THE LIFE OF
MARY BAKER EDDY
CHAPTER I
ANCESTRY AND GENEALOGY
Forty years after the close of the American Revolution Mary Baker was born in the town of Bow, New Hampshire. Her birthplace was a farmhouse in the midst of cultivated acres, situated on a crest of hills overlooking the broad valley of the Merrimac River. Bow was not a village, but a cluster of farms with a town government, and four or five district schools, centers of education and rural politics. There was a meeting-house, as the homely phrase of those days described the church edifice, but many of the God-fearing of the community attended divine worship either in the adjoining town of Pembroke, across the river, or in the neighboring city of Concord, the capital of the state, from which Bow is five miles distant.
Bow was a rural settlement, but it was not remote from the stirring forces of the life of its day. The men who owned its homesteads had been born in the heat of political struggle. Their mothers' birth-pangs coincided with those of a nation. They were born individualists and democrats. New Hampshire, a mountainous state, originally covered with
