The Tall Tale of Germantown’s New Arrival
A young newcomer spins wildly imaginative yarns of buried gold and subterranean earthquakes, charming the neighborhood kids and confounding their parents.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A family named Smith has recently moved to Germantown, and Mr. Brown’s boy, on Saturday, came over to the fence and gave his impressions of Mr. Smith’s boy, a lad about fourteen years old: 'Yes, me and him are right well acquainted now. He knows more than I do, and he’s had more experience. Bill says his father used to be a robber (Smith, by the way, is a deacon in the Presbyterian church, and a very excellent lawyer), and that he has ten million dollars in gold buried in his cellar, along with a whole lot of human bones of people he’s killed. And he says his father is a conjurer, and that he makes all the earthquakes that happen anywhere in the world. The old man will come home at night, after there’s been an earthquake, all covered with sweat, and so tired he can hardly stand. Bill says it’s such hard work. Bill told me that one time, when a man came around there trying to sell lightning rods, his father got mad and ate him right up, and he takes bites out of everybody he comes across.' The Smith boy, we think, will be profitable to the youth of this community.
“He knows more than I do, and he’s had more experience.”
Every generation has its local legend—the kid who tells stories so big they become neighborhood lore. While this 19th-century snippet captures a specific brand of tall-tale childhood, it rings true to the way urban legends and playground myths still circulate in neighborhoods today.
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