Gardner and West Gardner. In the township are the state colony for the insane, the Henry Heywood memorial hospital, and the Levi Heywood memorial library (opened in 1886), a memorial to Levi Heywood (1800–1882), a prominent local manufacturer of chairs, who invented various kinds of chair-making machinery. By far the principal industry of the township (dating from 1805) is the manufacture of chairs, the township having in 1905 the largest chair factory in the world; among the other manufactures are toys, baby-carriages, silver-ware and oil stoves. In 1905 the total factory product of the township was valued at $5,019,019, the furniture product alone amounting to $4,267,064, or 85·2% of the total. Gardner, formed from parts of Ashburnham, Templeton, Westminster and Winchenden, was incorporated in 1785, and was named in honour of Col. Thomas Gardner (1724–1775), a patriot leader of Massachusetts, who was mortally wounded in the battle of Bunker Hill.
See W. D. Herrick, History of the Town of Gardner (Gardner, 1878), covering the years 1785–1878.
GARE-FOWL[1] (Icelandic, Geirfugl; Gaelic, Gearbhul), the anglicized form of the Hebridean name of a large sea-bird now considered extinct, formerly a visitor to certain remote Scottish islands, the Great Auk of most English book-writers, and the Alca impennis of Linnaeus. In size it was hardly less than a tame goose, and in appearance it much resembled its smaller and surviving relative the razor-bill (Alca torda); but the glossy black of its head was varied by a large patch of white occupying nearly all the space between the eye and the bill, in place of the razor-bill’s thin white line, while the bill itself bore eight or more deep transverse grooves instead of the smaller number and the ivory-like mark possessed by the species last named. Otherwise the coloration was similar in both, and there is satisfactory evidence that the gare-fowl’s winter-plumage differed from that of the breeding-season just as is ordinarily the case in other members of the family Alcidae to which it belongs. The most striking characteristic of the gare-fowl, however, was the comparatively abortive condition of its wings, the distal portions of which, though the bird was just about twice the linear dimensions of the razor-bill, were almost exactly of the same size as in that species—proving, if more direct evidence were wanting, its inability to fly.
 |
| Gare-Fowl, or Great Auk. |
The most prevalent misconception concerning the gare-fowl is one which has been repeated so often, and in books of such generally good repute and wide dispersal, that a successful refutation seems almost hopeless. This is the notion that it was a bird possessing a very high northern range, and consequently to be looked for by Arctic explorers. How this error arose would take too long to tell, but the fact remains indisputable that, setting aside general assertions resting on no evidence worthy of attention, there is but a single record deserving any credit at all of a single example of the species having been observed within the Arctic Circle, and this, according to Prof. Reinhardt, who had the best means of ascertaining the truth, is open to grave doubt.[2] It is clear that the older ornithologists let their imagination get the better of their knowledge or their judgment, and their statements have been blindly repeated by most of their successors. Another error which, if not so widely spread, is at least as serious, since Sir R. Owen unhappily gave it countenance, is that this bird “has not been specially hunted down like the dodo and dinornis, but by degrees has become more scarce.” If any reliance can be placed upon the testimony of former observers, the first part of this statement is absolutely untrue. Of the dodo all we know is that it flourished in Mauritius, its only abode, at the time the island was discovered, and that some 200 years later it had ceased to exist—the mode of its extinction being open to conjecture, and a strong suspicion existing that though indirectly due to man’s acts it was accomplished by his thoughtless agents (Phil. Trans., 1869, p. 354). The extinction of the Dinornis lies beyond the range of recorded history. Supposing it even to have taken place at the very latest period as yet suggested—and there is much to be urged in favour of such a supposition—little but oral tradition remains to tell us how its extirpation was effected. That it existed after New Zealand was inhabited by man is indeed certain, and there is nothing extraordinary in the proved fact that the early settlers (of whatever race they were) killed and ate moas. But evidence that the whole population of those birds was done to death by man, however likely it may seem, is wholly wanting. The contrary is the case with the gare-fowl. In Iceland there is the testimony of a score of witnesses, taken down from their lips by one of the most careful naturalists who ever lived, John Wolley, that the latest survivors of the species were caught and killed by expeditions expressly organized with the view of supplying the demands of caterers to the various museums of Europe. In like manner the fact is incontestable that its breeding-stations in the western part of the Atlantic were for three centuries regularly visited and devastated with the combined objects of furnishing food or bait to the fishermen from very early days, and its final extinction, according to Sir Richard Bonnycastle (Newfoundland in 1842, i. p. 232), was owing to “the ruthless trade in its eggs and skin.” There is no doubt that one of the chief stations of this species in Icelandic waters disappeared through volcanic action, and that the destruction of the old Geirfuglaskér drove some at least of the birds which frequented it to a rock nearer the mainland, where they were exposed to danger from which they had in their former abode been comparatively free; yet on this rock (Eldey＝fire-island) they were “specially hunted down” whenever opportunity offered, until the stock there was wholly extirpated in 1844.
A third misapprehension is that entertained by John Gould in his Birds of Great Britain, where he says that “formerly this bird was plentiful in all the northern parts of the British Islands, particularly the Orkneys and the Hebrides. At the commencement of the 19th century, however, its fate appears to have been sealed; for though it doubtless existed, and probably bred, up to the year 1830, its numbers annually diminished until they became so few that the species could not hold its own.” Now of the
- ↑ The name first appears, and in this form, in the Account of Hirta (St Kilda) and Rona, &c., by the lord register, Sir George M‘Kenzie of Tarbat, printed by Pinkerton in his Collection of Voyages and Travels (iii. p. 730), and then in Sibbald’s Scotia illustrata (1684). Martin soon after, in his Voyage to St Kilda, spelt it “Gairfowl.” Sir R. Owen adopted the form “garfowl,” without, as would seem any precedent authority.
- ↑ The specimen is in the Museum of Copenhagen; the doubt lies as to the locality where it was obtained, whether at Disco, which is within, or at the Fiskernis, which is without, the Arctic Circle.
