USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Litchfield > The history of the town of Litchfield, Connecticut, 1720-1920 > Part 28
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Of a different stamp was the debonair M. Laloux, of an age to touch the hearts of the susceptible. At the opening meeting of his first class, he divided the members into grades, and when Anna Hubbard alone was left he said genially: "Mees Hubbard, you may split yourself up anyway you like!" Laloux was anxious that his English should be both classy and up-to-date, and when his use of slang caused laughter, he would inquire in all seriousness: "Aha! Ees not zat in use in ze best circles?"
An educational institution not intended as such, but function- ing on the whole in the direction of righteousness, was the County
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court house, then our only temple of justice. New Milford, Falls Village and Winsted had not then arisen as rival centers. We attended many of the trials diligently. To watch a real story unfold before one's eyes, to see the actual characters and hear them tell what they had seen or experienced, and later to listen to the impassioned pleas of the opposing counsel and the calm summing up of the judge, followed by the breathless "waiting for the ver- dict",-all this goes far ahead of any novel I have ever read, or any play I ever saw. That at any rate, was the way we felt in the 70's. Of course the story thus unfolded was always one of crime or misdemeanor, though we took it all impersonally. The real protagonists, in our eyes, were the lawyers: the judge was too remote and chill to be regarded in that capacity. We naturally took sides with the local talent: Henry B. Graves, Edward W. Sey- mour, Solon B. Johnson. I was a little doubtful about Johnson, because he edited the Sentinel, a Democratic sheet, and I was a Republican, but his wit was something that could be matched at the Litchfield bar neither before nor since.
I well remember him in his defence of Green, an alleged wife- poisoner. He was pouring out the vials of his sarcasm on some luckless physician, who had testified that he had prescribed the application of ice for the wife, who had admittedly died of an over- dose of strychnine, whether administered by her husband or not. "Once upon a time", narrated Johnson, "a workman who was tamping a blasting charge with a crowbar had the misfortune to set it off; and the bar was driven through his body, half protruding on either side. A doctor was summoned, who gave the following opinion: 'My good man, if I leave that bar there, you'll die. If I pull it out, you'll die. But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you a pill that will melt it where it is!" Johnson went on to say: 'Our friend here would doubtless have prescribed-ice'." For such passages as these we waited, holding our breaths, while Solon B. was speaking. His basso-profundo voice and preternatural solemnity, together with his stature of about six feet three, added to the effect.
Edward W. Seymour was my Sunday School teacher and as such I revered and loved him. He was rather belligerent in court, and on one occasion when he was on a side that I had previously made up my mind was the wrong one, I was so torn between con- flicting emotions that I almost resolved to frequent the halls of justice no longer. We always took sides and debated the cases among ourselves with some heat.
Politics bulked somewhat more large in our lives in the 70's than it does, I think, in those of the boys of to-day. The Civil War had recently ended, and our political ideas expressed themselves largely in military form. Why this should have been the case more in 1870 than in 1920, when a much greater war has just ended, possi- bly some sociologist will explain. Each political party had its semi-military marching organization, and we had ours in imitation of our elders. I recollect parading on the North Street sidewalk
JUDGE EDWARD W. SEYMOUR
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MRS. EDWARD W. SEYMOUR. ( Mary Floyd Tallmadge)
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and shouting: "Hurrah for Hawley! Get out for English!" These being respectively the Republican and Democratic candidates for Governor. I had no doubt whatever that Joseph R. Hawley was good and that James E. English was wicked. My Democratic boy friends held precisely the opposite opinion. How much present day political feeling is any more logical? The old-fashioned elec- tion-day would have scandalized the modern Litchfielder, I am sure. We boys were allowed to make lists of the voters, as they deposited their ballots, so that the political committees could check them up; and we proudly supposed that we were performing an official func- tion of some sort. As the day wore on, our mothers kept us indoors, for the outlying voter was bent on painting the town red before he returned to his rural home, and he often succeeded in so doing to the point of actual riot.
Just as our elections have become more orderly, so the spirit of order has spread in other directions. Litchfield has spruced up. She gives more attention to-day to the things that please the eye. In the late 60's, she was what we should now call slovenly. Her lawns were uncut, her citizens thought more of the value of an acre's crop of hay than of the pleasures of looking upon closely cropped sward. Her yards were fenced, for there were not infre- quently stray animals in the streets and the Town Pound was something more than a name. By night the streets were dark, and the possession of a hand lantern or two was a necessity in every well-regulated family. Those distant lights, with their irregular motion, compounded of the lantern's own pendulum swing and the forward progress of him who held it, were familiar sights in those days. Even after Mr. Perkins' shocking innovation of lamp-posts, and even after the V. I. S. had encouraged private lights on the tree trunks, the individual lantern still retained its popularity. It is hard to realize the revolution wrought by electricity in our noc- turnal habits, here and elsewhere.
In the winter we walked in the street. When we trace back the sequence of causes, we come again to the Town Pound, oddly enough. An occasional stray horse, cow, or pig, meant a fence to keep them out; a fence, when the snow flies, acts precisely like the snow-guards along the western railroad lines: it slows up the air current, which drops its burden and builds up a drift along the obstacle. These drifts were, with us, often higher than the fences, and when hard we walked on them. Cleaning off the sidewalks would have involved a continuous cut through impacted snow; hence we walked in the middle of the street, and welcomed the ox- sleds with their loads of wood, then the fashionable fuel, which broke the road for us. The Borough regulations now require the removal of snow, but the householder may thank the present infre- quency of wandering beasts for the possibility of fence-removal that has made our streets like parkways and incidentally abolished the worst of the drifts.
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In general, Litchfield's aspect is more colonial to-day than it was in 1870. People were proud then of the old houses, but never thought of keeping up their general effect in new constructions. We think we have an artistic sense now-a-days. Perhaps we have, but I fear that our racial history is all against it. Just now it is fashionable to be guided by artistic motives, but it is the fashion, not the art, that we obey primarily. In the Revolutionary days, it was the fashion to build houses such as the Georgian architects were building in the old country. That the motive was fashion, not an appreciation of the beautiful, is sufficiently proved by the fact that when fashion shifted to ugliness we began at once, with these colonial gems before our very eyes, to build probably the ugliest structures that the eye of man has ever rested on. We are clearing them away now; scroll-saw decoration and pseudo-gothic construction are going to the scrap heap, but that we have become incapable of similar atrocities in the future I fear to believe. We are no more original now than we were then; but we are imitating the old models, which chance, heaven be praised, to be the better ones.
So we may see in Litchfield streets to-day more good colonial architecture than we did fifty years ago, although we may also see some houses which, beautiful and costly as they may be, are not in accord with its traditions. As for our church buildings, they are all architecturally bad, and our one beautiful example of colonial work we have tucked off in a corner, where it shelters a movie show. This is the saddest thing I know about Litchfield. In the early 70's it is a fact that the old colonial buildings were covertly sneered at or regarded with amused tolerance. We felt toward them like the western visitor to the Philadelphia Exposition of '76, who, as related by the late Dr. William Deming, exclaimed to him dis- appointedly : "I thought they would have some up-to-date buildings; these old Greek things must be three hundred years old!"
I have said above that in winter we walked in the streets. A good snow surface, hardened by passing runners, is not a bad pavement, but it is sadly dependent on temperature. The snow turned to slush and the frozen earth to mud, in mid-street, long before the disappearance of the snow banks which buried our sidewalks. Then it was irksome to walk abroad. I have seen laboring vehicles up to the hubs, I speak literally, in soft mud, almost anywhere on North or South Streets. Not even an attempt to improve the roads with gravel was made until the 80's, and the macadam came much later. Even then we lived in flying and floating dust until the prevalence of motor traffic, only a few years ago, forced the use of oil and the preparations of tar, which though odorous and dirty in themselves have possibly contributed more to our general comfort and cleanliness than any other improvement of the last half century. These good roads, thanks to an enlightened state policy, are creeping out through the country in all directions. Fortunately for those who come among us for rest and enjoyment,
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they are almost all scenic highways, as well as serving for com- merce, their primary purpose. I do not know a section of the Union where one may follow the ordinary channels of communication with so great a certainty of seeing pleasing and constantly changing views.
All the things that I have mentioned, repaired, restored and cleaned buildings, shaven lawns, well lighted streets, hard, dust- less roads, combine to produce on the visitor the impression of a well kept park, that old Litchfield gave in a much less degree. What is the cause of the change? Many persons would answer, wealthy summer visitors. But this does not go to the root of the matter. The change is due to a development of community feeling and civic self-respect in which the influence of the summer resi- dent with wealth and taste has been an undoubted factor. No one can take stock of the houses on North and South Streets without seeing that the number occupied in summer only has greatly increased. Yet it is true that the civic spirit of which I have spoken began to show itself long before the increase of summer residents. It first showed itself in the Village Improvement Society, which gave us shaven lawns, street crossings, concrete sidewalks, street lights, and best of all a conviction that these things were good and a deter- mination to have more of them. It cropped out later in the willing- ness of our citizens to put good money into improved railway com- munication, sewerage, water and lighting. Whether public or private enterprise was the immediate cause, the underlying impulse was the same, a quickened community consciousness, acting under the spur of intelligent leadership and itself reacting to raise up and stimulate new leaders. In all this, of course, the men of means and good taste who have made Litchfield their summer home have played a capital part; but it should be noted that these are very largely Litchfielders themselves, by ancestry or by long resi- dence. This town has been fortunate in its summer visitors. Many a place has been ruined by them. Litchfield appears to be so con- stituted that the sort of people it does not want do not like it and would not live here under any circumstances. The exact reason for all this will bear study; a passing mention is all that we can give it here. It is surely noteworthy that without putting up the bars, without formally creating a park or a club or anything of the kind, this village has always been able to secure the citizens it wants and to exclude undesirables.
Is this tendency toward the replacement of all-year residents by summer visitors a good thing or not? That depends on what we desire for Litchfield. In Torrington or Waterbury it would be a very bad thing. Imagine, if you can, 60 per cent of the residents of an industrial town turned out of their homes to make room for semi- annual occupants! There could be no successful industrial life under such conditions. If you want Litchfield to be an industrial town, you will conclude that the change is bad for it also. Even as it is, movement in this direction may have gone far enough.
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None of us, I think, would like to see every house on North and South Streets closed every winter. Permanent residential families are needed here to carry on the Litchfield social and community tra- ditions, but without the yearly access of other citizens from with- out, these traditions would be more apt to grow flat, stale and unprofitable. This presupposes, of course, free social intercourse between permanent and temporary residents, and this has always been the rule unless the temporary residents are unworthy. There has never been any distinction here between visitors and towns- people. I used to be afraid of it and I remember a symptom or two in times now happily long passed. It is not altogether because Litchfield people have always been socially acceptable. They have been that of course; but I have been in old New England towns where families of as good birth, breeding and education as ours were placed in the disagreeable position of being looked down upon by persons of extremely doubtful urban antecedents, whose wealth had enabled them to create a social machine which rolled over that of the old fashioned residents as a veritable car of Juggernaut. The reason is rather that so many of our most influential summer resi- dents have themselves been Litchfielders by birth or ancestry, that many of the houses left vacant in the winter have been old family mansions, links between the permanent society of the village and its summer social fabric. A visitor at the Hotel was heard to remark recently that she desired to attend a function at the Club House, in order "to see what a real country audience looked like". If she had done so, she would have seen a gathering com- posed partly of New Yorkers, and residents of other cities, and partly of those who dwell in Litchfield the year round; but I doubt if she would have been able to distinguish between them, certainly not by their long chin-whiskers and the hayseeds in their hair.
The community feeling, of which I have already spoken, has doubtless been strengthened by the very fact that so many persons have thus loved Litchfield as a community rather than any par- ticular persons in it, or any particular locality in it. Our feeling of affection for it is rather a compound than a sum; we have the people, and the houses, and the elms, and the hills, but the result- ing feeling is related to these in the same way that the properties of a chemical compound are related to those of its constituents. No one can taste in salt the chlorine or the sodium that compose it. Now the fact that so many persons have always regarded Litchfield in the community sense must have had the effect of increasing and developing community feeling in its citizens. I believe that this feel- ing has been and is being transmitted to the younger generation and I see no reason why it should die out, though it may be modi- fied. It is quite evidently modified indeed by a factor that is changing the whole of modern life. I refer to the possibility of rapid transit by automobile. The motor has contracted our maps in the same proportion that it has extended our facilities. Comparing what the scientists call the hour curves of travel of a half century
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ago, with those of the present, we find that the time grade of our neighborhood has been completely altered since my boyhood. Then the first hour circle, for most of us, would have passed through . Bantam, about half way to Torrington, and a mile this side of East Litchfield. For those of us who had horses at command it would have lain somewhat further out. But to-day, how the lines have. sprung apart! The first hour line of the automobile mnay pass beyond New Milford on one side and two-thirds of the way to Hart- ford on the other. The second may lie partly outside the State.
The result of this state of things is that for the present gener- ation the environs of Litchfield have broadened out well over the State, overlapping and intermingling with those of many other cities and towns. We thought of Litchfield as our all; to them it is merely a center, a place from which to start and to which to return. Their knowledge of it is vastly more extensive than ours was; but ours was more intensive. They know how to get from Harwinton to Farmington; we knew how to walk across country to Prospect Mountain and the quickest way from Hollister's Bridge to Chestnut Hill. They know the broad topography of the coun- try in many counties, the lay of hill ranges, the valleys and streams; we knew every path, the stones in all the brooks, almost every tree, within a narrow radius of a few miles. I do not know that either knowledge is better than the other; each differs from the other, that is all.
Their Litchfield is not quite ours; but the change here is not objective, but subjective, though it has been brought about by a material factor, the invention of machinery for rapid transporta- tion. I see no reason why the extended Litchfield should bar out the intimate knowledge of immediate surroundings. In many cases it seems to have done so; in some few it has not, and I hope that its permanent effect will be to add to our opportunities, not simply to substitute one set for another.
In only one respect can I see that the old intimate and inten- sive knowledge of the country, of which I have spoken, has held its own. Our people, young and old, know the river well, between the Little Pond and the Lake. They know it better than we did. We went in row-boats from one pond to the other; they start with their flock of canoes from the canoe-house. Here is a sport into which speed cannot enter, and its continued popularity is a hope- ful sign. But elsewhere, as I have said, the Speed King sits on his throne.
It is in line with our community life that we have become "socialized" in many ways unknown to our ancestors. In my boy- hood, the churches were the chief social as well as religious organi- zations. Now we have clubs for old and young, and for both together. In my boyhood the ever present gang instinct showed itself in the formation of temporary groups, but these were unknown to our elders as well as unnoticed by them. A club to which old and young alike should belong would have been unthinkable; such
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clubs indeed were unheard of anywhere in our country in that day. Their advent is an indication that everywhere, and not in Litchfield alone, we are moving in this country toward a more coherent social organization. But the existence of bodies of the kind we now have in so small a community as ours, is evidence, it would seem, that this movement has gone further and struck in deeper in Litchfield than in other places.
The opinion has been expressed that the greatest change in Litchfield is a liberalization of thought and habit, a loosening of the bonds in religion and morals, a reaction in fact from Puritanism. This is perhaps true, but it is not peculiar to Litchfield, and if we take a broad enough view we need not attach supreme impor- tance to it. These things swing in cycles. There are always Puritans and always Cavaliers. Changes mean only that there is a slight shifting of majorities, whereby now one and now the other is in the ascendancy.
Possibly some may think that this attempt to tell of the changes in Litchfield has succeeded only in showing that it has changed very little, perhaps not at all. I shall not feel that I have failed altogether, even if this is the conclusion. Human nature is eternally the same, and its manifestations cannot vary greatly with the years. Whatever our changes have been, they are essentially human, and our lack of change is human also. Litchfielders will be men and women for many a year to come, and we may hope and expect that they will continue to be the type of men and women that have honored Litchfield in the past, the outcome of an honest and sturdy stock, shaped by an environment that they and their ancestors have loved, and that can never, we are proud to think, turn out an inferior product.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE WORLD WAR.
BY FLORENCE ELIZABETH ENNIS.
It is difficult to look back upon the past few years as a "period" in our history, the events are so recent that it seems only yester- day that we were doing as a matter of course, all the things here recorded, because our one thought was that "we must win the war". The sympathy of our town was so whole-heartedly with the Allies, that from the outbreak of the war in Europe in August, 1914, we felt that we were with them spiritually in the great struggle, and it was with a deep sense of relief that we took our place beside them in 1917.
The first evidence of our sympathy for the war victims was an appeal for funds, issued by the Litchfield Red Cross Chapter on August 13, 1914, which met with a generous response. The first relief work done in our town was started by Miss E. D. Bininger, who gathered together a group of women to make garments for the wounded Belgians.
On September 5, 1914, a very successful Lawn Fete was given for the benefit of the Red Cross at Kilravock Farm, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Louis A. Ripley. The fete was organized by Mrs. William Woodville Rockhill and her general committee, Mrs. John L. Buel and Mrs. Ripley. Mr. and Mrs. Rockhill had just returned to Litchfield to live, having lived abroad while Mr. Rockhill was in the diplomatic service.
The day of the fete was all that could be desired, and it was estimated that about 1,300 persons attended, many coming by auto- mobile from distant parts of the state. The diversions furnished by the committee were varied enough, to suit all tastes, and included a Gymkhana, a ball game (which Litchfield lost to Water- town), dancing, a baby show, fortune telling, a horse race, a shoot- ing gallery and lawn games. A special feature, which was much admired, was the charmingly arranged enclosure of the Garden Club, wherein were sold plants, flowers, seeds and garden imple- ments.
The Litchfield Enquirer issued a souvenir edition, in honor of the occasion, emblazoned with the Red Cross emblem, which was sold on the grounds. Many new members were secured for the Red Cross. The sum of $4,000 was sent to the Red Cross National Headquarters, $1,600 of which represented the proceeds of the fete, and the remainder donations.
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A second Lawn Fete was held a year later at Kilravock Farm, also for the benefit of the Red Cross, and was under the direction of Mrs. Ripley and Mrs. Gordon W. Burnham. Again our uncer- tain New England weather, which has been known to spoil the best laid plans, was on its good behavior. Besides booths for the sale of fancy articles, an excellent vaudeville performance was provided, the hit of the afternoon being a minstrel show, given by our leading citizens. A boxing match was a great attraction and was watched with absorbed attention by a surprising number of our Litchfield matrons. The Boy Scouts gave an exhibition and drill, and were as always of great assistance in many ways. A prize was awarded to the best couple in a dancing contest, and was presented by Mrs. E. H. Sothern (Julia Marlowe), our distinguished summer visitor. $1,500 was raised for the Red Cross.
During the summer of 1916, Miss Harriet C. Abbe organized regular sessions for the making of hospital garments and surgical dressings for the Allies. When Miss Abbe left in the fall for her winter home, this work was taken over by the Litchfield Chapter of the Red Cross, under the direction of Mrs. Charles H. Coit, who served as chairman of the Production Committee from this time until June, 1919.
As the Litchfield Chapter has, like so many institutions in our town, so long and honorable a career behind it, it is necessary here to go back and briefly outline its history up to 1914. Organized in May, 1898, as Red Cross Auxiliary No. 16, our Chapter has the distinction of being the oldest Red Cross organization in Con- necticut.
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