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Health & Fitness

EG THEN AND NOW - William Henry Tarbox, The Dahlia King

One of the things sadly missed from the old days by people with any history in the village are the characters. East Greenwich always had a vast array of characters in town. It seems the band of normal people was much more narrow in the past with more room top and bottom for the oddballs. Characters are always a topic of conversation and bind the community together. That is missing today, or at least not as apparent as in times past.

Fellow Townie Bruce Mastracchio once listed all the nicknames of everyone he could think of in town who had one and it was a long, long, list. And it could be said that if one got a nickname, one was truly fitting of the designation “character!” Something had to attract the attention of the nicknamers, who often those chaps sitting on hot summer nights in front of the fire station. I remember trying to be invisible walking past the fire station in the hopes of avoiding a less than enviable moniker. Obviously I was successful because the only nickname I ever had was laid on me about the time the movie “Alfie” came out and it was usually followed by the question, “What's it all about?”

In a town where Levi® jeans were high style, the late Vincent G. Putnam shone like a beacon when seen on Main Street wearing a three-piece sharkskin suit in his late teens. He was the “Senator” and a pretty sizeable character in his own right when he complained 40 years ago that there were no characters left in town.

Certainly every barber in town was a character. Being a barber was not particularly a labor intensive job so much as a time-consuming job. You didn't labor much but had plenty of time to read the paper and bet on horses. With all that free time and being in the public view with shops on Main Street, their personalities developed extrovertedly. Having to have conversations while cutting hair meant you had to know what was going on in the world and better yet, having an opinion on the topic. Barber shops were friendly places and often very funny places to be.

But these were characters of a recent era. Here's a little known “town character” story about East Greenwich's Dahlia King. His name was William Henry Tarbox. He was first born of twins in December 1841 on a farm out straddling the East-West Greenwich line. He graduated from East Greenwich Academy and a college in New York State, and was a teacher for five years. He must have grown tired of being out in the world because he soon returned to the farm where he was born and which he shared with his twin brother Daniel Webster Tarbox.

His loves were books, music, and flowers. Daniel Webster Tarbox was the farmer in the family. Daniel was widowered fairly young, had two sons and apparently that was enough manpower to tend to the farming so William Henry Tarbox listened to music, read books, and grew flowers. He grew asters and dahlias, but he became most famous for his dahlias. For the thirty-five years straddling the turn of the century he was the largest importer of dahlias in the country and he used to cultivate them in large fields on the farm. He was forced to stop when a ban was put on importing them by the government and after that he had only a small quantity of American types. His one ambition in life was to create the “pure blue dahlia” for which Queen Victoria of England offered a $5,000 prize. There's nothing I can find saying whether he was successful or not.

Of William Henry Tarbox, the late East Greenwich Historian Violet Kettelle recalls: “William Henry Tarbox … was a twin to brother Daniel. He was known as the Dahlia King and was called “Bill Tuck” and “Tittie I Tie Tie” after one of his expressions. He raised asters and dahlias to sell. The dahlia tubers came from Holland. Every Fall before the Danbury Fair in Connecticut he had what was called a “Big Sunday” for neighbors and other people to come and see his flowers. He also had some other object covered [with flower heads] to be shipped to the fair. I went only one Sunday. At that time he had covered an old horsehair couch/sofa with the heads of dark purple asters and a pillow with white asters. He had a doll on it. People made fun of him because he was not normal in talk and actions.”

A newspaper reporter and photographer from the Providence News showed up one time in 1925 and wrote a rather nebullous article about William looking for a wife. I say nebullous because it's hard to tell if a prank was played on the 83-year old man by local folk or if a fraud was concocted by the newspaper people themselves. At any rate the article called William Henry Tarbox a “Gay Young Lothario” with “gay being used in the lexicon of the times. It claimed William was ready to settle down and get hitched. William was estimated to have had around $100,000 in assets, which one wonders even today, but his offer to any prospective bride was “she can have a silk dress every month if she wants it.”

William was also the family genealogist with an intimate knowledge of his family's history to his own generation with all its branches, which he can recite without reference to notes or figures. His ancestral tree in East Greenwich dated back to 1640 when Pasco Whitford left Wales, came to town, such as it was then, and built a log cabin on the property the Tarbox twins lived on, although the log cabin was later replaced with a large Colonial that might be still there.
It appears Daniel was the more down-to-earth brother and William Henry the intellectual. Of his twin brother, Daniel, says “that fellow was born under a different planet than I was.”

It seems the brothers were content to just stay home on the farm. Daniel never attended a movie but William admitted he had “been to see them places.” Neither of the brothers had been to Providence in over nine years. William Henry last went to East Greenwich three years before the story broke in 1925 and that was his last journey off the farm.  

So we know William Henry Tarbox, the “Dahlia King” was a bit of a character. We know local people thought him a bit odd, giving him such nicknames as “Bill Tuck” and “Tittie I Tie Tie” and with such names, you had to stand out a bit from the hoi polloi. William was smart enough to be a college graduate and be a teacher. Yet upon returning home, he hermitized himself to the farm with his biggest social engagement being the Danbury Fair.

But I cannot tell the extent of his oddness by the newspaper account because it is a very tongue-in-cheek battle between fact and fiction. I'd be willing to bet a young smartassed reporter could build a pretty good fable about an 83-year old grizzled hermit looking for a wife and this would be it.

William Henry Tarbox died in 1937 and Daniel Webster Tarbox died in 1928. The “Gay Lothario” article was written in May, 1925.


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