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GENEALOGY COLLECTION
А. 1. артист
1999.
vides.
١
BICENTENNIAL LIMITED EDITION Limited to 1000 copies
No.
444
VIEW OF STOCKBRIDGE DRAWN ON THE WALL OF CHERRY COTTAGE BY HARRY HOPKINS IN 1830
STOCKBRIDGE ,
Mass.
I739 - 1939
A CHRONICLE
BY
Sarah Cabot Sedgwick AND Christina Sedgwick Marquand
FOREWORD BY RACHEL FIELD
1939
COPYRIGHT, 1939 BY SARAH CABOT SEDGWICK AND CHRISTINA SEDGWICK MARQUAND
ENGRAVINGS BY THE JAMES MCKINNON COMPANY SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS MAP BY JAMES L. SINCLAIR
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE BERKSHIRE COURIER GREAT BARRINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS
1207846
To, The Town of Stockbridge this book is affectionately dedicated
Sauthem -$5.00
1
Acknowledgments
A GREAT deal of the material for this book has been gathered from personal reminiscences, papers and letters, and we wish to express our gratitude for the help which has been so liberally given us. Mr. Chester Averill lent us excerpts copied from the Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay; The Reverend Albert R. Brown put at our disposal papers relating to the Congrega- tional Church; Mrs. Raymond L. Buell made accessible the R. H. W. Dwight collection of historical papers at her house in Richmond; Miss Mabel Choate lent papers relating to John Sergeant; Mrs. J. H. Denison allowed us to quote from Esther Burr's journal in her husband's unpublished manu- script, entitled Abigail Williams and Early Stockbridge; Mr. David Dudley Field lent an account of the life of his father, Stephen Dudley Field; Mr. David Milton Jones, papers on Curtisville; Miss Elizabeth G. Norton of Boston, the unpub- lished recollections of Anne Ashburner. Mr. Henry Dwight Sedgwick and The Reverend Theodore Sedgwick and Mrs. Charles Stuart Wilson wrote personal reminiscences, and Mr. Carl Wurtzbach of Lee allowed us to use two papers he had written on Curtisville.
In addition, anecdotes and contributions have been grate- fully received from Mrs. Charles Bidwell, Mr. Edward M. Church, Mr. Frank Crowninshield, Mr. Frank Farrell, Miss Daisy French, Mrs. George de Gersdorff, Mrs. Charles E. Hull, Miss Florence M. Jones, Miss Helen Kobbé, The Rev- erend Edmund R. Laine, Miss Anna C. Lufburrow, Mrs. Augustus H. Lukeman, Mrs. John C. Lynch, Mr. Arthur C.
STOCKBRIDGE
Monroe, Mrs. John P. Palmer, Mr. Walter E. Patterson, Mrs. Carter Richardson, Miss Alice Riggs, Mrs. Ella Edwards Rogers, Mrs. William Scoville, Miss Gertrude Robinson- Smith, Mrs. H. C. Stanton, and Mr. Allen T. Treadway.
Mr. A. M. Costello photographed the Harry Hopkins drawing fifty years ago and retouched it for inclusion in this book. Mr. Karl M. Foster generously contributed his time and skill in preparing all the old photographs used and in taking the new ones.
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur N. Bartlett at the Mission House, and Miss Rosalie Ellis and Mrs. Graham D. Wilcox at the Stock- bridge Library have been unfailingly kind and helpful.
Finally, we wish especially to thank Miss Nancy Osborne for acting as our publisher. Her tireless industry and patience have made it possible to have the history ready in time for the Bicentennial Celebration of the town.
THE AUTHORS.
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD .
xiii
I. THE MISSION 1
II. THE INDIAN TOWN
25
III. THE WILLIAMS RING
49
IV. JONATHAN EDWARDS
72
.
V. THE GROWTH OF THE ENGLISH TOWN 98
VI. THE REVOLUTION 125
VII. SHAYS' REBELLION
150
VIII. THE FEDERALIST PERIOD
166
.
IX. GOING OUT INTO THE WORLD
182
.
X.
THE VILLAGE BECOMES LITERARY
·
205
XI. THE VILLAGE EXPANDS
225
XII. THE RESORT 237
EPILOGUE
264
.
NOTES
.
283
BIBLIOGRAPHY
.
·
293
INDEX
·
301
List of Illustrations
MAP
A VIEW OF STOCKBRIDGE IN 1830
. Endpaper
Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
14
JOHN SERGEANT
THE MISSION HOUSE
.
32
GLENDALE WOOLEN MILLS
·
152
THE FIELD BROTHERS
.
196
CATHERINE SEDGWICK
·
212
THE VILLAGE STREET
·
246
THE BERKSHIRE PLAYHOUSE
.
·
276
1
Foreword
I T is impossible for me to write with maturity of Stockbridge, for I knew it only through the eyes of a child. By the same token it is difficult to be impersonal about a place that was a complete world in itself for the first ten years of my life. It bears no relationship to other places, though even then I knew that such did exist. In time I came to accept that fact, always however with a certain resentment. There was New York City, for instance, which was apparently bigger than Pittsfield; there was the Mississippi River that dared to compete with the Housatonic, and Mt. Blanc and Pike's Peak that wore snow caps all the year round, not just in winter like Monument Mountain. But for all that, Stockbridge and the Universe were synonymous to one of its least important inhabitants in those early years of the 1900's.
To a child, Berkshire seasons were like a clock where every subtle shifting of light and shade, of budding or reddening leaf, every note of fall cricket or summer thrush, marked the passing of time as plainly as the movement of pointing hour and. minute hands. Unconsciously even today I reckon the seasons according to their arrival in Stockbridge, not as they have come to other places where I have since lived.
It was winter not so much when the first snow fell as when the Red Lion Inn put up its shutters, after the departure of the last city visitor, and the isinglass-eyes of the big iron stoves in the station and Van Deusen's store began to glow again. It would be Thanksgiving, we knew, when the shallow pools in the river meadows below the Indian Burying Ground had ice
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STOCKBRIDGE
solid enough for skating. Christmas meant snow, of course, and Saturday excursion to woods outside town limits where we gathered ground pine to make wreaths and holiday fes- toons. Our mittens were frozen stiff from snowy burrowing as we bore home our greens in the dark of those shortest days of the year. Miss Wells lighted the library lamps early then and their yellow oblongs welcomed us at the corner where the watering trough was a white gothic of icicles. But that was only the prelude to Christmas Eve and the carol service at Saint Paul's Church with Dr. Lawrence stepping down from the chancel to hand out gifts of his own choosing. We could never quite live up to his annual pleas that the candy wrap- pings should remain intact until the service was over. So peppermint sticks, ground pine garlands and evergreen trees always mingled their scents and became forever linked with the frankincense and myrrh of the Wise Men in Bethlehem before we rustled to our feet for the last carol. Then the squeak of sleigh runners, the frosty-clearness of bells, and snow crunching under our feet as we clutched our presents and started home with the long, stained-glass windows still bright behind us. Yes, those were Christmas Eves.
Sunrise Prayer Meeting on the first morning of January stands out as another important event. I can just remember the famous one when the century came in. First, the strangeness of being wakened in the pitch dark and then the setting off with lanterns in below-zero cold to meet something of breath-taking significance that went by the name of 1900. We whispered as we climbed the stairs to an upper hall and sat on easily collapsible chairs waiting for the town to gather. All the familiar sounds of winter were outside: trees creaking with cold and sleighs that squeaked and jingled as they drove up; and inside there was that no less wintry sound in that zip- perless era-the clank-clank of loosened goloshes' buckles as
xiv
FOREWORD
people filed in. All the important men in town and a few of the hardier women arose and said a few words about the new century. But only Mr. Alexander Sedgwick dared to confess in public that he had come breakfastless to do honor to the New Year. After we had prayed and sung it in in proper fashion, there followed such an orgy of handshaking that I can recall only the problem of rescuing my own goloshes from under chairs and at the same time keeping my right hand free to be wrung by larger hands reached down to me from every direction.
Others of my generation must have known the same long winter evenings by open fires or Franklin stoves with kerosene lamplight soft on the table and the rest of the room shadowy and chill. They must have known those incredible mornings after a night of sleet when icy trees in the sun could put Christmas tinsel to shame. They must have known, as I did, the wonder of County Fair and Cattle Show, and have felt the same excited responsibility of going for the mail. I can see the postmistress's fingers yet as they slipped letters and papers into the little numbered boxes. Did others know, I wonder, where the clumps of pink lady slippers made their appearance in a patch of pine woods whose secret we guarded? Did they also stand incredulous before the miracle of those migrant fringed gentians that for several autumns turned a bit of swampland by the South Lee road into pure indigo?
March was a test of skill in navigation whenever we crossed the village street and that was the time the willows by the Housatonic stood in sheets of quicksilver. Their branches took on a pinkish tinge that would change to yellow by April Fool's Day when we concocted delicious looking candies stuffed with cotton batting to be brought for recess at Miss Brewer's and Miss Byington's school. And then there were May baskets to be filled with early offerings of hepatica and
XV
STOCKBRIDGE
violets or with the rare white and rosy stars of arbutus that hid under damp leaves in a remote clearing Bear Moun- tain way. We felt it a personal calamity if springs were tardy and the plentiful and unfailing bluets had to do duty instead.
Lilacs, of course, belonged to Memorial Day. It has always seemed, because of Stockbridge, a little forward of them to blossom two and even three weeks before that time in other places. Apple trees were in full bloom then, too, and usually falling in delicate showers as the little company of old men in blue and townspeople followed a fife and drum to the ceme- tery. The cemetery was a beautiful spot and I am glad now that no one thought it queer for children to play there as we so often did. We knew all the different family plots and had our favorites among the headstones, though the dog's statue in the Sedgwick lot was the one we loved best. He was, and still is, as real to me as our own fox terrier and the neighbors' dogs we greeted by name each day.
In those days when summer came in like a green and over- whelming tide of leaf and bloom, the Inn opened its doors wide to the summer visitors who usually returned season after season. Occasionally, too, there were couples who appeared to stroll about hand in hand in obviously new and stylish clothes. These were apt to be brides and grooms and they lent romance to the scene. Sometimes they asked the way of us and we volunteered not only to guide but to show them what we considered the points of interest of the town. There would be coaching parties, too, in summer, on the way to or from Lenox and it was a sight to see these sporting travelers alighting from the high seats to have lunch at the Inn. The call of the tally-ho horn used to sound like Tennyson's Blow, Bugle, Blow, to us as we heard its flourish in the distance and saw the coach appear or disappear in a cloud of dust.
xvi
FOREWORD
Yet there was another warning sound that heralded a far less popular dust cloud. This was the first automobile that I recall personally. It was always referred to as The White Terror and we children were warned to flee it as our forebears were warned of Satan himself. People swore and shook their fists at it, and if it were rumored to be "at large" our mothers debating the hazard of meeting it on the Lenox road. The owner of The White Terror had a summer place on that road and it was unfortunate because visitors must always be driven to Lenox and it took the better part of an afternoon to go there and return. Tom Carey who kept the Stockbridge livery stable learned to be almost psychic about the automo- bile's whereabouts and people trusted their lives to him and his horses even with such a menace in the offing.
Summer, it seems to me now, ended officially with the Laurel Hill Association Meeting in the grove behind the schoolhouse. We scanned the weather for days in advance and hoped the skies would be fair because if rain fell the meeting would be held in the Casino and there would be no room for children in its glories. For days beforehand, too, sandwiches and cakes were in preparation for the tea that fol- lowed the speeches. I can feel the hardness of those impro- vised benches yet, and how hot the sun felt as it shifted through the trees in the clearing, now on our backs, now in our eyes. But we never thought of this as an inconvenience and neither did the speakers who came from Boston and New York and Washington and even from London to talk in Laurel Hill about the Village Improvement Society. They all said the same thing in different words-that there was no place in the world like Stockbridge. We, of course, knew that already, but we counted on hearing it each year and I cannot remember that we were ever disappointed.
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It was a truly great occasion, next to the Torch Light Parade in my mind. Nothing quite equaled that for com- motion and color. I am uncertain of its origin and I do not know if it has survived, but then it came with turning leaves and the first frosts of fall. On the chosen night all the young and agile dressed in costume. The street was alive with gypsies, peasants, Indians and pirates and they formed a long procession that disappeared into the woods and on into the mysterious depths of Ice Glen. The torches made glorious flares and the familiar features of neighbors took on strange- ness in that pulsating light. I was considered too small to join the revelers. Only the sure-footed were encouraged to explore those caves, but once I was allowed to stay up and see the return and the dance round a tremendous bonfire. I watched fascinated, feeling vaguely awed and excited as if I were witnessing some pagan rite, so old that no one could remember its reason for being or why the heart must respond with quickened, instinctive clamor.
Did red-skinned King Konkapot hand it down as some wild legacy to his white friends and neighbors, I wonder? Did Jonathan Edwards forget his preoccupation with the affairs of the soul to take part in it with his sons and daughters? Did other generations of Dwights and Sedgwicks, of Cannings and Williamses and Fields join hands around other such bonfires? Did Fanny Kemble, perhaps catch up the folds of her riding- habit, the better to dance there, and did Hawthorne and Mel- ville on their brief sojourns watch and remember it, as I am remembering now?
A quarter of a century, with a decade added, is a long stretch to span in the life of a person, though not so much in the life of a town. If these fragments that I have set down seem random and insignificant it is because we can never account for the memories that we pull out of the mind's xviii
FOREWORD
clutter much as New England housewives used to turn out the contents of their piece bags. Sometimes a bright bit of cloth will recall the lost pattern of which a forgotten garment was made. And sometimes only the unrelated snippet remains in the hand. The whistle of an evening train from New York, a train that I had heard was bringing Joseph H. Choate from his years at the Court of St. James's home to Stockbridge and the house on the Hill-that is no more vivid than the call of the oriole that returned each spring to nest in our plum tree. These are the stuff of which memories are made, and so I set them down for others who know and cherish the same scene to match them as they will.
RACHEL FIELD
=
xix
STOCKBRIDGE
Chapter I
THE MISSION
I N the autumn of the year 1734, the Berkshire Hills, dressed in their gaudiest and most pagan garb, looked down upon a curious scene. In front of a large wigwam, by the wind- ing Housatonic river, stood a group of about twenty Indians. Ragged-looking, but brave in paint and feathers, they har- monized with their background and contrasted with the sober black and white of two earnest-browed ministers, who were engaged in conversation with the only Indian present who could speak English. The two chiefs of the tribe, Konkapot and Umpachene, were standing by, grave and uncompre- hending, as the Reverend Nehemiah Bull of Westfield, and John Sergeant, a young tutor from Yale College, were examin- ing this Indian on his knowledge of the Christian faith. They explained that his name was to be Ebenezer. He dramati- cally declared that he would like to have the rites of baptism administered immediately and that his faith in Christ was such that he would rather burn in the fire than forsake the truth. Parrot-fashion, he repeated the profession of faith:
"Through the goodness of God towards me, in bringing me into the way of the knowledge of the Gospel, I am convinc'd of the truth of the Christian religion, and that it is the only way to salvation and happiness. I therefore freely and heartily forsake heathenish darkness, and embrace the light of the Gospel and the way of Holiness, and do now, in the presence of Almighty God, the searcher of Hearts, and before
2
STOCKBRIDGE
many witnesses, seriously and solemnly take the Lord Jehovah to be my God and Portion, Jesus Christ his Son to be my Lord Redeemer, and the Holy Ghost to be my Sanctifier and Teacher."
To Konkapot, a man of stalwart character but limited brain power, it seemed obvious that these kindly Englishmen must worship the same Great Spirit that the Indians knew, although the form of their religion was somewhat different. There was no ritual. No wampum was passed, and no sac- rifice was offered, but to his simple mind the idea was clearly the same. He invited his visitors to climb over the mountain a few days later to the Great Meadow where he lived, and where Indians and Englishmen together would offer a deer to the Supreme Being. Ebenezer, acting as interpreter, would explain the ceremony.
Accordingly they set out, Ebenezer leading the way over the faintly marked trail. As they rested a moment upon the summit of the mountain, Sergeant noticed a large heap of stones on which Ebenezer was carefully placing another. He explained that this was their custom, which had been handed down from father to son through the ages. It was an expres- sion of their gratitude to the Great Spirit for preserving them to look down upon the valley again. Sergeant gazed upon the future scene of his labors and, although his mind was not primarily occupied with the beauties of nature, and he thought the Indian custom a barbaric one, perhaps he acknowledged to himself that there was some justification for it. The mountains-hills they were by measurement but they had the bold outline of mountains-stood protectively above the Indian community that lay below them, seeming to guard it from intrusion. Nature had apportioned the village on three levels that rose in steps, one above the other: the first, a plateau of broad meadows that followed the capricious windings of the Housatonic River; the second, a plain termi-
3
THE MISSION
nated at its eastern end by a laurel-covered hill; and a third, a hill that formed the northern boundary of the settlement. Indian wigwams were scattered over hill and plain, not grouped as an Englishman would expect. The smoke rose from a single isolated wigwam, as if the Indians valued privacy.
Konkapot, who lived down by the river, had a neighbor, so Ebenezer told Sergeant, who had shared the rich intervale with him for many years. This was a Dutchman, a trader named Jehoiakim Van Valkenburgh, one of the first white men to dwell in the valley. He lived on the most friendly terms with Konkapot and the others, carrying on a profitable trade and occasionally acting as their interpreter to the English. His was a simple and practical attitude toward the Indians, Sergeant was to learn later. He interfered in no way with their customs, their way of living, or their religion, but drove the sharpest possible bargain with them and, with liberal applications of rum, quieted any objections they might have to being cheated.
As they walked down from the white-cliffed mountain on which they had been standing, Ebenezer, slipping into a reminiscent vein, told Sergeant many things which the indians had always believed to be true. Childish and ridicu- lous fables, Sergeant called them later in his journal, but they were an ancient and integral part of the Indian inheritance and would be hard to uproot.
Ebenezer told him of the seven stars that were seven good Indians translated to heaven in a dance. The stars in Charles's Wain, on the other hand, were Indians hunting a bear. All spring and summer they chased it, and wounded it in the autumn, and that was why the leaves turned red. By winter, they killed it, and the snow was its fat. This melted with the coming of spring and turned into the sap of the trees.
4
STOCKBRIDGE
Once there had been a prophet among them. He had descended from the sky fully equipped with snowshoes, the first they had ever seen. Striding over the countryside, he had cleared the land of monsters. He had married a human wife who bore him two mortal children. One day when he was praying with a child on each knee, he was suddenly, in a wonderful manner, raised from the ground. Just as he was about to disappear through the top of the wigwam, he paused, a child still on each knee. The Indians begged him to leave them one child to remember him by. So as the prophet con- tinued his upward flight, his half-mortal child floated down to them, a token of his favor.
Questioned more specifically about the Indians' religious beliefs, Ebenezer was vague. Some believed God to be the sun; some that the sun was the habitation of God; others were professed atheists, believing that all things began, continued and ceased, according to the laws of their natures without any direction from an outside power.
Sergeant and Bull were received by the tribe at Konkapot's wigwam, situated by a little brook just south of the river. Van Valkenburgh was there and viewed the Englishmen with suspicion. He knew their purpose in coming over the hills into this sanctuary of the red man and, unlike the simple Konkapot, he had no illusions as to their reception of the ceremony about to take place. The offering of the deer was made with Sergeant and Bull sitting with the Indians in a semi-circle around the priest.
After the deer had been cut up according to an elaborate ritual, it was placed upon a strip of bark in the middle of the wigwam, with the skin arranged over it to make it look like a whole deer. Then the priest hallooed to God to attract his attention and spoke this prayer: "O great God, pity us, grant us food to eat, afford us good and comfortable sleep, preserve us from being devoured by the fowls that fly in the air. This
5
THE MISSION
deer is given in token that we acknowledge thee the giver of all things." Then wampum was passed, the deer was boiled, and everyone ate a piece, except the priest. The skin and feet, and some of the organs, were given to an old widow- woman, an act of charity that was part of the ceremony. They told Sergeant that the man who had come down from Heaven on snowshoes had taught them these things. Of course Ser- geant explained to them that this sort of ceremony was not consistent with the true faith and such practices were actually offensive to God.
A hundred years before they would not have listened to him. Strong in numbers, owners of a vast territory, they could then afford to ignore the white man, his ways and his beliefs. Now they had fallen upon evil days. The great Mahican tribe was a pitifully depleted group-perhaps thirty families in all-scattered along the banks of the Housatonic. The tribe was a branch of the Algonquins and the Indian name is Muh-he-ka-neew, which means "the people of the ever-flowing waters," because at the height of their glory their principal home had been on the banks of the Hudson River. In those far-off days when the tribe could muster 1,000 fight- ing men, the Housatonic country had been only their hunting ground, visited at certain seasons of the year. Their posses- sions, extending from the Hudson River to the Connecticut Valley, reached north of Lake George and Lake Champlain. All through the seventeenth century, however, they had been greatly reduced in numbers and property by a long and mur- derous war with their hereditary enemies, the Mohawks, who, in forming the confederation known as the Six Nations, which included the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, the Tus- caroras, and the Senecas, had proved an invincible foe. By 1680 the Mahicans had been entirely driven from the west bank of the Hudson River. From the east bank of the Hud- son, they found themselves gradually crowded out by the
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