USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 30
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Certain years in the traditions of the town were marked as those in which the Great River executed an unusual performance. Each such would be remembered as the flood year until another with like demonstration came to replace it. There was the flood of 1863 to be talked about until it was dethroned by a supreme event in 1869, making it thenceforth "the year of the flood."
Occasionally there was a local showing of nature's power to be remembered. The tornado of 1821 was firmly fixed in history. Sun- day, September ninth in that year, was one of the belated hot days that rival midsummer. Suddenly, in the afternoon, which had been free from storm, a dark spiral cloud gathered on the mountain east of the town and moved to its crest and over to the Warwick hills beyond. As it moved, it carried all before it, uprooting the forest and destroying all the houses in its narrow path. Such of their households as sought safety in the cellar might escape but in one of them two lives were lost. Houses and barns were lifted from their foundations. A horse was picked up and carried a distance and one swine was seized in his pen and carried into the woods. The track extended for several miles across the fortunately thinly settled portion of Northfield and Warwick, leaving complete desolation behind and for years after the scar of its course was clearly marked.
On the afternoon of June 7, 1867, somewhere up in the hills near Old Crag, thunder clouds which had been rolling in blackness came to an aerial combat and burst into a downpour that in an instant turned Millers Brook into a torrent. With a roar, the stream rushed down its narrow valley, swept every bridge away and carried the ruins
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of the saw-mills on its flood. At the little schoolhouse, Number 9, on the easterly side of the village, the first warning of the unusual was the crash of a balsam tree, broken off at its base, followed almost instantly by the flood which surrounded the building, rose to the level of its floor and made escape impossible. The school's teacher, who that day left her name, Minnie Bliss, imprinted for life on the minds of the children, gathered them about her and told them that what had come so suddenly must as quickly go away. When the flood passed, the bridge over which many of them came was gone but a butternut tree had fallen across the brook's bed and over it the father of three of them, Asa Holton, who had been in the village and hurried to the scene, carried the children one by one to the other bank. The deepest trace of the disaster was left on the town's books in the expen- diture to replace bridges and rebuild mountain roads.
Every spring, the Connecticut was swollen to a flood by the melt- ing snows of the Vermont and New Hampshire hills. The meadows along its banks were flooded without harm. Northfield dwelt in the comfort that it was elevated beyond any peril to its homes. For the rest of the year, the Great River behaved faultlessly. In October of 1869, it transgressed. Great rains suddenly carried it to an unprec- edented height. The meadows now were in harvest. The corn was in the stook and rowen in the tumble. Down came the flood. Great Meadow was a vast lake. Ferryman Stebbins' house on the high westerly bank was surrounded. The flood was strewn with the wrecks of bridges and barns swept down from the smaller streams. Count- less pumpkins bobbed on its surface. On the floating roof of a barn rode a bewildered rooster. The water rose to within a man's reach at the railroad-toll bridge. It was the highest flood of record and its damage was made serious because of its destruction of the meadow crops. When it subsided the land was strewn with wreckage and there was a campaign of the owners to identify on the land of others the corn that had been swept from theirs. The fall flood of '69 seemed to have made its place as secure in Connecticut valley tradi- tion as Noah's in Biblical record.
In no one feature were Massachusetts towns showing firmer de- votion to old notions than in their schools. A quarter-century after Horace Mann had assailed the district system, that institution was
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still firmly entrenched and a town which made claim to being pro- gressive was content to leave its neighborhoods to provide as they would and manage as they chose their own little schools, as good or as bad as they might chance to be and none of them as good as they should be. For anything beyond the common school's limited instruc- tion, parents could provide at their own cost. This they did variously and intermittently.
A subscription school was now maintained by hiring two or at most three rooms in the Bee Hive and employing a single teacher to instruct in the higher branches, necessarily a cultured person to be versed in all of them. Here, at last, was one of the products of a state normal school, Miss Mary E. Huse, brought from Framingham and having in her hands some thirty pupils, more girls than boys, ranging from fourteen to seventeen or eighteen years in age. One day the charming teacher discovered to her embarrassment that all her pupils had decorated themselves in purple-purple hair ribbons, spreading purple bows, purple neckties on the boys. It' was their gentle way of recognizing her engagement to marry a substantial farmer, owning broad acres just over the line of the town of Gill, by the colorful name of J. Smead Purple.
The deficiencies in the district school for even younger children led to the support of now and then a little group in a private house, as when for a period the widow of Robert Cook carried out certain personal notions of child-training-never having had a child of her own-in the roomy house she had inherited from her husband. She had the distinction of having taught school "down South" and in war days was suspected of Southern sympathies, confirmed by the name she gave her sole companion, a large and impressive cat, her "Beau- regard." Dame Cook lived her late days a lonesome and somewhat terrifying survivor of old times and devoted to old styles, including the rather over-indulged habit of snuff-taking.
When a new schoolhouse at the centre was built in 1800, with two stories, it was expected that it would provide for higher education. The town had then only recently considered building an Academy or high school and its narrow defeat in town-meeting might be expected to be only postponement of the project. Fifteen years having failed to bring a realization of the dream, the voters of District Number One voted to sell the upper story and a committee, of which that exponent
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of public spirit, Thomas Power, was a member, conveyed it to Heze- kiah Mattoon, who after some years sold it in undivided fourth parts to such town leaders as Calvin Stearns, the builder, Oliver Smith Mattoon and Charles Mattoon, the lawyer, retaining an eighth share each for himself and his brother, known always as John L .- without the necessity of adding the Mattoon of his name. These upper-story owners, in 1856, conveyed their elevated property to a much more numerous group of leading citizens.
Throughout this forty or more years, the schoolhouse second story was a public hall, used for all manner of purposes under the name of Union Hall. Here the succession of young women teachers in the earlier part of the period had conducted their high-class school for girls. Here social affairs and public meetings found their place, until the town hall replaced it. Finally, in April, 1865, its owners sold this negotiable second story to a committee of the Masonic Lodge, and Harmony Lodge established itself there, to remain in as complete possession as was the school district underneath.
The years in which the men who had gone into the Union army were settling back into the home life and the town's people were kept close to the tasks of making the farms yield enough to pay the war taxes and a living were years of swift national expansion. It could only be watched with a detached interest and a degree of national pride in New England. The great region beyond the Mississippi val- ley, vast organized territories not yet lifted to statehood, was attract- ing the venturesome by discoveries of gold and silver and repelling the cautious by the outbreaks of Indian violence. The first transcon- tinental railroad was making its way through the Rocky mountains. Emigration was active from the Middle West. New England capital and wealth seekers were moving into California. All of which was observed but rarely shared in from comfortable settled-down towns like Northfield.
Political issues which were deeply disturbing at Washington con- cerned chiefly the states of the South. Massachusetts was represented at the capital by Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson in the senate and most conspicuously in the other branch of congress by General Butler. The assaults of the former on President Johnson's conciliatory reconstruction policy were ardently supported by the men who had been in the Union party in the support of Lincoln, and Butler's pas-
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sionate "waving of the bloody shirt" was accepted as justifiable. In the election of 1868, there was little change from the party lines of war time and the Seymour vote was cast only by the unyielding Democrats, of whom Northfield had its disproportionate number. A mild interest had been taken in the fact that Benjamin R. Curtis had been chief of the counsel for President Johnson in his impeachment trial, confined to those who remembered Mr. Curtis in his earliest days of practice, thirty years in the past.
In recent years both of the churches had changed pastors. To the Unitarian First Parish had come Rev. Charles Noyes, a Harvard man, the son of the doctor of divinity who had made a modern translation of the Bible. The Trinitarian church had lost two ministers in suc- cession, Rev. Willard Jones, who died in 1861, and Rev. Isaac Perry, May 2, 1865. To it had come Rev. Theodore J. Clark, a native of Northampton, William College '36, Andover Theological Seminary, 1841. He was acting pastor from 1865 to 1870 and was installed August 17, 1870. Two ministers of the gospel could hardly offer greater contrast. Mr. Noyes was of modern type, debonair, of fine pulpit appearance, singularly deep voice and popular. Mr. Clark was of the true, devout, modest sort. Both were held in warm regard by their people and the significant outcome of their contrasting serv- ice was that there was the height of good feeling between the people of the two churches. Religious differences of opinion, wide as they were, carried no further than the church doors.
Christmas night of 1871, the First Parish (Unitarian) church was discovered to be on fire. It had been used for celebration in the eve- ning and the fire resulted from a defective furnace flue. The town was always helpless in face of fire and the usual total destruction fol- lowed. In it the Paul Revere bell, which had pealed from the old meeting-house, standing out in the street, up to 1832, and from the one which replaced it through the gift of William Pomeroy, fell and was melted to a shapeless mass. Rev. Charles Noyes now found a field for ardent work in securing the money for a new church building and in it he scored the crowning success of his pastorate.
CHAPTER XXXVI TWO CENTURIES OLD, OF ONE BLOOD
House by House, a Common Origin and Individual Character
Now-the year is 1869-it was two centuries since Daniel Gookin, gentleman, and his three companions had discovered the region which was now Northfield. He was without expressed honor in the town which came to be settled because of his favorable report upon its location for a plantation. Had he been blessed with a more pleasing name, the town might have been christened in his memory. It was indeed a name that had all but disappeared, and with it the distinc- tion that was due this leading citizen in the Bay Colony, the major- general of its troops, the companion of John Eliot in Christian labors with the Indians, the constant "assistant" to the governor. The occa- sional lineal descendant could claim that what was of worth in his blood had been preserved in the Quincy and Adams families-and that they owed their merit to Gookin ancestry. His daughter had married the first Edmund Quincy and was the ancestress of all the Quincys in America, as well as of the Adams line after John, the second president.
Of the other explorers in the quartette, Captain Prentice had been represented in the land of their discovery by Dr. Samuel Prentice, descendant in the sixth generation, who had been in practice here in the early part of the present century. He had built on a knoll rising from the street a part of a house, to which he had planned to add an imposing front. It stood now much as he left it, the home of the town's one dentist, Charles Shepardson. Dr. Prentice had moved to Vermont and his son, who had married the Northfield tavern- keeper's daughter, Lucretia Houghton, had been for twelve years in the United States Senate and later a federal judge. Another son had been a founder of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, its mayor and throughout a long life a leading citizen. Captain Henchman's descendants had remained in Boston and one of them in Revolutionary days had
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given the Hancocks their start in business. Leftenant Beers, six years after his sharing in the discovery, had come back to the settlement as captain of a relief party, to die and rest in a grave on the hill-top from which he first saw the valley. In Watertown, the Beers' home, his sister had married Isaac Stearns, ancestor of the Stearns family, represented here by the house-building brothers.
Interest in the town's beginnings or in its history had never been ardent or general. Present-day affairs had kept everybody occupied. Occasionally a citizen would show concern in old days and old things but he was regarded as odd, if not a bore. An exception, whose lively telling of old-time tales made him a welcome visitor to the town of his birth, was Deacon Phinehas Field, whose brother, Moses, and no end of other relatives were here. The deacon was one of a knot of men and women who had started an antiquarian society in Deerfield. Presently Northfield was invaded by two antiquaries who began a campaign of search and inquiry into old records and family Bibles, which had hitherto been paid the respect of privacy. One was a minister from Framingham, who had gone antiquarian and was mak- ing a profession of it, the Rev. Josiah Howard Temple. The other was a substantial, shrewd and intelligent scion of an old Deerfield family, George Sheldon.
There was no attic safe from the antiquarians' invasion and no tradition proof against their acid test. The first outcome of their at- tack was a celebration of the bi-centennial of the town's first settle- ment and the second was a "History of Northfield with Genealogies." If it had not been for the celebration there would not have been the "History." Of all social affairs none was in greater favor than a picnic -and the celebration was an all-day picnic. It was held in Belding's grove, on the West side near the Vermont line. Belding's grove was the high resort for all manner of reputable festivities. Moreover, there was a band, a full-blown brass band, from Hinsdale, and it was not often Northfield echoes were stirred by such music, albeit this was an era when brass bands were in high favor.
The celebration of the two-hundredth birthday was a dignified and serious affair. It was held September 12, 1872, the significance of the year being that the town had its first settlement in 1672. The morning was devoted to the dedication of a monument at the side of the road leading to Pauchaug meadow, marking the spot where
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Nathaniel Dickinson and Asahel Burt were killed and scalped by the Indians, April 15, 1746. The monument now built bore only Dickin- son's name. Burt was just as much killed as was Dickinson but he had the misfortune not to have descendants in the town or still interested in it. The Burts had in their day been one of Northfield's most sub- stantial families but they had scattered themselves over New Hamp- shire and Vermont. Even though there were judges and other dig- nitaries among them they seemed to have forgotten their slain and scalped ancestor, as the blankness of the monument as to him elo- quently indicated. The Dickinsons were in evidence of the day, even to having one of them, the venerable Mrs. Polly Holton, ninety-two years old, singled out for honor as the granddaughter of Nathaniel, slain one hundred and forty-two years agone.
The monument duly dedicated, the line of carriages made its way down the main street and through the mid-day darkness of the toll bridge, bringing up at Belding's grove. Here there was such an output of speeches as the town had never before experienced. Mr. Sheldon, the president, was sprightly and entertaining, as was even more so the story-telling Deacon, Phinehas Field. Mr. Temple was ponderous in his deliverance of over twelve thousand words of history. For full measure Deacon Brown, Artemas Washburn and Joseph Stebbins of Vernon, once a part of Northfield, made real contributions of folk lore and an unending list of other visitors were permitted to speak as a reward for having travelled distances to be here.
Incidentally there had been pointed out the rock in the town street where Aaron Belding was killed, the last victim of savagery, and the people were shown a crude inscription cut upon its face by that old Revolutionary survivor and beneficiary of the town's kindly charity, Thomas Elgar, long since dead. According to Mr. Sheldon, the people of the town had, to an extent, not known there was such an inscrip- tion nor indeed that the rock had such history-evidence that anti- quarian matters had been outside the pale of local interest. Not so, from now on. The people were convinced there must be much to be said if all that Temple had told today was only a sample. It was certain at the day's end that there would be a History of Northfield with Genealogies.
At the end of its second century the town was nearly as pure English as in its first settlement. The decided majority of its people
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were descendants of original settlers, in one of the three attempts to establish a town. There was a considerable aristocracy based on descent from the brave little group of 1672 to 1675-but they asserted no distinction in a population so closely inter-related as to make the town exceptionally homogeneous even among towns of its kind. No race distinct from their own had invaded the town until within the past quarter-century.
In the very middle of the present century Massachusetts had re- ceived a great number of Irishmen. They had come, generally bring- ing their families with them, under the impulse of the great famine in their native land. Northfield received its group of them at the time of the building of the railroad and the bridge across the Connecticut. They had settled here, bringing a valuable accession to the town in farm labor and household service and had readily adjusted themselves to the town. They had built their modest and invariably neat and attractive homes or had acquired existing ones, such as the little group on the Warwick road that had once housed the workers in the dis- tillery, the industry that had gone out about the time they came in.
There was now a racial and religious line of distinction in the town. It was not deliberately drawn but existed through a fine understand- ing by the people on each side of it-the Yankee and the Irish. There was no social denial and no social assertion. There was mutual respect and mutual good feeling, a ready acceptance of the situation. The newcomers were industrious, thrifty, orderly, conforming to the standards of the community and bringing their own equally strict code of conduct. That in the twenty-five years there had been no intermarriage was a tribute no more to one than the other. It required no compulsion to bring the Irish children to school; they were there at tenderer age than the Yankee children and they were easily match- ing the brightest of the scions of the old stock; in class and on the playground there was no trace of distinction. The town had gained a valuable addition to its life, recognized it and saw nothing in it to talk about.
Whenever money was to be raised for a town or church project, whenever there was calculation as to how the vote would go in the next election, or whenever there was an exercise of the less purposeful
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practice of estimating the financial standing of each household, the uniform method was to "begin at the south end of the street" and proceed seriatim, up one side and down the other. Applied to the problem of what proportion of the Northfield at the end of two centuries had settlement ancestry, it would have established the per- sistency of the now somewhat ancient stock.
In the house at the corner of the street and the road to the ferry, the house built by Daniel Callender early in the century, with its deep front yard adorned with towering smoke bushes, was Joseph B. Callender, clerk of the First Parish, leader in the choir and favorite speaker on important occasions. The Callenders were relatively recent to Northfield, going back only three generations, but Mrs. Callender was a Field, of a pioneer family in the third settlement, descended from a Dorchester settler of 1630, also by ancestry a Mattoon and a Petty-equally pioneer. There had been a Petty ancestor in the second settlement, another killed in an Indian scouting party, another taken captive from Deerfield to Canada and, what was of less tragic but not less picturesque interest, a grandmother christened Piana. It was a household of culture and refinement.
Back from the street in an odd and rather ornate house sometime built by Wright Stratton was the Elmer family, the head of which was the successful manufacturer of Elmer's Painkilling Balm, of which it was proclaimed on black and yellow signs along every roadway that it "cures like a charm." It was the red-hottest concoction ever named a balm, betraying capsicum in control of its patented formula. The threat of its administration was credited with accounting for the prevalent health of childhood in the town. Elmer was an Indian-war name, an ancestor having been the builder of one of the fortified houses in the exposed neighborhood over the present state line in Hinsdale.
In a cottage on the street lived "Uncle" Mark Woodard, son of a soldier under Burgoyne, himself a veteran of the war of 1812, his wife the daughter of another of the shattered British army who had floated into Northfield after the battle of Saratoga. It was modern to have only a Revolutionary ancestry.
On the Janes lot was the big-roomed house built by one of the family about 1750, now occupied, as it always had been, by descend- ants of the man who preached the first sermon to the settlers of 1672,
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under the old oak still standing a little way down the street. The venerable gentleman with snowy hair and patriarchal beard, sitting outside the quaint old doorway, is Ebenezer, son of the Xenophon Janes who in his day was a leading citizen and the town's first official organist, and the next generation is represented in Charles Xeno- phon, a Civil War veteran. In their veins flows the blood of Alex- anders and Bascombs, further mark of the first settlement.
Dr. Samuel Mattoon remodelled the next house in 1760, the oldest now standing on the street, a perfect example of the early eighteenth century architecture with its broad two-story front lined on the street and the roof sloping to a single-story at the rear. Here lives a namesake grandson, whose wife is the daughter of Jacob Moody, one of the brothers who came up from Hadley late in the previous century. The Mattoons carried, aside from their own direct ancient ancestry, descent from Wrights and Partridges, notably pioneer, and even from that family of prime distinction, the Cottons of the Bay Colony.
Another Mattoon lives in the house with pillared porch built by Isaac, son of Dr. Samuel, the present one being Oliver S., who adds to his other colonial ancestors the Smiths of the first settlement, whence his middle name. "Uncle Oliver" is one of the town's wealth- ier citizens, with a thrift that made certain no diminution of his for- tune. An air almost of tragedy hung over the house and perhaps ac- counted in a measure for the reserve that seemed always to cloak Uncle Oliver's contact with the townspeople. He had married at twenty-two a cultivated girl, the daughter of a Brattleboro physician, Charlotte Arms, and there had been seven children. All had died either in infancy, childhood or early maturity, only a daughter, Helen, a girl of fifteen, being left when the mother died, and she had followed three years later. By a second marriage, there was brought into his household a beautiful girl and just now this step-daughter was sharing with him the grief of her mother becoming violently insane, her removal to an asylum and her death there. Not from Uncle Oliver's lips would anyone ever know of his sorrows-in which he displayed not so much a characteristic of his own as that of the people among whom he lived, an unbreakable silence as to their personal afflictions.
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