USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 10
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No more could all the inducements held out by the committee in charge of Northfield's affairs, none of whom set an example of in- terest sufficient to make them move up from Northampton, have an effect upon the Hutchinsons. They had been at Northfield in the first years, in the person of Ralph, and at the second settlement in the sons, one of whom had been killed with one of his children in the attack on Pascomuck in 1704, while the others had settled down in the comforts of Northampton or sought fortune in Connecticut. Their expansive holdings down near the south meadow road were deeded this summer to Joseph Petty, not so good a prospect as a new citizen. He and his wife had been through captivity following the Deerfield massacre, had been redeemed, and were settled at Coventry. Perhaps he would come later but his present interest seemed to be in land trading and he was known to be negotiating with the Janes heirs for property adjoining that he had just bought.
Cornelius Merry's heirs were still farther away from interest in Northfield, where their father had been made aware, in those distress- ing second settlement days, of the disadvantage of being simply Cor- nelius the Irishman. Holding property there in anticipation of in- creased value through the enterprise of actual settlers had lost its charm and they sold out to Robert Cooper. There could be no en- thusiasm over this transfer. Robert had been more or less of a sol- dier and as the result of a wound received during the Queen Anne
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war his right arm, with its elbow stiffened, had withered and hung helpless at his side.
There was slight encouragement in such transactions, when the villagers took account of the new owners. Captain Wright had to en- large to his neighbors upon the blessing that had come in Jonathan Hunt's prospective arrival. To add a romantic interest to the event, he may be heard telling the story of a wedding day back in 1684, late in September, in some such way as this-
" "Taint directly connected with Leftenant Hunt, who's comin' here, but you know my brother Ebenezer married his daughter, Han- nah. That's his second wife. When he had just turned one-and- twenty he was to be married to Jedediah Strong's girl, Elizabeth. Their weddin' was set for September twenty and six. Elizabeth, that's my sister, was betrothed to Thomas Stebbins and she said it would be pleasin' to have their weddin' at the same time as that of Ebene- zer and the other Elizabeth. Then my good mother, who had been a widder since that day when the heathen fell upon us and my father was killed on the medder hill, told us she was to marry Natha- niel Dickinson, one of the Hadley tribe, and she would be happy to have her weddin' that same day. Her name was the same as t'other brides. So our minister had to say, 'Elizabeth, will you have this man to be your wedded husband' three times agoin' and not twice to the same woman, either."
CHAPTER XII
A COMMUNITY
Spiritual Fortifications Supplement the Physical
ANY MEASURE OF THE TOWN that was slowly getting foothold on the easterly bank of the Connecticut must include other dimensions than the number of the people that had responded to the efforts to secure settlers. It was a little town, a scant dozen families, less than a hundred people. But it was a town and a self-conscious one. The community was complete in the sense of having a solid unity among its people. It was no longer experimental in their minds. They had no notion that it would again yield its ground. They were not only determined but confident of its permanence. Their vision of a town of size and importance was clear.
These people were of one blood. They were English, save for the Scotch strain supplied by the Alexanders, already interwoven and never having been distinctive, inasmuch as the bonds of a religious unity had held them as one group from the beginning. The one Irish element, confined to the Cornelius Merry family in the earlier settlements, had withdrawn and had left no descent here, in contrast to the survival of the family of Clesson, coming down from another of the three indentured Celts at Northampton and mingling now in the blood of Deerfield. The Northfield people were drawn solely from the Puritan emigration to the Bay Colony. Their fathers or grand- fathers had come from the provincial counties of England. They were of the middle-class in the old country, sturdy, self-reliant, and in the main, agricultural. That they were in America was due to the revolt against the dominance of the Anglican church. Piety and in- dependence of churchly authority were characteristic and controlling, with no lessening from generation to generation.
Among them the effect was evident of their extraction from the migrators from the Bay to Connecticut. This curve in the line by which they traced back to Dorchester and Watertown was significant.
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It brought them the change from the authority of the clergy, which was signalized in the founding of Hartford and New Haven. At a time when the coast towns were still holden to the notion of the Cot- tons that the minister should be the recognized head of town affairs, the valley towns were forming on the plan of the purer democracy of an unhampered Congregationalism, following the impulse of ventur- ers like Hooker. In consequence, not only were church affairs in lay control but those secular interests which in common speech were being called "the prudentials" were vested in committees made up from the people, chosen by them or designated temporarily by the General Court.
Detachment of this little community from every other only carried independence and self-rule to its ultimate. There was as yet no min- ister of the gospel here. When one should come, he would be the spiritual servant and the political equal. For the time being, each household preserved in its own way, even though a commonly accepted one, those pious exercises which made the Sabbath to be solemnly observed and every day's beginning one of family prayer. In town affairs, there was still the intervention of a committee, non-resident and named by the General Court, but its authority was not final, as had been shown in the successful revolt against its plan of drawing the town into the confines of a stockade. Moreover, the town-meeting was getting its start in the election of a growing list of officers and only awaited a larger population when it should be in full control. The new town was still small but it was a pure crystal of democracy.
Captain Benjamin Wright, the leader in all affairs, even though he was not always followed, as in the instance of the town plan which even he could not control, was continually pointing out that the people were too nearly like heathen in having no minister of the gospel. The committee at Northampton in charge of affairs took note and in the autumn of 1716 (October 3) ordered that a house be built for the present accommodation of a minister. It was to be far short of a mansion. The committee specified that it should be about 16 foot long and 12 foot wide, to be set near or adjoining the dwelling-house of the inhabitant with whom the minister should lodge. By the same order, the selection of Mr. James Whitmore for the occupant was announced. He was engaged for only half a year and for his "encour- agement" it was agreed to give him 25 pounds, subsist him and keep his horse.
MEETING HOUSE AND FIRST PARISH CHURCHES
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CHANGING CHURCH ARCHITECTURE
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SOME OLD NOHETFIELD DOORWAYS
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The minister was three months short of 21 years old. He would bring the Connecticut tradition with him, being a native of Middle- town, a river town a little below Hartford. He was two years out of Yale college with an A.B. From such a youth, the Northfield people heard the gospel preached, out of doors, after the fashion of Elder Janes of years before, or from the front of one or another fireplace during the months of that first winter.
Military preparedness kept pace with the spiritual and through the winter a company of ten men guarded the town, one of them being the sergeant-in-command. Indeed it had preceded the minister by a few months and in the absence of military demands the men had been of use in the work of the day, on the lands and helping in house- building.
No fort had been thought necessary in the absence of any threat upon the peace and security of the settlement. More in need were a grist mill, to replace the tedious teaming with oxen to and from Had- ley, and a saw-mill, to relieve the greater difficulty of carting boards over the same route. Two brothers by the name of Belding, Stephen, living at Swampfield, and Jonathan, of Hatfield, were induced to establish the mills by liberal grants of land in Bennett's Meadow, across the Connecticut but the best that was left for such gift. The Mill Brook, crossing the street in the middle of the village and falling in rapids to the big river, was the obvious site and here, by the sum- mer of 1717, both were placed, near to the site of John Clary's mill in the second settlement. A dam was built very near to the line of the street and a broad pond was thus spread to the east of the bridge which had been re-built to connect the two sections of the village. The mills were built up from the edge of the stream, with heavy logs to the level of the bank, each with its mill race and wheel, from which operated, in one case, the up-and-down saw and, in the other, the upper millstone between which and the nether stone the corn was to be reduced to meal.
All the town lacked was inhabitants. Three years had passed and there were but twelve families where there should be no fewer than forty. The possible homesteads on the street were as desirable as those occupied but they were stoutly held by owners, whom even the taxing device could not compel to come.
"There only remains to us," said one of the younger and more impatient settlers to his neighbors, "to deprive them of their title
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who refuse to come hither. It is not meant that they shall gain by their indolence while we toil here. The land is theirs who use it. Have we not warned those who do not come to us that they shall come within this year or their estate shall be forfeit?"
"Such votes," joined another, "have been often passed by the General Court and no heed has been paid unto them. Can it be thought that the order of our honorable committee, now many months recorded, will have greater weight and effect?"
There was but one power that could compel the surrender of title, the Governor of the province, and to him Mr. Partridge was asked to write, as he did, setting out the opinion that the town would soon be settled, "were the lands at liberty." He asked, as well, that the garrison of soldiers be made constant, as without them the town was defenceless. In November, the General Court ordered the garrison of ten men to be provided, with the proviso that they be not of the present inhabitants.
The spiritual defences had likewise been neglected since the de- parture of Mr. Whitmore in early summer. He seemed to have no partisans. His youth and culture seemed to show a churchly learning that savored of the formalities that had been left behind in England. Through the Mattoons, who had come from Wallingford, Connecti- cut, the townspeople learned of a Benjamin Doolittle, grandson of one of the settlers of New Haven, whence he had come from England, and son of a revered townsman in Wallingford. He was of the same age as Mr. Whitmore, and a graduate from Yale even later by two years (1716), but there were assurances of his full sympathy with the simple, unadorned faith of the people. He accepted the invitation and preached his first sermon in November of 1717. An immediate result on the part of the town was the laying of the first tax levy --- six shillings on the poll, twelve pence per acre on the meadow lands, six pence per acre upon the uplands. On the part of the minister, it was matrimony. He brought with him his bride, Lydia, daughter of Samuel Todd of New Haven.
No sixteen foot by twelve foot house was fit domicile for a mar- ried minister. A better one had been made available by an event that had brought genuine grief to the townspeople in the late summer just passed. It was the drowning in the Connecticut of Lieutenant Thomas Taylor. He had been a good soldier and bore the scars of wounds received in De Rouville's attack on Deerfield in 1709. Later he had
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been in the company under Lieutenant Samuel Williams that con- voyed French prisoners to Canada in the summer of 1712. He had married Thankful, the daughter of Deacon Eleazer Hawks of Deer- field, and they had an infant, Thankful, born in Northfield ; and an- other child was born a few weeks after his tragic death and given his father's name. Through negotiations with Deacon Hawks, the Taylor house was secured for the minister. It stood on the west side of the street, not far from opposite Captain Wright's.
The town was getting under way. Developments even now were none too swift, particularly in population. Some more emigrants from Connecticut had arrived, including the Merrimans, who had followed the youthful minister from Wallingford. What now appeared was, in the main, the further evidence of the vigorous enterprise of the men who were the actual founders. A new feature in town government, looking towards independence, was the election of a committee to take charge of town affairs. Captain Wright was, of course, the chair- man and the others were his compatriots, Benoni Moore, Peter Evens, and Isaac Warner. The town-meeting gave them, with the addition of Zech. Field, the additional duty "to manage the affair about build- ing a meeting-house," directing Captain Wright and Ensign Field to discourse with the "honored committee of the town" about building it and asking the General Court for some relief in its cost. Warner was assigned to the care of the town boat.
The Great River which gracefully curved through the town was at once a blessing and an obstacle. It was useless for navigation, at least until there should be devised some fashion of boating that would relieve the ox-team in commerce with the lower towns. It annually, at least, overflowed its banks and brought new tilth to the broad meadows, here and there doing the disservice of depositing a covering of sand. It yielded fish in the fickle fashion of an overabundance of shad and salmon in the season of their up-stream migration for spawn- ing and a spare yielding of pickerel and perch all the while. The receding flood left a temporary lake in Great Meadow with a land- locked profusion of bull pout, which gave the boys a rewarding sport in the capture of a fish that was not in high favor for food.
With all this, the river supplied a problem, the means of transport- ing crops from the meadows on the westerly side. Some of these, hay and corn, not needed at harvest time, could be left in stack and stook until the mid-winter ice furnished a safe bridge. The town boat, a
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broad flat-bottomed scow, served at seasons of an open river. Pro- pelled by poles and oars, not an easy method, it was moved up and down stream, to connect with Bennett's meadow to the south and Moose Plain much farther up the river. The town early had a canoe for carrying the farmers to their lands on the westerly bank and there were smaller ones, little used by their owners but having possibilities if Indian troubles appeared.
On came the meeting-house. It was voted on the third day of March and the honored committee of the town was promptly visited by Captain Wright and Ensign Field. By the eighteenth, the order was given. By mid-summer the General Court had granted aid to the amount of forty pounds, for the support of the ministry. Construction had been with like speed and by August the first church stood in the centre of the town tract. Moreover, it stood in the centre of the street, now for the first time in its length and breadth occupied by any structure.
An August town-meeting extended a call to Mr. Doolittle to per- manent settlement and voted him "encouragement" in the substantial form of fifty acres of meadow land, ten acres of pasture, a dwelling house (if possible the Taylor house in which he was living), one hun- dred pounds in three annual payments, fifty-five pounds more an- nually for the first six years and seventy-five pounds annually beyond that time, such stock of wood as the circumstances of his family shall require for six years and, beyond that term, as much wood as each man might cart on sled in one day of each year.
The Rev. Mr. Doolittle had favorably impressed the little com- munity in his few months of ministry. The appropriation of lands and money, assuming proportions beyond all that had been reached by all other undertakings and pledging a future of debt, was the free-hearted gift of a struggling little village. Would the honored committee, presiding over the town's prudentials, sanction such outlay ? Precisely a week later it registered its approval and by way of cour- tesy added another ten acres of upland. The beneficiary, twenty- eight years old, two years out of college, with a new house, acres upon acres of land and money in hand and in prospect, a landed proprietor and an endowed preacher, showed his appreciation by promptly signing his acceptance of the terms. He could now know he had preached profitably to the people-and to himself.
CHAPTER XIII SEEKING TOWNSHIP
Political Entity Cautiously Bestowed
THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH asserted itself in the town-meeting of March 2, 1719. It was the first held in the meeting-house. The new setting lent a sense of reality to the notion that Northfield was a politi- cal unit. More men than ever before were gathered to consider its affairs-and more affairs were to be considered. The day was bleak, such as mark the slow, unwilling yielding of winter. The sledding was poor and cart wheels sank into mud at those spots where the frost was working out. It was the season of a compelled leisure. There was no outside competition and the townsmen settled down to a full day of talk and action.
Major Stoddard had made out to come up from Northampton to act in his capacity as "clark" and to represent the committee which presided over the town. After a fervent prayer by Parson Doolittle, he went into the pulpit and after telling of the committee's continued interest in the town, called for the election of a moderator. Eleazer Wright was chosen. The usual town officers were elected, constable, fence viewers for each of the meadows, haywards, surveyors of high- ways, tything-men and a committee to manage the minister's supply of wood. Then the aspiration for home management showed itself.
How long was this town to be less than a town? Was not this the time for it to assume control of its own prudentials? The ques- tions were boldly asked by some of the younger men who had already answered them in their own minds and were ready with arguments, the chief of which was that it was the only settlement in the valley which still required "guardeens." Some of the older heads were for waiting. They argued that only the General Court could alter the present arrangement and they went so far as to chide the restless spirits for disrespect to the honorable committee. What officers would they name to take their place?
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The answer to this question was ready. It was moved that three men be chosen as trustees. The name was new, it was imposing and it won its way. It would carry its own meaning and there was no need of instructions. The progressives were ready with the names of the three to be chosen-Benjamin Janes, son of the elder of the old days and survivor of that savage attack on Pascommuck, where he had seen his family slain; Thomas Holton, one of the three brothers who had brought to the town their numerous families, grand- sons of that William Holton, who was on the first town committee ; Eleazer Mattoon, the older of the two brothers now here, sons of Philip, the Indian fighter in Captain Turner's day, and representing the honored Boltwood family through his recent marriage to Eliza- beth, daughter of Samuel.
These facts about the proposed trustees did not need to be stated in a meeting of men who knew every item as to one another. The out- standing fact was that they were the younger generation, Ben Janes being forty-seven to be sure, but Thomas Holton only thirty-eight, and Eleazer Mattoon but thirty.
When Major Stoddard carried the record of the town-meeting's actions to the committeemen he was not able to transmit the spirit that prompted the election of "trustees." They sensed the possible conflict in authority and they would abdicate-they used a less objectionable term to describe their retirement from command-when the General Court ordered it and not before. Mr. Partridge, the chairman, met the situation by taking his pen and interlining in the records, after the word "trustees," the significant and settling phrase, "to lay what is necessary for the town's affairs before the Committee for their approbation and confirmation." The uprising of independ- ence was quelled at a stroke. The election of trustees the next year was an empty gesture, and so it was each year until 1723, when the determination to be a town in fact, as well as in name, overruled all opposition and a petition for incorporation was sent to the Gen- eral Court.
In the petition for recognition as a town, the facts relied upon were that management of affairs by a committee living thirty miles away "brings a great difficulty and inconvenience upon the affairs of the town," and that the number of inhabitants "is so far increased that they judge themselves capable of managing the prudential affairs"
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of the town. The house of representatives at its May session received the petition and ordered that
The Town of Northfield be and hereby is authorized and impowered to have use exercise and enjoy, all such powers privileges and immunities which other towns have use exercise and enjoy.
The Council "read and concurred" and the act was completed when on Saturday, June 15, 1723, it was "consented to" by the Governor, William Dummer.
It was coincidence rather than recognition of any anniversary sentiment that the formal creation of the town was precisely a half- century from the year when the first settlers began its existence. The reasons, however, were hardly stronger than when the rebellious spirit showed itself in the town-meeting of 1719. The number of polls taxed in 1720 was 38, and it increased by only one in the years that followed, being 39 in 1723. What the colonial government actually recognized was, not that "the number of inhabitants had so far in- creased," but the more potent fact that they judged themselves capable of managing their own prudential affairs, as they emphati- cally did-and as they undoubtedly were.
If population had not much increased in the four years between the first outbreak of the spirit of independence and its consummation in a town charter, several things had happened which contributed to the town's completeness. In the first place, it was bigger territori- ally than it had previously known it was. The town lines had been run for the first time. Timothy Dwight, Esq., of Northampton had been assigned that job by the committee and he justified his selection by making out that the town included 8,256 more acres than the original grant had allowed.
Dwight's survey, which was made in 1719, had its point of begin- ning at the south-east corner. Good servant of the town's interest that he was, he founded that corner at the extremity of an addition that was rather loosely made during the second settlement, miles below the original purchase. He struck inland from the Connecticut three and three-quarter miles for his base line and took in another three- quarters of a mile on the west side of the river. Then he went north on the east side only one hundred rods short of twelve miles, which took him well beyond the Ashuelot river, keeping three and three-quarters
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miles east of the general course of the Connecticut. Thence he struck across the great river in parallel to his south line and drove his stake at the mouth of the broad brook that empties into the Connecticut beyond all that had ever been claimed and beyond all the meadows there were on that side. The westerly line he was compelled to hold down to eight miles in length because here he met what Deerfield claimed as its territory. Even so, he enclosed a small empire of 31,296 acres.
Instead of the thirty-six square miles which was the limit first set for Northfield's area, Timothy Dwight, Esq., presented it to the world as containing forty-five square miles. He accomplished this expansion by taking nothing off the top of his map to compensate for the addi- tion on the south end of the town which had been made in 1685. It was not for any inhabitant or land-owner to object to this appropria- tion of territory, although every one of them knew that the northern boundary was supposed to be pulled in when the southern one was moved down the river. It was unclaimed wilderness to the north any- how, and why trouble about a few extra square miles ? The General Court proved not to be aware of the enlargement or, if aware, not to be fussy and it promptly accepted Squire Dwight's acquisitive survey.
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