USA > Massachusetts > Hampshire County > Amherst > Around a village green; sketches of life in Amherst > Part 8
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The fire on the hearth was a part of family life in Amherst. Helen Hunt makes an old colored woman standing before the rollicking blaze put it first in the list of life's essential satisfactions : " Bless yer, Honey, yer's got a wood fire - yer's got meat and drink and clo'es." By Helen Hunt's day the air-tight stove had come into general use, and the turkey-wing that once served to brush the hearth was super- seded by a small broom with a long handle. When furnaces were
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introduced in the sixties, the fire on the hearth became more of a luxury. Its uses were formal. The hearth was swept clean each morn- ing, the fire was laid with hickory backlog and forestick of white birch, finely cut kindlings beneath, and little curls of fresh shavings on top. It was then ready for the afternoon or evening lighting. Never a scrap of waste paper was thrown into the fireplace. There were two schools of opinion on the question of whether the fire should be lighted on top or underneath. This served as a topic of conversa- tion when welcoming a new acquaintance. His answer helped to settle his status for real intelligence if it accorded with the way the host was accustomed to light his fire. A guest was never to poke the fire or use the tongs unless the action was preceded by the formal request, " May I fix that log a little ?" It is difficult to convey an idea of the orderly precision in the daily care of the hearth.
Nearly forty years ago - I think it was in 1900 - Miss Lavinia wrote asking me to come to see her some Sunday. So one Sunday morning about eleven I walked up the steps of the steep bank from the street to her house, penetrated the hemlock hedge, and rang the bell. She was expecting me and opened the door herself. She took me first into the front room on the west side, and, after a few minutes, led me by the hand across the hall into the parlor. Once there, she went to the old drawer and opened the drawer, saying: "I want you to hold my sister Emily's poems in your hand, just as she left them." She took several scrolls from the drawer and put them in my hands. They were tied with green and white string. She did not untie them, and I reverently put them back in her hands. " I am very glad that you have held the 'Treasure '," she said.
Then she took from the drawer a miniature of Miss Emily done in sepia. She held it in the palm of her hand a moment, and then gave it to me to hold. She said that she herself had had the miniature painted, because she had no likeness of Miss Emily.
I have many letters from Miss Lavinia to my mother, written while Emily Dickinson's poems and letters were being prepared for publi- cation and speaking with happy confidence of their power to " charm " all who read them. William Knox's " Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud ? " was an often quoted poem in Amherst. Anyone who witnessed Miss Lavinia's exquisite joy in her sister's poems might have supplied the answer. Emily's Eternity was hers. Though the texture of the poet's soul was too fine for this world's rough thumb and finger, its quality could be felt everywhere in the messages that constitute her "letter to the world."
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FACULTY STREET
T HE well-shaded street that skirts the Amherst College campus on the north was not called College Street much before the eighties. It was always referred to as Faculty Street. Its only rival in importance, judged by the prominence of the families that re- sided there, was Amity Street, pronounced " a-mighty street " by the small boy spelling out the new street sign that the town put up, and generally so regarded.
" Faculty " was a name to conjure with in the Amherst of my child- hood. Only colleges had faculties then, and the revered professors were looked upon with awe. We knew that a professor had a copy of Homer or Plato in his pocket, or if by any chance it was not in his pocket, it was in his head. We also knew that next to Homer he car- ried a horse-chestnut picked up in the college grove to prevent rheuma- tism. We had seen him rise from a deep arm-chair a little stiffly, bracing his hands on the sides of the chair and exclaiming, " Here I raise my Ebenezer." All this made him a bit more human to us.
A little footpath across the unmown common was a short cut from Northampton Road to Faculty Street. As I recall it in the early seventies, the first house on the south side of the street, but facing on the common, was the home of Reverend Charles Lothrop, a retired minister who conducted services for the colored people of Zion's Chapel. Some distance beyond the Lothrop's large yellow house was the first house fronting Faculty Street on the south side, the residence of Mrs. Eli Smith, who conducted a private school for young ladies. We went there for drawing lessons given by Mrs. Smith's son, Mr. Ben Smith, later known as one of the chief editors of "The Century Dictionary." To get to the Smith's house we had to wear rubber boots for depth of snow in winter and depth of mud in spring. Few streets then were paved.
Next stood the house where Professor L. Clark Seelye lived until he was called to become the first president of Smith College. Profes- sor William Cole Esty, the distinguished professor of Mathematics, succeeded him, and after the Estys the house was inhabited for many years by Professor Edwin A. Grosvenor. Remodeled to serve as faculty offices and named after its last owner, the building is now a part of the college plant.
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It happened that I had the good fortune to know President Clark Seelye from my earliest childhood. He was a family friend, and I played with his children in the leafy quiet of his yard on College Street. I well remember the day when my father came home saying that Professor Seelye was to be president of the new college for girls in Northampton, and that, as he had passed two Amherst citizens dis- cussing the news on the village green, he had overhead one of them remarking that it was a very foolish thing for an Amherst professor to leave the boys he was sure of and embark on the uncertain venture of teaching girls. My father added that, in spite of these forebodings, he hoped I would some day be one of those girls - and I was.
Next to the Seelyes lived Professor Montague, a small, perky man, who taught the modern languages. Beyond him was the house newly built for the college pastor, Reverend Thomas P. Field, the father of Judge Henry P. Field, Amherst's beloved alumnus and benefactor. With the Field house Faculty Street as a social entity terminated. The road sloped rapidly to the railroad tracks, and beyond the tracks was no man's land.
Let us return, therefore, to the common and start again along the north side of the street. Facing the common was the home of David Warner, an acquisitive citizen who accumulated all sorts of odd pos- sessions in his back yard, which always looked as though an auction were going on. He had a small Spitz dog that followed him about the streets and did many tricks when the cues were given him by his master's cane.
The first house properly facing the street on the north side belonged to the Reverend Laurens P. Hickok, the author of philosophical text- books then greatly esteemed. In my senior year at Smith we all studied Hickok's " Mental Science " and "Moral Science," as edited by Julius H. Seelye. Both Doctor and Mrs. Hickok belonged to an earlier generation. It would have been easy to imagine them stepping out of a pair of old daguerreotypes with stately dignity. Mrs. Hickok was greatly interested in missions. She held fairs at her home for the benefit of her favorite causes, where she sold dainty articles of her own manufacture - pin-balls such as gentlemen then carried as provision for their boutonnieres, needle-cases and little work baskets lined with silks from a bride's outfit of a hundred years before, silk patchwork quilts and afternoon aprons, pen-wipers in little books labeled " Ex- tracts from the pen of a distinguished citizen," and hand-painted cases for court plaster, inscribed :
O, may you never, never feel
A deeper wound than this can heal.
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She also helped the young daughters of the faculty in presenting little plays and tableaux in the Barrett Gymnasium for increasing the foreign missionary offering. One such production was called "Using the Weed," a title of sinister portent in days when tobacco was linked with the demon rum. The audience was in an ecstasy of delight when " the weed " turned out to be the popular Weed sewing machine. The Hitchcock girls, the Seelyes, and Alice Mather made up the casts for these performances. After the Hickoks, Doctor Harry Seelye occupied their house.
Next door was the handsome house of Professor (later President) Julius H. Seelye, and behind his house a fish pond where we skated joyously in winter. The overflow from the pond ran off through a deep ravine that paralleled the street. We did not know then, and perhaps the professor himself was unaware, that the water for his pond was supplied by the ancient log aqueduct that formerly served the town distillery where cider brandy was manufactured. A century ago this distillery flourished in what is now the garden of the Lord Jeffery Inn, but it had yielded to the Temperance crusade years before I was born. In days when most houses were carefully fenced in, the Hickok and Seelye yards were noticeable for the absence of a dividing fence. The lawn between was the scene of many children's parties, at which the gracious Mrs. Seelye of the distinguished James family and her daughters Bessie and Anna were our hostesses. Mabel was quite too young at this time to be at parties, and her brother Will was quite too grown up to come. To these parties came little girls in white dresses with gay silk sashes. One, to the envy of the rest of us, had a pink and blue Roman sash brought by her traveled father from Italy, and wore a string of Roman pearls that greatly became her. A long table was set on the lawn and covered with a snowy white cloth. Col- ored tablecloths, though then fashionable, were never used out of doors. A big glass bowl of white raspberries at one end of the table and one of red raspberries at the other, accompanied by golden sponge cake and sugar cookies and a long dish of frozen custard, supplied a satisfying supper. A few children drank milk. There were no fancy beverages and no confectionery.
When we were a little older, we went to grown up suppers served on President Seelye's eastern piazza. I well recall the tall chocolate layer cakes that brought these entertainments to a joyous close. After President Seelye returned from Turkey, he always served coffee in the Turkish fashion to guests as they entered. The early coffee pro- moted an atmosphere of good cheer at the outset.
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Across a lane beyond President Seelye's house stood the home of Doctor Edward Hitchcock, famous in Amherst annals as " Old Doc," but then a young professor of Hygiene and Physical Education and one of the first to introduce the care of the body into American col- leges. Doctor Hitchcock was a deeply religious man, and it was known that he conducted family prayers every morning wearing the dressing- gown then so fashionable for gentlemen. He also played the bass-viol to accompany the hymns. The whole college felt his electric vigor of body and soul, and his memory has been perpetuated by liberal gifts made to the college in his honor. Charles, Lucy, and Bessie Hitchcock were our special playmates here, though Edward, Caroline, Albert, and John sometimes joined us.
Last on the north side of the street was Miss Cooper's house, built in the late seventies. It still stands as a faculty residence. Miss Cooper was fond of ornamenting her extensive grounds with decorative trees and shrubs. The trumpet vine on her east porch and its neighbor, the delicate Madeira vine, grew with especial luxuriance. This pleasant porch was the scene of many a delightful company invited to "tea " (supper) out of doors.
An especial favorite of Mrs. Cooper's was a shrub of sweet bay ( Magnolia glauca) which was transplanted from her former home in Magnolia, Massachusetts (the northernmost stand of the genus). So it was doubly cherished by her, first for the delicious fragrance of its flowers, " noticeable for a distance of three quarters of an English mile," according to Pehr Kalm and then for its associations with her former home. This shrub was transplanted several times, finally to the home of her granddaughter, Mrs. Orton Clark, when Mrs. Tuck- erman left the Cooper home to live next door, so this Magnolia has followed the family through three generations.
The ravine which bordered her grounds as well as Doctor Hitch- cock's with the distillery brook flowing between shady banks covered with ferns was a most picturesque nook.
There were four houses in Amherst associated with one or another of the college presidents, and this fact has caused some confusion. The "First President's House," where I lived as a child, stood on the site of the present Psi Upsilon fraternity house. It was occupied by Presi- dent Moore and by President Humphrey during a part of his term. In 1834 the college erected the present President's House, which was first occupied by President Humphrey, and has been used by all his successors except President Seelye. President Hitchcock, however, lived in this house only during the nine years when he was in office, and his own house on Pleasant Street opposite the new gymnasium,
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a house easily distinguishable by the octagonal cabinet that he built on to it to hold his private mineral collection, is usually referred to as " President Hitchcock's house." President Stearns lived in the official President's House until his death, but President Seelye preferred to remain in his own substantial home on College Street, the house now owned by Phi Kappa Psi. The college, therefore, rented the vacant President's House to Mrs. William F. Stearns, the widowed daughter- in-law of President Stearns, and she conducted there until 1891 a girls' school known to Amherst students as "The Convent." Beginning with President Gates the President's House has been regularly occu- pied by the official head of the college.
The present public library in Amherst, so beautifully housed in the building made possible by the bequest of Samuel Minot Jones, may trace its beginnings to an early book club organized by the families who lived on Faculty Street and in the adjacent houses on the village green. This club subscribed to the Atlantic Monthly, Littell's Living Age, the North American Review, and the Fortnightly for magazines, and bought a new book, usually a book of travels, once every two weeks. When Doctor Hamilton J. Cate came to Amherst to prac- tice medicine (and eventually to marry a grand-niece of Washington Irving's who was teaching at Mrs. Stearns's school), he arranged a second book club modeled on the first. Then with the cooperation of these two clubs he proceeded to establish a town library. The ladies whom he had persuaded to lend their support to the project sometimes met in our house, covered the books with thick manilla paper, and pasted in each the slip which was to record the dates of drawing and returning.
Perhaps, as the ladies were engaged in this work, there might have been a ring at the door and a basket of game handed in that had been sent by Sam Jones to his mother. A note from Miss Mary French, Mrs. Jones' daughter, is before me which is indicative of a similar gift, " Mother sends you a pr of Prairie Chickens which have been recd from Chicago." At this time, Mr. Jones was making his fortune in Chicago. He was not an unfamiliar person to Amherst, for he came back to see his mother. " Sam Jones is in town " was the friendly word passed along as people met each other. On these occasions, he entertained his friends in his mother's hospitable home on Amity Street.
Perhaps, too, as the ladies pasted the slips on the books, a small boy might have passed the window. The boy grown to manhood is Mr. George Cutler, to whom Mr. Jones entrusted the entire charge of his treasure gift to Amherst.
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The library opened one Saturday afternoon in cramped quarters over Hannah Waite's hat shop. Miss Kate Ward sat at the librarian's desk. I was one of the first to draw out a book. I chose "What Katy Did " by Susan Cooledge. A little later the library acquired " What Katy Did at School," and I devoured that also. Nearly twenty years later I found myself at a hotel table in Blandford with Susan Cooledge and her sister, Miss Dora Woolsey of New Haven. I told them of the first library book I ever drew, and they in turn gave me introductions to friends in New Haven, where I was going to live for some time.
To raise funds for the library the ladies gave entertainments like those dedicated to the support of foreign missions. Dramatic perform- ances of " The Mistletoe Bough " and "Villikins and His Dinah " were given in College Hall before enthusiastic audiences. Barnaby and his cork leg appeared in College Hall about the same time, but I think this was for the benefit of the college.
A form of entertainment that is closely associated in my mind with the raising of money for the library was the burlesque " art gallery." This had a brief vogue in New England towns about the time the library started. Before me as I write is a four-page printed leaflet entitled " Amherst Library Fair Art Gallery Catalogue." Everyone paid a small sum for admission, received a catalogue, and proceeded to identify the " pictures " in terms of an astonishing array of objects placed about the room. A bottle of perfume, for example, appeared in the catalogue as " View of Cologne " by S. Cent. " Things to Adore " was obviously a lock and key. " The Early Home of Lincoln " by the artist Berceau looked very much like the cradle in which Emily Dickinson was rocked, and " Portraits of Distinguished Citizens " was represented by a large gold-framed mirror. Everyone boasted as he left the gallery that his portrait was hung on the line. This was our equivalent for the cross-word puzzles and twistagrams of today. Everyone enjoyed it immensely, for the art of pleasing and of being readily pleased was brought to high perfection on Faculty Street.
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THE FIRST PRESIDENT'S HOUSE ONCE MORE
W HEN the first chapter of this book was printed in the Amherst Graduates' Quarterly for February, 1937, a very strange challenge came to me. I was asked to prove that the house we lived in really was the First President's House, a fact I had never heard questioned before. Uncertainty had arisen because the college archives contained a photograph labeled in the handwriting of Dr. Edward Hitchcock "The First President's House," and as such it was reproduced in " Amherst, The Story of a New England College " by Claude Moore Fuess. This photograph, however, was not a picture of our house, but of the Bentley house, which stood next door to ours on what is now the property of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. On one side of the house shown in the photograph can be seen a cor- ner of the Baptist Church, and behind it the chapter house of Alpha Delta Phi in process of construction, so that there can be no doubt about the identification of the building.
Now it so happened that Professor W. C. Fowler was the owner both of the house we lived in and of the Bentley house next door. So Dr. Hitchcock, who was a small boy when the First President's House ceased to be used by the college, must have confused the two houses that Professor Fowler had owned and become firmly convinced that the Bentley house was the one built by the college and occupied by Presidents Moore and Humphrey. When it was demolished in 1892, he secured the huge lock and key of the front door and deposited them in the college archives as the original lock and key of the First Presi- dent's House, " used from 1828 to 1892." But the first of these dates is not correct for the First President's House, which was built in 1821. There can be no question that Dr. Hitchcock was mistaken. The pedi- gree of the house we lived in can be easily traced. It was sold by the college to Professor Fowler in 1838, and passed from him to my father in 1858. It was sold to the Psi Upsilon fraternity in 1879 and was used as a chapter house until the present Psi U house was built, about 1912.
There is also a story that the college had once in its possession a heavy brass key, six inches long, of the old-fashioned type such as one sees in collections. This key was labeled " Key to the First President's House," but it did not fit the lock that it was supposed to match. How- ever, when someone tried it on the door of the old Psi U house, it fitted into the lock like a cartridge in a rifle bore. This key has appar-
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ently disappeared, and with it has gone a bit of circumstantial evidence in support of my contention.
The words " circumstantial evidence " bring to my mind a favorite story told by President Julius Seelye and known to every Amherst man in his classes. It ran as follows. A student visited the British Museum and asked to see a rare and valuable gold coin. It was brought him by the curator. When the student rose to leave, the curator went to his desk to take back the coin. It was not there. The student was stopped and threatened with arrest unless he produced the coin. He refused to allow himself to be searched. Why? The answer was that the student had in his pocket a facsimile of the coin. Fortunately the original coin was found - it had slipped into a crack in the desk - just as the student was being hurried off to jail. This discovery saved him from jail, to which circumstantial evidence would otherwise have condemned him.
I will give you three guesses, as Eugene Field used to say, as to what was the first improvement my father made when he moved into the First President's House. He told me in strict confidence, for we all had a deep respect for the presidents and the professor who had pre- ceded us, and what he told me is here divulged for the first time. He removed from the cellar the old village hearse which was being used as a potato bin. My father thought it was a bit gruesome, even for potatoes.
How it got there remains a mystery. My own theory is that it may have been hidden there after the students had used it for the tradi- tional funeral procession preceding the burning of Euclid. Fortu- nately it had not been used for the obsequies of Noah Webster's dictionary. There was a large bulkhead in the rear of the house through which the hearse might have been carried unobserved at the time when President Humphrey and his family were in Europe. There at any rate it remained, forgotten and unrecognized, until my father had it removed.
When my family owned the house, from 1858 to 1879, there were about thirty fruit trees on the grounds : apple trees of many varieties, Early Harvest, Oyster Bay, Baldwin, Northern Spy, Russet, and Bell Flower; for pears, Winter Neilis, Sugar, Flemish Beauty, Clapp's Favorite, and Seckle; also cherry trees and plum trees. A currant bush bearing fruit flourished in the button-ball tree where the trunk was cleft. Another button-ball tree that stood by Sellen's Lane was covered year after year by magnificent clusters of Queen of the Prairie rose. This rose was always at its best at Commencement time, and many graduates who remembered it from their college days came to
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see it. The pink blossoms seemed fairly to reach the sky among the mottled, bark-shorn branches of the great tree.
We sat up in the Bell Flower tree to shell peas for dinner with the help of any youth who happened to be calling. The trees were full of birds. A Baltimore oriole nested every year in the Flemish Beauty tree, which stood at the south end of the first terrace. The wood- peckers had hollowed out a home in the Sugar pear tree that stood by the south door of President Humphrey's study. It was in the second floor room looking out on this pear tree that Clyde Fitch is said to have written his first play. He was not a Psi U, but his most intimate friend was, and so he sat by the open fire in his friend's room, with the sun streaming in, and felt the congenial atmosphere that he needed for his writing. The red-winged blackbird called from many a tree. Hummingbirds hovered over the flower garden on the first terrace, and bluebirds lighted on the trellis of the Catawba grape vine near the house. When Professor A. S. Packard of the Peabody Museum visited us, he found a very rare species of plant louse on this vine. The insect went off to fame in the museum, but we were shy of boast- ing of the great find. " Louse " was not an accepted word in the vocab- ulary of Amherst.
When the Psi Upsilon fraternity acquired the house, they added a third story, removed the woodsheds and barn at the rear, and leveled off one of the terraces on the south to form a tennis court. The lane north of the house, which had been a favorite place for sliding down hill, was regraded. It is now Sellen Street. The old Sellen house of white painted brick that stood at the head of the lane has been torn down.
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