USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 40
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
417
NOW A SCHOOL TOWN
bins. He lived in a neat white cottage on the westerly bank and was at the boat's end as soon as the approaching carriage could reach it. From the other shore, the "street" side, he was called by a bell hung in a modest weather-beaten bell house, or quite as likely by the shouts of on-coming passengers as they rode down the hill from the town and kept up their calls for the long half-mile across Great Meadow. The lung power of Northfield youth was largely developed in the exercise of "Hello-o-o the Boat," a joyous feature of the trip to Greenfield, Gill, Bernardston or the lower end of the Kingdom.
Foot passengers were rowed across in a flat-bottom boat, the only sort safe for the river's uncertain navigation. Even it had its perils. One day after Stebbins had died, as he did on the piazza of a street house in a sudden heart attack, and the ferry franchise had been sold, an unskilled man ran the row-boat on the wire, hidden by high water, and his two fares were thrown into the river. The rower swam to the shore but the passengers, clinging to the overturned boat, were carried down stream, their hands clasped across the bottom of the boat. Another boat was rowed out and the rescue made more than a mile below the ferry. One of the victims was the older of the two daughters of D. L. Moody's uncle, Cyrus Holton. The Holton girls were cultivated young women, who had the exceptional experience of being sent away to a convent for finishing touches to their educa- tion. There was no more fastidious person in town than Ella, one of the two overturned passengers. The other was Kirk Nims, a tall, sadly cross-eyed young man, conspicuous in Orthodox church affairs. The two were unacquainted and it was one of the town gossips' mor- sels that Miss Holton most resented the attempts of Nims to converse with her as they floated down the river. There was more reason for sympathy than for such fiction, for she never fully recovered from the accident. Kirk recovered and tried recovery of damages from the owner of the ferry, alleged but not proved to be Mr. Moody him- self.
For periods in each year the ferry could not operate. In winter there was passing on the ice, the course having to be carefully marked out to avoid thin spots and often being curved well down the river. Spring floods carried out the ice and kept the meadow roads long under water; in the summer the great log drives, with first rights to the river, made difficult at least the operation of the boat. Then the travel would take to the railroad toll bridge, adding miles to the
-
418
A PURITAN OUTPOST
Greenfield distance-and to the travel to Mt. Hermon, the school Mr. Moody had established just over the town line in Gill.
The need of a bridge was obvious but when the legislature of 1897 was asked to order one built a vigorous contest started. There were defenders of the ferry; it was picturesque, almost romantic; it answered very well. The Farms people opposed its location and ob- jected to taxation for a bridge they would not use. The county com- missioners opposed, foreseeing a tax burden to the county. The town's representative in the legislature, who came from Orange, voiced the opposition and was joined by others from the county, save the one from Greenfield, who happened to be a son of Northfield, and he championed it as a needed improvement, the cost of which should not wholly fall on Northfield even though the bridge was entirely within its territory.
The bill passed, directing the county commissioner to build the bridge at a cost not to exceed $40,000, to be apportioned upon the county and the benefited towns. Then came great controversy over location, with a two-day hearing in the town hall. D. L. Moody had kept out of the discussion before the legislature acted. It was claimed that he was opposed to the project, just loved the old ferry, did not care to have communication between the two schools made easier. Much after the event it was realized that he had shown his native shrewdness by not championing the cause and so giving the opposi- tion grounds to claim that it was for him the bridge was asked. At the hearing on location, he came out stoutly for Bennett's Meadow and in pointing out the value of this site to the schools made the prophetic statement, "These institutions are only in their infancy."
The bridge was built in 1898. It was 613 feet, the main span 360 feet long, 45 feet above the average height of the stream, the road- way 20 feet wide and the design the quite new form for this region, a reversed cantilever. It cost $39,482. The apportionment of the cost brought on another struggle before a special commission ap- pointed by the court. Northfield was to pay 70 per cent and it was something that a bridge all its own had $12,000 of its cost paid by county and other towns although there was not unanimous content among Northfield's tax-payers over the apportionment. The bronze tablet placed upon it made lasting the credit to the county commis- sioners for building it without recording that they stoutly opposed it.
Another bridge problem followed close upon the building of the
419
NOW A SCHOOL TOWN
one between the two meadows. The right to take tolls at the com- bined railroad and highway bridge on the Brattleboro road would expire January 1, 1899, a reminder that it had served a half-century. New legislation authorized the town and the Central Vermont rail- road to join in building a new one and the town in February, 1901, voted favorably, ordering that a committee be chosen to act as a joint committee with the railroad. Postponement was asked and the legislature authorized the town to build independently, farther up river, but limited its outlay to $12,000. This was no solution, the river not being spannable for such a sum.
Solution came from another quarter. Francis B. Schell of New York, who now occupied his Northfield castle, came forward with an offer to give the town a bridge as a memorial to his father. The town accepted gratefully and a bridge quite similar to the new one at the old ferry was completed in 1903. Its main span was 384 feet, 24 feet longer than the other ; its roadway 18 feet, two feet narrower.
When the old toll bridge was fully replaced, as it was in 1904, by the modern steel structure of the railroad, resting on the same granite piers and abutments, there had vanished a landmark less picturesque than the ferry but with a half-century of more trust- worthy service. It belonged to the disappearing type, the covered wooden bridge. Its original Howe trusses from pier to pier, carrying on their shoulders the timbers to support the railroad and with the highway suspended from them by great iron rods, would have broken down years ago if not reinforced by great arches of heavy planks bolted together to at least five feet of thickness and reducing by so much as their width the already narrow roadway.
Sparingly lighted as was the toll bridge by its few small windows, dimness by day became Stygian blackness at night, relieved by widely placed kerosene lamps only until nine o'clock. At that hour "Little Morgan" faithfully lowered each lantern and blew out its light. He seemed always to have been the toll-taker. He was quite cross-eyed, consistently with watching the two roads coming to the bridge at widely different angles. The high wooden gates stood open but no vehicle escaped his demand as he popped out of his cobbler-shop with extended hand. After the lamps were out, passage was free from cost but not from peril of collision or from the fright of horses as a train thundered overhead. Little Morgan did not live to see the end of toll-taking and of the old covered bridge he had faithfully guarded.
1
CHAPTER XLV MOODY'S FINAL YEARS
The Schools Realized His Great Ambition-The Leader Falls
FORTY-TWO OF DWIGHT L. MOODY's sixty-two years on earth, terminated as they were to be in December, 1899, were closely re- lated to Northfield. There were the seventeen of his boyhood, an absence almost total for twenty, and the quarter-century, lacking the fraction of a year between his return from the first evangelistic tour of the British Isles in the summer of 1875 and his death in December 1899. It was a vital relationship. Only the campaigns which carried him in this period to every quarter of the United States and twice across the Atlantic kept him away from his native town. Here he preached to the countryside, coming in such throngs as had never before gathered within its borders, and here he sought the souls of men with the same determination them to save as had come to make him, as Lyman Abbott had years ago said, the world's greatest mod- ern evangelist.
Rank and fame were the least of Moody's concerns. He sought no heights from which to deliver his gospel. He met men on their level, was one of them, personal in appeal and seeking a personal response, multiply it by thousands as you may with no loss of its individuality. He was that sort of a townsman as well. It was as if he had never left the town, had no interest outside it, and knew every man, and presently every child, within it. He would have rejoiced to win them all spiritually; he did win them all personally.
Once Moody had established himself as of the town by purchase of "Uncle Elisha" Alexander's house in 1875 and making it his home, he had no other. He added to the house a long ell and here in the first year of the Seminary the girl students were quartered. The house, which was of the severely plain but substantial farmhouse type, was otherwise changed by such modern features as bay windows and piazza and in the yard was built a play cottage for the daughter
420
421
MOODY'S FINAL YEARS
Emma's childhood joy. Mr. Moody's study occupied the enlarged "sitting-room." The relocation of the highway along the front gave the house a broad lawn and a degree of seclusion.
Mr. Moody was home from his campaigns in each early summer and at every other opportunity, generally including the observance of "Founder's Day" at the Seminary, his birthday, February 5. His concern in the schools and in the town was apparently as active when away as when here. In 1880, he called Christian workers to a sum- mer conference, the beginning of the convocations which came with every August. To them he summoned religious leaders to a crowded program in which he vigorously shared. In 1885, came Prof. Henry Drummond for the first of his many visits. It was in this year that Moody told the townspeople they were not making the effort they should to get their neighbors to church and at the services of one day raised money from the congregation to buy two wagons to be used for transportation from distant parts of the town.
In 1886 Mr. Moody set out the need of a new church, and pres- ently secured the funds for it. In 1887, he spoke with other towns- men at the town hall in behalf of no-license and in the same year had among his conference speakers, Francis Murphy, the high apostle of temperance. In 1891, he shared in the dedication of the hall given by E. M. Dickinson, the Fitchburg capitalist, to his boyhood neigh- borhood on the west side of the town. In these and less public ways he was constantly demonstrating his full share in the town's affairs and interests.
At the conference of 1891, much the largest in attendance of any yet held, Moody preached a stirring sermon in which he challenged the claim that the world was growing better and, what was of more local concern, called for the building of an auditorium, Stone Hall being now quite too small for the conference sessions. The Earl and Countess of Aberdeen paid him a visit in the summer of this year, a possible outcome of which was that he sailed for Scotland in October and was away during the following year.
The Columbian world's fair at Chicago in 1893 offered Moody such an opportunity as he was swift to improve, with his main meet- ings held in the great tent of the Forepaugh circus. For six months he spoke at least twice daily, relaxing only by a brief stay in North- field for the annual conference and raising at its meetings $9,000 to
422
A PURITAN OUTPOST
sustain the Chicago work and $35,000 towards the needed auditorium. Unwearied, he went in early November for campaigns in Providence and in Washington.
Financial depression worked no reduction in the attendance at the conference of 1894, the largest indeed thus far, possibly an out- come of Moody's fervid call. In it he said, "In these times of unrest and distress, while the multitudes are seeking relief and rest and find- ing none and the social philosophers of this world are at their wits' end, we should make all the more manifest that there is a God who is the Refuge and Strength of His people, a present Help in time of trouble, who will not fail though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the sea." The new auditorium was used for the meetings but dedication was not to take place until a deficit of $20,000 in the building fund was met, as $12,500 was from collections during the sessions of the conference.
Two marriages occurred in the household in 1894, the daughter Emma becoming the bride, May 16, of Arthur Percy Fitt, who had been a secretary to her father during his British tour, and the older son, William Revell, being married, August 29, to May, daughter of Major D. W. Whittle, to be at home at Mt. Hermon after Decem- ber 1. The revered grandmother, Betsey Holton Moody, now nearly 90, was able to give both these couples her blessing. She died a few months later (January 26, 1896) and her son's funeral tribute to her was long to be remembered as one of rare tenderness.
In the winter of 1896-7, Moody and Sankey were holding meet- ings in Boston, attended by great crowds in a tabernacle built for their use, but Mr. Moody came home for Founder's Day, February 5, was given a sleigh-ride by Mt. Hermon students and $25,000 raised by them towards a new chapel at their school. It was at the confer- ence of the following summer that he uttered words that were to be permanent as showing his distrust of purely ethical movements: "I am tired and sick of moral essays. It would take a ton of them to convert a child five years old."
Moody was now 60 years old, heavier in weight-said now to be 280 pounds-the always neatly trimmed beard turned to gray, as agile in motion, as unceasing in activity as when 40, as ready for new venture. In 1898 the country had gone to war again, this time with a foreign foe, and Moody promptly joined with other men with
-
الاتهاسله
كيبورجر
--
BIRTHPLACE OF DWIGHT L. MOODY
HOMESTEAD OF DWIGHT L. MOODY From 1875 to 1899
423
MOODY'S FINAL YEARS
memories of the war between the states for the revival of the Chris- tian Commission of that earlier era. He had served in it for four years then and he would again go into the camps, now as the head of the evangelistic department. Sankey was a Civil War veteran. Major Whittle's title had been won in the Union army. General Oliver O. Howard, familiar one-armed figure on Northfield plat- forms, had high place in his nation's history. Moody was in intimate company in the renewal of war service. The opportunity for it was brief. The year, 1898, bringing the sixteenth of the general confer- ences also brought the greatest crowd, and on its greatest day, Moody spoke for two hours to an enthralled audience.
Throughout these years Moody was giving to the schools he had established a direction which could have been no more effective, no nearer complete, if he had no other interest and occupation. He deter- mined their policies, planned their development, selected their prin- cipals, enlisted his friends in their support and devoted his masterful skill in raising money to the financing of their expanding needs. The Seminary, from its beginning with his own house as its dormitory from November, 1879, through its initial year, had followed his origi- nal design, the well-rounded education of girls who would otherwise have been denied it. He established the year's tuition at $100, relying upon gifts to the school to provide the other like sum which he esti- mated would meet the cost, and this provision remained unchanged during his lifetime.
Moody's purpose in founding the school was clearly educational but with the essential that it should be distinctly Christian. The Semi- nary was not a religious institution in any sectarian sense. Moody had turned educator. Bible study was indeed required but there was no compulsion to the literal acceptance which he ardently dis- played in his preaching. From the outset, girls from Unitarian fami- lies in the town were among the students and in the early, as in the later, graduating classes ; they were under no compulsion to change their faith. Presently Catholic girls entered and were graduated.
Mount Hermon, as the school for boys was named by its first benefactor, Hiram Camp, had a different design. Moody had a vision of a farm school for small boys of the type he knew in Chicago, the street gamins. They were to be in cottages, each with its house mother. The first principal was a woman. The scheme soon proved
424
A PURITAN OUTPOST
impracticable. City urchins were not successfully transplanted to so different a soil. House mothers of the matronly sort, capable of domes- tication of such material, were not to be found. The founder recast his plan. The original maximum age of sixteen became the minimum. The principal would be a man, the perfected type of the New England schoolmaster. Mount Hermon came to full resemblance to the Semi- nary and in the subsequent years had served for boys an identical purpose.
The principals of the two schools were full partners with Moody, carrying out his design, supplying the educational direction, guided at every important step by his unceasing counsel. They were chosen for their places with the keen sense of human and spiritual values, which was a major characteristic of the founder. The Seminary's first principal, Harriet Tuttle, was selected by Mr. Moody from a list supplied by his counsellor and friend, Henry F. Durant, the founder of Wellesley college. Miss Tuttle had been graduated from Wellesley in its first class. She gave three years of high service and was succeeded by Emma Angell, M.D., whose school career was closed at the end of her first year here by her marriage to Rev. E. R. Drake, the minister of the village church to which she led the students each Sunday. Then came another Wellesley graduate, Evelyn S. Hall. Beginning her direction of the Seminary at the opening of its fifth year (1884) Miss Hall had given to its development a devoted and masterful service.
At Mt. Hermon, in 1895, the principalship passed to Henry F. Cutler, who had been connected with the school as an instructor. Under Mr. Cutler's direction the school had made in these recent years a rapid advance and won recognition not only as an instru- ment of schooling for hundreds of boys who would not otherwise have obtained it but as a college preparatory school of high rank.
With his two schools thus directed Mr. Moody's last years on earth were blessed with the realization of his vision and he could say, "They are the best pieces of work I have ever done."
The largest auditorium in the United States, the convention hall built by Kansas City, primarily for national political conventions, was filled on the evening of November 12, 1889, for the first daily meeting in a week's campaign by D. L. Moody. The crowd num- bered nearly 15,000. With all the vigor that had come to be known
425
MOODY'S FINAL YEARS
as characteristic of the evangelist, he held the throng in his hand. Only those who knew him well detected that he was overcoming by his utmost will power some unwonted difficulty. He went to his hotel wearied as never before.
For four nights he faced like crowds, speaking to them with mov- ing power but with evident difficulty. And now, he could no longer lie down at night. It was only by sitting erect that he could breathe. Thursday night, the 17th, 15,000 people were told that Mr. Moody was ill and were dismissed. Only to the physician was it evident his heart had failed and through him was repeated Moody's admission, "I have had trouble with my heart for a good many years, but I never felt as weak as I do now. There is nothing alarming about my condition, I believe."
The morning papers of the entire country on November 18 an- nounced Moody's collapse and that he was then being carried to his home at Northfield in a special car through Chicago, the city of his many triumphs and dearest associations. At Buffalo, there awaited him Mrs. Moody and Will, his older son, only to have his car pass through unidentified. At no other time would Moody have travelled by rail on the Sabbath but he was not now in control. He reached Greenfield on Sunday afternoon to be met by the other son, Paul Dwight, and driven to Northfield behind a pair of horses. He was rested, enjoyed the ride, was glad to be in his home. Mrs. Moody and Will reached home in the evening. The Kansas City physician who had come with him stated that Mr. Moody seemed much improved, that there was no valvular disease of the heart and that he "looked to see him gradually recover." He was now turned over to the care of Dr. Norman P. Wood, the family physician.
Clearly, Dwight Moody had come to the end of his activity. Under the ceaseless drive of as powerful a dynamo as ever kept a human being in action, he had taken no warning of the heart's sig- nals until that organ had utterly failed him. Even now he yielded no ground he could possibly hold and for three weeks there was hope he would be in some measure restored. Dr. Wood's first bulletin re- ported a general improvement, a normal pulse, that the trouble was a weakening of the walls of the heart caused by overwork and akin to fatty degeneration of the heart, adding, "I confidently expect steady though not rapid improvement."
426
A PURITAN OUTPOST
Then came a fourth week marked by serious reversal, a day when the end was seen to be near, periods of coma, moments of clarity, sudden awakening to exclaim, "What's the matter? What's going on here?" and calm intervals of contemplation of the end of life and charge to his children to keep up his work. In one, "I have always been an ambitious man, not ambitious to lay up wealth but to leave you work to do, and you are going to continue the work of the schools and of the Bible Institute." At noon, December 22, his earthly life went out in the faith of his final words, "I see earth receding. Heaven is opening. God is calling me."
The day after Christmas, 1899, was bright and warm. The only indication of winter was the patches of snow on the Vermont hills, as they stood out on the landscape from the doorway of the home for a quarter-century of Dwight Moody. Through that doorway this morning passed his neighbors and such of his associates as could come to share in a simple service. No sign of mourning was displayed, there was no crape on the door, the blinds were all open. The reporters sent here by city newspapers made note of the absence of funeral formalities, of the people coming as if to a reception, of their sitting about the house and chatting. Rev. Dr. Schofield, pastor of the Second Church, and Rev. R. A. Torrey, superintendent of the Moody Bible Institute, shared in a brief service.
The casket was brought from an upper room, placed on a cloth- covered frame outside the house and carried to the church, a mile away, on the shoulders of thirty-two Mt. Hermon boys, followed by Sankey and the trustees of the schools. At two o'clock, the church was filled for services shared in by George C. Stebbins, D. B. Towner, F. H. Jacobs, close associates of Moody in his work, Dr. Schofield, Dr. Arthur T. Pierson and Rev. George C. Needham and marked most of all by the tribute paid to his father by William R. Moody. From the church the casket was carried by the Mt. Hermon students to Round Top, the knoll on the Seminary grounds, a spot consecrated by Moody in services he had often conducted there and where he had once said he wished to stand to witness the second coming of The Lord.
There could be no successor to D. L. Moody. He had formed a million partnerships. Each was dual, he for one, the soul he had
1
1
427
MOODY'S FINAL YEARS
touched for the other, sharers in the enterprise of a personal, indi- vidual salvation. The promoting partner was gone and no human being, though there were another endowed as he was and purposed as he was, could succeed to such relationship. Could there, indeed, be one to take his vital, compelling place in the organized enterprises, the schools, the convocations, the Chicago Institute? In these Moody had shown and used another of the faculties in his forceful endow- ment, that of enlistment and organization.
Moody had attracted and inspired men and women, given them definite tasks and placed in them unqualified trust. With the skill and the art of a general, he had chosen with a seemingly intuitional sense of value, actually the play of penetration into personal character, a distinct Yankee endowment. The gift, which numerously among his kind would and did make a horse-trader or a sharp driver of bar- gains, was sublimated in him to human relations. He chose unerringly and having chosen, trusted implicitly. He guided and counselled but he did not interfere.
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.