USA > Connecticut > The Connecticut River and the valley of the Connecticut, three hundred and fifty miles from mountain to sea; historical and descriptive > Part 29
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his noble friends, Claremont derives its name from that of the English country seat of Lord Clive. Springfield repeats the name of the Massachusetts Springfield. Charlestown, with its greater wealth of historical associations, and its tranquil rural aspect, particularly invites the summer sojourner. Along its broad main street, only a few rods back from the railroad station and park displaying " Num- ber 4" lettered in the greensward, are numerous historic homes ; and its agreeable institutions include a well- equipped memorial public library. The site of old Num- ber 4 is properly indicated with other landmarks of the history-making epoch in which Charlestown had so leading a hand; and delightful walks and rides in the country round about abound.
Between the gorges at Bellows Falls and at Brattle- borough, twenty miles apart, in the reach where the Val- ley again expands luxuriously, Walpole, Westmoreland, and Chesterfield are placed picturesquely on the River's east banks, with Westminster, Putney, and Dummerston on the west side. From the rugged heights of Bellows Falls Village, and the abrupt slopes of Kilburn Peak opposite, the lovely meadows of Walpole and Westminster immediately outspread. Bellows Falls Village is the business heart of Rockingham and the second place for population in the Vermont-side line through the Valley, Brattleborough holding the first place. The towns between are now charmful villages with outlying farms treasuring pleasant memories of an active past. Walpole, for a bril- liant period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had especial fame for its society of wits to which the whole region round contributed. Chief of them was " Joe " Dennie. "delicately made, needy of purse, but
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Dartmouth College-The Rollins Chapel.
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usually dressing in pumps and white stockings," who edited the Farmers' Weekly Museum, which Isaiah Thomas began here in 1793, and afterward The Portfolio in Phila- delphia, and whose writings in Walpole won him the sobri- quet of the " American Addison." Another was Royal Tyler of Brattleborough, in his sedate after-years chief- justice of Vermont, wit and poet, and author of The Contrast, the first American play to be acted upon a reg- ular stage by an established company of players, - at the old John Street Theatre in New York, in 1786. Others were clever young men, some of whom became great law- yers. The late Rev. Dr. Henry W. Bellows, of fragrant memory, in his chronicles of the Bellows family in Wal- pole beginning with Colonel Benjamin Bellows, the founder, tells how these roystering Walpole wits converted the vil- lage tavern into a sort of literary pandemonium, in which fine scholarship, elegant wit, late card-playing, hearty eating, and hard drinking mingled in a very fascinating complication. The literary flavor yet lingers about the mel- low town, and it is still a favorite summer abiding-place of literary folk ; but the convivial spirit has forever departed. So, too, have gone with the old days the bibulous customs, when in a single year forty-eight hundred barrels of cider were made and all drunk here, an average of three barrels to each man, woman, and child then in the town; and at the tavern feastings punch flowed as freely as water.
Brattleborough, spreading over its four irregular ter- races and intervening dells, with the deep background of gradually-rising hills and the foreground of Wantastiquit lifting a precipitous cliff above the winding River, fitly heads the Upper Valley's final reach to the finish at the Massachusetts line. No town on the River is more attract- ively set. Its pleasant streets, abundantly shaded, mount
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the terraces, here and there with steep ascent, dip into the vales, and cross broad plains. Comfortable dwellings, often embowered in trees, not infrequently with gardens, or with lawns to the sidewalk edge, line the thoroughfares and byways. It was for its romantic beauty together with its salubriousness, that, half a century and more ago, during the prosperous vogue of the " water-cure," Brattleborough was selected for the most extensive establishments of this class, when numerous professional persons, scholars and authors, were attracted to the place and mixed water with literature. Its charm of situation and environment also, more than its happening to be the home of his wife's fore- bears, brought Rudyard Kipling to abide here for a period, and attempt the life of a literary country gentleman. At his picturesque seat, -" The Naulahka," -he wrote his Captains Courageous. Other masters in art as in liter- ature have had the good fortune to have been born here or in Chesterfield across the River. Among these are the Mead family, - Larkin Goldsmith Mead, the sculptor, born (1835) at Chesterfield, but spending his boyhood in Brattleborough, and modeling here that colossal snow image of an angel which got his name into the newspapers and brought him his patron ; his younger brother William Rutherford Mead, the architect, born in Brattleborough (1846) ; their sister, Elinor G. Mead, who became the wife of William Dean Howells ; and their cousin, Edwin Doak Mead, born in Chesterfield (1849), essayist, lecturer, re- former, philanthropist, and civic leader. The painter William Morris Hunt (1824-1879) and his younger brother the architect, Richard Morris Hunt (1828-1895) too, were natives of Brattleborough, but when they were boys the family moved to New Haven. Brattleborough is favored by some æsthetic industries, notably piano and organ
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Suspension Bridge, near Brattleborough.
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making, together with manufactures of such utilities as hosiery, power pumps, and brass castings. It has various literary institutions, with one of the best public libraries in the Upper Valley, generously endowed by a Brattleborough citizen ; a pleasing " opera house "; and a public park favored by handsome trees, and with a lookoff over an exquisite interval deep down below the plain which it occupies. Old Chesterfield, on the upland back from the River, is a serene agricultural town now, with a rich past upon which its natives love to dwell. Through the first half of the nineteenth century its Chesterfield Academy, as Edwin D. Mead, of the distinguished alumni, has suffi- ciently shown, was only second in importance to Exeter among New Hampshire academies.
Vernon and Hinsdale mark the end of the Upper Valley attractively. Hinsdale is the larger and a manu- facturing town; Vernon the smaller, given mostly to agri- culture. In Vernon, in the village cemetery, is the grave of Jemima Howe, the " Fair Captive." South Vernon has a pungent flavor as a place of cider-mills.
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Northfield's attractive Seat at its Head - The Dwight L. Moody Institutions - Landmarks of the Indian Wars - Clarke's Island and its Spectre Pirate - Rural Hill Towns below Northfield - Beautiful Greenfield - Turner's Falls - Historic Deerfield - Rare Deerfield Old Street and its Landmarks - Picturesque Sunderland and Whately - Old Hatfield and Hadley -The Russell Parsonage and the " Regicides" - " Elm Valley ": a fine Type of the Colonial Farm-seat.
W ITH its white and neat villages beautifully dotting the symmetrical slopes backed by mountain ranges on both sides of the River, and the lofty buildings of its Dwight Lyman Moody institutions the most conspicuous features of the landscape, Northfield picturesquely heads the Valley's reach of fifty miles across Massachusetts, as is fitting for the upper gateway to a region in which pictur- esqueness is the dominant note throughout. The Moody institutions give an evangelical tinge to the town of to-day, which but softens its varied attractions to the worldly eye. Interesting and impressive as practical monuments of the crowning endeavor in the life-work of a good man, whose object in founding them here in the place of his birth was to help the poor in purse but not in spirit to help them- selves to a useful education, these institutions now embrace the Northfield Seminary for young women, comprising the group of academic buildings which occupy the main estate in East Northfield; and the Mount Hermon School for young men, with handsome buildings and a generous campus for athletic games, on the west bank of the River
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below the Seminary plant. The other attractions of the old town are found in the comfortable aspect of the tree- embowered streets; the mountain drives about the sur- rounding country; and the numerous historic spots. Beers's Mountain with Beers's Hill at its southwest foot, reminiscent of Captain Richard Beers and King Philip's War, lies in East Northfield on the range of highlands forming the background of the town. Captain Beers's grave, marked with the memorial stone, is seen on the southwesterly spur of Beers's Hill. Beers's Plain, also marked, where Captain Beers and his men were surprised from the ambush, was the site of an Indian village. To the eastward lay the " Great Swamp," by the side of which, according to Mrs Rowlandson's narrative, the horde of two thousand Indians made their camp for a night in March, 1676.
Clark's Island, in the River off the upper end of Pine Meadow, has its legend of Captain Kidd and his hid- den treasure. As the tale runs, the captain and his men, despite the falls and other obstructions which repelled less venturesome skippers, sailed their pirate ship up from the Sound till they reached this secluded spot. Here they landed a heavy chest of gold ; dug a deep hole and lowered the chest into it ; covered the whole with earth and stones ; and then in the good old-fashioned pirate's way, selecting one of their number by lot, despatched him and placed his dead body on top of the heap, that his ghost might forever after guard the treasure from avaricious fortune-seekers. The spectre pirate seems to have been faithful to his trust if we are to believe the old dames' stories of the awful fate that befell the would-be harvesters of the fabled gains of his master, the bold - and maligned - corsair.
Erving, below East Northfield, perpetuating the name
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of a merchant of Boston, John Erving, who bought its territory in the middle of the eighteenth century, is a rural hill town, devoted to agriculture among its hills and to con- siderable manufacture along Miller's River, which waters its southern side. Gill, opposite, having the Connecticut on two of its sides and on another side the tributary of Falls River, is also largely a hill town enjoying extensive landscapes from its highest elevations, and with spreading intervals on the River's borders. It was part of Greenfield till 1793, when it was set up as an independent town and took its name from Moses Gill, a worthy Massachusetts lieu- tenant governor next succeeding Samuel Adams. Gill Vil- lage, the oldest hamlet, occupying a hill-framed plain, or what an artist has described as a twisted hollow, is agree- ably assembled about a central green.
Greenfield, at the turn of the great curve where the River again trends southward, is the upper railroad centre of the Massachusetts Reach. In beauty and character of situation it does not belie its name. With its frame of green hills varying in contour, its two local streams meandering through verdant parts, - Falls River coursing along the upper eastern border to the Connecticut, Green River winding to the Deerfield, - and its fine fringes of green intervals, it is veritably a town set in green fields. The central part spreads over an elevated plain, marked by broad beautifully shaded streets, the Main Street double- lined with elms ; by numerous old-style commodious dwell- ings and spacious grounds surrounding them, often adorned with large gardens; and by public buildings of various styles and dates denoting an important past with an active present, for Greenfield has been the shire town of Franklin County since the creation of this county in 1811. The several historic spots are suitably marked by monuments,
Deerfield Old Street, 1671-1906.
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placed through the efforts of the Pocumtuck Valley Memo- rial Association, an excellent historical society inspired by Mr. George Sheldon, the historian of these parts. The most interesting of them are in the " North Parish," - the place where Captain Turner was slain on the retreat in the Great Falls Fight, and the scene of the massacre of Eunice Williams on the direful march of the Deerfield captives.
Turner's Falls, now a place of important manufactures, with the water-power about the Indians' great fishing place utilized by a dam and canals, is a half-hour's trolley-car ride, or pleasanter drive from Greenfield centre. The falls lie near by a romantic region. The site of the Falls Fight is marked by a monument at Riverside, in Gill township. Montague, south and east of the Falls, with its ambitiously titled upper village of Montague City, was the " Hunting Hills " of Sunderland famous the country round in colonial days for its big game. When it became a district of Sun- derland, in 1754, it was given the name of Captain Wil- liam Montague, the commander of the "Mermaid " at the taking of Cape Breton. It dates as a separate town from the opening of the Revolution. Montague City was chris- tened shortly after the construction of the canal of the Upper Locks company in 1793, with the fond hope of the speedy development of a little metropolis here.
Deerfield, on the plain beneath the Deerfield mountain range, owes much of its natural charm to the Deerfield River, entering from the Deerfield valley at the south end and flowing northward, then eastward, through deep level meadows to its union with the Connecticut. The historic features of the village all cluster about the delectable Deerfield Old Street. On the central common where the monument stands within the lines of the palisaded fort of 1689-1758, are the marked sites of the Benoni Stebbins
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house which, at the Sack of 1704, that band of " seven men besides women and children " so valiantly held against the assaults of three hundred, and the Ensign Sheldon house, the stout door of which with its "hatchet-hewn face," now in neighboring Memorial Hall, " still tells the tale of that fateful day." On the lane by the side of the common, opening the " Old Albany Road," is seen Parson Williams's second house, well preserved, on the original minister's-lot. Farther down is the ancient burying-ground on the meadows, with its graves of victims of the Sack and of various town worthies.
As interesting, and more, perhaps, is the succession of venerable mansions and humbler dwellings along Deerfield Old Street under the boughs of its noble elms, each with a story or a romance to tell. On a knoll above the street- way is Deerfield's Old Manse, with its ancient wing, the latter dating back to 1694 and one of the few houses that escaped burning in the Sack. At that time it was the home of Samuel Carter, his wife, and their six children. Wife and children were all seized by the Indians - one child was killed, the rest were marched off with the cap- tives to Canada. One was redeemed and got back to Deerfield ; two were afterward known to have married Indians. The mansion dates from 1768, when it was built, attached to the little old house, by Joseph Barnard, the estate then having been long in the Barnard family. After Joseph the mansion was occupied by his son Samuel for a score of years, and a pretty incident of Samuel's time was a wedding here on a December Sunday morning, in 1792, before church service, when the three lovely daughters of the house, all " dressed in sky-blue gowns," were married to three gallants of Greenfield. In 1807 the Rev. Hosea Hildreth, then preceptor of the Deerfield
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Academy, leased the mansion, and it was the birthplace of his son Richard Hildreth, the historian. It became the manse with its occupation later, in 1807, by the Rev. Samuel Willard, nephew of President Willard of Harvard, his alma mater, upon his coming to the pastorate of the Deerfield parish, as his first settlement. It remained his home for more than half a century, with the exception of seven years spent in the Old Colony town of Hingham, with which he had affectionate associations, for there in 1808 he married his wife, "the lovely Susan Barker," as he recorded in his diary. Rare distinction was conferred upon the manse by the gracious hospitality, scholarship, and refinement of the minister and his family. Channing, Parkman, the remarkable father of the historian Parkman, Emerson, and Holmes were among the throng of welcome guests who crossed its generous threshold.
Another dwelling that survived the Sack is the " Frary house," with the date of 1698 painted on its chimney. This was at one time a tavern, and the local guide makes note of its doubtful honor in having harbored Aaron Burr for a night. Of other old estates marked by tablets arrest- ing the visitor's attention is the Sheldon homestead, dating back to 1708 and handed down from sire to son to the present generation. In the lane, beside the Common, is " the little brown house on the Albany Road," the story of which Mr. Sheldon has told in his fascinating idyl, - where long lived that remarkable genius Epaphras Hoyt, scientist, military expert, antiquarian, philosopher, high sheriff; and his father before him, David Hoyt, one of the Deerfield captives ; where, under Epaphras Hoyt's tutorial direction, his nephew Edward Hitchcock, afterward Professor and President Hitchcock (born on the adjoining homestead, son of Deacon and Mary Hoyt Hitchcock) made youthful
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ventures into astronomy and other high learning; and where Hitchcock, yet a boy, was inspired to his fervid tragedy of 1814, The Downfall of Bonaparte, which was produced with great eclat in the Deerfield meeting-house, and for its swelling rhetoric had a rare vogue with young declaimers in New England towns. Other interesting houses are associated with artists of fame. At the south end of Deerfield Old Street is the J. Wells Champney house, with an old-fashioned box-bordered front garden, which was Champney's principal studio from the eighteen-seventies through the remainder of his life. Farther south, at " The Bars," is the Fuller homestead, where, in the spreading gambrel-roofed house embowered in elms and maples George Fuller was born and lived a large part of his life and where his masterpieces were conceived.
Memorial Hall, established in the old Deerfield Academy, and a monument to the devotion of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association to thorough and accurate historical research, should be reserved till the finish of the round of Deerfield " features " and its collections leisurely examined. Nor should the exhibits of the society of arts and crafts, in which Deerfield particularly excels, be ignored.
South Deerfield, on the plain west of Sugarloaf, is called the commercial end of the town, but beyond the gentle hum of a factory or two, a touch of animation about the bunches of country stores, and the sociable piazzas of the inn with the sanguinary name, it appears to the casual visitor as serenely unbusied as Deerfield Old Street. After a stroll over the field of the "Battle of Bloody Brook," through which the brook glides sluggishly as of old, a glance at the quaint monument in the little park, then at the stone slab in the front of a neighboring house that marks the grave of many of the "Flower of Essex," it is the
Looking down from Sugarloaf, South Deerfield-Sunderland across the River.
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customary thing to make the easy ascent of Sugarloaf and gaze upon the expansive panorama of winding river and valley, meadows and terraces, and distant hill and mountain.
Sunderland, on the east side of the River facing Sugar- loaf and extending southward to Hadley bounds, and Whately on the west side reaching to Hatfield, are both farming towns, both cultivating to some extent Connecti- cut Valley tobacco, and Sunderland making a specialty of onions. Sunderland's village clustered about Sunderland Street, beautifully shaded by maples, spreads along the interval backed by hills rising northward to Mount Toby, on whose ledges are those "Sunderland parks" of giant maples, cascades and glens, which Charles G. Whiting depicts with the touch of a Thoreau. Whately's village lies on upland above the meadows with a background of hills of steep and rugged sides. Sunderland dates back to 1718, when it was cut mostly from Hadley and given its name in honor of Charles Spencer, earl of Sunderland. Whately, in Hatfield bounds till 1771, received the name of Governor Hutchinson's friend, Thomas Whately, then under-secretary to Lord Suffolk.
Old Hatfield and Hadley opposite are fairly in the heart of the Massachusetts section of the Connecticut Valley tobacco belt, and here tobacco farms and barns are the commonest sights. On the neat Hatfield plantations one may follow the art of tobacco growing and curing quite agreeably. Most of these farms lie on the fertile meadows bordering the River. The prevailing note of the Hatfield of to-day is neatness and thrift. The town seems to be perpetually smartened up to make its prettiest ap- pearance before strangers. Hatfield Street, the broad and beautiful thoroughfare along which the first settlers
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planted, and through which in those cruel old Indian days the savages so frequently swept in devastating raids, still remains the town's centre. The present village is the " Hat- field Street " of the original settlers. Scattered among the modern structures on either side of the old thoroughfare are ancient houses dating back to " first days." Here and there with the maples that line the Street mingle aged elms. The homesteads on the Street, to which Hatfielders point with the fondest pride, are those that belonged to the phil- anthropic Smiths, -" Uncle Oliver" and his nephew Austin, who from small beginnings, the former in the country store, amassed large fortunes, large for their days which knew not " high finance," and bequeathed them to the public good. Oliver founded the Smith Charities from which a group of eight Valley towns benefit, and Austin's fortune, through the beneficence of his sister Sophia, went to the foundation of Smith Academy in Hatfield for the equal training of both sexes, and Smith College in Northampton for women. Some town antiquary will identify the site of the house where lived Colonel Samuel Partridge (1645- 1740) the powerful colonial leader of the Valley in affairs of war and politics, whose life continued active almost to its end in his ninety-fifth year. Here too was the scene, in the meeting-house, of the three-day's August convention, immediately preceding the "Shays's Rebellion " of 1786, when fifty towns were represented and the formidable list of twenty-five " grievances " against the state government was drawn up.
Hadley, on the meadow-bordered peninsula formed by the River's great loop westward and back again, centres about the original Town Street, now West Street, stretch- ing from bank to bank of the River, upon which the first home-lots fronted and which became the scene of animated
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happenings with the muster of the yeomen soldiery in the Indian wars when Hadley was the military headquarters. The mellow old street is exceptionally broad, and its road- ways border a deep strip of green or common in the middle embellished with a double row of venerable elms. Now it wears the tranquil air of retirement from a well-spent life. Old dwellings line its sides, some hard weathered, some interesting examples of colonial architecture, displaying the high-boy scroll above the front door ; the more modern houses and other structures being for the most part on adjacent streets.
The most interesting of all the old town's landmarks, -the site of Parson John Russell's house in which the "regicides," Whalley and Goffe, were secretly harbored for so many years, and beneath which the ashes of one if not of both are supposed yet to lie, - is now covered by the hotel at the corner of West Street and Academy Lane. Sheldon, who has done so much for true history in clearing up the story of the regicides here, by separating fact from fable, would have a suitable memorial erected at this spot to the chivalric minister whom he justly terms the " great- est hero of Hadley." It is Sheldon's belief that the ashes of Whalley, who was buried under the kitchen cellar of the parsonage, still rest in an undiscovered grave somewhere beneath the hotel, notwithstanding the circumstantial rela- tion of the finding of his bones some years ago (which Sheldon believes were the remains of an Indian buried here years earlier) ; and that Goffe, who, according to the evidence of various historical writers, died in Hartford and was buried there, really died in the Russell house and was entombed by the side of his older associate and father-in- law. Sheldon also reasons from shreds of evidence, some of which have escaped other investigators or have been
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