History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I, Part 32

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed. n 85042884-1
Publication date: 1888
Publisher: Philadelphia : J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1538

USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I > Part 32

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After the exclusion of Mr. Fisk from the pulpit, a majority of the members of the church withdrew and built another meeting-house near at hand.1 The with- drawing members continued to use the title of "The First Church," their right to which could hardly be gainsaid, perhaps, except upon the ground taken by the courts of Massachusetts a hundred years later, viz .: that the church derives its designation from the parish out of which it has grown, and upon which its identification depends. Mr. Fisk took away with him the church book of records, retaining it through the period of his ministry. In 1762 Rev. Dudley Leavitt, the minister of the church which Mr. Fisk had led out in 1735 to a new home, died, much beloved and lamented. That church soon after opened a gracious and conciliatory correspondence with the church of the First Parish, proposing to relinquish to it the title

1 They first placed it too near, -" only twelve perches and eleven feet from the First parish meeting-house." The General Court interfered, and ordered that it should not stand "nearer to the other than forty perches." It was removed accordingly.

HISTORY OF ESSEX COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

of the First Church from that time, and took for itself the title of " The Church of which Rev. Dudley Lea- vitt was late Pastor,"-known since, and now for many years, as the Tabernacle Church. These over- tures were met in a like spirit. An amicable division of plate and other church property accompanied and attested the healing of the old wounds of dissension.

Leaving, for the present, the notices of other churches formed in the town from time to time, we follow out first the sketch of the First Church. During the years from 1735 to 1762 the old First Church and Society was called, and called itself the Church and Parish of the Confederate Society, or, for a shorter title and common use, the Confederate Church. Dr. Worcester says the seceders gave them the title. The effect of the division by which the society was cleft in 1735 was depressing for a while, undoubtedly. But on the 5th of Angust, 1736, Mr. John Sparhawk was called by " the brethren adhering to the ancient prin- ciples of the First Church in Salem," with substan- tial unanimity, to the ministry among them, and was ordained on the 8th of December following. He was the son of Rev. John Sparhawk, of Bristol, R. I., and was born in that town in September, 1713, and gradu- ated at Harvard College in 1731. He died April 30, 1755, in the forty-second year of his age. He was described by his parishioner, Dr. Edward Holyoke, as " large in person, a man of dignity and an excellent preacher." If that people is to be accounted happy whose history affords few incidents or experiences deemed worthy to be recited, the same evidence may be taken as ground for the belief that a church is happy, its life one of peace, of silent, healthful, spir- itual growth, when it affords little material for the historian to record. The First Church entered upon such a period after the close of the rather tempestu- ons ministry of Mr. Fisk. The usefulness of Mr. Sparhawk's labors, and the affection in which he was held, is shown by the sincere sorrow caused by his death. The ministries which followed were of a like character, and, even down to this day, have generally abounded in quiet and diligent service ou the part of the ministers, and been characterized by general har- mony and co-operation on the part of the church and congregation in maintaining the institutions of re- ligion and cultivating the spirit of the Christian gospel.

Rev. Thomas Barnard succeeded Mr. Sparhawk. He was the son of Rev. John Barnard, of Andover, and was born in that place August 16, 1716, grad- uated from Harvard College in 1732, ordained at Newbury January 31, 1738, left his people there on account of " difficulties about Mr. Whitfield's preach- ing," and turned to the study and practice of law for a time. Re-entering the ministry, he was installed minister of the First Church in Salem September 17, 1755. He was a man of solid excellencies, both of mind and character, not brilliant, but strong and rightly balanced, "much beloved by his society and

esteemed by the public." He was disabled by paral- ysis in 1770, and a colleague was settled in 1772. Mr. Barnard died August 5, 1776. The colleague just re- ferred to was Mr. Asa Dunbar. There had been a division of feeling in the choice of a colleague, some desiring Mr. Barnard's son, Thomas Barnard, Jr., to be invited to take the place, while a bare majority were for Mr. Dunbar. The organization of the North Church, with Mr. Thomas Barnard, Jr., for its minis- ter, was the result of the disagreement. But the parting between the brethren who went out and those who stayed behind was friendly, and characterized by an affectionate reluctance to take the decisive step, and by a generous surrender of some of the vessels and sacred things belonging to the church, because they had come to it by gift from those who were now de- parting or from members of their families. Rev. Asa Dunbar was born in Bridgewater May 26, 1745, grad- uated at Harvard College in 1767, and ordained in Salem July, 22, 1772. His health before long be- came broken, and compelled him first to seek its res- toration in rest, and finally to resign his office, which he did April 23, 1779, his society consenting with re- luctance, and not until convinced that it was a neces- sity. Honorable and delicate testimonials of the mutual affection and confidence subsisting between the pastor and people were exchanged at parting. Mr. Dunbar studied law after leaving his ministry in Salem, and settled in Keene, N. H., where he prac- ticed his profession and lived greatly respected till June 22, 1787, the time of his death. He appears to have lived in Weston before coming to Salem ; he married there Mary Jones, in 1772, and had a child born there in 1776. After leaving Salem, and before settling in Keene, he probably lived in Harvard for a time, as he had children born there in 1780 and 1781. Mr. Bentley, a competent judge, and not given to un- meaning praise, characterized him as a man of genius.

Rev. John Prince, who succeeded Mr. Dunbar, and whose ministry covered a period of fifty-seven years- for forty-five of which he had no assistance-was born in Boston July 22, 1751, graduated at Harvard College in 1776, and ordained minister of the First Church in Salem November 10, 1779.1 Dr. Prince was a faith- ful and devoted minister and lived in the sincere af- fection and respect of his people during his long pas- torate. But he had greater fame as a devotee of natural science and an ardent philosophical investiga- tor than as a preacher. His parishioner, the late Hon. Daniel A. White, says of him that " he possessed the spirit of a true philosopher and a true Christian, and was alike distinguished for his mechanical ingenuity, his attainments in natural, in theological and general

1 The ministry of Dr. Prince has had no parallel for length in Salem, except in that of Rov. Dr. Emerson, of tho South Church, which ex- tended over more than sixty-seven years, though for the first nine and the last thirty-two of the years of bis ministry he was associated with col- leagues, and for many years before his death he performed almost no professional dulies.

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learning, and for his various genius and taste, his ar- dent love of nature and of art, his single-heartedness and truly Christian temper, and for his amiable and generous disposition, especially as manifested in the gratuitous diffusion of his scientific discoveries and improvements, and in imparting his rare knowledge at all times for the gratification and entertainment of others. His character will long be remembered with sincere admiration." He bequeathed to his society a library of nearly four hundred and fifty volumes. He was an honored member of various societies organized for the study of science, art and history, and received the degree of Doctor of Laws from Brown University. His death took place on June 7, 1836.

During the ministry of Dr. Prince the parish re- ceived valuable legacies from Charles Henry Orne, a merchant, and from Miss Mehitable Higginson, a descendant in the sixth generation from the first minister, and widely known as "a teacher of succes- sive generations of children," and " a blessing to the church and the town." More recently the permanent funds of the society were increased by a liberal be- quest from Hannah Haraden Ropes, and in 1867 amounted to about ten thousand five hundred dol- lars. In the year 1817 the society became incorpor- ated as the First Congregational Society in Salem.

In 1824 Mr. Charles W. Upham was ordained as a colleague pastor with Dr. Prince. He was born in St. John, New Brunswick, May 4, 1802, graduated from Harvard College in 1821, and from the Divinity School in Cambridge in 1824. He was ordained in Salem the same year, December 8th, and filled a min- istry of twenty years, when impaired health caused him to resign, and he closed his ministry in Decem- ber, 1844. Mr. Upham was held in high esteem as an acceptable preacher and a man of scholarly at- tainments. He received, on retiring from his ministry, substantial tokens of the generous appreciation of the people whom he had served, and which he acknowl- edged with a warm recognition. He died in Salem June, 15, 1875, more than thirty years after his min- istry ended, having filled in the course of that time several important civil and political offices. He was mayor of Salem in 1852; elected to both Houses of the Legislature of the State at different times, and president of the Senate in 1857-58; member of the National House of Representativs in 1853-55; and of the State Convention of Massachusetts in 1853. In various sermons and addresses he sketched and illus- trated the history of the Salem Church, and contrib- uted for publication much historical and biographical material, relating to the men and times of early New England. During his ministry he published a small work upon the "Logos, " another upon " Prophecy as an Evidence of Christianity ;" " Lectures upon Witch- craft," which, in 1867, he expanded into an elaborate work of two volumes of nearly one thousand duodec- imo pages. " A Life of Sir Henry Vane," in Sparks' American Biography, was from his pen. In 1856 he

wrote the " Life, Letters and Public Services of John Charles Fremont," one of the Presidential candidates of that year. His last published literary work was a " Memoir of Timothy Pickering," in three volumes. He edited the Christian Register in 1845-46, and was a frequent contributor to periodical publications, both religious and secular.

Rev. Thomas Treadwell Stone was called to the vacant pastorship in June, 1846, aud on the 12th of July following was installed in that office, with the simplicity of form observed in the primitive Salem Church, the entire service being carried on and com- pleted by the congregation through its appointed rep- resentative and the pastor-elect. Mr. Stone was born in Waterford, Me., February 9, 1801, and graduated at Bowdoiu College in 1820. He was ordained in Andover, Me., September 8, 1824, and continued to be pastor of that church till September, 1830, when he became preceptor of Bridgton Academy. After two years he resumed the ministry, and was settled in East Machias May 15, 1833. The anti-slavery agitation which came to its crisis after a quarter of a century in civil war in 1861, and which had been long straining threateningly the civil institutions and the political integrity of the nation, had also deeply disturbed the peace of a large proportion of the churches of the free States. Some ministers caused discontent in their folds by preaching upon the country's responsibility and duty in regard to the in- stitution of slavery, some gave equal offense by wholly refraining from the theme, and still others displeased their hearers by what they said or their manner of saying it. The public feeling was ex- tremely sensitive. The congregations were divided in sentiment. Expressions used in the pulpit, which in ordinary times might not have produced a ripple of commotion, in the inflammable state of popular feeling then existing, broke friendships, and sun- dered in many instances the bond that held pastor and church together. Mr. Stone, incapable of giving offense by any breach of Christian charity or cour- tesy, yet felt himself constrained to utter an earnest testimony against slavery as subversive of the plain- est principles of justice and humanity, and as equally condemned by the fundamental teachings and the es- sential spirit of Christianity. While his personal and professional character was unassailable and unim- peached, as it respected the purity and disinterested- ness of his motives and the singleness of mind and the high ability with which he discharged the duties of the ministerial office, some of his society became dissatisfied, and he was dismissed in February, 1852. He was afterwards settled in Bolton, and is now passing a serene and studious old age, dividing his time between his home in Bolton and the homes of his children.

January 6, 1853, the vacancy caused by the dismis- sion of Dr. Stone was filled by the installation of Rev. George Ware Briggs. Mr. Briggs was born at

HISTORY OF ESSEX COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

Little Compton, R. I., April 8, 1810, graduated from Brown University in 1825, and from the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1834, and was ordained in Fall River September 24, 1834, and installed in Plymouth, January 3, 1838, as colleague pastor with Rev. James Kendall, D.D. Dr. Briggs resigned his ministry in Salem April 1, 1867, and the same year was settled over the Third Congregational Society in Cambridge (Cambridgeport), where he still ministers, his society having refused not long since to accept his resignation. During Dr. Briggs' ministry in Salem the "irrepressible conflict" between slavery and freedom reached the stage of open war, and the at- tempted secession of the slave States brought the conflict to a termination in the emancipation of the slaves, the victory of the northern armies and the re- storation of peace between the North and the South. Dr. Briggs was a strenuous and able champion of the cause of freedom and of the maintenance of the na- tion's integrity during the war.

Rev. James T. Hewes succeeded Dr. Briggs, Sep- tember 27, 1868. Mr. Hewes was born in Saco, Me., March 23, 1836 ; was ordained in South Boston, Feb- ruary 19, 1862; resigned June 4, 1864; settled over the Second Unitarian Parish, in Portland, Me., June 23, 1864. He resigned his Salem charge August 31, 1875. With health already impaired before leaving Salem, he was installed in Fitchburg September 26, 1875. After a ministry there of five years, seriously interrupted by ill health, he resigned, sincerely re- spected and beloved by his society, and after a year and a half spent in California, removed to Cambridge, where he died November 21, 1882.

Rev. Fielder Israel, now in pastoral charge of the First Church, was installed March 8, 1877. He was born in Baltimore, Md., June 29, 1825, was in the Methodist ministry for some years, and later had been pastor of the Unitarian Church in Wilmington, Del., and of that in Taunton, Mass., before his settlement in Salem.

The First Church has occupied successively four houses of worship on or near the same spot, Essex, corner of Washington Street. The first is still stand- ing-so much of it as to make its size, shape and gen- eral aspect visible and certain. The main timbers of its frame are preserved and are in their original places, the clothing of the skeleton only-that is, the boarding and plaster-having been from time to time renewed. "An unfinished building of one story," says Rev. Mr. Upham, "was temporarily used at the beginning for the purposes of the congregation." Houses had been provided at once, hy order of the company in London, for dwellings for the two minis- ters,-Rev. Mr. Higginson's "directly south of and about fifty feet distant from the eastern part of the site of the present meeting-house " (ground covered at present by the southeastern corner of the Asiatic Block, now the rear room of the Salem Savings Bank, in which the corporation and its trustees hold their meetings).

Mr. Skelton's house was farther south and to the east, on the southern side of the present Front Street. Neither of these two ministers lived to preach in the first meeting-house, which was contracted for in 1634, the year of Mr. Skelton's death, and which stood, it will be recalled, quite near the sites of their dwellings as just given. Mr. Norton was the builder of that first meeting-house. The trees for it were not felled till the beginning of 1635, and the house was erected the summer after. Its dimensions were twenty feet in length hy seventeen feet in width, and twelve feet in the height of the posts. A gallery extended across the northern end, or side, whose front supporting heam rests now in its original position, the floor of the gallery rising towards the rear by a sharp pitch. The main floor of the house is supposed to have been of clay. The door opened on Essex Street when the building stood on its original foundation ; the gallery ran across the same end; the preacher's place-and the pulpit's, when one was built-was opposite, that is, on the southern end. The windows were not glazed till 1637. In 1639 the house was elongated southward by more than its original length, viz. : twenty-five feet. When a new house of worship was to be built, in 1670, the town voted to appropriate the old house to the town's use for a school-house and watch-house. In the course of the next ninety years it was put to various uses by the town. It was in 1760, it is prob- able, that it was sold to Thorndike Proctor, and by him removed to a spot now in the field a few rods south of Boston Street, near the foot of Gallows (or Witch) Hill, a public road at that time running past it, and there it was occupied as a tavern, after which it stood awhile as a neglected and nearly empty stable and disused store-house. In 1864 it was presented to the Essex Institute by Mrs. David Nichols, its owner at the time, and removed to the rear of Plum- mer Hall, where it now stands restored to its primi- tive form hy the liberality of the late Francis Pea- body, Esq., then president of the Essex Institute, in such a way that the original parts and the renewed portions, respectively, are easily to be distinguished from each other. The second meeting-house was built in 1670, on the western side of the site of the first. It was sixty feet long on Essex Street, fifty feet wide and twenty feet stud; "cost one thousand pounds," says Rev. Mr. Upham, "had galleries, and was called by Cotton Mather 'the great and spacious meeting- house.'" This house served the congregation nearly sixty years. In 1718 it was found to have beeome so decrepit as not to be worthy of repairing, and it was voted to build a new one to take its place on the same ground.

This third meeting-house was seventy-two feet long on Essex Street, and fifty feet wide, with two tiers of gallery and a spire. " The steeple," says Mr. Upham, " was probably like that still preserved in the vener- able meeting-house of the First Church of Hingham, built in 1681, rising directly over the centre of the

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roof, the bell-rope coming down to the broad aisle, half-way between the pulpit and the main entrance." Great changes were afterwards made in the interior arrangement and in the external appearance of the building. A picture of it, as it appeared in its latest form, may he seen among the collections of the Essex Institute, and is also preserved in the appendix to the sermon preached by Rev. Mr. Upham at the dedica- tion of the church edifice at present occupied by the society. The old house was taken down in 1826, and the new was built and dedicated November 16th of the same year. There are a few still living who remember the former, with its three tiers of windows, its tower and spire on its western end, and its front entrance upon its Essex Street side.

The meeting-house built in 1826, and now in use, was materially changed in appearance both within and without in 1875. Without, it was originally a plain brick structure, cruciform in general outline, the central and main portion, that containing the auditorinm, being nearly square, and in appearance much the same as now on its northern front ; high porches projecting from the middle of the eastern and western sides made the arms of the cross; the building stood above a lower story devoted to business purposes,-stores, etc., as now. On the Essex Street side of either porch were doors of entrance to the auditorium and the gallery; the ascent from the pavement to the entrances was made by a short flight of steps, an iron fence with gates inclosing the re- cesses between the street and the steps. Within, a gallery extended along the Essex Street front, in which was the choir and organ, and some space for sittings besides; on the opposite, the southern side, was the rather high pulpit. In 1867 considerable changes were made from its first interior appear- ance; a smaller organ was substituted for the one which had been in use, and was placed with the choir, in an alcove or gallery, within the upper part of the eastern porch; the front gallery was removed, and appropriate inscriptions were placed npon the northern wall, against which it had stood. In 1875 the whole interior was changed to its present form, the pulpit or preacher's desk being carried to the western side, and a large new organ built in its rear. At the same time the two porches upon the eastern and western sides were replaced by extended additions on those sides reaching the entire length of the build- ing, providing not only stairways of access to the andience-room, but rooms adjoining for the minister's use and his library, for the Sunday-school library and for other convenient purposes.

SOCIETY OF FRIENDS .- We now turn back to find and trace the offshoots from this parent stem of eccle- siastical growth in the Salem settlement. The earli- est of these was a gathering of Quakers. Mention is made of the appearance of these people in Salem first in 1656 or '57, only abont ten years after George Fox began his itineracy and public preaching in

England. The peculiar tenets and practices of the Quakers exhibit one of the numerous phases taken on by the new and freer spirit to which the Reforma- tion of the sixteenth century had given birth. It was an emancipation from bondage to legalism, ecclesias- ticism and hierarchies. It was usnally characterized by more or less spiritual exaltation and religious enthusi- asm. In some sanguine, imaginative and emotional temperaments, this new spirit bnrst forth, like new wine from old bottles, into effervescent prophesyings and extravagant claims of illumination. Sincere and pure in motive as most of these people were, they were yet protestants of the protestants, and in many instances boldly arraigned the existing churches as needing a new baptism of the Spirit; as leaning with- ont warrant wholly on the letter of the Bible. They affirmed that each human soul might have its own immediate communication with God, its own inter- pretation of Christ, and its own revelation of truth, not to be superseded by any external authority. Very innocent and even commendable affirmations these would perhaps be pronounced to-day ; and were Endicott, Higginson and Wilson here now, they would, it is likely, assent to them; while we who are to-day sitting complacently in judgment upon their conduct and upon that of the Sonthwicks and Maules, if we had been among them in their time, should have been Quakers and denonncers of Qnak- ers in just abont the same numerical proportions as they were. We need not be unjust to those who fined, sold and hanged Quakers, in order to do justice to the Quakers. The members of the churches of Salem and Boston could not know just the nature, conditions and the probable outcome of the problem which they had to deal with in Qnaker- ism in 1656, as we now know it, viewing it in the light of history. When they first heard announced the peculiar views of these people, they recognized in them something like and yet unlike the teachings of Mrs. Hutchinson and of the Anabaptists, which they deprecated with genuine dread. To what would the new doctrines disseminated by these preachers, of which they had some not reassuring reports from England, lead, and where would they end? Did the preachers themselves know ? Or were they on a drift whose tendency they were quite unable to forecast ? Now it is but common-place wisdom to say that it was not right to judge the whole body or the great majority by the vagaries of a few unbalanced spirits. But the judgment had to be made then and there, by the contemporaries of Robinson, Stevenson and Mary Dyer, and they could not tell at once who were the typical disciples of the new school and who were the exceptional zealots whose ways would be eventu- ally repndiated by the majority,-nor indeed whether the few might not yet become the majority, which was what they feared. They could not tell, nobody conld, to what pitch this excitement might rise. Alarming possibilities loomed up to their apprehen-

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History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I, Part 32

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed. n 85042884-1 Publication date: 1888 Publisher: Philadelphia : J. W. Lewis & Co. Number of Pages: 1538

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed. n 85042884-1
Publication date: 1888
Publisher: Philadelphia : J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1538