USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 23
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Gathering war-clouds had given added zest to military training and the militia was kept up to full quota and regular drill. North- field's company was full-manned and full-armed. Presently added distinction came to the town in the commission of Lawyer Nevers as major-general of the 15th Massachusetts division. Colonel Medad Alexander, through all these years, was holding his command up to high efficiency and regular practice. More was expected than gala- day performance. Brigade orders received by him as early as 1807 required that the men should be trained in all skilful maneuvers and that "all matters of parade and show should be merely secondary objects."
The artillery, under the same broadside of instructions was re- quired to train in quick and accurate firing, to be "acquainted with laboratory duty that they may direct the preparation of their ammu- nition" and to "acquire some knowledge of fortification, to be able to superintend the construction of small field works." The brigadier- general was confident "that no exertions will be wanting to fit them- selves for discharging the important duties which the country has a right to claim from them should they be called into active service."
Confident and inspiring words were these from the brigadier- general up in the hills of Worthington, in western Hampshire, in 1807-"the duties the country has a right to claim" from militiamen. Not so in 1812, if the Massachusetts' view was right. The militia was not at the behest of the country; there was no "right to claim," and none to "call into active service." Around that issue raged a war of words, over it recriminations poured forth from the Federalists of Massachusetts ; upon it the governor had to make a momentous de- cision. Good Caleb Strong had been called again to the governor's chair in 1811, such had been the subsidence of the feeling that retired him in 1807. Just as war was about to be declared in June, 1812, a call came from President Madison for troops to be subject to the requisition of the regular army commander, Brigadier General Dear- born. Could the militia be delivered to federal command? Governor Strong turned to the federal constitution to find that "congress shall have power to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws
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of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions." None of these conditions existed. Again the constitution reserved "to the states the appointment of the officers." Dearborn was not of the militia. The call was refused. Massachusetts' militia would be used alone to protect the state against foreign invasion. The state supreme court upheld the Governor's refusal. When, two years later, a convention of delegates, known as the Hartford convention, with the war still on, framed terrific indictment of the federal administration, the con- trol of the militia for home defense was vigorously reasserted.
Now it seemed, Northfield's smart military-infantry and artillery alike-would not be sent to the nation's defense. Nevertheless a new company was recruited by Captain Elisha Field, using a front room of the house that faced Council Rock, at the corner of the South Warwick Road, given the name of Sea Fencibles, and marched down to Boston to be stationed at Fort Independence. There was some mirth over the name of Sea Fencibles, for a Connecticut Valley troop, but it was entirely willing to go to sea, at all events.
The artillery company was put into action in September, 1814, under orders to march to Boston "completely armed with field pieces and apparatus." There had been some difficulty in keeping the com- pany's ranks filled. Going to war was serious business, even for an artillery-man. Some of the men absented themselves, others procured substitutes. When marching time came the captain himself failed to appear and Leftenant Bowen took command.
On the bright afternoon of Sunday, the 1 1th, the street resounded with the stirring music of fife and drum, two drums, in fact, "the snare and the base." As the base drummer was the centre of interest to many of the people, small boys in particular, it was quickly observed that Joel Munsell, the plow-maker, who stood high in popular admira- tion as a performer with the big drumstick, was not doing his usual military duty. Will Hall, a Winchester youth, was in his place, a good substitute for actual warfare, having the prime qualification of being a descendant of Captain Ben Wright, the famous scout of days when drums were not used in advances upon the enemy. It was quickly circulated that Joel's wife had put up a plea that he hire a substitute out of consideration of herself and three children, the young- est less than a year old.
It was a typical Northfield company that took up its line of march
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at four o'clock that Sabbath afternoon, over the turnpike, out by the distillery and by the new mill pond and up the stiff hills to War- wick, for the first night. To be such it had to be made up largely of men carrying the names of Alexander, Field, Holton, Wright, Hunt, Lyman and Stratton, as a full quarter of them did; with them, sons of families less ancient but now well identified with the town, Stearns, Whiting, Norton, Nettleton, Morgan and Colton.
It took six days to reach South Boston and there they remained for two months, with no chance to distinguish themselves or show how faithfully they had followed the brigadier's strict instructions of years before. When they marched home, the town turned out to re- ceive them at the foot of the mountain and watch with admiration the evolutions they had newly acquired, cheerfully performed all the way to Main Street.
Late in the war, the draft was resorted to, not as a means of com- pulsion to service so much as to put militiamen into the United States service, so stoutly had the notion been held that otherwise they could only be used for home defence. There were a score of these who went out in a company commanded by a Warwick man, Captain Enoch Mayo, and half as many more were in the service in one or another way.
Sons of Northfield in army and navy served during the war with more or less distinction-none more memorably than the son of Clem Miner, the gingerbread man, Henry Miner. He was on board the Chesapeake, when that frigate was disabled off Boston by the British ship Shannon, June 1, 1813, and her commander, Captain James Lawrence, uttered his dying order, "Don't give up the ship," which instantly became the watchword of the war. Dr. Charles Blake, who had come to Northfield in 1807, having married a daughter of Gov- ernor Hunt of Vernon, was surgeon mate on the Constitution, the most glorious ship of the young navy, and was wounded in one of her engagements; he returned to his practice here after the war.
The unpopularity of the war, common to New England, was only mildly shared by Northfield men, the degree varying with their politi- cal views. The ineffectiveness of the army was painful and disgust reached its height in August, 1814, when the British were allowed to march leisurely up from near Chesapeake Bay and after a miser-
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able resistance by an unorganized mob at Bladensburg, near Wash- ington, enter the nation's capital and lay it waste, without receiving or firing a single shot. The victories on the Lakes were the cheering offset-that of Commander Perry on Erie, September 10, 1813, and of Captain McDonough on Champlain, a year later, the latter turning back the invasion from Canada and ending the war. After the treaty of peace in February 1815, there remained the satisfaction of General Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans, and it did not matter that the battle had been fought after peace had been declared.
At last there had been an international war which hardly touched the life of this town. Its people had done their patriotic duty and had been ready to do more had the call come to them. They shared the prevailing confusion as to what it was all about. It seemed to have been as much a war between parties in the country as between the nation and an enemy outside. Now that all were rejoicing in the vic- tory, they sensed that the nation's standing had been strengthened. And they could go on with the home affairs of a gradually growing and hopeful town, which had in fact been hardly jarred by the national conflict.
In the meantime a new county had been created. Hampshire county had originally included all the state west of Worcester but Berkshire had been set off in 1761. Hampshire now embraced all the Connecticut valley in the state. Agitation for the separation of the northern towns had begun in Revolutionary days and been inter- mittent until in 1810, when on the first Monday of December, a con- vention was held in Greenfield and all the northern towns save four joined in a petition to the legislature for the creation of Franklin County. The act to that end was passed by the General Court the following June.
Greenfield was named as the shire town but Deerfield made a determined effort to have the county's buildings placed at Cheapside, within its borders. The legislature of 1812 heard the rival claims, in which it appeared that Cheapside had only seven small houses, unfit for boarders, while Greenfield had twenty well-built and commo- dious ones. The choice of Greenfield stood. The new county was an almost perfect parallelogram, lying equally on the two sides of the Great River, with its north line bordering New Hampshire and Ver- mont. Northfield was one of its most populous towns, considerably
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larger than Greenfield, and would have made an ideal county seat but for its non-central location.
At a meeting of the Court of Sessions held in Greenfield the first Tuesday of March, 1812, a committee was appointed to procure plans for the county buildings, a court house and a gaol, and Ezekiel Webster of Northfield was one of its members. Presently, the same court, which had entire control of county business, named General John Nevers the first high sheriff. Elihu Lyman, Jr., son of the vet- eran who as a young man beat the drum in Northfield's street calling out the minute men for the march to Concord, was made the county attorney. The honored father of this lawyer was still living in Green- field ; the son had been graduated at Dartmouth in 1803.
Before the year's end the two Northfield men changed places, Lyman becoming sheriff and Nevers, the county attorney. Still an- other Northfield man, although now practicing law in Colrain, Isaac B. Barber, was made the first judge of probate. He was the son of Captain David Barber, the Revolutionary veteran still living in North- field, and so the grandson of the leading merchant, Timothy Dutton. He was a Dartmouth graduate of 1805, learned his law from John Barrett, being admitted 1808, and had a captain's commission in the war of 1812.
The next year General Nevers was succeeded by Samuel C. Allen, the former Northfield minister and law student of John Barrett, now practicing law in New Salem, a hill town at the eastern end of the county. At the bar of the county in its first days were two other prod- ucts of Squire Barrett's training, Horatio G. Newcomb and Franklin Ripley, the latter having married Charlotte Collins Barrett, daughter of his instructor in law, and granddaughter of another substantial citizen, Obadiah Dickinson.
CHAPTER XXIX NEW ERA OF PIONEERING
A Mother Town to Vermont and New Hampshire
IN THE LATER YEARS of the previous century and quite as much in the early ones of the nineteenth, the town had come into maternity, with numerous offspring in the way of young and growing communi- ties up the river, among the Green hills and beyond. Her own house- hold had been cut in twain by the boundary line that the King in Council, spiteful towards Massachusetts, had caused in 1741 to be placed forty miles south of the one claimed under its charter and even fourteen miles south of the most daring claim of the province of New Hampshire. The old state had lost six hundred square miles of territory. The town that suffered most by this stroke was the one on the Connecticut River, then the terminal of the advance up the Great River. It lost a third of its territory.
For a time the dismemberment worked no loss of family ties. Association of blood and church and trade withstood the invisible separation by a state line but self-consciousness developed and the mature town could look upon Hinsdale in New Hampshire and later Vernon in Vermont only as daughters not far removed from the roof- tree. Now she had witnessed and was witnessing much more distant departures.
Even before French domination of the north country had been put to an end on the Plains of Abraham, certain venturesome souls had sought lodgment in the wilderness in which still lurked the hired savages. They paid heavy penalties for their daring. John Kilburn, of Northfield in 1741, made the first settlement in what was now Walpole, and by the defence of his cabin against attack of Indians to the number of four hundred-by whom counted no one knows- in 1755 had won a lasting monument in the mountain which came to bear his name, across the river from Bellows Falls.
Township Number Four, now Charlestown, in New Hampshire,
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was the scene of repeated slaughter and somehow it was next to always Northfield men who were cut down. The nearer hamlets of Keene, Winchester and Hinsdale were again and again under attack and Northfield families mourned the victims. In the teeth of such peril, settlements were persistently undertaken on the east side of the river, such as Westmoreland, where several of the Howes, from the neigh- borhood of Fort Dummer, had taken up a grant in 1752.
Advance had been more cautious on the west side of the river. Here the memorable tragedy was that on West River, one of the last in the French and Indian days, where the home of Captain Fairbanks Moore, within the bounds of the new town of Brattleboro, was at- tacked at midnight, the captain and his son killed and the latter's wife and four children carried captive to Canada. Captain Moor carried two old Northfield names and his wife was the daughter of Colonel John Kathan, who had lived in the northerly part of the town, was in the Northfield militia and scouting companies and was the first settler in Putney, Vermont.
After the passing of the French authority from the continent, in 1760, emigration from Northfield and other valley towns to the regions west of the Connecticut had become active. Fort Dummer, on North- field territory, had been the first foothold in what was now the state of Vermont. Within the fort had been born a son, John, to John Sargent, a Northfield Indian fighter, and claim had been made that he was the first white child born on the territory that became the state of Vermont. The first birth of record, however, was that of Timothy Dwight, May 27, 1726, son of Timothy, the builder and first com- mander of the fort, the same Timothy Dwight who had made the original survey of Northfield, the one that generously added territory to it beyond all claims or expectations.
The Dummer infant, Vermont's first-born, in time was graduated from Yale, became a prosperous merchant in Northampton, judge of the court of common pleas and many years a representative. He was a Tory in the Revolutionary days and went to Natchez, Mississippi, taking with him his sister, the widow of Major-General Phineas Lyman, and died there in 1777. He married the daughter of Jona- than Edwards and had thirteen children, the oldest of whom, Tim- othy, in 1795 had become the president of Yale.
The days when Vermont territory was the battleground between New Hampshire and New York were now of memory, but a memory
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keenly cherished in Northfield because of the parts numerously played in the drama by sons of her families and men who had been asso- ciated with her own life. New Hampshire's royal governor, Benning Wentworth, had left a fame as the most extensive grantor of land the country had known, and of land that was doubtfully his to give. He claimed for New Hampshire's western boundary a line twenty miles east of the Hudson-a continuation of the western boundary of Massachusetts. Against him was the counter claim of the government of that empire which King Charles of England had, with a stroke of the pen, bestowed upon his brother, the Duke of York, with the Connecticut River as its eastern boundary.
Wentworth began with a grant near the north-west corner of Massachusetts, to which he applied his own name, Bennington. New York came on with patents to speculators in New York City, mean- while confirming to settlers on the soil some of the grants already made by New Hampshire. The King in Council had confirmed the New York claim of all territory to the Connecticut River and Wentworth's grants to himself and his relatives, enormous in extent, were declared to vest in the Crown. Up to 1776 New York had made original grants of 2,418,710 acres.
Many Northfield men now held New York grants by virtue of settlement and were drawn into the thick of the fight. The nearer settlements, townships like Guilford, Dummerston and Halifax, were strongholds of New York and in them raged the most vigorous battle. The settlers in the disputed territory in convention in 1777 declared themselves an independent state and took the name of Vermont but the Continental congress refused recognition. It was only when the treaty between Great Britain and the United States, September 3, 1783, established a boundary that included Vermont that the state came into recognition, not even then to be acknowledged by the lower settlements, the offspring of the old valley towns. Guilford, yielding no fealty except to the King of England, was for a series of years in effect a republic all its own and it was in 1784 that Colonel Ethan Allen, hero of Ticonderoga, had to lead troops there to make it subject to Vermont authority.
In the first census of Vermont, in 1791, the most populous town was: Guilford. It had 2232 people. There were older towns, such as Halifax, next after Bennington to receive a charter from Governor Wentworth; Rockingham, dating from 1753, when three men from
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Northfield began clearing its land; Westminster, the old Number One of 1735. Guilford owed its large population to bordering upon Massachusetts. It was Northfield's town, by right of pioneering, for it was Captain Samuel Hunt's two sons who first broke the ground there.
There was ample topic for reminiscence for a group sitting around the hospitable public room of Houghton's tavern, in the migration from the town to Vermont and New Hampshire regions. Let such a chance gathering of the older men on an evening in 1814, one sup- plementing another, recount the transplantings. In Winchester they numerously count Alexanders, Beldings, Burts, Fields, Holtons and Wrights, coming down to the recent event of William Swan's daugh- ter, Betty Lauretta, marrying Amos Alexander. Hinsdale had the Bridgmans and Taylors and in later years the Wrights. On the Ches- terfield road out of Hinsdale stood the old tavern kept by Thomas Taylor, whose first wife was Sarah, daughter of Northfield's Theoph- ilus Merriman, and the second, another Sarah, the daughter of Joseph Stebbins of the part of Northfield which was now Vernon, who kept the tavern going after Thomas' death and until her own in 1809.
Then it occurs to the tavern group to make a list of the Vermont towns to which Northfield had contributed, if indeed it had not, in the persons of its pioneering sons, laid the foundations. It took more than one night to complete their record. Once started, they found it good for a large share of the winter evenings.
Westminster alone kept them occupied through long hours. Dr. Bildad Andross, the Northfield physician, went there in 1768, and was in the thick of the famous troubles leading up to the "Westminster massacre" of 1775, which they would talk over another evening. Then the list ran on by names and the years of the removal from Northfield if known-John Avery, 1774. Benjamin Burt, son of Asa- hel (who had been killed by Indians on Pauchaug hill), a judge, now living in Bellows Falls. Ebenezer Holton, a soldier of the last French war, 1798. Caleb Howe, of the Vernon region, a Tory who had made escape to Nova Scotia. Nehemiah Howe, his brother, who had been with Captain Thomas Alexander in the Crown Point expedi- tion. Simeon Knights, a Fort Dummer soldier, who married a daugh- ter of Joseph Burt and was one of the first three settlers. John Pettee, born in Northfield in 1735. Elizabeth Root, daughter of Samuel of Fort Dummer and his wife, Mary, daughter of Joseph Alexander,
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married to Elijah Ranney. Mary Root, married to Judge Burt. Naomi Root, married to Captain David Eaton. Thankful Taylor, granddaughter of Joseph Stebbins, married to Stephen Bradley. Medad Wright, brother-in-law of Captain Thomas Alexander, and his wife, Irene Holton. Moses Wright, son of Benoni, one of the first settlers in 1753, commissioned a captain by New York in 1778. Captain Azariah Wright, "Uncle 'Riah," the foremost disturber of the peace in the riotous days of '75, who had died in 1811, about whom there was much to recount, another evening. All these were in the recent past or now in Westminster.
Then they turned to Hartland, far up the valley, beyond Windsor, because of the interest kept up by the Northfield Alexanders in their relatives, Reuben, Eldad, Quartus and Consider, settled there. One of Rev. John Hubbard's sons was there. Submit Lyman, daughter of the Revolutionary veteran, Simeon, had married, in 1804, Colonel John Dennison, a conspicuous Hartland citizen.
At Brattleboro had settled Eliphaz Alexander, William Holton, Aseneth Holton, John Sargent, Jr., the disputed first-born white Ver- monter, and Alpheus Taylor, who was also of Field descent.
In Windsor-Moses Evans, who married Chloe, daughter of Rev. Benjamin Doolittle, and their son, Zerah. Two daughters of Elijah Mattoon, whose mother was a daughter of Seth Field, had married in succession Samuel Hedge of Windsor.
Brandon-Seth Carey, who married Abigail, daughter of Captain William Holton-their numerous sons and daughters now living there. Rufus Carver, a Northfield minute man, 1797. Ezra Holton, son of Lemuel. Oliver Smith, son of Deacon Samuel and grandson of the original Preserved, removed in 1794, his daughter, Martha, having been won back to Northfield as the wife of Isaac Mattoon.
Rockingham-John Evans, who married Lydia, daughter of Rev. Benjamin Doolittle, with sons now at Rockingham and Hartland. Philip Safford (of Northfield 1758-66), soldier in Captain Burke's company, a leader of the "Whigs" in the Westminster "massacre" and marked for his bravery.
Guilford-Besides the Hunts, two sons of Samuel Root-Timothy, a prominent partisan of New York and commissioned a lieutenant ; and Elihu, a soldier of '76, settling there in 1783, after his marriage to one of Joseph Stebbins' daughters.
Lyndon-Calvin Doolittle. Lavinia, daughter of Captain Thomas
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Alexander, married to Moses Root. Dr. Hubbard Field, nephew of Squire Seth, in practice of his profession.
Beyond these groups, the list ran on to note-At Middlebury, Benjamin Brown and his wife, Sabra Wright; at Montpelier, Samuel Prentiss, who married a daughter of Edward Houghton, the tavern- keeper, in 1804, the next year after his removal there; at St. Johns- bury, Amaziah D. Barber (son of Captain David of Northfield), a merchant there, who had died this year ; at Sharon, Captain Thomas Alexander's daughter, Lydia, wife of Asahel King ; at Chester, Anna, daughter of Shammah Pomeroy, wife of Lucius Hubbard; a daughter of Gad and Lydia (Norton) Corse, the wife of Cephas Wells; at Bridgeport, Charles L. Field, son of Abner ; at Shoreham, Elisha Alex- ander, son of Elias, and Josiah Fisher, who had recently had a mill on Miller's brook in Northfield; at Newport, Reuben Bascom; at Barre, Calvin Holton, son of Elias; at Woodstock, Timothy Swan's daugh- ter, Mary Gay, the wife of Charles Dana; at Orwell, Elias Bascom, soldier of the last French and Indian war, now living there with his son, Elias, and near his several daughters; at Springfield, David Saw- telle, of the old Sawtelle fort, a first settler ; at Pittsfield, Luther Fair- banks, Northfield blacksmith before the Revolution, soldier with Cap- tain Thomas Alexander in New Jersey, made a captain, still living ; at Newfane, Chester Pomeroy, son of Shammah; at Huntsburg, Lucretia Swan, sister of Timothy, the psalm tune-writer, the wife of John Webster, a first settler; at Burlington, Samuel Smith (born 1789) son of Oliver and grandson of Preserved ; at Franklin, a son of Rev. John Hubbard, who had married Elizabeth, daughter of Tim- othy Swan; at Vershire, Nathaniel Mattoon (born 1763) son of Philip, grandson of Hezekiah Stratton, and his wife Almena, daughter of Squire Seth Field; at Fairhaven, Doctor Jesse Smith, another son of Deacon Oliver; at Halifax, Oliver Orvis and his wife, Patty, daughter of Joseph Stebbins ; at Bradford, Arad Stebbins, grandson of Joseph ; at Brookfield, Ebenezer Stratton (born in 1762), grandson of Hezekiah, now an aged tavern-keeper; at Hanover, Palina, daughter of Josiah Stebbins, the wife of Theodore Kellogg; at Bellows Falls, John Stratton, drowned in 1785 and the subject of one of Rev. Bunker Gay's most elegant epitaphs.
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