Thomas D. Twiss Account Book
A farmer and laborer in Antrim, N.H., Thomas Dimon Twiss was born in Beverly, Mass., in 1801. At the age of 24, Twiss married a local Antrim woman, Betsey Brackett, with whom he raised a family of three children.
This typical single-column account book of the mid-nineteenth century records Twiss’s diverse economic transactions, providing labor for the town in “braking rods” [breaking roads] and “digin graves”and to neighbors and for a wide variety of manual farm labor, including killing hogs, plowing, threshing, haying, and assorted carpentry work.
Thomas Dimon Twiss (sometimes spelled Twist) was born in Beverly, Mass., on Dec. 23, 1801, one of nine children born to Dimon Cressy Twiss (1773-1861) and his first wife Sarah Ireson. As an infant, Twiss and his family relocated to southern Hillsborough County, N.H., where Sarah died in 1815. Thomas established himself in the town of Antrim, where he was listed as a farmer in the federal censuses of 1850 and 1870. At various times, he supplemented his livelihood by working for the town, including as a sexton and on bridges and roads, and by providing agricultural labor for other members of the community.
On Jan. 30, 1834, Twiss married Betsey Brackett of Antrim, with whom he had one son Alfred C. (ca.1837-1875) and two daughters, Sarah E. (Mrs. Charles J.) Davis (1840-1870) and Hannah A. (Mrs. Nathan D.) Curtis (1843-1911). He died of pneumonia on Mar. 21, 1876, and is buried at North Branch Cemetery, Antrim.
This typical single-column account book of the mid-nineteenth century records Twiss’s diverse economic transactions, providing labor for the town in “braking rods” [breaking roads] and “digin graves” and to neighbors and for a wide variety of manual farm labor, including killing hogs, plowing, threshing, haying, and assorted carpentry work.
Gift of Bob Paynter, June 2016.
Originally donated to the George C. Frison Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming, apparently by a person who had acquired it at a yard sale, the Twiss account book was given to Bob Paynter of the UMass Amherst Department of Anthropology in August 2009, who donated it to SCUA with his papers in June 2016.
Processed by I. Eliot Wentworth, July 2016.
)Cite as: Thomas D. Twiss Account Book (MS 921 bd). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.