USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Ludlow > Ludlow: a century and a centennial, comprising a sketch of the history of the town of Ludlow, Hampden County, Massachusetts > Part 10
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ADDRESS OF WELCOME.
My friends, this is a birthday party, and it is a solemn and im- pressive thought that we shall never see the like again. All of our names will be checked on the roll of living men before another. A. gentleman was lately overheard declaring that he would have nothing to do with another centennial ! We appreciate his sentiments. The next we shall keep on the eternal plains. We are then treading on sacred ground. Age is everywhere entitled to reverence and honor. The old town never seemed so sacred as now. Reverence, faith, en- tire good will become the hour.
In the name and in behalf of my fellow-townsmen, I bid you wel- come. We are glad to see you. Your presence does us good. We are glad you have not forgotten or lost your love for the old home- stead. We should have been recreant to real fraternal feeling if we did not invite you home and make ready our best for you. Whether the fatted calf is or is not made ready, I will not say, but I assure you there has been no stint in this getting ready. This is a hearty wel- come. With most cordial affection we greet you ; glad to take by the hand many of you who have long been known to us as personal friends; we greet those most kindly, who, on returning, find them- selves strangers in the land of their birth. We hail with gladness our gray-haired and venerable men who occupy a well-deserved prom- inence. A hoary head is surely a crown of glory if it be found in the way of righteousness. We know it was with unwonted pleasure that these, our venerable fathers, saw this movement set on foot. We rejoice in your presence here, to-day. Welcome ! welcome ! honored sires, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. Kindred, all, we bid you welcome home. We have come to talk of olden times. We have come to honor the dead, and to carry away with us, if we may, some benefit from such filial homage, for ourselves and for our children. How unwonted our emotions ! We welcome you to the home of your earlier years, to the altars of your God, and to the graves of your kin- dred. Let us to-day press around the time-worn graves of our dead. Let the finest sentiments of the heart prevail. Let friendship be re- newed.
{ Welcoming one another to these assemblies on earth, and hailing this occasion for the expression of confidence and love; coming
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together by the will of God, may you with us be refreshed, and our thoughts run forward to that day when all the servants of Christ, ยท coming from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, shall meet together at the harvest home in the end of the world. So it is that our hopes of heaven enter into the welcome we once more give you. Modest old town, may she more than ever be the love and delight of her sons and daughters !
A Literary Address, with reply to the Greeting, occupied the next half hour. Prof. Lorenzo White, then of New Salem, now principal of Vermont Methodist Seminary and Female College, opened his ora- tion with a few pleasant words not in the manuscript, saying that although not a native of the town he had come within its limits when a boy of four, and received all his early training in its society and schools. Then followed the Address, as follows :-
ADVANTAGES OF LIFE IN A COUNTRY TOWN.
The address of welcome to which we have just listened may seem to one who has come to see what we are doing to-day, as nothing more than a formality in the carrying out of a prearranged programme. Doubtless your words of greeting have been spoken according to a prescribed order of exercises in the celebration of your Centennial. . But in this you have only conformed to a higher law to which we owe allegiance at all times. The order of the day obeys the spirit of the day. To us, who are here in response to your invitation, these words are full of meaning. They come to us freighted with pleasant memo- ries-memories, in the case of many of us, fragrant with the loves and joys of childhood. We are glad to be here, and to feel that we are at home with you. Our esteemed friend who has so well spoken your greetings to us returning wanderers, skilled though he be in the use of words as a fine art, could not, if he would, cheat us with fine phrases. We have heard his voice with gladness becauses it harmo- nizes with all the other voices about us. He has but rendered into graceful English the greetings wherewith these hills and valleys and brooks with which we were once so delightfully familiar had already welcomed us-the same old hills and vales over which and through which we so often roamed in childhood, and the same loved brooks where we fished and bathed and frolicked, and in which we built res-
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ervoirs that always served their purpose well, and did no harm. Smiles and looks of welcome, too, we receive on every hand from old school-mates and play-fellows-the same boys with whom we always had good times, and the same girls whom we boys used to think the fairest and best. They do not look just as they used to, and we are not sorry, for they point us with pride to their daughters who are as fair as ever they were, and who wonderfully bear their likeness, while they themselves have just changed in the order of a happy develop- ment. They seem only to have been born into a freer and larger and grander life. They have just outgrown the bloom of girlhood, and have put on the riper, richer charms of womanhood, and most of them of wifehood and motherhood. And we boys, as we feel ourselves to- day-if we have been true to the charter of virtue-love them as much as we loved them when they were girls, with the love that every true man has a right to cherish towards every true woman with whose acquaintance he is blessed.
Even the children of to-day, many of them, do not seem strangers to us. Their tell-tale faces show their ancestry. They are so like the faces of their fathers and mothers, and grandfathers and grand- mothers, that I often know them as soon as I see them, and the children quickly know those who know them. These rushing hours speedily make us old friends with them. But we find yet other friends here who pleasantly remind us of the good days of yore. These grand old trees which stood here when the old men of to-day were boys, trees which even the greedy axe has not dared to destroy, wave their greeting to us in the morning breeze, and from their wide- spreading branches, clad in richest foliage, come the greetings of the birds, caroled in their sweetest songs, while all about us, too, even the wayside and hillside flowers, looking up to us lovingly, claim us as their friends and bid us welcome. And well they may. Though these birds and flowers are not just the same that we used to know and love, they are so marvelously like them that they must be the children undegenerate of the very old birds and flowers of our child- hood through a line of I know not how many generations. The mother bird has, from year to year, taught her offspring the same sweet songs, and the mother-plant with unerring care has transmitted
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to the baby-plant the same exquisite taste and skill, in displaying its charms and diffusing its fragrance.
It was a happy thought or hit with you to select the charming month of June, when Nature has just arrayed herself anew in her most beautiful attire, as the time of year for holding these exercises ; for these blessed children of nature have a right to join with us in the celebration of our Centennial. They were old citizens here long be- fore the first visit of our ancestors to this continent. They welcomed our fathers here a hundred years ago with the same melodies, the same gorgeous display of their charms, the same wealth of fragrance, with which they welcome us to-day.
I can not help remarking here that the fashions of Nature do not change, except only as culture develops them more perfectly, and com- bines them more skillfully, and I am sure none of us would have them . change otherwise. Ought we to imitate Nature in this respect, think you, and to hand down the same fashions from generation to genera- tion ? Not certainly till human taste shall be so cultivated as to give us fashions true to nature, and even then there will be room for new combinations in infinite variety. Is it not just here that Nature sug- gests to us the true solution of the fashion problem ? But this only in parenthesis.
On this very year of our Centennial, Iceland celebrates her millen- nial. Who shall say that the robins, the blue-birds, the violets, the roses, the daisies and their numerous kindred of other names, and along with them the trees as well-the maple, the elm, the pine, and the oak-have not this same year a good right to celebrate the millen- nial of their occupancy of these loved retreats ? Pioneers and teachers they were to our fathers, and they are to us, prophets, too, are they of a better time coming, if we will learn from them their lessons of taste and purity, and sweetness and strength. A millennium they foretell just as glorious as we will make it. Divine sovereignty in the case is the assurance of God's blessing upon our honest and well-directed efforts.
Considerable are the improvements even in this country town which a hundred years have wrought. Providence has, through the fidelity, the hardship, and the wisdom of our fathers, committed to us the
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trust of these cultivated lands, these pleasant homes, these churches and schools-in a word, the advantages, such as they are, of life in a country town. What have we to do to transmit these blessings to those who shall come after us, and to multiply them so as to make the future what it should be ? is the question, then, which the occasion gives us with such emphasis that I need offer no apology for making it the starting-point of a few suggestions.
The inspirations of this glad Centennial day awaken, I doubt not, a desire among the people of the town to act each a good part in his day, and may well culminate in an ambition satisfied with nothing less than the best things-a steadily-increasing prosperity for your goodly town, and the brightest and happiest future for the genera- tions coming.
Indulge me, will you not ? in saying we to-day as much as I have a mind to, for I have always loved to think of myself as one of you, and in this I know I am not alone among those who are counted as guests here to-day. While we have found homes in other places, our hearts are not bounded by the limits of our new homes. We do not have to give you up to make room for new friends. In coming here we are like married daughters, who, returning each thanksgiving day to their father's with their new recruits of young life, always speak of going home.
The first Centenary of the town of Ludlow to-day becomes historic, and we are all anticipating with much pleasure, the address which shall more fully make it our own by unfolding to us its records and its les- sons. It is in the light of the present as well as of the past, that on this day we look forward. And our path is a plain one. If we would make the future bright and prosperous, such as shall give us a claim on the gratitude of those who may follow us, then we have simply to be true to this goodly inheritance received from our fathers.
But to be true to this sacred trust, to make the most of our advan- tages, we must shun the perils which experience has taught us our lia- bility to meet.
It is wise, then, that we pause just here for a moment amidst the rejoicings of our Centennial Jubilee, and face the dangers against which even the comparative security of country life is not always proof.
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It would be out of place here to rehearse the catalogue of sins which are everywhere the peril of careless lives. I must take for granted that those whom I have the honor to address to-day, are chaste, temperate, upright, industrious and frugal. If any of them are not so, they ought to be, and by all' means they had better be. But life, even on this higher plane, where crime is rare, has its fail- ures. Indeed, every plane of life, till you rise to Heaven itself, has its evils to be avoided, and the higher you go in the scale of being, the more deplorable is the ruin which these threaten.
Hence, it now and then comes to pass in the country, that just at the point where intelligent industry with frugality has won thrift and competency, and has thus reached the plane of the highest financial independence that mortals ever can attain, there begins to spring up in the family an ambition for city style. I am warranted, if I mistake not, in taking for granted that the good sense and good blood of the thrifty farmers of Ludlow is generally a guaranty against this evil. This foolish ambition, however, is singularly blinding to its victims, and a word of caution even to the wise may not be out of place.
It need not be urged that attempts at imitation are generally fail- ures, and that the actors besides are very likely to cut awkward fig- ures. It is said that the young men of Byron's time who thought to imitate his genius, only got so far as to make themselves ludicrous by mimicking his limping gait and more limping morals. So it com- monly happens that would-be imitations in the country of city life, turn out to be only apings, and that, too, not of that which is worth copying, but of the weaknesses and vices of the city-the shoddy pa- rade and slavish subserviency to position and power of those who have not learned to wear the honors of city life with good grace.
But this evil is sure in due time to cure itself. Fifth Avenue style in a farmer's home never fails to show itself, sooner or later, to be as absurd as would be the attempt to devote our New England lands to the raising of tropical fruits. We have all seen enough of this mis- take to understand its results. It means heavy and steadily-increas- ing debts, irredeemable mortgages, bad dreams, haunted rooms, for- feited credit, seedy garments, an aspect of decay within and without, a general unhingement of manhood and womanhood, and then bank-
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ruptcy, or else that which is worse-an old age oppressed with intol- erable burdens.
The failures of country life are chiefly traceable to causes working nearer the other extreme of society. Not in the excesses of taste and style lurks the demon that oftenest plays first tyrant and then de- stroyer in homes of industry. As the foremost or parent evil among upright and energetic farmers, I incline to place the tendency of both men and women to become working machines, appendages, the one sex to the soil and the other to the house. I do not refer now spe- cially to the overwork so common that breaks down the constitution and shortens life ; for even in the country dissipation doubtless slays more than work does, and when overwork brings premature death, that is not the great evil in the case. But your mere workers may be philosphers enough to adjust the daily demand on their strength to the daily supply, and so drag out the full measure of their days, though whether they do or not is of comparatively small account. The abominable thing is, that man should be degraded to the rank of the instruments which he wields. The curse lies in the debasing, not in the shortening of life.
The first result of this all work and no play is to make Jack a dull boy, and next a dull man, if he lives to be one, who, because he is more a machine than a man, drops naturally into the old ruts of his fathers, is incapable of accepting improvements, but plods blindly on, absurdly seeking to perpetuate ideas and customs which the world has outgrown, mistakes narrowness for independence, stupidity for con- stancy, penuriousness for economy, shows but slight appreciation of the beautiful, pays his church dues as a kind of future life insurance demand, regards money expended for books and pictures as wasted, and the education of his children as useless, save only as the outfit of a drudge like himself. Call this an extreme case, if you please. I mean it as such. But remember that sins invariably lead to extremes.
Extremes are not always reached in a day. But let a man only con- sent to be a mere working machine, and to make his wife and children the same, or no matter if the wife leads in the case, and in due time this very extreme will be gained, if not in his day, then in his chil- dren's. But let him not flatter himself that he is becoming rich. Such
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a man is not a possessor at all. The farm or the shop, from first to last, owns him, and works him as its slave. If we would escape these results, then we must shun the sin which leads to them.
Our fathers were hard workers, it is true, and we can not say that they were always wise; but it is the evidences which we see to- day of the subordination in a good degree of work to the higher pur- poses of life, that inspires for them our respect and gratitude. They not only made for themselves homes of comfort, and caused their lands to yield for them the supplies demanded for physical life, but they also early founded churches and schools, and cheerfully sustained them from their scanty and hard-earned means. Not least among the legacies which they have left to us is their own example of self-sacri- fice in behalf of their children. They have done their part well, and have thus made it our duty to show that the oft-repeated claim of New England farmers, " we build school-houses and raise men," is no idle boast.
To be true to the fathers, our first duty is to be men. Use, then, the good things of life, and let them not use you.
Be a free man, not a slave. Make your homestead not your work- shop, nor your prison, nor your world, all which terms in this connec- tion mean about the same thing; but make it what home should be, as beautiful as your means will permit; at all events, make it within doors and without so bright and cheerful, and so warm and radiant with love, as to charm the faculties of your children into joyous and healthful exercise. And you may be assured the work will not suffer as the result. Make work a delight, a fine art; infuse into it the play element ; give brain and heart their natural right of dominion over muscle, and we can do a third more work, and do it better, with only the weariness that makes rest sweet and dreams pleasant. And then, too, home, in its industrial character, will become what Heaven designed it to be, a gymnasium for the free and happy development and training of mind and body.
There can be no doubt that the right of every man under our free government to sell his property when he pleases, even though it be the old homestead of his fathers, is a wise provision. Though the ex- ercise of this right greatly modifies our local attachments, making
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them less a clinging to the soil, this is on the whole a great advan- tage. Fostered by our educational agencies, its tendency is to the cul- tivation of a nobler style of patriotism, a love that rises above mere matter and place, and cares rather for institutions and principles and life.
By frequent transfers of real estate it has actually come to pass that comparatively few occupy the houses and lands of their fathers. But if you live where the ancestors of your neighbor lived, somebody else lives on the old homestead of your fathers, and plucks the fruit from orchards which they planted, and mows the green fields which their skillful hands first brought under culture. These changes, then, 1 in the ownership of real estate, are but the interchange of trusts com- mitted to us by our fathers, and it is all the same though the bound- ary line of towns comes between. Our obligation is none the less to enter into the labors of those who have lived and wrought before us.
He who has planted a tree, and by careful culture has made it fair and thrifty and fruitful, has a claim upon those who come after him that they shall take care of it, and, when it dies, plant another in its stead; and so, in general, of whatever improvements he has made dur- ing his occupancy. With peculiar emphasis is this true of all that con- tributes to make our homes beautiful. He whose industry and good taste has made his buildings and grounds a paradise, is a benefactor of the entire community, and of every pilgrim passer-by ; and no man can with money purchase the moral right to lay them waste, or neg- lect them. Money may buy these goodly acres, but the beauty that covers them is the common heritage of all who have minds and hearts to enjoy it. To heathenize grounds that our fathers have Christian- ized is treason. However, then, the improvements of a century, have come into our hands, whether by direct inheritance or by purchase, they are a trust to be kept faithfully, and transmitted to those who may follow us.
The advantages of life in the country, just as in the city, are, for the greater part, what we make them. But take our good country homes as we find them, or as they find us, and they will, I believe, all things considered, bear comparison with the best which the city af- fords. But it is what the country affords, more or less, that is ours,
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and the main chance with us is the faithful improvement of what we have.
,Success is everywhere achieved by making the most of our own re- sources. If you please, it is the one talent of a country town, and not the five talents of the city upon the improvement of which success is here conditioned. But perhaps our one talent may yield us as much substantial good as five talents in the city. It will, if we make the better investment, and take better care of the increase.
There are many things in which it were folly for the country to at- tempt to compete with the city.
The worshipers of mammon, the devotees of fashion, and all the giddy, fluttering throngs to whom a whirl of excitement is the daily or nightly necessity of life, may gain their ends and end their useless lives more readily in the city. Wealth, fashion, noise, with all their train of ambitions and vexations, find here in but inferior degree either their motives or their means. Some of the advantages of cul- ture, too, it must be admitted, are generally more easily accessible in the city than in the country. The machinery of the city can turn out professional characters as well as sharpers of all kinds with much the greater facility.
But the country can do without many of these. It is not polished instruments of any kind that is the world's great want. Professional training is well ; but it is never the great essential. Look out for the man, and you will risk little to let the professor take care of himself. The grand aim of life everywhere should be the development and cul- tivation of manhood.
Now the first requisite to this is home and neighborhood. And in both these respects the country has the advantage over the city. One can scarcely know what the word neighborhood means till he has lived in the country. The word home has generally too in the coun- try a breadth and depth of meaning which is rarely possible in the city. In the city, it means additional to the family itself for the greater part a hired house, or part of a house, a temporary abode, often little more than a business head-quarters, with but slight local attachments. But in the country, home generally means possession as well as occu- pancy. Often it means the old homestead, endeared by a thousand ten-
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1
der associations. And it means not only house, but also gardens, lawns, fields, trees, fruit and flowers, flocks and herds. In its fullest realiza- tion it is a place where two lives united in one were planted in youth, from which, fertilized by a pure love, other young lives have in due time sprung up around them. Be not afraid of this word planted. Man has not so grown out of relation to other forms of life in the king- doms of nature, that he can, without a great loss to himself, be tossed hither and thither, with no local attachments, all places being alike to him; and he never will at least in the present life. He need not in- deed be attached to the soil like a tree which cannot be moved without endangering its life. But as the very means of insuring for him that vigor and strength of manhood which can withstand the trials of any clime, and make his life everywhere fruitful, his heart must have root- lets that take a strong and permanent hold upon home associations, and become intertwined inseparably with the happiness and prosperity of the people among whom were passed his early days. I do not say that a country birthplace and early home must always be more to him than any other place. It may or may not be the dearest of all places. It ought not to be in the case of those who afterwards have permanent homes in other places where families grow up around them. It must however be to them what no other place ever can be, the lovely dream- land of infancy, the charming fairy land of childhood, and a little later, a kind of border-land paradise, in which youth blossoms into young manhood and womanhood. Far from confining his life within narrow limits, these life-long attachments to an early home become a condition upon which his life may ever after more freely and widely and securely expand itself. He whose infant life is thus planted in the soil of a good home, and whose life, thrice blessed with the culture of home, the school, and the church, all working in harmony, and in- viting his faculties into free and happy exercise, is prepared in due time, as he could not be otherwise, to reach out his life in vigorous runners that shall take root, and make his life fruitful in places far remote.
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