USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 44
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The post office, traditionally a feature of the store, had long since been set up by itself. It happened down town when Dr. Ward won the postmastership away from L. T. Webster in Cleveland days and set up the office in the part of the Siamese-twin house where Dr. Mead once carried on a medicine store. Once afloat, the post office landed at last in a little building on the old Belcher place, where it went Democratic under the later Roosevelt, a Quinlan (Lawrence) succeeding a Slate (Charles). The East Northfield office in its fifty years had first had Moody relatives, Julia Walker, until her brother, Samuel E. was of age, niece and nephew of the Evangelist, then Leonard R. Smith, F. B. Estabrook and Merritt T. Skilton, all Re- publicans and the last-named holding out even under Roosevelt rule.
When the federal government, under the Roosevelt regime, pro- ceeded to spend in dizzy amounts for the relief of the unemployed,
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Northfield discovered some of its people to be so classifiable and received sums of money for their benefit. There was a possible proj- ect in the provision of a playground and a special town-meeting, in February, 1934, considered it. The leader in its favor was a com- paratively new resident, William A. Barr, now for some years sharing with his wife, the granddaughter of Charles Osgood, the ancestral Osgood house. He was on familiar ground in advocating physical exercise, of which he was an example as a long-distance walker, hill- climber and swimmer. His clear-cut speech took effect in a vote to develop an athletic field on the land at the rear of the high school in co-operation under the National Civil Works Act.
A supreme tragedy befell Mount Hermon, the evening of Sep- tember 14, 1934, when Headmaster Elliott Speer was almost in- stantly killed by a gun-shot fired from outside his study window. Mystery completely shrouded the event, both as to the person who committed the deed and any tangible motive for it. Investigation by local and state police and by the district attorney gave only the slen- derest clues and these proved worthless. An inquest was begun December 3 in the district court room in Greenfield by Judge Timothy M. Hayes, a special justice of the court, ran on for weeks behind closed doors, with the examination of numerous persons, who were witnesses in only the most general sense, and ended in a finding of "by a person unknown."
The centre of sympathy from the wide world of concern for the Northfield schools was the deeply bereaved widow. Mrs. Speer went bravely through the strain of telling the meagre facts as to her husband's death. The following spring with her two young daughters, Caroline and Eleanor, she sailed from New York for Los Angeles, thence to Shanghai to visit her brother, head of the American School there. In the fall of 1935 she was to go to Bryn Mawr College, to take an administrative position.
Changes in the Mount Hermon personnel following Mr. Speer's death were the serious problem of the trustees of the schools. Wilfred W. Fry had been the board's president since Mr. Speer's transfer to the headmastership. He was a graduate of Mount Hermon and now head of the advertising corporation, N. W. Ayer & Son Company
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of Philadelphia. In January, the board chose David W. Porter as headmaster, as which he had acted meanwhile. He was fifty-two years old, a native of Oldtown, Maine, a student at Bowdoin, when chosen one of the first group of Rhodes students from America at Oxford. He had been a leader in the cause of voluntarism in educa- tion, had been at the head of the work of the Y.M.C.A. in colleges and universities and had taken courses at Union Theological Semi- nary, Columbia's Teachers College and Harvard. All along the way he had been a leader in athletics. Mrs. Porter was the daughter of a Maine educator and his associate. Of their four children one was now at Harvard, another at Hermon, one daughter a Vassar grad- uate now studying dramatics in Moscow, and the other a student at Bennington College.
At the end of the school year, Richard L. Watson, for nearly a half-century at Hermon, teacher in charge of the work department, "King" of the dining room, would retire. Professor Lyon L. Norton, until recently vice-principal had recently retired in poor health and died May 27, 1935, at his home in Northfield. Thomas R. Elder, dean and a cattle expert, to be credited with the building-up of Her- mon's famed herd of Holsteins, left the school in mid-year and went to Florida. With these changes went the last of the personal ties to the school's founder.
It cost $7,538 to run the town in 1877. In 1931 it cost $124,513. These are the low and high annual expenditures within a period of 58 years but neither was far out of the range of its neighboring years. They mark the fairly symmetrical increase in the town's appropria- tions throughout the period. The tax-payer who complained at a rate of $9.50 on each assessed thousand of his possessions in 1877, and it is not to be supposed there was no complainant in any year, should have lived a full half-century longer to face one of $32, as he would have in 1932 or '33.
Increasing tax-rates were the common lot of all communities. In some of them a contributing factor was the decline in population and property without decrease in the required outlay. In others it was a marked growth in population, imposing new burdens, without corresponding gain in taxable property. Northfield had neither such
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factor. Here was a town of practically the same number of inhabi- tants throughout the half-century. So far from being a decline in valuation, the real estate assessment in 1877 was $595,545 and in 1932 it was $1,699,038. Personal property subject to taxation grew from $98,605 to $242,458. The tax-rate increased 247 per cent at the same time the valuation increased 177 per cent. The determining factor was the increase in outlay by 1,552 per cent.
Let it not be thought that old-time thrift had given way to reck- less extravagance. Town-meetings still passed upon all appropria- tions, assisted in the later years by a critical examination by an appro- priation committee. The few and simple items of the budget had grown to a long list, apparently as definitely required. All the older ones had been expanded by the pressure of the greatly higher costs of materials and particularly of labor. The town had modernized. It had kept pace with the world. The public schools of 1877 cost $2,500. Those of 1932 cost $34,000, but comparison between the merit of the schools in the two far-apart years would have started at a point not much above zero and there could be no numerical in- dex of the education now being given.
CHAPTER L THE NEW-OLD TOWN
Changing Population, Permanent Standards, Lost Isolation
SHOULD THE VISITOR, who paid house-to-house calls in the year when the town was two hundred years old, return for a like tour now that it is nearly seventy years advanced in its third century, he would be rewarded with few renewals of acquaintance, even with the fami- lies of those he met before. At no more than eight houses in the old "street"-the region "'tween brook and brook"-would his knock at the door be answered by one who has the slightest kinship with the occupants of the eighteen-seventies.
Physical changes have been few. The broad street is shaded by the same elms, arching over its travelled way, with an occasional slighter one replacing a veteran, for more than a century has passed since Thomas Power led in the first orderly planting. The grassed stretches have been transformed from untrimmed growth, yielding a dubious crop of hay, to well-kept lawns. The travelled way is no longer a dirt road with seasons of mud and others of dust and a con- stant problem of surfacing with gravel which steadily sank into the soft soil. It is now a smooth and, in itself, unbeautiful strip of black. Irregularly placed posts, supporting uncertain lamps for kerosene, have given way to less ornate poles, carrying the wires for the electric lights which have come to dispel alike the deep darkness of unlighted intervals and the romantic beauty of the moonlight glinting through the trees. The houses are familiar, less austere through the sometimes doubtful adornment of piazzas; two or three are missed because of fire and as many more because of removal; there are a few newly built ; and all are trim, well-kept and, with but an exception or two, fresh and bright in the still nearly universal white paint. It is in their occupants that the returning visitor is interested.
The old south meadow road, with its perilous railroad crossing and its steep, even though curved, descent has been replaced, farther down, by the highway which passes under the railroad and in straight
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line across Great Meadow, not to Stebbins' ferry but to a bridge, which is not even a covered one. In its course from Main street it cuts through the site of the cottage, where lived the maidenly last of the once leading family of Whiting. The Callenders have gone from the high-pillared house, long their cultured abode, the last of the race here having been Thomas Russell Callender, whose widow, the last in the town of the Bemis family, is at Norwood, with a teacher- daughter, while a son, distinguished in his profession, Dr. and now Lieut .- Colonel George Bemis Callender, is in high military position in the Canal Zone.
The significance of being a school town begins here, with the Callender house being the home of the keeper of the students' store at Mt. Hermon, meaning the school for boys, which has taken the place of the Purple farms across the river ; his name, Curtis R. Car- mene, frees him from suspicion of Northfield ancestry. The house from which Elmer's Balm was once widely, and hotly, dispensed is now the home of the Crosier family, with a Hadley but no North- field background. The cottage from which Uncle Mark Woodard used to start his walk up-street to the post office, followed by his duti- fully trained pig, had a long interval occupation by Charles Blackmer, the clock-repairer, who had a monopoly based on his fully accredited claim that he knew "the disposition of every clock in town"; it is now the property of Charles F. Slate, the pre-Roosevelt postmaster, and tenanted by H. S. Harriman, a salesman in a Greenfield store (Green- field is now 20 minutes away instead of two hours).
Antiquity reaches its peak and family continuity its high and rare instance in the Janes house, itself nearly two centuries old, with finest example extant of old-time panelling. It is occupied by three brothers, Martin, Benjamin and Fred Janes, sons of Charles Xen- ophon, lineal from the preacher under the Old Oak in 1673. A new house has wedged its way into what was the house lot of Dr. Samuel Mattoon in first-century days, its occupant a Bernardston Merrifield, custodian at the up-town Congregational church, and with it a two- apartment house, the two being near neighbors of the distinctive fea- ture of modern ways, a garage. These occupy the ground of Dr. Mattoon's house, remodelled in 1760 and standing for a century and a half, later to be demolished and its priceless interior finish carried by an appreciative purchaser to the other end of the state.
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There are no Mattoons now in the old Mattoon neighborhood. Uncle Oliver lived out the last of his many years in the house, as pre- cise and frugal of adornment as its owner, a house of sorrows, stoi- cally borne and buried in his silent memory. Late in his solitary days, he brought here as his third bride, so contrasting a person as a spir- ited South Carolinian, who in turn brought with her that novelty to a New England household, a colored maid. Incongruity could not be more extreme, and Harriet contributed her share, her devotion to her mistress, Miss Selina (as if the name had not changed from Bing- ley to Mattoon) and her quite unrestrained description in good negro dialect of Uncle Oliver's strict and saving ways of life. Along came too, for stays longer than Uncle Oliver would have chosen, a dashing brother, David Bingley, from New York, who did his best, without success, to conform to established rules of the household; one of the prim door posts came to bear the pencilled figure "g" and its companion, "10," so that David could truthfully assure his inquiring and austere brother-in-law that he came in the night before between nine and ten. After Uncle Oliver, the house and land went to a great-niece, Kate, daughter of Isaac Mattoon, who had married an upstanding college-graduated son of another of the old families, Nelson Dwight Alexander, and here they lived until they moved to Vermont and eventually to Springfield. Now it is the home of the proprietor of the neighboring garage, Edward M. Morgan, and his cultivated family. They are relatively newcomers but link to North- field's earliest days through Mrs. Morgan's descent from William Janes, the preacher to the settlers of 1673, two of whose sons were killed in the attack of September 2, 1675. Mrs. Morgan and her sister, now her nearest neighbor, are descendants from Benjamin, the elder William's son, two of whose children were killed in the Mt. Tom massacre of 1704 and his wife scalped. Thus they relate to Bathsheba, the belle of Coventry, the grandmother of Gov. Samuel J. Tilden of New York.
In the house on the site of the first stockade where the deep-voiced, consistently Democratic, skilful doctor of the old school, Elijah Strat- ton, M.D., had lived, is now the household of Martin E. Vorce, whose wife shares with Mrs. Morgan descent from Benjamin Janes. In the pillared cottage, once the home of the Widow Beach and her eight children and then of Edwin M. Alexander of Moody kinship,
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is now a newly arrived Mattoon, not claiming a Northfield lineage. Then, a new house, that of Rev. W. W. Coe, active citizen and the first in the rapid succession of publishers of the always struggling local newspaper. In the Judge Mattoon, later the Albert Lyman house, is Rev. Elliott W. Brown, another of the clerical accessions to the town, through its religious attraction. Almost, there is historic back- ground next door, through the residence there of the widow of Fred- erick Zebulon Allen; but it was the home of one of the Stearns' house-builders at the time of the previous call. Where "Aunt Jim" Mattoon, and, entirely incidentally, Uncle Jim, lived, now the mod- ernized house of Charles H. Green, in his day the town's liveliest citi- zen, are the household of his daughter, Mary (Green) and Thomas Parker.
The last of the Minots, Sallie, spirited, outspoken and devoted to the old town's interests and traditions, lived her days out in the spa- cious William Pomeroy house and bequeathed it to the Raymond Sauter family from Greenfield, who had been her companions in her late life. That rarity, a new house in the old part of the town, stands between the Pomeroy house of old and the site of the Pomeroy store of history ; it is the home of Frank H. Montague, of "Farms" Mon- tague and Field background, quite the leading citizen and often select- man, his wife being the daughter of Captain Charles Dwight Merri- man, a Vermont-enlisted sharpshooter of the Civil War, with a record of many battles. The closed doors and shuttered windows of the store, which was finally that of Williams, and back of that of Webster and older still of Hastings, give silent testimony to the disappearance of the full-ordered country store. Country merchandising is now in chains.
Grandchildren of Priest Mason, the minister of the old First Parish who is a permanence in Northfield tradition, have possession of the imposing house, where was formerly found the Bostonian, Phineas Wright; they are Mary Mason Bardwell and her brother, Thomas Mason. Where the Widow Everett lived and later, through- out his Northfield years, the creator and singer of "Gospel Hymns," Ira D. Sankey, has until lately been a daughter of the Coltons, the widow of Newton Keet.
Passing the First Parish (Unitarian) church, with obeisance to its traditions of towards three centuries, there is reached what seems the
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commercial centre of the town, the "block" which was the product of the enterprise of Charles H. Webster, with drug-store, the "A & P", telephone exchange and, around the corner, the Kidder furniture and undertaking place. In the house beyond there is the rare satis- faction of a continued family possession, the home of Josephine Alex- ander Webster and her talented musical and artistic daughters. Long since, the Lord house was burned and a modern one is the home of Charles S. Warner, as new to the town as is the house. Where Walk- er's store and leaf-tobacco establishment flourished and was burned, is St. Patrick's, the Roman Catholic church, which the townspeople of all faiths helped towards building in the eighteen-eighties.
Thus far along the street, in no more than three houses have been found occupants in any degree connected with those of the eighteen- seventies. One is added to the scanty list in the high-pillared house where was Albert S. Stratton, of early settlement ancestry and the nearest to a capitalist in his own right, is now a granddaughter, her husband and their children. The Stratton descent in the next genera- tion carried the name of Preston, also colonial, and now that of Tyler, of equal significance.
The little store which had intruded upon the historic ground of Timothy Swan's abode in his hymn-tune composing days has been moved away to Parker street (the deep-po road) and the Swan house, Windsor Fay's at the time of the previous tour, has been transformed beyond recognition. The Southern hotel man, Charles A. Linsley, after marrying the widow Joslyn in its parlor, had the old house modernized to the utmost; later it was the home of John Phelps, whose beautiful wife was the daughter of the widow Joslyn, and now it is the headquarters of the first American Youth Hostel.
The modest cottage built as the Unitarian parsonage was first occupied in the eighteen-seventies by the youthful minister, Jabez T. Sunderland, who died in August, 1936, at the home of a daughter in Poughkeepsie, N. Y., at the age of 93. The house has passed to secular ownership and is the home of a newly arrived physician, Dr. F. Wilbur Dean, of Greenfield origin. The house built by Col. Pomeroy for his son, Charles R., in the eighteen-seventies, is now the home of Joseph F. Bittinger, formerly a newspaper publisher in old Plymouth. Pomeroy Mansion, the spacious house built by Col. John Nevers, the county's first sheriff, is Moody school property, much
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enlarged and for a time the residence of Elliott Speer, while presi- dent of the Schools, before his ill-fated headmastership of Mt. Hermon.
Where Micah Mudge built in the Second Settlement and John L. Mattoon, the largest landholder of his time lived, two children of Thomas Quinlan, the enterprising Irishman who succeeded to the dis- tinction of acreage, have lived until Mary recently passed to another world. The town fell heir to the brick house of Hezekiah, and his organ-blowing son Dwight, Mattoon, as a bequest of Addie M. Dutton Alexander, whose last home it was, and is a modest source of public revenue from its two apartments. The fine Silas Field (originally Dutton) house burned years ago and its place is taken by the high school and Alexander memorial building.
Not to be recognized because of its modernization and its new location is the house now the home of the widow of Dr. Norman P. Wood. It was of old the Moses Field place, the girlhood home of Mrs. F. J. Stockbridge, and was moved when its site fell within the exten- sive domain acquired by Francis B. Schell for the grounds of his château. Association with other days revives next door, the home in his day of the substantial citizen, "California John" Mattoon and now that of his daughter, Mrs. Jennie Mattoon Foreman, but for summertimes only, her winters being spent in Virginia. In what was Joe Brigham's house and tintype studio is now one of the new North- field cult of retired ministers, the Rev. Arthur T. Thompson.
Missed from the present scene is the towering (because three- story) Brigham castle, the Northfield abode for years of the Rev. George F. Pentecost, D.D., where also lived Capt. C. C. Duncan of "Innocents Abroad" association. D. L. Moody considered the old house as the place for his girls' school but dismissed it after Samuel C. Holton, a genius in building and in terse speech, reported to the evangelist the result of his inspection, ""Taint wuth fixin' up." Two houses occupy the broad site, all that was ever realized of the project of a Mrs. Spring to build homes for retired preachers and mission- aries ; now Seminary property. Down the hill, which was bathed in the blood of an Indian onslaught, the home of Henry Webster, the miller and representative, is now that of a member of the Britton family (Frank P.), come in town from the somewhat ancestral Brit- ton home up near the Hinsdale line. Around the corner, the White
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and later the Cowles house, is the property of William H. Dale, upon whom the last of the Cowles family bestowed his acres.
The tour up Main street's west side has been too tarrying, maybe, but it has revealed the nearly complete disappearance of the families of a half-century or so in the past. The return calls would confirm that showing. Gone is the Arad Webster house, first moved away to give Francis Schell his domain, then burned, and the Pierson house, now across the street, and the ancient Azariah Barber house, torn down. The one Polish Main-streeter, John Jurkowski, is in the William Holton house. The fine Dickinson Memorial Library replaces the low- pillared house which was once the law office of General Charles Devens and, at the end, the home of the peculiar Darling brothers. Dr. Allen H. Wright is in the place of "Uncle" Walter Field, the brother of Timothy, closely related to the Silas Field family and the others. Deacon Dutton's home, long the possession of his grand- daughter, Miss Lucie Woodruff of Connecticut, was recently bought by a New York architect who died soon after the local purchase.
The "Orthodox" church, transformed to a Red Men's fraternity house and burned to the ground, has an unholy successor in a garage and filling station. Rev. T. J. Clark's house, one of the oldest on the street, owned by Mrs. Minnie Holton Callender, at the time of her recent death, has now come to be occupied by tenants. Where Wil- liam Henry Harrison Phelps lived, later the Whittle home and scene of the wedding of May Whittle and Will Moody, is now Mrs. Herbert Reed, granddaughter of "Little" Morgan, the honest bridge tender of toll-bridge days. A new centre school, new at least in the last century, stands on the lot where the first public school was placed after being removed from the middle of the street.
Everything has happened to the Bee Hive. Originally Hunt's tavern, and famous, then the Academy, then a temperance hotel (which Hunt's was not), then the ambitious Northfield Institute of Useful Learning, but not for long, then the home of the Ross Horse- hoe, with partial occupation by the "select" school, in its day a sub- stitute for a public high school, then variously tenemented, sadly neglected and shorn of some of its double piazzas, and at last in good fortune as restored by the Rev. Dr. Bronson into an inn and apart- ment hotel of many spacious rooms and attractions to his city friends and patrons. The Dr. Hall house, once an adjunct to the Institute,
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is now in neglect and vacant. The Mason house, which the minister of many traditions built, after alteration into an inn, has had varie- gated fortunes, coming in 1936 to be a possession of the Youth Hostel.
Actually the first instance of family continuance in this return tour is met at the present home of William A. Barr and his wife, who as Gertrude Dewey is the granddaughter of Charles Osgood, life- long owner of the house, merchant, postmaster, town clerk, town- meeting orator par excellence, preceptor of the Academy a century ago. A distinctly modern cottage, with a barber-shop annex and an enterprising garden at the back, and one of the two business "blocks," are new to the scene. At the head of the turnpike, now Warwick avenue, where once was the liberty pole and the imposing guidepost and, later, the bandstand, now stands alone the Belcher Memorial, a polished granite shaft and at its base a drinking trough for the now extinct horse. At the Dr. Medad Pomeroy house, with Alex- ander owners in the time of the earlier tour, are now the town clerk, Mrs. Haskell, and her husband, town constable. Next is the town hall, second in succession, and the municipal offices. Here for a while was the National Bank, quite too metropolitan a feature to be permanent here, although it demonstrated the prudence of its owners by weather- ing the depression storm. Union store, historically, tin shop medie- vally, post office modernly-that's next. The Col. Belcher home, and that of the prudent sisters, Mary Ann and Eliza, whose savings went to the town and the church, is now owned by Mrs. Richards. The ancestral Wright place, in the family from the first days until the last of the line, the bachelor Henry and spinster Martha, died, is the house of one of the Irish contingent which in nearly a century has contributed substantially to the life of the town, this one being John Callaghan, whose parents were of the first in the emigrant group. A grange hall, new to the scene, relatively speaking; then, in place of Joel Fay and his musical son who claimed direct inspiration by Mozart and was locally known by the name, a widow of Andrew Lyman, the name suggesting the actual family background, and George Pfefferle, obviously not so, the express agent ; in Dr. Mead's Siamese- twin house, relative strangers, Chamberlain and Miller; in the house built by Dr. Rollin C. Ward, the Rev. Dr. Brown, recently from New Jersey; so goes the transformation in population.
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