USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 41
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In return, Moody was paid a devotion by the chosen which showed itself in the fullest performance of duty by every recipient of his confidence. The inspiration of his leadership remained the cen- tral source of power in every project. How, now that he was gone, would this force be supplied? By whom? Widespread as was the instant forming of such questionings, it was most intensive in the town which had been the base of his activities and where his practical enterprises were physically displayed.
Certainly among his kin, there was none that closely resembled him. There had been one, his younger brother, Samuel, one of the twins, the last born of Edwin and Betsey, but he had gone years ago. He had died suddenly as he walked across the very field, then barren, which was to become the central site of the school he first suggested as the two drove together over the mountain road on a day now memorable as the birthday of a new idea.
The myth has somehow been created that Sam Moody was an invalid and so the object of his brother's sympathy. No word could more ill befit him. Subject he indeed was to a form of epilepsy but not to the point of curbing the activity in which the two were most alike. This youngest of the tribe was a restless, impatient being. He spoke his mind in "town meetin'." He was the town's tax collector, and the taxes were paid or there was a reason why not. He gathered the
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pew-rentals for the First Parish with like thoroughness. He was the local news-gatherer and what happened was written to the county paper in a strong square hand. He was a proprietor of the Social Library and a reader of its solid books, an intelligent, popular and trusted citizen.
When Dwight came home from England in 1875, Sam promptly changed his church allegiance, solely out of his keenness for his brother and his cause. Physically they were not unlike, square-built, full-bearded, with the difference in hue between black and red, but most of a kind in their restlessness, along with a lively wit and out- rightness. There was no second Sam, as surely there was no second Dwight.
Moody, in almost his last words, had bequeathed the schools, as a sacred charge, to his children. Of these there were three. Emma, now the wife of Arthur Percy Fitt, most closely resembled her father in personality. William Revell justified the family name acquired from his gracious mother and had been closely associated with his father and with the schools. He was graduated in the first class from Mt. Hermon, that of '87, and after his marriage lived there in a house built for him and given the name of Dwight house, in mem- ory of his one son, Dwight Lyman Moody, 2nd, who had died in young boyhood. Paul Dwight, now recently out of college, was headed for the Congregational ministry. Both the boys were Yale graduates. Respect was bound to be paid the founder's wish in the selection of one of the sons to assume the heavy responsibility of carrying forward the development of the schools, and the Seminary trustees promptly chose William Revell. Paul Dwight presently be- came a member of the board of each school, as he was to continue to be until his resignation in 1910.
In the twenty years of the Seminary's existence and the eighteen of Mt. Hermon's, the schools had come to a landed estate of 1,200 acres, with 30 buildings, and a valuation of a million and a quarter. The Chicago buildings and their equipment represented $250,000. The annual requirement for the maintenance and operation of the institutions Moody had built up was not less than $125,000. The schools had by no means reached the limit of their possibilities, nor of their need. Moody had said in 1898 that "these institutions are in their infancy." It would be no fulfilment of his purpose to maintain
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the schools at their present size. Moreover the summer meetings were a permanent institution and alike had their possibilities of expansion.
Such were the dimensions of the task now undertaken by this young man, in his early thirties, with all the uncertainty as to the effect of the removal of the founder's dynamic leadership and his world-wide prestige. In his favor were the established capacity and the devoted interest of the principals of the two schools, Evelyn S. Hall, who had been at the head of the Seminary since 1883, and Henry F. Cutler, Mt. Hermon's principal since 1890. With him also were the two boards made up of his father's stoutest friends. Greatest of the assets was the support his father had won, as shown in the response to his appeals, and now to be quickened by a memorial purpose. Even so, realization upon all these factors depended upon the mastery, the diligence and the ability of the man upon whom responsibility fully rested. Would he succeed?
The first summer gave an indication of affirmative answer. The religious gatherings brought a larger number of people than that of any previous year. Still larger was the 1901 attendance. In 1903, more than 5,000 people came. Succeeding years maintained or ex- ceeded the response. The schools likewise gained ground. In 1902, by gift of Mrs. Frederick Billings, a new hall was added, a memorial to Henry M. Moore, a Boston business man who had been a power- ful supporter of Moody from the outset of his Northfield work. In 1908, a home science building was dedicated, the gift of Mary and Elizabeth Billings. In 1909, Sage chapel, the finest ornament to the Seminary campus, was opened, a memorial to her husband from Mrs. Russell Sage. These were the physical signs of the continued support which in the ten years justified, as did less conspicuously the meeting of the growing expense of the schools, the confidence placed in the son of the founder.
CHAPTER XLVI HONORING THE PAST
Historical Interest Enlivened-Moody Schools a United Institution
REALIZATION BY NEW ENGLAND TOWNS that they had history arrived in the latter half of the nineteenth century. A certain indul- gence had been granted aged citizens, in recounting as much as lay within their personal memories but, on the whole, it was regarded as a symptom of dotage or queerness if they expected patient listening. In all the lecture courses of succeeding years in Northfield, hardly an historical topic was listed. Even when a distinguished Bostonian, with local relationship, presented "Old England in New England," linking Puritan events across the seas, it was pronounced dull. Life had too many current difficulties and interests to afford a margin for search for those of the past. Outside family Bibles and town records, and none too surely within them, there was no writing down of the events that would carry to the next generation the material for annals.
The historical awakening came after the Civil War had settled vexed issues and released the minds of men from absorbing disputes over them. It came locally when a few men and women organized a historical society in Deerfield and more closely when its second field-day was the celebration, in 1872, of Northfield's two-hundredth anniversary, closely followed by Temple and Sheldon's "History of Northfield with Genealogies." Interest smouldered for the next quarter- century and blazed up when, in 1897, the Pocumtuck Society came again, this time in alliance with the Village Improvement Society, joining in dedication of stones marking the historic spots in the town.
Meanwhile the town had adopted the vogue of "old home days." This institution was of New Hampshire origin and had been adopted all over New England. The Massachusetts legislature gave it recog- nition by authorizing towns to include it among legal tax items. The home-gatherings had become annual and served both to express and
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stimulate community interests, including one that flowed back from personal recollections, abundantly indulged as they were, to the past even beyond the memory of that revered character, the oldest inhabi- tant. He indeed might have the poorest memory and the least interest. The historical field-meeting of September 8, 1897, was only the more formal and purposeful home-day. It had special reason, the dedica- tion of markers of historic sites, the cost of which was borne by Mrs. A. M. D. Alexander, one of her many public-spirited gifts.
There was fitness in Mrs. Alexander being the giver of historical monuments. If it could be respectfully said of a human being, and a most animated one, she was herself one. She was a descendant of the early settlers and her husband had the highest distinction North- field ancestry bestowed, descent from the first settlement. She was a Dutton, and so of the family which had first place in business im- portance in previous generations. She was a niece of Deacon Samuel Dutton, pillar of the Orthodox church, and she was as truly pious and church-faithful as he and her cousin Mary, the organist. In all ways she was a Dutton, tall, spare, erect, with red hair, bespectacled, cultured and animated. There was an approach to romance in her marriage to Uncle Elisha, the outstanding Alexander of his period, somewhat of the John Bull in his physique, including the side-chops, deputy sheriff, shrewd trader, money-lender and money-maker. She was his ward, long a member of his household and his devoted second wife. Hence the fortune, which she guarded but turned to account in generous public ways, including just now the historical markers.
The town's history was elaborately recounted in the day of monu- ment dedication. The leader was the town's most active physician, also a prime factor in its public affairs, Dr. Norman P. Wood, a transplanted Vermonter, fully localized. The exercises, always the word for such events, were held in the yard of the fine Dutton place, also Addie M. Dutton Alexander's birthplace. Dr. C. I. Schofield, minister of the North Church, gave the welcome. George Sheldon, patriarch of valley history, responded. The prayer was by Rev. George W. Solley, minister of Deerfield's old church, who belonged to the event by reason of being a descendant of Major Treat, the com- mander of the company which rescued the besieged first settlers in September of 1675. Dr. Wood told the story of the gift of the mark- ers. Rev. George F. Piper, minister of the First Parish church, made
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the long speech, a condensation of Temple and Sheldon's "History with Genealogies." As if that were not enough, after luncheon under the trees, speaking went on, with Edwin Doak Mead, Boston editor and lecturer, cousin of the Northfield Meads, eloquent in tribute to the Connecticut valley and its traditions ; the Vermont judge of the U. S. District Court; a representative of the Parsons family just now also a representative in the General Court; a son, Joseph, of the famed Priest Mason, last of the town-hired ministers; plus a letter from a scion of the Holton tribe, Dr. Henry D., of Brattleboro, Vermont ; and a particularly graceful tribute by Edith Callender, in verse to the Old Oak, the town's vernal first place of worship,
". . a temple . . . whose arches fair As the slow years expand, Were wrought and lifted in the still blue air By God's Almighty hand."
One of the markers served to show the site of the first settlement, the stockade built in 1673, within which the people lived days of tor- turing peril in 1675, the first fort and Council Rock, which long stood in the Main street; another, on the slope towards Mill Brook, where the second fort was built in 1686; a granite shaft on Beers Plain, rather cryptically saying that there the Indians "surprised" Capt. Beers, September 4, 1675 ; a boulder, where the Old Oak sheltered the first religious service, 1673 ; a granite slab on Merriman hill, where Capt. Beers was killed and buried.
All the monuments commemorated events of the seventeenth cen- tury and all were expected to do so permanently. Not so with the Beers grave stone. A modern owner objected to its presence on his lawn. It was reerected within the highway, only to be overturned. Then the legislature was asked to throw the shelter of law around historical monuments within road bounds but legalistic solons objected to adding a new easement to land taken for highways and the law enacted was moderated to a doubtfully useful measure. The monu- ment found its final place at the edge of the road, not the precise burial spot of the captain, who was one of the discoverers of the site of Northfield (1669) and was cut down when leading a company to the rescue of its inhabitants six years later.
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The President of the United States paid Northfield a visit on September 2, 1902. The town had never before entertained so dis- tinguished a guest, certainly not since the brief call of Governor An- dros in 1685, he being at that time the nearest approach to a presi- dent. It was possible that General Chester A. Arthur had some time paid a call to his step-mother, who spent her last days here with her brother, John L. Mattoon, but if he did it was before he was president and the visit was not publicly observed. The widow of a man who many believed was really elected president in 1876, Samuel J. Tilden, quietly attended the old-home-day in 1900. It was not mentioned that her distinguished husband was a descendant of Benjamin Janes of the Northfield family.
The slim roster of historically important people had been somewhat enriched by the names of men drawn here by D. L. Moody, such as General Oliver O. Howard and W. C. P. Breckinridge and the Earl of Aberdeen. None of these visitations rivalled the distinction of President Roosevelt's coming. He had been foisted against his wish into the vice-presidency in 1900 and succeeded to the presi- dency in 1901 by the tragic death of Mckinley.
When it was announced that the President would tour New Eng- land in the late summer of 1902, Ambert Moody, manager of the Hotel Northfield, sent him an invitation to include this town and, not expecting it to be accepted, dismissed it from his mind, only to be surprised and all but dismayed by an acceptance on short notice. A town-meeting was called for August 26 to make arrangements and it followed the fixed precedent for patriotic demonstration by voting, as it annually did for the Fourth of July, to employ seven extra special policemen for the day. Thus made safe, the people of the town pro- ceeded to make it gay by displaying every star spangled banner to be found within its borders. Moreover, a triumphal arch had been built across the roadway of Main Street.
The President stepped from his car, attached to a train from the north, to the platform of the Mount Hermon station, the afternoon of September second, to be greeted by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Governor W. Murray Crane, Congressman Frederick H. Gillett and the selectmen of Northfield, headed by Henry Cyrus Holton. The President was accompanied by Secretary George B. Cortelyou.
A landau, from Nims' stable in Greenfield drawn by four white
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horses awaited him, with a rotund German, Jake Bechtold, on the box, wearing a topper as high as that of any president since Lincoln. Driven the mile to Mount Hermon School, the President was given a lusty greeting by the students, shot a spirited speech at them and was on the road to Northfield, asking that the horses show a con- sistent speed.
In Great Meadow, the usual road was abandoned and Main Street, whose surface was in process of repair, was reached by way of the old cemetery. The stones of a macadam road rattled so loudly that any cheers would have been lost if they had been uttered. The only conversation reported was Roosevelt's question of Selectman Hol- ton how many children he had, to which the answer was, "None." There was dinner at the Northfield, then a reception in an ante-room of the Auditorium on the Seminary grounds with Congressman Gillett doing the honors, and in turn, a half-hour's speech by the President, who was introduced by William Revell Moody. The address was an incitement to youth to be alive and was punctuated by the high fal- setto note which was the Roosevelt sign of earnestness. Emphatic words in it were robustness, integrity, virility, activity.
Early the next morning, after a peaceful night at the Hotel North- field, the President was given a resounding farewell by an organized throng of school-children. At Millers Falls he made a snappy short speech to a crowd on the station platform and took the train for the Berkshires by way of the tunnel. On the morning drive, Selectman Holton made out to renew conversation as to offspring in order to tell Roosevelt that he now had a son. There would be no question the newcomer would be named Theodore Roosevelt.
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In the twenty-seven years, from 1883 to 1910, the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies, as Moody had christened the school he founded in 1879, owed a large measure of its quality to the woman who was all this time its principal, Evelyn Sarah Hall. Her selection for the post was another token of the relationship between Wellesley College and the Northfield School, and of the personal one between Henry F. Durant and Dwight L. Moody, their respective founders.
These two virile men had in common a deep religious interest, a purpose to spread religion, and presently a devotion to the education of women, a cause which was hardly out of its pioneer stage. Durant
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gave up the law practice which had given him wealth, in 1863, de- voted himself to evangelical promotion and in 1875, the year Moody came back from his great British campaign, opened the new college at Wellesley. Moody turned from business with identical purpose and, as the two early came into contact, he may be thought to have gathered the impulse for girl education, with a religious coloration, from this association.
Durant came to Northfield to dedicate the corner-stone of Moody's schoolhouse, in 1879. He presented Moody the list from which the first principal, Harriet Tuttle, was selected. And when after her three years of valuable constructive service and one year of Dr. Emma Angell's principalship, ending in matrimony, a new head of the Semi- nary was to be found, Moody turned again to Wellesley. Its presi- dent, Alice Freeman, named Evelyn Hall, who had just left in disgust a Chicago "ladies seminary," where she had spent three increasingly unhappy years as a teacher. She was of Wellesley's first class, that of 1879.
Miss Hall was of a quality Rhode Island family, with a full bless- ing of distinguished ancestry, all the way along from Henry Hall's purchase from the Indians in 1664, of two square miles on the border of Connecticut and Rhode Island, to which he gave the enduring name, Westerly Manor. Into the line had streamed the blood of the Cranstons, two of whom were governors, "The Nobel Scottish Lord Cranston," as the Newport monument immortalizes him, and his son, and of the Brentons and Mumfords, plus that of the famed Fighting Parson Eels of Stonington. She was fully entitled to the dignity, the grace and the devout character which came to be fortunately devoted to the guidance of the Northfield School and its girls. She was beau- tiful in person, gracious, resourceful and quietly but effectively com- manding. She had the unqualified trust of Moody, with an inde- pendence to stand her own ground against even his opinion and to have his respect for doing so.
When Miss Hall came to the Seminary in 1883, then 28 years old, she brought with her two Silverthorne sisters, who for the years to follow were her chief lieutenants. These were the years of the school's great expansion and of its academic advance, to which Miss Hall's personality and ability made unmeasured contribution-six- teen of them within Moody's lifetime. In the last years of her service, she endured two serious surgical operations under the hand of Dr.
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Maurice Richardson, who did the rare thing of publicly paying his patient a high tribute. She returned to the Seminary in September, 1910, showing evidence of incurable disease, and after a few weeks had to yield, going to Lakewood, where she died April 14, 1911. After funeral services at the home of her sister, Mrs. Cathcart, in Westerly, the body was brought to Northfield for burial on the Seminary grounds. A large boulder, with bronze tablet, marks the grave on a commanding knoll, near Sage Chapel.
While Miss Hall's life belonged to the Seminary, to which she gave it unreservedly, and as an influential memory among its students, it was shared by the town, with whose people she had cordial rela- tionships, not limited to those of the church, and contributed to the community of interest between school and town, which is often irri- tatingly lacking in school towns.
The passing of Evelyn Hall was closely coincident with, if it did not indeed precipitate, a change in the form of the school organiza- tion. She was in 1910 one of the few remaining of those who had been intimately associated with the founder, either in the institutions or in evangelical work. The schools had greatly expanded in the ten years after Moody's death, in buildings, in endowment and in attend- ance. The separated interest, as between the two schools, of the people who were contributors to the maintenance and continuance of his work, had lost its distinction as the original membership of the two boards had yielded to successors with less of the pioneering con- cern. The time was ripe for consolidation.
Emma Revell Moody, fondly and justly spoken of as one of "the two founders," had survived her husband less than four years. Mar- ried to Moody in her teens, when he was at the beginning of his religious career, she had been of the utmost value to him and im- measurably a contributor to his success. With a most gracious per- sonality she combined a practical ability which served to balance his impetuous spirit.
George F. Moody, the oldest brother, who had given shrewd and sound direction to the physical development of the Seminary prop- erty, died in November, 1905. He had the Holton characteristics, sound, sturdy, moderate and not given to, as he was unfitted for, public appearance. Another brother, Edwin, who had been variously employed about the school without other distinction, died January II, 1907. The Moody interests had passed to the next generation.
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In it, the responsibility rested full upon William Revell, the evangel- ist's older son. Paul Dwight, who was in college when his father died, was now following a career of much promise quite apart from the schools and the town. There had been no such sharing of respon- sibility between the sons as their father had contemplated and the severance from the work by the younger became complete when in 1910 he resigned from the governing boards of both schools.
The nephew, Ambert, son of George, who had the Moody char- acteristic of energy, had early expended it in Mount Hermon service and now for years in the management of the Hotel Northfield. An- other, son of D. L. Moody's sister, Cornelia, Samuel Walker, had positions of varied responsibility, all short of a share in direction of affairs. Account has to be taken of the spirited and valuable service of Arthur Percy Fitt, whom Moody had brought over from Ireland, where he was the evangelist's secretary, no trifling task, and who rep- resented, along with his own, the devoted interest of Emma, the founder's one daughter, whom he married shortly before her father's death. W. R. Moody's headship in the family, as in all the Moody activities, was incontestable. He had the effective co-operation of his wife, the talented and deeply religious daughter of one of the strong allies of the elder Moody, Major D. W. Whittle.
Major Whittle, who to the end was active in religious work, long a close associate of Moody, had died at his daughter's home in 1901. A. Judson Philips, musical director for the schools for twenty years, had given up his work in 1905, to be missed in the town hardly less than by the schools. Henry M. Moore, Boston hat merchant, from the outset a vigorous and highly animated supporter, had died in 1905. Dr. George F. Pentecost, who followed Moody to Northfield in the '70's, sold the big house built by John Barrett in the century before and moved away in 1909. James McGranahan, one of the earliest of the Gospel Hymn group, here as early as 1883, had died in King- ston, Ohio, in July, 1903. And Sankey, the singer whose name was to be forever linked with Moody's, had died in August, 1908.
Ira D. Sankey had been a familiar Northfield figure, not alone as the singer who shared fully in Moody's revival efforts here but as a townsman, owning and for many years living in the house next the First Parish, Unitarian, church. He was here for the summer meetings of 1899 and attended the funeral of his long-time companion in De- cember of that year. His stalwart figure and vigorous health were so
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