USA > Massachusetts > Hampshire County > Amherst > Around a village green; sketches of life in Amherst > Part 6
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A little gilt-framed oil painting of a bachelor darning his socks hung in my father's room by his mirror as long as he lived. Its subject recalls the popularity of Ik Marvel's " Reveries of a Bachelor," which was much read in Amherst during the fifties. The author, Donald G. Mitchell, was a frequent visitor in Amherst. He was a close friend of President Clark Seelye and gave him much practical advice in laying out the grounds of Smith College. The little painting was given to my father as a joke during his protracted bachelor days. It was painted especially for him by Orra White Hitchcock, the wife of
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President Hitchcock, who taught drawing and painting to Mary Lyon when the founder of Mount Holyoke College lived with the Hitchcock family in Conway and studied chemistry and geology under the guid- ance of the scientific pastor.
My mother came to Amherst to live in 1853 and attended Amherst Academy. She brought with her a diploma in colors awarded to her (at the age of seven) by the private school she had attended in Brook- lyn, N. Y., for " moral and genteel Deportment and for Faithfulness and untiring Industry in the prosecution of her Studies and Employ- ments during the term " (April, 1846). This document, entitled the "American Youth's Diploma," merits description. I have never seen one like it, though there must be other copies in existence. A school- mistress at the foot of the Hill of Science points the way up the many steps, beginning with three marked Virtue, Perseverance, Patience, to the Temple of Learning at the top. A long line of youths are making the ascent. Beneath is printed the exhortation: " Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth." Around the edge are symbols of all the branches of learning then commonly studied. A pair of scrolls contains a list of subjects pursued - for my mother, Orthography, Grammar, Geography, and Writing - and her teacher's signature, with the motto: "Do good as you have opportunity." Between the scrolls are printed these lines, signed M. L. G .:
Behold yon Mount, where Science rears her head,
Whose steep ascent the young and lovely tread,
Where Springs Pierian spread their golden lore
And gushing fountains their rich treasures pour, Where childhood lifts the fairy tube on high,
And cradled beauty in his mother's eye Sees mirrored deep a ray which God has given, To gild the Mount and light his steps to Heaven.
From this school in Brooklyn my mother transferred to a school in Rhode Island taught by Cyrus Hinds, afterward the law partner in Indianapolis of Benjamin Harrison. She often spoke of how great a teacher Mr. Hinds was. His well-trained mind and his strong char- acter impressed the children just coming into their teens. It was in small country places in New England that young men seeking means for their own education by teaching school gave the young people under their charge a daily example of energy and inspiration. Such influences for good were especially felt in Amherst schools, where the teachers were nearly always drawn from the best of the college students.
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My mother's education was completed by a year at Ipswich Acad- emy and another at Norton Seminary, now Wheaton College. At Ipswich she shared a room with Emily Hitchcock, the daughter of President Hitchcock of Amherst and later the wife of Reverend C. M. Terry. After her husband's death, Mrs. Terry came to Smith College and became the well-known head of Hubbard House.
The thought of Emily Hitchcock brings to mind a long-forgotten romance in which she had a small part. At Mount Holyoke she was a classmate of the attractive Cora A. Welch of New Haven, who often came to Amherst to visit the Hitchcocks. There she met and became engaged to Truman Tomson, an Amherst student. The young man suffered a breakdown while studying law, and Miss Welch mar- ried him " on his death bed." She then went to Turkey as a missionary, and married eventually the distinguished professor of History at Robert College, Alexander Van Millingen, whose father had been surgeon to the Sultan and a close friend of Lord Byron. Mrs. Van Millingen spent summers in Amherst in the later seventies, enjoying the com- pany of her friends there.
While at Norton my mother sat at table next to Miss Lucy Larcom, who taught elocution at the seminary, and thus was formed a lasting tie of friendship. Miss Larcom, remembered as a graceful woman with soft blue eyes beneath her low, broad forehead, was fond of scattering " uplifting sentiments " among her pupils, but she was also capable of humor. I find in one of my mother's notebooks the following quota- tion of one of her sayings: " If Atlas had undertaken to keep a journal of his state of mind while holding the world on his shoulders, he might have been successful and he might not." My mother's notebooks in Astronomy, Geometry, Geography, Rhetoric, and Elocution are before me, all in the beautiful handwriting that Norton taught. One book contains notes on Miss Larcom's course in English literature. I observe that in this book capital letters were used to designate emphatic words, very much as Emily Dickinson used capitals in writing her poems. I judge that it was not unusual in those days to use capitals to mark the more important words.
When we were children we loved to hear my mother recite Poe's " The Bells " and the poems of Longfellow as Miss Larcom had taught them to her. We learned to recite Miss Larcom's " Hannah's at the window, binding shoes " with the poet's own intonation, and our childish ears caught something far deeper than the rhythm. Lucy Larcom was insistent in her desire to make the years of childhood beau- tiful with all that was " lovely and true and pure and of good report," and her influence was felt in the homes of her pupils. It prompted my
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mother to give a sea-shell to a very young child visitor that he might " hear the sea in it," as he did with wondering eyes, while she repeated the lines written in her Norton notebook
" Take the bright shell From its home in the lea And wherever it goes 'Twill sing of the sea."
and, on another occasion, to take a prism right off the girandole on the mantel so that he could see the rainbows in it. Such matters were for active hours. It was Moore's "The Night before Christmas " and the book which had "Who killed Cock Robin?" in it that we wished to go to sleep by, before the open fire.
Before I was ready to go to school Amherst Academy had closed its doors. It survives today only in the Academy Fund from which the trustees annually make an appropriation for the encouragement of classical studies in the Amherst High School, and in the pages of the scholarly and delightful " Amherst Academy : A New England School of the Past " by Dr. Frederick Tuckerman. I first attended a private school conducted by Miss Emily Upton in the Palmer Block on the site of the present Town Hall. An old receipt, still in my possession, shows that the tuition was two dollars and a half for a term of ten weeks. I have also a photograph showing Miss Upton in a red flannel jacket with pinked edges and her dozen pupils on the steps of the Palmer Block. In this school every pupil could recite to the teacher's satis- faction " The mountain and the squirrel had a quarrel," and some of us could sing " Can she make a cherry pie, Billy Boy? " Eugene Field and his brother Rosie (Roswell), who had rooms at the time on Lessey Street just opposite our school, had taught us to count out with the unvarying formula, "Intry-mintry, cutrey-corn." On days when we deserved it, we had given us pieces of white commercial notepaper the size of a domino with "Good " written in violet ink. These " Goods " we carried home in triumph.
Had this school been in existence fifty years earlier, Noah Webster could easily have heard through the windows of his home across the way, our shrill, excited voices carried clearly on the air over the nar- row street, as we chose sides and spelled down in our school-room - its windows wide open - for the house which he built and resided in until 1822 stood at the end of Phoenix Row and was directly opposite the entrance to Palmer Block on Main Street. The well-worn blue spelling book from which Miss Upton put out the words may have been one of the famous old Webster spelling books. This was still on book shelves in many an Amherst home.
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Miss Upton used a gay abacus to facilitate our progress in arithmetic. Its bright colored balls slipped merrily along the wires for us, as we added and subtracted. When we sang the multiplication tables, Miss Upton would beat time for us with the abacus, raising it high and bringing it down with a crash of the balls, to our great delight. The tune we sang for the multiplication tables persists audibly with me to-day, when I try to multiply.
Once as we went home from school through the business section we passed the Baptist Church when the door chanced to be open, and there in the vestibule just beyond the open door dangled the rope that the sexton pulled on Sunday morning to ring the great clanging bell, the bell that Emily Dickinson thought would certainly ring in the Day of Doom. A boy, accepting the unexpected challenge, darted into the church and threw his whole weight on the long rope. Before he knew what was happening, he was lifted off his feet by the recoil and followed the bell. His companions, seeing him depart to upper regions like Elijah, ran off, terrified. They were relieved to see him in school next day, none the worse for his " translation."
Children were apt to act out on week days the Bible story of the Sunday before. A professor returning from theological discussion in his classroom was startled to encounter his own children and those of his colleagues rushing madly down hill to Professor Seelye's fish pond. It turned out that they were impersonating the Gadarene swine into whom the devils had gone, and were rushing down a steep place into the lake to be drowned.
Some of the children of this same group actually saw Santa Claus come down the enormous chimney and step out of the huge fireplace in the home of Miss Laura Emerson, their Sunday school teacher in Grace Church. This was in the room where the high-boy and deep armchairs were. The rector was originally cast for Santa Claus, but his wife, less portly and more agile than he, superseded him and actually came tumbling out of the wide opening to the glee of all.
At a later time an unmarried rector of Grace Church asked a young lady in his Bible class what was the occasion of Jeremiah's lamenta- tions. Caught off guard, she replied, " He was lamenting his wife." The class was thrilled by this revelation of what most interested the student of Jeremiah.
The home of Solomon Eastman, graced with three attractive daugh- ters, was a focus of many festivities. His nieces, the Misses Sarah and Julia Eastman, founders of Dana Hall, always called when they were in town. I remember in particular one morning in early August when I brought them red raspberries I had just picked in our garden from
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bushes given us by Professor Julius Seelye. With the berries I offered them powdered sugar in a little silver-wire basket that had a light blue bowl. Miss Julia in comprehensive appreciation began dusting with sugar the leaves on which I had put the berries. It was a pretty bit of playfulness that reminded me of the graceful touch that dis- tinguished Miss Julia's stories. Their aunt, Miss Sarah Ferry, who sometimes came with them, had for years conducted a famous student boarding-house at her home on Amity Street. When she went to Dana Hall as matron, she was equipped by long experience in dealing with young people to give much practical advice and her contribution to the success of the new school at Wellesley was not inconsiderable.
In the octagonal house on North Prospect Street, at the head of Cowles Lane, the Misses Howland had a school for children and young ladies that commanded the confidence of both faculty and townsfolk. The children who attended this school are now widely scattered and many are prominent in the world. Some of them must recall how Professor Bertram B. Boltwood of Yale played with them during the summer vacations which he spent with his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Lucius Boltwood. A bronze tablet in Converse Memorial Library records his birth in the old Boltwood house and his remarkable achieve- ments as teacher and scientist. The Howland house had a long row of cherry trees along the front of the lawn, almost a hedge, where both children and robins were allowed to eat the cherries without restric- tion. Once to the consternation of parents the children spent a happy afternoon swallowing cherries, stones and all. Strange to say, there was no sad aftermath.
On the other side of Cowles Lane stood the house of Charles T. Brown with a beautiful double row of maple trees extending from the house to the street. There was a gorgeous swing in one of these trees. The limbs were high above the ground, and the children, after school, swung in long arcs way up into the branches. Two would stand on the board at once and work themselves up. Mrs. Brown was a person of great intelligence and force of character. She was far ahead of her generation in public matters and was particularly interested in politics and the advancement of women. Her daughter, Nina, a graduate and honorary Doctor of Letters of Smith College, became in later years the archivist of her Alma Mater.
Mr. Brown sold his house in the early sixties to " Dick " Cowles. Everyone in Amherst called him that. When Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins, soon after their arrival, were invited to supper at his house, Mrs. Jenkins, not thinking it proper to be familiar with so prominent a man, told the driver of the hack to take them to the house of Mr.
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Richard Cowles. The man went all over town, but no one could tell where Richard Cowles lived. Dick Cowles first name was Dickinson.
South of Cowles Lane facing Pleasant Street stood the house where Helen Hunt Jackson lived as a young woman, and where she helped her father, Professor Nathan Fiske, receive his guests at college gather- ings. This was not the house in which she was born.
The children of my generation took dancing lessons from the Green girls, who lived in the house built by Dr. Robert Lincoln of New York, " Mount Doma," the present clubhouse of the Golf Club. Through paths unbroken in winter and deep with mud in spring, we made our way down the Mill Valley road and across lots to the Lincoln home. There rubber boots came off and dancing slippers appeared. We learned to dance the polka redowa and the glide waltz.
In 1876 Mrs. William F. Stearns, dressed in deepest mourning for the recent loss of her husband, came to Amherst with her daughter and four sons. We knew that Mr. Stearns had given the money to build the College Church and that he had lived latterly in India. His family had the envied culture of those who had seen much of the world. The children's manners were perfect. They were not allowed to romp casually with the rest of us, but they came to our parties. I have still a note from Harold Stearns accepting an invitation to a party on my birthday. It is addressed to "Miss Allen, Chez-elle." Where was " Chez-elle "? We hunted through our geographies to find it, but never, never told what we had done when we finally found out where " chez-elle " was. This elegance made a great impression on us.
Alfred E. Stearns, destined to become a great headmaster of Andover Academy and a trustee of Amherst College, was a small boy then. In later years when he rode from Amherst to Northampton with college comrades, he would exclaim in high glee as they passed the stretch of land where the Montgomery Rose Company now has its green- houses, " This is the spot where I drove our cows to pasture in the early morning." Mr. Stearns has always carried with him the bracing atmosphere of those early days in Amherst. We also drank the milk from those cows. The Stearns's farmer would bring the pail by a path past the back of Morgan Library and College Hall, across the road and through Mrs. Davis's barn, to our kitchen, where he set it on the table upon which Noah Webster wrote a part of his dic- tionary, a conjunction illustrating plain living and high thinking.
President Stearns walked by our house every morning as he went to the post office for his morning mail. I can see him now, tall, erect, and with inborn refinement visible in every line of his face. He had the faculty that his grandson, Alfred, so notably inherited of inter-
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esting others in the institution over which he presided. None could doubt his patriotism, for he had given a son to the Union cause. His wife, Mrs. Olive Stearns, was a lady of singularly gracious manner. We celebrated the same birthday, the twenty-ninth of February. Her gift to me on one of " our " birthdays, a copy of Whittier's poems, was symbolic of her own gentle forcefulness.
President Stearns's daughter, Miss Fanny Stearns, was greatly beloved in Amherst. Lovely to look upon, dressed in a becoming light green silk, she seemed the center of admiration at the college recep- tions given by her father. She married the Reverend W. V. W. Davis, and became the mother of two talented children, William Stearns Davis and Fanny Stearns Davis Gifford.
The military department at the Massachusetts Agricultural College brought army men and many pleasant guests to Amherst in the late sixties. Lieutenant Totten was in charge of the corps at the time of Grant's second election to the Presidency. Nearly every Amherst what-not then had a little marble bust of General Grant and a photo- graph of Abraham Lincoln in the grape-vine frame of Civil War times. To celebrate the election all the cannon from the Agricultural College were brought down to the common in front of our house. There was a thunderous firing, which struck terror in us as one after another forty-six panes of glass fell shattered from our windows. We did not know enough to raise the windows slightly. It was a cold Novem- ber night, and we had to paste paper over all the broken panes. Lieutenant Totten saw them staring blankly at him, when he came the next night to offer his courteous apology for the damage. He looked very elegant in his white gloves. White gloves for gentlemen and bronze boots for ladies were the last word in youth's ideas of fashion then. And to tie a nosegay with a hair from your head was the quintessence of sentiment.
The last of the Colonial houses with columns in front disappeared from Amherst a few years ago when the Henry Nash house burned. This building was the home of the famous Mount Pleasant Institute, a school for boys where Henry Ward Beecher was prepared to enter Amherst. It stood on the eminence overlooking the campus of the State College.
Much of the older Amherst has gone. But it is pleasant to end this desultory chronicle of Amherst schools with a thought of the delightful Little Red Schoolhouse recently built on the Amherst College campus, where our successors now go to school in full view of the Pelham Hills and at the beginning of an enchanting trail that leads onward to the hills of inspiration.
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LOVE OF FLOWERS
A MHERST, being itself on a hill rising from the floor of the Connecticut Valley, overlooks an amphitheatre about twenty- four miles in length and fifteen in breadth, beyond which lie the hills that form the valley's rim, Sugar Loaf, Mount Toby, Pom- eroy Mountain, the Pelham Hills, Rock Rimmon, Norwottock, Mount Holyoke, and Mount Tom, hills so accessible that you may tramp over them all. The old meeting house, which stood where the Octagon now stands, was famous for the " great multitude of fine objects " that could be seen from its belfry. Professor John W. Burgess in his " Reminiscences of an American Scholar " tells how the Amherst landscape affected him when he came north to college from his Tennessee home: " The abruptness of the Holyoke range, on the south side, and the conical Sugar Loaf in the north, made the land- scape quite Italian and classic." Perhaps it was this quality of the landscape that impelled President Hitchcock to bestow so many classical names on the beauty spots of the region.
The shadows on the grass, as I saw them when a child at Amherst, and the tracery of the trees penciled on the glistening crust of the snow, are pictured in my mind. Emily Dickinson knew these shadows on the grass and wove her feeling for them into several of her poems. A gentleman who had been long away from Amherst said that the Pelham Hills were the only things that had not changed during his absence. For Emily Dickinson, too, they were a symbol of perma- nence in her poem on the unchangeableness of the hills. You must see the Pelham Hills daily to feel this. Others perhaps may apply this poem to the regions they know best, but those who grew up in Am- herst see them always in terms of the village green and the college grounds and the beautiful hills bounding the horizon.
Nature left " footprints on the sands of time " all about Amherst as vividly as Amherst men have left their impress on the world. Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom are volcanic formations, sands of the sea rest in what President Hitchcock called the " upturned saucer " on the Amherst side of the Notch, and dinosaur tracks, as well as rain- drops and ripple marks of eons ago, can be traced on the banks of the Connecticut.
Nature also left the country around Amherst filled with a larger variety of wild flowers than may be found in other small areas. Presi-
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dent Hitchcock, as he tramped over the traprock ledges of Mount Holyoke, felt the beauty of the flowers growing there and sought to change such local names as the Devil's Pier and the Devil's Piazza to classic names more in harmony with the floral growth. So the nar- row defile on the Hockanum road became the Pass of Thermopylae, and the adjacent rock formations Titan's Pier and Titan's Piazza. Satan still retains his hold on the Devil's Garden, the old name for the shambles of loose rock near the Notch, but that is fast disappearing in the maw of the stone-crusher to emerge as roads and pavements.
Professor Edward Tuckerman, the distinguished botanist of Amherst College, was the one for whom Tuckerman's Ravine on Mount Wash- ington was named. His specialty was lichens, though he possessed a comprehensive knowledge of the flora of the White Mountains. He always walked up the trail to the summit of Mount Washington, scorning both the railroad and the carriage road, as the people of the region delighted to remember when they recalled him in after years. At the foot of the beautiful Arethusa Falls is a tablet in memory of Professor Edward Tuckerman, who discovered the falls in 1847, and by its side another of more recent date in honor of Dr. Frederick Tuckerman, his nephew, who likewise played an important part in blazing trails through the White Mountains. A trail and several hundred acres of woodland near Arethusa Falls have been dedicated as a memorial to him by the Walking Club of Randolph, New Hamp- shire.
The influence of the professors in Amherst College was happily per- vasive of the entire community. Many of them were lovers of flowers. Professor Edward Tuckerman, merely by his residence in Amherst, gave a stimulus to the study of plants in their native haunts and to the growing of flowers and shrubs in the gardens of the village.
Amherst's love of flowers was one of the gentle influences that sur- rounded the education of the village girls a century and more ago. I have before me a composition on the subject of "Flowers," written in Amherst Academy in the 1850's. Doubtless it could be matched by similar productions written in other schools of the period, but in no place was there a deeper interest in flowers than in Amherst. The composition is copied on unlined single sheets of fine notepaper, blind- stamped in the upper left hand corner with a decorative design sur- rounding the word " Bath." I have seen other paper marked " Paris " in the same way. The three pages are tied together at the top with narrow white ribbon. Evidently this composition was written for an occasion and previously gone over by the teacher, since there are no corrections in it.
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FLOWERS
There is no employment which harmonizes more pleasantly with taste and amusement than the cultivation of Flowers. It unites grace with purity, health with virtue and affords an agree- able occupation for all gentle, refined and cultivated minds.
Flowers have been called " the stars of earth," " the alphabet of the angels." Of all creations of God, none seem better fitted to gladden the heart of man and inspire a love for their creator than flowers. With what eagerness do little infants grasp at Flowers and as they become older they are often found among them, gathering all they can and sorting them, singing over and caressing them till they wither in their grasp. And as they grow up to maturity, they assume in their eyes new beauties and char- acters. They become surrounded with many ties which are memo- rials of the joys, sorrows and hopes of our forefathers. They are to all nations emblems of youth in its purity. The young, the middle-aged and the hoary head all hang with delight over the blooming flowers. Never may the love and the cultivation of Flowers be discontinued from a study of their structure.
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