USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 17
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Here was still an inter-related people. None were strangers to its blood save the minister and the doctor. Even their separateness had been reduced by Rev. Mr. Hubbard's marriage into the Hunt family and Dr. Bildad Andross' household including six or eight children born in Northfield. The town's perils and exposure had made it unat- tractive to new people. Its population was kept up by a sustained birth rate. Every household had its numerous children, and almost none
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was without its venerated survivor of the settlement's earlier and continued struggles.
The century was two-thirds gone but there were patriarchs from the preceding one, such as the two sons of Captain Benjamin Wright, of honored memory, Daniel, born in 1697, and Remembrance, in 1685 and so a survivor of the historic second settlement ; Jonathan Janes, just over seventy, weaver grandson of the elder who preached the first sermon, nearly a century ago, under the old oak still stand- ing down the street; Captain Ebenezer Alexander, hero of Louis- burg, born in 1684, only twice removed from the immigrant patriot, William, the founder of the family in the valley.
Towards these elders the children were trained to pay constant respect. None interested them more than Jonathan Belding, not so old but rather more venerable. Here was an example of correct living. Sickly in youth, near victim of consumption, he had saved himself by rigid rules dutifully followed, including a diet inconceivable to country boyhood-bread and milk three times a day, followed, to be sure, by a glass of wine and one clay pipeful of tobacco. More impressive to youth was Mr. Belding's careful costume, topped with that new elegance, the cocked hat, and his unvarying moderation of gait as he regularly trod the village street.
The town was no longer detached from the world. Its separate- ness had developed a strong self-reliance. But now its men had been out in remote regions for military service and formed comradeships beyond the town's limits. They better knew the way of the world. The younger generation was far from illiterate. Under the instruc- tion of Schoolmaster Field, the young men of the time had come to manhood with a mastery of useful knowledge and readiness in ex- pression ; by him they were now kept in constant knowledge of world affairs ; through him, they came to sense that there was another struggle impending, that for recognition of their rights as Englishmen even if in a detached colony.
Household industry, if not relaxed, had changed. The spinning wheels, the big-wheeled one for wool and the smaller one for flax, were being gradually stored away. Weaving was more and more being turned over to men who made it a business. A certain disdain for home-made stuffs had set in. There were attractive fabrics on the shelves of the village store, at Burt's, far up the street beyond the
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brook, and the newer one of the Pomeroys, in the centre of the town. Black had come into favor for the best gowns and materials of silk and of wool, made in English mills, were to be had in exchange for the products of the farm. The stout shoes, made by the village shoe- maker, had given way to the handsomer ones brought from Boston or the frailer ones Gad Corse, who also tanned his leather, was making. Even the bonnets had taken on elegance and were produced by Deacon Root, the hatter, who also turned out from fur and from wool pre- tentious headwear for the men. Clothes for the men had long been made, in some part, by tailors who had been duly apprenticed but now Elias Bascom, "one of the town's weavers, was maintaining a clothier's shop at the south end of the street."
There were three physicians in the town. Dr. Andross, who had come in 1750, had enjoyed a monopoly of practice until young Samuel Mattoon, a native, son of Isaac, who was induced by a gift of land to come here in 1721, established himself in the house he rebuilt in 1760, and Dr. Medad Pomeroy arrived from Northampton in 1762.
There was almost an invasion of Pomeroys at just this time, Elea- zer coming from Sunderland, and Josiah and his son Shammah, as well as their cousin, the doctor from Northampton. Shammah opened a saddle shop in the heart of the village, which presently became a favorite social and political resort for the men of the town. Medad had been graduated from Yale in 1757 and was the son of Colonel Seth Pomeroy, who had been the only field officer in Colonel Wil- liams regiment to survive the "Bloody morning scout" in the recent war. Dr. Andross found it wise, a few years later, to remove to the new town of Westminster, up-river, and Dr. Pomeroy, who had mean- while married a daughter of Captain Samuel Hunt, went about the same time to Warwick, Northfield's nearest neighbor to the East. Dr. Mattoon held his ground.
In the last year of the war the town took the first steps towards a new meeting-house. In the town-meeting of 1761 there was unani- mous opinion that the old church, built in 1718, should be replaced, but a vigorous difference as to its location. There was some sentiment for removal from within the street bounds and a division among those who would keep it in the street as to whether it should hold the centre or be placed at one side. The dispute was so ardent that the selection was referred to a committee from other towns, Hinsdale, Hadley and
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Sunderland, but, as earnest that it should be placed somewhere, a building committee of seven was chosen. Issues of the sort are not so easily determined.
After a vote in November of 1762 to place the meeting-house in the middle of the street, just north of the old one, the town voted the next spring to place it to the west of the street's centre. The town's land in Great Meadow and a part of the sequestered land south of the village were to be sold and the sum of £20 raised by taxation. At the vendue, the town supplied a mug of flip and two gallons of rum, foretastes of the supply at the church raising, the next summer, of two barrels of New England rum and four gallons of West India rum.
The new meeting-house was nearly square, fifty-five by forty-four feet, and stood lengthwise of the street, with its main entrance in the middle of the street side and others at the northerly end and from the west. It had galleries three sides, the high pulpit, with its canopy of a sounding board on the southerly end. Its pews were enclosed with panel work. By subsequent votes of the town, a steeple, at the northerly end and a bell were provided. Begun in 1763, further votes were needed for its completion; in 1764, raising money and selling more land "towards finishing"; in May, 1765, selling more land "for still further finishing"; in December raising more money "to finish." In 1767, the pulpit and pews were built; in 1768, the bell was hung; in the course of five years the work was completed and the town had not a cathedral, but a plain wooden structure with its outside boards, as well as inside finish, in process of acquiring the color of exposed wood. The finishing touch of stone steps and horse block required another year.
The "seating" of the meeting-house, a problem in determination of social rank supremely testing the diplomacy of the town's wisest, was assigned to a committee of nine, the chairman being Captain Samuel Hunt, commander of a company in the late war and now tavern-keeper and extensive land-owner. With him were four who had acquired military titles and Seth Field, the one citizen entitled to "Esq." after his name and given highest position next the minis- ter's in the seating. Pews directly in front of the pulpit, customarily considered the highest, were given second and third place, the min- ister having chosen a side pew and thus upsetting the usual order.
ALONG THE TWO-MILE SHADED STREET
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Photos by A. C. K. Hallock
The Stratton Tavern Alexander Homestead
The Janes House Adjutant Field House
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY HOUSES
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Beyond the first six pews, clustered about the pulpit, the numbers scattered about the house. Numbers 7 and 8 were at the farthest point, flanking the main door, as if dignity combined with easy egress at this point. It was back there that the town's best dresser, Jonathan Belding, was seated and Dr. Mattoon, who might thus be called out without publicity. The young folks, over a hundred of them, were in the galleries, not promiscuously but with assigned places and under the eye and rod of the tithing-man. A choir of twenty-five was seated near the pulpit. The dear old ladies were conspicuously placed directly at the left of the pulpit and there were five of them in this venerable array, widows and maidens whose marital status was un- revealed by the respectful designation of Mistress, applied to all of them. Close upon the first use of the new house, it was voted by the town to let out pews to people in the neighboring towns.
New location for the schoolhouse was compelled by the choice of its site for the meeting-house. The old one and the schoolhouse had been for years close neighbors in the middle of the street. The shame of contrast with the new and imposing building was spared it by the vote to remove the schoolhouse to the middle of the road which led to Warwick. Then it was concluded that it had served its time and in 1764 the town decided to build anew on the proposed site. The new school building was 21 x 20 feet, a single room, seven feet high, with the chimney at one end and the master's desk at the other. Here Seth Field, who had been the town's only schoolmaster for nearly thirty years, continued to teach in the winter, and Phinehas Wright began to teach a summer term. The new teacher was the older one's cousin, as he was indeed-and each was-of the parents of most of their scholars.
The town was keeping abreast with the times in the maintenance of public schools. It had relieved the parents of the burden of tuition, although it was expected that the wood-pile, which stood in the street, would be kept supplied by the families of the scholars. With the pro- vision of a schoolhouse and the employment of such a teacher as the town was fortunate to have in a member of one of its families, the sending of the boys to school was left to parental choice. If parental pride was so low as to neglect the opportunity, the result was an un- educated child. The need of the labor of the older boys on the farm was reflected in their attendance only at the winter term, when they
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crowded even the larger room and furnished the squire with a prob- lem of adjusting his teaching to ages varying from six or seven to as high as eighteen and twenty. The difficulty of sending boys from as far away as the Farms, a distance of fully six miles, was recognized by the allowance of from &3 to £6 for the support of a school there, to be kept in one or another of its farmhouses.
What the character and quality of the instruction should be was determined by the master. The selectmen had the oversight of this as only one of the town's affairs and exercised it only to the extent of paying the master his ten shillings a week. If occasionally a parent of girls ventured to suggest that they should have a place in the town's school plan, it was so far from the prevailing notion as not even to deserve discussion. The girls were being given the only instruction they needed-reading and writing-in one and another of the homes where a woman possessing such education added her neighbors' chil- dren to her own group. Even as to the boys it was expected that they would have learned their A B C's before entering the town's school.
CHAPTER XXII ENGLISHMEN AGAINST ENGLISHMEN
Quick Resentment of Oppression, and Revolution
AT THE END OF ITS FIRST CENTURY, Northfield was more a town of promise than of achievement. Its people were facing the future confidently and resolutely. They were making slight note of the past, otherwise than in reverent gratitude for final deliverance from struggle and peril. With every household having at least one member who could recount deeds of valor and thrilling adventure they were con- tent to leave the past to the chance of memory.
Since Parson Doolittle there had been no keeper of a journal. Even the most important events were unrecorded. Reuben Wright, who chose to spell his honored name "Rubin," supplied one modest exception. He had been in an encounter in the late war in which he had proved himself a hero and from which he narrowly escaped with his life. Not to lose the exact date he made an entry in his book of accounts, in the midst of charges for labor or for products of it, "candel" wood, buckskins, flaxseed and corn, peeling bark and hoop- ing hogsheads-
"August 21, 1756 then I recued a wound from Ingans up by Joses Stebns house."
Elaborate, in contrast to the silence with which the past was cus- tomarily treated! Moreover, there were appearing signs of a new challenge.
When the hard, day-long labor of the farm was relaxed by season or weather and the men sat around Pomeroy's saddleshop, favorite resort for the idle hours, there was ample topic in the news from Bos- ton of the protests and resistance to the arbitrary and oppressive acts of the King. Seth Field's copy of the "Boston Gazette," the weekly messenger, was read and its contents discussed with no restraint upon opinion. It developed that there was a unity of mind, varying only
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in the warmth of its utterance, to the point that oppression from one's own people was no more patiently to be borne than assaults from an open enemy.
When the terms, "whig" and "tory," were beginning to be applied in the rising heat of discussion at Boston and the other eastern towns and even as near as Northampton and Hadley, they were useless for distinction between the men of this town. If they had sought the reason for such unity, they would have found it in such facts as that Northfield had ever been on the defensive of its rights. Primarily there had been the right to exist as a community. The warfare it had waged was not for a cause beyond its borders, save as others in like situation were engaged in a common concern to hold their ground. The town had indeed sent its sons out in the last war, to join forces with the royal army, and had shared in the rejoicing over the final victory of British arms; but the prompt enlistment and the final re- joicing had been alike due to the quick sensing that the engagement was with the power that had directed attacks upon their homes and that it was the arch enemy of their peace that had been vanquished. Self-preservation, localized in terms of town and home, had been the compelling motive.
English as they were in every drop of their blood, their detach- ment, their enforced self-reliance and their resistance to infringement upon their freedom of possession and action had prepared them to resist invasion upon their liberty from whatever quarter, even from the seat of the government under which they lived, be it Boston or Westminster. An agricultural people, no commercial interest had brought to them a fear of injury from interruption of trade across the seas. It was an independent town by force of all it had ventured and suffered-ready as a unit and in the person of every member for any needed showing of independence.
Far removed from the scenes of active resistance to the crown's and parliament's restrictive and oppressive measures, the little town watched with sympathetic interest. It was not represented in the Gen- eral Court, as it was entitled to be, but it could resent with no little feeling the attitude of Colonel Oliver Partridge from Hatfield, a com- mander under whom its men had served, now a representative, who was standing with the governor and the crown. When James Otis, the fiery patriot, was demanding and securing the appointment of a
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committee to consider the danger and the menace from the stamp tax, Partridge was one of the two conservatives appointed by the royalist speaker to be the majority against Otis, whom he was com- pelled to appoint. The towns down the river were furnishing an undue share of such defenders of the prerogative.
The Northfield men, in their own counsels, joined in the surprised rejoicing over the speech which they read had been made in early June by a young lawyer, Patrick Henry, in the Virginia assembly, a startling defiance of the King's tyranny. Crowding events of 1765 were followed with keen interest; the vote of the General Court, in June, to ask the colonies to join in a congress; the hanging in effigy at Boston of the stamp collector, Andrew Oliver, and of Lord Bute, the offending British minister, and the riotous smashing of the windows in Oliver's house; the tolling of bells in many towns, Northfield having none to toll, for a funeral of the stamp tax ; the assembling of the new continental congress in October in New York.
Promptly upon the example of Boston people in pledging them- selves to abstain from the use of English goods while the stamp tax was pending, the Northfield women made like resolve. The spinning wheels were brought from the attic or the shed and set in motion. The home dyes, sage and redroot and butternut, were again in evi- dence. The herds of sheep, which had dwindled, were again built up. The people would eat no lamb. The acreage of flax was in- creased. If the town stopped short of forming a band of the Sons of Liberty, aimed at forcible resistance, there should be no doubt that its people were on the side of patriots like Samuel Adams and James Otis.
The repeal of the stamp tax, only to be followed by new revenue acts; the complete non-importation agreements ; the sending of Brit- ish troops to Boston; the refusal of Governor Bernard to call the General Court, which met in spite of him; the arrival of new regi- ments and their parade through the streets of Boston ; the riotous en- counter of March 5, 1770, when a negro bystander, named Crispus Attucks, and two others were killed by the fire of British soldiers ; the controversy between Governor Hutchinson and the General Court as to meeting in Boston, where he called it, or in Cambridge, where it chose to meet-and met ; the throwing of a cargo of tea into Boston
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harbor, December 16, 1773; the closing of the port the next year ; the act of parliament superseding the colonial charter-these events of the troubled years down to 1774 were followed with concern and rising spirit for the colonial cause in a town whose people grew with it all into a sense of common cause with the defiant leaders of colonial resistance.
Military organization had died out after the close of the war with France, as it had in the valley towns generally. The events at Boston and throughout the colonies clearly enough showed the possibility and increasing probability of conflict under arms. Northfield would be ready. A company was formed in the autumn of 1774, to respond on the minute to any call, and the town voted to provide ammunition for any of its members who were not able to supply themselves. The town accumulated a stock for emergency. Meanwhile, it had sent Ensign Phinehas Wright as representative to the General Court, which met at Salem, October 5, 1774, and upon Governor Gage's revoca- tion of his call organized as a provincial congress, transferred to Con- cord and thence to Cambridge, where its sessions extended from October 17 to December 10-and the town paid the ensign for his time and expenses. At a meeting held just after his return the town instructed the selectmen not to lay a province tax and to indemnify them if such action caused them any trouble or cost.
Anything short of outright support of the colonial cause on the part of any person was quickly noted and suspicion of Toryism was easily aroused. There was a shadow of that sort over Aaron Whitney, a young man who had come from Petersham in 1768 and opened a store. His father, the minister of the Petersham church, an outright Tory, was in open conflict with his people and the son might be sus- pected of sharing his views. It was prudent for the town to remove its stock of ammunition, kept at Whitney's store, and distribute it to quarters of unquestioned patriotism, an unjust imputation upon the merchant which was corrected by making him a war-time selectman and later sending him as representative for three years.
By 1775, the town was fully alert to the cause. Its January meet- ing, aside from electing Ebenezer Janes a delegate to the provincial congress to meet in Cambridge the next month, appointed five of its best citizens a committee of inspection-most of the towns were say- ing "of inspection and correspondence"-and a committee of two,
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one of whom was the misjudged Aaron Whitney, to receive a dona- tion for the poor of Boston, good indication of prosperity and patri- otism. The minute-men, twenty-six of whom were of Northfield and twenty-five of Warwick, were under the training of Joseph Allen of Bernardston and Gad Corse, the tanner and shoemaker, both of whom were beyond the age of military service.
Just after noon on the 20th of April, 1775, the long vigorous roll of a drum brought the minute-men on the run to the centre of the street and with them, at varying speeds, all the people of the town. A messenger had arrived with the news that an actual battle had taken place at Lexington and Concord the morning of the day before and had continued through the day as the British troops had retreated towards Boston. Captain Wright ordered his men to prepare them- selves for the march and before night he was leading them over the hills to Warwick, there to be joined by the company's other half, for a rapid march to Concord.
Captain Eldad, forty-two years old, was of the fighting Wright stock although not a lineal descendant of Captain Ben. He was marching away from wife and seven children. The first sergeant was another Wright, Eliphaz, son of Phinehas, the schoolmaster. Half the company were direct descendants of Northfield's oldest families, the fifth or fourth generation from English emigrants, and nearly all the men bore names familiar in the annals of the town. They were, in the main, from eighteen to twenty-three years old, with three beyond the age of forty.
Stirred by the event they had witnessed, the men of the town who remained at home went directly from the street to the meeting-house, organized a meeting and chose a committee of correspondence, with Deacon Samuel Smith, whose son was at the moment marching over the Warwick hills as one of the minute men, as its chairman, and the other four members with the same interest or with sons who would be brought into the service should there be a real war.
When Captain Wright and his men reached Cambridge they found slight occasion for their staying. If there was to be war it was not apparent when nor where. There was disturbance enough in the minds and in the behavior of the people of Boston, hot talk, British troops coming and going, no yielding of the autocratic rule, feverish readiness to resent and, if need appeared, to resist ; but no use for the
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guns the minute-men shouldered. There had been no formal enlist- ment-they were farmers away from home, idle and unpledged ; and they drifted back home as the fancy struck them. When in a month's time, Captain Wright had with him no more than half his men left, he led them tamely home again.
Town-meetings were quite as stirring and warlike as lying around Cambridge. They were held frequently. One in May elected Phine- has Wright a delegate to represent the town at the provincial congress to be held in Watertown the 31st. Another in July chose him as its representative in the General Court, also to meet in Watertown. When winter came, a regular company was recruited and made a part of the colonial troops to await orders. Thomas Alexander was its captain and with him were fifty-six men, now carrying names strange to the town along with Alexander, Belding and Petty of the old sort and Robbins, Weeks and Mun of newer families.
It was a less stirring event than the quick marching of the minute- men the year before, when on the sixth of March, 1776, Captain Alexander led his company out of the town, down the valley to Hadley, there to join Colonel Porter's regiment in the invasion of Canada, which, let his own journal tell the story, was the least glori- ous of the patriot undertakings. Long marches, over the western Massachusetts hills, northward to Bennington, to Ticonderoga, to Crown Point, sailings on Champlain, on to Quebec, some burnings of towns, of little consequence, the retreat from Quebec, tarry at Crown Point, there to hear with rejoicing of the declaration of American independence, twelve days after its signing, idle months at Ticon- deroga down to November, thence to Albany and to join General Washington's army in New Jersey, half a month's staying beyond the period of enlistment, "out of compassion to the people" and, ending it all, the return of the fragment of the company, eighteen men, who had seen Morristown, to their homes in the valley towns.
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