USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 47
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wife of Leonard R. Smith and the mother of Richard M. Smith, M.D., Boston's leading pediatrician. Another granddaughter was the wife of Martin A. Brown, Dartmouth graduate, the town's most phenomenal schoolmaster.
SAMUEL C. ALLEN. In 1792, a Bernardston boy, during his course at Dartmouth College, was engaged to teach for a term at the up-street town school. His name, Samuel Clesson Allen, marks his descent from the Edward Allen, a soldier in Cromwell's army, who sought refuge in America when the restoration made departure from England prudent, and from him through generations in Suffield, Connecticut, Northamp- ton and Deerfield. Also the middle name has Northampton significance and descent from the Irishman, Clesson, who shared with Cornelius Merry the deprivations visited upon such as they in that Puritan town. This acquaintance with Northfield led to his settlement as the town's minister, the year after his college graduation (Dartmouth 1794) on a salary equivalent to $400 a year. Succeeding to the pulpit of Rev. John Hubbard, whose loyalty to the King caused him trouble in Revolutionary days, young Allen's preaching was so pronouncedly Calvinistic as to contribute to his retirement in 1798, with no loss of regard, to be succeeded by the minister who brought the first Harvard influence to the town, Thomas Mason. Allen had turned his ambition to the law, which he studied under John Barrett, taking up practice here and pres- ently (1803) removing to New Salem, thence after some years to Green- field. After legislative service and in the governor's council, he was elected to Congress, where he served from 1817 to 1829, in the Daniel Webster and Henry Clay period. Meanwhile he had bought a farm in Bennett's Meadow, now to be his home. He went back to the executive council for two terms, followed by another year in the state senate. In this period he was a lecturer on political economy, at Amherst College. He died February 8, 1842, aged 70. He was an active Northfield citizen in his later years and one of the incorporators of the academy in 1829. He married three times and had 15 children. The first born was Samuel C. Allen, Jr., who figured largely in town affairs, was six years in the legislature (1837 to 1843) and removed to East Boston, where he was postmaster for several years and up to his death in 1860. The second wife was Mary, daughter of Elisha Hunt, the long-time keeper of the famous tavern in what was later the Academy and eventually the less distinguished "Bee Hive," and so a niece of Jonathan Hunt, who by virtue of living in the part of Northfield which fell within the territory of Vermont became lieutenant governor of that state. She was the
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mother of the 12 later children, including Elisha H. Allen, (Williams, 1823) whose distinguished career was largely achieved in the Sandwich Islands under its kings and its final queen; also Frederick H., (University of Vermont) judge of the supreme court of Maine, congressman and lecturer on political economy at Harvard. The distinctions of the Allen family demand a separate volume; they would include the careers in the prominent medical Wesselhoefts of Boston and those of the Allens in western states. The last survivors of the line in Northfield were "Uncle" Dwight, son of the first Samuel C., who lived out his gentle days at Bennett's Meadow, and Frederick Zebulon Allen, Samuel C.'s grandson, who spent his life in that ancestral quarter.
THOMAS MASON. Coming to Northfield, three years after his gradu- ation from Harvard ('96) to be the minister of the town, and the last in the succession of town ministers, Thomas Mason was the central figure in the town's life for well towards a half-century. Powerful in body and mind, a wrestler none could throw, a preacher of complete inde- pendence and a politician, serving more terms in the General Court than any other in the town's annals, save only Colonel Medad Alexander. He became the center of a church controversy, more personal than theologi- cal, which caused the Orthodox to depart from his fold and the Uni- tarians, as they were newly called, to divide into two societies, uniting after "Priest" Mason accepted a thousand dollars as the condition of his resignation. He built the hip-roofed house, where his daughters, Mrs. David West Allen and Miss Elizabeth, spent their late years and which with an added story became later the Stimpson inn. One of his sons, Joseph, a lawyer, was for long years county clerk of courts for Wor- cester. Another, George, married a daughter of Captain Henry Alexan- der and was the father of Mrs. Leonard R. Smith and grandfather of Richard M. Smith, M.D., the leading Boston pediatrician. Another son, Thomas, was the father of Thomas Mason, who was educated by his uncle, the Worcester lawyer, and devoted his talents to social work; also of Mary Mason Bardwell of Boston and Northfield. Rev. Thomas Mason died in 1851, at the age of 84.
TIMOTHY SWAN. The town gained a musical genius and a real char- acter when Timothy Swan, as a boy of 17, came to it in company with his recently widowed mother, 1775. He was born in Worcester, his father being a goldsmith with distinguished Scotch ancestry. A sister, Catherine, had married, in September, 1774, Caleb Lyman, the hatter, whose shop stood where the later lane to the cemetery, now Parker
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Street, left Main Street, a spot long marked by two great elms of the hatter's planting in front of his shop door. Learning the hatter's trade, Swan left Northfield and carried it on in Suffield, Connecticut, for a quarter century, when he returned and continued it with two Lyman nephews. He married in Suffield, Mary, the daughter of Rev. Ebenezer Gay, D.D., and niece of Rev. Bunker Gay of Hinsdale, a fertile writer of epitaphs, the product of whose genius remains on the tombstones of the neighboring towns. The Reverend Bunker built for Timothy the house which much later was elaborately modernized by Charles A. Linsley and in turn became the home of John Phelps. In Swan's day, the deep front yard was closely set with Lombardy poplars, a tree as odd in the town as was the occupant in all ways. He gave to psalmody such tunes as "China" and "Poland," long standard in New England hymn-books, along with a collection, "New England Harmony" pub- lished in 1801. His one service to the town was as librarian through many years of the Social Library. Of his fourteen children, several of whom died in infancy, none remained to carry on the family line in Northfield, where Swan died on his 85th birthday, in 1842.
JOHN NEVERS. In 1804, there came to the town a young man, for no apparent reason other than to study law with John Barrett. He was John Nevers and 30 years old. He was admitted to the bar in 1808. That he had ability and that Barrett law was good law was shown by Nevers being made high sheriff when Franklin County was established in 1811 and prosecuting attorney the next year. He gave way to Samuel C. Allen as county attorney in 1812 but returned to the shrievalty in 1831 and remained in it till his death in 1847. He was one of the incorporators of the Greenfield bank, 1821. Most of all he was a mili- tary man, major general in the Massachusetts militia from 1812 on. He built the spacious house, later the home of Colonel Charles Pomeroy, and had his law office and military headquarters there. When Thomas Power, the young lawyer from Boston, had the elms set out along Main Street, the General served notice that he would shoot the man who undertook to put trees in front of his place; he was opposed to the trees because of their obstruction to artillery maneuvers and he was opposed to Power as a rival, contributing thereby to this enterprising young attor- ney's departure from the town after four years. The General was a warrior in civic life as well. He made out, however, to be selectman three years and to serve the same number in the legislature and was the town's second postmaster, succeeding Solomon Vose in 1808. He cap- tured ownership of the large tract known as the Commonwealth, to the
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east of the town. General Nevers gets into national history by reason of being the law instructor of Benjamin R. Curtis, the great jurist and member of the United States Supreme Court. He died March 30, 1847, aged 73, and left no children. A bristling description of the General appears in the life of B. R. Curtis by George Ticknor Curtis.
CHARLES BLAKE, M.D. In 1807, there settled in Northfield for practice of his profession as a physician one who had done naval serv- ice as a surgeon-mate on the old Constitution, been wounded in an engagement and had been stationed at Fort Independence and Norfolk. He had married, five years before, a daughter of Jonathan Hunt, of the old Northfield family, who had been an original settler of Vernon when it was a part of Hinsdale and became lieutenant governor of Vermont. Mrs. Blake's uncle, Elisha Hunt, was landlord, at the time they came, of the tavern built by his father, Captain Samuel. The Blakes took the house on the other corner of the Warwick road and lived there until the doctor's death, April 20, 1841. Dr. Blake was all that the country family doctor should be and honored in his profession but entered only slightly into the affairs of the town. The home was a social centre. A son, Jonathan Hunt Blake, familiarly Hunt Blake, was a gay leader, a bit reckless, losing caste among his prudent townsmen by such reckless performances as lighting a cigar with a five-dollar bank-note rolled into a taper, but popular enough to be elected town treasurer and selectman for one year, a distinction his doctor-father never reached. Hunt Blake outlived his close kin and the family fortunes and died at an advanced age in the Northampton hospital for the insane. A talented daughter of Dr. Blake, Frances, married in 1832 the jolly Dr. Marshall Spring Mead, who had come from Chesterfield, New Hampshire, and a dis- tinguished family, to practice for a half-century in the town and collect a small fraction of his professional charges.
THOMAS POWER. Introduction to Northfield of the man permanently honored in the town as the planter of her elms and as the founder of her library was due to his connection with the Field family. Justin Field, one of the fourteen children of Adjutant Samuel, a gifted tribe, settled in Boston as a lawyer and married Harriet Power, the sister of Thomas. Their descendants include Rev. Thomas Power Field, long the preacher at Amherst College, and his son Judge Henry Power Field, prominent attorney, judge of probate in Hampshire and instructor in law of Calvin Coolidge. When Thomas Power started in practice he turned to North- field. He was born in Boston, October 8, 1786, was graduated from
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Brown University in 1808, was admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1811 and landed in Northfield in 1812. He remained until 1816 and in that brief period led in the planting of the elms the length of Main street, with a gap in front of the belligerent General Nevers' mansion, and in the founding of the Social Library. Mr. Power became a member of Harmony Lodge of Masons in 1813 and was its worshipful master when he left town. Subsequently he was district deputy grand master of the first district (Boston) and the recording grand secretary of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts from 1821 to 1826. He returned to Boston, somewhat impelled by the undying antagonism of Nevers. There he in time became clerk of the Boston Police Court, from which post he retired in 1860 to Framingham, where he died September 9, 1868. In Boston, he was conspicuous as a musician and as a public speaker, being the city's Fourth of July orator. He married, while in Northfield, Betty Simpson of Duxbury.
JOB M. DICKINSON. Grandson of the Nathaniel Dickinson, a monu- ment to whom stands by the road to Pauchaug, where he was killed by Indians in 1747, Job Dickinson was born June 20, 1783, the son of Benoni, who was born after his father was killed. He was the per- fected type of New England character, imposing in stature, prosperous, enterprising and trusted with the most important affairs of the town. He was an habitual selectman, serving in that office as many as 16 years between 1817 and 1848 and going to the legislature in the days when Levi Lincoln was governor. He was close kin to Obadiah Dickinson, the town's squire, and to the wife of John Barrett. He lived in the big red- brick house in the Kingdom, was captain in the militia, and had nine children, one of whom was Elijah M. Dickinson, to whom Northfield owes its library building.
CHARLES OSGOOD. The Northfield Academy of Useful Knowledge was incorporated in 1829, the leading spirit being Samuel C. Allen, with whom were associated William Pomeroy, the distiller; Jabez Parsons, tan- ner; and three merchants, Daniel Callender, Timothy Dutton and Thomas L. Doak. They bought the three-story Hunt tavern and added the double deck of piazzas. They imported two recognized academy teachers, Owen Keith from Framingham as principal and Charles Osgood from his native town, New Salem, as preceptor. The academy lasted five years and passed to individual ownership as a private school, and its preceptor turned storekeeper, marrying just at this point Lovicy, daughter of Jabez Parsons. Thenceforth and for the rest of the century
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Mr. Osgood was a conspicuous townsman, a leader of Jacksonian and all the later types of Democracy and a town-meeting orator without a rival in ornate periods. His store, a small one but carrying the wide variety of merchandise which marked country stores, was Democratic head- quarters. It was said that it was also the practice ground for his impres- sive town-meeting orations, which were uniformly based upon "resolves" which he produced from his tall silk hat and which covered a wide range of world and town issues. He was postmaster in Democratic years, town clerk over a long period, member of the legislature and of the constitu- tional convention of 1853, and an unfailing supporter of the Unitarian church. The oldest of four daughters married Charles G. Hooker of the Hinsdale, New Hampshire, family, who had a leading business place in the early days of San Francisco; the second, Charles Dewey of Ber- nardston, a Civil War soldier; and the other two maintained through many years the dignity and quality of the Osgood home. The only son, Charles P., was a life-long business man in San Francisco. The family's sole representative in this home, came to be Gertrude, the daughter of Charles and Henrietta Dewey, who with her husband, William A. Barr, came from Boston to make the ancestral house a model, modern home.
ALBERT COLLINS PARSONS. The name of Parsons was connected with the first Northfield settlement (1672) by the original proprietorship of Cornet Joseph of Northampton but ceased when his son, who was never a resident, disposed of his inherited holdings. It reappeared in 1798 when Jabez, descendant of a brother of Cornet Joseph, migrated from Enfield, Connecticut, and settled here as a tanner and currier. His wife was Lovicy Prior, whose brother, Isaac, also located here and became the leading merchant and owner of boats which navigated the Connecticut. Albert Collins Parsons was born July 31, 1812, in the house built by his father on lower Main Street. He succeeded to the leather-making of his father, who had become totally blind and so remained through over 40 years until his death at the age of 93. This son's middle name came through his grandmother, who was the daughter of Rev. Nathaniel Col- lins, long the minister of the Enfield church, a descendant through a succession of Edward Collinses from Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth colony. Tanning was a slow and laborious process and there was equally slow teaming to Boston for a market, with return loadings of South American hides. The home manufacture of boots was undertaken and carried on, with as many as thirty workers, through some years. The tanner and bootmaker was also a farmer and in middle life became
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wholly so. When nearly 70 he also became a merchant, building the store near his home. He remained active until over 80 and measurably so until his death in 1902 in his ninetieth year, and in the house where he was born. His was a Northfield life; the town was both his ideal and his passion. Public spirit was personified in him. As such a citizen he was intense in his interest in affairs of state and nation. He was an original anti-slavery man, a Whig, a "Free Soiler" of 1848, a Repub- lican of 1856, an ardent peace man and a radical as to temperance. He was an upholder of the First Parish church, which became Unitarian in his boyhood, constantly an official there and once president of the Con- necticut Valley conference of Unitarian churches. He was a representa- tive in the first year and a senator in the last year of the administration of the war governor, John A. Andrew. Once later he ran for the legis- lature as a Republican but was defeated because of his ardent prohibi- tion views and then fell into the hopeless habit of being the independent Prohibition candidate. Without other than the meagre schooling of his own town, he absorbed a culture which showed itself in his public speak- ing, approaching oratory and fully reaching eloquence. Positive in opin- ions and outright in his declaration of them, he was at once one of the least popular and the most completely respected men in the town of his devoted sonship. Mr. Parsons married Hannah, the daughter of Joseph Stevens of Warwick, a woman of fine culture and grace, and had several children, the one who long survived being Albert Stevens Parsons, a con- spicuous reform advocate and publicist whose last home was in Lexing- ton. A widower with two children, Mr. Parsons married in 1858, Susan Lane Beach, a widow with eight. She was born in Greenville, Alabama, of a family that traced back to Virginia and to its earliest colonial days; a woman of characteristic Southern graciousness who shared in full meas- ure her second husband's devotion to the town and all its interests. Of their two children, a daughter, Mary Lane, died in young womanhood and the youngest was Herbert Collins Parsons, whose youth was spent in his native town, which he left at 27 to become a newspaper editor and publisher and to serve in a varied succession of public offices.
BENJAMIN R. CURTIS. A young man, destined to become one of America's greatest jurists, came to Northfield in 1831 for completion of his law study and start in practice. He was born in Watertown, the son of Captain Benjamin and Lois Robbins Curtis, November 4, 1809, grad- uated from Harvard in 1829 and was studying in its law school when he broke away from his course there under the combined pressure of
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financial need and love for his cousin, Eliza Woodward, the daughter of William Woodward, the treasurer of Dartmouth College and defendant of record in the famous "Dartmouth College case." His biographer, George Ticknor Curtis, places the love impulse first. Through acquaint- ance with James C. Alvord of Greenfield, a fellow student, he secured a law-clerkship with General John Nevers, was married soon after com- ing here at the spacious home of his uncle, George Ticknor, in Boston, was admitted to the bar in September, 1834, and began practice in Northfield. His first account book, now in the Northfield Public Library, contains the entry of his first retainer, the sum of one dollar from Samuel Merriman. On the thousand dollars received by Eliza under the will of her father the young couple set up housekeeping here and their first son was born here. They entered fully into the life of the town and the young attorney counted upon remaining here but was induced by a cousin, Charles Pelham Curtis, to become his partner in Boston, making this change in 1835. He subsequently served two years in the Massa- chusetts legislature and in 1851 was appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President Fillmore. He came to national prominence and a place in history by dissenting, with one other justice, from the decision written by Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case. His dissenting opinion upheld the right of Congress to prohibit slavery and of a person of African descent to become a citizen of the United States. He resigned from the Supreme bench in 1857, resumed practice and was thenceforward the leader of the Massachusetts bar. He presided over a peace convention in Boston, early in the Civil War period. In 1868 he became one of the counsel for the defence of President Johnson against impeachment, read the answer to the articles of impeachment and opened the defense in a speech of two days, which attracted the attention of high legal authorities. He was the Democratic candidate for United States Senator in 1874, against Henry L. Dawes. Mr. Curtis died at Newport, Rhode Island, September 15, 1874. A son, Benjamin R. Curtis, Jr., (Harvard '75) was a justice of the Boston Municipal Court from 1886 until his death, January 25, 1891. In the two-volume "Memoirs and Miscellaneous Writings," the first of Mr. Curtis' papers is his argument in the case against Judge Wells of the Court of Common Pleas for libel of another Northfield attorney, Asa Olmstead. Mr. Curtis' practice in Northfield was taken over by his brother-in-law, William Gustavus Woodward, who remained until 1841, when he re- moved to Iowa, there to become in time the chief justice of the state supreme court.
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EDWARD JARVIS, M.D. Born in Concord January 9, 1803, the son of Francis and Millicent Hosmer Jarvis, graduated from Harvard in 1826 and its medical school in 1830, Edward Jarvis was attracted to North- field by the settlement as minister of the First Parish church of his townsman, George Washington Hosmer. He began practice here and was the founder of a Sunday school, which grew to large number and importance in the town life under his leadership. He lectured frequently in the town lyceum on natural history and one series of eight on "Anat- omy as showing the wisdom of the Creator and His continuing watch- fulness and benevolence" was permanently published. Hosmer said of him "no plant or flower on the mountain or in the meadow escaped his eye." He returned to Concord, removed later to Louisville, Kentucky, came east again in 1843, settled in Dorchester and attained eminence as the leader in the reform of the treatment of the insane and as a pioneer in establishing vital statistics as a public service. After partial recovery from a paralytic stroke in 1874, he wrote a valuable volume of 650 pages on the "Traditions and Reminiscence of Concord." He died October 31, 1884.
ASA OLMSTEAD. In its golden decade of quality and distinction, the eighteen-thirties, one of the town's conspicuous characters was Lawyer Olmstead. He ran afoul of General Nevers' prejudices and his char- acter was overhauled for meanness in the case B. R. Curtis conducted. He outlived Curtis in the town but not General Nevers, whom nobody seemed to outlive and certainly nobody could ever outdo in vituperation. Born in Enfield, Connecticut, in 1791, he was graduated from Princeton in 1814, studied law with George Bliss in Springfield, practiced in Wilbraham from 1822 to 1830, came to Northfield and practiced until 1841, when he gave up the law and settled in Clinton, New York, where he was much honored. He died there in 1874. He married Mary P., daughter of Dr. Solomon Bond of Enfield, Connecticut, and their eldest daughter Mary, married Theodore Woolsey Dwight, the eminent pro- fessor of law at Columbia and president of Yale University.
SAMUEL W. DUTTON. Town affairs through many years had at their core the prudence and steadfast character of the man who was invari- ably spoken of as Deacon Dutton. Tall, spare, bearded, calm, austere, he was for untold years the town clerk and treasurer. He had the broad culture which somehow men acquired with no other than the limited education of the town schools and with small contact beyond town boundaries. He was the son and grandson of town merchants but was
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himself a farmer and met his death in a mountain pasture by the kick of a colt he had gone there to feed. He was deeply pious and the main pillar of the Orthodox church, whose fortunes took a sudden upward turn, with a jolt at first disturbing to the conservative order, when Dwight Moody arrived on his native heath in 1875. Deacon Dutton was born May 13, 1813, and married, when 22, Mary Dascom of Milton, New Hampshire. Their son, Samuel D., left town but the daughter, Mary T., remained to share with her father his town and church trusts. Two nieces, the daughters of his brother Timothy, were Lucie, a town teacher and the wife of Samuel Woodruff of Hartford, Connecticut, and Adeline, first the ward and after years the wife of the doughty sheriff and financier, Elisha Alexander, the gifted woman who became the town's chief benefactor.
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