USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Brimfield > Historical celebration of the town of Brimfield, Hampden County, Mass > Part 18
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Great changes have transpired, since the founders of this town ven- tured to invade this land of the Nipnets. The Philadelphia exposition is the type of our modern civilization, in its forms, forces and results, as made manifest to those countless throngs, gathered during the sunny months of this centennial year, from all the sections of our own broad realm, and from the remotest lands beyond the sea.
How diverse the times and scenes, the habits and the customs of the homespun life of our ancestors, as this day presented. Their primitive institutions, civil and religious, seemed as simple and unde- monstrative as we can conceive; but the manhood of those ancestors of ours was transcendently great. No nation was ever founded by braver or better men.
Monson was incorporated, as a district, in 1760, with all the rights of a town, except that of corporate representation in the legislature. This distinctive and most important right and function, according to
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the primitive constitution of a New England town, was conferred in 1775, and the first town meeting was held December 29th of that year.
" The progress of freedom," of which so much is said, has reduced the town of Monson, after enjoying this right for nearly a century. once more to the legal condition of a district, as it was during the first fif- teen years of its corporate existence. The territorial limits of the legislative constituency to which Monson now belongs, are nearly the same as the original boundaries of the town of Brimfield.
The best authority for the early local history of Monson. is the llis- torical Discourse of Rev. Dr. Alfred Ely, preached December 224, 1820, in commemoration of the Landing of the Pilgrims. It contains a brief, but invaluable record of facts, which has served as the basis of the sketches, published by Dr. Holland, in his History of Western Massachusetts, and by other authors. Dr. Ely gives the names of the ten original proprietors, out of the whole number, eighty-four, who settled in the western part of the township; some, whose lots lay in the eastern part, sold or exchanged them and removed to the west part. Among them, was Capt. D. Hitchcock, and Thomas Stebbins, the ancestor of the Stebbins families. Captain Hitchcock died in 1763, and was the first person buried in Monson. Previously to the separation, the people attended public worship and buried their dead in the cast part of the town.
Dr. Ely has recorded the names of the forty-nine families, in the district at the time of its incorporation in 1760. The population did not then exceed 350. In sixty years from that date, that is in 1820. the number of families had increased to 328, and the population from 350 to 2.126. No measures were taken to build a meeting-house, to organize a church, or settle a minister, till the separation of the dis- triet from Brimfield. The first meeting-house was raised May 20th. 1762. On the 23d of June following, the people met in the unfinished structure, to organize the first church. and settle their first minister. Rev. Abishai Sabin.
The first actual settler in what is now the town of Monson, was Robert Olds, an original proprietor. He came from Springfield, but was born at Windsor, Conn., October 9, 1670. the son of Robert Old, and his wife Susannah Hanford. In the Windsor records, the name is variously spelled Old, Olds and Ould. The exact date of his com- ing to Monson is not known, but Dr. Ely says, "he commenced here about the same time the settlement in Brimfield began." This must have been as early as 1715. He lived on the farm, in the north para of the town, owned in later times, by Dea. Royal Merrick.
All the original proprietors of Monson came, according to Dr. Ely.
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from the river towns. With the genealogy of these proprietors, Doctor Ely was familiar. He was himself a native of West Springfield, born in 1778, four years after its separation from the very large town of ancient Springfield in 1774. Probably no man has lived in Monson so well acquainted with the history of its early inhabitants, and of the second generation, who took part in the war of the Revolution. It is deeply to be regretted, that his extensive and minute knowledge of the history of the town, of which he was the pastor nearly sixty years, was nearly all buried with him in the dust.
The traditions relative to the Grant of the General Court to Richard Fellows, of 200 acres on the south side of Chicopee river, have been erroneously blended with the early settlement of the towns of Monson and Brimfield. These traditions first appear in Dr. Ely's sermon, and have been copied in Dr. Holland's History of Western Massachu- setts, and in other narratives.
The grant to Richard Fellows, was made to him as an individual, and not as an associate in any company, like a town corporation, on certain conditions, which he never fulfilled. His grant, like those of Elliot, Winthrop, Saltonstall, Collins and Hutchinson, located in Stur- bridge and other places in this region, was made at a very early period. It was surveyed by George Colton and Benjamin Cooley, the earliest settlers of Longmeadow, in 1657. The conditions of the grant and a copy of the survey with a plan, are found in the State archives. It comprised within its limits the so called Frank Morgan farm. The survey was made only 21 years after Springfield was settled, by Wil- liam Pynchon in 1636, and 44 years before Major John Pynchon, with his twenty associates, went into the wilderness to spy out the land of Brimfield.
Fellows was bound by the conditions of his grant, to build a suitable house of entertainment, and to occupy his land seven years. No house of entertainment was ever built by him, such as was required by very exact specifications. He may have lived on his farm long enough to prove the fact of occupancy. The next year after the survey he was in the employ of Thomas Clark, a relative of the Hutchinson family, as a surveyor of a Colony grant long known as Hutchinson's land. Fellows, assisted in his survey by Henry Chapin, located and his grant of 300 acres, within the bounds of the Connecticut Colony, on a hill, called Ocquebitucke, containing 500 acres, and situated, partly in the town of Union and partly in Ashford .- Mass. Col. Records, Vol. 4th, p. 356. He soon sold his farm on the Chicopee to the Hutch- inson family, by whom it was long retained. Fellows moved from Hartford to Springfield in 1659, according to Savage's account of him,
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and from thence to Northampton. In 1661 he was at Hatfield, where he died in 1663. His eldest son, Richard Fellows, was killed at Springfieldl by the Indians. August 25th, 1675, in King Phillip. war.
The district of Monson was formed the very year, when the Revolu- tionary conflict began. Monson became a town about six months be- fore the Declaration of Independence. During those fifteen years of preparation for war, the political relations of Brimfield and Monson were connected as formerly, and they cordially sustained their repre- sentative, Timothy Danielson, who was a member of the Provincial Congress and a leading patriot of the colony.
The people of Monson were of one mind and heart in their devotion to liberty. An efficient cause of their zeal, was the patriotism of their first minister, Mr. Sabin, and his successor, Mr. Ives. The pastorate of Mr. Sabin from 1763 to 1771, was brief, but overeast with the shad- ows of coming events. Ill-health prevented another settlement, and he died comparatively young. The antecedents and training of Mr. Sabin were fitted to inspire great devotion to the patriotic cause. He was one of eight young men of his native town of Pomfret, Conn., who graduated, as classmates, at Yale in 1759. Two of these young men were civilians, and six were ministers of the gospel. All were patri- ots of the intense type, which characterized the townsmen and cotem- poraries of General Putnam, the commander in the battle of Bunker Hill. Among these classmates of Mr. Sabin, were Col. Ebenezer Crafts, an officer in the army of the Revolution, and the founder of Leicester Academy in 1784, and the Rev. Joshua Paine, both resi- dents of Sturbridge, and both commemorated by Dr. Clark, in his his- tory of that town. Rev. Dr. Joseph Sumner of Shrewsbury, and Rev. Ezra Weld of Braintree, the predecessor and colleague of Rev. Dr. Richard S. Storrs, were townsmen and classmates of Mr. Sabin. One of his relatives. Mr. Noah Sabin, was long a resident of Monson. He came from Pomfret, and was very active in the Revolution. The peo- ple of Monson, were earnest in their sympathy for Boston, when suffer- ing in consequence of the Port Bill, and sent a contribution to aid the people in their distress. The letter sent by a bearer with " the small present from the inhabitants of the small district of Monson." is a most interesting document. It is printed in the Massachusetts His- topical Collections, Volume 4th, Fourth Series, and shows that. al- though the district was "small," its people were plucky. It was addressed to the donation committee of Boston, of which Samuel Ad- ams and Joseph Warren were members, and was signed by Benjamin Munn. Abel Goodell, and Noah Sabin. This letter was dated April
29
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Sth. 1775, fourteen days before the battle of Lexington, and it con- tained the following words :
"We send a testimonial of our firm adherence to the great cause you have asserted, in which everything dear to us is embarked. We would not be found wanting. in affording our utmost assistance to those involved in penury, on account of public liberty, and in vindication of our just rights. We profess a ready cheerfulness to shed our blood to oppose tyranny and oppression, much more to part with our substance to help our suffering friends."
Appended to the letter was a note as follows :
"N. B .- We have eighty fellows in this district. a great part of whom are disciplined and excellent marksmen. I dare be bold to say that, at about thirty rods distant, they would pick up tories as fast as so many hawks would kick frogs from a frog pond."
It is to be presumed these men responded to the Lexington alarm, and did good service as sharp-shooters at the battle of Bunker Hill. We know that nearly every able-bodied man served in the Army for longer or shorter terms. Rev. Jesse Ives served as chaplain, at one time, for six months ; at another, for a year.
When the General Court called upon the people, to vote on the question of Independence, in the month of May, 1776, the town of Monson voted in the affirmative, unanimously, and among the earliest records of town proceedings, the Declaration of Independence was cop- ied, verbatim, in accordance with a vote passed without dissent.
CAPT. LINCOLN'S INTRODUCTION OF GEN. WARREN.
We have with us one of our old citizens, and although he has not been with us much of the time for many years, has ever shown a deep interest in all that pertained to the welfare of his old home; indeed, I think I am safe in saying that wherever his duties may have called him, he ever has, and does now, consider Brimfield his home. I know not whether he can lay any claim to kinship with the General Warren of Revolutionary fame, but this I do know, that in giving his services to save our government in the war of the Rebellion, he showed as true patriotism as did Gen. Joseph Warren, in giving his life in defense of the principles on which the government was founded. But before ask- ing Gen. Fitz Henry Warren to address you, I will call on the band to give us "Hail to the Chief."
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ยท ADDRESS OF GEN. FITZ HENRY WARREN.
MR. PRESIDENT :- I thank you for the cordiality and the courtesy of your welcome. I cannot claim, however, any significance in the overture of your band, though delicate may be the compliment in- tended by you. I come in obedience to your invitation to participate with you on this most felicitous occasion in which the skies and the soft air seem to have a perceptible sympathy. I come to you with the autumnal foliage passing to the fading and falling leaf. It glows in the glory of your autumn. I accept it as a type of the occasion and of that passing of myself and others into the autumnal period of life.
My loyalty to my native town does not need illustration. In the events which have kept me in close communication with it more than any other one of your natives who have gone forth into the broader world. I have kept bright the links of association by frequent visits and occasional residences. It is dear to me in its aspects, in its land- scape, in all the visible beauty which is spread out before us. The shading trees of its avenues and its public walks, have grown with my growth. I witnessed them when they were first planted in a conge- nial soil. They have now spread into broadness of shade and greenest of foliage. I have not only kept close my regard, but I have given higher evidence of my affection of my native town, by placing in the keep of its cemetery the remains of my children, tenderly loved and early lost in a distant climate and in a most antithetical scenery. It is my desire and my hope that when my own period is marked in the calendar of life, I shall join their companionship with her who has been to me, to elaborate the beautiful metaphor of Irving, the clinging vine of my prosperity and the sustaining oak of my adversity, and when we shall have
" Climbed the world's great altar stairs That slope through darkness up to God,"
mingle what is mortal in the long slumber with which the stranger intermeddleth not.
I may refer again to the beautiful configuration outlined in its am- phitheatre, with its sloping valley and its undulations of verdure. I have known it in the inclemency of winter. in the vernal softness of spring, the tropical heat of its summer and, as now, in its fading veg- etation and its leafless trunks. I cannot better embody my feelings than by a quotation from the living laureate of the Queen of Eng- land :
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Dost thou look back on what has been, As some divinely gifted man Whose life in low estate began, And in a simple village grown ?
Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star.
Who makes, by force, his merit known, And lives to clutch the golden keys ; To mould a mighty State's decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne.
And passing on from high to higher, Becomes on fortune's crowning slope, The pillar of a people's hope,
The center of a world's desire.
Yet feels as in .a pensive dream, When all his active powers are still,
A distant dearness in the hill, A secret sweetness in the stream.
The limit to his narrower fate,
While yet beside its vocal springs, He played at counsellors and kings With one who is his earliest mate .
Who ploughs with pain his native lea, And reaps the labor of his hands, Or in the furrow musing stands ; Does my.old friend remember thee ?
I disclaim the personal application which would seem a vanity of analogy, but I can feel to its fullest emotion the sentiments which run through the rhythm of the melody.
But I pass, Mr. President, to the more immediate purpose which has been suggested to me as the substance of what I am to offer. I am penetrated by two emotions; the one a desire to say something which may not be unworthy of the men to whom I shall refer, and the other that in my feeble condition of nerves I shall not be equal to the task.
I take in the order of chronology the first of our residents whose dust is in your graveyard and whose name has an enduring and hon- ored place in your colonial and revolutionary history. Gen. Timothy Danielson. I may remark that in the early struggle between the col- ony and the mother country, this town, then large in area and frontier in geography, and sparse in population, early responded to the patriotic
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calls of the metropolitan Boston, and earned by its patriotism and self- devotion the plaudits of the great apostle of American freedom. Sam- uel Adams. Of those who were foremost in advanced opinions and in moulding the purpose of the rural population, was General Danielson. Next to Major Hawley of Northampton, no man in Western Massa- chusetts has a higher claim to the remembrance and the gratitude of history. I cannot in a discoursive address like this, make allusion to particular events of biography, or be exact in dates and transactions. Prematurely taken from his usefulness, he has left in the annals of the period, and in the traditions of those who knew him, an enviable place, not only in our local, but in our public history. Next to him, wider in national repute and larger in the scope of his capacity and ambition was the man who, marrying his widow, identified himself with our foreign consular history and with our military prowess and renown, and bore our flag to the deserts of the Orient. I cannot speak of him at the length that he deserves. His achievements, eclipsed by many late events in our domestic and foreign wars, gave us at an early period a prominence in our foreign history. His early life is something typical of the fortunes of its later events. Leaving his family, by frugality and industry he secured a collegiate education solely by his own exertions, and was afterwards, through the instru- mentality of friends, placed in commission in the United States Army. He commenced his services under Wayne, in Ohio, and was afterwards stationed in Florida. The hot chivalry and irascibility of his temper were exhibited in his associations with his superior officers, and a duel in one instance, and a court martial in the other, in both of which he was evidently not the aggressor, and in the last was honorably ac- quitted, gave the earliest indications of that impulsive heat of pas- sion which later may have been an obstacle to his fortunes.
In 1798, he was appointed by the then President Adams as consul to Tunis. The United States was at that time to the semi-barbarous African an unknown country, whose citizens were treated as vassals. -upon whose commercial marine, piracy was only a levied tribute. Perhaps no better selection could have been made to elevate our character in the eyes of those plundering corsairs of the ocean transit. His whole course was characterized by that intrepidity of character and utter disregard of all personal considerations which he evineed in all the varied actions of his military and private life. His ap- pointment as consul was eminently successful in securing treaties and making us respected in the eyes, not only of the Barbary powers. but of the larger commercial nations, England and France. An evi- dence of his power with the Bey, and of the reckless generosity of his
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character, was the redumption of six captured merchant vessels of the Danish Government, which he ransomed and placed at the disposal of their owners without compensation. In a letter to his wife he thus explains his conduct : " Do you ask me why I did this ? Because there is more pleasure in being generous than in being rich." It may be remarked in this connection that subsequently the king of Denmark made recognition by the present of a beautiful snuff-box studded with diamonds and precious stones, a gem in value and beauty. In the complication of the affairs of the Barbary powers he communicated to his government a proposition to humble those powers, particularly Tu- nis, by assisting to restore to power the rightful Bey, Hamet Ba- shaw, in place of his usurping brother, Jusseff. Returning home in 1805, he again sailed for Egypt with a flotilla of vessels of war, for the purpose of carrying out his project of restoring the rightful Bey. At Alexandria he recruited a motley crowd of mercenaries, Maniots, ma- rauding Greeks, wandering Bedouins and native Arabs. His whole force consisted of about 700, with whom, not associated in command, was Hamet Bashaw, the rightful Bey. His line of operations in- volved the passage of the desert of Barca. The whole expedition, from its movement from Alexandria, had in it all the elements of ro- mantie fiction. The ill-assorted and ill-disciplined crowd of adventu- rers were constantly in insubordination, and often in mutiny, frequent- ly placing him in peril of his life. Nothing but the higher qualities of determination and courage ever carried him through that sixty days of difficulty and danger, to the ultimate point of his expedition, the city of Derne. The record of all this in his private journal, exemplify his unfailing resources, his unflinching courage, his high powers of command. and stamp him as being one eminently endowed to have been a conqueror in high enterprise. After triumphing over almost insurmountable difficulties, the sight of the American squadron off the port of Bombay rewarded his perseverance and his suffering. An at- tack was ordered upon the city of Derne, and after a severe struggle, in which again the capacity and energy of General Eaton shone conspicu- ously, the victory was complete. The city was captured. The reply of the governor to his summons to surrender, is marked in its laconicism, " My head is yours." In the meantime, he held a complete victory within his grasp, and with it the humiliation of the entire power of Barbary.
Tobias Lear, the former private secretary of Washington, but who had transferred his allegiance to Jefferson, accompanied the squadron as a Commissioner to treat for peace. Without waiting for the fruits of this conquest he entered into negotiations, for a treaty, and concluded
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it by the payment of a ransom of $60,000 for the prisoners of the cap- tured . Philadelphia." The hot spirit of General Eaton was humiliated by the disgrace, but remonstrance was useless. Arrested thus with but half the fruits of his enterprise gathered, he returned to the United States. His communications with the commander of the squadron and the commissioners, were characterized by the force and energy of his style. His politics were of the straightest school of federalism. He met the democratic party in its height of power under the second ad- ministration of Jefferson. Imprudent, as ever, in speech, and indulg. ing in a habit which unfortunately shortened his life, and made sad the later days of his glory, he soon raised a partisan feeling which was an obstacle to the settlement of his accounts, and prevented the proper recognition of his eminent public services. A proposition to confer a gold medal upon him as a mark of national appreciation, was bitterly attacked by John Randolph, then chairman of the Ways and Means, who characterized the struggle and success of Derne as " a mere senf- fle." The Legislature of Massachusetts, however, more appreciative of what he had accomplished, made him a donation of ten thousand acres of land in the then wilderness of Maine, a dependency of the State. Popular ovations followed him. At Richmond and different points he was the recipient of public dinners and other marked civic honors.
The next event in his life which made him public in notoriety, if not in reputation, was his complication with the celebrated Aaron Burr expedition and imputed treason. Burr found him soured and discontented at the ingratitude of the administration, and poured his seductive persuasions into his ear to induce him to join in what may not have been a treason, but which was at least an illicit enterprise. At his trial, at Richmond, Va., he was a leading witness, and an at- tempt to discredit his testimony signally failed. After this. disap- pointed in receiving any higher command in the military service which his ambition aimed at, he returned to the town of his residence, and there, in the few years of his remaining life, wasted the vigor of his constitution with a reputation which was fading under adverse private influences, until, in 1811, he became a tenant of your dwelling of the dead, where his humble headstone now reminds you of the vanity of human pursuits and the almost utter oblivion of a once widely known name.
In a discoursive address like this there can be no characterization of this man or his qualities. Brave, impulsive, generous, his qualities were of the highest order. Had he been divested of the foibles of character and the unfortunate influences which surrounded him, he
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would have had an enduring and a widely known name in the history of his country. We cannot speak upon what might have been the result had he been spared for the war of 1812, in its utter absence of all great military capacity in the leadership of armies in its carlier years. He might have written his name a hero ; but his premature death buried all permanent fame beyond the achievements of his Egyptian expedition and his humbling of the pirates of the Mediter- ranean. It should in justice be said of him that the faults and foibles of his character were of the noble, and not the base, and that no stain of dishonor, no meanness of private life, no venality and no treason blurs the unsullied record of his fame.
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