USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Farmington > An historical address delivered at the opening of the village library of Farmington, Conn., September 30th, 1890 > Part 16
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mained, and the boys were driven to the river for amuse- ment, which, especially for the smaller ones, was a poor substitute for the old canal. While that remained no boy could help learning to swim. The water was just so. deep that any frightened learner had but to stand on tip- toe and his head was at once safely above water. Every- body learned to row a boat as soon as he was old enough to run away and get to the canal, and the water was full of roaches shining in the sun, and bullheads and eels down in the deep holes ready to fall an easy prey to the youth- ful fisherman. Boats bearing on their sterns the names : Gold Hunter, Enterprise, Paragon, Sachem, American Eagle, James Hillhouse, De Witt Clinton, and I know not how many other names, passed frequently, and the boys had but to drop from the nearest bridge upon their decks and ride as far as they would. If the captain amused himself by steer- ing too far from the towpath for the boys to jump ashore, they had only to wait for the next bridge which they climbed into where the sides had been previously knocked into wide gaps for their accommodation. The farmers hated the canal. The water leaked through the towpath and turned their meadows into swamps. The rickety bridges frightened their cattle and were set so high that it was hard to draw a good-sized load of hay over one, but it will be hard to find one who was a boy in those happy days speak evil of the Farmington canal. Nor was it the small boy only that found recreation on the old canal. Those of an older growth did not disdain its quiet pleasures. I remember standing one fine autumn day on the old " Yellow Store Basin " wharf and watch a packet- boat sail away northward with a jolly crew for a week's fishing on Southwick ponds. They were farmers who had finished haying, merchants tired of daily drudgery, and foremost among them all and chief organizer of the ex- pedition, Professor John Pitkin Norton, who loved his
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favorite science much, but nature more, enthusiastic, la- borious, healthy minded, an ardent disciple of good old Isaak Walton, and ever ready in spirit with him to in- voke the blessing of St. Peter's Master "upon all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in his providence, and be quiet and go a-Angling." Of all the worthies who sailed on that expedition but two survive. They have long since laid aside their fishing-rods and only occasionally are heard to recount the marvelous exploits of that week's life on the old canal.
Such is a brief account of an interesting episode in the more recent history of this village. Whatever honor at- taches to the enterprise belongs to the Hon. James Hill- house of New Haven. His biographer, Dr. Bacon, tells us that he took no part in obtaining the charter, but there- after, though far advanced in life, yielded to the solicita- tions of the townsmen who, since he led them in repelling the invasion of Tryon, had always looked to him as the one man able to accomplish any public enterprise to which they called him. He died in 1832 while the canal seemed about to justify all the care and labor he had lavished upon it.
THE LIBRARY OF A FARMINGTON VILLAGE BLACKSMITH A. D. 1712
AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED AT THE
Annual Meeting OF
THE VILLAGE LIBRARY COMPANY OF
FARMINGTON, CONN.
September 12, 1900
By JULIUS GAY
HARTFORD PRESS The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company 1900
THE LIBRARY OF A FARMINGTON VILLAGE BLACKSMITH A. D. 1712
AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED AT THE
Annual Meeting
OF
THE VILLAGE LIBRARY COMPANY
OF
FARMINGTON, CONN.
September 12, 1900
By JULIUS GAY
HARTFORD PRESS The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company
1900
ADDRESS.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Village Library Company of · Farmington:
It has been the custom of the managers of some neighbor- ing libraries to celebrate the passing of each decade of their history. Let us also to-night briefly consider how it has fared with us. Ten years ago the old library, dating from the close of the Revolution, had ceased its usefulness for want of suitable accommodations. Another, known as the Tunxis, the result of enthusiastic and well-directed individual enterprise, had taken its place, and it in turn began to find its usefulness limited by its contracted habitation. Again, the village library, heir of many predecessors, has outgrown its quarters, and we hope that somehow in the march of public improvements a larger and more convenient building, and one separate from all other public uses, may in good time be provided for it.
Ten years ago this library was opened to the public by a goodly company ; to-night we are again met, but not all. First among the speakers of that evening to pass over to the majority was Professor Nathan P. Seymour, who came among us every spring with the coming of the birds. To the school he dis- coursed on Grecian literature, and by us all his familiar con- versation was greatly enjoyed, rich with stores of the most genial wisdom. Next passed away President Porter, whose love for his native village was strong and enduring. He was its earliest and best historian, his high position reflecting honor on the home of his youth and of his long line of ancestors. Next to leave us was the Rev. Thomas K. Fessenden, active in all good words and works, Then came Mr. Edward Nor-
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ton, one of the founders of the library and useful with advice and assistance as an officer of the company. An active helper in all worthy enterprises, and of great learning in his special department of thought and research, but so modest that few knew of his attainments. Next passed away the beloved minister, Rev. Edward A. Smith, helpful in all good things, judicious in no ordinary degree, loved by all, and the personal friend of many. These were all graduates of Yale and an honor to any station to which their lot called them. Last of all the company of that evening, passed away from the scene of her life-long work, Miss Sarah Porter, the eulogies upon whom from all parts of the world need no repetition here. Her life is known of all men. On that evening a paper was read on the former public libraries of the village. To-night I propose to speak of the private library of a Farmington village blacksmith in 1712, if so small a collection of books can be called a library.
Considering the serious character of Puritan literature, we approach the subject very much as Burns did his Epistle to a young friend, feeling
" Perhaps, it may turn out a sang, Perhaps, turn out a sermon."
There is certainly an opportunity for something more solemn than any sermon you have heard of late years. We will, how- ever, endeavor to take as cheerful a view of the subject as it admits. I think it may be interesting for us all to know, not merely what books might have been read in New England in 1712, but what was actually the daily intellectual food of the common people in this very community.
Samuel Gridley, son of Thomas Gridley the immigrant. lived and had his blacksmith shop near the site of the house of the late Egbert Cowles. Esq., now known as the Lodge. He repeatedly held the office of townsman or selectman, and that of constable. I do not know that his collection of books sur- passed that of his neighbors, but he had the rare good fortune
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of having John Wadsworth write the inventory of his estate. He, instead of valuing the books in a lump, as was usually the custom then as now, gave us the title of each volume. First in order came an " Old great Bible," valued at three shillings. The precise edition we do not know. I have seen the great Bible of only two of the first settlers of this town, that of Newell and of Thomson, and for many reasons believe Mr. Gridley's to have been of the same kind, namely the London Bible of 1598 or of about that date, commonly known to collectors as the " Breeches Bible." from its peculiar rendering of a certain passage in Genesis. It had maps showing the precise location of the Garden of Eden and many curious cuts. It contained also Sternhold and Hopkins' Book of Psalms, " with apt notes to sing them withall." I do not suppose we should enjoy the constant use of this music, but I should be greatly pleased for once to hear a hundred strong voices singing in unison. with all the fervor of their souls, the music set, for instance, to the 68th Psalm. "Let God arise and then his foes will turn themselves to flight." Such were the tunes which carried the Ironsides of Cromwell victorious over many a bloody field. Next on the list appears one Psalm Book, IS pence. We can- not be sure which one of the three versions of the Psalms in common use was meant. These were Ainsworth's " Book of Psalms Englished both in Prose and Metre," that is, with the prose and meter side by side, so that the worshiper might see how far he was straying from the Bible ; Sternhold and Hop- kins' " Whole Booke of Psalms," and the famous Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in New England, a copy of which was bought by Cornelius Vanderbilt at the Brinley sale in IS;o for twelve hundred dollars.
Next we find KOMETOPPADIA, Or a Discourse Concerning Comets ; wherein the Nature of Blazing Stars is Enquired into : With an Historical Account of all the Comets which have ap- peared from the Beginning of the World unto this present Year. By Increase Mather. Teacher of a Church at Boston
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in New England. And sold by J. Browning at the corner of the Prison Lane next the Town House. 1683. This was the only scientific book in Mr. Gridley's collection, but it was a scientific book written by a Puritan divine with a theo- logical intent. This is set forth by the Rev. John Sherman in his introduction to the book. "Comets," he says, "are ordinarily the forerunners of disastrous calamities, mischiefs. and miseries, hastening to follow and fall down on the heads of senseless and secure sinners. . If it be said that some of these peri-wigged heralds have appeared on the etherial stage upon a more benign account, it may be rationally replied. that the number of such is very small. When the hand of Heaven is seen writing Mene, Mene, Tekel, etc., it may become the highest of mortals to tremble." The author begins by expressing his regret that he could not at this dis- tance from Europe, in this American wilderness, suddenly ob- tain the long list of learned works he proceeds to enumerate. The opinions of ancient philosophers from Aristotle down as to the nature of comets, he combats. "The Peripatetic School," he says, " has fancied them to be meteors generated out of the bowels of the Earth, exhaled and extolled by the Sun to the supreme region of the air and there set on fire." He contends that comets are not placed in the first heaven or
air, but far above it in the second or starry heaven. After vanquishing the ancients, he enters on his main task, that of setting down the dates of the appearance of great numbers of comets from the beginning of the world to his own day, and. along side of them, the duly corresponding dates of all the dire disasters which history has recorded. We will consider a few of these remarkable coincidences. "In the year after the creation, 1656, there was seen a formidable blazing star, which all the old world beheld for the space of nine and twenty days.
Immediately upon its appearing Methuselah died. .
The next year the flood came, wherein all men, women. and children throughout the earth (excepting eight persons)
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perished." "Anno Mundi 1744 there appeared a comet in the sign of Capricorn, which in the space of sixty-five days passed through three of the celestial signs. The building of Babel, confusion of languages, and subsequent dispersion of mankind throughout the world have been noted as events attending that comet. A.M. 2118 a comet was ob- served in the sign of Aries followed by the famine
. which caused Abraham to remove into Egypt." He gives the dates and the descriptions, too lengthy for our pur- pose, of the comets which heralded one after another the Trojan War, the War of the Amazons, the destruction of the Philis- tines at the death of Samson, Haman's plot to massacre the Jews, the Peloponnesian War, the burning of the temple of Ephesus, the burning of Rome by Nero, the persecution under Diocletian, and the composing of his diabolical religion by Mahomet. As he proceeds to the more precise dates of modern times, the misfit between the comets and the disasters became more apparent, until he was forced to exclaim, " But there must needs be some mistake in that relation, and there- fore I intermit it and proceed unto." And he proceeds accord- ingly. The Star of Bethlehem could not very well be called a herald of evil, so he concludes that it was not a comet, but is ready to believe that the darkness of the crucifixion was caused by a comet interposing itself between the sun and the earth.
The next book enumerated was " Time and the End of Time," by John Fox. Printed in Boston in 1701. This is worthy of a moment's consideration as a good specimen of the form of sermons two centuries ago. The writer divides his subject into five heads: istly, When is time to be re- deemed ; 2dly, What time must be redeemed : 3dly. How time must be redeemed ; 4thly. Why time must be redeemed ; and 5thly, Motives and Directions to help you. Each of the five heads has from five to seven subdivisions, each of which sub- divisions has its application, and each application has six heads called uses, and each use from four to ten motives. I do not
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propose to weary you with any rehearsal of the subject matter of the book, for I am too forcibly impressed by the arguments of Mr. Fox against wasting time to be guilty of any such folly. In general we gather that time is most wisely spent in " read- ing the Word, catchising and prayer," and that it is most de- plorably wasted in story-telling, inquiring after news, card- playing, dicing, dancing, stage plays, bear and bull baiting, hunting, hawking, and in reading romantic tales. Especially was he displeased at the waste of precious time by a certain gentlewoman who invited a godly minister to dinner and kept him waiting from ten of the clock till one, all of which time she was dressing.
Next we come upon "Sion in Distress, or the Groans of the Protestant Church," printed in Boston, 1683. This is now one of the extremely rare books of Mr. Gridley's collection, though common enough in his day. The inventory of a Boston bookseller in 1700 showed six copies on his shelves. It is the third edition of what the writer calls " a revived poem with such additions and enlargements as makes it very different from the first impression." That is, he dares to print more fully here than in England, what the Popish or Titus Oates Plot of 1678 had suggested to his heated imagination. He says, " We have now a plain prospect (by the gracious discoveries of Provi- dence) of those horrid and execrable plots, which the restless adversary has contrived against the peace and very being of Sion, and which were much in the dark when my Muse first bewailed its condition." As for the style of his poetry, he in- forms us that " In a subject of grief a quaint and ornamental method is not to be expected, for an abrupt and sobbing de- livery is more natural in the delineation of sorrow than a studied, well-poised and artificial harangue." He accordingly opens his poem with the lines,
" What dismal vapour. (in so black a form) Is this, that seems to harbinger a storm?"
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The poem is a discourse between Sion's Friend, Sion, Sion's Children, Babylon, Jehovah, Beelzebub, and Justice, which soon takes the form of a judicial trial, and the Waldenses, Al- bigenses, and Protestants of Piedmont, Savoy, Bohemia, and other lands are called in as witnesses. You will doubtless re- member in this connection the nobler lines of Milton's sonnet,
" Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold:"
Finally the Judge, descending from lofty rhyme to vigorous prose, indicts Rome as the Man of Sin, and also under the various titles usually chosen for her from the Book of Revela- tion, and finally convicts her of the peculiar sins and abomina- tions most popular at the court of Charles the Second. The next book is entitled "Spiritual Almanac," a title so abbreviated that we cannot discover the book with certainty. On the last page of an almanac for the previous year, 1711, is the advertise- ment of a book which has the characteristics of what might be looked for in a spiritual almanac. It is a chronological account of the labors of the farm, beginning in the early spring and going on through the year, with religious observations thereon. It is entitled " Husbandry Spiritualized : Or the Heavenly Use of Earthly Things. By John Flavel, late minister of the Gos- pel." The husbandry is decidedly spiritualized, there being the least possible amount of husbandry that would suffice for a text to a long homily. Nevertheless the book is so superior to much of the literature of the day that I should be tempted to say something more about it if I could be sure that it was the very Spiritual Almanac we are seeking. That Mr. Gridley had an almanac of some sort, spiritual or otherwise, there can be no doubt. Every man, whatever other profession he might have, whether mechanic, or lawyer, or doctor, or minister even, was a farmer, and farming was in a way much more scientific than now. There was a precise time for every labor of the farın, and the almanac, with its information about the positions
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of the sun and moon and the signs of the zodiac and its list of saints' days was indispensable. In the book of Ecclesiastes they read : " To everything there is a season, and a time to every pur- pose under the heaven. A time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted." What these times were they read in old Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry and in the other old English worthies who laid down the time for everything. Cut your hair when the moon is in Leo if you would have it grow like the lion's mane, or in Aries that it may curl like a ram's horn. The labors of the farm are duly set down as follows :
March I. Upon St. David's day put oats and barley in the clay.
March 12. Upon St. Vitus' day sow cabbages.
March 21. On St. Benedict's day sow oats and barley.
May I. On St. Philip's and St. James' day sow peas and lentils.
May 25. On St. Urban's day sow flax and hemp.
June II. On St. Barnabas' day put the scythe to the grass.
June 24. Cut your thistles before St. John's, or
you will have two instead of one.
July 8. On St. Killian's day sow vetches and rape.
July 13. On St. Margaret's day put sickle to the corn.
Sept. I. On St. Giles' day sow corn.
Sept. 17. On St. Lambert's day put meat in pickle.
Sept. 21. On St. Matthew's day shut up the bees.
Oct. 15. On St. Oswald's day roast geese.
Oct. 18. On St. Luke's day kill your pigs and bung up your barrels.
Nov. On St. Martin's day make sausages.
And the list ends with the very comfortable injunction, hardly of Puritan origin, Drink wine all the year round, and then you will be ready to die at any time.
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The next title is " The Unpardonable Sin." In the cata- logues of the many thousand sermons which came from the presses of London and Boston before 1712 it is amazing that not one on this favorite subject of speculation can be found. If any are curious about the effect of this weird subject on the early New England mind, they can find a vivid picture of it in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of Ethan Brand, who in early life wandered away from his native village in quest of the un- pardonable sin, and returned in old age, boasting that he had found the object of his search.
The next book is " The Doctrine of Divine Providence opened and Applied," by Increase Mather, Teacher of a church in Boston in New England. Printed by Richard Pierce for Joseph Brunning, and are to be sold at his shop at the corner of Prison-Lane next the Exchange. 1684. The book opens with the well-known story of the angel who justified the ways- of-God-to-man to a doubting hermit by stealing a cup front one kind host who entertained them, drowning the servant of another, and killing the child of a third. All three seeming crimes the angel satisfactorily explained, and with this intro- duction Mather goes on to unfold to his readers things hard to be understood, - the Old Testament stories of the bloody ex- termination of the heatlien by the word of the Lord, the de- struction of Saul for his pity towards the wretches he was told to slay, and the removal of the American Indians by the plague to make room for the Pilgrim Fathers. All these cases he ex- plains to the honor and glory of the Almighty. Next on the inventory we meet with " Man's chief End to Glorifie God, or Some Brief Sermon Notes. By the Reverend Mr. John Bailey, Sometime Preacher and Prisoner of Christ at Limerick in Ireland, and now Pastor to the Church of Christ in Watertown in New England." It was a farewell sermon to his flock in which he speaks of the power which " thrust me from poor Limerick," and .of the time " when I was in prison and my public liberty gone." It is a long lament. more inter -
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esting to his dear friends than it can possibly be to us. The next treasure noted in the library was a Commentary on Faith. but I find so many books to which this abbreviated title would be appropriate that we will pass on to the next, which is " How to walk with God. or Early Piety exemplified in the Life and Death of Mr. Nathaniel Mather, who having become at the age of nineteen an instance of more than common Learning and .Virtue, changed Earth for Heaven, Oct. 16, 1688." Whereto are added . A Walk with God." Samuel Mather, in the opening address to the Reader, writes " am his younger brother and son of Increase Mather, the well-known teacher of a church in Boston and rector of Harvard College in New England." The youthful subject of this memoir lived be- fore the days of athletic exercises for students, spent his days and the larger part of his nights over his books, entered col- lege at the age of twelve, and, before many months, "had accurately gone over all the Old Testament in Hebrew, as well as the New in Greek, besides going through all the Liberal Sciences." His biographer says, " While he thus de- voured books, it came to pass that books devoured him. His weak body would not bear the toils and hours, which he used " himself unto." The extracts from his diary are a record of pious introspection in which he worked himself up to the usual test of piety, that he was willing to be eternally damned if God so decreed. As for the accompanying discourse, " The Walk of Holy and Happy Men," we have not time this evening for an extended walk with the Mathers, though we need not fear being wearied with any commonplace conversation by the way, for they had always something fresh to talk of and a vigorous way of saying it. Books like this, describing saints who were good, but rarely anything else, are not much in vogue at present. Forty years ago there were a number in our Sunday-school library which had been handed down from generation to generation because they were in such superb condition, and they were in this condition because no one read
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them. Famous books they had been in their day, - The Dairyman's Daughter, The Young Cottager, and others. Thackeray continually alludes to such under the title of his - supposed tract, " The Washerwoman of Finchley Common." You remember how Becky Sharp thanks Lady Southdown for that precious work " which she had read with the greatest profit," and asked about its gifted author. A youthful saint, or prig, if you choose so to call him, may be an infinitely more useful member of the community than a brute, but most readers now prefer an account of the brute.
The next book on the list was considered by the appraisers to have the highest commercial value of any, and was inven- toried at five shillings and four pence. It was certainly the most famous book of that time. "The Wonders of the In- visible World. Published by the special command of his Excellency the Governour of the Massachusetts Bay in New England." This book was written in October, 1692, by the Rev. Cotton Mather at the request of Gov. Sir William Phipps in explanation and justification of the witchcraft trials at Salem. Up to the 22d of September nineteen persons liad been hanged and one pressed to death for refusing to plead. The jails of Salem and the surrounding towns were full of the accused. and complaints against the highest persons in the land were beginning to be made. In this book Cotton Mather repeats the great need of caution as to the character of evidence which the ministers of Boston had already urged in their return of June 15th, a due regard to which might have saved all the dis- graceful tragedies which followed. Nevertheless it did not occur to Mather, or indeed to any believer in the Word of God before the advent of the higher criticism, that there could be any doubt of the existence of witchcraft. His first proposition is, " That there is a Devil, is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influence of the Devil. For any to deny the being of a Devil must be from an ignorance or profaneness worse than diabolical." In explanation of the sudden inroad
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