USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 46
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The distinctive "Farms" names are next to extinct in the region- Field, Morgan, Stratton, Merriman, Hilliard, Severance, along with those of less antiquity but ample kinship, Nye, Nash, Metcalf, Stark- weather, Montague, Browning. A landmark is the rangy old tavern, with some generations of Alexander connection, where actually there is now one of the name, Samuel, a suggestive one of tribal back- ground, and in the attic of the house a store of antiquities no col- lector can buy. Another, one of the oldest houses in the town, is the
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Stratton tavern of earliest third-settlement days. One of its inside walls bears fanciful decoration believed to have been painted by a French prisoner.
A grandson of a typical, quality New Englander of the last cen- tury, Judah Nash, holds the ground in the person of Ernest. Near the historic "No. 4" schoolhouse, long a community centre, is a rep- resentative, Charles Gilbert, of one of the oldest valley families and in his ancestral home. The name of Hammond is relatively new but there is a linking with the old town in the fact that the wife of the senior of the family, J. Lincoln Hammond, is the daughter of Lieu- tenant Marshall Stearns of Civil War distinction. Search for old family descent is rewarded by finding in Frank V. Wood a descendant in the fifth generation of the Revolutionary hero, Capt. Samuel Merriman, who also traces back to the soldier of that period who carried to the battle of West Point the burden of such a name as Barzillai (Wood) and brought it back with honor.
Nearer the town, on Merriman hill, the site of the death of Cap- tain Richard Beers and the probable hilltop from which he and his exploring comrades of 1669 had the white man's first view of the region, the fine old house of the descendants of Captain Samuel Merriman, is now the possession of the family of Col. Ashel Bennett, coming here from Bridgeport, Conn., and well maintaining the old house with its commanding valley view. Nearer the town, on one of the broad farms, diligently tilled, which stood along the Farms road, is still a representation of one of them in the Ware household, the matron of which, the widow of Clinton A. Ware, was in a time now seemingly historic the "Little Buttercup" of the Northfield "Pinafore" achievement. A grandson of the original owner of the farm, Henry Ware, was Henry Ware Barnum, counsel for Boston Elevated Street Railway up to the time of his death November 22, 1936, having formerly been an assistant Attorney-General of Massachusetts, a grad- uate of Harvard (1900) and the Harvard Law School.
Population has all but deserted the Eastern hills of the town, "the Mountain" of common speech. Only woodsy echoes would respond to the call of the roll, Holden, Stimpson, Collar, Greenleaf, Whithead, Piper. Their offspring might be found in "the street," as in the in- stance of George Piper, connected with the Seminary, and in one branch of the Britton family by a Greenleaf marriage, but in the main the search would have to be carried much farther. The one
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remaining section to be combed for old family representation is that beyond the Seminary campus and to the New Hampshire line. Hol- ton and Smith are the names of its background, carried today to other regions and all but absent here. In Westchester County, New York, there is a distinguished son of this region, George Arthur Smith, son of Homer and so sharing in descent from that first to bear the name of Preserved Smith, by reason of being saved out of a Hadley massacre. By way of Winchester, and a part of the original Northfield territory, the name comes back to the town in the person of one of its outstanding citizens, Leonard R. Smith, now the possessor of the former home of the stately Captain Henry Alexander.
A fading memory of the Winchester road's now missing people re- calls William Bent, with a certain gift for fiction, set forth as fact, who expected people to believe that he once "druv" his smart "hoss" the fifty miles from Springfield to Northfield, with a shower follow- ing him up the valley, raining all the way in the back of his buggy and never wetting a hair on the horse. As the Winchester road ap- proaches the town it traverses the Seminary property and is the approach to the Auditorium, which D. L. Moody built for his large audiences. The neighborhood has traditions of the Maynards and the Lymans and, farther back, of Strobridge, the name that has be- come permanent as that of the hill most familiar to succeeding Semi- nary students. The road curves by the Homestead, the shrine of re- ligious interest as the birthplace of Moody, and descends to the Main street past post office, and Seminary book-store. The slopes to the east have come to be populated and such new designations as Rustic Ridge reflect the inflow of population the school has attracted.
To the eye, in all the regions of the town, save alone the largely deserted "Mountain," there has been change only for the better. Perhaps the freer contact with the rest of the world, which the motor- car has brought, has heightened pride in the home. And the newer residents are not of so different a sort, attracted to the town, as they have been, by its natural charm, along with its significance as a school and religious centre. If somewhat of community self-reliance has been lost, along with self-satisfaction, and self-importance, the town has thereby but shared the common experience of towns of its kind.
When the town quite grandly celebrated, in 1923, the bi- centennial of its incorporation and the 250th anniversary of its first settlement, the historian of the affair made the point that the North-
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field of today would gratify the founders if they could return to survey it. It fulfils their probable dream. They would not be mystified by an industrial transformation. They would not be annoyed by a crowding of their descendants and successors in compacted apart- ments, a modern reversion to cave-dwelling. Nor would they be dis- tressed by deserted houses and ruinous cellar-holes, the stigmata of a depleted settlement. The broad street they grandly charted keeps to its original lines and is flanked with houses set well apart and of an architecture in the main developed from the severe but substantial and spacious lines of their pioneer home-building. Amazed at the modern devices of travel and of communication, they would yet dis- cover that the standards of life do not depart fundamentally from those of their day, however fashions vary-that the town-meeting is the way of government, that the children are schooled at public ex- pense, that the church has withstood the shift from tax-support to voluntary maintenance and that, increasingly with the years, they, the founders, are held in respect amounting to reverence.
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In the early spring of 1936, the Connecticut river rose in its wrath and mightily smote the works of man along its banks. It was as if it intended to demonstrate that it was still its own master and that the devices to dam its course and span its bed were resented and would be shown to be fragile and ineffective. Rains and melting snow gave it the power. The winter's full product of ice was its weapon, to be hurled with might at every obstruction to its awakened anger. All past floods of the springtime would be outdone.
It was the middle of March when the great river made its swift rise. Each day carried it higher. It soon passed the high mark of the flood of 1927, which had largely spent itself in the upper reaches and the tributaries of the Vermont streams. The ice was broken into floes and, as the water rose to the level of the bridges, was thrown in resounding blows against piers and the superstructure of bridges which had stood for years against such onslaught and above its reach. One after another of them gave way. First to go was the suspension bridge above Brattleboro, carrying the highway to the New Hamp- shire side at Chesterfield. Then sections of the bridge at Hinsdale gave way. The great dam at Vernon, setting the river back into a
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vast, but now turbulent, lake was assaulted and in a danger that was only resisted by strenuous efforts to close the breaks that were actually made.
As the masses of ice struck the steel of the railroad bridge, which was built in 1901 to replace the historic double-decked covered bridge connecting the two sections of Northfield, the thundering of the bar- rage resounded for more than a mile and echoed across the valley. The bridge gave way. Long sections were wrested from the piers and fell to the river bottom, carrying with them blocks of granite which had withstood the floods of over ninety years. The two highway bridges, the Schell bridge, up-stream, and the King Philip, at Ben- nett's Meadow, were submerged but held their ground. Great Meadow was a vast lake, its easterly shore nearly up to the underpass at the foot of Main street, its westerly one far up the Allen hill on the Mt. Hermon road. King Philip's hill now did civilization a serv- ice by sheltering the houses of Bennett's Meadow from the drive of the stream, surrounded though they were by water.
Around the westerly abutment of the Schell bridge, the river cut for itself a new channel and threatened the buildings of the Purple farm, now the property of an enterprising Polish farmer, Urgielewicz, and those of the other farms along the road to South Vernon. When the flood was over, the broad fields were cut through by gulleys from 15 to 35 feet deep, ruined for all time, into one of the cuts had toppled over the silo, broken from the Urgielewicz cattle-barn, and the tobacco-barn had been swept down stream.
Pine Meadow, with its well-tilled acres and its enterprising farm buildings was another lake. In its centre stood the great stock farm of Charles S. Tenney, its main barn holding 350 head of blooded dairy animals, the product of the owner's years of selection and breed- ing. They were safe-the flood mark of 1927 showed they were! Water could not rise higher now than then. But it did. Presently the herd was standing in it-and there they would stand, resisting every effort to remove them, panic-struck by the water, unaccus- tomed to any roaming from their stanchions, until all were drowned -- all save one, with bovine maternal instinct, making her way to a loft, there to give birth to a calf-they two the only survivors.
When the flood subsided all the meadows were covered with a grayish white silt, to varying depths up to more than three feet. This
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was a new order of deposit by the river, usually an enrichment, now a gritty drift. As it dried, every breeze caught it up and carried it in dust clouds over the town. Would these broad meadows ever again be fertile? Only, indeed, if the useless, sterile silt could be mixed with the rich soil it covered. This became the new problem-and the challenge to deeper plowing than had ever been undertaken. The late months of the spring saw this undertaken, with steam plows coursing over the fields, with what certainty or what extent of rescue more than one season would be needed to tell.
Down the river, the Montague City bridge, relic of the time of long, wooden, covered bridges, went down. So too the suspension bridge at Sugarloaf, linking Sunderland and Deerfield. On the low populated sections of river towns, homes were swamped and loaded with the river's mud and silt. The river coursed through the streets of Hadley and Hatfield and home regions in Northampton, Chicopee, Springfield. Northfield could again be thankful to its founders in the placing of the homes of the "Street" at an elevation of a hundred feet above the peaceful level of "Great River" and beyond its grasp, in this its angriest outbreak.
In the year 1937, the town celebrates the hundredth anniversary of the birth of its most celebrated son, Dwight Lyman Moody. He was born the fifth day of February, 1837, in the farm-house on the crest of the hill, now become the corner of the domain of the school which is the visible monument to his vital service. He left the home when he was 17 years old, to seek his fortunes in Boston and then in Chicago and he came back to it at 38, with the acquired fame of the greatest evangelist of his time. From the year of his return, 1875, to the day of his death, 24 years later, he made the town not only his home but the base of his widespread activity for the regeneration of men. As was said of him by the most discriminating of those who shared in the memorial tribute at his funeral, he was entirely the product of the town of his ancestry and his birth. In his preaching he renewed the Biblical faith of the founders of New England. Through him the town which was the farthest planting of the Puritan Commonwealth became, in a new phase,
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BIOGRAPHICAL
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BIOGRAPHICAL
TO AN EXTENT that might have been burdensome within the story of the town, it is due the men who have figured in it to give certain of them a personal attention. And to the extent that the reader has come to an interest in them, it is gratifying to offer the personal intro- duction.
Certain limitations have necessarily, at least excusably, been set in the selection of subjects for biographical treatment. They are of the nineteenth century, either by reason of their lives having fallen within or having begun during this period. They are not now resi- dents of the town, for the obvious reason that to include men and women now making up its life would be to compile a voluminous "Who's Who" and to make distinctions that would be both difficult and unfair. After all, this is history. Only suggestive of the contribu- tion such a town has made and is continuously making to the larger world, there are included some of its offspring who are now leading lives of distinction elsewhere.
Because this added feature is only supplementary, there are omitted certain of the men whose lives have been portrayed in the foregoing story as conspicuous actors in it.
Within the nineteenth century may be placed the arrival at full maturity of a town which had gone through a valiant struggle for existence and had made its rich contribution to the formation of a new nation's being. It had formed its own distinctive character as a community and was now busily and progressively occupied in the en- joyment of its heritage and the development of its own resources, keeping a pace that was firm and steady, if not swift. The century opened with the assurance of security of life, in the physical and the civic sense, and of rewards for personal industry and community service. It closed with the accomplished change of character to that of a school town, the outcome of the enterprise of its most distin- guished son. Somewhat of the independent and distinctive quality
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of widely separated communities had been lost under the transforming influence of livelier communication with the rest of the world, but not without compensating gains.
Such a town made men and by them was itself made. There was character here-and there were characters. The contribution of the latter to the former is to be traced in summaries of the lives that might, without such record as the following, fail of due recognition. These might, in instances, be expanded to volumes.
Such a town could not escape having distinguished relatives. It might escape the relatives and it might miss any recognition on their part of the relationship,-no offence intended and none taken. From its old families, sturdy of stock, grounded in faith, industrious, self- reliant, intelligent and courageous, there had gone out to the world men and women who were bound to be leaders and to pass on strong traits to their descendants.
Such families in the Connecticut Valley as Holton and Lyman, for example, both of them represented in Northfield from its beginnings, have richly contributed to American life in the persons of note and prominence. Both these families are in the lineage of the present President of the United States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a de- scendant of William Holton, the Hartford patriot, a Northfield founder and the progenitor of its outstanding citizens through the years. In the fourth generation from the founder there was union of the two families, in the marriage of Mary Sheldon, of the Holton line, to Joseph Lyman, a cousin of Major Elihu of Northfield; their granddaughter, Catherine Robbins Lyman, married Warren Delano and became the mother of the present Sarah Delano Roosevelt, the President's mother.
Samuel J. Tilden, the New York governor, who is believed by many to have been elected President in 1876, was closely related to the Janes family, grandson as he was of Bathsheba, "the belle of Coventry," daughter of Benjamin Janes, others of whose descendants are now of Northfield. The famous portrait painter, William Morris Hunt, was the son of Jonathan Hunt of Northfield, whose home was separated by the running of a state line between Massachusetts and Vermont. James Kendall Hosmer, author of "Thinking Bayonet,"
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Descendant of Holton and Lyman Families)
William Morris Hunt Portrait Artist
Samuel J. Tilden Governor of New York
James Kendall Hosmer Civil War Author
Capt. Edward Latimer Beach United States Navy
SOME DISTINGUISHED RELATIVES
Paul Dwight Moody President, Middlebury College
Lieut .- Colonel George R. Callender United States Army
Richard M. Smith, M.D. Eminent Boston Pediatrician
Rev. Miles Merrill Moore Rector, Bethlehem, Pa., Episcopal Church
FOUR DISTINGUISHED SONS OF NORTHFIELD-1937
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a Civil War-time "best seller," was a Northfield native, a son of the minister of a century ago, who was later president of Antioch College. Captain Edward Latimer Beach, now retired from a distinguished naval service, is of immediate Beach and Alexander ancestry.
These are instances. The pioneers from Northfield into Vermont territory were conspicuous in its affairs and had sons of national im- portance-the Allens, of Ethan Allen connection ; the Wrights, in the outstanding importance of Silas; the Fields, in the instances of the Supreme Court justice, Stephen, and others of the same tribe; the Prentices, a United States senator and several judges; and this list a partial one. The Mead family had close relationship to President Hayes, to William Dean Howells, in his day the dean of American literary lights, to Larkin G. Mead, the sculptor and to William, mem- ber of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. The Hunts produced, besides William Morris, his equally noted brother, Richard Morris Hunt, the architect who designed the castles of the richest New Yorkers, formerly the adornment of Fifth Avenue, and the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.
In early days the Dwight family had close association with the town. Its boundaries were broadly laid out by Timothy, the first ; he was in command of its military defenses, including Fort Dummer, where his son, the second Timothy, was born, the first white child native to the territory of what was later the State of Vermont. The third Timothy was president of Yale as was also his grandson, the fourth Timothy. By another local line, in descent from Asa Olmstead, the lawyer, connection was newly established with the Dwights. Olm- stead was himself a Dwight descendant and his daughter married Professor Theodore William Dwight, the distinguished teacher of law at Columbia, a grandson of the early president of Yale. Genealogical tangle could not be more intricate, with two Northfield threads dis- coverable in it.
The family album is voluminous with the portraits of notables, only moderately sampled in the page of this book devoted to "Dis- tinguished Relatives."
JOHN BARRETT. Soon after the Revolutionary War there came to Northfield from Springfield, Vermont, a young lawyer, the remainder of whose life was to be spent there, to the town's gain and to his own con-
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tent. His coming was not sensational enough to be recorded and the exact year is uncertain; it was before 1786. He was the son of John, who in turn was the son of John, which succession leads back to Boston and, because the wife of the first of these three Johns was Rebecca Collins, back in that line to Governor Bradford. The second John married Eliza- beth Edwards, descendant of Thomas Edwards, an original settler of Dunstable, and the young couple migrated to Middletown, Connecticut, where their four children were born. The tide of emigration to Vermont caught them and they moved to Springfield, in the territory in dispute between New Hampshire and New York. There he came to be a pros- perous storekeeper and landholder, an "original proprietor" in the con- firmation charter from New York in 1772, a captain in Colonel Seth Warner's regiment at Ticonderoga and in the Quebec expedition of 1776, master of the first Masonic lodge in Vermont (1781), colonel in the militia and member of the earliest Vermont legislatures, 1778, '81 and '82. Colonel John died December 3, 1806, when he was drowned in the Connecticut at Springfield at the age of 75. John, the older of two sons, entered Dartmouth College but was graduated from Harvard, in 1780. He studied law with Benjamin West of Charlestown, N. H. What led him to Northfield is not apparent; his father was thrown in with Captain Thomas Alexander on the Quebec venture; there were a Lyman, a Woodward and a Wright in his company, names with Northfield flavor; and the ties of valley relationship were close. It was all of four years after arrival here that he married (in 1790) Martha Dickinson of the Hatfield family, a sister of Obadiah, the Northfield squire. He presently came to own a large section of the Mill brook portion of the village, including the Belding, later the Clary, mill privilege, which he sold to Ezekiel Webster. In 1791 he bought the land of Aaron Whitney, the storekeeper from whose possession the town had taken its gunpowder at the outset of the Revolution because of his suspected Toryism, put up a store on the slope towards the pond which Benjamin Callender and later Timothy Doak carried on, and in 1796 built the house which a later generation would know as the Brigham "castle" and then as the Pente- cost place. It was a two-story house, to which he added a third story, in the skyscraping competition with Captain Hunt and his tavern. He had a large part in town affairs, as selectman, member of the General Court, head of the commission to settle the dispute over the Tiffany ferry, which the town sought to possess as a municipal enterprise. Principally he taught law. Samuel C. Allen and any number of other men of later prominence acquired their law from him. Had his instruction not been so personal, his great house might have become the seat of an established law school. He died December 26, 1816, aged 60, and a modest, unre-
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vealing stone marks his grave in the Center cemetery. Of eight children, three died in childhood, and of the five none remained in their native town. The oldest daughter, Mary, married Woodbury Storer of Port- land, Maine, and that city attracted the youngest sons, both graduates from Brown College, John, a physician, and Charles, a lawyer. A daugh- ter, Charlotte Collins, married one of her father's students, Franklin Ripley, Greenfield lawyer and banker.
MEDAD ALEXANDER. Outstanding citizen of the town in the first third of the century and progenitor of Dwight L. Moody, Revolution- ary soldier, and the son of Captain Thomas Alexander, the town's prime patriot of the Revolution. Born July 15, 1757, his ancestry combined Alexander and Wright lineage, his mother being Azubah, daughter of Azariah Wright, grandson of the victim of the Indian attack on the first settlement. His one elder brother was in the company led by their father to Quebec and from there to New Jersey to "jine Gin'ral Wash- in'ton" in time to share in surprise attack on the British at Trenton. He began being selectman in 1790 and settled into the habit in 1800, serving almost continuously until 1824. He served more terms in the General Court than any other Northfield man in the town's history, first in 1804 and the following three years, then six more between 1812 and 1820. He was justice of the peace by the town's request of the Governor and, although it was the period when the town had lawyers, was counsellor, administrator and trustee in general. He was long colonel of a militia regiment and commanded with exacting faithfulness. He was one of the early deputy sheriffs of the new county of Franklin; as of its parent, Hampshire. His scrupulously preserved papers were guarded through her long life by his devoted daughter, Azubah, and are a historical mine. Stalwart, dignified, active, he acquired culture, respect and trust. By his wife, Eunice, daughter of Hezekiah Stratton, the one child, Phila, became the wife of Isaiah Moody, the mother of Edwin and grand- mother of the evangelist. His second wife was daughter of Captain Sam- uel Merriman, a Revolutionary commander and there were four more children, the second being Henry,-Captain Henry, whose dignified figure was familiar through a large part of the century. A grandson was Henry Alexander, banker, mayor of Springfield and senator, whose wife was the sister of Samuel Bowles, one of their daughters being the wife of Major Henry M. Phillips, another Springfield mayor. The other daughter, Amy, remained the mistress of the conspicuous old house in Springfield. Colonel Henry Alexander died December 8, 1880. A daughter married a son of "Priest" Mason, their daughter becoming the
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