build his now famous house. It was finished the next year, and
in 1787, the young man, having been elected town treasurer of Dunbarton,
resolved to settle down in his new home, and brought there as his wife,
Miss Sarah McKinstrey, a daughter of Doctor William McKinstrey, formerly
of Taunton, Massachusetts, a beautiful and cultivated girl, just twenty
years old.

It is interesting in this connection to note that all the women of the
Stark family have been beauties, and that they have, too, been sweet
and charming in disposition, as well as in face. The old mansion on the
Weare road has been the home during its one hundred and ten years of
life of several women who would have adorned, both by reason of their
personal and intellectual charms, any position in our land. This being
true, it is not odd that the country folk speak of the Stark family with
deepest reverence.

Beside building the family homestead, Caleb Stark did two other things
which serve to make him distinguished even in a family where all were
great. He entertained Lafayette, and he accumulated the family fortune.
Both these things were accomplished at Pembroke, where the major early
established some successful cotton mills. The date of his entertainment
of Lafayette was, of course, 1825, the year when the marquis, after
laying the corner-stone of our monument on Bunker Hill, made his
triumphal tour through New Hampshire.

The bed upon which the great Frenchman slept during his visit to the
Starks is still carefully preserved, and those guests who have had the
privilege of being entertained by the present owners of the house can
bear testimony to the fact that the couch is an extremely comfortable
one. The room in which this bed is the most prominent article of
furniture bears the name of the Lafayette room, and is in every
particular furnished after the manner of a sleeping apartment of one
hundred years ago. The curtains of the high bedstead, the quaint
toilet-table, the bedside table with its brass candlestick, and the
pictures and the ornaments are all in harmony. Nowhere has a discordant
modern note been struck. The same thing is true of all the other
apartments in the house. The Starks have one and all displayed great
taste and decided skill in preserving the long-ago tone that makes the
place what it is. The second Caleb, who inherited the estate in 1838,
when his father, the brilliant major, died, was a Harvard graduate, and
writer of repute, bei