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Updated: June 20, 2025
The old lumber road was not hard to follow, and they reached the camp in a little less than an hour. They found several plats of mitchella, and began industriously to gather the vine. They had such a good time at their work that they almost forgot their luncheon. When at last they opened the pasteboard box in which it was packed, they found the sandwiches and the mince pie frozen hard.
Halstead led the way with the two lanterns; Addison and I, each shouldering a basket of mitchella, followed; Tom, dragging the body of the fox with his hooked stick, came behind the girls. It was nearly midnight when we reached home. Tom still thought that the fox's silvery pelt ought to be saved; but the old Squire persuaded him not to run the risk of skinning the creature.
But it was one of their girl friends, named Lucia Scribner, or rather Lucia's mother, at Portland, who invented mitchella jars, and started a new industry in our neighborhood. Lucia, who was attending the village Academy, often came up to the old farm on a Friday night to visit our girls over Saturday and Sunday.
After going completely round the borders of the clearing they had gathered only half a basketful. Kate then proposed that they should go on to another opening at Adger's lumber camp, on a brook near the foot of Stoss Pond. She had been there the winter before with Theodora, and both of them remembered having seen mitchella growing there.
Mitchella vines, with thread-like, wandering stems, and here and there a gleaming scarlet berry among small, round, close-lying waxy leaves; breaths of silvery moss, like a frosty vapor; these flung a grace of lightness over the closer garlanding, and the whole lay upon a bed of exquisitely curled and laminated soft gray lichen. A message.
It was a long way home, and they had their baskets of mitchella to carry. Hoping that the distressed creature had gone its way, they listened for a while at the door, and at last ventured forth; but when they drew near the place where Kate had gathered the dry spruce branches they heard the creature yapping in the thickets ahead. In a panic they ran back to the camp.
That was the way the little industry began. The girls, however, did not really go into the business until the next fall. Then Theodora, Ellen, and Catherine prepared over a hundred jarfuls of the green vine and berries. Those they sent to Portland and Boston during Christmas week under the name of Mitchella Jars, and Christmas Bouquets.
The jars, which were globular in shape and which ranged from a quart in capacity up to three and four quarts, cost from fifteen to thirty-five cents apiece. When filled with mitchella vines, they brought from a dollar and a quarter to two dollars.
After the linnæa and the arbutus, the prettiest sweet-scented flowering vine our woods hold is the common mitchella vine, called squaw-berry and partridge-berry. It blooms in June, and its twin flowers, light cream-color, velvety, tubular, exhale a most agreeable fragrance. Our flora is much more rich in orchids than the European, and many of ours are fragrant.
To keep it fresh she had only to moisten it with a spoonful of water every two or three weeks. And cold weather even zero weather did not injure it at all. Friends who called on Mrs. Scribner admired her jar, and said that they should like to get some of them. Mrs. Scribner wrote to Theodora and suggested that she and her girl friends make up some mitchella jars, and sell them in the city.
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