USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 21
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Surveyors for the turnpike found a better route out of Northfield than the old Warwick road. Thereby Captain Hunt suffered a loss to his rival landlord, Houghton. The route was chosen from the cor- ner of Houghton's tavern lot, almost opposite the meeting-house, straight towards the mountains, across Great Swamp, which was not a swamp great or small but a level stretch of plain and pasture, up some steep grades and into Warwick by an entirely new course. The road was promptly built and Northfield rode into the new century over a highway such as had not been seen in the old.
It was an "important" town, in geographical rating, that greeted the nineteenth century. Its population had reached one thousand and sixty-seven. It had acquired new spirit and to its old-time fami- lies had been gathered new ones, modern in their notions and bring- ing a culture and enterprise which promised a fulfilment of the fond- est dreams of the future. Comfortable fortunes were being acquired, out of the town's natural resources and the varied small industries, coupled with a thrift that was ingrained and constantly inculcated. Impetus had been given the schools and in the first year of the cen- tury, by combination of the three districts in the street a pretentious
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two-story schoolhouse with a belfry was built in the wide space at the head of the upper Warwick road, next the Hunt tavern. The main street had been cleared of the various sorts of structures that had been allowed to be built there, the. meeting-house alone occupying street space. New houses of a more pretentious sort were being built.
The new fashion in houses ran to hip-roofs, although not always taking the place of the pitch-roof with its attic, rather wide halls replacing the little "entry," square rooms, two on each floor, each with its fireplace, and the kitchen assigned to the ell, with its second story lower studded than the main part, panelled front door in a somewhat ornamental casing with narrow windows at the side and a more or less ornate one over the door. The example for this more elegant domicile had been set by Dr. Medad Pomeroy, in the house at the corner of the turnpike.
A rivalry between Lawyer Barrett and Landlord Hunt had pro- duced two three-story houses-one well up the street near the site of old Clary fort, the other on the corner of the Warwick road, the latter becoming the Hunt tavern. Presently Lawyer Nevers built a mansion, on the corner of the north meadow road, and made it all the more impressive by setting it far back from the street. Finest of all, there followed the Dutton house, square, upstanding, with broad halls intersecting and separating the four rooms of the first floor, with the added feature of one-story wings at the side, consistent with the architecture of the house.
Paint was becoming the rule instead of a rarity and white was the choice, with blinds of green. Interiors were elaborately panelled and plastered walls were covered with English wall-papers. Barns were being sent to the rear, although the barnyards of older places still lent their dirty, mucky presence to the street line.
With stages rolling into town, carts passing this way to transport the products of the farm to far-away markets on the coast, drovers bringing down herds of work oxen, beef, cattle and milch stock, or sheep and even swine, to trade along the road, which might be the long road to Boston or down the river to other "important" towns, the tavern came to be a feature. The tavern gained a place in the local life, as sociability developed and the "sundries," as Cap- tain Hunt persisted in calling the liquid items of his business, were in demand by men of the town who found a margin of time to spend
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in the hospitable public room-in instances only too wide a margin for their own and their families' good. In the heart of the street were Hunt's and Houghton's, open rivals for business, with the latter now gaining the larger part. For years, Lucius, a son of the old parson, Doolittle, had a tavern far up the street and, at the Farms, Hezekiah Stratton maintained another. The best of the town's people resorted to them for formal meetings to discuss and arrange local affairs that fell short of town-meeting importance or to plan in advance who should be favored for town office or what articles should be placed in the warrant.
Most deeply the life of the town had been affected by the new- comers. Somewhat of the old order passed in the loss of men like Rev. John Hubbard and Seth Field. Their deaths occurred but two years apart, Squire Field's in 1792, Parson Hubbard's in 1794. They had served with a deep interest the spiritual and the prudential welfare of the town. The town's life was their life-types as they were of the best New England provincials.
If monuments to distinguished and valiant men were in the way to be erected none would be better deserved than to Seth Field. None was provided save that plain stone in the old cemetery which re- corded that he "departed this life, May 1, 1792, in ye 80 year of his age-
"Death comfortably ends A well spent useful life."
Moderation never carved a more restrained epitaph. What North- field had become, almost that Northfield had even continued in being, was to no other citizen due in such measure as to this cultured and public spirited man. He was but three removes from the emigrant, Zechariah, who was of the Bay settlers of 1630, in the great removal to Hartford in 1639, further a pioneer at Northampton in 1659, and again a founder, in Hatfield, in 1663. In the two generations between there had been a hero of the Falls' fight and victim of the Deer- field massacre, Seth's grandfather, Samuel; another Zechariah, his father, captain in the French wars, large land-holder at Deerfield, Northfield pioneer of the third settlement; and Sarah, daughter of Philip Mattoon, his mother, a Deerfield captive at seventeen years, she who "was like to be married" to Mathew Clesson and was made
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equal heir with Mathew's brothers and sisters to his estate. The Mat- toon ancestry had been hardly less distinguished in war and peace.
Such antecedents were assuring of worth but the significant for- tune of Seth Field was that the cultured minister, Doolittle, saw in the youth such promise that he prepared him for college and put him through Yale, to be graduated at twenty in 1732, the young town's first college graduate. The town fell heir to so rare a preparation in benefits such as his forty years as its schoolmaster, nearly as many as its town clerk, his military service close to Captain Kellogg, the town's actual savior, and as captain in Colonel Israel Williams' regiment in the war that settled English domination of North America. His steady hand directed the town's affairs, upheld the independence of his benefactor in the fierce theological encounter with Edwardsism, and drafted in fairest script the documents that served the town's progress, not the least among them the treaty of peace between the second minister, Hubbard, and his townsmen who revolted against his loyalty to the King.
The romance of Seth Field's life was in his marriage to Susanna, daughter of Rev. Benjamin Doolittle. It brought to their children another line of brave and puritan English ancestry. She was the mother of their fourteen children, the oldest of whom was a sergeant in the Continental army at the surrender of Burgoyne, two others of whom were revolutionary soldiers, and eleven of whom were living when the father died, preceded by the mother by three years. His activity, influence and leadership continued to the end of his four- score years, and the measure of it could be taken only in calculation of the heritage of worth to the town, whose deepest welfare was the centre and circumference of his life.
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CHAPTER XXVI NEW, BROADENING FACTORS
Harvard Influence Supplants Yale Exclusiveness
NEW LIFE FAIRLY POURED into the town in the late years of the century. It was life of the most desirable sort. Ties to old families brought some of it. Adventure into newer regions, the somewhat restless pioneer spirit, brought others. Mainly, the attractiveness of the town, its position of healthfulness and its agricultural resources accounted for accessions which were advancing its quality and cul- ture. Its one disadvantage was that it was on the border of the state and thus barred from becoming a centre. While it was gaining new people, it was in a measure being drained of its adventurous young life by migration to the still newer country of New Hampshire and, more particularly, Vermont. The balance was to its credit and its gain.
In no one person did the influx count for more than in John Barrett, the young lawyer, who had come here in 1786 and, aside from his activity as a citizen and town official, was attracting stu- dents in law from near and far. It seemed that he was to make the town as much a centre of legal education as Litchfield was becoming in Connecticut. He was of Connecticut stock but his boyhood home was in Springfield, Vermont, whence he came at the age of thirty, after graduation from Harvard. He married, in 1790, the youngest daughter of Obadiah Dickinson, Martha, thus joining an old family, and by 1800 there were six daughters. He had built the imposing three-story house on the crest of the slope, where the main street dips to Mill Brook, and a small office building on the line of the street. Some of his students settled in the town and for a time at least figured conspicuously in its life, Samuel C. Allen being one of them, turning to the law after his brief ministry.
Professional distinction and social life gained another contributor in Solomon Vose, a Harvard graduate of 1787, who came here in
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1796, practiced law, was assessor for the national government and the first postmaster. Another, somewhat less youthful, was Samuel Prentice, M.D., arriving in 1786 and now a practitioner of distinction as a surgeon. It had taken more than a century to link the name of Prentice again to the town, for he was in the sixth generation from Captain Thomas Prentice, who was one of the four official explorers, who, led by Daniel Gookin, had been the first white men to see these lands. The doctor had been a youthful surgeon in the Revolution, in the regiment of his father, Colonel Samuel Prentice, who was still living in Worcester.
Such a growing and prosperous town, so situated as to draw trade from a wide region had attraction for young merchants seeking new territory. It was this that lured Samuel Brewer from Boston and, about the same time, the two Benjamin Callenders, father and son. Both had family connections here and, after a fashion, with the same family, the Nortons.
The Norton girls were as near to belles as the pre-Revolutionary time produced. Alexander Norton had come here in 1751 and mar- ried Lydia Chamberlain, thus connecting with one of the substantial early families of the third settlement, as well as with the Merrimans, another distinction. His oldest girl, Huldah, had married William Belcher, who had come from Boston to be a local tailor. Another, Sarah, in 1791, married Samuel Brewer. Benjamin Callender, while still in Boston, had married Abigail Belcher, of the same family as William. In such a tangle of relationship, there can be discovered the thread linking Boston and Northfield, which the charm of the Norton girls may be understood to have had a share in spinning. Young Benjamin, however, found his wife in Boston, where he mar- ried Sally Laughton in 1798. The Brewers did not remain long, re- turning to Boston in 1798.
Trade attraction brought the Duttons from Connecticut, and the town gained strong characters in another father and son, Timothy and Timothy B., merchants. The elder came very promptly to the leading place in town affairs. With them came Captain David Bar- ber, the husband of Lois, daughter of the elder Dutton. As a Revo- lutionary soldier he had been one of the party that in the night of March 4, 1776, put up the surprise fortification on Dorchester heights. This group came from Hebron, the central Connecticut town which
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through family ties was in several ways linked with Northfield, in- cluding the transplanting there of Micah Mudge, pioneer in the first and second settlements. The Barbers, in turn, were related to the Phelps family, as nearly everybody was in Hebron, a town about half made up of Phelpses. Trade prospects attracted Barnabas Billings from Hardwick, in Worcester county, who, while only twenty-one when he came in 1792, rose in confidence so rapidly that in '97 he became the town treasurer.
Craftsmen of one sort and another were drawn to the town. Two Boydens, James and Simeon, weavers and clothiers, came up from Deerfield but Simeon changed to tavern-keeper and later, with his two sons, went to Boston to keep the City Tavern. Ebenezer Ban- croft, cabinet-maker, had transplanted from Auburn, near Worcester, to Warwick and came to Northfield, where he married Selectman Seth Lyman's daughter, Naomi. The Lyman family had been iden- tified with the town ever since John Lyman signed the initial petition of 1671 and his brother, Robert, joined in the first settlement, but one branch had been separated by Aaron, a grandson of John, going to Cold Spring as tavern-keeper and his son, Elihu, the man who beat the drum to call out the minute men in April of '76, removing to Greenfield ; but it reconnected when the drummer's son, Caleb, came back to set up a hatter's shop. Caleb had married a sister of Timothy Swan, a queer genius, of a musical turn, who had for a time been here, learned the hatter's trade and was now following it in Suffield, Connecticut, and composing hymns. Another blacksmith, Ezekiel Webster, also of a family with past local connections, came from Greenfield. New farmers arrived, among them the Caldwells from Londonderry, Vermont, and the Prestons from Dummerston, these two settling on the high plain to the west of the Great River.
Two brothers by the name of Moody, Jacob, a cooper, and Isaiah, a brick mason, were attracted up-river from Hadley by the opening here for their crafts. Isaiah came first, riding into town in 1796, with no other worldly possessions, as he was later fond of saying, than the horse and the kit of tools in the saddlebag. He found his trade chance and presently his matrimonial one, winning for his wife Phila, the oldest daughter of Captain Medad Alexander, first citizen and a perennial selectman.
The Moody-Alexander wedding occurred December 15, 1799,
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Isaiah was now twenty-four and his bride eighteen. Phila brought an ancestry rich in local distinction. Her mother was of another old family, the Strattons, her father, Hezekiah, being the son of that other of the same name who was one of the original settlers of 1715 and who had led the opposition to the plan, favored by Captain Ben Wright, to contract the town into narrow limits, to the abandonment of the wide street. This mother had died when Phila was two years old and her father had married again, with the result that there were four younger Alexanders, Lucius, Henry, Medad, Jr., and Eunice, and when the first Moody child, Edwin, was born, November 1, 1800, he had an aunt only three years older than himself. On the mother's side, Phila was descended as well from the Smiths, in a line back to the Preserved who won his significant name at the time of an Indian attack on Hadley. To complete the distinction of blood, she had a Wright ancestry, running back to Captain Samuel, the first victim of Indian attack in the fateful days of September, 1675.
The marrying of Strattons and Alexanders had been an approach to a romantic epidemic in the early eighties. Medad Alexander had married Eunice Stratton, February 8, 1780, only to be followed in three weeks by his cousin, Simeon, marrying her twin sister, Jerusha. Medad had an older brother, Eldad, and three years later he married Mary, older sister of the twins. At the time of the marriage of Isaiah Moody into the family, his bride had a full complement of grand- parents, plus a great-grandfather, Deacon Samuel Smith, who died six days later at the age of ninety-four. The Moody boy, Edwin, arrived with a rare heritage of longevity and a complicated relation- ship, extensively inclusive of the town's population. One of the earliest to greet him was Captain Thomas Alexander, his great-grandfather, the Revolutionary hero who had been with Arnold at Quebec and with Washington at Trenton.
In 1792, a stage line had been established by the post-office de- partment of the new government, from Springfield to Dartmouth college, with a stage running each way once a week. Its route barely avoided Northfield, passing through Bernardston and Guilford to Brattleboro, the half-way point. The stage left Springfield at one in the afternoon of Monday, rested for the night at Northampton, dined at Greenfield and reached Brattleboro Tuesday evening. Here it ex- changed passengers with the stage that had taken the same time to
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come down from Dartmouth. Another line started in July, 1793, connecting Northampton with Boston, and was extended to Albany the next year, a journey of four days, with three stages in a week and a passenger fare of three pence a mile.
Improvement of the Connecticut for freight transportation was another venture of this enterprising period. It began with the incor- poration in 1792 of the "Proprietors of the Locks and Canals on Connecticut River" and prompt construction of the canal at South Hadley to carry boats twenty feet wide and sixty feet long, dimen- sions that were reduced, before work was begun, to sixteen by forty feet. The money, to the amount of $20,000, was raised by a lottery, with legislative sanction. Previously, the boats up the river had stopped at Springfield and there had been a six-mile carry by teams to the landing at Smith's ferry where freight was reloaded to be "poled" up to the Deerfield, where it was discharged at a landing which acquired the name of Cheapside. A canal around Turners Falls followed by a few years and freight boats floated from Northfield to Springfield and to lower "ports" through the canal at Windsor.
Up to this period the town had been a transplanting from Con- necticut, either by direct migration or, and more largely, by the secondary removal from towns that were of strictly Connecticut origin. Her successive settlements had come from the down-river towns. All her families traced to Connecticut ancestry. Her manners, her speech, her institutions bore the stamp of Hartford and New Haven, obscured not at all by the intervention of Northampton, a town that was purely of southern New England origin.
In no particular was this control of her thought more marked than in church affairs. She had completely escaped the ministerial hierarchy of the Bay towns. The minister knew his place, the pulpit and spiritual leadership, and kept it unquestioningly. In civic affairs, he was without other standing or authority than the man who tilled the land or kept the shop; hardly as much, for he never aspired to town office and was never called to it. The culture of the town, to such extent as it was cultured, flowed from Yale, without the slightest trickle of Harvard influence. It was as if the barricade of hills, bound- ing the valley, had resisted intrusion from the east, while the even slope to the south was so gentle as to invite the tide from the sound and its inlets.
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Few boys of Northfield had been given a college education, but of the few not one had been sent to Harvard. The marked scholar among them was Caleb Alexander, graduated at Yale in 1777, a prolific author of text books, Latin and English grammars, an arith- metic and a dictionary, now the minister of a church in Mendon. A Mattoon, a Burt, a Hunt, a Janes and a Lyman, with names that mark them as of the town's pure stock, had in the rather recent years been sent to Dartmouth, up-river. Both the ministers, whose pas- torates nearly spanned the century, were products of Yale. Above all, there had been the leadership in cultural as in practical affairs of Seth Field, Yale 1732.
Now came new relations with the Boston region and with it the effect of Boston ways and ideas. There were contrasts in speech. The language of the valley was almost a dialect. Somehow speech had become nasal, along with an almost total loss of the letter "r" and the narrowing of the first vowel into obscurity. The final "g" was totally lost. When in the writing of town officials the past of catch became "cytched," future was "futer," board was "bord" and medical service was "doctrin" there was more than misspelling-a reflection of common speech. It might have gone further to make road into "rud," stone into "stun" and verbs like widen into such as "widden." For years yet would it be difficult for the stranger to follow a town- meeting speech on highways when it urged the widdenin' of the rud and the pooting up a stun w'll. Along with these provincialisms went the preservation of good old anglicisms, best of all the interchange- ability of "a" and "e," which made clerk into "clark" and obnoxious beasts like wild cats into "varmints." Always the boy who wrote "cow" and "now" would read it "kaow" and "naow."
Somewhat of this dialect was giving way under the influence of broader contacts and the coming into the community of people who brought the different speech of the Bay regions. More notably, the Boston and the Harvard impress was being felt and shown in customs, manners and thought. John Barrett and Solomon Vose, both Har- vard men, had brought with them a new influence and produced an effect. With it came a certain loss of deference and courtesy, reflected in the change in such a routine instrument as a selectmen's order. Hitherto it had approached the treasurer with "Sir, will you please to pay;" Barrett, elevated to town office, curtly ordered, "You will
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pay." Perhaps Harvard was severer and more summary than Yale, as it had been represented in the unfailing graciousness of Squire Field.
Now came a Harvard preacher after the brief ministry of Samuel Clesson Allen, with its scholarly return to orthodoxy, from which the liberal Doolittle and Hubbard had departed. The town sampled preachers with no little care and, after hearing a young man from the town of Princeton in Worcester county, Thomas Mason, a Har- vard graduate of 1796, through several Sabbaths, voted to give him a call. It was accepted. The terms of encouragement were cautious, going beyond a salary of four hundred dollars a year to provide a settlement sum of two hundred and fifty pounds, conditioned on the minister remaining twenty years, "and if he leave before the expira- tion of that period-the fault being his own in the opinion of a mutual council, he shall pay back to the town such proportion of the two hundred and fifty pounds as the time falls short."
There was another imposing gathering of the ministers and dele- gates from the towns of wide range for the ordination of November 6, 1799. The new Paul Revere bell rang for the occasion and a great choir, trained through the town's long-sustained appropriation of in- struction in Psalmody, sang acceptably. The new minister, thirty years old, three years out of college, and unmarried, was cultured, eloquent, strong-minded and strikingly strong-bodied. He had been the champion wrestler at Harvard.
There was joyous pride in the imposing appearance of the min- ister. His preaching had already proved that he was broad in theology and deeply human in his mental attitude. There might have been a hope he would find a wife, as each of his notable predecessors had done, among the daughters of the town, one that was defeated by his marriage a year later to a Sterling girl, Lydia Kendall. She died at the age of twenty-six, three days after the birth of her second child. in August 1803, and five months later Mr. Mason married another from the town of Sterling, Sophia Barnard.
Only the tuning-fork had given instrumental aid to the church singers, all these years, under Xenophon Janes' choristership, until in the second year of Mr. Mason's ministry a son of the town, who had removed to Winchester, the next town, in New Hampshire, pre- sented the church with an organ, "a new and complete church organ,"
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as he described it. The donor was Captain Samuel Smith, of the original family, a grandson of Preserved of Hadley and a cousin of Mary, the wife of Hezekiah Stratton, whose daughters numerously married Alexanders. Captain Smith's wife was Anna Wright, a great-granddaughter of the famous Captain Ben. Lineal and domes- tic ties could not be more notable and Captain Smith's letter of presen- tation genuinely admitted gratification that he could thus express his "respect and attachment" for his native town. The town accepted with gratitude at a meeting called for the purpose. The organ was established in the gallery and Xenophon turned from fork to the manual, at a salary of fifteen dollars a year.
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