spent in teaching was married in 1873 to Mahlon L., the youngest son of Nathaniel Randall and Ruth Hutchins Mason. As the wife of the proprietor of the Sunset Pavilion at North Conway, one of the delightful summer hotels of the mountains, she has been brought prominently forward in the social world and has made a large circle of acquaintances. She is also widely known as a writer. Some of her poems have found a place in the compiled books of poetry both of New Hampshire and Maine, and her prose contributions to the Boston Sunday Herald, the Portland Press and Transcript, the Granite Monthly, the White Mountain Echo and other publications have attracted considerable attention. In the autumn of 1887, with her sister, Miss McRoberts, and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Freeman Mason, she spent eight months in Europe, mostly in Germany. Her son [see *1 below] accompanied her in order to study German. While abroad, Mrs. Mason was engaged in such inquiries into German life and character as would naturally be interesting to a bright New England woman, and in superintending the education of her son. The fruit of her observations of German homes and habits found expression in letters to the Boston Sunday Herald. She visited the Hartz Mountains, and was deeply impressed with their savage sublimity. She gives a stern and graphic picture of cold, huge, desolate nature as seen in those grim rivers and ghostly mountains.

Her sketches and letters have been hastily written in moments of leisure snatched from a busy life, and are specimens of easy, racy, and elegant writing, rather than an actual test of her powers as a writer. But as summer correspondent at North Conway, Mrs. Mason has made known to the outside world the enchanting beauties of the region which to visionary people seems ''half classic and half fairyland;" but to Mrs. Mason it seemed a delightful New Hampshire village, imparadised among the great watching hills of the north, where tourists from all the weary world might come, like pilgrims to Mecca, to rest awhile in pleasant homes, among the enchanted woods and broad intervals, by swiftly gliding rivers, in a land surrounded by the great guardian mountains, and there breathe the fragrant odors of the green trees, and passively quietly enjoy the tender caresses of nature in her loveliest moods. Such, to Mrs. Mason, is North Conway; and as such she has called it to the attention of the beauty-loving world. And the effect has corresponded with her design. Her sympathies are always with the right; and none can more readily detect the delicate pencilings of nature in mountain, cloud, or sky, or more warmly appreciate true nobility in man or woman.

Contributed 2022 Jul 12 by Norma Hass, extracted from History of Carroll County, New Hampshire by Georgia Drew Merrill, published in 1889, pages 895-898.