USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > West Springfield > Account of the centennial celebration of the town of West Springfield, Mass. : Wednesday, March 25th, 1874 : with the historical address of Thomas E. Vermilye the poem of Mrs. Ellen P. Champion, and other facts and speeches > Part 4
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For nearly three quarters of a century, the town experienced few changes. The people met on the Sabbath in devout wor- ship, and at stated times to transact parochial and town busi- ness, and elect delegates to the General Court and to Congress. And thus, and in industrial pursuits, the years flowed on. The grave-yards gathered the generations into their silent domains, and sons took the places of their sires. It was so in part. But
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from a desire to escape the quietude and plunge into more ex- citing scenes ; from natural ambition to better their circum- stances, and still more from that restless spirit which has impelled the race onward and still onward, to cover the whole continent and possess its wealth, the young men very com- monly left the old homes, to people the receding West. Yet it was not a "sleepy hollow," where life was sunk in lethargy. They were intelligent as well as industrious, and kept informed of what was going on in the world. There was an unusual number of college-bred men here in my day, and I doubt whether any community of the size, was more regardful of the education of the young, or sent to the colleges more young men than West Springfield ; the lists comprising many of different professions, and the record of the town in this respect being most honorable.
Within the last twenty-five or thirty years, however, the state of things has greatly altered. Although the soil was adapted to farming, there were, all over the surrounding region, and within the town itself, vast capabilities for manufacturing purposes, which have been utilized, and have wrought extensive changes, not only in the occupations and habits of the people, but to a large degree also in the appearance of the town and the sur- rounding country. Springfield, nearly up to 1840, had the char- acter of a pleasant inland country town of quite moderate size, chiefly occupying a district of perhaps a quarter of a mile, or a little more in circuit, from the first meeting-house as the centre. A few stores on the main street were frequented by the inhabi- tants, and the people from the country. There were two churches so far as my recollection goes, possibly three, some very sightly dwellings on the hills, Ames' Paper Factory, the Armory, probably one quarter of its present extent, and there were less than 10,000 inhabitants. The principal hotel was at the corner of Main and Court streets, whence stages started at set times up and down the river, and east and west, delivering their
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passengers, wearied and worn, at Albany or Boston, in, it may be, twenty hours. I have left West Springfield at midnight, to take the morning boat at Hartford for New York, arriving there in the evening, with great boasting at the wonderfully rapid transit from Springfield to New York in a day. But how has Springfield enlarged the place of her tent, and stretched abroad the curtains of her habitations. It has now a popula- tion, I suppose, of about 30,000, churches numerous and costly, elegant residences and capacious stores of all kinds, a fine pub- lic library, several able and influential newspapers, long ranges of streets, alive with busy crowds; is the radiating centre of railroads, north and south, and east and west, over which are annually carried millions of freight, and myriads of travelers, showing in a very striking manner the material prosperity, and the moving, bustling energy of American life.
Cabot was a small village, now the seat of large factories, and the home of a large manufacturing community. And so of the Hadleys.
But on this western side the progress has not been less sur -. prising. Holyoke, formerly the Ireland Parish, at the north end of the town, has, within a year, become a manufacturing city, with 14,000 inhabitants, and its valuation has increased from $2,374,566 in 1863, to $8,578,192 in 1873. Mills and machine shops are various and very extensive. Its water works from Ash- ley's pond cost $250,000 ; its free bridge nearly $150,000. It has nine churches, eleven school-houses, and land has risen in some localities over 200 per cent. in five years. About 7,000,000 of pressed brick are made there annually.
At the north end of modern West Springfield, Mr. Clark has a flourishing carriage factory, which reminds me to say, that the first wagon known in the town, was without springs, and owned in Amostown. Whoever has suffered by such a conveyance over a rough road, and then has tried Mr. Clark's carriage, and then a drawing-room car over a smooth rail, must be well
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drilled in the degrees of comparison : positive, misery; compar- ative, comfort; superlative, enjoyment. Yet the primitive method of going to meeting on horseback, the women on a pil- lion, could hardly have equaled the springless wagon in comfort.
The water power of the Agawam has also been turned to good account. Mittineaque, begun in 1844, contains 900 inhab- itants, being one-third of the whole town, a Congregational and a Catholic church, and four large schools, a cotton mill, employ- ing about 300 hands, three paper mills, manufacturing in the aggregate five tons daily ; all grown up on the spot, which, in my time was as wild and unreclaimed as when the savage , hunted its forests, or shot his canoe across its waters. Mr. Sewall White, who overflowed with curious and antique lore, was accustomed to relate a tale, not all invented, probably, but received by the early settlers from current tradition ; a legend of Indian love which had its seat at Mittineaque. Names and minute circumstances have perished in the lapse of years. But diverse forms of life are really not so opposite, that we cannot in one condition often picture to ourselves the realities of an- other. We may conceive the Indian beauty, the pride of her village, and the Indian brave, her favored suitor, and follow out a story which needs no vivid imagination to fill up its details of love and plighted faith ; of joys and fears ; of desertion and jeal- ousy ; of frantic passion and wild despair; the " swift waters " at Mittineaque closing at last over the broken-hearted pagan maiden. We do not often recall to our thoughts the truth, that this whole continent had been the theatre, upon which, ere yet the white man came, great nations flourished, and the drama of life was enacted in its twofold forms, both tragedy and comedy ; that here were homes in which the affections and sympathies of human hearts, warm and tender as our own, conjugal and pater- nal and filial love and duty played their part; and that here also, human passions dwelt in savage breasts, and were excited to deeds of grandeur or horror ; to heroism and self-sacrifice; to
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treachery and blood. The ground on which we tread covers a whole people, once numerous and mighty, of whom scarce a vestige remains. Sometimes the names imprinted on the soil remind us that they were here ; and tradition, fast fading into mist, tells what they were, and obscurely what they thought, and what they did. The air seems full of voices of the past ; of ro- mance unstoried ; histories untold ; and poetry unsung. Stream- lets and groves were often the seats of a mythology as beautiful and imaginative as that of Greece, and the deep forests, of a su- perstition as stern and cruel as that of the Druids. And many a spot over which we heedlessly wander, has been the scene of sweet home-bred joys, or Spartan fortitude, or more than Ro- man courage. And many also, could the earth give up her se- cret of fearful crimes, of desolated homes and crushed happiness. But it was all human still. And there was a religion too. The Great Spirit implied the idea of a God ; the Northern Dancers, immortality ; the great hunting ground, a conscious, active being beyond the grave ; all, no doubt, the shattered fragments of some very ancient tradition brought away, probably, from the early seats of the human family. Could the red man have held the pen, what narratives could he have given of life enacted on this very soil, to show how human nature is evermore the same in its elements, and how truth is stranger than fiction. But the Indian is dispossessed, and from the homes of his tribes, and the graves of his fathers, he pursues his weary journey to the set- ting sun. Soon he will have disappeared forever from the con- tinent that once was his ; and no historian or poet of his own will ever write his story, or chant the funeral dirge of his race. We give our version, not always perhaps the truth, and the term savage is made to mean, whatever is faithless or ferocious among men. But have you ever read a tale of savage barbar- ity that could not instantly be matched by one of civilized and self-styled Christian men, against their Christian brothers ? often, too, under the mask of religion. And oh ! how long and fearful
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the catalogue of wrongs of civilized men against the poor In- dian.
But while we thus expend our sympathies, we may be re- minded that the Indian was but a modern compared with na- tions, the monuments of whose civilization and power excite our wonder and baffle our curiosity. All over the continent, but especially through its central regions, their works remain more skillful and imperishable than any the red men have left, and bearing evidence of a higher degree of cultivation. But when and whence they came, and who and what they were, and how they perished, what oracle will proclaim ? How strange that in this newly discovered and virgin world we are walking amidst the tombs of many ages, and successive races of men, who here grew great and built cities and have left evidences of military art to prove their title to man's warlike passion, and their Babel towers are ruins, and the builders have made them- selves no name to be remembered. Truly " Man is like to vanity." Over this vast tomb is written, " Generation goeth and generation cometh."
The glance we have taken at the changes which have oc- curred in this town, during the few past years, is full of inter- est. In place of the one church, we find eighteen or twenty, meaning, as we hope, that religion has kept pace with the ad- vancement in other respects. The population has increased, in the last half of the century, six or seven fold. Three free bridges and two railroad bridges span the river in place of one then within the limits of the town; and all around this rural centre, the throngs of operatives, and the roar of machinery, and the bales of merchandise, and these but a small portion of what the whole State produces, seem to say that New England will soon rival Old England in various fabrics, as Pennsylvania threatens to do with iron. But education in this favored region has advanced in like proportion. Round Hill at Northampton, the Female Academy at South Hadley, the Academies at East 7
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Hampton, Westfield, Wilbraham, and Amherst College, all in this vicinity, and all created within the present century, in ad- dition to a full supply of district schools, show the value the people set on education, and that of the higher order. This, and their Puritan principles, have given them their pre-emi- nence. We can with difficulty estimate the advancement in books, apparatus, school accommodations and modes of instruc- tion at the present day, over the very limited means of educa- tion fifty, or even twenty-five years ago. And the discoveries and improvements, particularly in Natural Science, are literally immeasurable. Boys and girls at primary schools are now in- ducted into learning that was unknown when their grandsires were at college.
And if we raise our eyes from this immediate vicinity, to survey the whole country, what wonders fill our minds. From a narrow strip on the Atlantic coast, the population has spread in fifty years to the base of the Rocky Mountains, filling all the intermediate space with States, many of them larger than sev- eral kingdoms of the Old World. They have over-leaped the mountains and poured down the declivities on the west, plant- ing Cities and States on the Pacific shore, and carrying there the principles, the institutions, and the religious conscience, also, which characterized the early colonists in America.
And if, with wider view, we take in the civilized world, we find that the whole has been in motion. In inventions and discov- eries affecting almost all departments of industry ; in conse- quent improvement in the conditions of social life ; in political changes that promote the true ends of government, and the well-being of the masses of the people ; in the introduction of high moral and religious principles into public acts ; in thus urging on the race in the path of true progress, the last hun- dred years have been, probably, the most efficient of all the ages of recorded time. With Galileo we may exclaim,“ But it does move!" And let us not overlook the fact that in this
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progress, the idea of right and of duty, in place of mere will and brute force, has been gaining ground. It was consicence ; the feeling of obligation to their own conscience and to God : it was Luther's " Here I stand : God help me : I can do no other- wise," that filled and exalted the souls of the Puritans in Eng- and, the Huguenots in France, the Covenanters in Scotland, to brave all consequences in the maintenance of what they felt to be right. That conscientiousness planted these wastes with re- ligious men, and they have carried it over the continent and have spoken its lesson to other lands. The assertion of principle wrought out our independence. It was to establish justice. And let me add, duty to God and to humanity roused the spirit and stiffened the sinewy arm of the nation in our late civil con- flict, to uphold our free constitution, and wipe out forever and for- ever the stain and the curse of African slavery. I think this idea of conscientious duty runs through our whole history. Plymouth Rock ; the monumental granite on Bunker's Hill ; the soldiers' monuments in every town, and that beautiful memorial tablet you have so fittingly placed at the entrance of this hall, to com- memorate your sons given up at the call of duty, all proclaim that the Puritan principle and spirit have not yet died out.
But strange contradictions appear in human societies. Israel, God's chosen people, was selected from among the nations as the repository of the doctrine of the Divine Unity. Yet their prevailing sin, until the Babylonish captivity, was idolatry. The United States were committed to the doctrine of universal freedom and equal rights for all men. It was the boasted land of liberty. But nowhere, certainly in modern times, was slav- ery so widely spread and so deadly. I believe God appointed this as the theatre, and brought the two principles face to face, that here the battle might be fought out and the victory pro- claimed for all future times and places. And I ever thought the . evil was so inveterate that it must end in convulsions and blood. The issue came, and has been settled in our day. When the
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thunders and lightnings of war ceased, a voice came out from the throne saying, " IT IS DONE." Slavery is ended. This op- probrium is removed henceforth from this fair continent, and it will disappear, in due time and speedily, from all civilized States, in marked reversal of the practices of all former ages and modes of social and political life.
And to America also the honor falls of having under very irritating circumstances, reduced to practical use the Christian idea of international arbitration ; reason and right in the settle- ment of national disputes, in the place of senseless and passion- ate war. It is a fitting prayer for our nation ; evermore let principle and conscience assert their supremacy in all our affairs ; let this idea be ingrafted into the fixed sentiments of the people, that reason is better than violence, justice is always politic, that truth is great and will prevail. And this prayer should be re- duced to a settled purpose, universal in its application ; including all classes of men and all kinds of evil. The broad and mas- sive foundation of our whole national superstructure should be righteousness ; then will become manifest to mankind the reason of the being of this republic in the course of human events. The training of the Fathers, under the hard rule of despotism, civil and ecclesiastical ; their guidance to this land ; their settlement; the revolution; our civil war, and by that means the extinction of slavery ; will be seen to have been so many steps by which our nation became prepared to take its peculiar place and speak with high authority of liberty and of justice in the counsels of mankind. Thus events will " Vin- dicate eternal providence, and justify the ways of God to man."
Here, then, we close our review of the settlement of West Springfield and of the past hundred years of the town. It has been a time of great commotion; and the changes wrought have not been superficial merely, but have reached the founda- tion of the religious, social and political fabric. Our entire civil polity has been changed ; and with the perfect freedom of action
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now enjoyed, with the path of advancement in various directions opened to the generous ambition of all classes, and with in- creasing wealth and ease, the sentiments and habits of the peo- ple are likely also to undergo great modifications. The character of the generations that are to come after us, will feel these in- fluences even more than we have done. It is to be developed under other conditions than those which existed in the retired life and simple occupations of the Fathers ; and the result must be contemplated with solicitude by every Christian patriot and every lover of his race. Will they escape the danger of a low, material civilization ? The Fathers served their generations by the will of God, and are fallen asleep. But their life-work re- mains. Their just thoughts, their religious spirit, their energy and enterprise infused themselves into the young blood of the nation, and their memorial appears in the noble institutions under which we live. Thus far, these institutions have been preserved against trials not a few nor small. They stand, at this day, in a more hopeful condition, in some respects, than at any preceding period ; more free from inward contrarieties and outward dangers ; better poised on their foundations, and more authoritative before the world. Shall it continue thus? We read the past. The record of a century of struggles and suc- cesses, is open before us, and we thank God and take courage. But the future is always uncertain. What eye can pierce the obscurity ? what prophetic mind can forecast the events of a century to come? That they will be as momentous in their in- fluence upon the progress of mankind as any that have ever occurred, I fully believe. We have not yet reached the prom- ised land. But we are acting in one of the grand revolu- tions of time. We are hasting in providence, as I think, to a new order of things, of which only divine prophecy gives us a glimpse. Nor can we fail to ask with anxiety what shall be the place and position of our beloved country in that coming age ? And we may answer with confidence, that if the princi-
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ples which animated the first settlers, if the spirit that was in them be maintained ; if the God they obeyed be revered ; if our children love truth and justice, and practice moderation, amidst the affluence of their advantages, all will be well. Our Republic will then march in the van of the nations, going on to a higher, purer, and altogether a better civilization than any the world has yet known. The bright vision that dawns on our fancy will have become reality ; our hopes will have passed into fruition ; our children will be living amidst the splendor of the golden age of promise, enjoying the blessings the Bible foretells. The days of ignorance, and injustice, and vice, and misrule, and convulsions, and wars will have gone, to be succeeded by pros- perity and gladness
"Such as earth saw never," " Such as heaven stoops down to see."
" Shall old acquaintance be forgot ?" was then sung with ex- cellent effect ; prayer was offered by Rev. Dr. Ashbel Vermilye of Schenectady, N. Y .; the long meter doxology rang out grandly in the solemn strains of " Old Hundred," and the bene- diction, by the orator of the day, concluded the exercises in the hall.
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RICHARDS DER
THE FIRST TOWN HALL. BUILT IN 1820.
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THE CENTENNIAL DINNER.
FOLLOWING the hall exercises came the glad news of dinner in the school-room below. The space being limited, only 190 found places at the table, but enough crowded in afterward to make locomotion almost impossible. Col. Aaron Bagg appro- priately presided here, as he did in the hall above. Rev. E. B. Clark, of Chicopee, invoked the Divine blessing on the prepared food. The feast ended, the Band played, and the President of the day announced the first regular toast :
" The Governor of the Commonwealth." The response came from the Secretary in the following letter :
BOSTON, March 21, 1874.
MY DEAR SIR :- Your favor with an invitation for me to be present at the anniversary exercises of your town on the 25th ultimo is at hand. Be assured it would give me pleasure to be with you on so interesting an occasion ; but my official en- gagements are such, that it will be impossible for me to accept your kind request. You may well be proud of your history in the past, and I trust the future will be no less eminent. While I am not personally acquainted with many of your townsmen, yet I know how ready you have been to further every good and noble enterprise. May your children be worthy successors of so noble an ancestry.
I am your obedient servant,
W. B. WASHBURN.
" The Commonwealth of Massachusetts," was responded to by Mr. SAMUEL L. PARSONS, of New York :
About two hundred and fifty years ago there landed from the old ship, Mayflower, on the' rocky shores of Massachusetts, a
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company of one hundred and two persons, seeking the freedom that the New World offered, to worship God, and to plant a new nation that might be an honor to the world. The severe win- ter, exposures, and disease, carried to the grave in four months one-half of the Pilgrim party. But this terrible affliction only served to draw the hearts of those who survived more closely together, and to knit them more firmly in bonds of brotherhood, for the purpose of accomplishing the work the Master had for them to do. The compact formed on the Mayflower was carried into the new State; it is the corner-stone of the institutions that have been handed down to us, and in which we so proudly rejoice to-day. Massachusetts is the leading State in manufac- tures ; she is not behind in the arts ; her commerce is of world- wide repute ; her statesmen are among the leading minds of the world ; her churches and schools are open to the people ; her purse is open to the cry of distress from whatever land. Wherever I have traveled, I have found the people not only re- spect a man from Massachusetts, but they are ready to trust him, believing that true men hail from the old Bay State ; in- deed her sons are among the leading men in nearly all the States of the Union, and have carried her institutions and energy with them. It is hardly necessary for me to occupy your time further ; your own immortal Webster was content to say of Massachusetts, " There she is, behold her." And surely it would be presumption in me, with the added glories of a quarter of a century, not to leave her in that same exalted position.
" The Orator of the Day," called up Dr. THOS. E. VERMILYE, of New York City :
MR. PRESIDENT :- I thank you most sincerely for the com- plimentary manner in which you are pleased to speak of my services to-day ; and I thank this company and the good people of the old town of West Springfield, for the kindness they have shown me to-day, and me and mine in times past. I feel much at home in this region and recall years of pleasant, and I hope not unprofitable residence among you-as the pastor of the old first parish. I have always felt, and often said that my minis- terial life and usefulness (if I have been useful in my calling),
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was greatly formed and made by my pastorate in West Spring- field, and my advice to my young brethren would be to prefer such a parish for their first settlement, if they could find it, to any city charge, as the school for their professional training. But, Mr. President, I ought not to indulge such a strain ; and particularly I ought not to occupy the time of this respected company after taxing them already for more than an hour at the public meeting. Let me, however, pay a debt of justice before I sit down. Of course I knew a good deal of West Springfield ; its history, its localities, its men, and many, also, of its peculiarly good things in the way of story and anecdote. But I needed aid in the short time given me for preparation, and for that aid, in the collection of materials, I wish it to be understood that I was indebted very largely to Deacon Bagg, who has taken such a lively interest in this Centennial Celebra- tion ; and who is such an adept in West Springfield lore that what he does not now know of West Springfield, can hardly be greatly worth knowing.
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