USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 39
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Another transforming hand was quietly grasping the valley, not so conspicuously but with impairment of some of its beauty spots. It was the extension of the water powers, already turning the French King rapids into sluggishness and submerging its noble mid-stream boulder nearly to its head. This was the result of the dam at Tur- ner's Falls being heightened. Presently the Vernon dam would trans- form the river farther up to a lake and cover Merry's meadow, the tract that preserved the name of the second settlement Irishman. Forestalling disputes over flowage rights, the river front on both shores was being bought by the power company, sometimes an entire home- stead, such as the George Holton farm, near the toll bridge, now a memory, or only so much as was needed, with the certainty that in the coming years there would be unbroken ownership along the river throughout its Northfield range.
CHAPTER XLIV NOW A SCHOOL TOWN
Physical Change with No Loss of Traditional Life
BY THE CLOSE of the nineteenth, the world's wonder century, Northfield had come to have a double character. It was now a school town, with the two schools of Moody's founding and fostering well- developed institutions, a religious centre radiating his gospel to the world's far corners, but yet the old New England town, quiet, orderly, self-reliant, moderately prosperous, cautiously progressive and con- sciously beautiful. It had been not so much transformed by the enter- prise of its now world-famous son as amplified. Moody had chosen wisely when he made his native town the centre of his far-reaching activities. The town with its natural beauty, fine traditions and clean social life, unmarred by industrial invasion, gave perfect setting to expanding schools and alluring hospitality to religious sojourners.
The town, for its part, had not become an adjunct to the schools. The home opinion was that Mr. Moody was vastly fortunate in find- ing and appropriating such advantages as the town afforded. How- ever the account balanced, it would have to show on one side that the town was independently existent and self-conscious. The last quarter of the century, which encompassed the Moody development, had also been the period of the town's best community growth, not in numbers, which changed almost none, but in home-developed activi- ties under home leadership.
The Street, that term still meaning the village, had distinctly im- proved in appearance. A village improvement association, first formed in 1876 and reorganized and reenlivened in 1896, had effectively imposed upon the more careless the standards of the more esthetic. At the outset it brought about the narrowing of the roadway and the straightening of its borders. The trees had been trimmed and new ones planted. The grass was no longer allowed full and irregular growth. There had been attempts to get the long street lighted but,
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with only individual provision for them, only eighteen street lamps could be counted as late as 1897. Best of all, the fences began dis- appearing in the 'seventies and now few of the varying and often neglected pickets and gates were left for the no-longer-needed-protec- tion of front yards; the street had become a park. Paint had come into more frequent use, fortunately "white lead and oil" with no added pigment except the universal green for the universal blinds.
There had been minor changes. The Liberty Pole, which had stood in the street on the little triangle at the head of the turnpike since the days of the Revolution, renewed from time to time, had gone. So had the square signboard on the same plot with its array of dis- tances, to Warwick 6 m., to Boston 83 m. In its place had stood for a while an ornate bandstand, built in the '70's for the concerts of the brass band and removed in 1892, marking the end of that resounding form of public entertainment.
Few new buildings had appeared in the old part of the town, and these so followed the settled fashion as to be unobtrusive. Down the street, the leading modern carpenter, Will Moore, had built a house next the imposing pillared Captain Lane place. The Parsons store had been built on its owner's home lot in 1878. Farther down, the rambling cannery, which had only scant years of steaming activity in the '80's, had come and gone. On the ancient Mattoon place, next the oldest house on the street ("remodelled" by Dr. Samuel Mat- toon in 1760), Moody, the tailor, had committed a building atrocity and flamboyantly labelled it "Mount Hermon Bazaar."
The S. Y. Walker store and tobacco warehouse, burned in the winter of 1886, had been replaced by St. Patrick's, the Catholic church. Quite the most striking transformation had been the modernizing of the Swan house, once the abode of the composer of "China" and other lasting hymn-tunes. Bought in the '80's from Wright Stratton, who had first and last owned one at a time more houses than any other citizen, by Charles A. Lindsey, proprietor of hotels in the South, and remodelled by him in 1885 it had become the outstanding modern residence, the only one in town with plate glass windows-actually so. Across the street, the house built by Priest Mason, as the last min- ister of the town church was known in the days when he and Timothy Swan were uncomfortable neighbors, had been changed into an inn by Frank Stimpson, the last of the locally famous landlords
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of the rambling old tavern just down the street, which he left in 1894.
Offset against the improvements and the general thriftiness of appearance, was the Bee Hive, which had come down from its famous past of Hunt tavern of the century before and Academy of the 1830's to a sad state of neglect and shifting tenement occupation. This par- tial wreck and a small but pillared building up the street, which in its day had been the law office of Charles A. Devens, later famous as major-general and jurist, were described in 1885 as the town's two eyesores ; the small one had gone now but the big one remained, get- ting steadily eye-sorer.
Public buildings had changed. The town hall had been extensively altered to serve modern uses, losing in the process its distinctive calico- colored windows and gaining a modern stage. The railroad station- not so, the depot, with a short "e,"-which for over half a century had been the town's port of entry and departure, had in 1887 given way to one of modern architecture and convenience. The old "depot" had served in the early part of the time and for part of its space as the depot-master's residence. Its platform was built to the level of freight-car doorsills and passengers had to make flying leaps to land on car platforms; they would not adjust to conventional climbing of car-steps. The Vermont and Massachusetts had long since ceased to operate, this part of its line becoming the New London Northern and lately, by shift of leases, the Central Vermont.
Well up the street, there had appeared the Dickinson Memorial Library, standing near the site of the frontier Dickinson fort. It was the gift of E. M. Dickinson in memory of his ancestors and was opened in 1891, receiving to its shelves the residue of the Social Library begun in 1815 by Thomas Power and his associates and the accretions of the town library from its town-hall quarters. Beyond this had come a transformation due to the purchase of a large tract of land by Francis B. Schell, New York capitalist, for his estate in the centre of which he had built a château in 1894. The estate converted a long Main Street front into a rear, enclosed by an ugly high red fence, and swallowed up the fine ancestral house of the Webster fam- ily, which disappeared, and another house long held by the Moses Field family and later the home of Rev. Dr. Arthur T. Pierson, an evangelist associate of Moody. Dr. Pierson was a forceful preacher
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with such a command of the scriptures that he was once character- ized, not unkindly, as a Bible gymnast. The Pierson house had been moved across the street by the newest physician in town, Dr. Norman P. Wood. In the same enterprise of the New Yorker the familiar mill pond had vanished and Mill brook crossed the street unvexed.
Some of the accession of new residents which was transforming the school end of the town had overflowed into the old street. The Brigham castle had been since 1880 the property of Rev. Dr. George F. Pentecost and intermittently his home, moderately changed by the addition of piazzas. It had chiefly been occupied by Captain C. C. Duncan, a vigorous and venerable man, whose vigor would explode at mention of the fact that he had commanded the ship that carried Mark Twain overseas and was given permanence in literature in the first pages of "Innocents Abroad." The disturbing incident was the report of a banquet on shipboard when Captain Duncan was recorded as making the most acceptable speech by ordering up another basket of champagne. The Captain's real ardor as to beverage was as a lifelong total abstainer and stout temperance advocate.
Sankey, who does not have to be identified to the world as Ira D., had bought in 1885, the house almost under the eaves of the First Parish (Unitarian) church and it was thenceforth his home. It had association with his companion in world fame, as for a time in boy- hood Dwight Moody had been there in the household of Rev. Oliver C. Everett, the Unitarian minister, who was the friend and helper of the widowed Betsey Moody. These liberal-religious associations in no wise hampered Mr. Sankey's production here of many of his gospel hymns and here he entertained at times the blind producer of others in the familiar collection, Fanny Crosby. The prior owner was Dr. Rollin Clayton Ward, the town's most active practitioner, as well as Democratic leader and its postmaster in Cleveland days. He acquired one of the old houses in the same neighborhood, removed it and built anew. Mr. Sankey had also bought in 1884 the house, farther down the street, long occupied by "Dame" Cook, intending it to be the home of his brother but the brother did not come and the place was resold.
The fine old house standing at the corner of the north Warwick road, now School Street, had been bought by friends of Major D. W. Whittle and it became his home. This house, in late years known as the Phelps place, was originally the home of Dr. Blake, who built it
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early in the century. It was from this house that May Whittle, the Major's beautiful and musically talented daughter, had gone on an August day of 1894 to be married in the new Congregational church to William Revell Moody. A choice little cottage near the site of the Alexander fort was bought by the Seminary in 1886 and promptly occupied by Professor A. J. Philips, the musical director of the Moody schools.
Mill Brook was the dividing line between the old and the new Northfield. High on its rocky bank had arisen the new Orthodox church, a product of Moody's restless enterprise, dedicated in 1888 and the joint place of worship of the two Moody schools. Somewhat back, in what had anciently been the farm of Ora Holton, stood the Hotel Northfield, opened in 1888. A new short street leading past the church to the hotel had been the scene of both Moody and Sankey working with shovels and tipcart in its construction.
The Schell estate embraced a long stretch of the brook and here stood his imposing castle, said to have cost $300,000. In 1887, there had been opened a new street, parallel but not rival to Main Street, running along a crest of the plain and ending squarely in front of the Moody "birthplace." Houses now occupied its new areas, the first having been built by D. B. Towner, a musical genius long associated with the Moody work. There had been much building at the upper part of the town, along with the Seminary's development and includ- ing residences for people drawn here through related interests and it was now spreading to the hillsides of the region long known as Strobridge.
The town had been taken by surprise in 1889 by the announce- ment of a new post office to be known as East Northfield. It had come about without local knowledge. It was resented, of course. It seemed to indicate a purpose to divide the town. "East Northfield" was a brand new name. Why "East"? The region to be served by the additional post office was no farther east than the older part of the village and its post office. Resentment died rapidly away as it was sensed that the convenience of the numerous population, permanent and seasonal, at this end of the town was the sole consideration, post offices being primarily for accommodation and not for the compensa- tion of postmasters.
Illogical as the name of East Northfield geographically, it bal-
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anced the other subtitle, West Northfield, directly across the river, and would it have made the down-town people happier if "Northfield" had been left out of the designation? Once there had been a proposal to form a new town with the name "Evangel" but Moody was quite too sensible to endorse so supernal a title and there were substantial old residents in that section who would protest being lifted off the earth in such fashion. The intervening years had shown there was nothing divisive in the establishment of a post office either in purpose or effect. One of D. L. Moody's many generous traits was his loyalty to the town of his birth and all its finer as well as practical interests.
Along the upper Main Street there had appeared new houses and transformations of old ones. An old resident, Simeon Lyman, had built one near to and in modern contrast to the Alexander house, fine specimen of the Revolutionary period. A spreading store build- ing was built in the '80's by a Crowell, emigrating from Bernardston, and in 1897 sold to a partnership in which Samuel E. Walker, nephew of D. L. Moody, was junior. The historic Doolittle tavern, in its last days reduced to the ignominy of a tin shop, met its doom in 1878, when Charles Alexander had sold its site to become, the next year, that of the first Seminary building, the original recitation hall. Across the street, a fine new house had been built on the corner of the road up Moody hill, on the site of the home for years of Isaiah Moody, the evangelist's uncle. Down the road to Pauchaug, which had been swerved away from D. L. Moody's front door, all was transformed by the removal of houses to open the Seminary campus and the burning in mid-winter of 1886 of Bonar hall, the brick house to which Joseph Beach had brought his Southern wife in the 1850's, one of the Seminary's first dormitories.
Social and literary life in the town had continuously centered around the First Parish church. Its "Ladies' Sewing Society" was the dispenser of the town's finer charities and of tea for the gentle- men on its meeting days. Patchwork quilts were its steady product, built for warmth and permanence. Its presidency was the highest honor afforded woman. It mixed literature with its stitches, spar- ingly indulged in gossip, wielded a powerful influence in parish affairs without having a vote. The Sewing Society staged great events with seasonal regularity, the annual church fair, the sugar, strawberry and harvest festivals. Any one of these was quite likely to have a presen-
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tation in recognition of distinguished service, such as the sexton's, the organist's and the choir leader's. This feature reached its highest im- pressiveness when the gift was a Rogers Group and the recipient the parish clerk, Joseph B. Callender, who sang a talented tenor in the choir for years and displayed a genuine gift in gracious acknowledg- ment of the generous tribute.
The young people organized in 1872, under the leadership of the active young minister, J. T. Sunderland, who had brought western sprightliness with him to the old church, as the Young People's Christian Union, before their title to the name of Christian had come into question. It changed in name to the Helpful Club in 1880 and to the Unity Club later. Its meetings were devoted to music, readings, ardent debates on prohibition, whether women should receive equal pay with men, whether the pen was mightier than the sword and other wide issues. It also developed the drama, staged in the church vestry or the town hall, with dancing to follow in the latter place, being tabu in the church. That its meetings were important was proved by such items in the county newspaper, for example, as that, in 1891, the small great-grandson of the famous Priest Mason, Richard Mason Smith, recited charmingly "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, with Variations." Denominational distinctions vanished as the years passed and at the closing session of the club in 1896 the speaker was the Rev. Gaius Glenn Atkins, formerly of the Mount Hermon faculty and now minister of the Congregational Church in Greenfield.
Three maiden sisters lived a long life of quiet orderliness in the old town's most dignified house. It was the exactly square, hip-roofed, high-studded mansion the prosperous merchant, Timothy Dutton, had built for himself early in the century. At first it had equally square one-story wings set close to its street line, exact duplicates in form of the house they extended ; but these had been removed years ago, perhaps to make the exterior of the abode of the sisters consist the better with the precision of their perfectly ordered days. Two broad halls, opening to the air at each end, intersected at the centre of the house, dividing its first floor into four exactly square rooms. There should have been four sisters to balance the architecture but the sur- plus room would as well stand for the bachelor brother, hardly senior to the three sisters, technically the owner of the house in these later years although vaguely associated in the town's thought with New
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York City, from which he came for consistently dignified visits to them.
There was a caretaker of the estate, suitably simple-mannered Charlie, who would never jar the nerves of his trio of mistresses by so much as the least variation from their perfected routine. He could compensate for the subservience of his station by cultivating flowers at his own "Floral Cottage," a mile away, down the street, and for forty years placing flowers at the pulpit of the First Parish Church and as dutifully serving in the humbler station of gatekeeper of the Grange. On Memorial Day, the town could smile at the reminder that Charlie had been in the Union Army, his one decoration being an extremely moderate pension.
The three sisters were of the Field family which had from the earliest days of the third settlement contributed leadership in its af- fairs. There were numerous relatives-Uncle Tim, stone deaf, living with his maiden sister, Aunt Abby, in the ancestral home of Adju- tant Field, and Uncle Walter among them. But the relatives who counted in their lives were Bostonian, as indeed the sisters had been in their now remote girlhood. Silas, the father, Northfield-born and in the many years of his later life again of the town, had spent his young manhood in Boston, married there, and there given his children the full benefit of Beacon Hill culture. The girls transplanted it to Northfield, to the town's great gain. Miss Elizabeth painted, Miss Augusta wrote, Miss Maria played. It was Miss Maria's talent and the generous, enterprising and public spirited use of her gift that leads this household out of its privacy into history.
How old the three sisters were no one was to know, as long as they lived. When records were searched, family Bibles explored, persistent questions asked, by the genealogists of the 1870's, the printed page could only carry the order of their births without the record of the year. To the town they were the Field girls, sometimes but not dis- respectfully the old maid Fields, and they might have been triplets for all they would tell. Actually Miss Maria was the youngest, never more truly a comparative word. It was known of her that she out- rightly played a different hymn-tune on the church organ in defiance of Minister Tenney's explicit direction from the pulpit, and that was years before the Civil War. She resigned as organist in 1894.
Miss Maria, like her sisters, dressed uniformly in black. Her locks
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were raven, somehow resisting the intrusion of so much as a single white hair. She was trim in figure and strong of feature. She was excessively near-sighted but somehow could discover the slightest de- parture from good deportment in any youngster in the group she was training. She could not sing a musical note but she knew the exact singing value of every person in town. She was masterful at the piano and at the organ. There was no need of an orchestra for an evening-long concert or for accompaniment of a full Gilbert and Sulli- van opera. She could accompany and direct with entire competence.
Miss Maria was a patient trainer, as she had need to be with the varied native material she was developing, but an exacting one. When her choir went guttural over "The Spangled Heavens A Shining Frame," she brought them out by parting the second word, and the congregation next Sunday would contemplate "spang-led heavens." No vocal talent in the rising generation of the town failed of her dis- covery and she kept the owner of it in contribution till advancing age produced a creak or crack. She cast two sixteen-year old girls for the alternate carrying of the title role of "Patience," while in the numerous chorus of recumbent maidens the rising curtain would re- veal the familiar features of women old enough for grandmothers. But they sang and they acted in a fashion to win the praise of the critical people who came from distant and more favored towns to hear them; it could have been told that there had been months of unsparing training.
Miss Maria was giving concerts in the 1850's. She staged "Pina- fore" for an ambitious run of four nights in the autumn of 1879. She produced "Patience" with the same season in 1882 and loaded her company on a special train for a one-night stand to a s.r.o. house in Brattleboro, Vermont. Other like excursions were being planned when the death of an elderly woman in the town put a large part of the chorus in mourning for a revered relative. As late as 1891, she gave the town an amazing old folks concert with forty in the chorus and her locally produced stars in a range of specialties. Miss Maria died March 8, 1897, fifty-two years after she had come to this home of the Fields, already an accomplished player of the piano. To tell the story of her life here is to make record of the musical life of the village and of a generous devotion of talent and public spirit.
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Getting across the Connecticut had been a problem from the earliest days of the town. One of its first outlays was for a scow, the prime use for which was to bring over the crops of Bennett's Meadow. Unique among the river towns in that its territory was laid out on both sides the stream, the unity of its people depended upon some means of negotiating the passage over a river that was difficult of navigation because of its currents and highly temperamental in its varying height. The wire ferry was the first achievement and for a century it had formed a link in the highway of the county seat.
The ferry was a social institution. Its ferryman was the repository of all the news, was in everybody's confidence, an authority on events recent and remote, local and national, inescapably a philosopher. The craft was a flat boat, capable of carrying as many as four carriages when skillfully interlapped. A stout wire, anchored on each shore, passed through two posts on the upstream side of the boat and a small pulley wheel in each kept down their friction. The ferryman carried a mallet-shaped wooden implement with a deep slot to slip over the wire. He was the motor. Gripping the wire at the front post he walked the length of the boat, thus propelling it by just as long a distance as he walked. His mastery of the process was such that his conversation with his fares was unbroken.
At midstream or when the river was high, the wire was slipped out of the aft post, the boat swung lengthwise of the stream and the ferry- man operated across the bow of the craft, getting only short holds. At the landing, which was no more than the section of the steep road to which the river's height and the weight of the cargo brought the boat's end, the projecting apron was let down the few inches necessary, the ferryman braced his feet, still standing on the boat, held tight to the wire and the wagons bumped off to the roadway and up the sharp hill. At some point in passage, the toll had been paid, ten cents for each vehicle and two cents for each foot passenger.
There were three ferries within the town's limits at this period. Earlier and before the railroad bridge was built, there had been an- other, Tiffany's, for northerly travel. The important one was Ben- nett's Meadow, Stebbins' as it had come to be known from the un- told years of its operation by George Robert, descendant of the Vernon Stebbins, near whose house Reuben Wright had recorded that he "this day recued a wound" from the Indians. No public service was ever more faithfully and courteously discharged than that of Robert Steb-
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