USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 42
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well known that it was inconceivable that five years later he had wasted to 90 pounds and under an affliction that brought him to total blindness. In his last months he had dictated the story of Gospel Hymns, prefaced by his life story, a volume to be published after his death.
Sankey was three years younger than Moody and 68 at the time of his death. He was born in Pennsylvania, was a soldier in the Union army, met Moody at a Y.M.C.A. convention in Indianapolis in June, 1871, and was immediately enlisted in a partnership that was to be life- long and to gain the hearing of millions of people. "Gospel Hymns," the collection of his own and other compositions, was destined to run through 84 editions and reach a sale of over sixty million copies. The royalties, amounting to thousands of dollars through each of many years, were a source of support to the evangelistic enterprises. Of two of the Northfield School buildings, Moody said, "Sankey sang them up." W. R. Moody described him as "a pioneer in a certain type of Christian hymnology." It was not only a certain type but one that gained a favor none other had, moved more souls, became the familiar possession of the millions, entered into common speech as well as song, and deeply affected all subsequent hymnal composition.
Of the gospel hymn writing and singing group, P. P. Bliss, whose "Wonderful Words of Life" was one of the last of his works and was published by Fleming Revell in a Sunday School periodical, had died in the railroad disaster at Ashtabula, Ohio, in 1875. Northfield had heard him often and knew well the black-bearded singer, the sweetest of them all. James McGranahan's voice had been silenced in 1903. George Coles Stebbins, who wrote "Beyond the Smiling and the Weeping" in 1880 and whose enduring "Some Day" was first sung at a Moody meeting in Newport in 1894, had fallen in with Moody, Sankey and Bliss at Chicago in the early '70's, came to North- field in 1876 and although but little the junior of these (born in 1846) was the survivor of them in 1910 and still active in song and in composition.
It was largely with new personnel on the boards of the two schools, that the radical change came in 1911 in the consolidation of their interests and control under a single board, the trustees of the North- field Schools. Quite as marked a departure was the selection of a man, Charles E. Dickerson, to be the principal of the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies.
CHAPTER XLVII CHANGING WAYS, STABLE IDEALS
Houses Modernized, a Gift Bridge, Shifting Pastorates
ADJUSTMENT TO MODERN FASHIONS and adoption of new facili- ties marked these years of a new century, both privately and publicly. The modernization of homes was none too consistent with the plain and honest lines of the early New England architecture. Somehow the town escaped the atrocious over-adornment of the Centennial period but more than one of the severely simple old houses suffered the addition of a gingerbread piazza or bay-window.
Interiors gained bathrooms and lost fireplaces. Heating turned to air-tight stoves, highly ornamented cast-iron or soapstone, with an occasional Franklin. Coal was now in growing favor both for the parlor and the furnaces, in the few houses that had acquired them, but the kitchen stove was still fed with wood and the wood-box had not ceased to be the insatiable consumer of boy-time.
Kerosene lamps were the sole source of light and had taken on ornate forms of domes over the dining-table and in the parlor while an awkward but luminous "student lamp" was an occasional luxury. The broad boards of the floors were being covered with narrow hard pine and oak and the bricked-up fireplaces were further obscured by ornamental mantels. Corner what-nots were on their way to the attic, to keep company with the Rogers Group, hitherto the parlor's prized ornament, and the tin-hat bathtub, now retired from Satur- day-night service in rotation to members of the household. The melodeon had yielded to the piano, for which there were highly orna- mental covers and "throws."
Changes in dress and in speech marked the period. Women's attire in the 'nineties had reached picturesque extremes, with expansive skirts, balloon sleeves and hats of hitherto unapproached size and un- dreamed decoration, little short of floating flower gardens. The near- est approach to abandon was the shirtwaist but even it was decorous
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and completely enclosing, even to stiff high necks. The bicycle, now at its peak of use, had wrought some changes, the startling one being bloomers, which baggy as they were, excited attention and aroused criticism on grounds of modesty. The early automobile, with its whirling speed of twenty miles an hour, challenged the big hat but with no concession beyond the use of yards of veiling to reef the broad brims and float in filmy banners on the startled atmosphere. Then came a time of hobble-skirts, so tightly binding as to give femi- nine gait a ducklike waddle. The century was a quarter gone when woman emerged from her trappings, with limitations in dress material that drove textile mills to bankruptcy and exposure of form that would have given deadly shock to even the generation before.
Under the impact of freer association with the world, words and phrases were going out of common speech and nasal pronunciation losing its prevalence. The letter "r" had entered the field. Children no longer said "ca'd" for card, unreproved. His'n, her'n and your'n were getting rare. Widen was supplanting widden, rud had expanded to road. Even profanity was breaking loose from puritanic conceal- ments, with "b'gosh" and "I swanny" turning to stronger forms. There were some survivals of phrases no longer explicable, as when the oldest men still paid nine shillings for a day's work, in memory at least, and "odd as snow at election" echoed the forgotten time when governors were elected in May. These were changes in fashion, not in men or women. What would seem crudities at a later day had been consistent with high character, intelligence and even with culture in a time now gone.
Municipally, the advance to hard surfaced roads kept pace with the gradual arrival of the automobile, resisted as it was by resentment that found expression in town action to close all but main roads and put impossible restrictions on speed. As the use of the roads by auto- mobiles grew, there was a swing to reliance on the state and co-opera- tion with it in an expenditure the town could not hope to pro- vide.
Main street had become part of a state road and by 1921 the town voted to contract with the state division of highways for the repair of roads and bridges other than state roads, appropriating $5,325 for its share. This amount grew to $10,800 in 1924, on the basis of $150 per mile for 75 miles of highway. Then and there
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came to an end the chief source of town-meeting oratory through two centuries. Even the elms that shaded Main Street and the care of the broad spaces passed from town to state. The two bridges across the Connecticut were still the town's affairs, the Bennett's Meadow one built in 1899 and the Schell memorial one in 1903.
The Schell bridge had solved the problem of replacement of the old toll-bridge, for which the franchise had expired in 1899. Francis Robert Schell, New York capitalist, drawn to the town by an interest in its religious work, had acquired 125 acres of land in the heart of the town where he had built his "castle," completed in 1903. He had given his architects directions to reproduce a French château, had stayed away from it until it was completed and then occupied it for a few seasons before his death. Having no heirs, his mansion became a burden upon his estate, fell into neglect, was of all possible properties the least salable, and finally fell into the hands of the Northfield Hotel Company, which bought it for the land value and could use it as an adjunct to its inn. Even as such, it remained more ornamental than practicable, with its great rooms, its vast mirrors, its costly crystal chandeliers, its ramps and stairways objects of curiosity rather than utility. Mr. Schell had done the town a greater favor in presenting the bridge.
September 17, 1901, Mr. Schell's proposal was accepted at a special town-meeting. In it he said, "Desiring to leave an enduring memorial to my honored father, Robert Schell, in Northfield and also desiring that a bridge be built across the Connecticut River .. . I covenant and agree to pay to said town the cost of said bridge not to exceed thirty-two thousand dollars." He stipulated that two such tablets as he should direct be placed upon the bridge and, finally, "I make this offer in order that the town of Northfield and the North- field Seminary may be permanently benefited; and I desire no for- mal or informal opening of the bridge to take place when the bridge is done ; simply begin to use it." Mr. Schell was as modest as he was generous. The use began in 1903.
Other items of community equipment came with moderation. The telephone gained ground slowly. The New England Company set up a local exchange, in a house on Parker Street, "the depot road," in 1904 but in 1910 was refused further locations for its poles until it came to terms with the Northfield Farms Telephone Company.
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These were the last spasms of local telephone companies against in- evitable monopoly. Electric light had reached the town in 1910. In that year the town voted a sum not to exceed $200 annually for street lighting, the opening of the way for electrical equipment in the homes, which in the course of the next ten years came to general replacement of the time-honored oil lamps. Water supply had made some gain in the organization of the Northfield Water Company the first year of the century and the replacement of pump-log lines, each with a few families to supply, by iron pipes and a larger range. In 1915, it was taken over by the town and the reservoir, a modest one but fed by the purest spring, was somewhat enlarged. The first move- ment for fire protection came in 1904 with an appropriation of $450 for hose and cart had advanced gradually by the purchase of chemical apparatus and the organization of volunteer fire-fighters.
Central feature of social equipment as the town hall had always been, it fell short of new-century needs and in 1904, the town spent $6,000 to raise it higher, allowing for a basement which could be more widely useful and cheerful than as a stable for the town hearse, and extending it to the rear to provide for a modern stage and ampler town offices at the front. The old building lost its variegated windows but none of its austerity. It served a bigger community use until 1924, when it was burned to the ground. In its place came a brick town hall, having certain merits of convenience but none of architecture. The opportunity was again missed to provide a public building that would be of colonial quality and consistent with good standards for a strictly New England town. The old building was no loss, archi- tecturally speaking, and the new one no gain.
Fire did another dis-service, when the old North church, which became a fraternity house, was burned, January 14, 1910. The old church was of no ornamental merit but its loss meant the intrusion of the least beautiful of modern conveniences, a garage, with its pumps and grease and dirt, the feature a well-planned town keeps in obscurity. The church had almost forgotten association with Moody and Sankey. From its steps Moody had preached innumerable times to a street congregation and from the platform Sankey had sung gospel hymns to the self-accompaniment of his melodeon. It was built in 1829, when Orthodoxy departed from the First Parish fold, was remodelled in 1858 and fell from dignity and use when the new
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Second Congregational Church was built on the rock "beyond the brook." It was bought cheaply enough by the Sons of Veterans in 1898 and occupied by that fraternity, along with the Johnson post of the Grand Army, the Women's Relief Corps and the Red Men until fire destroyed it. Then the Red Men built a hall on Parker Street, where the garage might better have gone than to blemish the Main Street. The Red Men, after a few years, sold their new hall to Harmony Lodge of Masons, which remodelled it.
The town had now become steadily Republican, with an occa- sional variation, never over the Democratic line. It was Progressive in 1912, perhaps out of recollection of Roosevelt's visit of eight years before, and one of its townsmen, Charles H. Webster, was elected to the legislature on the Progressive ticket, even though his own town failed to support him. It stayed Bull Moose in 1913, gave Charles S. Bird a lead for governor and this time strongly supported the repre- sentative, who now was given the Republican nomination. Interest in the story subsides at this point, with a dull certainty of the town's Republicanism, by 1924 being ten to one.
The town was against woman suffrage on a test in 1895, against biennial elections the next year, against all the constitutional amend- ments submitted by the convention of 1918, and in varied referenda in 1924 showed itself discriminating, at least. It was by this time favorable to striking the word "male" out of the constitution, 325 to 83 ; for enabling women to hold any office, 334 to 98; for pro- hibition, 349 to 163; against a two-cent "gas tax," 206 to 248; deadly towards daylight saving, 114 to 425; against the child-labor amendment to the federal constitution, 117 to 420. No case could be made out for a town's social-mindedness on such a test but it was moving with the tide except as to the gas tax and daylight saving- on the latter going with the ineffectual farm opposition.
The town-meeting, as a prime instrument of government, was zealously guarded against innovations the legislature made permissive. Three-year terms for selectmen, a departure from direct popular con- trol, met with rejection in 1911. The change was voted in 1921 but rescinded two years later, perhaps as an outcome of a bad state of affairs in its town accounts, due to alleged fault of the treasurer and
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certainly showing a laxity in administration. It was just as well to hold the selectmen annually accountable.
An appropriation committee to examine proposals to spend money was created in 1911 and remained a permanent feature. The town- meeting was moved forward to February in 1914 and “March meetin' " took its place on the shelf along with the now forgotten May elections.
Through the enterprise and skill of Rev. W. W. Coe it had been demonstrated that a newspaper could exist in the town. After five years it passed to the hands of a graduate of Harvard, F. Ambler Welch (A.B. 1911), a native of Quincy, who went into city journal- ism and then, to use his own language, "tiring of a metropolitan career a split second before they tired of me, set sail." He disembarked at Northfield and for four years gave a lively conduct to the weekly paper, which later went through varying fortunes. Welch went per- manently to the Boston Globe.
Relative numerical strength of the two old churches gradually shifted to the one D. L. Moody had revived and caused to build a larger meeting-house. Largely the change was due to the passing of the old families and the accession to the town of people drawn here by the Moody schools. The First Parish (Unitarian) after the leaving of Rev. John Lewis Marsh, in 1884, a man of fine quality, had two pastorates the only virtue of which was that they were brief, followed by compensation in the settlements of Rev. Samuel R. Free, 1889- '92, Rev. George F. Piper, 1893 to 1903, and Rev. Daniel Monro Wilson, 1904 to 'og. Both Mr. Piper and Mr. Wilson identified them- selves thoroughly with the town and were spiritual leaders. A younger Wilson, Rev. Arthur E., succeeded his namesake and remained until 1912. Rev. Herbert L. Buzzell served another two-year pas- torate from 1913 to 1915.
Rev. George L. Thompson, in the six years from 1916 to 1922, revived the old-time union of ministerial and civic leadership, one item in which was the formation of a town historical society. Rev. R. E. Griffith was the minister from 1923 to 1930. A deviation from formal settlement was the engagement, in 1930, of Rev. Charles C. Conner, a Universalist minister who had become a resident in retire- ment, for supply "so long as it remained mutually satisfactory." An outcome was the association with the church of his wife, also an or- dained minister in the Universalist denomination, Rev. Mary A.
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Conner. On March 7, 1932, Mrs. Conner became the pastor, bring- ing great energy and fine spirit to the work of the church.
The North Church, which in Mr. Moody's day had the attend- ance of the two schools, had been replaced as to them by the chapel services at each. Its congregation was accordingly depleted but re- mained the larger of the two. After Rev. Dr. C. I. Schofield, who was here in Moody's last years and remained into the new century, came Rev. N. Fay Smith in 1906.
The Catholic church gained in numbers with the increase of Polish population and had the ministration of the priests in Turners Falls and later in Millers Falls.
From the earliest days of the settlement the town made its con- tribution of manhood to every war in which the country shared, save one. The exception was the Spanish War of 1898, for which the enlisted troops were the then existing organized militia, and North- field had long since ceased to maintain a military company. The spearhead of the colony's advance into the wilderness, its every man, was a warrior in defence of its homes. For a full century it bore its share in the conflict for the resistance to French invasion. Its men went afar-to Louisburg, far up the coast, to the Champlain country and to Quebec. In the Revolution, they marched to the defence of Boston, to Ticonderoga, to Quebec, to the Hudson valley, Saratoga, White Plains and West Point, and to New Jersey, Morristown and Trenton. For the "war of the rebellion," as the war of 1861 to '65 was called in its day and by the Yankees, it volunteered nearly ten per cent of its total population for service far down the Mississippi and on many of the major battlefields.
Now, in 1917, came a war which would call its men across the seas and would put upon all the people a duty of contribution, par- ticularly in food conservation. The response was immediate. Farm- ing was speeded up and war gardens were popular. Many of the town's young men volunteered for the national service in one or an- other of its branches, army, navy and marine corps. Some were already in the regular army, others were in the National Guard, having seen service on the Mexican border, while still others were in University units. Then came the national draft.
When the time came for registration, the men subject to the draft
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repaired to the town hall. The next step took them to Amherst for examination by the district draft board, two members of which were from the town-Ambert G. Moody and Dr. Norman P. Wood. The departure of the men for actual service was without public demon- stration, consistently with the depth of soberness over the possible sacrifice involved. Two young women enlisted as army nurses and one of them, Laura O. McGrath, gave her life as a result of her strenuous service.
Recognition by the town of service in the World War took the form of a bronze tablet placed at the entrance to the new town hall. It bears the 83 names of "citizens of Northfield who served in the World War." In the roll are names as old as the town itself, such as Janes in the person of two descendants of the preacher under the "old oak" in 1673, Benjamin and Dwight; and Wright, in that of the nurse, Mary D. Hardly less significant of background are those of Callender, Holton, Long, Smith, Stratton and Moody. Outnum- bering these are those of the newer elements in the town's popula- tion-Broderick, Casey, Coughlin and Dale, familiar as representing the Irish families here for nearly a century ; and the later ones such as Cappelluzzo, Demyanoff, Kopriva, Marino, Plakidas and Tanski. Their comradeship might be the text for a treatise on the merging of old and new on the level of a common patriotic service. The tablet was unveiled with due ceremony on Armistice day, 1929.
A Post of the American Legion was organized within a year after the armistice, its charter bearing the date of August 22, 1919. Its number is 179, the original name, Northfield Post, being changed the next year to Haven E. Spencer Post, in memory of one of its comrades, who on September 15, 1920, was killed by the crashing of an army plane he was flying about the town. Spencer was born in Virginia in 1891, came with his family to Northfield in 1903, gradu- ated from Mt. Hermon, entered Yale College in 1915 and enlisted in the aviation service in 1917. He had been flying instructor at several fields and been promoted to the rank of second lieutenant. The fatal accident was due to striking a tree while trying to land the plane.
The monumental work of William Revell Moody for the North- field Schools and the religious conventions throughout the years since
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his father passed this heavy responsibility to his children, came to a close by his choice in 1928. It was not an entirely happy termination. The consolidation of the schools in 1912 and other developments at the time had caused the complete severance of the other son, Paul Dwight, from the organization. William R. Moody's mastery had been, through the later years, as complete as it was effective. In 1926, the board of trustees of the schools had been increased to 30 and Mr. Moody was continued in chairmanship, and as president. Under pressure of ill health he went abroad in that year and while away received a request for his resignation as president with assur- ance that he "should have the honorable and influential position of chairman of the board."
The trustees, whose responsibility was for the entire work in Northfield, had meanwhile chosen Elliott Speer as president. A young man of rare gifts and great energy, the choice promised to be a for- tunate one and there was evident intention to bring about so impor- tant a change without loss of either Mr. Moody's interest or his sup- port. It proved otherwise. In June, 1928, Mr. Moody published a letter he was sending to the trustees, tendering his resignation as chairman and elaborately setting forth his resentment of the trustees' course towards him as well as his dissent from the policies of the board and the new president.
Whatever the merits of the issues raised, however fully the trustees were justified in bringing a young man of great attractive- ness to the presidency and however considerate they sought to be to- wards W. R. Moody, the turn in events was the end of a service of devotion to a cause and a task such as few men render in any relation.
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CHAPTER XLVIII TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES
Serious and Spectacular Observance of a Colorful Past
THE QUARTER-MILLENNIAL of the town's existence, coming in 1923, was made the occasion of a celebration quite worthy of the past of a Puritan outpost and richly significant of the pride in it in the hearts of the present. The town had voted a liberal appropriation, too liberal to be legal, as it was discovered with the result that it was re- duced to nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. There was no limit of law on the outlay of enterprise by the town's people, and none in its outpouring.
The town put the matter without restriction in the hands of a committee of eight, the membership of which was discreetly balanced between descendants of the early settlers and persons of adopted loy- alty. Its chairman was Dr. Norman P. Wood, whose interest in the town was acquired but ardent. Ambert G. Moody, descendant through the tribes of Alexander and Holton from the beginners, Thomas Russell Callender, with Field and Mattoon ancestry, and Frank H. Montague, also of Field descent, were its other male mem- bers, while their wives were committee companions.
An elaboration of committees and group leaders enlisted well towards a hundred persons. They were not all of the Northfield of 1923 but of the Northfield of two centuries before, when its domain included the towns of Vernon, in Vermont, of Hinsdale and a por- tion of Winchester, in New Hampshire. Nor were they all of the Northfield tradition; no Bolinski, Urgielewicz, Cembalisty or Szes- towieki was in the first settlement, nor second, nor third. For that matter, Quinlan and Dale and Broderick stood for another accession, albeit this was nearly a century in the past. But they were here in a common and undistinguishable interest in the town and all its history, fully adopted in the community and now sharing equally in the im- posing celebration.
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