The Mysterious Midnight Delivery

Sometimes the smallest incidents of everyday life are the ones that survive longest in local memory. One such story from early Wilbraham involved nothing more valuable than an old farm hoe.

Stephen Newell, an early South Wilbraham resident and Revolutionary War veteran, once loaned a hoe to one of his neighbors. What should have been a simple favor turned into a very long loan. The neighbor kept the hoe for more than a year despite repeated requests to return it.

Unidentified Illustration of a Man Hoeing a Garden (1868). Artvee

Then, one summer night, the missing hoe finally came home.

Rather than return it during the day, the neighbor apparently waited until the middle of the night. He quietly placed the hoe against Stephen Newell's kitchen door, resting its handle on the doorstep, and disappeared into the darkness.

The next morning, Newell opened his kitchen door. The old hoe fell inside.

There was just one problem: the hoe was broken and practically worthless.

The incident apparently amused someone enough to turn it into a poem, written as though the old hoe itself were speaking to its master. It began:

“Good morning, Dear Master, you see I am come,’Twas late in the evening before I got home.”

The imaginary hoe explained that it had been gone a long time because the man who borrowed it had “used me so bad.” It claimed that it had finally decided to “throw off my chain” and return to its “good old Master.”

The poem ended with the hoe reminding Newell that, when it was young, it had “hoed all your corn,” before signing off simply as:

“An Old Broken Hoe.”

The story might have disappeared completely into Wilbraham's past if not for the poem and the story being preserved in Chauncey E. Peck's 1914 History of Wilbraham, Massachusetts. Peck noted that he had obtained the account from the Newell family and included the entire poem in the town history.

It is a wonderfully ordinary story, but that may be what makes it worth remembering. In an age when most people owned few possessions, even a simple farm tool mattered. And apparently, in old Wilbraham, borrowing one for a year and returning it broken in the middle of the night was memorable enough to inspire a poem.