Peter Rugg is a New England literary character who figures in several American short stories and poems. Rugg is a stubborn and angry man, born about 1730. He rides out into a thunderstorm in the year of the Boston Massacre (1770), and is cursed to drive his carriage till the end of time.
Travelers claim to have sighted him along one road or another, driving a carriage with a child at his side, and declaring that he will reach Boston by nightfall.
Just at twilight last summer a person stopped at the door of the late Mrs. Rugg. Mrs. Croft on coming to the door perceived a stranger, with a child by his side, in an old weather-beaten carriage, with a black horse. The stranger asked for Mrs. Rugg, and was informed that Mrs. Rugg had died at a good old age, more than twenty years before that time.
Presently a man with a child beside him, with a large black horse, and a weather-beaten chair, once built for a chaise-body, passed in great haste, apparently at the rate of twelve miles an hour. He seemed to grasp the reins of his horse with firmness, and appeared to anticipate his speed. He seemed dejected, and looked anxiously at the passengers, particularly at the stage-driver and myself. In a moment after he passed us, the horses' ears were up, and bent themselves forward so that they nearly met.
"Who is that man?" said I; "he seems in great trouble."
William Austin, born March 2, 1778 and died June 27, 1841, was an American author and lawyer, most notable as the creator of the Peter Rugg stories published in the periodical New England Galaxy during 1824–27. Austin's stories, constructed as long letters signed with the name Jonathan Dunwell, presented the Rugg story as a long-standing New England legend, about a strong and obstinate man who got lost in a thunderstorm in 1770 and wandered the roads ever afterwards.
In Public Domain
First Published 1841
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Peter Rugg, the Missing Man
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