USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Litchfield > The history of the town of Litchfield, Connecticut, 1720-1920 > Part 27
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The Seth F. Plumb Post, No. 80, Department of Connecticut, was formed in 1884. Its records were kept by Dwight C. Kilbourn, who was First Lieutenant of Company C in the Second Connecticut. He was wounded in both arms at the battle of Winchester, Septem- ber 19, 1864, but was able to rejoin his regiment in three months. He died at his home in East Litchfield, in 1914, at the age of 77 years. Mr. Kilbourn was by nature a historian; he had the his- torical sense, as will be testified by all who have read his admirable Bench and Bar. He wrote many minor works and articles; but it is not generally known that he also wrote a history of the town. This had just been completed at the time of the fire of 1886, in which his law office was burned, together with his large library and the manuscript of his great work. He afterwards gathered together a new and valuable library, but he did not re-write the history.
The war records of the individual men, whose names are kept in proud remembrance on our Honor Roll, cannot be given in detail here. It was honorable service, performed with ready willingness. There was little of romance or of the unusual, little that varied from the hard routine of the soldier's life. We do however read of one case of a Litchfield boy, Lyman E. Sweet, who captured three prisoners of the enemy "with a coffee-pot" at the second battle of Hatcher's Run, but even here we are deprived of the details of this marvelous exploit!
For Litchfield the real end of the War was on August 1st, 1865, on which day the soldiers of the Second Regiment and others
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returned from camp. About three hundred of the County Regi- ment were present. The Triumphal Arch stood on East Street, near the side of the present Library, making a gateway to Litchfield as the men arrived from the East Litchfield Station. There was a parade, and speeches. The whole town was decorated to welcome the men.
Two monuments have been erected in the Town to the memory of the men who fell in the Civil War. The one in Northfield is of red sandstone, and was erected by the citizens of that village directly after the end of the war, and is said to have been the first of the Soldiers' Monuments to be completed in the country. The one in Litchfield stands in the Center Park. It is of white marble, and bears the names of 52 soldiers, including the 8 names which are on the Northfield Monument.
CHAPTER XXII.
IMPRESSIONS AND POST-IMPRESSIONS.
BY DR, ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK.
My boyhood was spent in Litchfield until I went to college in 1877. After an absence of many years, with but occasional visits, I returned about 1911 as a householder and a member of the sum- mer colony. I am therefore in the unusual position of being able to describe the Litchfield of the early 70's as seen through a boy's eyes, and to note the changes that have occurred in our town between 1870 and 1920, without having my impressions dimmed by too great a familiarity with the intervening years. Changes, which have come so gradually as to be almost unnoticed by the permanent resi- dents of Litchfield, present their cumulative effect to the returned absentee with a startling reality. Though these changes may be relatively small, who can tell but that the flight of fifty years may one day be seen to have had its importance in the great historical picture of our American civilization? Part of my notes on this head have already been used by me in a lecture before the Litch- field Historical Society on "Changing Litchfield", delivered on September 1, 1914, and reported in the Enquirer of the following day.
Litchfield in the early 70's was a pretty good place for a boy to grow up in. Here lived an unusually large number of persons, of all ages and degrees, whom it was stimulating to know. Among those who impressed themselves early on my boyish memory, were George C. Woodruff and his wife, the latter known to her numerous band of relatives and to very many others as "Aunt Sophy". George C., as he was usually called, (the family name went without saying), was a lawyer and a gentleman of the old school: the perfect incar- nation of stern Puritan justice and uprightness, a terror to evil- doers, forbidding sometimes even to the just, but full of humor and kindliness under his shell. I stood in awe of the stern exterior and I was half terrified and half scandalized when my mother, who had known him as a good friend, many years before I was born, used to venture upon persiflage in conversation with him. I well recol- lect a controversy on the subject of Contentment, which was renewed between them at each casual meeting. Stopping her in the street, Mr. Woodruff would fix her with his eye and quote with a sternness that almost withered me where I stood: "Contentment with Godli- ness is great gain". To which my mother rejoined: "Yes, and 'to die is gain'; and so Contentment is only a living death!" All
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of which gave, and still gives, me food for thought. I have always thought that her husband's mask of sternness worried Aunt Sophy a little. She knew him as he was, and she would fain have had others do likewise,-especially boys of ten.
Another of the Litchfield great ones of this era was Origen S. Seymour, afterwards Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. Judge Seymour's eyesight had been weak from boyhood and the completion of his college course was dependent on the services of a companion to read his lessons to him. In later life, on the Bench or elsewhere, he always sat with closed eyes when listening intently. This sometimes gave rise to misunderstanding, as when a newly inducted rector of St. Michael's remarked, after his first sermon, that Judge Seymour seemed to have enjoyed it, as he was sound asleep all the time! As a matter of fact the Judge could probably have reproduced that sermon, if required, with a good deal more fidelity than it deserved. Judge Seymour was kind to boys, and I remember several conversations with him in his study at the South Street house. He told me once how he went to New Haven on horseback, to pass his Yale entrance examination. He and a com- panion had but one horse between them, and used the method of "ride and tie", by which one rode ahead for a specified distance and the other followed on foot; having covered the distance agreed upon, the first tied the horse to a tree and himself proceeded to walk; when the second reached the horse he mounted, overtook his companion, rode ahead of him, tied the horse in turn, and so matters went until the end of the journey. It was effective and economical, but somewhat unsociable, it always seemed to me.
When retired for age, Judge Seymour was Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court of Errors. We have had two Litchfield Chief Justices in my day, the other being Governor Charles B. Andrews, our only Governor since the days of the Wolcotts.
Edwin McNeill was the first approach to anything like a financial magnate that our little town had ever known. A farmer's boy, of that dour but extremely competent Scotch strain that has left its impress all over our land, he became an eminent civil engineer, amassed what was then a fortune, and failing in health returned to live on Litchfield Hill. He bought from Gideon H. Hollister the house on North Street now owned by Frederick Dem- ing and proceeded to remodel it on a scale of luxury then unheard of, including a billiard-room, a hot-air furnace, and running water. He was a force in Litchfield while he lived, and his influence upon it persists to this day. Almost alone he pushed through the direct railway connection with New York against great difficulties.
I do not recollect anyone who ever occupied precisely the same relation to a town as that held during my boyhood and for many years afterward by J. Deming Perkins. Wealthy patrons are not unknown to New England towns, but Mr. Perkins' services to Litchfield were not precisely of this type. He was continually giving, in no spectacular way, things that he knew by observation
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were needed by the village and unlikely to be acquired by it through public channels. This was the more welcome at that time because the old village organization had fallen into abeyance and had not been revived in its present borough form. There was no way in which Litchfield could raise money by taxation, except as a town- ship; and the residents of Bantam, Milton and Northfield were not at all likely to contribute to the betterment of Litchfield village. So, when Litchfield streets were dark, and lanterns on the elms did not seem to fill the bill, Mr. Perkins ordered lamp-posts from New York, set them up on the conspicuous corners around the Green and paid a man to fill and light the lamps until the Village Improve- ment Society took the job from his hands. He became the Presi- dent of the V. I. S., and was its good genius and constant adviser. I well remember how proudly he used to tell us that the color of the new lamp-posts, white with green trimmings, was precisely that of the posts on Fourth Avenue in New York, the first metropolitan thoroughfare that the countryman used to see when he issued in wonderment from the portals of the old New Haven station at 27th Street, where the Madison Square Garden now stands.
When a badly frayed banner ceased to disgrace our hundred- foot mast on the Green and was replaced by a bright new one, we did not need to ask who had bought and paid for it. And it was under his auspices that the V. I. S. raised the money to build tar pavements over the town, setting a fashion that still persists. The Enquirer used to comment proudly every week on the fact that "the tar rolls steadily westward", or northward or southward, as the case might be. The money was raised, not by a "drive", which would have "driven" most of us out of town, but by a series of enter- tainments of all possible kinds. In organizing these, Mr. Perkins was active and invaluable, and his experience was always available. When we wanted a new stage curtain, he sent out and bought strips of cloth in claret and buff and had them assembled in exact imita- tion of a Vienna concert-hall curtain. When anything was to be done that required money, experience, judgment or hard work, his was the name first in our minds, and he never failed us. Of Mr .. Perkins' other and great services to Litchfield this is not the place to speak; but the fact that he was the first president of the Shepaug Railroad reminds me that I must not overlook the great part that this institution played in our lives in the 70's.
The history of almost every railroad is worth writing. Will that of the Shepaug ever be set down? From start to finish it was a fight. When Edwin McNeill was making the preliminary surveys, he was confronted time and again by angry farmers who objected to the proceedings as trespass. When it comes to a con- sciousness of the rights of land proprietorship, the average Con- necticut farmer makes an English Duke look "like thirty cents". On one occasion the opposing farmer bore a shot-gun, and threat- ened to use it; Mr. McNeill calmly vaulted the fence, saying: "Come on boys; I have smelt powder before!" The farmer did not shoot.
ยท
HON. J. DEMING PERKINS
DR. HENRY W. BUEL
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Later came the fight to induce the towns along the route to subscribe for the stock. This raged in the town meetings and is best described in John D. Champlin's Chronicles of Sirrom, (Morris spelled back- ward), first printed anonymously in the Sentinel, of which Champ- lin was then editor. As a piece of semi-political pamphleteering, this takes high rank.
But we boys did not really get into the game until actual con- struction work began at our end of the line. Recognizing the value of the stimulation of interest by visualization, Mr. Perkins even had rails teamed over from East Litchfield, so that they could be laid here before the arrival of the outfit from Hawleyville. We were interested spectators of the work from the early day when Miss Lucretia Deming's ice-house was split in two by the work- men's picks, to the triumphant hour when the whistle announcing the arrival of the Waramaug at the foot of West Hill brought out our whole population. It will be remembered that the names of our three locomotives: Shepaug, Waramaug, and Weantinaug, moved a jealous neighboring sheet to remark, that they aug-ured well for the future.
Then began the fun for us boys. Things were new and rules were slack, and we rode on the engines of construction trains as much as we pleased. I even remember seeing Eph Mower standing at the throttle upon occasion. Of course we knew intimately all conductors, brakemen, engineers and firemen. What Litchfield boy was not proud to number among his friends the redoubtable Al Paul? Al was a Welshman, and worth knowing. If Roosevelt shook hands habitually with his faithful engineer and fireman, we went him one better; we adored ours, they were as heroes and demi- gods to us. Putting up the hand brakes, there were no air brakes then, became a standard sport with us. All this was educational, although if we had suspected that it was, doubtless we should have turned to something else.
In my boyhood, Litchfield had lately been a purely American community, by which I mean one inhabited almost solely by families of English descent. There were only half a dozen negroes or so, and the Irish had only recently begun to come in. I remember no other exotic races. This accounts for the fact that individual mem- bers of these two races play a large part in my memories. The negroes were not employed as house servants, or in general outdoor work about houses. They were not coachmen or gardeners, but were manual laborers on outside jobs. In the South, black and white boys play freely together. What the Southerner is particular about is not social contact, but social status. The latter did not worry us, but there were only two negro boys, as I recollect, who associated with us. One was Charles Nicholas Doute, a West Indian, brought here as a servant by the McNeills. His French accent and queer ways amused us, and caused him to be graded in a class by himself. The other was Sam Rowe, the son of Solomon Rowe, sexton of St. Michael's Church. The Rowes were altogether
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a notable family. Their hospitality was without stint, and their little shack, already bursting with the Rowe family, was warranted to hold as many guests as applied for admission. Sol was a wit. When a certain young rector, who had business interests in New York, used to absent himself from his duties, so frequently as to cause remark, Sol said, "I can always tell when Mr. X. is going to be away, for the Sunday before he always preaches from the text: 'It is expedient that I should leave you' ".
The Rowes, I believe, had been Northern for some generations. A great contrast were the Elliots, who came from the South with Jack, the head of the family, after the Civil War. These were negroes of the real Virginia plantation variety. Jack presided at the rear of the Congregational organ, during the pastorate of the Rev. Mr. Elliot, which led some wit to remark that there was an Elliot blowing at each end of the Church.
About the only other colored families in town were the Harri- sons and the Jacksons, and I can pass over neither. The Jacksons have already been mentioned as the last family whose ancestor had been a Litchfield slave. As known to me, they were Aunt Lucy and Crazy Caroline. The latter was really out of her mind and used to parade the streets with corn-silk curls and a small branch for a parasol. Aunt Lucy was a colored Mrs. Partington. On being asked once where she was going, she replied: "Oh, just around the corner to explode". On another occasion she expressed her pleasure on the receipt of some gift by remarking: "I am not only gratified, but highly mollified". Meeting on the street Gideon H. Hollister, who had just been appointed to the Haytian mission by President Johnson, she thus addressed him: "Well, Mr. Hollister! I hear you've been appointed minister to Hayti! Well, I hope you'll preach to 'em, and convert 'em all!" To one who inquired if she were comfortably situated, she replied: "I have everything that heart could wish in full bloom, and some in maturity!"
As for the Harrisons, they were brothers, Miles and Epaphro- ditus, Paiphe for short. Paiphe was a great hulky, lumbering giant, in demand where brute strength was required, and ready to shout out rough badinage at any boy who would take it. If any-
one should be surprised at this extended treatment of the so-called menial classes, I would remind him that these classes bulk very large in the experience of children. In a village like Litchfield, the boys are acquainted with all the cooks and all the hired men, and many of them, to be sure, are well worth knowing.
As I have said, we were just beginning to know the Irish. They lived in a colony at the foot of East Hill, then known as Lavinville: for the Lavin family formed no inconsiderable part of it, and the family was one of standing and influence. Patrick Lavin, the head of it, had begun, many years before in Ireland, his education for the priesthood. I know not why or how it was interrupted, but it was an awesome thing for a boy to have a man making his garden, who had studied Latin.
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At this time the Irish in Litchfield were all domestic servants and day laborers. Their advance, here and elsewhere, in a single generation, is one of the most notable changes in our country with which I am familiar. I never knew a finer lady in temperament and manners than old Mrs. Lavin. She was the soul of considerate politeness. On one occasion I had achieved, in a course of lessons in drawing, what I considered a masterpiece in the form of a picture of a barrel, with orthodox perspective and shading. I ran to show my result to Mrs. Lavin, who was washing clothes. She dried her hands, took the drawing and admired it for some time. Then she said: "My, my! but isn't it fine! Sure, it's a church, isn't it?" Now, the drawing was really not so bad; but Mrs. Lavin's eyesight was failing. I have always loved her for her desire to say the right thing.
Two generations made a difference. Possibly also saying the right thing, but from a different standpoint and in a different way, Mrs. Lavin's little granddaughter, carving knife in hand, chased Charlie Belden, who had said "shoo" to the family rooster, down East Street, shouting the while this bloody threat: "I'll cut the one head off ye!" That suggestion of a possible cranial plurality always amused me.
Our colored Mrs. Partington, described above, was not our only one. Decidedly "male, white and 21", was Ed Peck, who filled, for what now seems to have been a large part of my boyhood, the office of jailer in Litchfield. Huge of frame, kindly of speech, popular with one and all, Ed could rarely say exactly what he meant. Put forward to utter a few words of thanks, when a delegation, of which he was a member, had been entertained at lunch, he said briefly: "Gentlemen; I thank you very kindly for your handsome coalition". And in narrating his part in the contribution of a fund for some suffering brother or sister, he went on: "So I mounted down off my horse and put in my poor pitiless mite".
I was particularly interested in our two newspapers. In the first place I have always been intrigued by print, and secondly I was intimate with both editors. George A. Hickox, of the Enquirer, was my next door neighbor, and John D. Champlin Jr., of the Sentinel, was my first cousin. He lived at the Mansion House, and his sanctum there was the literary Mecca of my early years. The Enquirer and the Sentinel carried a line of good-humored political badinage in those days that was rather better than some modern equivalents. The Sentinel had several editors after Champlin went to New York, and it finally passed out; but the Enquirer lives on forever. Mr. Hickox made it a valuable sheet in a literary way. His editorials and book reviews would have done credit to The Nation; but the average rural subscriber, doubtless, did not know that; and as an original War-Democrat his post-war Republicanism was regarded by some as not over stalwart. I well remember a review of Froude's Caesar that was a masterpiece; but all he got for it was the following skit from the Winsted Herald: "The Litch-
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field Enquirer prints a two-column obituary of the late Julius Caesar. The deceased was much thought of in Litchfield". I believe that my proximity to Mr. and Mrs. Hickox, as a boy, was rather more important to me, from a purely educational point of view, than the fact that I afterward went to college. The Hickoxes were not original Litchfielders. Mr. Hickox was from Washington, and his wife was a South Carolinian. For me the intellectual center of Litchfield was in their house, next to ours on East Street, still owned by their daughter. There one could hear discussed intelligently science, religion, literature and politics. Mr. Hickox was also a fine musician; and we had at that time a very creditable musical ensemble: Dr. William Deming, first violin; Dr. Gates, viola; Mr. Hickox, 'cello; Julius Deming, double bass; to which were often added brass and wood-winds, as represented by flute and cornet. The playing of these musicians went far to form our musical taste.
Dr. Howard E. Gates was also organist of St. Michael's. He frequently went into the church to practice, and as he was prone to forget his key, he left a window unfastened that he might use it as an emergency entrance. One afternoon he proceeded to enter the church in this way, and had forced about half his body through the narrow window when he chanced to look up and saw to his astonishment that Mr. Perry stood at the reading desk, conducting evening prayer, in the presence of a numerous congregation. It was Lent, a fact that had escaped the absent-minded doctor. Dr. Gates afterward said that what chiefly riveted his attention was the face of Mrs. Perry, in the foreground, gazing at his burglarious efforts with a look of fascinated horror that he never forgot. Some kind friend sent an account of this incident to The Police Gazette of New York, and this classic sheet issued a full page picture of it, in which St. Michael's was expanded to about the size of St. Patrick's Cathedral and was filled with a worshiping multitude, while no feature of the method by which the doctor was gaining admittance was allowed to lack in sensationalism.
In my boyhood there was much boasting about the excellence of the Connecticut common school system, based on the fund that was the proceeds of the sale of the so-called Western Reserve in Ohio. I used to wonder why, if our free schools were so fine, we should see no local evidence of the fact. We had in Litchfield one District School, situated on West Street, and differing only in size from such rural district schools as those on South Plains and Harris Plains. Nobody went to it, who could afford a term's tuition at the Insti- tute, whose building now forms part of the Henry R. Jones resi- dence on North Street. My memory does not go back to the days of the Rev. James Richards, who used to throw inkstands at the boys and otherwise give way to an ungovernable temper. Mr. Richards deserves mention in this connection on account of his talented granddaughter, Mrs. Craigie, whose novels, written in London, under the pen-name of John Oliver Hobbes, are of a high
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order of literary excellence and have doubtless been read by many Litchfielders who do not know the author's connection with our town.
My first memories of the Institute are of the time when it was revived after a brief period of coma by Edwin McNeill, Dr. Buel, Henry R. Coit, and others, who had large families of children and hesitated to take advantage of the Free School system, as it then was. At this period I was interested chiefly in the primary depart- ment, and Miss Sarah Bronson was my instructor.
In the 70's no one's education was considered complete in Litch- field unless he or she had studied French,-a tribute to the waning pre-eminence of that tongue in the world of polite letters. The schools taught no languages but the dead ones, so we depended on private tutors. The Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who filled this office in Litchfield formed an unbroken succession of character studies. They taught us a little French and a great deal about the characteristics of the French people.
There was little Mamselle Brun, like a small dried apple, who had rooms at Stephen Trowbridge's, where the Playhouse now stands. She said once, with a toss of her head: "What a differ- ence zere is be-tween Madame B. and myself! She is all dignity; while I am all grace and ease!"
Then there was old M. Laslier, noted for his frequent trans- Atlantic trips. His benevolent Litchfield friends would subscribe enough to send him to his dear Paris, where his relatives, after a brief visit, would invariably ship him back to us. His income from Litchfield students of French was not large, and it was currently reported that in his room in the Beckwith block he lived on something like an onion a day: there is no doubt about the onion, though I will not swear to the day. He was fain to eke out his income in various ways; once, for instance, by delivering a lecture on Lafayette, in what was then known as the "old church", now the moving picture palace. Dressed in solemn black he rose, before a select audience of his Litchfield friends, tiptoed to the edge of the platform, closed his eyes, and began to recite the Lord's Prayer, while his auditors did not quite know how to take it. In the course of the lecture occurred this passage: "Ab-out zees time, a gr-r-eat misfortune happen to Lafayette. He loss his gr-ran- mothair!" Loud shouts of laughter from the audience, to the amaze- ment and disgust of the lecturer.
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