USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Longmeadow > Proceedings at the centennial celebration of the incorporation of the town of Longmeadow, October 17th, 1883 > Part 4
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He is catholic and progressive; is not afraid of novelties and innovations; encourages the new hymns and the singing-masters, and the pulpit readings of the Scriptures; looks kindly at the "New Lights ;" will not multiply the "Separates" by fighting them; welcomes George Whitefield when it is the clerical fashion to decry him.
He is philanthropic and public-spirited. Beginning at home, his charity goes all abroad. With a tender eye for all distressed persons, he scans their practical necessities and presses his people for contributions. The widow Steele's house must be shingled, wood must be sledded to the widow Aitchison. Our Thanksgiving collection he originated. Our Benevolent Associa- tion is but the unfolding of his old charity meeting. Our weekly
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conference meeting is no improvement upon his frequent meet- ings from house to house, and the sermons that he so often repeated to the aged and the invalid at home. Our Sunday- schools impart less solid instruction than his frequent catechis- ings and familiar conferences with the young men at the school- house when he encouraged them to propose their questions. Often he goes to Springfield jail to visit the prisoners. Brimful of the missionary spirit, his heart is always going out to the Indians. He is instrumental in securing John Sargeant for missionary to the Stockbridge tribe; he is interpreter for the Housatonics when his friend Gov. Belcher meets the Indian congress of various tribes at Deerfield. Rejoicing as we do this day in so many honored missionary names connected with Long- meadow,-the Schaufflers, Temples, Raynoldses, Calhouns, Blisses, McQueens,-we must not forget the benediction and the impulse that come down from Stephen Williams. Eleazer Wil- liams, the reputed " Dauphin," descended from Eunice, his captive sister, was a missionary to the Iroquois and educated by Deacon Nathaniel Ely.
Our foreign missionaries suggest the mention of our foreign commerce. Merchant Colton, the richest man of the precinct, had a ship-yard on the river bank. His vessels, the Speedwell and the Friendship, were launched at high water, floated over Enfield Falls, rigged at Hartford, laded with hoops and staves, these exchanged at Havana for molasses, and this sold at Bristol, England, for a general assortment of goods to be distributed again at Piscataqua -now Portsmouth - at Boston, and at Longmeadow. See how our fathers put their religion into their bills of lading : --
Shipped by the grace of God in good order and well conditioned by James and Dickinson, and in and upon the good ship called the Friendship, whereof is master under God for this present voyage, Edward Sargeant,
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and now riding at anchor in the harbor of Bristol, and by God's grace bound for Piscataqua - to say ten casks of nails, etc., on the proper accommoda- tion and risque of Mr. Samuel Colton. In witness whereof the master or purser of the said ship hath affirmed to three bills of lading, etc.
And so GOD send the Good Ship to her desired port in safety. Amen. Dated in Bristol, June 6, 1771.
EDWARD SARGEANT.
The Town period, - our recent century, - may be briefly scanned; for it is simply the outcome and enlargement of the pre- ceding periods. It is the receptacle of all the priceless treasures accumulated by our fathers' sturdy faith, ceaseless toil, and heroic sacrifice. Do we s e further than they, it is because we stand upon their shoulders. Do we enjoy more than they, it is because they suffered for us. Do we build better than they, it is because they discovered the quicksands and settled the foundations firm. Have we peace in our day, 'tis because they fought the inevitable battles. Even as our towering elms derive not their leafy crowns and royal stature from the sandy surface, but from the deep clay subsoil, so if we have any spreading roots of character, or our institutions any permanent vitality, it is because we are planted by the living waters of our historic past. "The child- ren of Thy servant shall continue, and their seed shall be established before Thee."
The Town period opens with Shays's Rebellion. The times are out of joint. The people are generally impoverished-dis- tressed with debt, crazy over paper money ; deceived and ruined by it, and yet wanting more. It is the heyday for demagogues. The courts and lawyers are denounced. The blind remedy is insurrection ; the very foundations of social order begin to rock, and it is a question whether the American Revolution has not been fought in vain. In this demoralized state of things, there is among many of our people too much disposition to shun hard work, to haunt the taverns, to indulge in wrestling matches on
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the village green. John Bliss is the Longmeadow bully and he magnifies his office. Alpheus Colton is the captain of our insurgents, and brings upon himself like the other leaders the sentence of death. But our more conservative citizens like Dea. Nathaniel Ely and Col. Gideon Burt were Gen. Shephard's minute-men, standing by the guns of the commonwealth and the federal stores, true to hard work, hard money, law and order. When Shays quarters his marauding soldiers on Wilbraham, and a battle seems impending, the frightened women and children of Wilbraham flee for refuge to Longmeadow.
The Town period opens also with the ministry of Richard Salter Storrs. He is a fit successor to his great uncle, Stephen Williams, connected with him by various ties of blood, which were afterwards renewed by his marrying for his second wife Sarah Williams, granddaughter of his predecessor. Moreover Mr. Storrs had been singled out in the secret choice of Dr. Williams, some three years before he began to preach, for his successor in the Longmeadow pastorate. He was as Elisha to Elijah. The old prophet's mantle fell upon him; he entered into his labors, reaped what he had sowed, carried out his line of things, and by essentially the same methods. Their com- bined ministries made just one hundred years, and that century was the corner-stone of our foundations.
Mr. Storrs, like his predecessor, was ordained in the fresh vigor of his youth, having but just passed his majority. The salutatorian of his class at Yale, his superior scholarship and felicitous address had already excited brilliant ex; perations. He was far more eloquent than his predecessor. Of commanding presence, a piercing though genial eye, strongly built, his expres- sion bold and earnest, suggestive, of a hidden energy, and yet softened by a warm and confiding heart, of quick sensibilities, and lively and exuberant imagination, he was a natural orator
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and the father of orators. At the same time he was subject by native temperament to alternate elations and depressions, and harrassed through life by periodical attacks of nervous headache. These constitutional infirmities fell in with his native self-dis- trust and dislike of publicity to keep him at home, a dweller among his own people ; not therefore so widely known as Dr. Williams, nor had his public influence, cut off in his prime at the age of fifty-six, ripened to that maturity which crowned the old age of his predecessor. But in the chosen sphere of his own parish and in all this region, pre-eminently admired and beloved, given to hospitality, attractive in social life, a son of consolation. He was peculiarly gifted in public prayer, remark- able for his appropriateness, copiousness, fervor, and a variety of expression that suited every place and each occasion. The favorite chaplain on the muster-field, well mounted, with shin- ing Blucher boots and cocked hat, he delighted in the hearty welcome of his fellow-soldiers. More easily stirred .and not so patient as his predecessor, he was a little ruffled if the bell stopped tolling when he was but half way across the green. He once preached with all sincerity and solemnity, though with less necessity, his farewell sermon. It relieved his mind and resulted in his continuance. He rode home from the First Church in Springfield without preaching the lecture because the parish authorities had failed of their repeated promise to cut down an apple tree behind the pulpit window, which had too often obscured his vision. His theology was of the Pauline type, and while he forgot not the terrors of the law, he delighted more in the affectionate entreaties of the gospel. He magnified the divine sovereignty, and was pertinacious on the decrees.
An arrangement having been made with his brother, Dr. Howard of Springfield, for exchanging lectures, they meet half way on horseback. Says Brother Storrs: "Brother Howard,
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you see how it was ordained from all eternity that you should preach my lecture." Says Brother Howard : "I don't see it ! And if it was so decreed, I'll break it!" The good brethren got warm; each turned his horse for home. But Brother Storrs has the parting word : "If you won't preach my lecture, that was decreed !"
It would be but ungracious, unhistorical, and unfair, should I fail to connect with these influential pastors the less conspicuous but greatly helpful and sustaining power of their godly wives,- Abigail Davenport, Sarah Chapin Burt. Sarah Williston, and Sarah Williams. And these names are singled out only as representatives of that goodly company of the Longmeadow women who, as our foremothers, well deserve ancestral honors. Even as they, with the fathers, are laid away in the sacred dust of the old churchyard, so, side by side, and hand in hand, and heart to heart, they lived and wrought together. It was from the blazing hearthstone of their beloved homes, lit up most of all by the fervent affections of mother, daughter, sister, wife, that our fathers went forth to build the Church, the School, the State. It was woman's influence that made the New England home the unit of a civilization widely different from that of other American colonies, where Frenchman and Spaniard fol- lowed, not the New England pastor, but the celibate priest,- not the'Puritan mother, but the homeless nun. Let the tenderest memories of this centennial day be given, in our common Mother's name, not so much to her sons as to her daughters. "Their price is far above rubies. The hearts of their husbands did safely trust in them. They girded their loins with strength, and strengthened their arms; they laid their hands to the spindle, and their hands held the distaff ; they stretched out their hands to the poor; they were not afraid of the snow for their households; they made fine linen and sold it ; they deliv-
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ered girdles unto the merchant ; strength and honor were their clothing ; they opened their mouths with wisdom, and in their tongues was the law of kindness ; they looked well to the ways of their households, and they ate not the bread of idleness. Their children rise up and call them blessed. Give them of the fruit of their hands ; and let their own works praise them in the gates ! "
The Town period also opens with a public library, the numer- ous subscribers headed by Mr. Storrs, the admirable preamble and constitution drawn by "Master Jabez Colton."-(I would that the time allowed to name the whole catalogue of our honored pedagogues, such as Rufus P. Stebbins, John Dixon, Sanford Lawton, William Goldthwait)-our town clerk and village lawyer, also ; steadfast, tenacious, true, ready for every good work; the lay reader of sermons when the pastor was ab- sent or disabled ; and on Fast days he read the annual statutes of the commonwealth from the broad pulpit stair. There never was a permanent place in this town for titled lawyers ; for there has always been some unprofessional citizen able to do the needed business. .
But we never could have spared the village doctor,-Dr. White, Dr. Stebbins, Dr. Frost, Dr. Bliss, to mention no more of the honorable succession. And they were very reasonable in their charges,-only twenty cents for a visit, thirteen cents for an emetic,-and not without an occasional trace of quack- ery, when the public sentiment clearly called for it. As witness Dr. Stebbins's well-worn "Perkins' Metallic Tractors."
It is a little before Mr. Storrs' untimely death in 1819, that the seating business goes out and with it compulsory taxation. Here is one of the old warrants from Assessors Ephraim Colton, John Hale, and Aaron Cooley, to Nathaniel Ely, constable. It includes the minister rate and so winds up: "And for want of
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goods or chattels whereon to make distress, you are to seize the body or bodies of the person or persons so refusing, and him or them commit unto the common jail, there to remain until he or they pay and satisfy the several sum or sums whereat they are respectively assessed."
Let us see how this works. It is town-meeting day. A citizen by the name of Glazier, not long resident, but long enough to pay his minister-rate, is presented with it by Samuel Stebbins, constable,-a poll-tax,-amounting to eighty cents. He squarely and . profanely refuses. The constable insists. "What if I don't pay?" The constable replies by putting his . hand upon Glazier's shoulder. " If you really won't pay, I arrest you; and you go with me to Springfield jail." In mild astonish- ment the prisoner would like to see him do it. The constable appoints Mr. David Booth keeper, while he hastens for his wagon. Glazier proposes that they save the constable the trou- ble of returning, as he lives a half-mile distant on the way to Springfield. They find the constable engaged in catching his horse. "Let us go and help him," proposes the prisoner. As they go the prisoner breaks for the woods. Mr. Booth, however, has the longest stride, and as the prisoner vaults over a fence, his collar is firmly grasped. There stand the two men panting with the fence between. "You may as well come along," re- marks the stalwart keeper. The wagon being ready, the pris- oner takes out his wallet and proffers the eighty cents. " But you must also pay my fee for arresting you," replies the constable. After a considerable pause, with one eye to the woods and the other towards neighbor Booth, fifty cents more is tendered- "But you must also pay for the keeper." A profane refusal bursts forth. On arriving at Springfield jail, the wallet comes out again. "But you must also pay the transportation fee." The jail is preferred, with profane expletives. It becomes evi-
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dent that this man needs gospel preaching. The turnkey is about to shut the iron door when the love of liberty inquires, " What can I settle the business for." "You must also pay the turnkey's fee." The eighty cents has grown to several dollars, -but he pays it.
In the midst of the Town period comes in the temperance reform. Our nineteen cider mills and our six brandy, gin, and whisky stills go out. The wood-sleddings for the minister, the payments of the minister rates in grain, the ministry lands,-go too. Likewise go the meadow gates, and the gates of the home commons, and the town's and the proprietors' land grants, and the browsing cattle,-no more to run at large, -and the swine, and the geese,-three cents fine for each goose. And the fire wards come in,-no more setting of fires in the woods. And the Sunday-school, at first a questionable innova- tion,-and the Baptist church in the eastern part of the town, with its able and fervent pioneer ministers, Elder George Atwell and Elder Alvin Bennett, established as a branch of the Enfield Baptist church in 1807, as an independent church in 1818.
The successor of Mr. Storrs in the old church is Baxter Dickinson, after six years called to a pastorate in Newark, New Jersey, and thence to the chair of pulpit rhetoric in Lane Theologi- cal Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio,-judicious, solid, able, thorough ; a strong and impressive preacher, a diligent and successful pastor ; beloved at home, greatly esteemed abroad. His impress here was firm and strong, and he made his special mark in his in- auguration and victorious leadership of the temperance reform. After him came Jonathan B. Condit-youthful, singularly win- ning, ornate, magnetic-for personal attractions most admired of all the occupants of our pastorate, before or since ; and by and by called to the rhetorical chair in Amherst College, thence to a pastorate in Portland, Maine, and finally to a professorship in Auburn Theological Seminary, New York.
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In 1829 the old church colonizes. The Second Congrega- tional church begins its prosperous and useful career. It is blessed in those earlier years, with the faithful ministries of Calvin Foote and Martyn Tupper, with marked revivals, and numerous accessions, and since then, with a succession of faith- ful pastors and a steady and healthy growth. The whole eastern district of the town at the beginning of the century, sparsely settled and almost an unbroken forest, has been constantly increasing in enterprise and thrift, rich especially in its famous quarries of the Longmeadow sandstone, a source of future in- dustry and wealth that seems to be exhaustless.
The last fifty years of the Town period with its events of interest and progress, including the establishment of the Roman Catholic church in this part of the town and the Methodist Episcopal church in the eastern district, and the stirring scenes of the civil war, must be passed over by the present limitations of this address, as belonging to the more familiar recollections of our own times ; times whose harvests are yet unripe, whose actors like ourselves are yet upon the stage, not for historical treatment, but as living epistles known and read of all.
A hundred years ago! Were the former times better than these? Better for us, but not for them. The glory of the chil- dren are the fathers, but it is the glory of the children. The goodly heritage is ours. The stream is better than the fountain, the harvest better than the seed-corn.
Behold the contrasts-then, the blowing sand; now, this park-like green. Then, the arid, well-nigh treeless plain ; now, these shaded walks, and spreading elms. Then, the tortuous, steep and miry roads ; now these viaducts and smooth highways. Then, the unpainted, lean-to houses, the weather-beaten horse- sheds, the unsightly row of shops in the middle of the village green ; now, these cultured lawns and ornamental mansions.
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Then, the rude, springless, heavy wagons and the rope traces ; now, the trim and handsome turnouts.
As to the qualities of character we should be more modest in our comparisons. Let the next centennial praise us and not our own mouth.
Since the civil war it has been with us as with many rural towns, a time of much depression. But not like that which attended the French and Indian war, or that which succeeded the Revolution, or the hard times belonging to the war of 1812. Our young men it is true have left us; the cities have won them ; our manufactures too have fled to the more convenient centers. We have been accounted slow and dull. But in the face of all these depressing circumstances, not our fault, I can say to my fellow-townsmen : You have made as brave a fight as ever the fathers did. The old vitality yet survives. This anniversary asserts it. Those "meadows fresh and fair" await a better agriculture. Their thirty-fold shall be a hundred fold. These sweet homes, the church, the school, cherished still, we shall transmit them to our children and they will hand them down to theirs. We shall not abate our courage or our hope. We claim our full share in the honorable prestige of this valley, fairest portion of New England,-New England, the genius and inspiration of the republic,-the republic that leads the course of empire till the rising shall catch the setting sun, and Occident shall with Orient clasp hands in blessing those brave hearts that came, westward ho! across the sea, two hundred and fifty years ago.
De Tocqueville is right. As the oak is in the acorn, the republic is unfolded in such histories as ours! We are members one of another. The civilization that lines our silver stream from its rising to the Sound, take it in the collective sum of all its thriving cities, enterprising towns, its smiling villages and its
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lovely homes ; its churches, libraries, factories, colleges, asylums ; its cultured men and women ; where on this round earth is it, for a like extent, surpassed ? I have but this last word to say : This old town is a part of it by inseparable and immortal ties of sacred memory and of benignant hope.
And, when we shall have joined the majority of the immortal dead,-that silent congregation in yonder church-yard,-and when our children's children shall gather here a hundred years to come ; from the upper air, 'mid the great and increasing throng of witnesses, may we behold their grander prosperity and their brighter joy !
For documents and authorities referred to in the preceding Address, as well as for that expansion of some of its sections which was inconsistent with the pictorial form, by preference adopted for oral delivery, the reader is referred to the Appen- dix, as being in fact if not in form an integral part of the Address itself. It has been preferred, however, not to encumber the printed page with numerous and minute references to an Appendix whose entire perusal will, it is hoped, prove interesting.
THE COLLATION.
It being now somewhat past one o'clock, the President, at the unanimous request of the Committee of Arrangements, announced a slight change in the day's programme by which Mr. Boies' Poem should follow, instead of preceding the Collation.
A few moments were allowed after this announcement for the vacating of the aisles by those who had been standing in them, when-presto !- there suddenly appeared in every part of the tent a hundred waiters, selected from the young people of the town and formed in companies of ten, each officered by its lady captain and gentleman lieutenant and distinguished by its own badge,-a letter of immortelles,-corresponding to similar large letters upon the tent side, marking the settees into ten sections
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with separating aisles. Each lady captain presided over a large table in the supply tent containing her proportion of the Colla- tion viands, and thence supplied, in rapid succession to her own company of waiters, each item in its pre-arranged order ; the waiters following each other in this exact order in their service in the audience tent. Each gentleman lieutenant kept open passage for the waiters of his section in its aisle, and signaled to them the wants of those occupying the settees. The viands were substantial and abundant ; the coffee, tea, and cake, being specially prepared by the ladies of the town to ensure their quality. All the culinary details were conveniently arranged and perfectly screened under the adjacent tent, from which there were ample and convenient passage ways into the larger one.
It was the surprising result of this happily conceived and systematized arrangement, thoroughly administered in all its details, that the great congregation of probably twenty-five hundred people were all dined to their apparent entire content, and without the least confusion or interruption of their social intercourse, in the almost incredibly short space of forty minutes.
A well-known proprietor of one of our largest metropolitan hotels, among the guests of the occasion, observing with amaze- ment the order, celerity, and success of the collation arrange- ments, said of the chairman of the committee of preparation, to whose organizing and executive faculty a large part of the success was due, "The man who organized the details of that Collation could feed an army of ten thousand, and not a soldier lose his rations." While the chairman himself, in his own re- port, modestly observes that the success of the Collation may not be due so much to the organization, as to the perfect har- mony and intelligent co-operation of every worker. Each probably was right.
The close of the Collation was signaled, as its opening had been, by the stirring strains of the band ; and after an interval of a few moments for changes of position, and the seeking out of mutual friends, promptly at the expiration of the allotted hour the assembly was again called to order by the President, intro- ducing the Poet of the day, William E. Boies of Longmeadow.
ווי וד'ASV
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٠٠٠
AH
٠٧ ; ! 11
!
.NOM O F VI.
..
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THE CENTENNIAL POEM.
BY WILLIAM E. BOIES.
The kindly mother who doth greet Her children here with grateful tears, That tell her love surer than speech, Had never cared to count her years, Until the sum of them should be The cycle of a century.
"Tis said the aloe in our clime A hundred years will waiting stand, And then flower-crowned look fresh and fair As any rose-tree in the land ; Though building for itself a tomb From its own pyramid of bloom !
Our century-plant is blossoming, Not like its prototype to die, But as the fabled almond-tree Cherished with loving loyalty, A larger growth to gather thence, And yield a richer recompense.
From their sojourn up the river Came our fathers to the lea, Lured by its rare virgin beauty, And serene tranquility.
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