USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 37
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
School books were now supplied by the town, the State having come to a different conclusion from the town's school committee, which in other years had declared the home-owned school book was a cherished object of respect as well as of economy. The school year had been lengthened to thirty-three weeks in general and no fewer than twenty-eight in the mountain schools, so-called. Transportation was provided from distant parts. Young men had been chosen to the school committee and their reports, less wildly and mistakenly philosophical, were pleas for progress and a measurable record of for- ward steps. Particularly they urged a higher grade in the centre school, open to all the town, which they cautiously avoided calling a high school. The higher grade was established in 1891 and at last Latin was taught in a public school. The next year the committee dared to call it the high school. There had begun a discussion as to joining with other towns in the employment of a school superin- tendent, a new state law having given towns such option.
1
CHAPTER XLII NATIONAL ISSUES AND LOCAL, BOTH HEATED Ancient State Boundary Dispute Revived, Street Railway Averted, Motor Cars Unfavored
MUCH WAS GOING ON in the world that had no direct or apparent relation to the quiet New England town, with ample problems of its own, but none of it escaped attention and judgment. The one assured crop was opinions. Not only unfailing, it was high grade. It should have found a market in world centres but somehow never went be- yond home consumption. Political issues had moved away, had taken on industrial aspects, had come to do with the great West, with In- dians unrelated to the extinct Squakheags, Pocumtucks and Mohawks, revolved around Wall street but still were convincingly passed upon in Main Street, and if involving foreign policies were not beyond the scope of a town that a century ago demanded of Washington the ratification of the Jay treaty and a little later told the inhabitants of Boston they were wrong as to the embargo and wrote thanks to God into its town records for its independence of opinion.
Having voted for Cleveland in 1884, with no other local conse- quence than having a Democrat for postmaster, the town's majority opinion stood by him through an administration which accomplished little. A Republican Congress blocked his efforts to reduce taxes in the face of an enormous and increasing surplus in the national treas- ury, to reform the civil service after, as was caustically observed, Democrats had been given a major share of the offices, to curb the excesses of Civil War pensions, to resist the demands that silver be enthroned and to pull down the protective tariff, the issue that Cleve- land brought to the fore in his message of 1887 to Congress. The tariff entered into ordinary conversation and thrilled every political rally.
The liquor issue was rampant. Northfield had been steadily lib- eral, the preferred way of saying that it had been constantly on the
386
387
NATIONAL ISSUES AND LOCAL, BOTH HEATED
license side. It was fatal to a political candidate to be suspected of prohibition leanings. Massachusetts, having given high-license a trial, was to face the issue squarely in a vote in 1888 on an amendment to the State constitution to prohibit the manufacture and sale. The United States Supreme Court in 1887 had confirmed the validity of the Kansas prohibitory law on the ground that the right to sell alco- holic beverages was not one of the rights of citizenship secured by the Constitution. Northfield voted against the proposed amendment to the State constitution and stayed Democratic at the election of 1888, also throwing its vote against its resident Republican candidate for the legislature in favor of a retired bartender, a veteran of the Civil War, in another town. After successively giving a majority to the brilliant young Democrat, William E. Russell, for governor, even before the State as a whole elected him, the town turned against Cleveland in the election of 1892 and thus came to resemble its neighbors in their unvarying allegiance to what they consistently regarded as the "grand old party." Even this year another of its young men, a descendant of the historic Cap'n Wright, came within three votes of election to the legislature as a Democrat.
Two-thirds of the townships of New England had a smaller pop- ulation in 1890 than they had in 1880. In twenty years the acreage of improved land on New England farms had fallen from thirteen and a half millions to a little over eight millions. The abandoned farm had become an object of public concern, without making it otherwise, and farm values had shrunk correspondingly. Above all other causes was the opening of the West, where great fields could be cultivated and harvests handled by machinery. Discouraged by the decline of farm prospects, attracted by the wages in industry, and lured by the glamor of city life, the boys had been leaving the old home for years past but now the procession to the cities was con- tinuous. It had almost become a mark of stupidity in a young man to remain on the farm. Other employment than school teaching, which had been the one occupation for them outside the home, was now opening for the girls as well, presaging further inroads on the home circle and the village population.
Country towns were put to further disadvantage by the luxuries with which city homes were being equipped. Electricity was being employed in transportation, lighting and communication. The first
-
1
388
A PURITAN OUTPOST
arc lights were introduced in 1880 and the incandescent filament, the invention of Thomas Edison, had quickly followed into common urban use. The telephone, which started as a business in 1880, had become a commonplace. Just now an overhead trolley, running on electric wires, was being developed for street cars; it had its first trial in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888, was quickly installed in Boston and promised to come into extensive use for suburban travel.
The farm or even the village home was without the modern de- vices. They were lighted by the kerosene lamp, with still a lingering preference in some of them for candles, heated by stoves or at best by hot-air furnaces. The plumber had not invaded them to install bathtub and flush closet. Transportation was by horse and wagon or steam train, whose locomotives had but recently come to burn coal instead of wood.
Not excepted from the draft upon its youth which largely depop- ulated like towns, Northfield had maintained its census showing at each decennial period. It had no natural advantages over towns that had steadily and rapidly declined. It had developed no industrial employment and had no resources upon which to base it. The one feature that distinguished it was that it had been chosen by its re- turned son, Dwight Moody, as the site of the schools which had come to be his dearest project. Their building and the development of their lands furnished employment for local artisans and laborers. To an extent they were attracting new people to the town. As a school town it could expect no great expansion, no bustle and stir, no commercial growth; but it was spared the decline the neighboring and the like communities had been and were still undergoing.
The distinction of being a Democratic town, while all about were steadfast Republicans, gradually faded in the late years of the cen- tury. Bryan, with his cross-of-gold stroke in 1896, was so far from New England notions of sound money that the Republican vote for Mckinley reached a point (222) hitherto unknown and only 45 of the traditional Democrats stood by their guns, while 15 of them sought refuge in the Gold-Democratic escape from responsibility. By 1900, the new issues raised by the Spanish War brought the Democrats into line to the number of 92 but the town was now getting Republican by habit, expressed in 190 votes.
The ancient spirit of independence had shown itself in 1899 by the
389
NATIONAL ISSUES AND LOCAL, BOTH HEATED
complimentary vote given a son of the town, the state senator who had affronted the Republican powers by refusing to vote for Henry Cabot Lodge in the legislature of that year and was running inde- pendently. Again in 1900 it gave Charles H. Green, a constant Dem- ocrat, 218 votes to 34 for the Republican candidate, surprising itself somewhat and its favorite more. The surprise was deepened for him when he learned that he was the senior member-elect, having served a term in 1875, and would have the distinction of calling the house of representatives to order when it assembled in January, to this mod- est citizen an appalling prospect. In 1904, the town was for Roose- velt, 205 to 66, when it should have been unanimous for this one president who had ever paid it a visit.
The political preferences of a town which in excited national elec- tions recorded not more than 300 votes are insignificant in national or even in state choices but they were amply important in home esti- mate. There were rallies, campaign flag-raisings, personal encoun- ters, never more than verbal-all the stigmata of political disturbance, not less marked than if the fate of the nation hung upon Northfield's decisions. The declining Democratic vote was not the result of con- versions ; it reflected the death rate of stalwart Democrats who had never faltered, never doubted, and to the last election before their demise had gone, however lamely, to the polls in consistent devotion to the memory of Jackson. The coming of the Australian ballot in the early '90's had given them a shelter they did not need ; they had hitherto flaunted their open ballots, headed with portraits of national candidates, and it was a stupid performance to have to make pencil marks in the privacy of a booth.
Tidal waves of politics brought no ripples in the constancy of party voting. Even in 1910, when the Taft administration received warning of disapproval in a loss of Congress and widespread election of Democratic governors, the town that had become Republican stayed so without varying. Dix, son of the Civil War hero, was elected governor of New York, Harmon in Ohio, Baldwin in Connecticut, all Democrats, and in New Jersey another, a professor, unknown to politics, named Woodrow Wilson. Now Massachusetts picked for governor a manufacturer, Eugene A. Foss, a former Republican who had affronted Senator Lodge and been practically read out. In all this overturn, Northfield did not waver; only the Democratic old
----
4
390
A PURITAN OUTPOST
guard, now reduced to 59, voted for Foss. The town's capacity for having its own mind politically was newly demonstrated.
Through her two centuries of existence, Northfield had never been sure of her northern boundary. She had shared in the insecurity of all the towns bordering on New Hampshire and more seriously than any other because of a larger loss of territory in the running in 1741 of what had become historically known as the Hazen line and because in subsequent efforts to rectify that line, never fully ratified, she would again lose most heavily. The old issue had been threateningly revived in the last years of the previous century, and the report of a commis- sion created by an act of the Massachusetts legislature of 1885, which had taken its time, was awaited with some concern.
The only assured fact about the boundary between the two states was its easterly beginning, the mouth of the Merrimack River. From there its course inland created a disputed triangular tract with its base on the Connecticut. Thus Northfield stood to lose most heavily as the corner of the base was moved southerly. As far back as 1693 efforts were made to fix the boundary without success. Just after the final settlement of Northfield, the controversy was renewed but it had slight interest to the new town because the supposed line reached the Connecticut many miles to the north. It was the assured line of the first Massachusetts charter from Charles I. New Hampshire was striv- ing to enlarge her boundaries, hoping that with increase of territory and population the province would be equal in rank with Massachu- setts and be able to support a governor, the governor of Massachusetts being at that time also the governor of the lesser province.
The issue was carried to the King, on petition of New Hampshire's agents in 1737, and a commission was made up from the counsellors of New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Nova Scotia. When they met at Hampton, August Ist of that year, New Hampshire made claim to a line due west from the mouth of the Merrimack until it reaches His Majesty's other government (New York). It would have reached the Connecticut at a point about two miles above the junction of the Ashuelot. Massachusetts claimed a line parallel with the Merrimack to the point of the parting of that river, as far north as a tree known for more than seventy years by the name of Endi-
391
NATIONAL ISSUES AND LOCAL, BOTH HEATED
cott's, standing three miles north of the parting of the Merrimack and thence due west to the South Sea. It would have reached the Connecticut at a point above Walpole.
The commission reached no conclusion, only repeating the grounds of the counter claims. The agents of the two provinces in England then presented the case to the King. New Hampshire had more of a sentimental than a factual case. She asserted that the vast and opulent, overgrown province of Massachusetts was ready to swal- low up the little, loyal province of New Hampshire and to destroy the King's own property and possessions in its rapacity. Her aspersions on Massachusetts and her adroit allusion to the symptoms of inde- pendence in the region of Boston had their effect. The point of departure of the line from the Merrimack was moved down to another tree somewhere described as a crotched apple-tree but actually a pitch- pine, henceforth to be known as the Boundary pine, standing three miles due north of a place called Patucket Falls (Pentucket, now Lowell), thence straight west till it meets with his Majesty's other governments-presumably New York.
New Hampshire, by this decree, gained more than she had ven- tured to claim, losing somewhat on the side towards Maine, but add- ing 3,500 square miles to her territory. Massachusetts lost 6,000 square miles and 30 towns. Northfield's realm had up to this time included so much beyond the new state line, on both sides of the Connecticut, that she lost a full third of territory. She would have suffered even worse loss except for a surveyor's error.
Massachusetts refused to share in the expense of any survey but it was duly made, the western section being engineered by Richard Hazen, whose name became forever fixed upon it through its subse- quent troubles. In surveying the line, Hazen made an allowance of ten degrees for variation of the needle, an error which came to have real significance for Northfield as it carried the town's northern boundary three miles up the river from the due-west point. It, how- ever, left an issue for a century and a half of controversy. Within this period the towns on both sides persisted in a habit of moving the state stones to suit their local notions. Far to the east, an unpopular land-owner, Delaware by name, was set over by the town of Salisbury into New Hampshire and South Hampton responded by setting him back into Massachusetts, with the result that Delaware for many
ยท
392
A PURITAN OUTPOST
years, until his house was burned, was a man without a country, his own sovereign. There were rival surveys in 1825 and 1827, the results of which were not ratified.
In mid-summer of 1891 there appeared in Northfield a group of surveyors under the direction of Professor E. C. Quimby of Dart- mouth College. There was immediate apprehension that the Hazen error was to be corrected and the New Hampshire line moved down Northfield's Main Street, carrying out of town and state the entire campus of the Seminary, the birthplace and the home of D. L. Moody. But the rival states had come to better feeling and the Mas- sachusetts contention, that a state line which had been recognized for 150 years had acquired a certain respect and there could be no bene- fit in changing it, was allowed. What had been mutually consented to as a reconnaissance was finally accepted as conclusive.
Vermont having joined in the project, the three states met and established as the tri-state corner the one that Hazen had blunder- ingly indicated. It was marked by a copper bolt at the apex of a granite block fastened on a stone pier sunk below the west bank of the river. This submerged marker's location was to be indicated by a large monument set at some distance from the river's bank on the line between Vermont and Massachusetts, 582 feet from the actual corner. The remains of a monument placed by the surveyor Varnum in 1827 were found in the excavation for the new and permanent one.
The Commission for Massachusetts, made its report to the legis- lature of 1900, officially recording the agreement of the three states and a bogey of 150 years was laid to rest.
The town's loss of the top third of its territory by the Hazen sur- vey of 1740 was a forgotten blow by the time the line between the states was settled in 1900. It could not have been deeply resented when it occurred ; the town was having all it could do to defend the populated portion and the region taken away was next to uninhabited. There came to be a fortified hamlet on the easterly side, with Cap- tain Hinsdell's fort as its main defense and across the river was Dum- mer, which was a Northfield fort even though doubtfully within its original border. After the division there came into being the town of Hinsdale, covering all the lost territory on both sides of the Con- necticut, incorporated in 1753. In time, the region west of the river developed into the town of Vernon, the corner town of Vermont,
,
NORTHFIELD SEMINARY CAMPUS (Airplane View)
6
MOUNT HERMON SCHOOL CAMPUS (Airplane View)
393
NATIONAL ISSUES AND LOCAL, BOTH HEATED
when that state came into existence as the first to be added to the original thirteen.
Losing the Hinsdale territory, Northfield lost its only chance of industrial development. The Ashuelot river was the only stream within the original grant that had power beyond the requirements of a saw or grist mill of the primitive type. Upon it, there came to be built up woolen mills and paper mills of considerable extent and Hinsdale had industrial importance. As an incident, the older town lost the distinction of being the site of "Over the river, they beckon to me," the sombre verse of a factory girl with imagination sufficient to be inspired to its supernal plaint by the Ashuelot River viewed from a factory window. The poem by Priest, the factory girl, had wide acceptance, won its way into the school "readers" and remains secure in the collections of the rhythmic products of the century. Again, there was lost the chance to be the birthplace of Charles A. Dana, one of the great American journalists in the heydey of newspaper per- sonalities, the maker of the New York Sun. It was not known, how- ever, that Dana ever bothered to remember that he was born in Hinsdale.
On the Vermont side the town of Vernon became just another farming community with its own interests slightly related to the mother town. It had its beginnings with the Hunt family first break- ing its ground and producing such a genius as the artist, William Morris Hunt, son of the lieutenant governor of Vermont. The village which straddled the state line, South Vernon-West Northfield, had a group of vigorous native families, the Beldings, the Barbers, the Richardsons, producing the pre-eminent surgeon, Maurice Richard- son, related to all three of them, and the Priests. It gained a mild prominence as a railroad junction, the old Vermont and Massachu- setts coming here to join the New London Northern while the Cheshire came down the Ashuelot valley to its terminus. In general the establishment of the state line made a geographical as well as a political division of the original township, and reduced social rela- tionship to near the vanishing point.
Over the edge of the century, Northfield acquired an interest in trolley-car possibilities. Such an interest was not permitted to await the development of an indigenous ambition. It was insistently pressed upon every Massachusetts town that gave a prospect of profit to the
394
A PURITAN OUTPOST
promoters or happened to furnish a territorial link between towns that did. The last decade of the 1800's was marked by an epidemic of electric-road building. Street cars had been known to American cities for seventy years (the first in 1832) but they were kept within urban bounds by the slowness of horses. Up to 1890 it was one of the thrills of a visit to Boston to ride out to Harvard College seated on the side of a car drawn by a pair of plodding horses to the music of jangling bells and, if it were winter, with the car floor strewn with straw for foot warmth.
The first departure from horse-cars was cars drawn by under- ground moving cables, first used in San Francisco in 1873, by Chicago in 1878, by Philadelphia in 1884 and by New York not until 1892, soon to be superseded by underground trolleys, drawing power from an electric rail. The overhead trolley opened the way to extension into the country and by 1900 Massachusetts was in fair way to being gridironed with trolley roads. The delusion developed that any elec- tric road would be a bonanza as well as a civilizer.
Greenfield was a prospective radiating point of trolley-road devel- opment. Northfield was one objective outpoint or perhaps a way- point for advance up the valley. To realize it a Bernardston and Northfield company was organized in September, 1901. A rival plan, to connect with the Greenfield road at Millers Falls, appeared the next month. From that point through several years the discussion ran on, with fluctuating fervor and intense personal differences. In 1904 a definite plan appeared for a line from Millers Falls through the town to Hinsdale, with a spur track up Moody Hill. In March, 1905, the promotors promised tracks would be laid and cars run- ning by August first. After a lull, unbroken by any clanging of cars, the issue reached the town-meeting and after fervent debate, fran- chise was refused by a vote of 96 to 78.
Incidental proposals were a new bridge opposite Mt. Hermon and an elevated structure across Great Meadow, backed by New York capital. A Northfield and Greenfield street railway company was incorporated in 1907, the town not voting it a franchise. Brattleboro reappeared and held out inducements in connection with the building of a power dam in the river at Vernon. Then the issue faded away and the peace of the town was assured.
The appearance on the horizon of the motor car reduced trolley
395
NATIONAL ISSUES AND LOCAL, BOTH HEATED
road ardor, fortunately before rails had been laid soon to become useless. Even this invasion was doubtfully regarded. Sometime in the 'eighties a local mechanical genius, George Long, had devised a horseless carriage with a steam motor, driving an ordinary buggy, and operated it on Main Street. It so fully satisfied its inventor that he made no attempt to develop it further. Who in town first owned an automobile was not recorded ; certainly not a candidate for select- man. Possibly it was Rev. George F. Pentecost, D.D., who in 1908 was disturbing people by driving a noisy car, very similar in form to an ordinary carriage.
In 1905, acting under a permissive state law, the town closed most of its roads to automobiles and put a speed limit upon all of them to twelve miles an hour and, in Main Street, nine miles. Under a right to appeal such restriction, the state highway commission gave a hearing in the town hall, its members actually arriving in one of the objectionable vehicles, listened to fervid denunciations of the devilish machines and after it had reached Boston annulled the exclusion from the highways.
The speed limit remained and in 1906 it was observed that cars were whirling through Main Street at a speed nearer twenty than nine miles an hour. Constables Kidder and Doane were put on the warpath. In 1907 there were twelve cars owned in town and in 1908 the number had increased to fourteen, including the Pentecost noise-maker. Sunday use of them was out of favor and a news item that two prominent citizens had gone in an automobile to Mt. Monad- nock was obscured by naming the time as "the first day of the week." It was worthy of news note that Congressman Gillett went through town in a motor car. The winter of 1908 furnished the diverting spectacle of an "auto" driving through the snow. Sleighing and sleigh-riding, the latter a social event, were undiminished and in 1909 racing in sleighs was objectionably common on Main Street, it even occurring on Sundays. The motor car still knew its place in winter ; it was in the barn.
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.