USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 25
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If the brooks, fed by the springs back in the hills on either side of the Connecticut and flowing into the Great River, were some day to be made to turn wheels, other than those of the present saw-mills, grist mills and bark mills, it would be when some outsider should try to harness them. There was no need of Northfield men undertaking it. They could read the predictions of such industry with a smile-as they did. The farming business was good enough-and they were farmers by heritage and by inclination. Such of them as carried on other trades owed their patronage to the home folks, in the main, and they were not more prosperous than the owners and tillers of the soil ; rather less so, in fact, and distinctly less so as a rule. If the sons wanted to make money faster than their fathers, they could buy more land and work harder on it. Perhaps they could find some new crops to raise that would pay better. The land was the one safe reliance- the meadows the mine to be worked.
The crop that paid the best was the one object of interest and of search. Fashions in crops changed as demand outside home use varied and as habits within the home took new turns. Barley, for example, had ceased to be grown as beer had gone out of favor and cider had taken its place. The malster had gone out and setting the mash had long since ceased to be the housewife's Saturday task. Wheat was sparingly raised, for lack of a market and limited home use; the grist
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mills were not flour mills and wheat was not a meal grain. Rye, on the other hand, was a staple crop. Rye meal was the common reliance for bread. The distilleries demanded this grain and Strobridge's mill, on the pond that had been made, a short mile out on the pike, was wholly used for grinding it.
Corn, of all the grains, held first place in acreage. It was the prime staple both for household and barn use. Every house had its "meal room," kept stocked with both corn and rye meal. Corn was in steady demand outside the town and found its way to the down- river towns by Prior's boats. Oats stood high in acreage, the standard feed for horses, as was corn for the swine and cornmeal for the milch cows. The largest single item of farm production was hay, main reliance for the dairy, for the cattle barn and stable. Tobacco, in- herited from the Indans, was grown to the extent that its leaves were needed to fill home pipes. It was a dwarfish plant, ranker in odor than in growth, except that when raised on heavily enriched soil, such as an abandoned barnyard, it grew higher and its leaves broadened.
In 1813, a new crop was introduced-broom corn. It resembled Indian corn in field appearance but had no family relationship. It was really a grass of tall growth, closely akin to sorghum-another new arrival in local cultivation. The value of broom corn was solely in the long fibrous top. It required careful tillage and rich fertilizing. When ripened, the stalks were scored near the top and the heads doubled over, making the field resemble a huge table. When har- vested, as it must be before frost, and the heads fully dried, it was hetchelled of its abundant seed and after being put through a sulphur fuming was ready for the broom-maker.
Some attempt was made to turn the seed of the broom "corn" to account for stock-feed. There was standing dispute as to its value. The seed was almost as hard as gravel. It was defended as good for the hens and, in turn, was alleged by one poultry-raiser to cause the hen's feathers to reverse and point bristlingly towards the bird's head.
In the next ten years, the acreage of broom-corn rapidly increased and it took its place as a profitable crop. The broom-tier came to be a recognized professional. His skill was shown somewhat in the shapeli- ness of his product and more in the number of brooms produced in a day. In this rivalry there was a general suspicion that the veracity
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of man underwent a new and severe strain. In the beginning, house- wives had little favor for the new broom as against the old one, made of splints or twigs, but it made its way and soon came to the point of providing a real industry.
Five years later, came another new crop, which likewise captured the farmer and his acres. Hop-raising began on Moose Plain, west of the river and "the Kingdom" rather rapidly came to have large fields of this prolific vine, grown on poles and giving the landscape the aspect of great fields of beans. The dried hops had a good market, not at all local, and yielded a corresponding profit.
Every homestead had its orchard, made up of apple and pear trees, with an occasional peach tree and a quince bush or two. They were allowed to take their own form of growth and were kept in serv- ice as long as they continued to produce. The product was for home consumption, save that cider had come to have a marketable value. The best apples were stored in the home cellar and the seconds were sent to the cider mill. The Baldwin apple, a clear improvement on the old stock, had appeared. The russet was in favor and the summer sweets were valued for baking. Every orchard had its "Shropshire vine," if that was the correct name for what in common speech was the "shropsy-vine" or, for short, the "shropsy," an apple of the ruddi- est hue, juicy and acid to the limit.
Cider had wholly replaced beer as the common beverage. It was produced to the extent of hundreds of barrels each year. The change in beverage was a doubtful gain. Beer, when newly made, was more of a stimulant, and did not become more intoxicating in keeping. Cider was harmless when sweet but as the winter passed it took on a disturbing potency. As certain men waxed disagreeable and even ugly towards springtime, it was commonly remarked that their cider was getting hard. There was a pious excuse for ample storage of it that it would turn to vinegar, a household requisite. There was no such cover for sending it to the distillery to be turned into cider-brandy, a liquor that was as vigorous as it was colorless.
In the memorandum Colonel Alexander made in 1813, for tax assessment, "cyder" was valued at $1.34 a barrel; "cyder" brandy, at fifty cents a gallon. The grain values were $1.50 a bushel for wheat ; corn, 75 cents ; rye, one dollar ; oats, 25 cents ; buckwheat, 67 cents. Flax was rated at 12 cents and hemp at 10 cents a pound. Horses
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were valued at $30; cows at $10; pairs of oxen, $35; young stock on a scale according to years ; swine, $3. Meadow land was assessed at from $37 to $60 an acre and other land at from $5 to $8.
By 1820, the town had made another twenty-five per cent gain in population in a ten-year period. It was now 1,584, as compared with 1,218 in 1810 and 1,047 at the opening of the century. Even such a population failed to make it "important" in the same relative degree as when it was approaching a thousand in the nineties, but it was more than three times as populous as in Revolutionary times. It was an expanding town and keeping step with New England's progress in social conditions.
The notion of public improvements which Thomas Power had stimulated in his brief residence was active and the street, where the trees he had caused to be planted were attaining size and shade, was reflecting greater care. Even that historic object, Council Rock, fell into disfavor and in 1821 public spirit accomplished its removal. The great mass of conglomerate, standing athwart the street near the site of the first fort, had been a picturesque and somewhat a social feature. Its level top had served through the years as a gathering place for leisurely gossipers and a play spot for the young children. The road- way could be straightened only by its removal, which proved no small undertaking. After the blasting, the stone was dragged on stone boats to the easterly side of the street where it was turned to account for a wall along the street line of the Seth Field homestead, now owned by the squire's nephew, Zechariah, who had built a house at the corner of the south Warwick road, in the prevailing hip-roof style.
The meeting-house remained, the only intrusion upon the street's broad space. It seemed antiquated and out of place. The vacant lot back of it invited it and only the cost of replacing it saved it from removal or replacement by a modern structure. It stood in a certain reverence, not fully shared by the youngsters who found their delight in the racket caused by the slamming down of its hinged seats at the close of service. Perhaps it would follow the old-time religion, now giving way in New England to quite a new order of theology.
CHAPTER XXXI A GOLDEN PERIOD OF CULTURE
Accession of Hosmers, Curtises, a Jarvis and Academy Teachers a Deep Influence
NORTHFIELD VERY SLIGHTLY FELT THE SHOCK of the upheaval of Calvinism through the force of liberal religious ideas, which in the first quarter of the century had torn asunder many of the churches. It had a tradition of liberalism. It had taken its stand when it de- fended its minister, Benjamin Doolittle, in his Arminianism, more than seventy-five years ago. Its people fully sympathized with those of Deerfield who in 1807 had persisted in their choice of Rev. Samuel Willard for their minister, even after a church council called for the purpose of settling him, had dissolved without ordaining, not finding him orthodox in his belief.
The people with liberal slant were not irreligious. They were keenly interested in theological issues. When the Social Library in- cluded in its slender first array of books such trifles as Paley's "Moral Philosophy and Natural Theology," it served the town's appetite. The next year their committee added Adams' "View of Religion," Blair's "Sermons" and Fordyce's "Sermons," then Zollicoffer's "Sermons," Mosheim's "Ecclesiastical History" in six volumes, Wilberforce on "Religion," Burch's "Village Sermons," Hurd on the Prophecies, "The Gospel Its Own Witness," and others of the kind to such num- ber that in the five hundred titles in the catalog of 1825, the religious works held a high proportion. To be sure the Rev. Thomas Mason had all this while been the chairman of the committee to purchase books but there had been associated with him physicians, lawyers, blacksmiths, hatters and farmers. The library reflected and served the town's demands.
Freedom of religion, which to the Puritans had been freedom only for those who accepted their faith, had taken on a new meaning in the late years of the last century and the first quarter of the new. The first church which had been willing to bear the open reproach of
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Unitarianism was not, however, one of Puritan background; it was the Episcopalian King's Chapel in Boston, under the leadership of James Freeman in 1787. By 1800 all nine of the Congregational churches of Boston were deeply infected with the heresy and in this year the First Church in Plymouth, the church of the Mayflower people, was breaking in two because a liberal minister had been settled. Meanwhile Universalism, founded in England, had been organized as a sect in America, and the Baptist church had yielded another division, the dissenters from its sectarianism taking the name of "Christian."
Harvard College had accepted an outright Arminian, Henry Ware, as professor of divinity and, a few years later, Kirkland, one of the most advanced in the liberal brotherhood, had become the college president. In 1809, Boston had set up a defensive fortification, the Park Street Church, avowedly "to give asylum to high orthodoxy in the midst of the enemy." The professors of Andover and Harvard theological schools came into open battle in 1815 and their great debate fixed upon the dissenters the name of Unitarian, which had been avoided by them on the ground that rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity was but one article of their platform. William Ellery Channing, the liberal minister of the Federal Street Church, holding back from affiliation with the avowed English Unitarians, had said, "We preach precisely as if no such doctrine as the Trinity existed," and again, "We, all of us, think it best to preach what we esteem to be the truth and to say very little about speculative error." In 1819, Channing, at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore, preached a sermon that produced a sensation greater than had any ever yet preached in America and it had become the high text of the Unitarian movement. In it he squarely placed Unitarianism upon the Bible, an affirmation and not a negation.
In Northfield, aligned as the church was with the liberals, the Orthodox minority withdrew in 1825 and formed the Second Con- gregational Society. Even now the difference was not so much doc- trinal as it was personal. With a more tactful and conciliatory min- ister than Mason in the town's pulpit or one who gave less offence by his sarcastic speech, in pulpit and out of it, the separation would have been less likely to occur. When it came, however, it took out of the old meeting-house some of the worthiest of the townspeople.
From woodcut in Fenner's "Raising the Veil"
THOMAS POWER, EsQ.
Planter of Northfield's Elms and Maples ( 1815)
Rev. George W. Hosmer, D.D. President, Antioch College
Edward Jarvis, M.D. Pioneer in State Care of Insane and in Vital Statistics
Benjamin R. Curtis Justice, U.S. Supreme Court
William A. Stearns President, Amherst College
General Charles Devens Justice, Mass. Supreme Judicial Court ; Attorney General, U.S.
William Gustavus Woodward Justice, Supreme Court of Iowa
SIX MEN WHOSE PUBLIC CAREERS BEGAN IN NORTHFIELD IN THE EIGHTEEN-THIRTIES
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When the dissenting (Orthodox) church was organized, November 17, 1825, following by two days the formation of the second parish, it had a membership of thirty. It began holding services in Union Hall, the town's one public meeting-place outside the meeting-house. The leader was Isaac Prior, who would no longer need to climb the Gulf road for acceptable preaching. Families divided and in the new body, as well as remaining in the old, were Alexanders, Lymans and Fields. Its first preacher was Rev. Eli Moody, a native of Granby, installed November 22, 1826.
That church unity had been broken in a town where the people had worshipped God together for more than a century was but one manifestation of the independence of thought that marked the time. There was incitement to doctrinal differences in the battle over creeds being carried on by the theological schools of Andover and Harvard. Politics, which for a period had been quiescent-the era of good will under Madison and extending into the presidency of Monroe-had now become virulent, with a peppery Adams at the head of the nation and a rabid Jackson rising to leadership.
Both religion and politics were in the common talk. Not alone as to them was there readiness for discussion. It was in the fashion to have opinions on science and literature and world affairs. The town that had been one of the first to have a library now fell in with the towns of like spirit in forming a lyceum. Here it would give a plat- form for the delivery by men of learning on every known topic of human interest. It was well under way by 1830 and bade fair to be a permanent feature of the town life.
Meanwhile there had been a more serious rift in church affairs than the departure of the Orthodox group in 1825. It was solely due to impatience with the town's minister, Thomas Mason, on personal and not doctrinal grounds. The doctrinal dissenters had numbered thirty ; now, in 1827, the church lost fifty-six members by withdrawal from communion to form the Unitarian Society of Northfield. None of these would concede that the separation was permanent. The breach would be closed when Mr. Mason withdrew, which he showed no inclination to do. In February of 1828 they ordained as their minister the Rev. Samuel Presbury, a graduate of Brunswick College, 1822, and of the Harvard Divinity School, 1825.
Now the town had, instead of its one body of townspeople gath-
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ered in its meeting-house, three distinct churches in the village, with a Baptist church newly formed at the Farms and the Methodists hold- ing out on the easterly hilltop. It was in fair way towards complete separation of the support of worship from the town treasury, a change that by this time was becoming common in Massachusetts towns.
While Rev. Thomas Mason was reaping the unpleasant but to him not disconcerting harvest of his unrestrained sarcasms and person- alities, the town was getting the benefits of his intellectual leadership, equally unacknowledged. He had been Thomas Power's best support in the library venture and was now a promoter of the lyceum. All along he had taken an active and always positive part in town affairs. In the very time that there was the fiercest disapproval of his minis- terial actions the town elected him year after year its representative in the General Court, beginning in 1824, running through the two following elections, giving him a respite for three years, but return- ing him in 1830, the exact year in which he was dismissed from the pulpit. He was in popular if not churchly favor. Always he had been provoking-in the less pleasant sense of irritation and in the helpful sense of keeping the town thinking. When any citizen calmly dis- cussed Priest Mason, as seldom happened, it was to admit that the town owed no slight share of its intellectual activity to his incitement and example.
There had been a financial item in the terms of settlement of Mr. Mason in 1799 to the effect that he should be paid two hundred and fifty pounds sterling in addition to his salary, on condition that if he should leave within twenty years it would be repaid in such propor- tion as the time of his stay fell short of that period. The conditions had been fulfilled. He had long over-stayed the twenty years. But there seemed to be a surviving association of a thousand dollars with the compact. When the pressure for his resignation became strong, he consented to yield upon the payment to him of just that sum and it was finally tendered.
Sitting one evening in the public room of Houghton's tavern, Mr. Mason heard a Vermont drover, on the way home from Boston, boasting that he had sold his hogs for a good sum, a matter of three or four hundred dollars. Next day it was current in the town that the deposed, or bought-off, minister rejoined, "I have done better than that, I have sold my hogs for a thousand dollars." True or not,
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such an observation was accepted as entirely consistent with his manner of speech. And at next election, he was returned to the legis- lature.
Higher education than was reached in the town schools was needed, consistently with the cultural standards that were commonly recognized in the growing town. Back in the seventeen nineties, the town-meeting had considered the establishment of an academy as a part of its public school system. The voters were not ready for a step that would have put the town to the fore in public education but at a heavy cost. In the elapsed thirty years, there had been widespread adoption in Massachusetts towns of the academy, privately supported and filling the wide gap between the common schools and the college. Indeed, some of the academies so established had become colleges. There was no apparent reason why just that might not happen in Northfield, a favorable location for an advanced educational institu- tion. In 1829, an act of the General Court was secured, incorporating the Northfield Academy of Useful Knowledge.
The academy, when it came, would be for both sexes. The need was greater now for boys than for girls. In the periods when the girls were not welcomed to the public schools, there had developed pri- vately supported education for them that had advanced to a point beyond what was provided for the other sex. The boys who did not go to college gained only the education of the town schools, which was no more than elementary. As early as 1805, Sally Williams, a granddaughter of Squire Obadiah Dickinson, had opened a school for girls in Union Hall. In 1814, Patience Bancroft, a sister of Ebenezer, the cabinet maker, followed her and kept the school open nine months in each year until 1817, when she was led away from the school to the altar by Artemas Brown. She had a crowded school, some of her pupils coming from other towns. Next came Hannah Blake, a relative of the new Northfield family. Among the girls in the school under Miss Bancroft or Miss Blake were three Draper sis- ters-Julia, who was one of the first women public school teachers, beginning in 1817 at "Number Three," the Upper Farms; Emily, who in 1823, took the Union Hall School; and Eliza, who succeeded her. The school, under the succession of these ambitious teachers, came to be the point of supply of teachers in the town schools and did the greater service of lifting the culture of the town to a high level,
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on the feminine side. Nothing like it was provided for the boys until the Academy arrived.
The leading incorporators of the Academy were the town's busi- ness men, with the exception of Samuel C. Allen, the lawyer; four merchants in the list, William Pomeroy, Daniel Callender, Timothy Dutton and Thomas L. Doak, and with them the tanner, Jabez Par- sons. Only Pomeroy among them represented an old family, the others being men who had come to the town in the period of accession of new blood. The act of incorporation authorized the holding of real estate not exceeding $50,000 in value and the proprietors promptly acquired the Hunt tavern, the three-story building next to the centre district school. They added a two-story piazza, extending around three sides of the spacious structure and rescued it from its blank plainness. About this time, out of regard to its being an industrious abode of learning, it acquired the name of "The Bee Hive."
In October, the Academy opened most auspiciously. Its principal was Owen S. Keith, a young graduate of Harvard ('26), who had been the head of an academy in Framingham. He remained only a year but formed one attachment which led to his marriage in 1833 to Lucretia, the daughter of Northfield's leading merchant, William Pomeroy. Principal Keith's associate, Charles Osgood, was found in New Salem, where he was preceptor of a like academy. He was the son of a New Salem militia colonel, Joel Osgood, and descendant from the John Osgood who was one of the early Bay immigrants from Eng- land, the family being for several generations of Andover, then of Barre, the Worcester hill town, and New Salem in Eastern Franklin. There could be no mistake about the Academy beginning with the traditions of New England.
Now Northfield entered upon a period of exceptional culture and quality. The Academy brought new leadership in progress. When Mr. Owen left in 1830, he was succeeded by Cyrus Hosmer, one of the distinguished old family in Concord. In the same year, the First Parish, for a successor to Thomas Mason, settled George Washington Hosmer, a younger brother of the preceptor and a Harvard graduate. The same year brought from Concord, Dr. Edward Jarvis, just grad- uated from the Harvard Medical School, to begin his practice here.
Coincident with these accessions, there arrived from Boston to con- tinue his law studies and eventually to practice here, Benjamin Rob-
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bins Curtis. He was born in Watertown, November 4, 1809, and had been graduated from Harvard in 1829. The young man bore the credentials of the highest social standing of his family. He was imme- diately recognized as a man of rare maturity for his years and of great promise because of his personal abilities and charm. The circum- stances leading Mr. Curtis to Northfield and certain of his experiences here will be told later in the story. His first legal fee was entered in his account book thus-
August 10, 1832, of Samuel Merriman jr, for retainer $1.00
The service Mr. Curtis was to render was possibly in connection with the estate of his client's father, Levi Merriman, who had died suddenly at dinner, August 3, 1829. The designation of "junior" for this Samuel Merriman was in distinction from his uncle of the same name. If Mr. Curtis should rise to eminence later, it would be a treasured honor to have given him his first professionally earned dollar.
Already in Northfield, when Mr. Curtis came, was another lawyer, Asa Olmstead. He was a native of Enfield, Connecticut, a graduate of Princeton College ('14), had studied law with George Bliss, in Springfield, and had practiced eight years in Wilbraham, a town near Springfield, from 1822 to 1830, when he was attracted to Northfield.
Another accession was that of Samuel C. Allen, who returned after some years of residence in New Salem and Greenfield to the town where in his college days he had taught school, had been for two years minister of the church, too Calvinistic in his views to be satisfactory, and having studied law with John Barrett had begun practice. Meanwhile he had been state senator and served several terms in Congress.
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