USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 32
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of the people who were original to this extent could also trace their lines back to the brave frontiersmen of the second-settlement and not a few to those of the fated one of 1672. Thirty-three of the fifty- four households, slightly over sixty per cent, were of Northfield pioneer ancestry. Of the remainder, seventeen were of the earliest Bay Colony or Connecticut ancestry and among these a majority of the families had been in the town for several generations, missing by only a slight margin the pioneer distinction. There was one as recently arrived as the Revolutionary period and there were only four others that were not of the pure colonial New England stock, one Irishman, one Frenchman, each of whom had within less than five years replaced pioneer households, and two whose residence here was new and their family origins not identified.
"Between brook and brook," being that part of the town where each of the successive settlements had been undertaken, was the proper zone for a population study but the showing of continuing family and racial factors would be hardly less conclusive to the same ends if extended over the township.
"Beyond the brook," always denoting the street north of the Web- ster ponds, has the same characteristics. First there is William C. Bil- lings and his shoe-repair shop; there had been Billingses in Northfield from the time of Barnabas, the town treasurer, and it might be as- sumed that the family is the same, in absence of established relation- ship. Up the hill, another Wright, Henry, descended from the first "engager," Captain Samuel, through the Azariah line; in the ell of the house, tenderly cared for, are to be found the few town's paupers, at least in those years when some other citizen did not underbid this custodian in the annual "auctionin' off of the poor."
This is the old Burt neighborhood but their busy store has long since gone, as has the distillery down by the river and indeed the Burts themselves, not all by as violent a method as Asahel, killed by the Indians with Dickinson on Pauchaug hill and missing his com- panion's monumentation. On the street site in a spacious house is Eli Colton, of the old down-valley family, first represented here by his plow-making father, Richard.
One of the sturdy Irishmen of Northfield's colony, James Camp- bell, in the next house, is the one of the three of this part of the popu- lation who owned a Main street place, and next is Francis Fisher,
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distinctly Yankee but with an Irish wife who was the town's most strident defender of the Catholic faith. In a brick house, long stand- ing, just now is Wright Stratton, of the old family, who had lived in and owned more different houses than any other citizen. Then a Lyman-Simeon, like all the others from a "first engager" ancestor.
The perfect type of spacious Revolutionary house-building, stand- ing on the street line, with the barns coming up to the same line, and the barnyard between, the last survivor of this once common lay-out, is the home of William D. Alexander. Consistently, its owner is en- dowed with a typical Northfield ancestry, going back through the Alexanders to the first days and complicated by including the Lymans, the Swans, the Johnsons, the Dwights, the Pomeroys-an incomplete but ample list. Moreover, his wife was a Severance, which fact opens another line running back to the first days of the final settlement and enriched by no end of Indian war heroisms. The name of Dwight, associated with the earliest days of the town and its defensive fort, Dummer, had dutifully been kept current in the Lyman line and an uncle, son of Caleb Lyman, the hatter, who has recently died (1869) in his ninetieth year, carries the name of Josiah Dwight Lyman, which in turn gives possible significance to the christening of a son in a related family of the same neighborhood, Dwight Lyman Moody.
Another Alexander, Charles, lives next, he and his brother having married sisters in the Colton family. An old building opposite the foot of the hill up which runs the road to Winchester dimly preserves the traditions of the Doolittle tavern, where the stages used to tarry. A Dunklee, the Scott Dunklee who mastered the toughest of winter schools, occupies it. It is remembered that here lived in his day, William Brooks, who married Phila Alexander Moody, a sister of Edwin, and whose account book, continuing the accounts of his brother-in-law, showed that he paid the tuition of the boy, Dwight Lyman Moody, in the Bruce school back in the eighteen-fifties.
Down the hill is the old schoolhouse of District Number 2, full of north-end traditions, and beyond it a brick house, once the home of the numerous Beach family, now that of Henry Day, who ties to the town through his Lyman marriage; the cottage of Joseph Lyman and then Pauchaug meadow, a sort of town's end. Turning down the street, on the other side, are three cottages, which may have tra- ditions but are now the homes of Lafayette Smith, buyer of calves
1
DWIGHT LYMAN MOODY 1837-1899
G
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D. L. Moody as a Boy
Mrs. Betsey Holton Moody Mother of D. L. Moody
Samuel H. Moody Younger Brother of D. L. Moody
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for market to an extent that identifies in the town, without disrespect, as Calfayette Smith, reduced to its first syllable; Willard Bancroft, last reminder of the cabinet maker of years agone, and Thomas Con- way, an Irishman, somehow removed from the down-town colony.
Elisha Alexander, "Uncle Lisha" to a good share of the town and quite as extensively the creditor of his fellow townsmen, lives in the fine house well up the hill. In his own right he is deputy sheriff and sharer in all the Alexander ancestry. Moreover, he is a great-grandson of Rev. Benjamin Doolittle, the patriarch of the town's struggling days, and a descendant of the first Preserved Smith, with ties to other of the old valley families. The romance of his life is in his marriage this year (1872) at the age of sixty-five, to Adeline M. Dutton, of the honored Northfield family of merchants, who from young girlhood had been his ward and member of his household, and filled the other- wise vacant place of daughter to him and "Aunt Cynthy."
Three Moody households guard the Winchester road, Medad to the north and Lucius, his brother, to the south on the street, and the widow Betsey Holton Moody, with her sons, George F. and Samuel H. up the hill. Medad, whose wife is of the old Wright family, and Lucius, whose wife is a daughter of John Long, an emigrant from Swanzey, New Hampshire, are brick masons, following the trade of their father, Isaiah, the Hadley man who arrived on horseback with his pack of mason's tools in 1796. The latter's son, John, had gone to Chicago, where for years his cousin, Dwight Moody, had been an evangelizer, and claimed to have, in their early years there, shared with him the operation of horse-cars-Dwight as driver and John as conductor. His story ran on that when the street car was waiting on a siding, Dwight would come into the car from the front platform and make some sort of speech to the passengers, religious, political or on any other line it might suit him to talk. Dwight Moody has come to distinction as an evangelist and his life has just been published, without a mention in its pages of the street-car employment for which his cousin, John, was authority.
The man living in the next house down the street qualifies for such a town by bringing with him the name of Ziba Rugg but lacks the other fitness of five generations or so of local ancestry. In the region of the old fort, in its day a main defense, dwells another Colton-E. Wells, son of Richard of down-valley origin; and a new-
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comer, again with the merit of a New England style of name-Rod- ney Fisher. As much could be said of the occupant of a cottage close on the street-Adolphus Hale and his wife, who had the first settle- ment Wright ancestry.
In the big house, set back and high from the street there is com- plete return to the old order in the person and household of Captain Henry Alexander. Captain Alexander, now eighty-two years old, erect and active, has brought down to this period the dignity and dress of the early days of the century ; Washington was in his first term as President when he was born. He is the last of the children of the honored Major Medad. All about him are the second and third gen- erations. Among these are the grandchildren of his older half-sister, Phila, who married Isaiah Moody and whose son, Edwin, long since gone, had left the numerous family, including the now widely known evangelist, Dwight Lyman Moody.
Looking backward, Captain Henry is the grandson of both the conspicuous commanders in the Revolution, Captain Thomas Alex- ander and Captain Samuel Merriman, each of whom as well was in the campaigns in Canada that ended the domination of France in America. Through both Alexander and Wright ancestries the line runs back to the settlement of 1672.
Captain Alexander's most distinguished son is his namesake, who in the 40's started a banking life under Franklin Ripley in Greenfield, went from there to Hartford and reached his great success in Spring- field, where he has been mayor and would have been congressman but for the opposition of his ever-independent brother-in-law, Samuel Bowles, in the columns of his Springfield Republican.
Companion to the Captain in his old age is his oldest daughter, Azubah, physically deformed but mentally alert and filially devoted. Another daughter married George, son of the famous minister of the town, Rev. Thomas Mason; a son, Thomas, married a daughter of Jonathan Barber; and there was a double alliance with the Minot family through his son, Edwin Moody Alexander, having married Helen Minot, and his daughter Marie Antoinette, being the wife of Rufus. Distinction of ancestry and of contemporary relationship could do no more in terms of Northfield than it has done for Captain Henry Alexander, and he looks the part.
The Long brothers lived in the next two houses, David in the
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little brick one and Alvin a distance beyond. Looking for distinction in these relatively newcomers, it is discovered as to David in that he was very deaf and thus qualified for his position as road surveyor ; having a district in which the mud was hub-deep in the springtime, complaints to him were either totally unheard or taken as compliments for his efficiency. Alvin, cattle-raiser and trader, was one of the stone- mason builders of Boston's granite custom-house.
In the house built by Dr. Prentice, set on high ground back from the street, and to which he intended to add a more pretentious front, lives Dr. Charles W. Shepardson, the town's only dentist, originally of Warwick. In the house nearer the Belding rock is Elias Lyman, schoolmaster, of the historic Lyman stock.
Precisely as the people living along the main street "beyond the brook" displayed much the same local and colonial integrity, the sur- vey extended over the town would reinforce the same characteristic. Towards the Farms are Fields, Lymans, Merrimans and Hilliards, all of settlement ancestry. At the Farms are Johnsons, Alexanders, Strattons and Morgans. On the mountains are families of scarcely less extended local ancestral lines and fully equal New England colo- nial origin-Holden, Sikes, Piper, Greenleaf, Collar.
Across the river, in the Kingdom, are Holtons and Dickinsons in profusion and, towards the Vermont line, where West Northfield and South Vernon join in a village, representatives of the families of Beld- ing-notably in the person of Eastman Belding, a grandson of the Jonathan, conspicuous in his day, and himself a citizen of the most substantial sort-Barber and Priest. The later families in the western half of the town are of the same genuine old-time New England origin-Caldwell, from the Colrain Scotch-Irish settlement, Wildes, Knight, Sawyer, Purple.
There is hardly an approach to the centre of the town, by what- ever road, without passing the homes of Holtons. Fate seemed to have placed them on guard at every portal. From the county seat, the town line is crossed at the farms of Deacon Charles and Cyrus Holton, brothers of Mrs. Betsey Holton Moody. The road from the Farms is guarded on each side at the crest of the hill below the saw-mill brook by a George and a Henry Holton. The mountain road reaches town by passing the house of Alexander Holton and, near Number 9 schoolhouse, the homes of Asa and Samuel. There are
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Holtons on the Hinsdale road and Holtons on the Vernon road. Even railroad approach is under Holton guard, with William the station agent at West Northfield and Rufus at Northfield. All are descended from William Holton, whose name is on the monument to the founders of Hartford and who was on the committee to direct Northfield's second settlement in the sixteen-eighties.
The only variation in nativity, that of the Irish, has already been noted. Their neat homes are along the roads leading out of the Main street. They are distinct, claim no social relations, are prosperous, respected and the mainstay of the farm work. True to their faith, they are granted the use of the town hall for their masses, conducted by priests from Brattleboro, Greenfield and now from the nearer Turners Falls.
A town made up as this survey has shown Northfield to be was unified in every interest. Its people knew each other to the last item of personality. They understood each other. Their differences in civic affairs were settled on a common basis of thrift and caution. Every- body worked. There were none very rich and few abjectly poor. The moderate fortunes, the fruit of slow accumulation, shrewd bargaining and honest labor, were snugly held, very snugly. There was an active social life, running to public entertainments, dramatic and musical, in which every spark of native talent was made to glow if it did not blaze, and to balls and dances, generally in the town hall, only looked upon askance by the fraction of the people who held to the old dis- approval of such devices of the devil.
Religious differences were respected, taken for granted, made no note of. There was never a voice raised nor an effort made to change one's church allegiance. No difference in faith carried beyond the church door. The utmost good feeling prevailed between even the ministers of the two churches, far removed as they were from each other in their consistent Calvinism and Unitarianism. The item of concord with no yielding of belief and no untimely assertion of it is to be particularly noted as something was about to happen which would force religious differences to the front, somewhat change the alignment between the churches and deeply affect the general aspects of the town's life.
CHAPTER XXXVII CONFORMITY TO CHANGING FASHIONS
Political Ardor, Prohibition Reaction, Style in Dress and Religious Calm
IT WAS A PERIOD of national readjustment, political, social and financial. The changes were the least difficult in a community that had always been fervid in political differences, was pretty much on a social level and was favored by a steady-going reliance upon its rich soil to yield, under diligent and laborious application of energy, a sufficient supply, if not profit. The war had removed the major issue of political strife. Some over-nice people were trying to get the four- year conflict called the war for the Union, the civil war, the war be- tween the states. In Northfield it was still the war of the rebellion, the southerners were Rebs, or Secesh. There had only been exaspera- tion over Andy Johnson's placating performances. The citizens who had been critical of or antagonistic to Lincoln and the war were in- delibly and contemptuously labeled Copperheads. They were in a rather silent minority, only suspected of echoing their disunion notions quite among themselves, in harmless reminiscence.
When the country overwhelmingly turned to General Grant as the leader out of the political mire of Johnson days, this New Eng- land town showed its traditional gift of being different by giving the old Democratic warrior, Horatio Seymour, 104 votes, nearly two- thirds as many as it gave Grant and Colfax. When the year 1872 brought the astonishing acceptance by the Democratic party of Horace Greeley, so recently the great anti-slavery editor, as a candi- date for president, the town's staunch old-time Democrats declined the dose. It was a tremendous campaign, reminding the older men of the Tippecanoe disturbance of 1840, and having about as little sense or reason.
One day in late summer an enormous crowd gathered for a politi-
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cal demonstration at Lake Pleasant, a newly developed resort not far from Northfield's southern boundary. Northfield Republicans were numerously there and one of them, Albert C. Parsons, was in the little group of war-horses on the platform. Henry Wilson, the one-time Natick cobbler, who had laid aside his leather apron to go into the anti-slavery fight, had been a war-time senator and was now candi- date for vice-president, powerfully expounded the Republican party's virtues. The governor, William B. Washburn of Greenfield, pre- sided. Most stirring on that day had been the arrival of Ben Butler, quite disregarding the interruption of Wilson's speech, marching down from the train platform under the full blare of Gilmore's band, led in person by Patrick S. Gilmore, the great bandmaster of his time. Northfield had its own rally and torch-light procession to insure the election of Grant and Wilson, and the Greeley vote was only 57.
For a burning issue, anti-slavery and preservation of the Union had given way to temperance. In its political phase it centered on the sale of liquor. Massachusetts had some years ago adopted the Maine law, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicants. Once it relented and permitted the sale of beer and wine, only to find that in so doing it had given the whole case away; every beer-selling place was irrepressibly the station for purveying the harder stuff; and the legislature had returned to full prohibition. To enforce the prohibi- tory law there had been formed a state constabulary, with enforce- ment of this law as its sole function, a most unpopular service and one whose performance of duty was beset with difficulties. Northfield had a resident State constable in George H. Phelps. He was a grand- son of an emigrant to the town from Hebron, Connecticut, a com- munity which was pretty much all Phelps, and his mother was a Prindle, daughter of the commodore of the ferry-boat.
One great weakness of the effort to reduce the liquor evil was the free passage of the beverages over state lines. Northfield being a border town could observe the flow closely. Vermont was also a prohibitory state but there was no unison of action between the enforc- ing officers on the two sides of the line. A general store on the west side straddled the state line. When the Vermont officers called, the barrels had been rolled to the Massachusetts side of the store; the reverse transfer foiled the Massachusetts constable when he dropped in.
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In the early 'seventies the liquor issue flared up and wrecked politi- cal structures, party and personal. The Democratic party embraced the issue eagerly, drew to itself the support of the voters who thought they were liberals when they were only thirsty, drafted a highly repu- table but physically insignificant Boston lawyer, William A. Gaston, as its candidate for governor, and in 1874 carried the state, supposed to have been permanently Republican. Northfield rather violently swerved from its Republicanism and gave Gaston 149 votes to 116 for the high-minded but unfortunately prohibitory governor, Thomas Talbot of Billerica.
The temperance issue upset local as well as state politics. The towns no longer elected their separate representatives to the General Court. There had been a time when the house of representatives had over 600 members ; under a districting system it was reduced to 240. Northfield was just now in a "double district," combined with Green- field and other towns to choose two representatives. One of the Republican candidates in 1874 was Albert C. Parsons, who in war- time had served in house and senate, and who was recalled to political candidacy largely because he was outrightly a prohibitionist-and at an unfortunate moment. He was defeated by his neighbor, just across the street, Charles H. Green, a young man who had come to North- field as the manager of the lumber interests of the Heywoods, the Gardner chair-makers. He had been in no way politically identified, other than that he was a Democrat, but had won esteem in the town as an enterprising new citizen.
Such an event as the election of a Democrat to the legislature was ample occasion for celebration and the victor entertained a good share of the town at his house of an evening, with the Bernardston band, led by Nahum S. Cutler, the shoe manufacturer, to supply the music. Mr. Green pointedly failed to invite to the party his opponent in the election and near neighbor but Mr. Parsons, not to be utterly sup- pressed, strolled across street and made a speech to the band.
The town had now relapsed into its old-time habit of being Demo- cratic, stood by Gaston the next year, when the state rejected him, and in the national election of 1876 actually went for Tilden and Hendricks, although only by one vote. The town might have more generously supported the Democratic reform governor of New York for president had the people known that Tilden was a close relative of
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the Janes family, proud of his Janes ancestry, a great-grandson or so of Benjamin Janes, who had been a Northfield citizen of prominence.
Benjamin Janes, whose family had years before been all but exter- minated in the Indian assault on Pascommuck, at the fort of Mt. Tom, had gone from Northfield to Connecticut, lived in several towns and spent his last days in Lebanon. His grand-daughter, Bathsheba Janes, had been famed as the belle of Coventry. She had married a John Tilden, one of the colony from Lebanon, Connecticut, to establish Lebanon, New York, the birthplace and life-long home of Samuel J. Tilden, and was the governor's beloved grandmother. Northfield voters were more politically than genealogically-minded in the elec- tion of 1876 but gave Tilden their endorsement.
The war period had been a prosperous one and the following years were equally so. Tobacco, now the main crop, was highly profitable unless ruined by any one of the calamities to which it was liable. A hail storm would destroy a field in fifteen minutes time, leaving the crop to be plowed under. An early frost would do equal harm. There was no assurance that the leaf would cure properly, even with the most careful regulation of the ventilation. It was a costly crop to produce, requiring much labor in keeping the soil well cultivated, removing periodically the tobacco worm, the fattest, softest, greenest of all plant pests, and suckering-meaning the removal of the top of the plant to induce fuller leaf-growth.
At harvest, in late August, the plants were cut at the foot of the stalk with care not to injure the ground leaves, loaded with equal care and tied to the poles in the "tobacco barn" upon which they were to dry. In the early winter the plants were ready for stripping, at which task men, women, boys and girls could work, with deep stains of the hands as part of the reward. Upon the skillful sorting of the leaves into "wrappers" and "fillers" depended somewhat the proceeds from the crop, which after all might be sold "at so much through." Native trading skill was taxed to the utmost in the encoun- ters with the tobacco buyers, of whom Sam Walker, already men- tioned, was fairly typical.
The other farm industries were well rewarded. Hay was in ample demand at $20 a ton, or was fed to stall cattle or dairy stock. There was large acreage of corn but the competition of the prairies had begun to make it unprofitable. Broom-corn was still grown and
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the broom-tyer was sticking to his task in the face of the competition of power manufacture.
Essential to the common prosperity was the low price of labor. Farm hands were plentiful at $1.50 a day and the day was of unlim- ited length. Carpenters received the same rate or the most skillful, such as the Stearns builders or an artisan like good old Caleb May- nard, were possibly paid $1.75. Section hands on the railroad worked steadily for $1.25 or, it might be $1.00. One youth who came home from a mill town with the story that he earned three dollars a day only confirmed the opinion previously held of him, that he was a hopeless prevaricator. The low wages were not oppressive, since the manner of living and the use of odd times at cultivation of the home garden spot made savings possible and actual in most instances.
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