William Marvel: Elbridge Potter

Plummer Potter, erstwhile owner of Center Conway’s renowned salvage yard, died early this month. He left this life exactly two centuries after his great-grandfather entered it, and now he has gone to join him in the family cemetery on the Potter Road. Plum’s gravestone has been waiting for him there for decades now, depicting him in his Corvette, heading toward the Smith-Eastman covered bridge; that bridge was burned by vandals in 1975, but somehow Plum managed to cross over the river.

The aforementioned great-grandfather, Elbridge Potter, first saw the light of day in the spring of 1816. It was a difficult year in many ways. Currency inflation since the end of the War of 1812 had wrought financial blight on the American people, and Congress chartered the Second Bank of the United States in February of 1816, hoping to stabilize the currency and reignite economic expansion. Instead, that early equivalent of a central bank ended up serving the late Federalist-era counterparts of today’s One Percenters, fueling speculation that only precipitated our first great depression, three years later. Like the victims of Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs today, those born in 1816 faced a long uphill struggle for economic stability, let alone security.