USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 36
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52
There had been a succession of house burglaries, of which certain always suspected citizens had been silently accused. A mining com- pany had been formed to take gold out of rocks in the bed of a brook on the New Hampshire edge of the town with an ample issue of 400,000 shares of stock of a par value of one dollar and an actual value of much less. It was one of the enterprises of Amos Ross, the maker of horse-hoes, whose only recent achievement was the raising of a hog of unprecedented weight, the stuffed frame and skin of which had been sold to Barnum's circus. A youth who had been active in town affairs, a grandson of the Dr. Gideon Ryther, and so a relative of the Moodys, had been put through Harvard Law School by his uncle, a Holton, and actually gone to Boston to practice. The voters, after a stirring campaign for Garfield and Arthur and Hancock and English, with a Greenback diversion as well, had shown themselves still a Democratic majority in the election of 1880.
Under the patronage of the town by vote of town-meeting, there
376
A PURITAN OUTPOST
had been published the "History of Northfield with Genealogies." The town had bought three hundred and seventeen copies, paying the publisher, Joel Munsell of Albany, a native of the town, four dollars a copy and supplying them to actual residents at one dollar each. This was the product of Temple and Sheldon's explorations of ancient records, only less ancient garrets and family Bibles. It was a substantial achievement, a book packed with more or less valuable facts, making a slight claim to popular reading but a priceless com- pendium of the details of the successive settlements and, more spar- ingly, biographical of the persons who had been marked as contribu- tors to the town's upbuilding. Its genealogies were a mine of family facts and even its faithful printing of the inscriptions on the grave- stones of the old cemetery was of a permanent if not thrilling interest.
The changing use of the meadow lands was now marked by a sharp decline in the acreage of tobacco. The Connecticut valley seed leaf had for years claimed a special place in the market as a fine, silky leaf, with particular value for cigar-wrappers in contrast to the ranker growth of the plant in warmer regions. Northfield was nearly the northerly point in the valley for its production, a limit that was drawn by the length of the season and possible early frosts. Its rich bottom lands were ideal for the crop but time had proved that it was an ex- hausting plant and generous fertilization was necessary. In favorable seasons, a most fickle factor, and with a favoring market, also vari- able, it was highly profitable, good crops selling at twenty-eight or thirty cents a pound "through," meaning all the crop regardless of the grading between "wrappers" and "fillers," firsts and seconds. The price was further subject to the competition between New York buyers in sharp bargaining with the farmers. It was a contest between Jew and Yankee. A season or two of narrow margin or actual loss had reduced the acreage from three hundred or more acres to the point where only twenty-five were devoted to the weed.
The setting up of a canning shop, one of L. T. Webster's enter- prises, had given impetus to the production of sweet corn and there was a new use of land in the raising of cucumbers for pickling, as many as two hundred acres being given over to this crop. Mean- while, there had been a new development of baling of oat and rye straw. Hay remained the steady reliance, well cured "timothy, red- top and clover" commanding the profitable price of at least twenty dollars a ton. It was all for local consumption.
1
377
CHANGING TO A NEW ORDER
The stall-feeding of cattle for the Brighton market was no longer profitable, now that western states were pouring in carloads of grass- fed steers-the "stall fed ox" was passing into history. Dairying was more profitable-or nearer to profitable, there being no certainty that butter, the one negotiable product, did not cost all it brought. Every farm had its small dairy and every home place along the street had from two to a dozen cows. The buttery of every house had its rows of milk pans, from which the cream was skimmed and churned into butter of varying color and flavor. The surplus over home use was packed into round wooden boxes of two standard sizes, five and ten pounds, and exchanged at the town's stores at prices varying in re- verse order to the strength of the odor of the contents.
A new resource for actual money was the marketing of apples. From the first days of the town an orchard had been the feature of every farm and homestead. There were standard varieties, the bald- win, the greening, the winter and summer russets, the "swopsy vine," a name probably corrupted from Shropshire without any accounting for "vine," as an apple suffix, the porter and the sweets. Grafting was a well-developed art and old trunks that could tell the story of to- wards a century were made to yield fruit of quite modern sorts. It all had been for home use until buyers appeared for the English market and carloads of the winter kinds were being shipped to Canada. The ordinary price was from $1.25 to $1.50 a barrel, not enough to induce the planting of orchards but clear gain from the old trees if labor cost was not reckoned. It was not known that labor cost was ever counted as to any farm product.
One day in 1878, Lewis T. Webster, progressive citizen as well as postmaster and a frequent selectman, walked down to the old build- ing on the Parsons place, where the Social Library, founded by Thomas Power and his associates in 1813, was kept, and wrote his name on the records as a shareholder. He was accompanied by the sole male representative in this generation of the Belcher family, "Bill" as the town knew him, a bachelor of ample leisure, variously spent, whose name also went down as a shareholder. Library shares had come to be loosely held but the list on the records books contained the autographs of the town's most distinguished citizens from Power's day down, B. R. Curtis, George W. Hosmer, Dr. Jarvis, Justin Field, Obadiah Dickinson and others in a notable roster.
At Webster's request, a shareholders' meeting was held. It was
378
A PURITAN OUTPOST
attended by the few whose ownership could be established and the shades of men who had been great in their earthly day. The dead were in the majority but the quick carried the day for a lease to the town of the library, the books, the shelves and all the appurtenances, for the period of nine hundred years on condition that the town spend at least one hundred dollars a year for new books. The town accepted the near-millennial loan and established the library in the town hall, against the day when some plethoric son of the town would follow the fashion of memorializing his ancestors by a library building.
The town's churches changed ministers, the Unitarian in 1879, the Orthodox in 1880, for quite different reasons. The old church had been done all the damage one minister could be allowed to do, by the brief pastorate of Sunderland's successor; and now called a completely contrasting one, Rev. John L. Marsh. At the Second Church, the sainted but quiet leader, Rev. Theodore J. Clark, who little fitted into the plan of stirring campaigning which Moody had brought home, remained until 1880, when there came a rather youth- ful and amply active man to the charge of the church which it was now sensed was bound to be an adjunct to the Moody school, the Rev. E. R. Drake. Mr. Clark remained in town in revered retirement.
Moody, returning to Northfield after spending the entire winter of 1879-80 in Saint Louis, made evident his design to build the school for girls into a much greater institution than was indicated by the recitation building and his own house, which had quartered twenty- five girls in the first year. Land had been extensively bought adjoin- ing the Alexander farm, now his homestead, nearly all of it rated poor land and hopeless for cultivation. The contract had been drawn for a dormitory and during the summer there appeared on the slope a substantial, not too ornate building to be known as East Hall.
The character of the school was already clearly indicated, educa- tionally of college preparatory grade, self-supporting so far as the work of the students in its domestic care could make it so, its annual tuition and maintenance fixed at one hundred dollars, and Bible study to have a fixed place in its curriculum. The one substantial house on the purchased property, a two-story brick building on the westerly side of the road to the meadow, Pauchaug hill as the town knew it, was to be used with slight alteration for lodgings.
Another of Moody's plans developed in a call for a convocation of Christian Workers. It was the broadening out of his neighborhood
379
CHANGING TO A NEW ORDER
Bible study meetings in his own home, keeping pace with the exten- sion of his school plan from the primary thought of a supplement to the common schools, in all their meagreness, for the girls of the region to a school to which students would be drawn from quite beyond local bounds. The little group of the initial year had indeed been to a degree gathered from other states than those of New England, fore- casting a far from local future. The convocation was held the first ten days of September and brought a throng of people to the town for its almost continuous sessions from sunrise to night.
There was no relaxation of the meetings in the village and the steps of the Second Church were again Mr. Moody's pulpit, with the broad street filled by his congregation. Aside from Sankey, there had come to be identified with the town men whom Moody had called to his aid, notably Rev. George F. Pentecost, D.D., Major D. W. Whittle and Rev. Arthur T. Pierson. The "Gospel Hymns" had be- come familiar in every household and under the leadership of Sankey or of the new singer, George C. Stebbins, the congregation could be counted upon to enter with full force into their effective singing.
Action was always ahead of announcement, with D. L. Moody. It was usually ahead of matured conclusion and plan. That impulse did not lead him into mistakes was due to a shrewdness that kept pace, fast as the pace was, with the wish or will to do. When, early in 1881, it became known that he had bought the farms of Smead and Ezra Purple, two of the best in the region, covering the long slope from hilltop to river, it might be assumed that a boy's school was on the way. It would be known later that Moody had resisted the requests that he admit boys to the Northfield school, declaring he had troubles enough without adding responsibility for co-education, that he had no original purpose to start a like school for boys, and that its origin was the unexpected outcome of a conversation with Hiram Camp, a New Haven capitalist, who placed $25,000 and the responsibility to establish such a school simultaneously in his hands.
The Purple farms were just over the Northfield boundary in the town of Gill. They were four miles away from the Seminary. The Connecticut flowed between the two and was crossed by a slow- moving ferry or, in a roundabout way by a toll bridge, adding two miles to the distance. All the deliberation of the most cautious plan- ner could not have better balanced the separation of boys and girls and community of interest in two schools.
380
A PURITAN OUTPOST
The farmhouses were spacious and substantial and in short order were made ready for the first students at Mount Hermon, a name selected, with Old Testament significance, by the initial giver. The school opened May 1, 1881, with one student and with enlistment in progress of boys under sixteen from poor homes, city or country. Had Moody in mind the boys from Chicago slums and their kind in other cities? If so, he quickly dismissed them and before Mt. Hermon had been long in existence changed his plan to a school for older boys, on the same basis as the girls' school.
For three years Northfield was to see little of Moody. Going to Great Britain in the fall of 1881 he gave himself to campaigns in Scotland and Ireland, was home for the summer of 1883 and re- turned for an eight-month mission in London. Coming back to America in August, 1884, he gave the following three years to evan- gelical work in the United States and Canada. During his British tour, the general conference was omitted, being resumed in 1885.
Even with their founder absent in body, as he never was in his interest, and keeping constant his communication, the two schools grew apace. The Seminary recitation hall gave way to the ampler school building, Stone Hall, and one dormitory after another appeared on the tract now become worthy to be called a campus. Crossley Hall, the first new structure, was built in the first years of Mt. Hermon and others quickly followed. In the summer of 1886, on a call sent out to the colleges, a college student conference was held at Mt. Her- mon, through the month of July. It was transferred to the Seminary buildings the next year and brought to the campus hundreds of stu- dents, representing all the principal and many of the smaller colleges.
The old Northfield was in process of adjustment to a new life, that of a school town and a religious centre. There was acquiescence with- out enthusiasm. Trust a New England town not to lose its poise, individually or as a community. It could accept the benefits without undue demonstration. The building of one after another of the Semi- nary structures gave employment to laborers. Marshall, the business agent, had bought and opened the granite quarry "on the Mountain" and the stone for Stone Hall was taken from it. There was some stimulus to local trade and a moderate market for produce. More- over the Seminary was open to the town girls as day pupils and was being resorted to, as was shown in the membership of the first gradu- ating class of 1884.
381
CHANGING TO A NEW ORDER
Mr. Moody's relations with the town were thoroughly cordial, with no limiting line on religious grounds. The people attended the meetings, whether or not they were among the converts. The town was proud of its now famous son, had a real affection for him and re- joiced, quite silently of course, in his achievements. In its corporate capacity it granted the moderate requests as to highways, moving the one in front of Moody's house farther away and building a new street along the top of the slope, parallel with Main Street, not without some characteristic dissent by confirmed objectors to whatever was pro- gressive. They found their grounds in the fact that the school prop- erty was non-taxable and quite disregarded the other fact that the value of the property when taken had been insignificant.
When an old citizen and family doctor died, as did Dr. Marshall Spring Mead in November, 1883, a link was broken between the two extremes of the century and the change in country medical practice was to be marked. His father, as a boy in Lexington, had shared in the pursuit of the British regulars and later served on Washington's staff. Migrating to Chesterfield, New Hampshire, he had been the progenitor of a notable family, in which Marshall was next to the youngest, a younger sister having married Timothy D. Doak, the Northfield merchant. A brother, Bradley, had remained in Chester- field, as a tavern-keeper, but his son, Edwin Doak Mead of Boston had become a widely known publicist, lecturer and peace advocate. The son of another brother, Larkin G. Mead, Jr., was the famous sculptor, maker of the great bronze statue of Lincoln for the monu- ment in Springfield, Illinois. The daughter of another brother was the wife of William D. Howells, long the dean of American literature. A nephew, William Rutherford Mead, was of the eminent New York firm of architects, McKim, Mead & White. Close of kin were Ruth- erford Burchard Hayes, the president elected or declared to have been elected in 1876, the Converses and Meads of Vermont. Dr. Mead married Frances Blake, daughter of Dr. Blake, surgeon on the Consti- tution and Northfield practitioner and so a granddaughter of Cap- tain Samuel Hunt and sister of the one-time lieutenant governor of Vermont and aunt of the artist, William Morris Hunt.
Dr. Mead was the last of the old-style country practitioners. Through a half-century he had driven in chaise or carriage over all the hills and along all the valleys of a wide region, answered every call at whatever hour, carried an overflowing cheer into countless
382
A PURITAN OUTPOST
households, and gloriously neglected to collect his bills. He had come down from the day when several doctors were needed to keep the health, leastwise to supply the pills and perform the surgery of the town. His early comrade, Dr. Elijah Stratton, a sterner sort, had died some years ago-both of them having acquired all the medical train- ing a college gave at the institute at Dartmouth and much more from country practitioners such as they were to be. One physician, or at most two, would now do for the town and the principal one would find time to be the Democratic leader, town officer and, when parties changed control, the town's postmaster. These varied requirements were being met by a resourceful son of Vermont, Dr. Rollin Clayton Ward, who had served as a captain in the Union army and found the fortunes of a Democrat as well as a physician better this side the Vermont line.
Ever since the Civil War, the war of the rebellion as New Eng- landers called it, the chief political disturber in the state had been Benjamin F. Butler. A Democrat before the war, voting through forty ballots for Jefferson Davis for president in 1860, a violent Re- publican in Congress after it, a persistent and flamboyant seeker of the Republican nomination for governor, then a Greenbacker and now the Democratic candidate. As such he won the election in 1882 and Northfield was with him. The campaign of 1883 was lurid. George D. Robinson of Chicopee went into a personal battle with Butler, following him wherever he spoke and finally defeating him. Not with Northfield's help; all its voters were out and the majority stood by the General. The next year's national election brought the revolt against Blaine, the first use of the word "Mugwump," and the elec- tion of Cleveland. Northfield had its rallies, its great campaign flags and Democratic jubilee over both the nation's and the town's vote. It would mean, in time, Dr. Ward as postmaster. Somebody took pains to find out how D. L. Moody stood and was squarely told by him that he was for Blaine, the only time he was known to have given out a political opinion.
A third church found its place in the village in the summer of 1886. For nearly forty years there had been Roman Catholics in the town, the Irish settlers of the railroad building period and their children and grandchildren, now a group of a score or more families. The first comers had faithfully travelled a dozen miles by such means
383
CHANGING TO A NEW ORDER
as they could command, perhaps the railroad's hand-car, to Brattle- boro or Greenfield for mass but now, for several years, had been given the use of the town hall. The parish priest at Turners Falls, Rev. Patrick L. Quaille, had won a warm place in the regard of the town quite beyond his own people and when the project of a church build- ing was known, Protestant citizens gave ready financial aid. D. L. Moody was among the contributors and a year later presented the church with an organ. The modest but worthy St. Patrick's was the visible token of the townspeople's respect for each other's faith. With a seating capacity of three hundred and fifty, it was planned with a view to a larger Catholic population.
The need of a large meeting-house for the Second Congregational church had been apparent from the day of Moody's first meetings and with the growth of the schools had become inescapable. Mr. Moody had urged it but wisely left the response to the people of the parish. Mrs. Adeline M. Dutton Alexander, widow of the "Uncle Elisha," from whom D. L. Moody bought his homestead, brought the matter to a practical point, by a Christmas gift of one thousand dollars for the purchase of a new site. One was proposed adjoining the old Brigham castle, historic as the home of John Barrett, Esq., now owned by Rev. Dr. Pentecost, but that vigorous divine arrived in town to protest stoutly. The location finally chosen was on a knoll "beyond the brook," surmounting the rock on the face of which was carved the record of the killing of Aaron Belding by the Indians in 1756. It was not until 1888 that the building contract was let to H. N. F. Marshall for $24,900.
Length of pastorates had gone out of vogue. The nearest recent approach to the old order was in the stay of Rev. T. J. Clark but in recent years in retirement and now his successor, Rev. E. R. Drake, was leaving (January 1, 1887). There had been a romance in his days here. The second principal of the Seminary, Dr. Emma Angell, served but a year before she became his bride.
Mr. Moody, who was home for the summer of 1887, displayed his civic interest by joining in the effort to get the town to refuse to grant licenses for the sale of liquor. Prevalently the town had voted for license and it was a mark of bigotry in certain citizens that they kept up an agitation against it. Mr. Moody spoke with other citizens at a mass meeting in the town hall just before the annual town- meeting. There had been a disregard of the license law, as flagrant as
1
-
384
A PURITAN OUTPOST
violations of prohibition in the rare years when the town voted it. A law and order league undertook to prosecute the keeper of the tav- ern who had not even shown respect for the law by paying the license fee but a numerously signed protest against this prosecution pleaded that though liquor was illegally sold it was "not to a reprehensable (sic) extent." The town now voted to refuse license and the tavern went under the sheriff's hammer.
The college student conference, which had swiftly come to a prominent place in Moody's summer activities and called hundreds of young men from all over the country, was distinguished in the ses- sion of 1887 by the presence of Prof. Henry Drummond. Prof. Drum- mond had been one of Mr. Moody's chief aides in his British cam- paigns and a strong personal attachment was evidence of the hold the evangelist had upon men of the highest learning. One evening in the new Stone Hall, whose auditorium had already proved too small for the summer gatherings, Prof. Drummond gave for the first time in America an exposition of the 13th chapter of Corinthians, in which he translated "charity" to "love" and with scholarly grace established it as "The Greatest Thing in the World," a phrase that was adopted for its widespread publication.
Whether induced by the prominence the town was gaining and the wish to make a correspondingly good appearance or in concert with a development of village improvement in country towns gen- erally, the period was one of increasing civic pride. The grass in Main Street was being frequently cut; the meandering foot-paths were being widened and straightened into gravel walks ; most effective, the fences, which had been continuous along the street and highly various in design, were being removed. The street to the railroad station, where the elms planted in the 1850's by Francis J. Parker, a Boston lawyer, now arched the roadway, was given graded walks and a name, Parker. It seemed to take a Boston lawyer to plant trees. Under local pressure, the railroad had replaced its old depot, a model of discom- fort, with a modern station in 1886. The darkness of the shaded street, hitherto relieved only when the moonlight sifted through the branches, was being dispelled in spots by irregularly placed lamp- posts and deepened in the spaces between. The common practice of carrying lanterns could not be wholly abandoned.
Selecting a sightly location, which no one had discovered was of
1
385
CHANGING TO A NEW ORDER
particular value, Mr. Moody brought about in 1887 the building of a hotel, which was opened early in the next year under the manage- ment of a professional landlord, William Hill. The manager had one new thing to learn and learned it dramatically when Moody found a well-stocked cigar stand set up in the lobby. The new hotel was mod- ern and capacious and came at once to have an important relation to the schools and particularly to the conventions that now kept up in unbroken procession through the summer.
The progressive spirit which had caused the building of the new centre schoolhouse was lifting the town schools out of their old rut. With the change of the highway in front of the Moody homestead, the old one-story white schoolhouse, where Dwight had been a mis- chievous "scholar" and where long before that the later distinguished Samuel C. Allen had made his first contact with the town as a school- master, was removed and on land bought by Mr. Moody, a quite different house for "District No. 2" was built. Across the river a scion of the old Dickinson family, who had been a successful shoe manu- facturer in Fitchburg, Edward M. Dickinson, joined with the town in the building of a new schoolhouse and public hall, taking the place of the primitive "No. 7." It was dedicated in 1891, with formalities, in which citizens of the town, including Mr. Moody, had a share.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.