USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Conway > History of Conway (Massachusetts) 1767-1917 > Part 3
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Rising the hill by the old road, we pass on the left the spot on which John Emerson built his house and set his elms in 1770 ;- we may find Abner Forbes, Esq., sitting under the shadow of his trees. And if now we are tired or thirsty, the house of Capt. Thomas French, "Innholder," is in sight upon the flat, one third of the way up Arms' Hill before us. This "Principle Inhabitant" of Conway walked to the Deerfield line on his own land, went into office-holding beyond any other man, wrote his name in great letters, "Test. Thomas French," on the town book, fell into idleness, cheated the Continental government in salt, took to the lawyers, forged, sat in the pillory, and died a vagabond. Not waiting with him, we may look up if we can his brother Tertius; and find Nathaniel Field, not far, it is to be guessed, from the foot of Arms' Hill, west of the Baptist meeting house. Down on "the Flat," uncertain where, we may search for Asa Merritt, great-grandfather of Charles of West Street. On the hill beyond, northeast of Charles Parsons, we may call on
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HISTORY OF CONWAY.
Jonathan Whitney, at the house, now gone, where town meetings were often held.
Over all the land that can be seen from this point in every direction, but especially, it may be guessed, on a site a little to the east of Jonathan Whitney's, lives Caleb Sharp. He is
11
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THE PARSONAGE OF REV. JOHN. EMERSON.
half negro and half "Indian, or something else," it is said, which last statement may be rested in. He is a vigorous man, a builder of sawmills and gristmills; and has already before or by the incorporation of the town, a grain mill running where the mill now stands. With him will presently appear his successor "Black Cæsar" (Cæsar Wood), in later times "Saxton and Grave Diger," who also, as the ancient memories tell us, "did
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THE FIRST CENTURY.
.
every sort of a thing." After him soon is coming, third in the line, Asahel Wood, "respected by everybody old and young," and again, fourth in succession, Thomas Cole, who will continue to the first centennial.
Turning south, towards where the Congregational meeting house now stands, Aaron Howe will shoe our horses, or Maj. James Davis, if we have not passed him before by the Baptist meeting house, and if wherever he is we can find his shop, will tap our boots .- a questionable matter, for he is the man whose newly put-on sole Adoniram Bartlett lost from his foot, "care- lessly," as he said, "because he took it from the stirrup." If we wait a little this Davis will leave his shop for the Continental army. Still southward and west of the road as we go into
Pumpkin Hollow we pass the log houses of Joel and Elias Dick- inson, the latter the owner of the "center lot" and living in Jabez Newhall's garden. Elijah Wells calls to us from the western hill; by H. B. Childs, and Gersham Farnsworth shortly on the other ear. But hastening out of this swamp, the best part of which Jonas Rice would not take at twenty cents an acre, though for the rest of his lot he gave a dollar, and running up Field's Hill, we pass near the summit Alexander Oliver, a lieutenant in the army of the Revolution, and Robert Oliver, and James Oliver, a Tory refugee and one of the three that the town furnished that went away with the British. Under the hill south is Captain James Look (Martha's Vineyard, 1768). We may hurry as best we can through Hardscrabble, by Elisha Clark on the west side, and by Ebenezer Allis at the Fairfield place; and beyond at the southeast we will halt at the always hospitable stand where John Allis now lives by the home of his grandfather, Captain Lucius (Somers, Conn.). Here, if the Davis boots have failed, others may be borrowed, for Captain Allis has a pair of fashionable ones, or rather the only pair in the district, which he lends to his neighbors when they go a journey in style.
Captain Allis was a principal inhabitant. Besides his boots he had one of the only two carts that for twenty years were known beyond Field's Hill. And over and above boots and cart he had some public spirit. He bought, it is said, and gave to the town the common by the old church. Withal he rode at
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HISTORY OF CONWAY.
first seven miles, Sundays, to the Deerfield meeting, horseback, with his wife, and with a child in the arms of each. And with many other Conway men, he helped take Burgoyne.
A half mile southeast were Elijah Wells and Matthew and Simeon Graves (Whately); and a like distance, more to the north, James Gilmore, where Israel and Thomas I. Allis, of the Captain Lucius stock, now live. Still beyond, on the edge of Whately, at the Foote place, Samuel Wells, where was a hotel. Westward again a mile from Captain Allis's, and on the present Whately road, was Amos Allen, "Captain Barefoot." He fought in the war of the Revolution. He needed to borrow no boots. He got his commission and his title coming from the army over the Green Mountains with bare feet in four inches of snow.
Passing west to Cricket Hill, we find Capt. Abel Dinsmore, a Revolutionary soldier, where his grandson, Alvan Dinsmore, now lives. William Gates was his next neighbor at the north. Southwest was Gideon Cooley. He brought his wife and all his goods on the back of a horse; and the wife filled her bedtick with the leaves of the wood. Not far off was Nathaniel Marble. Going to the northwest we pass the farm of Deacon John Avery (Dedham), now uninhabited, but stoutly occupied for two generations, and reach the stand of Malachi Maynard (Westboro), where his daughter Lucy and his son-in-law Zelotes Bates now live.
The town had men on the hill in those days, and later. Malachi Maynard was a genuine old New Englander and a Puritan, and a good specimen of both; strong in body and in mind resolute, independent, upright, religious, staying put in his place. He had but six weeks' schooling, was twenty-six years town treasurer, figured in his head and figured right, and settled right after he had figured.
. South of Malachi Maynard was Solomon Goodale. North- ward was Samuel Crittenden, in 1772, father of Medad Critten- den; a name still kept among us by the memories it brings of a life manifestly growing through all its long later years into the likeness of the life that is to come.
Looking from Cricket Hill toward the southwest at the date of the incorporation, there was probably no settler's house to be
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THE FIRST CENTURY.
seen. (Indeed it may not be quite certain that there was one on the Hill itself at that time. Mr. Maynard came in 1768.) Isaac Nelson may probably have been the earliest. Richard Collins was where Hiram Collins now lives as early as 1770. Solomon Hartwell (Dedham) was soon planted north of John Bradford's. Also two brothers of Malachi Maynard, Moses and Calvin: one south of John Bradford, the other north of Edward Bradford. Ebenezer Tolman was here in 1772. Twenty years later there were farms still uncleared in the districts that have since become "city." So late as that Shubael and John Bradford were first occupants. Caleb Beals was early in Po- land, north of the Lucius Bond place; also Jonathan Oakes upon the Chester Wrisley place, and Ebenezer, another of the Maynards, upon the Captain Phillips' farm, with Reuben Hendricks hard by him. And far northwest across the river, still a fifth Maynard brother, Timothy, living but four years ago (1863), ninety-nine years old.
Coming down the valley we are near by at the house of Capt. Consider Arms (Deerfield), the opposite side of the road from the one now occupied by the Arms family. Consider Arms was one of the earliest settlers in the limits of the town, one of the greatest landowners, a leading public man, and everyway a "principle inhabitant."
Passing again our grove and the Inn of Captain French, and over the Arms Hill northwest, by the Goddard who brought the boy, Eleazer Flagg, to the place where Samuel Flagg now lives, and past the neighbors Stebbins, Whittemore, and Woodward, all later comers, we go down upon the large farms of Isaac and Elisha Amsden (Deerfield), now occupied by Walter and Earl Guilford. Beyond them the settlement, as at the southwest, was somewhat later; Solomon Field (Surrey, N. H.) was of the first, in 1772 or 1773. He was the man who killed the bear which gave its name to the river that is called Bear River. His grand- son, Consider, still keeps the place. Near by him toward the south were Jesse Severance and Zadac King. Toward the east Sylvanus Cobb (Deerfield) at Charles Macomber's, and north- ward Samuel Wilder (Deerfield), Aholiab Wilder, and farther on William Halloway and Seth Godfrey; none of these last, perhaps, first settlers; and returning from the north schoolhouse, Nathan
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HISTORY OF CONWAY.
Bacon, and still later, though himself the son of an early inhab- itant, where Ryder had lived, in the center of the district and the central man, Caleb Sherman.
There were doubtless some other early settlers whose names are not here mentioned, but there can have been but few such. On the other hand some of those whose names are given, though for the most part the first occupants of their farms, were relatively late in coming. Dividing the town by a line from Broomshire through the center to the South Part, the eastern half contains almost all that were on the ground at the date of the incorporation.
The number of families was about fifty, and the whole popu- lation, the households being then small, did not much if at all exceed two hundred.
These were the men, who, as Mr. Emerson writes, had come in, "planted themselves down on new and unimproved spots of land, and with small property but good resolution commenced the arduous but honest and respectable business of earning their bread by the sweat of their brow." They were, with a few exceptions, very poor at their coming. They were not well furnished with tools nor with animals for farm work. William Warren's apparatus consisted of one cow, one axe, one hoe, one chain and one "bung-town copper." It was usual to go to Deer- field or Hatfield to hire cattle for plowing, or other team work. It was not for several years that a man commonly owned either oxen or a horse. During this period it was customary to carry grain to mill upon the back. One bushel was the usual load. There are many accounts, however, of larger quantities having been carried from great distances. Amos Allen ("Captain Barefoot") brought two bushels of rye from Hatfield, taking it but once from his shoulder, and that at the mill where it was to be ground; other accounts resolutely put it at three bushels. Mal- achi Maynard also brought from Hatfield, in bags, nineteen shad and two pigs, the pigs being of considerable size. He rested at midnight on the top of Popple Hill, leaning against a tree, and fearing to remove his load lest he could not replace it. He used to say that "he was more glad at breakfast for those shad than ever after for all the income of his farm."
Our fathers made up thus in vigor and resolution for the lack of means. So too did the mothers. Mrs. Joel Baker built
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THE FIRST CENTURY.
her own oven, which did good service for herself and her neigh- bors, her husband providing stones and mortar. The wife of Alexander Oliver, on the top of Field's Hill, was accustomed in summer to do her washing at the brook, one hundred rods north, down the steep slope. Having finished the work, Captain Childs tells us, "she would take her two pails of wet clothes, one in each hand, her baby under her arm, and her wash tub on her head, and go up the hill home." It may be hoped that this was only while the lieutenant was away in the army fighting for his country and his wife.
Considerably later, between 1780 and 1790, John Sherman, son of John and brother of Caleb, ran eight measured miles in 5612 minutes, and on a hot August day. A wager of eight pounds had been laid that he could not do it within an hour. He ran on the Deerfield road, from near the foot of Arms' Hill to "Eagle brook." He had previously, to make the matter sure, gone over the course by night, his brother accompanying him on horseback, and giving him the time at every mile stake, "it being moonlight."
FRONTIER LIFE.
There is much that is common with new settlers everywhere in the way of living. The condition of things here one hundred years ago repeats itself now at the farthest West. Yet not with exactness. Most of the men who have gone lately to the new lands have not been so poor as these settlers were. The age is not so poor. Materials and implements of all sorts are more abundant and much better. The prairie country at the West, too, makes less hard work than these stony and wooded hills did. The whole township at the period of its settlement was densely covered with timber, much of which was of great size. It can hardly be said that any of the original forest is still stand- ing, to show what it was. There are spots that have never been cleared, but the heaviest growth has been removed. A few single trees may remain. Most that we see are but puny representa- tives of those our fathers felled. Some of us, not old now, have found stumps of pines and chestnuts, five or six feet or more in diameter. We are not likely to have come upon the largest. John Allis has this year cut a chestnut upon the lot of his grand- father, Lucius, full six feet across at its butt. There is one maple
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HISTORY OF CONWAY.
at least on the farm of Levi Page that is 1812 feet in circumfer- ence. Others larger are known to have fallen. Enormous hemlocks, growing and prostrate, covered the low and level grounds and blocked up the ravines and river banks. Adding to this the rough surface in many parts, it made tough work and gave a hard look at first to the country. Thomas L. Allis narrates it from his grandfather that about the time of the setting off of the town, Eliphalet Williams of Deerfield rode on horseback all day over it, as best he could, and told his neigh- bors at night he would not give the horse he rode on for the whole of it. Others judged better of its value. The great trees stood for hearty soil as well as hard work. They made stout houses too, and substantial "backlogs"-such of them as were not too large.
To illustrate still further the style of living prevalent among the early settlers, I will quote from the address of Captain Childs: "Many families had but one cow for some years. Milk porridge was very common fare. At those seasons of the year when milk failed, bean porridge was the usual substitute. They were fre- quently entirely out of meat in March. It was usual then to go to the river and buy a horseload of shad, which might be had in any quantity for a copper each. Indeed they were so plenty that they were considered not as a rarity but as a drug, and were resorted to from necessity and not from choice. Roast potatoes alone frequently constituted the entire meal. One man said to me, 'I have often seen the time when I would have given more for a roast potato than I would now for a roast turkey.' They had no tea except bohea, and but precious little of that."
The roasting of potatoes carries us back to times when cook stoves were unheard of and when enormous fireplaces ventilated and occupied, if they did not warm, the houses. The privation of tea may not strike us all with force. And the like may be said of the necessity of living upon Connecticut river shad. As to the fish indeed we know that it got into bad repute not wholly on its own account. The ill savor it had was the taste of the lack of meat. Long after, if by evil chance, a farmer was brought to the buying of fish in spring he might be likely to hear inquiries after the state of his pork-barrel. It is told of one in later times that, having come prematurely to the last layer, he went about among his neighbors to procure a lamb, whose wool he said his
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THE FIRST CENTURY.
wife was in want of. Not finding any, and being at last in despair, he muttered, forgetfully to himself, that he believed he should go and buy some codfish.
It may be remarked withal that as to food the scarcity was only in the first years. Once cleared the land brought forth abundantly. The fields yielded wheat, and sweet grasses for the cattle were ready to cover the hills.
Reviewing thus this time Mr. Emerson declares, "While the rank and situation of your fathers did not admit of that ex- ternal polish and refinement, or elegance and luxury in living, which modern fashion and taste have introduced, and prosperity . can now better afford, yet their comparative indigence did not subject them to the extremities of want or merited contempt. Providence smiled upon their honest efforts and industry, by which they were rising to a state of credit and respectability; verifying the remark of Solomon that 'the hand of the diligent maketh rich.' "
The first inhabitants of Conway are described by one still living, who remembers them, as "men and women of sound minds, frugal and industrious habits, strict integrity of char- acter and sterling worth." There is much other testimony to the same effect. They were, as a class, hardy, resolute, indus- trious, endowed with strong common sense, attached to the principles of morality and good order and earnest maintainers of the doctrines and institutions of religion. There was, how- ever, among them, as in almost every community of every age, those of whom so much could not be said. The memories that go back to the past are apt to overvalue the distant in comparison with the near. If the question is put whether on the whole the population of that day was superior in point of character to the present, we should have need to hesitate before answering that it was. There can certainly be gathered up, in stories and songs illustrative of the social habits that pre- vailed in some circles, and from the records of the church, enough to comfort those who fear that our town is deteriorating in the quality of its population and running hopelessly into looseness and disorder. There was dishonesty, not perhaps at first quite down to the average (it may be feared in this respect we have made no gain at least); there was intemperance, after a little,
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HISTORY OF CONWAY.
below the line of recent times; there was as much vulgarity of speech and of manners and as much immorality and irregularity of life in general as is usual in modern times. It will not be ex- pected that I should produce the proofs on some of these points. And it is not pleasant to lower the estimate many may hold of those who lived here before us. But waiving further compari- son with the present, if we take the years between 1840 and 1850, it is a matter of the clearest knowledge that there was never any earlier period at which our town had on the whole a better popu- lation than it had then. More than this, it is my decided belief that, going back from that time, the levels will be found dropping somewhat lower. What changes the last few years have wrought I cannot undertake to determine. Moreover, to look fairly on the later generations is in justice, also, to the fathers themselves. They set on foot appliances of education and religion upon the working of which they relied, not only to maintain for their own time the power of sound principles, but also to perpetuate them and to pass them down to the coming generations. To place the present below the past is to disparage the past; for it was the business of the past to make the present better. Our fathers meant to do it.
THE FIRST CHURCH.
Previous to the incorporation of the town. religious meetings had not been held with regularity. Such as were able went to Deerfield; or they attended any occasional meeting they could hear of. At the second town meeting provision was made for hiring a preacher. The Congregational church was organized in less than a year-July 14, 1768. It had thirty-two members, sixteen men and sixteen women. After a little Mr. John Emerson of Malden was invited to preach as a candidate for settlement. "It was," says he, "in the month of April, 1769, when I com- menced my public labors here on the Sabbath, being the 9th day of that month and year. We met at a barn. It was sur- rounded with thick growing wood except a small adjacent spot cleared, which admitted ye light of heaven; a place different indeed from those costly and splendid edifices erected and dedi- cated to the worship of ye Most High since that day, and very dissimilar," he goes on to say, emphasizing his words, "from
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THE FIRST CENTURY.
that in ye ancient church in Brattle St., Boston, where I had been called only ye Lord's day before to preach." "On this Sabbath," he continued, "the people, all 'tis supposed that were able, came to hear the word. Natural curiosity indeed was doubtless one motive for this attention. The speaker was a stranger from a distance, and a youth of small stature, nothing otherwise dis- tinguishing; only it was literally John preaching in the wilderness when they came out to see and hear."
Mr. Emerson pleased the people and was ordained pastor, Dec. 21, 1769. He was voted "for an encouragement" an annual salary of fifty pounds, with a yearly addition of three pounds until it should rise to eighty. He was also to have, within two years and a half, an additional sum of one hundred and fifty pounds "settlement."
The ordaining council had dinner at Consider Arms's. Tradi- tion has preserved the story that after dinner two of the ministers were unable to find their way back to the church-on account of the woods. Yet it may here be mentioned that fifty-eight years later, at the settlement of Daniel Crosby, it was reckoned a strange thing that he should propose and insist upon the enter- taining of the council without liquors.
All proceedings with respect to the support of preaching were then, as for many years, had in town meetings. The town was the parish. The money raised for religious purposes was collected . with the other taxes.
Here, also, by the town, were taken all steps for the building and furnishing a meeting house. For several years no subject appears more frequently upon the records. At the second town meeting, held in September, 1767, a committee was appointed to find the center of the town, with this object in view. This committee discovered what they regarded as the appropriate spot in the so-called "center lot"; the same being what is now known to a few as "the old common," situated twenty-five or thirty rods south of Mrs. William Avery's, and now owned by Jabez Newhall. But the matter of location was not so settled. Many meetings were held, and many conflicting votes taken. A committee from abroad was called in. They reported the true center to be seventeen rods southwest of the old common spot, and not suitable for building on; and recommended a
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HISTORY OF CONWAY.
site on the Elijah Wells place, a few rods cast of where H. B. Childs now lives. And their report was also "excepted" and the spot "established." But neither did this stand. They subsequently voted to build a small house near Jonathan Whit- ney's; rescinded this vote, and finally, in the spring of 1769, determined "yt ye Nole, about fifteen or twenty rods north of the southeast corner of ye Center lot, where is a large stump with a stake Spoted, standing within ye same, be established for a spot to build the meeting-house upon." The site thus fixed on was the same now occupied by the schoolhouse in Pumpkin Hollow, a third of a mile east of "the old common," and within, and near the eastern line of, the same center lot, which stretching west- ward over the hill, included both the other locations selected by the committees. On this "nole" was raised the house which stood, a meeting and a town house, until within the memory of all of us who have attained to middle age. The frame was put up in the spring and summer of 1769. And it was in this building that Mr. Emerson was ordained, as before noticed, in December following.
It was then, and for years after, only a shell. took for a pulpit one end of the carpenter's workbench, which was left against times of further use. Part of his congrega- tion sat on the other end. The larger portion occupied benches made of slabs. The questions of the sale of pew ground, of the building of pews, of pulpit, gallery, and porches continued long to exercise the ingenuity and to disturb, it must be feared, the temper of our fathers. The pews, when they began to be builded, were not put in all at once, but there remained a space still occupied by benches. There are signs of a jealousy of the pew building as of aristocratic tendency, and of a disposition on the part of some to stand by the common benches as more suitable to a wholesome sentiment of equality. Gradually, however, the house grew into order and convenience. It was enlarged in 1795 and 1796 to meet the wants of a rapidly increasing congre- gation. Porches and a steeple were built and a clock provided. In 1842 it was taken down, a new house having been built a quarter of a mile north, which still stands. The connection between town and parish having been then dissolved, arrange- ments were made by which the town secured the right of holding its meetings in the basement of the new building.
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