Book Review: 'Goshen' Revisited

Nellie Carver, the last district schoolteacher in rural South Conway, did her neighbors a tremendous service when she gathered a lifetime of research into a little book called "Goshen," published in 1971. Through deeds, church records, letters, and stories collected in personal interviews with residents born in the mid-1800s, she sketched the settlement, agricultural development, and demise of the two grants of land that were referred to as Goshen in Conway town reports as late as World War I. Five years after Nellie's book appeared, it was transformed into fiction by Ira Glackens.

The son of Ashcan School painter William Glackens, Ira lived in one of the old farmhouses on the Potter Road, in the southwest corner of what had been Goshen. There he cultivated antique apple varieties, wrote books, and allowed a couple of local children obsessed with the Civil War to reenact the conflict from behind his stone walls. Many of the stories Nellie recorded came from people who had lived on Ira's road, or in his house, and he evidently meant to bring them to life even more vividly than Nellie had. In the attempt, he chose the same historical epoch that I would have.