Like all the best mysteries, this one began with a single clue. Years ago, I bought a sepia-toned photo of a young Victorian mother and child for a few dollars in an online auction. The woman is bright-eyed with short or pulled-back hair and a clear complexion. Her boyish face reminded me of Mary Martin in the 1950s Broadway production of Peter Pan. Full disclosure, I fell in love with Mary Martin when the play appeared on black and white TV in the 1950s. I was five.
According to an inscription on the back of the photo, the woman is Elma Seymour Wood. She is wearing a tent-like dress with ballooning shoulders, but the fabric clings to her arms and waist. Her blonde-haired son, Cedric, is also wearing a long dark dress. He is five. He sports a Buster Brown haircut and a frilly top. Full disclosure, when I was little, I had a pair of Buster Brown shoes.
Lafayette Newell, the most prolific Portsmouth photographer of the era, took this undated portrait in his downtown studio at 31 Congress St. Someday, I told myself, I am going to figure out who these two people are. I put the picture in an envelope, put the envelope in a folder, put the folder in a filing cabinet and forgot all about it. Then last week, searching for a topic for my final history column of the year, the old photo of Peter Pan and Buster Brown spilled out. It was time, they said, to come home.
A little Googling
I had no idea, at first, if this well-dressed woman was a Portsmouth local. Were Elma and Cedric just passing through town? A little Googling proved she had married Rufus Wood in 1891. If Cedric was 5, then the portrait dates to about 1896. Was the picture a gift for the mysteriously missing Mr. Wood? Or was he dead?
Rufus Wood, I soon discovered, was alive and thriving when the photo was taken. Born in Nova Scotia in 1868, he was the second oldest of 12 children in a farming family. Arriving in Portsmouth in 1888, Rufus and his brother Burt, known as “Burpee,” started a delivery business with a single team of horses. They expanded to six teams and six employees, including another brother. Working from a store on Daniel Street, they specialized in harnesses, blankets, fixtures, and supplies. Rufus was “in every sense a self-made man,” according to a Who’s Who of Rockingham County entrepreneurs.
Brother Burt, a harness-maker and blacksmith, managed the livery, stable, and wagon rental business. With an eye to the future, the Canadian brothers made a slow smooth transition to a fleet of motorized delivery trucks. A turn of the century photo shows Elma standing in the office doorway flanked by, I assume, Rufus and Burpee. A large sign overhead reads WOOD-BRO’S-EXPRESS and notes their specialties as “Furniture & Piano Moving & Jobbing.”
More about Elma
The ever expanding Internet is an astonishing tool. Within three hours of searching the Web, never leaving my office, I knew a truckload about Rufus Wood, even found the license plate numbers (572 and 573) of his two 30-horsepower Cadillac cars in 1912. But tracking young Miss Elma G. Seymour, prior to her marriage, was difficult. She was a Portsmouth native and the oldest of five. Her mother was Alice Garland and her father was a local blacksmith. The puzzle pieces were coming together. Elma married Rufus on May 16, 1891, seven months almost to the day from the birth of their only son Cedric. They attended the Advent Church, but, since women could not vote, only her husband was listed as a Republican.
Had better luck when it dawned on me to search for Mrs. Rufus Wood. That name popped up in a number of early 20th century copies of the Portsmouth Herald. The newspaper “morgue” of old copies no longer exists. It was tragically tossed out years ago. I did not have time to churn through rolls of microfilm at the library. Instead, a digital search turned up Elma’s name in an online newspaper archive.
It costs money to see most newspaper archives online, and I am a cheapskate. But with practiced finesse, I was able to read the scanned text of a few entries for free. I discovered, for example, that in 1909 Elma, Rufus, and Cedric donated a “mound of flowers” to a silent film actress from Maine named Leah Winslow. The Herald columnist noted that the young actress, marrying for the third time, had divorced her second husband only a week earlier, while he, having been charged with “cruel and abusive treatment” was then living in New Orleans. Admittedly, the old newspaper text file was difficult to interpret. The flowers from the Wood family may have been sent to someone less interesting, but the actress story was too spicy to resist.
Elma’s mother died in 1938, the Herald reported. A year later, Elma, then living on Parrott Avenue, was in Portsmouth Hospital due to an unspecified ailment. Elma was born in 1865, making her three years older than her husband, but I have yet to find the date of her death. Rufus Wood, according to his local obituary, died on May 6, 1944, after a long illness. J. Verne Wood of the Wood Funeral Home, the Victorian mansion still on Broad Street in Portsmouth, naturally handled the service.
Cedric grows up
Cedric Wood, according to an online article, joined his father’s business at age 17. The mystery of the Buster Brown boy in the dress and his Peter Pan mother might have ended there. But another clue appeared on the Portsmouth Athenaeum database. The athenaeum collection includes a handwritten ledger by “Bert” Wood (aka Burt or Burpee). From 1906 to 1909 Burt catalogued the daily weather, the names of all his horses, the types of wagons, the people who rented them, their destinations, the duration of each rental, and the fee. The company was listed as “Wood Bros. Express.”
A whole new universe opened up. Old time Portsmouth residents, of course, have been shouting at me since this story began. They know what’s coming. The company that Burpee and Rufus created in 1888 still thrives. The search immediately turned up the website of Wood Bros. Moving and Storage, now located on 3607 Lafayette Road. Their website proudly proclaims it is the oldest moving company in the region. Katie Elmendorf, who answered the phone, listened politely as I explained how surprised I was to discover that Woods Bros. still exists. Katie, of course, had known it all along.
Katie emailed me copies of the historical images that hang in the office. After 57 years in the moving business, it turns out, Cedric Wood sold the company to Edward “Teddy” Walsh. Ted’s sons Bill and Edward Walsh joined forces with their dad and ran the company until 2007, when it was purchased by Mark Harrington, the current owner.
Hoping to close the case of the mysterious photo, I called Bill Walsh. Now 57, Bill has a distant memory of meeting Cedric Wood in the mid-1960s just before his death. Bill was four years old at the time. Cedric was “kind of eccentric” he recalls from his father’s stories.
“He was also very thrifty,” Bill says of Cedric, and then adds, “somewhat cheap.” Bill’s father, Ted Walsh, had been in the moving trade in Kittery. He actually started in the trash business, Bill says. After attending college, Ted Walsh borrowed $100 from news and magazine distributor Harold Winebaum. He used the loan to purchase a beat-up old Model A flatbed truck. Ted Walsh went around collecting rubbish for 25 cents a week, Bill says. That evolved into a moving company based in Kittery, Maine.
“My father knew [Cedric] really well,” Bill says, since they were both in the same business. Ted Walsh worked with Wood Bros. for years before buying the company in 1957. He recalled Cedric Wood lighting the morning fire with only a couple of coals in the stove. Rufus Wood (who the locals called “Roof”) drove around in fancy cars. Rufus preferred Cadillacs, Bill’s father used to say.
The Walsh family was proud to carry on the Wood family business. Mark Harrington, Bill notes, represents only the third family to own the business in almost 130 years. And in all that time, the moving business has changed little. People still need to get their stuff from Point A to Point B as safely and as affordably as possible.
Moving pianos was his favorite part of the business, Bill Walsh notes, although he “ran out of gas” after 32 years as a mover. “Pianos were very special,” Bill says. “They were a very important part of people’s lives. They were a prized possession.”
Wood Bros. delivered countless grand pianos for the Steinway Company, Bill adds. Moving these gigantic and precise instruments was a skill he learned from his father Ted, who learned it from Cedric, who learned it from Rufus Wood, who married Elma Seymour of Portsmouth in 1891. Case closed.
Copyright 2016 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
Photos courtesy of Wood Bros Moving & Storage
Celia Thaxter’s First Known Letter