Introduction: A Minister and His Diary
by Ross W. Beales, Jr.
Ebenezer Parkman was born in Boston in 1703, the youngest son of William and Elizabeth (Adams) Parkman. His father was a shipwright, and his parents belonged to the New North church of which his father was a founding member and later a ruling elder. Parkman attended the North Latin School and entered Harvard College at the age of fourteen. Upon graduation in 1721, like many other young men destined for the ministry, he taught school and preached where opportunity and need afforded. He was called by the people of Westborough in 1724; married Mary, or Molly, Champney; and was ordained on October 28, 1724, at the age of twenty-one.
For the next fifty-eight years, he served as Westborough’s minister, weathering the discords and tensions of both the Great Awakening (he was a moderate New Light) and the American Revolution (he was a reluctant Whig). He served as clerk, or secretary, of the Marlborough Association of ministers; participated in ordinations and ecclesiastical councils; and was called upon to preach the sermon at the annual convention of ministers in Boston in 1761.
By education and calling, by sustained and dedicated service to his people and to his profession, Ebenezer Parkman was hardly a common man. At the same time, he was not, in most respects, an exceptional man. Like ministers before and after him, he labored in his vineyard but made no lasting mark on history in ways that normally define historical importance. Surely he had been a good and faithful man, one whose loss was keenly felt by those who knew him and had benefited from his ministry and friendship.
Nonetheless, Ebenezer Parkman did leave a remarkable legacy, not to his own generation but to later generations who would attempt to understand his age. This was not a legacy of published works, for in his long ministry he published only two sermons. His legacy was a collection of manuscripts—sermons, correspondence, a commonplace book, an account book, notes on ecclesiastical councils, his parishioners’ relations of spiritual experience and confessions of sin, the records of the Westborough church and of the Marlborough Association, and, most importantly, his diary. On February 19, 1719, while a student at Harvard, he started the diary that he kept until a last, incomplete entry on December 5, 1782, four days before his death at the age of seventy-nine. Day after day, with few interruptions and with remarkable constancy, he recorded the small facts of his world and observations about that world.
As a minister, he noted the full range of his pastoral duties: sermons that he composed and preached (and often repeated); conferences with prospective communicants; visits to the sick and dying; baptisms, catechizing, marriages, and funerals; his wide range of reading, both religious and secular;
Like other rural ministers whose salaries were never sufficient to support a family, Parkman followed a second calling, that of a farmer. While he lent his hand only occasionally to the physical work of farming, he recorded the weather; hiring workers; the sowing, tending, and harvesting of crops; clearing brush and building walls; slaughtering animals; exchanging services with neighbors; purchasing and training oxen and horses; marketing surplus animals in Boston; and many other activities that impinged upon his daily life.
Parkman was also head of a family and a household, and he recorded many details about his family’s life: the birth, illnesses, marriages, and deaths of children and other family members; decisions about education and apprenticeships; the comings and goings of his wives, Molly, who died in 1736, and Hannah Breck, whom he married in 1737; household servants; visits and correspondence with immediate and distant kin; the birth of grandchildren; and many other dimensions of family life.
The records of family life are, one must emphasize, both incomplete and one-sided. As a man, he lived in and focused his attention largely on a man’s world. Thus, we know far more about his sons than his daughters, and he recorded much more information about his male field workers than about female servants. So, too, his wives appear in the diary only on an irregular basis. Altogether, however, the amount of information in the diary is extraordinary.
Parkman destroyed the first six volumes of the diary that covered his years at Harvard and contained “numberless puerilities and better destroyed than preserved.”
How the diary was dispersed, preserved, and handed down through the generations remains obscure, but ultimately portions of the diary were donated or loaned to, or purchased by, the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Historians made little use of Parkman’s diary until the 1930s, when Clifford K. Shipton began the first of his fourteen-volume continuation of George Langdon Sibley’s Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University. For some forty years, Parkman’s diary remained Shipton’s “secret weapon,”
Despite this major effort, more than half the diary remains in manuscript: the diaries for 1736 and 1742, which the American Antiquarian Society acquired in 1985, and some twenty-four extant years from 1756 through 1782. Historians have only begun to use the diary in any systematic way.
He was well aware of his limited vision and reflected upon his “Seclusion from most of those Objects which Engage the Busy and active part of the world.” Not “in the midst of the Crowds, Employments and accidents,” he was “in Retirement,” with little more to write about than “Domestick affairs, and personal concerns.” Indeed, “when under Confinement to so narrow a Sphere of motion,” it was “rare” to have anything of “very great importance or weight to interest the world in.”
There was indeed little to record except his daily activities, but how much deserved note, and how much time could one devote to compiling a record? So much of his time was “consumed in much the Same manner, the Same Business or Amusements” that it would be difficult “to say which took us up most, and it would be too great a Labour to insert all.”
One may speculate that Parkman possessed a certain compulsive drive and energy to sustain his commitment to the diary over so many years. His reflections suggest a wider purpose. The first surviving volume of the diary, number seven, is titled “Diurna: or An Account of Remarkable Transactions of Every Day.” Two biblical texts accompany this title. Proverbs 14:6 instructs that “A scorner seeketh wisdom, and findeth it not: but knowledge is easy unto him that understandeth,” while Psalm 90, verse 12, implores, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” Self-knowledge, particularly within the context of faith, and an awareness of life’s uncertainties, yet the certainty of death, appear to have guided Parkman, at least in part, in determining to keep a diary and especially in persevering over more than sixty years.
Despite the loss and destruction of portions of the diary, the remaining pages are a monument to Parkman’s perseverance, which was all the more remarkable because many of the events he recorded seem so unremarkable. Day-in and day-out, he rarely failed to make some sort of entry; the lacuna typically occurred on Saturdays when he was preparing sermons for the Sabbath. Clearly he was conscious that others would read the diary, and he found nothing in those first six volumes but a source of shame. At one point he had seen these early volumes as a source of instruction. Thus, on New Year’s Day 1746, he read through his journals for the years when he was sixteen through eighteen years old, finding them useful reminders of his “egregious folly and Vanity.” He was full of “Shame and Grief”: as he reflected, “O what a Price had I in my Hand to get Wisdom—but how little Heart to improve it!” The next day he continued his review for his “deep Abasement and Sorrow before God,” imploring God, “remember not against me the sins of my Youth and my Transgressions.” Two years later, also in January, he reviewed his college journals “with great Sorrow and Shame.”
During the first years after graduation from Harvard, Parkman was less than assiduous in keeping a regular diary. Thus, on January 1, 1726, a Saturday, he confessed that other than his preparations for the Sabbath, he had “little to remark concerning this Day.” One day was pretty much like another, and most days “rolled away without anything worth noting upon them.” Some pages in his diary were blank because he had wasted the day (“Diem perdidi”) or had done nothing of “importance either to Myself, or anyone Else.” After finishing his sermons late in the evening, he reflected upon himself and his soul that he might be better prepared for the Sabbath. He focused particularly on both his “grievous Neglect of the Affairs and Concerns of my Soul and preparations for Eternity” and particularly his “omission of this Method of keeping a journal (or Diary) so long as I have.” He regretted that when he “did make a Business of it, there was so much time and pain spent in Vanity,” and he therefore resolved to “prosecute other Aims and purposes, and to confine myself more severely and strictly to Studies of Grave and Serious Subjects, to Enquirys into my own Deportment, and to such observations on the Demeanour and Conduct of these as that thereby I may learn the most Suitable regular method of forming my own Thoughts and Actions.”
But what he did insert had the effect of jogging his memory, bringing to mind other, perhaps more weighty matters, “an hint being Sufficient to bring the whole circle of actions or accidents into our minds and view again.” What was “but a Trifle” might “best Serve to direct us to the whole Series.”
What Parkman may have considered “a Trifle,” when accumulated with other entries into a “whole Series,” can reveal important dimensions of eighteenth-century life for which other records are silent or incomplete.
1 For a sketch of Parkman’s life, see Clifford K. Shipton, Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College in the Classes 1713–1721 with Bibliographical and Other Notes (“Sibley’s Harvard Graduates”; Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1942), 6:511–27.
2 One or more of his colleagues was undoubtedly the author of the death notice that appeared in the Massachusetts Spy, Dec. 26, 1782, p. [3], and later, in somewhat revised form, in the Boston Gazette, Jan. 6, 1783, p. [3].
3 Ross W. Beales, Jr., “Ebenezer Parkman’s World of Print: A Country Parson and the Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century Anglo-America,” Library and Information History 31, no. 4 (Nov. 2015), 229–57.
4 For workers on Parkman’s farm and in his household, see Ross W. Beales, Jr., “The Reverend Ebenezer Parkman’s Farm Workers, Westborough, Massachusetts, 1726–82,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 99 (1989), 121–49, “Boys’ Work on an Eighteenth Century New England Farm,” in The American Family: Historical Perspectives, ed. Jean E. Hunter and Paul T. Mason (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1991), 75–89; and “‘Slavish’ and Other Female Work in the Parkman Household, Westborough, Massachusetts, 1724–1782,” in House and Home, ed. Peter Benes (The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings 1988; Boston: Boston University Scholarly Publications, 1990), 48–57.
5 Ross W. Beales, Jr., “A Minister’s Bereavement and Remarriage: Ebenezer Parkman of Westborough, Massachusetts,” The History of the Family 17, no. 4 (Oct. 2012), 397–406; “Nursing and Weaning in an Eighteenth-Century New England Household,” in Families and Children, ed. by Peter Benes (The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings 1985; Boston: Boston University Scholarly Publications, 1987), 48–63.
6 Parkman Diary, Jan. 16, 1752.
7 For the provenance of the Parkman Family Papers at the American Antiquarian Society, see: https://www.americanantiquarian.org/Findingaids/parkman_family.pdf.
8 “Extracts from the Private Journal of the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, of Westborough, Mass.,” in Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (Boston, 1842), 204–12.
9 Harriette Merrifield Forbes, The Hundredth Town: Glimpses of Life in Westborough, 1717–1817 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1889). Anna Sophia Parkman’s diary is lost or in still private hands.
10 The Diary of Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, of Westborough, Mass., for the Months of February, March, April, October and November, 1737, November and December of 1778, and the Years of 1779 and 1780, ed. Harriette M. Forbes ([Westborough:] Westborough Historical Society, 1899). These portions of the diary are lost or still in private hands. According to Mrs. Edward Tuckerman, who loaned a portion of the diary to Forbes, “The book came to me directly from my aunt, Mrs. Asa Rand, an older sister of my father’s who received it from his mother Sarah, daughter of Rev. Ebenezer. My good old aunt had more of her grandfather’s diary, but in some of her movings (she was a minister’s wife), it got left behind in a box of papers, on a closet shelf, she told me, and she could not recover it, probably destroyed as waste paper.” Ibid., [v].
11 L. H. Butterfield, “Historical Editing in the United States: Papers Read at the 150th Annual Meeting of the American Antiquarian Society, I: The Recent Past,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 72, Part 2 (Oct. 1962), 283.
12 Clifford K. Shipton, “Foreword,” in Francis G. Walett, ed., The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1703–1782: First Part, Three Volumes in One, 1719–1755 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1974), [vii]. More recently, Ben Mutschler states that “Parkman dominates: the temporal span of the diary, the depth and consistency of his entries, and his abiding interest in the illnesses of family, household workers, and flock make his journal invaluable for this study.” Ben Mutschler, The Province of Affliction: Illness and the Making of Early New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 13–14.
13 Francis G. Walett, ed., “The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1719–1728,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (Apr. 1961), 91–227.
14 These pages were later photographically reduced and re-formatted for publication in a separate 250-page volume: Walett, ed., The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1703–1782.
15 Most notably, Mutschler, The Province of Affliction, and Douglas L. Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
16 Historians have noted his entry for Sept. 7, 1774, in which he recorded the numbers of men (4,722) from various communities who gathered in Worcester to shut down the court. See, for example, Ray Raphael, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord (New York: New Press, 2002).
17 Nov. 1726.
18 Ibid.
19 Francis Walett’s edition of Parkman’s includes several pages of autobiographical notes, dated August 24, 1719, that were not part of the diaries. These notes, which provide invaluable information about Parkman’s early years, are contained in a small hand-sewn booklet that also includes a confession of faith, rules of the behavior, and a solemn covenant (Parkman Family Papers [American Antiquarian Society], Box 2, Folder 4). The “Rules of Behaviour” were not original to Parkman, and he did not provide a date for what he wrote. The first rule, to “Keep an exact Diary,” may, of course, strike readers of Parkman’s diary as especially significant. Parkman copied the rules from Cotton Mather’s Early Religion, Urged in a Sermon, the Duties Wherein, and the Reasons Wherefore, Young People, Should Become Religious . . . (Boston, 1694), in which Mather quoted from the writings of an anonymous young man who died in 1688. The young man was undoubtedly Mather’s younger brother, Nathanael, whose life he celebrated in his first English publication ([Cotton Mather], Early Piety, Exemplified in the Life and Death of Mr. Nathanael Mather, Who Having Become at the Age of Nineteen, an Instance of More than Common Learning and Virtue, Changed Earth for Heaven, Oct. 17. 1688 . . . [London, 1689]). Nathanael Mather left thirty-four rules of behavior, and it was these that Parkman copied. The rules, in turn, derived from several sources that attest to the young Mather’s scholarship and, quite likely, to his father’s extensive library. Most of the rules, including the admonition to keep a diary, were copied or closely paraphrased from William de Britaine, Humane Prudence, or, The Art by Which a Man May Raise Himself and Fortune to Grandeur (London, 1680).
20 Parkman’s most introspective contemplations appear in his birthday reflections, the “Natalitia.” See: https://congregationallibrary.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/natalitia-notebook-by-rev.-ebenezer-parkman-1727-1782/109573.
21 See Kenneth A. Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674–1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 1–12.
22 Diary of Joshua Hempstead of New London, Connecticut, Covering a Period of Forty-Seven Years, from September 1711, to November, 1758; Containing Valuable Genealogical Data Relating to Many New London Families, References to the Colonial Wars, to the Shipping and other Matters of Interest Pertaining to the Town and the Times, with an Account of a Journey Made by the Writer from New London to Maryland (Collections of the New London County Historical Society 1; New London: New London Historical Society, 1901; reprinted, Camden, Me.: Picton Press, 1985).
23 “Lieutenant Bruce came into my House, and the Storm abroad was great, Thunder, Lightening, and Rain. Yet the Storm of Brother Bruce’s Passions was more grievous; uttering many bitter and grievous Things; neither could I at all lay his Passionate Heat by anything I could Say. He went away talking and in a Rage, notwithstanding it was the Sabbath, and the Storm which Should have Struck Terror, into each of our Hearts” (June 22, 1755).
24 After the death of his daughter Hannah, he preached on Psalm 39:9, “I was dumb, I opened not my mouth; because thou didst it,” desiring “desire Grace to enable me in the Same Manner, with the holy Psalmist, to Exercise holy Resignation and submission to the sovereign Will of God” (Oct. 19, 1777). He had used the same text after his daughter Susanna’s death (Dec. 13, 1772). After his son John’s death, he preached on Job 23, “Then Job answered and said, Even to-day is my complaint bitter: my stroke is heavier than my groaning” (Sept. 17, 1775).
25 Apr. 21, 1727. John Demos used this event to illustrate the potentially complex relationship between minister and parishioners in the face of a parishioner’s grave illness; Remarkable Providences: Readings on Early American History (rev. ed.; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991 [1972]), 188–92.
26 When Parkman approached his neighbor Maynard for help in the harvest, Maynard replied, “when my Grass and Corn will move into my Barn without hands I’ll leave it to Help Mr. Parkman—not before.” His neighbor Clark was much more charitable: “He answers what shall I do? My own is really Suffering and Everything is backward for want of a Team, for I have none and can get none, But he is Labouring for our Souls and why Shall I refuse? and came away” (July 30, 1726).
27 Jan. 14, 1748.
28 Jan. 16, 1752.
29 Jan. 1, 1726.
30 For other uses of Parkman’s diary, see Ross W. Beales, Jr., “Literacy and Reading in Eighteenth-Century Westborough, Massachusetts,” in Early American Probate Inventories, ed. Peter Benes (The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings 1987; Boston: Boston University Scholarly Publications, 1989), 41–50; “The Smiles and Frowns of Providence,” in Wonders of the Invisible World: 1600–1900, ed. Peter Benes (The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings 1992; Boston: Boston University Scholarly Publications, 1995), 86–96; “‘To Promote Civility and Benevolence’: Rev. Ebenezer Parkman and an Acadian Refugee Family,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 51, no. 1 (Winter 2023), 67–89; “‘As My Outward Man Decays’: The Aging of Ebenezer Parkman,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 42, no. 1 (July 2023), 3–27; “‘By the Providence of God Is Bereaved of Her Reason’: An Eighteenth-Century Minister’s Response to Mental Illness,” in Living with Disabilities in New England, 1630–1930 (The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings 2021; Boston: Boston University Scholarly Publications, 2023, forthcoming).