USA > Massachusetts > Hampshire County > Amherst > Around a village green; sketches of life in Amherst > Part 2
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These were exclusively for grown-ups, a small but hilarious company, for Mrs. Allen found life in Amherst dull.
I once had the pleasure of a ride with Harriet Beecher Stowe. I came in on the train and took my seat in the one town hack at the station, when there got in and sat on the seat beside me a serene personage in gray pongee with a big drab bonnet. I think that she did not speak to me. She sat stiffly erect, holding on to her umbrella. When we turned into Mrs. Allen's yard, I knew that my companion was the great object of my childish admiration, the author of " Uncle Tom's Cabin." We drove so quickly through the curving carriage entrance, past the group of tall hemlock trees, that Mrs. Stowe was out of the hack and at her daughter's front door before I could catch my breath. Her husband, Reverend Mr. Stowe, frequently preached in the village church when he chanced to be in Amherst.
Professor Edward Tuckerman, the distinguished botanist who gave his name to Tuckerman's Ravine on Mt. Washington, was a familiar figure on the streets of the village. Any afternoon in the early seven- ties, about four o'clock, one could see him walking from his beautiful gray stone house south of the Chapel up to the Agricultural College, his wife hanging on his arm and trying to keep up with him, and a little fox terrier close at his heels. He walked as lightly as a youthful mountaineer, and you could picture him blazing a trail where another would fear to go. He grew the English violet out of doors; others were not so successful in bringing the coveted clumps through an Amherst winter. Professor and Mrs. Tuckerman gave delightful parties, many of them on their lawn, where there were contests in archery, bowling, croquet, and tennis. There was always brilliant con- versation among the " grown-ups " on these occasions. On the evening of the day on which the invention of the telephone was announced, Professor Elwell stretched a wire from President Seelye's house to Professor Tuckerman's, and Bessie Seelye (Professor Seelye Bixler's mother) in her own home played upon the piano. A quarter of a mile away we heard the notes with wonder. The Tuckermans had asked in a few children, the Estys and Seelyes and Hitchcocks.
Another botanist, Professor Jesup, later of Dartmouth College, was a minister whose health did not permit him to keep on with his profes- sion. He had rooms in the house next to ours, overlooking my croquet ground on the south. On the mossy bank under his windows he had set out many of the wild flowers and ferns that grew about Amherst, as he found them in his tramps over the mountains and along Rattlesnake Gutter in Sunderland. He used to wear a gray and purple velvet dress- ing-gown in his study, and when he found some treasure under his
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microscope, he would run across the croquet ground to our house, hatless, with dressing-gown flying. We never saw him at any other time without his tall, shining beaver. He even wore that on tramps, I think. He would ask my brother and me to come over and share his enthusiasm for what he had found. He asked the children oftener than their elders to look through his microscope. He taught us the names and haunts of the flowers of the surrounding hills, and we in turn always brought home in our fishing baskets some flowers for the Professor. It might be a sprig of pinkest arbutus gathered from the moss hidden under the needles of a stately pine at Orient Springs, or a bluebell, mixed in with the dace and " pumpkin-seeds " we had caught. Today every fisherman's basket, filled though it be with speckled beauties, seems wanting to me if there is not in it a treasure from the brink of the stream.
We did not have the mystery stories that children delight in now, but there were mysterious sayings among the older people which we knew from the twinkle in their eyes contained jokes that we could not fathom. Every time we drove to Northampton in the carryall, we passed that wonderful gilded rooster that whizzed and whirred on top of the Christopher Wren steeple of the Old Hadley Church. The people of Hadley said that it crowed every time it heard the other roosters crow. "How can that be? " we questioned. Their answer was only a laugh. And then there was an inhabitant of Hadley who said that if we ate the horse-radish which grew by her barn, it would make us smart. How often I have longed for this magic herb at din- ner parties, when the butler served horse-radish sauce foaming white in a silver bowl.
Day by day those early years in Amherst glided by. Springing up along the path that memory traces through spring and sunshine, through long summer hours and short winter days, are these recollec- tions of old friends that have refreshed me. Perhaps they are immortal in the proper sense - a great company who inspired one to be faithful to duty as one saw it. Always I see them in their integrity of soul and intellect, in the setting of the green old college town, with its peace and serenity closely guarded by the mountains in " their eternal chairs."
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THE FIRST PARISH
V ISITORS to Amherst driving down Main Street toward Pel- ham pass in a moment the gray stone Congregational church in a setting of green lawn shadowed by spruce trees. Its friendly parsonage stands on the same plot. They may admire the graceful outline of the church, rising to a high-pointing spire, the first to be built in Amherst. They may hear the bell that since 1869 has summoned the members of the First Parish to worship within these portals. But few can comprehend the significance of this church in the religious and educational life of the town, few can realize to what far horizons it has sent forth its spirit. Let us pause for a moment to honor in memory the sturdy, earnest, generous men and women who fostered this church and found in its activities the fulfillment of their aspirations.
According to the first historian of Amherst College, " The officers and members of this church were the Founders of Amherst Academy and Amherst College, and inasmuch as the Agricultural College was the daughter of Amherst College, this church is the mother of them all." It is not necessary to dwell on the early history of Amherst College, but it is fitting to cite a few facts from those early days to illuminate for a younger generation how the " liberal spirit " (as it was then called) began to be felt in the First Parish, and from the church was communicated to the village. There was a slight shifting of moorings with the increasing tide, a perceptible forward swing of the prow.
But first for the building itself. The present village church is the last of four houses of worship built by the First Parish. It is well to recall the story of its three predecessors.
The first meeting house of the First Parish of Amherst was built upon the hill where the old college observatory (the Octagon) now stands, a site that was in those days about the center of the town com- mon. Completed in 1753, the building was forty-five feet in length and thirty-five in breadth, covered with " quarter boards " of spruce and roofed with spruce shingles " without sap." A " konk," still pre- served in the historical collection of the college, was blown as "a signe " to call the congregation to meeting. This building served the needs of the parish from the time when Sir Jeffery Amherst was a soldier of the King until the date of Washington's first inauguration.
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The second meeting house, finished in 1789, stood on the same site. Its foundation was of hewn stone. It was sixty-five feet long and of a proportionate width, and had a porch on the west side rising to a tower crowned by a belfry, to which, later, was added a lightning- rod. In 1792 a bell succeeded the konk. This bell was struck regu- larly at twelve o'clock noon and at nine o'clock in the evening. The horse sheds were near the parsonage. The second meeting house en- dured until the first presidency of Andrew Jackson.
The third meeting house, completed in 1829, still stands today as College Hall. Just to the south Morgan Library occupies the site of the minister's house, where the Reverend David Parsons once lived. The new building was begun when the Trustees of Amherst College conveyed to the First Parish a piece of ground ten rods square on the northeast corner of what had been the Parsons farm, on condition that the old meeting house should be demolished and that the college should be allowed to hold its annual Commencements in the new building. Here, accordingly, have been held all graduating exercises from 1829 until 1937; in June, 1938, Commencement was held out of doors to accommodate the increasing number of visitors. The new meeting house had originally a portico in front supported by huge pillars resting on a stone platform. This was taken down in 1861, but early in the present century a new portico was added to restore the building to its pristine form. Shortly after the Civil War the parish moved to its present home in the village church.
The grant of land by the college and of reciprocal privileges by the parish testifies to the close connection that prevailed between the two institutions during these early years. Without the church there would have been no college. Long before the first college building was con- structed, the dream of a collegiate institution had been cherished by the leading men of the parish and their ministers. Prominent among those whose hope foreshadowed the founding of Amherst College were the two pastors named David Parsons, father and son, who together ministered to the First Parish for a period of eighty years from its first incorporation.
Three ministers bore the name of David Parsons, and it was the second and third of the line who occupied the Amherst pulpit. The first David Parsons never lived in Amherst. He was born (1680) in Northampton, a son of Cornet Joseph Parsons, judge of the Hamp- shire County court. A graduate of both Harvard and Yale, he held pastorates in two Massachusetts towns, Malden (1709-1721) and Leicester (1721-1743).
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His son, David Parsons, Jr., the first pastor at Amherst, graduated from Harvard in 1729 and received his Master's degree three years later. He was ordained in Amherst in 1739 and remained pastor of the parish until his death in 1781. He is described by the Reverend Robert Breck of Springfield, who preached his funeral sermon, as " a man of strong intellectual powers with a penetrating eye," and again, " a doctrinal preacher, reverent in manner, devout in temper and fer- vent in prayer."
He was succeeded by his son, Reverend David Parsons, 3d., who was given the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity by Brown and was generally called Doctor Parsons to distinguish him from his father. The third David was born in Amherst in 1749, graduated from Har- vard in 1771, and was offered the chair of Divinity at Yale when Timothy Dwight resigned it to accept the presidency of the college. Doctor Parsons had a deserved reputation as a scholar. He made a practice while he lived in Amherst of receiving into his family stu- dents from Harvard who stood in need of private instruction. It was he who gave the land on which Amherst Academy was built. He was president of the Board of Trustees of the Academy from its beginning until he performed the ceremony of laying the corner-stone of Amherst College in 1820, when he resigned his seat and was succeeded by Noah Webster. Among his classmates at Harvard were James Bowdoin, benefactor of Bowdoin College, Samuel Phillips, projector of Andover Academy, John Warren, founder of Harvard Medical School, and other men of note. The encouragement of colleges and academies was infectious in that generation.
Doctor Parsons resigned in 1819 and died four years later, leaving a fragrant memory. It was said that his face beamed with intelligence and good nature. He had the keenest sense of the ridiculous, and his anecdotes and witty sayings enlivened any gathering, religious or secu- lar. Even in the pulpit he was criticized for his seeming inability to distinguish between drollery and seriousness. For example, he is reported to have remarked on a solemn occasion that he believed in Total Depravity, when it was lived up to. Yet he was what was called " a sensible and instructive preacher." Another well-marked trait of the Parsons was their tendency to increase and multiply. David, Sr., had five children, David, Jr., nine, David, 3d., eleven. " Few of our early settlers," remarked a brother clergyman, “ are represented by more numerous families than those that perpetuate the name of this respectable stock." Fortunately the Parsons wit proved to be inheritable. I shall have occasion to return to it in a later sketch.
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Noah Webster, his wife, and three daughters united with the Amherst church by letter from New Haven, when they came to live in the village in 1812. Afterwards two other daughters and a son united by profession of faith. Since the elder daughters were gifted young ladies and active in revivals, their home quickly became a center of religious life. In the ten years before he returned to New Haven, Noah Webster not only wrote a part of his famous " American Dic- tionary " but impressed his own deep religious earnestness upon the First Parish. In this he was ably assisted by every member of his household.
In the rich tradition of the parish, while it remained in the meeting house, two other names stand out distinctly, one that of Reverend Royal Washburn, the fourth pastor (1826-1833), the other that of Reverend Aaron M. Colton, a deeply beloved minister who served from 1840 to 1853. Mr. Washburn was a graduate of the University of Burlington (Vermont) and of Andover Theological Seminary. Though he died in office after a short pastorate, he so united " sound common sense, intelligent piety, and unaffected Christian humility " that he was greatly mourned by his flock. He married Harriet, the daughter of Reverend David Parsons, 3d., and was elected a trustee of Amherst Academy in the first year of his residence in town. His son, grandson, great-grandson, and great-great-grandson have all be- come graduates of Amherst College, a remarkable record of family allegiance.
Reverend Aaron M. Colton, a graduate of Yale who studied theol- ogy at Union and at Andover, was pastor of the First Parish when the great religious revival of 1850 occurred. At that time the revival services and other evening meetings were held in the Amherst Academy building, since the meeting house had no adequate vestry or chapel. In 1853 Mr. Colton accepted a call to the First Church of Easthamp- ton, where for several years he was a trustee of Williston Seminary. His brother, Reverend Walter Colton, a chaplain in the Navy, was the author of once popular but now forgotten travel books, "Land and Lea," " Ship and Shore," " The Sea and the Sailor," published in the 1850's and much read in Amherst.
The Academy building was also used for a Sunday school organized in 1861 by the ladies of the college Faculty for the colored people of the village. Both adults and children attended. From this beginning sprang Zion's Chapel, the colored church, which stood for many years on college ground in the rear of College Hall on Parsons Street.
When I heard in later years that a professor, gazing at College Hall (then denuded of its portico), had exclaimed, " It is the eighth aston-
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ishment," I was surprised. A deep reverence for the old building had been instilled into me from my earliest years. It was there that my family had worshiped ; it was there that I was baptized. Some souvenirs connected with this meeting house may not inappropriately be recorded here.
The deed to pew number 62, which my father bought from the Honorable Edward Dickinson, is still in my possession. Pews in the meeting house were then privately owned. Mr. Dickinson had ac- quired two pews to accommodate his family. When his son Austin married and took a pew for himself across the aisle, Mr. Dickinson sold the vacated pew to my father. It may be a matter of interest to read a deed of such formality as the following :
WARRANTY DEED
Know all men by these Presents, That I, Edward Dickinson of Amherst in the county of Hampshire and Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in consideration of Eighty-five dollars paid by M. Adams Allen of said Amherst, Trader, the receipt whereof I do hereby acknowledge ; do hereby give, grant, bargain, sell and convey unto said Allen his heirs and assigns, Pew Number Sixty- two, in the meeting house of the First Parish in P. Amherst. TO HAVE AND TO HOLD the before-granted premises, with the privileges and appurtenances thereto belonging, to the said Allen, his heirs and assigns, to their use and behoof forever; and I do, for myself, my heirs, executors, and administrators, covenant with the said Allen his heirs and assigns, that I am lawfully seized in fee of the beforegranted premises, that they are free of all incum- brances, that I have good right to sell and convey the same to the said Allen, and that I will warrant and defend the same prem- ises to the said heirs and assigns forever, against the lawful claims and demands of all persons, subject to the By-Laws of the Pro- prietors and voters of the Parish. In Witness Thereof, I the said Edward Dickinson have hereunto set my hand and seal this sixth day of April in the year of our Lord One thousand eight hundred and fifty nine.
EDWARD DICKINSON
Signed, sealed and delivered in presence of Wm. A. Dickinson. Hampshire ss. April, 6, 1859. Then the above named Edw. Dick- inson acknowledged the above instrument to be his free act and deed, before me, Justice of the Peace.
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The present generation, accustomed to free seats in church, cannot comprehend the dignity of the father of the family, sitting at the head of his own pew, with the little pew-door buttoned tight, his family safe and secluded beside him under his watchful eye. Sunday was then a Sabbath indeed. The hymn book which was used in pew num- ber 62 has been carefully kept. It is the 1854 revision of Mason and Greene's " Church Psalmody," originally published in Boston in 1831. This had been substituted for Watts's "Selected Hymns " in 1839. A precisely similar copy, with the name of Edward Dickin- son stamped in gold on the front cover, is preserved in the Converse Memorial Library of Amherst College - a book that Emily Dickin- son may have used before she began to keep the Sabbath staying at home.
One of the appurtenances conveyed to my father by Edward Dick- inson, along with the pew where Miss Emily sat with her brother, was a pair of crickets. We used them in the village church and took them to Holyoke when we moved from Amherst. I wish I had saved the carpets we took from those crickets. There were at least seven different layers, one over the other as the coverings became worn. If I had saved them, I would have had samples of the gay-figured carpets of the Dickinson family, " six generations of whom were born within sound of the meeting house bell," and the very carpet on which Miss Emily's foot had rested while she listened to orthodox sermons. And besides that, the Dickinson carpets had the reputation of being the handsomest obtainable.
While I was thinking of these relics, I attended service in an old New England church. When the clergyman gave out the hymn to be sung by the congregation, it proved to be one entitled " Roseate Hues," written by Doctor Watts in 1707. As it was sung, the lines seemed to me to picture the way in which the early members of the First Parish now recur to me.
" How bright these glorious spirits shine !
Who came to realms of light.
How came they to the blissful seats Of everlasting day!
Now with triumphal palms they stand Before the throne on high."
At home I turned to the " Church Psalmody," but this hymn was not included in that collection.
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There was a favorite charge given to a young minister a century ago. It was, " Let the sermon preach, the hymn sing, and the prayer pray." These words seem to me to give the atmosphere of the old meeting house of the First Parish, as it was often described to me by my parents and others.
The First Parish worshiped in the third meeting house at the time of the Civil War. One can hardly realize in these days the depth of feeling in Amherst and other small communities that the struggle to preserve the Union called forth, or how solemnly incidents connected with it were told to the children in family gatherings. The Ladies' Benevolent Society was transformed into a village sewing circle to sew for the soldiers, or as a tiny boy put it, "to ho for the holders." They made garments for the men in the army and scraped lint from old linen for dressings. They made white stars and sewed them on the blue field of the flag when a new state came into the Union. I have an old flag that hung in my father's place of business throughout the war. There are thirty-two stars printed on the blue and two sewed on by hand before the war ended.
The saddest day of the war, as told in village story, seems to me to have been the day when Frazar Stearns' body was brought home for burial. He was the son of the President of the College, the first student to enlist, the first to fall in action. How often was the story of his home-coming told before the open fire to the children of the family - the casket draped with the flag borne through the streets in solemn procession of students wearing badges of mourning. The beloved, gallant, handsome, high-spirited Frazar Stearns, killed at Newbern while rallying his men to a charge.
A six-pounder brass cannon, taken from a Confederate battery by his regiment, the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers, in this same action, was presented to Amherst College and for years stood in the entrance of Williston Hall. It has now been placed in Morgan Library. Few who pass it can know what this memorial to a brave man meant to those who had worshiped with him in the old meeting house.
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THE VILLAGE CHURCH, 1867-1877
I N the early sixties members of the First Parish began to feel the need of a new house of worship. The meeting house was not adequate for the expanding activities of a religious center. Its basement was inconvenient, and in practice was used for all sorts of purposes, for courts, auctions, entertainments, fairs, and the like. The question of whether to build on the same site or on another was vigor- ously debated and delayed action for several years. A decision to move the site was not voted until April, 1867. Just two months previously Reverend Jonathan L. Jenkins was invited to become acting pastor of the parish.
Mr. Jenkins came from the Pearl Street Church of Hartford, his second pastorate, the first being at Lowell. I have heard him describe his arrival at Amherst, how the nine o'clock train of the New London & Northern, the only railroad to Amherst at that time, pulled into the little dark station on a February evening, and there to welcome him, carrying lanterns, were Deacon Luke Sweetser, " the upright merchant, the sagacious citizen, the earnest Christian," as a former pastor described him, and Mr. Austin Dickinson, the genial lawyer whose lifework was the beautifying of the town of Amherst. These two representatives of the church, who welcomed Mr. Jenkins in the gloom of the lonely station, became his lifelong friends and greatly helped to further his influence in the church and through the church, on the community during the ten years of his ministry.
The new site for the village church was purchased shortly after the new pastor's arrival. The change in location met with adamantine opposition, as was natural, but Mr. Jenkins at once showed himself capable of handling the situation with a tact and patience that kept the congregation united. The Scriptural exhortation, " Come ye, let us go up to the mountains of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, for out of Zion shall go forth the law " (Isaiah 2:3), was taken literally by our New England forefathers in choosing the site for a church, and the meeting house stood in fact on " Mount Zion," for that was the local name for the hill on which it was built. To change its location was, therefore, a vital move for a community which had worshiped time out of mind on the same ground, in a meeting house set upon a hill, and on land granted by the college. Finally, after a series of twenty-four parish meetings, under the leadership of a pastor
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Mrs. Jonathan Leavitt Jenkins The brilliant wife of the Pastor
Rev. Jonathan Leavitt Jenkins Minister of the First Church Amherst, Massachusetts 1867-1877
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THE FIRST CHURCH OF AMHERST AND PARSONAGE Dedicated 1868
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whom they had already begun to admire and love, the church voted to buy the " Montague lot," a central location on Main Street, hardly more than a stone's throw from the business block at the north end of the town common. The old meeting house stood at the south end of the common, fronting the college. Main Street sloped to the low- lands. It seemed to some, symbolically at least, that Mount Zion had been deserted.
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