USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 26
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Mr. Allen's congressional service ran through five Congresses, the 15th to the 19th, covering ten years, from 1817 to 1827, of great political importance. Henry Clay was the Speaker through much of the time and the Massachusets delegation included Daniel Webster, from 1823 to 1827, when he went to the Senate, and Edward Everett, in the last term of Mr. Allen's service. He met another son of North- field in his last term, in the person of Jonathan Hunt, from Vernon, Vermont. Mr. Allen was recorded in the congressional directory as from Greenfield, in 1817; from Northfield in 1819; from Greenfield in the remainder of his service. He brought back to his old town a
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great distinction, which was now being crowned by a professorship in Amherst College in political economy. His son, Samuel C. Allen, junior, was one of the town's most substantial citizens, a farmer, living in an imposing house in the midst of his many acres in Bennett's meadow.
The men who came to Northfield in this period and brought with them high education and professional talent entered fully into the life of the town. B. R. Curtis became a shareholder in the library and a speaker in the Lyceum. He made a notable address for so young a man (only twenty-four) at the Deerfield celebration of the centennial of the birth of Washington, in which he devoted much attention to New England, closing with the words,
"There are few periods of two hundred years in the history of any country which can compare with the history of New England."
The Hosmers, Asa Olmstead and Dr. Jarvis took immediate place in public, literary and social affairs. None of them exceeded in activ- ity this young physician and the town profited by his varied contribu- tions and leadership.
A Sunday school was established by Mr. Hosmer in the first year of his pastorate, a novel church activity, and Dr. Jarvis was its super- intendent. It promptly became a powerful factor in the life of the town, was attended by all the numerous children of the parish and greatly stimulated their intellectual as well as their spiritual interest. The doctor was an ardent naturalist. Of him Mr. Hosmer said, "No plant or flower on the mountain or in the meadow escaped his eye." What he gained for himself in studies of nature he ardently com- municated to the youth of the town, along with his enthusiasms for search and understanding.
None was a more welcome speaker than Dr. Jarvis in the Lyceum where his first lecture was on "Vegetable Products-Food." During the winter of 1830-31, he gave a course of six lectures, beginning in December and ending in April, on the Thermometer, Heat, Electri- city, Oxygen, Combustion, Salts, Limes and Minerals. One on "Anal- ogies and Differences of Vegetable and Animal Economy" he deliv- ered in both the Northfield and Greenfield Lyceums. Other North- field lectures were one on "Peculiarities and Habits of Animals" and two on "Vegetable Anatomy and Physiology." Revealing his associa- tion of science and religion, he gave a course of eight lectures to the
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Sunday School teachers on "Anatomy as Showing the Wisdom of the Creator and His Continuing Watchfulness and Benevolence."
Benjamin R. Curtis came to Northfield as the result of General John Nevers' search for a law clerk. The old General had a consider- able and a profitable practice. He was respected and trusted. To him came the people of the town and the neighboring towns with their personal affairs calling for legal assistance and with their disputes, numerous as these were. He avoided appearance in court, having never acquired experience as a trial lawyer. Within three years of admission to the bar Nevers had become high sheriff and had con- tinued for sixteen years in that dignified office, the duties of which prevented his engagement in trials ; he could not step from his station in the courtroom to enter the arena. For the trial of his cases he engaged other attorneys, chiefly relying upon Daniel Wells. He was now nearly sixty, much occupied, none too fond of search into the intricacies of the law. Out of his need he turned to Mr. Wells, who consulted his nephew, James C. Alvord, now a student in the Harvard Law School. The young man suggested his most intimate friend there, young Curtis.
Curtis was the son of a sea captain, who in some business ventures had been so unfortunate as to leave his widow in close circumstances. The young man was a year and a half short of graduation from Law School but felt the need to be self-supporting and the inducement offered by General Nevers, including the prospect of coming into his practice, led him to accept. Some of his Boston friends suspected a romantic reason for his venture. He was frankly in love with his cousin, Eliza Maria Woodward, the youngest daughter of William H. Woodward, a former treasurer of Dartmouth College. Mr. Wood- ward was the grandson of President Eleazer Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth, practiced law in Hanover and was chief justice of the court of common pleas. He was the nominal "defendant in error" in the celebrated Dartmouth College case which gave Daniel Webster early fame and established a legal precedent of national importance. He married Betsey Curtis, sister of B. R. Curtis' father. Mr. Wood- ward had died in 1818, pending the conclusion of the famous case.
Young Curtis came to Northfield in August, 1831. He was only twenty-three and not yet a member of the bar, to which he was ad- mitted the following year. He married Miss Woodward May 8, 1833, at the home of his uncle, George T. Ticknor in Boston. His bride
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had a little fortune of her own, just sufficient to furnish a small house in Northfield and the young couple immediately began housekeeping. Their first child, a boy, was born here. In the winter of 1833-34, the young attorney was made an attractive offer by his cousin, Charles Pelham Curtis, Esq., of Boston, to become his associate and he left Northfield in the fall of 1834.
The stay of Mr. Curtis in Northfield was chiefly of profit to him in the opportunity it gave him somewhat for a varied practice but more for study of law, to which he applied himself with absorption. In the letters to his own people, afterwards published, and in his later statements, he attached great value to the seclusion which would not have been possible in Boston. The letters show no other enthusiasms over this period ; General Nevers had a waning attraction.
The old General was fairly described at this time in his life as a tall spare man, with silvery hair, a parchment complexion, manners that were both rustic and formal, a dry humor and an expression about his eyes and mouth that indicated shrewdness and a habit of suspicion. The General's antipathy of years before towards Thomas Power was remembered in Northfield as characteristic. Much the same spirit was now shown towards Asa Olmstead, the only other attorney practicing here. Young Curtis was thrown into a conflict with Mr. Olmstead, which had to do with what was regarded as the old lawyer's outrageous treatment of people who fell within his grasp.
Mr. Olmstead was identified in the Curtis family correspondence as "a pettifogger of the worst character." As strong, or stronger, language was used in a presentation against Olmstead to the Court of Common Pleas held at Greenfield on charges most vigorously and unsparingly prosecuted by James C. Alvord. The result of this pro- ceeding was a slander suit brought by Olmstead against Daniel Wells, who had signed the charges against him, and for language used in the presentation. It fell to Curtis to defend Mr. Wells, which he did suc- cessfully on the plea that the document was a privileged communica- tion. His argument was preserved, to become the first document in the published papers of the lawyer, who had within a few years become eminent at the bar. The incident had its effect on Mr. Olm- stead, who a few years later gave up practice and removed to Clinton, New York. There was divided opinion in Northfield as to the merits of the case and not all its people would subscribe to the bitter denun- ciations of Olmstead by the Nevers, Wells, Alvord, Curtis group.
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When Mr. Curtis left town for Boston he turned his practice over to William G. Woodward, his cousin and Mrs. Curtis' brother. He was but a year older than Curtis, born at Hanover, May 20, 1808, was at Harvard as a graduate student for a year, read law with Hon. Ira Perley at Hanover, took a year at Harvard Law School, where he met Curtis, read further with Hon. Ebenezer Moseley at Newbury- port, began practice there in 1833 and, the same year, became the law partner of Henry Chapman at Greenfield, coming to Northfield in 1834 and remaining until 1839, when he went to Muscatine, Iowa. Mr. Woodward married May 10, 1838, Arabella, daughter of Job F. Brooks of Westmoreland, New Hampshire.
Men of culture, like the two Hosmers, B. R. Curtis, Dr. Jarvis, Asa Olmstead and the rest, had not come into an intellectual wilder- ness. One of the attractions of the town for them was its existing cul- ture. They had no occasion to assume a superior air nor to put themselves in the relation of benefactors to an inferior populace; and they never did. They formed companionships without concession and cultural enterprises were eagerly and intelligently supported by mem- bers of old families and men long identified with the town. The new men could find their wits matched by Thomas Mason, who for over thirty years had been a powerful, even if sometimes a disturbing, influ- ence for culture, by the Allens, by Dr. Charles Blake, with his memories of service on the famous old frigate Constitution, by Ezekiel Webster, a Harvard graduate of 1812, and by any number of others. They could treat with high respect an old worthy like Obadiah Dickinson, now in the seventies an active lawyer, with the distinction of Yale graduation as long ago as 1778.
Also there were the Callenders, Benjamin, with a long-ago Boston youth, and his son, Daniel, the elder now town treasurer and the younger through these years the town clerk; Otis Everett, of the dis- tinguished old Dedham family, a leader in the improvement of the street and the central cemetery, whose son, Oliver Capen, had in 1832 been graduated from Harvard ; Isaac Prior, schoolmaster in Connecti- cut in his young days, now a man of means gained in trade in North- field and boating on the Great River ; and Timothy Swan, the aged genius in music, who had given the world hymn-tunes now recognized in every church collection.
Accessions to culture had come in the arrival of such men as James White, who had come from the western Franklin town of Heath,
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built the great house on Mill Brook, near his fulling mill farther down the stream, and was repeatedly trusted with the town's treasury; Richard Colton, from Springfield in 1811 ; the Stearns brothers, Sam- uel Spring and Calvin, who in this period were building one after another of the town's pretentious houses; the heads of the new families of Whiting, Watriss, Belcher and Parsons, every one of whose names appeared among library proprietors and church leaders. An- other man of quality in this period was Nathaniel Seaver Boughtelle, whose ornate autograph in library records matched his impressive name; he removed later to Fitchburg.
Whatever new men brought in culture and enterprise, the old families were the backbone of the town. In this day and generation, they were abreast with the world and as alert to its progress, gloriously independent in politics and religion and partners on the level with the newcomers. A numerous group of young men, most of them born in the early years of the century, were active in the affairs of town and church and giving promise of maintaining for the future the standards that were being set high in this favored period. Among them were several Alexanders, George (born in 1808) and Charles (1810), brothers who had married the sisters, Eliza and Amanda Colton ; Josiah (1791), whose wife was Mira Lyman, daughter of the hatter, Caleb; Elisha (1807), son of the venerable Major Elisha, who was still living ; Henry, son of Colonel Medad.
The Holtons were as numerous, there being now in active young life twelve of the thirteen children of Luther among them, one of the daughters, Betsey, having married, January 3, 1828, Edwin Moody, who, born in 1800, was following the family trade of mason. Jonathan Hunt Blake (1807) carried two of the family names of standing and his sister Frances, having married a new young physician, Marshall S. Mead (1802), who had come to the town from Chesterfield, New Hampshire, in 1828. There were two Parsons boys, Elijah (1804) and Albert Collins (1812), sons of Jabez, the tanner, and nephews of Isaac Prior. Belding blood was represented in Elijah Eastman (1813), grandson of the interesting patriarch, Jonathan, who from his sup- posedly consumptive youth had lived ninety-four years, until 1829. Newer names in the town were borne by Franklin Lord (1808), son of the tavern-keeper from Athol, and already married into the Stratton family, and Ira Coy (1804). Aside from Ezekiel Webster, the Har- vard graduate of 1812, there was a brother, Arad (1795), married
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and with a growing family, the first-born in which had been given the name of Lewis Taylor, for an uncle in Hinsdale.
The Allens, sons of the distinguished Samuel C., were present in the persons of Zebulon (1802) and Samuel C., Jr. (1793), while others, Elisha H. (1804) and Frederick H. (1806), had been given college education and were starting in the practice of law. There were two Merrimans, Samuel (1807) and Elijah (1806), grandsons of the Revolutionary patriot-captain, and a sister had married Ezekiel Wood (1794), son of the Revolutionary soldier, Barzallai.
Of all the old families the Fields were outstanding in number, culture and public spirit, Phineas (1799) ; Lucius (1796), a Wesleyan graduate of 1821; Moses (1808) ; Erastus (1791) who had married Elizabeth, daughter of Benjamin Callender; and the son of Silas, who had married Ruth Faxon of Boston, lived in the finest house in town, built by Timothy Dutton, and for some of the time in Boston and Charlestown, where his sons Benjamin F. (1806), Franklin (1819) and Joseph (1826) and his daughters, Augusta (1809), Eliza- beth (1811) and Maria (1821) had been born.
The one Dutton of the period was Samuel W. (1813) son of Timothy B., who had been a leading man, the present Samuel marry- ing in 1835 Mary Dascom of Milford, New Hampshire. The Janes family, interwoven with about every one of the other older families of the town, was represented in this array of youth in the person of Frederick (1808), son of the Xenophon, who was church organist, town clerk, deacon and about all else, the young man now keen to get into the ministry.
Such a list, written in the eighteen-thirties, might have future interest only for the descendants. It is far from a complete roster of the rising generation which was a fit circle for companionship with the cultivated young men who had come to the town. It had the present worth of evidence of the character of the home people. Few had been given a college education. All were by inheritance and necessity industrious and enterprising but at no sacrifice of the grasp upon those affairs of the wider world and current thought which sup- plied a common intelligence and culture. It quite overlooks the cul- tural influence of the young women of the period who had quite gen- erally gained a liberal education in the local private schools, including the new and now well sustained Academy.
CHAPTER XXXII SOCIAL LIFE IN NEW FREEDOM
Old Meeting-house Demolished, Old Restraints Go with It
UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE came to an end in Massachusetts in 1832. And it came without jolt and jar. For more than two centuries the support of preaching had been the first charge upon the people of every town in the colony and Commonwealth. Long ago, now, there had been practical division of government, the church, separately organized, consisting of its members and deacons, coming into control of ecclesiastical affairs, and the town gradually withdraw- ing to the simple performance of financial support. Now the taxing of property for maintenance of preaching was discontinued and the parish came into the town's place. Northfield had anticipated this action by six years, the First Parish having been incorporated in 1826.
It was still within memory that in the controversy with Parson Hubbard over his Tory views the towns and church were arrayed against each other and it was only after four years that peace was brought about through the arbitration of a committee made up equally of church members and townsmen. The discontent in the church with Priest Mason would have accomplished his retirement much earlier had he not had a town following, and with the town holding the purse strings. Under the new order the church and the parish, made up substantially of the same people, would manage affairs and pay the charges. Events proved that nothing was lost spiritually by the change.
First physical sign of the new order was in the removal of the meeting-house, built in the 1760's and holding its place within the street's bounds. The old house of worship would have stood longer but for the public spirit of one man who must from now on be counted as a town benefactor. William Pomeroy had made his moderate fortune as merchant and distiller. He was descendant, in the fifth generation, from Eltweed, in the Dorchester settlement of 1630, and of the family that had been at the front of affairs in Windsor
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(Connecticut) and Northampton. Pomeroys had been among the first petitioners for the settlement of Northfield but had become residents in the 1760's, when Medad, the doctor, Eleazer, and Sham- mah, the saddler, came here, William being the son of the saddler. His mother was a Mattoon and he was related one way and another to about all the other old families.
Mr. Pomeroy offered, in 1832, to remove the old meeting-house and build a new church on the vacant lot adjoining its site, a part of the old Parson Doolittle home-lot, on condition that the pews should be sold and the avails constitute a permanent fund for parish expenses. Acceptance, demolition of the old house and building of the new one were prompt and the new church was dedicated October 16, 1833.
Three years later Mr. Pomeroy created a trust fund, amounting to another $5,000, for the maintenance of a minister of the Christian religion, with the provision that his religious sentiments "shall be in conformity with the general and more important sentiments and doc- trines as taught at the Theological College in Cambridge." By that stroke he made the First Parish permanently Unitarian.
The new edifice was modern in its arrangement, including heat- ing, a recent innovation, had high gothic windows and a spire after the style of Wren, with an open belfry in which was hung the bell cast by Paul Revere for the town in the 1790's. The Trinitarian Society, with the privileges and liabilities of a parish, had been incor- porated in 1829 and had built the same year its house of worship, farther up the street.
Towards the end of the decade, which in its early years had been marked by the influx of young professional men of high culture, long steps in educational gain and church development, the town was conscious of a pause in its progress. The Academy had not proved the expected success and, in 1835, the property was sold to Phinehas Allen, who carried it on as a personal enterprise. There had been no new developments of industry. The country was in a distraught financial situation, a panic in 1837 being the most serious it had suffered. Agriculture, the town's main reliance, was under the general depres- sion. New people were not now coming to the town as in the recent past.
By 1840, there was for the first time since the Revolution, a decline
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in population, slight to be sure but contrasting to the gains shown in the census of each previous ten years-1,673 now as compared with 1,757 in 1830. Most serious of all the losses had been the de- partures, somewhat of young men, sons of old families going out into the world to seek their fortunes, and more conspicuously of the group who had given the town cultural and social leadership.
Benjamin R. Curtis, the talented young lawyer, who had made a good start in practice and had said he intended to remain here, had left in 1834. He had fully entered into the life of the town. His name was enrolled in that list of the intelligentsia, the library shareholders. So was that of William G. Woodward, his successor in practice, who left in 1837. Dr. Edward Jarvis, after most publicly fruitful years here, was attracted back to his native town of Concord, in the same year that B. R. Curtis left, somewhat by its better attraction for prac- tice, Northfield being rather over-supplied with physicians, but more, it was surmised, by his interest in a Concord girl, Almira Hunt, whom he married in 1834. It was known that he had, four years later, yielded to the pull of the West and gone to Louisville, Kentucky.
Of the Hosmers, whose presence in the town had been a blessing, Cyrus, principal of the Academy, had died here in 1833. His brother, Rev. George Washington Hosmer, in 1836, asked dismissal from the First Parish pastorate, to go to the new Unitarian church in Buffalo, New York. He had married, the next year after coming to Northfield, the daughter of Rev. Dr. Kendall of the old Plymouth church, and three sons had been born here, the first, named after Dr. Edward Jarvis, dying at the age of two years, the others, James Kendall, born in 1834, and William R., in 1835.
The discontinuance of the Academy meant the loss to the town of a group of teachers, whose presence had been a priceless benefit, such as William A. Stearns, Harvard '27; Jonathan F. Stearns, Harvard '30 ; Samuel M. Emery, Harvard '30; Edgar Buckingham, Harvard '31 ; William W. Wellington, Harvard '32, Cyrus Hosmer's successor as the head of the school. In the new order of things, under Phinehas Allen's proprietorship, the assistants were all young women, two of whom, Jane Whiting and Mary Ann Willard, came from Cambridge, another being Lucinda R. Stone. Cultured as were these women, they could hardly replace in effect upon the town the remarkable group of Harvard men who had been on the Academy faculty.
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The ministerial changes were the succession to Mr. Hosmer of Rev. Oliver Capen Everett (Harvard '32), son of Otis Everett, al- ready a resident here; and in the Trinitarian church, in place of Rev. Eli Moody, in 1831, the Rev. Bancroft Fowler, well on in middle life, fifty-six at the time of settlement, a Yale graduate of 1796, succeeded in 1836 by Rev. Horatio Lombard, a Williams graduate of 1815. Within the period before 1840, it could not be said of these that they had made the distinctive contribution to the town that had placed Hosmer and Moody in grateful memory.
Somewhat of force and leadership had been lost to the town in the retirement of Rev. Thomas Mason, who had continued in public affairs down to 1835, the last year of his continuous service in the General Court. Now, in the seventies, he was living a leisurely life in the house he had built and limiting his associates to a small group, in which the favorite was Charles Osgood, his nearest neighbor, the late assistant principal of the Academy. One of his diversions was an occasional caustic exchange with the venerable Timothy Swan, who lived behind a small forest of Lombardy poplars in the house nearly opposite.
There were other retired worthies, like Squire Obadiah Dickinson, well on in the eighties, whose family departures typified the new and locally destructive fashion, the children now scattered from Maine to Illinois and as far south as North Carolina and Florida, a son and two married daughters in Boston, and only one, the youngest, Louisa, still in town by reason of marriage to Timothy, about the only one of the most distinguished branch of the Field family who stayed here in- stead of moving to Boston. Samuel C. Allen, likewise, was conferring distinction on the town where in youth he had taken a brief tour in the ministry and started in the law, now after his years in Congress and professorship at Amherst, spending his late years here. Up to 1839, Captain David Barber, who could recall the fortification of Dorchester Heights, had been paid the reverence due a Revolutionary soldier. Then here was the now aging General John Nevers, who in other years had travelled with regularity to the county seat from his big house set well back from the street, sustaining, whether in Greenfield or Northfield, the dignity befitting the high sheriff of the county of Franklin.
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