USA > Connecticut > Fairfield County > Newtown > Newtown's bicentennial : an account of the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the purchase from the Indians of the land of the town of Newtown, Connecticut, held August fifth, 1905 > Part 11
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The kitchen was arranged under the direction of Mrs. S. Grace Glover, with the assistance of the other members of the committee. It had the old fashioned fire-place, with the crane, pots and oven, iron fire dogs, and all the other paraphernalia. There was a flint lock musket and powder horn, an old spinning wheel, reel and swift, and the room was adorned with strings of pepper and dried apples. There was also a cradle belonging in the family of Mr. Theron Platt, and many other relics of interest, and the exhibit was visited by a large number during the noon intermission and throughout the day.
At the conclusion of the exercises on the Fair grounds, a large part of the vast throng left the place to return to
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their respective homes. An immense number came from neighboring towns in carriages and automobiles, and the Consolidated Railroad Company furnished special trains which accommodated the hundreds which came from a distance.
The sunset gun closed the day but opened another feature of the celebration. A crowd of 3000 remained to
BAND CONCERT AND FIREWORKS
The concert began at eight o'clock. The Woodbury band was stationed south of the liberty pole and rendered a fine musical programme. A splendid display of fireworks was shown between the numbers rendered by the band. These were in charge of Mr. Herbert Flansburg and his assistants on the committee. The exhibition closed with a magnificent set piece, the gift of Dr. W. C. Wile. The piece represented two Indian heads with the figures 1705 between, and was a brilliant close to a most successful day.
After the fireworks and concert an additional train was run by the railroad company to Bridgeport for those who could not remain over Sunday. Besides arranging for these special trains, Vice President Todd, who has his summer home among us and had shown his interest by a generous contribution, added in other ways to the comfort of the people and their sense of security by sending to the town to be present during the celebration, the chief of the secret service force of the N. Y., N. H. & H. R. R. Co., Mr. James F. Valley, and several assistants. These served to keep away from the town all crooks and evil characters. No fakirs were allowed upon the grounds, and nothing was lost or stolen. There was no need to keep order, for all
WILLIAM A. LEONARD
Chairman of the Fireworks Committee.
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were present for a good and neighborly purpose, all had a genuine interest in making the day a credit to the town, and what is more remarkable in such a large multitude, there was no accident to mar the pleasure of those gathered together. With her children old and young assembled from all parts within her borders, with her many other sons and daughters returning home, with distinguished guests and many neighbors to rejoice with her, and with a kind Providence to bless with sunny skies and avert all untoward injury, the old town had probably the greatest day of the two hundred years of her history.
Coming as the anniversary did upon Saturday, with many who would remain to spend Sunday, it was planned to make that day one of special observance in the churches by appropriate services and historical sermons. The day was thus observed in the two oldest parishes, and therefore it was thought well to include in this story of the Bicentennial an account of the exercises of that day.
II
THE COMMEMORATION
ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 6TH
It was part of the programme of the Executive Committee that on the day following the celebration of the Bicentennial there should be in the various churches in the town such services and sermons or addresses as should seem best to those who had charge of them. The several houses of worship that day had large congregations composed of the regular attendants and many who had come to attend the celebration. It was a welcome opportunity to renew sacred associations.
In the Congregational Church the services recognized the occasion and the Rev. Mr. Barker, the pastor, preached a sermon on "The New England Leaven."
THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH.
THE NEW ENGLAND LEAVEN
A SERMON PREACHED IN THE NEWTOWN CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, SUNDAY MORNING, AUGUST 6TH, 1905
REV. OTIS W. BARKER
Text-MATT. 13: 33: "Another parable spake He unto them, The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened."
What is all this for? Why, for these last few days, have we been indulging in decoration, oratory and noise? Have we for one moment stopped to consider that this splendid celebration would mean really nothing apart from our national life? We cannot pack away a little fragment of this great country and label with some local names and insignia and then proudly say, "This is ours." The great stream of our national life may run into tiny eddies and miniature bays, but the strong, swirling current rolls majesti- cally on. We are only a part of a mighty whole. We can only have a celebration like this because we have some- thing to celebrate; and that something is not a date so much as it is great events and wonderful destinies, and noble women and grand men.
It is said that millions of our human race have been cursed by their ancestry. Their sires lived under a despotic government where they were made to serve an iron will. The later generations feel the poison in the blood; they come into the world all back head and no forehead. Not so with us. We have come of a godly and goodly line.
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Shall these children know from these anniversary exercises from what worthy stock they are sprung? Shall they appreciate what it means to be the logical and spiritual heirs of their Puritan forefathers? That is the question which deeply concerns us to-day. Charles Sumner, the great statesman, when speaking at a New England dinner in 1873, said, as he looked toward Henry Ward Beecher, sit- ting near him: "I have often thought that if it had been my privilege to preach the Gospel and to fill a pulpit as grandly as you have done yours, I would sometime take the text, 'A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump'; and speak of the great influence of the Puritans in the history of our land." You see I have not followed even this suggestion, coming from so august a man, because when Paul uses these words he uses them to signify the leavening power of evil; but no influence in our nation's history is stronger for good than that of the noble band who planted firmly their feet on Plymouth Rock on one wintry day.
A great problem confronts us as a nation just now. It is this: Shall we be able to stem the flow of immigration that is now so strongly setting toward these shores? Shall we be able to receive it into our nation's life, and assimi- late it, and Americanize it, and uplift it from the plane of the sty? This tide in the last fiscal year reached high-water mark; more than a milllion souls floated here with the flot- sam and jetsam of the waters. Representatives of one, or at most two, nationalities gathered around the camp fires of the Pilgrims ; representatives of a score or more national- ities assemble about the camp fire of the California miners or stroll through the streets of our western towns. A score of men, Dr. Strong tells us, are found working in a factory in New York City, who are come here directly from Haran, the ancient land out of which the progenitor of the Jewish race was called. The stream of the nation's life, in its flowing, has been sadly contaminated since the Mayflower
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days. That is sure. Is the current which these worthy men of 1621 set moving yet so strong that it will overpower all counter currents that seek to impede its course? The characteristics of the Puritan are strong, impressing and enduring. Will they endure through all the years? "Histories make us wise," says Bacon. "A moral and philosophical respect for our ancestors elevates the charac- ter and refines the heart," says Webster; and no one can look even briefly into the history which this day brings to our view without being made more of a man, a nobler patriot, and taking a larger grasp on the work which this nation has been ordained of God to do.
What, then, are the characteristics of our Puritan sires, those things which have acted as leaven in the nation's life? A striking characteristic is this: Our Puritan forefathers had a sublime faith in God. I put the emphasis upon the adjective, for there is much faith in God which scarcely means any faith at all. The Puritans gave large place to God. They read His majesty in the clouds; His power in the storm. For them He rode upon the wings of the wind and trailed the shining garments of His glory in the sun- bursts of the early dawn. They emphasized His presence with them. He went forth to battle with their armies. He was with them in the ploughing of the fields, in the harvest- ing of the grain, in the keeping of the humble Puritan home. In these days, when faith seems slipping from her moorings, it is well that we get back to the foundation faith of our grandsires.
They believed in God. It is said that they believed in the God of the Old Testament rather than in the God of the New. In the literature of those days the Puritan was caricatured. He was ridiculed as a sallow-cheeked, bigoted, narrow-minded man. The epitaph that might have been written on his tombstone would have read thus: Born in discouragement, he grew up in dejection, matured in depres-
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sion and died in disgust. We must not harshly criticise any one before we recognize the fact that every one is a product of the times in which he lives and of the conditions out of which he comes. The Puritan, before he set his foot on Plymouth Rock, had just thrown off the tyranny of prelate, Church and State. He had swung far away from all earthly sovereignty, and as always happens in such cases, he swung to the other extreme of the pedulum and found himself emphasizing alone the sovereignty of God. No wonder he believed in the God of the old Testament, the God who thundered his mandates from Sinai and overcame the prophets of Baal with the descent of flame. In this soft age, when it is often inquired whether it really makes any difference in what a man believes, it is well to go back to those who solidly believed in a God of law. I do not think that the theology of the Pilgrim rang out no musi- cal tone of love, or that amid the smoke of the flaming mount the cry was lost that rose from bitter Calvary.
Those who sought on these shores "a faith's pure shine" came here as the growth of two hundred years of changes that were wrought on European soil. There had been the movement called the Renaissance, springing out of the invention of the printing-press, and there had been the move- ment called the Reformation, the product of the translation of the Bible into the speech of the common people. These two lines of life converging upon the Puritan developed a growth that could not flourish in a fetid atmosphere. A new land was necessary where the tree of civil and religious liberty could flourish and throw out its spreading shade, and that land was here; and here it took form in what has ever been known as the New England conscience. Do you ask me by what phrases I would characterize the Puritan ideals? They are these: The Puritan believed in the stern righteousness of a just God. He believed in convictions of duty from which he would not swerve a hair's breadth ;
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he believed in the overrule of God in all things, making good and bad, devil and saint, bend to His sovereign will; he had a vision which gave him glimpses into the unseen and opened up the bourne beyond the corridors of Time ; he was an optimist who never let go his hope that the worst would swing round at last to that which works for the best. He held tenaciously to the ultimate triumph of the right.
I have already said much about our Puritan forefathers ; you might almost suspect that I had never heard that there were Puritan foremothers, too. The fathers have been fêted and praised too much, and not half so much has been said as is their due for their wives, their better halves. It was the mother who when she was placed where there was no sound of the Sabbath bell gathered her children about her and taught them the Westminster catechism. She made the old Psalms of David ring as the war songs of old. She read the Old Testament stories to the troop at her knee until those worthies came out of the past and lived before the eye. There was Elijah, who with his mantle smote the waters back; there was Moses, whose face shone as he talked with God; there was David, who charmed the hard Saul with the music of his harp; there was Samuel, who was left in the temple as a child; there was Hezekiah, the good king, to satisfy whose wish the shadow went back on the dial, and all these famous men became as familiar to the Puritan child as the playmates with whom he sported before his mother's door. You cannot understand what the Puri- tan has done for our national life until you understand the part that religion played in their common life. The meeting-house was next to their home, or even above their home. The Sabbath was as binding in its obligations as the laws on the tables of stone, for it was in these laws. The Bible was their vade mecum, the compass by which they sailed their craft and the lantern by which they guided their way.
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All through our country's history the line of their influence runs clearly down. We see it in the struggle of '76, when in the darkest days at Valley Forge, Washington was seen at midnight on his knees in prayer. We see it when our Continental Congress opened as Benjamin Frank- lin, almost the last of the great men of the early days to recognize God's control in human affairs, advocated seeking the blessing of God. We see it in our great Declaration of Independence, which reads : "And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we pledge ourselves, our lives and our sacred honor." May the leaven of their trust in God go on with us as a perennial force to the end of our days. A striking characteristic, too, of the Puritan was that he could endure. I tell you this soft age in which we live has much to learn from the age of homespun. Our plainest comforts were their most extravagant luxuries. Do you think that it was a small thing for them to decide to leave their own land? If it had been to an Eden they were coming the case would have been different; but how inhospitable were these shores ! They were striking out anew; they were burning every bridge behind them ; they were starting entirely new desti- nies on altogether untried lines. And here again the praise that is due the Puritan mother has not been paid. Tell me, was the voyage across the waters any less perilous for the one whose breast stirred with deep thoughts as her stern lord coldly looked at the sky? The fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence well knew what they were taking upon them; they knew that liberty must win or they must die. One of their number hit the point when he said : "And now we must all hang together, or else we shall all hang separately." But did one of those fifty-six give his life for his convictions? Not one. They all died peacefully. How many of that Pilgrim band, tell me, perished during that first bitter winter? Overcome by struggles and
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weakened by privation, for half the number the driven snow became their winding-sheet and the winds howling through the naked pines sang their funeral dirge; and, as it always is, the suffering came harder upon the women than upon the men. It was not so much the wild beasts of the forest that howled about the door; it was not so much the Indian, who often proved terrible, treacherous, and cruel ; it was not so much these things that made the heart sick and made life in the pioneer wilderness a prolonged round of heroic endurance, as the utter loneliness and exile of those who had left the best in life across the stretch of waves. The stars of the winter's night looked down upon them, but they were so cold and far away. The winds of the forest murmured low whisperings about their dwellings, but they were so gloomy and chill. The waves of the tossing sea talked in hoarse cadence as they listened, but they gave forth no syllable of love and echoed no sympathetic tone. Our luxuries have brought us into effeminacy and love of ease ; we delight in soft things; we do not dare to mount the steeps. We wish the way marked clearly out before us. If this age is to leave an impress upon all times such as the Puritan has done, if it is to take the strong characteristics of those days and hold them steady and true in the swirl of currents setting all the other way, we must get back to the grit that brooked no obstacle, and to the pluck that carried victory in the very doing.
The characteristic, however, which, above all others, strikes us as belonging to this pioneer age is the love of home. The Puritans were home-makers and empire- founders. God first made woman because it was found that man could not get along without her, and woman only reaches her completeness when the union of the strong and the gentle qualities is made in the establishment of a home. No nation has ever yet endured which has neglected this God-given institution; and this nation has so far led in the
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march of Time because its foundation pillars were three- fold, the church, the schoolhouse and the home.
Did you ever study into the history of our two leading colonies, the one founded at Jamestown and the other on Plymouth Bay? The Virginia colony came within one of being an utter failure. Did you ever look into the reason why? The Jamestown colony left out the thought home. It was one hundred and two old bachelors who came over here and settled upon the river James, and had it not been for Pocahontas the beautiful Indian maiden, who is said to have saved the colony by supplying them with provisions, and had it not been that twelve years after they landed here their mistake was discovered and one hundred beautiful young women were sent over from England to make wives for these colonists, the whole settlement would have gone down in total collapse. A whole colony of bachelors ! What on earth can you do with them? It is bad enough to have one or two scattered throughout an entire community, but when it comes to a whole colony of them, what then? Of course you tell me that some of the greatest and best men whom this country has ever known came in the line of that colony in the Old Dominion. There were Patrick Henry, the fiery orator of the Revolution, George Washing- ton, the Father of his country. and Thomas Jefferson, the penman of the immortal Declaration, and James Madison, who wrote our nation's constitution ;- all this is true, but . still I say without fear of contradiction, that had it not been for this voyage of England's one hundred fair women to these shores, the history of this part of our nation, at least, would have taken quite another turn. In the passenger list of the Mayflower there were nineteen wives and seven daughters, the foremothers of so many of these homes which have blessed the New England vales and made this little corner of God's footstool great. It is a beautiful tradition which has been handed down to us that the first one to set
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foot upon stern old Plymouth Rock was the first maiden, Mary Chillion, and the last one of the Plymouth band to survive was Mary Allerton, living to see twelve out of the thirteen colonies established which became the nucleus of this great nation.
Would you like to know a little more about some of these sturdy women of those early days who were true home- makers and who, by strength of mind and muscle, were noble helpmeets to their stalwart sires? There was Miss Elizabeth Zane, who ran the gauntlet of the Indians' fire in order to secure a keg of powder, and by nerve and hero- ism saved the whole settlement from massacre. There was Mrs. Hendree, of Royalton, Vt., who rescued fifteen cap- tured children from the Indians at the risk of her own life. There was Hannah Duston, who dispatched with a toma- hawk a whole camp of Indians and secured her own safety. This heroic deed, as recorded by Bancroft, is perhaps the most thrilling of all tales found in Indian lore; and the citizens of Concord, N. H., have erected a monument on the spot where the deed was performed, that the memory of such a brave woman might not be left to die. There was Mrs. Sarah Knight, daughter of Captain Kemble, who was equal to the all-round woman of to-day in doing well the duties of business and the home. This Captain Kemble, by the way, obtained quite a reputation in his day. He had returned from a three years' voyage and was seen kissing his wife on the doorstep of his home on a Sabbath after- noon, and for this "flagrant misdemeanor" he was con- demned to sit for two hours on Boston Common with his feet fast in the public stocks. His daughter, Mrs. Sarah Knight, was proficient in all housewifely cares. She was a good soap-maker, sugar-maker, butter-maker, clothes-maker, bread-maker, cloth-maker, and broom-maker. We know from her diary (for she kept one with minute care) that she owned and superintended a flour and gristmill, ran a
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tavern, taught school, rode on horseback from Boston to New York and back again on business errands, and specu- lated a little in Indian lands. Do you think now that the sphere of our foremothers was contracted and narrow, and that they knew scarcely anything of life beyond the bounds of their dahlia beds? The Puritan maiden was in many respects a striking and fascinating figure. Who would not have looked twice at such quaint personalities as Deborah and Mehitable Nash, robed in bear skins? The pretty Puritan maiden, too, Priscilla Mullens, sitting at her spinning wheel, had enough of romance in her to suggest to Longfel- low his most beautiful poem on Courtship. These Puritan foremothers of ours were real home-makers. They kept a home, a home, I say,-not a flat where you stay for a while in a sleeping car, nor a four-story affair, where at different portions of the day you are on different rounds of the ladder. Our good Puritan foremothers were the loved heads of the home. They were not creatures of fads, the star patients of the physician. They did not spend so much time at the club that their children once in a while wished to get acquainted with them. They did not think that the chief aim in living was to pose before a mirror or illustrate the latest mode. They were mothers,-perhaps we ought to place some emphasis there; they were mothers of many vigorous sons and blooming daughters. They had large families. I do not think that they spent a great deal of time in discussing the problem of race suicide. I have said that our Puritan sires have been fêted and dined over-much ; it is high time that the era of the foremothers was due. Here is a point where we should strike the loud cymbals in the praise of the home-makers of that day; they got along with their cranky old sires. They brought two bears into the home, and without these bears a good deal of growling will go on. These mothers learned how to compromise, how to yield and yet pretty well to have their own way.
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They governed their children, not by breaking their will, but by making their will act in loyal harmony with the other faculties. Yes, one who could do this and at the same time live peacefully with good old Roger Williams, who was conscientiously cranky and consistently out-of-sorts, deserves a bright crown in Heaven; and these mothers are wearing their crowns now over there.
How much does this great nation owe to these Puritan homes? Can you measure their influence in our history by weights and scales? Can you set over their value as pro- portionate to so much timber-land or navigable rivers or great watersheds or railroad systems? Here are some of the families which have shaped our nation's destiny and guided its career ; will you put down in mathematical calculation how much they are worth: the Otis family, the Hancock family, the Adams family, the Jefferson family, the Washington family, the Budinot family. John Quincy Adams tells us in his diary that when he first realized that he bore the name of Quincy, a name that his mother had given to him, he felt a great call to splendid achievement. My dear friends, that is the meaning of this anniversary occasion; you greatly mistake if you listen only to its din and noise. Back of all our parading, back of all our pyro- technics, back of all our addresses, is this clarion call: Live up to the best that was in your sires. This is no place or time for criticising or finding fault. Our New England forebears had their defects and shortcomings; but this is not the occasion to thrust in our bodkin and pick out the false thread. You remember what an influence the elder Pliny had in the best days of Rome; his letters send forth an aroma of sweetness that is really refreshing in the midst of so much that is uncanny and foul. He writes (and I think it is beautiful) of his wife: "She loved that which was immortal in me." Let us take that which was bravest and truest and noblest in the lives of those who have gone
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