USA > Massachusetts > Bristol County > Rehoboth > Historic Rehoboth: record of the dedication of Goff memorial hall, May 10th, A.D. 1886 > Part 5
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The first thing needed in the reconstruction of our old towns is to place them abreast of their neighbors in all the educative and refining influences which modern society has to furnish. When people are seeking a home, nowadays, the first question raised relates to the character
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of the people in the community, the second as to the schools and churches. Now the facilities for a good edu- cation are not confined to our cities or larger communi- ties. The best education may be and often is obtainable in our country towns. Our very best colleges and semi- naries are in what may be styled provincial communities. Norton, Wellesly, Amherst, Williamstown, South Hadley, Hanover, Middlebury, Andover, Wilbraham, Easthampton, East Greenwich, and other educational centres, are pro- vincial towns, chiefly known to the world through the schools and colleges planted in their midst. Their quiet and retired situations have been found most favorable to study, and around the schools families have made homes for the education of their children.
Now New Rehoboth must learn the lesson so clearly taught by so many hundreds of our communities, and though she may not have a famed school or college, she may have as good a high school with as thorough a course of study as any other town in Massachusetts. My own experience here in your midst enables me to state, with- out fear of contradiction, that the talent, the scholarly ability, are here, and all that you need is the able teacher installed in your new high school, dedicated to-day, to draw from these homes, far and near, the bright boys and girls who are hungry for a better education than the common school affords, and who had better for various reasons obtain it at home than spend time and money at boarding-schools away from home. I have spoken of the high school first, for it is really the foundation of good elementary schools. You should by all means have first class common schools, and the good school should always give way to the better, the better to the best, and the last is the foe of all others. From primary education through the high school, Rehoboth may give her children as good,
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and even a better education than Boston, for here the opportunities for learning so much of nature, of natural sciences, of Yankee ingenuity, of robust and healthy character, are beyond compare with the mechanical, excit- ing and over-stimulating influences thrown about boyhood and girlhood in our cities. Given a hundred healthy children at five years of age, fifty of them to be brought up and educated in the city, and the other fifty to be brought up and educated in the country, and the product in industrious, honest citizens will be two to one in favor of the country-bred child.
Among other educational agencies which are helpful in creating and fostering intelligence in a community, are the lecture and the debating club, both of which have been the means of developing some of the finest minds of our state and country. The lecture platform is now one of the most instructive and popular of the people's schools, and at a small cost, by the aid of the stereopticon and other means of illustration, the ends of the earth may be brought to the acquaintance of all the dwellers of our most isolated inland towns. For a few hundred dollars, courses of lectures can be established for the instruction and en- tertainment of old and young, which would be of equal value to the more famous courses of New York, Boston and Providence, and these make the people content with their own intellectual environment.
Of the well managed debating club, I cannot speak in too high praise. As a spur to study and research, and a means of personal culture, it has not its equal, and in the development of individual talent and the acquisition of mental power, it is a powerful auxiliary. Here men may measure themselves one with another, and the man of mental power is readily measured by the standard of a more shallow pretender. In such schools, N. P. Banks,
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Henry Wilson, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, Senator Hoar, John D. Long, Gov. Robinson and hun- dreds of others, of state and national fame, took their first lessons and received their first encouragement to make the most of life and its opportunities. One of the valuable results of well arranged courses of public lectures is the instruction of the people on social and economic questions, concerning which there is such wide divergence of popu- lar views and consequent misapprehension, distrust and conflict, not only of opinion, but of action, as are now so remarkably displayed in all parts of our land and the world. The war now waging in so many places between capital and labor is as unnatural and as cruel as the civil war of 1861-65. It is equally unreasonable and unneces- sary, and would not have been precipitated, to the great loss of the wage-earners and the destruction of the very capital that encourages and sustains labor, had it not been for the ignorance or misguidance of those who are seeking to be benefited by strikes, boycotts and other labor-saving machines, too often engines of oppression in the hands of Jehus as engineers. The press, the platform and the pulpit must in such times be honest, earnest and outspoken in their voices of intelligent instruction for the people ; must be calm and dispassionate, that they may allay the excite- ments and passions of men, and must educate the people into the true philosophy of labor, and help men to solve the problems which beset their daily lives.
And here, also, the public library enters as a factor to mould public opinion and direct to wisest forms of action. History is at hand, with her lessons from all the past, to in- struct the seeker after truth. 'Tis greatly wise to talk with the experiences of men and nations, and if we would avoid their faults and follies, we must enquire concerning their causes and their consequences. Biography lends us wonder-
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ful assistance in showing how the great men of the world acquired greatness ; the wise, wisdom; the strong, strength ; the virtuous, virtue ; and the pure in heart, the Kingdom of God. Philosophy becomes a light to our path. By her guidance we may sit at the feet of Plato in the Academy, and walk with Aristotle under the olives. Bacon reveals to us his inductive methods, Franklin chains the lightning for our use, Spencer explains to us the movements of our inner thoughts, and Darwin and Agassiz tell us of the grand laws which govern all development in the natural world around us, leading up to the spiritual world above us. Science unfolds the structure of the atoms in the sunbeam and resolves star dust into suns and systems. Fiction shows us the semblance of real life and in this mirror, as face answers to face in water, so the human heart is made an object lesson to teach the passions, the purposes and the resultants of living. Poctry, the hand- maid of fiction, and the companion of Art, gives us songs in the night of our sorrows, comfort in the evening hour of trials, checr and strength in the mid-day heat and toil, and a sunrise glow of hope and promise to the opening life of man. Would you know men, study books ; would you know books, study men. Each study is the comple- ment of the other. Would you find solace, without satiety, find it in the pages of a good book ; do you seek a real friendship with a friend always faithful and at your service, it is found in the silent communion of kindred souls in literature.
This library which you have opened may be made a mine of wealth to this community, and the youth of the town should learn early to find within it the precious ore. The catalogue of your shelves shows how wisely the trustees have made their selections from the multitude of good books of the day, and I am sure that the nucleus
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already formed will gather to itself from time to time new additions, so that from this beginning you shall have a large storehouse from which the people of Rehoboth shall draw in all the future years.
Old New England was an agricultural section and the farm was the place where centred hope, health, happiness. To-day New England is a workship, a storehouse, and the exodus is so strong towards the cities that the babies in the cradle show an unwonted restlessness to be clad in hat and boots and be off for the town. This mania is encouraged by the early education of the child and the conditions which surround him. The home, it may be, into which he is born is unattractive, and its surroundings contain no element of beauty. He finds no attractions at the village, no good schools, no library, no social life which interests him. He goes to the city and his eye and mind are at once drawn to the many objects which attract and hold the youthful attention. On his return the dull, hard routine of farm life becomes almost hateful to him, and he longs for the day when he will be old enough to leave the parental roof for the more seductive outward charms of the city. Elegant houses, gay equipages, fine dresses, the many prizes of a mercantile life, allure and entice the youth from the quiet country life to the noise and excitement of the city. In the great lottery of busi- ness, trade, exchange, the lad sees only the one success- ful winner of the prize, and not the ninety and nine who draw the blanks or something worse. We are fast coming upon a time, however, when this wholesale departure from the good old ways of the grandfathers will be checked by a new departure, taken in returning to the safer but more conservative pursuits of rural life, where every man is an independent freeman, earning while producing, saving his honest earnings against the rainy days of life, and never
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puzzling his brain over the speculative manipulations of the stock market. During a conversation the other day with a gentleman who has attained moderate success in business in Boston, and who has figured heavily in Dem- ocratic politics, I asked the question, how he regarded city life as compared with that of the country ? His reply was significant : "The great mistake of my life was in leaving the old farm - my boyhood's home - and I am looking forward to the time when I shall return to it."
Now in our model town of the future the boys and girls, the brightest and handsomest of them at least, are to stay at home and care for the varied interests which are to grow up and flourish by their enterprise and industry. Labor-saving machines have taken the hard drudgery from all forms of manual toil. Farming, gardening, the culture of small fruits, silk culture, dairies, the making of honey, fine needle work, painting, flower culture, wood carving, the manufacture of jewelry, and all forms of orna- ment suitable for woman's labor - these and a multitude of other occupations will engage the attention and employ the skilled labor of the men and women of the year 1900. As a foretaste of the good time coming when woman's labor shall be found in the healthful occupation of our out door life of New England, in a climate unexcelled for health and rigor the wide world over, I may refer to the fact that women are now successfully cultivating the orange in Florida, the grape and the silkworm in Cali- fornia, small fruits in the Central West, and managing suc- cessful cattle ranches in Montana. In the Rehoboth that is to be, under the influences of Farmers' Clubs, Rural Improvement Associations, and individual and town cor- porations, we are to have well cultivated farms, the old forests well protected, excellent and well shaded roads, beautiful groves, lowlands well drained, Palmer's River
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and your ponds stocked with fish, meadows yielding three tons of good timothy to the acre, and blooded cattle graz- ing over these hilly pastures. Fruits and flowers will be found in abundance at every home, and each family shall sit under its own vine and elm tree. Arbor Day will be celebrated annually, and Art will come to Nature's aid in beautifying this varied landscape. The churches and schools will be made as attractive as the most delightful homes, and the cities of the dead shall waken with a new life, when, on some beautiful Easter morning, the lily and the rose -- types of the resurrection - shall be found at every resting place, a tribute of love, and the witness of immortality.
I have said that the various departments of service represented in this beautiful and useful edifice relate to all the needs of the complex life of man. Your school and library look toward the future of this town. The fine hall in which we are assembled represents the historic present, as it stands before us in the transactions of men and society ; while your Historic Society lives in the past, and with its eye backward, its index finger points forward.
In the rambling review of this address, I have en- deavored to show in briefest outline, some of the agencies that have built up and sustained this municipality. The worthy lives of the men of earlier times are our rich legacy, and through their toils and sacrifices we enjoy
priceless privileges. To the study and preservation of all that was true, noble and of good report, it becomes you, people of Rehoboth of to-day, to devote yourselves. Would you do better than the fathers, you must know how well they acted. Would you be wiser, purer, freer, you must come into the measure of their wisdom, purity, free- dom and justice. The house the fathers built must not be torn down until a better edifice shall stand in its place,
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and he is the wise architect, who in the midst of changing styles, builds after the pattern of the things made in the heavens. It is true that our times demand new measures and new men, and while we "let the dead past bury its dead," we must "act in the living present, heart within and God overhead."
New Rehoboth, with its Goff Memorial as the repre- sentative of a nobler present and a better future, must bestir herself in these matters which shall make for her progress and her prosperity. The school and the church must be magnified in their work of saving men and society. The only conservative forces in society are intelligence and religion. He who loves God and his fellow will neither strike nor be struck, and the millennium is at hand where- ever and whenever a Christian education gets possession of the minds and hearts of men.
Let this Memorial, erected to the memory of sainted men and holy women, be a reminder of their virtues and an inspiration to higher attainments. Let youth come up here to prepare for the warfare of life. In this armory shall be found a shield more wonderful than that of Achil- les ; a sword better tempered than the blade of Damascus; and a panoply lighter than that of Knight or Crusader. With a noble past to inspire you, a living present that demands serious thought and progressive action, and a future that beckons to grander duties as individuals and as a people, you will, if faithful, realize the beautiful picture of the Psalmist :
When our sons shall be as plants grown up in their youth.
And our daughters as corner stones hewn after the fashion of a palace; When our garners are full. affording all manner of store,
And our sheep bring forth thousands and ten thousands in our fields. When our oxen are well laden,
When there is no breaking in and no going forth, and no outery in our streets.
Happy is the people that is in such a case.
Yea, happy is the people whose God is the Lord.
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Rev. Alexander Macgregor, of Pawtucket, offered an eloquent Prayer of Dedication, followed by the song "Oh Restless Sea," by the quartette. Dr. E. G. Robinson, President of Brown University, was next introduced, and spoke as follows :
ADDRESS BY REV. E. G. ROBINSON, D. D.
It must seem inexcusable, almost impertinent, for one to venture upon even few words at this late hour, and after the full and careful address which we have had so much pleasure in listening to. Two reasons, however, induced me to except the very cordial invitation to be here to-day, and I do not feel quite at liberty to decline the earnest request to add a few words, though unpre- meditated, to what has already been said. My first reason for coming was that I wished to drive along the roads and look on the fields and streams of the old town that was the home of my ancestors. George Robinson, one of the men of Rehoboth who made the North Purchase, as it was called, from the Indians, a territory including my native town - Attleborough - was my great-great-grand- father, and in the old First Congregational church of Attleborough, the one of his sons who was my grand- father, as well as his sons, including my father, were accustomed to worship and to receive their religious in- struction.
Another reason for my being here has been a desire to show appreciation of the generous gift of our friend in the erection of this memorial building ; to recognize one of the noblest uses to which wealth can be donated - the increase of means for the diffusion of knowledge -a knowledge of what is and of what has been. Honor to him whose memory this building will so worthily per-
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petuate, and to all who have joined in contributing to make the building so fitting a source and centre of knowledge and intellectual quickening for the town. By no means least among the good ends which the building will subserve will be its antiquarian and historical uses. Nothing of the present can be fully understood and appre- ciated without knowing the past out of which it has sprung. If the Rehoboth of to-day would understand itself it must remember the Rehoboth of the earlier days. And it will be here that the relics of past days will be preserved and may be studied when they shall elsewhere have vanished.
And it is none too soon that relics of the past have began to be gathered here for preservation. Dropping out of use and uncared for they would speedily be forgotten forever. And there are later memories in some of the aged heads here to-day that, unless soon garnered, will be irrecoverably lost. Where, outside of New England, in all our country, can you find so many men among the same number of people, whose years are touching the last quarter of a century, as are here assembled ? They could tell of experiences strange but useful to youthful ears -experiences that would help to a better appreciation of what now is as well as of what is to come. But far behind the memories of all living men lie our richest fields of inquiry. Implements of industry and of household econo- mies speak to us of toils and of endurance to which we are strangers; but they were toils that bred men and women of heroic mould - an ancestry of whom we never need be ashamed.
And additional to what will here speak of the past to the eye, there are less conspicious relics that ought in lectures here to be pointed out to the ear. Brown bread, pork and beans, pumpkin pie and fish balls speak dis-
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tinctly of the plain living and hard working of the fathers, but subtler elements remain to be recognized. Traces of Puritan dialect still linger in our daily speech. Phrases are common on the lips of our farmers that have come down to us from the first settlers of Rehoboth and Attle- borough. The phrase "English hay " that distingushes the hay grown on the upland from that of the natural grass that grows on the wet meadows or swales ; what a light is thrown back by it on the beginnings of New England life ! The only hay the first settlers had on which to carry their half-starved cattle and horses through the winter was that of the native grasses of the low meadows. Readers of Mr. Bliss's History of Rehoboth, and of John Daggett's sketches of the History of Attleborough, will remember the jealous care with which these meadows were divided and distributed among the original settlers of both towns. Imported seed from England gave them in due time a sweeter hay from grasses grown on culti- vated fields, and from that time on all cultivated hay from upland fields has been known as English hay. And so, could we go back to the earlier days, we should find in them the origin of many a social custom and form of speech now prevailing in the rural parts of Rehoboth and Attleborough, and Seekonk and other towns, to which the earlier Rehoboth gave birth.
But this building looks to the future as well as to the past. It is not only memorial but educational. The gen- tleman who has addressed us is interested in education. We all are. It is to educational ends that this building is chiefly to be devoted. The generations to come are here to be helped to outstrip their fathers that have lived in these neighboring homes. And all this is good ground for our rejoicing. But in all education, even in the high- est and broadest, no lessons under heaven should be more
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earnestly and continuously instilled into the minds of the young than those of personal integrity and honest indus- try. Next to what we owe to God stands what we owe to society - the duty of honestly earning one's own living and sustaining the state, of contributing something to the possessions of mankind and to the common weal. If the schooling that shall be given within these walls shall but teach the young men of Rehoboth the folly of forsak- fng the conntry for the city and crowded towns, of aban- doning the tillage of the soil for trade and the counting- room, shall teach them by skillful tillage to bring these surrounding fields into the productiveness of which they are capable, then a service will have been rendered for which all wise citizens aud good men will rejoice and give thanks.
But I must cease. With congratulations to our friend, whose name this building is to bear, on the successful completion of his purpose, and to all who have aided in its completion, my carnest hope is that boundlessly more than the most sanguine have anticipated shall flow out in future years from this memorial structurc.
ADDRESS BY REV. JEREMIAH TAYLOR, D. D., OF PROVIDENCE.
MR. PRESIDENT AND CITIZENS OF REHOBOTH :-- It was said of a distinguished English divine, of a former genera- tion, that he was a very unfair preacher, inasmuch as he left nothing to be said by another when he had completed his discourse. The orator of the day has rendered him- self open to a like charge by the fulness and completeness with which he has covered the ground open to review on this interesting occasion. We are all impressed that this is a stirring, proud day for this old town, which is wont
A
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to be in such quiet rest and cheerful repose in the lap of its richly cultivated farms and contented homes. That you have this building to dedicate, and that you are here on this auspicious occassion for so suggestive and inspiring a service, is one of the best things that has occurred here of recent years.
It is a matter for congratulation that seventy-seven years ago there was born on this spot a child, who to-day has come up hither in perfected manhood, with his noble benefaction already conferred, while the benediction of his presence offers such additional pleasure. I am prepared to congratulate him, I can almost say envy him, for what he has found purpose and means to do, in connection with others, for his native town. If, according to the adage of the ancients, it be sweet and honorable to die for one's country, it certainly ought to be no less pleasant and honorable for a man while living to do something to beautify and enrich in things most excellect, for all time, that particular section in his country which cradled him in infancy and imparted to him these vital forces which so materially aided in creating the manhood of later years. How much subsequent life depends upon the birthplace. The physical, moral, intellectual, are all toned by the atmosphere of the place. Mountains, valleys, streams of water, trees, flowers, birds, houses, churches, are constant and efficient teachers. A person would be insensible to the most important surroundings of his being who had no love for his native town. Surely, if Mr. Goff had been born any where else than just here, he would not have been the man among us that he is to-day.
Nothing more beautifully reveals the spirit of Lamar- tine, the French statesman and poet, than the story he tells of his effort to portion off and sell his paternal estate, at Milly, when under the hard pressure of poverty. His
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tender associating was so inwrought with every foot and yard that he rather suffer from want than to see the same domain in the keeping of strangers. A sacred sentiment might not be exchanged for gold. The town, in our New England, has had such a formative influence, in connec- tion with all that is most excellent in the state and national government, that it is only a just recognition of such in- fluences that prompts us to do what we can to perpetuate the institutions of the town.
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