USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 35
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That Moody intended to make Northfield his home had been sig- nified by his purchase, during his first visit, of the home place of his near relative, Elisha Alexander, known to the town as "Uncle Elisha,"
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a title that overflowed from the numerous Alexander family into common speech. There was a story current that the transaction had unexpectedly come about in a conversation as to the trespassing of the Widow Moody's hens on the adjoining land of the Alexander homestead. It was believable that something would come out of an encounter between two such vital persons as the young evangelist and the crisp and energetic deputy sheriff and shrewd trader, the town's principal money-lender, and that the family bond would in no wise restrain it. As the story ran, Moody had asked for a price on a strip of the corn field which his mother's hens invaded ; but Uncle Elisha would only sell the whole farm. Asked a price, he incautiously named thirty-five hundred dollars and Moody promptly said, "I'll take it."
Accurate or not as was the story of the trade, Mr. Moody acquired the substantial house on the road by which the Main street slopes off toward the historic Pauchaug meadow and with some twelve acres of rather sterile land, mainly carried on the town assessors' books as pasture. He now had a typical New England homestead and here he presently established his household. With it he bought a feature that was up to this time never known to enter into valuation, a priceless intangible, one of the most charming of landscapes, a sweeping view up the valley, with the Connecticut winding into the State between the wooded green hills of Vermont and New Hampshire.
After a succession of evangelistic campaigns in Brooklyn, Phila- delphia and New York, Mr. Moody returned to Northfield in mid- summer. He had spent a thrilling day at Princeton and in July had dedicated the Chicago Avenue Church which had replaced the build- ing he had lost in the Chicago fire of 1871. The new church had been built with the profits of the "Sacred Songs and Solos," published in England. This book of sacred songs had been one of his daring ven- tures, upon which he had risked his entire money possessions, sixteen hundred dollars, and from it had flowed some thousands in royalties, none of which either he or Sankey had taken to himself. Already in America, where copyrights barred the use of this book, there had ap- peared "Gospel Hymns No. 1," largely the compiled songs of Sankey and others of Moody's associates.
The vacation of the evangelist, the first in many years, was char- acteristically spent, with preaching services every Sunday, either in the town, thronged by the people from all the region, or in smaller
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villages, in nearby Vermont and New Hampshire. With him again had come P. P. Bliss, composer of some of the most appealing of the revival hymns and a singer of rare charm. Together they drove over the hills to hold meetings in little country churches or on village greens. Additionally, he carried on a series of Bible readings in his own new home, inviting his neighbors to join in them, beginning a feature which had promise of becoming an important one to the town. Leaving in October for a campaign on his old field of action, Chi- cago, to continue for three months, he was called home by the sudden death of his favorite brother, Samuel, and again to be shocked by the loss of Mr. Bliss in a railroad disaster at Ashtabula, Ohio.
After Chicago, Moody turned to Boston, the scene of his conver- sion and the head centre of liberal religion. His campaigning was now reduced to a system. He would not again confront such diffi- culty as when he and Sankey had landed in England only to find they must fight for a foothold. Boston, like every other city he visited, was alert and organized and the tabernacle which had been made ready for him was besieged by crowds far beyond its capacity to receive on the first night of his season there. Moody was as master- ful in practical preparation as he was effective in sermon and moving in prayer.
Northfield was untouched in its secular life by its new importance as the seat of revival planning. It centered about the Unitarian church, which under the enthusiastic leadership of the young min- ister from the West and his brilliant wife, was a community institu- tion. The basement of its new meeting-house, dignified by the name of vestry, and its cheerful parlor were not too sacred for activities that if not pious were as distinctly not impious. The young people were organized in what was first a Christian Union and presently a Unity Club, which had been given quarters by the leading store-keeper, Postmaster Webster, for a reading-room. Drama and music were given a place in life and in the church, with training of every symp- tom of talent to the fullest point of expression. The town hall, bare and echoful as it was, was employed for grand ventures in both fields of art. Life was full, in the fashion of a self-reliant country town.
Then to the fortunes of the old First Church fell a disaster, the full measure of which would be sensed in the years just ahead. A divided opinion as to the need and wisdom of rejoinder to the preach-
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ing of what seemed a narrow Christianity, a literal Biblicism, along with a rejection of all that science had brought-of meeting this with vigorous assertion of the place of reason in religion, resulted in the departure of the minister who had vitalized the old church and greatly served the community. It might not have been so bad, had not the one called to his place been other than an easy-going intellec- tual, with more of a gift for poetry, in the classic style, than for leader- ship, in the Sunderland style.
Moody was home again for the summers of 1877 and 1878, with a renewal of his efforts to reach the people of the country towns as earnest as his strenuous campaigns in the cities. Moody meetings came to be an expected feature of every year. Sankey had come to make his home here and Gospel hymns were known and sung in every household, with varying harmony but unrestrained vigor. Between these seasons the two had devoted themselves to their cause in the smaller New England cities and in the early autumn had returned to the Moody church in Chicago, thence to Baltimore. There was now no section of the nation that was not seeking the stirring of its re- ligious life by these incomparable revivalists.
Early in 1879, when it was known that Charles Alexander had sold a tract of land next his home at the north end to H. N. F. Mar- shall, a Boston business man who had been enlisted in Mr. Moody's affairs, it was realized that some project was on the way, to what end was left for a little to local speculation. It was the site of the old Doo- little tavern, a portion of which had been degraded to the unsenti- mental state of a tin-shop. Whether its future was as a site for a new residence or a summer boarding house or a school, of which there were rumors, was unknown, until work began on the founda- tions of a building which was admitted to be a recitation hall for a girls' school Mr. Moody had decided to provide. The corner stone was laid with ceremonies, chief of which was the speech of Henry F. Durant, the Boston capitalist and founder of Wellesley College.
Mr. Moody's interest in creating a school was characteristic in that it was on impulse. On a mountain road, east of the town, lived the Sykes family. The father was a partial cripple, getting about on crutches ; the mother patient, dutiful and industrious; both of them intelligent and high-minded. There were three children, all girls, bright, sturdy, happy and dutiful. Moody, driving over the moun-
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tain roads, with his brother Sam, the last summer of Samuel's life, came upon this secluded family. The father was sitting while he worked at the wood-pile, the mother and girls plaiting straw hats for the few cents paid by the manufacturer over in Petersham, whose carts toured the country distributing the straw and gathering the braided hats.
The preacher stopped and talked with them. The girls kept at their work. From neither father nor mother was there a word of complaint. Moody's alert mind caught the pathos along with the beauty of the situation. For the girls, what future? On the way home, down the rough road, across the plain, through the town street, the plight of the Sykes family and the like deprivation of other chil- dren of the hills followed the brothers, Dwight and Sam, and out of it came the project of a school. It would be a school where girls like these whose seclusion and denial he had just sensed would get as good an education as any high school gave, at a cost within their means, even if that meant at no cost. Moody saw the outlet now for the royalties of "Gospel Hymns" and the channel from the pockets of the rich to the Christian education and training of now hampered and restricted girls.
The distance from thought to action in D. L. Moody's being was not measurable. That driving, resourceful man, Marshall, who was the effective chairman of the committee that ran his Boston campaign, was called into counsel and action. He bargained with Uncle Charles Alexander for the tavern lot. He bought the brick and directed the raising of the walls for the schoolhouse at the foot of Moody hill. He expanded D. L.'s house-the town had fallen into the way of calling its owner "D. L."-to accommodate the first group of students. Durant picked a Wellesley graduate for the principal, Harriet Tuttle, herself a Connecticut valley girl who had not to be told of the need and opportunity. And the autumn of 1879 saw the school in opera- tion. It was the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies, a title that exactly, even if somewhat elegantly, embodied the founder's vision of its possibilities. Moody was off for the winter in a campaign for the salvation of Saint Louis.
Meanwhile another campaign for human rescue had been run- ning strong in the town. It was part of a nation-wide attack on ine- briety. An inspired, magnetic leader, Francis Murphy, had set the
...
MARIA A. FIELD Musical Leader of the Town for Fifty Years
Elijah Stratton, M.D.
Rollin C. Ward, M.D.
Norman P. Wood, M.D.
PHYSICIANS OF THREE PERIODS
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country afire to pull the victims of drink out of their besotted state and pledge the rest of the people never to touch the evil stuff. North- field would have been an exception if it had not joined. Meetings were held nightly in a crowded town hall. Speakers and singers came to the town to join in the drive-ministers of the gospel, a massive tavern-keeper from Greenfield who had abandoned his liquor trade and could tell why; best of all, rescued inebriates coming up from the audience to proclaim their emancipation. One night it was St. Germain, a railroad engineer, with a thrilling story of the wreck of a locomotive and its being reset on the irons, and he the human counter- part as a reconstructed man-with the result in swift order that St. Germain was in wide demand as a pleader for abstinence. Murphy meetings gave a winter supplement to the Moody meetings of the summer time.
There was need enough of temperance agitation. Hard drink was the countryside's besetting evil. Everywhere the country tavern had its group of drunken loafers. It was tolerated as an inescapable feature. It had its respectable patrons and its political defenders. Village stores, some of them, carried on a more covert but profitable trade out of whiskey barrels. Cider, innocent enough at the mill where the apples were ground and their juice extracted by a horse-operated press, was plentifully stored in farmhouse cellars to acquire an alco- holic potency that showed itself in the increasing crossness and abusive- ness of over-indulgers as winter turned to spring. On the Erving road, on the edge of the village, a cider-brandy distillery was running steadily and its patrons walking unsteadily, if at all. Homes were made wretchedly unhappy, farms were desolated or half-tilled only to have their yield turned into drink. The sons of moderate drinking fathers found it smart to follow parental example and it was ordinary, as well as amusing, for them to get silly and even disturbing at what were intended to be respectable social affairs. And against it all there was only fitful resentment or the next to insufferable ranting of un- popular even though respected citizens.
For forty years there had been organized efforts to promote tem- perance. They were ineffectual in the face of the trade in liquor and the majority tolerant of it. Massachusetts had taken a tour with statutory prohibition and now the effort was being made to restrict the trade on a license system, which had yet to justify itself, as none
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of the consistent temperance citizens believed it would. Agitation was thrown back to the field of moral suasion. The Murphy movement was its exuberant flowering. Perhaps the children who were put on the platform to recite temperance poems or to sing inciting songs such as "Help drive from out the land King Alcohol" would grow up to practice the virtue they helped to inculcate.
Religious and temperance agitations did not turn the town from its other diversions, literary and musical. Perhaps it only stimulated them. The Unity Club maintained winter-long weekly meetings with literary papers, debates and plays. A lecture course was supported by subscription. Itinerant entertainers like the Guy family, furnishing a street parade by day and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" at night, and Georgie Spaulding and her bell-ringers filled the town hall on a basis of twenty-five cents admission ; reserved seats, no better than the others, thirty-five cents.
Most ambitious and quite as popular were the musical events directed by the highly cultivated pianist, organist and director, Maria Field, the town's highly prized "Miss Maria." All through the spring and summer of 1879 she had every trainable voice in town in prac- tice on the now popular Gilbert and Sullivan opera, "Pinafore." It was presented in September with a phenomenal run of four nights. It was provided with the costumes and setting of the professional stage, secured from Boston. In the cast were Miss Maria's talented Boston relatives of the Field family, Fanny, Will and Benjy, and along with them local soloists who had gone through months of re- hearsal-Mrs. Clinton Ware, wife of a leading farmer, as a capital Little Buttercup, Walter Holton of the West Northfield family as Dick Deadeye, the good town doctor's grandson, Marshall Mead, as Bob- stay, the captain's sisters and his cousins and his aunts entirely re- cruited from the town, as was also the crew of the Pinafore. It cost the extraordinary price of fifty cents to see "Pinafore" thus master- fully presented but the seats on the uncomfortable town hall "set- tees" not occupied by the townspeople were filled by the patrons from other towns recognizing Northfield as a light-operatic centre. It was all managed by the enterprising Miss Maria, who, near-sighted though she was, directed and accompanied from the piano facing the stage.
The other outlet for musical talent was the brass band. It was re- cruited from the age and youth of the town and trained by a band-
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master from the county seat who with infinite patience developed cornet, clarinet, bass-horn and drum players out of hitherto unsus- pected musicians. The town sexton beat the bass drum; the post- master's oldest son powerfully manipulated the E flat cornet; the middle-aged and somewhat rheumatic "Ruf" Minot played the solo alto with the merchant Parsons' young son as his second and under- study, and there were twenty-three pieces in its talented ensemble.
A bandstand was built on the triangle at the head of the Warwick road and at odd times when the band was not touring in its four- horse band-wagon it was filling summer evenings with concerts from this elevation. It was under the patronage of the town's chief capi- talist, Albert Stratton, and the caps worn as a part of a gorgeous uni- form bore the gold enwreathed letters S. B. B., meaning Stratton Brass Band but commonly translated as Some Bum Blowers or other- wise unappreciatively by the boys of the town denied a share in its glories.
CHAPTER XLI CHANGING TO A NEW ORDER
Town Schools in Contrast to Moody's, with One Now for Boys
UNDER THE DISTRICT SYSTEM, the common schools of the town had made slight progress since the days when Horace Mann, hope- less as he was that the districts would ever be abolished, had thrown his soul into a battle for their improvement. Certain citizens of the town, steadily unpopular because progressive, annually undertook to get the districts done away and the schools brought into a town sys- tem. The little republics, as they were politely called, stood up in their boots against the invasion-and the cowhide boots of the day were stout armor. Nominally the town had thirteen such districts but declining population in some of them had reduced the number where schools were kept to ten. At that, in 1876, No. 7 had an average attendance of nine; No. 10 had ten; No. 1I had seven. Even in the most populous district, the Centre, the number of weeks of school was twenty-six and the outside districts had varying shorter terms. The "scholars" ranged from the infant of under five to robust boys of eighteen. There was slight chance the same teacher would con- tinue throughout the year; a new one for each of the three terms was not extraordinary.
Somehow, the selection of teachers had just now been wrested from the "prudential committees," who ran the districts, and vested in the town's committee but not without continuing protests. The outraged feelings of the district potentates were somewhat solaced by the town's committee reminding them, in the report of 1878, that they could still furnish wood and furniture for the school and keep the house in repair.
The latter duty was not sure of performance. The schoolhouses were hardly better than disgraceful. The people were freely saying so and the committee in its report felt it necessary to rebuke criti- cism of them. "Whatever the condition," said the annual report, "it should never be condemned by the parents or teachers. A constant
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censure, in the presence of scholars, can but have a baneful influence. The Schoolhouse should be considered by our children next to, if not equal in importance with, the church. When scholars lose respect for the old schoolhouse, the teacher's labor is crippled."
The same restraint from comment was urged as to corporal pun- ishment of the "scholars," and atrocities went unrebuked. The young woman in the centre school in a recent year who made a suc- cess of discipline had used such measures as having the offender stand close to the next-to-red-hot stove or "hold down nails" in the floor, by pressing the thumb on them until, in some instances, the blood burst from the nose of the stooping child, boy or girl as the case might be. The official request for parental silence as to such treat- ment was not wholly successful, but the teacher taught her term out.
The town school committee, in turn, showed its independence of state authority. In its report for 1878, a dogmatic educational treatise written by the village doctor who was chairman, it was said: "The law prescribes certain studies to be taught in our common schools and makes it obligatory upon the school committee to visit the schools during the first week of each session and say what each scholar shall study. This your committee have not done, thinking parents as good if not better judges as to the peculiar traits of their children." It was disastrous that, under state influence, children were required to pursue three or even four different studies. Again, the law's permission to children as young as five to attend school was assailed and eight set up as the earliest justifiable age. "If encouraged in learning ere long their [the younger children's] minds become crippled as the infant's limbs [probably meaning legs] would from too early use."
There were instances of teachers, generally town girls, who proved effective, but they were fortuitous blessings under serious handicaps. The centre school was the only one to have a separate primary section and it had been for years under the wise guidance of one of those prudent Belcher sisters who travelled only on "stock days," Miss Eliza. The other division was miscellaneous in age and instruction. It had a ceaseless panorama of teachers and a dull routine of studies, none of them advanced beyond grammar-school levels. It was late in the next decade that an effort was made to grade its work by the intro- duction of a new-fangled scheme, called a curriculum.
Beyond the common school, the one compensation for its short- comings, was the "select" school in the Bee Hive, with its traditions
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of a grand tavern in Captain Hunt's day, of the later Academy and of Bruce's Institute of Learning in the 1850's. Supported by sub- scription, at a cost per pupil of from six to eight dollars a term, this school had at most twenty-eight pupils. Its one teacher must be equal to instruction in all branches known to the high schools of larger towns. For several years its varied requirements had been met by a young woman from Framingham, and its normal school, Sarah Jane Russell. Later it had one term under the guidance of a newly grad- uated Dartmouth man, John Adams Aiken, the son of the stern old Judge Aiken of Greenfield, the Nestor of the Franklin bar, who in his budding days as a barrister had his office in Northfield.
Young Aiken had his hands full with a school largely made up of girls very nearly his own age, and turned with satisfaction, after twelve weeks of a dignified but futile struggle, to the lesser perplexities of the law. Now in charge was a marvel of learning and a master in imparting it to receptive young maids, impatient and hopeless with the dullard though he was. This teacher, Martin A. Brown, was the son of a wheelwright in the busy old shop just over the Winchester line. He was a Dartmouth man, had roamed the country, taught in Georgia only to gain a contempt for Southern "shiftlessness," which he declared began to be visible the moment one crossed the New England border, a scientific naturalist who knew every stone and plant of the region and who was equally familiar with dead languages and live mathematics. There seemed to be no realm of learning he had not invaded but, far from being a pedant, he was a virile, em- phatic and a bit jocular New Englander, who solaced himself in the confinement of the schoolroom by slyly slipping through the enfringe- ment of a bristling mustache a moderate morsel of "cut plug" or "fine-cut chewing."
There was no course of study at the Bee Hive school and hardly the form of a class. Each pupil advanced as far and as fast as he could be led to travel. He stayed shorter or longer as his parents saw fit to have him, gained no diploma but could pass, if such was the plan, to any college, albeit none did. At odd times there was an equally informal school for younger children in a lower room of the massive old building, conducted by one or another of the girls who had gained their education up-stairs, Lucy Webster, the postmaster's sister, "Josie" Morgan, daughter of the toll-bridge tender, or Colonel Pomeroy's gifted daughter, Laura.
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Such was the periphery and the content of education in North- field at the period when D. L. Moody set going a new institution for girls, local in its initiative but open to the world.
The next year, a new schoolhouse was built in the centre district, at last a cheerful and decently equipped but still a "common school," although a second story gave a vague suggestion of higher grades in an uncertain future. It replaced the one built in 1800, which might well have been torn down had not the Masonic lodge a full owner- ship of the second story. The old building was stout enough to stand being moved to the rear of the triangle, where Harmony Lodge could meet in full retreat.
The years brought along the succession of events which vary the life of a self-conscious, if not self-important, town without seriously deflecting its life. The historic old store, centre of the town's trade, politics and gossip, and postoffice, recently Hastings', and the building stil owned by the brothers who had migrated to Wisconsin and Minnesota, now Webster's, was burned in December, 1879. A cousin of D. L. Moody had taken possession of the oldest house on the street, the one remodelled by Samuel Mattoon in 1760, claiming a date of 1715, and the new owner in a garb proving his long resi- dence in New York, more ornate than expensive, with a massive watch-chain carrying a crystal charm rivalling the Kohinoor, a tailor, promised to modernize Northfield dress.
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