USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1928, Volume I > Part 45
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Frederick Freeman Bowers, who for forty-three years had been principal of the Brown School, died in 1893, aged 72. He was a native of Mansfield. In his later days his active duties had been performed by Charles L. Ames, today continuing as district supervisor, the dean of Connecticut School-masters, and member of the State Board of Education.
Since the days of the training by Irving Emerson, in the '70s and '80s, music had received much attention in the schools. Ralph L. Baldwin, who was to win distinction as a leader beyond the confines of the city and the state, was appointed supervisor of music in 1903.
Through the influence of Rabbi Hurewitz, the Hebrew Insti- tute was dedicated in 1902. In addition to the class rooms there was a large hall in the building at the corner of Pleasant and Winthrop streets. Both English and Hebrew (Loschen Khodish) were taught, the rabbi acting as principal without salary.
If, standing by the open grave of Dr. Henry Barnard in 1900, one could have looked forward through even one decade as he looked back over the past six, he would have been still more rever- ent. He would have felt that this pioneer organizer of school systems had been an instrument in the hands of the Almighty to prepare the way for this epoch in the nation's history. The sources whence came a large part of the new population were to be more and more prolific for two decades, and the degree to which America could keep her institutions uppermost in the minds of a free people from many nations and speaking many tongues must depend in a large measure upon the strength of her schools. If one reads the pages of this history with comprehension of the life of the people, he sees that development of the schools along lines followed up to 1840 would have supplied but little to withstand
DR. HENRY BARNARD (1811-1900) First National Commissioner of Education
BIRTHPLACE AND HOME OF DR. HENRY BARNARD, HARTFORD
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this pressure of the early twentieth century ; if schools should fail, law must, and with it art, culture, ideals, government itself. Bar- nard lived to see blessings greater than the country that received had realized in its gradual progress.
Born of Hartford's old stock in 1811, the doctor went through the district schools and to graduation at Yale in 1830. His matur- ing mind was not on the bar, for which he had prepared himself, but rather on the schools, and the moment he got into the Legis- lature in 1837, his ideas began to formulate, with results already described. The Board of Commissioners for Common Schools and the State Board of Education furnished him opportunities to secure better buildings, better training, normal schools and institutes. As superintendent of education in Rhode Island for four years, he fathered plans which he was glad to come back to his own state to develop. The presidency of the University of Wisconsin (1857 to 1859) and of St. John's at Annapolis (1865 to 1866) lured him, and the need of personal income was urgent. But the whole country was awakening to the needs and in 1867 he was the one selected to fill the new office of United States commissioner of education. He did for the nation what he had done for Connecticut, and the books, magazines and papers on the subject which he published are said today to constitute the greatest in number and influence-not in this country alone- of those of any man. When he left the commissioner's office, it was to go on with his field work while his strength endured. Then he retired to the beautiful old homestead near South Green where St. Peter's now stands. His condition became forlorn. In a letter to United States Commissioner Harris he wrote that he never had earned enough to pay expenses, that the old home had to be sold and that he was heavily in debt and in feeble health, while his wife had been an invalid for twenty years. This was in response to a letter of inquiry and he added: "If you do not get a response in Connecticut where I worked for nine years, 1834-1842 and in 1850-1854, spending all my salary on my work, what can be expected elsewhere?" The New York Tribune in 1890 published an appeal for subscriptions to a fund. The Legislature had rejected the proposition for a pension. The Courant started a subscription list headed by Simeon E. Baldwin with $100, but the end was near at hand.
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The churches were better prepared to meet the surge of the hour than were the local schools. The foundations laid by Thomas Hooker and the others whose descendants still lived here and had drawn their like unto themselves were solid. In a strong sense, no greater good had been done Hartford than when the original churches of the Congregational, Episcopalian and Baptist creeds withstood the tendency to move out and away from their old-home neighborhoods, in the business center though they were. Doctor Walker was endowed with prescience when he took stand with those who opposed removal of the "Hooker church" from Main Street. Its presence among the bustling throngs was a constant reminder of the rock the city was built upon. And it was just at this time that Mary Mather Hooker, wife of Edward W. Hooker, himself a lineal descendant, caused to be placed in the edifice a memorial window of rare beauty and appropriateness, represent- ing the founder preaching to his congregation of founders, Teacher Samuel Stone near him.
Rev. Dr. George Leon Walker, in many ways suggestive of Hooker, died at the turn of the century, in March, 1900. He was then seventy, physically weak from his childhood, yet a tower of spiritual and civic strength. In the parsonage of his father in Rutland, Vt., where he was born, he seemed to have learned how to triumph mentally over the ills of the flesh. Compelled to aban- don the study of law, he turned to the study of theology in his hours of illness and at Andover Theological Seminary gained a recognition which caused his selection for a church in Portland, Me., but only to be thrown back again upon his home, there to continue his studies with a wife and two children to cheer him. After his wife's death he was called to succeed Dr. Leonard Bacon at the historic First Church in New Haven and was honored with the degree of D. D. by Yale. In 1873 he was forced again to surrender to his spinal ailment and for four years lived in retire- ment in Brattleboro, Vt. When the Hartford church sought him in 1879, he found himself able to accept the position he was to make so notable in the list of pastors since Hooker. With supreme will power and the talents he never had ceased to cultivate, he was to rise superior to all ailment and to prove himself worthy of the choice of the society-to arouse it at the very outset to new zeal and to rejuvenation when that was so much needed if the church were to retain its prestige; to become a national figure in
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framing the "creed of 1883" and in molding the work of the missions; to compile the history of the church and write other notable books including the life of Hooker; to serve as a member of the Yale Corporation and as chairman of the Board of Visitors at Andover; to make forced trips abroad a means of widening his horizon, not yielding to accumulating ills till the age of sixty- two and even thereafter to perform duties as pastor emeritus till his death. The knowledge that his son, Prof. Williston Walker, of the Hartford Theological Seminary and later at Yale, was up- holding the family tradition was a joyous consolation.
Changing with changing conditions, the church was becoming again about as much of a civic organization as a religious. Its windows were memorials to such citizens as John Caldwell, Har- vey Seymour, Calvin and Catherine Seymour Day, Thomas H. Gallaudet, Dr. Horace Wells and Elizabeth Wales Wells, the Cat- lin family, Ellen, George C. and Edward H. Perkins, Henry A. Perkins, Henrietta Perkins Bissell and her daughter ; Ezra, George and George W. Corning and Bryan Edward Hooker; there were tablets and other memorials to John Caldwell Parsons, Thomas Scott Williams, Stephen P. Kendall, John Warburton Cooke, J. Coolidge Hills, John D. Parker (clerk of the church for thirty- nine years), Rodney Dennis, Frank G. Smith, Solomon Smith, Charlotte A. Jewell, Antoinette R. Phelps Pierson, Clarissa May Davis Ely, Dr. Walker, Sarah Emmons Perkins, Leonard D. Church (in the form of the organ given by his wife), Anson Hungerford, Clarence C. Hungerford, John Calvin Day, Francis B. Cooley and Daniel R. and Annie R. Sanborn (the camp site at Columbia Lake). The services of a Sunday still called for the best in plain thought and straightforward scholarship, as in the days of Hooker, Stone, Whiting, Joseph Haynes, Isaac Foster, Timothy Woodbridge, Daniel Wadsworth, Edward Dorr, Nathan Strong, Joel Hawes, Wolcott Calkins, George H. Gould, Elias Richardson, George Leon Walker and Charles M. Lamson-to name the pastors in their order,-but the pastor's duties only began there. Like the first one, he must concern himself about the affairs of the community, be a leader and also an administra- tor, for, what with the subdivisions for charitable, humanitarian, missionary, social and civic work, a library and an office for business affairs, the province of what was well called the "Center Church" could not be well maintained.
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Happily, in 1900, one who had the qualities of youth, a broad education, an appreciation of history and a dispassionate outlook upon the times, Rockwell Harmon Potter was called to succeed the lamented Dr. Lamson. He was born in 1874, the son of Spencer S. Potter of Glenville, N. Y. He had rounded out his course at Union College, where he had been graduated in 1895, with courses at the Yale Divinity School, the Union Theological Seminary, where he received his degree of B. D., and the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1898. Immediately upon his ordination in 1898 he became pastor of the Reformed Dutch Church of Flush- ing, N. Y., where he preached till called here. Rutgers College has given him the degree of D. D. and Williams that of LL. D. As president of the Connecticut Bible Society and the Institute for the Blind, director of the Hartford Seminary Foundation, trustee of Union College and of Mount Holyoke College, modera- tor of the National Council of Congregational Churches and since 1925 president of the American Board of Commissioners for For- eign Missions, he has commanded the respect of his associates in many good causes. Accepting the deanship of the Hartford Sem- inary Foundation, he resigned the pastorate in 1928.
The conference room of the church, in the building on Main Street next north, which had been used since 1832, was sup- planted in 1909 by the Center Church House on Gold and Lewis streets, the gift of the Cooley family, as has been said. The edifice itself was one hundred years old in 1907.
There was another addition to the list of nationally eminent bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the diocese of Con- necticut when Chauncey Bunce Brewster was consecrated in 1899 and made his home in Hartford-where in these later days Christ Church has been made the cathedral. The bishop is one of a dis- tinguished family in the church. He is a son of Rev. Joseph and Sarah Jane (Bunce) Brewster, who lived in Windham at the time of his birth in 1848. At Yale, in the class of 1868, he won high honors and in 1871 received the degree of M. A .- the D. D. following later from his alma mater, from Trinity and from Wesleyan. Deacon in 1872, he became rector of Christ Church in Rye, N. Y., the following year where he remained eight years. After that he was rector of Christ Church in Detroit (1881-85), Grace Church in Baltimore (1885-88), Grace Church in Brook- lyn (1888-97) and then coadjutor bishop in this diocese in 1897.
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His younger brother, Benjamin, has been bishop of Maine since 1916. The bishop is the author of several works, prominent among which is his "Catholic Ideal of the Church." Though he was eighty years old on September 5 of this year, 1928, it can be said that the increasing years and the greatly increasing diocese have brought only increasing love and esteem from all his fellow citizens without regard to creed, and it is with reluctance that his wish to retire is granted.
At Christ Episcopal Church, the greater the demand the more generous has been the response of the members. The edifice itself was greatly beautified by the addition of the pinnacles in 1902, the gift of George E. Hoadley. In 1908 the Nativity Chapel was constructed in the southwest corner of the church, given by Miss Alice Taintor in memory of John and Amelia Taintor and Louise Taintor Kneeland. Rev. Lindall Saltonstall resigned as rector in 1901, at the end of ten years of service and was succeeded the next year by Rev. Dr. James Goodwin. He was the son of Francis Goodwin, who had done much in many ways to help the city. Born in Middletown and in 1865 graduated at Trinity in 1886, he was well endowed with the family liking for literature and art and also for history and sociology. He continued his studies in New York, at Oxford and in Paris and was ordained to the priesthood in 1890. Trinity gave him the degrees of M. A. and D. D. Previous to coming here he rendered service in New York and in Berlin and Nashua, N. H. For fifteen years-and he was taken seemingly at the hour of his greatest usefulness-he was to maintain the great parish as a stronghold of religious and chari- table influence. He was a member of the park board and its president in 1913. Always interested in and entering into the activities of the community, he was chaplain of the First Com- pany Governor's Foot Guard, was a member of several clubs, including the Yacht Club, and was a trustee in a number of insti- tutions. It was during his rectorship that the chimes were placed in the tower, himself among the donors, the others being George E. Hoadley, Jane Tuttle, Mrs. Mary I. B. Russell, Mrs. J. H. Rose, Mrs. Charles Holland, the Misses Mabel and Eleanor Johnson and Miss Alice G. Tuttle. Three years later the old chapel in the rear of the church was made into a choir room by Mrs. James J. Good- win, and the altar of the old chapel, with its mosaic reredos repre- senting the good works of Dorcas, was placed in the baptistry of
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the church. The new parish house on Pratt Street was dedicated the year of his death; it was the gift of Mrs. James J. Goodwin in memory of her husband and an endowment of $125,000 was pro- vided.
Not only the Church of the Good Shepherd but the entire com- munity mourned the death of the youthful rector, Cornelius G. Bristol, in 1901. Yale '86 and Berkeley '89, he had succeeded Rev. John H. Watson in 1893 and, gathering the forces of the young people, had entered at once into the work which all the parishes found to be increasing. Rev. Dr. George H. Clark, who had been rector of Christ Church from 1862 to 1867, died in 1896.
St. John's Episcopal Church edifice on Main Street had to give way before the plans in connection with the Morgan Memorial in 1908, but in that year the cornerstone was laid for the beautiful structure on Farmington Avenue, spacious at the time but now, in the rectorship of Rev. William T. Hooper, to be added to materially, yet without harm to its architectural grace.
At the Asylum Avenue Baptist Church Rev. George M. Stone was made pastor emeritus after a fifty years' service in the min- istry which had brought him recognition throughout the country.
Rev. Dr. William De Loss Love resigned in 1910 the pastorate of the Farmington Avenue Congregational Church to give more time to his work with the Connecticut Humane Society and was succeeded by Rev. Dr. Charles F. Carter. Doctor Love, son of a prominent clergyman of the same name, was born in New Haven in 1851. He was graduated at Hamilton College in 1876 and at Andover Theological Seminary in 1878. When he came here this was the Pearl Street Congregational Church. It removed to the new edifice in 1895 and later there was affiliation with the Park Congregational of Asylum Street, which also was feeling the encroachment of business. The doctor succeeded Rodney Dennis as president of the humane society and greatly widened the scope of its work, with headquarters in the former residence of John C. Parsons on Prospect Street. His investigations into the conditions of aged people and children and the study of causes brought about a material improvement throughout the state. Meantime his historical research was of much value. His "Co- lonial History of Hartford," 1914, is a work of very great worth for the light it throws upon subjects that had been in controversy. His loss, in 1918, to the humanitarian institutions of the state was deeply felt.
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