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player ready...This is a tale of two Bartlet(t)s.
U.S. President Josiah “Jeb” Bartlet may be the fictional master of “The West Wing,” but former New Hampshire President Josiah Bartlett is the real-life pride of this tiny Colonial-era town where most of the clapboard houses are, indeed, white.
Kingston, a hamlet of 5,800 not far from the seacoast, leaves visitors in no doubt that they’re in Bartlett country. At the entrance to the town, which is dominated by a long, broad, grassy swath called “the Plains,” a prominent green plaque boasts the accomplishments of Kingston’s favorite son. There is also a tall granite obelisk recounting his triumphs as “doctor, statesman, soldier,” a street bearing his name and an austere polished granite tomb holding his remains in the town cemetery.
Josiah Bartlett, who died here in 1795, apparently was quite a guy, managing to compile a lengthy and impressive resume in his 65 years.
Like the fictional Jeb Bartlet, he was a doctor, but of medicine, not of economics. A delegate to the Continental Congress from New Hampshire twice, in 1775-76 and in 1778, he was the second person, after John Hancock, to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Somehow, he also found the time to establish the New Hampshire Medical Society.
A justice and later chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Josiah Barlett–unlike his television near-namesake–was a president before he became a governor. From 1790 to 1793, he held the title president of New Hampshire, becoming the first person to hold the elected post of governor in 1793. The fictional Bartlet, a Nobel Laureate in economics, was a two-term Democratic governor of the Granite State before being elected U.S. president.
The Bartlett stamp
The influence of Josiah Bartlett still can be seen in the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy in Concord, N.H.; the Bartlett Museum in Amesbury, Mass., his birthplace; and the Josiah Bartlett School in Bartlett, N.H., another tiny town tucked into the snowy White Mountains.
Bartletts –with two Ts–have been living here since about the mid-1700s, when Josiah set up his medical practice in a big white house along the Plains. The house still stands at the edge of the town and a Bartlett still lives in it.
“He was my great-great-great-great-grandfather,” Ruth Bartlett Albert said. “This is his house,” she said proudly, gesturing at the handsome, three-story white clapboard with black shutters and a red barn in back. She noted that Bartlett began living in the town in 1751–“It must be that this area needed a doctor,” she reasoned–but built this house in 1774.
Albert, a member of the Kingston Historical Society, said there aren’t too many Bartletts left in Kingston. They’re spread around the country.
But as for the Bartlett line, she said, “It’s continuing on very nicely. A lot of them studied to become doctors and some of them stayed in some form of public service.”
Albert and her relatives were not at all offended that the NBC series took liberties with their ancestor’s name and biography.
“Oh, we thought it was great,” she said. “I just assumed they left the other `t’ off for legal reasons, so there would be no repercussions from the family. But, we were all thrilled that they did it.”
In the fictional White House, Jeb Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, boasts that his great-great-great-grandfather signed the Declaration of Independence. And, it is made known that he comes from a place in New Hampshire where his family has lived since the Second Continental Congress and his chief of staff describes as “the middle of nowhere.”
Fiction disappoints
But when an episode featured the president returning to his rural New Hampshire farm, it was not in leafy Kingston–it wasn’t even in New Hampshire, said a dismayed Albert.
“New Hampshire Magazine was trying to get them to come out here and get a feel for what the area was like and to hear about the real Josiah Bartlett,” she said. “Maybe someday.”
Why Jeb Bartlet hasn’t come to Kingston or how Josiah Bartlett became the inspiration for his character remains a mystery because, despite repeated calls and e-mails, NBC, which broadcasts the program, isn’t talking.
Still Albert holds out hope and, clearly, the real Josiah Bartlett isn’t leaving town.
`Fragrant is the recollection…’
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Far at the back of the Plains Cemetery, where many of the inscriptions on the aged, paper-thin headstones are lost to centuries of New Hampshire rain and snow, stands the Bartlett sepulcher. About 4 feet high and 6 feet long, it contains the remains of Bartlett, who died on May 19, 1795. Beside him is his wife, Mary, who also was his first cousin and mother of their 10 children; she died six years before him, at the age of 59.
On the tomb’s polished surface is an epitaph that begins “Fragrant is the recollection of friends.”
And, more than 200 years after his death, thanks to “The West Wing” and the little town of Kingston, Josiah Bartlett may long be gone from this world but certainly not forgotten.