USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 24
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It had interested the Houghton tavern group to draw such a list, whether or not it would ever interest another soul. It was in the main
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a list of persons now living and known to them. It established the fact that the town had made its full share of contribution to the rather new state of Vermont. They undertook a similar one of New Hampshire, beginning with the removal of the town treasurer, Barnabas Billings, to Chesterfield, where he was now living, but summarized it with the observation that there were Burts and Howes at Westmoreland, Burts and Lymans at Walpole, Hubbards, Hunts, a Janes, Stebbinses and Taylors at Charlestown; a Robbins, who had married a Holton, at Lyme, and a Strowbridge, son of the owner of the hill in Northfield which was already stamped with the name, the son having married Sarah Lyman, daughter of Simeon, now settled at Claremont. There was no chance that their town would make an impression on the life of New Hampshire at all like that it was clearly making through its sons and daughters widely scattered over the Vermont country.
To be added to the list was the most notable of all who had gone from the town to the Green Mountains, General Ebenezer Walbridge. Fifty years ago he had been a carpenter in Northfield and had worked as such in building the meeting-house in 1760 to 1763. He had gone to Bennington at the time the New Hampshire governor made his first appropriation of territory to the west, had kept step with Captain Thomas Alexander in the march upon Quebec in 1776, was in the battle of Bennington with General Stark, became a major general and was in command of the Vermont troops in the conflict with New York over the land grants. In the early days of the state he had held high civil offices. His business enterprise had produced the first paper mill in the State. The venerable general was living at this time, well towards eighty years old, a dignified figure in his gentleman's costume of short breeches, long hose, silver shoe buckles, three-cornered hat and silk waistcoat. He was closely tied to the Northfield neighbor- hood, his wife being a daughter of Joseph Stebbins, the founder here of the family which was, now, by chance of changing state lines, on the homestead in Vernon, Vermont.
More familiar had been a contrasting figure, old "Uncle 'Riah" Wright, of Westminster. He had died in 1811 but there was no one in Northfield who did not know of him and his exploits. He was a great-nephew of the town's historic hero, Captain Ben Wright, and was born here in 1738, the son of another Azariah. He was one of the earliest in Westminster, and always the most prominent. As "cap'n" of
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the militia he was in charge of the forces of the town involved in the massacre, which was a bloody incident of the same sort of conflict as was raised by Daniel Shays in Massachusetts. He had his share in state affairs and succeeded in running one speaker of the house of representatives out of office. He was the terror of his home town.
Being the champion of the town's minister, by the name of Goodell, who was run out of both pulpit and town on some charge of immoral conduct, Uncle 'Riah showed his ill-will towards the suc- cessor, Rev. Joseph Ballen, by speech and action, repeatedly tweaking the minister's nose. He tweaked it once too many times and a docu- ment of excommunication was drawn up. On the Sunday it was to be read Cap'n Wright paced the aisles of the church throughout the service, armed with his musket. At its close, as the minister started to read the paper, the old warrior raised his gun and pointed it towards the pulpit.
"Make ready!" he shouted as if to his militia. The minister con- tinued to read. "Take aim!" commanded the cap'n, and obeyed his own order. The minister prudently ceased and passed the document to the eldest deacon, John Sessions.
As the deacon resumed the reading, Uncle 'Riah turned the gun upon him and repeated the self-commands. The deacon followed the pastor's prudent example, returned the instrument and closed the services with the scriptural phrase, "All things are lawful but some are not expedient." The proclamation of Uncle 'Riah's excommunica- tion was folded and laid away not again to be opened.
While in such characters as Captain Azariah, Northfield had passed along to Vermont a vigorous share of its pioneer spirit and widely contributed to the making of a new state, it was suffering no decline in its own progress. By virtue of newcomers to the town and a high birth-rate in its own families, the population was steadily increasing. In 1810 it reached twelve hundred and eighteen, a fifth more than in 1800. It was taking on the refinements of the progres- sive towns with which it was increasingly in contact. Its provision for schools was more liberal with each year and it had fully arrived at the education of its girls, at least in the three R's and the graces of singing and polite letter-writing.
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CHAPTER XXX GROWTH, DEVELOPMENT, BEAUTY
Trees on the Street, Bridges over the River, Ventures in Invention Mark Progress
IN POLITICAL AND IN RELIGIOUS OPINION, the town had steadily been on the liberal side. In the present period, marked as it was in the expanding nation by a breaking-away from old standards, the people of this community were simply following their own traditions of free- dom. As in the Revolutionary days the town was intensely patriot and had no toleration for Torys, even calling its minister sharply to account for his loyalism. Its sympathies had been with the Jeffer- sonian revolt. It had gone the length of opposition to the rule of the Federalists in the election of 1804, in contrast to the commercial towns, even with its mother town, Northampton, and towns more like itself in size and character, such as Deerfield and Hadley. It had, seemingly, never ceased being an outpost.
Jeffersonianism was more than a political fact-it was a symp- tom in politics of the spirit of democracy, of personal freedom and dignity. Freedom of religious thought moved along with it-another symptom of a powerful social fact. Here again, this independent town had no occasion to change its mode of thought. It had been liberal for a century. It had stood by its minister in his Arminianism in the Jonathan Edwards days and it had accepted the leadership of that minister's protege, Seth Field, of whom the men who had known him were saying that he was "the father of Unitarianism." The Unitarian name was new. Its liberal gospel, set out now by Channing in Boston's Federal Street church, was capturing the Congregational church of New England. It had no conquest to make in Northfield, whose people were all that the new name implied before the name arrived.
In the town's pulpit was a product of Harvard, a big and strong man, powerful alike in verbal and physical encounters, unsparing and
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sarcastic in speech, an unmatched wrestler, a welcome member of the group at the tavern, a fact which carried no reproach, completely unfettered as a preacher, never described as spiritual but distinctly human and capable of deep sympathy. When Guy, the so-called slave of Deacon Dutton, died, the Rev. Thomas Mason made a mem- orable prayer of the most touching humanism, long to be remembered.
When Priest Mason's less conventional and most unministerial acts and words jarred some refined member of his parish into criticism, the outraged parishioner might safely expect a thinly concealed re- joinder, a bristling one, in next Sunday's sermon. There was a bound- less range in his preaching and a force and originality that kept antici- pation of his sermon alert, along with a dread of the shock it might give. Expectation was not always justified, for there were lapses into inconsequence that betrayed the fact that his worldly week had yielded scant time for spiritual preparation. Consistently he was a liberal. Calvinistic dogma had the sole claim upon his interest in that it gave him an occasional target. He fitted the times in this respect, so well indeed that the more pious of his people sensed a strain upon their loyalty which was saved from becoming a breach by his usual avoid- ance of doctrinal themes.
Reaction towards orthodoxy found its first outlet in the arrival of the Methodist church within the town's borders. It was tardy echo of the revivalistic disturbance of Whitefield, the English associate of the Wesleys, most marked in its profound stirring of religious feeling and awakening of the indifferent in other states than Massachusetts, Pennsylvania in particular, where Benjamin Franklin, free-thinker that he was, had given it his powerful favor. The Methodist invasion of a town that had thus far known but one church was modest and inconspicuous. It established itself on "the mountain," as the easterly part of the town was designated, four miles away from "the Street." It gathered into its fold hardly more than its hill-top neighborhood. The notable exception was the Connecticut man, Isaac Prior, now one of the leading firm of storekeepers, who twice each Sunday attended its devout services, driving his horse up the hills for the morning and walking the distance for the evening one-out of consideration for the horse.
The houses built by newcomers on ample lines and with a pref- erence for hip-roofs, after the fashion set by Dr. Pomeroy, in the
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house at the corner of the Boston turnpike, or in similar style by the prospering sons of old-resident families, were giving the town an appearance of elegance. The three-story exceptions, Lawyer Barrett's and Captain Hunt's, were not held in high regard. The only gambrel roof had been replaced by the Bostonian, Benjamin Callender, with a plain gable one on his house, just across the street from Houghton's rambling tavern. Picket fences, some of them with gateways of some pretension, lined the entire street, save where a barn or a house had been placed on the street line.
Now and then the notion was expressed that the street itself could be beautified but it gained no headway. The broad stretch had prac- tical uses. It was good training ground for the militia and the artillery company. It afforded storage for carts and for piles of lumber and wood. Here and there trees had been set out but on no general plan. Two elms stood in front of Caleb Lyman's hat shop. There were a few Lombardy poplars, a small forest of them occupying the front yard of the house that Rev. Ebenezer Gay had built for his daughter, where she dwelt with her genius of a husband, the tune-writing Tim- othy Swan. The roadway kept no definite bounds; it swerved out of line around the meeting-house and again for Council rock, which was too much a historic feature and a community loafing-place to be removed.
In 1812, there arrived a young lawyer from Boston, Thomas Power, who was attracted to the town as a place for practice of his profession and brought with him enterprising ideas and a sense of beauty. There was another attraction, young Power's acquaintance with the Field family. Justin Field, a brother of Silas, had married Harriet Power, a sister of this Boston lawyer.
In spite of the disadvantage of being some fourteen miles from the new county seat, the town offered an opportunity for the lawyer. Ever since John Barrett had established himself here and prospered it had gained standing as a seat of legal learning and his students tarried for a while as practitioners. Litigation was in favor. Men stood for their rights and fought for them, chiefly to the profit of the lawyer. Whether the new man from Boston would find a field here or not, his coming proved a fortunate event for the town.
Power immediately displayed a public spirit which was to count in certain definite ways to the town's advantage. He started the move-
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ment for the planting of shade trees in four rows the entire length of Main street and in the face of some vigorous opposition carried it through. It was unfortunate that Squire Power chose for his office a room in the second story of the Pomeroy store. There was a standing feud between Pomeroy and John Nevers, the young lawyer and the militia general. Power suffered by it and his tree-planting project easily aroused the general's protest. He threatened to shoot any man who undertook to plant trees in front of his house. His most logical ground for objection was that it would ruin the street for training, certainly for the artillery, with trees standing in the way of the drag ropes and of the maneuvers in general. But Power carried the day with the approval and co-operation of the townspeople. Two rows of elms marked the roadway in the centre of the street and one of rock maple flanked these on either side.
Even earlier than his tree-planting venture, Thomas Power had awakened an interest in the establishment of a library. Within a few months of his arrival he gathered the leading citizens at Houghton's tavern and with them formed a Social Library corporation. The General Court had passed an act in 1798 "to enable the proprietors of Social Libraries to manage the same." Northfield, under Power's leadership, was the first town in the county and one of the earliest in the state to take advantage of the act.
On February fourth, 1813, the first meeting of the library promo- ters was held at the tavern, which from that day became the library headquarters. A constitution and by-laws had been drafted and to it the proprietors signed their names, that of Thomas Power, written in a hand only to be compared with that of John Hancock in his signature to the Declaration of Independence, leading the list. Among the signers were the storekeepers, Bowen, Pomeroy, Prior, Dutton and Doak ; the tanners, Whiting and Parsons; another of the town's few lawyers, Obadiah Dickinson; the minister, Thomas Mason; the tav- ern-keeper, Houghton; the plow-maker, Munsell; the distinguished member of the Hunt family, Jonathan, from Vernon, over the Ver- mont line; and for the rest, members of the old families, Alexander, Holton, Wright, Mattoon and Field, with the addition of such a representative of culture as the young Ezekiel Webster, just out of Harvard college, and the musical genius, Timothy Swan. The name conspicuous by its absence was that of John Nevers, who was as little
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in accord with his young rival's library project as he was soon to be with his tree-planting.
The proprietors held equal shares, each contributing the modest sum of four dollars to the book-purchasing fund. These were from time to time transferred and came to have a gaining value as the collection of books grew. In March, a committee was chosen to buy books and before the year's end the library had seventy titles. That they were acceptable proved the substantial reading tastes of the town's household. The costliest was a set of Russell's "Modern Europe" in five volumes, costing thirteen dollars and fifty cents. In the first catalog were Paley's "Moral Philosophy and Natural Theology," Rob- ertson's "History of America" (four volumes), "The Parent's Friend," Goldsmith's "Grecian History and Plutarch" in six volumes (costing nine dollars). Classification of the list showed: Geography, descrip- tion and travel, sixteen titles ; philosophy, eight ; biography, thirteen ; history, nine; essays, thirteen; natural history, four; poems, five ; leaving "The Parent's Friend" unclassified, and a total lack of fiction.
Each year books were added with no sacrifice of the solidity of the foundation list. There were occasional gifts and additions in lieu of assessments. A main source of income was from the elaborated scheme of fines, not alone for detention of books but for failure on the part of the trustees to attend meetings, each absence carrying a penalty of one dollar. Shares of proprietors failing to pay fines and assessments were sold at public auction and the proceeds added to the association's funds. There were no expenditures other than for books, the library room being donated and the librarian serving without pay. By 1818, the number of volumes had increased to three hundred.
Lawyer Power's stay in town was for only four years. He had devoted himself quite too freely to the public enterprises he started to make practice profitable and there was a suspicion that the persistent enmity towards him of General Nevers, who by now had become the county's high sheriff, contributed to his rival's return to Boston. Back in the city he presently became the clerk of the police court. He had planted the seeds and nurtured the early growth of two of the town's chief blessings, the trees that would in time be his graceful living monument, and the library which would increasingly with the years serve the intellects of the townspeople.
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The Great River, bisecting Northfield as it did no other town in its entire length, was a divisive feature, separating a community quite as effectively as did the state line. The two ferries that furnished transportation were clumsy and slow and could be operated but half the year. The ice-bridge supplied a crossing for the winter months, or such parts of them as were cold enough to give safe thickness. The currents and eddies kept open places and the ice crossing was likely to be in long loops and rarely direct, the course found safe for travel being marked by poles or brush. Spring floods broke up the ice in a grand spectacle and resounding noise. Then for a season the meadows were covered and the ferry road impassable.
Tiffany's ferry, just above the mouth of Mill brook, the stream that divided Main street into two sections, was on the stage route from lower Vermont towns, through the village, and out of it over the Boston pike. Moffatt's, at the lower end, was a link in the road to the county seat. Ever since the bridge between Greenfield and Montague had been built and opened with great demonstration in 1802, the ambition of Northfield for a like one to span the river had been growing. There was another inciting precedent in the existence of a bridge at Walpole, thirty miles up the river, built in 1784 and claim- ing the distinction of being the first to span the Connecticut.
With the turnpike an accomplished work, the bridge was the natural next step in progress. It was taken in 1807, when the Gen- eral Court granted incorporation to the Proprietors of the Northfield Bridge. Twenty-three of the substantial citizens of the town were named in the act (Chapter 119) headed by Major Elisha Alexander, by chance of alphabetical order, and including John Barrett, the lawyer; Thomas Mason, the minister ; Governor Hunt, of Vernon ; his son, Arad; both the local tavern-keepers, Adrastus Doolittle and Edward Houghton.
The act defined the location as "Between Mill Brook and Tiffany's ferry." The bridge must be at least thirty feet wide and foot travel was to be protected by sides of boards at least a foot high. Enterprising as was such an undertaking as building a bridge across the Connecticut, it was with expectation that the investment would prove profitable. The legislative act fixed the toll rates, closely follow- ing those prescribed for the toll-gates on the turnpike, with classifica- tion of vehicles according to the number of horses or oxen drawing
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them, the curricle still being most heavily taxed, while rates for live- stock driven over it ran from the head charge on cattle down to the dozen rate for turkeys. The tolls were to continue for seventy years, with the proviso that after fifty years the legislature shall have the right to regulate them.
No more complete charter, no more definite promise of the Com- monwealth not to disturb it, could be asked. Based upon it, certificates of shares, handsome enough to be framed, were issued with a par value of fifty dollars each. It was substantial as a business undertak- ing but the money was not swiftly gathered. After two years, the town was besought to come to its aid and in 1810 voted to contribute $1,000, taking twenty shares of the stock. The bridge was built during the year 1811.
The legislative act had required that the bridge should be strongly built of good material. It was entirely of wood, with abut- ments of logs. It was a "trussel" bridge, a description which in tavern talk could have been heard transformed into "tussel," out of regard to the long pull for money to build it, with the rejoinder that it would earn the name when it got into a "tussel" with an ice jam. Its finan- cial soundness also came into question in the first year and the General Court was asked to mark up the toll rates, which it consented to do, early in the session of 1812.
As a unifier of the two sides of the town the bridge was not a success. The river was one sort of an obstacle to unity and a schedule of tolls, higher than the ferry had charged, was another and rather more effective. In 1818, the west-siders had come to such a sense of independence that they petitioned the General Court to be set off as another town. Significantly the first name in the petition was that of Nathan Prindle, the former ferryman, whom the building of the bridge had put out of business.
For years past the over-river section of the town had been known as Satan's Kingdom, in common speech considerately shortened to "The Kingdom." The tradition was that some wag coming out of church, after hearing a sermon in which the fires of hell were depicted, and seeing a forest fire across the Connecticut, observed that Satan's Kingdom was burning. The petition for separation did not propose a name for the town and by the legislative refusal to grant it, Massachu- setts was possibly saved a town by the majestic name of Kingdom.
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There was no malice in the name, the west side being populated by families held in the highest respect.
The bridge was seven hundred and twenty feet long. In com- mon speech it was "the great bridge." It was not, however, fully trusted. It shook under passing loads and there was a strict rule that horses should not trot as they were driven across it. No informed citizen of the town would have ventured upon it with a load of hard- wood plank drawn by a yoke of oxen, that daring test of its strength being reserved to a Vermonter, Seth Newell by name, who came to the town April 1, 1820, and on the 20th so displayed his confidence or his ignorance. He had gone but a few feet, when he whipped up his team and, intending to fall behind, was standing by the side of the load when the bridge broke. Newell was killed by the fall. The oxen fell in shallow water, the yoke was broken by the fall, and they escaped. No effort was made to rebuild and when ice covered the river the next winter the shattered bridge was taken down and lumber sold for firewood. The ferryman returned to business.
The industries that had appeared in the town in recent years had thus far not developed beyond the means of livelihood to the owners and an occasional hired man or two. The distilleries were the most profitable but called for little labor. The two tanneries turned out heavy leather somewhat in excess of home demand but were family concerns. The process used was not attractive to any but the most muscular. The product was either the raw material for boots so stout as to last a good share of a lifetime or, in the case of calfskins, a finer leather suitable for dressier because somewhat less substantial boots.
Munsell's plow shop, turning out an advanced model implement, and a shear-making shop in the Alexander up-town neighborhood were the only other industries reaching out for a market beyond the town. Asahel Cheney, maker of eight-day clocks, famous in their day and running for years in a good share of the households, had died, and his shop had been replaced by a distillery at the rear of the lot, on the river. One far-reaching venture was made by Amos Alexander, at his blacksmith shop on the turnpike, just off Main street. It was to supply the southern market with an improved plow. He made three hundred of the plows, sent them by Isaac Prior's boat to Hartford,
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whence they were shipped by sea. They struck a market which was glutted by the product of other manufacturers and the only return was for the old iron knocked off the shares. The shop had other local fame as the place where Daniel Lyman had forged the iron-work for a shoe-pegging machine which was a pioneer invention.
There were dreams that the town would gain industrial impor- tance. It found eloquent expression in the description of the resources of the town by Rodolphus Dickinson, a Deerfield man, who had a project of a gazetteer of the state and in 1818 published sample pages devoted to Lexington and Northfield-"intended as an exhibition of the plan of a contemplated Gazetteer of Massachusetts Proper." He spoke of the modest industries of the town, located on its streams, as "capable of vast accession and improvement." The "Gazetteer" did not expand beyond the "exhibition" and the vast accession of the town's manufacturers showed no positive signs of any greater ful- filment.
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