USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 31
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On the site of the first stockade, where the beleagured little hamlet
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of 1675 heard the hopeless gunfire of the Beers battle, at this time lives Dr. Elijah Stratton, deep-voiced practitioner of medicine and sur- gery. In him converge the lines from Hezekiah, the resolute towns- man who in Indian war days had successfully resisted the plan to abandon the wide street and had fought with Kellogg, and from the Holtons and Smiths of the first plantation. It is his daughter, Mary, who is pursuing the sober task of copying all the epitaphs in the old cemetery for the town history now being written by that searching pair of antiquaries, Temple and Sheldon.
The dignified cottage, next in line, built by George Stearns, had been for a time occupied by Joseph S. Beach and his Southern wife, whom he later left a widow with eight children. It had been con- sidered an act of courage on the part of another resident of the neighborhood, Albert C. Parsons, himself a widower with two chil- dren, when he married the widow Beach with her flock but he won a wife of rare charm, and two more children had been added to reach the traditional New England of a dozen. The cottage was now occupied by Edwin M. Alexander, straight in ancestral line from the first settlers, a grandson of the town's outstanding citizen of his time, Colonel Medad, and signifying in his name, Edwin Moody, the cousinship to the numerous family of Betsey Holton Moody, the widow of his namesake. Just now he was postmaster of the General Court at Boston.
Where Judge Mattoon had until recently lived, now dwells Albert Richard Lyman, the town's one marketman, grandson of Colonel James Lyman and of a line that runs back to the valley's first days with Janes and Wright ancestry as well. His wife, a talented musi- cian, was a Brooks from Brattleboro and a probable descendant of the pioneers of Northfield by that name.
Next along the street was another of the Stearns' houses, this one the home of Albert D. Stearns, one of the building family, in straight line from the Isaac Stearns of Watertown, whose wife was the sister of Northfield's earliest hero, Captain Richard Beers. This Stearns had twice married into the Priest family, not ancient in Northfield but amply so in the Bay Colony.
Any survey of the street a year earlier would have halted at the next step for admiration of the most extensive and floral of Northfield gardens. It was then the home of James Mattoon, with the familiar
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Mattoon ancestry and his wife, a Field, the daughter of Elisha, the sea captain. The couple had somehow come to be identified in town nomenclature as Uncle Jim and Aunt Jim, not because there was any shortage of individuality in the latter. She was indeed the masterful personality of the household, with Uncle Jim giving an impression of unwelcome but complete subjugation. Combined with her strenuous traits was an artistic one that ran to writing verses that found place in the poets' corner of the county paper and to the cultivation of flowers-wonderful flowers, protected from invasion by her own re- sistance to visitors, reinforced by a strong and high picket fence, albeit she was at moments most generous in gifts from her garden, as the chancel of the church often proved. The house had just passed into the hands of Charles H. Green, a new citizen.
In William Pomeroy's house, of a half-century's history, was now Jonathan Minot, retired Bostonian, and under its roof the alliance with the town's ancestral distinction was through the marriage of his son, Rufus, the style-leader of prewar days who had quite failed to keep the pace of fashion, to Marie Antoinette, Captain Henry Alex- ander's daughter. The middle name had been favored and as An- toinette she was known as a woman of culture and grace, the teacher through the years of numerous boys in the First Parish Sunday School.
Passing the old store, once Pomeroy's, where Thomas Power long ago had his second-story office, the centre of the town's trade under the later ownership of Murdock, then Hastings and now Webster, the imposing house on the old Munsell lot is at this time the home of Phineas Wright, another of the three Bostonians to retire to North- field. The line of ancient heritage breaks here as in spite of the local flavor of the name, this Wright seems not to fit into Northfield origin. A son had married Cynthia Brown, of a family not old in Northfield but distinguished by the close relationship to the now famous sculp- tor, Henry Kirke Brown, her uncle.
In the house beyond, there dwells the widow Lydia Everett, who had married late in his life Oliver Everett, the father of the minister of the old church, and herself the grand-daughter of Rev. Benjamin Doolittle, Northfield's outstanding minister in the eighteenth century.
The new First Parish church, in process of building, is on the cor- ner of the road to both the depot and the cemetery, the road which was irreverently spoken of as the way out of Northfield by one route
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or another. On the other corner is one of the old houses, made mod- ern, now the home of Lewis Taylor Webster, the merchant and, so long as Republicans are in power, the postmaster. He is scion of the Connecticut Websters, one of whom was that State's colonial gov- ernor, and of the family that for three generations had been foremost in Northfield affairs. Close neighbor is the Lord family, into which Lewis Webster had married, the father being Franklin Lord, of old Ipswich stock back to 1636, allied to Northfield by his marriage into the historic Stratton family.
A store that had some time been that of George A. Arms, now a Greenfield merchant, and of Windsor Fay, whose trade had shrunken to a much smaller shop just up the street, is now the headquarters of Samuel Y. Walker, merchant and tobacco dealer. For the first time the survey reaches a complete break in local connection, this vigorous trader having no town ties. As a buyer of the principal product of the Northfield meadows, he is regarded as more shrewd than gen- erous and suffers under an accumulation of resentment by tobacco growers who have found that he had captured their crop at too low a price. "In New York," he has said, "I am S. Y. Walker, the gentle- manly tobacco buyer; in Northfield I am Sam Walker, the d-d thief and liar." Which will stand as an example of his gift in exag- geration of an actual fact.
An imposing, pillar-fronted house, dating well back in the cen- tury, is at this time the home of Albert S. Stratton, the town's wealth- iest man. Not so long ago he had been the miller on the Warwick road but when he fell heir to the fortune of a bachelor uncle, a widely known dental surgeon of Brattleboro, he brushed the meal-dust from his coat and came into the street as the town's biggest capitalist. His was the distinctive Northfield Stratton ancestry.
The house in which Timothy Swan had lived and written the standard psalm tunes, "China" and "Poland" and many others, long since lost the seclusion from the street afforded by a small forest of Lombardy poplars and is now the home of the merchant, Fay, with his little store on the street line and no discoverable Northfield relationship.
General Nevers' stately house on the corner of the Meadow road is now the home of Colonel Charles Pomeroy, his title won by service ยท on the staff of a governor who was looking for a handsome farmer for this military distinction and made no error in his choice of the im-
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posing tall and broad scion of a distinguished Connecticut valley family. He has been the county's high sheriff and is now as near a judge as the town has, its one trial justice, before whom small civil disputes and criminal acts come to judgment and by whom occasional marriages are performed, never without the protest of his more rev- erent wife who holds that marriage should always be solemnized by prayer ; justices do not pray when they marry. Colonel Pomeroy is the grandson of Dr. Medad, great-grandson of General Seth of Revo- lutionary fame, of whom Washington spoke highly, and farther back descendant of the clerk of the first proprietors of Northfield and, as well, of the Hunts and the Alexanders of Northfield's past.
More Mattoons-John L., in the house on the site of Micah Mudge's second-settlement home, a bachelor farmer with perhaps the largest holdings in Great Meadow. He now has the companionship of a widowed sister, recently returned from York state, after the death of her minister husband, whose son, Chester A. Arthur, is a prominent politician. Mrs. Arthur, whose first marriage was to a Mudge, leads a life of seclusion but it is said that her step-son, Gen- eral Arthur, gives her considerate attention, although it is not known that he has visited her here. Next, in a brick house which is a perfect survival of the Revolutionary period, lives another brother, Hezekiah, and his son Dwight, whose pride is in his skill in "blowing" the First Parish church organ. He matches his talent against Miss Maria Field's playing, claiming that he "can blow any tune that Miss Maria can play."
Nothing finer for a house ever stood on the street than the Dutton house, now the home of the Silas Field family, and no family has contributed more to the town's life. The one-story wings, originally flanking the house at the front, have long since been removed, with no detriment to the stately example of the hip-roof period of local architecture. The place at this time stands in the name of Franklin Field, son of Silas and brother of three maiden women whose home it is, Elizabeth, Augusta and Maria, artist, poetess and musician re- spectively. The owner has business interests in New York. The oldest of the family, Benjamin F. Field, is at the head of a shipping firm in Boston, chiefly engaged in East Indian trade, having with him the youngest, Joseph Warren Field. It was Justin Field, a brother of Silas, who married a sister of Thomas Power, Northfield's gratefully remembered benefactor. The family was as much Bostonian as North-
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fieldian, but not more so. Its members identified themselves closely with the town. Miss Maria gives time and talent generously to train- ing the native musical talent and to the home come the younger mem- bers, her brother's sons and daughter, all of them talented and all of them ready to share in the musical ventures of their aunt. There were Benjamin, Jr., familiarly "Benjy," William de Yongh and Fan- nie, basso, baritone and soprano, all of them beloved in Northfield and regarded as of it. The Silas Field family, as this branch is locally designated, is in straight descent from Captain Zechariah, one of the founders in the third settlement, and his wife, Sarah Mattoon, Deer- field captive of 1704, and by another line from Dr. Samuel Mattoon, and thus from the Partridges and Cottons, quintessence of Puritan ancestry both local and colonial.
The next house, another fine example of the four-square archi- tecture of the first years of the century, built by Obadiah Dickinson, the lawyer, had been occupied rather recently by Hugh W. Greene, Governor Andrew's councillor, and for a short time by Lewis J. Powers, now a prominent citizen of Springfield and paper manufac- turer. It is now the home of John Mattoon, who, because of having been on the Pacific coast in other years and because of stature, was distinguished from the others of identical name as "California John" or "Little John,"-a substantial citizen, a pillar of the Unitarian church and of a social rank indicated by his ownership of "a span" for pleasure driving.
An old house, standing at the corner of the road built to reach the toll bridge, with the top story converted into a photographic studio, had become the home and workshop of Joseph Brigham. Not to have been at least tin-typed by Brigham was to be a rare exception in the town. Next beyond is the three-story house built by the dis- tinguished lawyer, John Barrett, now the Brigham castle, through its possession by the elder Joseph Brigham. The Brighams seem to have escaped Northfield ancestry.
On the slope towards the brook, where the Clary fort once stood and where the family was slaughtered in second-settlement days, in the house built by Lawyer Barrett for Daniel Callender's early resi- dence, lives Henry W. Webster, one of the three brothers now here, descended from the Connecticut governor, and with a local ancestral background of Nortons, Merrimans and Chamberlains.
Just off the street, on the road along the brook, is the spacious
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house reputed to have been built by James White, clothier and sen- ator, at all events the present home of James White Cowles, son of Porter Cowles of the old valley family who allied himself with North- field by marrying the senator's daughter, Caroline, now a sprightly old lady with abundant white curls, whose equally animated maiden sister, Phidelia, had recently died. The fulling mill, which had been White's, farther down the brook, has gone and the quiet, wooded bank is now "the Glen," the picturesque retreat for the romantic and an occasional picnic spot.
Mill Brook had throughout the two centuries served as a sort of ward boundary, dividing the village, although never more definitely than into school districts. "Beyond the brook" was designation as to residence but it had long since lost any social meaning. Historically it was a slightly more modern region, but only historically so.
Here the survey of the street usually turned. On the slope of the little valley, on the easterly side of the street is the original Webster house, now the home of the third of the brothers, Charles, a bachelor, and his maiden sister, Lucy.
At the next house, in the household of Moses Field, the investi- gator if he had come a little earlier would encounter a typical tangle of ancestry with its lines running back to the town's earliest settlement and beyond that to the Dorchester settlement of 1630 by the way of Connecticut. The mother of the Field family was an Alexander, the grandmother a Lyman, and through lines of Root, Arms and Gilbert there was inter-relation with no end of the valley's first families. But the house has become the home of Peter McHugh, the one Irishman to have taken residence on the old street.
In an ancient house standing on the street line is now a Barber family, relatively new to Northfield but age-old in Warwick. Some- how, to occupancy of the next house had crept in the one actual for- eigner on the entire street, a Peter Boucher, sole permanent repre- sentative of the French Canadians who were otherwise transient woodchoppers. Then in a little pillared house, moved up from the Parsons' place, dwelt a pair of rustly old brothers, Moody and Luke, of old enough line, but the beginning and end of the name, Darling, in this town.
This is the region of the old fortified house, the Dickinson fort, the last sign of which had disappeared in the building of modern but not now new houses. In one of them there is living Walter Field,
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son of Walter and Piana, and so of the truest settlement lineage. Inter-relationship with the old families had been observed by Uncle Walter in both his marriages, the first to a Holton and the second to a Lyman, his two children being by the first, the son a lieutenant in the late war.
Puritanic ancestry and devotion to the high standards of the fathers marked the next household, that of Samuel Williams Dutton. Deacon Dutton, as everybody knew him, was third in the succession of substantial men of affairs, the merchants who were his father and grandfather and the country squire, town clerk and treasurer that he is. If there were anything lacking in far-reaching ancestry-as there is not-it would have been fully compensated for in the mar- riage of one niece into the ancient Woodruff family of Connecticut and of another quite recently to Elisha Alexander, an outstanding representative of the original Northfield family.
Quite fittingly, the Orthodox church, of which he is pillar, is Deacon Dutton's nearest neighbor. It is buttressed on the other side by the residence of its minister, Rev. Theodore J. Clark, in whom his flock are happy, as well they might be in a Christian leader of the purest merit. He is of the distinctive valley family of Clarks.
In the four-square house at the corner of the old Warwick road, built by Dr. Blake, is a Phelps from Hebron, the Connecticut town which is more Phelps than all else combined, and probably, because Mudges and Phelpses intermarried there, a descendant of Micah, the Northfield pioneer, whose second-settlement house stood, in its time, directly opposite.
In the fork of the roads now stands the two-story building which was owned on the ground by the school district and in the air by Harmony Lodge of Masons. Then the Bee-Hive, home of the "hoss- hoe" and the "select school," rather dismal reminder of the gay days of Hunt's tavern and the temporarily flourishing Academy. In the house different from any other is Dr. Philip Hall, also different in that he has long since ceased to have a patient or to seek one.
To the Rev. Thomas Mason's house had recently come David West Allen, his wife, Priest Mason's daughter, and her sister, Miss Elizabeth Mason, a quality household with Bay Colony ancestors in abundance, the Allen line converging a few generations back with the ancestry of the Samuel C. Allens, father and son.
Charles Osgood, quite the leading Democrat of the town, learned
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and on occasion oratorical, in the next house, came to Northfield as preceptor of the Academy, is of the distinguished Bay family of the name, and the household linked to Northfield through his wife being a Parsons, descendant of the Priors and of the old Enfield, Connecti- cut, Collinses. Mr. Osgood was postmaster in days before the war, long the town clerk and a member of the constitutional convention of 1853.
Houghton's tavern of earlier days, when it was social and politi- cal headquarters for the town, had now long been carried on by one of the Mattoons and has but just passed to a newcomer, typical country-inn host, James Pickard, whose ancestry would be found in Newton genealogies.
In Dr. Medad Pomeroy's house, which years ago had set the style in hip-roofs, are now two Alexanders, George and Elisha, father and son, preservers of the family trade as blacksmiths. The name speaks volumes of Northfield ancestry throughout all the two centuries.
Passing the town hall, antiquity of race runs on in the Belcher household, Col. Jonathan, hatter in the days of hat-making, his wife a Whiting, further assurance of Northfield antecedents. Its occupants now are the sisters, Mary Ann and Eliza, quality women, one the town's best maker of dresses, the other the "primary" school teacher, and their bachelor brother, William.
This is the region of Captain Benjamin Wright associations and on his lot, occupied in the second settlement by the doughtiest of In- dian scouts who as a boy was in the beleaguered group of 1675, now lives his descendant, the thrifty bachelor, Henry Wright, and his sister Martha.
In the house built by the merchant prince and river shipmaster, Isaac Prior, is now Joel Fay, one of the trio of Bostonians who had retired upon Northfield before the Civil War days. Then in a queer pair of cottages, linked like the Siamese twins, is the kindliest imagin- able of country doctors, Marshall Spring Mead, here since the 1820's, uncle of Larkin G. Mead, famous as a sculptor, the doctor's wife a daughter of Dr. Charles Blake, once surgeon on the old Constitu- tion, and so the grand-daughter of Governor Jonathan Hunt of Ver- non, thus leading back to the Hunts of the second settlement.
The tour of the town is just too late to find another John Mattoon in the house once the home of the merchant, Brewer. He was one of the four or more Johns of this period, distinguished among them as
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"Lame John." Through his wife, a Bennet, there is possible but un- traced descent from the first settlement Bennets and Broughtons. Now the owners are two Russell brothers, carpenters, new to the town but of colonial stock.
Another recent transfer has followed the death of the last survivor in the town of the old Watriss family, which had filled a large place in town affairs, but the ancient house is still the home of one of an old valley family, Martin Dickinson, who had been called to North- field as an expert tobacco grower by one of the most extensive farmers, Thomas J. Field. Ancestry was the least of his concerns and it did not bother him that in local economy of speech he was familiarly Mart Dick. The house is one of the oldest and perhaps actually the oldest on the street, with traditional great fireplace, broad boards and early-day panelling, concealed now, as modern fashions required, be- hind plastered and papered walls ; in the cellar, a great arch of ancient brick upholds the tradition, as it also does the now hidden fireplace. Mrs. Dickinson, a Hayden and of the family which had furnished a lieutenant-governor of the State, is the gracious and devoted step- mother of her sister's five children.
A long building, which had once been the Parsons' boot factory, has at its front the Social Library, founded by Thomas Power and his associates, now grown to several hundred volumes with no corre- sponding increase in readers. Its librarian is Albert Collins Parsons, living in the house where he was born, whose occupations include those of assessor of the federal government's revenue, farmer and town-meeting moderator in perpetuity, pillar of the First Parish, an original anti-slavery man and, now that this issue is removed, the ardent advocate of temperance. There had recently died here a much respected man, the tanner of many years ago, who had been totally blind for forty of his ninety-three years, an example of cheer under an affliction which had stopped his activity in middle life, Jabez Par- sons. Through him and by his marriage to a Prior, the family line runs back to the first of Connecticut settlers, thence to the early ones of the Bay Colony and, through the Collins ancestry, to the May- flower in the person of William Bradford, governor. It is this house- hold that is graciously presided over by the Southern woman who once was a widow with eight-Susan Lane Beach, now Mrs. Parsons.
Dame Cook and her cat, Beauregard, who seemed to be in about the seventh of a cat's nine lives, maintain the solemn dignity of the
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next house, which not long since ceased to be the seat of her dame school. Here she dwells in snuff-taking seclusion, an almost witch- like terror to the neighbors' children. Her ancestry was clear to the Puritans, through the Goodriches, but as foreign to Northfield as was the next town of Gill, her girlhood home.
This is the Stearns' neighborhood. The imposing high-pillared house is the home of the widow of Captain Samuel Lane, a daughter of Calvin Stearns, and here again the ancestry is Puritan, leading back to the first days of Watertown. One of the brothers, who had built more Northfield houses than any other carpenter, lives in the adjoin- ing one, Charles Henry Stearns ; and by his marriage to Mrs. Sophia Spafford, born a Field, the next generation traces descent from that worthy of the third settlement, Seth Field, the Squire.
Just a half-century before this time, the north room of the square house on the corner of the South Warwick road was the recruiting office for the Sea Fencibles of the war of 1812. It was then and is now a Field house, its occupants being "Uncle" Timothy and "Aunt" Lucretia, brother and sister of Silas, Justin, Esq. and Captain Elisha and with them having Northfield ancestry back to the beginning. Uncle Timothy's wife, some years dead, was a daughter of Obadiah Dickinson, the squire.
On the other corner is another Field house, on the tract that was Seth Field's homestead, occupied for a generation or two by the Lord family and now by Joseph Young. The house was once a tav- ern, conducted by Zechariah Field and exchanged by him for the Lord tavern in Athol, by which transaction the Lord family secured its Northfield foothold.
The survey of the street fittingly ends with two Matoon houses, the present occupants being another John and Isaac, and the home of a Wright-John, great-grandson of Col. Phineas, delegate to the provincial congress, and descendant of that Captain Samuel, who lost his life in the attack on the first white inhabitants in September, 1675.
By the house-to-house survey of the old "street" it is disclosed that at the end of the second century from the original settlement of the town its population was almost purely Puritan in its origins, with a marked preponderance descendant from the town's pioneers. To be of pioneer stock it was enough to have come from those who a cen- tury and a half before had permanently established the town. Many
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