USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 33
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The panic of 1873, which brought ruin to many financiers and put a halt on enterprises such as railroad building, which indeed had been overdone, was no more than news in this comfortable, non- speculative and thrifty town. It took its place with the news of the Chicago fire of 1871, the Boston fire of 1872, the Beecher-Tilton libel suit and the shooting of Jim Fisk, the New York speculator and sport, who once peddled dry goods in the towns of the valley.
There was a general public spirit. Men combined their work for minor public improvements, repairing the church horse-sheds, slicking up the school-grounds, doing a sick man's haying or working up a widow's woodpile. One leading citizen, for years in succession, used one or the pair of his driving horses to plow the snow paths up and down and at all angles across the street with no thought of compen- sation. There was enterprising care of the houses, with no neglected one in the village.
Rarely was a new house built and only recently had there been shown an interest in alteration of the exterior of the old ones. This innovation was the front piazza. It had no place on the original New England house and it added nothing to architectural merit. Rather suddenly it had been discovered that there was comfort in sitting out of doors. Perhaps early generations lacked time to sit at all. As one after another piazza, veranda, porch, as taste might name it, came to be added, it was noted that it usually appeared when some inherit- ance had become available. It was common to ask when the build- ing of a piazza was begun, "Well, who died here?"
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Along with the piazza, to a less extent, came the bay-window, an outright innovation. Interiors had undergone the process of closing the fireplaces, which had been supplanted by stoves, Franklins with an open grate or, more generally, air-tights, cast iron, sheet iron or soapstone, and there had quite recently been installed hot-air fur- naces, the earliest ones being wood-burning but the later ones for anthracite. There was not an open fireplace in use and almost none visible in the street houses, all of which had been built with them. The first kerosene lamp brought to town was still in use, and not older than fifteen years. Many households still relied for light upon tallow candles, which were a considerable article of trade at the stores.
In all things the Northfield of the eighteen-seventies was modern. It dressed well and in fashion. There were some survivors of older styles-Captain Alexander wore a high collar and stock, Colonel Pomeroy a great military cape, Dr. Hall a frock coat and a silk hat as high as Lincoln wore. Young bloods wore silk hats less towering and just now the gray felt stovepipe. All the men wore boots, cow- hide for work, calfskin for dress. The only compromise was the bro- gan, stout shoe of ankle-height, made of cowhide or split leather with a single buckle. It did not well become the long-legged man who was indifferent to the length of his "pants." Captain Coy, tall and lank, wearing store trousers much too short and socks that draped themselves over his brogans, exposed several inches of Captain Coy between the two.
At work, the men went barefoot, but not at home or about the town. One new arrival from a down-valley town came near selling out and leaving because the people here were so high-toned that he could not walk to the post office barefooted. It was only a tradition now that people walked in bare feet to the mill at the foot of the street and there put on boots to complete the way to the meeting- house.
Feminine dress had taken on an entirely new order. Waists must be small, wasp-like, at any cost of discomfort in rigid corsets. The evil of tight lacing was the object of denunciation by doctors and mor- alists, totally without effect. The distortion went further and there was rivalry in the size of bustles. The Grecian bend was the ideal, totally unlike any distortion of which Greece was ever guilty. Skirts
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trailed in the dust. Fashionable hats were the size of a tea saucer and equally flat, perched on the head at a pronounced angle. Para- sols were no longer the toy-like shades of a few years before but had become expansive and brilliant. The most violent exercise of the girl in this mode of dress was croquet, indeed the one outdoor sport in which women could share, and even here the situation was some- times awkward. At the stores it could be learned that hosiery was uniformly white.
Older women still clung to the crinoline, the least clinging of femi- nine dress and there were survivals of the space-consuming hoop- skirt. In the winter there appeared narrow collars of fur and diminu- tive muffs. Only Dame Cook still carried to church a vast muff of the good old style, considerably protecting her from view as well as from cold, to both of which she was averse. Ringlets were in favor with the old ladies and lent an active emphasis to the speech of such ani- mated persons as Mrs. Caroline White Cowles. The young girls wore long braids but their slightly older sister boasted a single curl that hung nearly to the waist or a "waterfall" of a size that required much supplement to natural hair.
Nearly everybody attended church. The two bells rang at nine and again at quarter past ten for fifteen minutes, tolling for the last five. The afternoon service had not survived the war period. At the First Parish church, there was a choir, the younger members of which were trained by Miss Maria (the "Field" of whose name was rarely spoken) and the older of which were quite independent of her leader- ship. For the third and closing hymn, the congregation turned to- wards the choir, stationed in the gallery at the rear of the church. At the other, the Orthodox church, there was an evening service and a mid-week prayer-meeting.
In its new meeting-house, the First Parish had much the more numerous congregation. Its popularity was just now being enhanced by the energy and vigor of its new minister, Jabez T. Sunderland, a young man from the West, educated as a Baptist and finding here his first Unitarian settlement. With him came his bride, his equal in energy and intellect, entering at once into a co-leadership which was new in a New England minister's wife, even on occasion going into the pulpit in her husband's place and preaching what some of the people who were not disturbed by the innovation would say was a better
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sermon than his. Quite shockingly she wore grass-green kid gloves into the pulpit.
The vivifying effect of a fresh, earnest, progressive minister in an old New England parish was swiftly demonstrated. Church attend- ance grew. A Sunday school, of a size unknown since the initial one of Dr. Jarvis, forty years before, was ardently recruited and organized on a new educational plan. Mr. Sunderland was a liberal, broadly intelligent, vigorous in his doctrinal preaching but reverent, devout, and, according to any definition of the word yet made among these people, Christian. Frank, earnest, unafraid, he was so far from radical that his preaching stirred no animosities. The cordiality of relation- ship between the people of the two churches was unmarred and be- tween the two ministers, different as were their doctrinal views, there was entire good feeling.
Such was the town to which came D. L. Moody, at the moment of his return from two years in the British Isles, during which he had accomplished the greatest achievement of his career as an evangelist.
CHAPTER XXXVIII SIGNIFICANT RETURN OF A NATIVE
Dwight L. Moody, Now Famous, Arrives in a Town of Relatives
As NORTHFIELD PEOPLE tarried at noon-time to read the morn- ing newspapers of August 15, 1875, the item to stir their liveliest in- terest told of the landing in New York, the day before, of D. L. Moody, returning from England after two years there, during which he and a singing partner named Sankey had stirred the people of the British Isles in a sweeping religious revival. The reporters had captured him as he came ashore and their stories gave the picture of a sturdy, bustling businesslike man, about five feet six inches tall, broad-shouldered, with full black beard and thick, luxuriant hair. He had proved their match in questioning and had to know of politics, of business, of whatever else was news in America. The highest point of interest to the people of his native town was reached when he was asked, as he bustled around his trunks on the docks, what were his immediate plans.
"I am going right up to Northfield, Massachusetts, to see my mother," was all the answer they secured.
The arrival in the home town at once took on news interest and if they were to know more of his designs the reporters must follow him there, as they did. Two days later the return of Moody to his birthplace was described in their dispatches, without light upon his further intentions.
Mr. Moody arrived in Northfield August 16. He was met at the South Vernon station by one of his brothers, in a somewhat rickety buggy, drawn by a plodding farm horse. He was driven along the bridge road, with its stop to pay the ten-cent toll, with a word of familiar greeting to "Little Morgan" at the bridge gate, up the hill to the street, over the Mill Brook bridge, past the homesteads of cousins and uncles and up the last hill to the farmhouse, where he had been
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born and where was waiting his venerable mother, the widow Betsey Holton Moody.
Curiosity was keen as to this son of the town who had become world-famous. He was a stranger to the townspeople, remembered in the neighborhood by those of his age as a restless, mischievous boy who was none too fond of school and for whom there had been no predictions of distinction in life. It was now over twenty years since he had left town and dropped out of the knowledge of its people, other than his own family, only to be heard of in quite recent years as having turned to religious work in Chicago, having established a church there and, with Sankey, having led a religious awakening in Great Britain.
Now that he was famous it became of interest to know that this one of the Moody boys had left home when he was seventeen years old to seek such fortune as the world had for him away from the farm. It came out that his brother, George, the oldest of the boys, who had been the mainstay of the household, had given him five dollars as his sole capital for his venturing-forth, that he had gone to Clinton, where another brother, Luther, had found work in a store, had failed to find a similar chance there, had walked to Boston and walked about Boston in the unsuccessful search for work. With some humiliation he had resorted at last to an uncle, Samuel Socrates Holton, who kept a shoe store in Court Street and who consented to employ him on certain strict conditions, including regular attendance at church, living at a home to be selected by the uncle, evenings at home, no bad companions and next to no pay. This uncle knew the boy. He had refused, two years before, when visiting Northfield, to take him into his employ on the ground that the city was no place for such a tempestuous youth. Dwight had now yielded his pride enough to seek favor from his uncle, Samuel Socrates, upon the urgent advice of another uncle, Lemuel, who was living in Boston and who had given him temporary shelter.
Young Moody stayed in Boston but two years. His enforced at- tendance at the Mt. Vernon church, where his uncle had been a member before his removal to Winchester, had at first caused him distress because of the contrast with the quality of its people and rebuffs at their hands but, through the interest of his Sunday school teacher, had led to his conversion. Against his uncle's advice and be-
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cause of some unhappy incidents which he had revealed no further than to refer to persons crossing his path and saying that, "I was fairly drove out of Boston," he left the city and made his way to Chicago. There his independent, impulsive nature found a more fav- orable, because unrestrained, field. There in one employment and another, he had started well on his way towards the goal of business success he had set for himself-the accumulation of a fortune which he had set at a hundred thousand-when his concern for the souls of the city's ragamuffins had led him into missionary work. The occupation with the street gamins in time caused him to abandon all else and devote himself to their salvation.
Between 1856, when Moody reached Chicago, and 1875, when he renewed contact with the people of his native town, there lay a period of devotion of the resources of his vigorous, vital, determined and now consecrated nature to the saving of men from lives of sin. His strenuous efforts had not only met reward in a great city following but had fitted him for the amazing achievement in the cities and towns of Great Britain.
Moody was now thirty-eight years old. He was stalwart, unself- ish, democratic and, as was soon to be realized on his native soil, tremendously in earnest. The townspeople came quickly to know him. He had not come here to rest. He was incapable of idleness. He was out and among them from the first day of his arrival. Instinctively they proceeded to take his measure; and they might have been sure that with the instinct he shared with them by nativity, he would pres- ently be taking theirs. In their analysis they saw in him the charac- teristics of both the tribes of Moody and Holton-Moody quickness and Holton solidity. They promptly noted the resemblance in par- ticular to his younger brother, Samuel. It was somewhat a physical likeness, although the brother was shorter in stature and had reddish hair and beard in contrast to Dwight's coal blackness ; it was more in tireless activity, quickness of action and speech and outrightness of opinion.
Samuel H. Moody was one of the twins born four weeks after their father's sudden death. In spite of a handicap of epilepsy, he was one of the town's stirring young men. It was known to a few and quickly sensed by everybody, that he was the favorite of Dwight among the brothers and their companionship was evidence of their
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kindred spirit and mutual understanding. The other brother remain- ing in the old house, which he had saved by his years of industry and thrift, George, older than Dwight by four years, was of the Hol- ton type, steady-going, unemotional, undemonstrative, substantial, of sterling thrift and common sense.
The other resemblance of Dwight Moody discovered by those whose memory ran back to 1840, was to his father. One day when Dwight was walking with some neighbor's child clinging to each hand, his brother George, out of his boyhood recollection said, "There you have a perfect picture of our father-broad, square and loved by children." Edwin Moody, who died in early middle life, could not be remembered by his younger children, including Dwight, but townspeople recalled him as industrious, joyous, witty and im- poverished only by reason of his trustfulness of others and his too ready willingness to stand for their debts. That he was poor was in no wise due to lack of industry. He followed the family trade of stone and brick masonry, even making his own brick, and his carefully kept account book showed extensive dealing with his townsmen and an excess of unpaid balances against them. Far from indolent, he had the unceasing activity, amounting to restlessness, now marked in his sons, Dwight and Samuel.
For a living example of the Moody characteristics of wit and good nature, it was only necessary to go down hill to the corner of the ancestral estate, where lived Dwight's uncle, Medad Alexander Moody, follower of the family trade, who mixed his mortar with wit and humor and squared his honestly built walls by the rule of con- sideration for his fellow men. There were those in the town who carried their theory of the Moody endowment back another genera- tion and found it in the Alexanders. Edwin Moody had been the first-born of the union of the man who rode up from Hadley late in the previous century with all his belongings of mason's tools in the saddle-bags, and the daughter of Colonel Medad Alexander, quite the outstanding man of his time in the town, and so the grand- daughter of Captain Thomas Alexander, the brave Revolutionary patriot leader of his company at Quebec and Ticonderoga and with Washington at Trenton.
Dwight Moody was of an almost unbroken Northfield ancestry. His own name rather singularly departed from ancestral lines but was still significant of the relationship which was widespread in the
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region. He was christened, as the First Parish church records would show, Dwight Ryther Moody. The "Ryther" which had been dropped (even though in the newly published town genealogies he appeared as Dwight R. Moody) was tribute to a relative, Dr. Gideon Ryther. Dr. Ryther in his youth had been a teacher in the district school of the neighborhood, and had married one of Captain Thomas Alex- ander's daughters, an aunt of Edwin Moody's mother. At the time of Dwight's birth he was a much respected practicing physician in Bernardston and a close friend of the Holton family, as well as of his relatives, the Moodys.
Dwight Lyman was a combination of names long continued in a family related by marriage to the Alexanders, coming down from the Dwights of Fort Dummer fame, from whom were descended the Dwights in this period associated famously with Yale College. In the neighborhood of his birth there was living Col. Josiah Dwight Ly- man, a relative by marriage. It was not casually but with honor to near, even though not blood, relatives that Edwin and Betsey Moody named their fifth son Dwight Ryther and changed it to Dwight Lyman.
In all of Dwight L. Moody's ancestry there were but two persons who were not distinctly of Northfield in the pioneer sense. One of these was his grandfather, Isaiah Moody, coming from Hadley and qualifying his descendants for local ancestral distinction by promptly marrying an Alexander. The other was his grandmother, Betsey Hodges, the wife of Luther Holton, coming from the next town, Bernardston, and bringing with her the name to be held in perpetual honor as that of Dwight Moody's mother. These two intruders ex- cepted, all others in his ancestry were of ancient Northfield name and blood. He was a Holton, from the line of William, of that Northamp- ton group that petitioned for the settlement of 1672. He was an Alexander, in straight descent from the George who led the explor- ing party up the valley to establish the new plantation. He was a Wright, descended from Samuel, an original engager, a settler of 1673, killed in the attack by the Indians which ended the first settle- ment, father of Captain Benjamin Wright, Northfield's hero. He was a Smith, from Samuel, of the third settlement, the son of the first Preserved Smith. He was a Stratton, from Hezekiah, the third settle- ment pioneer who was the spirited defender, even against Captain Benjamin Wright, of the town's broad plan. He was a Shattuck,
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from Daniel, the builder of the outpost fort in Merry's meadow at the beginning of the final settlement, whose name had vanished but whose descent could be traced widely in Northfield families.
There could be no more distinctive Northfield ancestry. It was as though the pioneers had designed that the son, however far down the line, who should bring the highest distinction and perform the greatest human service, should be the exclusive product of the town they made. Such was the interweaving of the pioneers and their descendants that at the time of his return to the town in 1875 a large proportion of the population could call him cousin with no serious strain upon genealogy. It was true not only of those who bore in com- mon with him the names of his ancestors but as closely through con- nection by marriage the members of the families of Mattoon, Field, Allen, Janes, Beach and Merriman, and only more remotely, Dickin- son, Doolittle, Long and Stebbins, with no certainty that the list is complete.
Back from the Northfield ancestry, the lines led to the pioneers in the Connecticut settlements and thus to the earliest Bay Colony pion- eers. The names of both Holton and Moody could be read on the monument to the founders of Hartford. Through the Holtons, he was closely related to the family of Jonathan Edwards; the brother of the wife of William Holton was the grandfather of the Northamp- ton preacher and philosopher, the leader in "the great awakening" of the middle of the eighteenth century, the precursor of the awaken- ing to be led by a descendant of Abigail Edwards Holton. The two religious awakeners, Edwards and Moody, had a common ancestry. Through the marriage of an Alexander ancestor there was descent from the Buck family of Wethersfield; through another Alexander, from the Gaylords of Windsor. A direct ancestor was Rev. Henry Smith, whose revolt from the religious restraint of Connecticut led to the settlement of Hadley; through Smith ancestors there was deriva- tion from the families of Morton and Ensign; through the Strattons from the family of Fry of Concord. All of these were Puritans and distinguished by leadership in the earliest New England days. Richer endowment could hardly be the lot of any man of New England birth. In this case, it was unique in its purity from any strain of blood foreign to its kind. D. L. Moody could not escape a realization that he was nearly everybody's cousin in Northfield. It is only certain that he never tarried a moment to discover his ancestors.
CHAPTER XXXIX EVANGELISM AND CHURCH DISSENSION
Moody as Man and Preacher, the Wonder of His Home Town
D. L. MOODY was now in the town of his birth and boyhood, the town he had left twenty-one years before with no note made of his going, as other ambitious boys had gone, to make his place in the world. He came back in the full fame of having stirred to the depths the people of the British Isles in a religious revival without recent parallel. It was much the same town that he had known as a boy, with hardly a change in its people, either in number or name, a prosperous, cultivated, quiet farming town, exceptionally keeping the character of the old New England community. It would be a favoring place for the evangelist's rest after two years of un- relaxed evangelistic campaigning. And the first thing the town was to learn as to him was that he had neither need nor capacity for rest.
Before the end of the month, in the middle of which he had reached his home town, Mr. Moody was holding meetings of such size as to overtax the Orthodox church and to substitute the broad steps and the street for its pulpit and its pews. He had been again joined by Mr. Sankey and had drawn to the town, as well, P. P. Bliss, singer and author of hymns of a sort new to the churches, and Major D. W. Whittle, another master of exhortation.
In the following fortnight the meetings were organized into a campaign of intense earnestness. It was realized that Moody was as ardent in his efforts to save the souls of the countryside as of the great cities. Herein was the manifestation of the truth about him that his devotion was to the salvation of the man he could reach and not to the moving of masses of men. As converts came to be made there was further showing of the effectiveness of the appeal, while interest grew apace as to what was to be the effect upon the town.
Shrewd judgment of men was one characteristic that Moody's
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townsmen shared with him. It was a gift of his ancestry to him and it was active among those of like inheritance. Turned upon him, the home-town estimate came to swift appreciation of his greatness of soul and of a mental agility keeping pace with a ceaseless physical activity. He had none of the marks of the traditional preacher. Broad- shouldered, with a large head and short neck, he was heavy of frame and still heavier of flesh, with a waistline that revealed the truth that he was, to use the common phrase, a good feeder. Appraisal of his character agreed, as it could not avoid doing, that he was as keen as he was quick, with instant insight into men and masterful in com- mand of them. Doubt as to his entire sincerity could not survive the least study. He was tremendously in earnest, practical, direct, un- sparing in his judgments and forthright in pronouncing them, even though vastly kindly. The mischievousness of his boyhood, now re- called, was only modified into a love of humor. He was big, cordial, human, genuine and democratic. He had neither enmities nor ene- mies. He won the hearts of the people of the town, whether or not he would win their souls, in the sense that he used the phrase, and to the extent that it was evident he intended to do.
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