USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 43
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There were three full days, from Friday morning, June 22 to the
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late Sunday afternoon following. Around the monument marking the site of the first settlement with its tragic end in 1675, a morning group listened to a fitting address by Rev. Francis W. Pattison, minister of the Second church. In the afternoon, a band concert and the histori- cal pageant, of which more later. In the evening, the opening of a historical exhibit at Dickinson Library and friendship gatherings at the open houses, Minot, Mattoon (Foreman) and Moody (the birthplace).
Saturday, there were elaborate sports in the morning, anniversary exercises on the high school grounds in the afternoon, a band concert and the pageant again in the evening. Sunday, in the open field of the high school, there was a religious service, and, in the afternoon, the main historical exercises. Upon this program framework, the hours were filled with features that never departed from the historical pattern.
Supremely engaging in all that the three days contained was the historical pageant. It was written and presented under the direction of Miss Leila M. Church of Rockville, Connecticut, in whose fine sense of propriety there was worked out a succession of episodes, with consummate artistry. The broad space at the front of the Northfield, with the ground sloping towards it for its gallery, was an ideal theatre for the spectacle. Particularly in the evening performance, with a flood of electric light lending both brilliancy and shadow, the scenes had a charm that pageantry only meets at its best. More than 750 persons were in the cast, all of them personally linked in some fashion to the shifting scenes.
First across the field came the discoverers, the Bay Colony's offi- cial explorers, Gookin, Henchman, Prentice, Beers, to the accompani- ment of a stirring recital. Then followed the Indians, some hundred of them, warriors and squaws. The second episode opened with a dance of the stars, preceding the arrival of the settlers of 1673, fol- lowed by the first religious services with Elder Janes preaching under the Memorial oak. The Indians in War council, the attack of Sep- tember 1675, the battle of Beers Plain, the rescue by Major Treat, a succession of thrilling scenes, completed the episode.
With a freedom from full narrative permissible in pageantry, the period between 1675 and 1714, with its ineffectual second settlement, was bridged and the thread taken up at the later year with the meet-
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ing in Northampton to consider the third occupation of Squakheag, now for the first time named the North Field. The final founders shared in a discussion and signed the resolutions and agreement to settle on the land. The next scene pictured the arrival of the news that the General Court had granted incorporation to the town (1723). Coming to the Revolutionary period, the fourth episode enacted the assembly of the townsmen to protest the Stamp Act, the response to the Lexington alarm, the quick mustering of the minute-men and their departure to the scene of war. The life of this period was re- produced, the most charming feature of which was the dancing of the minuet.
. Away from historical sequence, the succeeding episodes reflected the town's life in the nineteenth century, the broom-making, with a march of "the ladies of 1830" with their brooms, a spectacular dance of "the corn husk dolls," with more than a hundred girls perform- ing, a war wedding of the Sixties, a procession of vehicles, from pil- lion and ox-cart, stage-coach, two-wheeled chair, one-horse chaise, the phaeton and carry-all down to the vehicle driven by its own power, an early attempt at which was a local steam-driven wagon. Thence the pageant turned symbolic of the struggle between wealth and poverty, the advance of hope and endeavor, and the develop- ment of learning, each impersonated, and leading up to the academy and the modern school. Then came the World War period, calling out the Legion, and the climax in the tenth episode, typifying history and calling the entire company of 750 to the grand finale.
Such was the spectacle witnessed at each performance by several times the population of the town at any time in its 250 years. Smaller but not inconsiderable numbers followed the serious features of the celebration. Historical exercises ran through the succeeding days. Those of Saturday afternoon were held under the elms on the campus of the high school, modern designation of the yard of the Dutton mansion, more recently the Silas Field place and more anciently the actual home lot of the founder of the town's most notable family, leader of the 1672 exploring group from Northampton, George Alex- ander. Dr. Wood presided. Hon. Benjamin Loring Young, speaker of the House of Representatives, eloquently spoke for the Common- wealth. The mayor of the maternal town, Northampton, brought her greetings.
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Sunday morning, under the same shade, a religious service was conducted by Ambert G. Moody and the sermon was given by Rev. Horace F. Holton, D.D., grandson of Deacon Charles L. Holton who was brother of the mother of D. L. Moody. It was historical in its tribute to the ministers from Elder Janes of the first days to Priest Mason, the last of the town's ministers, with tribute to the speaker's evangelist-cousin, Moody. In the afternoon Thomas Russell Callen- der presided, a historical address was given by Herbert Collins Par- sons, a "native son," and like speeches in shorter measure by Daniel Munro Wilson, former minister of the First Parish, and Richard Mason Smith, M.D., great-grandson of the Reverend Thomas Mason.
The proceedings of the abundant three days are handsomely pre- served in a volume, "250 Years of Northfield," published by the town, a record of a celebration deserving permanence for its dignity and beauty.
In the late afternoon of August 20, 1925, the town received an- other visit by a President. It was as much less spectacular as a Cool- idge was less showy than a Roosevelt. Unlike the stirring episode of 1902, there were no "arrangements." The President and Mrs. Coolidge were on their way down from Plymouth, the Vermont town of his birth, and had detoured to the valley. There was a procession of fifteen or more cars, the only occupants to be recognized being the distinguished couple and an escort of secret service men. It moved slowly down the long street, Mr. Coolidge bowing and smiling in response to the spontaneous cheers of the townspeople, who barely knew in advance of the visit. There were no stops, no speeches, no audible responses from the visitors. It was the town's first sight of the President, who had, with the help of its all but unanimous vote, been elected the year before, after his three years of service to fill out the Harding term. If Calvin had tarried he would have found himself among his kind, with like Puritan lineage, speaking the same language and with traces of the nasal tendency.
From the beginning of a fire department, when the town voted in 1901 to buy a hose-cart and a volunteer company had been formed,
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there gradually developed a service that would replace the bucket lines that had rarely stopped a blaze, once it started, in all the years before. In 1924, there was an outlay of $6,000 for a truck, to carry chemical apparatus and hose, and an enlistment of a company on the basis of a dollar an hour for actual service. This was but one of the new items of town expenditure which kept pace with modern demands. The new town hall was now serving purposes far outside the range of official affairs, with dramatic equipment and such items as a moving picture booth, added to the old building in 1917 and more adequately provided in the new one, were constantly appearing in town-meeting votes.
Public school outlays were growing beyond all the old notions. The acquirement of a superintendent in the 1890's before it had be- come compulsory, and the building of a high school, with the aid of the Alexander Fund were supplemented by the addition of new features, such as $300, in 1920, for the education of adult Polish people in the English language and $800 for the employment of a community nurse, an item increased to $2,000 in 1923. There was, however, positive resistance to the establishment of an agricultural department in the high school, refusal in 1916 to cooperate with the state in the employment of an agricultural instructor, along with a refusal of an offer of $100 from the Village Improvement Association and $50 from the board of trade for that purpose. The idea seemed to be that the last thing Northfield boys and girls needed to be offi- cially taught was how to farm.
Male principalship of a girls' school, the departure of the Semi- nary from the succession of three women in the position, proved satisfactory enough to last eighteen years. It would never have been dreamed by the founder, who had chosen the three-Tuttle, Angell, Hall-for this place and been justified, as he uniformly was, in his personal choices. Professor Dickerson had put science on its feet at Mt. Hermon. He had been there twenty-one years, when he was made the Seminary head in 1911, and it was the worth of his work that led Emeline Fletcher to give the boys' school the highly modern Silli- man laboratory.
The Seminary grew, prospered, modernized under Dickerson's administration. He was a gifted teacher and an inspirer of good educational methods. He cared less for administrative tasks but he
Harriet A. Tuttle
Dr. Emma Angell
Evelyn S. Hall
Charles E. Dickerson
Frank L. Duley
Mira B. Wilson
PRINCIPALS OF NORTHFIELD SEMINARY SINCE 1879
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David R. Porter
Henry F. Cutler
Elliott Speer
PRINCIPALS OF MOUNT HERMON SCHOOL
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carried them until 1925, when he was succeeded by Professor Frank L. Duley. Even though Professor Duley was only acting principal in name, the fact that a man was chosen signified his predecessor's suc- cess and that male rule was not abnormal. Professor Duley continued to "act" four years, another demonstration. Then came a return to woman leadership.
Miss Mira Bigelow Wilson was teaching at Smith College in 1927, when the Northfield Schools' trustees discovered her. She had been graduated there in 1914. She was the daughter of a Congregational minister, Rev. Frederick A. Wilson, of Andover. She had a degree of bachelor of divinity from Boston University, 1918. She was now director of religious work at Smith and assistant professor of religion and biblical literature. For two years, earlier in her years there, she had been secretary of Smith College Christian Association. Such im- plications, it may be supposed, would have been ample for the ap- proval of the Founder, even without the Wellesley stamp. While the appointment as the Seminary's principal was announced March 5, 1927, she was not to take charge until the opening of the school year in 1929. Prof. Duley would still act and the Seminary prosper. A factor of continuity was supplied by the Silverthorne sisters in the Seminary faculty. They had come with Miss Hall in 1891 and would round out forty years of service well along in Miss Wilson's princi- palship, when they would retire, for no other reason than that seemed long enough, to them solely.
Deeply disturbing to the mind of William Revell Moody as was his displacement from the Presidency of the Northfield Schools, how- ever kindly intended by the trustees, who continued him in a less authoritative position and justified the shift on the basis that it would give him a youthful associate, it brought to Northfield a man of ex- traordinary gifts in Elliott Speer. The link to the days of the Founder was his father, Dr. Robert E. Speer, eminent in the Y.M.C.A. and closely associated with the elder Moody. The son was now twenty-seven.
Elliot Speer was born in Englewood, New Jersey, November I, 1898. He was at Phillips-Andover from 1913 to '16, entered Prince- ton, where his course was interrupted by the World War, during which he served with the British Army Y.M.C.A., and was gradu- ated in 1921. In March of that year he had married Charlotte Rose
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Wells, a graduate from Vassar. In the same year he went to Edin- burgh for a course in theology and returned for two years of city missionary work on the staff of the First Baptist Church. In 1924 he became chaplain and head of the Bible department of Lafayette College, coming to Northfield in June, 1926, to be the head of the schools. He resigned this presidency, after five years, to become prin- cipal of Mt. Hermon, but took a year's leave for graduate work in education at Edinburgh, from 1931 to '32.
A new linking of the Moody schools to the life of the old town was forged when the Pomeroy Mansion was bought for President Speer's occupancy. The old General Nevers house, down in the centre of the town, was extended by a spacious rebuilding of the ell, the roomy main part being but slightly altered. Housed here, Mr. Speer became a full citizen, sharing in the town's secular affairs, including an active part in establishing its First National Bank, first indeed as a banking venture, his associates there being men of the town. He won his way into town popularity with his gracious but spirited personality, the while he was giving to the schools an effective and progressive leadership.
At Mount Hermon, where he was installed in October, 1932, Mr. Speer succeeded Henry F. Cutler, who had been its principal for forty-two years. Mount Hermon and Cutler had seemed identical. The school was but nine years old when he took it in hand and his life had been devoted to its physical, educational and spiritual devel- opment. Just how the years had told upon him is shown by his venture now into medical education, which he promptly sailed for Paris to pursue.
A pastorate coming near to the old-time span of years ended December 28, 1931, when Rev. Francis Wayland Pattison preached his farewell sermon in the Congregational Church, of which the linger- ing designation with the older townspeople was the Orthodox. Mr. Pattison had come to this charge in 1915, from London, England, where he had been assistant to Dr. Campbell Morgan, the preacher who was almost of Northfield by reason of his frequent sharing in its Moody conferences. He was now going to the First Baptist Church in Calgary, Alberta. The traditional separateness of the two denominations, which gave some lurid pages to colonial New Eng- land history, had so far vanished that a minister who was the son
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of a Baptist divine could be sixteen years in a Congregational church and go hence to a Baptist one, without a jar to his theology.
Rev. Stanley Carne, succeeding Mr. Pattison, came in February, 1932, from Gorham, Maine, where he had preached for twelve years. He was born in Cornwall, England, had been two years (1910 and '11) in South Africa, gained his theological training in the Bangor, Maine, seminary and had served pastorates in Leavenworth, Kansas, Spokane and Seattle, Washington, doing his war-time work in ship- building plants. He brought to Northfield a wife from Maine, Florence Clark.
CHAPTER XLIX IN FULLNESS OF YEARS
The Past Honored-The Present Brings End of Another Moody's Life, and a Mount Hermon Tragedy
MASSACHUSETTS considered itself three hundred years old in 1930. Such a conclusion omitted the ten years between Pilgrim and Puritan, between Plymouth and Salem, between Brewster and Win- throp, but it took note of the date of the charter of "London's Plan- tation in the Massachusetts Bay," signed by Charles I, March 4, 1629, and of the landings of the Puritan fleet in June and July of 1630. The tercentenary observation was broadly planned and amply financed. Every spot of historical interest was marked and every town set about a distinctive celebration. Northfield, with an antiquity only forty years less than the colony itself, did its part with more than a proportionate elaboration. It would be an event only less expansive than that of 1923, which was the town's own, and every inhabitant with a spark of reverence for the traditions of the Commonwealth enlisted.
On Wednesday, July 30, the houses were opened with hospitality marked by old-time customs and costumes. At night there was a colonial ball, bringing into a common picture the gowns and garbs of antiquity, many of them historic in themselves. Thursday, there were tours of historic and scenic places and an old-folks concert in the Seminary auditorium.
The evening event was a triumph of the managerial skill of Emma Moody Fitt. Its colonially attired chorus was directed by Arthur J. Philips, now of New York, son of the director of music in the North- field Moody schools in their early years. Arthur's own claim to his- torical distinction rests upon his management of the Northfield base- ball team of 1908. Friday morning there was a parade, with every antique feature that could be unearthed or devised; then an open-air "rally" on the grounds of Schell's castle, William L. Moody presiding
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and two congressmen, Treadway of this district and Gibson of the nearest one in Vermont, speaking; and finally a service of thanks- giving in the auditorium, with the sermon by Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, D.D., minister of Boston Arlington Street Church. Thus Northfield paid her dutiful respects to the Commonwealth and did so ornately.
William Revell Moody died in October, 1933. This elder son of the evangelist had given his entire life to the service of his father's interests, the schools and the summer conferences. What they had become and how far they had fulfilled their founder's designs and hopes were supremely to be credited to him. The removal from the nominal presidency in 1926 had not severed, it had hardly lessened, his responsibility in this service. He was in Europe for his health when it occurred and he had, through the four years following, been under the restraint of physical ills, to which he yielded the least possible in his activity. His home had been the "Homestead" from the time he returned there after a very few years at Mt. Hermon. The house, which his father had bought in 1875, the year of his return from the fame-making two years in the British Isles, had been Mrs. Emma Revell Moody's home until her death in 1903. Then it had passed to Paul Dwight, by whom it was sold to Mrs. John S. Ken- nedy of New York, then to be given to the Seminary, with a life resi- dence for William Revell.
That William Revell Moody was not a townsman, apart from the schools and their related interests, was the consequence of his devotion to them. In his two separate biographies of his father, he gave little credit to the background of his life, found it easy to speak of the community as obscure, which perhaps it might warrantably be rated, and primitive, which it was not, in any such sense as he in- tended. Literary license in the emphasis of an unfavoring back- ground upon which to depict a great career was not a conscious assumption on this biographer's part. It was genuine for him and consistent with a completely undesigning aloofness. Occupation, tense as it was, and disposition, personal as it was, jointly accounted for separateness from the town in which his life was spent. The con- tacts, tenuous as they were, never became unpleasant ; there was only slight play for the entire cordiality between him and the towns-
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people, and no ill-will on either part. None would ever question the ability and the devotion with which he had discharged his one exacting life task.
Schell's castle, from the grandeur of its owner's day came rapidly after his death to be a problem. Its movable contents were largely taken away by the widow but the great golden mirrors and the sparkling crystal chandeliers remained. Also there lingered the por- traits of unnamed relatives, indeed one or two alleged to be of the builder himself, spectral survivors in the otherwise deserted rooms. Thus neglected, the castle bade fair to become a picturesque ruin. It was saved that fate by the corporation of the Hotel North- field.
New distinction came to the Schell château, in the winter of 1934-5, as the pioneer station in America of the Youth Hostel. With much acclaim and distinguished blessing, including that of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was opened December 27, 1934. The spa- cious basement of the Château was dedicated to its use and during the winter was appropriated by some hundred of youthful pedes- trian tourists. The co-tenancy with the hotel was not so feasible when the season opened and the guests were assigned to the upper stories. Not to abandon the idea, nor desert the station, the hostel manage- ment took over the historic Swan house, down-town, vacant since Victoria Sankey had married and her step-father, John Phelps, had removed to Parker Street. Now the one-time abode of the composer of "China" would have new distinction.
The name of French King took on new interest and its origin new research when, in 1932, one of the state's major highways was thrown across the Connecticut just below the boulder. The bridge would cross the river in a single span, a structure so graceful as to win the distinction of being the most beautiful of American bridges of the year's construction. It just misses being within Northfield but the boulder of ancient name remained within the town's borders. It had an equally firm place in tradition, its name being bestowed by Canadian French, whose tours down the river in early settlement days were not uniformly of a gracious sort. The rapids, now calmed by the set-back from the power dam at Turner's Falls, had once, in
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early days, engulfed a canoe-load of Indian invaders. Near them, searchers on an island for Captain Kidd's hidden treasure, were de- feated by the failure of one of them to keep the required silence when his bar struck the chest and it sank beyond reach, as had been related through many generations.
When the nation's prosperity gave way to national depression, of a sudden in October, 1929, great fortunes collapsed, card-houses of fictitious wealth fell, and great industries heard the knell of doom, the least disturbance was caused and the least damage done in a town which had neither great fortunes nor industries, great or small. Per- sonal losses there were but they were as guarded from exposure to public view as personal possessions had ever been. There were no factories to close, no artisans to face unopening gates, no families wholly losing their subsistence, no outcry for relief or sympathy.
The farm lands, which in other generations had been the sole source of subsistence, had ceased to be profitable, save to the new race from central Europe, whose constant labor, shared by every member of the household out of the cradle, would continue to yield, with only such fluctuations as governed the prices of tobacco and onions. There would be ample knowledge of what was happening in the world, some realization of a share in the suspended or reduced dividends, keener sense of the reduction of savings bank profits, positive opinions posi- tively expressed. The town would continue to go Republican.
One form of investment suddenly lost its charm. Through years and under the enterprising salesmanship of an investment company at the county-seat, personal funds had been freely invested in western farm mortgages. When the Greenfield company, with its other office in Kansas, had a short supply of mortgages, it accepted the home money for its dividend-paying certificates. Now it suspended, pres- ently collapsed utterly and its officials were brought to court, civil and criminal. Not alone private but public money had been put in its till. Church funds and the town's trust funds were now revealed to be so placed. The impairment was serious and town-meetings were excited over the responsibility of the treasurer and investment com- mittees. It was not a complete defence that they had invested pre- cisely as the citizens of the town had done but out of repeated and
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fervid debates the voters showed a majority spirit of consideration for well-meant but, as time had shown, mistaken investment.
Meanwhile the country store, emporium of boundlessly varied merchandise, centre of political discussion, haven of the otherwise idle, had gone, utterly gone. Not the depression but the spread of chain stores and the automobile had wrought its destruction. Grocer- ies would be supplied by "A & P" and "Economy" stores and for all other merchandise the shops of Brattleboro and Greenfield were nearer by as much as the difference between two hours with horse and buggy and twenty minutes in the Ford. The Webster store, ear- lier the Hastings', more anciently Pomeroy's and Prior's, had made valiant effort under one of the Williams family which had emigrated from Warwick, but it put up its shutters in 1933. The old store had burned in 1902 and the newer one had modern features and the modern decline. Uptown a Robbins & Evans establishment was burned completely in 1910, had been rebuilt and was still going under shifting ownership, a commercial but in no fashion a social concern. Some special shops kept alive trade items that once were parts of the general store mosaic-the drug-store in the Webster "block," the Kid- der furniture shop around the corner from "the street," Stearns' clothing and shoe store in the other "block" on the turnpike corner, even this closing out in 1934. The Parsons store down the street had many years ago been transformed into two apartments. Completely the general store had joined the dodo.
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