A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32

A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl’s Journal, 1830-1832 is the best-known book by children’s author and educator Joan W. Blos. The novel is presented as the fictional journal of Catherine Hall, a young girl living in New Hampshire before the Civil War. Through Catherine’s journal entries, the novel portrays the daily life, challenges, and changes in a young girl’s world over two years, including personal loss, the complexities of friendship, and an encounter with someone running away from enslavement. Atheneum Books published the novel for young readers in 1979; it went on to win the 1980 Newbery Medal for excellence in American children’s literature and the 1980 National Book Award for children’s books.

This guide refers to the Kindle edition of the Aladdin paperback version of the book.

Content Warning: The novel and this guide discuss death, slavery, and racism, including a reference to a Black man liberating himself from slavery as a “boy,” as well as a reference to a peddler man as “the Jew,” as if he were defined by his religion.

Plot Summary

The story opens with a letter written in November 1899 from Catherine Hall, now Catherine Hall Onesti, to her great-granddaughter and namesake. Catherine explains to the younger Catherine that she is giving her the journal for her 14th birthday. The older Catherine turned 14 in the last year covered by the journal, the same year in which her father remarried, she lost her best friend, and she left the farm.

The journal begins on October 17, 1830. Catherine explains that the journal was brought back from Boston to her home in Meredith, New Hampshire, as a gift from her father, Charles Hall. Her diary includes many aspects of her daily life, including events that happened at school, recipes, jokes, and family stories. Her father is a widower, as her mother died soon after the birth of a baby boy who also died. She has a little sister, Matty, and a neighbor friend, Cassie Shipman.

Provoked by a school lesson, Catherine reveals that she hopes to always remain in the house that her father built with his own two hands and prays that harm never comes to the people she loves: Father, Matty, Cassie, the Shipmans, and her unmarried Uncle Jack. She also wants to train herself to do as she is asked.

One night, Catherine’s father tells the girls a ghost story about a man who goes into the woods to chase after his four runaway hogs and sees a headless woman in the dark, only to find later that it was just a tree. The lesson, Charles says, is that intelligence and reason must come before fear.

Catherine later sees a mysterious, lanky man in tattered clothes moving about Piper’s Woods. He vanishes before Catherine can point him out to Cassie and her brother, Asa Shipman.

Later that month, Uncle Jack and Father are discussing how frequently “bound boys” seem to be escaping these days in comparison to the few that escaped during their childhood. Father says that if he were to encounter someone escaping enslavement, he would turn him in, but Jack suggests that maybe the “boy” is right to run off. Catherine thinks that Father is not being severe but honorable.

Catherine sees the “phantom” in Piper’s Woods again and resolves to examine the area. Her school lesson book soon disappears. After several days, the book reappears on a rock close to the school. Someone has written a plea for help in the book, asking for pity because the writer is cold. Asa suggests that the writer might be someone escaping enslavement and says that they should help him. Catherine feels conflicted because of her father’s attitude.

Days after they find the lesson book, a few pies go missing from Cassie and Asa’s family. Asa accepts the blame, and his parents whip him. He and Catherine secretly suspect that the self-emancipated man took the pies.

Asa tells Cassie about this person, and after initial disapproval, Cassie agrees to help the others take a quilt that Catherine’s mother made to the man. They leave it on the rock where Catherine found her lesson book, and it is soon gone. There are no more signs of the man, and the children begin to think that he has left.

Cassie’s unmarried and stylish Aunt Lucy visits town, hoping to catch the eye of Charles. Despite her elegant looks and cooking abilities, Charles is uninterested, and Lucy stops pursuing him.

One day, Catherine’s teacher, Edward Holt, brings to school a copy of The Liberator, a newspaper put out by William Lloyd Garrison that calls for the emancipation of enslaved people. This controversial move causes people in the town to believe that Holt aided the self-emancipated man in the woods. Holt moves in with Cassie’s family and no longer reads the abolitionist text at school, but he continues to teach its contents after school. Catherine turns 14 in March 1831. While living with the Shipmans, Holt has a romantic connection with Aunt Lucy, and the two are soon engaged.

Charles arrives back from a trading trip to Boston and announces his engagement to a widow named Ann Higham. They marry in May, and Ann comes to live with the Halls. At first hesitant around Ann and jealous of her relationship with Father, Catherine eventually becomes more comfortable with her and her son, Daniel. When Matty unwittingly describes to Ann the quilt that Catherine gave to the self-emancipated man and the truth comes out, Ann gives Catherine the task of making a new quilt. The experience brings the two closer together, and Catherine begins calling her stepmother “Mammann.”

One day, when Cassie’s and Catherine’s families are picking berries together, Cassie gets a chill and comes down with a fever. Her condition worsens over the next several days, and she dies in August 1831, greatly mourned by Catherine. Soon after the marriage of Lucy and Holt, Catherine receives a letter from the self-emancipated man saying that he is now free in Canada. The older boys in school, including Daniel and Asa, begin flouting rules of the strict new schoolmaster, causing trouble. Disapproving of the schoolmaster, Ann begins to homeschool Catherine and Matty.

Now married and living in another town, Lucy and Holt have a new baby, and in December 1831, they ask Catherine to come to help out. She agrees, and the journal ends in March 1832 as Catherine prepares to leave. A final letter from the older Catherine to her namesake, written in December 1899, describes what happened to some of the neighbors and reflects on the new century starting.