USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 28
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for, reached Northfield. It had taken nearly twenty years of agita- tion, controversy and slow construction to accomplish this realization. Actually the first charter granted by the General Court for a railroad was that of 1829 for one to be built over what was now the route of the Vermont and Massachusetts. It was the route from Boston to the interior which had been recognized before railroads were dreamed of, in the survey by Loammi Baldwin for a canal. Other projects, however, had been actively and successfully promoted, among them the Boston and Albany, which gained legislative favor and the Com- monwealth's financial aid and was in operation before any real effort was made to get the road to Vermont under way.
By 1844, the Vermont and Massachusetts had been chartered by both states. It had yet to win financial support. In a letter published in the Boston Courier early in that year, its cause was argued on the ground that it was the feasible route to tap Vermont and by extension beyond Brattleboro eventually to link the West with Boston. A pamphlet dated June 7, 1844, signed by a committee of eight, two of whom were James White and Richard Colton of Northfield, set out in detail the prospect that the road would pay a profit of ten per cent on the investment.
Beyond the securing of capital, which was not readily gained, other difficulties obstructed progress. The route along Miller's River was unopposed but the proposal to turn sharply around Mr. Grout's barn in Montague and proceed north through Northfield and Vernon to Brattleboro aroused the violent opposition of Greenfield. A con- vention in that town on October 25th, 1845, framed an address to the effect that the whole question was as to the best route from Boston to Troy and that was to be met by a straight course to Greenfield and thence up Green River over the southern Vermont hills. The charter of 1844 was patiently extended by the legislatures of 1845 and 1846. Greenfield's state of mind was relieved by providing a branch from Grout's Corner to that town.
Further delay was caused by a furious controversy over the route from Westminster, waged between Gardner and Winchendon. The captains in this battle were Alvah Crocker, the Fitchburg capitalist and promoter, and Levi Heywood, Gardner's champion. The out- come was a compromise by which the road would enter Ashburnham pointing north and would then almost double upon itself to pass
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through the lower part of Gardner. The result was that when the trains began to run, they were halted at Ashburnham Depot, the engine turned around and attached to the train's other end, while the passengers rose and reversed the seats to avoid riding to Boston back- wards.
Railroad building in Northfield was active in 1847 and 1848. The great task was the building of the bridge across the Connecticut. Granite for its piers was quarried in the Northfield mountains. In the railroad's building were first employed the Irish laborers who came to be a part of the town's population. The road's engineering staff of ten men were quartered in the house of Dr. M. S. Mead, which was let to the company for this use. The legislature of 1848 authorized the company to receive the franchise of the Northfield bridge, which was to be a combination highway, with tolls, and rail- road structure.
October 16, 1848, the road was officially opened. The committee and officers on that day passed over the whole route from Fitchburg to Brattleboro and over the Greenfield branch as far as the Connecti- cut River. In the report made to the stockholders at their meeting, February 14, 1849, the committee rejoiced over the best railroad con- struction yet achieved in the country. It particularly described the bridge as "the beautiful structure spanning the Connecticut River at Northfield, which has four spans of 166 feet each, the railroad track being upon its deck and the travelled way upon its chords." It was a carping critic who would dwell upon that word, "beautiful," as applied to a bridge that had the architectural charm of an average New England barn, greatly elongated and set upon granite sup- ports.
In the same report it was stated that the road was now in business, with five passenger engines weighing from 16 to 23 tons each, six freight engines of from 20 to 25 tons, two second-hand engines, five passenger cars with sixty-four seats and three with fifty-six seats, four baggage cars, sixty eight-wheel and twenty four-wheel freight cars and sixty-four platform cars.
After the railroad which brought Northfield into communication with Boston was finished and in operation, E. H. Derby, a Boston promoter, in an argument to the legislature said of it, "There is not, Mr. Chairman, a railroad in Massachusetts, I may say in the whole
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United States, which in substantial masonry and bridges, and in favorable curves, surpasses the Vermont and Massachusetts."
Eloquently he dwelt upon the bridges, as well as he might, for between Grout's Corner, near the mouth of Miller's River, and Gard- ner that stream was crossed not less than thirty times in "Howe truss," covered wooden bridges. "You have seen," said Mr. Derby, "pon- derous engines with heavy trains attached, flying across bridges, over valleys and streams, at the height of sixty feet, without causing so much as even a deflection to the structure."
The project of another railroad, which would traverse Northfield, on the westerly side of the Connecticut, was being urged in the middle 'forties but was not taken seriously. Hudson's letter in the Boston Courier in 1844 declared that "there is little prospect of a railroad up the Connecticut valley reaching farther than Northampton." Rail- road expansion was too much in favor to support such negative pre- diction and the Connecticut River road was opened as far as Green- field November 23, 1846, and was then assured further extension to Brattleboro. The Vermont and Massachusetts had hardly been built when it was joined by the River road at South Vernon, Vermont, but a few rods beyond the Northfield line.
If railroads could make a town, Northfield was made. The last of the stages which had lumbered over the turnpike to Boston made its farewell journey in 1846. No whistling, bell-ringing arrival of the locomotive would ever stir town interest or be the thrilling event of the day which had seen the coming of the stage, with its horses whipped up to rattling speed and its horn freely blown to arouse the villagers.
Shifting of population to mill towns, emigration to the West, first to the Western Reserve in Ohio, then to the prairie states and now to California in excitement over gold discoveries, and the develop- ment of the railroads were only the visible causes of change in the interior New England towns. To these reformative causes was added the assertion by the state government of an authority over local affairs, which might prove to be beneficent but which was clearly a reversal of the traditional order. For two centuries the town had been the high seat of authority in New England. It was the unit and it had yielded to the Commonwealth only those fragments of its integrity necessary to serve a common interest. Its own affairs were-its own
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affair. Now the state was asserting authority in matters that had always been home concerns.
In 1841 the state had begun to demand of the towns full records of births, marriages and deaths, lumped under the new and ornate title of "vital statistics." The towns had the independence to pay slight attention to the demand. Of what concern at Boston could be the knowledge that such a couple, both of the town by generations of ancestors, had married ; or that some aged person, whose life had been of so little account that his passing was hardly noted by his neighbors, had died; or that a child had been born in a household already overblessed in that fashion? Such records were not even kept by the town; if anybody wanted information of the sort, the family Bible had it fully written between the Apocrypha and the New Testa- ment. In the report of this new and interfering activity of the state for 1843, it was admitted that Boston, now a city, was refusing or failing to supply its statistics. Northfield, in this instance, stood with Boston.
In the same spirit, the state was undertaking to regulate in some fashion the care of the poor. Northfield had an ancient pride in its provision for the needy. It had steadfastly refused to deposit them in an almshouse ; it never had a poorhouse. It sought no advice from the capital and it mildly resented inquiry. Again, there was being undertaken a search for the insane and the idiotic. The town cared for its occasional crazy person humanely; it was considerate, even kindly, towards its fools, of which it had a few. Could the state do better?
Resentment of the state's interference as to the insane was soft- ened in Northfield by the fact that the leader in the enterprise was Dr. Edward Jarvis, who was gratefully remembered in the town where he had begun practice. In fact, he had been the leader in the campaign for "vital statistics." His "Report on Insanity and Idiocy in Massachusetts" in 1855 was a wonderful product of great study and sound reasoning. It was, on the whole, interesting reading. It was really the report of a Commission on Lunacy but the other commissioners (Levi Lincoln and Increase Sumner) said it was "due to the intelligence, ability and fidelity of our laborious and indefatiga- ble associate, Dr. Jarvis, to state ... that the draft of the report is from his pen."
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Doctor Jarvis made out a great case for better care of the insane than keeping them in dark dungeons; but Northfield did nothing like that. He had counted all the lunatics in the state-and it was cheer- ing that he found only two in Northfield, while smaller towns like Montague, Shutesbury and Whately had six each, while Deerfield actually had ten. When it came to idiots, the town scored higher, with four males and one female, while most of the towns had only two, one or none. Perhaps idiots were more clearly recognized in Northfield, by virtue of contrast to average intelligence; and it was something that four of the five were "independent" against one who was a pauper. Even a fool in Northfield could be independent. Thus some comfort was gained by reading Dr. Jarvis' learned report.
More determined was the state's invasion of town management of the public schools. In 1836, a state board of education had been created. There could have been no thought that any part of the actual control of the schools could be taken over by the state. For two centuries they had been local institutions. The one requirement was that the towns should support schools and now there was not a Massachusetts town that failed to do so. In 1789 control was carried even closer to the people by the creation of school districts within the towns. The school district was the purest jewel of democracy. Its authority was final and rested in the hands of the people of the neighborhood. Each had its own committee. In 1840 there were three hundred and seven towns in the state and over twenty-five hun- dred school districts, each completely self-governing. A supervising town committee had been provided by legislation in 1827 but it had next to no power, none indeed beyond visiting and making an annual report. What was there for the Commonwealth to do in such a situa- tion? The answer was being furnished in the form of annual state reports that were unsparing in criticism and prolific in advice.
The state board had at the outset employed a secretary by the name of Horace Mann, a name that very promptly came to be known in every corner of the Commonwealth. His first great stroke had been the creation of state normal schools, for the training of teachers. The first was opened at Lexington in 1839, the second in Barre, the same year, and the third in Bridgewater in 1840. Next he set up county conventions, to which the towns might send their school committees to hear Mr. Mann assail the imperfections and shortcomings of their
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towns and rejoin as best they could. They could return home as free as they came, to do or not to do according to the degree of their acceptance of Mr. Mann's vigorous advice.
By 1841, in his fourth annual report, the secretary was able to show some results of his campaigning. The average length of the school year in the towns had advanced from six months and twenty- five days to seven months and ten days-a gain of a fortnight. The monthly pay of teachers had been increased from $25.44 to $33.08 for man and from $11.38 to $12.75 for female teachers. But this valiant reformer had but begun. He declared there were too many schools-more than three thousand in the state when there should be only nineteen hundred. The schools should be conducted by the towns but he admitted, with a perfectly audible groan, that it was not probable the school districts would ever be abandoned. He had secured legislation in 1838 permitting districts to combine and this process was his hope of relief. Forty children was the minimum for a good school and twelve hundred in the state had fewer. The schools were attended by "scholars" from four years old to twenty and, in instances, from two and a half to twenty-five, all under one teacher. The general regulations were the same, he observed, for infants but just out of the cradle and for men who had been enrolled for seven years in the militia.
Mr. Mann's terrific assaults on the public schools were made endurable by his constructive advice and by his buoyant recognition of every forward step. He found the towns responsive in a degree. In 1841 he could look back a decade and say that by now there was not a single public school in Massachusetts which would not be re- garded as tolerably good. There were indications that school commit- tees were awakening, that the incompetence of teachers was being discovered and that the painful irregularity of attendance was being reduced. He offered up thanks that one town in the state, Springfield, had taken the novel step of employing a superintendent of schools at a salary of one thousand dollars. More female teachers were being employed and they were incomparably better than males for young children. But he was unsparing in his denunciation of private schools, which the people of the state maintained for common school instruc- tion with a total expenditure ($241,114) half as much as they were taxed for public schools ($447,221).
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That such assertions of the state's concern about what had been purely local affairs were not seriously resented was due to the realiza- tion that the town had everything to gain and that it lost none of its real authority. In each feature the new state boards and officials asserted no control. The towns could neglect the needy, retain the lunatics instead of sending them to the state hospital, and allow the schools to be poorly taught and badly attended, even though they could no longer escape criticism for so doing.
Northfield, in the eighteen-fifties, had district schools to the limit of subdivision. Only the one in the centre was divided on the age basis-the "primary" and the promiscuous "upper." Within the vil- lage there were three other schoolhouses, each with single room, "scholars" of all ages and sizes and teachers of widely varying fitness -No. 2, in the Alexander and Moody neighborhood at the northerly end of "the street"; No. 3 at the "Upper Farms"; No. 9, "out east" on the road to the mountain. At the lower Farms had been built a two-story schoolhouse, the added story for a neighborhood hall ; across the river were two more of the common type and in the hills to the East were two more. If each of them had one or more or many of the faults Horace Mann was vigorously assailing, they were the centres of neighborhood interest and pride, more or less justified according to the chance of employment of good or poor teachers. Nearly all the teachers were "females"-town girls, products of the same schools and fully competent in the "common school" branches which were little more than the "three R's." Attendance was op- tional and irregular. Summer terms would have few "scholars" and winter terms would be crowded.
The register of the primary division of the centre school showed for the summer term of 1850, beginning May Ist and ending Sep- tember 9th, an enrolment of thirty-one and for the winter term, December 2nd to February 21st, one of 49. A niece of Deacon Dutton, the chairman of the superintending committee, Adaline M. Dutton, taught the former and Mary A. Lord, the sixteen-year-old daughter of another leading citizen, confronted the winter aggrega- tion, with pupils ranging from Margarette Kieffe, barely four years old, to a boy of one of the old families who was nearly thirteen and one exceptional student, also of ancient stock, who was all of seven- teen. Horace Mann could have said something about this school in
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particular if he were not so busy saying pointed things about the schools of the day, in general, of which this was typical, but he would have rejoiced in this sort of "female" teachers.
Northfield was showing a response to the disturbing Secretary Mann's preachment, as far as was possible with actual control resting in district "prudential" committeemen. It took care to choose the superintending committee from its best citizens-just now Deacon Dutton, a man trusted with all the major responsibilities of town affairs, Charles Mattoon, Esq., its one lawyer, soon to become the county judge of probate, and young Elias Lyman, who had proved his worth by being able to handle that most difficult of all teach- ing tasks, a winter school. The committee's reports were echoes, mild but distinct, of the secretary's criticisms. The districts were pay- ing higher wages to the teachers, although not in all these years see- ing fit to employ one from the normal schools. Private schools did not exist for the common school sort of "scholars." Indeed, the town had some difficulty in maintaining a private school for advanced in- struction and was seriously considering building a town hall, the upper story of which should be used for a high school. The Academy build- ing had been used for a temperance hotel after Phineas Allen gave up his school enterprise, an inn whose name pointed a contrast to the sort first kept there in the days of Captain Hunt and his wet "sun- dries." In the early days the big building had been revamped and opened as an Institute of Learning, with high pretensions under the guidance of Alexander Bruce, a college man of courage and culture.
CHAPTER XXXIV NEW TOWN HALL, A SYMBOL
Higher Oratory, Livelier Politics, Greater Sociability
THE PROJECT OF A NEW FEATURE-a town hall-appeared in a town-meeting of March 6, 1850, held in the basement of the Unita- rian meeting-house. Already land had been purchased of James O. Webb, a relative by marriage of the late General Nevers and living in the spacious house which the General built. A contract that had been made with Jonathan Minot, the Boston man who had chosen North- field for his residence, and others, contemplated a combined town hall and schoolhouse. Now the town had changed its mind and the meet- ing chose a committee to bring about a settlement with Mr. Minot. A motion to deed back Mr. Webb's land was "not sustained" and the selectmen were authorized to settle as best they could. Another meeting, held April I to consider purchasing land for a town hall, dismissed the whole matter.
It was not till four years later that the town-hall project again appeared. The March meetin' voted to raise $500 to purchase land and at another, held March 13, it was voted to build, by a vote of 210 to 120. A site offered by George Alexander was accepted and $3,250, a sum that was denounced as extravagant, was voted for the building. Two weeks later the site was changed, when it was voted, 181 to 40, to locate on the southwest corner of Arad Alex- ander's garden. By fall, the appropriation proved insufficient and, on October 14, an additional sum of $610 was voted for stone steps, settees and heating apparatus, meaning, of course, wood-burning furnaces.
The town hall, which came into use late in 1854, was an imposing but by no means ornate structure. Its interior was a spacious hall, with a shallow gallery with level floor, from only the front seats of which a view could be had of any part of the main floor. Under the gallery were rooms for the town officers. A platform at the farther
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end of the hall carried a long, ornamental, black walnut desk. The transcendent feature was the windows. They were nearly the height of the room and the ten by eighteen panes were of all the colors that glass could carry. The color effect upon the town-meeting was hardly short of startling. The voters were green, blue, purple, yellow, according to their location. In the course of the day-long annual meeting on a sunny March day, the citizen of the most unyielding mind would rival the chameleon in change of hue. At night it was lighted by chandeliers of kerosene lamps.
The town hall was expected to be of community use. The town voted, in 1856, to authorize the selectmen "to appoint an energetic and suitable man to take charge of the town hall and to let it at a sum not exceeding $10 a day nor less than the cost of lighting and heating." In protection of the property it was ordered "that no nails, screws, hooks or other articles shall be drove (sic) into the walls or woodwork under any circumstances whatever without the consent and direction of the selectmen." The hall came at once into use for dances, lectures, debates, church fairs, annual maple-sugar and straw- berry festivals, political rallies and travelling shows, Professor Har- rington's and Comical Brown's along with the rest. It developed one unplanned feature, a remarkable echo, somewhat diminished when crowded but adding resounding effect to town-meeting oratory.
It was observed that town-meeting oratory took on new fervor and eloquence in the new setting. Every March meetin' was a field day for certain citizens who had cultivated a Websterian style. Some- what of its majesty was shown in the resolutions in protest against the separation of Hack's Grant from the town.
Hack's Grant was a tract of one hundred and eighty-one acres near Grouts Corner that had been retained by Northfield when the town of Erving had been set off. There were five houses on the tract. It was an island of Northfield entirely surrounded, not by water, but by Erving. The latter town had petitioned for its annexation and the legislature ordered Northfield to show cause why it should not be severed from her ancient territory. It did so in these terms-"After due deliberation it is resolved that this meeting views with surprise and regret the interference of the Selectmen of Erving with the cor- porate and private rights of the town and citizens of Northfield by petition recommending a dismemberment of the town by annexing Hack's Grant to Erving when all its inhabitants so earnestly protest
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against so onerous a burden being inflicted upon them and their interest.
"To sever the inhabitants of the 181 acres from the pleasant and flourishing town of Northfield and annex them to the small, moun- tainous and sterile town of Erving must involve a sacrifice severe and oppressive in the extreme.
"A separation from their school association which enjoys the in- come of a fund of considerable amount, besides a large and commo- dious schoolhouse with all the apparatus for useful instruction, is also an interference with municipal interest in the town of Northfield, to which they have been so long used and to which they have con- tributed a liberal share, which must damp the ardor of a commend- able ambition and awaken the most painful sensibilities of the present and future generations."
Representative Samuel Holton was instructed to use all honorable means to resist the petition and (Query, did this fall outside "all honorable means"?) that he be authorized to employ Samuel C. Allen, late of Northfield, now of East Boston, to appear before the committee of the legislature to carry into effect the Northfield reso- lution. The protest was ineffective and the inhabitants of Hack's Grant were consigned to the mercies of the "small, mountainous and sterile town."
After the political excitement of 1840, the year of "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too," there was a period of calm. The Whigs rested upon the victory which put an end to the Jacksonian regime and were forced to an ashamed silence by the disappointment of the Tyler adminis- tration. The election of Polk in 1844 was accepted as a rebuke to Whig pretensions. The war with Mexico, unpopular in New England, had brought new political issues and the appearance of a new party outrightly opposed to slavery. It also brought a new hero into the political field-General Zachary Taylor, who in 1848 was nominated by the Whigs, again defeating Henry Clay and painfully disappoint- ing Daniel Webster, for whom Massachusetts voted solidly through- out the convention. In a speech at Marshfield during the campaign, Webster declared the Taylor nomination as one "not fit to be made." But he stayed Whig and Massachusetts stood with him. Then fol- lowed his "Seventh of March speech," in 1850, which aroused the anti-slavery men of Massachusetts to denunciation, bitterly voiced in John G. Whittier's "Ichabod." The election of the New Hampshire
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