USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Cheshire > Exercises commemorative of the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the First Congregational Church in Cheshire Connecticut, 1724-1924 > Part 4
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That particular device for encouraging a fondness for
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public speaking, I think, must have soon fallen into disuse, for the impression which remains concerning this church is that "Her ways are the ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace." This includes all my relations with it, which embraced the favor of being a librarian of some de- gree, the privilege of holding a singing book with the church choir (a manifestation of gross favoritism rather than a recognition of musical merit), and the benefit of attendance at the noonday class conducted by E. R. Brown in the choir gallery. The greatest of these was of course the Sunday School Bible class. Our teacher of affectionate memory, with all his deep religious conviction and his consistent week- day practice, showed an advanced breadth of mind by en- couraging a spirit of inquiry which has made it always a delight to recall those instructive discussions. They were stirring and free debates between primitive modernists and fundamentalists, and they had the effect of stimulating an anxious searching of the Scriptures for texts to countenance views which had been rashly advanced in the exigencies of argument.
There were divers other functions of the church which invited. There were Sunday School picnics which always stimulated a keen, if transient, interest in religious matters on the part of the children and caused a notable, if rather ephemeral, increase in attendance. There were, too, the church festivals at which one could take a chance with the grab bag or the ice cream. And there were many and fre- quent prayer meetings and church services, with interludes of social opportunity.
It is very comforting to me now to reflect upon my regular and assiduous part in these varied activities. It helps the average. However, if I were to exercise the Puritan trait of introspection, I might have to admit in this truthful narra-
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tion that such devotion was inspired by mixed motives, and that the attraction of a pair of laughing blue eyes may have had as much influence as did "the beauties of holiness."
It was a pleasant and a useful part which the church filled in the life of the town. This edifice, as I remember, was a center of social activity and political excitement. Its base- ment served, not only as a place for the church festivals, but for lectures, town meetings and caucuses and as a polling- place where the voters registered by ballot the opinions which had been debated under the horse-sheds. This con- tinued until the Town Hall was built, when that became the place for such affairs. As the facilities were enlarged, the activities increased, so that altogether these furnished an epitome of the social and civic life of the town.
Whenever I drive by that prosaic building even now, its sight invariably stirs a riot of youthful memories and re- calls the bright, iridescent dreams of those buoyant days. It was in the Town Hall that, on a day in June, the gradu- ating classes of the old Academy were wont to declaim their "Orations" to a hazy audience of perspiring but politely attentive townspeople and admiring relatives, the latter of whom alone among all the world appreciated at their full value the gems of thought extracted from the unfathomed caves of youthful meditation.
Prayer meetings were held in the court room, and so were the exciting liquor trials, when Cheshire went almost dry by local option. The debating society, of merry memory, met, I think, in the hall over Mr. Brown's store, but there were many other meetings in the Town Hall. The singing school met here, and there were concerts here and lectures, town meetings, variety shows, and theatricals, native and exotic. The Young Men's Club had rooms here which pro- vided a place convenient for the playing of games and the
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exchange of important local intelligence. There were dances, too, where the glide waltz and the heel-and-toe polka shared the floor with the money musk and the Virginia reel, the lancers and the quadrille, the last furnishing infinite oppor- tunity for the exercise of individual initiative and the dis- play of more or less serious agility. This mid-Victorian qua- drille was a very present link in terpsichorean evolution. You could see in its performance a survival of the stately minuet executed with mathematical precision ; and then, at the call of "Balance corners!" from the first violin, there was an infinite variety of mutual whirls and individual jigs, flour- ishes of heel, genuflexions and nimble convolutions which would make the jazz look like serious calisthenics. All who saw it will recall the picturesque festival given in this as- sembly room by a literary society of bright and lovely girls (the survivors will recognize by the description the E. M. Society), where the young ladies were garbed in the style and with the clothes of their grandmothers and great-grand- mothers, and where a very few representatives of the great- grandfathers made a surprise appearance, in wigs and knee breeches, shoe-buckles, and sundry sartorial impedimenta of the earlier century. Those were rapturous days!
In the old Town Hall were held the peaceful and the tur- bulent meetings connected with the School Board, of which I had the diverting experience of serving as chairman dur- ing a period of rather tempestuous progress toward methods which now have become the ways of approved and common practice.
The schedule of my debts to Cheshire would be quite in- complete without mentioning another of the interesting as- sociations which hover about the old Town Hall. This one opened the way to a brief but edifying lesson in the way- ward courses of politics for which I have always been prop-
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erly grateful. It happened that at the first caucus which I attended a vagrant impulse caused my old friend and fellow disputant in the Sunday School class, William H. Newell, to move that I be made chairman. This trifling urge resulted in a few appointments as delegate here and there, and then in a term in the House of Representatives, which taught, concerning the individual import of civic obligations, useful lessons which seem not even periodically to stir the torpid voter who has never felt the spur of personal appeal. Inci- dentally, the experience with politics served as a warning that, as with another pursuit which is wholly agricultural, none but the most hardy and weatherwise should take it as a vocation, for seldom does its cultivation produce the per- fect flower of influence joined with repute which we have be- fore us in the person of the presiding officer of these exer- cises.
Cheshire seems nearly always to have had a place of in- fluence in political affairs. There was Governor Foot, who was born here in 1780 and died here in 1846, who served in the United States Senate, a colleague of Webster and Clay and Burton and Calhoun. Before his time there were Steven Bradley, who was born in Cheshire in 1754, was an aide on the staff of General Wooster in the War of the Revolution, and later was a United States Senator from Vermont, and Peter Hitchcock, who was born here in 1781, practiced law in Cheshire, afterward served as a member of Congress from Ohio, and for many years occupied high judicial office in that state. Dr. Lyman Hall, in 1724, first saw the light shine on this dominion of George I in the town of which the Parish of New-Cheshire, named that year, was then a part- the same year in which his uncle, the Rev. Samuel Hall, "was ordained Pastor of ye church of New Cheshire." He achieved fame forever as a signer of the Declaration of Independence
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from Georgia, and was governor of that state. Further- more, he had the distinction of being executor of the will of Button Gwinnett, another signer from Georgia, whose autograph is the rarest of all autographs of the signers, chiefly because within a year from signing that document he was shot by General McIntosh in a duel, at which, as Lyman Hall wrote his fellow signer, Roger Sherman of Con- necticut, "they were placed at ten or twelve foot distance."
Many of us remember Judge Hinman, the Chief Justice, who lived here for several years and was a trustee of the old Academy. Everyone who is familiar with ancient Chesh- ire and the school knows that Admiral Foot (a Sir Gala- had of the quarter-deck) belonged to both, and that many others who achieved renown studied at the Academy and fraternized about the town. One of them was John Frederick Kensett, born here in 1818 and in his mature years a painter of distinction who enjoyed the material fruits of success in his lifetime. Among others who became known to fame are the schoolmates, General Joseph Wheeler (1849-51) and J. P. Morgan (1846-51).
These biographical notes have little to do with the case, but they suggest that the atmosphere hereabout is not un- favorable to the nurture of ambition, and that if the youth of Cheshire today need enticement for an attempt to leave their "footprints in the sands of time" a trail lies at their own door.
The spirit of enterprise, like the atmosphere of ambition, always pervaded Cheshire from the days when the early settlers of West Society in Wallingford (as it was called in 1723; it became New Cheshire in the following year) deter- mined to have a church of their own. In the days that I re- member, and before, an interest and a liberality in encourag- ing manufacturing projects were shown, equal to anything
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of the kind exhibited in the places of the vicinity which have become successful manufacturing towns. As everyone knows, some of these local enterprises have enjoyed prosperity and long life. Others, because of the soundness of their concep- tion, deserved a better fate than theirs happened to be, just as the people who showed their courage and public spirit by risking in them their savings merited better fortune than they experienced. They took their losses with grim humor, but possibly other investors actually felt as one uncon- sciously expressed himself, when offering by request a peti- tion in prayer meeting for the expiring manager of one of these disastrous ventures, "who," he sadly said, "is now, as we trust, on his death bed."
It was a fine exercise of this valiant spirit of enterprise which had secured the founding here, in 1794, of the Episco- pal Academy of Connecticut, in the face of vigorous compe- tition from other towns in the state, which wanted the honor and the practical benefits of possessing this venerable dioce- san institution. At different times, or at the same time, it has been college, theological seminary and boarding school. Boys from the town were always admitted and in the ear- lier part of the last century the Cheshire girls were endowed with equal rights to its educational privileges. The Acad- emy has been so much an integral part of the life of the town that one cannot think of Cheshire without recalling the boys one knew in school, the teachers one met in the class- room and in the homes of the people and regarded with tender sympathy after substituting now and then for some teacher temporarily a victim of the wanderlust. Some of both ranks and stations fell under the lasting spell of the beauties, animate or inanimate, of Cheshire and formed here a permanent alliance or established a home. Some did both.
Among these fortunate and discerning mortals many will
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think of Captain Williams (whose title, I believe, was a regular army title) ; of Professor Woodbury, who is now one of your most venerable and beloved citizens ; and of Profes- sor Phillips, who taught in the school and took an active part in the life of the town while he was preparing for the great work of his career as a professor at Yale. It seemed to me a marvel that he could throw himself with so much zeal into his work in the school, when he spent his evenings and early mornings, and the noonday hour (with a book before him while he ate) digging at the studies which he was carrying on with teachers in New Haven. And all was done with as much liveliness and zest, and even merriment, as if it were mere play.
It is a delightful memory that for several years every Saturday evening at his home on the green near this church was given to me. Every Saturday evening I was expected, and every Saturday evening I called. The family gathering about the evening lamp was not a myth in that home, nor, I am sure, in other homes in Cheshire. Mr. Phillips, as he was called then, would try to rekindle a smouldering interest in the higher mathematics, while he explained to me by the hour the work he was doing, and this did not much interrupt the flow of conversation with the entertaining and cultured ladies of his household. The art of conversation was, in those
days, assiduously cultivated. Many practiced it. Others imi- tated it. These ladies possessed it to the degree of perfection. Their mother was of an old Cheshire family, and their fa- ther, the Rev. Peter Clark, had been a chaplain in the navy, so his daughters had traveled much and met many interest- ing people. They had the faculty of interesting any number of persons, of any age, at the same time, making them all talk and causing each one to feel that he was the object of especial attention.
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There were other teachers, and there were many of the "Academy boys," who appreciated the attractions of Chesh- ire and some celebrated them with pen or brush.
I do not know where one can find a more satisfying charm in the varied beauty of lovely vales, picturesque crags and changing sunset lights than in this familiar town of Chesh- ire. Countless times I have watched the twilight splendors from the orchard in back of your public library, whence one could often see the cliffs of the Hanging Hills glowing like a colossal amethyst in the gleaming girdle of mountains which surround the town. The walks and the gallops and the drives over these hills and through these valleys were to me an unfailing delight-even the midnight rides, barring a few in the dead of winter. Exploration of remote corners of the town when taking the census here in 1880 revealed fascinat- ing bits of landscape that I had never heard of, which are commonly missed by the casual traveler, and which would well repay any resident for time spent in the finding.
I believe that it was, indeed, the scenic attractiveness of Cheshire, quite as much as the promise of growth, which determined my people to locate here. As I have heard the story told, my father, after practicing in New Hartford and New Milford, had been traveling about the country in search of a promising town in which to settle, and had returned from a westward journey which took him by stage so far west as Dubuque, when, one evening in the year 1856, he was riding down the old Canal Railroad on a train which stopped at West Cheshire as the lengthening shadows were falling across that pleasant valley. Attracted by the scene, he stepped out upon the platform. Fate had arranged that at just that moment a college classmate was standing at the station. An invitation to stop over Sunday was quickly given, and so it happened that my father was for some forty
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years a leading physician in this part of the country, the friend, adviser, and confidant of the parents and grandpar- ents of many who live here now, some of whom may them- selves remember his cheering presence in the sick-room.
A mental pageant of the life in Cheshire as I knew it would be incomplete without giving a place to Temple Lodge No. 16, F. & A. M., which happens to have been my topic at the centennial celebration here in the last century. We keep as a family heirloom a unique ring which was designed and made at the order of the members of this Lodge and pre- sented by them to my father in recognition of his efforts in securing the restoration of the Charter of the Lodge soon after he settled in Cheshire. Naturally this fraternity was one of my early enthusiasms.
The Lodge took an important part at the time in the ac- tivities of the town. It contributed to the forming of inti- mate acquaintanceship and to the promoting of friendly re- lations, an influence which extended beyond its group. It was an instrumentality for neighborly service, and provided an organized means for giving practical help, in a restricted field, to the sick and the needy and the mourning-such serv- ice as the people of New Cheshire probably practiced throughout that parish. It was an important and necessary help which the members of the Lodge as a right and duty gave to one another and to their families in the days when the district nurse had not appeared among the ministering angels of humanity, and the trained nurse, in fact, was known only in the city hospitals, and there not as the profi- cient aid of today.
This fraternal help was not perfect. Since that time much progress has been made in the organized giving of social service. But something has been lost in the close knitting of social ties which was brought about by the old friendly
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ministrations in sickness and by the dispensing of charities in a way that warmed the hearts of giver and receiver alike.
It is doubtless more beneficial to take the advice of the district nurse than the miscellaneous prescriptions of kind neighbors. It is probably pleasanter to receive charity when and as it is wanted-even though it should come by parcel post-than in spasmodic gushes of personal benevolence. Life is surely more comfortable and entertaining with the modern improvements and the new diversions, even if the bonds of neighborly intimacy and mutual dependence have been weakened by the changes. The loss of the personal touch in human relations is nevertheless a serious loss, which will be more exactly reckoned at some future time.
The wave of progress and change which has swept through the years has not, of course, left this fair village untouched. If once again "old things have passed away and all things have become new," it may be that things are not so charmingly idyllic now as they seem to have been in those halcyon days of the last century, and that the Cheshire I knew, which has always stirred affectionate memories, no longer exists entire.
One can imagine that the stealing of hours by the movie from the conversational atmosphere of the porch where the wistaria blossoms used to hang has had some effect upon the gradual making of leisurely acquaintance and the gentle un- folding of the flower of romance. The substitution of the hurrying flivver for the amiable horse (which always had a listening ear for any evidence of social inclination on the part of the driver) has cut short the jovial greeting and diminished the practice of friendly debate along the way. The supplanting by the rural free delivery of the epochal journey to the post office to get the weekly paper has in- creased acquaintance with the world at large, but lessened
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opportunity for intimacy with people at home. The employ- ment of the party wire instead of the confidential whisper has broken the habit of running in. And so people near by have been growing farther apart.
In the old village life there was not much which was true that people did not know about one another. There were not many personal characteristics that were not discovered. How it would strike the other fellow was an open book. If "the proper study of mankind is man," the old country town was the most favorable place in which to acquire a practical edu- cation.
Anyone who has not grown up in such a country town has missed an interesting and instructive experience, with chas- tening benefits. The life there afforded a vocational school in universal friendliness, in wide sympathy, in the practice of charity, and in such good manners as spring from all three. The older people, native and foreign, whom I knew here all showed a speaking acquaintance with what is now called old-fashioned courtesy. An English official who trav- eled through the colony in the eighteenth century wrote, rather fretfully, in his journal: "The yeomen of Connecti- cut know no superior, all are gentlemen." It was so in Chesh- ire a century later.
The town meetings used to furnish, and I suppose they still do, a unique means for civic education. There, concern- ing the public business, which is everybody's personal busi- ness, anyone can speak his mind freely, and often does so, without lasting offense. I recall many a lively debate in the town meetings in Cheshire, but not an instance of conse- quent bad blood. And anyone may graduate from the Town Meeting to the Legislature to try there his prentice hand at statecraft.
In the years that I remember here country life furnished
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a fine ideal of domesticity and the exercise of hospitality. An instance was when homes were thrown open to the boys after the senior house was burned in 1873. In many other homes, as in the one which I knew best, the front porch was a gathering place for the neighbors and the socially inclined passers-by, including the dwellers in the purlieus and their summer "visitors." Here they knew they were sure of a gra- cious welcome from my mother and a flow of jest and anec- dote from my father. When winter came, and the doors were closed, the welcome was as warm within. The acquaintance expected it, and the stranger met with a greeting which was all the more cordial just because he was a stranger. No one went away without some material evidence of hospitality. In the kitchen there was a standing order that all tramps ask- ing for food should have hot coffee and a satisfying meal.
The life here was a happy, healthful, wholesome, friendly, human life. There was plenty of play and fun, and there was abundant incentive to work and study in the examples about. There was time to think, and it was quite the custom to think things out and have opinions of one's own. A conse- quence was the instructive practice of plain speaking and polite listening. Honest and open dealings were the rule. In such concentrated publicity falsehood and subtleties could not thrive. Truth was usual and promises were sacred. The New England conscience functioned in secular affairs.
There was evidence of the old traits of thrift and dili- gence in business which had been a vital necessity in the Parish of New Cheshire and in all New England two and three centuries ago. Characteristics of the forebears, natu- ral and acquired, which had been bequeathed with the material results of their industry and frugality, shed an in- fluence outside the family circle. As the necessities of the pio- neers had been the prolific mother of invention, and their
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isolation had inevitably developed a spirit of independence and compelled experiments in self-government, the results of which became imbedded in the fundamental law of the land; so other effects of frontier conditions, self-reliance, courage, helpfulness, were conspicuous in the life of rural communities a half century ago. Probably, with all the speed and variety of changes in the interval, these condi- tions are no less evident today, when we are commemorating the work of the men and women who were responsible for them.
One of the uses of such exercises as these is the oppor- tunity to appraise inherited benefits and to acknowledge them. We have been told that we are the heirs of all the ages, and so we are, of course, in material things and in the things of the mind. But we are more particularly the bene- ficiaries and the product of the environment in which we have been placed. When we acknowledge, as we should do, our debt for the labors and the influences of such people as those who founded this church, we may acknowledge our obligations to their successors, even to the present genera- tion.
This is a privilege which I wish to use. In my memories of Cheshire, among the most vivid and the most beautiful are the personal favors and the friendly acts of the people whom I knew here yesterday and those whom I know here today.
There is something of the glamour of youth in all my thoughts of Cheshire, there is the warmth of a cordial ap- preciation of all the early surroundings-the influence of the Puritan church, the beauty of the country round about, the benefits of the old school, the kindliness of the people, the abounding humor, the family associations.
But such are my memories of Cheshire. They will, I am
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sure, always be a treasured possession as they already have been, and as they remain now.
Still o'er these scenes my memory wakes, And fondly broods with miser care. Time but the impression stronger makes As streams their channels deeper wear.
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