USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 45
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An outstanding instance of restoration of a two-century-old house
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is the long-time home of the Watriss family, where for a period were Martin Dickinson and his pleasing daughters. New finish and closed fireplaces have given way to broad boards, hewn timbers and a vast, original fireplace, at the hands of another of the Callaghan family and her engineer-husband, Thomas Dollard. The last of the Parsons tribe in the house built by the tanner, Jabez, in 1812, was Albert C., who died in 1901, at nearly 90, and the house is now that of Carl L. Mason, who has made it modern without radical change. A building, not here when the town was toured previously, the Parsons store of all but forgotten days, is now "two family" and tenemented. Where was Dame Cook, is now George Dunnell, once of Colrain; in the house built by William Moore, is Burt C. Abbott, painter, not native ; in the imposing Captain Lane house, the widow of James Wall, her- self a daughter of the Dale family, among the first of the Irish settlers.
At last, a renewal of acquaintance-Charles Calvin Stearns, in the house his father built, himself a descendant from Seth Field, the justicia pacis of the seventeen-hundreds, and the further gratification of a house-mistress who is an Alexander by birth with descent from the first of the pioneers. There is continued occupation of the Field house by a Field, after "Uncle" Timothy and "Aunt" Abby of the last century, coming Joseph Warren Field, son of Silas, and now his son, Joseph, who, with his wife, the older daughter of Charles H. Green, has put the house into full accord with its traditions, from the time its north front room was the recruiting station for the Sea Fenc- ibles in the war of 1812. Lord's tavern which was, the Joseph Young house of later days, is now owned by a Pennsylvanian, Samuel Shaw, and in part occupied by Robert H. Wilder and his wife, a Smith Col- lege graduate and a lively citizen.
This is Mattoon neighborhood again-and there are no Mattoons. As on the west side of the street, their homes have passed to alien hands, using the word alien in a purely local sense, equivalent to not of Northfield background. Where one of the several Johns in the Mattoon tribe was, is now Rev. Herbert F. Randolph, adding to the clerical color of the new occupation. Where was Isaac is now Herbert F. Millard. The former house furnishes a fine example of moderniza- tion of an old house; the other replaces an old house burned.
In the house at the street's end there dwells in bachelor seclusion a representative of the line most distinguished of all in the pioneer days, Warren John Wright. About him in his home are rare examples
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of the craftsmanship of the old days, which all the pressure of the searchers for the antique has failed to persuade him to release.
The region surveyed is the original town, the "street" as it has always been designated. The tour reveals but eight households in ancestral homes. There are five more of old family lines. Another five are of the Irish stock which in nearly a century of residence have become integrated in its people. To another ten, old New England lineage may be credited. Against this are 30 new both to the town and to the antecedents of New England, with an added 15 not house owners, the feature of tenantry not familiar a half-century before. In the section of the town not contiguous to the schools of D. L. Moody's founding, there are not more than ten households whose presence is to be accounted for by direct relation to this factor in the development of the 60 years since Moody came into its life. There are six clergymen, not settled as pastors, drawn here by the religious attraction. The intangible in any calculation of the effect of the Moody development is the extent to which the substantial dependence is upon the presence of the schools.
The contrast between 1873 and 1936 is that at the earlier day the population of "the street" was 90 per cent of clearly New England ancestry and fully 60 per cent of descent from the town's pioneer settlers, while at the later time the assured New England lineage falls to 30 per cent and the distinctly original in town background to below 20 per cent. The contrast is, however, more statistical than discoverable in alteration of standards or of the ways of life.
Pursuit of old acquaintance in the region which was, in familiar speech, "Beyond the brook," and is now, in postal speech, "East Northfield," would be no more rewarding than through the "street" -and not much less. The designation came with the establishment of an up-town post office in 1889 and signifies no separateness, politi- cal, social or even religious; it is still the one old town, with its traditions as much shared and as much treasured above as below "the brook."
The old houses are here but there are more intrusions of the new. There are increasing marks of a change in the town's traditional char- acter as the main street approaches its end, where it culminates in the transformation of Alexander and Moody fields and pastures into the
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beautiful campus of the Northfield Young Ladies Seminary-the very name of which marks its Victorian beginning.
Mill brook now runs unvexed to the river. The unvexing was done by the New York capitalist, Francis B. Schell. In the develop- ment of the hundred acres for the grounds of his castle, he removed the dam which set back the waters into a pond on both sides of the street, and thus transformed both the stream and its region. Gone are the cider mill, the blacksmith shop and the Webster grist mill, standing on the brink of the Glen, which in turn has lost its romantic appeal, perhaps because romance has taken to wheels and finds more distant nooks. The creamery, on the other bank, so recent as to have both come and gone since the eighteen-seventies, has ceased to cream.
In the denser population of the up-town region, familiar names are few and descendant-occupants of the older houses fewer. Up the hill from the brook, where lived Henry Wright, sexton of the First Parish through many faithful years and powerful artist of the base-drum in the now forgotten Stratton Brass Band, is indeed his son, William, and here the union of two of the town's most venerated lines, Wright and Alexander, through his marriage to the oldest of the daughters in the spirited and talented household of the ancient Alexander homestead, farther up the street. A grandson of the owner of Brigham Castle built the house perched on the crest of the hill and it is now owned by the only one of the generation, whose other home is in Boston. Passing houses new and old, mostly the former, the Campbell family still holds the cottage from which has gone out to the world a generation of nurses and teachers. The ancient Alex- ander house, perfect example of Revolutionary architecture, is still in the family but the family not in it although still owned by one of the daughters, the girls having shown their home loyalty by marriage into as distinctive names as Wright, Stearns, Webster and Holton. They are all within the present households of the town, while one of the sons, Nelson Dwight, is in Springfield and the other, Leon, substantial citizen and town official, to be found on his farm, near the New Hampshire line, where Main street extended into the country finds itself resolved into the Dartmouth highway. It was by this way, Wheelock moved from Connecticut to the wilderness to civilize and educate the sons of aborigines along with the sons of Puritans, at Hanover.
From the church D. L. Moody caused to be built on the rock
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above the brook, on whose corner-stone Sankey powerfully sang "The Ninety and Nine," the house-by-house search for old families is more rewarding. Nearby, where lived Elias Lyman, in his day one of the versatile schoolmasters who could teach everything and subjugate a winter school, then for years the town clerk, there lived until her death in 1936 the widow of his son, D. Everett; herself a Caldwell and so suggesting the West Side, "the Kingdom." In the house built by Dr. Samuel Prentice, father of Vermont senators and the like, where Dr. Shepardson lived for many years in the practice of the dentistry which required no other implements than forceps and the turn-key, now lives a representative of a war-honored family, Miss Ina Merriman. The house is the birthplace of Charles Preston, who gave priceless service to the country in World-War days, Dr. Shep- ardson's grandson.
Next up the street is a neighborhood where a family has held its ground through several generations, the Long neighborhood. There are, first, Dr. Richard G. Holton, dentist of the modern sort (in contrast to "Dr. Shep") the leading spirit in the Haven H. Spencer Post of the American Legion, whose mother was a Long; then Mary (Long) Nye, widow of the man who made the Northfield Creamery famous in its day; finally, in the brick house, where lived David Long, who qualified as highway surveyor by being stone-deaf to all complaints, the widow of his son, Russell, and her two daughters.
Tradition holds its ground in the big house, set high and back from the street, where Capt. Henry Alexander and his sister, Azubah, kept sacred the papers and the memories of those ancestral worthies, Colonel Medad and Captain Thomas, the prime hero of the Revolu- tion. Meet here Leonard R. Smith, of the old Winchester family, and his wife, Minnie Mason, granddaughter of both Captain Henry Alexander and of "Priest" Mason, the outstanding minister of a cen- tury ago-the parents of Richard Mason Smith, Boston's leading pediatrician. And down the slope to the street, in the cottage, Miss Virginia Smith, of the same family. What was the home of the worthy of a century ago, Col. Medad Alexander, is now that of a retired missionary, William H. Giebel, who keeps up an oriental in- terest by the display and sale of the wares of the East.
Farther up the street, tradition running back to the very begin- nings of Connecticut Valley civilization is personified in the present- day members of the Colton tribe, notably in Joseph, the outstanding
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authority on Indian lore, who has discovered and can dilate upon the old trails and shadowy marks of aboriginal villages, a leading spirit in the Historical Society and all it does to keep alive the ancient back- grounds. Passing the new houses that have come upon the scene, all the past of the town and all that has given it fame in the world give greeting from the household presided over by the daughter of Dwight L. Moody, Emma, and her husband, whom the evangelist brought back with him from overseas, Arthur Percy Fitt, now the leaders in activities that combine the historic past and the vital present.
This is the new Northfield, the section which presents the evidence of the vigorous life-work of D. L. Moody. Up the hill is the now sanctified "Birthplace," the century-old home of the widow of Edwin, Betsey Holton Moody, whose struggle to maintain her numerous household has become a treasured background of the story of her vibrant preacher, world-stirring son. From the main road, where the village thoroughfare begins its descent to "Pauchaug," there has been removed the house built by Medad Alexander Moody, the evangelist's uncle, who preserved through his life the characteristic trade of the family as masons in brick and stone (which he faithfully pronounced "stun" to the end of his life), has long since been removed to a new region somehow named Birnam road. It stood at the corner of that expansive region now the domain of the Northfield Schools and all they stand for as an outcome of D. L. Moody's educational impulse. D. L. Moody's home from the time of his return here in 1875 to the end of his life in 1899, the first abode of Seminary students in the initial year, 1879-80, was in turn the life-long home of William Revell Moody and is still that of his wife, May Whittle Moody. About the house, now designated "The Homestead," faintly linger the mem- ories of "Uncle Elisha" Alexander, doughty deputy sheriff and money-lender, and his ward, later his wife, Amanda M. Dutton Alex- ander, the town's chief local benefactress. It was from "Uncle Elisha," actually a relative, that Moody bought the property in a swift transaction that Will R. has given a romantic coloring by trac- ing it to an encounter between D. L. and "Uncle Elisha" over the trespassing of the latter's hens on the Widow Moody's land, even lifting the cackling of the hens into historical harmony with the honk- ing of the geese that saved Rome. In his record, however, W. R. Moody no more closely identifies "Uncle Elisha" than to describe
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him as a neighboring farmer. The designation of the doughty deputy sheriff as "Uncle" was a term of relationship in the neighborhood where Alexanders abounded; actually D. L. Moody's Alexander grandmother, Phila, and "Uncle" Elisha were second cousins.
Over the stretches of pasture and thinly productive tillage of the period before 1875 now spread the slopes of the Seminary campus. It extends to the river below the site of the brick house which was the original Bonar Hall and farther back the home of the Beach family, also Moody relatives. To the east it runs beyond the ancient Winchester road, upon which the Auditorium faces, well towards the region of Strobridge in the range of the hills bordering the valley and of its bejewelled Garnet Rock. Upon the slope towards the Con- necticut, commanding the perfect landscape, with its range of the river and the Vermont and New Hampshire hills, are the Seminary buildings, each with its story of the founder's enterprise or the tribute to him by one and another benefactor-the first of the dormitories, East Hall; the second of recitation halls, built of Northfield granite, Stone Hall; the early and ambitious but architecturally severe, Mar- quand; the beautiful Russell Sage chapel, gathering grace with the years, the gift of the shrewd financier's widow; and the array of buildings, each speaking for some beneficent donor, with the ample spaces, somewhat possessed by tents in the succeeding seasons of re- ligious gatherings begun with Moody's first convocation of 1881.
Away from the Seminary's domain all the region shows the trans- forming effect of the school's presence. Back towards the hills are settlements of houses, in new avenues such as "Rustic Ridge" or scat- tered about among the trees. From the crest of Moody Hill, runs the relatively new street towards the old town, rather perfunctorily named Highland Avenue, coming to an end at the inn, the Hotel Northfield, with its commanding view down the valley and to the graceful hills along its eastern border. Mainly these newer areas are populated by equally newer families but there are ancestral links, such as in the presence of Moody relatives, Ambert G. Moody, nephew of the evangelist, Samuel Walker, another nephew, and Gordon Moody, successor to his father, Ambert G., as manager of the modern inn.
Like change in population and absence of the familiar names of two generations in the past is marked along the tributaries of "the Street," the lanes, as they were once called, now bearing street names,
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leading easterly, across "the swamp," which was never a swamp in any modern sense of the word, and over the hills.
Along the upper of the two highways marked out in the first plan of the town, running easterly, the old road to Warwick, at whose corner Captain Hunt built his tavern, there are households still carry- ing the names of the Irish settlers of the railroad building days, Dale, Joyce and O'Keefe. Along the turnpike, now labelled Warwick Avenue, none remains of the familiar names of old, Stratton and later Bacon at the vanished grist mill, Turner, Coy, Webb, Evans, Warden and Alexander. The sole descendant of this old neighborhood "out East" is the daughter of one of the Reeds (Chauncey), Mrs. Fred Watson. Not a trace remains of the industries of the last century, the Johnson pail factory, the Evans saw-mill, the Minot cotton-batting mill, even the ponds that stored for them having disappeared.
The search for association with the past is here and there rewarded on the south Warwick road of antiquity, now Maple street, as at the brick house, the long-time home of the Ward family, where live Miss Clara Ward and one of the next generation, Henry Russell. Nearby is the house, long the home of the family of William Brown, brother of the famous sculptor, Henry Kirk Brown, and later that of Francis J. Stockbridge, still actively represented in the affairs of the town by Mrs. Stockbridge, a leader in its current affairs. Entirely missing are the names of Mattoon, Robbins, Stebbins, Keet, Stearns, Field and, with one exception, Holton. The name of Randall, brought here from down the valley by Joel, has been transplanted to the West side in the person of his grandson, Leon.
The "Number Nine" schoolhouse, of precious associations to the now scattered "scholars" of its significant days and their descendants, is a monument only. In its neighborhood, the one person connecting with its past is the daughter of the solid citizen, selectman and rep- resentative, Asa Holton, Mrs. Cora Preston, in the old house of this one of the Holton families. The other and neighboring Holton house, the home of Samuel S., is no longer in the family, which, however, is prominent in the town's current affairs, a grandson, Fred B. Hol- ton, being chairman of the board of Selectmen. Nearer "the Street" is another of the present generation of the now scattered family, Arnold Holton. A modest cottage now the home of Faustine Bigelow, was formerly that of Warren Mattoon, Civil War veteran, one of whose handsome daughters married George T. Angell, famed friend
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of dumb animals and founder of the Massachusetts S.P.C.A. Mr. and Mrs. Angell were so frequent visitors to the town during his life- time as to seem to belong to it.
Romance attaches to another modest house nearby, where lives a daughter of Henry Hart, another Civil War soldier. It concerns his oldest daughter, Mary, who was one of the first fruits of D. L. Moody's enterprise in founding a school for girls. She was in its first graduating class (1884) and so attracted its principal that she was aided to attend and be graduated from Wellesley. As a teacher, she met and interested a young instructor at McGill University, in time married him, and as the wife of Professor Francis E. Lloyd, distin- guished as one of the world's leading botanists and the recipient of many scholastic honors, is herself leader of the literary circle of this Montreal university and the mother of two sons, one an editor of Montreal's leading newspaper and the other a Rhodes student at Oxford. From another household of the neighborhood, that of Merrill Moore, has come another living tribute to the school opportunity D. L. Moody opened to the youth of his old town in the person of his son, Merrill Miles Moore, a graduate of Mt. Hermon, now the rector of a large Episcopalian parish in Bethlehem, Pa.
Changes in such as this of the neighborhoods making up the town mark no decline; they only signify the transformation which has come about through the disappearance of old families and replace- ment by others, in the main of like character. In the old Stearns' homestead, for instance, where the last of the original family was Lieutenant Marshall Spring Stearns, his title coming from his 52d regiment service in "the late rebellion," is now Dr. Robert McCastline, retired, perhaps only temporarily, from active and distinguished prac- tice in New York City, who has entered into the life of the town to its gain and has been pressed into service as an active consultant physician to the Moody schools. Maple street could fill a volume of traditions and romance, from the time it was the approach to the stockade of the first settlers in the seventeenth century, past the potash factory Squire Seth Field set up in the eighteenth, the bark mills along its brookside to supply the Whiting and Parsons tanneries of the early nineteenth, its rather modern but now vanished cider-brandy dis- tillery, down to its present maple-shaded roadway passing well-kept homesteads on its course to the precipitous "Gulf road" over the east- erly hills.
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The original meadow road, at whose head Micah Mudge built his house in the second settlement, and General Nevers held military and judicial sway a century ago, came to be a part of the Irish colony when the railroad brought it here and now has the later generation of its families. The later road to the old cemetery gained in conse- quence by being also the way to the "depot" and rose to dignity and beauty as the elm-shaded Parker avenue. Here for years was the quality Bemis household; enlivened during the summers by the pres- ence of the grandchildren from Boston, the two sons and daughter of Frank Bemis, long the diamond expert of Bigelow & Kennard; the now living persons of the remembered family being the daughter, Gertrude, now Mrs. Gertrude Bradlee of Brookline, her aunt, Mrs. J. Douseman Stratton, of Boston, and her cousin, who as Mrs. Thomas Russell Callender, was the last to leave the old town; altogether an instance of the transplanting from the town to the city which could be duplicated in numbers. Down the street, in the house where was the State constable of the Massachusetts prohibition days, long for- gotten-George H. Phelps, is now a linking by ancestry with a still earlier period in the persons of two Mattoon sisters, daughters of Thomas, long the tavern-keeper, the elder the widow of General Phelps of Civil War service, the younger being Gertrude, gratefully remembered as the Center School teacher of other years. All else on the avenue is new, including the Masonic Temple, housing as it does Harmony Lodge, which brought here from its old abode in the second story of the Center schoolhouse its charter of 1796 and its unbroken records, kept up with meticulous care by its secretary for years past, Charles Calvin Stearns.
In the other parts of the broad township, away from "the street" and its immediate tributaries, search for the names of a half-century or more ago would be slightly rewarded. From the region across the great river, there have disappeared the familiar ones of Belding Priest, Wildes, Purple, Barber, Dickinson, Preston and only sparingly does the once prevalent one of Holton remain. The name of Holton goes back to the first venture from Northampton to the new plan- tation and has been as continuous as the town itself, which is quali- fied by the two complete abandonments. The present sons of Ros- well Holton, Clifford and Frank B., are of the seventh generation from William, the English-born first settler of Hartford. Far down the west side, in a region come to be known as Mt. Hermon, the old
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home place of Deacon Charles L. Holton, an uncle of D. L. Moody, is now the home of the youngest of his daughters, Mrs. Lucy (Holton) Folstead and on the adjoining farm, a Holton possession since the day of Indian deeds was, until her death in 1936, Mrs. Minnie Holton Callender, daughter of Cyrus, another Moody uncle. Among the scat- tered descendants of these brothers, distinguished ones are the Rev. Dr. Horace F. Holton of Brockton, and his brother, Rev. C. Leonard Holton of Raynham, Deacon Charles' grandsons. Grandsons of Cyrus are Theodore Roosevelt, Holton of Worcester, and Henry C., of West Hartford, Conn., the former winning his name through birth during the visit to Northfield of the first President Roosevelt. Bennett's Meadow, once the region of distinguished Allens, now yields no links. The ferry has long since ceased to navigate and the ferryman's daugh- ter, who in her girlhood days was schoolteacher and the Lady Jane in "Miss Maria's" cast for the opera "Patience," is now Eva L. Cal- lender, the widow of Benjamin, and living at Littleton, N. H. His- torically it was Moffatt's ferry and in a later period a descendant of another ferryman, James D. Prindle, a long-time market-man in Bos- ton's Quincy market, returned to ownership of the Meadow and of the original Allen home site.
A social and genealogical survey of the expansive and picturesque part of the town known as "the Farms" would confirm the fact that the old families have, within the seventy years of the third century, largely disappeared, to be worthily succeeded by people of, in the main, the same sort and with the same thrift and pride in their homes. Into it have numerously come that newest race of the valley, Poles and Lithuanians. Their coming has been agricultural salvation. It has also given a demonstration of the adjustment of a new race to the standards of the old and the acceptance of all the privileges that New England has developed in three centuries, as witness the honor- rolls in the high school and the sharing in the town's social affairs.
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