USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 22
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CHAPTER XXVII INTO A NEW CENTURY
Spirited Development of Home Resources and National Interest
LET ANY CITIZEN of the town in one of these opening years of the century be asked if he thought Northfield was to continue to grow and become of greater importance, he would almost scornfully ask, in good Yankee report, what was going to prevent. To which there would be no answer.
In every aspect of a well-ordered and well-rounded community, the town was moving steadily forward. Of undiluted English stock, bound together by intricate family ties, rich in traditions of a long period of struggle to hold their ground, prosperous, sturdy, reaching out for new refinements, its people saw only the promise of distinction for their town. There was but one religion and it was faithfully ob- served-the perfected Congregationalism of New England, broadened here under the long-sustained liberalism of the ministers of the town's church and now strengthened under the leadership of a vigorous, cultured, independent preacher, bringing the impress of Harvard's advanced learning. Every family was in its own castle, tenantry was unknown, and every household busy in meeting its own needs. Self-reliance was both a household and a community trait and habit.
The town was gaining a repute for superiority in its own esteem. It was made to suffer some jibes as to its self-importance, with no other apparent effect than to make stronger its determination to jus- tify the claim ascribed to it. But it was ready and eager to receive new people, be they of the right sort, and to appropriate them. A lawyer such as John Barrett would hardly settle in town before he was made a selectman and sent to the legislature. Another of the kind, Solomon Vose, even fewer years in town, succeeded him in the General Court. When Dr. Samuel Mattoon died, after thirty-three
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years as town treasurer, it was a new arrival from Boston, Samuel Brewer, who was put in his place, to remain there until he left town, and then to be succeeded by the quite new citizen, Barnabas Billings. After him, Benjamin Callender, another Bostonian.
When a school committee was chosen, for the first time, in 1800, relieving the selectmen of this charge, three relatively new men, Samuel C. Allen, now out of the pulpit and at the bar, John Barrett and Timothy Dutton were the first three named, having with them four who bore the old names of Alexander, Dickinson, Stratton and Smith. The best men were kept at the top, new or native as they might be. Once a man proved his worth, he would be kept in service as long as he consented-witness the career as townsman of Captain Medad Alexander, selectman all these ten years and representative through four of them.
Politics were taken seriously, town, state, national and inter- national if there was need of it. Any annual town-meeting was as likely to confront a national or a world issue as one about the roads and schools. In 1796, a special one was called for such business as to seat the meeting-house and to forbid the cutting of trees in the highways, along with these to frame a memorial to the Congress of the United States, calling upon it to carry into full effect the treaty lately made with Great Britain.
Thus the town came to the support of John Jay, when he needed it, after his struggle to settle aggravated differences between the United States and Great Britain. There was sharp alignment just now between the sympathizers with France, in her flair for republican government, and the upholders of English ideas of a strong central government. It was an issue personified in Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Northfield followed the fashion of Massa- chusetts in being Federalist in her notions. The men had returned to voting, after a period of indifference and even scorn. In 1800 they were ardently for Caleb Strong of Northampton for governor, some- what because he was from their county seat, partly because he was personally known to some of them and was of their sort, but chiefly because he was as conservative as he was staunch.
So alert and enterprising a town needed but one assurance to make its future all that it dreamed. It was that people would con- tinue to want to live in such a town, would find here the surest means
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of livelihood, would not be drawn away or restrained from coming by brighter chances of fortune in another sort of place than an agri- cultural one. Not much note was made of the mechanical inventions which were capable of replacing hand labor and which some people were saying would centre industries around great water-sites. The power loom had been invented in the last century and was coming into use where power was available. The cotton-gin was being read about but not worried over, even though it had solved the problem of making cotton easy to reduce to manufacture. Incidentally, there was a local story to the effect that a Northfield man, Apollos Beach, a rest- less genius, had invented the cotton-gin but had abandoned it, with the result that another Yankee, one Eli Whitney, captured it and was credited with the ingenious device for ridding cotton of its trouble- some seed. These devices could be talked about with no yielding of the superiority of wool and linen and their spinning and weaving in the household.
The spinning wheels, for wool and for linens, held their place in every home. Each house had its weave-shed, where the loom was dextrously operated. Homespun clothes were the rule for all members of the family, varied only by the fabrics of silk and mohair and cotton found on the shelves of the town's several stores or brought from Boston by the head of the house on his occasional visits there. Some of the processes of cloth-making had passed out of the home, some of the dyeing and quite generally the dressing or finishing of the fabric. Housewives there were who took pride in their skill as dyers but even these passed the finishing to one or another of the shops carried on by an expert.
Captain Alexander tucked away among his methodically kept papers, the fall before his girl married Isaiah Moody, the receipted bill of Abel Stone for "colloring green cloth," for "dressing 51/2 yards blew cloth" (eleven shillings), for "colloring an old coat" (three shillings), and for pressing sixteen yards cloth, two and sixpence ; but this same typical head of a family, during the seasons he was in Bos- ton as a legislator, brought home certain elegancies bought at Vinton's, 60 Newbury Street, such as lustring, black mode, calico, cotton cam- bric and "shire muslin," including in the account for himself pairs of silk hose at five and ninepence and a couple of vest patterns. Such things supplemented but did not replace the linen for garments and
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for the beds, the linsey-woolsey, combining linen and wool for dresses, and the heavier homespun for men's and boys' wear, the products of home wheels and looms.
Newcomers to the town were bringing new enterprise in industries and trade. Besides the two tanners by the name of Jabez-Whiting from Warwick, and Parsons from Enfield, Connecticut-a black- smith, Oliver Watriss, also from Connecticut, who had served from Northfield in the Revolution, had an enterprising son, Richard, who carried working in iron a step further by setting up a triphammer and scythe factory on Miller's Brook, and another artisan from Windsor, down river, Joel Munsell, established a wagon and wooden-plow fac- tory on the Main Street. There were several hatmakers-Timothy Swan one of them, whose greater talent was as a hymn-writer, having come back to town and established himself with his brother-in-law, Caleb Lyman ; likewise Jonathan Belcher, who married a daughter of the tanner, Whiting.
Trade had greatly expanded, chiefly at the hands of new arrivals, such as Isaac Prior, a Connecticut schoolmaster, who had followed his brother-in-law, Jabez Parsons, from Enfield in 1806, and Charles Bowen, whose father had been in Northfield briefly in Revolutionary times but was now in Charlestown, New Hampshire. These two joined William Pomeroy, Bowen's brother-in-law, whom everybody called Billy, in the firm of Pomeroy, Prior & Bowen, distillers and merchants and masters of boating on the Connecticut. Pomeroy was son of Shammah, the saddler, and their store, much the most extensive yet seen, was built on the lot in the centre of the town, where the saddler's shop had stood.
The distillery, just out on the Boston pike, soon became a great industry, with related ones in the fattening of cattle and hogs on the still's wastes and in the raising of grain for the supply. Farther out the turnpike, Mill Brook had been diverted from its course and a mill pond created, from which power supplied Strobridge's mill for grind- ing the provender for the distillery.
Growing, busy, self-reliant, the town attracted professional men, such as the lawyers, Barrett and Vose and now a new one, John Nevers, another student of John Barrett's, admitted to the bar in 1808 and promptly getting into the militia, where he was rising from one command to another. Still younger was Franklin Ripley, whom
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Barrett presented at the bar in 1809, and who remained here for practice. Physicians were finding the town a favorable seat and some of the younger ones were clearly on the way to distinction. The dean in the group was Dr. Samuel Prentice, whose practice in surgery and medicine ranged over wide territory. One of his sons, Samuel, studied law with Solomon Vose, married Landlord Houghton's daughter, Lucretia, removed to Montpelier, Vermont, in 1803, and was rising to distinction in the newer state's affairs. Another was learning the printing trade with his uncle, Hon. John Prentice, at Keene, New Hampshire.
Another established physician was Dr. Isaac Hurlburt, who had been here since Revolutionary days and retired in 1806, when his place was taken by Dr. Charles Blake, a native of Hingham who had married Fanny, daughter of Jonathan Hunt, the most distinguished of the Northfield Hunts, who had built, years ago, a grand house on old Northfield territory, now Vernon, Vermont, been a leading military man and lieutenant governor. Then there was old Dr. Pomeroy, son of the Northampton General Seth, a hero of Revolutionary fame, and himself the hostage-captive of the Shays' rebellion, now over seventy years old but in practice.
It was a quarter-century since the Revolution but there were nu- merous veterans of its campaigns who, with the years, were being held in veneration. Captain Thomas Alexander, quite the most dis- tinguished, died in 1801 but his nephew, Major Elisha, in the prime of life, remained to tell of the sieges of Boston and Ticonderoga. Captain Thomas' oldest son, Eldad, who had marched with the minute-men to Concord, had gone as a pioneer to Hartland, Ver- mont, as had also the younger one, Quartus, who had kept step with the old captain in the marches to Quebec and Trenton.
Particular reverence followed the Revolutionary veteran, Benoni Dickinson, now in the sixties, because his life linked the present peace- ful days with those of Indian terror. He was the son of Nathaniel, who with Asahel Burt, had been killed on Pauchaug hill in 1747. That tragedy had occurred April 15 and Benoni, given the name because of the circumstance of his birth, was born December 12. Two sons of Squire Seth Field, Sergeant George and Henry, were among the survivors of the war for independence and there were in the group John and Elisha Holton, Jonathan Janes, John Moffat, two Morgans,
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living at the Farms, several Wrights and others with names of less town significance. Actually, if not consciously, the town's life was being deepened and enriched by the venerated presence of the sur- vivors of the nation's natal war. Captain Samuel Merriman, who had led the first patriot company forth from the town, had died in 1803 but there lived seven years longer his second wife, who had been a Canadian captive, mother of the wife of Medad Alexander and so the great-grandmother of the first born in Northfield of the Moody family.
These were prosperous days. The distresses of the days after the Revolution were forgotten or served only as background for the con- trasting plenty of the present. The nation prospered and was expand- ing. In the ten last years of the century, thousands of men had moved across the mountains along the valleys of the westward-flowing rivers. The new states of Kentucky and Tennessee had been added to the Union. Their population had increased from 109,000 in 1790 to 377,000 in 1800. Ohio had been made a state in 1802, populated as it was in the main by emigration from the Eastern states. Two adventurers, Lewis and Clark, had explored the great regions beyond, as far as the Pacific ocean. The Mississippi was no longer the nation's boundary, for Jefferson had added the great domain beyond it by the Louisiana purchase. New England was prosperous in her own right. Fortunes were accumulating in the hands of the masters of her commerce, her ships were sailing the seven seas, and her manu- factures were expanding from such beginnings as that first cotton mill at Pawtucket in 1793, in fabrics, and in metals.
To an inland town, eighty miles from the coast, it was enough to have a part in this new growth of wealth and be a part of the advanc- ing nation. Its own resources were ample for its needs and its in- dustry was sending a surplus of products to the seaboard, somewhat in manufactures such as leather and distilled liquors, but more in the yield of her farms, such as dressed hogs, transported over the new turnpike in great carts drawn by two and four horses, and small herds of cattle, sheep and turkeys driven over the road to market. In turn, the town had become a trading centre, her stores supplied by the re- turn loadings from Boston or the boats in their slow transportation up the Connecticut. New elegancies were finding their way into the homes. The crude benches, beds and tables of the years gone by were
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giving way to solid furniture in good design and ornate decoration wrought by her skilled cabinet makers.
With prosperity, commonly shared even though moderate, came the desire for a finer culture and the means to supply it. The town had kept abreast the times in her public schools but their deficiencies were being discovered. They carried the boys no further than those simpler branches necessary for the common occupations, save when some college-bred master had led certain of them further on and in few instances had prepared them for Dartmouth, from which in the years from 1800 to 1810, five Northfield boys had been graduated. None had gone to Yale since Caleb Alexander, who finished in 1777, and none at all to Harvard, unless claim be laid to Thomas Bridg- man, born in his father's famous fort, who had years ago been a judge in Hinsdale, within which town the state line had carried the northern third of Northfield. In the middle nineties a town-meeting had faced the question of establishing an academy and passed it by.
Slight attention had been paid to the schooling of the girls. Groups of them had now and again been gathered around some fireplace and instructed by an enterprising woman but no further than the rudi- ments. Even Captain Thomas Alexander's daughter Lydia, who had married Schoolmaster Gideon Ryther, signed the acknowledgment of her dowry in the cramped hand which showed scant training. It was a hand that could show itself adept with the needle or at the wheel. Occasionally a cultured father would see that his girls acquired such learning as the boys gained at school. Dr. Samuel Mattoon did as much for his eight daughters. When he sought a scrap of paper upon which to write a receipt from Demar Colton for his son Abisha's teaching school in 1792 he used the back of a copy sheet upon which his Mabel at the age of fifteen had practiced. He thus preserved for the future a sample of her laborious writing and rewriting of the injunction-
Commend nor di remmend any perfor haftly? Commend nerdi) commend any perfor haftily? Halle Hattcon of With full 23 1992- wertom
Systematic education of the town's girls had its first venture in 1805, when Miss Sally Williams, from the hill town of Warwick,
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opened a school for them in Union hall, the second story of the centre schoolhouse.
On certain days in summer the street was enlivened by the militia drill. It was good training field-ten rods between fences, un- obstructed by trees save for the old oak near its southerly end and an occasional elm. Structures of every kind had long since been cleared away by vote of the town meeting, only the meeting-house remaining. Council rock, down near the starting point of the South Warwick road, which had now come to be known as the Gulf Road, alone broke the even surface of the broad stretch. Here the military could go through its evolutions unrestrained while the people gath- ered in the ample yards along the way to watch and admire.
"Trainin' " was everybody's holiday. Ever since Northfield had been a town, the militia company had been kept up, with varying interest as war or danger from Indian attack had been near or remote. Since the Revolution, its life had been fairly constant, inspired in no slight degree by the presence of the veterans of its battles and campaigns. There had been the enlivening prospect of war with France during John Adams' administration in the nineties and now there was the clear threat of war with Great Britain. Just as the approach of the Revolution provoked the organization of minute-men, the new men- ace induced the formation of an artillery company and its maneuvers with field pieces and drag-ropes added new spirit to the street- practice.
The serious military aspect was obscured by the gala-day spirit of the boys and girls who watched the performance, devoting a share of their attention to Clem Miner, the gingerbread man. Clem was a potter, who came here as long ago as 1787 to follow his trade. On training-day, he mounted his horse, took on a load of gingerbread in two huge panniers and moved up and down the street, avoiding with skill gained in years the evolutions of the infantry, taxed in his last days-for he died in 1810-by the greater peril of getting in the way of the clattering cannoneers. The artillery men wore broad chapeaux and blue uniforms faced with red but the militia was not less imposing in its head-attire of high stiff caps with cockades and its smart uniform of blue and brass buttons.
Military titles once gained were never lost. A visitor to North- field in this period would find an amazing proportion of the men
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addressed unfailingly by titles from general down to corporal. They were not always bestowed with care to the military dignity of the recipient. Occasionally a spirit of levity crept into company elections and a man escaped the rating of town fool under the protection of the title of ensign. In the main the matter was taken seriously, surely so when actual service was in prospect.
There was no end of political strife among men who tried still to be friends and good neighbors. Angry disputes between Adams men and Jefferson men could be heard at the stores and at Hough- ton's tavern, whenever they encountered each other. Let that wait. Youth was otherwise occupied. Old notions of restraint had relaxed. Dancing was out from under the ban. The example of good society in Washington and New York was gaily followed.
The minuet was learned but it put awkward boys to disadvantage and the square and contra dances, new ones constantly being devised, were more popular. The taverns were provided with dance halls; there was a larger one at Hunt's, rather going out of favor as Hough- ton's correspondingly won it with its fine hospitality; and Warwick and Bernardston had the attraction of being six or seven miles away with an acceptable road between. Pleasure carriages had come in and all the wealthier families owned more or less pretentious ones ; sleighs were rather common but for the party who joined in a winter's ride and dance there was nothing better than the more commodious pung with its straw-covered floor.
A fine propriety ruled such gaiety. If old rules had yielded, the good breeding of well regulated homes showed itself in the sports which the boys and girls shared. For the boys whose energies were not exhausted the while their muscles were toughened in farm work, there was sport in hunting, in shooting at mark, in pitching quoits, for which horseshoes served, and in wrestling, a form of contest that could not fail of popularity when the minister was known to have been the champion at Harvard and showed himself ready for it when- ever challenged. Best of all, there was skating, safe enough on the mill ponds and on Sage hollow, the long depression in Great Meadow into which the river set back, but only to be undertaken on the Great River itself when ice had formed at full winter thickness.
Political issues, over which the nation was becoming more heated with each year, were remote from the interests of the town but were
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joined here with as much fervor as though they were home affairs. The town which could advise Congress on international affairs could not be indifferent to the controversy between the supporters of Presi- dent Jefferson and the conservative old guard which had its strong- hold in Boston and particularly in Essex county among men who had wealth in ships and commerce.
The few copies of Boston newspapers that came to Squire Barrett, Parson Mason-now and then familiarly called Priest Mason-and other leading men, were commonly read. A weekly paper had been started in Northampton in 1786 and one in Greenfield under the imposing name, "The Impartial Intelligencer," in 1792, presently changed to the "Greenfield Gazette," and as such was brought in con- considerable number of copies to Northfield every Monday. These journals were intensely political and much of their space was devoted to the debates of Congress and the utterances of political leaders, with marked favor to the Federalists, of whom John Adams was the con- spicuous spokesman. It had suited the New England temper when Adams refused to attend the inauguration of his successor, the ab- horred Jefferson.
By 1804, when Jefferson was re-elected, it was in the face of Mas- sachusetts' fiery opposition but there had come to be some dissent from the Federalist faith, most marked among the farmers of the western towns, Northfield among them. It showed itself in the sus- pension of the habit of election of Colonel Alexander to the legis- lature and the substitution of Ezekiel Webster, the blacksmith, for one year, and after him, the young lawyer and militia-man, John Nevers, for three in succession.
CHAPTER XXVIII ENTERING ANOTHER WAR
Sea Fencibles March from Valley to the Coast
THERE WAS A RISING TIDE of sympathy for Jefferson in his resist- ance to the oppressions that England was visiting upon our shipping and when, in desperation, he put in force an embargo, the denuncia- tions of the merchants and shipowners of the coast towns were hardly echoed a hundred miles inland, slightly concerned as its people were in the suspension of foreign trade. In this turn of the political tide, the Hampshire governor, Caleb Strong, who had been elected seven successive years, was defeated, the same year that Northfield changed its representative.
The country was clearly threatened with war with England. James Madison, another Virginian, Jefferson's choice for his successor, was elected in 1808, as Jefferson might have been but for his devotion to the example of Washington in refusing a third term. The em- bargo upon shipping had proved unworkable and been removed but continued assaults upon American commerce by both France and England led to successive non-intercourse legislation by Congress in support of the President.
Warlike acts were following one upon another. The naval frigate, President, had been fired upon near New York and in an engage- ment with British sloop, Little Belt, had quickly made her a helpless wreck. Before this there had been an unprovoked attack on the American frigate, Chesapeake, off Hampton Roads. The search of American vessels and the impressment of seamen had long been con- tinued to the exasperation of both the government and the people. On the western frontier, in Ohio, the British were enlisting Indian allies, under Chief Tecumseh, and supplying them with arms and ammunition, and on November 7, 1811, an attack was made on General William Henry Harrison and his troops at Tippecanoe, in the Wabash Valley. That was a type of warfare of which Northfield
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had distinct memories. Under provocation which seemed ample to the people, with the exception of the Federalists of New England, no longer in the majority, war was declared April 10, 1812.
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