USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 38
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
f
CHAPTER XLIII MODERNIZATION
Last Prospects of Industrial Features Fade. Gifts Well Directed
CONSISTENTLY WITH THE TIMES, even if unconsciously so, the town was making progress during the period of the last years of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, at least in material things. There had been no new sources of wealth; indeed audits of personal and family resources would probably have discour- aged new outlays. It was an enlivened public spirit. At no time in the two centuries of the town's existence had there been witnessed such a development of inventions that added to the comfort and facility of living. Never had there been such a casting-off of old things and the taking-on of new. A town which had been variably enterprising could not help becoming unitedly so, in step with the rest of the world. Moreover, there had been an opening up of certain tightly held home purses, to the town's benefit.
The tremendous industrial growth of the nation and the building up of great fortunes from the development of natural resources could, of course, have no open manifestation in a town which was tradition- ally agricultural and still so. How far the new feature, the schools Moody had placed here, had to do with the advance in local pride, reflected in public and private spending for new things, would have been ardently debated if the question had been raised. It was at least certain that Moody had opened a channel between some of the big fortunes and his enterprises and it poured out in the town of his birth. The town had become world-known, a stimulating change, although some of its people would not have admitted it even in an unguarded moment. Finally there were thousands of people coming into the town and even though they went out again there might conceivably be a commonly but silently shared wish to have them think well of it. Whatever the causation, the town visibly improved.
Material contributions to the town's benefit came from three sources, all of them of strictly local origin. In 1896, Elijah M. Dick-
396
397
MODERNIZATION
inson, a Fitchburg manufacturer, announced his gift to the town of a library building. He was born on the West side, spent his boyhood there, and his sister, Miss Electa, a woman of rather massive dignity and marked brightness and refinement, now lived in the consistently solid brick house on the road through the Kingdom. They were among the children of Job Dickinson, an able and solid citizen. This name for the region, by the way, had long since lost its Satanic prefix and carried no opprobrium.
Mr. Dickinson had already given his natal neighborhood and the town a serviceable combined schoolhouse and community hall. He was a descendant of the Nathaniel Dickinson, the site of whose death at the hands of savages on Pauchaug hill, was marked by a monu- ment. The fortified home of his ancestors had stood on the town's Main Street. This site had now been bought and here he offered to build a library as a memorial. The gift was said to have been some- what promoted and certainly was guided by Charles Henry Green, the man who had come years ago from Gardner to manage lumbering projects of his relatives, the Heywoods, makers of chairs, and who had now long been a leader in town affairs.
The Dickinson gift was accepted by the town in 1897, voting also $2,000 for furnishings, and the library was dedicated June 7, 1898. D. L. Moody was one of the speakers and Gaius Glenn Atkins, first known here as an instructor at Mount Hermon, the principal one. The keys were passed by Mr. Dickinson to the town's library commit- tee, the leading physician of the town, Dr. Norman P. Wood, being its chairman. The memorial was architecturally fine and, unlike some of the ornate gifts to native towns, perfectly fitted the scene. That it was built of granite from the Northfield Mountain quarry perhaps helped make it consistent.
Then came the gifts of Adeline M. Dutton Alexander. It was she who had given the historical markers and kept herself silent and all but unseen on the day of their dedication in 1897. She had given largely to the building of the new Congregational church. Now, in 1903, the town received as an immediate bequest, the house which had been her recent home, a roomy, solid brick house of eighteenth century date, originally one of the Main Street's Mattoon homes, and with it $5,000. More than this, a sum was left to trustees for a memorial hall, with a breadth of discretion in its application which
398
A PURITAN OUTPOST
made it possible for the town to have a voice and a share in whatever was done. In 1909 the town accepted a plan to build a combined memorial hall and high school.
The town bought the Field lot, as the site of the fine house in which Mrs. Alexander was born had come to be known, had town- meeting controversies as to whether the new building should be in the front centre or at one side, finally fixing on the centre at a distance of 80 feet from the street, and accepted the plans of Augustus Holton, an architect of Northfield birth, whose every building, including this one, reflected the rigorous convention, not to save severity, of New England birth.
Finally came the Belcher gifts. We have met the Belcher girls before, in this story. They were Mary Ann and Eliza, maiden daugh- ters of Colonel Jonathan, the town's hatter in the days, nigh a century ago, when there were real hats. Mary Ann was the town's modiste in a period when it was "dressmaker." Eliza taught for years the younger section of the centre school, called the primary in a school outfit which did not presume to give any label to what was not pri- mary. They lived in the old house and in the old way. Their only extravagance, and an amazing one, was the building of a piazza and bay window. They gave to the church, the First Parish one across the street, and they dutifully met every church obligation. They only denied themselves.
The Belcher "girls" were intelligent, refined, respected and liked. They just did not spend, and not-spending had become a habit and an art. They highly respected their forebears, indulging the tradition that they were descended from Belcher, the colonial governor, a be- lief no one would disturb. And now in 1908, when both the sisters had gone, the town found itself beneficiary in specified ways, a fund for the needy, a fund for the cemetery and a fund for the church, along with a sum to build a Belcher memorial, a monument on the triangle where the old turnpike deltas into Main Street.
The site of the Belcher memorial monument was itself historic. Near it, in the centre of the main roadway, had stood the old town meeting-house and the earliest schoolhouse. The triangle had been formed by the approaches to the turnpike opened in the first years of the last century and upon it had stood for years the town's liberty
399
MODERNIZATION
pole. In the same former period a square, white-painted shaft had been the guide post with distances to Warwick, Worcester and Bos- ton, the last one being 83 miles, a distance which had somehow been elongated in recent years. Here also had been the bandstand, an ornate structure, removed in 1892.
The new sole occupant, the Belcher monument, was a handsome shaft of polished granite, rising from a base carrying a drinking fount for horses and a lower one for dogs, a glorified modernization of the watering-trough, which had also sometime stood here, and in the new form destined to be somewhat memorial to the disappearing horse. The memorial was dedicated in 1909, with an address by Rev. Daniel Munro Wilson, the minister of the church to which the last of the Belchers had been devoted.
Somewhat indifferently, the town had accepted the telephone. This instrument of communication, exhibited as a queer contraption at the Centennial exposition of 1876, had come into widespread use in the 1880's. Northfield was fairly prompt in accepting the device, the first "phone" being set up in Webster's store, September 25, 1883. The Town granted to the New England Telephone Company, in 1890, the right to erect poles in Main Street. Few instruments were installed up to 1890, when a local telephone company was formed. Its efforts to install service in the households were even now slightly successful. The rates were $1.50 per month for private use and $2.00 for business but these were clear additions to cautiously guarded out- lay, and only 30 customers were secured.
Then came the invasion of state road, an outright infringement on the most important item of home government and the most con- troversial. It took the form of state aid to the improvement of a sec- tion of Main Street in 1901 and 1902. When the President of the United States paid the town a visit in the latter year, the barouche in which he was driven at high speed rattled over the loose stones of a macadam road in process. The town clung to its kerosene lamps until 1910. The initial variation was in the gas-lighting of the Sem- inary buildings from its own plant. The Greenfield Electric Light Com- pany in 1909 was granted the right to erect poles in the town and on a summer night of 1910 Main Street was illuminated as never before.
There was a short dream that electricity might further transform
400
A PURITAN OUTPOST
the town when in 1909 and '10 a great dam was being built in the Connecticut between Vernon and Hinsdale, within what were orig- inally the boundaries of Northfield. It was a part of the enterprise of appropriating water powers by a company which had started in Greenfield, had put the Deerfield in elaborate harness and had now enlisted Boston capital. The Vernon dam was costing three million dollars, would set back the Connecticut for over twenty miles and was to develop 2,500 horse-power.
Henry I. Harriman, the head official of the project, visited North- field during the construction period and at a meeting of a newly created board of trade held out possibilities of a supply of energy to the town to the extent of 2,000 horse-power. It was the policy of the promotors, he announced, to build up the nearby use of the utility. The dream did not materialize. It was soon evident that the Con- necticut had been harnessed to the service of already existing indus- trial centres fifty and a hundred miles away.
The town's immunity to industry, in the mill sense, had become complete. Even the minor enterprises which had in other years shown some promise were now memories only. Once Mill Brook had turned wheels, other than the millstones of the grist mills, even these having ceased to grind. After the pail factory on the Warwick Road had fallen into decay, there had been a cotton-batting factory near its site, surviving only a few years. Near its entrance to the Connecticut, after the fulling mill some old people could remember, there had been wood-working use of the power. In 1879, William Phelps had been described as "our enterprising spoke-manufacturer" but he was now working in the bigger timber of the state of Washington. And spokes were going out of fashion. Then there had been on the same lower stream the wood-working shop of George Long, none too prosperous, and later that of William D. Morgan, prudently limited to fitting and finishing lumber for local uses.
These modest industries were now gone, along with the historic grist mill of the Websters on the other bank. The mill pond had ceased to be. The cannery, principally packing sweet corn and at one time employing 45 people for its season, had come and gone. The enduring enterprise was the Cooperative Creamery, incorporated in 1885 and all these years furnishing a profitable outlet of the farms on a butter-fat basis.
401
MODERNIZATION
Changes in the physical appearance of the town were not con- fined to the extensive building in the section which had by now come to be known as East Northfield, part as it still was of the one village. In 1903, a region on the hillside easterly from the Seminary, given the name of Rustic Ridge, was developed by the building of 20 houses. The Northfield, the hotel established by D. L. Moody and now under the efficient management of his nephew, Ambert George Moody, had been much enlarged. Downtown, the old tavern, dating back to the important days of the stage coach, when it was Hough- ton's, had burned. Its fortunes had varied, with a period of high repute under the landlordship of Frank Stimpson, ending in 1894, when he bought the Priest Mason house, adding a story and con- ducting it until 1899. Gone also was the livery stable, which had burned and would not be replaced when horse-hire had given way to the advance of the motor car.
In 1898, the historic general store had been sold by Charles H. Webster and he built this year the first approach to a "block," on the corner of Main and Parker streets, later extending it down the latter. This youngest of the Webster family had succeeded to the tradition of business leadership and added to it admission to the bar, the first resident lawyer since the distinguished days of General Nev- ers, B. R. Curtis, David Aiken, William G. Woodward and General Charles Devens, ending before the Civil War.
A like block had later been built on the opposite corner and in 1903 one of its tenants was a printing concern, headed by Rev. W. W. Coe, with daring enough to launch a weekly newspaper. Among the residences, the loss of the Silas Field house by fire in 1903 had re- moved the finest of the century-old ornaments. The Brigham castle, earlier the home of John Barrett, who built it, and his law students, and later the residence for years of the Rev. George F. Pentecost, was torn down in 1915. It had given way to a plan by Miss A. M. Spring for the establishment of a missionary colony to be known as the Spring Memorial Gardens, under the Seminary's ownership. As a castle, it had been quite outshone by the grand house built by Francis B. Schell, finished in 1903, a conspicuous but costly misfit in a New England town's architecture.
Now, in 1910, the old "Orthodox" church had burned. Built in 1829, it had been the scene of D. L. Moody's earlier preaching,
-----
402
A PURITAN OUTPOST
quite as often from the front steps as inside its inadequate walls. Latterly it had been the home of the Sons of Veterans, the town having refused to buy it for the public library. Several of the old houses along the street had been bought and made modern by men attracted to the town by its religious interests. The town hall had been extensively changed and enlarged in 1904, at a cost of $6,000, and now had a modern stage and competent town offices.
Emergence from the old sort of public schools went through diffi- cult stages in the eighteen nineties. The state had undertaken to pro- mote the formation of school supervision districts and offered substan- tial help to groups of towns which would unite for the employment of skilled superintendents. Northfield ardently discussed the plan, held off for awhile, voted to join, undertook to rescind its vote and finally settled into the new order in 1895, before the state finally made it compulsory. A higher grade was established in the Centre School in 1891, not up to the level of a high school, and there was for a while an arrangement with the Moody schools to supplement it.
Tuition was paid in high schools of other towns, under state com- pulsion. Special instruction in music in all the schools was provided in the new supervision district. In 1899 a summer kindergarten was set up but was not continued the next year. A new schoolhouse was built at East Northfield at a cost of $4,000 in 1903. The outside district schools, which had once numbered a dozen, were gradually superseded by transportation, leaving only those at the Farms and on the West side. In 1907, a school physician was employed. All these steps led up to the joining with the A. M. D. Alexander trustees in the establishment of the high school, which was opened in 1911.
That the line of demarcation between the churches was losing some of its sharpness was signalized by the more liberal utterances at the Moody conferences, as when Dr. G. Campbell Morgan in 1907, while upholding the divinity of Christ, commended much of the Unitarian view of Christ's humanity. More significant was the preaching in the Unitarian church by Rev. Paul Dwight Moody on the last Sunday of 1908, marking the 66th anniversary of the join- ing of the church by Betsey Holton Moody, the mother of his father, the evangelist. It was a gracious act upon the part of the son to accept the invitation his father had scorned a third of a century before.
403
MODERNIZATION
Merging of Massachusetts towns into the larger community, rep- resented by the State, which had advanced by gradual, and often stoutly resisted steps, became more pronounced in the first decade of the century. It affected, in varying degrees, every one of the tradi- tional local concerns. The public schools reflected the advance in standards and the expansion of instruction set up by the Common- wealth. The form of town control remained. The school committee held its ground in administration, but it had signed away its direc- tion of the teacher when the towns consented to combine in groups for the employment of a superintendent. This project was much debated while optional but becoming mandatory in the late 1890's.
Along with superintendency came features altogether novel to the schoolroom, the sign of the developing notion that there was more to do for and with the child than to supply academic rudiments and involving his general well-being and culture. His physical condition, none of the school's business in old days, came to definite recognition in the requirement of health examinations and the employment of a school physician, a step taken by Northfield in 1907. Teaching to sing, which had varied widely, through the range of the school- ma'am's interest and capacity, had now a trained district supervisor. This feature was almost a flare-back to the days, more than a century before, when the town employed a singing master, the end then sought being a general capacity to sing psalms.
Complete now, after agony of long dispute, was the abandonment of the small one-room, one-teacher school, the bête noire of Horace Mann. Along had come a central school for higher grading and the transformation of the few remaining outside schools to primary and intermediate instruction. Northfield made out in 1905 to accomplish the higher grade, taking on the name of high school, graduating its first class of two in 1908, ceremoniously, in the town hall, with an address by no less distinguished an orator than Rev. George F. Pente- cost, D.D. Now it was getting its real high school under the aid of the Alexander bequest.
These advances were not inexpensive. Previously to 1890, the town's school expenditure was ordinarily about $2,500 ; it was nearly three times that ; and there was every expectation and willingness that it should presently run much higher. The state had even invaded the local right to have as poor teachers as a town wanted and pay them
404
A PURITAN OUTPOST
as little as it chose-actually fixing a minimum wage as a condition for getting any allowance from the state's school fund.
State control was encroaching upon the richest field of town statesmanship and "March meetin'" oratory, the highways. In 1902, Main Street had ceased to be a problem of dust clouds in summer and mud hub-deep in the springtime, the Commonwealth joining with the town in substituting macadam for native soil. A highway commission was enlarging its authority, even over-ruling the town as to the use of the roads by automobiles and how fast they should be permitted to go. The motor car was bringing havoc to the town's road independence.
Police authority, hitherto strictly local and in Northfield vested in constables annually elected, was beginning to be exercised by the state. The administration of justice, not so long ago vested in the justice of the peace, had been completely transferred to the county seat. Colonel Charles Pomeroy's south front room was no longer the scene of civil actions and the lesser criminal trials. There would never be another such cause célèbre as one man's trial for assault on a neigh- bor. The accused was a bit low-witted and blamed his mental short- age to a head-on fall in the barn in childhood. His defense, "Not guilty, Mr. Pumery, not guilty, sir. Only struck him once with m' fist and twice with the hoe. Not guilty, sir."
Trial justice authority ceased in 1896, when a district court was established for the county at Greenfield.
The town was no longer charged with the problem and the bur- den of provision for its insane and feeble-minded, it having been fully assumed by the state in 1903. The publication in the town's annual report of the list of persons given poor-relief, a protection of the town treasury through disagreeable publicity, was discontinued in 1910.
In all these ways, the town was being made conscious that it was increasingly a part of a larger community and less and less an inde- pendent integer. Town expenditure was annually increasing and already at a sum that would have made the citizens of a past genera- tion gasp. Not alone, nor chiefly, was the town spending more be- cause of the state's requirements. It was keeping the pace of the times.
In a census of organizations in 1905, an unofficial count by an
405
MODERNIZATION
otherwise unoccupied newspaper reporter, there were discovered 47 such voluntary associations. It was token of an organizing habit that had taken a firm hold upon all but strict individualists and found its exercise in every discoverable reason for uniting, however slight. There were the secret bodies, most ancient of which was Harmony Lodge, of Masons, which had already celebrated its centennial, and the Eastern Star ; the Red Men ; the Grange, which had been revived in 1892; then the patriotic orders, the Henry H. Johnson Post of the G.A.R., is women's auxiliary and the Sons of Veterans; then the societies connected with the churches, such as the Brotherhood of the Second Congregational and the Unity Club of the Unitarian; and perhaps most significant of the new order of things, the Woman's Club, presently to become The Fortnightly. There had been boy organizations, fore-runners of the Boy Scouts, of which there was not a troop trained enough to go into contests with like ones in the larger towns.
Baseball came out of its "scrub" stage into club form with the new century and the "Tigers" appeared in 1902. It would be a source of pride in years to come to have been enrolled in its earliest roster- Fred Atwood, pitcher; Charles Webster, catcher; Charles Stearns, short stop; Ben Callender, first base; Charles Preston, second base ; Will Webster, third base; Will Curtis, left field; Will Wright, right field; Will R. Moody, centre field; Frank Green, left field ; Albert Preston, centre field. By 1905 there was new talent, including the other Moody boy, Paul Dwight, and Arthur Philips, who rose to the distinction of being manager in the 1907 and '08 seasons, succeeding John Callahan. All this was many years after Connie Murphy had sprung from this native soil of his to the distinction of being a "regu- lar" player, that is to say a professional, on the unbelievable salary of $1,200 a year, so stellar an elevation as henceforth to be lost to local vision. Now talent was more evenly distributed but would stay amateur.
A new racial strain was finding its way into a population that had hitherto been Yankee in great preponderance, Irish in the third gen- eration and as much a part of the town, with the slightest tinge of French Canadian through precipitation from the flow of wood- choppers. The Polander, Lithuanian, Austrian, or possibly Russian, like the first settlers, came up-valley. He was known in the lower towns
406
A PURITAN OUTPOST
as a farm laborer, but not for long. Soon he was a tenant of the land, hiring it for a season at a price beyond what the yield had been in recent years on many indifferently tilled acres. Next he was owner, building a modern house with all the features of comfort and style the old houses had, and often more than they had gained. There was a peril, as some of the native people sensed it, that the valley would become Polish. In one of the towns the farmers banded together to resist the invasion, joining in a compact that none of them would sell his farm to a "furriner." It was a good, all Yankee and piously Orthodox town, justly proud of its traditions, and it would stay so! The Polander, with money in hand, willing and able to pay the price, had an ally in the mortgage to the savings bank, often for all the property would stand, and against the enticement of a cash offer and the pressure of the debt, no compact could survive; so the town "street" was fast becoming an American Poland, to no apparent loss of its characteristic neatness and good order. It would take a quarter century to tell whether Northfield, already conscious of the new thrifty presence, would be likewise transformed.
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.